SSH connection using public/private key authentication fails only for port 22 I have been struggling for hours to make sense of a specific failure from connecting to an SSH server from one recent macOS system.

ssh user@machine -p 22

I have added all keys to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the target machine. The keys have been generated with default settings for ssh-keygen.

The server is a freshly provisioned Ubuntu 18.04 instance on Azure, we also tried a different cloud provider.

I can successfully connect with public/private key authentication (PKA) from an Ubuntu machine. I can't connect to port 22 with public/private key authentication (PKA) from the macOS  machine in question.

What am I missing?

Symptoms

For connecting from the macOS machine we observe the following symptoms:

Connection to the server works with password authentication
Connection to the server does not work with PKA
When I start a second SSH server using /usr/sbin/sshd -d -p 2222, connection to the server works with PKA (using ssh -p 2222 on the client)
Same for ports 23, 80
Same behavior using

the built-in SSH client
a freshly brewed one (version 8.1p1 with brew install openssh)
cyberduck

Client logs

I checked the logs of ssh -vvv for both ports. The only difference (apart from host key differences) are the following lines which are missing when using port 22 (this makes it very hard to search for the problem):

debug3: put_host_port: [machine]:2222\
...
debug3: put_host_port: [ip-address]:2222\
debug3: put_host_port: [machine]:2222\
...
debug3: receive packet: type 7\
debug1: SSH2_MSG_EXT_INFO received\
debug1: kex_input_ext_info: server-sig-algs=<ssh-ed25519,ssh-rsa,rsa-sha2-256,rsa-sha2-512,ssh-dss,ecdsa-sha2-nistp256,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521>\

It appears that, when connecting to port 22, the server fails to send (or the client fails to receive) a "packet of type 7" with SSH2_MSG_EXT_INFO and kex_input_ext_info.

Client config

The output of ssh -G (which shows the effective configuration) is identical for port 22 and for other ports.

Server logs

When looking at the output of /usr/sbin/sshd -ddd, the following entry is missing for port 22:

debug3: send packet: type 7 [preauth]

The server doesn't send a "packet type 7"; but perhaps this is just an unrelated symptom?

I also see the following differences:

Port 22:

debug2: KEX algorithms: curve25519-sha256,curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group16-sha512,diffie-hellman-group18-sha512,diffie-hellman-group14-sha256,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 [preauth]
debug2: host key algorithms: ecdsa-sha2-nistp256-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp256,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521,ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com,ssh-rsa-cert-v01@openssh.com,ssh-ed25519,rsa-sha2-512,rsa-sha2-256,ssh-rsa [preauth]

Port 80:

debug2: KEX algorithms: curve25519-sha256,curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group16-sha512,diffie-hellman-group18-sha512,diffie-hellman-group14-sha256,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,ext-info-c [preauth]
debug2: host key algorithms: ecdsa-sha2-nistp256-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521-cert-v01@openssh.com,ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com,rsa-sha2-512-cert-v01@openssh.com,rsa-sha2-256-cert-v01@openssh.com,ssh-rsa-cert-v01@openssh.com,ecdsa-sha2-nistp256,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521,ssh-ed25519,rsa-sha2-512,rsa-sha2-256,ssh-rsa [preauth]

Extra entries (compared to port 22):

KEX algorithms: ext-c-info
host key algorithms: rsa-sha2-512-cert-v01@openssh.com,rsa-sha2-256-cert-v01@openssh.com

Different order:

ecdsa-sha2-nistp256,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521,

Workaround

For machines that are under my control, I can change the default port of the SSH daemon.

Question

What else can I try to narrow down the problem?

The problem here seems to be that you have "something" interfering with your network traffic that is specifically blocking out your attempt to authenticate via keys on port 22.

This "something" could be so called "endpoint protection" software (software firewall), it could be a network device on your network (i.e. router with deep packet inspection, firewall, etc.) or it could be a network device on the network path or at the server end.

This seems to be the most logical conclusion as this can explain why it doesn't work on port 22, but do work on other ports.

I.e. if you hadn't included the port information, I would have looked at the authorized_keys file on the server. It is possible to specify that a specific key can only be used for authentication when connecting from a specific host - or that it must not be used when connecting from a specific host. If you had set that up to allow the Ubuntu host and not the Mac host - that could explain parts of what you're seeing. However, this method does not include matching again the port number - so it cannot explain that.

This is all assuming that you're running the exact same configuration for port 22 and port 2222 (which you stated you are), and that you're running standard OpenSSH software on the server. If you're not, that software might include configuration to discriminate based on ports - but I don't think it is likely.


Disable Application During Class I'm teaching a class on Sunday and my wonderful but occasionally rebellious students love to quietly play Minecraft during class.  Is there a way I can disable the Minecraft application during class time?

My students range in age from 8 to 12.  I'm taking them through game design with Unity 3D so they are getting a little scripting experience in C#.  Most of them have some basic programming ability.  I know a couple of the students around here have set up Minecraft servers at home.

The students use standard accounts on our computers which are running OS X 10.8.  We have never employed parental controls in the past but I'm open to that as an option if it will work.

Parental controls allows you to exert more control over standard accounts and could restrict that app easily for you. In practice, I prefer other levers.

Whether it's worth the time to setup vs. getting out and moving around the class (or having an assistant sit in the back of the class and keep an eye on screens) is debatable.

Assuming you don't already have an MDM/imaging workflow and this is just a bunch of computers that you go to one by one to manage I'd just move the Minecraft app outside the student directory and set up ssh keys / use Apple Remote Desktop to place a link to the app in each user's ~/Applications folder if and when you want them playing that app or game.

That method is very useful for other problems, has low cost of tools and might be a nice introduction to things like munki/autopkg/etc... for improving the management of this lab of Macs.

You can also leverage Apple Remote Desktop to monitor all the screens in the classroom. I'd take an old iPad and use Duet Display so that my Main screen(s) were devoted to the work I was doing as opposed to cycling through screens to see who needed their screen locked due to minecraft violations.


Does an iOS virtual machine exist for Windows? Does an iOS virtual machine for Windows exist? If it doesn't are there any reason why it couldn't?

Simple answer: No.

Apple does not allow iOS to run anywhere else but iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) and the Xcode simulator. You could simulate OS X on your Windows VM application and then use Xcode to simulate an iOS device, but this would be really taxing on your computer and really not worth the effort, but you cannot simulate iOS directly on Windows because of chipsets and Apple preventing it.


How do I switch opened windows within the same application using shortcuts? As shown in the figure below, I opened three Safais windows. To switch among them, I double click the Safari ico in the dock and select the window.

Is there any shortcuts to move these opened windows?

Command + ~

This switches windows of the app. Like Alt-Tab to switch application, this switches the windows of the selected app.


How to show a notification when the iSIght webcam turns on? Is it possible to get a desktop notification when my iSight turns on? It would be optimal if this could go through Growl, but I've tried HardwareGrowler and it doesn't give me a notification.

I know that the green light always turns on when the iSight turns on, but when the iSight turns on just for one second it is possible that I'm not looking at the screen and that I miss the green light, hence a notification that stays on the screen until I close it would be optimal.

I'm on a MacBook Pro 5,3 and I have Mountain Lion 10.8.3.

With the help of Growl's documentation about AppleScript support and a little discussion with Bart Arondson and Elliot B in the comments onto the question I've come up with the following AppleScript.

I've saved this script as an application agent which you can add to your login items in System Preferences → Users & Groups → Login Items.

Basically, this application works by detecting if a unique executable related to using the camera is being accessed. Whenever the executable is accessed, the application will notify about it to Growl:

Download

It's important to know that this script monitors access to the executable...

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC

Full script

-- check if growl is running in order to avoid the "Choose Application" dialog
tell application "System Events"
    set isRunning to (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0
end tell

-- store time of last iSight access
global lastopened
set lastopened to do shell script "ls -lu /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC | awk '{print $6,$7,$8}'"

-- make the application ready for use with growl
if isRunning then
    tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp"

        -- make a list of all the notification types that this script will ever send
        set the allNotificationsList to ¬
            {"iSight access monitor"}

        -- register the script with growl
        register as application ¬
            "iSight access monitor" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
            default notifications allNotificationsList ¬
            icon of application "FaceTime"

        -- send the first notification right after the application is started
        notify with name ¬
            "iSight access monitor" title ¬
            "iSight access monitor" description ¬
            "last iSight access:
" & lastopened application name "iSight access monitor"
    end tell
end if

-- monitoring routine: checks every 10s if the VDC executable has been accessed
on idle
    tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp"
        set newopen to do shell script "ls -lu /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC | awk '{print $6,$7,$8}'"
        if (newopen is not equal to lastopened) then
            notify with name ¬
                "iSight access monitor" title ¬
                "iSight access monitor" description ¬
                "new iSight access:
" & newopen application name "iSight access monitor"
            set lastopened to newopen
        end if
    end tell
    return 10 -- interval in seconds
end idle


MacBookPro crashed with pixel disturbed screen and 3beeps I have
MacBook Pro

15-inch, Early 2011

Processor  2 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Once a week it crashed with beep sound ( 3 times ) beep - beep - beep

Then pixel in the display ever time it crashes is as shown in screenshot
The only way to turn off the the laptop is by pressing power button for 8sec.

There is most probably a problem with your RAM.
You can run a full test on the RAM with something like Memtest booted off a CD. See here for Mac instructions.

You may find just one RAM module is corrupt and you just need to replace or remove it. It might also be that the RAM has become unseated, try taking it out and putting it back in again to see if that is the case.


Edirol UA-101 OSX Mojave Drivers I have an Edirol UA-101 and have recently upgraded to Mojave. I was running of High Sierra which supported the audio interface, however I am struggling to make it compatible with Mojave. Is there a driver that exists or a workaround?

I have disabled SIP (System Integrity Protection) by entering the recovery mode (holding cmd+R on boot) and typing "csrutil disable; reboot" on a terminal.
Then I installed the latest driver available from the Roland website (the ones for Mac OS X 10.9) and after a reboot the UA-101 came back to life.
All of this was done on MacOS Mojave 10.14.2 on a MacBook Pro late 2016.
If you want more info head to http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/05/disable-rootless-system-integrity-protection-mac-os-x/


Why doesn't iTunes detect my iPhone? When I connect my iPhone 3GS to my computer, iTunes does not detect it. The phone displays the green battery meter indicating it's charging, System Profiler detects an "iPhone" connected to the USB bus, and I can even open iPhoto and pull some pictures off of it.

It doesn't appear under "Devices" in iTunes at all, nor does it appear in the Organizer window in Xcode.

I've tried:

Using a different sync cable.
Using a different USB port.
Restarting the phone.
Restarting the computer.
Connecting the phone to a different computer.

(I'm on OS X 10.6.6 and iTunes 10.1.2)

Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities);  do you see the iTunes Helper service running?  Make sure you set the view to "All processes", not "My Processes".  If it's not running, that's your problem.  Re-install iTunes and away you go.


Automator: Service to list File Paths of selected items, into Text File How can this Automator Service for Finder be created?

I'd like to be able to use Finder's Context menu (by right-clicking a Finder item) to run a Service that gets the file paths of the selected files.
The paths should be entered into a Text File (which can be unsaved or saved in the current folder).

Furthermore:

I currently only need to be able to get the paths of multiple selected files – but not the paths of subfolder contents, etc. I hope that serves not to overcomplicate things.
I would prefer if the filenames don't have Escaping Spaces ("Like\ This"), but instead normal spaces – but if there's a setting for that, I'd like how to alter between the modes within the script.

If you're looking for something that's more "pure Automator," here's one option (although, as was mentioned in the comments, right-clicking on the items in Finder, holding option, and selecting Copy Items as Pathnames is probably the easiest solution):

Accepts files or folders in Finder
Set Value of Variable Inputs
Run Shell Script: /usr/bin/dirname "$1" (make sure to pass input as arguments)
Set Value of Variable Parent Folder
Get Value of Variable Inputs <-- this should not accept input (right-click on the action and select Ignore Input)
New Text File (Plain text, [whatever file name you want], Parent Folder (drag this in from the variables list))

I've included a screenshot below:


What is "Two system dialogs displayed" message? I was using the VO learning in System Pref and went away from my computer for a few min. My screen was black when I got back and I clicked the mouse to wake it. Then it went black again and I clicked the mouse to wake it again it said “Two system dialogs displayed “. What is that?

It is a feature of VoiceOver to alert you to the fact that system dialogs have been displayed (this text can be read by the computer voice for you).

You can find the dialogs by tabbing through the open windows (or if you can see sufficiently, they're probably already displayed on the screen).


MacBook Unibody 2009 Battery Issue I have a MacBook Unibody 2009 and am facing a weird issue.

My laptop only works when it's connected to a power source but not on battery.

As most of us would, I thought the battery was gone so I bought a new battery. However, after charging it I still had the same issue.

So, I took it to a repair person whom I know and he told me it's some issue on the motherboard. Now I am not very sure how accurate his diagnosis is.

Does anybody here know of or have a similar issue concerning MacBooks? Can anyone share some information on this?

Have you tried resetting the SMC?

Reset the SMC

It's easy to reset your computer's System Management Controller (SMC). The instructions for resetting the SMC on a MacBook depends on two things:

Does your device run from a removable battery? (Yes in your case)
Does your device run from a built-in battery?

Now, for the sake of others who may come here looking for answers to the same issue, I will provide the process for both.

For MacBook Pros, MacBooks etc that you can remove the battery from, here’s what you do:

Shut down your computer
Disconnect the MagSafe plug (power cable) from the computer
Remove the battery
Press the power button for 5 seconds and release
Put the battery back in
Reconnect the MagSafe cord (or power cable)
Turn your computer back on with the power button

For MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and MacBooks where you can’t remove the battery on your own (i.e. it's a built-in battery), here’s what you do:

Shut down your computer
Keep the MagSafe adapter (power cable) plugged in.
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

Hope this helps. Please report back and let us know.

Reset your PRAM/NVRAM

Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). It may be worth you also resetting this. Here’s how to:

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

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. mouse speed, time and date/timezone, etc).


Is there anything missing in an encrypted iPhone backup? As far as I understand iOS Security, Oct. 12, an encrypted backup via iTunes also backs up the keychain of the device. While I recognize that some elements might not be restorable onto a different device (non-migatory), I was wondering if anything substantial is actually missing in an encrypted backup.

I am asking this because I heard that after wiping an iPhone, the private key of the app Threema is lost and cannot be restored via backup, even on the same device.

Got answer from Threema support. The keys actually are included in an encrypt iTunes backup but can only be restored to the same device. That is why they advise a separate backup.

  Hello,

  Yes, encrypted iOS backups include the iOS keychain and therefore also
  the Threema private key; however as it is stored with
  kSecAttrAccessibleWhenUnlockedThisDeviceOnly, it will additionally be
  encrypted with the device-specific UID key. Therefore, it will only be
  usable if restored to the same device that the backup was created on.

  Best Regards,

  Threema Support


Battery Life on Macbook Pro I've got a 15" macbook pro, i5 2.4ghz which I've inherited. When I use it to watch video -- with the notebooks monitor turned off, video piped to an external monitor - the battery dies in 90 - 120min.

Is this normal? Does that mean its time to replace the battery? What sort of life should I be expecting?

You can check the battery's capacity to see if there's a problem with that. I use the free CoconutBattery. It will give you the percentage of the battery's full capacity (what it had when it shipped) that it has at this point.

It's possible that you may have some errant process running that are eating up your battery. Open Activity Monitor and click the CPU column head so that it sorts by CPU usage. Is there anything there that shouldn't be?


Failed to copy files to Macintosh_HD I am trying to copy files from the server to Macintosh_HD (/Volumes/Macintosh_HD) via scp: scp -r username@IP:directory-path .

But it is showing an error:

  Permission denied, please try again.

I am logged in as admin, and the above command is working fine while copying in /Users/home.

Kindly suggest the probable solution.

The Permission denied, please try again. is because your password for username was not correct.

If it were a file permissions issue, the error would tell you the path it was having trouble with.

$ scp user@host:/var/root/ /tmp/
scp: /var/root: Permission denied

$ scp user@host:Desktop/*.xls /var/root/
/var/root//test.xls: Permission denied


Why does USB audio out mute after about 1 minute? I am seeing the following behavior on a MacBook Air and an iMac.

We have external speakers set up that we connect to via USB > external sound card > speakers. When we initially connect, the audio works as per normal, sounds great. Then after about a minute it mutes completely, and won't turn on unless we reconnect the usb and select it again as the output. It's not iTunes or Spotify because using the volume up and down keys does not make any sound either.

The iMac started doing this 4 or 5 months ago and now it has just started on the MacBook Air. This also happens on the MacBook Air when I try to connect audio out to the external display I have connected to it, so I don't think its the sound card, I think it might be OS software related.

Sound panel screenshot:

Edit:

Some more info - when I switch between the two USB audio outputs in the sound panel, I get a short flicker of sound before it cuts out again.

Another edit:

Turning off Bluetooth and WiFi had no effect - the problem still persists

I have problems with the Alesis M1Active 520USB speakers. After an undetermined amount of time they just stop working. Switching to internal speakers works fine. A reboot fixes it...but that's painful. The easier solution I've found is this:

Change your sound source (option clicking the sound icon is the quickest method) to Internal Speakers.
Unplug the speakers
Open a terminal and run this command, which restarts the Core Audio Daemon: sudo killall coreaudiod
Plug the speakers back in

Maybe it will help you too.


Is there a way to make certain apps switch to my active screen? (Rather than other way) I use a lot of screens, and each screen I have dedicated to a specific task, generally. What happens is that I have some apps, like Finder and Terminal, that I want to follow me when I switch to them. So my dream workflow would be like follows:
I'm working on a project. I need to grab a quick file or run a quick terminal command, I cmd-tab those apps and they come to my current screen so I can run a command or drag and drop a file.

I use iTerm with a transparent full screen setup, which is soooo cool when it overlays my current screen, but usually it just drags me to a different screen. I went through iTerm's settings (and Finder's) but it didn't seem like they had built in support for this sort of thing. Is there any MacOS trickery I can use instead?

I'm on OS El Capitan 10.11.06 but I can upgrade if that'll help.

You can't bring an app to the Space you're on in a single command.

You could use one of two workarounds...

Switch to the app, then grab its window title bar & switch back to the Space you wanted - the app will follow you.
Right click the app in the Dock & select Options > All Desktops.
The app will then always be on the current Space.


Do I need to upgrade my late 2011 Macbook Pro I currently own a MacBook Pro, Late 2011, With a 2.4ghz intel core i5, 4gb memory DD3. I use my mac mostly for web browsing and iTunes, and use (bootcamp) windows for programming. Recently, I have seen my mac slow down at times. When I click an application on my dock, takes aprox. 5-10 secs to open the application. I have seen lag when having multiple applications open at once. Running Windows 8, I do not see any lag unless I am running the debugger on visual studio but that could a VS issue. One of the reasons I want to upgrade is booting time. I am constantly changing going from OSX to Windows and can take up to 30-45 seconds to boot into either operating systems.

My question is asking for your opinion of what Should I do to improve performance. Do I upgrade my current MacBook as it is still In good condition and runs relatively fine. Or do I buy a new Mac with a better processor, more ram?

TL;DR: upgrade your laptop with at least 8 GB RAM (2 x 4 GB) and a quality SSD.
I have the exact same 13" MacBook, same original specs and everything.  I got it used and immediately upgraded to 8GB RAM and a 128 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. It absolutely flies now!
I use various IDEs, Logic Pro for making music, VLC to watch videos, lots of MS Word and Excel, and sometimes have ~20 tabs open in Chromium, never have any problem with speed or system freezes. It runs like a clock, whatever I throw at it.
The cost of the upgrade was about $240 (at the time) and it gave this computer a new life. Absolutely worth it. Note:  I used an optical bay adapter to install a second hard drive and have the SSD paired with a 500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate HDD.
For your particular usage profile, the only thing you would likely notice in going from an upgraded 2011 MBP to a 2015 MBP of same specs is an increase in battery life.  Probably not worth the extra $1000, since you didn't list battery life as a problem.


Why are my command line utilities running so slowly on my Mac? I have just noticed that command line utilities such as ls (/bin/ls), touch (/usr/bin/touch), cat (/bin/cat), etc. are very slow when I run them from Terminal or iTerm on my MacBook. For example:

ls'ing while in an empty directory takes 1 second (it also takes 1 second in a non-empty directory, both with lots of files or with a few files);
touch'ing a new file takes 1 second (it also takes 1 second to touch an existing file);
cat'ing an empty file takes 1 second (there is also a 1 second lag before anything happens when I cat a non-empty file).

I have tried to diagnose this in many ways but to no avail. I do not think this is a filesystem issue, since:

I have run Disk Utility and it reports no problems.
Everything seems to be working just fine in Finder, e.g. directory contents are shown instantaneously in Finder.
I installed GNU coreutils using Homebrew and tried using gls, gtouch, gcat, etc., and all of the operations I listed above happen instantaneously when run with the GNU version instead.

Any ideas on what could be going on? Any ideas on how to fix this?

EDIT: When I reboot the computer, or try a different user, these issues go away temporarily, but after a few minutes they seem to reappear again. Another strange thing that I noticed:

$ time date
Wed Jan 28 10:07:11 PST 2015

real    0m0.151s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.003s

$ time date
Wed Jan 28 10:07:13 PST 2015

real    0m0.029s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.002s

$ time date
Wed Jan 28 10:07:16 PST 2015

real    0m1.005s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.002s

$ time date
Wed Jan 28 10:07:18 PST 2015

real    0m1.005s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.002s

This happens for all the utilities I've tried, mkdir, scp, sftp, more, cat, etc.: The first time I run it after a reboot, it's medium-slow. The second time I run it, it's sorta-fast. All subsequent times I run it, it's slow.

I actually figured out the issue today. It was caused by a piece of anti-malware software called Sourcefire AMP (Advanced Malware Protection). All of my issues went away after I disabled/uninstalled it.

I'm guessing that it was doing something like putting a delay on things in /bin, /usr/bin, etc. for "security reasons"... I'm guessing the GNU tools were not delayed because they weren't in the "blacklisted" directories.


Opening a PDF in an email I received a PDF file in an email. I successfully opened it. Later, I went back to the email, but could not access the PDF again. The first time the PDF appeared as box. The second time I opened the email the PDF appears as follows: <2016 TIAHA Charity Golf Tournament, Participants 9-18-2016.xls>

How can I access the PDF a second time?

.xls files are Microsoft Excel files, perhaps you might have opened it as a preview and it appeared as a pdf when in reality it is an excel file.

If it isn't the case, try restarting your mail client, sometimes the mail might have not loaded properly.

If it is neither of the above, provide a screenshot of how it is attached.


`brew install openvpn` vs. Tunnelblick for OpenVPN client I recently switched to Macbook pro (Mojave) and would like to have an OpenVPN client installed. In Linux systems I've been always using openvpn from within command line. I just want to know if it would work flawlessly as in macOS.

I see that everyone recommend Tunnelblick, or paid options such as Viscosity but i prefer free and open source solutions.

According to it's official website:

  Tunnelblick is a free, open source graphic user interface

When I used Tunnelblick, it worked flowlessly with MacOS. So I would recommend to go forward to run:

brew cask install tunnelblick

When you choose a software for Mac, if it's included in home brew or home brew cask package list or not is one point to consider. See if it's useful enough or popular enough to be a brew package.


Passwordless SSH between MacOS and MacOS not working I know there are many tutorials, including instructions on this forum but I find that SSH still asks me for a password.
Here is what I tried on the local machine:
ssh-keygen -t rsa                   #   Generate Key Pair, accepting all defaults
ssh-copy-id me@192.168.1.235        #   Copy to remote
ssh me@192.168.1.235                #   Still asks for password

I have also tried with a custom key:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/test.rsa
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/test.rsa.pub me@192.168.1.235
ssh-add ~/.ssh/test.rsa
ssh -i ~/.ssh/test.rsa me@192.168.1.235

In the remote host, I have changed the privileges to authorized_keys:
chmod 600 authorized_keys

I have tried all the variations to copy the key to the remote server, but they all give me the same results, and the authorized_keys file has the same new key.
Many of the tutorials are several years old, and some are for linux, so I don’t know whether things should be different.
Is there an extra step I need to take to use SSH without a password?
I am on MacOS Catalina.
Update
I have turned on verbosity, and I get something like this:
debug1: rekey in after 134217728 blocks
debug1: Will attempt key: /Users/me/.ssh/test.rsa RSA SHA256:…etc…
debug1: SSH2_MSG_EXT_INFO received
debug1: kex_input_ext_info: server-sig-algs=<ssh-ed25519,ssh-rsa,rsa-sha2-256,rsa-sha2-512,ssh-dss,ecdsa-sha2-nistp256,ecdsa-sha2-nistp384,ecdsa-sha2-nistp521>
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: /Users/mark/.ssh/test.rsa RSA SHA256:…etc… explicit
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive

If you tell your config file about the setup it will work.
Open ~/.ssh/config
Add this:
Host whateverYouWannaCallIt
  Hostname      192.168.1.235
  User          me
  IdentityFile  ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Then you can do this:
ssh whateverYouWannaCallIt

I recommend when creating the ssh key, to not use a generic one and give it a name for the machine, so one key per computer. You don't want to use the same key for more than one machine... but that's what will happen if you keep using id_rsa.
So as step one, do something more like this:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 3072 -f ~/.ssh/theServersName.rsa
...
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/theServersName.rsa.pub me@192.168.1.235

Then point IdentityFile  to the right place:
Host theServersName
  Hostname      192.168.1.235
  User          me
  IdentityFile  ~/.ssh/theServersName.rsa


How to manually uninstall Adium completely from Mac OS X? How do I manually uninstall Adium from Mac OS X?

I uninstalled Adium using "AppCleaner", which seems to have caused my "Internet Accounts" logins to malfunction (I'm guessing the uninstaller deleted necessary files that were modified by Adium). So, I don't want to use another uninstaller app to get rid of it.

I thought Adium was gone, but I now have an "Adium." Internet password in Keychain Access that reappears every time I delete it. Getting info on it tells me the location is "AdIM://Adium.".

Uninstalling Adium is similar to uninstalling most Mac OS X applications.

Note: The "Library" folder mentioned below is hidden in OS X versions 10.7 and newer.

Removing the Adium application

Most of Adium is contained within a single application bundle—that's the green duck you dragged to your Applications folder in InstallingAdium.

Make sure Adium is not running.
Drag the Adium application (Usually located in /Applications) to the trash.

Removing settings, chat transcripts, and Xtras

Adium stores all of your important preferences (including accounts—specifically, the service each account is on and each account's username), all of your transcripts of previous chats (if you didn't turn logging off in Adium's Preferences), and all Xtras you've installed in this folder:

~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/

Adium also places preferences and supporting files in the following locations (in your 'Home' folder):

~/Library/Caches/Adium/
~/Library/Caches/Adium Crash Reporter/
~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.adiumX.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumx.crashReporter.plist

Removing the Address Book scripts

Adium also installs Apple Address Book contextual menu actions via AppleScripts in the following location:

~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins
Move all of these to the Trash (preferably with Address Book not running).

Removing saved passwords

Adium stores your passwords in your Keychain. To remove them from there open Keychain Access (in your Utilities folder)
search for “service.username” (for example, “AIM.jdoe”).
select it and press the Delete (⌫) key.
Keychain Access will require your keychain password to go through with this; usually, this is the same as your Mac OS X login password. (It is not the password you're deleting.)

That said, it is safer to leave them in the Keychain, so you don't delete a password saved by another application by mistake. There is no harm in having keychain items that you aren't using.


“Untitled” item on my MacBook Pro desktop I just installed macOS El Capitan, and now I see there is an Untitled item on the Desktop:

This item contains the following directories:

I’ve never seen anything like this on the Desktop before. When I look through the Finder, I don’t see this item.

What's the issue here?

This is just your system hard drive. You didn’t provide a name when you formatted it, and so macOS gave it a default name of Untitled.

You can rename it by right-clicking it in the Finder sidebar under the heading Devices, or by opening Disk Utility and right-clicking it there. Then simply choose Rename.

You can also hide hard drives from your desktop by going into the menu bar Finder → Preferences → General and unchecking Hard disks under the heading Show these items on the desktop.


ram upgrade works in safe mode but not in normal mode I have new installed 8 gb ram in to my 2010 imac i3.

It kernel panic when booted, but worked when I start it in safe mode.

It also shows as 12 GB ram. ( 4 Gb original and 8 gb new. )

How can I make it work in normal mode ?

First thing is to simply remove and reseat the chips. Restart, zapping the P-RAM as you go - might be surprised to find it's all okay.


How can I downgrade mac to 10.9.4? I don't really like OS X 10.9.5, it has many problems with SelfControl, can I down grade it to 10.9.4?

Upgrade:
I can't install 10.9.4, here is the error message

Generally speaking it is not possible to un-install a Mac O/S update. Actually there is nothing general about it at all, it's just not possible. Apple does not offer an uninstall option for O/S updates and patches. Or anything else for that matter.

Which means that any time you update your system you run the risk of obsoleting some software on your Mac.

There are a couple of ways to proceed, none of them are particularly good. You can contact the developer and see if there is an update on the way, or you can back-up your system, wipe the drive and re-install the operating system to the previous revision assuming you have the relevant installers and updaters. If you clone your drive all you have to do is re-install the O/S, the migration assistant will then copy your files and Apps from the clone.

Personally I recommend anyone wait before applying any O/S update to verify their critical apps work with it. There is no real benefit to being the first to apply an update. Conversely there are multiple benefits to waiting. Not the least of which is letting everyone else be your beta testers.

I also recommend you use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone the entire HD **before* any O/S upgrades. Yeah it's a PITA but allows you to "revert" an upgrade if it breaks something.


Can't write to known_hosts I reinstalled my system and recovered the known_hosts file with Time Machine. And now I have no longer permission to write in said file.

I have set Read & Write for me,staff and everybody on said file. But that doesn't change anything.

What could be the problem there?

Output:

-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 username  staff  17773 14 Mär 14:44 known_hosts

Output 2:

-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 mtdesign  staff  17773 14 Mär 14:44 known_hosts
com.apple.TextEncoding     11
com.apple.finder.copy.source.checksum#N     4
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot     50
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot     50
com.apple.quarantine       23

Given that the file has extended attributes and on a fresh install doesn't I'd start by removing them, xattr -c ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

When you say you can't write to the file, do you mean directly or via ssh adding a host? I'd try cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts to make sure you can open it. Then you might try cp ~/.ssh/known_hosts ~/Documents/known_hosts and echo "Delete this line" >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts to see how that goes.


Macbook Air how to setup proxy for iTunes and App Store? I am confused how to setup proxy for iTunes and App Store on Macbook Air.

I have noticed that Safari can connect to the Internet through proxy, but for iTunes and App Store, I do not know how it works.

Can you help me with this? Thanks.

The Change Settings… button in Safari > Preferences… > Advanced opens the global Proxies sheet. Changes made here affect every app that uses that connection.

Alternatively the sheet can be opened by opening System Preferences.app, selecting Network, then Advanced…, then Proxies.


How can I use a keyboard shortcut to go to my Dropbox folder How can I change the Finder keyboard shortcut command + shift + D to open my Dropbox folder instead of the Desktop folder.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > select Application Shortcuts in the left column > click the "+" button > Application = Finder, Menu Title = Dropbox, Keyboard Shortcut = whatever you like > click Add

test it out. worked great for me from Finder

Note that this uses the Finder's "Go to > Recent Folders" Submenu. If the Folder isn´t in the List (and there's no way to keep it there), you won't be able to jump to it.


What is this icon on my mac Does anyone know this icon? I can't get rid of it.

I don't recognize that, but you can usually figure out any menu bar item by
clicking it or option clicking it. You can usually option drag any Apple item out of the menu bar to remove it:

How can I get rid of this icon in my menu bar?

If not in this specific case, go download this menu bar tool and start digging into what it tells you about that item.

http://www.macbartender.com
Where that icon on my OS X menu bar comes from?

Alternatively, you could isolate this to a user process or system process following this guide:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204772

Once you know if it's a system or user program, you can look at all the places where apps start and figure what software was installed to make that icon. You could save all work and make a system backup and then start killing user processes in Activity Monitor one by one that belong to your user to see which process makes that icon. It's likely not anything from Apple, so simply uninstalling all third party software would be a last resort.


How do I disable all Source Mapping in Safari DevTools? In a minified jQuery file I'm using, this snippet at the end: //# sourceMappingURL=jquery.min.map is causing an annoying 404 error to appear in the Developer Console on every refresh.

I don't have the .min.map file and don't intend to get it.

Is there a way I can make Safari DevTools to ignore these annotations and never complain about missing Source Maps? I rarely need that feature.

As far as I know, there is no 'disable source map' option in safari.

I'm also not interested in these red lines in my console log. And tackled the problem from the other end, by letting the server give empty 200 responses for .map files

For nginx it's done by adding the next line to your config

location ~ \.map$ {return 200;}

I know this is dirty, but hey it works...


Quicktime 10 - export in original size, not 4k, 1080p, 720p etc? I do a lot of non full size screen recordings, e.g., they could be small such as 320x240 or in completely non-standard sizes and proportions like 1500x300. I want to save them using HEVC (rather than the default H.264).

In QTP HEVC is only available using File -> Export but that way I can only use a couple of standard dimensions (4k, 1080p, 720p and 480p).

How can I use both HEVC and a non-standard format in QTP10?

There is no way to export in any other sizes other than 4K, 1080P, 720P or 480P, according to this post here (it's in Mandarin, but I translated it) You could, however, export it in a higher resolution (such as 4K or 1080P) and then use another program to save it in your preferred recording.

Why do you need these strangely sized videos, by the way?


What is the spinning circle on IPhone data Does the spinning circle when accessing data from the internet on an IPhone mean you are using data?  It seems it's always spinning non stop on Facebook.  I am concerned this indicates data usage.

Yes it does.  To see how much, or to prevent data access to certain apps when on mobile/cellular visit Settings > Mobile (or Cellular) and scroll to the list of apps at the bottom, here you can see what is enabled for mobile access, and how much data has been used since the last reset point.

You can reset the stats back to zero from the same page any time you like.  This is useful if you know for example that your Data billing cycle starts on the 17th, and you can set yourself a reminder to reset it on that date.

Note that the above is only really useful on iOS7, you don't say what version you use, if you use an older version the same rough idea applies only it's not split by individual applications, and you can't get granular detail or control.


Connection error when remotely managing 10.9 OS X Server (SSL Handshake) I am managing a Mac Mini with OS X Server (10.9) at the office and I got everything running perfectly. However, since some days ago I have lost the ability to connect remotely to the server using the server.app from my computer. I am still able to connect through screen sharing though (locally running server app works fine).

The system logs throw an SSL handshake error every time I try to remotely admin the server. I have looked through here and apple discussions but found no one with that same error code. It seems to me like a certificate problem but I have not been able to figure it out. All other services work great (file sharing, profile manager, ssh, etc.)

  Dec 19 10:04:52 server.XXX.private servermgrd[80208]: Got error -9805 for SSLHandshake  remote address is 192.168.XXX.XXX:34545
  Dec 19 10:04:52 server.XXX.private servermgrd[80208]: Got error -9805 for SSLHandshake  remote address is 192.168.XXX.XXX:34801
  Dec 19 10:04:52 server.XXX.private servermgrd[80208]: Got error -9805 for SSLHandshake  remote address is 192.168.XXX.XXX:35057

Any ideas?

Ok, so after two weeks of not using this feature I tried again and it has now worked (not sure why). The log file says:

Jan 3 09:13:14 server.XXX.private collabd[329]: [CSUserSessionServiceBase.m:48 4398000 +0ms] Detected Magic Superuser Auth Token –


Resizing Keynote Slides I received a 4:3 Keynote presentation that had been changed to 16:9 (adding white bars to left and right) and then changed back to 4:3 (adding white bars to top and bottom).

Now all my content is basically shrunk to 75% of it's original size with a white box around everything.

Is there a way to resize the slides with out resizing the content or resize all the content up? (I have 84 slides, I can't do it one by one)

No, this is currently not possible in the app. You can notify Apple that you would like this feature implemented using their Keynote feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/keynote.html


How to find duplicate lines of code in Xcode When I am making applications in Xcode, I sometimes find that I write duplicate code.

Is there a way in Xcode to find duplicate code in all files? I would like to know this because I would put the code into a function instead.

Not in Xcode itself, but there are third party solutions. They both can analyse Swift code.

PMD, it includes CPD, the copy-paste-detector.
jscpd, a copy/paste detector for programming source code


How to stop window order changing on multiple monitor setup in Mavericks? I've been having a problem since upgrading to Mavericks. I have two monitors and I have Excel on Monitor 1 (M1) and Thunderbird on Monitor 2 (M2), if I open TextEdit and move it to M1, then CMD+Tab back to Thunderbird, Excel moves above TextEdit on M1 despite it not being the window that just took focus.

How can I stop this?

There's a check-box that will turn this on/off. System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on recent use


iMac causes WiFi interference / outage I have an Apple Airport Extreme WiFi router and three wireless clients (iPhone, MacBook Pro & iMac).

The iPhone and a MacBook Pro are connected to the WiFi network and everything works fine. As soon as I join the WiFi with the iMac, all three lose Internet connectivity and the ping times for external sites go to ~100,000ms at which point the network becomes unusable.

As soon as I shut the WiFi on the iMac off, the network returns to normal. What's interesting is that my WiFi base station has two SSIDs, one private network one guest network. It doesn't matter which network I join with the iMac, both cause the same problem.

I had the same wifi issues with two iMacs, one iPhone, one android... the iMacs were the problem. This worked for me:

Resolving Stubborn Wi-Fi Connection Problems in Mac OS X

I hope it does for you.

Cheers


Floor Plan software for Mac Is there a free program that can make floor plans on a Mac? Specifically, I'm looking for something that's fairly easy to use. Doesn't need to have a ton of features, just shouldn't be a headache.

You could try Lucidchart. I think it's pretty close to what you're looking for. Free, not a huge selection of shapes when it comes to floor plans, but very easy to use for making an office desk plan or something like that.


How can I find out what is taking up space on my hard drive? I have a tiny hard drive - 128 GB. I am not that technical. I see that other files under storage is taking up say 40 GB of space. My boyfriend got me a WD NAS hard drive and I was able to move my photos from iPhoto, and iTunes, there to free up some space.
I accidentally deleted iPhoto so in order to install it.
My boyfriend showed me a script that showed the size of some big directories.

.3G   /Applications/iMovie 9.0.9/iMovie 9.0.9.app/Contents/Resources
1.3G  /Applications/iMovie 9.0.9/iMovie 9.0.9.app/Contents
1.3G  /Applications/iMovie 9.0.9/iMovie 9.0.9.app
1.3G  /Applications/iMovie 9.0.9
2.0G  /Applications/iMovie.app/Contents
2.0G  /Applications/iMovie.app
5.3G  /Applications/Install OS X Yosemite.app/Contents/SharedSupport
5.3G  /Applications/Install OS X Yosemite.app/Contents
5.3G  /Applications/Install OS X Yosemite.app
1.1G  /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources
1.3G  /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents
1.3G  /Applications/iPhoto.app
1.0G  /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office
1.2G  /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011

Can i delete the iMovie directory and maybe download it at a later time?
Is there a better way to figure out where all the space is being taken up?
Like lets say I had an 18 GB zip file saved on my desktop. Theoretically that would be under the other space category but OS X isn't helping make me aware of that file. How do I find big files like that? Mind you i don't have a 18 GB zip file sitting around but I am trying to find if I have any big files sitting around to delete.

I highly recommend using:  http://daisydiskapp.com

.. Once downloaded and installed they have a "Test Drive" option you click that lets you use it for free.  Please note that to see all files on your HD that all users own, you will want to use the "Scan as Administrator" option, which will prompt you to enter your password.

There is also:

Disk Inventory X - http://www.derlien.com
Disk Map - Google for "Disk Map OS X" ( Commercial software )


iPhone Remote app and Apple TV I have my Remote app set up on my iPhone to work with my Apple TV.  This was easy because my Apple TV is linked with my Apple ID Account (which is obviously identified with both my phone and my computer).  When I went to set my wife's Remote app up on her iPhone, I get a message that says "Turn on Home Sharing in iTunes on your computer or on Apple TV using the account [Name of Wife's Account]."

On the Apple TV, Home Sharing is on and I still get this message.

My wife does not have an Apple computer.  Only an iPad.  She does not use iTunes at all.

How does this work if she does not use iTunes?

Apple TV has Home sharing turned on and when I go into the Remote app on her phone and go into settings, it says Home Sharing is turned on.

I just want to link her phone up.  How do I do this and why do I have to?  Shouldn't there just be a way to use her phone as a remote without making it a part of my Home Sharing network?

Is home sharing activated for the same account? (If she uses a different apple ID, then the two devices won't bind).

In that case, pair the remote via the apple tv's settings (under general i believe)


Finder sidebar icons gone After a reboot caused by an empty battery, my Finder’s sidebar icons are just gone. I tried a few reboots, re-launching Finder, but I can’t fix it.

Try resetting Finder by running the following Terminal command:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist && killall Finder

This will reset all Finder preferences back to default.


What iOS Twitter apps support custom API URLs? I recently read about the WordPress.com Twitter API released in 2009, and I want to test it out.

The API requires you to use a Twitter client that supports custom API URLs.  The example iOS application that they listed was Tweetie2, but it's dead now.

Are there any other iOS app that allow custom API URLs to that I can test this out?

Tweetbot for iOS does. It relies on the "tweetbot://" prefix. Using it without a suffix launches the app. But you can also tack on things like "timeline" to load up a users own timeline (the full command would be as follows tweetbot:///timeline). Other commands are tweetbot:///post?text=hello which will tweet "hello" or tweetbot://cksum/post which will tweet with a username (in this case "cksum"). Others include things like search or pull up a user's profile.


Accept/Maybe/Decline Missing in Apple Mail I'm using Apple mail with a fresh install of MacOS and I'm missing the Accept/Maybe/Decline buttons on calendar invites. My company uses a Exchange 2013 server and some other users do see the buttons. For me, I just see an email with an attached .ics file for the same invites.

Expected behavior seen by some people....

How my mail app shows it...

Open the Contacts app, select your own email address in the list of contacts. In the menu on top of the screen, go to "Card" -> "Make this my card". Reload calendar. Then it should work, you will get a notification popup with accept/decline buttons. (I just had the same problem, on a Mac running Yosemite)
Source


Can Pages export .doc document to .xml? Can I do this using Pages? It's basically a simple table made in MS Office Word (.doc) which I need to convert to xml / html, insert some html input blocks (there are cells which are left empty for data input). I remember doing this with MS Office Word (the exporting), but it was a long time ago, I lost the file and now I need it again, but I have the original .doc one on my mail, so I just need to export it once again. So is it possible do this with pages or do I need to do it on someone's PC (I don't have Office for OSX)?

It doesn't appear the Pages can export to XML (here's the exported formats: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4641). I did come across a website (http://www.office-converter.com/Convert-to-XML) that converts .doc files to .xml files. I tested it against a .doc file I exported to .xml from Word and the documents look the same.


HOW can i enable my "ipad" airplane mode BEFORE i unlock it? i just read the article,

  Possible to access/restore past versions of Notes in iCloud?

And someone's answer seems great:

  Assuming you have 2 devices, let's say an iPhone and iPad, there is only one thing you can do:

delete something on your iPhone
as soon as you notice, enable airplane mode on your iPad
unlock iPad & open notes
copy note to somewhere else
turn off airplane mode
copy note back to notes

So my question is: HOW can i enable my "ipad" airplane mode BEFORE i unlock it? I didn't even know that was possible! Please help-- i need to recover my icloud note from 2 hours ago.

much appreciated!

i am rather "low-tech" BTW

You can’t for a couple reasons.

Networking works while the device is locked
You can’t operate the device until it’s unlocked

Your best bet is to power off the device immediately and take it to where there is no WiFi to which you are pre-connected (power off that WiFi that are set up or move away from them all). Also, consider if you have cellular service, disable that or remove the SIM or go away from coverage (in a faraday cage if you can) before you unlock the device to make changes.


Can I safely remove these MOV files from the OSX SSD? It is my 'Macintosh HD Info':

However from time to time I get this 'There is not enough disk space available to install the product.'.

So I really want to free up some space.

I also use the 'CleanMyMac 3' to identify the files to remove.

It suggests these large files:

My questions are

How can I make OSX to start the purging process?
I hesitate to remove those MOV files because I am not sure if it will also remove them from my iCloud Photos library. The warning from CleanMyMac is quite dire: "Are you sure you want to permanently remove "IMG_3627.MOV"? You can't undo this action."

I certainly do not want to remove it from my photo library. I just want to remove the local copy so I can free more space.

So is there a safe way to reclaim the local space without removing the MOV files from icloud?

EDIT:

I have already used the 'Optimise Mac Storage' option

If CleanMyMac is going to remove the files from their present location, then yes, they will be removed from your Photos Library.

You would be better off going to "About This Mac" under the apple menu, and on the Storage tab, click "Manage". Then click on "Store in iCloud", and select Photos.

As a general rule, I avoid all apps that claim to 'clean', 'purge', 'sweep' or otherwise perform housekeeping, as they often can have unintended consequences.


My keyboard can only produce 95 characters? I have heard from multiple sources that a standard QWERTY keyboard can produce 96 different characters, not counting the option key characters. Here is a picture of my keyboard:

I highlighted in red the alphabet keys, which can produce 52 characters–26 lowercase and 26 uppercase letters. In blue is the symbolic keys, which can produce 22 characters–11 buttons, two for each. In green are the numbers, which can produce 20 characters–10 numbers with 10 symbols. Orange keys can't produce any letters. And there's also the space bar, delete, and return. Only the space bar can produce a character, a space.

In total, that is 52+22+20+1=95 characters? What is the missing character? The best guess to me is enter/return, although that doesn't really make a character to me.

I have a Macbook Air.

There are two different kinds of "standard" keyboards, ANSI (like in your picture) and ISO.  The former is sold in the US, the latter in Europe.

References you have seen to 96 characters are presumably for the ISO version. It has one key more than ANSI version, which is located to the left of the z. Your keyboard is ANSI and has 95.

To see the different kinds of keyboards made by Apple, go to

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201794


SongBeamer Print pdf I need export the songs of SongBeamer with the accords as PDF on an MacBook. On Windows I can press Print and then select pdf as print options. with the MacBook I can't do the same. I have add an printscreen of the program. Do someone know how to print as PDF in SongBeamer?
Thanks in advantage

Now after all the work. I will thank you all for the helping. I have contact the vendor. He have released a new version of SongBeamer just for this case. Here the Link: Download (today is the: 06.01.2017) Just in case please go to the website and watch out for a newer version. If there is one then download it. Probably it will be more stable.

Don't know whether I did something special, but if you change the name of the printer there is an option to print to PDF.


Alter inertia scrolling behaviour in Mountain Lion I like how with inertia scrolling you can swipe harder to scroll further down the page, but what I don't like is how the scrolling speeds up quite a bit as you scroll. This was not the behavior in Lion, and it is causing me headaches while scrolling around my text editor trying to edit code as it will consistently scroll right past where I'm trying to go. I can't find any settings for this, any ideas?

There no official specific settings to this, although with command line changes you can turn inertial settings on and off full stop.  Unfortunately, especially if you like the inertial scrolling in part, the beth way forward for you is to understand how it works better.

I've nicked this sentence from the ArsTechnica review, as there is no point in re-inventing the wheel:

  Finally, Apple has added iOS-style accelerated scrolling to Mountain Lion. The first three swipes on the trackpad scroll as they did in Lion, but on the fourth swipe, the distance traveled within the document greatly increases. This magnified ratio of finger movement to scrolling distance continues as long as the user keeps swiping repeatedly.

If you like inertial scrolling to a point, then perhaps a workaround is to only use it to a point.  Stopping after 3 scrolls will prevent you from triggering the increased scrolling acceleration.

It's not exactly what you want to hear, but sometimes you need to work within the confines of the system if you wish to pick and choose which bits of scrolling behaviour you wish to apply or not.  Perhaps further preference options will show up in the future (likely as command line changes), but overall you can probably imagine why they have made this change, because it's a good one for most (non-coding) users.


Synchronize with Google+ Photos Im trying to sync my photos on google plus using my iphone, because i had more free space on it.

How do it sync in timely manner  - auto sync.

You will need to install the Google+ app onto your phone.

According to Google's directions:

Open the  Google+ app > touch the Menu icon > Gear icon > Camera and Photos > Auto Backup > Toggle On or Off

Allow Google+ to access your photos: Phone settings > Privacy > Photos > Google+ > toggle the setting ON or OFF


Mail folder structure: where are most recent messages? I've got a major cluster-fart on one of my IMAP accounts that's being hammered by bounce messages as backscatter. Over the weekend my Mail on 10.7.4 crashed with a [Crashed Thread:  20  -[MailApp _doBackgroundFetch:]].

Reading up on Google for when Mail unexpectedly crashes 30 sec after loading that I should find the message that's causing it to crash and remove it. The trouble is finding it given I have several mailboxes. And I know where the ~/Library/Mail/ folder is. My problem, after having mail since pre-Jaguar days, my folder structure is like the below:

Bundles >

Mail >

____Mail Lost+Found >

____V2 >

____ ____Several mail account folders >

Mail Lost+Found >

____Several mail account folders >

SpamSieve >

V2 >

____Several mail account folders >

Of course, I'm using SpamSieve, but this crashes before and after its latest update. And the IMAP folders of each account is scattered as indicated. OK, which one? So I get Info on each of the folders listed above looking for a date within the last two days. Nope, the most recent is several months ago.
I've read the V2 is Lion Mail, but as you see above I have more than one.

My question, is after all this time, which folder does what purpose and what files in them should I start yanking to pull the most recent messages out?

If Mail stumbles across a specific messages when accessing the mail server via POP or IMAP it might help to remove the offending message directly on the server. The easiest approach in this case is to access the mailbox via webmail (at least if your provider offers this). Alternatively installing another mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) and using it to delete the offending mail might help as well.


Using Ditto across a windows network I am trying to use the ditto command after connecting to a PC across a network with a shared C drive. I try:

ditto -V smb://10.XXX.XXX.XXX/C/users/john.smithy/documents /volumes/"macintosh hd"/users/john.smithy/documents

but I get an error that the path can't be found!! Even though I am connected and can navigate via Finder.

Please help this hapless Windows kiddie make this command work.

You have to use proper capitalization because paths in arguments are case-sensitive and I'm not sure if the double quotes are set properly to escape the blank. So try instead:

ditto -V smb://10.XXX.XXX.XXX/C/Users/john.smithy/Documents /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/john.smithy/Documents

or

ditto -V smb://10.XXX.XXX.XXX/C/Users/john.smithy/Documents "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/john.smithy/Documents"

This doesn't apply if one or both of the "Documents" folder really have the name "documents". At least the standard OS X volumes and users folder have the names Volumes and Users!


Super and admin user in OS X Superuser account is disabled by default in OS X (Mavericks). But if you run sudo -l you will come to know that the admin user can execute all superuser commands. Then what is the point of disabling superuser? What are the actual differences between super user and admin user?

But if you run sudo -l you will come to know that the admin user can execute all superuser commands. Then what is the point of disabling superuser?

Any user that can escalate their privilidges to root can execute all superuser commands, and any member of the admin group on OS X can escalate to root privilidges using sudo. Generally, without escalating to root privileges, a user cannot execute commands reserved to root, so you may be reading more into sudo -l than is there.

There is only one root account, one superuser. The point of disabling it is so that no one can gain access to the actual root account, they can only gain root privilidges by using sudo. Sudo offers some benefits: all attempts to authenticate with sudo are logged, and all commands run using sudo are logged; sudo can be restricted with user permissions using the /private/etc/sudoers file; sudo can be run using an admin users' password, so they don't need to know the root password; sudo will also eventually time out, and require authentication again.

I found a very nice article here on the benefits of sudo and how it compares to using su or logging in as root. The article concerns Ubuntu, but the basic information remains the same for OS X and any BSD or UNIX flavor.


In Terminal, how to erase typed command quickly? In Terminal, let's say I type a long command, but before I press Enter, I decide that actually I don't want to run this command, and want to run another new command instead.

In such case, how to quickly remove everything I have typed, so that I can start typing the new command?

Pressing Delete for a few long seconds is not a good solution, I am looking for something faster.

You can cancel current command with ⌃ CTRL+c.
You can clear command to the beginning with ⌃ CTRL+u.
To clear line after the cursor press ⌃ CTRL+K.

Here are some great answers on StackOverflow.


Location of system file that connects roles with apps RCDefaultApp can change so-called macOS "roles", eg. change the handler of the mailto: protocol. This is stored in the following file:

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices/com.apple.launchservices.secure.plist

LSHandlers = (
...
    LSHandlerRoleAll = "com.apple.mail";
    LSHandlerURLScheme = mailto;
...

Question: In which file in the filesystem is it defined how the value set in LSHandlerRoleAll, e.g. com.apple.mail, is connected to the actual program that is run, eg. "Mail.app"?

Put differently, what is the full path to the system files that RCDefaultApp manipulates?

The full path to the system file that RCDefaultApp manipulates is:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices/com.apple.launchservices.secure.plist

(i.e. this is the file you already mentioned in your question)

This is the actual file that Finder queries (through LaunchServices) to find the global preference for whichs applications are associated with certain types of files.

You seem to be thinking that RCDefaultApp manipulates some other file, which mentions explictly "Mail.app" (i.e. the actually app folder for the application). This is not so.

Instead Mail.app actually provides this information to the operating system by way of its Info.plist file inside the application folder. This is scanned when the application is opened, so that the system knows about the application itself and its supported file types.

Inside the Info.plist file for Mail.app, you'll find that it defines the "CFBundleIdentifier" for Mail.app to be "com.apple.mail". This is how the information from the LaunchServices preferences is "linked" to the actual Mail.app.

Additionally, it defines supported content types inside Info.plist within the CFBundleDocumentTypes, where LSItemContentTypes includes for example com.apple.mail.emlx, com.apple.mail.mbox, etc.

This ensures for example that even if you move Mail.app to a different folder, the system will still be able to start Mail.app when you double-click an emlx file in Finder for example.


Prevent automatic removal of the Spotlight index due to low disk space I am guessing that when disk space runs low, it automatically deletes the Spotlight index to make room for virtual memory. Then when space becomes available it reindexes. But I'm not sure about that.

Since my MacBook Air SSD is only 128 GB, I often work with little free disk space and the re-indexing drives me crazy.

I tried to disable Spotlight, remove its index and reindex.
Also check filesystem and repair permissions. In diagnostic reports (~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/) nothing about reindexing is mentioned.

You can say that I should control the amount of free space but also should be another way. Disabling Spotlight isn't the option.

crosspost: https://discussions.apple.com/message/17321018#17321018

mdutil is the command line tool that controls Spotlight.

Looking at the mdutil man page, there doesn't appear to be an option to make the index persistent regardless of disk space.  There is mention that "indexing may be delayed due to low disk space or other conditions".

One idea that comes to mind is that you can take away write permissions on your index files for all users, this should prevent them from being deleted, but it would also prevent them from being updated, and a static index is likely not desirable, and could cause errors.  This might be worthy of testing, but I don't expect it would go very well.

It doesn't appear that Spotlight is designed to work in the way you are looking for.  I would suggest submitting a feature request to Apple.


How to force Thunderbolt-ethernet connection when switching networks without restarting computer? I have a thunderbolt to ethernet cable on a MacBookPro Retina on Lion.

Sometimes the thunderbolt to ethernet connection does not work. It seems to occur when I switch network locations (e.g., I move from my home network to my work network). Restarting the computer fixes the problem, however, I don't want to have to restart my computer.

How can I force thunderbolt to ethernet to connect without restarting the computer?

More details:

Under network settings, there is a red dot and not connected on "Thund...thernet".
It further says:

Status: Cable Unplugged
Either the cable for Thunderbolt Ethernet is
not plugged in or the device at the other end
is not responding.

Under system information - thunderbolt it states

Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter:

  Vendor Name:  Apple, Inc.
  Device Name:  Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
  Vendor ID:    0x1
  Device ID:    0x8003
  Device Revision:  0x1
  Route String: 3
  Firmware Version: 5.5
  Port:
  Status:   Connected
  Link Status:  2
  Port Micro Firmware Version:  0.0.8

Under Network - Thunderbolt Ethernet it states:

Thunderbolt Ethernet:

  Type: Ethernet
  Hardware: Ethernet
  BSD Device Name:  en1
  IPv4:
  Configuration Method: DHCP
  IPv6:
  Configuration Method: Automatic
  Proxies:
  Exceptions List:  *.local, 169.254/16
  FTP Passive Mode: Yes
  Service Order:    0

I had this problem, too, and an Apple Support call and Genius Bar visit later, I had the answer: if you're using Network Locations that preexist your Thunderbolt display, it doesn't seem to auto-add the possibility of "Display Ethernet" to your available network ports. To solve this, either:

Create a new Location in your Network system preferences. It will finally detect the "Display Ethernet" and use it. It'll slowly change from disconnected to No IP to green-is-for-go.

or

Fix an existing Location by clicking the + to add a port and choosing Display Ethernet. It'll slowly change from disconnected to No IP to green-is-for-go.


iOS 10 face recognition - Merge people? My photo app shows two separate sets of the same person, but iOS thinks they are different people, even if the name is the same. Is there any way I can manually "merge" two separate people?

Ok, found it: in the Photos app...
- go to "People"
- Click on "Select" in the upper right corner of the screen
- Then click on the "Merge" button in the lower right corner of the screen.


What does this mean? "((•))" Downloaded song and played it for months. It then stopped playing and the ((•)) symbol appears to the left of the song title.

What does this mean, and how can I get may song playing again?

That symbol indicates the "song" is an online stream rather than a file downloaded to your computer. This happens if you add a URL to your library rather than downloading the file and adding that.

So you must have been streaming the song each time you played it and now the stream has been turned off. You obviously need to find and download an actual copy of the song file to be able to play it again.


If I replace my MacBook Pro hard drive can I reinstall OS X using Internet Recovery? I have a MacBook Pro early 2011 and my hard drive is failing, I was wondering once I replace the hard drive, is reinstalling the OS X as easy as turning it on and booting into Internet Recovery, formatting the drive, and just reinstalling OS X?

I just did this yesterday (I have a slightly older MBP) and wasn't able to boot into Internet Recovery mode without mounting the old drive using a USB sled.

According to Apple your Mac should support Internet Recovery with a firmware update:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202313

If for some reason you can't access Internet Recovery the alternative is you can mount the new drive externally and use Internet Recovery to install OSX on the new drive before swapping them but the install process will be a bit slower since the drive is external.

Hopefully you're planning on installing an SSD, I installed one and it made a huge improvement on the speed of my Late 2009 MBP.


Internet Accounts in System Preferences has multiple entries for iCloud...why? The two that are active and the one that is inactive have the same email address gchung@me.com. Also, I cannot get rid of the Game Center account, which is also under gchung@me.com. I'm not sure what's going on here...

(edit: I've updated the images)

I'm inclined to leave things alone since everything seems to be working fine, but it is a little bit disconcerting.

That's very unusual, perhaps you have two separate Apple ID accounts (and thus iCloud accounts). You can check this by clicking on each one and see what email address is listed on the right. Perhaps macOS allows you to login to the same iCloud account twice..

See if the checkmarks for what services are checked. If Mail is checked, see if you have multiple email accounts set up in the sidebar of your Mail application. If you don't but the mail checkmark is ticked on both accounts, it is pretty likely you can delete the duplicate account.

In theory, if they are the same account there would be no harm in deleting one of them by selecting one and clicking the delete "-" button at the bottom of that window. Although, I'm pretty sure some wise guy once said that if something works - don't touch it. Let me know how you go.


How can I play local multiplayer games on Apple TV I would like to play multiplayer games such as Beach Buggy Racing on my Apple TV 4th generation. I wonder if I need to buy an MFi game controller, such as the Steelseries Nimbus or if I can just use iPhones as remotes together with the TV remote?

I've read that up to two MFi game controllers are supported. However, Beach Buggy Racing seems to support up to four players in split screen. Has that limit been lifted or would we need to use a combination of iPhones, Siri Remote and iPhones as controllers to get to four?

I've reached out to Vector Unit Support. Here is what they had to say:

  Currently you need any combination of up to 1 Siri remote and up to 3
  MFi gamepads. You can't use the iPhone or iPad as a second controller
  at this time.

I would note that it is possible to use an iPhone as remote, using the Apple TV Remote app, but that will go instead of the Siri remote.

I will also add that the scenario of coupling a Siri remote with an iPhone controller is possible in Crossy Road, but not using the Apple TV Remote app. Instead they've created a feature inside their iPhone app that allows the iPhone to control a player in the TV app.

And finally, it seems the answer to the limitation of two MFi game controllers has been lifted by Apple at some point after the above statement was made back in 2015.


is my iphone spying on my macbook? The Bluetooth indicator in the Macbook's menu bar is indicating a connection, but does not list a connected device in the Bluetooth preferences. system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType shows it is my iPhone running services:

PAN Network Access Profile, AVRCP Device, Handsfree Gateway, Audio Source, MAP MAS-iOS, Wireless iAP, AVRCP Device, Phonebook

There is no indication of any bluetooth connection in the iphone's bluetooth menu, and i never asked it to do any of this.

What's going on?  Is it possible this is malware?

it is normal.your devices won't actually use this e.g. for bt file exchange but when using services/features like continuity/handoff etc you will see they are somehow connected (transferring data).if both of your devices have the same iCloud account, then this is it.no need to worry.


TextEdit problem after inst. Catalina After installing Catalina, my in-built TextEdit doesn't work anymore, neither by clicking the icon nor from the application. It says
The application “TextEdit.app” is not open anymore.

Please advise me.
Thanks

The typical fix is to choose log out from the Apple menu when this happens.

This closes out your work more cleanly than trying to force quit apps. Also, it has the benefit of forcing the OS to name any apps that are not responding or have work to be saved.

Next, restart the os and possibly test making a new user account. Let us know how it goes...


Can't type ' / ' (slash) after the letter ' l ' (ell) in Terminal, makes 'l' with stroke character 'ł' When I type any word ending with an 'l' (ell, like "local") and then press the / key, the 'l' is replaced with another symbol and the slash, '/', is omitted. How can I deactivate that function?

This looks like the behavior of some very old Mac fonts (Palatino was one of them) where you could make the character l with stroke (used in Polish and elsewhere) by typing such a sequence.  Try changing your font.  If this is in fact the cause of the problem,  you should get rid of the font that does this, which should not be on any modern mac.


MBP Battery normal but won't charge, pro is now glitchy and slow I've got a MacBook Pro (mid 2012 using Majave) which was bought reconditioned 2 years ago. It's been great, no issues. I updated a search engine app (Ecosia) while the battery was charging, once full I decided to it shut down as I don't recall the last time I did this. It wouldn't turn on after this so I plugged the Magsafe back in, turned it on and it started up....

Now it's showing battery at 0% - Magsafe light is on green and icon shows "Battery not charging"
"Power source: Power adapter". It's taking ages to boot up (though all the usual things happen) and i'm often getting the spinning wheel, which never happened before, it was always quick and responsive.

I've done the following with no change to the above issues:

Deleted the app I updated thinking it might be that
Bought a new Magsafe (light is the same)
Cleaned/checked the MagSafe connection
Updated Safari & security update (not yet Catalina though)
Scanned using Malwarebytes - 0 threats detected

I have 360GB left of 480GB & only use Safari, Mail & Word.

The battery shows 334 cycles - well below the 1000 it could take before needing replacement.

I've spent hours googling all the possibilities and now I'm here. Now we're all in Covid 19 lockdown meaning taking it to someone isn't an option so ......Can anyone help please?

Your battery is dead.

I’ve written a short guide to diagnosing a battery problem which you’ve already done.  A battery charging or not won’t have anything to do with the OS installed, how much space you have or even if there’s a virus. Remember, your battery will charge when the machine is off.  So, while checking that info doesn’t hurt, it’s not going to help solve the issue.

There’s one other thing and that’s to check the charger itself.

For more info see the following posts:

Mid 2012 MBP shuts down claiming no power with charge at 30% or 40% or more
Can a low-wattage adapter fully recharge the battery of a turned off MacBook?
3rd Gen Macbook pro randomly suspends

One last thing you can try is to disconnect the battery and try to run your Mac. Yes, you won’t be able to disconnect your charger, but it will help you diagnose the battery issue by removing it from the equation.


How to do after fsck_hfs fails to repair "invalid directory count" after 3 attempts multiple times? I have an OsX installation that doesn't get past the apple logo.  The progress bar loads and then shuts down midway.
I have rebooted as single user mode and noticed that /sbin/fsck -fy complained that the disk was full.  So I deleted some fairly large files and reclaimed > 15% of disk space and ran:
fsck_hfs -rft /dev/rdisk0s2
Now, I get the following error messages:
Executing fsck_hfs (version 305.10.1).
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
The volume name is Macintosh
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file
Rebuilding catalog B-tree
Rechecking volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy
Invalid volume directory count (It should be 136231 instead of 136234) Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume
Rechecking volume
....
....
The volume Macintosh could not be repaired after 3 attempts.

I have tried rerunning fsck_hfs several times, but it does not change the message.  The invalid directory count remains.
I've tried booting the repair disk to run DiskUtility, but not surprisingly, this has the same error information as well, with the additional error message:
File system check exit code is 8
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as File system verify or repair failed.

How can I fix this?  How do I get fsck to rebuild/reset the directory count?  I cannot believe that the installation is toast simply due to an invalid directory count?

This would be the kind of task I'd be throwing at one of the high-end 'fixit' apps, Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro etc. Both of these can in essence rebuild the directory from scratch, then replace the old one.
Disk Warrior was always the king of this, but can't yet handle APFS. TTP 14 can handle APFS & seems to handle it well so far [I've only recently got the upgrade].
idk if any of them do a free trial.


can't hear FaceTime on Macbook Pro Retina Mid-2015 I can't hear people when they FaceTime me, of course at first I thought they had muted themselves but actually the call works perfectly on my iPhone 7.

I guess this is a problem with the FaceTime app on my laptop, but I don't find any sound settings in its preferences.

The audio options are available in Facetime in a perhaps confusing place:

Open Facetime. Then in the top menu choose "Video" and at the end of this menu, there's a subtitle "Output" where you can choose the audio device. Choose the speakers you want here, and you should be able to hear people on calls.

If you still cannot hear the other party, then open System Preferences > Sound > Output, and select the device you've selected in Facetime also. Now you should see an "Output volume" slider, where you can adjust the volume.


Excessive horizontal mouse scrolling On a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.1 (13B42) with both the trackpad and a Bluetooth "magic mouse" I observe an excessive amount of (especially) horizontal scrolling.

A trivial touch to the mouse (or touching the trackpad with two fingers) may result in dozens of (especially horizontal) scroll events. This is especially pronounced in Excel, Firefox, and Emacs (which notice horizontal scrolls) but not in Terminal and Outlook (which mostly ignore them).

Mouse tracking in system settings is set to the 3rd notch (out of 10).

It is possible to disable or reduce horizontal scroll events?

Yes, you can disable horizontal scroll events. I know this because unwanted horizontal scrolling with the Magic Mouse used to drive me insane, especially with Adobe products.

MagicPrefs, a "free application […] to improve the functionality and configuration options of the Apple Magic Mouse", indeed let me disable horizontal scrolling. It's somewhere in the "Magic Mouse" settings tab. Hope this helps.


Accidentally deleted private/var/folders on macOS Big Sur I’m using macOS Big Sur and accidentally deleted private/var/folders while trying to clean up my storage. Now I’m stuck at the Apple logo on the boot up page (the white bar won’t move). I’ve found some solutions from similar questions which did not work for me. I guess the old commands don't work in Big Sur.
Under single-user mode I tried:
/sbin/mount -uw /

It returned:
Volume could not be mounted:resource busy failed with75

I’ve also tried reinstalling macOS but it failed and automatically returned to recovery mode. Sadly I just deleted my back-up a few weeks ago so Time Machine won’t work.
Is there any other way to fix the problem?

You can reinstall “macOS” in the recovery partition, which will install all system-relevant files that are important for the system.  This should solve your problem.


Inexpensive AC charger for iPod 3rd gen / 4th gen I have a couple of iPod Touches, a 3rd generation and a 4th generation. I would like to get an AC adaptor so that I can plug them into the wall to charge. The Apple charger is $30, which seems quite expensive to me (the cheapest 3rd-party USB charging units are just a few dollars).

Is there an inexpensive AC charging unit for these iPods? Or am I stuck in the Apple happy place?

As a bonus, I've also got a Garmin Nuvi GPS unit that would be nice to charge with the same device.

You should be able to use any USB charger of decent build quality, as long as they follow the USB spec. Emphasis on decent build quality, you get what you pay for sometimes. The Apple charger has the added advantage of working with other Apple plug adapters the MacBooks use, like the travel kit and those longer cords. Plus they look nice ;)

If you're looking for quality-but-thrifty, try finding unused USB ports on other devices, such as the Xbox 360.


How do I change the iCloud ID on iPhone 5? I lent my iPhone to someone who logged into iCloud with their apple ID. Now I want to change the iCloud account to my own, which can only be done by deleting the currently logged-in iCloud account. To do that, I have to enter the password for that account, to turn off the Find My iPhone app. There seems to be no way to remove the old account without knowing the password for it.

This is on an iPhone 5, with iOS 7.1.1.

Two options:

1) Get the person you lent it to to enter their password and disable their account on your device.

2) Bring proof of ownership (sales receipt) and your device to an Apple Store and talk with a Genius. They will be able to reset the device for you.


In their simplest form, do programs just run terminal commands? Say for example in a program it lets me select one folder and copy it to another location, on a very basic level is that application running commands that I could run in terminal or is it using some internal OS API to make that move?

Please spare me any vicious responses; I'm just curious and totally aware it can be perceived as a question a 13-year-old would ask.

Conceptually, it always uses OS API - the question is only in what way. There are essentially three options.

using low-level OS API (system calls) directly. In your example the task is quite involved: get the list of items in the folder, check the type (folder, file ...), for each of them create the corresponding item in the target folder, for files read the content from the source, write to the target file etc. Since the task is so complex, it is easy to get something wrong, so most applications will avoid this.
use a library (API) that simplifies the task. For example the Apple Cocoa framework provides NSFileManager class with the copyItemAtPath:toPath:error method which does all the dirty work using low-level OS API, so the application doesn't need to use low-level API itself but can rely on something that requires less work and is always present in the system. Also Apple is likely to make sure that it works well.
use an external process to do the task. In this case the external process will be using one of the two methods above to do the work. The application has to start such process, monitor it and wait until it is done. It is likely that such process can be run as a command line tool, so this would likely be a command you can run in Terminal. It is not guaranteed, but very possible.

Most applications will use option 2. because it is more simple than 1. and more safe and efficient than 3. In order to run an external process you need to set it up properly and you have no control over what it does. For example it is much harder to figure out what exactly went wrong in case of a failure and it is hard to know what it is doing (e.g. show progress). That is why in most cases developers will likely choose option 2, but there is no guarantee. A notable example are applications that use shell scripts for customization - such as installers.

Advanced user note: you can use dtrace facility of OS X to find out what a particular application is doing. For example, you can check any processes it is spawning so you would see the tools it is using (see execsnoop).


Is there a way to add items to notification center through terminal or other means? I'm wanting to add specific Websites to notification center (the stack exchange network, for example) and I want to be able to see various notifications that the website would send me.

Is there a way to add a website to be checked in notification center via terminal or some sort of script that can be written?

You can send a notification from the command line with this terminal-notifier utility. Getting the notification data off a site can be fairly involved, requires at least some decent scripting and/or web coding knowledge, and is probably a better question to pose on Stack Overflow.

The basic outline of such a script would be:

Open a site
Send login data if necessary
Scrape the page for the data you need (unless you're lucky and the site has a JSON or XML API, in which case you can parse that)
Send the appropriate data via the terminal-notify utility

This sort of thing may be more common in the future though, as Safari 6 and Mountsin Lion add support for web notifications, which will allow a site to display notifications, when Safari has an open tab for that site.

Support for this needs to be coded into the site however, so it's not really an end user solution I'm afraid.


Anyway to tell iCloud Drive in Sierra to stop downloading things? With macOS Sierra's iCloud Drive feature, it seems the promise of automatic space management is that:

it will fill your hard drive's free space by downloaing iCloud drive files automatically
it only clears the local copies when you select other iCloud drive files to download instead

This works to keep your HDD constantly full to capacity, causing many issues with other programs, including Terminal and iTunes complaining there is not enough free space to continue. Despite Finder reporting there is plenty (due to point 2).

Is there a way to tell iCloud  Drive to stop attempting to download more files (fixing point 1), and to delete the local copies of files it has insisted on downloading (fixing point 2)?

The below image captures the problem. Finder reports 157.99GB available, yet I can't download a 773.1MB folder because there isn't enough free space, because iCloud Drive is insisting on filling my hard drive with 164.63GB of data.

Okay, if you call this script using:

find "$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs" -exec cloudevict {} \;

it in theory will delete the local copies of everything, which seems to work more or less, however as soon as it is done, iCloud Drive will attempt to fill your hard drive once again, and there still seems to be absolutely no way to stop it.


How do I install the GnuPG PHP extension? I'm having trouble installing a PHP native extension: GnuPG. Here's what I've tried so far.

First:

sudo port install gpgme
sudo pecl install gnupg

Output from the second command ends like so:

checking for gnupg support... yes, shared
checking for gnupg files in default path... not found
configure: error: Please reinstall the gpgme distribution
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/temp/gnupg/configure' failed

So, I tried installing manually, guessing at some values based on output of port contents gpgme and port contents gnupg...

pecl download gnupg
phpize
./configure --with-gnupg=/opt/local/include --with-libdir=/opt/local/lib

Alas, no luck. This ends like so:

checking for gnupg support... yes, shared
checking for gpgme_check_version in -lgpgme... no
configure: error: wrong gpgme lib version or lib not found

I then tried augmenting CFLAGS like so:

CFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib" ./configure --with-gnupg=/opt/local/include

This returns a nonzero exit code, but then make fails. Here's the end of that output:

/bin/sh /tmp/gnupg-1.3.2/libtool --mode=link cc -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/tmp/gnupg-1.3.2/include -I/tmp/gnupg-1.3.2/main -I/tmp/gnupg-1.3.2 -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php/main -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php/TSRM -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php/Zend -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php/ext -I/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php/ext/date/lib -I/opt/local/include  -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -L/opt/local/lib   -o gnupg.la -export-dynamic -avoid-version -prefer-pic -module -rpath /tmp/gnupg-1.3.2/modules  gnupg.lo gnupg_keylistiterator.lo -Wl,-rpath,/opt/local/include/lib -L/opt/local/include/lib -lgpgme
cc ${wl}-flat_namespace ${wl}-undefined ${wl}suppress -o .libs/gnupg.so -bundle  .libs/gnupg.o .libs/gnupg_keylistiterator.o  -L/opt/local/lib -L/opt/local/include/lib /opt/local/lib/libgpgme.dylib /opt/local/lib/libassuan.dylib /opt/local/lib/libgpg-error.dylib /opt/local/lib/libintl.dylib /opt/local/lib/libiconv.dylib  -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/opt/local/include/lib
ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L/opt/local/include/lib'
ld: duplicate symbol _gnupg_keylistiterator_class_entry in .libs/gnupg_keylistiterator.o and .libs/gnupg.o for architecture x86_64
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [gnupg.la] Error 1

I'm suspicious that my --with-gnupg arg somehow messed up linking, because I see -L/opt/local/include/lib in the output of that failed make run.

That's where I'm stuck. Feels like I'm trying way too hard or just going down the wrong path.

I'm using Snow Leopard (v10.6.8). The PHP command-line program I'm using came with MAMP 2.1.0.

See http://measure9.varkel.net/2013/10/building-gnupg-for-php-5-5-on-osx/ (a lengthy text explaining how to patch & build gnupg from source)


Safari created a strong password but did not remember it On a website I tried to change my login password. After typing it in once, Safari replaced it in both input fields with a generated strong password. In the menu on the bottom I tried to select “other password” (instead of the generated one), but it did not work. Also it seems the new password was submitted to the website as next time I could not log in with the old password.

The problem is, Safari did not remember the new password, so now I’m locked out of the website.

I can start a password reset process, but want first to look for other solutions. Is there any chance the password is stored somewhere?

I googled but only found “this happened to me too and I know no solution” stories.

This was on an iPad with iOS 12.1.1

Sadly this is a problem that happens with certain websites, and sometimes due to a small hick-up. (of you followed some of the links on google they all have there reasons, Im sure I don't have to repeat them here)

Why they haven't got a feature (like Dashlane) to show you the recently created but not saved passwords is a mystery to me.
AFAIK you'll have to reset your password.


Accidentally dragged a font's typeface out of the font dialog and "deleted" it When I was trying to change the font in my xcode, I accidentally dragged a typeface out of the dialog with the mouse, causing the typeface to disappear from the fonts dialog forever.

As you can see, Menlo Regular is gone, (Italic too, because I couldn't help myself, damn me) I can't select it anymore. Funnily enough, you can't drag the typeface out of the window on another machine here. How would I get it back?

For clarification, the typeface is still available on the system, just not in that dialog.

I had the same problem with the hack typeface and managed to resolve the issue.

You have to go to /Users/>>your_username<</Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes
and then open a *.dvtcolortheme file.

This file has xml syntax. There you'll find string elements with the current font, typeface and size.

Select all font and typeface and change it with your deleted one.

Save the file and restart & check your Xcode.
Your missing typefaces should be there again.


How does time machine handle iMovie libraries? My iMovie library is about 50GB, and appears to be one file. Does time machine version this file after each change, or is it intelligent enough to see into the library, even though I can't?

All Apple iLife and iWork apps are optimized for storage to make Time Machine run well.

When you see a 50 GB library in finder, you can control click and show package contents. The "library" is a highly ordered collection of files, so when you are editing clips and effects and assembling a project, only the small changes you make are backed up each time. The large clips don't change as you add them to a project and transform them.

Be sure you don't move/ trim / edit / delete any files stored inside a package directly. That will usually break the program and require you to retrieve a backup where the database that tracks all the component files matches the files you actually have on disk.

If you're interested in the command line - the tmutil compare option is handy. As soon as a backup finishes, you can run that to see the files that change often (there are tons). Then you could open iMovie (and only iMovie) and make a small change - then rerun the tmutil compare to convince yourself that small file changes mean small incremental writes the next time a backup starts.