Combining parts from a MacBook Pro with a Dell Inspiron I have an old 2007 Macbook Pro 15" and Dell Inspiron 1720. Since the logic board on the Mac is damaged, I kinda combined it in Dell (I took RAM, WiFi card, HDD). It all works perfectly.

Since they are same age, and both use Intel. My question is, will Dell work with Mac processor inside as well? (Mac 2.4Ghz per core, and Dell is 2.0Ghz per core)

Technically speaking, yes the CPU would work (provided it was still functional). Apple makes no changes to the (Intel) CPU making it "Mac only."

However, (and this is a big one), where Dell typically uses a socket, Apple solders the CPU to the board - you can remove the Dell CPU, but you need to de-solder it from the Mac.

What you would spend on the labor just to remove the CPU is far more costly than surfing eBay for a deal on a compatible CPU.


GitHub account unavailable on Xcode 10.2 I noticed a strange behaviour in my Xcode (v10.2, running on a 2016 MacBook Pro with macOS 10.14.4). I have most of my projects under source control with a local Git repository. I then create a remote to GitHub via Xcode and commit and push from the source control menu.

Since yesterday every time I committed I got asked for my username and password. At first I thought it was something normal due to some connectivity issue but then the issue persisted and, going to Xcode Preferences > accounts I noticed that my GitHub account was greyed out and, upon selecting it (or trying to) the right side of the window showed this message:

Account Unavailable Your account details could not be loaded because Accountname support is currently unavailable

At this point it is impossible to remove my GitHub account from Xcode in order to add it once more and it is also impossible to add any source control account, as if something with version control in general would be very broken. I thought it an issue with my SSH key for GitHub so I went on and scrapped the old one and generated a new one. The account stayed on "Loading" for a good minute and then the same message presented itself once more.

I really have no idea what to do here.

What is causing this and how do I get out of it?

This is kind of a tough one to search for but I did find this SO Q&A titled: Xcode source control wrong username on github
. There's an answer there that shows the use of a CLI tool called xcrun to manipulate your Github credentials that are stored in Xcode, for eg:

$ xcrun git config --local user.name 'new_user_name'
$ xcrun git config --local user.email 'new@email.com'

Might help with getting your issue sorted out.

Xcode 10

I was also able to find reports of people having the same issue as you where their source repos (Bitbucket, Github, etc) were greyed out in Xcode. For eg:

This reddit thread titled: Add GitHub account greyed out on Xcode 10, can't fix mentions this process for manually deleting out the creds. This appears to be a issue with Xcode 10 itself.

  Happened to me, this is the only thing that worked (from StackOverflow):

  Make screenshots of the custom preference settings
  Delete /Applications/Xcode
  Delete all files containing com.apple.dt
  in ~/Library/Caches
  Delete all files containing com.apple.dt
  in ~/Library/Preferences
  Open App Store.app, download and re-install Xcode.
  Create the Apple ID developer account

  After those steps all account types were enabled and I could create the GitHub account. Finally restore your custom preference settings from the screenshots.

References

Xcode add Github account not possible


Scripting on iPad - accessing features like accelerometer, GPS, etc Are there any scripting languages for the iPad that can access native functionality like accelerometer, GPS, text messages, etc?

I know that it is possible to write Scheme and Python scripts but I don't think they can access any of the native functionality.

Is there any way to do this?

If not, why not? Is it that Apple won't allow scripting environments in to the app store or is it the case that no one has bothered creating it?

techBASIC 3.1 supports the following connection and build-in sensor technologies:

Bluetooth LE.
WiFi via TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP.
HiJack (An A-D converter that plugs into the headphone jack).
Built-in accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer.
Access to composite information for heading, location (GPS/hotspot/cell tower), elevation, direction of travel.
Send emails (with user intervention).
Take photos or access the photo library.

It does not support:

The serial port. (It was implemented, but Apple would not allow this support to be released.)
Classic Bluetooth.
Receive emails. (Apple won't allow this.)
Send/receive text messages.


Update applications with another users AppleID - possible bug? The situations is this.

I installed all the the relevant apps from the App Store on my MacBook Pro using my AppleID and the apps could be updated for a long time using my AppleID.
Some time ago I created a user account on my machine for my daughter and for unrelated reasons made it an admin account.
Some apps installed as per 1. now require my daughters AppleID to update.

From reading lots of answers on this site it seems that apps installed by other users must be uninstalled/reinstalled to work resolve this issue. As this is not the case for me, does anyone know what might be causing this change of AppleIDs and if it is possible to revert back? As far as I can see this must be a bug.

Have anyone experienced this and is there a way to resolve this other than the uninstall/reinstall solution?

If you are on High Sierra or before, you can navigate to the app in the Applications folder, then right click the app and choose Show Package Contents. From the folder that pops up, expand the _MASReceipt folder and delete the receipt file. The app will now update properly.

If you're on Mojave you have to uninstall and reinstall the app.


Can't connect to iCloud or iTunes on my iPad I cannot connect to iCloud or iTunes on my iPad anymore. I can connect to the Internet but not iCloud or iTunes. I've tried seeing if I need to update software by going into settings-general-update software but I just get an error saying "unable to check for update. An error occurred while checking for a software update" then another saying "there was an error connecting to iCloud verification failed". Can anyone help?

Control if you can open Settings -> iCloud. At the top there will be your name. Click it and enter your icloud password and reach to your account. Look if any area in payment method  waiting for your update there. (red)


How to lock a full screen application in in a certain space? I want to keep the mail applicaton fullscreen in the far right space.

Every time I open a fullscreen application it moves to the far right.

How do I lock a fullscreen app in say the far right space?

This feature has been asked for by users many times, but unfortunately, Apple hasn’t implemented it yet.

A very ugly workaround is:

Add a new desktop in Mission Control.
Switch the Mail app to windowed mode.
Open Mission Control, and move the window to the newly created Desktop.
Switch to the Mail app. Right click on the icon in the Dock. In options, select “Assign to this Desktop.”

This is a very ugly workaround and you can use Mail only in Window mode this way.


How to set up second screen in iMac 2017 with macOS 10.12.6 Sierra? I have a new iMac 4k 21.5" (2017) running under macOS Sierra 10.12.6 and featuring 2 Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports for the connection to additional displays.

I'm attempting to connect this Mac to my 6 years old Samsung HD TV (32" 1080p (UE32C)) but with no luck. My TV has 4 HDMI ports, port 1 is connected to Apple TV and works quite well, the rest 3 ports had been used to hook up my Mac over an EZQuest cable.

I supposed that connection process should be trivial, you only have to connect the cable to the mac and to the TV than open system config tool and set up monitor in the screen config section but I failed. I have only got the black screen on the TV and second screen doesn't appear in the macOS config utility.

I would appreciate if someone suggest me where is the root of problem except the broken cable obviously.

I solved the problem finally, today I bought cheap Lenovo adapter and it works well. Previously unfair ad drove me to make the wrong decision to buy incompatible adapter. My brand new EZQuest cable working well with old MacBook 12" 2015 refuses to work with iMac 21.5" 4K 2017.


What might be causing Safari 6.0.2 to crash several times a day? Safari 6.0.2 randomly crashes on me several times a day. Today I checked the console logs after it crashed, and only found this:

  objc[2339]: Object 0x7f9b7b41cab0 of class NSUserDefaults autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking - break on objc_autoreleaseNoPool() to debug

I'm running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2. Any ideas as to what may cause this, or can anyone point me to logs where I can find more information? This never happened before in OS X Lion.

Update
This issue occurred again a few days ago, and I few a more informative error message:

It appears to have been due to me having an older version of the 1Password Safari extension which had a bug with Mountain Lion. I thought I had the latest version because I had the latest version of 1Password installed, however to update the browser extension, you need to run the browser install again. I think this may relate to the issue I experienced. I'll see how this runs for a few more days before declaring this as the true solution.


MS Excel shortcut Windows vs. Mac MS Excel for Mac has quite different shortcut keys than Excel for Windows.
Is there any comparison table?

Rather than this
http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/12/en-us/excel/item/64766a97-9258-4f78-9feb-2742ce769041

I want a table such as

Windows  Mac
F4      Ctrl+T   (Cell reference lock)
F2      Ctrl+U   (Cell edit)

I can only recommend to you to download the free Mac app Cheatsheet. It will show you a table with all relevant shortcut keys in any program when holding down the command key for 2 seconds.


Managing stolen iPad via Profile Manager We have deployed 50 iPads in field managed via Profile Manager. Recently one of the iPads got stolen. Unfortunately Find my iPad was turned off on it. We tried to wipe the iPad using Profile Manager but no success which made me think that probably stolen iPad needs to be connected to internet then it will be wiped. Is there anything we can do to save our data. Moving forward in future what could be the best and cost effective way to deal with lost or stolen iPads and protecting our data without spending alot or moving away from Profile Manager to other Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution. I have already instructed all iPad users to keep Find my iPad app on which again poses the limitation that lost or stolen iPad has to be connected to internet in order for it to be wiped.

In profile manager you could set/force a passcode option under settings that could wipe the device after so many failed attempts which does not require internet access.


I have a Magic keyboard with the numeric keypad, how do i use it in bootcamp with windows 10? I got a wireless magic keyboard with the numeric keypad. I installed bootcamp using windows 10 and am unable to connect the keyboard. At this point all i can do is use it plugged in. How do i pair it over bluetooth to be used wirelessly.

When adding a bluetooth device in windows 10, i can see the keyboard paired, pressing a key changes the text to 'Connected' and then back to paired. This happens with every keystroke rendering it unusable. How do i fix this?

I'm writing this with my new Magic Keyboard on my Windows 10 (64 bit) PC. I connected with a Logitech 'Dual Mode' Bluetooth V4/BLE dongle, which I installed first. Note I do not have bootcamp (I don't even know what that is/for)

There are a few differences to a normal windows keyboard:
- ALT key renamed 'option'
- I have have to use the 'command' key for the Windows key
- BACKSPACE is named Delete (there's a separate forward Delete key too)

Apart from these it seems completely normal so far, supporting all other keystrokes like F2, Control-Home, Conttrol-ALT-Delete (i.e. Control-option-Delete)

The only niggle = I can't tell the current charge level of the rechargeable battery. But even if the battery gets too low I can just plug in the USB-Lightning charge cable provided, and keep typing while it's charging.

All these minor shortcomings are well and truly outweighed by the appearance and feel of the beautfully styled keyboard

Hope this helps ...


How can I remove a pre-installed application on macOS Sierra I need to remove one of the pre-installed applications (Safari in my case) from a macOS Sierra system. Yet simply deleting the app, installing 3rd party "cleaning" software or any attempts to delete it via the terminal remain unsuccessful. I found out that since Mac OS 10.11 apple features so called 'System Integrity Protection', that basically forbidds its users to modify or uninstall 'system relevant applications'.

So how can I remove a pre-installed application on such a system?

PS: I already know that this may be a bad idea in regard of future upgrades. Nevertheless let's just assume I'm willing to take the risk and am just looking for ways to get this done.

You technically can remove Safari by weakening your system's security protections and disabling SIP.

Again: Do not do it!

Steps:

Reboot on the recovery partition (hold cmd-R while rebooting until the Apple logo appears)
Open the Terminal from the Utilities menu
Type csrutil disable
Reboot
You should now able to remove Safari (if the Finder does not let you do it, use the Terminal and type sudo rm -fr /Applications/Safari.app)
I'd highly recommend you reactivate SIP then by rebooting and typing csrutil enable (it won't reinstall Safari)


Transparent colours and images are shown in red For a long time I have had an issue with display color—it strangely has more red color in it as I can see. As far as I understand, it is due to how transparency is displayed.

The upper menu bar is having this redness, or in Preview.app for example, when viewing PDF files, it is blinking between normal white color and red background transparent color as you keep scrolling.

I tried to calibrate system color in System Preferences, but without any positive result.

Here are examples when using viewer to read some pdf file:

Here is how all the images are displayed (this redness I tried to explain above):

While scrolling, transparent red layer blinks from normal

This is only an example, It's not an issue only with this app, it's just easy to see it using this app.

Open Terminal and enter:
defaults delete -g CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages and hit the Enter key.

Restart your Mac.

This will disable highlighting non-retina images with a red overlay (probably in Apple apps only).
To reenable it open Terminal and just enter:
defaults write -g CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages YES and hit the Enter key.


How do I view the list of podcast chapters on an iPad using iOS 5? I subscribe to Tiesto's Club Life Podcast, and the episodes are released as very superbly crafted AAC files. Aside from containing audio data, they also:

Define Podcast "Chapters" marked at the start/end of each song.
Define custom artwork per chapter.
Name chapters appropriately by attributing artist/title (and often remixer) of the particular track.

As of iOS 5, none of this appears to work. During playback art never changes, and there is no indication of the chapter information (making it hard to look up the song after the fact).

Has this information disappeared from being easily accessed? Or has it just been moved somewhere that isn't obvious for me to find?

There really doesn't seem to be a way to view this info at all on iOS 5 iPads, in Apple's "Music" app.

Further iPad iOS 5 podcast annoyances:

If the main "Music" you listen to is podcasts, it's really annoying that you can no longer promote the "Podcasts" button from "More" to the main view: so you always have to go to "More" to see your podcasts.
If you have a mixture of video and audio podcasts, you have to switch between the "Videos" and "Music" apps to see them.

For all these reasons, I gave up on the built-in iOS 5 podcast tools, and switched to Podcaster. It costs a small amount of money, but has so many convenience features built in that it's well worth it.

(It's actually iPhone only - but works fine on iPad, at 2x size, even for showing videos)

I particularly like:

It downloads the latest episode of shows you subscribe to, but seamlessly shows you earlier ones too, so you can easily stream them
Automatic downloading via WiFi - so no more need to connect my device to a PC to update lots of podcasts
Back and forward buttons to go move 30 seconds back or forwards - or you can change the settings, and make these buttons go back/forward 10, then 20 then 30 seconds if clicked in quick succession.
Small icon at top-right of screen shows/hide details of podcasts.
Sleep facility (15, 30, 45, 60, 90 minutes)

(I'd like to include a link to the original question here where I saw Podcaster first mentioned, but there are so many answers singing its praises, I really don't remember which one I saw.)

Edit

And to answer your question about Tiesto's Club Life Podcast, yes, Podcaster displays that well. It shows the images as you listen, and at bottom-right of the screen there's a little chapters icon that shows name of each chapter, and its position (in minutes and seconds)

Furthermore, you can swipe upwards on the screen, when playing, to show the chapters.


How to migrate your iCloud account I have recently moved from France to the USA.
In the long run, that means I will shut down my French bank account who is becoming useless. But I cannot go on iTunes and change the "bank account" settings or change my address there.

From this article, I believe I will have to buy again all the apps, movies and music I have previously purchased, as well as "forget about" French apps not present in the U.S. store, even the ones for which I wish to keep an account active (not sure how to do that). I believe one cannot "switch" between a US and a French iTunes account at will. I will probably also lose all my Game Center scores, etc.

1 - How can I measure how much data / apps / settings will be lost?

Also, iCloud documents.

I have several hundred iCloud documents stored in Textedit, Notes, Pages, etcetera, that I absolutely need to work on, on a day-to-day basis.

2 - If there is a simple, step-by-step procedure that would allow me to migrate to a US-based iTunes account with as little loss as possible?

3 - What happens if I move back to France in 5 years? Same losses?

Models of devices: iPhone 4, iOS8, and iMac mid-2011 with Yosemite.

I understand that 1, 2 and 3 are different questions, and if anyone has a problem with this, I will gladly split the question in three different question pages, just let me know.

For #1, one thing to remember is your iCloud account is different from your iTunes/App Store account. You should not lose any of your iCloud documents because that is stored in the iCloud account.

Apple's support page describes the procedure here and you should be able to change it back if you like at a later point. But basically, when you change stores, you don't lose your previous purchases but you cannot update them any longer (because you are no longer hooked up to the store you bought it from in the first place). For these reasons, I have two iTunes/App Store accounts so I can switch back and forth to update my software.


iMovie stopped exporting I've been using/learning iMovie in order to create online classes for my students because of COVID19. Everything has been working fine until this morning.
iMovie just won't export a file.
I've created and exported about 30 videos thus far and I understand the basics. But now, when I select all the clips in a project and select the "Share - File..." option and hit "OK", nothing happens. No error messages, nothing. The little pie-chart progress indicator flashes for a fraction of a second before disappearing for good. The application doesn't bug or freeze (as I can keep working on the video or move to other projects), it just doesn't export the file.
I also can't export any of the videos it previously exported in the last few days and weeks. Nor will it export and brand new video.
I tried deleting the preferences: didn't solve anything.
I'm on 10.13 and iMovie 10.1.6 (and I can't upgrade).
Thanks.
P.S. The only change I made to the computer since yesterday is that I installed iOS 14 on my ipod touch. I had to use the MobileDeviceUpdater in order for iTunes to recognize my ipod touch.  I can't imagine why it would change anything for iMovie, but nothing else changed.

Try closing and reopening iMove, then export again. This worked for me.


Cannot update from 10.15.2 to 10.15.6 My wife's MacBook is currently running 10.15.2
She hasn't updated for some time, indeed she hasn't used the MacBook recently.
She tried to update, but had insufficient space.
We deleted some documents, and then tried to update.
This seemed to be OK, but on restart she was prompted to update to 10.15.4
This then was overwritten by an update to 10.15.6
We have tried several times but it remains on 10.15.2, and the whole cycle repeats.
How can we install updates?

I managed to catch the prompt to update to 10.15.4 which I tried - and failed. After this the 10.15.6 update downloaded the update (which it hadn't been before) and it worked. I will certainly use the combo update if the situation ever arises again.


How to jailbreak my iPhone 5S with iOS 9.2.1 or iOS 9.3? After updating to iOS 9.2.1, I could not enter my iPhone because I forgot my iCloud password (not e-mail) and also my security questions to restore it.

Are there jailbreak options for iOS 9.2.1 and if so, do I need to regain control of iCloud ID to use that option?

Unfortunately, iOS 9.1 is the latest jailbreak available. And yes, you would need to gain access to your Apple ID in order for the jailbreak to be useful.


Is it possible to edit a macOS alias with vim? I like to use macOS's alias feature to not have to make redundant files. These aliases work great with Chrome and TextEdit. When I open them with vim, however, I get a giant messy file (presumably the way macOS encodes aliases). Is there a way to edit the actual file through an alias with vim?

macOS aliases are just normal files. macOS knows when an alias is being accessed and passes the right file along to the app. Since aliases are just normal files, other tools just open the alias file itself rather than reading the contents of the file and finding where it points to.

If you actually want a link to another file, you can create a symbolic link instead of using aliases:

How can I create a symbolic link in Terminal?


iMac 27“ Mid 2011 - Can‘t reinstall macOS I‘m trying to reinstall macOS Sierra on my Mid 2011 iMac. I have a single 1 TB HDD and single partition called „OS X Base System“ that takes up 999.35 GB‘s. When I try to partition the Base Volume I get the following error

This volume has 1.56 GB used space. You can not remove the first volume on the disk. This volume can not be split because the resulting
volumes would be too small.

Also when just try to reinstall the OS the disk is greyed out and when hovering on it, it says

This disk is locked.

Any help would be appreciated.

It sounds like you've somehow installed a MacOS installer disk onto your internal drive. Then you're booting up to that, and trying to install the OS over itself, or trying to partition the volume of the running system.

Boot to Recovery (Command R at restart) and wipe the disk from there. Then install the OS.


Graphics Card Failure Let me preface this by stating I did look for a similar board handling similar situations but couldn't find one either in topic or response that covered me needs. I apologize deeply if I have broken a rule. That was not my intent in posting this

My first thought with my Mid 2011 iMac was a graphics card failure that apple announced a recall for and then later ended approximately one month before I had my unfortunate event. I was using a low end application (Diablo II) when I hit an orange screen followed by the WSoD. I didn't panic (yet). I had a lot of boot option to try to fix this. I ran through everything I could find on the web regarding various boot options and disc repairs. These would all start to work but die with a small percentage of the progress bar left to fill. This would be met with a full-width artifact just before WSoD.

To this point, and after a lot of struggling, I joyously was able to boot main drive through target disc mode. So I am at a worst case scenario of transferring all my data to an external drive and then (hopefully) clone the drive for further use.

I am experiencing the protracted "Stopping" on transfers that I have seen all over the net without much help.

What should I do next? Any ideas? All help will be welcome.

And assuming it is the graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 6970M), and ballpark ideas on repair costs? The sell and buy new may be an option if the numbers work right.

Given that Apple was offering free replacements, my recommendation is to go to a physical Apple store location and ask for a replacement. Apple still services these machines, and will be willing to quote you a price for replacement. There's a good chance that they'll offer to replace it for free given the circumstances, though the fee is up to their discretion.

Failing that, you could replace the GPU yourself. The GPU is an MXM board slotted into the logic board; while it's not the easiest thing to repair, it is serviceable.

Unusually, iFixit doesn't have a full repair guide for this model, but the limited guide should be enough to get you most of the way there. A 6970M or 6770M should work.


Making an inactive mailbox active I made one of my mailboxes inactive. How do I make it active again?

Under Preferences, Accounts, click on the account and then the "Advanced" tab. There will be a check box next to "Enable this account."


How to prevent iTunes/QuickTime Player playing both the main (5.1 AC-3) and backup (2.0 AAC) audio tracks at the same time? I have created for myself a build script to automatically import films into iTunes, making sure that they have compatible audio/video tracks. This generally means that if the input video track isn't H.264, it's converted to it, and if the input audio track isn't DTS, AC-3 or AAC, it's converted to a 2-channel AAC track.

In the special case that the input video's audio track is DTS, AC-3 or multichannel AAC, then a second, 2-channel AAC track is added for compatible with iDevices and my Apple TV 3 (which isn't connected to a device which can decode DTS or AC-3).

Generally this works well, except that if I play the resulting video on my Mac via iTunes or QuickTime Player, they play both audio tracks at the same time, and there doesn't seem to be an option to switch between them. Making them different languages via metadata works, but I'd rather have them both correct.

I use ffmpeg to do the necessary format conversions and AtomicParsley to set the iTunes-compatible metadata. I then use a custom AppleScript to import the resulting file and set the media kind to 'Movie' or 'TV Show' (since iTunes always seems to ignore the metadata set in the file and sets it to 'Home Video').

How can I create the video file with the preserved high-quality audio track and the backup 2-channel AAC, and get iTunes and QuickTime Player to play only the best-quality track they can (ideally in a way which can be automated)? I've noticed that films from the iTunes store include several audio streams, but iTunes never plays them simultaneously.

Update: Looks like at some point recently iPhones and iPads were updated to include an AC-3 decoder, and so are also playing both audio tracks simultaneously. I wouldn't even bother with the AAC stream if not for the Apple TV (pre 4)!

It turns out that streams have a 'default' status, and I guess that this status is copied from the input stream to both the output streams, even though you'd usually only want the high quality one to be the default. All Apple software plays all the default audio streams simultaneously.

To fix this, ffmpeg provides a disposition flag which can be 0 or default (see documentation for further options). To have the first audio track as default and the second one not, you would add as parameters:

-disposition:a:0 default -disposition:a:1 0

Having the AC-3 stream as default appears to automatically play the AAC stream if an AC-3 decoder isn't available, which is exactly what I wanted.


How can I use RSVG with ImageMagick? I'd like to use the RSVG for SVG processing in ImageMagick (the included library is fairly incomplete). RSVG is a supported delegate but needs to be installed separately.

I've installed librsvg and its dependencies using Homebrew (no custom settings or anything like that). Running rsvg-convert manually works fine.

Installing ImageMagick with Homebrew doesn't auto-detect and use the RSVG library and running IM's configure script with --with-rsvg doesn't detect the library either.

Clearly something isn't talking to something else, but I can't make sense of the log messages well enough to sort it out. Any advice would be appreciated.

Here's the relevant portion of config.log:

configure:31587: checking for RSVG
configure:31594: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "librsvg-2.0 >= 2.9.0"
Package xcb-shm was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xcb-shm.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'xcb-shm', required by 'cairo', not found
configure:31597: $? = 1
configure:31610: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "librsvg-2.0 >= 2.9.0"
Package xcb-shm was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xcb-shm.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'xcb-shm', required by 'cairo', not found
configure:31613: $? = 1

configure:31640: result: no
configure:31652: result:

This message indicates that cairo, a prerequisite for librsvg, cannot find the configuration options for package xcb-shm. They should be stored in /opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig/xcb-shm.pc. All you have to do is add this path to the environment variable $PKG_CONFIG_PATH:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig

configure should now be able to find what it is looking for.


iPhone Keynote - present to Apple TV? I have an Apple TV and Keynote for the iPhone. Is it possible to display a presentation that I created on the iPhone on Apple TV?

Unfortunately not, certainly not wirelessly.

What you need to do is wait for iOS5 (on the understanding that your phone will support this), for the implementation of the new "screen mirroring over airplay" functionality.


How to eject minidisc from MBP Friends, I've by mistake inserted minidisc in MacBookPro and it seems like it is stuck.

What we've already tried:

shaking device, hoping the gravity will solve the problem
ejecting programmatically.

I do realize that problem sound quite stupid, but if one have encountered this problem it would be nice to hear his story of salvation.

Ah, the downfall of slot drives - getting a disc stuck in it when it dies :(

As per the comment to your question, I presume that this is a smaller CD, not an actual minidisc that is more akin to a floppy disk in a plastic case?

Oddly, some slot loading mechanisms can support these smaller discs.  For example, the Nintendo Wii is a vertical slot loader that will accept Gamecube discs that are smaller than regular CDs/DVDs.

Obviously, the MacBook won't tho.  I would recommend the use of a pair of slim "shims" that you can use to make a pair of tweezers with.  They would need to be both slim, but strong enough to get a grip with.  You may need to cover the ends if you don't want to risk scratching the disc.

Alternatively, a piece of double sided sticky tape on the end of a plastic ruler may help.  Just insert an inch (don't go too far, don't want to touch the laser with sticky stuff), and wobble it up and down a bit, see if you can get contact with the edge of the disc, then slowly pull it out.  If this is tricky, try it with the drive/laptop upside down.


Show network name next to wifi icon? Is there a way to show the currently connected network name next to the wifi icon in the menu bar?

I found Display connected Wifi name to work perfectly for my needs.


How do I change/delete alias in OS X permanently? I tried to modify/delete alias, but it seems that it is only for the current session by doing this

unalias name

or rename it

unalias name='...'

Can anyone tell me the way to change/delete it permanently? Thanks!

I just solved it.
In order to make permanent change to alias, I need to edit a config file.

nano ~/.bash_profile

Than I enter the GNU nano editor window, then I make the change to the line that I want, maybe delete a line or change a line, for example:

alias name='/Applications/FunProfile/GoodProgram'

Then press control+o to save it, next press control+x+enter to exit it.


How to monitor icloud backup progress? How to monitor icloud back up progress?

I have left my phone plugged in and locked for four or five nights now. The backup has still not completed, but my icloud usage is around 45GB according to https://www.icloud.com/#settings. Does this mean the 45GB of data has successfully been transferred to icloud? Or that 45GB of space has been allocated, but all the data has not necessarily been transferred yet? When I go to icloud photos, they seem to be more or less all there, but I don't know if they are the full versions of each photo.

When I try to manually back up, it changes from "9 hours remaining", to "7 hours remaining", to "11 hours remaining", etc., even when I leave the phone plugged in overnight.

After 5 days you might need to figure out where the backup is hanging. 45 gb means you have significant data getting backed up. Also, there’s not a good way to monitor things, so you might need a a split half search.

In this case I would disable backup of half the items and then see if backup completes in an hour or two. If not, disable half of the remaining items and repeat.

See this article for how to selectively back up some apps and data. - https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204247

Once the backup succeeds, re-enable things half by half.

Worst case the backup never works and you have to back up to iTunes. Best case the smaller backup gets you past the log jam.


How to erase my iPhone photos completely? I decided to delete all of my iPhone's photos so I copied everything to iPhoto and deleted everything on my phone. But I still worry if somebody could recover my deleted photos from my iPhone? Does this method completely erase my photos on iPhone?

Open Albums view in Photos by tapping the icon in the lower-right corner. Now find the album called Recently Deleted (it will have an icon with a circled trash can).

Open it, tap Select in the upper-right corner, then Delete All in the lower-left corner. Your photos will be permanently deleted from your iPhone.


How do I dismiss many multiples of the "Disk Not Ejected Properly" notification in macOS? Today I'm dealing with the following problem:

Is there some way I can get rid of these without spending my entire day clicking, short of Homer's Drinking Bird?

Note: This is not a duplicate of How do I clear All OS X notifications with 1 click?, because the notifications in my question aren't shown at all in the Notification Center, and thus the solution in that question doesn't work for this question.

I started killing processes with "Notification" in their name, and when I hit the one called "NotificationCenter" the smoke finally cleared:

killall NotificationCenter


How to jump to a location using mouse on iTerm/terminal? I work on a terminal most of the time.

Is there an application / plugin over iTerm or any other terminal like application using which I can control the cursor location of my terminal using a mouse ?

At least in Terminal.app you can hold down option while clicking to jump within your current line (that actually means just the line, so if your current prompt is so long that it wraps to a second line of input you'll have to option-click to the beginning of the "second" line and then hop with the arrow keys to the "first" line where you can  option-click again.)


Mission control: switch to desktop1 + show desktop I'm bored of pressing 2 key shortcuts

need to write a script that tells mission control the following:

if not at desktop1, switch to desktop 1
perform "show desktop" (windows will be hidden\displayed, depending on how they are now)

PS: where can i find info on taming Mission Control and Finder?

currently i use it like this:

tell application "System Events"
    key code 18 using {option down, command down} --current shortcut for "Switch to Desktop 1"
    key code 103 --current shortcut to "Show Desktop"
end tell

but there is no check for "i'm on desktop 1 already", and no toggle (show\hide windows)

The in-n-out cannot be avoided with applescript, to my knowledge.

tell application "System Events"

    do shell script "/Applications/Mission\\ Control.app/Contents/MacOS/Mission\\ Control"
    delay 0.5
    tell process "Dock" to tell group 1 to tell list 1 to tell button 1 to click
    delay 0.5

    do shell script "/Applications/Mission\\ Control.app/Contents/MacOS/Mission\\ Control 1"

end tell


Sharing MacBook internet to iPad via USB I was sharing my MacBook LAN connection to my iPad using the internet sharing feature. But after the most recent update, I cannot find the iPad USB and iPhone USB option to share the internet. How do I fix this problem?

I had to first connect the USB cable between the MacBook and iPad before a prompt came up, requesting me to install some updates, before the iPad USB option came up


Excel, Chinese mojibake error On Mac, the Excel show mojibake

However with Numbers it can show the right content. How can I set Excel to show Chinese characters?

My system language is English.

From this other question regarding excel encoding:


Does the AppleTV support multiple Apple ID accounts? I'm considering buying the new AppleTV, but I'm wondering if it works in the way that I want it to work. What I would like is that my wife can take pictures on her iPhone and have them sync via iCloud to the AppleTV, but I want all iTunes purchases like videos to be on my account.

Will this work on the new AppleTV or is it limited to a single iCloud account?

You have to use a single apple id in iTunes homesharing on all devices that you want on your appleTV
BUT
This does not mean that you can't buy anything anymore with your personal apple ID everything you buy will still be placed in your library and will be shared on the 'family' apple ID account
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4352


Install Lion as second boot option on Mountain Lion machine My Mac is currently running Mountain Lion. I want to install Lion as a dual boot option, for development testing.

I have downloaded the Lion installer from the App store and I have a fresh partition waiting.

When I run the installer, it only gives me the option to quit because my system is too new. The Mac hardware should be supported by Lion.

Use Startup Disk, in System Preferences, to change your boot disk. From there select the second partition. Restart with the Lion setup on a USB drive. You can install it from there.

If the above doesn't work try holding down the option key while rebooting. That should bring up recovery mode. From there you should be able to select the target volume for the installation.

Do a quick google search on making a bootable disk image either on a USB drive or on a dual-layer DVD disk with Lion by using Disk Utility. This is the method I used to downgrade a Mac from Mountain Lion to Snow Leopard.

Let us know if you have tried the above options and what was the outcome.

Some useful links:

OS X Mountain Lion: Change your startup disk
Startup Manager:
How to select a startup volume
Make a Bootable Mac OS X 10.7
Lion Installer from a USB Flash Drive


How can I disable the notifications prompt in Safari? Safari for Mavericks has a website notifications feature allowing sites to send push notifications.

I never want to be prompted for this.

How can I disable the prompt for all websites, forever?

Since the release of Safari 7.0.3 Apple finally gives us an option to turn off safari notification prompts. To disable safari notifications go to Preferences within Safari. Click the Websites tab (notifications tab for older versions of safari) and uncheck "Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications". And voilà.

Websites panel for current Safari (as of High Sierra):

Panel for older versions of Safari:

The explanation below is only valid for versions of Safari before 7.0.3

Apple obviously forgot the option to disable the notification thing in Safari altogether when they added the feature. Anyway this works, but is not for the faint of heart. ** This is only for older Safari before Version 7.0.3 **

Stop Safari
Open Terminal
cd ~/Library/Safari
chmod 000 RemoteNotifications/

That's it.
The chmod 000 just makes the directory RemoteNotifications inaccessible. To make it accessible again (and to re-enable notifications in Safari) just do the above again but use 755 instead of 000 in the chmod command.

As lined out in Renés comment below, it is also possible to change the access rights via Finder.


Extend Mac display to Windows 10 is there an app to extend a MacBook Pro early 2016 display (OS X El Capitan 10.11.5) to a Windows 10 laptop? Preferably free, by the way, and also not counting Air Display since the newest version doesn't work on Windows.

The goal is this: just like you could extend the display of a Mac to a monitor using Thunderbolt, I would like to extend it to a Windows 10 screen using some software

So far, I have looked into multiple apps, such as AirDisplay, Splashtop, WIDisplay, Synergy, and ScreenRecycler as mentioned by bwall's answer.

This looks like it will work. It's not free, but I haven't seen anything else that works. It uses a VNC client for the "other" computer, but it says any VNC client should work so you don't have to buy theirs. You only have to buy the Mac program. There are plenty of free VNC clients for Windows. There's a free trial so you can download it and see if it works.

https://www.screenrecycler.com/ScreenRecycler.html


Stop dock moving between monitors while moving mouse to the bottom of screen We know why it is moving: Why does my dock keep moving back to my other monitor?

Now, how can we stop it? Some terminal command or even paid software?

You cannot "just" stop it - unfortunately.

You have some options to keep it in the same place, but they have drawbacks:

A) Keep the dock on the left or right side of the desktop. That way it will stay in place.

or

B) In Preferences => Mission Control, uncheck "Displays have seperate spaces". Now the dock will stay in place, but you will loose the spaces functionality.


Macbook Pro wont open apps or download content due to Error Code: -50. My Macbook Pro ran into a problem and reported Error: -50.  I cannot open applications such as Chrome, Word, and others.  I cannot download content or move content to the trash because it says the disk is full, even though it still shows 80Gb of free storage.  The Ram is free and I cannot run ClamXav to see if it is a virus.  Disk Utility verifies the disk but the permissions have all changed and cannot be repaired.  Some permissions errors include "user differs on private/var/at, should be 0 user is 1"as well as various others.  I cant even see/open external drives I connect.  Any idea how to solve this problem?

-50 is a file system error: "Error in user parameter list" (see https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1618)

What OS X version are you on? https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718 or Will reinstalling Lion erase all my documents and applications? maybe helpful.


Partition HD for triple boot (or move Apple_Boot Recovery HD from a primary partition) I want to triple boot but I'm running into a problem I ran out of primary partitions. Currently using rEFIt bootloader chooser or whatever it is called, from what I understand it is not a bootloader itself but selects the bootloader for the OS you choose to boot from a list.

The four primary partitions are in use by OS X, OS X recovery, BOOTCAMP (Windows 7) and EFI is the fourth. I believe "GUID_partition_scheme" is just the disk label for the entire drive. The drive is a 256GB SSD but size or type of the HD doesn't appear to be an issue in this situation.

Here is the output of the command 'diskutil list':

diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            125.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                125.1 GB   disk0s4

Is my only option to delete 'Apple_Boot Recovery HD' or can I move and make it (or the EFI partition) into non-primary partition? Of course this will have to happen after resizing the drive to make room for the third primary partition.

I'm fairly new to Apple but I'm OK with partitioning if I knew what to do.

You're getting confused between the MBR and GPT partitioning schemes. Intel Macs generally use GPT, but for Boot Camp, they also add a so-called Hybrid MBR for booting Windows, which duplicates all or some of the partition entries. GPT can have a large number of partitions (typically, enough space is reserved for 128 partitions), but as MBR only supports 4, if you have more than that, you can't represent all of them in the MBR. Note that one partition of the EFI type 0xEE is required - this normally covers the whole disk, but for hybrid MBR, it usually only covers the GPT itself and the 200MB EFI partition at the start of the disk. So that gives you 3 usable MBR partitions, which Windows will see.

You don't mention what your third OS should be for triple-boot; if it's another installation of OS X, you have nothing to worry about. Just install it as normal, it will use GPT entries 5+. If you want another BIOS-based OS, such as Windows or most Linux distros, you'll probably need to mess with the hybrid MBR yourself. I'd do all the partitioning in OSX's Disk Utility, as it will update both the GPT and MBR tables simultaneously. Just make the new Windows or Linux partition FAT32 to begin with. Then, if your MBR covers the Recovery HD but has no entry for your new partition, get the exact positions and sizes of the GPT partitions using

sudo gpt -r disk0

This should list all 5 partitions.

In fdisk (or so), delete the MBR version of the Recovery HD, and create a new partition with the exact position and size of your new (5th) partition. Windows should now see this partition instead of the Recovery HD. You can change its type, format it, etc. as usual. Just don't try to resize it from fdisk or Windows Generally, make sure that all partitions that exist in the MBR except the 0xEE EFI partition map exactly onto a GPT partition.

This is all a bit dangerous so make sure you have backups of everything.


What is the logind process, and why is it running? I've recently noticed that a new process is up and running every time I start my computer - logind, running as root.

I'm unsure why this is happening - could it be a patch or so? I'm running a fairly vanilla version of OS X 10.8.4

logind is a normal part of OS X. As @mt_ mentioned, there is a trojan that mimics it, but seeing a program by that name is entirely normal, not an indication of any problem.

If you are concerned that the normal logind has been replaced by a trojan, check /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.logind.plist, and make sure it refers to "/System/Library/CoreServices/logind", NOT "/usr/sbin/logind". See the CNET article for more info.


MacOS terminal Hangs on `login` On my macbook, I've found that sometimes it gets into a state where it cannot open up a new terminal - a blank terminal window just appears, and it hangs.  Rebooting solves this, but it seems to happen again within a week or so.

Activity monitor reveals that login is running, but it never gets to zsh as a child process.  If I leave a terminal open, this terminal is still usable.

I can open a bash terminal on a different program, and in that case the system hangs if I run login, zsh, or, interestingly when I run ls /dev/tty*.

Even typing ls /dev/tty and hitting tab to autocomplete causes the terminal to hang and become unusable.

When these processes hang, the terminal is useless - CTRL-C does not stop them.

I suspect it is hanging on accessing /dev/ttys00*.  It may be having trouble allocating a pseudo-tty? I don't think it is running out of available ptys because w only shows one or two open.

Here is some of the output from sample suggesting it is hanging on lstat:

Call graph:
    2893 Thread_2786263   DispatchQueue_1: com.apple.main-thread  (serial)
      2893 start  (in libdyld.dylib) + 1  [0x7fff5f9c43d5]
        2893 ???  (in login)  load address 0x105e34000 + 0x17b0  [0x105e357b0]
          2893 ttyname  (in libsystem_c.dylib) + 158  [0x7fff5fa3ba19]
            2893 ttyname_r  (in libsystem_c.dylib) + 146  [0x7fff5fa3baff]
              2893 devname_r  (in libsystem_c.dylib) + 175  [0x7fff5fa10e4d]
                2893 lstat$INODE64  (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) + 10  [0x7fff5fafba0e]

Any ideas?

Had the same stack trace and killing nvim in activity monitor unblocked all the login processes. No idea why this worked, nvim was already orphaned so shouldn't have been running anyways.

Guessing the offending program is probably different for everyone though, so if you don't use nvim maybe just look for an out of place orphaned terminal app in activity monitor.


How to mimic CTRL-d in Linux on Mac terminal If I want to move a folder or file at some relative location, in Linux I use for example:

mv ../../<CTRL-d>

And that gives me a listing of files/folders at ../../ so I can quickly (using the TAB command as well) continue to build mv command path.

How do I emulate this same capability in Mac terminal?

I tried configuring stty eol, but that did not work.

I know I can first use ls to build the path, but I am looking for CTRL-d equivalent

This actually works the same way on Linux as on macOS. You're simply using a different shell on Linux than you're using on macOS, and that's why it appears to be different for you.

Instead of using bash, which you're running right now on macOS, you should instead start up tcsh. This will give you the behaviour, you're looking for (i.e. ctrl-d for file expansion).

You can simply start Terminal.app and run:

tcsh

to test it out.

If you like it, you can open Terminal.app Settings in the General tab, and set the shell to open with to: /bin/tcsh


Add arcfour Cipher to Mojave 10.14 Im trying to use the arcfour cipher with SSH.  Yes, I am aware of the risks, but I have my own reasons for wanting to use it.  When I list available ciphers, it's not there.  Is it possible to add it in?

Available ciphers:

$ ssh -Q cipher
3des-cbc
aes128-cbc
aes192-cbc
aes256-cbc
rijndael-cbc@lysator.liu.se
aes128-ctr
aes192-ctr
aes256-ctr
aes128-gcm@openssh.com
aes256-gcm@openssh.com
chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com

Attempt to use arcfour:

$ ssh -c arcfour file2
Unknown cipher type 'arcfour'

Support for Arcfour was disabled by default in OpenSSH 7.2 (Feb 2016), and was subsequently removed completely in OpenSSH 7.6 (Oct 2017). macOS 10.14 ships with OpenSSH 7.9, which is several major versions beyond this removal.

In theory, you could reverse some of the changes applied in OpenSSH 7.6 to readd support for Arcfour. However, doing so will require significant C programming experience.

In practice, I would advise you to reconsider what you are doing.


APFS vs Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for external HDD Which one between APFS and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) works better as partition store type for an external HDD (Magnetic Storage) that will be accessed over USB from macOS only?

APFS is known to not perform well on spinning disk drives (non SSDs).

Developer of Carbon Copy Cloner:
An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software

OWC/MacSales (who probably know more about Mac hardware than some people who work for Apple:
Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To


Finder open new Finder tab in the same directory Is it possible to configure finder in Mavericks to open new tab (by clicking plus sign or cmd+t) in the same directory by default?

Press cmd + ctrl + o in Finder without any selection (otherwise you will open-tab to the selection if it's a folder instead).

cmd + ctrl + o will open a new tab in the same folder as the currently opened folder.

No need for any extra things in OS X for this ;-)


How to fix an unusable iMac G4 monitor plagued by static? I'm working on a friend's old G4 iMac trying to get his only computer running so he can do his college assignments at home. The machine has static on the screen during operation.

I reset NVRAM and tried booting to a Leopard DVD to no avail. I can get to single user mode, but when I try to run X I get an error and am unfortunately unable to make out the key part of the message due to the static.

I have checked for corrosion on the display connection to the motherboard, and it seems to have retained it's integrity.

Suggestions for making this machine functional again?

PS: After letting it boot overnight it went to the desktop, but was extremely slow. After almost 40 minutes of beach ball i had to reset it using the reset button on the board. It seems to boot normally (except the original static seen in the second image) but immediately goes to the state in the first image after clicking more than a couple times or attempting to drag a window.

Sounds like some part of the display sub-system (video card or display driver circuitry) has gone bad.

All the iMac G4 "lampshade" models have mini-VGA out ports, get an adapter and try connecting it to an external display.

Caveat -- if it's the display logic circuitry itself (as opposed to the LCD panel driver circuitry), you may get exactly the same static on an external display.


Can't see HD in disk utility in recovery mode, but can in OS I'm pretty new to Macs.  I got an iMac Pro in 2017 (grey one) and about 6 months ago it started giving me occasional folder flashing icon on startup.

It also started occasionally forgetting my password and so I'd have to reset it.

I figured maybe the HD got corrupted, so I ran first aid on it in disk utility while logged in.  Whenever (after a restart) I run this, it says it's ok.  If I immediately re-run it, it says there's corruption and I must run it from recovery mode.

Problem is, whenever I boot into recovery mode, it can't find the disk at all.

Clearly it can find the disk for me to log in and run disk util in the OS.

I don't have any external drives attached.

It's running Mojave 10.14.3 (I tried updating to 10.14.5 and it has a broken download and won't download the remainder of the update - that's yet another issue).

This iMac has hardly been used at all since I bought it.

Thanks for any pointers.

This sounds like a hardware failure; based on my own experience it will turn catastrophic, and probably sooner rather than later. Hopefully you have AppleCare, but:

get yourself an external hard drive, and make a Time Machine backup immediately.
reset your SMC and reset your NVRAM - if you're lucky, this is just some intermittent / bad state in one of these components and zapping it will restore your mac to full functionality.
take your mac to the Genius Bar and describe the symptoms; hopefully they can replace any defective components, but do this after you have a full Time Machine backup!


How to access App Store using only IPv6? There must be people curious about why I have to do this, so let me explain the reason first—Now I'm in an institute of Chinese Academic of Science, and the network environment is irritating. I'm allowed to use IPv4 traffic only no more than 1GB per day AND a total of 10GB per month (when exceeded the network is automatically cut off); however, the IPv6 traffic is unlimited. Thus, I can hardly update any software.

I've tried these two methods but I am new to Mac so I didn't find useful information yet:

Modify /etc/hosts and add some IPv6 addresses and the corresponding domain names. But I can't find them in Google.
Add a DNS that can resolve Mac App Store domain names into IPv6. I'm using one (which can perfectly resolve youtube video stream addresses into IPv6 in mainland China, wow), but it doesn't work for the app store.

So, can anyone provide

A list for what I should add into /etc/hosts; or
A DNS that works for Mac App Store; or
Other methods that can restrict the traffic of the app store in IPv6?

Just post my settings in case anyone need it.

System Preferences -> Network -> Advance

  TCP/IP: set "Configure IPv4" off.

  DNS: add 2001:778::37, and drag it to the top

Now you should be able to see contents in Mac app store. And it might take quite a while to establish connections for downloading. Just be patient.
I also found a line in my /etc/hosts (copied from this IPv6 hosts project, which was up-to-date and very useful for IPv6 users in mainland China):

  2600:140b:4:18c::c77 www.apple.com #e3191.dscc.akamaiedge.net

I'm not sure if it affects the result. If Step 1 doesn't work, you can consider to add it into your /etc/hosts file. Just remember to make a backup first.


How to edit a text file on an iDisk using the iPhone? Are there any apps which allow me to edit text files on an iDisk? I don't need anything fancier than a notepad with the ability to open/save iDisk files.

I understand that Notes.app is basically the same thing, and it might be considered if nothing better is available.

Notes.app stores its messages on a mail server, basically as a specially formatted mail message.

If Apple ever brings Pages to the iPhone, then you may be able to do this. Im pretty sure with the latest update for Pages on the iPhone lets you open and modify items on your iDisk.

QuickOffice for the iPhone may let you edit docs, it says that it can save to your iDisk, so you may be able to open the files there and edit and save back to iDisk.

There are quite a few apps that do let you edit text files and save them to a Dropbox account, which (outside of mobile me) is much more popular. I have used a few of these, and would recommend an application called PlainText.

Finally, one of the nicest and most straightforward note apps for the iPhone I think is Simplenote. Its now free, and syncs notes to its server. You can then edit these online, on your mac, etc.


Command key when running Mac through virtual box on Windows OS I just recently installed Yosemite in Virtualbox. Here's the installation video I followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYMEb0ZCfes

My OS is Windows and I'm trying to run Mac using Virtualbox.

I had no problems with booting and stuff. After booting, Mac installation settings appeared, then the system asked me to set log in details (full name, username, password). However, while I am retyping my desired password, the screen suddenly turned black. I waited and did nothing. The next thing it showed was the start up screen where it asks for my username and password.

I tried entering my username and password, but it won't work. I knew I haven't completed setting my log-in details due to the screen turning black. I searched for possible solutions, one thing I'd like to try is to use Recovery Mode and reset the password (http://www.macworld.com/article/2868032/what-to-do-if-your-mac-refuses-to-accept-your-password.html).

However though, can't figure out how to key 'Command-R'. Does anyone know how?

Also, it would be great if someone could suggest other things that might work if ever pw reset through Recovery Mode fails. I'd appreciate it a lot.

I would much rather point to this previous question/answer in a comment but my rep does not allow comments.

There are 3 answers: Windows key when running windows through virtual box on a mac

By default it's the right ⌘ (Command) Key.

The left ⌘ (Command) Key does not work because it is set as the Host (Meta) Key in VirtualBox.

And they can be swapped simply by replacing the Host Key with the right ⌘ (Command) Key, in Preferences > Input > Virtual Machine > Host Key Combination.


How to make a bootable partition from scratch? What I want to achieve is to make a new bootable partition on my MacBook's SSD, so it should be possible to press Option key on startup and choose this partition to boot from.

Why do I need that? I just successfully compiled XNU kernel from sources, found some drivers (kernel extensions), so now I want to boot this kernel and to load bash after boot process finishes. The key idea is to make a minimal Mac OS, just with command line interface.

Here is the output of diskutil list:

Alexanders-MacBook-Pro:~ aperechnev$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         250.8 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +250.8 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data     99.8 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 83.8 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                525.5 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk1s4
   5:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            10.9 GB    disk1s5

What I want to achieve first is to see the new partition as an option to boot from by pressing Option key and to get some error when I try to boot from that partition.

What makes it bootable? This has change slightly over time. I will assume you are not going to use encryption. Below are some basic examples. This is not a complete list.

The original OS X operating system.

The partition should be type 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC.
The partition should be JHFS+ formatted. If you are using the Disk Utility, you would select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
The boot file boot.efi needs to be in the System/Library/CoreServices folder.
There used to be a requirement that a file named mach_kernal exist in the root folder. The file can be empty.

The macOS operating system stored in an APFS volume. This became available starting with High Sierra. This volume resides in a APFS container. The container can be comprised of a single APFS partition or two APFS partitions on separate drives.

The partition(s) should be type 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC.
The container should be APFS formatted. If you are using the Disk Utility, you would select APFS.
The boot file boot.efi needs to be in the System/Library/CoreServices folder in a APFS volume with no specific role.
The mach_kernal file can be omitted.

A generic operating system stored in a FAT or ExFAT formatted volume. This works on Macs where High Sierra or a newer version of macOS has been installed.

The partition(s) should be type EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7.
The container should be FAT32 or ExFAT formatted. If you are using the Disk Utility, you would select MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT.
The boot file BOOTX64.EFI needs to be in the EFI/BOOT folder.

Operating system stored in partitions not recognized by the firmware. For example, partitions with NTFS (Windows) or EXT4 (Linux) volumes. Basically, the boot files go in a small EFI partition. The boot files are responsible for transferring control to the partition(s) containing the operating system.

The partition(s) should be type C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B.
The container should be FAT32 formatted. If you are using the Disk Utility, you would select MS-DOS (FAT).
The boot file BOOTX64.EFI needs to be in the EFI/BOOT folder.


How to get rid of erroneously drag-n-dropped folder shortcut in Finder toolbar? I erroneously drag-n-dropped a folder shortcut in my Finder toolbar.  I tried dragging it off and right clicking, to no avail.  How do I remove it?

Hold CMD (⌘) key down and drag the icon out of the finder window.

It should blow itself away in clouds.


Pasting images into Pages document very cumbersome - Inline vs automatic Pasting images into a Pages document is very cumbersome, requiring each individual image to be re-set and location to be adjusted manually to 'Move with Text' and 'Inline with Text':

Can image-pasting be made to default to that setting ?
Thanks muchly for anyone knowing of a (likely?) simple-yet-hidden solution.

First make sure that the image you want to replace is defined as a media place holder.  To do this click on the image that you want to replace so that it is active.  Now go to format at the top of your screen and choose "Advanced" from the "Format" drop down.  You should see the following bold text with a check mark in front of it "Define As Media Placeholder".  If it is not bold with a check mark in front of it click on it so that it is.
Once the image has been defined as a media placeholder right click on it and choose "Replace Image".  You will be given a choice of file paths to choose your new image which should then replace the original image and keep its formatting.  This only hitch is that you might be limited to choosing only those images which have been saved to your photo stream.


Copying a DVD in Yosemite I am looking for software to copy a DVD home created without copy guard.  Roxio Toast stopped working after installing Yosemite

You already have everything you need.

Open up disk utility, select the top filesystem under the DVD on the left side and create an image of it (CD/DVD master, is the format you should select, if I recall correctly) and save it to the location of your choice.

When it is done the DVD image will remaim in the list in the Disk Utility window. Eject the source DVD and insert your blank. Select the DVD image in the Disk Utility window and click on Burn Image (if it is not in the toolbar, it should be a menu choice).

Not as easy as Toast but easy enough...


Two of the original video cards in 2009 Mac Pro? I have a 2009 Mac Pro and am curious about whether or not I can put two of the stock video cards in it. My friend has an identical Mac Pro, but has a better video card. I could put his old stock one in mine if I wanted. I'm wondering if I can combine my card and his to get roughly twice the video performance? Or would that not work, since that little bridging thing isn't there?

Thanks!

I'm assuming you have a Mac Pro 4.1 or 5.1 which uses a Nvidia GT 120 which on its own does not support SLI. When you referenced the technology that can be used to utilize multiple graphics cards, that is SLI for Nvidia and Crossfire for AMD.

Since you have an Nvidia card, you would use SLI but there are a few problems with it:

Your motherboard does not support SLI. In addition to a hardware bridge on top of the cards, SLI needs a motherboard that supports it too.
SLI requires that both cards are identical with the same chip.
To the furthest extent of my knowledge Mac OS does not support SLI.

If you want to upgrade, I know that people have used GTX 660s on the Mac Pro, but not anything after that.


Emulating ARM (M1-like) macOS on an x86 Intel Mac Is it possible to emulate a macOS machine with RISC/ARM architecture on a physical x86 macOS machine? I suspect this is of value for those hoping to test the viability of their workflows on Apple silicon. In such cases, a performance penalty is of no consequence.
The only discussion I can find is here, though I don't find it particularly convincing or authoritative.

Yes, in theory it is possible to emulate a M1 Mac on an Intel Mac. As such there's nothing "magical" about the M1.
However in practice you're going to run into various problems, mainly that there's no readily available software that does this. You can get much of the way of emulating the CPU itself using qemu. qemu already supports emulating various aarch64 CPUs, but it doesn't emulate the M1 and its Apple-specific instructions (yet), nor does it emulate the rest of the SoC or the rest of the Mac's peripheral units.
Last there's the question of legality. When you want to run macOS, you need to be properly licensed for that. You will need to investigate the license carefully to ensure that you can run the M1 macOS software on your Intel machine.


What software alternatives support streaming via AirPlay? The Apple TV arrived! I'm slightly bummed that I can only stream from iTunes, and therefore only use formats that iTunes supports. I haven't found a single other video player that supports AirPlay, though to be fair, AirPlay has only really been around since the new Apple TVs started arriving.

What other software supports streaming audio and video to AirPlay devices? If none, is AirPlay one of those closed Apple standards or have other projects pledged to support it?

To date, there are no 3rd party software implementations of AirPlay. The spec itself is fully patented (though most of these patents relate to the hardware aspects of the system) and is essentially a proprietary standard unique to Apple (though several hardware vendors have announced hardware that will use the standard - XtremeMac, Denon). The current analysis of the protocol itself seems to indicate that it is a further evolution of the previous AirTunes protocol (which itself was built on top of Bonjour), so you are likely to see software implementations appear after developers have had more time to experiment with the protocol.


How to install reader on iOS 5 I have iPad 2 with iOS 5.1
I am developer and I need it to test apps.
But 99% of time nobody use it.
I decided to install ebook reader to reads fb2, mobi and other ebook formats.
But all readers I found do not install on iOS 5.
iOS 6 is minimal requirement.

Is there way to install older version of app?
Or upgrade just to iOS 6 (I know impossible)
Jailbreak? (I think it is impossible with version 5.1)

I am looking for solution to get some reader to work on iOS 5.1

Here's some information to keep in mind for the future. If you had ever installed a version of some app, then the App Store will allow you to continue either installing that app (if you had deleted it), or to install the last version compatible with that version of iOS. But if you never installed the app in question, Apple, the App Store will prevent you from installing it, even though there is obviously a version from App Store that will install if they'd let you. This is Apple's restriction and not something the individual app developers can decide.

Jailbreaking provides many options, but in my experience, introduces some new problems. I am just astounded by what, in particular, the Dev Team has accomplished, and more so what Jay Freeman (aka saurik) nearly single-handedly has accomplished. Cydia existed before the App Store, and is an implementation of Debian linux Advanced Packaging Tool. Developers began selling software there a good 5 months before App Store existed, as far as the public was concerned.

The new problems introduced by jailbreaking are merely that you really need to keep on top of things, and things change pretty fast in the jailbreaking community, which you necessarily need to become a participating member of if you want your device to continue working, or ever need help from someone because something stopped working. By and large, I found everyone in the jailbreaking community to be refreshingly shocking, but ultimately gave me a really great experience with it. But once my curiosity was satisfied, I found that maintaining my jailbroken device required more effort and time than I had to spend on it.

That being said, I just purchased a new iOS device, on the way... and because I really can't stand iOS7, I intend to get reaquainted with the jailbreaking community to mitigate what I just can't stand about it.

I recommend that you seek out more information from the dev team blog linked above, and also rediscover IRC, and the various jailbreaking IRC servers and channels, on Freenode and elsewhere (google helps), and involve yourself in that community in whatever positive way you can. And be patient with your desires.

Sorry for the magna carte here! And best of luck on your adventure!


Is it allowed to incentivize users to leave reviews? I was playing a game and encountered this:

Is this allowed by Apple? As soon as you click "Yes" and go to the app store review page, it unlocks all of the colors, whether or not you actually leave a review.

If they can force you to make in-app purchases (and spend real money) in order to unlock content, then why wouldn't they be allowed to force you to write a review in order to unlock content?

Plus, as you said yourself, you don't actually have to write a review for the content to be unlocked. You just have to click "Yes".


How can I extract/use icons in an icontainer file? I want to change dock view so I downloaded an icontainer file that should contain files to replace some in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Resources...

But how to extract files from icontainer files?

Have you tried out LiteIcon? It should be able to open iContainer format packages, and it is a free alternative to CandyBar.


Select All shortcut key Command+A no longer works This morning, I found out that the Command+A shortcut key for selecting all failed to work. I have gone into the keyboard shortcuts preference and did not find anything useful. Is there any suggestion on what to do to fix or at least troubleshoot my problem? Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Reboot in Safe Mode and see if it works.

Here and here are some Apple support documents on Safe Boot Mode.


Can I create a keyboard shortcut to toggle the primary mouse button between left and right? I switch between my left and right hand for my mouse a lot, and every time I do, I have to go to System Preferences > Mouse > and switch the Primary mouse button. Is there any way I can create a keyboard shortcut to toggle this setting? I'm willing to figure out AppleScript if that would help me

Looks like this has already been answered here:

Swap Mouse Button using AppleScript

Tested it and the code works for a normal external mouse.


In Fullscreen, disable auto-hiding Mac menu bar (on latest Mavericks)
While in VirtualBox (Ubuntu) fullscreen, on a Mac host, each time the mouse goes near the top, the Mac auto-hide menu bar appears - and I want to prevent that, or at least, since it's the annoying component, reduce the time it takes to that menu to disappear when the mouse goes down [currently it's ~1 seconds].
Ideally the time needed to trigger that menu should be higher than currently [instant] - eg like keeping the mouse on top for 1 whole second.
Illustration below shows the Ubuntu menu that has been overridden by the Mac menu when the mouse hits the top of the screen.

There are already a few questions like this one that are either old or not answered.
Any progress in Maverics, near 2014?

So it seems someone found a working solution, at last.

First,

close your VMs
Quit VirtualBox

then as root (or sudo ...)

copy the file somewhere as backup, then edit (eg vi) /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/Info.plist
and add the line shown in the middle

the line <key>LSUIElement</key> <string>1</string> to be inserted between LSCanProvideIMVideoDataSource and NSHighResolutionCapable

<key>LSCanProvideIMVideoDataSource</key>    <true/>
<key>LSUIElement</key> <string>1</string>
<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>          <true/>

save, then start VirtualBox again (I didn't have to log out/reboot).

The VM will not show anymore among the opened apps icons, but you can double click the VM in the VirtualBox to switch to it.

The whole post by Maestro is here.


Closing Terminal window does not kill script run with sudo X-posting from unix.SE on recommendation.

I have a bash script called testing saved within /usr/local/bin.

In one Terminal window in macOS I run sudo testing. In a second terminal window, I generate a list of processes:

ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args | { head -1; grep "bash\|testing" | grep -v grep; }

Which returns as expected:

TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
ttys000  73674 73673 -bash                              # login shell used to run sudo
ttys000  73701 73674 sudo testing                       # sudo process
ttys000  73702 73701 /bin/bash /usr/local/bin/testing   # "testing" bash script being run by sudo
ttys001   3714  3713 -bash                              # second login shell used to generate this process list

However, after quitting the first Terminal window (while testing is still running within it), the process list looks like this:

TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
??       73701     1 sudo testing
??       73702 73701 /bin/bash /usr/local/bin/testing
ttys001   3714  3713 -bash

As expected, the first login shell has been terminated and the second login shell is still running. But the sudo process and its forked (now-orphaned) child, the testing script, are still running!

I suspect this is because the user, not root, is the one closing the Terminal window, and as such does not have the necessary permissions to affect root processes. Is this correct? I feel like I'm missing something basic here. Is there some way to allow the root processes to be terminated by closing the Terminal window?

You are talking about orphan processes. As you will see, your question has little to do with sudo. Orphans are assigned to process 1. This process 1 is called init and is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. Here are two simple examples where orphans are created. The macOS is High Sierra which uses bash as the default shell.

  If you choose to repeat the examples, you will have to replace the process ids with the ones you get.

When the parent windows terminates, a hang up signal (SIGHUP) is sent to the child processes. Normally, this causes each child processes to terminate. However, if a child chooses not to terminate or is never sent a hangup signal (SIGHUP), then the child can become an orphan.

Example 1

Open a new Terminal window and enter the command shopt -s huponexit. This command is necessary because bash is a login shell. Output shown below.

Last login: Thu Mar 12 17:02:31 on ttys008
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ shopt -s huponexit
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Enter the command { trap '' hup; sleep 60000; } &, as shown below.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ { trap '' hup; sleep 60000; } &
[1] 8993
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Here a new process 8993 is created as job 1. The trap '' hup command causes the hang up signal (SIGHUP) to be ignored. Next, open a another Terminal window and enter the command ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 8993, as shown below.

Last login: Thu Mar 12 17:09:12 on ttys008
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 8993
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
ttys008   8993  8972 -bash
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

This shows the first window was assigned ttys008 and has a process id of 8972. Next, the first window is closed. In the popup window, Terminate is selected. A hang up signal (SIGHUP) is sent to process 8972, which is ignored. Process 8972 is now orphaned and will be assigned to process 1. Repeating the ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 8993 command in the second window will show this. See below.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 8993
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
??        8993     1 -bash
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Finally, the commands shown below are entered to send a terminal signal (SIGTERM) to process 8993 and show that the process has terminated.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ kill 8993
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 8993
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Example 2

This is basically the same as example 1, except instead of having the process ignore the hangup signal (SIGHUP), the disown %1 command is used to prevent a hangup signal (SIGHUP) from being sent to the process. Open a new Terminal window and enter the command shopt -s huponexit. This command is necessary because bash is a login shell. Output shown below.

Last login: Thu Mar 12 17:02:31 on ttys008
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ shopt -s huponexit
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Next, enter sleep 60000 & followed by disown %1. The %1 parameter represents job 1. The results are shown below.

Last login: Thu Mar 12 17:14:54 on ttys010
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ sleep 60000 &
[1] 9139
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ disown %1
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

In the second window, enter ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139. The results are shown below.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
ttys008   9139  9130 sleep 60000
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

After closing the third window, enter ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139 in the second window. The results are shown below. Another orphan has been created.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
??        9139     1 sleep 60000
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

Finally, enter kill 9139 and ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139, as shown below.

Marlin:~ davidanderson$ kill 9139
Marlin:~ davidanderson$ ps -axo tty,pid,ppid,args 9139
TTY        PID  PPID ARGS
Marlin:~ davidanderson$

References

Orphan process
Zombie process
init
Daemon


I have an iphone 4 with ios7 and I don't have any camera filters or different camera options I updated my phone and It updated everything expect my camera. I'm not sure if my phone just isn't compatable with it because it's not an S it's just a 4. The only camera options I have is video, photo, an square. All my othe friends iphone have those and other photo optiin and they have three little colors at the bottom of the screen on the right side. Please help I need to know if my iphone just isn't able to have it like it's the wrong version or generation or if something just went wrong when updating it.

It's perfectly normal. The iPhone 4 version of ios7 is lacking many features seen on the newer devices, including parallax, panorama, Siri and yes, live filters. However the filters can be applied in the photos app.


Apple Mail reply arrow not working reliably I'm running Lion, connecting to an Exchange 2010 server. Sent messages are stored locally.

Once I've replied to a messages in my Inbox, the "replied" arrow appears to the left of the message, as normal.  But when I click on the arrow to see the actual reply it fails roughly 50% of the time. By "fails" I mean that nothing comes up when I click.  A message I sent minutes earlier/later can work just fine.

The reply WAS sent using Apple Mail (not my iPhone) and it IS in my sent mail folder.  I have re-built my Spotlight index.

As far as I know, the issue is that Microsoft doesn't provide the Active Sync API to anything other than mobile devices. This is why using Exchange on Mac is a bit buggy.

I would recommend using Microsoft's own Outlook Web App (OWA) for your Exchange emails. Or installing the actual Outlook program for your computer. Those are what I use. :)

Those are probably your two best options if you need your email to be 100% reliable on your Mac.


Can't preview files in column view I'm suddenly not able to preview files in column view, or select them in the Open File dialog. Selecting the file gives me a spinning beach ball, and eventually I end up relaunching the Finder. I've confirmed that .jpg, .pdf, and .app files all do this, so I'm assuming it's an issue with previewing the files. Has anyone experienced this, or have any suggestions on resolving it?

I'm running a G5 PPC Mac with OS X 10.4.11

Thanks for the help.

Two things you can try :

If you don't need the preview feature in column mode (or for a short term fix), you can disable the preview column by going to View Options cmd-J in Finder and unchecking the "Show preview column" checkbox.

Alternatively, you can disable Quartz 2D Extreme (which should be disabled by default, but may be active and been known to cause Finder and preview slowdown). You can run the following command to disable it regardless.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Quartz2DExtremeEnabled -boolean NO

Run this command in Terminal (found in the Utility folder in Applications).  You will then need to reboot your Mac.


Wifi randomly turning itself off MacBook Pro I have a MacBook Pro mid-2012. I always had the common connectivity issues with wifi but now its beyond my comprehension. My wifi turns itself off randomly. Sometimes it works fine for days, other times the problem happens all day. It started when my Bluetooth speaker caused interference with the wifi signal causing it to run slow or disconnecting itself either the speaker or the wifi.

Then one day the computer wifi started turning itself on and off every couple of seconds. I shut down the computer reseted the PRAM then wifi showed the crossed out icon with wifi:not configured message. Shut it down again did a SMC reset and a clean install of OS X now the problem appears randomly most of the time a reset will restore wifi but it shut itself off whenever it wants.

Any solutions or ideas?

I feel your pain.  I had this same problem with my 2012 Macbook Pro. My WiFi would lose connection, and I would have to turn it off and then back on to regain the connection.  Then it started giving me the "WiFi not configured" message when I would turn it back on. Sometimes a reboot, or PRAM reset, or several reboots/resets would resolve it for a little while.

I will say there does not seem to be an easy fix.  Mine started having this problem when I installed Yosemite; my hunch (at least for my case which was very similar) is that is is a software/driver issue and not a hardware issue.  Call apple tech support.

I will say that mine was out of warranty, but they still helped me; they put me in touch with their engineers to work on the problem, gave me software diagnostic tools to figure out what was happening, and eventually were able to resolve my problem. They went to great lengths, and I am no longer working on a computer that has this issue thanks to them.


Is there a way for Pages to display an auto-updating date in ordinal format? I am currently putting together a template document in Pages and would like the date to update each time it is opened.

However, I would also like to display the date as an ordinal number (for example, today would be 11th September 2012) which isn't in the list of available formats.

Does anybody know of a way to set the date to auto-update in this format or do I have to manually set it each time?

You can set the date to update every time the document is opened by double-clicking on it, and selecting “Automatically update on open”. As for making the date ordinal, I don’t think it’s possible or would require heavy plist modifications or may depend on your localisation settings.


What is this virtual memory for the applications on macOs? I had a look in the activity monitor and when I pulled more information about TabNine, I didn't quite understand the concept of "virtual memory". It says "390GB".
How can it have a virtual memory of 390GB when I have a base variant mac with 8GB|256GB spec ?

About Virtual Memory
Virtual memory allows an operating system to escape the limitations of physical RAM. The virtual memory manager creates a logical address space (or “virtual” address space) for each process and divides it up into uniformly-sized chunks of memory called pages. The processor and its memory management unit (MMU) maintain a page table to map pages in the program’s logical address space to hardware addresses in the computer’s RAM. When a program’s code accesses an address in memory, the MMU uses the page table to translate the specified logical address into the actual hardware memory address. This translation occurs automatically and is transparent to the running application.
From Apple Developer Documentation

What is secure virtual memory on Mac?
To keep your information safe, macOS uses secure virtual memory. Virtual memory is a technique computers use to temporarily move data from random-access memory (RAM) to the hard disk if the amount of available RAM is limited. If the data written to the hard disk as virtual memory is unencrypted, and is never overwritten, it could be captured if the hard disk is scanned, creating a potential security risk.
Secure virtual memory in macOS eliminates this risk by encrypting the data in virtual memory. Secure virtual memory is always on, so data is kept secure while it’s swapped between your hard disk and RAM. The RAM on your Mac contains no information when it’s turned off.
From Apple Support


Is there a USB-C PoE adapter for iPad Pro? Is there a dongle which plugs into the USB-C port on the iPad Pro that accepts Power over Ethernet (PoE) so when PoE is available there’s no need to plug an additional USB-C cable to provide power to the device?

I see that starting this year Apple is selling a Belkin adapter for the lightning port which provides this, but I don't see any offerings for USB-C

I'm looking for an always-on kiosk implementation where Ethernet is preferred and more robust than Wi-Fi.

You could use something like this to turn 802.3at POE+ into data and USB-C power, then use a short USB-C cable and a short CAT6 cable to immediately patch into one of these (haven't personally tested this adapter but it should work in theory).  Not ideal since it requires multiple adapters, but a workable solution.


How to rescue light red Time Machine backups Today I've been looking for deleted by mistake folder. Time machine should help me, right?
But when I entered time machine (after multiple errors saying "Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk."), I saw my backups in light red, which means it's now available and nobody knows why (thanks Yosemite):

What to do? How to recover this backups?

After hours of investigation, I've found the solution. Just run Finder as root:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder

And under this Finder you should be able to Enter Time Machine and browse lost backups.
I hope somebody will find this useful.


How can I reconfigure my PF.conf to be more secure I want to make my computer more secure and a part of it I want to do with reconfiguring my PF firewall.

How can I reconfigure my PF.conf to be more secure?

I made a github repo where I posted my configuration.
My first github repo

Okay, the config is a total mess without some comments so we can know what you’re thinking instead of what you have written.  No worries, let us get this sorted out.  The syntax employed does not reflect well your intent, and in a few instances is in error or redundant.

It also appears that the ruleset you describe that is the config is not the same as that which you say is the output of the pfctl.

For clarity’s sake, let us make this simple, and more informative.  Please post the output of

sudo pfctl -vvv -s all

Then, please post your complete pf.conf - preferably to a place where we can comment and discuss like github or github gist. I’m seeing some discrepancies between the two files you posted (thanks for those), so I recommend explicitly writing out in NON FIREWALL SYNTAX - JUST PLAIN ENGLISH what exactly you want pf to do.

Firewall on. I blocked IP 93.184.220.29 with PF but it still popsup in netstat -n
How can I block all ports with PF except port 80 and 443?

Since I recognize a series of questions we might be at the point of diminishing returns asking larger and more detailed questions I will watch for your reply, and will make an extra effort to get this right for you but this might be a challenge in the Q&A format here. Thanks for your patience in providing some more work as to what you need to work.


iPhone SE -- Stocks App I have tried repeatedly to remove the chart in the stocks app from the screen. I scrolled up once to see a chart, and now I can't get the chart
to go away.

I can't get the chart in the attached screenshot
to leave the screen.

How can I dismiss or hide the part where it says Error retrieving chart?

One thing to try is add a few more stocks and then the chart should be off screen. Also, when you tap on a specific index - it should take over with the appropriate chart.

If all the indexes are wrong, you might need to remove them and re-add what you need to see if the settings for the app are messed up somehow.

You can delete this app entirely and re-install it as well, so that's kind of a last resort item to try.


iPhone Cable or Accessory Not Certified This isn't a coding question, but it is an issue that affects my ability to develop iPhone apps. Beginning this morning, I began seeing the message "The cable or accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPhone" whenever I plug in my iPhone 5's cable. I'm running iOS 7.0.4.

(This is the cable that came in the box with the phone, and I get the same message when I use the cable that came with my iPad.)

The phone will still charge (as long as I have the correct side of the jack "up"; it previously didn't matter which side was "up"). But Xcode no longer recognizes the device, meaning I can't test with it. (iTunes doesn't recognize it either.)

Does anyone know what causes this issue and how to fix it? I didn't have this problem yesterday and have made no deliberate updates to the phone recently. And as I said, I'm using cables that were shipped boxed with Apple devices.

As you can see in several threads like the one pointed by @Ohnomycoco, this is not a software problem but a hardware problem.

Lighting a "smart" connector with a microchip build-in the cables head. It's most likely due to a damage cable, so you'll have to replace it.

Also - be sure to test since in many cases it's the iOS device that needs repair and not the cable:

Only my cable can recharge my iPhone


Remove "steamclean" application Through my high school I have a Macbook Air. Because I am the technologically curious person that I am, I found a workaround for installing apps by putting them in the package contents of other apps (i.e. Google Chrome). I did this with Steam. After doing this, they found out about it and cleared out all of the apps' package contents.

They don't specifically know that I did this, but now every time I restart my computer a pop-up comes up saying that I don't have permission to run "steamclean".

I really don't want this to come up if they are trying to help me with my laptop if I have issues with it. Any suggestions?

Open the Terminal application and type (or copy and paste) the following command and hit ENTER. This will remove the steamclean job and should stop those popup messages.

  launchctl remove com.valvesoftware.steamclean

You may also want to run the following command to check for other Steam related launchd jobs.

  launchctl list | grep steam

On my own Mac there is another called "com.valvesoftware.steam.ipctool" that you may also want to remove.


30" monitor has black border around desktop I have been using a 24" monitor with my macbook pro early 2011 connected via a mini display port to DVI adaptor.  I recently received an HP Z30i 30" monitor.  When I connect to it with an mini display port to display port adaptor, although it displays at the monitors native 2560x1600 resolution, the mac is scaling the desktop display down so as to leave a 1cm or so black border around the desktop.  The mac reports using a resolution of 2560x1600 and the display reports this also.   This makes the display blurry as single pixels become sub pixels.   The display looks like the same effect as having "under scan" turned on when using an HDMI cable at 1080p.

I thought that maybe there was a hardware or display problem, but when I boot off a previous system partition from a different hard-drive using the same OS (10.8.5) release, the monitor set up works perfectly.  This proves the OS release, display and the hardware, so I'm thinking that there must be a preferences problem with my current setup.  Perhaps the under scan setting is somehow being applied to this display when it's not using HDMI?

I've tried deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist, ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.HostNumber.plist and rebooting but no results.

The scaling is applied before the login screen and logging in as a different user has the same problem.

Any ideas?  It's driving me nuts, I've got this nice 30" screen and I can't use it!

I ended up "fixing" it by re-installing OS X on the system disk.  Brute force due to lack of success with other methods, but all good now.

In some cases a faulty cable can do this as well:

External monitor randomly lowers resolution adds black borders


How to open a presentation document in Keynote on iOS? In Keynote app on my iPad, I see a list of seven of my presentations “On My iPad”. Next to these is a list of “Locations” including iCloud Drive, On My iPad, and Recently Deleted.

When I single-tap on the icons, nothing happens. When I double-tap on the icons, nothing happens. If I press-and-hold I get a context menu offering items such as Copy, Duplicate, Delete, and so on. But no Open.

➥ How does one convince Keynote to open its own presentation files?

Apparently, a bug.

Crashed out of Keynote. Relaunched Keynote. Now a single-tap opens the presentation.


Mini-display port MBP dual monitors Are there any dual monitor adapters for the Mini Display port that support true multi monitor mode?  For example the Matrox Dual Head To Go just makes your computer think it's connected to a 3360x1050 display rather than 2 1680*1080 displays and you have to do lots of work arounds to ensure that the dock doesn't span both monitors and alerts don't show in the middle of the monitors etc.

In theory Displayport 1.2 supports daisy-chaining and hubs, which would support this, provided you have a Mac that supports Displayport 1.2 (I think it's just 2011 Macs and later, but I couldn't find a definitive answer). However as far as I can tell, there aren't any monitors that support daisy-chaining available, nor are there any hubs expected until sometime in 2013.

At the moment you're restricted to the adapters that concatenate the two displays, rather than present them independently. An alternative might be a Displaylink adapter, which allows you to connect a monitor via USB. It does limit performance however, but how much this impacts you depends on what you're using it for.