Launch an older version of an application by default? There are two sets of applications where I'm running into this issue:

iWork, where I only have the new stuff installed because Software Update harasses you to install the new stuff if it detects you only have the old stuff
Office 2016, which I've discovered fixes everything I liked about Office 2011

When iWork first came out I tried telling the system to open all .numbers, .pages, and .keynote files with the '09 versions of the applications by default, but it ended up ignoring that preference and launched the new versions anyway.  As such I've gotten accustomed to just going to the Applications folder, opening up the old version manually, and then dropping whatever I want to edit into the open app.

Office is a bit more integral to what I do, however, and I'm really not looking forward to having to do more of this.  Is there some sort of setting, terminal command, script, etc. that I can set to force the use of an older version by default?

If you want to open specific file types with a certain default application, e.g., .docx or .pages:

1) right-click on any of those files, hold down the option key and click on "Show Inspector".

2) Choose your default application, e.g., Office 2011 Word, from the "open with" menu

3) Click on the "change all" button just below the "open with" tab


Smarter Bash Tab Completion As a recent switcher from Ubuntu (Well recent switch backer if that's a word) I'm finding myself in the command line a lot more than when I was a mac user before. One thing I really loved about Ubuntu was when I was compiling and running java programs for class my tab completion was really smart. When I needed to compile my class if I had a directory that looked like:

Example.java
Example.class
Client.java
Client.class

and I needed to compile the Client.java to take into account the most recent changes I would type:

javac C [TAB]

and it would complete to

javac Client.java

ignoring the .class files because you can't run javac on a .class. Also when I wanted to run the file typing

java C [TAB]

would result in

java Client

with no period. This was a very smart way of doing the tab completion that I got so used to that now it's driving me crazy when I hit tab and it gives me the Client. without actually completing to what I need it to be.

So is there any way to make the Mac bash completion smarter so that it would have this same effect?

*nix packages such as bash_completion can be installed with 3rd party package managers. I suggest Homebrew, but Fink and MacPorts also provide the bash_completion package. If it doesn't auto-handle the Java situation you describe, post back or read the man page.


Snow Leopard, App Store unable to download anything I am experiencing a weird problem, my Mac is running 10.6.8 and I want to download Mavericks, the problem is that when I click "Download" under the purchases tab, I enter my password and ... nothing happens. In fact it does the same thing for every app. Am I condemned to stay under Snow Leopard forever?
By the way I have been able to download and install Mavericks in the past.

Years late, but to provide an answer...

You can only download the current OS X/macOS from the regular apps or search page.

If you require an older OS, then you must use your Purchase History & download it from there.

Photoshopped to put these all next to each other

El Capitan is slightly different, as it has been specially preserved by Apple due to Sierra not being compatible with older machines.

If you need El Capitan, it can be downloaded from the App Store - though it's difficult to actually search for.
See Apple KB: Upgrade to OS X El Capitan which gives links that will open the correct location in the App Store app.

...or try this direct link


How do I sync the Visual Studio Code (vscode) theme to use my OS light/dark color scheme? MacOS now supports both "Light" and "Dark" mode (found in "System Preferences", "General", "Appearance").

How can I make VS Code automatically change it's theme to be light or dark, when I change my MacOS "Appearance"?

This was released in 1.42:

  Auto switch Theme based on OS color scheme

  Windows and macOS now
  support light and dark color schemes. There is a new setting,
  window.autoDetectColorScheme, that instructs VS Code to listen to
  changes to the OS's color scheme and switch to a matching theme
  accordingly.

  To customize the themes that are used when a color scheme changes, you
  can set the preferred light and dark theme with the settings:

  workbench.preferredLightColorTheme
  workbench.preferredDarkColorTheme


Help me getting my system preferences to work again Since the previous update (the one before BigSur), my system preferences were terrible slow. Since the update to BigSur, the systempref's stopped working at all.
The error says: "Preferences error The 'x' preference pane cannot be loaded"

This happens on all preference panes, here is a video explaining the problem.
I've tried

SMC reset (putting off, disconnecting cable for a while, reconnecting and restarting)
PRAM + NVRAM reset (shut down, hold option, cmd + P + R)
Deleted the systemprefs .plist file and restarted

Nothing worked so far, I can't connect my bluetooth mouse, headphones, and all the other settings. Can some one help me out with this issue?
-Update-
Okay, I guess I somehow found the error...
I logged in to the new account again. And look at this...
https://youtu.be/kapOvWY8xXE
When I go to the apple icon in the top left corner, it gives me another version of systemprefs. When I go to the systemprefs trough the applicationsfolder, I've got the 'new' systemprefs witch works as it should... The question now is, how can I override the 'old' systemprefs with the 'new' in the top-menu.

Yes. I like to make a new user account and the log out of all the old users. No data is lost, but you can time the new user to open preferences.
Then you know if the problem is the system needs to be fixed / reinstalled or just your user has corrupt preferences.
Assuming it’s not your user account, this might be faster to sort by a Time Machine backup and erasing the mac to reinstall a clean OS. Once you’re sure it’s not a bug in a clean OS, you can run Migration Assistant and bring back your apps / documents and not your settings in the hopes that it cures the issue.
Sorry I don’t have a more surgical method to isolate this reliably. It’s hitting what might be an isolated issue with a big hammer, but you probably need a backup anyhow since the system is degrading and you’ll likely spend more time troubleshooting this than testing a clean install.


Copied application showing "prohibited" instead of app icon in Finder I copied "Dead Island" to HDD from DMG file and it showed a "prohibited" icon instead of the game icon (2nd row, icon in the middle). I had to kill/restart Finder to solve it, but would like to know what is the cause for this and how can I prevent it from happening again?

I have seen Finder sometimes getting stuck still showing the last unfinished state of a file.  This may be a refresh issue, especially when you say that restarting the Finder solves it.

Alternatively, you could try to just run the application by simply double-clicking it.  If the "prohibited" sign is valid, you will receive an error message stating the cause.

Otherwise, it will simply work, potentially update the icon at that stage already or at least once you either restart the Finder or the computer.


Problem updating/uninstalling Xcode So I tried updating Xcode but after the update I still got the same version of it (so there was an update still available).

I decided to uninstall it by throwing the app in the trash. The update still remains. After clicking 'Update', nothing happens and now I can't use it.

Any help on this as it is very important for me right now?

Note: I deleted the Library/Developer folder too

There is a downloads page with all past versions of all of the developer tools on it, try https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

Click on the "+" button to the left of "Xcode 10.2"
Click on the "Xcode 10.2.xip" link to download Xcode.


Internal DVD drive not working I have a Macbook Pro 15 inch, mid 2010 with High Sierra installed (10.13.6)

Recently I tried to put a DVD into the internal DVD drive, but nothing showed up. It made some weird sounds as if it was trying to get the drive running, but it didn't help. So I tried to eject the DVD, but the eject button didn't work as well. I couldn't eject it from Finder either. I tried restart the computer while holding the eject button, but it didn't work. Then I just dropped to get it out.

But whenever I open my computer, it says the weird sounds as if it is trying to run the DVD. It runs 3 times, and then it stops.

Is there any way to fix this?

Unfortunately it sounds like your optical drive bit the dust.

The fact that it tries to read a presumably good DVD and can't and you get an error opening DVD Player AND can't get the disc out of the drive speaks to likely needing a new drive.

You will need to take it in for repair which will likely mean a replacement optical drive.


Mountain Lion freezes after sleep on iMac (Mid 2007) After upgrading to ML, my iMac freezes when going to sleep. The fan goes off but i can't not wake it up. Its that weird i need to unplug the power, and then i can start it again.

Keeping the power-on button pressed is not working.

It does wake-up from the screensaver, but then the mac isn't asleep (yet).

UPDATE: after i set the "Computer Sleep" to never, and "Display sleep" to 30 mins. I did had the "hdd to sleep" and "wake-up" LAN checked. I still got a black-screen, and complete froze, noway to wake-up the Mac. Unplugging the power for a restart.

Please try resetting PRAM and SMC. Also, you may want to run Disk Utility to perform a validate and repair on your permissions and disk to see if that helps.


External bootcamp drive not seen on different MacBook Pro When I purchased my MacBook Pro I setup BootCamp to run Windows 10 from an external SSD drive. I wrote up the details here: https://blog.brettski.com/2015/11/08/booting-a-macbook-pro-to-windows-using-an-external-ssd/ at the time.

What escapes me is why other MBP's cannot boot from this drive. If I connect the SSD to an identical MBP, hold down Option and start, the external drive is not an option to boot from. It works fine from the computer it was created on.

Does anyone know what may keep other computers from being able to use this drive as a boot drive?

Partition information:

brettskiworkmbp:~ brettski$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *256.1 GB   disk0
   1:         Microsoft Reserved                         16.8 MB    disk0s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data Win10 BC                255.6 GB   disk0s2
   3:           Windows Recovery                         471.9 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk2         500.1 GB   disk1s2

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.1 GB   disk2
                                 Physical Store disk1s2
   1:                APFS Volume Main                    383.0 GB   disk2s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 48.5 MB    disk2s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.0 MB   disk2s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk2s4

You do not have an EFI partition on the external drive. This would prohibit booting Windows on a different Mac. I expect that when you installed Windows, the boot files were placed in the EFI partition of the internal drive.

One possible solution would be to start over. This time make sure the external drive is correctly partitioned. The rules for partitioning are given in the Microsoft document UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions. If you are using the October 2018 Windows 10 release (1809), then I would recommend a WRE size of 800 MB.

Another possible solution would be to shrink your windows partition and add an EFI partition to the external drive. This is best done while booted to the Window Recovery Environment. (Hold down the shift key when rebooting Windows). After adding a EFI partition, you would then enter the commands to create the boot files in this partition. The command that actually creates the boot files is called bcdboot.

Below is a Windows installation similar to yours. This was setup in VirtualBox. The size of the drives and partitions are different, but the commands you would need to enter should close to what is shown.

The commands shown below were entered into a Command Prompt window after booting to the Windows Recovery Environment. These command create a bootable EFI partition at the end of the Windows disk. Also, the Windows boot files are removed from the original EFI partition.

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17763.107]
(c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

X:\windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17763.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: MININT-9R6AU7J

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          155 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online          325 GB      0 B        *

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            154 GB    17 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select partition 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> shrink minimum=1000

DiskPart successfully shrunk the volume by: 1000 MB

DISKPART> create partition primary size=800

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART> format fs=ntfs label=temp quick

  100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.

DISKPART> assign letter=t

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> select partition 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> assign letter=r

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

X:\windows\system32>xcopy r:\* t: /e /h
R:\Recovery.txt
R:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (1).sqml
R:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (2).sqml
R:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (3).sqml
R:\Recovery\Logs\Reload.xml
R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\boot.sdi
R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\ReAgent.xml
R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\Winre.wim
R:\System Volume Information\tracking.log
9 File(s) copied

X:\windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17763.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: MININT-9R6AU7J

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            153 GB    17 MB
  Partition 4    Primary            800 MB   153 GB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select partition 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> remove letter=r

DiskPart successfully removed the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> delete partition override

DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.

DISKPART> create partition primary size=800 id=de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART> format fs=ntfs label=Recovery quick

  100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.

DISKPART> assign letter=r

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> GPT ATTRIBUTES=0x8000000000000001

DiskPart successfully assigned the attributes to the selected GPT partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 3
Type    : de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac
Hidden  : No
Required: Yes
Attrib  : 0X8000000000000001
Offset in Bytes: 165397135360

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
* Volume 3     R   Recovery     NTFS   Partition    800 MB  Healthy    Hidden

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

X:\windows\system32>

X:\windows\system32>xcopy t:\* r: /e /h
T:\Recovery.txt
T:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (1).sqml
T:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (2).sqml
T:\Recovery\Logs\BootUX (3).sqml
T:\Recovery\Logs\Reload.xml
T:\Recovery\WindowsRE\boot.sdi
T:\Recovery\WindowsRE\ReAgent.xml
T:\Recovery\WindowsRE\Winre.wim
T:\System Volume Information\tracking.log
9 File(s) copied

X:\windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17763.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: MININT-9R6AU7J

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> create partition efi

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART> format fs=fat32 label=EFI quick

  100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.

DISKPART> assign letter=s

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART>  GPT ATTRIBUTES=0x0000000000000000

DiskPart successfully assigned the attributes to the selected GPT partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 5
Type    : c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b
Hidden  : Yes
Required: No
Attrib  : 0000000000000000
Offset in Bytes: 166235996160

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
* Volume 5     S   EFI          FAT32  Partition    200 MB  Healthy    Hidden

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            153 GB    17 MB
  Partition 4    Primary            800 MB   153 GB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB
* Partition 5    System             200 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select partition 4

Partition 4 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> remove letter=t

DiskPart successfully removed the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> delete partition

DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.

DISKPART> select partition 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> extend

DiskPart successfully extended the volume.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
* Partition 2    Primary            154 GB    17 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB
  Partition 5    System             200 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    System             210 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Unknown            324 GB   211 MB

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> assign letter=u

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> list volume

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     D   CCCOMA_X64F  UDF    CD-ROM      4840 MB  Healthy
  Volume 1     C   Win BC       NTFS   Partition    154 GB  Healthy
  Volume 3     R   Recovery     NTFS   Partition    800 MB  Healthy
* Volume 4     U   EFI          FAT32  Partition    210 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 5     S   EFI          FAT32  Partition    200 MB  Healthy    Hidden

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

X:\windows\system32>

X:\windows\system32>bcdboot c:\Windows /s s: /f UEFI
Boot files successfully created.

X:\windows\system32>u:

U:\>cd efi

U:\EFI>rd /s /q Microsoft

U:\EFI>rd /s /q Boot

U:\>exit

After booting back to Windows, I noticed the Windows Recovery Environment did not work properly. Below are the commands entered in a Administrator Command Prompt window which fixed the problem.

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17763.107]
(c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

    Windows RE status:         Disabled
    Windows RE location:
    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: b1098958-1b75-11e9-a3a8-ba8bed1fcc42
    Recovery image location:
    Recovery image index:      0
    Custom image location:
    Custom image index:        0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\Windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17763.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: DESKTOP-Q438CQ5

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          155 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online          325 GB      0 B        *

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            154 GB    17 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB
  Partition 4    System             200 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select partition 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> assign letter=r

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /setreimage /path r:\Recovery\WindowsRE
Directory set to: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Recovery\WindowsRE

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /enable
REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

    Windows RE status:         Enabled
    Windows RE location:       \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Recovery\WindowsRE
    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: aea2b938-1ba3-11e9-b797-c059ce58515c
    Recovery image location:
    Recovery image index:      0
    Custom image location:
    Custom image index:        0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\Windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17763.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: DESKTOP-Q438CQ5

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Reserved            16 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            154 GB    17 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           800 MB   154 GB
  Partition 4    System             200 MB   154 GB

DISKPART> select partition 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> remove letter=r

DiskPart successfully removed the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

C:\Windows\system32>exit

If you have any questions, post a comment.


unable to indent / shift right multiple lines of text in textedit New to mac and am not able to highlight and indent multiple lines of text using textedit.

I see many solutions that seem to only apply to older version of OSX / text edit.

Command + ] is functionless in text edit.

I don’t think this feature or function is coming back to TextEdit on 10.14 so I’d look to another editor if you need this super useful feature.

I’m a big fan of vi or more technically correct vim in the terminal since it’s free and included with each and every Mac (and because my initial learning curve for that peculiar editor is behind me). If you want a more graphical and super powerful free text editor - go get BBEdit which allows free usage of the core editing functions after the free trial of the licensed portion expires:

http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit

You’ll spend a little time getting either of these set up, but if you indent regularly - text edit isn’t worth all the time you’ll waste on it without more powerful features. I think the new Xcode beta has this feature from watching the 2018 WWDC videos, but I don’t think that’s released to non-paid developers quite yet.

Also, I would recommend spending a good amount of time learning the bookmark functionality on macOS in terminal app to get the full benefit (or choose and use tmux / screen / docker) to extend and run linux as needed if the Apple tools aren't making you feel super productive to edit and work from the command line (like the command open . to open a finder window from the current working directory).

https://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux2/tmux-2
https://support.apple.com/guide/terminal/keyboard-shortcuts-trmlshtcts/mac


Can a Maxtor ATA133 HDD be fitted into a 2001 iMac? I am a proud owner of a 2001 iMac, with a 10GB HDD. Is it possible to install in its place a Maxtor ATA/133 HDD of 40GB (produced Aug 2003)?

Having looked at the iMac (Early 2001) - Technical Specifications and comparing them with the information found on Wikipedia for Ultra ATA/Parallel ATA I do not see any technical limitation on why it should not work.

What you need to be aware of, however, is that in case the bus speed is lower than the ATA/133 (e.g. ATA/66 or ATA/100), the hard drive would not be as fast as it could be.  Nevertheless, I understand that it will be operational with the larger size available to you.


Upgraded iMac 5k restarts randomly I have a very frustrating problem and I need your guys help to fix it.

I bought an imac 5k that I upgraded it's CPU, HDD, RAM.

This is my second one i have upgraded and the second one that keeps restarting randomly, sometimes once a few days, other times once a week or less.

I have put in an I7, EVO SSD and Apple Ram.

I have tried testing it with less and more ram and it still restarts our of the blue.

The only connection between the two imac upgrades is the Thermalpad Arctic( 1,5mm which has a 6 W/mk thermal conductivity, its the best I could find ) I have used to cool the GPU.

I am running multiple flash related software/streamers that are very heavy on the CPU and GPU, and some photoshoping.

It always does restart when in use, but that's because when I am on it/ rather say, my wife is on it, she uses it for work but i don't think it restarts during normal use.

The fans are loud but i did not notice any pattern in which when it does restart, the fans are louder than before. They stay pretty much over 2000 rpm, which is a huge difference than the I5 i had before, doing the same kind of work, but I read that this is normal considering the I7 is much hotter. Thermal paste used was Arctic Silver 5.

What makes it difficult is that it is very hard to monitor the iMac because I am not working on it and sitting there and waiting for the restart to happen is just nuts. I was thinking I could observe the temps but I am sure that is not a feasible way to see if temps are to blame.

I went to library>logs>but couldn't find any readable log about this kernel panic.

Is there a software that logs the temperatures so after it restarts I can compare them to see if heat is to blame?

I have gone through different set of rams, external USBs, OS versions, you name it, nothing seems to solve it.

How to go on and investigate this issue?

Thank you very much!
Dan

LE:
I managed to make it restart. I had the usual amount of work that i topped with 4 4k videos playing at the same time on youtube. Here is a remaining pictures from team viewer at the moment of the restart.
Do you think that's enough ? I read that the values can go over 100 C without any problems.
I am using iStats first one is CPU, GPU-Die, Ram, CPU Fan Rpm

Problem solved. I believe the 1.5mm thermal pads were too thick on the GPU rams and the cooler didn't make enough contacts on the GPU chip. I went to an Apple service provider and asked them nicely if they could sell me the thermal paste they use and they were very kind and gave me a bunch of 2CL syringes with paste manufactured by Shin Etsu Microsi - microsi.com, that is what they use on apple products and it did the job.

I put a small pea shape bit of paste in the middle of the GPU memory chips, they are 8 and I used 1CL for every chip and when you put the cooler ontop it spreads it evenly. You could use less and it won't leak when you push the cooler in but i wanted to be safe and fill the gap between the cooler and the GPU chips.

Be careful, this paste is thick, its a pain to spread it evenly. You have to get a credit card and put paste on the top edge and swipe it with a bit of force so you can apply it in one take because its a mess to spread it with your finger, its like it won't stick to the chip.

I now have 56 Degrees on the CPU and 55 degrees C on the GPU die, lightly used and never went over 75 degrees C no matter the stress of the system. Measured with iStat Pro.

I hope it will help someone even though nobody cared to give me a hand.

Peace!


To prevent Finder from showing .noindex files I can restrict Finder searching files by adding .noindex -extension, this thread.
However, I want hide those files in Finder search.

How can you prevent Finder from showing .noindex -files?

There are a variety of ways to hide things in Mac OS X. Note: if you do any of these you most likely do not need to use the .noindex extensions since files hidden from the finder will not be typically be shown in Finder Spotlight searches.

chflags hidden fileToHide (as already mentioned) does this by setting OS X file attributes.
use the Unix style period at the start of a file name .fileToHide, of course this will hide the file from the Finder and the command line.
create a .hidden at the file system root and list the filenames of files to hide from the Finder. This was the way to do it in the first several versions of Mac OS X prior to the chflags method.
There is also a classic Mac OS 9 file attribute that can hide files, but this should be considered highly depreciated

Note that the various hiding methods and .noindex should all work on Folders too.


Combine Time Machine backups in Mojave My Time Machine backup drive became corrupt.  It would take several minutes to mount, and then MacOS would warn me to back up the data.  When I tried copying Backups.backupdb out I got "Error Code -36" saying that some data couldn't be read or written.

I was able to copy a few (apparently non-corrupt) individual backups out using finder, but unfortunately Apple has removed a multitude of admin permissions, including the ability to change Backups.backupdb, so I'm unable to copy my backups into it.  Access denied (even with SIP disabled).  We're also not not allowed to modify folder permissions, FWIW.

Any ideas on how to transfer individual backups into Backups.backupdb?

I think I've found a workaround (or "ridiculous hack", if you will). You can't modify Backups.backupdb, but you can delete it and replace it (back up your backups, if you feel the need):

Create a folder named "WhosTheBoss"
Copy any backups you want to keep in there (same directory structure)
Delete the original Backups.backupsdb folder
Rename "WhosTheBoss" to "Backups.backupsdb"
Point Time Machine and/or Migration Assistant to that location and win.


Is there a way to show the speed of copying files on a Mac? Is there a way to show the speed of copying files on a Mac?  For example, when copying a file from the hard drive to SDHC card and vice versa.

The reason is that I can check out the max speed of an SDHC card on my Dell PC, but it seems that on there, the card interface is limited to 20MB/s read or write.  So I want to check how it is on the iMac 27 inch.  Maybe some test program can be used, but I still like to find out any simple way to tell the speed of copying files on the Mac.

If you're comfortable in the Terminal, you can use rsync to copy some files from one place to another and it'll give you summary stats on the speed:

rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable path_to_source path_to_dest

E.g. rsync --stats --human-readable ~/Desktop/Large-File /Volumes/OtherDisk/Dir

You can also type into the terminal just the command:

rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable

(note there needs to be one or more spaces after --human-readable to end that command and break before the source and destination file names are provided)

Then drag the file / folder you wish to copy and drop it onto the terminal window, followed by dragging and dropping the destination directory. Dragging and dropping a file / folder onto a terminal window will place that file/folder's path into the terminal window. Dragging a file is preferred in most cases since it will handle a space in any folder or file name. In this case the space needs an \ to indicate not to end the file name exactly opposite of needing the space earlier.

The output of the above command will be similar to:

[jnet@Kyle ~]$ rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable /Users/jnet/Pictures/Screen\ Caps /Volumes/Scratch
building file list ...
644 files to consider
Screen Caps/
Screen Caps/.DS_Store
      21.51K 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=642/644)
Screen Caps/Can someone downvote me please.pdf
      78.19K 100%    8.29MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=641/644)
Screen Caps/Can someone downvote me please.png
     399.61K 100%   14.66MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=640/644)
Screen Caps/ChefVMMemtest.png
       8.29K 100%  207.68kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#4, to-check=639/644)
[...]
Number of files: 644
Number of files transferred: 638
Total file size: 176.85M bytes
Total transferred file size: 176.85M bytes
Literal data: 176.85M bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 12574
File list generation time: 0.002 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 176.92M
Total bytes received: 14.09K

sent 176.92M bytes  received 14.09K bytes  14.15M bytes/sec
total size is 176.85M  speedup is 1.00


Is there a GUI difftool that does symlinks? Let's say I have some directories with symlinks in them.

.
├── dirA
│   ├── file013
│   └── file212
└── dirB
    ├── file013
    └── file212

2 directories, 4 files

The symlinks are pointing to directories with lots of files and directories that I don't care about, so I've used symlinks to isolate them.  I can edit them just fine, for example, and the changes are done on the actual files.

I want to compare say A.file013 <> B.file013

Oh, I and I mostly work from the terminal, so looking for

$ awesome_diff dirA/file013 dirB/file013 : diff 1 file pair

opendiff/Filemerge does do this, actually. ✅  so does ksdiff/Kaleidoscope.

and

$ awesome_diff dirA dirB : diff at directory level.

compare directory contents, drill down into directories, drill down into
individual file diffs....

opendiff/Filemerge fails this ❌ as it will then consider only the symlinks' own pointers.  ksdiff/Kaleidoscope also ❌

(still appreciate GUI-only answers)

good:

Gnu diff : does a fine job, but terminal-only.  Most GUI diff tools provide line by line copy functionality.

bad:

Apple Filemerge/opendiff compares symlink file pointers, not file contents.  actually, if you launch Filemerge, the GUI, from the start it does work, but the command line opendiff calls the Filemerge incorrectly.
Kaleidoscope - file type (symlink) not supported

unknown/install issues:

Kdiff3 - compares, but otherwise broken at 0.998 release, the menu doesn't work at all for example.
Meld - haven't gotten it to work on macos yet.
Diffmerge - haven't gotten it to work on macos yet.

env:  Mojave

Both Filemerge and opendiff work with symlinks, so

opendiff symlink-to-foo symlink-to-bar

will open Filemerge and compare foo vs bar .


replacing a toshiba hard drive in a mac mini I took my mac mini in to a computer repair shop, they said I needed a new hard drive, so I paid them $300.00 to do the repair.  Later on when I went to set up my mini mac it wouldn't work, and I found out that they replaced my apple hard drive with a toshiba hard drive. why would they do that

Yeah it sounds like maybe you just need to install the OS onto it (I guess "it wouldn't work" isn't really defined, so this is a guess).

If Tetsujin's suggestion doesn't work, and you have the older Mac Mini (I know my Mac Mini had the drive die - and it's from 2005, so internet recovery wasn't available), then put a Mac OS CD in the drive and boot up while holding down
    Command + C
to boot from the CD drive.  Then install the operating system from that.

You might also want to make sure the shop gave you back your old hard drive, since it has all your stuff on it.  Depending on how dead the drive is, you could put it into an External Enclosure and try to get some of the data off it. (Make sure you choose the correct drive connection: IDE (older computers), SATA (newer computers I think?), or other types (mSATA etc.).


Mavericks, Minecraft, Mods and Parental Controls My son loves Minecraft and I have set up an account for him to play and it works fine with Parental Controls enabled.   Now he wants to add Mods to the game and I'm having a hard time getting the system to allow me into the proper folders to allow me to add the files he needs.  I need access to the ~\Library\Application Support\ folder.   I can access it with my administrator account but the one under my profile and not his.  I then shared his user folder with me on Read\Write but it says I don't have permissions.

Anyone else with this problem and were you able to solve it?   It is annoying me to no end.   I don't want to turn off parental controls if at all possible.

Thanks.

You'll have to open up Terminal.app for just a minute. This is what you should enter:

sudo chmod 777 '/Users/sandbox0/Library/'
sudo chmod 777 '/Users/sandbox0/Library/Application Support/'
sudo chmod -R 777 '/Users/sandbox0/Library/Application Support/minecraft'

Obviously, you'll need to change out sandbox0 for your son's name, that was just the account I used to test it.

So what do these commands do?

sudo means you'll be executing the command as root to ensure you have full permissions. You will need to enter your password the first time under a nice, big warning.
chmod means “change mode” which will change the permissions of the file, with the Library folder, the Application Support folder, and finally with everything in the minecraft folder. (the -R means recursive, going through all the files and folders inside that one).

You may have to run the final command once in a while as new versions of Minecraft are downloaded and ready to be modded; a new JAR that Minecraft downloaded on his account will not allow you to edit it. If you will be doing this often, open the Applescript Editor, paste this in, and save as application.

do shell script "sudo chmod -R 777 '/Users/sandbox0/Library/Application Support/minecraft'" with administrator privileges


Reinstalling a MacBook Pro w/Lion (10.7.2), when previous owner died, can it be done? What do I need? A colleague of mine gave me a MacBook Pro that a friend of her has asked for help with.

The MBP is installed with Lion, 10.7.2, but unfortunately the previous owner, the father in the family, died, so I don't have any of the passwords necessary for his App Store account.

I can run the reinstall program from the recovery partition, but of course this wants to activate with App Store with his account.

They are currently waiting for his email accounts to be opened up, and until that happens, requesting a new password from Apple won't do much good either.

However, the new owner, the son in the house, wants to use his own account. Can I activate Lion against his account instead? Of course he has never had a Mac tied to his account so he has not purchased Lion, yet.

What is the best way to move forward with this?

Basically, I want to reinstall the MBP to Lion factory presets, and tie this to the sons account instead of the dead father.

Or should they just take it to a factory outlet? Unfortunately there aren't any native Apple Stores nearby, but there are some ... what's the word, Apple Dealers, a local electronics shop that has a large Apple section. Would they be equipped to do this?

Can this be done? If so, how?

It can only be done if the son's account has purchased a copy of Lion from the Mac App Store.  So either wait to get the password for the father's Apple ID or have the son drop $30 and purchase a new copy of Lion.


Open a program in finder with only keyboard If I navigate to a program in my Applications folder in Finder and press enter the program offers to be renamed. Only a double-click with the mouse opens the app.

How can I open it with only the keyboard?

You can use cmd+O or cmd+↓ to open apps from the keyboard.

Other way is to use Spotlight cmd+space and type the app name, then hit enter.


iPad: H.264 vs MPEG 4? On the Apple website it is said that

  Camera Connection Kit support standard photo formats, including JPEG
  and RAW, along with SD and HD video formats, including H.264 and
  MPEG-4.

aren't H.264 and MPEG4 the same thing? I thought that there are two names only because different standard consortiums have different terminology.

With MPEG-4 you generally mean H.263, the predecessor of H.264. It has lower compression and therefore lower image quality at same bit rate.


Unable to disable Bluetooth How can I disable Bluetooth on my MacBook Air?
The option to disable it is greyed out in System Preferences and is non-existent from the Bluetooth menubar. I'm currently using the latest MacOS Catalina update and this has been a problem for quite some time now. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Have you tried "Turn off Bluetooth" using Siri?
I'm not suggesting it will work given the weird behavior you're experiencing, just that it might be worth a try. Maybe her response will provide a hint?
Good luck.


iCloud has sucked up all my laptop's files - can you transfer files directly from iCloud to Google Drive? I'm trying to disconnect my macbook from iCloud, as it's been creating some problems.  I was told by an Apple Support employee that doing so is only recommended once you've backed up everything from your Mac somewhere, to ensure you don't lose any files - so my goal is to upload everything to Google Drive before messing with my laptop's iCloud settings.
The problem is, almost none of the projects that I want to back up to Google Drive are truly on my laptop - instead I mostly just have folders full of file names, which are placeholders for the real files that have been sucked into iCloud. This means I have to re-download everything to my computer before uploading it all to Google Drive. Another crucial piece of information is that I only have 1 GB of storage left on my macbook, which prevents me from re-downloading any complete projects/folders at a time.
So unfortunately my current method is this: downloading 1-5 files at a time, uploading these few things to Google Drive, deleting the copies from my laptop and trash, repeat (thousands of times). So, I was wondering if anyone could offer any alternative methods for uploading stuff to Google Drive in this situation - for example, is there a way to transfer files directly from iCloud to Google Drive without having to download them to my laptop first?
I should probably mention that I've scoured my laptop for duplicated files and applications I no longer use, make sure to empty my trash regularly, etc (I also asked Apple Support to help me make sure I wasn't missing out on any other ways to maximize storage space). The most obvious culprit of my lack of space is the massive 150 GB iCloud folder on my laptop, which appears to contain duplicates of everything on my computer. I can't seem to do anything about it until I've disconnected from iCloud itself (its reasons for existence are unclear to me in the first place...but that's beside the point lol).

I have to agree with the comments:
1.) Get an external drive
2.) Offload or delete what you can on your mac.
3.) download some stuff you need, copy it to a local harddrive (out of iCloud), delete it in iCloud, then upload to Google Drive.
4.) Repeat 3.) until done.
iCloud can take a long time to sync up completely, so be patient.
Here is what Apple has to say: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996


Connecting my iPod to my Car's 30-pin Dock but Being Able to Control It from Within the iPod? I have a 5th Generation iPod nano. I own a 2008 VW Eos which has a 30-pin dock. It functions but, my car's UI for iPod is despicable. I wanted to know if there was a way to control the music within the iPod.

EDIT: My car does not have an AUX-in and, I'd rather don't go the FM transmitter route.

I don't think that you can override the car's interface when using the 30-pin connector with that iPod.

If you use an aux cable (1/8" male to 1/8" male) to the headphone port you will be able to control the iPod using it's native interface, but you will lose the charging capability. To regain charging you could use a 12-volt power adaptor, but this is two cables instead of the single cable you are currently using.


My command line says `complete:13: command not found: compdef ` When I use a terminal like iTerm or Hyper, right as I boot it up, the first message I get is:

complete:13: command not found: compdef

I don't know what this is from, and how to get rid of it. This message does not show up on the default terminal app though.

I am using zsh.

This is the same issue I got on my mac OS. I am using zsh shell.

Compdef is basically a function used by zsh for load the auto-completions. The completion system needs to be activated. If you’re using something like oh-my-zsh then this is already taken care of, otherwise you’ll need to add the following to your ~/.zshrc

autoload -Uz compinit
compinit

Completion functions can be registered manually by using the compdef function directly like this compdef  . But compinit need to be autoloaded in context before using compdef.


Itunes 12.3.2.35 playlist order non-alphabetic After updating iTunes to 12.3 something strange happened:

When adding a new title or folder to my playlists it is added in the playlist view at the left as last item !
When adding a title to the playlists and selecting a place, iTunes shows me as drop down an "alphabetic" list , why is this?

How can I synchronize the two views to alphabetic?

Restart iTunes.

I have the same problem. After I create a playlist, the order of the playlists (in the sidebar) is sometimes not alphabetical. I suspect it's a bug. Restarting iTunes has always fixed it for me so far, though.


installing express without npm for the MEAN stack My El Capitan shows node installed in /usr/local/bin/node, but  $which npm  reports nothing.
I have Angular installed and which to play around with the MEAN stack which requires express and mangoDB.

My current path is: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

Online reading to install express shows I must issue npm command.
Can I install express using brew instead?  Thanks

I fixed it by downloading and installing node.js which also installed npm.


What is the user name associated with the Guest Account? I'm trying to clamp down SSH access to a OS X 10.5 machine. Its a PowerMac used for testing software under the PowerPC.

SSH servers have a "Deny" configuration option that allows us to explicitly deny access based on a user. For a defense-in-depth measure, I want to specifically deny Guest access.

I'm having trouble finding information on what the actual user name is for the Guest Account. The Settings → Users & Groups app does not list it:

Following How can I list all user accounts in the terminal?, the dscacheutil command does not list the account.

And there is no man page on it:

$ man guest
No manual entry for guest

What is the user name associated with the Guest Account?

I think the easiest way to know Guest user name would be login to the system as guest and in terminal type id

My guess is that user name for Guest is guest


Messages Crashes on Mac Upon Startup Opened messages and the crash reporter immediately opened stating that the program crashed.  In the reporter it stated:

  Sandbox Creation Failed: You do not have permission to save the file "Application Support" to the folder "Library".

After some research the only possible solution I found involved creating a temporary account to see if its the system or user library and possibly having to delete your current account and creating a new, slightly different account and move your files to that new account.

My question was, is there an easier way to fix this without having to go through so much trouble?

(Hint: There is, or at least it worked for me.  Read on to the answer.)

Usually I activate the Guest account and use that to test issues like you're describing.

If you try with the Guest account and you're successful, it is an indicator that you've got permission problems with your files.

Unfortunately, Apple's Disk Utility doesn't fix users' files. I've generally found it is quickest to go into the terminal.app and look for permissions that seem out of the ordinary. For example, Application Support folder on my MBP is rwx------

You can view yours by opening Terminal, using cd Library to get into the right folder, then ls -lh to view the folders including Application Support.

If those permissions are different, we can show you how to change them.


Is there a use for my old iPhone? I upgraded to the iPhone 3G 2 years ago from the first iPhone and will (hopefully) get the iPhone 4 at some point.  I was thinking of just using my old one like an iPod Touch or just keep in my speakers for music.  I also considered jailbreaking (maybe it would help me get better with programming?) or reselling it as well.

What do you recommend I do with it?

You could:

Sell it: Gazelle is a good place to sell old gadgets.
Use it as a regular iPod Touch (I gave my old iPhone to my teen to watch iTunes U videos for school).
Jailbreak it.
Test Custom Apps
Turn it into a neat personal project (remote control cars/planes, house automation).  Blog about it too.
Donate it
Replace your car stereo (this one is fun).
Make it your portable DVR; load it with your favorite shows and watch them when you have time (I know you can do this with you new iPhone, but it'll save on battery life if you use a second device).
High tech alarm clock (I know, that one's silly).

Sorry if I repeated any suggestions.  I was doing a quick brainstorm.  It's fun finding new ways to use old gadgets.  Good luck and let us know what you do.


Non-Winclone Boot Camp backup solution I have an 11,3 i7 iMac, from around 2010. I want to upgrade to Mavericks and do a clean install of both Mavericks and Windows 7 in Boot Camp - reformat the internal HD and repartition.

I need a solution for backing up my Windows user files - documents, some apps if possible - but I don't need an actual image of my old partition. I did pick up a copy of Winclone and I'm running it, but the backup process is incredibly slow. Check out these timestamps!

26-03-14 02:37:28   Winclone[6116]  53.51 percent completed
26-03-14 03:06:37   Winclone[6116]  54.52 percent completed
26-03-14 03:37:34   Winclone[6116]  55.53 percent completed
26-03-14 04:13:04   Winclone[6116]  56.54 percent completed
26-03-14 04:46:15   Winclone[6116]  57.55 percent completed

Is there any alternative to Winclone (I refuse to believe that imaging a 250GB partition requires a fifty-hour period) and is there some way I could simply back up my Windows files instead of the whole partition? I know the two filesystems are different, so it cannot be as simple as simply dragging the files from the Boot Camp partition to my external 3TB Seagate?

Any Windows Backup software of your choice. Altho you then might have to reinstall windows before you can restore the files themself.


how to split an mp4 into separate clips? I have a 3-hour long .mp4 video that has sensible breaks roughly every 30 minutes or so.  I want to export this into multiple videos of each section, but have run into nothing but problems trying to do so.  This isn't something I do often so I don't really want to invest in commercial tools for this one task, but as yet I can't find any free tool capable of this job.

I really would prefer to just cut this up without having to decode and re-encode the file(s) all over again.  I'd like to just mark the sections I want, and spit them out as standalone .mp4s.  No other edits, no corrections, no effects, no anything... just cut & export without any formatting changes at all.

I thought Handbrake could do this, but if it can I can't figure out how.  I then thought maybe iMovie (10.x as I'm on Mavericks), but that's been nothing but headache and appears to decode the entire movie first before working with it anyway.  Quicktime itself seems only able to direct export as .mov and I don't want to re-encode to mp4 all over again.

I keep running into free/open source programs that either are only free in a very limited fashion (like 5 minute max exports, or nasty watermarks, etc.) or that won't run on Mavericks.  Is what I'm looking to do just not possible without commercial software?  Is it really so difficult to split one long mp4 into several shorter ones?

Here's a tutorial I just made to solve the problem. No pro subscriptions, no nonsense.

QuickTime Export Split Clip Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7MgVBGfFCo

Essentially, you just use the shortcut to split the clip, move the split over to a new file, and save the new file. Quick and easy. Split up an over hour long video into 13 videos or so [1] in 15 minutes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3z1TiLmRFcwBvXbeSmXhYbouKfBKZyZv


iTunes Internet Radio on iOS iTunes desktop app has a built-in Internet Radio where users have access to a vast collection of free, streaming Internet radio stations?

Listen to Internet radio in iTunes on Mac

Is there a counterpart for the same available in iOS? Say in the Music app. If not is there a 3rd party app which provides this feature and have access to similar stations?

I often listen to a bunch on stations while on my Mac. I looking to  have the same ability available on my iPhone.

Please note, I'm not looking to subscribe to Apple Music. I am exploring if:

The same feature from iTunes desktop app is available in iOS/1st party apps.
3rd party apps which can let me listen to the streaming Internet Radio stations that are available under iTunes for desktop.

Yes, it is possible but requires a bit of copy/paste work.

Select the radio stream in iTunes on desktop.
Select the Edit menu, choose the Song Info entry (or just press Command + I). This will show you the location URL of the stream.  For example, the first stream in the 80s Flashback section is A_A 80s with the URL of http://listen.shoutcast.com/a-a80svs90s.
Click the URL and it will select all of the text.
Copy the URL to the clipboard (Command + C)
If you have your desktop setup to use Handoff to your iPhone, open the Web browser on the phone (Safari and Chrome both work) and paste in the URL. The page will become a simple media playback bar.
If you don't use Handoff, open the Web browser on your desktop, open the bookmark manager, create a new bookmark with the URL of the stream. Hopefully you have your devices configured to sync your browser bookmarks, if so, the stream bookmark will appear in the iPhone browser.
Finally if you don't have the devices configured for sync, you can copy/paste the stream URLs into a new email message on your desktop and then send it to yourself. Open the email on your phone and click on the stream URL, which should load up in your Web browser.

As nohillside mentioned above, it might be easier to manage the streams using an Internet Radio app from the AppStore. You should be able to add the stream URLs from iTunes into any Radio app.


How to get data from a MacBook Pro hard drive on a Windows computer? My MacBook Pro is not working anymore, I have some valuable data that I want to retrieve right now.

This question is only software related. I can handle all the hardware stuff.

I know that the formats are different so I wanna make sure this will work.

Thank you.

There are a number of variables we need to answer before we can answer the question around what kind of drive it is, and what format the drive was in.

If you can provide some more information I can tailor the answer to you a bit more:

What model of MacBook Pro is it (which year and specification)
What version operating system was the Mac running?
What actually happened to the Mac to stop it working?

In the mean time this will give you some idea of what to do:

Drive type

The type of drive your MacBook Pro will dictate how you connect the old MacBook Pro drive to your PC.

Soldered SSD

First consideration is that more modern MacBook Pros' drives are soldered onto the logic board of the computer and cannot be easily removed, only Apple or an Apple Authorised Service Provider can retrieve this data.

This applies to MacBook Pro 2017 and 2018.

PCI Express SSD

This type of SSD is a removable stick, this can be removed easily using a take apart guide from iFixIt.com but would require a computer that supports this kind of SSD or a suitable adapter to read the data.

This applies to MacBook Pro models from 2013 to 2016.

SATA / IDE SSD or spinning drives

These are by far the easiest type of drive to remove and recover data from as they can be easily removed by following a take apart guide from iFixIt.com for your model, and the drive can then be connected to an appropriate USB to SATA or IDE adapter available readily on eBay or Amazon.

This applies to all models of MacBook Pro prior to 2013.

Drive format

After you've got the drive out the next question is whether it was running APFS or HFS+ file systems. if the drive is not a SSD i.e. it is a spinning disk it is most likely running HFS+.

HFS+

There are a number of applications available for Windows that can read HFS+ formatted drives, although I have no personal experience with using any of these this article suggests 4 options: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-ways-read-mac-formatted-drive-windows/

APFS

If the computer is running APFS the options are more limited, there is some new software from Paragon which also now supports APFS apparently.

Alternatives

If you don't fancy using any Windows software to do this, or don't want to pay you could look at borrowing a friends Mac which would natively be able to read both HFS+ and APFS drives if it is running macOS High Sierra.

This would allow you to copy the files onto another hard drive running ExFAT or FAT32 file systems which work on both macOS and Windows.


Transfer Audio output of my MacBook wirelessly What is the best way to output the sound of my macbook to my hifi system without using the headphone jack? Is there a way to use bluetooth or airplay or whatever to output all sound (and I mean not only iTunes Music) ?

What hardware do I need for this?

Since Airfoil has a very high latency, is there another solution that has a latency under 1 second?

I now found a good solution. The Belkin Bluetooth Receiver. It only costs 30$. Way cheaper than the AirPort+Airfoil Solution. AND it only has 100-400ms latency. Cheaper, faster and better sound.

But one final note:

You have to change the bluetooth settings a bit to make it sound perfect. Disable bluetooth, add the following lines and reboot.

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Max (editable)" 80
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 48
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Initial Bitpool (editable)" 40
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool" 58
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Max" 58
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Min" 48


Remove an automatic correction from the dictionary? At some point in the previous years, apple decided to include newspaper names in their dictionary. For Swiss French, this includes the words for morning and minutes, capitalised. So if write “munutes”, it gets corrected to Minutes and not minutes, which is particularly annoying. Is it possible to remove this word from the spellchecking?

Yes, there is a workaround for this.

Navigate to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement

You can now add "munutes" as the phrase and shortcut.

This will ensure your spell check won't autocorrect "munutes" from now on.

I have had to do this for my actual name as well as some of my friends names as autocorrect isn't a fan of Irish names.


Can't find sshd process Using PuTTY on my Windows laptop, I am able to ssh into my Mac desktop, but once I've logged in, I can't find any sshd process running on the Mac.  E.g. running the following right after ssh-ing into the Mac:

% ps -eo pid,command | grep sshd | grep -v grep

...produces no output.  Of course, needless to say, I get the same results (no output) if I use ps -ef instead of ps -eo pid,command.

Also, there's no /var/run/sshd.pid file.

What's going on?  Does OS X use a different program to handle incoming ssh logins?

No - OS X uses OpenSSH and you can inspect the source code used here.

Based on your output, it looks like sshd is not active on the machine. Also ps|grep ssh[d] will prevent your grep process from matching the target. Some people get concerned when they don't see sshd running, since it gets started on demand when launchd detects an incoming network request. Are you certain ssh is active? You could verify this with lsof|grep ssh if you have doubts.

Look for this when one ssh has been initiated recently on Lion:

Last login: Mon Jul 16 17:58:26 2012 from 10.0.1.35
mac:~ mike$ ps -ef|grep sshd
0   60320     1   0  4:23PM ??         0:00.00 /usr/libexec/launchproxy /usr/sbin/sshd -i
0   60321 60320   0  4:23PM ??         0:00.15 /usr/sbin/sshd -i
501 60330 60321   0  4:23PM ??         0:00.01 /usr/sbin/sshd -i
501 60336 60331   0  4:23PM ttys003    0:00.00 grep sshd


Same iTunes, different iTunes! (whishlist shortcut disappeared!) In iTunes I have my whishlist, sometimes I go to check that searching special prices. Since last iTunes version, I used to click on my username and use the shortcut to see my whishlist. With last update I noticed (with lot of disappoint!) that this shortcut disappeared!

Then I went on my other Mac and I noticed that here the shortcut survived!

What could be the difference?

From (or, I hope, in) iTunes version 12.3.3.17, to show that shortcut, is necessary to enable "Show Apple Music" in iTunes's settings.


IOS9 Video Scrubbing In IOS8 it was possible to scrub through videos without first pressing the play button.   In IOS9 it seems that the only way to access the scrubbing tool is to first start playing the video and then the scrubbing tool becomes available.

Anyone with a workaround for getting to scrubbing quicker?

You can click on the small thumb at the bottom to expand the scrubbing tool.


how to place file inside /sbin/ in MAC 10.11 during .pkg installation We have been installing / placing a tool for dhcp refresh under /sbin till MAC 10.10 there were no issues. but now it is completely blocked.
even with root privilege i cannot able to place it.
Any way is suggested?

Does Apple provide any other way to perform the release and renew IP address, clear the ARP entries in better way?

Thanks,
Saravana

wim-deblauwe's comment links to Release & Renew DHCP from the Command Line with ipconfig which shows how to do this:

  The basic syntax to renew DHCP lease from the command line with
  ipconfig is as follows:

sudo ipconfig set (DEVICEINTERFACE) DHCP

  If you know the device interface (en0, en1, en2, etc), just run that
  command to release and then renew DHCP for the determined device.
  Let’s say it’s en0, standard for modern Macs with wi-fi only.

sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP

Do not use setuid on OS X. This approach is considered a security risk and Apple appears to be working to invalidate any justification for it.

Any script or tool you create will need to acquire the appropriate authorisation rights before calling the related API.


Mac OS X - Terminal window shows up but closes immediately I'm using Mac OS X Lion 10.7. I open Terminal and its window shows up but immediately close and its icon remains in the dock. It's working fine a moment ago. I don't know what i have messed. I looked at the log file in the Console application and see "login: USER_PROCESS 172 ttys000"

I recently had this issue because I uninstalled the version of bash installed by macports (/opt/local/bin/bash) not realizing it was my default shell. The solution was to change my default shell back to /bin/bash via the advanced user options in the Users & Groups System Preferences. (See @sdmeyers' comment on @Pyrolistical's answer for instructions.)


How to publish magazines (in PDF format) to Apple Newsstand? We're interested in publishing our magazines to Apple's Newsstand and we're wondering how we would go about doing this?

I've read you need a developer kit (which we don't have), is there a way to just publish the magazines without this?

If you do not have a dev kit you can use other companies who build, release and manage subscriptions.

One such comapny is Woodwing

However these options are generally very expensive. You are better off (if you can create and develop the product yourself) purchasing the SDK license ($99 per year) or failing that you can use Adobe software to publish the Newsstand Magazine but that costs about $500

There is more information on Newsstand here


Do we have to submit a Paid Application Agreement if I intend to fix a price for my app @ 0.99$ Do we have to submit a Paid Application Agreement if I intend to fix a price for my app @ 0.99$

Is the agreement for a longer period or can be renewed after a certain interval
Can we update the pricing once the app is inside the App Store

Yes, you have to submit the agreement no matter what the price is - as long as it is not free.
The agreement runs for a longer period, but Apple will periodically make updates and changes, and at that point you'll have to agree to it again.
You can update the pricing at any time both before it is listed on the App Store, and while it is listed on the App Store.


Python 3 'json' module is actually corrupted I'm asking this question here and not on Stack Overflow because it appears to be MacOS specific. Many answers over there point to searching for a bad "json.py" module however we can see from the following that no such bad module is being imported.
How do I "fix" the Python 3 installation?
$ python3
Python 3.7.7 (default, Mar 10 2020, 15:43:33)
[Clang 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.17)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import json
>>> d = {'a' : 100, 'b' : 200}
>>> json.dumps(d)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: module 'json' has no attribute 'dumps'

>>> print(json.__file__)
None

Here's where it is located:
$ which python3
/usr/local/bin/python3

I've tried a brew reinstall python3 to no avail.

Well I suppose I will deal with "glib, graphviz and gts" later, but what did the trick for me was to entirely remove the brew installation of Python 3:
brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python3

And now things are back to normal:
$ python3
Python 3.7.3 (default, Apr 24 2020, 18:51:23)
[Clang 11.0.3 (clang-1103.0.32.62)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import json
>>> d = {'a' : 100, 'b' : 200}
>>> json.dumps(d)
'{"a": 100, "b": 200}'


Can I stop predictive typing from suggesting emojis? I hardly ever use emojis in my messages. Recently, I used one in a text and now predictive typing always recommends emojis for my words.

Is there any way that I can keep predictive typing on, but not have it suggest emojis?

I've found a workaround in this apple discussions thread from 2016:

go to:

Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Edit > Delete Emoji.

this will remove emojis from your keyboard, and as somebody commented, will also change the predictions.

and a quote from another person, more recent comment from feb '17:

  I have discovered a solution however, install GBoard - Googles
  keyboard. You can turn of emoji suggestions in settings and it's
  significantly quicker. Also the glide function works well.


Move SoftRAID to a new home We have 3x4TB 3.5" HD's in RAID 5 (SoftRAID) in a 2012 MacPro tower.

Is it possible to physically remove them and insert them into a larger enclosure and it will continue operating?

Yes, it is possible to move a SoftRAID array of disks from the internal drive bays of a MacPro and into an external enclosure connected to the same computer. You might have to do a small reconfiguration to ensure that it "finds" the array, but if you have used proper disk labelling it should be pretty much automatic.

Note that it is important that the external enclosure supports JBOD - i.e. it must be able to present the drives to macOS as seperate, single drives. If the enclosure only supports its own form of RAID, it is still possible to use the old disks - but the data on them will be overwritten.

Another thing to observe is that the 2012 MacPro tower by default hasn't got Thunderbolt or any of the newer, faster external busses. You might find an external enclosure too slow if it is connected via USB 2.0 for example.

Before you embark on anything, remember to take backups!


Triple screen on MBP 2016 13"? I currently own a MBP (2016, 13", No Touch Bar) as well as an official Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter (HDMI version). I have a second screen plugged in (Asus VS247H, HDMI, 24" 1080p), and everything works OK.

I was wondering if I could buy another identical adapter to plug a third screen (same as the second) and then have a triple screen setup : MBP screen + 2 external monitors ?
I would like to avoid buying another 80€ adapter if it will not work. In such case, would anyone know of a viable solution for achieving this ?

Yes, this model MBP supports two external displays without any problems, up to 4K each, or a single display at 5K. In both cases the MBP's built-in screen can also be used simultaneously.

You may want to consider whether buying another identical adapter is the best way to go, as you may want the flexibility of using another adapter or dock that provides other connection options as well. However, you can certainly achieve what you want and keep your MBP on charge as well.


How to use custom font for codes in Quick Look? When using Quick Look on a code file — .swift or .cpp, etc. — the font used to render the text seems to be Menlo. I was wondering if this is customizable. Can I manually set it to any font I want, such as SF Mono or Source Code Pro?

Removed the erroneous suggestion that it was Xcode font settings that provided this functionality.

You can find out which application is responsible for displaying source code in QuickLook by using this command in the terminal:

qlmanage -m plugins | grep -i "public.source-code"

If nothing shows up you don't have an application that provides this functionality.

In that case you can try this quicklook plugin https://github.com/anthonygelibert/QLColorCode.


IP address on network cameras change preventing remote access I have 5 network cameras on my network. I manually added settings in my Airport Extreme router for port forwarding. However the IP addresses change often, preventing remote access. Is there a way to prevent this?

Airport 7.6.3 and Mountain Lion 10.8.2

You need to do two things:

First, make sure the cameras are not on DHCP (automatic addressing). This will need to be configured at the camera itself. You would need to assign them manual IP addresses as @gosmond already mentioned.
Next, make sure your Internet IP address is static. Very few ISPs provide static IPs for home connections (they do for business users). You can work around this by using a service like dyndns which will give you a domain name that will point to your router even if your ISP changes your Internet IP.


Why don't new contacts created on my iPhone sync to my desktop Mac? On my iPhone running iOS 13.3, I can create a new contact in the Contacts app. However, the contacts do not end up in the Contacts app on my desktop Mac (which is running 10.13.6).  I have iCloud on the Mac configured to share contacts, as can be see in the following screenshot:

Similarly, my iPhone is configured to share contacts too, based on the iCloud configuration in Settings ➜ my Apple ID, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

Both the iPhone and my Mac use the same Apple ID.  Neither device is out of disk space, nor is iCloud out of space.  The contacts that are missing from the Mac were created last week, so I think enough time has passed that it's not a time lag issue.

What can cause this problem, and how can I fix it?

Solution 1: Verify new contact default account location

It is likely that while Sync is working, that the contacts aren't syncing because you are not creating those contacts in your iCloud account.

The contacts app has the concept of different places to store Contacts, indeed all iCloud services do this, a more relatable example would be in Apple Mail where you have multiple mailboxes within each email account.

One of the options in both of these Apple applciations is to create things 'On My Mac'.

In this case it's likely you are creating contacts on your Mac or iPhone and not in iCloud.

You can check and fix this by:

macOS

Launch Contacts.app
Click "Contacts" in the Menu Bar, then "Preferences".
Choose the "General" tab.
At the bottom look for "Default Account"

It should be your iCloud account.

iPhone OS

Launch Settings
Tap on "Contact"
At the bottom look for "Default Account"

It should also be your iCloud account.

Solution 2: Signing out of iCloud and back in again

If the above doesn't fix the issue, or is already correctly set to your iCloud account, I would suggest signing out of and back into your iCloud account.

  Warning: As there is unsyncronised data there is the possibility of data loss, you need to manually backup the missing contacts.

macOS

Launch System Preferences.app
Choose "Internet Accounts"
Select your iCloud account
Click the - (minus) symbol to remove the account.
Click the + (plus) symbol to add the iCloud account again.

iPhone OS

Go to Settings
Tap on your profile at the top with your avatar.
Select "Sign Out" at the bottom
If prompted choose "Sign out of iCloud"

Tip: Don't sign out of both at once as it will make login with two-factor authentication difficult to impossible.


Can I find a driver or something to make the EarPod buttons work on Windows 10? I have several pairs of Apple EarPods, and I want to be able to use the buttons with music players and the volume on my PC. Is there a piece of software I can install to my computer to let the buttons work?

It shouldn't need any drivers, controls are standardized across systems. It's probable that the computer you're trying to use it with doesn't have the four pole mic/control combo you need.


Can a foreigner make a purchase in App Store China? I want to make an IAP on my Chinese App Store account. I live in China so all the other information including mobile phone and valid address is not a problem.

So I can create an account and download apps. But when I try to make a purchase, I hit the wall as there seems no way to finish the payment.

Both WeChat and Alipay don’t accept the foreigners account. The credit card is acceptable but only cards issued in China are acceptable, which I can’t have. Also the bank transfer is not acceptable as it requires to type in a valid Chinese citizen number, which I cannot fill in using my passport number.

So I wonder there is a way to make a purchase in Chinese App Store as a foreigner.

It looks like that Chinese App Store accepts China UnionPay cards. If you have any Chinese bank debit card, you can pay for in app purchases easily.

As per Apple Support:

China

If you're purchasing iCloud storage, an Apple Music subscription, or content from the App Store in China, you can use:

    Alipay
    China UnionPay
    Online banking2
    WeChat Pay
    Gift cards (including App Store Top-Up cards)

UnionPay and Chinese bank cards
When you add UnionPay as a payment method, you must provide the mobile phone number your card's issuing bank has on file for you.

Some cards do not have mobile numbers associated with them. If this is the case with your card, contact your bank to update or replace it.

App Store Top-Up cards
You can also redeem App Store Top-Up cards for store credit in China.


Recover in-memory Pages data from failed hibernation wakeup My girlfriend's Macbook crashed while attempting to restore from a hibernated file. The progress bar stopped at ~10%, after which we restarted the computer for a normal startup.

This hibernated memory image had an unsaved document open in Pages, which we'd like to recover. There is a sleepimage in /private/var/vm, which I assume is the hibernate image which never got correctly restored. We backed up this thing to keep it alive.

We tried to strings sleepimage | grep known_substring but it returned nothing. grep -a known_substring sleepimage also did nothing, so I'm assuming that Pages didn't keep the text data in memory as plain text.

Edit: After reading this answer on Binary grep I tried to perl -ln0777e 'print unpack("H*",$1), "\n", pos() while /(null_padded_substring)/g' sleepimage, again being fruitless. I padded it with nulls in order to attempt a match for UTF-8 text. Then I tried with .* globs between each character –- still no dice.

So Pages probably doesn't store text by any common encoding in memory. I would need to find a translation rule between ASCII string and Pages data representation -- I'm thinking maybe some kind of Objective C string buffer. To me it seems very weird to store character data as anything else than a sequence of characters, but this seems to be what Pages is doing.

If you have any idea on how to figure out the in-memory representation of text inside Pages, it might be very helpful in solving this problem. Maybe I can dump and read the process memory in some simple way?

Another possible solution is simpler -- I'm assuming it is somehow possible to reboot the computer from this sleepimage, but I can't find any documentation as to how you would proceed with that. Some other users (macrumors) seem to have encountered this, but for all the forum questions I've found, none of them have responses.

The OS X version is Snow Leopard, 10.6.8.

Complex suggestions involving programming are welcome. I do C and Python.

Thank you.

First try, IF known_string WAS stored in plain text (not the case)
I guess you could try using
grep -Ubo --binary-files=text "known_substring" sleepimage

From that, -U parameter specifies search on binary files, -b specifies that the offset in bytes to the matching part should be displayed and, lastly, -o specifies that only the matching part should be printed.
If that works, you would know the offset in bytes to get to that region, but I would not know exactly how to proceed there. Depending on the filetype, you could probably check for the filetype signature near that informed offset and try to isolate only the bytes that do make part of that file. For this, I guess you could either write a C program to do that, or maybe execute hexdump -s known_offset sleepimage and try getting only the bytes that relate to the file you need.
For instance, suppose I wanted to know something about Chrome:
$ sudo grep -Ubo --binary-files=text -i "chrome" sleepimage
3775011731:chrome

So I know I got an occurrence of chrome at the byte offset 3775011731. Hence I could:
$ sudo hexdump -s 3775011731 sleepimage | head -n 3
e1021b93 09 09 3c 73 74 72 69 6e 67 3e 2e 63 68 72 6f 6d
e1021ba3 65 2e 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 2e 63 6f 6d 3c 2f 73 74
e1021bb3 72 69 6e 67 3e 0a 09 09 3c 6b 65 79 3e 45 78 70

The tricky part would be to get only the bytes you want. If the filetype has a known header you could maybe subtract the header size in bytes from the hexdump offset, so you get the file "since the beginning". If the filetype has a known "EOF" signature, you could try searching for it too and hence get only the bytes up to that point.
What is your filetype? Do you think that some procedure like this could be used in your case? Note that I have never done this before, and I am basing myself on a lot of "guesses", but I suppose something like this has a little chance of working..
Second try, a slow method for parsing all bytes
The method before does not work because it also searches only for plain text, my bet.
For this second text I created a simple C program containing:
#include <stdio.h>

int main () {
  printf("assim");
  return 0;
}

So I could search for "assim", which would be your known_string, in that text. In order to know what bytes to search for I did:
$ echo -n "assim" | hexdump
0000000 61 73 73 69 6d
0000005

Hence, I must find "61 73 73 69 6d". After compiling that simple C source into the program "tt", I did the following:
hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X\n"' tt | # format output for hexdump of file tt
    pcregrep -M --color -A 3 -B 3 "61\n73\n73\n69\n6D" # get 3 bytes A-fter and 3 bytes B-fore the occurence

Which returned to me:

If you did something like that, I guess you could get your data.. It would be kind of slow to parse 2~8GBs of bytes though...
Note that in this approach you must find the hexes in capital letter (write 6D instead of 6d on the last grep), not in under-case letters, and use \n instead of white-spaces (so you can use -A and -B for the grep). You could use grep -i so it became case-insensitive, but it would be a little slower. Hence, just use capitals if this is used.
Or, if you want a do-all automated "script":
FILENAME=tt # file to parse looking for string
BEFORE=3 # bytes before occurrence
AFER=3 # bytes after occurrence
KNOWNSTRING="assim" # string to search for

ks_bytes="$(echo -n "$KNOWNSTRING" | hexdump | head -n1 | cut -d " " -f2- | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | sed -e 's/ *$//g' -e 's/ /\\n/g')"

hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X\n"' $FILENAME | pcregrep -M --color -A $AFER -B $BEFORE $ks_bytes


Does activating auto-login compromise secure password storage? or:
Does enabling auto-login in OS X add any additional security risks?

How does this auto-login work? I'm not a security expert, but I imagine that such a procedure would require the password to be stored somewhere in plain text, right? But then this specific location could be exploited by malicious software.

Where is the password for the auto-login stored?

The setting I'm referring to is located at:
Users & Groups → Login Options → Automatic login

Yes. If you enable automatic login, the keychain password is stored in /etc/kcpassword using XOR cipher, which can be decoded easily. You need root privileges to read it though.

sudo ruby -e 'key = [125, 137, 82, 35, 210, 188, 221, 234, 163, 185, 31]; IO.read("/etc/kcpassword").bytes.each_with_index { |b, i| break if key.include?(b); print [b ^ key[i % key.size]].pack("U*") }'

Even if automatic login was disabled, the login password can be reset in single user mode. It doesn't change the password of the login keychain though. If someone logged in to your account after resetting the login password, they could access most of your files normally, but they couldn't log in on your account in Mail or use auto-fill in Safari. If automatic login was enabled, they could see your passwords with something like security find-internet-password -s accounts.google.com -w and use Mail and auto-fill.

There was a vulnerability when automatic login was enabled:

  According to a leading password recovery software developer Passware, your password could be easily accessed via the direct memory access associated with the Mac’s FireWire port.

  It seems that by enabling the “automatic login” feature the FireWire port on your Mac opens the door to unauthorized password recovery. It seems that this is an issue that has plagued Snow Leopard as well, but as it stands it does not look like there is any fix for it, apart from disabling “automatic login” and spending that extra second or two typing in your password.

The hash of the login password (which is usually also the password of the login keychain) is stored in /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/username.plist in 10.7 and 10.8. In 10.7 even relatively complex passwords could be cracked with DaveGrohl, but 10.8 switched to PBKDF2, which limits it to about 10 guesses per second per core.


Album art not syncing to iPhone for playlists A while ago I had a crash which wiped all the music synchronisation settings from my phone.

Until that point I'd synced based on selecting albums and artists in iTunes when the phone was plugged in, however having lost all that I decided it would be better to create playlists and sync those - that way if it happened again I just have to select half a dozen playlists to sync and I'm done.

The issue I have is that this doesn't seem to synchronise album art in most cases. The album art is there in iTunes but not on the phone.

If I select an artist to sync individually the artwork will appear (and will stay even when the artist selection is removed so it's just the playlist keeping the track on the phone), but without that it won't.

EDIT: Selecting the album individually doesn't seem to push the art work across so that may be a red herring. It's all feeling rather random.

Any thoughts on what I can do to force the artwork on to the phone without having to individually select every artist / album / track?

(iTunes 10.7 and iOS 6.0 on an iPhone 4S)

Denis Ahrens mentioned something about that in the last episode of mobileMacs (timecode).

For those of you who don't know German: He said that all of his music is lossless and that iTunes recently learned how to encode these files to 256kbit/s AAC when syncing his music to his iPhone. When he switched this on, he experienced the same problem that you have: No cover art at all. He explained that some people seem to get the cover art and some don't.

If I understood him right (even for native speakers, he talks very fast and the context isn't always clear) he says that the parts of your library that get converted from lossless while transferring are missing the cover art while the tracks/albus/files that you convert explicitly before syncing get the cover art – but as I said, I'm not sure about that.

I have neither iOS 6 nor lossless music so I can't test this theory myself, I can only pass on what I heard; I hope it helps. (By the way, Denis concludes that he hasn't found a workaround yet and advises to wait for the fix.)


Can't sign in to Apple Music, TV or Podcast on Mac I recently did a clean install of macOS Catalina on my MacBook Air and since I can't sign in my Apple Music account in Music App. Neither I can connect to TV although I don't have a subscription contrary to Apple Music. Same thing for Podcast, I can't sign in.

My Apple Music account works fine on the beta website or on my phone and every other iCloud service is fine too.

I tried deleting the full library, rebooting, login out and in again to iCloud and other things like that.

Sometimes I got various error ranging from 11556 to "not available in your country".

Any advice or solution?

It magically solved itself after few days.


Yosemite and Teac A-H01 sound driver- alternatives? The Teac A-H01 requires an audio driver, otherwise the sound becomes watery. Teac hasn't released a driver since Yosemite came out.

Are there any workarounds? It seems like USB external sound is fairly standard, so perhaps there are alternative drivers available?

I have same issue, contacted Teac support and recieved the following

Thank you for contacting TEAC-Audio.
Our engineering department is currently working on this issue. Please be so kind to check our webpage periodically for further info, or a possible driver update.
Thank you for your understanding.
MfG / Sincere Regards
Jürgen
Customer Support
TEAC-AUDIO Europe
Liegnitzerstr. 6
D-82194 Groebenzell / Germany
Tel.  +49-(0)8142-4208 141


how to use automator make this workflow? I have a folder full of video file to upload to a youtube like video service, they don't provide any api, and the upload form is made of flash, that means I can't manipulate anything, so what I think of is the mac automator

is anyway to do that?

some point that important:

how to choose the next video to upload?
how to copy and paste the file name into the title

because other video service is banned in China, so youku.com is my only choose to upload my videos in China

as you may notice, the upload page is made of flash, so there's no api for it, so the apple scripts may not work in my opinion, all I could think of is using automator

I have found two services to be much easier to automate for uploading videos.

Posterous - this site takes uploads as emails and also has an API, but email is the way to go for simplicity.
Vimeo - Vimeo has several API that are well documented and allow uploads through the API so this might be a better choice if you are more into programming than scripting/light automation.

I would go with posterous since you can set it up to autopost to just about any other social site and only have to script the generation of an email per attachment. It can automatically push your videos when they arrive to YouTube, Vimeo, FaceBook, Flickr and many, many other sites.

Lastly, don't forget that iPhoto works well with Automator and AppleScript and has upload to YouTube functionality built in. It should be doable to automate import the folder into an album/event and automate the clicks to publish to YouTube - but not nearly as easy as using Posterous.


kernel_task using *way* too much memory I have a 2008 Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM.  Recently (post installation of Lion), it started to behave extremely sluggishly, so I used Activity Monitor to see what was using up the system resources.  Turns out that kernel_task is using 2.95 GB of RAM.  Not a typo: it's using ~3 GB of RAM.

I use this Mac Mini as a home media server, connected to a TV and a Drobo.  In other words, beyond running iTunes, I don't really use it for much.  I don't have a ton of applications running, nor do I have any accessories other than the Drobo and the TV connected to it.

What on earth could kernel_task possibly need 3 GB of RAM for, and how can I tell it to stop eating all my RAM and dragging my system to a screeching halt?

In the past, I've experienced odd memory consumption issues after upgrading OS X, due to older kernel extensions that were still being loaded.  Some of the extensions were for applications that I was no longer using and had forgotten about.  You might try listing out all the non apple kernel extensions, then try unloading them one by one to see if you experience any improvement in memory consumption.

To list what is loaded, type the following from a terminal shell:

kextstat | grep -v com.apple

So, each of the kernel extensions, will have a corresponding kext file, located in the default /System/Library/Extensions/.

Then, to unload a kernel extension, type the following:

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/<NAME_OF_KEXT_File.kext>

If you identify any extensions that are wonky, you then have a starting place to see if perhaps there is an updated version of the application that is more Lion friendly.


Change iCloud account alias email address I'm trying to change my iCloud account alias email address, but I couldn't find any way to do it.

As you can see below, this account's Apple ID is name@email.com and it's alias email is anothername@icloud.com. I'd like to change the actual alias email to name@icloud.com, so it has the same name as Apple ID.

I've already tried to go on Edit, but it only allows me to change the Apple ID (main email) and an option to add more emails. Nothing regarding the iCloud email, such as deleting it and creating another one.

Is there any way to achieve the desired?

Thank in advance,
Luiz.

I just got off the phone with Apple support for this exact question. Short answer: it can't be done.

Once you create an iCloud email account, that account can't be changed or removed from your Apple ID. The only way to delete the email account would be to delete the entire Apple ID account.


After reboot system time changed and menu bar items changed position I'm new to Apple Mac OS, just Bought a new Macbook pro 13" Mid 2012 a month ago. Yesterday everything was good and working fine. I shut down system and went to sleep. Today when I Started my system I found some significant changes.

My system time went wrong from AM/PM to 24 hours which I fixed from apple Date/Time preferences. The but it just worked for the Menu Bar Display. System time is still 24hour format I can see in Terminal and start up Login Screen. In the Menu bar it is now showing the day number of the Week not the name as it was doing previously.

2nd is that in meny Bar the time is now shifted to left of Battery which was by default to right most and right to battery:

What is wrong with my system. I installed Macports yesterday. Don't know what else has been changed :(.

Menu bar icons can be repositioned by dragging them left and right with the Cmd pressed.


WhatsApp web option not displayed in WhatsApp iPhone I have an iPhone 4S with WhatsApp.

I install WhatsApp Web on my PC. It starts, and displays a QR code.  I'm supposed to use my iPhone's WhatsApp to scan the Qr code. The menu item to do this is supposed to be in "settings". When I open "settings" I don't see the option. It's supposed to be below "tell a friend".

What do I need to do to get the option to appear?

The option should be appearing in the iPhone software "WhatsApp"; it is missing from that software as installed on my device.

It seems that you have an old iOS version on your iPhone. In order to use WhatsApp Web, you should have at least iOS 8.1 installed on your iPhone. (https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080003)

In order to update your iPhone, go to Settings > General > Software Update > Install Update.


Open-source SSH app for iPhone I don't trust any SSH app on the App Store to make secure connections.

Any clue if there exist open-source terminals for iPhone or iOS?

The best ssh client I've used on iOS is Prompt from Panic Software.

That being said, there are open source ssh clients for iOS, like Blink Shell. If you have a dev license (100 dollars), you can build it and push it to your phone. Or pay the 20 dollars and get it from the app store.


Does anyone know how to sync/open an already shared calendar on outlook for Mac onto my iCal? Does anyone know how to sync/open an already shared calendar on outlook for Mac onto my iCal?
I have a shared calendar on my outlook for Mac (not Outlook 2016), but I need to open and sync that cal to my ical.

Open Apple Calendar. Select Calendar > Preferences.
Go to Accounts, and click the + icon on the bottom left.
Select Exchange, and enter your credentials.
That's it! Calendar will take care of the rest!


iTunes starts playing when disconnecting Bose Soundlink Mini i have a Bose Soundlink Mini connected to a Macbook Air. When the Soundlink turns off after a time (because of energy saver mode), iTunes automatically starts playing music. I didn't find any option to disable that, nor any information about others with the same problem. Do you have any idea, why this happens and how i can solve it?

This (http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-to-stop-itunes-from-opening-with-bluetooth-speakers.1666895/) worked for me --

In Finder go to Applications and show package contents on iTunes.app. Inside the MacOS folder there is a unix script called iTunes, I renamed it iTunesclosed. Also renamed ituneshelper.app to ituneshelpdisabled.app

Remove the iTunesHelper.app from starting on login via System Preferences -> Users and Groups

Also kill the iTunesHelper process via Activity Monitor.

Edit: Note that you may have to do this every time iTunes is updated.


CalendarAgent wants to connect to wunderground Odd one.
Without (knowingly) changing anything (of course SOMETHING must have changed) when I booted up Apple Calendar the other day I got this alert from Little Snitch:

  CalendarAgent via com.apple.WeatherKitService.xpc wants to connect to
  api.wunderground.com on TCP port 443 (https)

Any idea why or how that would happen?
I don't sync to any Calendars that I know of, and use the Calendar infrequently.

OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

Weather Underground is the provider for Apple's weather data in OS X/macOS (and iOS). Calendar.app downloads weather information for calendar events with a set location.
As soon as you add a location to a calendar event Calendar.app will try to fetch the weather conditions if it's only a few days in the future.

Location services (System Preferences > Security > Privacy) does not effect the download of weather information.


Fake/randomize/delete geolocation in Safari for certain Websites I would like Safari on Mac OS X Lion to send correct geo informations to some websites but not to others. Instead sending correct location data I would like it to send either no location data, faked or random coordinates.

Is there something to achieve that? Maybe a Safari extensions or a Glimmer Blocker script?

I believe Safari will do something like this by default (Mac OS X 10.7.3, Safari 5.2).
If you look in the Privacy pane of Safari’s preferences, there’s a panel:

Limit website access to location services:

Prompt for each website once each
Prompt for each website one time only
Deny without prompting

I believe the first option is the default, so when you visit a page that wants geolocation data in the default setting, you get a panel like this:

In the default setting, the page will throw up that prompt every time I reload it (so if I click “Allow”, then refresh the page, I get the same prompt).
If I select the second option from above (“prompt for each website one time only”), then Safari will throw up that panel once, then remember your choice forever.
If you want to learn more, Apple has published two support articles on the topic:

“About Location Services in OS X Lion and Safari 5.1 or later”, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5009, accessed 9 May 2012.
“About Location Services in Mac OS X v10.6 and Safari 5.0”, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4239, accessed 9 May 2012.

Hope this is useful.

Addendum: I don’t know of any way to have Safari supply fake location data.