Enable file sharing for app from iTunes Generally when I connect a iPhone to my computer, iTunes detects it and there is a option for File Sharing in iTunes which can be used to share files from the system to iPhone apps.

I am using an app called "Don't Touch This - Secret Data Vault". How can I enable the file sharing option for this app?

I followed this article but it is no use: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6029916/how-to-enable-file-sharing-for-my-app

You can't, it's up to the app developer to implement the feature.


Mails message contents not 'wrapping' (i.e. running off edge of box) I use OSX 'Mail' to look at my email.

I have received a message whose contents are not 'wrapping'.  Usually, when I resize a window the line breaks reformat so that all the message can be seen.  In this message the words run off the side of the window, even on full screen.

I am running 0S 10.14.5 on a MacBook

Looks like an HTML email has some CSS settings off the mark. Sender's fault. There is a little you can do. Hit altcmdU and see it in an even worse format but at least the text lines would break way before the width ends.

The shortcut corresponds to View menu → Message → Raw Source.


Where are cellular data preferences stored in iOS? In Settings → Cellular (Mobile in UK), settings can be changed regarding mobile data, including per-app switches for all installed apps to enable or disable mobile data.

Where are these preferences stored?

I've looked in /var/mobile/Library/Preferences, but there doesn't seem to be any preferences relating to this. I've searched through the plists for various strings including app names and IDs from the list of per-app settings, but not found anything.

The directory you're looking for happens to be /var/wireless/Library/Preferences. This is where the Settings > Cellular settings are stored. The per-application settings are stored in the database /var/wireless/Library/Databases/CellularUsage.db. If you want to add a setting manually, you'll need to add an entry for the application in two tables. The first is bundle_uuid, and you'll need to set the bundle_id field to the friendly bundle name (such as com.developersbliss.Helicopter), and then the macho_uuid field to its UUID (such as DD314675-0AA8-8A84-DB2BB966BAD8) (Repeat this step for each UUID that the application has. In my particular example, there are two UUIDs. Just add another entry to the table for each UUID, but with the bundle_id set the same as before, and with the macho_uuid set to the next UUID the application has.). Then you'll need to make an entry in the bundle_info table with the bundle_id field set to the friendly bundle name used in the bundle_uuid table, and then the flags field set to 0. This will make that particular application be restricted from using cellular data. To enable the application to use cellular data again, just set its flags field in the bundle_info table to 1. Any application not found in this database is assumed to be allowed to use cellular data.


Flashdrive stuck at 200 MB I’m a Mac OS 10.11.
I've tried to build a bootable images USB flashdrive on 2 of my flash drives, now I want use them as a storage again. I want to format them.
But they seems to stuck in 200 MB EFI mode partition or something like that,
and no matter what, I can’t seem to format it back to it original size (32 GB).
I’ve tried MS-DOS, and ExFAT. Both give me same result. :(
How do I force format my flash drive back to its original size on a Mac OS X 10.11 ?

Result of diskutil in Terminal
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           +499.1 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 5866A45F-D1A4-43E9-9719-881FBA5840F6
                                 Unencrypted
/dev/disk2 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +205.1 MB   disk2
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Google Chrome           205.1 MB   disk2s2
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *32.0 GB    disk3
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data USB 3.0                 31.8 GB    disk3s2

Updated
I've format it to ExFAT.
Mac OS X
When I plug that drive into a Mac, I got it to display fine with full capacity.

Windows
But when I plug it into my Windows PC, I kept seeing this EFI partition - not the other one.

What is the cause of that ? How do I prevent it ?
I'm running out of ideas now. :('''

You can try force format using terminal

Enter this in the terminal "diskutil list"
Then a list of devices will be shown.
"diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ diskname diskidentifier" replace disk name with device to formatted.
In the command above, change “JHFS+” to “HFS+” if you want a volume that is not journalled. Change “diskname” to the new name you want for the disk, and replace “diskidentifier” to the Disk Identifier obtained from Disk Utility. If you want to reformat, replace eraseDisk with reformat and delete the “JHFS+” and “diskname” parts of the command.

You can try the above steps. Hope this will help.


Free space on my jailbroken iOS device is rapidly declining -- how do I figure out why? Between yesterday and today, my iPhone 4 on Pangu 7.1.2 has gone from 2 gigs of data usage to 9 gigs.  I removed all of my videos and images.  Why the rapid jump?

My apps:
Messages, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Weather, Clock, Maps, Videos, Notes, Reminders, Game Center, iTunes Store, App Store, Settings, Line, SKype, Phone, Mail, Safari, Music, Extras, Voice Memos, FaceTime, Newstand, WeChat, Tether, Passbook, Gmail, Messenger, SpecialEffectsCamera, Swing Copters, Asphalt8, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, Time Zones, Stocks, Facebook, Talkatone, Jango, LSATMax, LSAT #, LSAT Proctor, and Cydia.  Also: iCloud.

This is usually an issue with being unable to properly remove temporary data.

It's root cause could be one of two things:
1. The permissions for the .Trash service is corrupt

Or

There is issues in the directory of the storage component.

Either way the solution is to restore the device and setup as a new iPhone.
Erase all content and settings should work fine too if it wasn't jail broken.

Happy travels!


SSD issue on macbook pro I tried to install FreeBSD on a Macbook pro 2015(early) and it totally formatted my SSD.
When I tried to rollback to macOS from the recovery menu, I cant see my SSD(although the laptop is working with freeBSD).
Is there a way to hard format the disk to the apple file system instead of trying to find my way around with the recovery menu?
Essentially, I want to make the SSD visible to the recovery menu so I can go back to macos.
Thank you for your time!

You have several options:

Boot to the recovery partition, open disk utility and delete the other non-recovery permissions and then create a new JHFS+ / APFS depending on the macOS version.  (credit Jean_JD in a comment)
Create an external macOS Installer flash drive. Hold the Option key and boot from the flash drive then delete the internal disk entirely including the recovery partition then install macOS. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
Boot to Internet Recovery Mode,If you use Shift-Option-Command-R during startup, you're offered the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available. If you use Option-Command-R during startup, in most cases you're offered the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac. Otherwise you're offered the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available. Connect to WiFi and delete the foreign FreeBSD partitions and install.


Easily pretty print XML Is there a way to quickly pretty print large XML files without needing an app? Online solutions don't allow for massive files and I'd like to do this without install more junk on my computer.

Macs come with libxml2 which inclues a tool called xmllint. You can use this to format your xml with ease. The tool does not have a graphical interface, so you'll need to fire up terminal.

Example 1. Format a file

xmllint --format - < file_to_format.xml > formatted_output.xml

Example 2. Format xml from clipboard

pbpaste | xmllint --format - > formatted_output.xml


Accidentally deleted /Library/Developer files I accidentally deleted my /Library/Developer files while trying to delete the Derived Data. Now, My Xcode 9 has stopped working and is crashing everytime I open it. I have a extremely important project pending.
I am using macOS Sierra.

Open Terminal from Application -> Utility -> Terminal
Type in the following.

xcode-select --install

This should install Mac Osx commandline tools and also create the /Library/Developer Files


multitasking gestures I develop for iOS, and use an ipad2 with firmware 4.3.2, and xcode 3.2.5
multitasking gestures work fine,

I got the ipad of a friend which has firmware 4.3.3, but my xcode doesn't recognize it,
 * so I want to make this friends ipad be able to use the multitasking gestures, is the problem of not recognition because of the x code?, does the 4.3.3 only work with latest xcode?

thanks a lot!

I think you'd have to use Xcode 4 (I did). But since you mentioned it worked with your iPad 2, try to first register the device in the developer portal.


What is the current status of handwriting recognition on the iPad with an air pencil or stylus Ideally I want to be able to use my ipad as a clipboard running google sheets to do inventory entry.  So I'm looking for a general purpose stylus to text converter.
Seems strange that Palm got this pretty close to right 20 years ago, but there is little progress since.
Research into this found a flurry of articles written shortly after the air pencil came out, but I've found little since then.  So my current answer is, "Moribund"

iOS currently doesn't support handwriting recognition on OS level. There are apps for the Pro models (with Apple Pencil) that recognize handwriting, but this won't help you with Google Sheets or similar.
Things appear to be more bright with iOS 14 (the version to be released later in 2020). Apple will introduce handwriting recognition on OS level, at least for the Pro models, with a feature called Scribble. Check out https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-preview/ for the details already known.


How to make Preview render PDF docs with crisp fonts on MacBook Air (without Retina Display) in Mojave? Hi have a Macbook Air (previous model, no retina display). Ever since the Mojave update, Preview renders text in PDF files quite blurry compared to Adobe Acrobat.

For instance, here is a screenshot of a file rendered in Preview:

Here is a screenshot of the same file, but rendered in Adobe Acrobat:

You can see that the top image is noticeably blurry compared to the bottom image.

I've tried the tips suggested on this website, such as:

Enabling or Disabling Font Smoothing in Settings
Enabling Font Smoothing in Terminal
Adjusting Font Smoothing Settings With Defaults

However, none of those suggestions fixed the blurry text rendering in Preview on my Macbook Air. Apparently, this is due to a change in the way that Mojave handles anti-aliasing compared to High Sierra. Is there a fix for this?

Here are the specs for my machine:

  Model Name:   MacBook Air
  Model Identifier: MacBookAir7,2
  Processor Name:   Intel Core i5
  Processor Speed:  1.8 GHz
  Number of Processors: 1
  Total Number of Cores:    2
  L2 Cache (per Core):  256 KB
  L3 Cache: 3 MB
  Memory:   8 GB

In short: No. Apple has removed the Font smoothing facility from the OS.

Your best option is to set Adobe Reader/Acrobat as your default app for PDFs. There are other apps, too. I quite like Foxit Reader, which is free and does display everything nice and crisply.


Messages in iCloud on some devices, mixed with old devices? What is the behaviour if not all devices support Messages in iCloud?

Do the supported devices sync to iCloud and the older devices continue to receive messages as normal, not synced?

That is exactly how it works. The devices that have Messages in iCloud enabled will sync amongst themselves, while older devices will keep working as they always did.

More precisely:

iOS devices with Messages in iCloud will no longer backup messages as part of iCloud Backup. This means that their backups should be smaller.
Devices that support Messages in iCloud will merge their messages with one another via iCloud, filling any “gaps” they may have had. Unsupported devices will neither merge their messages nor fill in any gaps they had.
If you delete a message/conversation on a device that supports Messages in iCloud, it will be deleted from all devices that support Messages in iCloud. That message/conversation will remain on unsupported devices.
Unsupported devices connected to your iCloud account will continue to receive iMessages just like before. There is no need for Messages in iCloud there.
Unsupported devices setup for SMS Forwarding will continue to receive and be able to send SMS/MMS messages like normal. No need for Messages in iCloud there either.


Apple Remote Control options does not appear on Advanced Security Preferences panel As you see here, I can't access any Apple Remote Control on my security preferences
so I'm not able to pair my Apple Remote again. I'm using High Sierra updated. Funny thing it was working previously on the same Mac w/ same config. Any ideas? Thanks!

iMacs late-2012 and newer, MacBook Air 2010 and newer, Retina MacBook, Mac Pro 2013, and Retina MacBook Pro do not have an infrared receiver. You computer may be one of these models.


Inconsistent App Store ratings stars representation In the iTunes App Store for iPhone, the rating is often displayed near the application's icon. Sometimes, when there are no ratings, the empty stars have an orange outline and sometimes they don't.

Is there a significance to having the orange outline? What might the outline signify?

it would appear to just be a styling issue where some of the stars on different category page/tabs have the orange surround and some don't.

If you find an application without the orange surround in a page then select it to take you into the app description, suddenly it will have the orange surround.


How do I show a partition created gParted while booting my Mac? I have a Mac Mini mid 2011, 500GB HDD with dual boot Windows 7.

I tried prepping this drive so that i can clone it to a smaller 240GB SSD using gParted from this tutorial.

Now when I boot holding the option key, I don't see the Windows drive. Is there a way to fix this?

fixed it by loading windows 7 (prepped by bootcamp) on a thumb drive then choosing th fix windows op


If I update a podcast episode on my server, when does it get updated on Apple Podcasts? I have noticed that some podcasts are different depending on the date I download them. For example, some have different advertisings when I download them again. I also noticed that some podcast episodes are no longer available.
So I suspect that podcast files live on the publisher's servers and Apple Podcasts does not host or cache them.
Is that true? If I update a podcast episode on my server, will all downloads after that get the new version?

Apple hosts a directory, Apple does not host the files of podcasts.
If you update the file of a podcast on your server, but do not indicate that you've updated it in your RSS feed, then only new downloaders will get the new file (obviously).  If you update your RSS feed to indicate that there is a new file, then many podcast catchers will figure out they need to re-download the file.  Others will simply list it as a new file again.


error "The variable var is not defined." number -2753 from "var" in a method I'm trying to write a method that waits for an element on a webpage to appear before continuing, this code works when not placed in a method but I cannot appear to place it in one without getting the error above

on waitForId(idText)
set var to false
set idText to "\"" & idText & "\""
repeat until var is true
    tell application "Safari"
        set var to (do JavaScript "document.contains(document.getElementById(idText));") in current tab of first window
    end tell
    delay 0.2
end repeat
return true
end waitForId

tell application "Safari"
global var
set var to false
if not (exists document 1) then reopen
tell current tab of window 1 to set URL to "https://www.google.com/?client=safari#channel=mac_bm"
tell current tab to activate
log "starting wait"
my waitForId("hplogo")

log "done waiting"
end tell

The "hplogo" is a google sign for testing. When run:

error "The variable var is not defined." number -2753 from "var"

figured it out, a misplaced ) and concatenating the javascript to make it a variable, silly question.

on waitForId(idText)
set wait to false
set idText to "\"" & idText & "\""
repeat until wait is true
    tell application "Safari"
        set wait to (do JavaScript "document.contains(document.getElementById(" & idText & "));" in current tab of first window)
    end tell
    delay 0.2
end repeat
return true
end waitForId

tell application "Safari"
set var to false
if not (exists document 1) then reopen
tell current tab of window 1 to set URL to "https://www.google.com/?client=safari#channel=mac_bm"
tell current tab to activate
log "starting wait"
my waitForId("hplogo")

log "done waiting"
end tell


What is this mysterious Google Maps popup? macOS 10.13.3
This window suddenly opened in the foreground.
It is not directly associated with any program, stays open if everything else is closed, can not be selected in any way, can not be moved or anything. At the time of it opening itself I am miles and miles away from the city of Berlin. This is the second time it happened, the last time being weeks ago.
Googling has not turned up any meaningful results. What is this?

Turns out the perpetrator is - for whatever reason f.lux.
The window is truly a zombie though and even stays unmovable and open if one of the buttons is clicked. Will inform them.

EDIT 17.02.18:
Here's their answer:

Thanks for your note - we have fixed this but haven't updated everyone yet.

Make sure you have 39.987 (download again) at

https://justgetflux.com/

The location popup says "f.lux" now and explains what it's doing....


XQuartz El Capitan not setting $DISPLAY for a Vagrant built VM I've built multiple VMs with Vagrant (CentOS, ArchLinux, Debian), all exhibit the same problem:

When I ssh onto the VM,

0;vagrant@archlinux: ~vagrant@archlinux:~$ echo $DISPLAY

0;vagrant@archlinux: ~vagrant@archlinux:~$

I've tried troubleshooting as explained here: http://www.xquartz.org/Support.html, but that didn't help.

I'm running El Capitan 10.11.3, XQuartz 2.7.8.

All I'm trying to do is to run vagrant ssh -c 'xclock' and have a window show up on my host OS.

I had this same issue but realized I never restarted OS X after installing XQuartz. Once I rebooted, XQuartz was correctly detected and X11 forwarding worked.


Laravel from Scratch - Traversy YouTube - SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] error when run PHP artisan migrate I'm running PHP 7.4.9, Laravel 8 and MAMP 6.0.1 and am learning Laravel.
Those of you running MAMP and following this excellent tutorial will find in Video 5 that you will get this error when attempt to run the PHP artisan migrate command in video #5:
SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO) (SQL: select * from information_schema.tables where table_schema = lsapp and table_name = migrations and table_type = 'BASE TABLE')
It looks like a basic mySQL issue but it's not, it's due to some missing configuration in the defaul Laravel configuration for MAMP users. I spent ages attempting to resolve and found bits of helpful and conflicting info across different threads so thought it would be useful to combine the solution in one place...

The solution...
For MAMP users, there's a line missing from the default .env file in Laravel which basically instructs Laravel where to find mySQL:
DB_SOCKET=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

You also need to change the DB_HOST and DB_PORT settings for MAMP.
This works for a default MAMP installation:
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=8889
DB_DATABASE=lsapp
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=root
DB_SOCKET=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

If you have set a username / password you should use them of course ...


Can the Magic Keyboard be used with the USB-C to Lightning cable? Can the Magic Keyboard be used with the USB-C to Lightning cable and have the keyboard actually work as a keyboard (not just charge the internal battery)?

The "Here's what you can do..." mentions said keyboard, but only for charging.

Yes, you can connect it up with the USB-C to Lightning cable and use it as a keyboard.

USB is backwards compatible in this manner with the previous versions of USB. The Lightning port really carries a USB signal for data purposes.


Does an iCloud restore on iPhone overwrite iTunes contacts/calendar etc? If I sync my iPhone contacts, notes, calendar etc with iTunes and then restore my phone using iCloud, then sync again, will my iTunes contacts be overwritten by the restored version? Will my iPhone contacts have the iCloud version of my contacts, the iTunes version or some merge?

iTunes doesn't sync Calendar & Contacts unless iCloud [over-the-air] sync is off, so there is nothing to merge.


Photo Booth/QuickTime-recorded video is out of sync when uploaded to Facebook Trying to record videos using the built-in camera in my 27" iMac (mid-2011, fully updated Mountain Lion) up until recently got me video that had out-of-sync audio. Once I switched from 32- to 16-bit audio, the audio then came in sync on my end, but uploading it to Facebook (or Vimeo or YouTube for that matter) ends up with the audio once again being out of sync by a second or so.

What exactly is causing this, and how can I fix it?

All .mov videos I uploaded to Facebook are out of sync. It's Facebook fault. If I upload the same video to Youtube it works fine.


How do I take screen shots on DVD movies and protected content? I saw this awesome movie that I watched on DVD and wanted to take a screen shot of it, but when I did, it was transparent. I could only see my desktop taken but not the movie. Is there a specific program or hack that could let me take a screen shot of that content? I tried every screen shot software, but still leaves it transparent.

This is deliberate from Apple and you will not be able to take screen shots using DVD player.

You can either use VLC and then a screen shot program (Cmd-3 and Cmd-4 works for me), or transcode your DVD to a QuickTime movie using Handbrake (which may take too long for you to find it interesting).  The latter will allow you to use QuickTime player which can do quite a bit.


Set alarm every 2 hour display on (Mac) I intend to save my eyes healthy. So, i want to set alarm every 2 hour computer i used. I have tried to set on calender and clock, but i can't find the way.

if you have macOS Catalina, in Reminders App, you can create a reminder that alerts you every 2 hours, for example.

for another, you have free apps in Mac AppStore like for https://apps.apple.com/us/app/time-out-break-reminders/id402592703?mt=12


Test Flight - How long does it take to transfer an App to a device? I was playing around with Test Flight - to put a version on my colleagues phone took 24-48 hours while we were separated. Normally he would work beside me and I can just directly compile to the device with a cable.

IIRC before Test Flight was absorbed by Apple the process was virtually instantaneous now it seems there is a giant propagation delay and nobody is talking about the delay or there is little mention of how long the whole process should take.

Have I done something wrong on my part or is this just part of the process?

I use Testflight OS X desktop app to upload a binary and it usually takes minutes for recipients to receive build notification emails.


How to remove preinstalled iOS apps? I have an iPhone 7 and I save all my work projects on it. On my iPhone I don't have any pictures or games but the memory is getting full and I'd like to free it. On my iPhone there are some preinstalled iOS apps that I don't use and they fill the memory. I would like to delete them but I don't know how to do that. How can I remove preinstalled iOS apps to get a faster system? Can I remove these apps or only the folders?

You can delete preinstalled iOS apps by holding down on the app icon until they wiggle, then choosing the × button. However, note that this will not free any space on your device as the apps are part of iOS and their files are not removed from your device. Removing any apps, regardless of whether they are part of the OS or not will not increase the speed of your device.

You can determine what is taking space on your device in Settings → General → Storage & iCloud Usage → Storage: Manage Storage.


Are there compatibility issues with Lion and VMware 2.0? I currently have a OS X Snow Leopard installation and Windows 7 as a virtual machine on VMware Fusion 2.0. Has anyone tried to upgrade to Lion with a similar setup? Are there any problems or compatibility issues?

You need to purchase an upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.1.3. VMware Fusion 2.0 does not support Windows 7 as a virtual machine, and does not support Lion as a host. Period.


Safari from macOS Catalina not working on macOS Mojave I followed this answer to downgrade from macOS Catalina to Mojave (without having a Mojave backup). This has worked well, except using the Time Machine backup made in Catalina to restore data to Mojave has resulted in getting a too advanced version of Safari for macOS Mojave:

You can’t use this version of the application “Safari” with this version of macOS.
You have macOS 10.14.6. The application requires macOS 10.15 or later.

What would be the easiest way to downgrade to a working version of Safari? I am hoping it does not involve reinstalling macOS Mojave.

As jaume and ankii suggested in the comments below the question (and as per Apple Support), the way to do it is to reinstall macOS Mojave. I now have the correct version of Safari for Mojave and I don't seem to have gained any new problems doing this.

If anyone comes to this question looking to find a place to download a stand alone version of Safari for macOS, I don't think it exists - though I am happy to be corrected.


a bad Shutdown resulting in a flashing folder with question mark I was rebooting my MBP when i turned off abruptly, now when i turn on my Mac again i just see a Flasing folder icon with a question mark instead the Apple Logo.

i have MacBook Pro 15" Late 2012 (Non retina)
Bootcamp (MacOS X Yosemite - Windows 10)
The HFS+ partition currently has Journaling Enabled (i didn't find a way to disable outside MacOS X, that i can't use it rigth now)

What have i tried so far:

Initialize Recovery Partition ( no partition in the hard drive is recognized by the EFI loader)
Using Disk Utilities [Internet Recovery] (the partiotions doesn't appears on the utility application)
Trying to install Mac OSX from Internet recovery (But Hard drive doesn't appears on drive selection menu.
Booted with Ubuntu 14.04 LiveCD tried fsck.hfsplus on it ( Ubuntu can actually see all the partitions and running fsck with foce parameter reports everything its OK with partition).

I don't know what to do ...

Sometimes booting in Safe mode or in Verbose mode will ratify the boot log problems.

Safe mode "Shift"

Verbose Mode "cmd-v"

or Press Option during startup  Start up in Startup Manager, where you can select an OS X volume or network volume to start from.


What will happen if I copy more pictures to my iCloud account than my iPhone has in spare space? I have lots of pictures and videos stored on a NAS (that isn't backed up). I want to move the pictures and videos to my iCloud account since I pay for increased storage on that and it will have better backup rather than anything that I would ever be able to do, and just leave movies on the NAS.

What will happen on my iPhone once I do this? Will it just max out, or is there anyway for it to ignore those? Otherwise what's the point of being able to purchase more iCloud storage than your iPhone has?

In the Photos Settings in the Settings app on your iPhone, you can select optimize storage.

Then will it only save often viewed pictures in full quality, and rarely viewed as a thumbnail, if you're looking at a picture on your iPhone it'll automatically start to download the picture in best quality.


Is it possible to use US English keyboard layout with dead keys in Mavericks similar to those from Windows and Linux? I read here that "The standard U.S. layout has a few dead key stated under ⌥". Does that mean that pressing Alt+that key would make that key act as a dead one?

I am looking for a layout that uses as dead keys the symbols that look like accents before the letters that one wants accented, like the "US-International" in Win7 and "English-US, with dead keys" in Ubuntu-Linux. In these layouts, the keys for ` , ' , ^ , " are dead. After them, Space key brings the character as such, while something like e will bring è, é, ê, ë respectively.

Are there such keyboard layouts for Mac? (I am very new to the system.)

(I am not looking for answers like "use this app and create your own layouts".)

The answer to your new question is the US International PC layout provided by Apple.


How far in the future can I create events on my calendar? My calendar does not accept events for September 2016 or beyond but will for May 2016.   Is there a limited time frame or horizon ?

This issue is related to the API limitations itself and vary on different platforms, device, regional settings etc. However you can get some functions blocked if you create to many events or calendars in short period of time.

Google: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2905486?hl=en

iCal: support.apple.com/en-us/HT202158

How to Hit the limits of Google calendar:

  If a user sees one of these messages it’s probably due to one of the
  following reasons:

Creating too many events

If a user has created more than 10,000 events in his or her calendar within a short period of time, that user might lose calendar edit access.

Creating too many calendars

If a user creates more than 25 new calendars within a short period of time, that user's calendar might go into read-only mode.

Sending too many invitations or emails to external guests

In order to prevent spamming, Google Calendar limits the number of invitations a user can send to external guests. This limit varies

  depending on the action, and is usually between 100-300 guests.

Google Apps users can send invitations to any number of guests from their primary domain, or from secondary domains associated with

  their primary domain.

Sharing calendars with too many users

If a user shares one or more calendars with many other users within a short period of time, Google Calendar might switch into

  read-only mode for that user. It’s almost impossible to reach this
  limit by updating sharing settings manually, but it can happen with
  some API-based tools or third-party apps.


Change macOS Mojave system icons In the past, I changed my folder icons for Applications, Downloads, Documents and for applications like Mail Safari.  Now many have reverted or gone to a white page picture.

How can I replace them with my own icons again?

The manual way is to go to the system folder using finder go to folder command
shortcut Shift Command G ⇧⌘G

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/

Rename the original icon and then name the new icon file with the original name.
Will need to be an admin user and enter your password when doing this

Using a dedicated program may be easier see Liteicon for a free download.

The file will need to be a Mac icon file .icns

I create my icons with Affinity Designer export to a 1024 X 1024 PNG then use iConvert Icons to make the icon files.
Any photo or vector graphics tool will work and there are other converters.


Does using pangu to jailbreak an iOS device delete your currently-installed apps? If I jailbreak my iOS device with pangu will it delete all my installed apps? How much available space should I have on my iOS device before attempting to jailbreak it with pangu?

Installing the jailbreak will not delete your apps, but it is generally recommended to backup your phone, do an "Erase All Content", and install the jailbreak with only the OS on the phone. You can then sync your phone to get all of your apps back after the jailbreak is installed. You should probably allow around 2 GB for the jailbreak, possibly more if you plan on installing a lot of packages.


iTunes crashes quickly after opening, every time I'm running iTunes 12.6.0.100 and MacOS 10.2.3 on a late 2015 iMac. Every time I open iTunes, whether with a brand new local library or an external drive library I've had for several years, the app crashes. It doesn't throw an error or anything, it just closes. I've tried, of course, opening it without a library to create a new one, and also booting in safe mode. Neither of these have helped. I've also tried reinstalling iTunes itself.

I do have iTunes Match on my account, but am not an Apple Music user.

I read somewhere that I could try clearing out the iBooks library, and so I tried this. At first I thought it might be helping, as it took a little while for it to crash, but it still crashed. There does seem to be some inconsistency in how long it takes to crash when it opens, but this doesn't appear to be related to anything I do differently.

What might be happening, and what additional things could I try?

I realize this is quite an old question but I encountered this issue myself and managed to solve it, so I'm answering in case it helps someone (maybe even the OP). I am on Windows machine but perhaps it's the same solution on Mac as well(in some cases).

First I narrowed down the problem to be related to the internet connection. I disconnected from the internet and the crash no longer occurred when having internet connection.

I updated the network and chipset drivers (as this article explained) but the crash still occurred.

Ultimately, I connected to a wireless hotspot only to see the crash no longer happens, so I understood that the problem was the way I connected to the internet.

Since I was behind a corporate proxy, changing the proxy server fixed the issue


Cannot open Terminal normally I tried to install opencv via homebrew, but I have done something wrong. I closed Terminal to restart it, however since then I can't open Terminal normally.

 Last login: Wed Sep 20 23:23:15 on ttys001
-bash: /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh: No such file or directory
-bash: touch: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ nano ~/.bash_profile
-bash: nano: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ ls
-bash: ls: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ cd ..
Ys-MacBook-Air:Users hareentej22$ cd ..
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ ls
-bash: ls: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ source ~/.bash_profile
-bash: /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh: No such file or directory
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ nano ~/.bash_profile
-bash: nano: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ xcode --version
-bash: xcode: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ brew doctor
-bash: brew: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$ brew update
-bash: brew: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:/ hareentej22$

When I opened Terminal, I tried the above command lines, but none work. How can this be fixed?

edit : i run the command line as @allan mentioned and i get the following result .

Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ /bin/ls -la
total 120
drwxr-xr-x+  32 hareentej22  staff   1088 Sep 17 03:12 .
drwxr-xr-x    6 root         admin    204 Jul  9 10:43 ..
-r--------    1 hareentej22  staff      7 Jul  8 20:16 .CFUserTextEncoding
-rw-r--r--@   1 hareentej22  staff  16388 Sep 21 00:39 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x    3 hareentej22  staff    102 Jul 17 00:55 .Seagate
drwx------   72 hareentej22  staff   2448 Sep 20 23:24 .Trash
-rw-------    1 hareentej22  staff  11027 Sep 20 01:01 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 hareentej22  staff    133 Sep 20 17:04 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--    1 hareentej22  staff      1 Sep 16 20:49 .bash_profile-miniconda3.bak
drwx------  238 hareentej22  staff   8092 Sep 21 21:10 .bash_sessions
drwxr-xr-x    4 hareentej22  staff    136 Sep 16 20:55 .conda
drwxr-xr-x   10 hareentej22  staff    340 Aug 30 23:59 .eclipse
drwxr-xr-x    3 hareentej22  staff    102 Aug 17 00:28 .netbeans-derby
drwxr-xr-x    7 hareentej22  staff    238 Aug 17 00:30 .oracle_jre_usage
drwxr-xr-x    8 hareentej22  staff    272 Sep  5 19:11 .p2
-rw-r--r--    1 hareentej22  staff    243 Sep 11 16:41 .profile
drwxr-xr-x    5 hareentej22  staff    170 Sep 14 13:28 .pyenv
-rw-------    1 hareentej22  staff     12 Sep 14 13:30 .python_history
drwxr-xr-x    3 hareentej22  staff    102 Aug 30 23:48 .tooling
-rw-------    1 hareentej22  staff   6232 Sep 17 00:23 .viminfo
drwxr-xr-x   14 hareentej22  staff    476 Sep 17 03:13 .virtualenvs
drwx------@   3 hareentej22  staff    102 Jul  9 11:02 Applications
drwx------+  31 hareentej22  staff   1054 Sep 20 23:24 Desktop
drwx------+   6 hareentej22  staff    204 Sep 12 22:30 Documents
drwx------+  38 hareentej22  staff   1292 Sep 18 16:43 Downloads
drwx------@  71 hareentej22  staff   2414 Sep 17 00:07 Library
drwx------+   3 hareentej22  staff    102 Jul  8 20:16 Movies
drwx------+   4 hareentej22  staff    136 Jul  8 20:36 Music
drwxr-xr-x    2 hareentej22  staff     68 Jul 29 13:36 Parallels
drwx------+   6 hareentej22  staff    204 Jul  9 10:00 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+   5 hareentej22  staff    170 Jul  8 20:16 Public
drwxr-xr-x    3 hareentej22  staff    102 Aug 30 23:35 eclipse

 Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ cat .bash_profile
-bash: cat: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ cat .bash_profile
-bash: cat: command not found
Ys-MacBook-Air:~ hareentej22$ /bin/cat .bash_profile
export PATH=”/usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin:$PATH”

# Virtualenv/VirtualenvWrapper
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Edit your ~/.bash_profile with nano replacing username with your actual profile username.

$ /usr/bin/nano /Users/username/.bash_profile

Delete the line(s) containing your PATH statement.  Save and exit.  When you restart your Terminal session, your path should be back to normal.


Can you turn off the (the lighting) of the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros? So I don't have a the new MacBook Pro here, but can you actually turn the TouchBar off, like you can turn off the backlit keyboard, when you're watching movie in example?

Searching on Apple.com to do some research didn't find any information about this function.

Can a tool or setting or script turn off the touch bar illumination on demand?

You can turn off the Touch Bar with this open source utility, Touch Bar Disabler. It disables the Touch Bar display, while mapping brightness controls onto Ctrl + 0, Ctrl + 1, volume controls onto Ctrl + 8, Ctrl + 9, Ctrl + 0.


How to open native youtube app from a video embedded in web page when I view a page on my iPad and there is a YouTube video embedded, if I click it I can watch it directly within safari.
This way, though, I cannot favorite the video, I cannot know the title of it or share it. Only thing I can do is watch it.

I'd like to be able to open the link to video in native youtube app, or at least open the YouTube web page of that video.

Is there a way to do it?

The following applies to IOS 8 on iPhone:
A YouTube logo appears in the lower right corner of embedded YouTube videos.

If you click on the usual big round 'play button' in the center of the embedded video, it will play fullscreen inside Safari. However if you click on the YouTube logo, the video will open in the YouTube app.


Controlling File Permissions on a Windows File Share I'm using a Mac running Mountain Lion (10.8.3) with file sharing enabled to Windows users.

Whenever a Windows user copies a file into the share on the Mac (Windows file sharing), the permissions of the file are 600, meaning that other users of the Mac cannot access the file.

Files copied from Mac clients (using AFP) have 644 permissions, which is perfect.

Is there a way to configure the permissions that are set by Apple's Windows file sharing?

Incidentally, I never had this problem previously with Snow-Leopard.

This is probably related to the "safe save" feature of SMB shares in OS X.

To allow group access enter in Terminal:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server AclsEnabled -bool YES

Source: OS X Server: When saving files on SMB shares, the permissions might be changed so that only the owner can read or write

Then modify/add an ACLs for the shared folder:

chmod +a "everyone allow list,search,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit" <Shared_Folder>

and if additional permissions are necessary for a group

chmod +a "<group_name> allow list,search,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit,<additional_permissions>" <Shared_Folder>

and reboot - I don't know if it's sufficient to simply restart File Sharing in the Server.app.

The ACLs also have to be applied to all already existing subsequent items in the shared folder to make them accessible for network users.


iphone 4s for Tracfone BYOP? I would like to use an iphone 4s for the Tracfone BYOP program. Does the iphone 4s have to be used to work on the Tracfone BYOP program, or can I use a new phone?

I have just activated (Nov 20, 2014) an iPhone 4s that had been on the Verizon System. It had to be unlocked for international use. It had to be active on the Verizon System to do the unlocking. The previous owner of the phone kept the sim card so it does NOT have a sim card installed. It is 100% functional on the Tracfone system.  I am not on any plan preferring to add minutes/text/data as I need it.


After getting a Mac, how to install Lion again on another partition? After getting a Mac with Lion and creating a partition to install Lion again (to have different versions of Xcode and Xcode beta on different partitions), how can Lion be installed on the new partition?  (Since Lion doesn't have an installation disc).

(update: the Mac already has Lion and so in App Store, it doesn't list Lion as "purchased" but need to pay $29.99 for it)

I usually just use a disk cloning app like Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate my existing Lion install to the other partition. Then you can boot into your new partition and install the Xcode beta.

This method is nice because it moves all of your documents and settings along with the OS so you don't have to use Migration Assistant after installing on the new partition. It's also convenient if you don't have the original Lion installer.


Show Battery percentage on Mac OS Big Sur After I upgraded my mac to big sur the battery on the menu bar only show bar/not percentage like before. How to show percentage again?
I go to battery preference but no that option.

The software changed what shows in the menu bar. Open the dock and menu preferences and enable percentage.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-dock-menu-bar-preferences-mchlp1119/mac


AppleScript returns error on defining date my following code returns an error

tell current application
    set b to "Tuesday 12 April 2016 at 18:06:10"
    date b
end tell

If I would write the string, defined in b, directly before date, it is working, but my date string is defined by some variables, so b is just an example for the string, how it looks like.

But why does AppleScript returns the error, only because of the string is defined in a variable?

Try:

set dateString to "Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 12:00:00 AM"
set dateReference to date dateString

tell current application
    -- insert commands here
end tell

Another approach:

set y to 2001
set m to 6
set d to 12
set h to 12
set min to 12
set s to 12

set cd to current date
tell cd
    set its year to y
    set its month to m
    set its day to d
    set its hours to h
    set its minutes to min
    set its seconds to s
end tell


I don't think my macbook can sense the right temperature I downloaded fan control recently due to my macbook heating up quickly however the fan control app keeps saying my macbook is 0 degrees even when it is burning hot! so the fan can only go up to 3500 rpm which is the fastest i can make as the base fan level.

Before making bold claims it could be the fan control app that you downloaded.

Try installing this free app to see what temperature readout you get with it.

As for your computer been very hot, anything above 50 Celsius feels hot to people. Your computer can operate up to 100 Degree Celsius (internally, the CPU) at which you would have blisters if you touch it.

If you have a household thermometer use it to check. The Mac body is designed no to exceed 60 Celsius since people could end up having burns and sue Apple for that.

If you still think your Mac goes way to hot, bring it in for service.


How does Apple's free apps program work? Apple recently announced that iLife and iWork suites are free with new Macs and iOS devices, but how does it work? Is it preinstalled? What happens if I wipe out the system—will it still be free in the App Store? Does it associate the apps with purchases on a single Apple ID?

Whenever buying anything from Apple in the recent past that came with software, it's been linked to my Apple ID, so perpetually available in the App Store.

Eg. buying a Macbook just as Mountain Lion came out, it shipped without it, but was available for free from the store with it when I logged in with my Apple ID.


Renewing the Developer Program Membership after it expires My Developer Program Membership (along with the iOS Distribution Certificate - it seems) expires in a couple of weeks. About a week ago, Apple sent me an email implying that I must renew the certificate before it expires in one month. However, I expect to submit some apps in at least a couple of months, and I would prefer to wait until this time to renew my certificate. Can I do this long after it has expired, or must I renew it before the expiration date?

You may renew your Developer account whenever you want. Just keep in mind: All your 'live' apps in the App Store will go offline when your membership expires. When you renew the Developer Account you can bring the apps back to the store again without setting up / needing a review proces.

I had the same with a customer of mine, their membership expired for several months (they just didn't care enough) and they renewed the account without any hassle.


Is it possible to install and boot Windows on a Thunderbolt drive? I know the BIOS emulation of the EFI firmware in Macs does not support booting from FireWire or USB drives, and the EFI version of Windows doesn't seem to be compatible with Apple's EFI implementation, so you can't install or boot Windows from one of those. But Thunderbolt drives are really just PCIe SATA controllers with one or more SATA disks attached, much like internal drives.

I have read that you can boot OSX from at least some Thunderbolt hard disks and SSDs. So is it possible to boot Windows off such a drive? And can you suggest any specific models of disks or Thunderbolt-SATA adapters that support this?

I realise that the Boot Camp assistant might not cooperate as the drive is "external", but the assistant is just for partitioning. You can prepare the disk's partition table manually, so the main question is if the Mac's firmware will boot an MBR-based OS from a Thunderbolt drive.

Obviously I could just go and buy a Thunderbolt drive and try it out but they're pretty expensive compared to otherwise equivalent and more universally compatible USB3 drives. Also, support is likely to vary between models, so chances are I'd pick up the wrong one.

I’ve not tried MBR1… but: you can indeed boot Windows 7 and Windows 8 (64-bit versions) in EFI mode off of a Thunderbolt-connected disk.  I have a handful of the Buffalo Ministation Thunderbolt2 drives with the original, slow 5400 rpm hard drives replaced with various SSDs, and they work wonderfully3.  You can boot off of them by pressing Option during the chime at bootup, and they show as an orange-colored "EFI Disk" in the selection options.

Now, the trick is getting Windows installed on the disk in EFI mode, because when you stated that "the EFI version of Windows doesn't seem to be compatible with Apple's EFI implementation," I assume that means (like me), you tried, and it just refused to install.  Well, to my knowledge, that's correct — however, the only part that isn't 'compatible' is the install process — whatever Windows tries to do to the EFI partition just before it goes to reboot doesn't work out right.

&nbsp

Solution to the rescue: install VMware Fusion on your Mac (even the trial will do) and use Vijay Pandurangan’s blog post to help you mount your external Thunderbolt drive directly to a new VM.  Pay special attention to the comment at the bottom of the post:  Hajo makes it much, much easier.

Partition the drive as GPT with OS X, and/or install an extra copy of OS X on the Thunderbolt disk first (if you wish) and leave free space for Windows.  If you’re not planning to have a spare copy of OS X to boot from this drive, leave all the space blank (don’t partition beyond the EFI partition OS X will initialize with GPT).

Set the VM to boot with EFI, and install Windows 7 or Windows 8 (has to be a 64-bit flavor to support EFI) directly to the disk.  Now, once Windows has gone through its setup process, and it counts down for a restart, shut the VM down.  That’s right - you're done with Fusion4,5, and you can go straight to booting from your new drive.  Seriously.  Press Option on boot, and you will indeed see "EFI Boot" as an option, you can choose it, and Windows on Thunderbolt you will have.

I don't expect you would have any issue booting from any other standard Thunderbolt drive either, especially if it is an AHCI SATA drive like the Buffalo.

&nbsp

While I’m fairly confident that you could get plain-old MBR-based Boot Camp to work, why would you?  EFI is the future, and once you go through the process, you can boot your Thunderbolt Windows disk from just about any new Mac5.

  1 I haven't had the need for it, yet.  There isn't an OS, or utility I've needed to run on my Macs that doesn't have EFI support, and I have an aversion to looking back and strongly feel MBR is looking back — like 1983 called, and wants its 10MB MFM hard drive back, back.

  2 The original disk worked fine too, but gaaah! so sloooww.

  3 Brian Klug wrote a really excellent review on this particular drive on AnandTech, and that's what convinced me to buy it.  It's a beautiful piece of equipment, with fit-and-finish like Apple, comes with both a Thunderbolt and USB 3 connector and cables! to match.  Yes, the included drive is slow as all get out, but you can replace it with just about any 2.5" HDD or SSD of your choosing.  Just make sure you have a hair dryer.

  4 Unless, you're not.  I use both interchangeably.  You can boot directly into Windows 8 on hardware, and you can boot into it from Fusion using this configuration when the need strikes you, like you're working on something, don’t want to reboot, but need to open a .PST file in Outlook 2013… for instance.

  5 Windows licensing issues notwithstanding; you’re going to have to buy a copy of Windows for every machine you want to boot it on for long-term use in order to not get black backgrounds and "this copy is not genuine" type errors.


AppleScript: Bulk iTunes work-and-movement Here I am yet again with another iTunes AppleScript question. I have a working script in which you select a work (several iTunes "songs"), and tell it what to set the work metadata as for that selection. You also tell it where the the movement name starts in the song name, and it copies everything after that position into the movement tag, excluding all roman numerals. It also of course numbers the movements.

Here's the code for that:

tell application "iTunes"
    set sel to selection of front browser window
    if sel is {} then
        try
            display dialog "Nothing is selected…" buttons {"Quit"} with icon 0
        end try
        return
    end if

    set c to (count of sel)
    set songName to (get name of item 1 of sel)

    set workName to display dialog "Edit for Work name and then click OK." default answer songName --prompt for work name
    set movementLength to display dialog "Edit to everything except the movement name. Do not include the roman numeral if one is present. If an arabic numeral is present, include it." default answer songName --prompt for movement length

    repeat with i from 1 to c --set the movement numbers
        set thisTrack to item i of sel
        set songName to (get name of thisTrack)
        set work of thisTrack to text returned of workName
        set movement number of thisTrack to i
        set movement count of thisTrack to c
        set movement of thisTrack to my delRomNum(text ((length of text returned of movementLength) + 1) thru (length of songName) of songName as string) -- copy movement text from song name and delete roman numerals
    end repeat

end tell

on delRomNum(t) -- the perl command search and delete any roman numeral (must be a word followed by the period and a space character)
    do shell script "/usr/bin/perl -pe 's/\\b[IVXLCDM]+\\b. //g' <<< " & quoted form of t
end delRomNum

You can see my post about that script here: Find-and-replace AppleScript for iTunes Track Names

Anyhow, that script has now not become efficient enough for my use (I process a lot of classical tracks)! Using the above script, I have to select every single work, and trim it accordingly for work, and then for movement.

What I would like to now create is a script that can do the whole process to multiple works at once, say, a whole album.

It would have to find every track that contained I. and set that as the starting point for the script I have outlined above, and also get the position of that I. and trim accordingly for the Work and Movement tags for that particular work - e.g everything before I. and the space preceding it would be set as the work, and everything after it would be set as the movement.

I can see that this is what I have to do, but I'm too much of an AppleScript noob to actually implement it! For me anyway, the real challenge lies in determining whether a string lies inside of another string (e.g. check whether I. is inside song name) and finding its position inside of the song name. If I knew how to do those two things I could probably write the rest of the script!

Any hints/ideas would be very helpful. And I hope my description makes sense. Thanks!

Note: Even though I got the key part answered, and can write the rest of the script myself, I'll add a sample input/output.

Use is in to check whether " I." is inside song name, like this: if " I." is in someString.

Use the offset command to get  its position inside of the song name

Here's is an example

set songName to (get name of thisTrack)
if " I." is in songName then -- " I." is inside this song name
    set {theWork, theMovement} to my splitText(songName, " I.") -- split the string to get the Work and the Movement
end if

on splitText(t, theSearchString)
    set x to the offset of theSearchString in t
    set a to text 1 thru (x - 1) of t -- everything before theSearchString would be set as the work
    set b to text x thru -1 of t -- this part would be set as the movement
    return {a, b}
end splitText


Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter and Widescreen (FullHD) Monitor Just got myself Apple Mini DisplayPort to VGA to connect my early 2011 (pre Sandybridge/Thunderbolt) 15" MacBook Pro to Samsung SyncMaster 2494HM monitor.

The monitor is currently connected to my PC via DVI, so I wanted to use its VGA port to connect my MBP as I frequently need to use them both at the same time and want to avoid shuffling cables.

Anyway, I have a problem with making it work in FullHD (1920x1080 Widescreen, monitor's native resolution).
The widescreen part in particular.
Basically if I choose its native resolution it doesn't fill the whole width of the screen. When I selected it for the first time it was on full width until I clicked Refresh Rate dropdown menu - no changing involved as was only able to use 60Hz anyway). Then, oddly enough, it switched to something between 4:3 and 16:9. So everything is a bit... too narrow.

Interestingly full width widescreen works perfectly on other 16:9 resolutions, but the res is basically too low for the 24" screen.

Anyone has any idea why's that and how to fix it?

The solution for me was to hold down the Option key while clicking on the "Scaled" radio button in Display Preferences. That offered many more display resolutions, including widescreen ones.


App for finding iPhone from a Mac? Is there any Mac client to enable the "Find my iPhone" service? It would be better from the command line, but an app will also do.

None of the programs I have tried seem to work right now.

I use Sosumi: http://clickontyler.com/sosumi/

It is essentially a Mac app version of the iCloud Find My iPhone webpage.  Except it allows you to add multiple iCloud accounts.  So as an example, I added my own so I can track my own iDevices, but I also added my Mom's to track her iPhone if need be.


Triggering a video at startup like the "Welcome Video" on Mac OS X Snow Leopard Do you remember the incredible Welcome Video on Mac OS X Snow Leopard? Does anyone know how all this is achieved? I mean the principle of how to get the video to play automatically the first time one tries to log in to a New Mac. Any suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks.

I don't know how Apple did it, but a common solution to 'one-time only' actions is to check for the presence of a special hidden file in the user's home directory before doing them.

So in this case, you'd have a login script that checks if the file is there. If it is, do nothing. If it's not, play the video, then create the file.


What is the maximum resolution for a second monitor attached to a MBP Retina? I'm curious if my new machine will support (for example) 3840x2400 retina-quality external monitor in additional to the built-in screen or whether that will exceed the capacity of the video card.

From the Tech Specs page over at Apple:

13":

  Dual display and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on up to two external displays, at millions of colors

15":

  Dual display and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on up to two external displays, at millions of colors


Greyed out Hide Column command In iWork Numbers, why is the command Hide Column greyed out? What format do I have set up that does not allow me to hide that specific column? I have un-merged all the cells.

I know you said that you have unmerged all the cells, but if any of the cells in the column which you are trying to hide are merged with cells outside of that column, the Hide Column option is disabled, including header/footer rows.

You need to unmerge the cells to hide the column or hide all the columns which the merged cell(s) span. You can test this by adding a new column to the end, then selecting all the other columns and the Hide Columns option will be enabled.

Alternatively, Hide Column will be disabled if it is the only non-header column remaining in the table.


Skype Bookmarked Chat Issue I have a desktop running Ubuntu 11.04 and a MacBook Pro. I have 2 bookmarked chats under Linux version of Skype, but it's not showing under Mac version.

Any suggestion?

chat bookmarks only work locally on your machine, these are not synchronized across different machines

more over, chat history is stored locally but normally last 30 days update/sync across different machines


OSX Prohibited symbol on Boot (High Sierra Update Caused) ive been researching and fighting this for a couple days now.  I tried recovery boot, disk utility, repair etc.. nothing seems to fix this...

heres what happened..

this 'puter was just fine, nothing wrong, runs great,  use it for software dev.  I "stupidly" clicked on update for High Sierra and it upgraded to high sierra.  rebooted, came up but was running slow.

A couple days later, a high sierra update showed up, so thinking it would fix my slowness i installed it...

Rebooted... Prohibit symbol.. rebooted...  rebooted .... prohibit symbol...

PRAM reset, SMC reset, rebooted...  same
recovery booted, loaded recovery fine, did Disk Utility, it says the drive is fine. rebooted... same
recovery again, use terminal i can see the files, they are there, i can browse in terminal..
did FSCK from terminal completes all is fine... rebooted... same
created a recovery thumbdrive with a working copy of high sierra on another mac, booted from that, tried to do reinstall OS, did its thing, rebooted... same...
Tried the gpt delete add, rebooted ..  same...
Ideas?

Here are some details

-bash-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            749.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           +748.9 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 3219E74D-E794-411D-836C-39FA507F94C5
                                 Unencrypted

-bash-3.2# diskutil cs list
CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group 9FEA1FA4-F17A-4760-BDDE-26720CDAF4C5
    =========================================================
    Name:         Macintosh HD
    Status:       Online
    Size:         749296615424 B (749.3 GB)
    Free Space:   0 B (0 B)
    |
    +- Logical Volume Family CBEDC035-AB5C-4683-BC47-755288A34DE2
        ----------------------------------------------------------
        Encryption Type:         None
        |
        +-> Logical Volume 3219E74D-E794-411D-836C-39FA507F94C5
            ---------------------------------------------------
            Disk:                  disk1
            Status:                Online
            Size (Total):          748944293888 B (748.9 GB)
            Revertible:            Yes (no decryption required)
            LV Name:               Macintosh HD
            Volume Name:           Macintosh HD
            Content Hint:          Apple_HFS

I had a similar issue with my MBP 2012 (SSD installed for the past 3 years or so), never had any problems until after a flight the other day.
Thought the X-Ray may have damaged the SSD so reinstalled etc. and nothing worked.

Turned out my data cable for the HDD is damaged and needs to be replaced.
Currently got my SSD in a disk caddy and working fine.

I also used an amazing tool called Stellar Data Recovery on my iMac to recover data on the SSD before formatting which really saved my bacon.


How do I turn off automatic downloads and updates? I don't see any options for deactivating automatic downloads for OS X and individual apps in the App Store app.

You can't disable automatic updates for individual apps.

The only options are to have automatic updates, or to not have automatic updates. It is not possible for granular control currently. You can provide feedback to Apple here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html


Hide contact's name when sending an email I am using somewhat "unofficial" names for people I work with in my Address Book.
Basically, I add an emoji after the first name to help me recognize the contact faster (extremely helpful on the iPhone and on my email app on desktop - my contacts are synced between my mac and my iPhone..).

The thing is that somehow when I send an email to someone he see himself the way I saved him, resulting in an awkward situations sometimes... And even If I send an email to a colleague and he forward that email - the name with my emoji stays!

Is there a way to hide the way I save contacts when I am sending an email? I know that an email can have a First and Last name attached to it as default, can I show this somehow?

I am using Gmail account, Unibox app for mac to send emails, and all my contacts are synced between my devices.

Use the nickname field instead.
afaik, that doesn't transmit. (At least, no one's ever complained to me about what I call them ;)


Cloning iMac HDD to blank HDD to be used in MacBook Pro? Can I clone from my iMac to a brand new hard drive to be used in a macbook pro?

Basically I upgraded my Macbook Pro 250G HDD to a TB HDD and the TB took a dive and is being replaced under warranty. However when I made the clone before it was from a Macbook pro to a Macbook pro (laptop to laptop) and since then I have gotten a 27in. iMac which used migration assistant to bring everything over through time machine.

Now I'm trying to see if will make a difference that it's cloning a desktop HDD to a blank HDD to be used in a laptop? (ie iMac to Macbook Pro).

I'm working with a MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2010), and my iMac is running Mac OS X (10.7.5)

UPDATE It's been two years since posting this question and since then I've actually gone back and forth cloning hard drives in both directions a handful of times without issue. The only thing that matters is the OS version, which when cloned remains constant, so it poses no issue. Copying all files over would be a different story.

I would not recommend it since this may cause issues. The installation process of OS X is specific to the underlying hardware. So if you just clone the iMac HDD and use it in a MacBook Pro, it's possible that you may encounter issues.

It won't hurt to try it out, so do try. But when you try it:

Make sure that you press Cmd+V when you hear the startup chime on the MacBook Pro and hold it until you see a Verbose Boot initiated (with many Unix related messages coming up on the text screen and scrolling up). You can read through the messages to see if any serious looking errors appear before the login window comes up.
Also note how long the startup process takes and whether it seems slower than it should be.
After you're logged in, you can also check Console.app for errors during startup.

For a good experience, I would instead recommend that you do a fresh install on the new HDD (with the HDD installed on the MacBook Pro) and then use Migration Assistant to copy applications and files over.


Permissions corrupted in OS X I have run sudo chown -R Ankur / by mistake and now some apps are not opening and there icons are also not visible. How can I fix this?

Here are some snapshots:

Short term, you can turn off Gatekeeper to allow the application you corrupted to run.

Open system preferences
Select Security & Privacy
Select general
Select Anywhere

The system should have protected most of the command line tools, but I would see if you can make one last back up of the system and then restore the OS if applications installed by the system are messed up.

Specifically, my Macbook has 60 million files - so had I run that command, I would have a lot of work to do to ensure everything is correct and staring with deleting all apps I can easily reinstall and then reinstalling the system if I broke any system apps is far shorter a path to recovery.

Luckily - all your personal files were already owned by your user, so this exercise in recovery will be to get copied of apps that are not unique to your system and at worst, you'll need to delete preference and configuration files and re-create them if they need permissions different than what you enforced on your system.


Reliable wireless Battery charging Charging my Iphone 6s with a cable has become a real headache for me, where the cables keep getting "broken" and not charging

Is there an alternative way to charge in a cable-free way?

The technology you may looking for is 'QI wireless charging'.

There are covers like LingsFire® 2 in 1 Qi Wireless Cover (German link) using that technology and there are other approaches like LEAPCOVER Universal-QI Wireless Receiver Patch (German link as well) where you can actually fit it into your iPhone.

I found a link for you addressing that: www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/12/11/qi-wireless-charger-iphone-6/#2d1685987fb2

You may also do a Google search with the keywords 'qi' and 'iphone'.


Safari opens pdf in browser window, but doesn't auto rotate and there is no control bar I just recently switched to a macbook pro with mountain lion from macbook with leopard. I had no problems with safari opening pdfs before, but now, what it does is that it opens the pdf, but it remains vertical (an otherwise landscape document) and there isn't even a control bar to zoom, or rotate it.
Does anyone have a suggestion?
Thx

I think you are using OS X Preview in Safari.
Note: If you don't have Acrobat or Reader, or haven't installed the PDFViewer plug-in, then Safari shows PDF files using the Mac OS X native PDF support.
Solution 1
Get Adobe Reader XI (11.0.02) installed, inclusive the browser plugin. Now Safari will open the .PDF files in Adobe Reader, and you can easily modify what you see (e.g. rotate the documents).
Solution 2
Try right click (or two fingers click on my MacBook Air) on the PDF document, that should open a window to rotate the document.


App has photo access, but I never allowed it to access photos I have a to do list app installed that allows you to add a profile photo. I added the image without ever being asked for access to my photos.

To my understanding, apps that can view your photos should be listed under settings / privacy / photos. This particular app isn’t listed there, what is going on?

Apps with photos access can access all photos in you library whenever the app chooses to in the background without your future confirmation, and can save pictures to the library.

Without photos access, the app can still ask the OS to get the user to choose a picture, at which point iOS can show a system-wide photo chooser and you can choose a single photo. Once you've chosen the photo, just that specific photo is provided by iOS back to the app.


In itunes, how do I view entire album of currently playing song? If I have a playlist of songs, and I want to go from a song and play the entire album, I can't see anyway to do this except manually finding album in music list.  There must be a better way.  This is using itunes 10

If you normally sort your overall library by album, you can right click on the currently playing song in a playlist and select Show In Playlist -> Music. This will take you directly to that song in your music library.


Where does terminal look for its commands? I've just installed pypy, and I've made a symlink from /pypy to my pypy installation.

How can I turn this into a command, so that I can just type pypy myfile.py
instead of having to type /pypy myfile.py?

if you are on Snow leopard or on Lion the way to do it is as follows:

go to /etc/paths.d then

sudo touch pypy

then edit the pypy file (with vim, nano or whatever) to include the path to pypy

/path/to/pypy

the restart the terminal. For instance, I installed julia (http://julialang.org/) and I added a julia file in paths.d

$ cd /etc/paths.d
$ ls
50-X11   MacGPG2  TeX      TeXbin   git      julia
$ cat julia
/usr/local/julia

HTH


2nd HDD in Early 2011 MacBook Pro ejects during large file transfers, but only in OSX I recently installed a 1TB HDD in my early 2011 13" MacBook Pro using an MCE Optibay. The stock 120GB SSD houses an OSX Mavericks install and a Windows 7 install, done basically via Bootcamp. The 1TB HDD is split into 2 partitions: an NTFS side for Windows file storage and an HFS+ side for OSX storage.

When I'm doing large file transfers (DVD .iso files, my music library, etc) to the HFS side of the drive, usually after about 5 minutes both of the partitions on the drive will unmount and display a message about not being ejected properly. After unmounting, the drive won't show up at all in Disk Utility and the "SATA" section of System Information just displays an unknown device. I've tried disabling the sudden motion sensor in Terminal and telling it not to spin down drives when it's plugged in.

The weird part is that large file transfers work fine on the Windows side, i.e. transferring to the NTFS side of HDD from within Windows.

Any thoughts or advice? I'm considering installing Windows to the HDD, giving OSX full reign of the SSD, and putting a FAT32 shared partition on the HDD. I also have a USB to SATA cable I'm thinking of using to test the drive to see if it's maybe the Optibay or ribbon cable's fault.

The answer:

I took the 1TB HGST Travelstar 7K1000 and gave it a firmware downgrade.  HGST emailed me application to set the port to either, Sata I, II, or III.  Reducing it to Sata II solves the problem.

No more dropping.

Has somethgn to do with Apple/intels first venture into the Sata III world back then.  I used the less expensive Opti bay kit.  Not the more expensive Extreme they have created to solve the problem.

Works great and is plenty fast for a seconday drive.


How to stop MS AutoUpdate prompt So far as I know, I don't have any Microsoft applications on my MacBook Air. I had installed Microsoft Teams in the past, which I later uninstalled by dragging the app to the trash (after I first saw this prompt) as it wasn't in use. Still, I get the 'Microsoft AutoUpdate' prompt often.

How do I get rid of this permanently?

The message is provided by Microsoft AutoUpdate.
You can disable the message without removing AU by setting the following key:

defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist \
    AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy RequiredDataOnly

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/suppressing-microsoft-autoupdates-required-data-notice-screen/

To completely remove AU from your system, delete the following:

/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft AutoUpdate/
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate.fba.plist
/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist


Change shortcut of  in finder I've managed to change shortcut of "Copy" to ^C for most applications by going to "keyboard->shortcut". But in Finder, the "copy" menu item is dynamic, like Copy "documents", I don't know how to change it.

I am aware of some 3rd party extensions that can do the job, I am just asking if there is any way to achieve this without installing any software.

Honestly, trying to individually replace any/all occurrences of the  Cmd ⌘  key with  Ctrl ⌃  is futile.

You can globally swap the keys in System Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... but I'm not even sure I'd recommend that.

Long term, I'd recommend,
"Get used to it. Don't fight it."


Is is possible to move a Verizon iPhone 4s to another US cellular carrier? Is it possible to use a Verizon iPhone 4S on another US carrier, such as GSM AT&T or T-mobile or CDMA Sprint, etc? And why if not?

Assuming the devices has been legitimately unlocked via the procedures mentioned in  Verizon iPhone 4S SIM UNLOCK Tutorial?

  Verizon has confirmed (here and here) they WILL unlock the SIM on the iPhone 4S, allowing for use of local SIM cards while traveling abroad (no word yet on whether this will allow for use on AT&T and T-Mobile.) This is different than the jailbreak unlocking method; SIM unlocking through Verizon is permanent and will not affect your warranty in any way.

  Meet the following requirements:

  Must be a Verizon Wireless customer.
  The iPhone 4S being unlocked must be active on a Verizon Wireless line of service.
  The line of service must be active at least 60 days.
  The line of service must be in good standing for the past 60 days.
  Only one SIM Unlock per line every 10 months.

  If you don't meet one or more of the above requirements, call anyway. You may still get lucky.

  Insert a foreign SIM into the SIM card slot on the side of your phone (only required to confirm that the unlock is successful.)
  Call 1-800-711-8300 (Verizon Global Support) and ask the representative for a SIM unlock. Occassionally a representative may not know exactly what you are referring to; make sure you are not transferred to a different department. You are in the right place. Explain that they should have a walkthrough on how to do this, and that it allows for the use of local, non-Verizon SIM cards while traveling abroad.
  Get confirmation from the rep that the unlock has been applied to your account, then check your phone to make sure it recognizes your SIM and can connect (if successful it will roam on AT&T, assuming you are calling from the USA.) You will NOT see an unlock confirmation in iTunes as that is for a factory-applied unlock only.
  Enjoy your new unlocked iPhone 4S!

However it seems that this unlock mentioned above is only for Internationale SIM cards for use outside of the US. Can this be done in the US, really looking for other carrier options with my existing phone.

I think I found the Answer I was looking for in How U.S. Carriers Fool You Into Thinking Your iPhone 4S Is Unlocked
Short answer "You can't do it!" If your phone is CDMA, its permanently locked to its CDMA network of origin.

Unlocking your Iphone 4S
Among the three major carriers operating in the U.S., only one, AT&T, will not unlock any iPhone. Because I purchased a Verizon-designated handset, the following information relates to those customers that purchase Verizon iPhones, but the technology and result is the same for any carrier.
When I called Verizon tech support to unlock my phone prior to leaving the U.S., I was told that I had to have a foreign SIM card installed in order to complete the process and that the phone would have to log in to the Verizon network on WiFi. The reason for this procedure is that the phone must validate the foreign SIM.

...

So I stopped in at an Apple store in London. We logged into a WiFi network, installed a micro-SIM card from a carrier in England, and within about thirty seconds, the phone was unlocked because Verizon had already unlocked the phone at their end before I left the U.S. For the rest of my travels overseas, it worked flawlessly and provided essentially the same options that are available on any other dual-mode or GSM-only device.

...

Four different iPhone 4S versions
When I returned to the U.S., I wanted to confirm that my Verizon iPhone could be ported to another carrier, whether CDMA or GSM. This was the intent of Apple when they designed the 4S: every phone is the same and will work on virtually any carrier in the world.
So, I contacted a regional GSM carrier in the Midwest that has roaming agreements with AT&T and T-Mobile. The carrier was kind enough to provide a micro-SIM card for testing in my iPhone. What I found may infuriate customers who have purchased expensive iPhones from one of the three carriers in the U.S. but at some point decide to switch to another provider because of poor coverage, customer service, or pricing.

...

Sitting in South Dakota, I replaced my Verizon SIM with the Longlines Wireless chip. The phone indicated that the SIM was not recognized by the phone and required its removal and device reboot. I contacted Verizon global support to confirm my suspicions. They advised that indeed their phones were locked as against any other carrier in the United States, and that the term “unlock” only applied to overseas carriers.
I next inserted my UK SIM card into the phone, and it logged into AT&T without issue, which confirmed what Verizon told me. I then interviewed managers at three different Apple corporate stores to confirm issues with regard to unlocking.
What consumers need to understand is that there are actually four different versions of the iPhone 4S: Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and Apple. Only the Apple phone, available from their stores or on-line, is fully unlocked and can be used on any carrier outside the United States. The other phones are permanently locked and cannot ever be used on another carrier in the U.S. Even if you spend $800 for an unlocked phone as I did and dedicate it to a single U.S. carrier, you are locked into that carrier forever if you want to keep using the iPhone. Neither Apple or the other carriers will fully unlock your carrier phone.


Downsides of using Windows on a Mac Please do not comment on how using Windows itself is a huge downside. After several years using OSX, Linux and Windows, I can say that working on the latter OS is best for my needs.

I do own an iMac (27", mid-2010) however, and I am aware that I can install Windows 7 on it w/o using Bootcamp. Now, are there any caveats in doing so? E.g. I noticed that the iMac is heating up more than it used to under OSX. Maybe the arguably annoying abundance of hard-disk accesses under Win7 is a reason for that.
Could this be a danger? Are there other issues known to SE users here?

summary: any caveats in using Win7 as main OS on an iMac?

EDIT: These helpful answers indicate that in general it might not be such a great idea to extensively use Win7 on a Mac because the hardware might wear off faster due to sub-par Win7 power management (compared to OSX).

Windows Vs Mac wars aside, it makes a lot of sense to use a Mac as a Windows machine. PC World or PC Magazine (I always get them confused) named the MacBook Pro the best Windows machine not so long ago. Their reasoning was that Apple includes the right drivers for the different hardware components that they ship on the Mac. I don't think that means the latest drivers, but the right drivers nonetheless.

@Rabarberski speculates if Apple does not want to invest too much time and money developing good drivers. My take on this is that I don't think Apple develops their drivers, they just work with a much limited number of components and that makes including all necessary drivers in BootCamp possible (For instance, there's only a handful of different video and sound cards that the Macs have shared over the last few years). My theory is that Apple doesn't issue repeated updates to the BootCamp driver set precisely because they don't need to--the ones included work fine for all of their Mac hardware configurations.

Before switching over to the Mac, I used PC's from Acer, Compaq, HP, Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo. On each one of these systems, drivers were always an issue at some point--even the ones included in the system restore disk. Using Windows on the Mac has been the exact opposite experience and I highly recommend it if Windows is your thing. I develop software for Windows and the Mac and I dual boot using BootCamp. I am seriously considering keeping my current MacBook Pro as a Windows-only computer once I get my next Mac. Hope this helps.


Can't Copy Text in Safari on iPhone 4 In Safari on an iPhone 4, how do you select/copy text? I've tried holding down on the text but nothing happens.

For instance, https://m.facebook.com and click Photos. On the iPhone 4, I'm told that the browser doesn't support "photo uploads" and am given an email address I can send the photo to instead. I wasn't able to copy text from this page.

Cut, copy, and paste.

According to Apple should work as follows:

  Find the text you want to edit in a note, email, web page, or other app. You can select a word by double-tapping it, and select more or less text by dragging the grab points. Then tap to cut, copy, or paste. To undo an edit, shake iPhone, then tap the Undo button.

However, in this particular case it appears that Facebook is creating a HTML 5 Web App/ page and is using JavaScript or similar functionality to prevent selection of text.  When trying to view the page on a Mac/PC text will also not be selectable "that is not in the pictured text box" for copying.

In this example pictured below the text "Photo" nor "No file chosen text" nor even the "Update Status" text on the top of the page can't be selected even on a Mac.

The select-ability of text on a website does depends on the sites implementation details. If a site chooses to disable text selection the iPhone's browser will obey the sites request, and will not give you the ability to select text.

For the Facebook example text is really not select-able  even on the Home wall page.  If you really want to copy text from Facebook pages try opening the desktop version of the site on your iPhone. The same rings true for other sites that may be offering custom mobile web pages that may limit text selection.


How can I fix or diagnose problems when Find My Mac doesn't work? I have 13" MacBook Pro (Early 2011) with Mac OS X 10.7.2. I can't make Find my Mac option in iCloud to work.

I've try turning off and on again the location services as well as the Find my Mac option in iCloud preferences. I've also tried turning off the firewall, but my MacBook Pro just doesn't appear on my iCloud.

Am I missing some configuration? Any help is appreciated.

Updated

Here is the explanation from Apple's iCloud Troubleshooting:

I cannot turn Find My Mac on

This can occur if:

You are not an administrative user on your Mac. "Administrator authorisation required" will appear under the Find My Mac switch in the iCloud System Preferences pane. Log out of your account, log back in with an administrative user account and try to turn Find My Mac on in that account.
Your Mac has an old Recovery partition. "Recovery system update required" will appear under the Find My Mac switch in the iCloud System Preferences pane. From the Apple () menu, choose Software Update and make sure you install the Mac OS X Lion Recovery HD Update.


How do I jump to a topic in vim under Terminal for a French Keyboard I'm on a French keyboard and I'm unable to jump to a topic in vim: If I go ':help' the instructions say:

  Jump to a subject:  Position the cursor on a tag (e.g. |bars|) and hit
  CTRL-].

I've tried various combinations with no luck. For example ALT+SHIFT+) gives ']' but adding CTRL does not work.

The only hack I found was to map CTRL-L to CTRL-] by add this to .vimrc:

map <C-l> <C-]>

Are there perhaps special mappings for French keyboards in Vim or Mac + French keyboards?

If you don't want to waste your CTRL-L, you can make CTRL-"] key" work like this:

:map CTRL-VCTRL-"] key" <C-]>


Installing mc (midnight commander) without root access? How do I do that? The normal installers (with .pkg files) ask for a root password. It is possible to run normal mac software without root access, but how do I run and install this shell software?

You can compile it yourself or use HomeBrew, that doesn't require root access.


I can send but cannot receive an sms on my iPhone 5s? This came out of the blue! I can send but cannot receive an sms on my iPhone 5s-this just came about out of the blue!

Apple doesn't have a great article on troubleshooting SMS reception so your first course of action would be to contact your carrier or look on their website on how they wish users to troubleshoot SMS reception.

Once you've done that, you could go over this article:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204065

It covers messages, so you might want to disable iMessage entirely on that phone while you work out what's wrong on the carrier side or setting side.

Feel free to ask a second question once you have some troubleshooting done and be sure to include your iOS version and what resources you're using to go through the checklist of things to remedy this.


Can a custom label be applied to a contact field using partial text from the field value? In the Contacts app in OS X Yosemite it is currently impossible to import custom field labels when importing from a CSV file. I use a 3rd party app to manage my contacts and I would like to import the custom labels that I use for postal addresses, phone numbers and email addresses for my contacts.

If I create a field that merges the custom label with field data, and a separator character in between, would it be possible to use an AppleScript to extract the custom label, remove the separator character, and rename the field with the custom label?

For example, I currently have a custom label for a phone field:

  Field Custom Label: Dad Mobile

  Field Value: 123 456 7890

  Merged Field: Dad Mobile;123 456 7890

When importing the file into Contacts via CSV I would map it to "phone other". So the phone field for the contact would look like this when imported:

  other:  Dad Mobile;123 456 7890

Again, the script would extract the custom label, remove the separator character and rename the field with the custom label, resulting in:

  Dad Mobile: 123 456 7890

I am somewhat new to scripting.

Applescript to Create Contacts:

    set phoneDad to "Dad Mobile" --Use your own custom variables imported from CSV
-- would need to parse CSV

    tell application "Contacts"

        set thePerson to make new person with properties ¬
            {first name:"John", last name:"Doe", organization:"ABC Apps"} ¬

        -- see the "Contacts" AppleScript dictionary
        -- for other attributes than may be added

        make new email at end of emails of thePerson with properties ¬
            {label:"Work", value:"john@example.com"}
        make new phone at end of phones of thePerson with properties ¬
            {label:phoneDad, value:"555.555.1212"} --Use a variable to replace hardcoded number
        make new url at end of urls of thePerson with properties ¬
            {label:"Work", value:"http://www.example.com/"}
        save

    end tell

You can set custom variables based on your CSV parsing.

This should point you in the right direction.  So, in answer to your question, with Applescript you can add custom fields.  Just use a similar syntax to the above code.  You just need to parse your CSV files accordingly.  I don't know what 3rd party app you use, but this is routinely done directly from database apps such as Filemaker.

Further reading: vCard Wikipedia

  vCard 3.0

  BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Gump;Forrest;;Mr. FN:Forrest Gump ORG:Bubba
  Gump Shrimp Co. TITLE:Shrimp Man
  PHOTO;VALUE=URL;TYPE=GIF:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif
  TEL;TYPE=WORK,VOICE:(111) 555-1212 TEL;TYPE=HOME,VOICE:(404) 555-1212
  ADR;TYPE=WORK:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of
  America LABEL;TYPE=WORK:100 Waters Edge\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited
  States of Ameri  ca ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation
  St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42
  Plantation St.\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of Ame  rica
  EMAIL;TYPE=PREF,INTERNET:forrestgump@example.com
  REV:2008-04-24T19:52:43Z END:VCARD


Kernel Panic on login and when mounting for write access (Catalina, Late 2014 iMac) I'm absolutely stumped on this one.
Background

This is a late-2014 iMac 5K with 3TB fusion drive, using Apple mouse and Apple keyboard, no third-party hardware attached. The camera has been broken for years. FileVault encryption is enabled.

Current macOS version is 10.15.7 (Catalina, Darwin 19.6.8, build version 19H2).

Also Windows 10 is installed on a Bootcamp partition.

Access Modes

I have no issues booting into Windows.

I can boot up the iMac up to the login screen as normal.

When logging in, the progress bar reaches about 55% before the kernel panic screen appears.

I can login using Single User Mode (Command-S) just fine and view the user account files.

I can access the Local Recovery Mode.

I can also access the Internet Recovery Mode.

I cannot access Safe Mode; Holding down the Shift key upon booting does not seem to activate it. The login screen menu bar does not display the Safe Mode text.

Disks and Mounting Partitions

When booting into local Recovery Mode, I can view the 4 listed Devices:

Macintosh HD (Not Mounted) disk3s5 (2.12 TB, Zero KB available).
Macintosh HD - Data (Not Mounted) disk3s1 (2.12 TB, Zero KB available).
BOOTCAMP (Mounted) disk1s3 (1TB, 671 GB available).
macOS Base System (Mounted).

In Single User Mode, df reports:

                         Used      Available  Capacity  Mounted On
/dev/disk2s5       22 289 504    227 239 704        9%  /
devfs                     373              0      100%  /dev
/dev/disk2s1    3 869 883 088    227 239 704       95%  /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk2s4        1 063 288    227 239 704        1%  /private/var/vm

Any attempt to mount the unmounted macOS drives in Recovery Mode will trigger the Panic.

Any attempt to repair the macOS drives in local or internet Recovery Modes will trigger the Panic.

Any attempt to mount the macOS drive in Single User Mode (mount -uw /System/Volumes/Data) will trigger the Panic.

Therefore I have no write access and cannot run fsck.

Ruled-out

Resetting SMC and PRAM has already been done.

I had expanded the RAM from 8GB to 24GB recently. I have since removed the extra RAM but the problem persists.

Possible causes

Norton Internet Security is installed and it is possible the kernel extension is interfering with the login process. However this doesn't explain being unable to mount the drive for write access in Single User mode. I cannot uninstall it for the same reason.

The macOS disk is probably full. Problem is, if this is the case, I'm not sure how to delete files since I'm unable to mount the drive for write access in Single User mode.

The Panic Error

When logging in with Verbose Mode enabled, the output contains:

Kernel extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.filesystem.apfs
com.apple.kec.corecrypto
com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage
com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfff...) /AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/apfs/apfs-1412.141.1/nx/fusion_mt.c:651 Assertion failed: length.
The are more lines printed with the final ones being:

@kec.pthread 1
@kec.corecrypto 1.0
@kec.libm 1

** In Memory Panic Snapshot Succeeded ** Bytes traced 39400 **
Recorded panic snapshot in corefile at offset 0x7000, compressed to 18557 bytes
[Attempting system restart...]

So, what are my options?

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfff...) /AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/apfs/apfs-1412.141.1/nx/fusion_mt.c:651 Assertion failed: length

Your filesystem is corrupted (probably from continued operation while full). Because there is not yet any third-party tool for repairing APFS volumes, you need to:

Already have, or make, a backup of your essential files. Continue reading below for details.
Erase the disk and reinstall macOS.

There is, unfortunately, no other way out of this. APFS is wonderful when it works, and a complete clusterfuck when it does not.
If you do not already have all of your essential files backed up, you can attempt to salvage them. In decreasing order of convenience, your options for this are:

Target Disk Mode.
Low-level imaging of the drive while booted into an external (non-Mac) OS.
Physically removing the drive from the computer, which requires separating the LCD from the chassis.

TDM is easiest (assuming you have a second Mac available). However, given the problems you had with merely mounting the drive, this may fail in the same way. There's a slight chance that using a newer macOS (i.e., Big Sur) on your lifeboat Mac could possibly work better than trying Catalina, as there's a chance that it contains a newer APFS driver implementation which could handle corruption more gracefully.
If you do install Big Sur on your lifeboat and are able to mount the iMac's TDM'd drive, copy your most essential files off of it first, then attempt to repair with Disk Utility. Do not, under any circumstance, attempt to delete or modify anything on the drive. Otherwise you risk corrupting it beyond repair.


About This Mac showing Mojave version 10.14.5 despite updating to 10.14.6 I updated my Mac to 10.14.6 yesterday but About This Mac is showing the version as 10.14.5. What is going on?

Most likely the update isn't installed. Go to System Preferences app → Software Update and check if an update is shown available.

Either the update is not downloaded or is pending installation. For latter, restarting your Mac should take care of installing it.


VLC on windows 8.1 can't open files on iMac I have an iMac running Mavericks. My music files (mp3) are stored on this machine. I also have a windows 8.1 laptop running VLC media player. I can access files on the iMac from the windows machine over my local home network using windows explorer with no problem. However VLC running on my windows 8.1 machine cannot access the files on my imac: I get an error saying "VLC cannot access the MRL."

Using VLC I can access and play music files stored on any of my windows machines, so it is not a problem with vlc getting through the firewall on my windows 8.1 machine. It seems the iMac is refusing access to VLC, though it allows access to windows explorer, ping etc.

How can I open these files?

Update: I tried different music apps running on my windows 8.1 machine besides VLC. Boom.exe and MPC-HC were not able to play the files stored on the imac (though they could both see and select them) but windows media player could see and successfully play the files.

This is not a fix but information sharing.

My mavericks Firewall has following settings

Use the + to add and allow connection.

I set my VLC to Block for demonstration purpose.


App not installing from Mac App Store Ive just got a brand new iMac and have purchased a game (BioShock Infinite) from the Mac App Store.

For some reason the download failed halfway through so I tried again from the Purchases page of the app store. However it fails again immediately.

After trying that a few times I removed it from the Purchases page and then searched for it again, back in the app store. I clicked Buy again and it advised me that it was already purchased and would download again. But the same error occurs.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Restarted Mac altogether. Seems to have worked