Lost iPhone, what action to take? Suppose you lost your iPhone or it was stolen and with your MobileMe subscription you have the choice of tracking it, locking it, displaying a message or remote wiping the phone. What would you do and in which order to maximize your chances to get it back?

No need to suppose, that just happend to me (somewhat).

Preventive measures

As of today, suppose you have an iPhone 4, iPad or new iPod Touch running iOS 4 and you had previously activated the free MobileMe "lost my iphone". Then you're in the best situation of all. Suppose you don't have any of the new iDevices, but still are on iOS 4 and want to activate it for free. There are ways around that, for now, if you can borrow a new iDevice.

All you got to do in that situation is go to the website and get the measures of your choice. It will depend on how you lost the phone. If you know it was stolen, lock it first; don't display any message and track it down. Wiping is always the last resource, unless you're paranoid about leaking data. Be aware you will lose the ability to use everything else - it will reset to factory defaults. If you just forgot it somewhere, send an SMS first - maybe you'll get lucky.

There are also many tools on Cydia store to locate an iPhone - lost or not. I personally use and enjoy Longitude. It's, by far, the cheapest one and does the very basic stuff - send location to Google Latitude within a time interval you set. Enough for me.

But all that will only work for a couple of days at most. After all, iPhone battery doesn't last too long with 3G enabled. And, of course, only if it's turned on.

Taken by surprise methods

You may have not prepared yourself for the worst. Or you may have done it, but found out about your lost iPhone too late and it's now turned off, battery dead or being re-sold in the black market after being wiped already.

There are 2 additional steps to do. Both include reporting it lost or stolen to the carrier. If you just ask for a phone lock, you can save yourself from a big bill made by someone ill intentioned calling to China. That's the SIM lock and it can be undone later at any time.

Now suppose you didn't have a passcode lock on the phone and have no MobileMe. Then all your data is available to the finder / thief of the iPhone. That can concern a lot of people.

There comes the last measure - disable the phone through the IMEI. On most phones you need to have written down the IMEI before it got lost. It may be on the manual, box or some place else. On iPhone, tho, that information is on iTunes and easy to find.

Make a police report on lost / stolen, get the IMEI, call the carrier and the phone should become useless. Supposedly, nobody will ever be able to use it as a phone again - not even you. My carrier promised me the phone doesn't even turn on anymore. While that's probably not true, at least your data will be supposedly wiped. (disclaimer: I'm still trying to verify all those suppositions)

If the thief wipes the phone (by reinstalling the iOS) you won't be able to track it through iCloud / find my phone / or any other tracking app, but the IMEI block is still worth doing. More and more carriers are starting to enforce the IMEI blocks on stolen phones unless the person with the phone goes back and argues to get it lifted. I don't know what would happen then, but I would suppose unless the person had a sales receipt, the carrier wouldn't serve that device after it being reported stolen.


MacBook Air: audio jack left channel failing I have a MacBook Air 2012. I listen to audio by plugging EarPods into the audio jack.

This morning I noticed that I no longer have sound coming out of the left headphone. Well, There is a little, but it is < 10% what it should be.  I tried a different set of headphones and got the same result.

Is there any option for repairing the headphone port?

I'm guessing it is soldered onto the motherboard, and there will be absolutely no chance of a repair, and I will have to use a USB soundcard.

π

Some how my software had panned the audio to the right channel only.

God only knows why my machine decided to pan itself fully to the right!?

Anyway, if you think you need a repair, double check it's not software as I found on the Apple discussions.


Can not record iPhone screen from OSX Why am I not able to record screen of my iPhone. Others can do it. iPhone has iOS 8, Mac has Yosemite.

Here I can see Christoper's iPad on one of my computer, but not on my other Mac.

This is likely a bug in QuickTime Player. It recognizes both of my iDevices, but not a couple of family member's iDevices. All I could say is try updating the iPad to iOS 9, in the event that it's the iPad acting up.


Don't want my email contacts in my contact list My native iPhone Contacts show not only my contacts with phone numbers, but also any email address I’ve ever sent an email to or received an email from. I really would rather not have email contacts save into my contact list automatically. Is there a way to stop this from happening?

In Gmail Settings, under General, check the following option:

Then go to Contacts and delete all the Other Contacts that were previously added automatically. Performing this action in Gmail will be faster than on your iPhone because you can select all those contacts with a single click. Then, just wait for the deletions to propagate to your iPhone.


Start up disk full due to backups I am getting the "disk full" error message and my computer is running painfully slow. When I run OmniDiskSweeper to find out the culprit it shows that I have over 800GB in "Backups" most of them are incremental backups. This is weird because I have Time Machine turned off and use a Mozy for my back ups. Can I simply delete the incremental backups? I tried running the disable script in Terminal but it didn't do anything.

I have an iMac and run osx, verstion 10.7.5

Any insight would be greatly appreciates. Thanks!

My guess is you had .Mac and ran Apple's .Mac backup tool as described in this article.

http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/09/23/backup3.html?page=1

If the files have orange or purple umbrellas as icons, that would be a good clue that they came from that Backup program. Looking at the dates of the files might also help you establish how old they are.

These are probably very old and you could delete them or move them to an external drive to free up space on the drive, but it would be prudent to be sure before deleting them.

Turning off Time Machine would delete any local backup file store, and you can force that by running sudo tmutil disablelocal but those backups get stored on a separate /Volumes/MobileBackups filesystem and are normally very well hidden and don't use any incremental file naming scheme like the older software did.


I have suspicion a Mac user has visibility to my text messages Can someone I don't know, set up their Mac to receive text messages from my iPhone 4?  I am having issues sending text messages; I send to a group and not all recipients receive the messages.

I do not have iMessage turned on, never have and I've never had any issues with texting until recently, everything has always worked perfectly.  I've recently changed my iTunes & iCloud passwords due to the suspicion.

The short answer to your question is: No.

The actual longer answer is that if that guy with the Mac happens to work in, infiltrate or hack your cell provider or one of it's suppliers, and work their way into the SMS message system - then yes, it could be theoretically possible.

The cost of doing so, the risk of getting caught, the punishments connected with getting caught and the extremely low return of being able to read your group text messages means, that this is probably not the case.

You would probably have to be just as crazy as the guy actually doing this to be able to think that this is the case.


OSX - Only show apps with open windows in the dock? I like to keep my dock tidy with almost only the applications I'm currently using shown. As such, I tend to completely quit out of apps so that they don't clutter my dock. However, there are apps which would be advantageous to allow to update in the background (e.g. mail). Is there a way to allow an app to remain open, but hide the icon when there are no open windows? I've seen ways to completely hide the icon at all times, but I would prefer that the icon was there when there are active windows open. Any clean way of doing this? Thank you much.

Hide the Dock, then use Contexts for Mac to switch between active windows. Contexts has an option to show only the application with active windows regardless it’s running in background or not. You can read my review here.


HDMI to VGA with USB-C VGA adaptor on 2015 Retina Macbook I have one of the new Macbooks on the way and have also bought the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter with HDMI to go with it.

If I want to get VGA with this adaptor, rather than buying the same adaptor but with VGA, I want to use an HDMI to VGA adaptor such as this one.

This adaptor has a USB power in if the HDMI out does not have sufficient power output. Will the Macbook adaptor's HDMI port have sufficient power to make this unnecessary or will I also have to use the adaptor's USB port when using VGA?

You won't know until you actually get it and test it.

HDMI specs say you should get 5v at 50mA.  That's not much to start with.

You can read about this more from here.  You could get more power but it would have to have MHL (mobile high definition link) support.  That will be able to give you up to 40 watts.

Now, I looked on the Apple site and it appears that the Adapter you selected isn't very highly rated.  I have rarely had success with genuine Apple adapters and instead had to rely on 3rd party adapters to get a reliable results.

You may want to save yourself the headache and just get the VGA adapter and be done with it.


It's possible to forward/reverse a track with Apple EarPods remote? I am using my EarPods for running, but i can't forward or reverse any track with remote on EarPods. I always pick the iPhone from my pocket. Much like it happens in the e-books..

To forward a track, double-press and hold the middle button of the remote.
To reverse a track, triple-press and hold the middle button of the remote.


Is there any way to use a non-apple remote control with a Macbook Pro? I own a Mid 2012 15" MacBookPro, non-retina model. It's from the era they still packed an IR receiver but not the remote.
Is there any way I can hook up a third-party remote control to control keynote? I found the Apple TV remote is functional with "Sirimote" but it's way out of my budget.
I already tried RemoteBuddy & iRed with an old remote to no avail.

Since it is IR, universal remotes will work, too.


Why is macOS forcibly renaming my USB drive? I have a USB Drive named "Cuthbert", and various apps use paths starting with /Volumes/Cuthbert when it is plugged in.  However, my laptop is putting it at /Volumes/Cuthbert 1, and won't let me rename it, even though there /Volumes/Cuthbert leads to nothing.  (It shows up when I ls, but does not show up in the Finder, and there is nothing there.)

What is going on?  How can I fix and prevent this frustrating situation?

Make sure you properly unmount the USB drive when you remove it. If a volume name already exists in a system and you try to add a volume with the same name it will append -n to the volume name.


Linus Torvalds and the OS X Filesystem Back in 2008, Linus Torvalds famously said in an interview that "OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." I've looked for more details about why he feels this way about the OS X filesystem (HFS+ presumably) but I haven't been able to find anything.

Linus surely doesn't dislike the basic Unix filesystem model, and I doubt he hates HFS+ for being case-insensitive. And despite how provocatively his comment is phrased, I doubt that it's completely without merit. Since the comment was in the context of programming for OS X, I suspect his opinion may have been based on performance, robustness, the operating system interface, or something along those lines. Does anyone know what complaints 2008-era Linus might have had with 2008-era HFS+?

A transcript of the “Q&A” session in which Linus made the comment is available, but it seems he wasn't asked to elaborate. I'm not sure whether a more in-depth analysis of his opinion on HFS+ has been written down somewhere else.
For someone else's analysis of the matter, you can take a look at John Siracusa's Mac OS X reviews. In particular the one for Mac OS X Lion which has a section titled “What's wrong with HFS+.” I think the most salient bit is (emphasis mine):

Concurrency, metadata written in the correct byte order, sub-second date precision, support for massive volume sizes, and sparse file support are all common features of Unix file systems. Mac OS X, of course, is built on a Unix foundation. When HFS+ was ported from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, it needed to be extended to support some minimum set of features that are expected from Unix file systems.
Some of those features were an easy fit, but others were very difficult to add to the file system without breaking backwards compatibility. One particularly scary example is the implementation of hard links on HFS+. To keep track of hard links, HFS+ creates a separate file for each hard link inside a hidden directory at the root level of the volume. Hidden directories are kind of creepy to begin with, but the real scare comes when you remember that Time Machine is implemented using hard links to avoid unnecessary data duplication.

The important point here is that Mac OS X is using a file system which wasn't even designed for a Unix system, it was designed for classic Mac OS and patched to implement the features of Mac OS X 10.0 while maintaining backwards compatibility. Apple has subsequently implemented the additional features that it now has in Mac OS X 10.7 (journaling, metadata, filesystem events ...) using the same patching approach rather than a “design from the ground up” approach. I'm not sure how to explain this non-technically, but you could say that all of these additional features are resting on a classic Mac OS foundation that was never designed to support them. This means the solution isn't as good as it could be. The example that Siracusa goes on to discuss is that the solution Apple had to use for hard links while working within the limitations of HFS+ is too sensitive to hardware failure, which is compounded by the fact that HFS+ was also never designed to concern itself with data integrity. Of course, maintaining compatibility with classic Mac OS was a desirable limitation in Mac OS X 10.0 but it really isn't anymore in Mac OS X 10.7.


I think I opened an unsafe unix exe file! Can anyone tell me what this file might've done? I was downloading a crack file for premier 2019 pro cc as something went wrong with my subscription and now I don't have premier, so when I opened the dmg. It showed an installer and I went through with the installation...(stupidly) nothing changed, but I am scared that I might have caused an issue to my computer.

How can I make sure that my system didn’t get infected by malware?

PS: I still have the .dmg on my computer in case I need it to see if damage can be reversed.

I don't know how to read the script or anything and I am just worried I might have given someone access to my personal and private information or might have caused an issue for may computer.

Without analyzing the scripts etc you run nobody can tell what (if anything) happened to your computer. To recover the best course of action is to restore from a backup made before you opened the DMG.


New iMac (mid 2013) storage options I recently purchased a maxed out iMac:

NVIDIAGeForceGTX780M 4GB GDDR5
3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM-2X4GB (upgrading to 32GB myself)
256GB Flash Storage

...and I'm questioning the last point above (I still have time to change my order). I know the iMac is limited to a single SATA III and a PCIe slot for storage, but I'm trying to balance performance with capacity with future expandability. I fear that my choice of the 256GB SSD is limiting me, since I won't be able to add a hard drive in the future. My questions are:

Which is faster, the 128GB PCIe SSD that comes in a Fusion Drive
configuration, or the 256GB SSD I purchased?
Is the PCIe connector compatible with the typical PCIe SSDs sold for PC use, or is it something proprietary like in the Retina
MacBooks?
Is it worth sticking to the stock 1TB HDD and installing my own PCIe SSD to make a DIY  Fusion Drive (I.e. Are there compatible PCIe
SSDs for less than $180)?

The PCIe flash storage will be faster than the SSD, but how much you'll notice that in the real world is questionable.
The PCIe card used in the new iMacs is the same (custom) stick-like form factor Apple uses in their other products.
You should get the 1TB or 3TB Fusion drive configuration if you want more than 256GB of storage and don't want a larger SSD. You could of course get an external USB3 drive to provide large storage if you prefer, or even get a USB/Thunderbolt external SSD.

The $200 for the fusion drive is expensive, but not insanely so. It will give the most noticeable performance boost of any possible upgrade on the iMac, unless you prefer to spend the money doing an all-SSD setup, which will still be very, very fast.

You're not going to find a compatible PCIe SSD for any less than Apple's upgrade cost. For example, OWC sells compatible SSDs for the MacBook Airs (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012) that may work, but I don't believe anyone has specifically tested it.

I will also note that opening up the current iMacs is more difficult than in the past, due to the laminating process on the screen to reduce glare, parallax and weight. It would be a false economy to buy a $2000+ computer, only to risk damaging it by opening it up for the chance to save $50. If external storage is not desirable and you want more capacity, go Fusion.


Numbers: Creating a Summary table based on values from different table I have a table that looks much like this:

That Category column is entered manually and will have several duplicated values.

I’d LOVE to be able to create a “Summary” table that manages to copy and manipulate some of this data. Namely:

It would take the “Category” columns with its duplicates, remove duplicated and sort the list;
Have a second column that sums all values in that category’s fields;
And finally, have a third row that shows how many times the original keywords appeared in the first table.

Here is a screenshot of what I’m trying to achieve:

Possible??

If your category column contains categories that are correctly spelled each time, then a simple solution would be to use the SUMIFS() and the COUNTIFS() formulas.

In the Summary table, add a category from the category column from the Finances table.
Next, in the Amount column of your Summary table, add the following formula: SUMIFS(2017 Finances::Amount,2017 Finances::Category,A2) Where A2 contains a unique category.
In the Count column, use this formula: COUNTIFS(2017 Finances::Category,A2)
Drag the formulas down the columns to fill for each category.
Sort Ascending or Descending as desired.

The SUMIFS and COUNTIFS compare the category column with the entry in the Summary table's entry.  If there is a match, it sums or counts based on the category.  Repeat as needed.

NOTE:

Dynamically creating a Summary table without knowing the categories is quite a bit more complicated as Numbers does not have Pivot Table (as Excel or Google Sheets has) functionality as of the date this answer was posted.  Great suggestion for Apple Feedback.

See the illustrations below.


limit resource use of java app I'm using the 'Diablo' app to mine bitcoins on my work computer.

But since I need to use that computer, I don't want it to consume all my resources as it is wont to do.

Anyway to limit it to use only 3/4 cores or half of the GPU or whatever?

Thanks.

It's generally hard to throttle java - doubly so in this case where the app in question is designed to solely focus on crunching as many numbers as possible. Luckily, the diablo miner has an -f option to dial back the computations.

It's trial and error, but you can read up on this huge thread and search for CPU for more details.

"-f 1000 will greatly reduce mhash speed, but increase desktop interactivity. -f should be a multiple or divisor of 60, lower values increase speed but decrease desktop interactivity, higher values do the opposite."

It's best to get GPU only going as CPU mining is very expensive in terms of heat and electricity as well as reduced performance.


Can I add personal info to my iPod touch's lock screen? My dad just got a new iPod Touch, and he'd like to add his personal info to the lock screen. If possible, how do I do this (without jailbreaking)?

The easiest way to go about this without jailbreaking is to use some custom wallpaper.

Make a new document in Photoshop, Pixelmator, GIMP, or your editor of choice.

Find a high-resolution image on the Web that you like and copy it into the document. Crop it to 640 x 960 pixels.

Add some text with your personal info over the image. Make sure that you leave ~225px space at the top of the image and ~150 at the bottom (these will be covered by the unlock UI). A subtle drop shadow can help make the text easier to read.
Export the image is a JPEG or PNG.

Use your preferred method to get the photo onto your iPod (sync with iTunes, email to yourself, Dropbox app, etc.).

On the iPod, go to Settings-> Wallpaper and select your custom image. You can set it as wallpaper for only the lock screen or the lock screen and home screen.

You'll now have custom text on the lock screen:


My MacBook Pro Retina display backlight doesn't work The backlight on the display of my MacBook Pro 15 retina early 2013.

I have tried to make it brighter by pressing F2 but it didn't work, and when I bring a light from the back of the display exactly near the Apple logo I can see my login screen.

You can try to reset the SMC by following the steps here.

If that doesn't work it looks like your backlight is broken, and you should ask for a replacement if you still have Apple Care.


Opening text files from finder: Unable to find application Since I updated my OSX to version 10.9.1 I am unable to open text files from the Finder.

I always opened the files with the default TextEditor. I've tried to change the default application from TextEditor to Sublime Text 2, which results in exactly the same error:

"Unable to find the application"

When I open TextEditor or Sublime Text 2 I can successfully open the file and view it's contents.

Is there a way to fix this problem?

Try setting the default app to open .txt files using Get Info

Left click a text file
Choose "Get Info"
Under "Open with:" choose the app you want to use as the default
Click "Change All..."
Click "Continue"


How to bring an application to the front, no bouncing dock icons In my AppleScript, I use activate to bring an application to the front. However, on machines of some colleagues, it doesn't do that. The app-icon in the dock will bounce, but it doesn't get put into the front. This is very annoying, because the user has to go to the app manually every time.

I suspect this is due to some setting or something. Any ideas how to accomplish this?

did you check if "visible" is true or false in your applescript Code?

Looks like the app is running in the background.

Try to set the app to the frontmost window.

If you want to delete the bouncing, it's in the Systeme Preferences, Dock, untick animated apps when open.

Hope that will help you.


vlc on mac, how to just play videos/songs without the main menu with media library/playlist coming up I just want to click videos and have them play, not have to close this annoying main menu screen everytime, I googled, checked settings, is it not possible?

A bit of guesswork required based on very little information, but try
Prefs > Video > Show video within the main window.
That will make it so the playlist window is re-used as the video display window.


iPhone flashlight when taking photo I need to take a photo in very dim conditions with my iPhone. I use the flashlight to see in these conditions but when I take a photo the flashlight goes out. Is there a way to have the flashlight stay on when taking a photo with an iPhone 7?

There is no way to have a flashlight on while taking a photo unless probably jailbroken.

The easiest solution is to just turn on flash in the camera app (tap the little lightning symbol --> tap on).


Restore MacBook after Avast! install (stuck at apple logo) Somebody installed Avast! on this MacBook running OSX 10.8 (that's what uname said) and now it won't boot, it gets stuck at the apple logo and nothing more, I was able to boot into single-user mode and made a backup. I have already run Avast!'s uninstall script at:

/Library/Application Support/Avast/components/uninstall/com.avast.uninstall.app/Contents/MacOS/uninstall.sh

But it didn't solve anything.

How can I restore my MacBook? How can I make it boot normally? I am a complete noob using Apple products.

Try this link:  https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=151393.15

part way down the first page of the thread, the poster Francisco Velasco had a solution that worked for me (his is reply #9 August 17, 2014). Good luck, and steer clear of Avast Antivirus - I'm going back to ClamX AV!!

Turn off your Mac, press Command + S, turn on, and don´t release Command + S until you see the Apple logo
When you are in the prompt (a black screen with white letters), type
/sbin/mount -uw / < ENTER >
Work through these commands, in sequence:
cd Library < ENTER >
cd Application\ Support < ENTER >
(as there is a space between "Application" & "Support", we use \ after Application then a space)
cd Avast < ENTER >
cd components < ENTER >
cd uninstall < ENTER >
cd com.avast.uninstall.app < ENTER >
cd Contents < ENTER >
cd MacOS < ENTER >
Now, in this last folder if you type
ls < ENTER >
You will see a file called uninstall.sh, and this is the one to run to remove
Avast, now to use it you must use the following instruction
sudo sh uninstall.sh < ENTER >
After this now you can reboot your Mac
reboot < ENTER >
If after this reboot you can´t login your Mac, turn off your mac, repeat step 1 and 2 and now go to the folder
cd private < ENTER >
cd etc < ENTER >
ls < ENTER >
and you see a file with the name launchd.conf, you need to delete this file, type the following
rm launchd.conf < ENTER >
Reboot your Mac with
reboot < ENTER >


MacBook Pro repeatedly freezes, often with odd display glitches I have an older, 2007 15-inch MacBook Pro (model identifier MacBookPro3,1)  which has begun freezing repeatedly.

If I boot into Single User Mode it stays operative, however I've begun to get graphic glitches here too:

Booting to the Mountain Lion recovery partition, a disc, or any other graphic interface I get a freezing hang. This is often before the machine has booted completely.

At other times it will repeatedly reboot.

I have reset SMC and PRAM, and run fsck -fy on the drive.

I should also note that the machine generally kicks up its fan pretty quickly and runs very hot, even in Single User Mode, so I am suspecting overheating, perhaps brought on by the video demands?

Does anyone else have a guess at this and/or another diagnostic step?

The symptoms you describe could all be explained by a failing GPU system but before seeking a hardware repair (or quote), I would try reinstalling a clean version of OS X - perhaps the original version that shipped with that Mac to ensure that the hotness and slowness isn't because of added load the new OS has provided and actually something relating to hardware cooling or heat generation.

Your picture is very telling as well.

The three things that hardware could fail are:

LCD panel and cabling
GPU itself
VRAM

The patterns you show in single user mode could either be software or hardware. If it's hardware, they will get worse over time (perhaps dramatically worse) and we've already covered the software angle. Usually when the hardware is faulty, you can get poor graphics in single user mode or the boot selection screen - so you might be right it's overheating / the hardware starting to fail.


Getting file path of latest added file in a folder - Mac OS 10.9 As learned from google and sister stack sites, this is the working solution I've come up with for getting the path of latest added file in a folder. But this is not giving the accurate result. I'm using Mavericks (OS 10.9)

set myFolder to "/Users/lawsome/folder"
tell application "Finder" to set latestFile to the last item of (sort files of (POSIX file myFolder as alias) by creation date) as alias
            set latestpath to POSIX path of latestFile
set latestpath to POSIX path of latestFile

Finally, Jose Alban's answer in here@askdiff gives an accurate sorted list using the mdls terminal command. How can I get the file path of last entry in this list.

Or any way to get the desired path.

The AppleScript code looks as thought it's getting the creation date rather than the date added.  Finder and System Events don't store date added information in AppleScript.  If you were running Yosemite, you could have done it with AppleScriptObjC.  But, with Mavericks, the only avenue I can think of is by way of shell scripting.
Via bash script:
F=~/folder \
&& [[ -d "$F" ]] \
&& mdls -name kMDItemFSName -name kMDItemDateAdded -raw "$F"/* \
 | xargs -0 -I {} echo {} \
 | paste -sd" \n" - - \
 | sort \
 | tail -1 \
 | cut -f4- -d" " \
 | printf '%s\n' "$F/$(cat)"

From within an AppleScript:
AppleScript has the ability to execute shell commands using do shell script.  You can either run the whole command above using do shell script, which is probably what most people would do.  But, just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to mix it with a bit of AppleScripting too.
property text item delimiters : space

set myFolder to "/Users/lawsome/folder" -- Folder to be evaluated

-- Assemble shell command
set sh to the contents of {¬
    "[[ -d", quoted form of myFolder, "]]", "&&", ¬
    "mdls", "-name kMDItemFSName", "-name kMDItemDateAdded", ¬
    "-raw", [quoted form of myFolder, "/*"], ¬
    "|", "xargs", "-0 -I {} echo {}", ¬
    "|", "paste", "-sd' \\n' - -", ¬
    "|", "sort"} as text

do shell script sh -- run the bash command
set latestFileAddedToFolder to the last paragraph of the result
--> e.g. 2018-08-13 08:02:52 +0000 Some File Name.txt

-- Split text up into date components and filename text
set [{yyyy, m, dd, HH, MM, SS, "+", timezone}, filename] to ¬
    [words 1 thru 8, text 27 thru -1] of latestFileAddedToFolder

-- Construct AppleScript date object from date components
tell the (current date) to set ¬
    [dateAdded, year, its month, day, time] to ¬
    [it, yyyy, m, dd, hours * HH + minutes * MM + SS]

set pathToMostRecentlyAddedFile to myFolder & "/" & filename

return contents of {pathToMostRecentlyAddedFile, ¬
    "was added to its containing folder", myFolder, ¬
    "on", date string of dateAdded, ¬
    "at", time string of dateAdded} as text


Can I use a time machine volume to store additional data? I have a large external hard drive that I am using as a time machine backup volume. Since I don't need all the storage space for backups, I'm considering storing additional data on the drive. Is there any danger of this usage interfering with the backup system or is this an always-safe storage spot?

Seeing that external storage is relatively inexpensive, I would leave the existing TM drive alone and purchase another external drive. That way, you can backup the additional data on the new drive to the TM disk, too. You wouldn't be able to do this if the additional data resides on the TM drive itself.

If you do choose to use the TM disk for non-TM data, I recommend partitioning the drive to separate the TM data from the non-TM data. If you ever need to reformat the TM partition, you won't need to move that additional data to another disk first, or visa versa.

All that being said, it is technically possible to use the TM disk to store additional data. I used to do it until #4 (below) happened and I lost ~10k .mp3 files I then needed to re-rip from CDs. (I did re-rip about 80% of the lost files to Apple Lossless format, so it wasn't a complete disaster, but I did lose thousands of files.)

There are several drawbacks you should keep in mind:

Time Machine will delete older backups more frequently when available space is low.
Performance on the drive will suffer when TM is running and you are accessing the additional data at the same time.
If you need to transport the additional data off-site, you'll also be taking your TM backup with you.
When (not if) the entire disk crashes hard, you will lose the additional data unless it is backed up somewhere.


Apple TV with a household of more than one Apple IDs Can you log in more than one account as long as you log off the one that is signed on before signing in another? For instance, if you buy an AppleTV and your house has two other members with different Apple IDs, can each person use the AppleTV as long as the one that is logged on is signed off then another person logs in? Or does it only allow one Apple user use the tv?

Would each person have to own the AppleTV or can more than one family member share one?

This is possible.  You can log out of your Apple TV and have someone else log in.  This can get kind of annoying though. But it is possible.

If you have multiple computers in the house though, each with stuff bought with different Apple IDs, and you just want to access the content on the machines, that is very possible too.  You can set up home sharing with one Apple ID on your Apple TV and then on the rest of the other machines.  It has to be the same ID across the different machines but it will let you access all the computers that are on the network from the Apple TV and access and stream the content stored on them.

You can find a great tutorial over here.

You can still do things the old fashion way and log out and log back in, it can just be kind of tedious.  Home Sharing can really simplify the process if you just want to share content from multiple computers though.


Provisioning Profiles are not being deleted When I remove the provisioning profiles from my iPhone using XCode 7.2, they always reappear whenever I reconnect my device.

This is where I'm viewing and deleting it: (the image is merely representative)

How can I effectively delete all provisioning profiles from my device?

On you iPhone go to "Settings" > "General" > "Profiles & Device Management". That should bring up a list of the installed profiles.

Tap on the profile you would like to delete.

At the bottom of the profile is a button "Delete Profile". Tap that button and follow the prompts to delete the profile.


Trying to text someone with a Samsung Galaxy using a MacBook without an iPhone I have gotten a MacBook for my high school, and as I have no phone or other portable mobile devices, it makes it really complicated to contact my parents, when they don't have apple phones, and especially when the only way I know is email. Help and suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

One possibility is using SMS. In some places you have free, web-based SMS services that will allow you to text any phone in the country for free. In other places you have to pay a small amount to be able to do so.

Another is using third party apps such as Skype, WhatsApp or Signal.


OS X dialogs: Can I use 'Enter' to invoke the *currently selected* button instead of the default one? In an OS X dialog, there a way to make 'Enter/Return' invoke the currently selected button instead of the default one (and, if possible, make 'Space' invoke the default button instead). That is, can I swap the behaviors of 'Space' and 'Enter' in this situation?

[This would keep this behavior consistent with that of the web's, and other platforms like Windows and Linux]

Updated:  Explained here https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/69305/44377

Also, I use KeyCue to find most-if-not-all shortcuts in any context.


Restarting automatically My macbook pro automatically restarting and it shows your computer restarted because of a problem...

How can I solve this problem?

That's a kernel panic, and from the error message, it seems like you're having issues with NVRAM. If this keeps restarting itself, I'd suggest you bring it in to an Apple store for a Genius to take a look at.

Resetting the NVRAM may also help, link: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063


What is the OSX ruler clipboard? I ran man pbcopy which listed the flag -pboard with options {general | ruler | find | font}.  I understand what the general, find, and font clipboards are, but I can't find any documentation on what use the ruler clipboard has.

The ruler pasteboard, or NSRulerPboard at the programming level, is:

  The pasteboard that holds information about paragraph formats in support of the Copy Ruler and Paste Ruler commands that may be implemented in a text editor.

You can read much more about the Pasteboard here.


Removing news headlines from Spotlight Search in iOS 9 How can I turn off news headlines from Spotlight Search in iOS 9?

I think it's a matter of turning off "Spotlight Suggestions" in the General > Spotlight Search preference pane, but leaving "Siri Suggestions" on? It's buried in the list!


Connect Two Dell 27" 2719H Monitors to Macbook Air 2017 I'm trying to connect two Dell 27" P2719H Monitors to a Macbook Air from 2017 running Catalina 10.15.4. The Macbook Air has an Intel HD Graphics 6000 graphics card. This model also has a Thunderbolt 2.0.

Is this possible to do? So far I've successfully connected one of the monitors to the Macbook using a Dynex HDMI-->Thunderbolt adapter. I've also tried to create a daisy-chain, but it did not work.

Since you're using the P2719H, it has DisplayPort connectivity.  Instead of converting to HDMI, you should just get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable (mDP to DP).

You can't daisy chain and since you only have one Thunderbolt port, you will need to get either (one or the other) of:

Thunderbolt 2 Dock with multiple display outputs
USB Video adapter

However, this a lot you're asking this MacBook Air to do.  Remember, there's no discrete GPU as it's integrated into the CPU.  Video memory is taken from system memory (up to 1.5GB worth).  I wouldn't be surprised if you see a noticeable performance decrease or reduced video capability.


Run applescript after specific application launch VLC can't autoload extensions, so I write applescript to load extensions, now I need make run it every time after VLC start, any suggestions ?

Keyboard Maestro also supports running a macro when an application is activated:


10.8 Notification Center occasionally freezes system My Mac Pro 5,1 sometimes freezes when I open the Notification Center, and it usually recovers by itself about 10 minutes later.  I'd like to know why and how to fix it.
When this happens, the notification center will be half open, as shown in the screenshot. This happens about once a week, seemingly at random. Symptoms include:

Cmd-Tab does not work
Expose / Mission Control Spaces does not work.
Notification Center is frozen
Dock will not appear
I can't type text in any application
I can't drag to reposition windows on the screen
Cmd-Opt-Esc opens the Force Quit window, which functions properly
Spotlight works properly

Here is the Console's "all messages" log for a few minutes before and after the crash.
http://pastebin.com/NuGesUdy

UPDATE:  I've discovered two related things.  When this problem happens, Activity Monitor shows Dock using about 100% CPU. Meanwhile, fseventer shows that the .db files in ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/ are being accessed constantly. Also, I think I've tracked down the culprit to the MySQL installation part of XAMPP.  It turns out I can unfreeze the system every time by turning off MySQL. I'd still like to know why, and how to fix this.

From Apple Support Communities Thread:

  Restart your computer and hold down cmd + R to boot into recovery mode.
  From the menu bar, select Utilities -> Terminal
  Type in "resetpassword" without the quotes.
  In the window that pops up, there will be a button in the lower right corner labeled "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs".  Click on that.  It will take a moment to complete.
  When it finishes, simply restart the computer from the Apple menu at the top right.  Your computer will restart normally.


Filter or Find Finder Items Using Variable In the Filter Finder Items and Find Finder Items actions, Automator lets you type out criteria for what your looking for like:
Folder Name Contains: (Manually Insert Text Here)
Here is an example image of "AnchorFile" being the typed criteria:

Is there anyway to pass a variable onto the filter?
I have tried to put a Get Value of Variable action before the filter/find in the hopes of being able to use the variable as the search criteria. Similar to this workflow:

The goal is to find the "XXXXX_Workers Compensation" folder on my computer using only a variable and filter/find Actions
I hope this is clearer than a previous post I made as I am a newbie in the Applescript/Automator world.
If we can get this "pass a variable to filter/find" thing to work, it would effectively:

Create a foldername from a filename,
Then input that foldername into the search bar of Finder to bring up the folder in Finder.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Turns out I needed to do a spotlight search instead of Filter/Find Finder Items in order to use a string to find the folder by its name alone (Without path).
I also did not need to store the filename as a variable in order for me to accomplish this final workflow but spotlight can use a variable that is a string to search I found out.
Here is my final workflow.
EXPLANATION:
(Get Specified Finder Items and Get Folder Contents were in place for testing within Automator)

A file being added to a folder called "WCCalcs" triggers the workflow.

Steps 1-2 (Filter Finder Items and Set Value or Variable):
Singles out our new file which is a pdf and saves it in a variable called 'MovingFile'.
It will always look like "#####_WCCalcs_YYYY"

with "#####" being a 5-digit number
and "YYYY" being the current year

Steps 3-4 (Get PDF Metadata and Run AppleScript):
Takes the first 5 characters of the file name and adds it to a string and this creates the folder name we need becoming "#####_Workers Compensation" (See AppleScript.)

Steps 5-8 (Spotlight,Get Folder Contents, Filter Finder Items, Set Value of Variable):
Uses the newly created folder name to do a spotlight search as well as  filters down to a destination folder which we stored in a variable called 'Destination.

Steps 9-10 (Get Value of Variable and Move Finder Items):
Calls MovingFile variable and moves it to the Destination folder

Thanks for your help @red_menace it caused me to think outside of what I was trying to do.


Can Mid 2012 Macbook pro be upgraded using nvme ssd using an adapter I'm looking to upgrade the storage on a 2012 macbook pro, and moving to an ssd. I know that I could just get a 2.5 inch drive in the optical drive bay, but I would rather keep the optical drive.

Is there a way to use a nvme ssd in a mid 2012 macbook pro model? I know an adapter is needed, so what adapter works? Also, I've heard that certain brands of nvme ssds work, so some confirmation on that would be helpful.

I dont know if OS version matters, but it is is el captian version :10.11.3.

There are M.2 PCIe to SATA adaptors that you could use, but there are two problems: Firstly, you're not going to see the faster speed of the NVM RAM, because the SATA interface is the bottleneck, and won't go any faster than 6 Gbps.
Secondly, ensuring that the adaptor card and the new SSD module will all fit together inside your laptop: neither being too big, nor rattling around loose.

The simplest thing is to replace the existing mechanical hard drive with a 2.5" SATA SSD. This will slot in exactly in place of your old drive, and will cost less than an NVM RAM module.

(Links to UK stores.)


Permanently Disable Bluetooth on MacMini 2019 I realize this was asked back in 2014 with this question, but hardware and software has changed a lot over the last 5 years.

Here's the specifics of my situation:

We haven't purchased the device yet, that is contingent on the answer to this question, essentially.
We are looking at putting a Mac Mini into an environment that requires we disable all wireless communications to/from the device.
Our devices have firmware passwords and FileVault 2 enabled.
Apple activates Bluetooth automatically on all devices before the drive is unlocked to ensure users can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to unlock the drive.
We need to prevent the Bluetooth from ever coming on in the environment we want to put it in.

Here's the million $ question: Is there any way to prevent Bluetooth from ever coming on, even before the drive is unlocked and policies are enforced?

In a dream world, we would just order a model without a BT card at all, but I don't know how feasible that is.

EDIT---
To clarify, this is going into a government facility that doesn't allow wireless signals at any point. So unfortunately we can't just ignore the signal and get wired devices.

We've talked about Faraday cages, but aren't confident they'll get approved since someone would only need to remove the cage.

Right now the closest solution we've come to, is removing the card, but they are soldered to the board. We're not sure if removing the antenna would work. I've got at least one report that someone was able to connect still, albeit from very close.

EDIT 2---

I forgot to mention that in an ideal situation, it would not void the warranty. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was a bridge too far.

The most foolproof way of doing this is simply to disconnect the physical antennas. Then no matter what kind of firmware updates, operating system updates, reboots, or whatever happens - it's not going to enable itself again.

You can follow the guide for disassembling at from iFixIt:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+mini+Late+2018+Teardown/115210

In step 7, you'll see that the antenna connectors are located on the main board just below the speaker assembly.

By the way: From the sound of your question, I could guess that you're wanting to place the Mac Mini in a data center that forbids the use of wireless devices. In my experience, these places are not so restrictive that you need to actually go through with this. Their rules just mean that you're not allowed to use WiFi/Bluetooth for actual data transfers in the data centers. It doesn't mean that if the Bluetooth antenna is powered up for 30 seconds during a FileVault boot, that they'll sue you for breach of contract. Perhaps try asking them how seriously you need to take that requirement.

EDIT: You have updated your question to say that you wanted to remove the Bluetooth card, and preferably doing so without voiding warranty. That is definitely not possible.

The "card" is not a card - Bluetooth is implemented as a soldered on module from muRata containing not only Bluetooth radios, but also the WiFi radios.

It seems like your requirements for hardware doesn't really fit a Mac Mini at all - so perhaps you should look at buying a different computer instead?

Or you could consider changing the default Apple software. For example you could run Linux instead of macOS on the Mac Mini - where Bluetooth as far as I know is not supported (and if it is, it is easy to disable). This also would mean that you would no longer be using FileVault 2, and so that part of the problem would go away. At that point you might as well buy different hardware since you haven't got a computer yet.


Am I still on iOS 13 beta? I have an iPhone XS which I updated to iOS 13 beta on early August (perhaps around beta 5) and I have been receiving updates.

At this moment, I think I should have received iOS 13 stable already but I think I haven't.

I think I'm still on the beta release and want to know how I would get on a current / stable build of iOS from here.

Yes, you're still running beta software (at this point in time 13.2 is a beta version).

You can remove the beta by following Apple's instructions here:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203282

The easiest method there is to open Settings > General, tap Profiles & Device Management, tap iOS Beta Software Profile and then tap Remove Profile. Afterwards you need to reboot the phone.

Now the next time Apple releases a non-beta version of iOS, you'll be able to update to it from the normal Software Update.

If you want to remove the beta right away and install a non-beta version, you'll need to erase and restore the device. You'll want to ensure that you have an up to date backup before erasing, and then restoring from that after restoring the system.

The easiest way to do this is to connect your iPhone to your computer, and then put your iPhone in recovery mode (press and quickly release the volume up button, press and quickly release the volume down button, then press and hold the side button until you see the recovery mode screen). From iTunes (or Finder if you're on Catalina) choose to Restore the phone, which erases the device completely and installs an up to date, non-beta version of iOS.


Apple Pencil with Pages I use Pages on my iPad pro and would like to edit using my new Apple Pencil - can anyone tell me how to get Pages to recognise the Apple Pencil? Would be very grateful.

Normally, you simply have to plug the Apple Pencil in your iPad and wait a couple seconds until it is detected...


Can MDM track my location? I have Maas360 on my iPhone, but the app isn't installed it's only listed under MDM. Can it track my location even if I didnt give the app location permissions?

If you didn’t give the app location permission then the app cannot access your location. If you gave it permission then theoretically yes, it could track you.

From this:

How to turn Location Services on or off for specific apps

  Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.
  Make sure that Location Services is on.
  Scroll down to find the app.
  Tap the app and select an option:

  Never: Prevents access to Location Services information.
  While Using the App: Allows access to Location Services only when the app or one of its features is visible on screen. If an app is set
  to While Using the App, you might see your status bar turn blue with a
  message that an app is actively using your location.
  Always: Allows access to your location even when the app is in the background.


Setting time format preference in unix (Mac-Terminal) I'm learning to work in unix using Terminal on a Mac and I'd like to set the default listing for the timestamp to display in 12 hour time, using AM and PM, instead of 24 hour time (ie: 1:00 PM, not 13:00). I'm somewhat familiar with setting preferences, so to speak, using the ~/.bashrc file, where I've set a couple of aliases, including one with the options for my preferred ls display. I've looked at the man pages and elsewhere online, but I haven't had any luck finding what I'm looking for time-wise though. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Using GNU ls, on Linux, there is a --time-style flag you can use to specify one of a few pre-defined time types, or specifying a completely custom +FORMAT style like the date command accepts. However, BSD ls, which Apple ships, does not support this flag.

I've seen similar discrepancies in commands like date and tar as well, all rooted in the differences between the GNU and BSD variants.


Can the Xcode SDK run on Windows 7? I want to install Xcode SDK for iPhone app development on my Windows 7 PC, does any one know is this is possible?

You can't install XCode or its SDK on the windows. All you can is create a virtual machine, install Mac OS X there and then install XCode and SDK.


External Disk to use with iTunes in a AirPort Extreme I have a external disk that I use now to have my iTunes collection, I want to connect the same disk to the AirPort Extreme so I dont have to use a USB port in my Notebook.

Does anyone have a reccomendation?


Force iBooks on iOS to sync with iCloud I have my iBooks setup on both my iPhone and Mac so that their contents are always in sync. If I delete a book on my Mac, then it gets deleted on my iPhone, too. However, it usually takes 24 hours before it takes effect on the iPhone, after I delete a book on the Mac.

How can I force a sync on the iPhone so that updates are reflected immediately?

I've found that if I want to ADD a book, then it's best to add it on my Mac. Then wait until it uploads to iCloud, then after about a minute it will appear in iBooks on my iPhone. I then hit the iCloud icon next to the book title to download it.

If I want to delete a book, then I delete it from my iPhone rather than my Mac. It will then walk you through a few options, until you reach the point where you say that you want to delete the book from ALL iCloud devices. Then it will also delete it from your Mac, after about a minute.


IOS 8.0.2 Facebook launch issues - it wont launch! my facebook wont even open now the update has happended! it flashes open for a nano-second and then automatically closes again. should I also try the delete and re download?

Try deleting the app and reinstalling the latest version from the app store.


How do I use Split View in OS X 10.11 El Capitan? I downloaded the Developer Preview of OS X El Capitan and I'm trying to use the new side-by-side split view feature.  However, I can't seem to figure out the right incantation to use it.

How do I put two apps side-by-side in a full screen split view on El Capitan?

It appears that I was doing it wrong.  I don't see a way to enable split-screen from just two fullscreen windows in mission control.  Nor do I see a way to enable it from two regular windows.  But if you have one fullscreen window and one regular window, you can drag the regular window onto the fullscreen in mission control, and it will create a split-screen view.

I tried this successfully with Safari, Finder, and Chrome.


Homebrew: change name of group ownership in /usr/local/ so admins and standard users can brew I have a local admin user and a few "network" mobile users (without admin privileges) who need to be able to brew on a Mac. So, these 'network' users are not members of the group admin and probably shouldn't be.

$ ls -l /user/local

-rw-r--r--   1 localadmin  admin   491 Jan 21 18:04 CONTRIBUTING.md
drwxr-xr-x   6 localadmin  admin   204 Jan 21 18:23 Cellar
drwxr-xr-x   8 localadmin  admin   272 Jan 21 18:06 Library
-rw-r--r--   1 localadmin  admin   789 Jan 21 18:04 README.md
drwxr-xr-x  44 localadmin  admin  1496 Jan 23 23:44 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 localadmin  admin   102 Jan 21 18:06 etc
drwxr-xr-x  27 localadmin  admin   918 Jan 21 18:24 include
drwxr-xr-x  98 localadmin  admin  3332 Jan 21 18:24 lib
drwxr-xr-x   6 localadmin  admin   204 Jan 21 18:24 opt
drwxr-xr-x   9 localadmin  admin   306 Jan 21 18:24 share
drwx------   3 localadmin  admin   102 Jan 21 18:37 var

My question is would there be a problem with, say, changing the group from admin to something like brewers for /usr/local -R (recurseively)? Then add root, localadmin and each network user to the brewers group. Would each network user now be able to brew?

I have read that I might need to change the umask for each network user to 0002?

This can work if you also then make /usr/local/ and everything under it group-writable with chmod. The current permissions have them writable only by localadmin.

Yes, you will need to do something about the umask for users running brew. Otherwise users won't be able to modify stuff brewed by other users, even if they're both in the brewers group. You probably don't want to change their default umask, because then all the files they create would be group-writable, which is probably not what you want. You might use a custom wrapper script around the brew command which sets the umask to 002 for just the duration of that command, e.g. by doing the umask and brew calls in a subshell.


Apple support, mac with unencrypted drive Because of an incident happened a few days ago, I'll have to bring my MacBook Pro to an Apple Store to get it repaired.
Problem:
Even though automatic logins are disabled, and to access the computer it is necessary to type username password, the hard drive is not encrypted with file vault. The computer does not switch on, so I can't do anything to enable it now.
Of course, this means that connecting the hard drive to another computer will make its contents fully accessible. This is my fault for not enabling file vault, I know.

In any case, I am mentally assessing what kind of sensible data is present on the drive.
I do not store logins and passwords in plain text files (I keep them encrypted with a specific application), but my default browser has cookies to automatically login into a number of services.
The Apple Mail app, also, has automatic access to my email accounts, although I believe that those login details are stored in OS X Keychain, which should be protected by the user's password.
Question
Does anyone know to what extent my data is exposed? What I should mostly worry about? What would be available to an attacker?
Also, does anyone have information about the policies of Apple support with the data on mac computers?

Your data is fully exposed, unless you have specifically encrypted files using a passphrase not stored on your hard drive.

Passwords and Secure Notes stored in the Keychain are encrypted on disk. If you have configured your Mac to require a password on boot, this password is usually also used as your Keychain Password. If this password is sufficiently hard to guess, your Keychain data should be safe.

As you note, your browser's session cookies (those that are are still valid) could potentially be exploited.

You can read Apples official document on keeping your data secure during hardware repair here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3294

Regarding Apple's policy - you can read their Service Terms here:

http://images.apple.com/legal/sales-support/terms/repair/generalservice/Service_Terms_English.pdf

Apple writes that they are not responsible for loss, recovery, or compromise of your data.

That being said, I'm pretty sure that Apple's guidelines for their service technicians make it clear that they are not allowed to, for example, copy of all your images on to a USB pendrive and bring that home with them after work. Depending on your location that would most probably also be illegal. That doesn't mean it can't happen though.


Terminal won't ask for passphrase and not stored in keychain I recently rent a VPS and generated a public/private key pair and transferred it to my server (added it there to the authorized_keys file) ...

So far on my first login via terminal on OSX I got asked for my passphrase and declined to save it to my keychain.

However my terminal won't prompt for the passphrase anymore, instead I can connect instantly via "ssh myserver.com" ...

I can't find the key in my keychain (why should I) and can't figure out why it's not asking for my passphrase!

EDIT: Ok, after a restart of my macbook I get the prompt again. One time. It seems it saves it temporarily ... I do not want that

Your passphrase isn't being stored anywhere, but your decrypted private key is stored (in memory) by a process called ssh-agent (man page). This process, which OS X starts when it boots up, stores and manages private keys so they never have to be exposed to other processes that use SSH connections.

When you enter in your password, your computer decrypts your private key and ssh-agent gets a copy to hold on to until it is killed (e.g. on shutdown) or the key is manually removed using ssh-add (man page):

ssh-add -l lists all currently held keys
ssh-add -D forces ssh-agent to forget all currently held keys
ssh-add ~/.ssh/newkey_rsa adds the private key ~/.ssh/newkey_rsa to ssh-agent.
ssh-add -t 3600 ~/.ssh/newkey_rsa adds a new private key with an expiry time, so ssh-agent will only remember newkey_rsa for (say) 3600 seconds.

It may satisfy your concerns to know that your passphrase isn't stored anywhere. But if you really want your computer to prompt you for your passphrase every time, you could use ssh-add to make ssh-agent forget your key and then re-add it with a short expiry time.

Keep in mind that other solutions — like requiring a password to unlock your workstation when you're away from your desk — may also address your underlying security needs.


What folders should I be backing up? Are there any I should avoid? I'm in the process of configuring a cloud backup for my OS X machine and am trying decide what folders to back up and whether there are any folders I should avoid.

I have complete control, by folder, over the frequency of backups, and can "seed" the backup locally (so the size of the initial backup is not an issue). My question is about (1) whether there are certain folders I want to be sure not to miss (e.g. they contain settings or history that it would be a bother to recreate) and (2) whether there are other folders that are best avoided (e.g. it is either more convenient or safer to "restore" their contents from other sources, such as a reinstall). And, as with all backups, a dimension of interest is the degree to which backing up a given file or or folder will cause frequent large backups of things that don't matter much.

Note that this is not intended as a "bootable image" backup, but rather as complete a backup as necessary for any restore other than a bootable image. Note also that I have access to all files on the machine, including hidden ones.

Some people recommend backing up your entire ~/Library folder. But I find there are a lot of things in there I wouldn't want replaced if doing a clean install. So I selectively back up certain contents of that folder, along with certain contents of the system level /Library folder.

You should poke around in ~/Library and see what's in there that you need. Here's a list of what I backup to get you started:

~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Preferences are where most of your application settings live. You should go through each of those folders' subfolders and see which ones you need.

Notably, Address Book's database is stored in an Application Support subfolder while some other Mac OS preinstalled apps have their folders directly at the ~/Library level. It's a good idea to look through the folders at that level as well. For example:

~/Library/Mail has your Mail.app data.

~/Library/Calendars has your iCal data.

~/Library/iTunes has all your iOS device backups and iTunes specific scripts.

~/Library/Scripts is probably where you install scripts if you use AppleScripts as folder actions.

~/Library/ScriptingAdditions holds any AppleScript additions you've installed.

~/Library/Keychains is the default location using Keychain Access to save passwords.

~/Library/Fonts for all fonts installed for the current user.

~/Library/ColorSync for all color profiles installed for the current user.

~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist has your Safari bookmarks. The other stuff in this folder is a good example of what I'd like to NOT be restored after a clean install.

The structure of the system level /Library folder closely matches that of the ~/Library folder, so if there are things in there (fonts, color profiles, scripts etc.) installed "for all users", you should back those up too.

Hope that helps you get started!


Running Application From External Hardrive on a mac I have copied my application to external my hard drive but when I run it it copies the application to the application folder on the mac and then runs.

Have you considered moving the copy of the application from your /Applications folder to maybe a temporary folder (or delete it, if you have a copy of that application already on your external HD) to see if that resolves the issue?

Also, can I ask what application it is and what version of Mac OS you're running?


How to always show window controls in Yosemite full screen apps? The default behavior in Yosemite for apps with combined window title/toolbar in full screen mode is, that the window controls (signal lights) slide in from the left when the mouse the mouse pointer reaches the top screen edge. Is there any known Terminal defaults command to disable this behavior and always show the "signal lights"?
I'm asking because I find it annoying especially in Xcode when I want to press the Run button but instead close the whole workspace :(
Thx

Use Option + Shift + Click green button to get the old fill screen behavior of expand to fill the whole screen.

Use Option + Click green button to get the old green button behavior to just expand vertically.

This was also driving me nuts today since every time that I change my KVM switch to my other machine, I end up with OS X resizing all of my windows! Argh! At least now I can get them back to the sizes I want. But the windows that I don't want to take up much room are still getting moved around annoyingly.


Can I make aol.com my default email reader in Mavericks instead of Mail? An AOL rep reset my Safari, and since then, whenever I hit commandI it brings up mail instead of italicizing words. How can I change back?

Assuming you already have the AOL mail installed on your system,

go to Apple Mail  (open it)- preferences

Select the Default mail reader to AOL.

The cmd i is standard Safari keyboard shortcut to open your default email (AOL) and to send the current webpage- nothing to do with AOL setting it up.


My mac's UI is randomly freezing for 5-10 seconds throughout the day. How can I figure out what's going wrong? I have a 2017 27" iMac running macOS 10.14.6. Throughout the day the entire screen will freeze for a period of 5-10 seconds. This happens sporadically and there's no consistent way to trigger it, but toggling Exposé and opening tabs in Safari seem to be the two biggest triggers.
While the screen is frozen, I can still move the cursor around, but I can't interact with anything on screen. All clicks and keystrokes will be delayed until the screen unfreezes, and then they'll all haphazardly fire at once. I'll still be able to hear audio from any application that's running, including music, videos, voice calls, or video calls.
I tried reinstalling macOS 10.14.6 to fix the issue, but sadly that didn't help. I read somewhere that one of the security updates released by Apple for 10.14.6 could introduce this issue, but I don't have any security updates installed currently and the issue is still there, so that's not it. I also have a 2019 MacBook Pro with 10.14.6 and much of the same software loaded on to it as my iMac, and it's not experiencing this issue.
Is there anything I can do to debug this, or some other solution I can try?

I have discovered how to determine the cause of the freezes. The trick is to take a sample of the system WindowServer process while it is frozen.
Of course, since I can't interact with the system while it's frozen, I used a separate computer to ssh into my mac, switch that session to the root account with sudo -s, and then execute the following command the moment the system freezes: sample WindowServer 5
That creates a sample that shows what the window server was stuck doing while it was frozen, and it consistently showed it locked in the following functions:
4613 Thread_1658: Main Thread   DispatchQueue_<multiple>
+ 4613 start  (in libdyld.dylib) + 1  [0x7fff71e563d5]
+   4613 ???  (in WindowServer)  load address 0x107900000 + 0x150d  [0x10790150d]
+     4613 SLXServer  (in SkyLight) + 1349  [0x7fff6b2b7af1]
+       4613 server_loop  (in SkyLight) + 602  [0x7fff6b2b7d52]
+         2238 CGXRunOneServicesPass  (in SkyLight) + 731  [0x7fff6b2b6df9]
+         ! 2236 mach_msg  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 60  [0x7fff71f8b76c]
+         ! : 2236 mach_msg_trap  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 10  [0x7fff71f8b22a]
+         ! 2 mach_msg  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 60,68  [0x7fff71f8b76c,0x7fff71f8b774]
+         2087 CGXRunOneServicesPass  (in SkyLight) + 1761  [0x7fff6b2b71ff]
+         ! 2086 post_port_data  (in SkyLight) + 237  [0x7fff6b2b7551]
+         ! : 1986 rendezvousHandler(unsigned int, mach_msg_header_t*, void*)  (in SkyLight) + 29  [0x7fff6b138bd1]
+         ! : | 1984 CGXHandleMessage  (in SkyLight) + 101  [0x7fff6b2738bc]
+         ! : | + 1984 invocation function for block in rendezvousHandler(unsigned int, mach_msg_header_t*, void*)  (in SkyLight) + 125  [0x7fff6b138c5f]
+         ! : | +   1979 _XGetEventShmem  (in SkyLight) + 310  [0x7fff6b0837bd]
+         ! : | +   ! 1979 WSEventSourceCreateGraphShmemForAuditToken  (in SkyLight) + 82  [0x7fff6b1bccb5]
+         ! : | +   !   1978 WSAuditTokenCanMonitorEvents  (in SkyLight) + 171  [0x7fff6b2bab0d]
+         ! : | +   !   : 1978 WSAuditTokenIsPostEventTCCApprovedCachingFailure  (in SkyLight) + 320  [0x7fff6b2ba977]
+         ! : | +   !   :   1978 TCCAccessCheckAuditToken  (in TCC) + 269  [0x7fff6c788a9e]
+         ! : | +   !   :     1978 TCCAccessRequest  (in TCC) + 345  [0x7fff6c783e5d]
+         ! : | +   !   :       1978 _os_activity_initiate_impl  (in libsystem_trace.dylib) + 53  [0x7fff7206889c]
+         ! : | +   !   :         1978 _dispatch_lane_barrier_sync_invoke_and_complete  (in libdispatch.dylib) + 60  [0x7fff71e15129]
+         ! : | +   !   :           1978 _dispatch_client_callout  (in libdispatch.dylib) + 8  [0x7fff71e0963d]
+         ! : | +   !   :             1978 __TCCAccessRequest_block_invoke.68  (in TCC) + 862  [0x7fff6c784549]
+         ! : | +   !   :               1978 tccd_send_message  (in TCC) + 656  [0x7fff6c784c25]
+         ! : | +   !   :                 1978 xpc_connection_send_message_with_reply_sync  (in libxpc.dylib) + 178  [0x7fff72088647]
+         ! : | +   !   :                   1978 dispatch_mach_send_with_result_and_wait_for_reply  (in libdispatch.dylib) + 50  [0x7fff71e1d882]
+         ! : | +   !   :                     1978 _dispatch_mach_send_and_wait_for_reply  (in libdispatch.dylib) + 609  [0x7fff71e1d3e7]
+         ! : | +   !   :                       1978 mach_msg  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 60  [0x7fff71f8b76c]
+         ! : | +   !   :                         1978 mach_msg_trap  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 10  [0x7fff71f8b22a]

This is taken from a sample that caught two seconds of a freeze.
This pretty clearly shows that TCC is the culprit. Now that I know that, the next question is figuring out how to fix the freezes.


Should I use all my storage on bootcamp? So I'm a gamer, and I will only use bootcamp and probably never use MacOS ever again. Should I "wipe" my mac to free up as much storage as I can to use all of the storage for bootcamp? I have 1TB of space, and I would like to use as much of that as possible for my windows partition. Would this cause any problems on my mac or windows?

While it is certainly possible and even practical to entirely wipe macOS from any Boot Camp supporting Mac I often leave a small (10-20GB) partition with macOS on it to keep around in case there are problems with Windows or the Mac itself strictly for troubleshooting purposes.

However that is a personal preference and there is really no technical reason to not dedicate the entire disk to Windows. Your call.


How do I keep Last.fm from scrobbling podcasts? I would like to use last.fm to just keep track of what music I listen to, but I listen to a lot of podcasts as well, using both iTunes and my iPhone.  Is there any way to prevent the Last.fm application from scrobbling my podcasts?  Or alternatively, is there any way to prevent Last.fm from scrobbling any music file longer than 1 hour or something?

Open the Last.fm application.
Menu item "Last.fm -> Preferences"
In the Scrobbling page, edit the "Scrobble Directories" and make sure that your podcast directory is not selected. If you have your iTunes library in the standard location: Expand the directory tree to find /Users/you/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media and make sure that the directory Podcasts is not selected.
Review the other directories that are selected, for example you might want to make sure that the Audiobooks directory is unselected.
OK!


What does "mds: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume " signify? In Console.App I can see various log messages.  I've diagnosed a Time Machine problem and searched for "backup".  In the resulting messages from backupd I also noticed the message

27/07/11 16.01.59,562 mds: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume

showed up (which is most likely not Time Machine related but has the word backup in it).

Any suggestions on what this is and how I can fix it?

I have only seen that in relation to Time Machine timing out when preparing a network sparse disk image for backup.(and I've seen it on Snow Leopard and rarely on Lion - but lion is young)

mds is very tightly intertwined in the time machine process, so it could just be time machine asking mds to do some work.

You'll have to disable time machine and watch for other network mounts failing - separate the two and you'll have narrowed it down to one bad actor.


How to increase max socket connections for Yosemite 10.10 I'm trying to test a network service app that allows for a large number of simultaneous socket connections.

I have adjusted /etc/sysctl.conf with the following:

kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=65536
kern.ipc.somaxconn=10000

With this in place, ulimit -n shows I have a 65536 "open file" maximum. Yet my service still gets stuck around the 1000th connection.

Thinking that perhaps it's something specific to the platform (Node), I re-implemented a simplified version of it in Golang, but it exhibits the same problem.

It also happens if I split the "client" side up into several procs that each open a handful of connections. The service always get stuck around the 1000th connection.

lsof -p <pid> shows 1011 IPv6 connections like so:

gochat  25034 username  178u    IPv6 0x11c1273e19ee5c8f       0t0       TCP localhost:http-alt->localhost:50080 (ESTABLISHED)

What is imposing this maximum socket connection limit, and how can I expand it?

So it turns out that the Go socketio library  has a default max setting of 1000 simultaneous socket connections. Calling server.SetMaxConnection(10000) (in conjunction with an appropriately high ulimit -n, as mentioned in the question) will allow > 1000 simultaneous client connections.


Does powertop work with Mac OS X Snow Leopard or are there other power profiling utilities? I recently came across a blog post highlighting powertop for Linux (see: http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/).  Based on the FAQ, powertop relies on the fact that the Linux kernel is now tickless.  Given a specific Linux kernel requirement, I am doubtful that it will work with the Darwin kernel.  Freshmeat also mentions powertop, but they have a tag suggesting that a POSIX compliant OS can use powertop.  Since FreeBSD is POSIX compliant, I was wondering if anyone had tried powertop on Snow Leopard ?

If not, does anyone know of similar, power profiling tools for Snow Leopard ?  Specifically, power profiling tools that highlight processes consuming power.

Thanks,

Scott

Using dtrace and counting which processes wake and the reason and time, you might be able to get some of the information provided by powertop


What determines the model name displayed in System Information compared to the model number? I've just purchased a used Mac Pro that was sold to me as a "5,1" model, which according to everymac.com and Apple's support site, should be a Mid 2010 Mac Pro. However the model display in System Information/About this Mac shows it as an "Early 2009", as does the Apple warranty check.

It does have the 3.2GHz Quad Core Xeon processor which was only available with the Mid 2010 model (again, according to everymac.com) and the latest firmware for the 5,1 Mac Pro. I'm not sure if the latter is an indicator though as some searches around the web suggest that it was possible to upgrade an Early 2009 model with the 5,1 firmware which should make it a Mid 2010.

So, I'm wondering if this is just a case of Mid 2010s reporting themselves as Early 2009 Mac Pros in general, or if this model has had both an upgraded firmware and upgrade processor?

I think the model name shown in System Information is determined from information encoded within the serial number. It looks like the precise details of this are private to Apple, but some information is given in this MacRumors post (which includes the image below), and it looks like some sites may have reverse engineered it.

Be aware it is possible under some circumstances to change the serial number reported to the software running on the machine. Specifically: logic boards supplied by Apple to service providers have a "blank" serial number, and service providers must "serialize" them (this is only possible once, from the service provider point of view) by running some special software and providing the desired serial number via keyboard input. (This is why I suggested checking the serial number printed on the hardware in my comment on the question.)


Is there any way to remove an app icon (especially stickies) on mac's application switcher (cmd+tab menu)? On Mac's application switcher I want to hide some applications such as Stickies. I always use Stickies, it is really useful for me that's why it's always running. But, I'm really fed up with it on ⌘ CMD+⇥ TAB. I want to get rid of it

Is there a way to do within altering any settings in macbook or using any third party software?

I tried the solution at "Is there a way to hide certain apps from the cmd+tab menu?". But it doesnot work maybe because of OS X Yosemite.

You could try this app. (It's paid though) GhostTile


Does iOS 8 support AES in GCM mode to encrypt data in TLS/SSL? While sending data over SSL/TLS in iOS 8 iPhone, is it possible to encrypt data using AES in GCM mode?

Yes, it is possible.

YMMV depending on which app you're using or which SSL/TLS library you're using, if you're talking about your own app.


How can I list the partition table of an unmounted disk image? I want to prepare Raspian Jessie found here in SD card for Biosignal Pi, instructions found here, but I have only OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan of Macbook Air 2013-mid now.
The image is in fstype format so it is not compatible with OS X.
Verifying that using the correct hash by
openssl sha1 /Users/masi/code/2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.zip which gives

SHA1(/Users/masi/code/2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.zip)= 4a841dffd02197548bf2329b90a0a44eeeebb4ab

which is the correct hash found in the website so not corrupted file.
However, running SHA1 on the .img returns different SHA1 than with David

masi$ openssl sha1 2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.img
SHA1(2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.img)= da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

One step requires me to list the partition table of an unmounted disk image. On Linux I would use fdisk -l, but OS X fdisk image.img gives

Disk: 2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.img    geometry: 0/4/63 [0 sectors]
Signature: 0x0
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

where you can see that the system does not recognise the image.
I try to mount the image 2016-02-26-raspbian-jessie.img in DiskImageMounter.app application but I get


Add colours to output of existing CLI commands I would like to create a function / alias that colorizes the output of another command. Is there a best-practice way to do so?

For instance, let's take the alias command, whose output looks something like this:

In the standard bash/zsh, this is all in the same colour. However, I'd like to adjust the output so that the part before the alias itself (the part before the =) is green, and the aliased command (the part after =) is red, for instance.

Obviously, alias is just an example, as I would like to add colours to other commands.

My current solution uses awk:

alias | awk -F"=" '{print "\033[1;32m" $1 "\033[0m=\033[1;31m"$2"\033[0m "}'

I don't find it particularly appealing (especially the colour codes). It also appears that this approach will become much more complicated for more complex commands (e.g. add colour output to top or ps) and also does not seem very maintainable in the long run.

Any ideas on how to make this better / easier ?

PS: I guess this is a Unix/Linux terminal question in general, but since I work primarily on OS X, I decided to start asking here...

EDIT: I now found this answer, that proposes using functions to make awk output look prettier. I'm not sure though if I want to have lots of formatting functions ghosting around my terminal. Still hoping for something cleaner...

Here's their example:

function red(s) {
    printf "\033[1;31m" s "\033[0m "
}

function green(s) {
    printf "\033[1;32m" s "\033[0m "
}

{
    print red($1), green($2), blue($3)
}

Especially since you're already using zsh, I would recommend using the existing highlighter framework (and builtin highlighters) of zsh-syntax-highlighting or fast-syntax-highlighting Based on a preliminary review, both should have sufficient documentation to hopefully allow you to set up your preferred environment.

Here's a screenshot of zsh-syntax-highlighting's default parser operating on the parsing command you provided (meta, right?)


How can I find out which program is trying to restart my Mac? From time to time I log into my server through screen sharing to find this warning:

There is a program trying to restart my server, and I can't for the  life of me figure out which one is the culprit. Sometimes the restart attempt gets blocked by the OS when other users are connected through the file sharing service, but other times (e.g. at night and during the weekends, when no one is in the office) the restart goes through. This drove me crazy when performing long backups overnight and coming to work in the morning to find a failed backup and no trace of what went wrong in the logs.

So now I'd like to get to the bottom of it.

pmset -g told me that autorestart was set to 1. I manually set it to 0 with pmset -a autorestart 0. This was a couple of weeks ago and I thought to have fixed the issue this way. But today I logged in to the same warning above, so something is still trying to restart the computer. autorestart is still correctly set to 0.

I have to confess I don't know where to look. Is there any tool I can use to find out where this warning is coming from?

Running macOS 10.12.4 and macOS Server 5.3.

I'm thankful for any pointer.

If you have Xcode installed, you can use Accessibility Inspector (full path below) to find information on any user interface element. Click on the “crosshairs’ icon in the window's menu bar and watch the informative display as you mouse over various UI elements.

In your case, however, it will show what process displayed the dialog, which is not necessarily the process that is trying to restart your mac. But you won't know until you try.

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Accessibility Inspector.app


Reuse of Apple SSD in a PC I have a spare 256GB SSD from my 2015 Macbook Pro that I would like to re-use in my PC. I have an Acer laptop that comes with an M2 slot. Are adapters available that would allow me to reuse this SSD in my PC?

Heavily edited answer:
In theory, the answer is yes. But as @benwiggy has pointed out in his comment, as a practical matter, the answer is: "It depends". Apple's proprietary design of the SSD's connector/interface means that an adapter will be needed to use it in a device with one of the industry standard M.2 interfaces. In other words, you can only re-use an Apple SSD in another machine IF you have the correct adapter. Making this still more difficult is the fact that Apple changed the SSD interface design periodically, and so the adapter required may be unique to a model or model year.
Your question has now been closed as duplicative, but in reviewing the duplicated Q&A, it will be noted:

that Q&A pertains to a Macbook Air early 2014 which requires a different adapter than your Macbook Pro 2015, and

some of the links are now broken, meaning some of the recommended adapters and sources are no longer available.

However, ferreting through one of the manufacturer's websites (Sintech) provided in this answer led to this page of macbook SSD adapters which may be of some use. I saw no prices provided on Sintech's website, but another answer stated that his cost was $13.99. You can factor cost & your research time into your tradeoffs for buying a new drive vs. buying an adapter to re-use the Apple SSD. You might also want to consider the environment in your decision.


Over 25 gb of Space Disappeared Here's my problem: over the past couple days I did a really good clean out of my computer and managed to free up several gigabytes of data and was hovering around 233+ gb of free space.

Then in the last couple of days I noticed my trash file was taking a really long time to empty (I don't know if this is part of the problem but wanted to mention it just in case).

Last night I noticed I was missing quite a lot of space on my drive, it was around 205 gigs now. I discovered I had accidentally set some large torrent files to be on my main drive instead of an external. No matter, I figured! I would just delete them and start them over on the external. But my disk space didn't seem to change. So I rebooted - after all I had recently used Photoshop and that tends to hog a bunch of space and I don't get it back until I reboot.

I rebooted and there was still the same ~205 gb of free space. I was very confused. I was even more confused when I checked "About My Mac" and saw that it was telling me that in actual fact I only had around 90gbs of free space. THE HECK!?

I did notice that my "backups" were surprisingly high - 119gb in fact. This was especially curious since I have a time machine drive (time capsule) thats supposed to be backing up hourly. I did get a message this morning telling me it was full, but isn't it supposed to clear itself out?

Running WhatSize (it's still running by the way) I see that my .MobileBackups folder is a gargantuan 134gb! I thought these were temporary! For when I'm not connected to Time Machine (WHICH I AM!)

What in the hell is going on? How did I magically lose close to 25 gigs? And how the hell do I get it back?

The current version of Time Machine keeps two types of backups.  There are backups that are stored on your computer as well as network backups that are stored on your networked storage (time-capsule, NAS, etc).  You can see these by entering Time Machine and looking at the timeline ticks to the right.  The pink/purple ticks are network copies and the white ticks are the ones on your local computer.  The local backups occur when your network storage is not available, also they may occur more often than the 1hr snapshots set for network backups.  As your hard drive fills up, OS X will start to cut back the amount of space it uses for local backups.  If you want to disable this feature and recover your local disk space, then open a terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and enter the following command followed by your password.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

This should turn off the feature and free up the space.  You can turn it back on with

sudo tmutil enablelocal


Difference between iPod 5th Generation (80GB, late 2006) and an iPod Classic (160GB, late 2009)? Is there any difference between an iPod 5th Generation (80GB, late 2006) and an iPod Classic (160GB, late 2009)?

The 80GB iPod works perfectly with a USA-SPEC PA-12 adapter for a BMW car stereo and a simple 30-pin to USB adapter for input to a receiver. The newer 160GB iPod is not recognized and will not play.

I also have a SONY RDP-X500iP Dock. The newer 160GB iPod works with it, but the old 80GB iPod does not.

Can anyone help me with these two iPods?

Well, of course there are differences. :)

However, the only difference I can see that may impact your usage is that the latest version of the OS that will run on these iPods is different. The 160GB iPod can run up to version 2.0.5 of the OS while the 80GB iPod can only run up to version 1.3. So I suspect your issue may have something to do with what the OS supports.

In terms of the USB connectivity via the built-in 30 pin port, they both support USB 2 high power charging, so it's not likely to be a physical port issue.

You could probably find a different 30-pin to USB adapter that will work for the 160GB iPod for input to the receiver in the BMW, but that may involve a fair bit of trial and error.


What's the easiest way to copy the URL of a traditional HTML frame in Safari? As much as I hate HTML frames, a vendor uses a documentation platform that makes heavy use of them. Whenever I search for a documentation page, it displays in a frame, and I would like to be able to copy the URL of that page inside the frame to share with colleagues.

I would have expected to be able to do this by right-clicking on the frame and choosing "Copy Frame URL" or something, but that's not an option. At present I have to find the link to the page in question in a list of documentation contents, and copy that.

This is a little indirect however based on your example, right-click in the frame and select Open Frame in New Tab, then select the new Tab and copy the URL from the Address bar.


Dictionaries and spell-checking My default language is English, but I also sometimes type in Czech. I have added a Czech keyboard to OS X, and can switch between the two easily. The trouble is that OS X has no native Czech dictionary.

If I download Czech .AFF and .DIC files, I can place them inside /Library/Spelling/, but OS X does not switch which dictionary it uses for continuous spell-checking. I have "Automatic by Language" selected in the Keyboard preference pane, but this seems to work very sporadically, if at all.

Is there an easy solution here I am missing, or is this it? It seems odd that the keyboard and dictionary would not be linked, like they are in iOS. Any help would be appreciated!

Only iOS links the keyboard and the spellcheck, OS X has never done that.  Most people find "automatic" unreliable.  To activate czech spellcheck, you should set the spell check to czech, either in system prefs/language & text/text/spelling or in Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar.  In Pages 4 and earlier and iBooks Author, you need to set Inspector > Text > More > Language.  MS Word and some other apps do their own thing.

The app Nisus Writer has preference settings that let you link keyboard and spellcheck dictionary.


ios development in windows I have HP-2000-Notebook Pavilion series with windows on it. More my notebook doesn't support visualization technology.

I want to develop and iOS app in objective c. Is there any alternative that work for me? rather than buying apple notebook.

Nope, apple requires that apps are build in Xcode.


What functionality of iTunes is not available anywhere else? I commonly use iTunes to add items to iPods and iPhones. However, I'm using Ubuntu more and more and I'm really liking it.

Ubuntu has some apps that replicate iTunes, but some features are either hard-to-find or missing. So my question:

What functionality of iTunes is not available anywhere else?

iTunes match is a huge feature for the iCloud integration features for easy streaming and syncing of playlists and metadata across iOS and Mac/PC. Ping is unique, though few would argue this is highly useful.


Why did I lose the ability to print to a networked printer? I have a Canon iP3600 printer connected to a networked hard drive and up until a few days ago I was able to print from it. however, i have now lost the ability to print ever since i downloaded Apple's updated software for the printer!

I have my mac partitioned and running Windows 7 and can still print perfectly from there, so the cables are obviously not the problem. I can still print perfectly if I connect the printer via USB directly to the Mac. I can even print a test page from the Print preferences page.

I just cannot print from a document. Print Queue keeps saying "Copying print data" but nothing happens! Have downloaded the latest driver from the Canon website and deleted and re-installed the printer several times and several ways to no avail.

Any ideas most welcome...

I had the same problem and this is what I did to fix it:

Go to http://localhost:631/

If you get the "Web Interface is Disabled" message, run cupsctl WebInterface=yes in Terminal.
Choose the Administration tab.

Click Add Printer.

If you are required to login, use a local Administrator account.
Select the printer (in my case it was automatically found).


How can I undo nvram recovery-boot-mode=unused if I don't know firmware password? While trying to get into recovery mode, I used this:

sudo nvram recovery-boot-mode=unused

... hoping it'd take me directly to recovery mode. Instead, it prompts me for the firmware password. Which I don't know. And I can't clear NVRAM without the firmware password. So, I'm stuck in a reboot loop.

Yes, I'm an idiot. How do I get myself out of this mess?

This depends on your hardware. Best bet is web chat with Apple to rule out any self rescue options as they will know exactly what to do for any sort of hardware. Also, they will be needed if you have to provide proof of purchase to get vendor unlock code.

https://locate.apple.com


How to control order of startup items for users at login? I have seen a few applications with mixed reviews that will allow a user to change the order of startup items.  I would simply prefer the "bare metal" method and stick to using the shell or the Open Directory / netinfo editor to do this.  I realize that this isn't controlled via launchd so what is the mechanism and where is the preference location for app startup definition?

I have found OS X's restore app/window process to be less than lackluster and I need to guarantee certain apps start first before others (such as ScreenRecycler as I need applications to open on the other display when they fire up).

If you're using a shell script to open applications, try something like this:

osascript -e 'launch app "ScreenRecycler"'
pgrep -qx Alfred||open -jga Alfred
sleep 10
pgrep -qx Mail||open -jga Mail
pgrep -qx Transmission||open -jga Transmission

You can run the script at login by for example saving the plist below as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/some.label.plist.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>some.label</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>bash</string>
    <string>-c</string>
    <string>osascript -e 'launch app "ScreenRecycler"'
pgrep -qx Alfred||open -jga Alfred
sleep 10
pgrep -qx Mail||open -jga Mail
pgrep -qx Transmission||open -jga Transmission</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

osascript -e 'launch app "AppName" and osascript -e 'activate app "AppName" are blocked until the application finishes opening. launch doesn't make an application frontmost but activate does. If an application like TextEdit or Mail is not running, launch and activate open a new visible default window. osascript -e 'tell app "TextEdit"' -e reopen -e activate -e end also reopens a default window if TextEdit is running but has no open windows.

open -jg usually opens an application hidden (-j) and without making it frontmost (-g). For some applications like TextEdit and Mail, it opens a new visible window if the application is running but has no open windows. To avoid that, check if the application is already running with for example pgrep. The -j option for open was added in 10.8 and it is only shown in the help message and not on the man page.

lsappinfo launch launchandhide=true nofront=true /Applications/TextEdit.app also always opens TextEdit hidden and without making it frontmost. lsappinfo was added in 10.9. I don't know how to use lsappinfo to wait until an application finishes opening.

The settings for login items are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist. You can add a login item with AppleScript:

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to make new login item at end with properties {path:"/Applications/TextEdit.app", name:"TextEdit", hidden:true}'

Some applications and processes are started up via property lists in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, /Library/LaunchAgents/, or /Library/LaunchDaemons/. _com.apple.SMLoginItemBookmarks in /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd.peruser.$UID/overrides.plist is used to configure login items for helper applications used by sandboxed applications like ScreenFlow, DayOne, and TuneUp.

Since 10.7 there has been a relatively long delay before some login items or launchd jobs are started. I don't know any way to reduce it, but KeyRemap4MacBook's FAQ says it is caused by Resume:

  KeyRemap4MacBook does not work after boot on OS X 10.7. What should I do?

  "Resume" feature introduced by Lion delays launching apps at login.

  Until KeyRemap4MacBook.app is launched at login, the keyboard layout is not changed. Please wait a minute until menu of KeyRemap4MacBook is shown.


What is the recommended (official) way to backup apple books (iBook) purchases? What is the recommended way to make a backup of all the books I have purchased with Apple books (formerly known as iBooks), preferably using macOS?

Or may there is even an official way recommended by Apple?

Apple’s recommended method for any local  backups is Time Machine. While other options exist, none of them match your combined wishes in question.


Video player on iPad that doesn't stretch to full screen I'm looking for a video player that doesn't stretch my 640x480 video files to full screen (1024x768), which degrades the quality IMHO.

Is such an app available?

OPLayerHD allows you to select the stretching mode, so you can select between full screen and actual ration of the video.

There is also a lite version, maybe you can try that one before buying the complete OPlayerHD

Alternativelly there was AVPlayerHD, which seems to be not available now.