Synchronization: iMessages on Mac not iPad How to turn off iMessages on iPad but turn on them on Mac?

And If I turn it off on device, does sync happen after I turn it on?

Situation:
I have an iPad and Mac.
I want to turn off iMessages on iPad, but turn it on on Mac.

Ok, I go to iMessages on iPad and turn it off.
But now I don't see that my messages are delivered on Mac.

And what will happen if I turn iMessages on iPad on? Does all data sync with Mac?

No, there will be no sync.
Only the devices, that are registered on iMessage at the point of time, when the message is sent by the sender, can receive the message (technically). The messages are end-to-end encrypted for each receiving device.
In other words: Your new device can't decrypt the old messages, as the original sender didn't know about this new device.

See this article:

  You’ve actually got one set of keys for each device you add to iCloud,
  and each iMessage is encrypted independently for each device. So if
  you have two devices — say, an iPad and an iPhone — each message sent
  to you is actually encrypted (AES-128) and stored on Apple’s servers
  twice. Once for each device. When you pull down a message, it’s
  specifically encrypted for the device you’re on.

Apple's Security Paper


After update to OS X Server 5.0.3 ports 80 and 443 closed The title pretty much sums it up.  I just updated to the new OS X Server (5.0.3) today and when I try to go to localhost, 127.0.0.1, I am getting connection refused.  When I load into OS X Server program, and go to the tab on the left Websites, it says Server website on port 80

Not reachable, this website is not available over the Internet

The same goes for port 443.  I ran curl, telnet and these ports are indeed closed.

How can I enable these ports again?  I can't find where to do it.

Not sure if it matters but I also updated Xcode, and Command line tools today as well.

I haven't seen similar and I have server 5.0.3 running on both 10.11 and 10.10 and those ports are open with no changes needed by me.

I would start with checking your Access for defaults on the server level and perhaps making a change to see if it propagates.

Then check the particular service that is running. port 80/443 can be opened for Profile Manager, Xcode, Wiki or Web Server so you might want to check them all before going to the logs to look and see if there is an error message.


ssh -A stopped working in macOS Sierra and keychain is not unlocked at login After upgrading, ssh -A no longer works. Uncomment ForwardAgent no line the /etc/ssh/ssh_config and change no to yes does not seems to work. This is extremely annoying. In addition, my Mac is password protected.

Previously, after I login, I never needed to enter the password for ssh once I selected something like "unlock keychain for ssh on login", years ago. I don't remember the exact message. I only needed to do it once for every mac I ever owned. However, it now prompts for password when I need to access ssh id_rsa, such as using git. I deleted the login item in the keychain, and the next time I restarted, try to use ssh, the password prompts appears again, but no prompt asking me if I want the keychain to remember and unlock the key.

Can anyone help or at least explain what changes are made for ssh in the new OS.

Edit
To answer my own question, ssh-add -K seems to do the trick.

It seems that the ssh keys are not loaded by default into ssh-agent.

This solved the issue for me:

Edit your ssh config

vi ~/.ssh/config

Add the following

Host *
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    AddKeysToAgent yes
    ForwardAgent yes

Find out more information on reddit discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/52zn5r/difficulties_with_sshagent_in_macos_sierra/


Macbook Pro 2016 stuck on "restarting" after installing mojave Whenever I try to upgrade my macbook with updates which require a system restart, it will begin the update then freeze on the screen with an apple logo and partially filled progress bar with the text "restarting".

System Info:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
2.9 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

This began when I was running macOS 10.13.4 and attempted to upgrade to mojave (without installing 10.13.6 first). The same issue as described above happened so I powered the system off and restarted it.
The update was not installed but it booted up fine and worked normally so I tried again, this time leaving it on overnight but the same thing happened.
This time I tried to install the 10.13.6 update before mojave but got the same results when installing 10.13.6. Upon reboot the system was still at 10.13.4
I tried installing the 10.13.6 combo update, same thing happened
I tried resetting my PRAM with Command + Option + P + R but that didnt change anything
I booted into recovery mode and ran first aid on my disk
I booted into recovery mode and reinstalled the macOS. This succeeded and set me at 10.13.6, hooray.
I opened the app store and tried to install the security update before moving on to mojave, just in case. System rebooted, began install, then froze on the "restarting" step.

I am under the impression there is an error during the install which also prevents the reboot sequence but I don't know how to track it down. Does anyone have insight into what is happening here?

I ended up trying to install the updates from safe mode and that worked. It doesn't solve the issue but is an acceptable workaround for me.


MBP will reboot after unlocking filevault partition I'm running a MBP 2015 retina with 512GB SSD with macOS 10.14 and Windows10 with bootcamp. The macOS parition is encrypted with FileVault.

Recently I cannot boot into macOS anylonger.
Here is what happens:
After "logging in" (to unlock the partition, before loading the OS) it reboots and returns to the same login-screen again.

Also when I go to RecoveryOS > Disk Utility > Mount my "Macintosh HD" parition, after entering the disk password, it reboots as well.

And when I want to recover the partition from a TimeMachine backup, after entering the disk password, guess what, it reboots.

Any clues?

As a follow-up: I ended up completely reformatting the harddrive without encrypting. Then I could restore the data from the time-machine backup.


Keyboard: how to enforce option-X system shortcuts when a program intercepts these shortcuts? I’m entering some less-used characters using option-key combination, eg option-o for ø on US layout (or ó on Polish layout). Unfortunately, some programs (namely IntelliJ/Android Studio) interpret such shortcuts on their own: in the "Find in Path" window, option-o toggles "Words" and so the character under option-o cannot be entered into search query (it can be typed in some other editor and pasted, but that's a short term solution). Unlike many other in IntelliJ, this shortcut is hardcoded and can not be turned off in preferences.

Can I make the system handle such key combinations and prevent rogue programs from hijacking this valid input?

/edit: I am not asking about alternative ways of getting those characters. For Polish layout users, option-(A,C,E,L,N,O,S,Z,X) are inherent part of the keyboard, as natural as Q, W or E being where they are.

A alternative would be to create a custom keyboard layout where the characters that cause a problem are remapped to other convenient keys with Ukelele.

You can also try a keyboard shortcut for the problem characters via: System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Replace With


Applications open on login when they shouldn't be My MacBook will open applications (even when no applications were open on shutting down or restarting it) when it boots up. I checked the login items on system preferences and nothing should be opening.

Yes - this can be disconcerting when you don't realize that the majority of the Apple apps save their system state and don't even need to be told to start or stop. You can have an app in the dock when it's not running and you can have an app running when it's not in the dock. (or the task switcher interface)

The simple way to reset this is to choose log out from the Apple menu and turn off the check mark below.

Then log out, log in and log out again and verify the status if the check is disabled and the apps do not relaunch.

In some rare cases, this setting / preference could get corrupt, so I then turn it on (which is the opposite of what you want)- log out / log in - then turn it off  (what you want) and before contacting support. Most of the time, just exercising the button a couple times is all that's needed if someone isn't aware to uncheck the button when they log out.


Armenian HM QWERTY keyboard - where's Շշ (sh)? Here's screenshot of available keys in Armenian HM QWERTY keyboard:

The thing that bothers me a lot - I can not find the "Շ" letter ("sh").
For instance, here's screenshot of the second keyboard available - Armenian Western QWERTY (Շ is marked with red dot):

So, the question is, how should I time sh on HM QWERTY?

Շ is at option + shift + s on HM Qwerty.  շ is at option + s.

You can use Keyboard Viewer to find such things

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13746


Is iPhone 5C suitable for development? I would like to buy a second-hand iPhone 5C and use it for testing purposes. Aside from hardware specs, are there any limitations specific to 5C that I should be aware of? Also, given that I want to buy it second-hand, what should I be looking for to ensure the phone can be used for development?

Short Answer : YES.

In depth : I am a developer and I have all devices, and most models concerning iOS. The thing about developing, as you will learn, with Apple is that they have strict guidelines, guidelines with pros and cons. These pros in your instance work in your favor. Apple requires all apps to be cross-platform compatible, even if the app is not specifically designed for that device. For example, they require all iPhone apps to be compatible with iPads, even if your not developing for iPad specifically, the app just must simply run as advertised in 1x or 2x mode as fluidly as it does for the device you specifically design for. The iPhone 5C is just as good as any other device. Furthermore, you can utilize the built in testing simulator, that has all the devices you may not own. You will have no issues, developing with the 5c, provided who you buy it from sells you a working device.


can't add my present account to folder > Get Info > Sharing & Permissions on Macbook Pro I want to access MacBook Pro OS 10.11.15 files from a Windows 7.  Can read files ok but writing causes permission problem.
ERROR AT WINDOWS IS:  "You need permission to perform this action. You require permission from the computer's administrator to make changes to this file."

At MacBook, I cannot enable Read & Write for my MacBook account.

I select my hard disk.
Open Get Info > Sharing & Permissions.
But + button is grayed out.

So then I tried going to the folder I'm working with;
open Get Info > Sharing & Perm..;
my present account is not listed;
the + is enabled so I click it;
the list shows my present account, but disabled (grayed out)

THINGS I'VE TRIED SO FAR, THAT DIDN'T WORK:
opening Windows File Explorer with "run as administrator."
At Mac > Terminal window:  set permission of root to read & write (chmod a+rw *)
Set permission of target folder to read & write:
cd to folder
chmod -Rf a+rw *
Turned off Mac and Windows Filewalls.

Solution:
Mac > Sys Prefs > Sharing > File Sharing > Shared Folders: select
Users > Everyone:  changed from 'read' to 'Read & Write' fixes it.

BUT, the best solution is this:
Leave 'Everyone' as 'Read only' or remove 'Everyone'.

Press [+] box and add Mac account that is same name as my current Windows account, and set it to read & write.
What magic!


Is there some way for me to connect old technology to airplay? I have a Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with El Capitan, I'm not able to use AirPlay because I simply don't have the hardware for it. However, I'm trying to work through the thought experiment of how I might be able to connect my computer to an Apple TV. Is there some external hardware that I could hook up my computer to the Apple TV (Gen 3) through Airplay (the same way that I could use an external wifi usb)?

There is no external hardware to use airplay, if your aim is specifically to connect your MBP to AppleTV through AirPlay I think you are out of luck. There may be very tricky ways of doing this, although much of the encoding used in AirPlay is done by hardware(I believe Intel chip) that your laptop doesn't have (as far as I know).

There are other options though for wirelessly connecting your laptop to a screen, but thats out of scope I guess.


Can I use 16 GB RAM with my MacBook Pro 7,1? I just picked up 16GB of RAM for my MacBook Pro, running the newest OS X. According to the NewEgg reviews, it should work in it. However, once I boot up, it shows the Apple logo and, after a few seconds, the spinner just freezes.

If I boot into my Windows 7 partition, it lists 16GB as installed, and 15.7GB available. Why, then, is OS X not recognizing it?

I've tried each of the sticks themselves (1x8GB), and OS X still freezes. The RAM came as 2x8GB and are PC3-10600 @ 1333 MHz.

I've tried holding D as the computer boots, but it just gray screens for a while, then jumps to the Apple logo.

It seems to me that 16GB may not work, but why then does the same hardware, just Windows 7 successfully run?

Your Mac needs to meet specific criteria for this to work. In the case of the 2010 Macs, here’s what you must have:

a Mac mini (Mid-2010), a MacBook (Mid-2010) or a 13” MacBook Pro (Mid-2010)
Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later
the latest EFI firmware update for your system
the proper specification memory modules

See Certain 2010 MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models join the ’16GB’ MaxRAM club for details.
You will need (2x8GB) 16GB DDR3-1066MHz SODIMM. Anything faster like a DDR3-1333MHz or DDR3-1600MHHz SODIMM will fail to boot the machine.


AppleScript: How to get the character count of an .rtf file? I would like an AppleScript .scpt file to determine the character count of any given .rtf file. I'm not sure if this is standard for character counts, but I would like each space character (" ") to also count as one character.

I would like the script to accomplish this, without actually opening the file in TextEdit.

It is important to note that this is a rich text file, not a simple plain text (.txt) file. This fact complicates things. It is not as simple as chopping off the rich text header, because a single .rtf file may contain multiple different types of rich text formatting.

What is the best way to go about this?

You asked, "What is the best way to go about this?" and while I'll not make that determination, nonetheless, here's an example using the do shell script command and some command line utilities.

set theRichTextFile to quoted form of "/path/to/filename.rtf"
set theCharacterCount to do shell script "textutil -stdout -convert txt " & theRichTextFile & " | LANG=en_US.UTF-8 wc -m | sed 's/ //g'"

Note that theRichTextFile must be a quoted POSIX pathname.

Update: Per comment by @jackjr300, added LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to the command.


Is it still possible to update my iPad from iOS 7.0.4 to IOS 7.1.2 and not to iOS 8? Can i upgrade my iPad 2 iOS 7.0.4 to iOS 7.1.2 ? I dont want to install iOS 8. I'm afraid of the performance issues and jailbreak possibilities of my iPad 2 running on iOS 8.

Nope. It's not possible on any iPad or iPhone because Apple stops signing the older iOS versions after newer ones are released. It's impossible to upgrade to iOS 7.1.2

Three options you have right now

Upgrade to iOS 8.1 [download the firmware separately and update before Apple stops signing]
Upgrade to iOS 8.1.1 from iTunes
Stay on iOS 7.0.4

iOS 8.1 has jailbreak, so this could be your chance to upgrade before the window closes.


Why do our iPhones keep asking for passwords of other users? Our client's employees all have iPhone 6s. They don't share phones, and have never used each others, but strangely, as one user tries to download an app at the App store, it then asks for a completely different persons' iCloud password. The only thing these phones share is a WiFi network, and mail accounts on an Exchange server.

This has happened to two other phones within the same client employees. One of the phones actually asked for a completely different client iCloud password, even though these two people have never met before.

Why does this keep happening?

Update: I have answered this myself, and marked as the correct answer because that is exactly what were happening.

Is this an enterprise setup? How are the phones being managed? MaaS360, OS X Server, ect?

It sounds like the users are connected to the same App Store ID and all have different iCloud accounts they are logged into (or vice versa).


Insert a Web Page into a Presentation On Windows, there is a PowerPoint plugin that allows live webpages to be inserted into a presentation.

I will be doing a presentation and it involves a web demo. I was wondering if a similar solution exists on the mac. It can be any presentation software, it just needs to have the ability to embed a live webpage and interact with that page.

I am using OS X Mavericks on a mid-2012 Macbook Air.

Keynote '08 has the ability to do this by selecting Insert -> Web View. Unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason, Keynote '09 omitted this feature. You can, however, create a presentation in the former, and use this object in the latter (or so I recall, as I no longer have Keynote '08 on which to test.)


Backward compatibility of shell scripts I use a .command file to start a basic shell script in the form:

#!/bin/bash
-- this simply starts Something at /usr/local/bin/Something
myLittleOneLineScript

To make it work I changed its permissions and made it executable.

The question is: I run the latest Mac OS X version and this script perfectly works. But: will it work in any previous OS X version?

"Will it work" has two aspects here:

will executing the binary work?
is bash capable of running the script as such.

The example looks fairly basic as far as shell scripting is concerned. So yes, it should work with previous OSX versions of bash. It would (as long as Something is installed in /usr/local/bin) even work in quite old versions of the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) on various Unix systems.


Will an iOS device fall back to 802.11a when 802.11n is unavailable? I was told that iOS devices defaults to 802.11a which runs on 5 GHz band when 5 GHz 802.11n is not available. Have anyone experimented with that?

How does negotiation between access points and client devices work?

The wireless chipset samples all spectrums and chooses the frequency that has the highest potential speed with a joinable SSID and won't generally switch to a different network unless there are errors or a drop.

Since the protocols are different there isn't so much a negotiation as a decision tree which of the several channels to join.


Is it safe to charge a MacBook Air after the green LED shows? Is it safe to charge my macbook after the green light shows? Would it not overcharge the battery, or reduce its lifespan?

I've heard that doing this is completely safe and it increases the cycles or something. Is that correct?

Is it safe to leave in?  Yes.  To understand this better we need to know what is happening when you have your charger plugged in.
What do the LED's on the MagSafe Charger Mean?
Amber:  Battery is charging.
Green:  Battery is fully fully charged and no power is being sent to the battery.
Your battery will naturally dissipate it's charge without use and the charger will detect this drop and automatically begin its recharge cycle.
Is it safe?
I am assuming you are referring to the longevity of the battery and not whether you will incur some sort of injury.
What affects the life of a battery are two things:

Number of Cycles - how many times the battery has been discharged and recharged.  1 cycle is a 100% discharge and recharge, or 5 20% discharges and recharges or 100 1% discharges and recharges.
Age -  this is actually the number one reason for batteries to fail.  Basically, a 3 year old battery that has never been used is going to perform about as well as a 3 year old battery that is used every day.

I answered a similar question recently about What's the best way to prolong the lifespan of a MacBook Pro battery?
Catalina Battery Health Management Feature
As of Catalina (10.15.5), there is a new feature; it's called Battery Health Management.  It will actually stop charging your battery and lower the maximum charge amount further making the micromanagement of your battery unnecessary. See the linked post for further details.
Leaving it plugged in will surely have pretty much zero effect on your battery.


Change m4v type from Home Video to Movie How can I via the command line change the iTunes Media type from Home Video to Movie?   After I convert a DVD to m4v via Handbrake I would like to set the iTunes media type.

I can do this manually in iTunes but I'm looking for a command line approach so that I can automate it.

The best approach is using Subler to open the m4v file and then fetch the metadata from the iTunes Store or MovieDB. Then, just save it and add it to your iTunes library. This is as automated as the process will get.


How to delete single songs in My Music without deleting them from playlists When i create a playlist then i add some songs from Apple music. These songs are added also to "My Music" as single songs. When i want to see only complete albums, it is impossible. I need to delete these single songs from "My Music" somehow but when i delete a song it also deletes from my playlist

Anyone knows how to do that?

Unfortunately you cannot accomplish what you are attempting, and here's why:

The "My Music" section is essentially the master collection of all your music. The Playlists you create are simply sub-sections of that master list.


"No offline messages" message after logging into Gmail on iPhone and iPad (using same account) [Note: Cross-posted to webapps.stackexchange.com]

My wife and I have 2 iPhones and 1 iPad2. We each use our iPhone to access our Gmail accounts. My wife also uses the iPad for that (whereas I do not).
However, recently, my wife is unable to access her emails on her iPhone or iPad.

To be clear:

She can login to Gmail without a problem.
She has access to the Internet at all times (this is regardless of being on 3G or WiFi, the problem is the same with both).
She can access other Google services (e.g. Google+) from the same device.
She can see how many unread emails she has in her inbox.
Logging into the Gmail account from a computer gives no problem at all.
Gmail is accessed through Safari (on the iOS devices).

But, no, she does not see any email in her inbox: she only has the message "No offline messages".

This occurs on both devices: her iPhone and her iPad.
Google tells me that she is not the only person to have the problem: it has happened to people on iOS, BB Playbook and even in Chrome. See links:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/17984389?tstart=0#17984389?tstart=0
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-playbook-f222/gmail-no-offline-messages-667628/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nda/6106404220/

The only solutions offered were on the BlackBerry forums such as:

Clearing cache (no effect)
Viewing Gmail in full browser/HTML mode (not possible from iOS)[correction: this is possible, one needs to scroll down to the bottom of the message list]

I personally use the Gmail specific app downloaded from the AppStore. So I downloaded that for my wife and tried that. It suffers the same problem.

I tried logging out of her account and logging back in, to no avail.
I tried shutting down all the apps and relaunching them, to no avail.
I tried shutting down the devices and restarting and relaunching, to no avail.

Finally, thinking it may be specific to my wife's Gmail account, I tried logging in with my account and it suffers the same problem of that device, although not on my own iPhone.

To make it even more complicated, I logged out of my account on my own iPhone and logged into her Gmail account. There again, no problem to log into the account, but "no offline messages" is still displayed.
I then logged out of her account and switched back to my account (still on my iPhone) and I can access all my emails without a problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Update:
The Gmail.app and accessing the account through Safari, on the iPhone ONLY, is now working again.
However, on the iPad, it still does not work.]

[Update2:

It is possible to view the browser/HTML version of Gmail and in that case it works. However, this does not solve the mobile view problem.
In the mobile version, I noticed that if one selects specific tags, the emails are shown. The problem is when viewing "Inbox", "All messages" and other default groupings.]

One workaround is to use the full version of the Gmail client. You can do that by going to Gmail.com on Safari and scrolling all the way to the bottom. There you will see an option to view Gmail in "Desktop" version.


Can I get Apple Mail app to automatically split emails into focused and other? I've come from using Outlook which automatically splits my emails into "focused" and "other" (Gmail does something similar I believe) and am wondering if the Mac Mail app has similar functionality?  If it's useful to know, it's a hotmail account that I'm viewing in the Mail app.
Sorry if this is an obvious question - I couldn't find anything about this online.
Thanks in advance.

Neither Apple Mail on iOS nor macOS has this feature.
You could set up a rule on your mail server to move messages categorised as other to a folder which would then appear in Mail, but then the emails no longer appear in Other if you looked at your emails in another client or the web interface.


Switching applications with CMD+TAB launches an instance of the target app For a while now, every time that I try to switch an application using cmd+tab when I stay in the target application for more than a couple of milliseconds, when I lift my fingers, a new instance of the target app is launched.

I've been looking everywhere how to change this behavior, but it has been in vain. Originally I thought it was an emacs bug but then I noticed it also happened in chrome.

Could it be that you are pressing Option at the same time?

There's a little known feature that can be used to open new windows in (some) apps from the macOS app switcher.

1.Cmd+Tab to the app of your choice
 2. Keep Cmd held
 3. Press and release Option
 4. Release Tab

https://lifehacker.com/384167/open-new-windows-via-command-tab


Does the 2019 iMac use proprietary SSD controllers or connectors? My old workhorse 17" MacBook Pro (circa 2011) finally gave up the ghost after 8 years of reliable service (may it rest in peace), and I'm looking into a 27" iMac to replace it.

I want to buy the high-end model iMac with the fusion drive and make the following upgrades:

Replace the 128GB SSD with a 1 or 2TB SSD.
Replace the 3TB spinning HDD with the largest SATA drive that will physically fit inside the case (hopefully a 12 or 16TB drive - I need lots of storage).
Ditch the Fusion Drive setup in favor of two independently formatted internal drives.

I understand that this is complicated surgery for this model and I have the skills necessary to perform the work.  But since my previous machine is so old, I am a bit out of the loop on newer Apple hardware.  I know that Apple was using proprietary connectors for their SSDs a few years ago (they were first to market with PCIe-based SSDs before the NVMe spec was finalized in the PC world).

So my question is, does the onboard PCIe SSD connector on the 2019 27" model conform to one of the industry standard M.2 form factors, or does Apple still use their own proprietary blade-style SSD connectors?

Also as a bonus, what is the maximum height clearance for the 3.5" SATA hard drive bay?

These models support a 7 mm tall SATA III (6 Gb/s) hard drive for the primary storage (using the 3.5" size as opposed to the 2.5"), and getting the Fusion drive means you'll also get what's called a small "blade" SSD via a PCIe connector. Without this you can't attempt what you're wanting to do.

So, in summary:

Primary storage uses a 3.5" 6 Gb/s SATA 3.0 connection
Secondary storage uses a NVMe PCIe "Blade" connection

However, getting a compatible "Blade" SSD is not as easy as walking into any computer store and buying one. You will need to purchase one from a vendor that specialises in Mac hardware to ensure you get what you need.

I haven't actually seen inside a 2019 model 27" iMac yet, so can't give you a definitive answer in terms of height clearance.

Recommendation

Before biting the bullet and ordering one of these machines, I would take a look at the following to ensure you can get what you need and also do what you want.

How to Upgrade or Install a SATA Drive (SSD or HDD) in the Main Drive Bay of a 27-inch Apple iMac (2012 - Current)
How to Upgrade or Install a PCIe SSD in a 27-inch Apple iMac with Retina 5K Display (2019)
OWC Solid State Drives For iMac 27-Inch (Late 2013 - Current)
OWC Complete Hard Drive Upgrade Kit Including Tools for all 27" iMacs 2012 & Later

Since you have the skills necessary to perform this upgrade, I would focus on ensuring you can actually get a compatible SSD with the storage you need.

NOTES:

For something like this I also recommend contacting OWC to discuss your requirements.
There would be no need for you to get the 3TB capacity Fusion drive in order to be able to do this, unless you want that capacity for whatever you intend to do with it later.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation whatsoever with OWC.


Mount smb share as local directory I want to use GIT and directory should be on a network drive (mounted with smb://). Because the software I'm using only supports the file:// protocol I need some kind of mapping the network share as a local drive on Mac OS X 10.9. How can that be managed?

You need to understand how mounting works. In short what you want is to:

Mount your smb:// drive on a certain location.
Use your file:// command as you always do.

When you use 'Connect to Server' - ⌘K, your drive should be mounted somewhere in /Volumes/. So now you can use file://Volumes/drive-name.

For normal use, like this, a mounted network filesystems can be treated just like a 'local' file system. There is no difference in use.

How to mount network drives automatically is another story and can be found on SO, for example https://superuser.com/a/367730/246895


What is a camera app for the iPod touch geared towards filming video? I know that there are several camera apps for iOS, but what's a good one for the iPod Touch? More specifically, I'm looking for an app for taking good video.

When I need more control over the video I'm recording I use Canopy Camera Tools. The Canopy app lets you choose a separate focus and exposure point - unlike the stock Camera app. It also lets you lock the white balance once you found a good exposure. Those features are also available when you want to take a picture.
You can also make time-lapse video's with Canopy.

I'm sure there are alternatives to Canopy but this is the app I use.
There are also apps that - unlike the stock Camera app - let you zoom while you're recording a video but since any zooming is achieved through digital zoom and not optical zoom they will degrade the quality of the video.


constant popup: "iTunes has found purchased items on the iPhone "xyz" that are not present in your iTunes library" I keep getting the popup shown below every single time (or almost every single time) I connect my iPhone to my MacBook Pro with a Lightning cable. Every time I click "Transfer" but it always comes up again.

I could click "Do not ask me again," but I do actually want purchased items transferred... I just don't think it's doing that. Any way I can fix this?

I'm not making very many purchases on my iPhone so I know it's not being caused by actual new purchases each time. Also I've tried this with multiple cables so I don't think it's a faulty cable issue.

In case it's relevant I have iTunes Match and do not have Apple Music.

Other details: iPhone 6S, MacOS Mojave, iTunes 12.9.4.94, it's over a USB 3 to Lightning cable.

I was having the same problem.  When I looked a little more closely, I found I had checked that I wanted "Selected Books" to be synced.  For the three books I had checked as ones to sync, I am now showing multiple copies (10 copies in one case) in the iTunes Books sync page; although there is only one copy of each when I look in the Books app on my iPhone and Mac Mini.  Since I have my Books app on the iPhone set to use iCloud anyway, decided there I didn't need to also sync them when I do my iTunes sync.  After unchecking "Sync Books" and hitting "Apply" in iTunes, the every-time-I-do-an-iTunes-sync reminder to transfer purchased items have stopped.

Maybe when iTunes gets split up into separate apps (as I heard might/will happen) these iTunes sync issues will get sorted out.  But don't get your hopes up.  I think we're lucky Apple supports sync-to-your-computer-without-using-iCloud at all.

Other details: iPhone 7, iOS 12.2, MacOS Mojave 10.14.4, iTunes 12.9.4.94, Lightning cable.


Lion Addressbook broken? When I launch Address Book and search for a contact, nothing visibly happens.

Also if I double click on a contact name in the group list, I see the contact info in a popup, but if I single click, I don't see it in the right hand pane.

And, also, if I look for a contact in Spotlight, I find it, but if I go to it, Address Book launches but the contact does not appear.

In short, it looks like the right hand pane in AddressBook is frozen. And this includes multiple attempts to relaunch it.

I have been using Lion from the start without a problem like this. I did install a few apps yesterday (Sparrow, Alfred and TotalFinder) and the problem appeared today, so there may be a connection.

What can cause this problem with Address Book?

My bet is on TotalFinder.

Firstly because I have both Sparrow and Alfred installed, and don't have any issue with them, and mostly because the way TotalFinder integrates into the OS.

Try to completely uninstall TotalFinder, reboot your computer and see if the issue is still there.


Terminal display changed after wipe? I had to basically wipe my Mac and reinstall Catalina[1] because I messed up some python package installations very badly, and I was able to erase it seemingly successfully. There's only one primary odd change: my terminal changed its display. It now prompts me: "[lastname]@[firstname]s-MBP ~ %" where [firstname] and [lastname] are my first and last name [2]. (There are some other odd changes as well, like Google seems to take longer to respond, but that may be because of higher internet traffic.) After searching, I haven't found anyone with a similar issue.

Is this a signal that I messed something up while erasing my old system, or is this normal variance across machines? If it is an issue, what might it be, and how might I fix it?

Thank you!

[1] Following the instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065

[2] It used to be something more conventional, ending with $.

With MacOS Catalina, the default terminal shell switched from bash to zsh. It didn't migrate existing users, but when you reinstalled Catalina it took the opportunity to update your default. The default prompt for bash is '$', for zsh '%'. Use chsh -s /bin/bash to switch back to your old shell as default. Alternatively, change your prompt by setting the variable PS1. Note that if you stick with zsh, there are some changes like different auto-completion methods. Also, if you had any sourcing files for bash (like ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc), you might have to update them to their zsh equivalents.


Is it safe to use styluses with iPads? I know my question sounds stupid but I can't imagine scratching my iPad mini screen!

I have iPad mini (Retina Display) and I'm considering getting Applydea Maglus stylus.

But is it safe to use styluses with iPads? Do they scratch the screens?

Feel free to suggest any stylus!

20€ is a bit steep for a stylus, you can find many on e-bay and such for way less than 5€. They're all generally the same thing: a stick with a rubber dome on one end. The rubber has a similar capacitance to human skin, so it can be sensed by the screen. The rubber dome on the end is squishy and very soft, it will not scratch your screen.


Recovery HD partition resized (now 300GB) I recently deleted my bootcamp partition that was 300GB and then tried to resize my Macintosh HD partition to my full 500GB hard drive, but after I tried to do this, instead my Recovery HD took the 300GB from bootcamp so now I am stuck with this:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            199.2 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             300.6 GB   disk0s3

Is there any way I can resize the partitions so that I have one Macintosh HD partition at about 500GB and the Recovery HD the normal size? (About 650MB). I have tried using the following command in terminal :

diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk0s3 650M

but I get the following message when I try to do that:

Unable to resize because file system volume format does not support resizing

Any Ideas? I have 300GB just sitting idle because of this currently. Thank you

I found this site http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/30/deleting-the-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-recovery-hd-partition/

Which explains that you erase the Recovery HD with this command "diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk0s4"

And merge it with this command "diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Lion disk0s3 disk0s4"

Before erasing the Recovery HD

After merging it to my macOS partition, which i used Disk Utility to do that.


How to play Flash games in iPad without internet connection? I want to play flash games with iPad 2, so someone told me iSwifter can help.

I want to know whether iSwifter can only run with internet connection. If it needs connection, is there any other application the can play flash games without internet?

There is no application that can play flash games without the internet. That is a pretty good idea, though.


Is my iPhone 5S draining battery too fast (and is it due to process mediaServerD?) My iPhone 5s has always had less good battery life than my previous iPhone (4S), but I'd always assumed that it was due to the increased speed of the CPU/GPU and the increased screen size.  It also sometimes seems warm in my pocket (not hot - but warmer than I would expect it to be in the ambient temperature.)

This article: http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain
Has been very popular in the last week, and I read it.  Something I had never done before was to check the usage stats. See also the second from last paragraph here: https://www.apple.com/uk/batteries/iphone.html

It appears that my phone never sleeps.  The standby (usage+standby) figure is always the same as the usage figure.  I assume that this is not normal.

The other day it ran down from full charge to almost empty in 7 hours.  As you can see from this screenshot:  Is that normal battery life?

Yesterday I ran Activity Monitor in Instruments on the phone when it was connected to my Mac - nothing seemed to be taking-up ridiculous CPU time, but I did notice that a process named mediaserverd was always at the top of the CPU chart - and always consuming 6% of CPU.   I assume that it was designed to be permanently running, but I doubt that it's meant to be that power hungry.

Please could someone else with a 5S run Activity Monitor in Instruments on their phone and let me know if the process is just as hungry on their phone.

Thanks.

It looks like a bug in mediaserverd.  Upon rebooting the phone the process returns to sane CPU use.  I have filed a Radar.


creating APFS fusion drive / conversion to APFS from HFS+ fusion drive fails - "you are trying to create an upside down Fusion" I have 1TB Internal SSD and 512GB SD card in a SD slot.

I can create a fusion drive in HFS+ format, and the drive was running fine on my previous El Capitan system. Now that I upgraded my system to Catalina, I wanted to format this fusion drive volume in APFS (currently running Catalina from external hard disk drive, not this fusion drive). But the conversion always fails with either of these 2 error messages:

1:----------------------------------
A problem occurred during conversion from HFS to APFS
APFS Converter exit code is 1
Aborted conversion in commit mode so will restore type
Setting type of disk0s2 to CS
Changing the physical disk partition type in shared mode
Partition modification attempt count was 1
Setting type of disk4s2 to CS
Changing the physical disk partition type in shared mode
Partition modification attempt count was 1
Not mounting APFS Volume
Exiting conversion operations with error code -69860
Error: -69860: The underlying task reported failure on exit

and

2:---------------------------------
It looks like you are trying to create an upside down Fusion:
Main tier (988 GB) is larger than Tier2 (462 GB)

I have no clue about the error message 1, but assuming from the error message 2, APFS fusion drive can not be created if the main drive ( SSD ) is larger than the secondary one? If so, is there a way to force it to make the fusion drive anyway?

what I did to convert:

diskutil apfs convert disk1
diskutil apfs createContainer disk1 disk2
from Disk Utility's Edit menu: "Convert to APFS" ( unmounted the target volume first too )
used a Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned Catalina's bootable volume on external hard disk to the target fusion drive
from OSX Catalina Install Disc

I'm really stuck now. Is there anything else I can try? I appreciate your help, thanks...!

I finally took the plunge and upgraded my iMac to Catalina.  It originally had the fusion drive with SSD and spinning hard drive.  However, I upgraded the HDD to a Samsung SSD and combined it with the original SSD to create one large CoreStorage logical volume (can’t call it “Fusion” anymore.”)

While trying to convert this logical volume, I ran into all of the same issues you did, so I was able to replicate the problem.  However, after about an hour of throwing to force things, I found the trick: reverse the order of the drives

What you think it should be:

$ diskutil APFS create disk0 disk1 “MyVolume”

Reverse the disk identifiers to make it work

$ diskutil APFS create disk1 disk0 “MyVolume”

(I’ll post all of the command output shortly...I’m posting from my iPad as Catalina installs onto a APFS “Fusion” drive).


How can I create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results? I'm trying to set up a Saved Search of my Mac that will exclude files in a folder called 'XYZ' from the search results. The reason is because I'm getting a ton of false positives from that folder that are difficult to sort through.

Just to be clear, I know you can add folders to a "Privacy" list in the Spotlight preferences, but I don't want to add this folder to that list --because I don't want to exclude it from all future searches, just this specific saved search. Any idea how something like this could be done?

If you hold option the (+) button to add a search criteria will become a (…) and an Any/All/None block. Set this to None.

For the criteria select Document Container. It won't be in the default list alongside Name, Kind, etc. Select Other… to select it from a list of additional criteria so long it has its own search feature:

Set this to the name of the folder that you'd like to exclude using whatever is/contains/begins with/ends with you find suitable.

The end result should look something like this:


Entourage MyDay replacement I am migrating from Entourage to Mac Mail. Entourage has a tool called MyDay which is quite handy for getting an overview over my appointments first day in the morning.

Is there a competitive product available which snycronizes with iCal appointments and todo list?

I think I found one app which could do the job on the app store, it's called "Today - Daily Calendar & Task Manager"


Disable confirmation dialog when moving files in iCloud Drive in Windows 10 My question is similar to this one but when using iCloud Drive in Windows (more specifically Windows 10). How can I stop iCloud Drive asking me for confirmation when I move files in the Windows Explorer?

This is specially annoying because many of the operations are just a rename (Ok, a move operation, but within the same directory), or move within iCloud itself. Also, a lot of times the Windows Explorer remains on top and you don't see the message, getting stuck until you realize why the action is blocked.

in windows go to icloud Drive in file Explorer and open the ".Trash" Folder (you have to enable "show hidden files" in explorer) select all files in the folder (if there are no files create some text files inside your icloud drive and delete them after they got uploaded) right click on the selected files and click delete, now there should be a popup window where you can add a check mark. check it and click OK.
now if you delete files inside your icloud drive folder it shouldn't ask you for confirmation anymore.
Problem solved
if you move multiple folders/files out of icloud drive it will now ask you just once for confirmation instead of for every single file
took me a while until I figured that out, hope it works for you too.


Problems with duplicate photos on Photos app I've been trying to shrink my Photos Library with no luck. I have some duplicate photos, inherited from the iPhoto days, as the result of syncing my iPhone photos via iCloud and making a local copy of those same photos "just in case" on an iPhoto album. Now, I'm facing the task of deleting one of those duplicates using PhotoSweeper X, which is pretty handy, but I can't see where those duplicates come from. For instance:

One of those photos is actually on an album called "iPhone security copy", but I can't see the real path on the app. Is there any app that can detect duplicates, and also show the real album for those photos?

Thanks in advance.

By default PhotoSweeper shows library-based paths in the path control. You need to change Preferences to show file-based paths (the menu PhotoSweeper > Preferences; the General page, Path Bar: Show file path).


Permissions looking for unknown user I have a problem on a external drive which permissions are looking for an unknown user. In the permission list it says "loading..."(or similar word, not on an english machine) in the user field.

How can I find out what user it's looking for? Is there anything I can do in the terminal?

If you browse to one of the external disks' folders in the Terminal, typing ls -l will show you the owner and group as the third and fourth columns.

If these are just numeric IDs, your system doesn't know who the owning user is, and is printing a raw UID/GID instead.


AppleScript to turn on the Accessibility Keyboard in High Sierra How can I write a script to turn on the accessibility keyboard present in macOS High Sierra?

It's of course possible to do this by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Keyboard > Accessibility Keyboard > "Enable Accessibility Keyboard," but this takes a number of clicks.  I would like a script that can be launched from the Dock, since I frequently use the Accessibility Keyboard.

One idea is to use AppleScript; another idea is to find the Accessibility Keyboard binary and use a shell script to open it.

Here is my attempt at an AppleScript:

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    reveal (pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess")
end tell

tell application "System Events" to tell application process "System Preferences"
    tell window "Accessibility"
        click UI element "Keyboard" of row 16 of table 1 of scroll area 2
        click button "Accessibility Keyboard"
        click checkbox "Enable Accessibility Keyboard"
    end tell
end tell

This script fails with the error: "System Events got an error: Can’t get button 'Accessibility Keyboard' of window 'Accessibility' of application process 'System Preferences'."

If I remove the last two click commands, the script does not produce an error, but also does not appear to click the "Keyboard" UI element.

What am I doing wrong?  Apologies if this is a stupid question; this is my first AppleScript.

Or if someone knows the location of the Accessibility Keyboard binary, that would be helpful, too.

Update Note: This answer was originally written prior to the release of macOS Mojave and as such to use it in macOS Mojave you'll need to change three lines of code.
Change:

select table 1 of scroll area 2
select row 16 of table 1 of scroll area 2
tell tab group 1

To:

select table 1 of scroll area 1
select row 16 of table 1 of scroll area 1
tell tab group 1 of group 1

The following example AppleScript code works for me under macOS High Sierra:
if running of application "System Preferences" then
    quit application "System Preferences"
    delay 1
end if
tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
    delay 1
    tell application "System Events"
        tell window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
            select table 1 of scroll area 2
            delay 0.1
            select row 16 of table 1 of scroll area 2
            delay 0.1
            tell tab group 1
                click radio button "Accessibility Keyboard"
                delay 0.1
                click checkbox "Enable Accessibility Keyboard"
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
    quit
end tell

In Script Editor, I saved example AppleScript code as an application, named Accessibility Keyboard.app, in the Applications folder.
Next, I added the Accessibility Keyboard.app to: System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility
Now I can bring up the Accessibility Keyboard easily via Spotlight, or the Accessibility Keyboard.app can be dragged and dropped on the Dock so as to be launched for there.

Update:
My original example AppleScript code was geared at opening the Accessibility Keyboard, not closing it. As such, if it's open and the original script is run again it errors out. The following version of the example AppleScript code accounts for whether or not the Accessibility Keyboard it already shown and if so, closes it.
Note thought that while this does close the Accessibility Keyboard if it's showing, there is an added bounce to Dock Tile of System Preferences and is not and issue other then a secondary visual distraction.
Example AppleScript code:
if running of application "System Preferences" then
    quit application "System Preferences"
    delay 1
end if
tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
    delay 1
    tell application "System Events"
        tell window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
            select table 1 of scroll area 2
            delay 0.1
            select row 16 of table 1 of scroll area 2
            delay 0.1
            tell tab group 1
                click radio button "Accessibility Keyboard"
                delay 0.1
                if value of checkbox "Enable Accessibility Keyboard" is 0 then
                    click checkbox "Enable Accessibility Keyboard"
                else
                    click checkbox "Enable Accessibility Keyboard"
                    delay 1
                    my clickOK()
                end if
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
    quit
end tell

on clickOK()
    tell application "System Events" to click button "OK" of window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
end clickOK

Note that System Preferences does not need to be visible for this to work and why there is no activate command in the example AppleScript code. Additionally if System Preferences is already open, it is first closed before the rest of the code is processed. This is done for a couple of reasons, the first of which was already stated and secondly seeing the UI Events processed is a visual distraction and can be annoying.
Also note that the value of the delay commands may need to be adjusted for your system, and or additional delay commands may or may not be needed. Adjust values of and or add/remove the delay commands as appropriate.
Keep in mind that once the app is added to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility and modified thereafter, you'll need to uncheck it and recheck it for the new changes to be allowed to be processed.

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and does not employ any error handling and is meant only to show one of many ways accomplish a task. The onus is always upon the User to add/use appropriate error handling as needed/wanted.


Is the SSD "stick" in the MacBook Pro the same as the Mac Pro? I have one of the new Mac Pros, and I'm thinking about upgrading the internal SSD. It seems that some Amazon sales suggest that the drive is the same format as in the Retina MacBook Pro.

Does anyone know for sure? Because if they are the same, the ones listed for the MacBook Pro are about 1/3rd cheaper.

The model of MacBook Pro will make a large difference as to whether or not it's compatible with the Mac Pro, assuming you're talking about the "new" 2013 model.

Specifically, the Mid-2015 MacBook Pro will work, but earlier generations use various different interfaces which will not be compatible.

As you can see comparing this photo of a 2012 MacBook Pro's SSD and this photo from the 2013 Mac Pro, the interfaces are completely different. Alternatively, you can see the same pinout in the 2015 MacBook Pro on this page.

I recommend sticking with 3rd-party upgrades provided by OWC (since they will tell you exactly what they've been tested with), or only getting parts that could have shipped with the original machine. (For example, ordering a broken Mac Pro off of eBay that came with a larger SSD that you can extract.)


Just installed Maverick and my Canon MP780 will print but no longer scan, would a new driver help? I get a message in the Image Capture window saying: No camera or scanner detected.

Scanner worked with Mountain Lion, but is not working with Mavericks.
On Canons website, this is the message on Canon's MP780 for Mavericks OS:
"There is no driver for the OS Version you selected. The driver may be included in your OS or you may not need a driver."

I know the hardware (Canon MP780) works as I tried VueScan, and the hardware scanned with this program - but I would have to pay $40.00 for VueScan.
Hoping there is a driver that would allow me to use my current software, without purchasing VueScan.

There are four options at present and being told you can't have the new thing without paying for an old thing to work means many people will resent the $40 option and be angry:

Pay the money and keep running Mavericks with VueScan to scan.
Don't pay the money and revert to Mountain Lion (or whatever previous OS works with your peripherals).
Get a new scanner.
Wait for someone else to provide a driver that either does more than VueScan or costs less than VueScan.


How to backup iPhone to iTunes for the first time (data stored on the iPhone, not on iTunes) I've upgraded to Lion OS X on my MacBook a while ago, but never connected my iPhone to iTunes for quite some time, however, there is no backup data on my iTunes but my iPhone has everything I need it to be transferred and backed up to my iTunes, but I cannot do this because I wanted to sync my iPhone, iTunes gave me a warning:

If I click "Sync Apps", will my iPhone apps be wiped off? Thus, causing no backup data to my iTunes.

How can I transfer my iPhone data to my iTunes without iTunes wiping my iPhone with no apps stored on iTunes?

Yes, if you do a direct sync, your apps will be wiped out. You should transfer the apps to the new iTunes by doing this:

  Files -> Transfer Purchases from iPod

This step should transfer your apps to iTunes. You can also see this Apple.SE post for a similar situation. After transfering purchases, you should then be able to sync with the new iTunes without losing your apps. The same situation holds for music.


Accidentally "Removed Attachments" via Mail.app I was trying to clear up space on my HD by running "Remove Attachments" in Mail.app on my Gmail accounts.

Too late I realized this deleted the attachments from server (Gmail) as well. They all show "[The attachment ___ has been manually removed]".

Now I see I should have just deleted locally from my HD, but is there any way to recover these attachments? Are they still on Gmail somewhere?

I have just accidentally "manually removed attachments" from Mac mail and because I had opened them first (word documents) I was able to open Word and go to "open recent" and they did open and I was able to save them properly.  Just as well because I had been unable to find them in the files that were modified today.


Resolution problem on external display with Thunderbolt->HDMI adapter Let me explain problem in quick bullets:

What I want:
I would like to use ultra wide external display with 3440x1440@50hz resolution with my MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012).
I would like to use my Thunderbolt port on mac, and my HDMI 1.4 input on my display.

I can successfully connect my display using:
- HDMI -> HDMI with 3440x1440@50hz
- TB -> DP (via TB -> DP adapter) with 3440x1440@50hz

I can partially successfully (with limited resolution) connect my display using:
- TB -> HDMI (via TB -> HDMI adpater) with 1920x1080@60hz (max)

Question is:
Is it matter of my adapter? For me it seems like it doesn't support HDMI 1.4, but only lower standard. (I have no idea how to check adapter type/support. There was no information about that on the product box).
Or maybe that is basically not possible to convert signal properly with TB/DP -> HDMI adapter?

Please advise.
Thanks,
Tomasz

P.S.
I have MacBook Pro Retina (Mid 2012), GeForce GT 650M 1024MB, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3).

It is the OS update; it includes system protection protocol so Apple is limiting your options of choosing the refresh rate in order to prevent system failure. Instead of fixing the bugs they just take away possibilities.


MacBook Air hot after sleeping I am experiencing strange issue with my MacBook Air (2011, with Mavericks):

I don't like to turn off my machine, so I usually just close the lid and put my laptop to backpack before I go to sleep
I take it off the bag in the morning at the work, do only basic work (email etc. - no suspicious things in Activity Monitor), but my MacBook Air will get to high temperatures (90℃ for CPU, runs fan at 6000 RPM).

I can 'solve' that by putting computer to sleep, wait a while (~30 sec), wake it up again and temperatures will get back to normal. I already tried resetting the SCM.

Notes:

I don't keep MagSafe connected to my Macbook Air during the night
I usually have plenty of running apps on my laptop (4GB of RAM, but Virtual Memory usually tops 10 GB)
I always run 1 instance of CentOS in VirtualBox (with Oracle database)

Disabling the deep sleep seemed to have fixed the issue for me.


Shortcut to Bottom border in Numbers Here there are many shortcuts for Numbers https://support.apple.com/kb/PH23737?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US.

I would like to have one for Borrom border. I tried (without success) the following:

Is it possible?

Custom shortcuts only work if there is a menu item that matches the command.  As there is no Border bottom menu command, this may not be possible.

Borders can be of any style and weight, so even if it were possible, it seems that such a shortcut would format the bottom border that was last copied.

A work around would be to format a cell with the bottom border of your choice, then copy the formatting only.  Format > Copy Style or option+command+C

Then use option+command+V to Paste the style to a newly selected cell.

DEMO:

Note that your custom key combination as pictured in the question conflicts with the built in shortcut for Paste Style.


iMac mid 2010 running slow [Specs of the iMac, the iMac already have 8GB(Should be enough to handle Yosemite)]
[1]http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i3-3.2-21-inch-aluminum-mid-2010-specs.html#macspecs1

Yesterday i bought this iMac, it's took around 45mins to boot up and it's unusable due to the slow response. Each click takes around 15mins to response. So i done a clean installation of yosemite and updated to the latest version. And it's now become normal(boot up around 3mins) except the temperature is high at around 110C. I open up the iMac and clean the dust inside(All three fan) but it's still running at around 100C.

But, when i try to copy VLC from the dmg, it's become slow again suddenly, though the boot up time didn't reach 45mins, but the OS become so laggy. I did not install any software except iStatMenus Trial and the VLC.

Any idea what is failing in this iMac?Could it be the HDD?
One more question, does putting on new thermal paste help cool down the iMac?

In the end, i send it to some expert to check on it.
There is two reason the machine is slow:
1. KVR ram is used for the machine
2. The HDD is most probably faulty.

Swap this two things out it worked fine.


System time changes after sleeping and waking up? Closing the lid to sleep, after waking, the system time would change by as much as 2 seconds.

Verified by using terminal command for over a month, daily
sudo -S ntpdate -u time.apple.com

Seems fairly normal, probably just checking back in with Apple servers about the time (time.apple.com) If you'd like to disable it, you can uncheck "Set date and time automatically" under Date and Time in System Preferences.


iOS map app that can load MBTiles tileset Are there any good map apps that will allow me to load the map from an MBTiles tileset file?
I'm looking for something that will allow me to use the map offline while hiking.

I recommend you one of these :

Guru Maps, its free version allow you to load 3 offline MBTiles. Their paid version is quite expensive - 50$ but the app is well-made.
OpenMapTiles, if you want to use OpenStreetMap vectors only.
MBTiles GPS, the app interface is basic but it's free.
MapTiler Mobile, I've never tried it but I heard great feedback about it.


Where does this symlink point to? The weirdest thing.

$ ls -al                                        ~/vm/win_8_1.pvm/Windows Disks
total 8
drwxr-xr-x   3 zoo  staff  102 Nov 22 14:04 .
drwx--x--x@ 15 zoo  staff  510 Nov 22 16:57 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 zoo  staff   10 Nov 22 14:04 C -> /Volumes/C
$ readlink C                                    ~/vm/win_8_1.pvm/Windows Disks
/Volumes/C
$ ls -al /Volumes                               ~/vm/win_8_1.pvm/Windows Disks
total 8
drwxrwxrwt@  3 root  admin   102 Nov 22 14:04 .
drwxr-xr-x  29 root  wheel  1054 Nov  2 15:07 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin     1 Nov 22 12:49 MacSSD -> /
$                                               ~/vm/win_8_1.pvm/Windows Disks

Where the heck is ~/vm/win_8_1.pvm/Windows Disks/C pointing to??

It's pointing to the mounted system volume C (visible on the desktop see below) of your virtual Windows 8.1 machine. If you shut down the VM or disable Share Windows afterwards, the link still resides there.

To make C visible again and your Mac secure (Windows mustn't screw the Mac volume) adjust the settings like in the picture below:


Is it productive to use a Stylus with the iPad? My son loves drawing comics.  He wants to do it now on my iPad 3.  Does anyone have experience with using a Stylus for such an activity?

Does it make sense or will it be an exercise in futility?  I've looked at the Wacom Bamboo and Cosmonaut stylus.  Are either of these (or some other ones) suitable for drawing comics?

The Cosmonaut is about the only stylus worth the effort in my opinion. I've tried a few different ones, but the Cosmo' has always felt right. I think it's to do with it's weighting and general sturdy feel.

I think with practice your son will produce excellent results using the Cosmonaut, especially with the right app (Paper or Sketchbook Pro are excellent for art.)

--

'Random' 2yr update: After using the Cosmonaut on and off for the last couple of years, mainly with Paper by 53 and Procreate, I feel a small update is in order.

I've used the stylus with the iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad mini and iPad Air. I've noticed a gradual loss of effectiveness of the stylus - it feels harder to use resistance-wise than it used to. Could be a change in screen surface technology or just the wear-and-tear you'd expect from using a stylus. So my opinion of this has lessened to a degree. Perhaps Paper's 'Pencil' product will be the one for me, when it's finally available for non-silly money in the UK.


What is the 'Zzz' complication on Apple Watch? It is shown here in an image from a Wired article on the watch before it came out.

This is the alarm complication if you choose to snooze an alarm.


I reassembled a Mac Pro A1186 and have extra parts left over. What do they go to? I disassembled a Mac Pro A1186 for cleaning and upon reassembly found that I have several screws and what appear to be some kind of nuts. I don't remember what they go to.

This system did not have any hard disks. I did not remove the only optical drive. Everything else was removed for cleaning including the motherboard.

I did not encounter any other similar screws during reassembly. It is therefore presumed that they are totally unique for their purpose.

The nuts are also unique and I'd have thought obvious enough considering their size and number to be remembered. But I can't find a place for them.

What do these parts go to?

For your personal entertainment I must also mention that that, although I am an experienced PC user, this is my very first Mac. It is very embarrassing for me to have reassembled a computer and not only have parts left over but have to ask someone else where they go.

For a while during disassembly I kept thinking how nice and obviously thought out everything was. But then all of the different parts and pieces started piling up and I knew that I was in trouble. And, well, here we are!

Answered:

As Tetsujin answerer already, the nuts are part of the locking mechanism that s initiated by a level at the back of the case. I had removed these while trying to figure out how to extract the power supply.

The other two screws, which I found to be identical to the ones which secure the 5.25” drives, secure the cage around the memory boards and secure it to the bottom of the case.

I'm posting this as a pure guess, just so I can add a picture...

The underside of the drive bay has a lot of screws like the ones in your picture, & also the pic shows one of many areas, under the PSU housing, that uses that type of 'spacer' as sliding locks - just in case they're not actually spacers.
Picture is from the Mac Pro 3,1 Service source - the yellow-circled screws are from the PSU & are dome-heads. The ones similar to your pic, button-heads, are the non-circled screws.

The red-circled area is what I meant for the 'spacers' - drive locks perhaps, activated by the release handle at the back of the Mac [I've 3 different Pros here, but all are in use so I can't take them apart to check ;)

I've never taken the mobo out of a Mac Pro, so never seen underneath to know what the spacers may look like.


Using keyboard text shortcuts in word I created some text "shortcuts" (well..not very short) in Keyboard. For example, when I type \alpha I get α, and if I type \sigma I get σ. While this works in almost everything on my computer, it doesn't work in Microsoft Office (e.g., Word and PowerPoint). I wonder if there is a way to make these shortcuts also work in MS Office. Thanks!

Unfortunately MS Office products live in the own world.

So to make the Alpha and Sigma words be replaced with Greek symbols you need to do following.

Open Word- Preference.

Now choose the Auto Correct

There is a field called Replace -With where you can now do that.

See this example:

Use same process for PowerPoint.


2011 13.3" MacBook Pro freezing during boot process I acquired a 13.3" MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro turns on but freezes after approximately 30 seconds. I installed a good hard drive with Lion and the loading spinner simply stops spinning after it freezes. I also tried booting from a bootable flash drive but it also freezes. The boot media isn't compromised because I've used the hard drive and flash drive with different machines with success. I attempted resetting PRAM. The battery is brand new. I have also attempted verbose boot mode but it doesn't reveal anything abnormal.

Note: I have since allocated the hard drive to a different machine so I don't have a working hard drive available right now.

Though the bottom place indicates the model is 2010, verbose booting logged the CPU build date to be in 2011. Additionally, the interior hardware of the computer differs from 2010 models so I suspect the computer is a 2011 model.

What are your suggestions?

If you had the hard drive still in the Mac I would have had you boot the mac into recovery mode and reinstall MacOs. It wont delete any information since its only rebuilding the system files.

You'll need to do the same when you get a working Hard Drive back into the Mac.


External disk does not show in "diskutil list" after premature eject, what can I do? This question is related to External drive does not mount after plug off without eject, but the difference is that in my case, the drive did not appear in the Disk Utility application nor in diskutil list. Furthermore, I had a strong suspicion that the problem was caused by a poweroff while the external drive wasn't (fully) unmounted, because Finder was showing a warning about disconnecting before unmounting for both partitions of the drive.

When I switched it on, the drive would briefly spin up and then spin down again, but none of the software on my mac would confirm that it was connected.

There are lots of (free) tools available online that promise to help with recovering compromised disks, including some that are provided by disk manufacturers. However, in this case, none of the programs I could find appealed to me, for at least one of the following reasons in each case:

It is only for Windows, or it requires creating a bootable flash drive before you can run it.
Its documentation does not clearly state that it will be able to find a disk that doesn't already show up on your mac.

I'm asking this question retroactively to share the solution I found. If you know of a different solution that worked in your case, please feel welcome to share as well!

Reading the man page of diskutil, I found a command that I thought might provide at least some diagnostics on what was wrong:

diskutil activity

When you run this command, it will start monitoring all disk activity and report back to you until you stop it again.

I ran this command and switched off the bricked external drive. Nothing happened.

I switched the external drive back on while the command was still running. Now, I saw the following sequence of events repeat several times (leaving out the information that came with the events):

***DiskPeek
***DiskAppeared
***DiskMountApproval

and finally a few times

***DiskDescriptionChanged

followed by

***DAIdle

which was also the last event before I switched the drive back on.

This seemed promising, so I took a peek in the Finder and lo and behold, both partitions of the drive were there!

This was my first attempt to mount the disk while running diskutil activity and the third attempt in total since the problem started. I don't know whether diskutil activity actually fixed the problem or that this was just my "lucky try", but if you run into the same problem as I did, at least this is something you can try!


TrackPad Speed and Mouse Speed - Resets to slow every time I ran into this weird situation.

Background: I was trying to shutdown my Mac, but the Mac was waiting on another program asking me to save the file or not. I didn't notice the prompt and closed the laptop. When I opened my Mac again, the Mac was at the same state, waiting for me to respond to the prompt.  Finally, I responded to that prompt and the Mac continued to shutdown.

Issue: After restarting the laptop, there was huge slowness in "Trackpad pointer speed" and "mouse pointer speed". So, I tried to set the tracking speed to fast, but the moment I close the window, it resets to slow. See below.

I tried to delete com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad.plist and com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse, so Mac would create a new one, if it had write permissions. The Mac created new files but the issue still persists.
Same case with the case of mouse speed too.

Any help is highly appreciated.

Although according to his comment it didn't help Mattias, the first thing I would try is resetting the NVRAM.

Since you don't specify what model your Mac is, I've included two different sets of instructions. Choose the one that applies.

Resetting the PRAM/NVRAM on ALL MODELS EXCEPT for Late-2016 MacBook Pro models

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

Resetting the NVRAM on Late-2016 MacBook Pro models

To reset the NVRAM on all Late-2016 MacBook Pro models (with and without Touch Bar) follow these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then immediately press the commandoptionpr keys.
Keep these keys pressed down for at least 20 seconds!
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note 1: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

Note 2: These steps will also work to reset the NVRAM (or PRAM) for all Macs. However, the late-2016 MBP models actually required the commandoptionpr keys to be held down for 20 seconds, while earlier Macs did not require this, but doing so does not cause any problems either.


Replace MacBook Pro screen with Screen from old MacBook I have a 13” MacBook Pro mid 2014 as well as a late 2011 MacBook Pro.

My 2014 MacBook Pro screen is broken and I was wondering if I could replace it with the screen from my 2011 MacBook Pro.

Will there be any issues during installation?

No, it will not work.

First, and most importantly, the LVDS connectors are not interchangeable.  The 2011 MacBook Pro uses the 30 pin LVDS connector while the 2014 uses the 40pin connector (left and right respectively).

Images sourced from iFixit.com

Secondly, the display assembly also contains the cables for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas as well as the iSight (webcam) cable.  All of which are in very different locations on each of their respective logic boards, thus very different cable lengths; they physically won't fit.


Is there a simple way to compare apps in my iTunes library with those actually installed on my iPhone? Thanks to the appshopper.com RSS feeds, I've downloaded a lot of free apps: some good, many forgettable.  Is there a simple way to see a list of uninstalled iPhone apps so I can re-evaluate and delete a lot of the duds?

I've seen programs that scan my iTunes library for apps (though some of them miss a lot of results), and IIRC it's possible to read an iTunes-managed iPhone backup to see which apps are installed there.

So, are there any existing utilities that do this?  Failing that, I'll upvote/accept an answer that points me in the right direction to create such a utility myself.

Two possible answers...

Assuming you've not actively deleted them from iTunes as well as from your iPhone...

Upgrade to iTunes 10.x if you haven't already
Plug your iPhone into your Mac, open iTunes, sync it.
Click on the iPhone in the side bar and go to the Apps tab

You'll see that some apps are checked and others are not. This is an indicator of whether or not they're installed on the device.

Pretty sure this got introduced in iTunes 10.x (hence the first step)

Assuming you don't delete your old emails... (e.g. Archive in GMail)

The iTunes store should have emailed you summaries of the apps you've purchased (even the free ones) shortly after their 'purchase', so, if you have an email account where you've kept those emails, you could search through them to get a list of each app you've purchased from the iTunes store.


No backlight + no keyboard backlight implies fuse problem? I have a MacBook Air 13" mid 2011.

I have had display problems, so I changed the backlight fuse. After that, there is still no display. The computer works fine otherwise, I can turn it on and hear sounds.

As of now I am wondering whether I soldered wrong, or whether the problem is with the backlight itself.

I also noticed that there is no keyboard backlight. Even if I hit the keyboard backlight keys, it doesn't light up.

I was wondering whether that means that my soldering is wrong, or not. Is the backlight fuse also "protecting" the keyboard backlight ?

If your backlight fuse was defective it might have damaged the backlight of the display. In official repairs an authorized service provider would replace the logic board AND display when the fuse was defective.


Using Wi-Fi and Ethernet at the same time I'm using the macOS High Sierra. There are two network interfaces on my Mac, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. The Wi-Fi is connected to the Internet directly, and the Ethernet is connected to out company's local network. They're in different subnets, one of which is 10.0.0.0/8 and another is 192.168.0.0/16. The Wi-Fi has faster speed than the Ethernet, but the sources in the local network cannot be accessed via Wi-Fi.

Now I want to route the traffic based on the urls. For example, I want all the access to *.corp.com to the Ethernet and others to Wi-Fi. The problem is the DNS. Those *.corp.com are only valid locally, which means they can only be queried in the local network. If I put Wi-Fi on the top priority, then all the access to *.corp.com would fail due to DNS query failure, because the system will use the DNS servers configured by the Wi-Fi router. However, if I set the Ethernet to the first, all the traffic will go to Ethernet.

I've tried the way to configure the route table manually, but it didn't work. The same DNS issue.

So if there any good ways to handle this situation?

Set your DNS server manually to the corporate one, prioritise wi-fi in network settings so it's the default gateway and route 10.x.x.x out through ethernet?


How to add export formats to Preview.app? Is there any way to teach Preview how to export/save (and not just import/open) additional formats? If so, how?

As you may know, Apple has removed several export formats from the default dialog in recent OS X versions. They are still available if holding down Opt/Alt, though. Yay for “expert features”!

Default formats

JPEG
JPEG-2000
OpenEXR
PNG
TIFF

Additional advanced formats

ASTC
GIF
ICNS
KTX
Microsoft BMP
Microsoft icon
PBM/PGM/PPM
PVRTC
Photoshop
PostScript
QuickTime movie
SGI
TGA

The simple answer here is No.

You cannot add formats because the libraries and support for those libraries must be compiled into the Preview application.  Since Preview is not an Open Source project, there is no access to the source code to add this support and subsequently compile it.

I investigated creating a plugin, however that also hit a dead end as there is no way to access the Plugin API (if it exists)

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16054059#16054059

The best way to address this is to let Apple know about it by submitting feedback:  http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html


Time Machine won't backup a folder that was previously excluded I was troubleshooting my wifes iPhoto library and rebuilt a duplicate library.  I didn't want to fill up the 2TB external hard drive used for Time Machine, so I excluded the folder that contained only the rebuilt library.  I now have deleted the old Library and want Time Machine to backup the new, rebuilt library, but it won't.  I moved the rebuilt library to the ~/Pictures/ folder and deleted the exclusion from Time Machine, but the Library doesn't get backed up.  I deleted the com.apple.timemachine.plist, formatted the external hard drive, and started all over with a new Time Machine backup, but the iPhoto library still won't get backed up by.

What's weird is that when the first Time Machine backup begins, it says the backup size will be ~1.1TB (which is correct), but once it's complete, the backup is only ~600GB (iPhoto library is ~500GB) I know Time Machine won't backup iPhoto if iPhoto is open.  iPhoto is closed the entire time.

I had the same issue. The workaround was that adding the folder to exclusion once and then start the backup. When backup is done, remove it from exclusion list. I am still using Mac OS 10.9.5. So, I don't know if this bug has been fixed on 10.10???


SMB Mount directory and reconnecting I have some trouble with fileserver shares, if the share get's disconnected and reconnected again. The mount dir, e.g. /Volumes/Data isn't removed and when the share get's reconnected again, a new directory /Volumes/Data-1 is created.

However, I need the mount to be available at a static path, so that I can use it in some tools.

I fixed the issue using automount

  sudo mkdir -p /mnt/scan

  sudo echo "/mnt/scan      auto_scan" >> /etc/auto_master

  sudo echo "scansnap -fstype=smbfs ://MYUSER:MYPASS@192.168.1.2/scan/scansnap" >>
   /etc/auto_scan

  sudo chmod 600 /etc/auto_scan

  sudo automount -vc

  ls -la /mnt/scan/scansnap


How to run a script on login whilst being hidden I have an applescript (scpt) script that I would like to run on login of a user.
I would like the script not be visible in the dock, menu bar, etc. (This would probably mean running it in the background or something.)

What would be the best way to do this?

Preferably, I would like it that it would not be easily noticeable that the script is being auto-run. Also, a way to somewhat easily remove the script from login would be helpful.

If needed, I'll attach a copy of the script. It's supposed to be a prank using the say command, any tips for improving the script would be nice ;)

Instead of launching Terminal You can make something like:

repeat
    delay (random number from 1 to 5) -- Change the delay in seconds
    do shell script "say Hello"
end repeat

You can save it as an app and then change its Info.plist file to hide it from Dock. Simply add this line inside Hello.app/Contents/Info.plist:

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<true/>

To launch it on login You can add this app to Login Items.


Can I use two 4k displays with MacBook Pro MGXA2 According to specs on Apple site it is not possible, but they not always accurate. Have anybody tried this?

Multiple (up to 12) thunderbolt displays or devices can be chained and utilised by a single port. Whether your device has the power to do this, and whether the OS allows it is a different matter. Your device should be running Mavericks or Yosemite and should be powerful enough to use the monitors. With most Thunderbolt Displays they can be plugged into the mains and therefore work fine in chains with low powered devices.


How does Font Book.app determine the "Design style" for a Smart Collection? In Font Book.app one of the criteria for creating a Smart Collection is "Design style".

How does Font Book.app determine whether or not a given font falls into one of the available categories?

OK, I think I figured it out...  Opening a font in RoboFont, I scoured all the obscure meta-info available and finally found the entry that seems to correspond to what FontBook uses for the Design Style in the section called Panose (a term I had never heard of!).  Long story short... FontBook seems to probably use the Proportion to determine the style.


External USB3 hard drive has suddenly become slow The machine is a mid-2012 MacMini that operates as a server (colocated in a remote data center).

The MacMini has an external USB hard drive to provide backup storage (WD Elements Portable 2TB, USB powered)

Every night (at 2 am) the startup volume (internal SSD) is backed up to the external drive using the application Carbon Copy Cloner (with automated task).

From the task history I can see the backup always takes approximately 30 mins (there are dozens of entries in the history).

The last backup took 1h 45m.

Despite no error were reported by CCC, I am wondering:

what may have caused that?
is it a signal of imminent failure?
what tools may I use to investigate the issue?

I know for sure that:

the volume of data copied/synced was approximately the same as previuos backups
the issue is with the external HDD not the internal SSD (because the HDD is subsequently backed up to a remote mac and also this operation did take much longer)
the HDD is not full (about 50% available)
there is almost no load/activity on the server during backup as it is performed at late night when no one use the server

Update:

I investigated CCC's log files but found nothing relevant.

I re-run manually the backup task and this time it took again the normal time (~30 mins)

Still I'm concerned that the single episode may be a signal of imminent failure.

Addressing your questions in order...

  what may have caused that [backup to take 1:45]?
  is it a signal of imminent failure?
  what tools may I use to investigate the issue?

Cause

Since you didn't get any read/write errors on CCC, it's entirely possible that you didn't have enough USB bandwidth to copy files at the speed it normally does.  I've had instances on several Macs, all running different versions of macOS suddenly lose connectivity to USB audio devices, and have slow transfers to USB drives.  A simple reboot and the problem goes away. (Normally, I would reset the USB bus, but found it easier to simply perform a system reboot).

Now, for me, this always occurred with bus powered devices.  Devices connected to a USB hub with external power supplies or devices that had their own power adapters never exhibited these problems so I chalked it up to too much power draw on the USB bus.

Imminent Failure?

Is this a signal of imminent failure?  Not exactly.  Read/Write errors are symptomatic of imminent failure.  It's entirely possible that the USB controller on the external drive simply "glitched" or pulled to much power thus improperly resetting the USB bus.  If the problem exists after a reboot, you should start paying closer attention because it could be the USB port on the Mac mini equally likely as the USB interface of the external drive.

Diagnostic Tools

What tools can you use?  Unfortunately, none.  Getting disk status is limited to what ATA commands the USB to SATA controller on the enclosure is capable of delivering.  The WD Elements Portable is Western Digital's entry level line of external drives so they don't have any software available for diagnosis.  However, one step up, the Elements SE line,  does have Windows/Mac software specifically for diagnosing those drives.    You could give the software a go; the worst that can happen is it doesn't work for your drive.

Going Forward

Your Mac mini is in a remote location that's now almost impossible to access.  When selecting your backup hardware, go for more "robust" products like the WD Passport or even the larger "desktop" drives with their own power supply.  You also want to have more than one in the event one fails.

If you go this route, don't back up the backup.  Let it make it's own backup because if you happen to back up garbage onto the first, you don't want the second to be garbage as well.  I would even look to backup to the cloud for good measure.


Just downgraded from iOS 11 beta to iOS 10 and now I can't pair my Apple Watch I'm not sure if my Apple Watch is still running the beta version or what, but I downgraded from iOS 11 beta to iOS 10.3.2 (went to iOS 10.3.3 beta first) and now I can't pair my Apple Watch. I tried to erase all content and settings and when it reboots, it goes into the pairing screen. When I try to pair it, it tells me that my phone needs to be updated.

How do I downgrade the WatchOS beta while running a solid iOS 10.3.2?

You can’t downgrade watchOS, no matter which version of iOS you're running on the paired iPhone. If you want to keep using your iPhone with your WATCH you have the following options:

Reinstall the corresponding beta version of iOS (11 for watchOS 4, or 10.3.3 for watchOS 3.2.3).
Wait for the public release of the required version of iOS (10.3.3 should land the week of July 17th).
Take your WATCH to an Apple Store so they can downgrade it for you. This requires them sending your Watch in for service, which will take a few days.


In iMovie is there a way to have the background have key frames and motion (similar to picture in picture)? I want to see in iMovie if there is any way I can have my background image start in one location at the beginning of the movie and end of in a different position at the end of the movie.

I see I can do that with a non background image using picture in picture and key frames but I want to see If I can do that to the background image as well?

iMovie is just not meant to be that flexible. You have more options in Premiere Elements, the affordable consumer-grade version of Premiere Pro. Or, of course, the 'pro' applications such as Final Cut Pro.


Should I turn the iPhone 12 out of the box? I just bought myself an Apple iPhone 12 -- my first iPhone. Should I turn it on and start using it “out of the box” or should I charge the phone first and then when its full, turn it on?

A new iPhone comes with around 50% charge on its battery. You can start using it out of the box and there's no need to charge it fully before starting to use it.
While it may not currently be applicable on an iPhone 12, if there's a newer version of iOS available for your model of iPhone, you may need to plug it into power outlet if you wish to install and update to the latest version of iOS. And that too would be required only after you have finished setting up the device.
But generally speaking, an iPhone battery is charged at factory to enabled it to be used out of the box while also ensuring that the battery chemistry remains intact while in shipment.


Synchronise folders on different Macs using rsync I am trying to synchronise two different folders using rsync. I have copied all the data worth 4Tb from a network share to an external hdd using rsync -v -r /source /destination. Now I need to run regular backup to sync both the locations. Can anyone suggest rsync command which I can use to synchronise both the folders.

The best way is to continue to use rsync so as to maintain /destination synchronized with /source.

1st run:

rsync -avE /source /destination

next runs:

rsync -avE /source /destination

The -a option = --archive == -rlptgoD.

The -E option means copy extended attributes and ACL, and is mandatory on HFS+ filesystems.

Warning: the standard version of rsync on OS X, version 2.6.9 (see rsync --version) still
have problems with extended attributes.
These problems will be shown thanks to the -v option.

A verification of the output of rsync is mandatory.

This version 2.6.9 is too old and causing too many problems.

I advise any user willing to maintain in sync directories between
different Macs (or between a Mac and another Unix machine) to install
rsync version 3.1.2.

Here is the method I use:

install MacPorts: MacPorts home page

go to the Quickstart section, install Xcode
choose the right version to install (Mavericks, Yosemite or El Capitan)

Upgrade your PATH so as to find the port command in it
for example, I installed it in /local/bin and modified my PATH
like this:

PATH=/local/bin:${PATH}
export PATH

Install rsync 3.1.2:

port install rsync

With this version of rsync, the right options to use will be:

rsync -avAX /source /destination

and if you read me thus far, you are pretty good enough now to read

man rsync

to get the light from the source.


Applescript - Connection is invalid I have an application for mac and I use the following applescript code (exported as an AS app) to start that app periodically:

on idle
    tell application "System Events"
        tell application "MyApp"
            run
        end tell
        return 7
    end tell
end idle

I use [NSApp terminate:self] in MyApp to terminate itself after it finished its work.

The problems is that the AS script displays a "Connection is invalid" error message when it tries to run MyApp the second time and onward. The error does not show up in the first launch.

I'm guessing [NSApp terminate:self] is causing the conflict with the AS somehow, but why?

In the end I used NSTimer to automate my code.

Rather then using the applescript to launch the app periodically, I have the app run constantly and use NSTimer within my app to fire a specific method from time to time.

[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:2.0
    target:self
    selector:@selector(targetMethod:)
    userInfo:nil
    repeats:NO];

This way the app is never killed and does not have to be restarted.


How to solve the "overscan" issue if the iMac is connected to an HDTV and using BootCamp and Windows 7? This question is related to both iMac and Windows, but since it is happening on an iMac 27 inch model, so I hope posting in the Apple forum is more relevant.

Basically, when an iMac is connected to an HDTV, part of the screen is missing near the margin (about 3% to 5%).  If running Mac OS X, the issue can be solved by using "underscan" in the System Preferences.  But what if the iMac is running Windows 7, can a similar solution be used?  (I don't see such options for the graphics card...).

(The solution of the iMac if running OS X is: How to solve Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Overscan problem? (Part of the screen is missing) )

Are you sure you need to have a software solution within Windows?  Many HDTVs let you adjust current display settings to disable the overscan.  See PCWorld - Tech Trend: For HDTV, Don't Overlook Overscan.  Quote:

  If you don't see every pixel you should see, you're not viewing a true
  1920 by 1080 progressive-scan picture. The name of the viewing mode
  differs from brand to brand, but it's commonly called Dot-by-Dot,
  Point-to-Point, Just, or simply Overscan Off.

To add to that, on my own HDTV, choosing "Studio" under the Aspect setting has the effect of eliminating the overscan.  I've also seen it called simply "PC" on another TV, and "Just Scan" on another.

Check your HDTV's settings ... chances are it has something like this and you aren't aware of it.  Though, admittedly there are some HDTVs without such a capability (sadly) and for these you'll need to find a solution that lets you reduce the resolution output to the HDTV.

Update: I found the following article explains well both the issue and troubleshooting steps: Windows Experts Community - Configure Your Display and Display Adapter.

Plus: some folks have successfully replaced the Apple video drivers in their Bootcamp Windows with ATI drivers, in order to access settings to compensate for the HDTV overscan.  See this blog post: Apple Macbook Pro (Early 2011) running Bootcamp Windows 7 with ATI / AMD Catalyst Control Center.  Got ATI video in your Mac?  Worth a shot perhaps, if you do.  Take a backup before messing with drivers, of course.


What do the small-sunrise / big-sunrise icons mean on F5 and F6 on the MacBook Air? What do the F5 and F6 keys do on the 2011 MacBook Air?  They are marked with what I interpret to be small-sunrise and big-sunrise icons.  I do not see any effect when I press them.

These are for decreasing and increasing the brightness of the keyboard backlight. When the system senses low light and the keyboard is allowed to illuminate, the keys will work. Otherwise, they silently do nothing at all.


Can micro-USB android device (Redmi 4 (India)) be charged using a hybrid converter (USB type-C to type-A) with MacBook Pro high watt charger? I have MacBook Pro (15'', 2017 model). It comes with a very high voltage charger with USB type-C port. I have a hybrid converter (USB Type-C to VGA + USB Type-C + USB Type-A). I want to charge my Redmi 4 (India variant) device using a cable (USB Type-A to micro-USB). My phone supports unspecified version of Qualcomm quick charge (tested with a turbo-charger of Moto Phone).

So, the connection is as given below:
MacBook Pro Charger -> USB Type-C to USB Type-C cable -> USB Type-C to Hybrid output converter including USB Type-A -> USB Type-A to micro-USB cable -> Redmi 4 device.

Will above configuration damage my phone or charger? Also, will my phone be able to charge quickly as it supports unspecified version of Qualcomm quick charge?

No, it will not damage your phone.

Whether or not it will charge quickly depends on the specific kind of hybrid converter you have. Most likely it will not charge quickly, as the USB Type-A port is most commonly just at 500 mA, or 900 mA for some ports that USB 3.0. It is not common to see dedicated charging ports with higher amps in such hybrid converters.


Add text captions/subtitles to videos without Adobe Premiere? (burn in) I want to add text captions to some videos I am uploading to social media/Facebook.

Is there a simple way to do this in QuickTime? Adobe Premiere is too expensive.

You can use Video Caption Maker to add captions/subtitles directly to your videos. Its free (with a watermark).