Macbook Pro Retina (early 2013) Trackpad Dead So I was watching some great BBC documentaries on YouTube last night, and before I fell asleep, I plugged in my Macbook (early 2013, 13") and set it on my nightstand.

When I got up today, I was unable to use the trackpad at all. Keyboard works just fine, but the trackpad does absolutely nothing. No clicks, no movement, no response.

I restarted, checked for updates, and did plenty of Google searching, but couldn't find anyone with a similar problem. I've tried safemode and my copy of Windows 8, and the trackpad worked with none.

My first instinct is hardware failure, it just seems odd for it to happen overnight while charging. I haven't unscrewed anything, but there's no indication of battery expansion or any external damage.

I bought it literally a year ago last week, so the warranty just expired. I can use an external mouse just fine, so it's not totally unusable (and I've made sure it wasn't the mouse causing problems, because I've fell victim to that before).

So, for clarification, this isn't the late-2013 model where there were known issues with the trackpad. It is early 2013, and it claims it has the latest the software update (however it's been bugging me for a couple weeks to update, which I haven't, and now it says there are no new updates, so this may or may not be relevant).

As far as I can tell, OS X isn't reporting issues with the trackpad, and Windows' Device Manager claims things are working fine. But absolutely no trackpad input works, and from my few hours of searching, nobody else with my model is reporting the same issue.

Anyways, any troubleshooting tips are greatly appreciated -- as well as potential advice for a possible part replacement.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Before you do anything hastily, try resetting your NVRAM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

This will clear several hardware-related settings and may resolve your situation.

If not, try creating a bootable installer (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372), boot from it and check if your trackpad works there. If it does, backup and reinstall your OS.

The alternative would be to open up the device and check if the trackpad connection is properly attached. Sometimes (although very rarely) the plug can become loose, likely due to radical temperature changes. You should only attempt this if you're comfortable with electronics repair and following a guide on a site like iFixIt. They also have parts for self-repair.

If the latter doesn't help, sometimes disconnecting the battery and reconnecting it works, as this will clear any battery-buffered settings remaining.

In case all else fails, I suggest purchasing a replacement part through iFixIt and following a guide to exchange the trackpad – if you're at all open to self-repair. Having it exchanged by a shop is always going by to be vastly more expensive. The upside being that they're usually required to provide a certain warranty period for repairs. This is not a complicated repair, so you may want to try it yourself.


Why do I still see my manually-deleted photos in Photos in OS X El Capitan So the question is really simple. I am using Photos app on my mac, without the knickknacks like Photo Stream, iCloud etc. The exact location of photos is the default one: /users/xxx/Pictures/Photos Library/Masters.

I have deleted some photos directly from the Masters folder in Finder, then also from the trash. Yet I still see these photos in Photos app. When I go to Finder again the photos are not there anymore. How come are these photos still displayed in Photos? Are they cached somewhere? Even a restart still shows me those.

I was facing the same problem.  Not only were the pictures still being displayed within the Photos app, the pictures (and their folders) that I have deleted manually in the Masters folder, have reappeared in that folder again after when I clicked on a few images within the Photos app.  The best way apparently to permanently delete the pictures would be to do so within the Photos app (see http://www.imore.com/how-delete-images-and-videos-photos-os-x#delete-permanent).


What is the safest way to shut down a Mac which is stuck at the screensaver? I use a MacBook Pro for work.  According to my workplace's policy, when I leave my desk, I lock the screen.  There's a bug in MacOS High Sierra where sometimes when I come back and unlock the screen, the screensaver is showing and can't be dismissed.  The laptop is therefore unusable.

The only way I have found of getting back into my mac is to hold the power button down until the laptop shuts down.  But this isn't a safe shutdown; if I have any Parallels VMs running they are usually corrupted and I have to restore them from backups.

Is there a safer way shut down, or otherwise get back into, my Mac?  If so, what is it?

A couple potential ideas:

1. Try to avoid the Screen Saver Bug: Turn off the screen saver (set it to “Never”) and just adjust the Energy Saver to turn the screen off to prevent burn-in. You can still lock the screen with ⌃⌘Q

2. Alternate Login Methods: If allowed, turn on Screen Sharing and/or Remote Login in System Preferences » Sharing and see if you can login with your phone using ssh or vnc (I recommend Prompt and Screens, respectively).

3. Sleep Instead Of Lock: Enable a “Hot Corner” to put the Mac to sleep instead of just locking it with the screen saver. Not as convenient as just locking it and walking away, as it will take a little longer to wake from sleep, but if it doesn't trigger the bug, it would be worth it, perhaps?


Remove duplicate pdf pages in Preview? Preview has a pretty clean and efficient PDF editor, especially when it comes to adding and removing pages.

What I'm really looking for is a function that can remove duplicate pages.

I've got a pdf with tons of duplicate pages and it would be really great if there was an option to remove all doubles.

Any ideas?

Click 'View' in the toolbar > Thumbnails. Then highlight the duplicated page, press delete to remove it.


How do I export an XCode app so I can publish it on my website, not in the Mac App Store? How do I export an XCode app so I can publish it on my website, not in the Mac App Store?

You have to export you application as a .app bundle and then it's the .app bundle that you sell or give away on your own web site to pass the application along. From this SO question:

In XCode 4, applications are exported from the "Organizer" and you build a .app bundle for redistribution by building an archive of the application:

On the menu go to Product -> Archive
Once you're in the Organizer - Archives screen click Distribute button if you're using XCode 4.3.3 or higher, click the Share button for releases before 4.3.3
Then choose the format you want to export.


Huge system file size CloudDocs Im on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016) running 10.13.5 (Latest High Sierra )

Here is a screenshot of my storage tab :

As you can see the system takes quite a lot of space. After using an app called Grandperspective to get a more detailed view of disk allocation it seems I've got a folder named cloudDocs in Application Support That weighs around 80GB.

I'd like to point out that I have lately been freeing a lot of space on my mac in order to turn off the Icloud feature that helps saving space by uploading old files or files not used often to the cloud and removing them from the mac.

I believe this CloudDocs folder is a result of turning off this "space saving option" and the long download process that resulted.

What is that folder for? Can I delete it?

Thank you for your help

Alex

Ps : this is not an issue related to time machine local backups as I have already checked for those

/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs

It is part of Apples iCloud service and will synchronize your Desktop and Documents folder with iCloud Drive. If you do want to store your Documents to iCloud this folder is required and iCloud Drive needs to be enabled.


Set Specific Podcasts to Show as TV Shows in iTunes, using AppleScript I'm using on online TV recorder to record TV shows. Those recordings are downloaded as a podcast to iTunes. My following Applescript should just grab those podcasts, update some info fields and finally mark them as "TV show" to have them show up under "TV Shows" in iTunes.

It works very well, only the part where I want to set the video kind to TV show doesn't seem to work.

set video kind of aTrack to TV show

I also had a look at this Doug's script that does something similar and I can't find any difference.

Here is my full script:

on matchRegExp(regex, txt, |caseSensitive?|)
    if |caseSensitive?| then
        set ci to "i"
    else
        set ci to ""
    end if
    set theRubyOneLiner to quote & "s = '" & txt & "'; s =~ /" & regex & "/" & ci & "; puts Regexp.last_match.to_a" & quote
    set theCommand to "ruby -e " & theRubyOneLiner
    set theMatchData to do shell script theCommand
    set tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to character id 13 -- new line
    set theMatchData to the text items of theMatchData
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
    theMatchData
end matchRegExp

tell application "iTunes"
    set myLib to library playlist 1

    set pods to every track of library playlist 1 whose genre is "Podcast" and album is "Online Videorecorder"

    set ofi to fixed indexing
    set fixed indexing to true

    with timeout of 3000 seconds
        repeat with aTrack in pods
            set desc to long description of aTrack

            try
                set episode to last item of my matchRegExp("(Folge|Episode) (\\d+)", desc, true)
                set season to last item of my matchRegExp("(Staffel|Season) (\\d+)", desc, true)
            end try

            set series to name of aTrack
            set title to description of aTrack
            set cat to category of aTrack

            try
                set video kind of aTrack to TV show
            on error m
                log m
            end try

            set episode number of aTrack to episode
            set season number of aTrack to season
            set show of aTrack to series
            set episode ID of aTrack to title
            set description of aTrack to desc
        end repeat
    end timeout
    set fixed indexing to ofi

end tell

The problem is that you can't change the "Media Kind" of a podcast track via AppleScript. For whatever reason, it seems to be some sort of special type that isn't exposed in the AppleScript dictionary.

The closest I've found to a method for doing this is this script in the Apple Support Forums that changes the Media Kind via GUI scripting. It seems to be set up for changing it to an Audiobook, so you'll have to modify it a bit, but it may be a decent starting point.


Can iPod touch 5th gen use older versions of apps? I know it's possible to drag and drop an older version of an app from apps you downloaded in your iTunes onto your iPod but will this work with the new iPod touch 5th gen? I was gonna get the iPod touch 5 but there are some apps that have updates and I don't like the updates at all. I have a 3rd gen iPod touch and I put an older version of Textfree/Pinger on it and it works fine but it has an update I don't want and I would like to have the older version on my new iPod but will it work?

Can some one try it and drag and drop an older version of an app onto their iPod 5?

Yes, all updates to iOS so far have been backwards-compatible with older versions of apps, so the apps should work fine.


Unable to sign out of iCloud; linked to old email that no longer exists I just purchased a brand new iPad Mini 4, and did a full restore from my old iPad Mini 1. After doing this, I noticed that it kept asking me for the iCloud login details for my old Apple ID account. So, I went into iCloud to sign out of the account and sign in with my new one, however since Find my iPad is enabled, it won't sign out of iCloud until that's turned off.

The problem is that the email address associated with it:

doesn't exist, as I erased it about 6 months ago, and;
is (obviously) no longer a valid Apple ID account

So there's no way for me to log into my old account so that I can log out of my old account. I can't even add the old email as a secondary to my Apple ID, because it needs to send a verification email, and the address doesn't exist.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

After spending over an hour and a half to Apple UK's support, and eventually getting transferred to a senior advisor from their US-based support, it turns out that I may have uncovered a bug in iCloud that has since been forwarded to the iCloud Development Team.

The old email address had been used as my Apple ID for around 3 years before I changed it. Rather than add an additional one (as I was deleting the old email completely), I change the primary Apple ID; however I neglected to change it for iCloud (I wasn't actually using iCloud for anything, so I didn't think about it). As a consequence, iCloud is still associated with the old Apple ID email, and it wouldn't let me sign out of iCloud unless I signed in with the old Apple ID so I could disable Find my iPad so that I could sign out.

Now, here's the rub: for whatever reason, Apple have no record of the original Apple ID email. None at all. Normally, as @Tetsujin pointed out in his comment, I should be able to sign in to my Apple ID with my old email even though it's no longer associated with my account, because there should still be a record of it on the system. However, because (for whatever reason) it seems to have been completely purged from Apple's records, there is effectively no way for me to actually sign out of iCloud.

Apple have admitted that this never should have happened, and they have passed the details of the case on to the iCloud Development Team... so I may be indirectly responsible for another iOS9 update. Sorry.

In the end, my 'solution' was to abandon the original iPad and set my iPad Mini 4 up as new, manually transferring my apps and settings across, using the old one as a reference.


Can I tag Faces on iOS using the iPhoto app? Is there a way to tag photos in the iPhoto library with Faces on iOS?

Something like a sequence of screens that just asks for confirmation like "Is this John, yes/no"?

I'm afraid not. You can do places and whatnot from your i-device, but sadly no faces ability, although I have the feeling Apple will do it in the future. You can quite easily do it on iPhoto however. If you need any help in getting started at all in iPhoto, here's Apple's own support page: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iPhoto/9.0/en/pht2297cf5f.html

Hope this helps.


My iPhone 5s is cracked and the screen is black, how do I get pictures from the phone? I dropped my iPhone 5s in water and then cracked it... Vegas what can I say?

It was working that day but, the next it just went black and didn't work anymore. When I connected to the computer, it is  recognized  but it says is locked and obviously, I can't unlock it from the phone, is there a way to unlock it from my Mac?

How do I retrieve my pictures from an iPhone I can't unlock?

You can try using an iPhone data recovery software such as iPhone Recovery. Good Luck!


How can I flip desktops between two displays in OSX I have a multi monitor setup, and I want the ability to flip the desktop being displayed on my primary monitor and the desktop being displayed on my secondary monitor.

I know this is a strange request, but I'm often engaged in video conferencing, I want the ability to remain looking at my camera while moving to work on related tasks. Is there anyway to code this type of macro, or is this a feature in OSX?

Thanks!

If what you want to do is just to swap your screens around, then you can do this with the Displays pane in System Preferences. More specifically:

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences
Select Displays
Click the Arrangement tab
Click and drag the display(s) to rearrange them as you wish. You can also rearrange which one has the menu bar.

If instead you wanted to do something else, please clarify your question so I (or someone else) can help you.

In the meantime, you may want to read: use multiple displays with your Mac.


iPhone 6 suddenly lost it's "Name" (I.e. "Nancy's iPhone") We don't know what triggered it, but the specific name of our iPhone 6 "Nancy's iPhone" suddenly lost it's "name" and became "iPhone."

Now we're having issues backing it up, as the computer doesn't recognize it (since the name is now different).  How do we change it back?


Using tracks from Apple Music in iMovie project I have used downloaded Apple Music as background music in projects created in iMovie? Will I lose that if I cancel Apple Music subscription?

It seems like I would keep that as it is exported as separate file. Also, what if these videos have been uploaded to Youtube?

It seems like I would keep that as it is exported as separate file.

Yes, once you export from the iMovie project, you'll retain the audio tracks.

  What if these videos have been uploaded to Youtube?

You'll most likely end up with an automated Content ID claim. If you used a substantial portion of a copyrighted material in your video verbatim, your uploaded media may automatically get deleted from YouTube.

However, in most cases it is generally not troublesome if you have created some original content. Quoting from the linked article:

  Am I in trouble?

  Probably not. In most cases, getting a Content ID claim isn’t a bad thing for your YouTube channel. It just means, “Hey, we found some content in your video that’s owned by someone else.”

  It’s up to the copyright owners to decide whether or not others can reuse their original material. In many cases, copyright owners allow their content to be used in YouTube videos in exchange for having ads run on those videos. These ads may play before the video or during it (if the video is longer than 10 minutes).


Are Quartz Compositions portable to Linux? I am interested in using Quartz Composer to make some visualization programs, that I want to run on a Raspbery Pi.
My question is, is it possible to run something made in Quartz on Linux?

No.  Quartz Compositions only run on Mac OS 10.4 and up.

There's a third-party tool, Qtzweb, which can translate a small subset of Quartz Composer patches into JavaScript WebGL code, which you could run in a browser on Linux.


Enable/Disable TextExpander using Script I am trying to disable/enable textexpander using a single shortcut key. Text expander's preferences require using option, command and control together with a predefined shortcut key. Is there a way to bypass this using apple script and simply enable/or disable textexpander using a single shortcut key? Thanks.

If it helps, you don't need to press all those keys, just one of them. So ctrl-F19 or Shift-F19 would work. It's not the same as just using the one key, but it's slightly better that you don't have to press four keys, just two. And if you use the Control key there's a good chance you won't bump into many other keyboard shortcuts.


Use touch ID without locking your phone I like to use touch fingerprint ID when in lieu of a password (when buying apps etc...), but I don't want to have to use it to unlock my phone, nor do I want a passcode lock. Is there a way to enable touch ID without locking the phone?

This is not exactly what the OP asked for, but it might partially solve the problem:
- Enrol a fingerprint and select a passcode,
- disable "iPhone Unlock",
- change "Require Passcode" to the maximum ("After 4 hours" in my case).

This will allow you to use Touch ID in Applications, but will require passcode for unlock only once in a long time.


Brightness settings stuck after computer shut down in bootcamp As I was going to sleep for the night I decided I didn't want to shut my computer off completely and so I instead opted for turning the brightness settings all the way down in order to keep the computer up (I know, pretty dumb right?) . However, upon waking up i noticed the cord wasn’t attached and the computer shut down while I was sleep and now I cant boot up windows without the screen dimming down after the logo goes away. I’be tried using the brightness buttons to turn it up to no avail and I’ve also tried just entering my passwoed in hopes I could use the buttons but theybwont work. Im using a 2012 Macbook Pro with Windows 10 installed. I’ve tried hard resetting to access the recovery mode but f8 sadly wont work. Any help is appreciated.

Just plug in your charger, bump the brightness up (not with the keys), disconnect charger, boom.


Is there a way to downgrade a 2nd gen iPod touch from iOS 4 back to 3.1.3? Is there a way to downgrade an iPod touch (2nd gen) from iOS 4 back to 3.1.3?

There are two ways.

The first way was if you backed up your SHSH blobs with Cydia. (you would know if you did this) During a software update, iTunes verifies the software with an Apple server to make sure it's a valid, Apple-approved release. With major upgrades now 3.x, 4.x, Apple has stopped signing older versions, so if you try to restore normally to an older SW version, the verification process will fail.

The tutorial above will register your specific device on Cydia's server, then force iTunes to verify there instead of Apple's servers. Unfortunately, if you didn't back up before you upgraded, this will not work.

The other option requires some terminal work and downloading iRecovery, but it's not so bad. Here's a tutorial for it.


MacOS install USB not listed in boot manager on startup I have a 2011 Macbook Air (a1370) that was stuck on the boot screen with the spinning wheel.

I booted into internet recovery and from Disk Utility wiped the SSD clean. When I then tried to reinstall Lion through recovery, I kept getting the error "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X." Avoiding this error, I made an install USB with TransMac and attempted to boot from that, but there are no drives listed, including the internal SSD.

I have tried to reset NVRAM  but that did not work. My USB drive is converted to GPT and I have tried different OSX versions. I'm not really sure what to do from here.

Weird time estimate

Initial error

Install USB partition

No bootable partitions

I finally was able to borrow a friends Macbook and created the installation drive there. It turns out that was the issue, and it booted fine my next attempt. I suppose the error in recovery was independent to my Macbook Air and just needed a reinstall. Because TransMac did not work on different computers, MacOS's, and TransMac versions, I can conclude that creating MacOS installation media via this method does not work.]

Update:
I received a second Macbook Air and got the same error in the OSX Lion recovery. This might be an internet problem and it wouldn't due harm to check try a different connection.


Stop iMessages from coming to my Mac When I send messages from my iPhone (A) to another iPhone (B), the responses from B keep coming to my Mac and do not appear on my phone (A), even when I have iMessages closed. This is maddening. How can I prevent this from happening?

You have a couple of ways to configure this. First off, make sure both the computer and iPhone have been set up to use the same Apple ID.

You can disable Messages.app's ability to receive text messages on your Mac:

Open the Messages application. Access your preferences by going to the menubar and clicking Messages -> Preferences...
Under the "Accounts" tab, you will see all the accounts you've set up to use with Messages, including iCloud. Selecting "iCloud" from the options on the left side of that screen will show the email addresses you specified and your phone number.
Unchecking these will disable the ability of Messages.app to receive those messages you wish to send only between mobile devices.

On your iPhone:

Tap "Settings", then scroll down to "Messages" and tap it.
Scroll down to "Send and Receive" and tap it. Look for the menu option heading that says "You can be reached by iMessage at:", which has your phone number (checked by default) and the email account you configured when you initially set up your iPhone. This is probably your apple ID, but can be any other email address you've specified.
Simply tap the email addresses that are checked to disable them. This should force messages to communicate with only your phone number.

It should work by disabling all but your phone number on iMessage, but you may need to disable everything on your Mac as well. A little experimentation and tweaking should get you set in just a couple of minutes.

Good luck!


Just dropped my mac, speakers broke? I have accidentally dropped my mac in a way that it damaged my internal speakers. They're not damaged severely, but they are impared.

Basically, without headphones the right side of my MBA 11' produces sound but the left side doesn't. This is clearly evident when I plug in headphones: The left earbud produces little noise and the right earbud produces normal amounts of noise. I have verified it is the MBA that is impaired and not the headphones.

Is it repairable? I have tried restarting my macbook and it didn't help. I don't want to take it to the apple store and pay a hefty amount. What do I do?

Yes, this is easily repairable. The speakers are relatively cheap. PBM sells them for $15 USD: http://www.powerbookmedic.com/MacBook-Air-11-Left-Speaker-p-22393.html (I have used them in the past for parts and highly recommend).

You can then hope to iFixit for a teardown of your MBA: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Replacing+MacBook+Air+11-Inch+Mid+2011+Left+Speaker/6312/1

Note that the MBA is actually as moderate difficulty in repairing (by iFixit), so if you are a klutz, you may elect to have someone else do the repair for you. Also, I have used general searches for your MBA model (based on the limited information you have provided), so you should ensure the parts are the exact ones you need and not go simply on my links above.


Can apps use different Twitter accounts on iOS? Now that iOS has Twitter integration, and many apps use these credentials rather than asking you for the Username and Password, I was wondering if there was any way to tell each app which account to use.

For example, in Settings > Twitter, you can sign on to multiple accounts. Now let's say I use 2 apps that both have Twitter integration. Is there any way App A could use one account on Twitter and App B could use my other account?

Furthermore, I notice that at the bottom of the Twitter settings page, it shows a list of apps that have access to Twitter. Is there any way to allow each application access to only a specific Twitter account?

I noticed that the Twitter app itself has a

Developers access your Twitter accounts through the Accounts framework.

When an app requests access to your accounts, it uses the requestAccessToAccountsWithType:withCompletionHandler: method. (The only supported account type is currently ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter.) This grants access to all accounts of that type.

Therefore, unfortunately, apps can't request access to only a single account — you have to give access to all of your Twitter accounts.


Can I create a formula to provide a value depending on when a timestamp falls in the day? In column A, I have timestamp values. In a second column, I'd like to have a formula that would return words or strings like "early morning" or "Late afternoon", so that I may count and chart these responses.  What formula am I looking for in Apple's Numbers?

Assuming you have a normal Numbers Date/Time 2/11/2016 12:00:00 AM, then a simple IF() statement can be used combined with the HOUR function.

=IF( HOUR ( A2 ) < 12, "Good Morning", "Good Afternoon")

To add more than just 2 options, nest your IF statement.

=IF(HOUR(A3) < 5,"Early",IF(HOUR(A3) < 12,"Morning",IF(HOUR(A3) < 17,"afternoon",IF(HOUR(A3) < 20,"evening","night"))))

Numbers will return the first TRUE value.


Is there a Mac equivalent for window snapping? In Windows, you can use the Win key + arrows to snap windows to half the screen.  Is there a OSX equivalent?

I found a program that does this called HyperDock.  It worked well, but it was just a trial version.  It has more features than I care about and costs to much (IMO).

Are there any other programs that are free or cheaper that do the same thing?

Depending on your technical inclination, you might want to try Spectacle, or install something like Mjolnir / HammerSpoon


What is the best widget for song lyrics? I'm looking for a widget that can

Show the lyrics of the current playing song
Get the lyrics online if there is none on the music, and save it
Nice designed

I used to use the Harmonic widget, but it seems it was abandoned

SaveThoseLyrics (Freeware)
It looks like it does the same thing as Harmonic.
LyricSearch (Free)
Allows you to search for lyrics by song. (Don't think this is what you are looking for)
Canto Pod (Free)
Allows you to search for a song, then add it to your iTunes library. (Don't think you are looking for this either)
LyricSearch and Canto Pod were lyrics widgets that I found. As I already said, I don't think that's what you are looking for, but I put them there in case you did want to search by song, rather than the current iTunes song. I hope this helps you out.


Photos vs iPhoto events Should I be using Events or Albums? Say I go to the Zoo with my family, take some pictures and then import into Photos. Is that an Event or an Album? I always used Events with iPhoto.

There are no Events on the Photos.app.

You should have all of your old iPhoto Events, but they are Albums now.

This answer describes a way of manually replicating some of the Events functionality:

  (…) you can create an Album from the last imported by selecting all in the Last Imported album and clicking the + icon on the toolbar.


Edit plist file for TextEdit I need to edit plist file of TextEdit (TextEdit/Contents/plist.info) for doing this, using Xcode. But TextEdit says that I've got no permission for edit

I've tried to get more permission for me, so I inscribed myself in GetInfo (Pasha is me).

But still the same problem as on the pictures above. I was searching for an answer and found this. As you can see, this answer suggests me to do what I've already done. So I hope you know the different solution for this problem.

You also need to have write permission to the directory the file is in:

sudo chown $USER /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist
sudo chown $USER /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents

After you have edited the file, change the owner of the plist and the directory back to root:

sudo chown root /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist
sudo chown root /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents

You could also run cp /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist ~/Desktop/ (which changes the owner to you), edit the file on the desktop, and then run sudo cp ~/Desktop/Info.plist /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist (which changes the owner back to root).

Or use another editor:

sudo nano /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist


How can I get more information about Servers under Recent Items? There are a number of Servers under Recent Items. The usual trick of holding down on command does not reveal any other information.

Can more information be obtained from this list of recent connections?

e.g. last time they were used, what operations happened, other details perhaps

There are a few resources (1, 2, 3) that describe how to get more information on Recent Servers (and other Recent Items). I'll summarize them here:

You can locate the RecentServers.plist or RecentServers.sfl in ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/

To convert the plist file into a more human-readable format, use plutil:

plutil –p <plist_file> > <output_file_here>

I used json as the file extension, which you can open up in a text editor.

The information this file gives you is limited. There are no dates associated with the data. What I found useful was the URL for Key 16.

I believe this only works to macOS 10.13 and below. It seems that in 10.14 that the Recent Items files are now sfl2 files.


Where are iWork templates saved? I'm using iWork (specifically Pages 5.5.3) and I can't find the templates I created for this anywhere on the HD.

Library > Application Support > iWork > Pages > Templates > My Templates

Only shows the ones I've saved to that location. For some reason, I think because I do have iCloud enabled, it's saving it somewhere else, but can't find it anywhere related to iCloud either.

I've also chosen 'Show Package Contents' for the Application itself and navigated through the Pages 'Contents' folder with no results.

It's not related to iCloud. I just went to iCloud.com and tried to create a new document from the template chooser—my templates did not show up there.

It's because I selected the option to "Add To Template Chooser" as opposed to saving it to my HD. Where are these templates stored when selected that option? I need to edit the name of one and delete another.

Your Pages templates are located in the following folder:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iWork.Pages/Data/Library/Application Support/User Templates

You can rename and delete templates without accessing the folder directly, by right-clicking on a template in the template chooser.


iPhone 4s: I keep receiving notifications over 3G for apps that I've disabled cell data for I try and keep an eye on my cell data so I don't use too much. From what I've noticed from my own usage the apps that eat up the most data are the ones that stream music and videos like Pandora and Youtube, so I turned off cell data for these apps. Just yesterday I got a notification from Pandora saying "New music has been added to so-and-so station". I wasn't on wifi and after double checking the cell settings data was still disabled for it.

Whats going on?

When you disable access for cellular data for specific apps like Pandora and YouTube, It only disables the access cellular data when you have the application open.

The push notifications you receive on your iPhone are sent through the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). This is done so that the application does not need to run at the background to fetch new notifications all the time, Only the Apple's push notification service runs all the time checking for updates from all the applications.

All the more the push notifications uses a very minimal amount of data which won't be shown in the usage.


"All My Files" Folder was Emptied when I Deleted Content of the Downloads Folder I am a Windows developer and have just got hold of a Mac for development of apps. I am fairly new to working with "Finder" and I am finding it easiest to do everything I need with the file system through the console. I have had to install alot of software and on the 128GB MacBookAir I want to keep the used disk space down...

Following the download and installations process I went in the the Downloads folder and deleted all of the .zip and .bin files to free up around 12GB - however I am now worried as upon removal I noticed that instead of listing the 10 installation files being deleted it said 25,000+ files. I now look at the "All My Files" folder and this is empty - I am worried that I have accidentally removed all the files from this folder.

Question. Have I removed all the file from this folder like a prime n00b, or was this folder listing all of the contents of the compressed files in the Download folder, and when I removed these the "All My Files" contents updated to reflect this?

Thanks for your time.

The "All My Files" folder is actually a virtual folder, using Spotlight to find all the documents, pictures and videos which you may have and displaying it to you in a categorized manner.

Deleting the contents of "Downloads" will potentially remove some documents you may find listed in "All My Files" (if they were located inside Downloads), but does in no way remove every single personal file of your computer.

On the other side, if you inadvertently opened "All My Files" thinking it was "Downloads" and removed all files there, everything what Spotlight can find will be placed into the Trash.  Since "All My Files" gets opened by default when opening a new Finder window, it is a possibility.  This behavior can be set inside the preferences of Finder.

Additionally you stated that you preferred "console", which I interpret as using Terminal or command line (Console is actually an application which allows you to see log file output) over GUI, which is very powerful and can easily lead to dataloss when forgetting to type certain characters, especially when using "sudo".

Example would be rm /Library/* vs. rm ~/Library/*.  The first would go for the system-wide Library folder while the second would use the Library folder of the currently used user.  Removing all the contents of the Library folder, user or system-wide, is a bad example, however, both folders do exist and just one character can have a profound difference.

Finally, when one (or more) of your files where so-called application or package bundles, it is normal that you delete one file and Trash when emptying shows the number of each of the bundle files.  This would not explain "All My Files" being empty thereafter, but depicts the difference in putting a file (bundle) into Trash vs. emptying Trash.


Can I back up the saved WiFi passwords on my Mac? Too frequently my Mac connects to WiFi but can’t access the Internet on cafes (my iPhone works properly). It has been tormenting me for over a year and I tried everything I found on the web but still could not resolve it. So I finally want to reset the WiFi settings.

However, if I reset the WiFi settings on my Mac, it erases all the saved WiFi passwords I connected on cafes, which have more than 500. It is not what I want to do to ask each password again whenever I enter the cafes again, so I rather want to back it up and restore whenever I want.

Is this possible?

All WiFi passwords are stored in Keychain.
So you need to make a backup of the keychain folder.

Location:

~/Library/Keychains/


Full screen videos in Chrome suffer a lag I have an issue concerning full screen videos within the Google Chrome browser. The video lags for a second.
Since it is too hard to explain, I captured 16 seconds of video.

What could be the cause on this?

If I've understood the video correctly, it's the long animation you're wondering what is? I don't see any other lag, please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Using the HTML5-version of YouTube, utilizes OS X's built in full screen mode. The animation from single-window to full screen in OS X is this slow, and it annoys me as well. Try disabling the HTML5-mode from here, or to shorten and/or remove the full screen animation it alltogether, see this question and it's answers.


Syncing contacts to multiple places My wife's iPhone is set up to sync contacts to an Exchange server at work. I'd like to move most of those contacts to iCloud and allow her contacts to be synced from both servers.
When I go into Contacts > Groups, I see one line for Exchange and another for iCloud. If I check the iCloud line, all her contacts on the phone vanish, which indicates to me that the phone is getting contacts from iCloud only.
Can someone explain to me what is going on here, and how to do what I'm trying to do?

There's some things that still aren't that easy to do on an iPhone/iPad and require the use of a Mac (or PC, however steps are harder) to accomplish.
Two parts to your question - first off going into Contacts--> Groups is simply a way to turn on and off certain groups of contacts so you are only seeing the groups you want to see. In your situation you would want to have the checkmarks ON next to all the Groups, otherwise you will see the behavior you are describing (accidentally hiding exchange contacts).
Next, in order to get the Exchange contacts migrated over to iCloud the easiest method is to get ahold of a Mac and follow these steps:

(Optional) If this is not your computer, or it's shared with others, consider creating a fresh user account for your Wife in order to do this task so it doesn't mix up content with other people. To do so Click Apple menu in upper left and go to System Preferences. Then click Users & Groups. Click the lock symbol in the bottom left and unlock the window pane with the computer's password. Then click the + sign in the bottom left and create a new user account for your wife to use for this task. Sign out of the account and into her account -- skip through the setup assistant the best you can, but do sign into her iCloud account.
Go to System Preferences, then click on Internet Accounts.
Add an exchange account and sign in with your wife's info. Then enable the info you are hoping to transfer - in this case just the Contacts.
If you didn't do it in the setup assistant, add your wife's iCloud account and make sure to enable Contacts.
Open the Contacts application on the dock and look to see if both her iCloud contacts and her Exchange contacts show up ok.
If they do, click on the Exchange section where it says "All Exchange". Select all (Command, A on the keyboard) or edit menu, select all. Then drag them onto the iCloud section and be patient as it copies over.

Once you've copied over the Exchange contacts to iCloud, you can then go back to the iPhone and enable the contacts for both Exchange and iCloud in the Settings--> Passwords & Accounts section. Or if you're running iOS 14 or newer it would be in Settings--> Contacts, then click Accounts near the top and make sure Contacts is enabled on both Exchange and iCloud.
(Optional) Last tip that helps a lot - in the same Contacts settings page as mentioned above, you can look for the option "Default Account". Once you find it set her default account for contacts to iCloud. Doing that will help her out a lot in the future as new contacts will go on her iCloud.
I love Exchange but have never felt comfortable putting my personal contacts onto a workplace email account that I could lose access to on a moments notice - hence my recommendation for her to set the default contacts to iCloud.

Regarding setup if you don't have a Mac, you can use a newer browser like Chrome/Firefox/Edge, and sign into iCloud.
Select the Contacts section and in the bottom left is a cog that will give you the option to "Import Vcard".
Next is the convoluted process of exporting the contacts as a multiple contacts vCard which basically involves exporting the contacts as a CSV file out of Outlook, then using Gmail's import process, then exporting them back out as a Vcard for Apple products.
Here's reference for those steps: https://www.msoutlook.info/question/803
Afterwards you would get that long sought after group Vcard you created with the steps mentioned above and upload it into iCloud.
Lastly jump back up to my steps mentioned after 6. and you'll be all set from there.


Trashing .Trash and Emptying Trash I don't want to sound stupid, but what happens if someone were to delete the .Trash folder using Finder and emptied it.

I know it's possible unless there is something that just stops it from happening.

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall finder can be used to show the folder.
Then go to ~/ in finder and delete .Trash.
Open trash from dock then empty it.

What would happen?

Quick answer, nothing happens.

If you delete it, .Trash will be created again once needed. You can delete it without issues, no matter if you delete from Finder or from command line (rm) will back again.


Cannot pair Playstation 3 controller to iMac firstly, apologies if this has been asked before, however I have read tons of online guides and had no luck solving this issue.
I bought a Playstation 3 controller with the intention of using it to play games on my Mac and my bootcamped Windows machines (I do not own a Playstation 3 console). Eager to start playing my games from a whole new perspective, I searched the web for instructions on how to connect the gamepad to the Mac computer via USB and Bluetooth.
As I said, I've read a dozen different guides and watched a few videos explaining how this could be achieved. They always list the same set of instructions:

Plug in via USB, controller should show up on list of Bluetooth
devices.
Press PS button and remove the USB cable; lights on    controller
should blink faster and Mac should ask for a passcode.
Enter passcode, add device to favourites, done.

However, I can't seem to get past that second step, where I am supposed to press the button and remove the USB cable. First of all, the lights blink slowly as the computer is charging the controller. Pressing the PS button doesn't make them blink faster, as when the device is looking to pair via Bluetooth. Also, when I remove the USB cable, the lights stop blinking altogether.
To expand on what happens step by step, the controller first shows up as 'Not connected', as expected. When I press the PS button, it switches to 'Connected' and the lights blink faster. After a few seconds, the lights stop blinking and eventually the controller switches back to 'Not connected'.
If I click on 'Pair' while the controller is 'Connected', it will either say 'Pairing failed' or 'Couldn't connect to this device' (I'm not really sure when each of these appear, but either way it just means I've been unsuccessful in trying to connect the device). I've never got a pop-up asking for a passcode.
My computer is a mid-2011 iMac 21.5" running OSX El Capitan 10.11.3 Beta. I've had some luck connecting my controller to my Windows 10 machine, however only through USB (I don't think I tried Bluetooth) and of course with the aid of Motioninjoy.
I'm thinking if I can't get this gamepad to work then I might replace it with either an Xbox 360 one (which seems to be the most compatible with PC/Mac games) or a Playstation 4 one (which I'd assume is more compatible with the newest OSX).
I would very much appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.

Are you're suggesting that you bought the controller used? If that is the case, are you sure that the battery isn't shot? Try leaving the USB cable plugged in and let the controller charge for a while. From my experience, if the battery is charged then pressing the PS button should at least blink something.

I have owned a PS3 only for the last year and rarely use it, but I have noticed that it only seems to charge when plugged into a PS3 as it doesn't seem to do much when plugged into an outlet that has USB charging ports on it (never tried an independent USB charging adapter).

If your battery is toast, I think you can find replacements on Amazon for several dollars. Documentation on the internet seems to indicate that replacing the PS3 controller battery is trivial for someone with basic electronics repair skills.


Mac Terminal: Edit Text Document I‘m again trying to make a siri-shortcut which let you run applications on your Mac.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/f74c9bd89f1a4e71a3e8f72da5cf5ab7

It's making a list of all your applications in a text document, but there is the text document self also in the list. Can I delete the name of the document in this list with a command and without using keyboard?

ls > Applications.txt is going to list the Applications.txt file in the list.

Though I don't entirely understand all of your workflow, adding the -d flag should do the trick, by specifying *.app.

ls -d *.app > Applications.txt

Just like your previous approach though, that won't catch .app files buried in subdirectories (like your Adobe Suite). You can modify find's maxdepth parameter for something like that:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "*.app" > Applications.txt

If you wish to search within all subdirectories of the current one, simply omit the -maxdepth option altogether.

If you have a problem with the pathname being part of the output (e.g., you want Terminal.app not ./Utilities/Terminal.app), then try this instead:

cd /Applications
find * -type d -name "*.app" -exec basename "{}" \; > Applications.txt

If you want to find any application anywhere on your Mac, try:

mdfind -interpret "kind:application"  # this is localized for your language

The mdfind command uses Spotlight's index, so it's fast, but (being an index) it may not always represent the exact, up-to-the-minute state of the filesystem. How to remove the pathname from the front is left as an exercise for the reader (hint: xargs -I{} basename "{}").


Cannot toggle between YouTube on full screen and other apps in Google Chrome I recently switched by browser from Firefox to Google Chrome and now when I have a YouTube video on full screen it won't let me toggle between the video and other apps using the ⌘ Command ` shortcut any more.

My OS is Mojave.

Has anyone else had this problem and know of a solution?

I don't think that's possible. When you go full screen, it becomes kind of a new desktop (three finger swipe up, at the top you see all the desktops). The only way to switch between full screen items is via switching desktops.

You can swipe to the other desktops by swiping three finger either right or left or use ^ Control → or ←


You cannot partition an external disk, a RAID disk or an internal disk on which FileVault encryption is in progress I'm trying to Boot Camp my Mac Pro (Late 2013, MacPro6,1).

  You cannot partition an external disk, a RAID disk or an internal disk on which FileVault encryption is in progress.
  Restart your computer using an internal disk that is not part of a RAID set or try it again after FileVault has completed.

Well, this is an internal SSD (an OWC Aura), and there's only one intentional partition; so I don't know why it's telling me this.

> diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.9 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Kate's HD               1.9 TB     disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

> diskutil corestorage info disk0
disk0 is not a CoreStorage disk

> diskutil info disk0
   Device Identifier:        disk0
   Device Node:              /dev/disk0
   Whole:                    Yes
   Part of Whole:            disk0
   Device / Media Name:      OWC Aura SSD

   Volume Name:              Not applicable (no file system)

   Mounted:                  Not applicable (no file system)

   File System:              None

   Content (IOContent):      GUID_partition_scheme
   OS Can Be Installed:      No
   Media Type:               Generic
   Protocol:                 PCI
   SMART Status:             Not Supported

   Total Size:               1.9 TB (1920080281600 Bytes) (exactly 3750156800 512-Byte-Units)
   Volume Free Space:        Not applicable (no file system)
   Device Block Size:        512 Bytes

   Read-Only Media:          No
   Read-Only Volume:         Not applicable (no file system)

   Device Location:          External
   Removable Media:          No

   Solid State:              No
   Virtual:                  No
   OS 9 Drivers:             No
   Low Level Format:         Not supported

> diskutil info disk0s2
   Device Identifier:        disk0s2
   Device Node:              /dev/disk0s2
   Whole:                    No
   Part of Whole:            disk0
   Device / Media Name:      Kate's New HD

   Volume Name:              Kate's HD

   Mounted:                  Yes
   Mount Point:              /

   File System Personality:  Journaled HFS+
   Type (Bundle):            hfs
   Name (User Visible):      Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
   Journal:                  Journal size 147456 KB at offset 0x37e2000
   Owners:                   Enabled

   Partition Type:           Apple_HFS
   OS Can Be Installed:      Yes
   Recovery Disk:            disk0s3
   Media Type:               Generic
   Protocol:                 PCI
   SMART Status:             Not Supported
   Volume UUID:              A22B65B2-1BAF-3561-B295-EF8343111867
   Disk / Partition UUID:    B85D962F-C97C-4C64-99AC-FD6C2F47F173

   Total Size:               1.9 TB (1919220523008 Bytes) (exactly 3748477584 512-Byte-Units)
   Volume Free Space:        710.0 GB (710019452928 Bytes) (exactly 1386756744 512-Byte-Units)
   Device Block Size:        512 Bytes
   Allocation Block Size:    4096 Bytes

   Read-Only Media:          No
   Read-Only Volume:         No

   Device Location:          External
   Removable Media:          No

   Solid State:              No

What steps can I take to install Windows on this volume? Preferably, I'd like to make Bootcamp “just work.”

Install the Aura SSD for Mac Pro driver and you should be good (direct d/l link).

It's obviously required for use with OS X Boot Camp utility.


Is there a way for the iPad mail show calendar links, as the iPhone's? If I receive a mail in the iPhone with the text "tomorrow morning", this text turns into a link for "tomorrow morning" in the calendar app. The same doesn't happens on the iPad. Is there a way to enable it?

How odd. On my iPad I do get links to the Calendar app, for the text 'Tomorrow morning', just as on iPhone.

I just looked in the Settings app, under 'Mail, Contacts, Calendars', for an option to turn this facility off and on. There isn't one.

So I don't think the issue is the iPad itself. I suggest you look carefully at the email itself, e.g. to see if there is any difference in punctuation or spacing, between what works on your iPhone and does not work on the iPad.


windows can't read my HDD installed in my dvd slot on MBP I've swapped my dvd drive with an HDD drive on my MBP 2008 non-unibody.
I can read it from MAC os but not from Windows.
I did configure it to be PC compatible...

Anyone knows why it's not seen as an addtional hard drive?

"PC compatible" refers to the way, partitions are written to the disc, I think. If it is HFS formated, Windows does not recognize it. Have you tried to format it with FAT32?


Laptop turning off due to positioning relative to another one I was working on a MacBook Pro which was placed on top of a closed MacBook Pro. There is a precise position where the screen turns black and the internet stops working. I can repeat this phenomenon again and again with always the same output.

On the .gif, you can see (if you stare a little bit) the laptop is on top of another closed laptop. At the beginning of the .gif, everything goes fine. Then I pulled the laptop just a little bit and the screen turns black when a precise position is found. When I pull the laptop a bit further everything turns back to normal.

What is going on?

Magnets.

Sensors in the body of the awake MBP are detecting magnets in the lid of the closed MBP.  It thinks you've closed the lid, so it goes to sleep.


iOS Mail automatically switching account, depending on recipient My Mail app switches from my iCloud account to Gmail when sending an Email to a Gmail contact. How can I disable this?

You are probably replying to the message from inside your gmail inbox which will use the gmail account as the sending authority since the email was sent to this account in the first place. The error therefor isn't with the mail.app it is with the way that your emails are sent to you.

If you want to change the address in which you send your email from just tap on your gmail address and switch it to your iCloud address.

If you don't want to have the automatic reply address to be your gmail one I suggest not using the address to receive emails to.

All that mail.app can do for default address is to ensure that your iCloud account is the address that is used when you compose a new email.


MacBook Pro Mid 2007 Not Showing Linux USB In Boot Menu I have a mid 2007 MacBook Pro that I want to get Ubuntu Linux on as the only OS. I have tried SO MANY TIMES to get a bootable USB working, but nothing is working. I have reset PRAM, used many different software, and more. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I have gotten it to boot, but it gets stuck on this line:

[    15.419970] fb: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA

I tested booting from a USB flash drive on a (20 inch, mid 2007) iMac.

First, download the file ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso from the Ubuntu web site: Download Ubuntu Desktop.

Second, erase and format a flash drive for a single MS-DOS (FAT) volume using a Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme.

Next, transfer the iso file to a USB flash drive using UNetbootin. This application runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. The instructions, when using OS X, are given at this site: How to create a bootable USB stick on OS X.

  Note: The message shown below is wrong. The USB flash drive can be used to boot off a Mac.

This flash drive did appear on the Mac Startup Manager menu. By selecting the icon, I was able to boot to a live version of Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu installation software places the Ubuntu startup files (GRUB) in a EFI partition. Unfortunately, the Mac firmware ignores these files. Therefore, nothing representing the Ubuntu installation appears on the Startup Manager menu.

When holding down the Option ⌥ at startup, the Mac firmware will look for the \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI file on each EFI partition of all drives accessible at startup. Each occurrence will generate an icon with the label "EFI Boot" on the Startup Manager menu.

Searching, for the BOOTx64.EFI file in the folder \EFI\BOOT on a EFI partition, is part of the UEFI specification. For example, if you go to the "uefi.org Specifications web page", you can download and view the "UEFI Specification Version 2.5". Sections 3.5.1.1 Removable Media Boot Behavior and 3.5.1.2 Non-removable Media Boot Behavior (on pages 88-90) describe the naming of the BOOTx64.EFI file and that it should appear in the \EFI\BOOT folder.

When Windows installs, some of the startup files are stored in the folder \EFI\MICROSOFT. These files are also duplicated (with some renaming) in the \EFI\BOOT folder. Not all non-Apple operating systems do this when installing. For example, Ubuntu Linux does not. (Well, last time I installed in EFI mode it did not.) The Ubuntu installer does create a folder \EFI\UBUNTU with startup files (GRUB), which the Mac firmware by default ignores. To get Ubuntu to appear in the Startup Manager, you have to manually mount the EFI partition and copy the files in the \EFI\UBUNTU folder to the \EFI\BOOT folder. (Also, the copied grubx64.efi file needs to be renamed to BOOTX64.EFI.)

If you need to do this for two operating systems, then you will need a second EFI partition. This should not present a problem since an EFI partition is fairly small (<200 MB) and the limit on Macs by default is 128 partitions. However, to tell one operating system for the other, while viewing the choices presented by the Startup Manager, you may want to change the icons.

For example, I have rEFInd installed in a second 134 MB EFI partition on my iMac. (This happens to be the last of 9 partitions.) Additionally, I have Windows 10, Yosemite (on volume "Steelhead") and El Capitan (on volume "Steelhead2") installed. Below is a image of my Macs Startup Manager menu. (For a better view, click on the image or open in a new window.)

The icon can be changed by mounting the EFI partition and adding the icon file .VolumeIcon.icns to the root folder. A collection of these icons, for popular Linux and other operating systems, can be found here.

  Note: While the Mac Startup Manager can be used to boot Ubuntu, this extra step is unnecessary when Ubuntu is the sole installed operating system. In this case, one would be better off by blessing Ubuntu so this operation system is always chosen at Startup. The process for doing this is beyond the scope of your posted question.


Use find in Terminal to remove directories and files of same search parameter If I type the following into Terminal, it will remove all files that meet the search parameter:

sudo find . -type f -name "*Xilisoft*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

Then if I start again and type it with d instead of f it will remove all the directories

sudo find . -type d -name "*Xilisoft*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

How do I get it to remove type f and d in one fell swoop?

You can provide multiple -type options with -o, such as -type f -o -type d in a single command.

find . -name "*Xilisoft*" -type f -o -name "*Xilisoft*" -type d

-o matches all parameters, so the -name is provided twice in the above command.
Note that find can delete the results using -delete rather than -exec rm -rf {}.


When do the Macbook Pro fans turn on? As a complement to this question about keeping the Mac cool so the fans don't get triggered:

At what temperature does the mac turn on the fans? I know that a high CPU load can cause the fans to go on, so it's not just temperature-based. Are there specific processor temperatures that trigger the fans to spin up?

(I've got iStat installed, so I can monitor the internal sensors for high temperatures. I now need to know what temperatures to avoid.)

My Mac is a Macbook Pro 13" 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5.

The short answer: We can't tell you exactly.

The algorithm that controls this is sure to be Apple-proprietary. I'm sure they've spent lots of work perfecting it, so they wouldn't share it for other hardware manufacturers to 'take'.

Basically, Apple's algorithm tries to strike a balance between not turning on the fan when unnecessary, like for a short spike in load, (so the computer is quieter and the battery lasts longer) and not letting things get too hot. Just how hot things are allowed to get probably depends on the components in your computer, the various temperatures of those components, how well the computer is ventilated at the moment, the ambient temperature, and maybe even things like load average.

Bottom line: If the computer's doing a lot of work, the fans go on to cool it off. There's no way to say exactly what temperature triggers the fans because it varies based on a lot of things.

Sorry I can't provide anything more concrete.


Is there a way to set Safari's homepage to an entire bookmark folder? I want all the pages to open in different tabs automatically. When I tried opening the bookmark and choosing "Set to current page" in Settings it only set it to the one tab I was actively viewing, not all of them.

Put them in a 'Favourites' category.

You can then either right click and 'Open in New Tabs' or from Bookmarks menu, 'Show Favourites'.

From the Safari Sidebar you can drag & drop to Different folders. Add a folder to Favourites & use that.


Any side-effects when sharing a Time Machine backup disk between Lion and Snow Leopard? Is there anything to consider if I want to share a Time Machine backup drive between a Lion machine and a Snow Leopard machine (a USB drive that I would be rotating between the two computers)? Obviously I cannot use encryption (since Snow Leopard will not be able to use the disk), but are there any other gotchas? For example, will Spotlight behave (i.e. not constantly re-index because of the version change)?

In general, there are no issues or side-effects of using a drive connected in turn to any number of macs with mixes of OS levels since each Mac only writes to its own backup folder.

The obvious exception is Lion style FileVault encryption where Snow Leopard and older macs will be prevented from reading or writing the drive.

The only other problem is if you mix lion and snow leopard on the same Mac and (or) let lion "inherit" the backup of another machine.

In that one case, the contents of the backup are mixed and you can't be guaranteed a restore of system files will work. Your data and pictures and other files will be fine but anything tied to database files or a specific version of the mail app (for example) can depend on versioning.

This isn't really a side effect of Time Machnie changing how it works, but of the OS and app changes.


Memory upgrade for imac 27inch mid 2011 2.7GHZ INTEL CORE i5 I have a imac as above, which has 2 x 2gb memory cards installed, I would like to upgrade my memory by putting in 4 new ones each being 4gb making a total of 16gb, but what happens to the memory already on the 2 cards in the mac, if i remove them will I loose all the stored memory in my photos, word etc. ?  please help, als can I have a total of 32gb in this model?

The memory you are talking about (also called RAM) does not "store". It only "temporary" stores.

It is used for when computer is running to shuffle stuff around getting it from your hard disk (memory) and putting it back to it pending what you are doing. It does not stores anything permanently.

Your files are stored on your hard disk. So go ahead and upgrade the memory.


Side button on iPhone 7 doesn't silent anymore but declines the call Until today I was able to silent a call (both from ringing and on silent/vibrate modes) on my iPhone 7 plus with the lock button on the right.
When I press it now, it just declines the call on both modes.

Under iOS 10 and earlier, the side/power button was responsible for silencing a call, just as you'd experienced. But now, under iOS 11, the volume keys — maybe just the Volume Down button? — are responsible for silencing a call. The side/power button remains the way to decline a call.

If you've recently installed iOS 11 on your iPhone, that may explain the change in functionality you've observed.

So, the next time you get a call, try pressing the Volume Down button and see if that achieves the effect you want.


Setting to open new TextEdit document window in center? I use TextEdit regularly as a scratchpad and to open script outputs. Annoyingly, TextEdit insists on opening a new document window in the top left corner of the screen. Is there any setting I can change to make this the center of the screen or to make it remember the last position of the window?

If this is really not possible, I could 'fake it' and create a script that creates a new TextEdit document and changes the position to the center. But I'd prefer not to do this.

It seems that TextEdit hardcodes the position for new document windows, and it's not possible to tweak this behaviour using defaults write to modify TextEdit's Preferences. See this old post from Apple Discussions:

  The current version of TextEdit does not maintain a preference in the com.apple.TextEdit.plist file concerning window placement for the document window. What appears to be missing in the TextEdit preferences file is an
   NSWindow Frame property for the document window itself.

To change the default position of new TextEdit documents there's really only one solution: write a custom AppleScript that can open a new document at your preferred location centered on the screen.

tell application "Finder"
    set screen_resolution to bounds of window of desktop
end tell

tell application "TextEdit"
    set screenWidth to (item 3 of screen_resolution) - (item 1 of screen_resolution)
    set screenHeight to (item 4 of screen_resolution) - (item 2 of screen_resolution)
    set screenCentreX to screenWidth / 2
    set screenCentreY to screenHeight / 2

    activate
    make new document

    set defaultBounds to bounds of front window
    set x1 to item 1 of defaultBounds
    set y1 to item 2 of defaultBounds
    set x2 to item 3 of defaultBounds
    set y2 to item 4 of defaultBounds
    set w to x2 - x1
    set h to y2 - y1

    set centreBounds to {screenCentreX - (w / 2), screenCentreY - (h / 2), screenCentreX + (w / 2), screenCentreY + (h / 2)}

    -- "set position" does not work, so we need to fall back on "set bounds"
    -- https://stackoverflow.com/q/12803847/190298
    set bounds of front window to centreBounds
end tell


‘The application "AppDownloadLauncher" is not open anymore’ when attempting to open Xcode I have just downloaded Xcode off the App Store and now when I try to open it I get this error:

  The application "AppDownloadLauncher" is not open anymore.

What does this mean and how do I open Xcode?

The process AppDownloadLauncher is used to launch apps from the Mac App Store. The error is shown when a problem occurred communicating with this process.

Use Activity Monitor to force quit AppDownloadLauncher, then try relaunching Xcode.
If this doesn't help, log out and back in.


How do I locate applications that drain my battery on a MacBook Pro? I purchased a new Macbook Pro and have since downloaded a ton of applications and add ins.  I think some of these apps are responsible for draining my battery too quickly.

How do I identify what applications are responsible for this, or otherwise experience what a "clean machine" feels like?

Back in the day I used Extensions Manager on OS 7.x to turn off add ins that would slow my machine down.  What is the equivalent in OSX?

The Activity Monitor template in Instruments shows average CPU use over time:

You can also use top -o time or Activity Monitor to sort processes by CPU time.

CPU time doesn't always correlate with CPU use though. It's reset when a process exits, so the list won't include old mdworker processes or applications that have been quit manually.


Fonts showing in Font Book but not in Finder I randomly found a font called 'Baloo' in Font Book, yet I can't seem to find out how it's been installed.
When I click on one of it's variants in Font Book, it says that I need to 'download' the font, and presents me with a download button like the below.
The font doesn't appear to be in my library folder and I can't find the file for it anywhere else. Font Book also as greyed out the Show in Finder feature for this font.
I can use the font fine in any CreativeCloud program, but it doesn't appear to be an Adobe Font.
Does anyone know why this might have happened?

Apple does provide additional fonts as optional installs that can be downloaded if you want. From the linked Apple Support document, Baloo is one of those.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192
If you have Creative Cloud, then you have access to Adobe's font library: CC apps can install any font for their own use directly from Adobe Fonts, independently of macOS's font management.


Is there a way to enforce straight mouse movement(horizontal, vertical, diagonal) in macos? I was wondering if there is a way to enforce a straight pointer movement in macOS.
For instance when you are annotating a PDF document, you may want to make a straight stroke as an underline.
So what I'm looking for is a feature like when moving your pointers with the shift key pressed, then the pointer movement would be restricted to a straight line (either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal).
Is there such feature in macOS, or other applications which makes this possible?

You can, in fact, make specific dedicated underlines.
In the top bar, the pencil tool, there are options for Underline & strikethrough.
Both will track any text you select, letter, word or paragraph…

Giving this [the blue highlight is the selection, the red line is the added underline]

Instructions from my beer-making xmas prezzie ;)


.mht files showing exec icon on Mac I am working on a Mac (Yosemite, OS X 10.10.5) and I have several mht files which I created on Firefox by selecting File → Save as MHT. I have already associated the files with Firefox — it opens them by default — but the files continue to show the exec icon. What I am looking for is a way to make macOS recognize the mht file extension: for eg, when a PDF file is renamed in macOS, only the name of the file is highlighted but not the extension, however when a mht file is renamed, both the name of the file and the file extension (mht) are hightlighed.

I tried browsing to Firefox -> Show Package Contents -> Contents and, since it was missing, I added mht to the Info.plist using TextEdit:

<dict>
    <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
    <array>
        <string>html</string>
        <string>htm</string>
        <string>shtml</string>
        <string>xht</string>
        <string>xhtml</string>
        <string>mht</string> <!-- added -->
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>
    <string>document.icns</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
    <string>HTML Document</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
    <array>
        <string>HTML</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
    <string>Viewer</string>
</dict>

This did not work. Is there any way to make macOS recognize the mht extension and associate it to the Firefox icon? Alternatively, how can I make macOS associate an icon to these files (other than manually changing the icon on each file in the Get Info window)?

In the comments, you indicated that the problem files were on an external drive. Is it formatted as FAT (or NTFS)?

These filesystems have no concept of executable files, so the system seems to assume that everything is an executable program. Don't worry, there's nothing wrong with the file.

Why does it do this? Well, it's a permissions problem.

To see the permissions on a file, you can open a terminal, type ls -ld with a space after it, drag in your file, and press Return. The first part of the output will look like this:

-rw-r--r--

So what does all this mean?

r: read  w: write  x: execute

    -        rwx     rwx     rwx
    |       └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘
additional  user    group   world
  info     perm.s   perm.s  perm.s

Try this on some file in your home folder. You should get something like rw-r--r--. Now try something on your external drive—it's probably rwxrwxrwx.

(External drives usually don't have a concept of ownership, so even on an HFS+-formatted drive you'll get the same set in each field. Edit: I tested this on a random file and it came back with rw-r--r--. Oops.)

Fixing the problem

The proper way

If the partition the file is on is formatted HFS+ (like your system disk) or any Unix filesystem (e.g. ext4, XFS), then you can use chmod. To do this, type chmod -x into a terminal, add a space, and drag in your file, just as with ls above. Hit Return, and you should be golden.

In fact, this is always worth a shot—it's safe to try on any type of filesystem. If it doesn't work, see below.

The improper way—just hiding it

On filesystems with no concept of executable files, chmod will silently fail and nothing will happen. You can still hide this by setting an icon. To do this, Get Info on a file (⌘I) and drag a .icns file onto the icon in the top left corner. (You can also just copy and paste the icon from something else—that's probably the way to go here. If you want a custom icon, read on.)

So, how do you get this mysterious .icns file?

The easiest way is simply to open an image in Preview, select everything (⌘A), and copy it (⌘C). Then you can just paste it into the corner icon (click to select it first).

But .icns images have a hidden benefit—they can display differently at different sizes. This is great for app icons, which is their main reason for existence. If you want to make your own image do this, you can do the following:

Slightly off-topic: making your own icon images behave differently at different sizes

Collect a set of images, with sizes of 64x64 up to 1024x1024. These are for Retina displays, you'll downsize them later. Put them in a folder named whatever.iconset.
Rename each of them to icon_<halfwidth>x<halfheight>@2x.png (for example, the 64px icon would be icon_32x32@2x.png).
Duplicate each icon, halve its size, and rename it icon_<newwidth>x<newheight>.png (for example, icon_32x32.png). This can be automated with a shell script, using the sips command (run man sips for more info on using it).

You'll see that if you Quick Look preview the folder, you'll see your icon, and see how it behaves at different sizes.

Convert it to a .icns with this command: iconutil --convert icns and drag in your iconset, as with the other commands.

Associating the file type with Firefox

I don't know whether your process would have worked, but you'll need to make sure the system can see the change. You do this with lsregister:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister .../Firefox.app

Replace .../Firefox.app with the path to Firefox, or drag it into the terminal.


Yosemite - Screen saver options - no default showing After updating to Yosemite I have no screen saver default showings at all.
How can I add photos?  When I click screen saver options the only thing that shows up to choose is thickness color and speed.
How can I change this to add my photos?

Choose a Style on the left, then choose a source from the drop menu in the centre...

Thickness, Colour & Speed sounds like the setup options for Flurry...


Why does Terminal ignore capital "B"? this happens to me from time to time: when I am using the Terminal, suddenly the terminal starting to ignore the capital 'B', regular 'b' works fine, other capital letter work fine. other applications in the system (browser, mail, etc) have not problems.

I tried to:

restart the Terminal application
switch to iTerm
switch to guest user and open Terminal there
Write a word in other window and Copy/Paste into terminal

all the above failed. next is restarting my machine.

Ok, The solution was not simple. but I found it in http://www.softpanorama.org/Scripting/Shellorama/inputrc.shtml.

When I ran bind -p i've noticed that I have a line like this per each char:

"A": self-insert

but not for "B". so I've ran:

bind -p > ~/.inputrc

then I've edited the file and added the letter.

Great Success.


Where is the tilde on French and US keyboard layouts? I have configured my keyboard for French and US layouts. I cannot find a tilde anywhere on there.

Normally, the tilde (~) is on the upper case of the key to the left of the "1" character.

It is pretty essential if you use the terminal a lot, as it allows you to go to directly somebody else's home directory. cd ~suzanne takes you to suzanne's home. Since, as a Linux user, I make a lot of use of the terminal, I really need the tilde.

Choose the keyboard viewer from the input menu on the menu bar. If you have the visible Keyboard in front of you, you can find out which keyboard combination for the Tilde is in both US and French

See also Apple Support Page to enable this feature.


Open a folder in default browser I have many web projects that I develop on the localhost. Normally to get to these one has to navigate from the root directory or bookmark the url.

I want to be able to open an OS directory/folder in the default browser. So for example I right-click a 'project A' folder and choose 'open in browser' and go there directly. I would like to be able to specify the beginning of the url, so I can change file:/// to http://localhost/ or mymac.local/.

I am imagining this could be done with Applescript but I'm not experienced in that. Is there any way to achieve this?

You can add a right click item via Automator. Open Automator and copy this workflow:

When you save it, it will appear in your right click menu under Services:

I'm not completely sure what you mean by changing the URL protocol, but I should be able to modify this to accomplish what you want


The common issue with Bluetooth Audio and mac OS I recently purchased an Anker Bluetooth Headset, and i had the common issue that it sounds like garbage when i pair it on my MacBook but awesome using my iPhone

The issue is fixed by turning "Input" to "Internal Mic" in

Settings > Sounds > Input

But the thing is.. i have to do it EVERYTIME i connect my earphones! If i need to charge them, the second time i turn them on, i have to do the same process again, is there a way to make this the default behavior??

BTW, i'm using High Sierra

create an aggregate device via audio midi setup and do not include the your headset input channel in there, then make that device to be default.

that's an example setup, as long as you do not include your headphones input and use the build-in microphone, it should not trigger the SCO codec upon bluetooth initialisation. that generally means if you want to listen to music and talk it will use the laptop microphone, not the headset one.

hope that helps.


How does codesign and signing of profiles on os x work? At the moment I am messing around with OS X profile manager and configuration profiles in general.
I like the idea of being able to push settings to clients and I'd like to use it for my customers. The problem is, that we can't use profile manager, because it doesn't fit in our business model.

(Short excourse: We manage around 50 customers in my hometown, mostly with 5-50 workers each. Those customers are all individual and do not have any relations to each other. Therefore we can't use one server for all, and setting up one server per customer is also not a thing we'd like to do (or the customer would like to pay;))

I found out so far, that you can import a "trust-profile" and after that one is installed, the user can install all profiles coming from this trusted server without having to supply administration-credentials (this is key, because we don't give them the administrator login in general).

However, on OS X you can use "codesign" (on the terminal) to sign profiles with your private key and then it's signed and computers with the trust-profile installed trust this signed profile.

I'd like to know, what exactly codesign does (does it simply encrypt the profile with your private key?) so I could find another way of signing those profiles on a non-osx machine.

The long term objective would be to have one (web)server sitting "somewhere in the internet" and serving all our customers with profiles. For this I'd write a library and webApp (if this doesn't exist yet) to configure and deploy profiles.
I could also imagine publishing it to github.

Regards
Christian

I suspect writing an equivalent to codesign on a non-Apple platform will be tricky; but you might be lucky as parts may be open source.

Consider having a Mac provide a code signing service solely for your web server. Then you can use Apple's codesign but avoid using the Mac as the public server.

Apple provide two useful documents about code signing:

Code Signing Guide
OS X Code Signing In Depth

The technical note is a great source of information for how codesign works and has changed across different editions of OS X:

  The purpose of this technote is to provide a more in depth view of code signing. It is intended to expand upon the information given in the Code Signing Guide by supplying a more detailed analysis of the technology. The target audience for this document is OS X developers who have read and presumably understand the information given in the Code Signing Guide but want to learn a bit more.


Setting speed of effects There are some effects in osx. For example minimize effect, fullscreen effect, slide effect when changing desktop. But I think these effects taking too long time. For example I'm pushing to CMD+TAB and selecting a full screen application then desktop is sliding about 500 milliseconds. This is slow for me. I want to decrease this time to 100 millisecond. It is time waste and enervator. Can I change time for effects.
I'm using linux in other computer and I can change effect times for compiz. I think there must be same thing in OSX too. Thanks for your help.

I don't know how to change the animation speed, but you can change the animation as follows;
System Preferences> Accessibility> Display> Reduce Motion.
Maybe it helps :)


Photos not appearing on iPhone I have an iPhone 3G, whenever I add a photo into a folder in iTunes, and then I sync it to my iPhone, the photo doesn't appear at all in the folder on my iPhone.

Why is it doing this? The image is JPEG image type.

There could be any number of issues here; not enough room on the device, corrupt image(s), adding photos in the wrong place... Since I can't know what your exact issue is without more details, I will offer up a suggestion for a "flow" that works for me.

I sync photos from various cameras (including iPhones) to iPhoto
In iPhoto, I have setup a Smart Folder that has at least a Date filter of Last X Months where X is something you can specify depending on how far back in time you want to sync over to your iPhone

Once it is setup, iPhoto will show you the photos that match that filter

Finally, in iTunes, you will connect your iPhone, select it in the iTunes window and using the tab bar at the top, select Photos. Turn on Sync Photos from iPhoto, select Selected albums, events and faces, and automatically include no events (note: include whatever events you want there, I include none). Then scroll down in the Albums list until you see the Smart Folder that you created in iPhoto and put a checkmark next to it.

Then the next time you sync your iPhone with iTunes, it should sync over all the photos in that Smart Folder. If it is too many, you can reduce the time frame that you pull photos from or use tags in iPhoto to mark some pictures to exclude and then include that information in your Smart Folder setup (telling that folder to exclude those tags).

If this is not the kind of information that helps you, then post some more info about the issues you are having so we can try to answer those specific issues directly.

Good luck!


How to change the appearance of volume & brightness overlay in dark mode? As you all know, in MacOS Mojave Apple has released a thing called Dark Mode. My problem is that I got used to the previous appearance of dark mode, when there were only dark Dock and Menu Bar. I've found out that I can type a command in Terminal to get back that previous view:

defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes

That worked fine, BUT there is one trouble. Not everything turned white correctly. For example, language switcher stayed as white text above white background, which is not really legible. Brightness and volume regulators stayed as dark cells above dark background, which is similarly illegible. Pictures below:

Appearance of language switcher was fixed by typing:

defaults write com.apple.TextInputSwitcher NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No

After this, it turned fully black (like for regular dark theme), that's fine by me.

I believe, that I can do the same thing to the audio & brightness overlay. The problem is that I don't know the specific name of this UI element to address it using that command. I would like to change its appearance to light one. It there a way to do that?

One more thing - is it possible to change the color of Notification Center and notifications themselves? They also stayed fully dark. I prefer seeing in dark only menubar and dock. I would be very grateful if there is a solution to my problem. Thanks in advance!

I tried to use bundle id com.apple.OSDUIHelper to exclude OSD from the aqua-appearance fixup, but with no luck – like it ignores per-app defaults.
However I've got what I wanted with following steps:

killall -9 OSDUIHelper; defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool NO
Perform some action to show OSD, so it will started in normal configuration
defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool YES

After that OSD becomes normal until reboot.
I didn't find any way to trigger OSD from a shell script to automate these steps, so I made the app:
https://github.com/dstd/osdui-aqua-fix/releases/tag/v1


Can I turn off all notifications? In the system preferences, I've set all of them to "None" for the various applications, but I'm still seeing things like software updates and battery status there in pop-ups in the top-right corner of my screen.

Is there any way to just turn off all notifications?

Do Not Disturb will mute all notifications. You can enable it by opening Notification Center by clicking on the NC icon in the menubar (or sliding in from the side of the trackpad with two fingers) and turning the switch on.

You can permanently set Do Not Disturb on by going to System Preferences → Notifications and setting the schedule to "00:00 to 23:59".

 →

To remove Notification Center altogether, you can run the following Terminal commands:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist
killall NotificationCenter
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui KeepAlive -bool False

Make sure to scroll to copy the entire line


How to see previews of old quicktime movies (old codec) Since I updated to Yosemite, the .mov previews in Finder no longer show up for videos with an older codec. (When I double click the video, it starts a conversion process.) Is there any way I can see previews of my videos without needing to convert them all? Even if there's a software I can download to see the previews, that is fine. It's too much work to convert all of the videos to see what they are.

Not sure about the Finder preview function. You would have to find a preview handler written for that specific codec (whatever it might be) and compatible with Yosemite. A bit of searching might find that, if it even exists.

If all you want to do is play the video try VLC at videolan.org it's free and well supported and will not try and covert it, just play it as is.


Installing old OS X version and the "It may have been corrupted or tampered" message that can't be fixed by changing the date I am trying to install OS X Yosemite on a dedicated partition of a MBP 13" mid 2012 running Catalina (I need dual boot).
I downloaded the file from the official Apple page and followed these instructions to get the .app file and, using createinstallmedia, I created a bootable installer on the new "Yosemite" partition.
I then booted my Mac choosing the Yosemite partition mentioned above and started the installation, however I got the error message mentioned here and here.
I see that most of the users fixed the problem by changing the system date, I have tried many different dates but I always get same error message. I have also re-downloaded the file, but by checking with diff it seems identical to the first I downloaded.
The hdiutil verify method proposed here generates a "valid" output.
Is there anything else I could try?
Thanks.

This is not so much a definitive answer as some speculation based on prior known behaviour.
One thing to note is that the 'date/certificate issue' should now be fixed for all older installers & so shouldn't need any workaround in that respect.
I haven't tried any of these older installers in a while, but in the past some were only valid if your computer could not run any newer OS. The El Capitan installer was specifically 'sold' that way.
The Apple site you linked  also obliquely points in the same direction. Each of those links says "can upgrade…"  (I don't have any recent hard evidence to know if this is true or not).
See How can I download an older version of OS X/macOS? for some history behind this, though the answer is probably falling behind the times now. I can't maintain it any more as I have no Mac capable of running anything newer than Mojave.
On a Mac Pro I'd test this by removing the drive with Catalina on it & installing from USB to a fresh clean drive. Not sure that's so easy on a laptop.
One thing I would definitely try… You appear to be creating the installer on the same partition you want to install to (if I'm reading you correctly). I'm pretty sure this isn't going to work. Create the installer on a separate USB stick & boot to that, then attempt install to the internal partition.
Alternatively, you could try installing from Internet Recovery. If you boot holding  Cmd ⌘   Opt ⌥   Shift ⇧   R  the installer presented should be the one that originally shipped with your Mac. If that's successful, then the earlier potential caveat of 'can update from' would then be on your side.
One other thing to note is that as these installers are all designed "to update" then I'd be pretty sure they will run as an app if mounted to a Mac already running any OS older than the installer. It wouldn't need to be made into a USB boot drive. That would make your upgrade from your original OS over Internet Recovery much simpler… maybe ;)
From comments
Apparently the new installer dmg files install the "Install macOS (name)" into your apps folder, from where you can run the update.


Can I use Chrome Enterprise deployment to secure extensions on my child's Mac? I want to 'force install' some extensions on my son's Mac (to limit access to sites), and was looking at Chrome Deployment documentation.
I'm at a loss on the last step ... is there a way to install Chrome on his Mac with policies in effect, without paying for an expensive professional MDM?
Unfortunately Apple's Screen Time does not work in Chrome (yet).

for the answer please see below. Just a question: How old is you son? Have you talked to him already about your limits and expectations? If you were my dad, I would really appreciate when we sit down together and make an agreement about proper device usage before using parental controls. If this doesn't work, you can can still offer your child to help him by using parental controls.  All the best!
You can manage the browser via admin.google.com. There you can register a free account. This will allow you to generate a file with a unique ID, which you have to put in a certain directory on your Mac. There is also a further opportunity to set local rules for the browser. For example you can enter in the terminal on your Mac "write com.google.Chrome SafeSitesFilterBehavior -integer 1" This will block mature content. BTW My Chrome browser is managed. Actually, I'm the admin and force myself to block mature content.


Enable Do Not Disturb in Notification Center when certain app is open Is there a way to get Do Not Disturb to automatically turn on when a certain app is running?

In the DND preference panel, you can tell it to engage whenever you're mirroring to a TV or projector, presumably for a presentation. When I give presentations it's using GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc., so I am trying to reproduce that behavior.

Sure. Create a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs when the app launches and runs an AppleScript to turn DND on.

Then create another one for when the app quits which runs another AppleScript to turn DND off.

AppleScript can be found here: http://m.tuaw.com/2013/02/04/applescripting-notification-center-scheduling-do-not-disturb/


How can I upgrade to any macOS version that is no longer available in the Apple app store? I am using a Mac Mini (Late 2012) that is running macOS 10.9.5 (Mavericks). I avoided upgrading to macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) when it was first released because of all of the stability issues surrounding it and have stuck to macOS 10.9.5. Never “purchased” or even attempted to download it via the Apple app store.

Now that macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) has been released, what can I do to upgrade to macOS 10.10.5 if/when I wish to? When I am in the Apple app store the only option I see macOS 10.11 as an upgrade option; screenshot below.

The logic is, I assume that macOS 10.10.5 is more stable that macOS 10.10 when it was first released, so I would like to put a 10.10.5 upgrade on my plate of options if/when I have the time and patience to deal with. I would like to avoid macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) for a while if possible.

Is my only option at this point to download a macOS 10.10.5 installer from some non-Apple website somewhere or does Apple have any accommodations to allow end-users to download macOS 10.10.5 from them in some way?

I see this OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 Update as well as this OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 Combo Update is available for download, but would any/either of those be useful to someone like me running macOS 10.9.5 in any way? I assume those updates are only useful for someone already running 10.10 already, correct?

As soon as a new Mac OS is released, the previous one becomes unavailable.

The only way to get an older OS directly from Apple is to have previously 'purchased it' - even if it was free - then it will appear in your purchase history in the App Store.

If it's not in your purchase history, then you'll have to get it from a trustworthy friend [or less-trustworthy torrent etc]

10.10.anything will do, as you can still get the combo updater to 10.10.5

It's always wise to get a new OS download, even if you don't intend to install it right now - just so it's always in your history.  I have every OS back to Lion in my purchase history - good for if I ever need a disposable OS for testing etc.

As Sierra will not run on older machines, this rule has been relaxed for machines whose last supported OS is El Capitan.
You can download it from here - https://itunes.apple.com/app/os-x-el-capitan/id1147835434?mt=12 - but it will not run if your machine is capable of running Sierra.
If it is capable, then you are back to needing it in your purchase history already.


Stereo mic to iPhone 5S (jack) for recording I'm looking for the cheapest way to get a stereo mic signal into iPhone 5S

A google search shows a lot of expensive mic solutions using the lighting port

And some say it can't be done without some special circuit

Is it not possible to use an oldschool analogue stereo jack mic somehow?

To record the sound, in stereo, using my own stereo mic with mini-jack

Perhaps with a converter to fit iphone multi-jack standard?

You need something to work with XLR mic's such as TASCAM’s iXZ. Search for "xlr iPhone microphone" to find other's that might fit your needs better.


Personal Hotspot not working over Wi-Fi on iOS 13 After upgrade to iOS 13 from 12.4, I noticed that personal hotspot isn't working anymore over Wi-Fi (via USB is ok).

Tested on two computers with Win7.
The PC can connect to Wi-Fi, but no valid IP (IPv4) is assigned and no connection is working to internet.

I found a workaround which works fine for me.

While connected to the hotspot open a cmd and enter the following commands:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

After that, the client gets instantly a correct IP-Adress from the DHCP.


Chrome crashes but stays displayed on external screen and I can't remove it I've got MacBook Pro with macOS Mojave 10.14.6 and an external monitor connected through "j5create JDC 381" USB-C to HDMI adapter.

Weird thing sometimes happens when using Chrome - when it's on the external screen it sometimes stops responding. I have to kill it through Activity Monitor BUT the window stays displayed even after the process is killed. It completely makes the monitor unusable and I can't do anything about it - I tried unplugging the HDMI adapter, power off/on the monitor, switch display mode to mirror and back, etc. Only reboot helps.

Any ideas how to "unblock" the external screen without reboot when something like this happens?

I had the same issue with Mojave 10.14.6.

The j5Create worked perfectly until installing the supplemental update to the OS.  With Apple trying to fix blacked-out/locked screen issue, whatever they did in the update broke j5Create.