Disable ambient noise reduction in macOS Catalina I think the ambient noise reduction is enabled by default in macOS Catalina, resulting in very poor audio quality using Rode plug-play microphone!

Is there any terminal command to disable ambient noise reduction in macOS Catalina?

As you can see the option made invisible in audio input settings since Catalina. Very unexpected form Apple!

Solution

Re-installed macOS Mojave (I decided not to update to macOS Catalina at any cost)! Here is the screenshot from macOS Mojave with ambient noise reduction option.

My understanding is that the "Ambient Noise Reduction" feature only works with the internal microphone. Thus when you plug-in a Røde USB microphone, ambient noise reduction is not applied to that input. Therefore I suggest looking at other possible causes of bad audio quality or latency.

The lack of the checkbox for the internal microphone on Catalina is, as I understand it, a bug. Hopefully Apple will restore it in a point update.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a Terminal command that enables/disables ambient noise reduction. You might however want to check if the plists in the /Library/Preferences/Audio/ folder contains a setting related to ambient noise reduction on your system.

However Apple's documentation seem to indicate that you can disable ambient noise reduction by setting up a 4-channel built-in microphone format with the Audio MIDI Setup program.


iPhone 5S camera focus Does anyone else often get blurry images when taking photos with iPhone 5S? I just feel they are more frequent than on my iPhone 4 and was wondering if anyone else experienced the same.

Blurry photos occur because:

skin oil or other cruft (pocket lint) is on the lens
the camera software is focusing on distant objects (when you want a closeup,) or focusing on close objects (when you want a distant object.)

If you are having trouble focusing, tap in the yellow focus box on the screen. You will notice that the software shows a larger yellow box when it detects a closeup shot, and a smaller box when it detects a distance shot.


Removing email account prompts to remove from other computers So I added my @att.net email address a while back and decided to remove it from OS X Mavericks Mail. When I clicked to remove it, it prompted me if I wanted to delete this email account from iCloud on this computer or on all computers. It also gave me a list of all the computers associated to my iCloud account. However, a lot of those computers don't even exist. How can I edit this list of computers associated to my iCloud account?

Go to iCloud Devices, sign in, click on "all devices", select the one to remove and click erase .


Parental Controls not restrict Terminal Commands? I have a Parental Controls limit on my child so I have to type in my password when they open a new application. I have recently discovered a problem though. They have tried programming in terminal. The problem is that the Mac thinks of each command as an application, so if they want to use a new command, I have to allow it. Is there a way to allow all of the commands, but not the actual applications?

Well, allowing all commands would probably allow your child to bypass some or all of the other Parental Controls on the system. Perhaps a simple Linux Virtual Machine without networking capabilities would suit your purposes better? Your child wouldn't be able to bypass any settings on the host machine and if they break the VM, it's trivial to fix/reinstall.


How to set all Google Chrome notifications act like alerts? According to Settings > Notifications there are two types of notifications Banners and Alerts.

Banners appear in the upper-right corner and go away automatically.
Alerts stay on screen until dismissed.

I want that all of my Chrome notifications act like Alerts. But they act like Banners. Is there something that I can do to achieve that behavior?

Chrome uses its own type of notifications that aren't necessarily system native - my apologies for the extreme vagueness, I don't know how else to put it. This can depend on whether its a website notification that you can get from an update or one related to chrome itself.

What I believe you are trying to do is force chrome to use native notifications throughout. Try this:

In your search bar input this: chrome://flags/#enable-native-notifications. Set this to enable.

Then, under Setting > Notifications set both the Google Chrome apps to Alerts.

I hope this works.


Is there a way to effectively clean a Smart Cover without causing damage? On my iPad smart cover (It's one of the polyurethane ones) there seem to be some spots of what looks like grease, it could be some sort of food grease or skin oil. What would be the best way to clean the cover without damaging it? I was thinking just a damp paper towel would be best, but I want to see what would be best before I tried.

I have found ironicly that using a Microfiber cloth does the job and also cleans the microfiber inside part of the cover.

I find that when you use it as a stand the inside of the cover collects anything you are standing it on and will the put this dust/debris onto the screen when its closed.

To add to this looking at the Apple website on Smart covers, the microfiber lining is the same colour as the polyurethane, yet the actual product is grey (just like in the video on the same page).


Install 1.69f4 (SMC 1.7) on MacbookPro8,1 running Yosemite Dec 2018 Update:
I bought a new battery (A1322) in Sep 2016 for S$42 because my battery deteriorated further. My MacBook recognised the battery and it had no random shutdowns for a while. However, it was a bad choice because the new battery barely lasted me for a few months before it started to expand. It pushed against the MacBook trackpad until it cracked the trackpad glass.
With that, I decided to say goodbye to my old MBP and I bought a new MBP in Jan 2017.

My MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) (aka MacBookPro8,1) running OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite has just crossed the 1000 battery cycle count mark.
It now suffers from random shutdowns without me prompting anything. I am sure it is not a userland software problem.
What I have done:

reset my SMC several times
checked Console.app for .panic files - none exists

So I read further and found that Apple says upgrade your SMC to 1.69f4 (SMC 1.7). My current SMC version is 1.68f99. However, the update installer throws an alert:

The update is not supported by your system.

Turns out the system requirements are

OS X  10.7.5
OS X 10.8.2

but I am running Yosemite. Any advice?

any luck with your issue? I am having SMC related issues on my early 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro (aka MacBookPro8,1) too. Also want to update SMC to 1.69f4 but on Sierra I'm not allowed to.

Curiously, the description for this update on Apple's website doesn't specifically list the 13-inch model. Also curiously, digging into the .pkg file there are 4 other packages, named MacBookProSMCUpdate, MBP18, MBP91 and MBP92, which contain the SMC file for the following models, respectively:

MacBookProSMCUpdate: 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro
MBP18: 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro
MBP91: 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro
MBP92: 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro

This info was retrieved from the names of folders/files buried within payload files.

That all seems to indicate that, although this update is listed on Apple's website as for the early 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro, the software inside is intended to use in other machines. Either that or Apple used totally inconsistent naming for the files and folder inside the package.

With some more digging, I found that I COULD manually install an SMC update through an EFI command-line mode in rEFInd. I have not yet attempted that as I'm aware of the risks and don't want to finish bricking my Mac with a wrong SMC firmware.

So i guess my question is: Has anyone with the same Mac model successfully updated its SMC firmware with version 1.7 (1.69f4) and can confirm that it is INDEED intended for this Mac model (MacbookPro8,1)?

If not, is there any other official word from Apple regarding the right number of the latest SMC update for this model?

Any hints are appreciated!


How does an iPhone import photos from the photo stream? If I put a picture on my Mac to photostream and it moves to my iPhone's photostream and I delete the picture from my photostream on my Mac, will there still be a picture left on the iPhone in the camera roll?

No.
When you delete an image from Photo Stream, there is a message (at least on iOS) that says something like

The image will disappear from Photo Stream on all your devices.

Hence, deleted means no longer in Photo Stream anywhere.


How can I post a photo to instagram that was on my computer and not taken from my iPhone? I want to use a photo from my computer and put it on my instagram account. The problem is that when I go to choose the picture, its not shown in the list of images in the /DCIM/100APPLE folder. I believe the issue is that it doesn't have all of the meta data about how the picture was taken so the software doesn't show it.

Someone has said that you need iTunes to do anything on your phone but I'm running linux and iTunes isn't available for my operating system.

Is this the only option? What can I do?

Send the photo to yourself
Save it to camera roll from the mail you just sent to yourself.
Post it on instagram

That's it ;)


mergerfs or similar on a Mac for combining multiple drives? I want to setup an old Mac Pro as a media server. In my recent setup, I use mergerfs to combine multiple drives into one which I can share. I would like to do the same on the Mac. I have seen, that mergerfs does not support the Mac, and that mhddfs is not maintained anymore.

Is there an alternative for macOS?

The README.md file for the mergefs project on GitHub answers this for you...

  mergerfs is a union filesystem geared towards simplifying storage and management of files across numerous commodity storage devices. It is similar to mhddfs, unionfs, and aufs.

Emphasis Mine

Unionfs is a FUSE project (available on GitHub) that claims to have Mac support.  There hasn’t been much development in the last few years so, how well it works with your version of macOS will be up in the air.

That said, it’s probably a better idea to just standardize the formats over those multiple drives to reduce complexity and ensure reliability.  If these drives are running in different machines with different OSes, NFS might be the direction you want to go.


Recovering data from an Encrypted iTunes Backup that's missing the Manifest.db Is there a method to recover from an encrypted iTunes backup if it's missing its manifest.db file?

I have the backup password and everything. There's a couple of third party tools that can read an encrypted iTunes Backup, but they fail if the backup is missing its manifest.db file. (iMazing, iPhone Backup Extractor)

Unfortunately, part of the encryption keys (one for each individual file) is stored in the Manifest.db. The backup password is used to unwrap (unlock) those keys with some more parts from the Manifest.plist, but doesn't help derive the missing key parts. I wish I had better news, but an encrypted backup missing either one of those Manifest files isn't decryptable.

Just to make sure, is there a subfolder inside the backup named "Snapshot"? If so, we should triple-check for the Manifest.db in there.


iCloud save support in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City I've been playing on my iPhone and iPad, and it appears that in order to do a "cloud save", I need to actually find a save point on one device and then do a save. Then, on my other device I need to manually load that save.

I was hoping this would be a little more automatic - is there something I'm doing wrong? I'd expect the game to just pick up where I left off on the other device.

Apparently this is how it GTA operates. Both Vice City and San Andreas iOS version of it. I've always wondered whether the game keeps some of the game save data in Game Center, iCloud or to a app-native cloud system.


Disable macOS screen capture snapshot sound? I'm not using Grab, but the screenshot shortcuts Command ⌘Shift3 and Command ⌘Shift4
A loud snapshot sound plays whenever I screengrab.
How can I turn off this sound, and is there any way other than disabling all system sound effects? Perhaps with a Terminal command?
I'm looking specifically for 10.8+, if it matters.

The easy version: Disable all the sound effects

Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen and select “System Preferences…”

Click on the option that says “Sound”

Click on “Sound Effects”


Reveal in Finder from the Terminal How do I reveal a file that I have the path for in the Terminal in Finder? I don't think that open will work for this.
Specifically I want to be able to fzf for a file and then pop it in Finder.
(I guess this would work if you get the path, chop off the file bit and then call open on the rest?)

How do I reveal a file that I have the path for in the Terminal in Finder? I don't think that open will work for this.

From man open:
-R  Reveals the file(s) in the Finder instead of opening them.

So, open -R /path/to/a/file.ext will reveal your file in the Finder...

Specifically I want to be able to fzf for a file and then pop it in Finder.

In its most basic usage the following will reveal in Finder the file selected from the execution of "$(fzf)":
open -R "$(fzf)"

The following fzf key bindings will map ctrl-r to reveal the file in the Finder and ctrl-space to a QuickLook of the file:
fzf --bind 'ctrl-r:execute(open -R {}),ctrl-space:execute-silent(qlmanage -p {})'


Why do I have to source ~/.bash_login every time I open Terminal When ever I close and open Terminal.app, it never loads my ~/.bash_profile. I have my RVM setup at the top of the file but it never loads it.

As you can see, when I type rvm into Terminal, it says command not found this is a pain as I have to run source ~/.bash_login every time I open Terminal.

Am I the only one with this problem? What am I doing wrong?

Does it have to be .bash_login? Try renaming it to .profile.


Macbook Pro won't load desktop on user account My Macbook Pro (running El Capitan) will not load my main user account. After I enter the password it just looks as though it's loading but never displays the desktop. I am able to log into the guest account without a problem and I have even created a new administrator account, but I need to access my old user profile. Any suggestions much appreciated.

It sounds like there is something (possibly) damaged that is preventing log in under your user profile.

Can you log into that account if you boot your Mac in Safe Mode (holding Shift during boot up)? If so there is a startup item or a preference file that is damaged and causing this problem.

I have found that temporarily moving the contents of the preferences folder elsewhere (like the desktop) and rebooting often solve such issues.

Log in to your Mac with the alternative administrator account
Open the /Users/[USERNAME] folder in the Finder
press ShiftCommand. to reveal the Library folder of the account with problems.
Get Info on that Library folder and click the lock icon and authenticate
Click the "+" icon (lower left corner) and add the current username to the list.
Select that name in the list and change the Privilege to Read and Write.
Click the Gear icon and select "Apply to enclosed items" from that menu.

All of that to give your current (admin)m account access to your non-working account.

I would move everything in that user's ~/Library/Preferences folder to another folder in ~/Library (call it oldprefs or some such, the name doesn't matter.)

Once that has completed reboot your Mac and log in with the problematic account and hopefully login will be successful.

If it is then proceed to use your Mac as you would normally. Some apps will have gone back to their default configurations. Registration may need to be reapplied, settings changed back to the way you want them, etc.

You can start putting preferences files back in their original folder if you like. I would do it a few at a time, logging out and then back in each time you do it. This will help you narrow down what preference file (if any) was causing the problem.


One Hard Drive to backup two Macs with Time Machine, then recover from one, then the other? I have a question and its based on the situation below. The whole aim is to get certain important files out of my Macbook Air's backup.
My Macbook Air crashed and won't wake up at all anymore. Before it crashed, I was able to save all the files (128 GB) into a Time Machine backup on an external 1 TB hard drive.
My Macbook Pro is working. I want to save all of its files too (128 GB) through a Time Machine backup onto the same external 1 TB hard drive.
I want to now use the Macbook Pro as a means to recover files from my Macbook Air. So I want to restore my Time Machine backup of my Macbook Air onto my Macbook Pro. However, after I get the files I want from my Macbook Air backup, I will replace this Time Machine backup with the backup I made for the Macbook Pro, so I get all the files of my Macbook Pro back onto the Macbook Pro and the files of my Macbook Air are kept in the external 1 TB hard drive.
Is this achievable using Time Machine, and if not, what should I do?- M.

It is possible to use an external drive to back up two Macs via Time Machine. Per this thread, the backups will be stored separately, without any special setup needed.
Per pulling specific files from another Time Machine backup, you may want to refer to this thread. It should be doable to search that backup volume without having to install the entire backup onto another machine using the restore feature.


TestFlight: Why isn't individual tester getting notifications when new TestFlight builds are pushed to store? I have an app on TestFlight, and I added an individual tester to version 0.1.3. I then pushed versions 0.1.4 and 0.1.5, and although this tester automatically appears under "Individual testers" for these last two builds, they didn't receive any notifications about them, so they still have only version 0.1.3. They have auto-update set to ON. Does anyone know how I can resolve this?

When you add an individual tester to a specific build, they're not automatically added to new builds you push to TestFlight. You need to do that manually - or add the user to a group.
Note that even if the individual tester is added to a specific build, it doesn't mean that it is available to them yet. You do need to ensure that you have entered the required encryption export compliance information, as well as having sent in the app for beta app review and received an approval.


How to make Adobe applications respect desktop/spaces? I have my applications arranged on three different desktops (formerly known as Spaces) to avoid cluttering.

The only problem is that Adobe apps such as Photoshop or Illustrator always spawn windows in whatever current desktop I'm in. It works with all the other apps.

Is there a way to make Adobe apps respect my settings?

Been struggling with this problem too, until I've found that the fix is, actually, very simple.

Right click on the Photoshop icon in dock > Options > Assign To "None".

This worked for me.


How can I change the resolution on my Mac to 720p (1280x720)? I'm looking to record some screencasts, and 720p (1280x720) seems to be the best choice for the resolution. It's supported by video sites like YouTube and Vimeo as one of the standard "HD" resolutions, but it's small enough that it can be comfortably viewed on smaller screens without needing to play the video back full screen.

However, there is no option for 1280x720 in my System Preferences. How can I get my Mac to use this resolution? I've seen SwitchResX and I've tried to make it work, but it's very complicated and I haven't had much luck with it. Are there any other utilities that do the same thing? Would buying a Mini DisplayPort -> HDMI adapter and hooking it up to a 720p TV work?

One quick tip for finding more resolutions is to hold the Option key while clicking Scaled in System Preferences > Displays. This definitely works in OS X El Capitan and I think it worked in Yosemite at least.

For example, without Option, my 1440x900 macbook air screen gives me 1440 x 900, 1280 x 800, 1152 x 720, and 1024 x 640. But when I add Option, it adds 1140 x 810, 1280 x 720 (the one you want), and 800 x 600.


What do I do to start my iPad back up if it is powered off and power button doesn't work? My iPad is powered off and I can't get on it because the power button doesn't work. Is there an alternative way to turn it on?

These things will resolve all issues:

Enable Assistive Touch: Settings>General>Accessibility>Assistive Touch
This will give you an on screen button, navigate to Device and then hold the sleep/wake on screen button, slide to power off
To turn the iPad back on, plug the device into power.


How do i automatically send ebooks to my Kindle? I would like to create an automation, that automatically sends a new file to my kindle email address if i put a new ebook into that folder.

How would a script look like, that i would have to apply to my folder?

On the Mac You can use automator to set up a folder action for this. I added a filter for mobi files use this folder action directly with my Downloads folder. The Script consists of three actions:

The first action would be this applescript:

on run {input, parameters}
    set theFile to first item in input
    set theFileAsString to theFile as string
    if theFileAsString ends with "mobi" then
        return theFile
    else
        tell me to quit
    end if
end run

Second, you need a "New Mail Message" action with your name@kindle.com email address. Be sure, that the sending mail address is trusted in your kindle settings of your Amazon account.

Third, you would use the "Send Outgoing Messages" action.

Be aware that this script takes only the first mobi file when you drop multiple files at once into your folder.


Make sysctl changes at startup I'd like to change the default smb settings at startup to remove timeouts. I have the following script;

#!/bin/sh

sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer=0
sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_hard_deadtimer=0
sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_soft_deadtimer=0

Running this script with sudo sets the relevant kernel options correctly. So I know that these commands are the correct ones.

I have created the following LaunchDaemon in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ to try and get this script to run at startup;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.jo.sysctl</string>
    <key>Disabled</key>
    <false/>
    <key>UserName</key>
    <string>admin</string>
    <key>GroupName</key>
    <string>staff</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/Users/admin/scripts/sysctl.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <false/>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

I've checked the plist with plutil and it checks out OK. I've set the permissions on the shell script to 0755 and set ownership of the plist file to root:wheel.

Running

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jo.sysctl.plist

...does nothing. The defaults are still set incorrectly. Where am I going wrong?

Thanks

It's probably best to ditch the script approach and use the settings file designed for this purpose: sysctl.conf

This applies up to macOS 10.12 Sierra.
as @klanomath pointed out in comments: " *.deadtimer are all "sysctl: unknown oid *.deadtimer" in my High Sierra environment. IE they don't exist!"
So it looks like that part of the sysctl interface is completely gone now.

sudo nano  /private/etc/sysctl.conf

add the following variables:

net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer=0
net.smb.fs.kern_hard_deadtimer=0
net.smb.fs.kern_soft_deadtimer=0

If you afterwards boot in verbose mode (cmd+v on startup or sudo nvram boot-args="-v" before a reboot), you should see the custom settings being applied.

You should then see on boot messages like these:

net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer: 60 -> 0
net.smb.fs.kern_hard_deadtimer: 600 -> 0
net.smb.fs.kern_soft_deadtimer: 30 -> 0

Otherwise check with

sysctl -a | grep smb

This approach should work for most settings that are accessible via sysctl and thus be as generalised as the question title implies.


Howto Setup External Drive as a Networked Drive I've got an external 1.5TB drive I'd like to connect to my iMac and use as a networked drive so other computers can connect to it's IP and read/write to the Drive.  What would be the best way to do this?

Specifics I'm looking for:

What format? (I'm thinking NTSF)
What software?  (FUSE or something
else?)
How would you set it up using
that software for a quick and easy
install?

My suggestion would be to format the drive to the default Mac OS X filesystem, HFS+ journaled. Then share the drive over SMB:

Open System Preferences
Go into Sharing
Check the box beside "File Sharing"
Under "Shared Folders", click the + icon and select the drive you want to share
Click the "Options..." button
Check the box beside "Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)"
Check the box beside the user accounts you want to have access to the drive
Click Done

Once this is done, all you have to do is to configure Samba on your Linux machine to connect to the shared drive.

You could also share over AFP instead and use netatalk on your Linux machine, but I've found that Samba is better supported.


How to set Inbox by Gmail as the default email client in Safari (macOS) I use Safari as my main browser on macOS.

I would like Inbox by Gmail to be my default email client so that it opens mailto: links.

Is that possible?

It's not straightforward, but doable:

Open Safari, install the mailto: extension, then go to Safari > Preferences > Extensions > mailto: > Options > Custom URL and add the following template:

https://inbox.google.com/?to={to}&cc={cc}&bcc={bcc}&subject={subject}&body={body}

Restart Safari
Open Mail, then go to Mail > Preferences > General > Default email reader > Select > Safari

And you are done! Any mailto: link will now open the Inbox composer.


Correct syntax for bash grep function? I'm trying to set up a function to make certain grep command easier.

gr() { grep -r --include=*.\{m,h,xib\} $1 \* ; }

The end result should be a recursive grep of all *.m, *.h, and *.xib files, for whatever is specified by the command's argument:

$ gr SearchText

Can anyone demonstrate the correct syntax for this?

Nevermind; thought I had tried everything I could imagine; turns out I was just over-zealous with escaping special characters from the shell. The syntax I was looking for is:

gr() { grep -r --include=*.{m,h,xib} "$1" * ; }


Can you reset the SMC an all Mac laptops by pressing power for 5 seconds after disconnecting the battery? I've always had this doubt and some clarification would be very welcome.  On Mac notebooks with non-removable battery (such as the MacBook Pro 2014), is the SMC reset by disconnecting the battery and pressing power for 5 second as is done on older Macs with removable batteries (such as in cases where Alt or Command keys are not working).

Here's the Apple article on SMC reset:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201295

No, on Mac notebooks with non-removable batteries you "press Shift-Control-Option on the left side of the built-in keyboard, then press the power button at the same time. Hold these keys and the power button for 10 seconds", exactly like stated in the support article you linked.


Chrome on OS X Yosemite Producing Garbled Graphics A couple of weeks ago Chrome started producing unusably garbled graphics for me, under OS X Yosemite 10.10.5.

It's perhaps easier to show than to tell.  For instance, Gmail looks like this:

...seems like it may be some sort of interlacing glitch, as if I adjust the window size I can get vaguely coherent things to display, such as:

I haven't changed any settings in Chrome; the issue seemed to appear at random.  Neither rebooting the computer nor restarting Chrome makes any difference.  Other browsers (Safari, Firefox) work fine, as does every other app on the machine.  The problem seems to be specific to Chrome.

Is there anything I can do to get Chrome usable again?

Edit - My chrome version is:

I'm pretty sure that says "46.0.2490.71".

I believe this was related to Chrome's hardware video acceleration feature, and has been fixed. I had the same issue with an external monitor attached to a USB DisplayLink adapter. After updating to Chrome 46.0.2490.80, the bug (#527556) was resolved.


Remove Default Application for File Extension in Catalina I accidentally associated a file type with an application that doesn't work with that particular file type. (There is no application installed on my system that works with the file.) I would like to remove the default application association. I found this Q&A How to remove the default application for opening a file? but it seems like it's not exactly what I want and outdated for Catalina. For instance, there is no ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist on my system. I would like to execute a command that removes the association for the one single file extension, not remove all of the associations for an application as this one appears to suggest. I have been able to dump the database using lsregister but I'm not sure what command could be used to remove one entry.

A Catalina-compatible alternative to RCDefaults can be found here:

https://github.com/Lord-Kamina/SwiftDefaultApps

It provides a preference pane and a command line utility for setting the default app of any file type.


How to find what ctrl+alt+up/down is mapped to? I have a MacBook Pro 2015.

I want ctrl+alt+up/down to map to duplicate line above/below in Intellij, but it is intercepted by macOS and causes the window to maximize to top/bottom of the screen.

I can't find where that mapping is in the keyboard shortcuts.

Does anyone know how to remove the mapping from macOS?

All native macOS shortcuts are mapped through Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts

You can search through all the lists and look for the following combination in the right hand column: ⌃⌥↑. When you find it, you can either disable the checkbox in the far left or change the shortcut by double clicking it and entering a new shortcut.

You should now be able to use that shortcut in any program that the developer has mapped that for.


Remove hyperlink formatting from address I have created a Numbers spreadsheet containing a set of data including email addresses.

Some of these addresses appear as hyperlinks, and I can't seem to edit or change them.
Every time I try to select one it jumps to my Mail application.

I have tried to change formatting to "Text", but this seems to have no effect.

In the Numbers 3.5.3 this is extremely difficult to do. Thanks to @Vev for giving me the hint to discover how to do it.

First: expand the size of the cell so there is some white space
around the hyperlink.
Click once in the white space to select the
Cell.
Click once again in the white space, to enable the Text Cursor.
Right-Click on the hyperlink, which selects it and provides a context
menu. (If you don't have right-click enabled, use Ctrl-click on the
Mac)
Select "Edit Link" in the context menu.
Click the "Remove" button from the Edit Link dialog.


How can I detect which application was started most recently? I have two utility applications.  I would like to detect which of these was run most recently.  My initial idea was to use stat to check the access timestamp on the application files and then compare:

mac:~ user$ stat -qf '%a %N' '/Applications/my-app1.app' '/Applications/my-app2.app' | sort -nr | head -n1 | cut -d ' ' -f2-
/Applications/my-app2.app
mac:~ user$

However this is insufficient, because there are other reasons these apps are being accessed - I assume by the backup system I am using.

Are there any system logs that I can examine to determine which of these apps was started most recently?

I'm not sure if this will suit your needs, but you could just look at the Recent Applications item stack located at the bottom right end of your Dock (assuming your Dock is located at the bottom of your screen).

If you don't have this stack visible in your dock, follow these steps:

Open Terminal (usually located in Applications > Utilities)
Type (or copy and paste) the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{"tile-data" = {"list-type" = 1;}; "tile-type" = "recents-tile";}'; killall Dock

Press the Return key
The Dock will quit and relaunch
You should now see a new item stack with recently used applications (at left of the Trash can)
Clicking on this will display your most recent apps
You can right-click (or control-click) on the icon to change what is displayed and how it is displayed. For example, choosing to display it as a List will show the most recent app at the top, and choosing the Grid option will display the most recent app at top left, and so on.

Regardless, the advantage of this over the Apple > Recent Items option is that everything is listed in the order they were run/accessed, instead of being listed in alphabetical order.


Suspected Places for Mac App Store Files I know that Evernote has about 4 gigs of stuff in my file system. I know this because I recently switched to a non-app-store version of Evernote and it "copied" my files and listed them at 2GB.

I want to start fresh with Evernote. Where can I look for all this data?

Not sure what you're planning to do, but here goes

  ~/Library/Application Support/Evernote/accounts/

Tread carefully or else… Evernote may not work for you.


Upgraded to iOS 11 iPhone 5S won't connect to data I have an iPhone 5S that I upgraded to iOS 11 and now it will no longer connect to data when I have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off.

My Carrier is T-Mobile and I have Wi-Fi Calling enabled.

Disable Wi-Fi Calling. When you disable Wi-Fi and have Wi-Fi Calling enabled it wont connect to cellular data. Not sure if this is related to how T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling is, or if it is an iOS issue.

Steps:

Goto Settings
Cellular
Wi-Fi Calling
Toggle Off Wi-Fi Calling on This iPhone
Go Back to Cellular and Toggle On Cellular Data.


Move "Favorites" font collection to another machine On my old laptop I had a moderate-sized collection of "favorites" fonts that I've set over the past few years. The laptop is now gone, but I have a disk image with the entire contents of the hard drive. Is there a way I can copy the fonts that were in the "Favorites" collection to my new computer? Put another way, is there a file I can copy from one machine to the other which contains my "Favorites" fonts collection? Thanks!

Yes!

Before you do, your font library on your new computer should probably contain the same fonts as the old one. (I’m not entirely sure this is necessary, but I suggest it to be on the safe side).

OS X stores most of its fonts in one of three locations:

~/Library/Fonts — fonts you’ve installed for your personal use;
/Library/Fonts — fonts you’ve installed for every user on the computer;
/System/Library/Fonts/ — the fonts that Mac OS X needs.

You’ll probably only need to transfer fonts from the first two folders, as your new installation of OS X will provide the fonts in the third. More detail in the Apple support article on font locations.

If you’ve got the odd font that isn’t in one of these three folders, you can still find its location. Open the file ~/Library/Fonts/fonts.list in a text editor (TextEdit would do). The file contains a long list of font locations, which correspond to the fonts that you’ve installed. With this, you can find any fonts that are lurking elsewhere.

Once you have your old font library on your new computer, transferring the font collections should be relatively easy. On the disk image of the old laptop, navigate to ~/Library/FontCollections. One of these files will be Favourites.collection (or whatever you called it). Copy this file to ~/Library/FontCollections of your new computer, and then the collection should show up in Font Book the next time you launch it.


Access iPod from Windows Explorer I just got my new iPod 4.

I wanted to use it as a storage device copying to it music and eBooks, but it doesn't show up on my computer.

I followed the direction in this page, but unfortunately, the option "Enable disk use" doesn't show up (iTunes 10), I've checked "Manually manage music and videos" instead, but it doesn't do the trick, and the device doesn't appear in Windows Explorer.

Do you mean an iPod Touch? IIRC "Enable Disk Use" is only for non-iOS devices. I don't know of a way in which you can manually copy songs from your computer to your iOS using the file system and have them play in the iPod.app on your iPod Touch. I believe Stanza allows you to copy ebooks from your computer to your iOS device but I'm not sure if it uses iTunes for that process.


The “Home” section of my Facebook page is empty (on mobile only) The Facebook home section seems to be empty and I don't understand why... out of 3 pages I have, 2 of them does this. I don't get it because they all have the same option activated and it seems like there is no real logic behind it...

I believe it was only a bug from Facebook, I did nothing but report it to Facebook and now it works like a charm !


Force URL link to open with a specific browser I've created a URL link in my dock, however, the link only opens with the default browser. I have safari, Firefox, and chrome (latest being the default) installed in my machine. I'm wondering if someone knows how to default the link to open with Firefox instead of Chrome but still keeping chrome as the default browser.
Note: I'm running Mavericks in my MacBook Pro.

You could use the all powerful open command to achive this using a shell script / apple script. Not necessarily the nicest way, but that's the way I do it.

open http://apple.stackexchange.com -a Firefox.app

would be the basic command to open this page in Firefox. You can easily wrap this in a nice to use apple script - let me know if you need to know how!


Use iCloud storage space to free space from iPhone 5s I have purchased a 200 GB iCloud plan. I have a MacBook, an iPad Air and a iPhone 5s.

My phone keeps on popping up "Storage Full" every now and then. What should I do to utilise the purchased iCloud space and free my iPhone of space ?

It will depend on the root cause of your storage being full, so start by checking on Settings > General > Usage, and select Manage Storage from there to have a detailed view.

In my case, pictures are using a lot of space, and podcasts are just behind.

If you click on any of the items on the lists, you get more granular options

Here I clicked Music and I'm able to see which albums are using space.

If I slide "All music" to the left I and click Delete I can remove it from my iPhone from here, and recover 1,9 GB of space; of course you have to be cautious and be sure you have that music somewhere else (on your computer, on iTunes Match, or if you purchased it from iTunes Store, you can re download it when you need it).

If it is full of pictures and videos, you can activate iCloud Photo Library and store full versions on iCloud, keeping low resolution copies on your device; that will free up some space.
If it is music, iTunes Match or another streaming service will allow you to delete music and download —or stream— on demand.

Other than that, check Whatsapp and iMessage which are huge space eaters —because of images and videos sent and received with those services; you can delete those images and videos if you have copies of what is worth saving.

iCloud will be very useful for backups and synchronized documents between your Apple devices, but your question indicates you hoped to somehow move some of your data from your device to the cloud, which is called selective syncing on other services (Google Drive, Dropbox); I couldn't find info on that —or similar— feature in iCloud, and I believe it's not possible.


Can't archive mail on one of my Exchange accounts I have a few Exchange accounts set up in Mail that are working fine.  Deleting sends the mail to the Trash folder, archiving sends the mail to the Archive folder.  However, one of the accounts won't let me archive.  The mailbox has a folder under the "Archive" section on the sidebar, and I can manually drag messages to it, but when I click Archive I get the following:

The message “[subject]” could not be moved to the mailbox “(null)”

The destination mailbox does not exist.

I would assume this means that Mail can't find the appropriate folder to put the message in, but since the account has a folder under the Archive heading, I'm confused.

Any ideas?

I had the same problem. I went into Preferences > Accounts and deselected "Enable this account." Then, I quit Mail and restarted it. I went back into Preferences > Accounts and selected "Enable this account" and it all started working.


Why can't I install an app (says "could not be found")? I just got an iPhone SE. I did a backup from my 4, then told iTunes to restore the new phone from the backup.

It said there were a bunch of apps it couldn't install because they cannot be found.

As just one example, Access RPN is on my 4, shows in my iTunes under "My Apps", but without art. When I go to the iTunes Store link, it says "Downloaded" so I can't redownload it.

How do I fix this?

EDIT:
I found an Apple page that says to do this I need an iTunes backup, AND a phone that's not set up. So I erased my SE and tried again. This got many more of the apps installed and their data recovered, but some still aren't working. Access RPN, my example app, still does not work.

Ok, in iTunes on the computer, it says "Downloaded". But on the device itself, go to

App Store -> Updates -> Purchased -> My Purchases

and select the "Not on this iPhone" tab. That shows all apps that didn't get transferred. Click the cloud icon to download them.

This even preserved the apps' data, because I had done a backup first.


Should I spin down Mac Mini's drive? I have a Mac Mini (2010) that I use as a home server with a DAS (2 drives) attached over USB. Everything is on 24/7.

From all my research online, it seems that spinning hard drives up and down constantly is actually only worse for the drive so I've unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". Now the internal drive as well as the two externals are spinning 24/7.

The other reason I keep the drives spinning is that if I do have the drives on auto-sleep, I keep getting I/O Errors from the kernel log for my two external drives on USB which was very worrying. Keeping the drives spinning makes those errors go away entirely.

The problem is that the internal drive on the Mini crashed recently and it was only about 7 months old :( Thankfully it was under warranty but the next time I probably won't be so lucky.

This has me doubting my always-spin approach. All the stuff I read previously was for 3.5" server drives, maybe the 2.5" drives are different in this regard and I should sleep them when possible? Or was I simply just unlucky with that crashed drive?

Additionally: Should I want to sleep the 2.5" internal drive, is there a way to sleep the internal but keep the externals spinning? Seems like the pref panel as well as pmset apply the setting to all drives.

Thanks!

Ideally, you should set a longer spin-down time so that it is not occuring constantly. A time to spin down of after being idle for 4-6 hours would be better. This gives you the benefit of saving power for long periods when little is being done on the drives, e.g. during the night or while you are away from home at work, etc. Having longer times also allows for less slow down when you are using your drive since you will have a reasonable time-frame to get files and work done before the drive trys to spins down on you.

Use pmset from the terminal to set up a custom interval that works best for you.

Others our claiming that spin down or not is really not that big of a deal in a home / SMB environment.

As for the differences between the 3.5" and 2.5" drives its safe to  assume they are the same or similar. Even a comparison between what you said was a 3.5" server drives is not the same as a comparison between a 3.5" consumer desktop drive, they are not on equal ground just because of form factor. It really comes down to the manufacture quality and is really one of those you get what you pay for kind of situations and OEM drives even in Macs are still a lowest bidder kind or process. Here is a discussion on the reliability of 2.5" vs. 3.5" drives.

As for the differences in trying to set internal or external drives independently it looks like its not possible since the setting is really only intended for the startup disk according to The X Lab -- Hard Disk Sleep

  Another undocumented aspect of Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible is that this option generally applies only to the startup disk. Non-startup hard disk drives — external FireWire® or USB® drives or additional drives installed in a Mac desktop — may ignore this setting.


How do I trigger Appstore check for app updates manually? I'm using a firewall and by default, everything, including checking for updates is blocked.

In some situations, I'd like to disable the firewall and trigger such checks manually. How do I do that?

I have the firewall turned on on my computer and I don't have a problem checking for updates.  I go to the App Store and at the top of the window is an icon for updates. Click on that and it tells you the updates available.

See the image below.


How can I get control functionalities in the notification center like in Android? How can I get control functionalities in the notification center like in Android?

I would like to be able to turn Bluetooth on and off without going though layers of menu in the Settings.app.

Is this possible?  And if it is, how do you do it?

No, this isn't possible. On iOS devices, the only way is via the Settings, unfortunately - at least, on a non-jail-broken device.


MacOS Mojave remote access login screen stuck on infinite loading spinner My company has a Mac Mini that we use for iOS builds. Occasionally, one of us needs to log in to it via remote access (from a Windows PC) to update the build tools.

However, ever since updating the OS to the latest MacOS Mojave, most of the time we cannot log in remotely. On any VNC client (I use VNC Viewer but have tested this with UltraVNC as well). As soon as one of us establishes a connection to the Mac, it just shows the login screen with the username and account picture, no password prompt or buttons of any kind, and a loading spinner that just spins forever:

I've found that I can "fix" this by physically accessing the machine and logging out of the account, but of course this is painful and impractical.

Is this just a mojave bug? Are there any ways to break out of this loop? I should mention that this didn't seem to be an issue before the mojave update.

Remote login should be allowed (System Preferences -> Sharing -> Remote login).

Connect via ssh: ssh user@host
Run sudo pkill loginwindow
Connect using VNC as usual


What is the domain name for the iCloud Activation Server? I am just wondering if anyone had the current hosts of the iCloud Activation servers, as I am currently writing a script that utilizes them. Any help is much appreciated. I know that it used to be albert.apple.com, however I am away from home and don't have admin privileges to install a packet sniffer at work.

It's still albert.apple.com, I don't think it's changed.

https://albert.apple.com/WebObjects/ALUnbrick.woa/wa/deviceActivation


What is mediaremoteagent under Activity Monitor? Under activity monitor there's a process called mediaremoteagent. I can't find any information about this process. What is this process and is it safe to disable it?

mediaremoteagent is /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaRemote.framework/Support/mediaremoteagent

The MediaRemote framework is used for managing unified media playback across macOS, determining which app is playing media and allowing you to control the media playback using macOS. For example, supporting the Now Playing widget in Notification Center, or the play/pause/skip keys on the keyboard.

The same framework is used on iOS, for features like Control Center playback controls. http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/MediaRemote.framework


How could I streamline this script to find Finder items faster? I have an Applescript script which checks if my playlist has less than 25 songs in it shorter than 11 minutes and then moves some random files from another folder to my Temp folder to make up the number.

Is there any reason the "Finder" bit of the script is so slow (it takes nearly 15 seconds to execute)? Any code workaround I could use here?

--this adds some songs if the playlist has less than 25 songs in it shorter than 11 mins
tell application "iTunes"
    set thePlaylist to playlist "Temp on iPod"
    --counts tracks less than 11 mins long
    count ((tracks of thePlaylist) whose duration is less than 665)
    set currentCount1 to result
    if currentCount1 is less than 25 then
        tell application "Finder"
            set theDestination to folder "Macintosh HD:Temp to be Listened to:temp on iPod:"
            get every file of folder "Macintosh HD:Temp to be Listened to:Temp:Short Temp (Small Files, <20mb):" whose kind is "MP3 audio"
            --this only gets the top level files
            set theMusic to result
            set myList to {}
            set theReplaceNo to (25 - currentCount1)
            repeat theReplaceNo times
                set currentFile to some item of theMusic
                copy currentFile to the end of myList
            end repeat
            --reveal every item of myList
            reveal myList
            delay 1.5
            move myList to theDestination
        end tell
    end if
end tell

Can anyone help?

I tested your code on my OSX 10.9.5 and saw no issue. It took 2 seconds (delay included).
So, for me, the code is correct.

What is your version of OSX ? (Maybe a bug ...)

You probably already know that but to investigate more on the part that slow the script down, you can use the following 2 statements :

-- Put this before the code you want to test :
set t to (time of (current date)) --Start timing operations

... your slow code here ...

-- Put this at the end of the code you want to test
set total to (time of (current date)) - t --End timing

Sorry, I can't help more.


Can't update iPhone to a specific version : "iphone could not be restored device isn't eligible for the requested build" Have iPhone 4 with iOS 5.1.1
Trying to update to 6.1.2 (not the latest) via downloaded IPSW but unfortunately getting error:

  iphone could not be restored device isn't eligible for the requested
  build

After searching for fix all over the internet found some suggestion like putting # in hosts file in line gs.apple.com but not helped.

Have you any idea why I'm getting this error and can't restore iphone?

Apple signs only the latest version of iOS. Previous iOS versions cannot be installed on iOS devices, even if you do so via an upgrade (and not downgrade). The iOS device will simply not allow you to upgrade to anything but the latest and greatest iOS version.


Mac printing error: paper size unresolvable conflict I am trying to set duplex as the default for my printer. Many people have told me to just create a preset and use that but there are some apps that this doesn't work for, so I am looking for a different solution. Another option I have found is to modify the CUPS settings on my mac for the printer. If I go into CUPS page for my printer, I change the two sided setting to on with long edge binding to be the default. This gives me an error though and wants me to change the default paper size to "A4 two sided margins". So I do that. Now whenever I go to print something, I get an error message come up:

"Changing the destination paper to A4 would cause a conflict that cannot be resolved. No change will be made."

The only thing I think could be causing this is that the default paper size setting in the printers section of system preferences is set to A4. There is no A4 Two sided margins option to select there. Maybe something else is causing the error.

Any suggestions on how I could fix this?

Running Mac 10.9.4 and HP Photosmart 5520.

An answer I posted on the HP forums http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Mac-Printing-and-Scanning/Trouble-trying-to-set-duplex-printing-as-default/m-p/4541236/highlight/false#M52949

I think I have found an interim solution, however, HP you MUST FIX THIS! This is a terrible way of having to set it up and it definiterly does not encourage me to buy HP products in the future. Please fix this and push a Mac driver update or printer firmware update or whatever is required.

Here is what I had to do but I am not confident that it is going to actually work all of the time :/

The different applications seem to have different key names for each of the individual settings in a printing preset. So a preset made in Safari would not work properly in MS Office. However, if you create a preset in Word it sort of works in Safari. In Word's print dialog, I first set the paper size to scale to "A4 Two sided margins", then selected the two sided print option and saved this as a preset. Here's the weird part; the two-sided checkbox is ticked if I select the preset but if I go into the "show Presets" option that shows the details of the presets, it says that two-sided printing is off! The same weird thing happens in Safari's print dialog. It is because of this contradiction that I don't really trust this solution but it seems to work for now.

HP FIX THIS PLEASE!


Why does the USB-C Ethernet adapter get hot, even when unplugged from ethernet? The new MacBook Pro have a bunch of USB-C ports and no ethernet port, so you have to use an adapter.

The issue is that as long as the adapter is connected to the MacBook, it gets very noticeably hot, even more than the power adapter.

This happens both when the ethernet cable is plugged into it or not.

Now, from reading other comments this seems to be normal behaviour, but I'd love to understand why! From an user's perspective, this does not seem right, and looks like it could cause the adapter to fail faster than it would without heating up.

I have a USB-C to Ethernet Adapter, model belkin F2CU040. It gets hot as soon as plug the 100 Mbps Ethernet connector. As you can see in the figure, we are more than 20°C above the ambient temperature.

It heats up because it's consuming/manipulating current.
Even though the adapter isn't in use, it's technically powered up.
Without going too deep into electronics engineering, it's important to remember that the USB port is supplying a minimum of 5V.  Most USB-to-Ethernet controller chips operate at 3.3V (i.e. Microchip LAN9500A controller)
The factors that would create heat are basically twofold:

Reduction of  the voltage to 3.3 volts
Powering the chip

Voltage Reduction
To reduce the voltage, manufacturers use one of two components - linear regulators or buck converters.  Linear regulators, which are quite cheap compared to buck converters reduce power through the dissipation of heat.  Buck converters on the other hand, are extremely efficient (meaning the run cooler) but more costly. In low voltage scenarios, it's not uncommon to find linear regulators since the tolerances are so generous.
Powering the chip
Looking at the specifications page, the chip  referenced above uses 395mW (.4W) in "low power" or "Suspend0" mode.  Keep in mind, the device manufacturer may not implement these low power features for cost savings.
When it's transmitting (sending data) it uses 692mW (.7W) of power.
In terms of heat transfer, 1W = 1 Joule per second.  Where a Joule = "The heat required to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 0.24 °C"
TL;DR
Between the chip transmitting/receiving ethernet packets as well as converting ethernet to USB as well as the heat generated by reduction of the voltage it's supplied, it's not surprising the adapter can appear "hot" especially if the manufacturer uses less efficient components for cost savings.


Are the photos I share using the Photos app not really shared? When I share a photo to iCloud using the Photos app, subsequent edits to the photo in my library seem not so sync with the shared photo. Has sharing created a new copy of my photo?

Yes - sharing the photo puts it in a cloud backed "truth" where that image is available for all participants of the album to download and modify their copy, but not to change the original.

You'll want to share the edited version and then clean old ones until such time editing directly that shared image is implemented.


'Mail can't connect to the account' keeps appearing So I've configured my mail using a profile. I have setup 3 mail accounts, but each time I launch Mail, it asks me for the passwords of all those accounts. The first time I thought: maybe that's a bug in Mail when mail accounts are configured using profiles. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case: it prompts me to enter the password for all 3 accounts, and it doesn't stop. When I enter it, it just asks me for the passwords of the other accounts, and then it asks for the first one again, etc., etc.

When I go to the Preferences, I can see that the passwords are indeed not entered. It can only connect to one(!) SMTP server (that's what Connection Doctor says).

What is causing this and how can it be solved?

The quickest way to run through the potential problems is to follow these steps:

Check the keychain to find any entries that match your email accounts, then delete all of them. Reboot.
Try to connect again, entering your passwords again.  Check email again and see if the error reoccurs.
If the error happens again, delete your email accounts using the system preferences, reboot, and then add them back. Check email again.

If the error continues to occur after doing all that, you might think about taking your Mac into the Apple genius bar.


spell check screen in Mail MacBookPro Why does the spell check screen in Mail pop up everytime I write an email and does not underline misspelled words? I cannot turn it off.

If you go to "Preferences" and select "Composing" make sure that "Check spelling" is set to "as I type" rather than "when I send".

This should fix it.


How can I specify a smaller block size for a Ramdisk? I use a ramdisk to speed up a git repository with a lot (> 60k) of small (~200 bytes) files.

Is there a way to create a ramdisk with a smaller block size?

Executive summary: I don't believe this is possible, at least not for volumes formatted as HFS+.

My current understanding is that HFS+ chooses its file system block size (separate from the physical device block size) according to a fixed default allocation block size that cannot be manually overruled.

Discussions in other forums spanning from 2002 to 2011 ( CompGroups, MacRumors among others) suggest using newfs_hfs(8), which has a -b <blocksize> option, to manually set the block size when creating a new file system.

I tried using newfs_hfs  on various kinds of partitions, on both .dmg diskimages and on physical SATA hard drives (through SATA<->USB interface) and with various file systems (HFS+, FAT16, FAT32.)  When I ran newfs_hfs with different -b sizes (512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192,) indeed it reported success in creating the filesystems with the specified block sizes. I could mount & read/write these volumes normally.

But when I examine the test volumes with diskutil info <diskname> (where <diskname> is disk1, disk4, or whatever your disk is), I always see:

Total Size:               104.9 MB (104857600 Bytes) (exactly 204800 512-Byte-Blocks)
Volume Free Space:        102.4 MB (102385664 Bytes) (exactly 199972 512-Byte-Blocks)
Device Block Size:        512 Bytes

Noting that the end of the newfs_hfs(8) man page includes this tidbit:

HISTORY
The newfs_hfs command appeared in Mac OS X Server 1.0 .  As of Mac OS X
10.6, this utility no longer generates HFS standard file systems.

It would appear that OS X 10.8 (and probably 10.7, and perhaps earlier versions) overrides whatever block size newfs_hfs claims to create, in favor of default sizes imposed by a higher authority. (??)

One article I came across suggested using OS X's software-RAID utility to create a RAID mirror. Software RAID allows one to specify a RAID stripe size, but as this is generally geared towards improving throughput for large files rather than tiny ones, I believe the minimum RAID stripe size is 4KB - not useful for your purposes.


How can I play songs across Apple Music playlists? I work while playing Apple Music in iTunes (12.8.0.150) on my Mac (macOS 10.13.6). I would like to add all the songs in various playlists to a single playlist so I can shuffle across them. These are generally Apple's "Essentials" playlists for an artist.

I tried going to each "Essentials" playlist, clicking the ellipsis button in the top right, and selecting "Add to Library." Here's a couple of the "Essentials" playlists I added.

None of the tracks for these playlists is greyed out.

I then created a smart playlist.

So, 15 songs in Faith No More's playlist, 25 in Foo Fighters, and 25 in Green Day's. Total of 65 songs, but...

Only 27 songs, less than half, made it to my smart playlist.

Perhaps I'm going about this in the wrong way. If this method can work great, but if not, is there some way to say to iTunes, "Shuffle all of the songs in these playlists?"

You can create a new Smart Playlist, and add in the rules to pick from each of the playlists you've already defined.

From your music library: File --> New --> Smart Playlist

Then set it up using rules similar to these:

You want to match music for any, and then click the + to add as many rule entries as you want, one for each playlist.


WhatsApp Web is active even after putting Mac to sleep I got a notification messages on my phone saying "WhatsApp Web is currently active" even when my MacBook is supposed to sleep and not check for messages. Power Nap is not switched on and I have set Do Not Disturb to On when the display is sleeping.

I am concerned about the impact on the battery life of my MacBook. I am not sure if the WhatsApp Web app just prevents the laptop from sleeping, or if the MacBook is in some form of modern standby similar to Power Nap.

I am using the official WhatsApp for desktop application on macOS Mojave:

WhatsApp Desktop

One option to solve this is to quit the application every time before putting the laptop to sleep. Is there any other workaround to fix this issue?

Note: Here's a screenshot of the Energy Saver settings:

WhatsApp Web is currently active

This is just an information notification that you receive on your mobile device, some time after you log into WhatsApp Web or WhatsApp desktop app (which is just a wrapper over the web app).

You can safely ignore this and rest assured, the app is not running on your MacBook while it is asleep.


Why does my Macbook overheat and use so much CPU and energy when on YouTube? For a long time now, my Macbook has been overheating and hogging my CPU. According to Activity Monitor, Google Chrome Helper is the culprit. Whenever I am browsing the web, there are usually ten seperate entries of Google Chrome Helper in Activity Monitor, each individually using around %0.5 of my CPU. On YouTube, one of these can spike up to using %82, with a second using %22. I don't understand the math behind it but its evident in the screenshots I took. I own an up-to-date MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) so it could be a result of an old system but only Chrome and YouTube (or just videos) are causing this issue.

Here are some things I’ve attempted to control / solve this:

updating FlashPlayer
disabling extentions
turning off Unsandboxed plug-in access to "not allow any site to use a plug-in to access [my] computer"
turning off JavaScript (which, of course, just stopped the page from loading in - very power efficient and cool, but not the trade off I had hoped to accomplish)

I've tried other web browsing apps and they net similar results as Chrome. I believe it has something to do with videos in general that are being served

At the moment, I have had to use an app called MacsFanControl so my fan stops the CPU and computer from overheating as it used to get to around 50˚C. Now, it is sits at 40˚C with the fan running on high to prevent it increasing.

Am I missing controls or options to have less heat from the CPU of this era MacBook Pro?

You can test the efficiency of video encoding and decoding quite well by getting a video from Apple’s events page and playing it in QuickTime player.

Same in Safari - and then same in Chrome.

You’ll quickly find out which encoding are easy to run for the CPU and which have GPU acceleration.

When that’s done, you can see if Chrome or the app in question can choose a lower resolution or if you can download the file for offline playing so that it doesn’t hit the CPU so hard. Also, you might use an iPad or other far more efficient video handling device if you just want to watch videos with the most economy / least power.


How to use Octave app on macOS Mojave I downloaded the Octave app bundle from here. The app is in /Applications. I have been unable to open it from the terminal. I tried the command 'octave' and some other variations from the documentation.

My goal is to be able to run a file /Users/[me]/Documents/OctavePrograms/firstlast.m in the command line by typing octave firstlast.m or some variation of it. I would like to understand why I have been unable to run my program.

You can use the following to open Octave with a file:

open -a "Octave" /path/to/file

If you want, alias this to octave by adding this line to your ~/.bash_profile:

alias octave="open -a \"Octave\""

Now you should be able to use octave /path/to/file anywhere.


How can I remove a folder from the itunes library I added a folder (a network share) to the iTunes media library (File -> Add Folder to library).
I didn't find a way I can undo this operation.
What am I missing? how can I remove this folder from the iTunes library?

I am using iTunes 10.2 in Windows 7 32bit.
Edit: I configured iTunes not to copy media files locally.

It depends on your iTunes preferences.

1.If iTunes is running default, iTunes actually copied all that media to your local drive, and you would have to delete it manually via sorting by "Date Added" to remove it.

2.If you have iTunes set to reference the files, when you disconnect the drive iTunes has some pretty annoying behavior where it will try to maintain the link but it will become a ghost music icon, the best way to get rid of these is sort by "Date Added" in your library and remove them manually.

These behaviors can be checked under iTunes preferences, I copied this pic from the Apple support site under HT1751:


iPhone 5C running iOS 7 does not display Contacts I have two different problems with contacts on my iPhone:

Some of them are duplicated
The new contacts are not available to see, like they doesn't exist, but if I dail the number in the contact shows up.

Does anyone know whats going on here and have a solution for this?

Thanks!

You likely have more than one contact "group".

In your case you will want to look two places.  First open the contacts app and note that using the "groups" button in the top left you will be able to 'show' a group that's not showing. That should get back the contacts that are "invisible" now.

Also navigate to 'Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars' and look at the "default account" in the Contacts section, which defines which "group" new contacts are stored to.


Dell WD15 Dock with 2017 MacBook Pro I have a 2017 MacBook pro w/ touchbar and the Dell WD 15 dock (work issued it to me). The dock has thunderbolt, HDMI, and VGA on the back. A single USB-C cable comes off of the dock.

The issue I have noticed is that if all three of my monitors are plugged into the dock, the Mac only recognizes them as a single monitor so its just 3 monitors mirroring my MacBook.

Currently, I had to solve this by using a dongle for two of the monitors, leaving only one hooked up to the dock.

This is not that ideal, for cable management and the fact that USB-C is supposed to be able to handle multiple monitors.

Are there any driver updates or hacks I can apply in order to get these monitors to be independent and not show up as a single monitor? Is this an Apple limitation in place or something else?

Edit: Use this link to install the drivers and the DELL Dock will start working Drivers

This is a hardware limitation.

I tested Dell WD 15 with my 2016 Macbook Pro 15. I used VGA and HDMI to connect my 2 monitors with Dell WD15 but Mac recognized both monitors as one.

Later, I connected one monitor with Dell WD15 and another monitor directly with my mac through USB-C to VGA and it worked fine.


How would I use Tor with Colloquy I've been switching back and forth between Colloquy and Linkinus a lot recently as my IRC server has become more and more popular - since then I've been trying out the correct way to use my Tor proxy with Colloquy or Linkinus. I've read they both have support for Proxies but I can't find anything in either of the Apps nor any relevant documentation around the internet.

It requires that the IRC server in question already making itself availble as a Tor service. Apparently Freenode does this  at the address (THIS IS AN OLD ADDRESS) mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion, but most IRC servers don't.  While not strickly nessecary alot of IRC servers block TOR exit nodes.  You can try by replacing the .onion address in the socat line and see if it works.

UPDATED Freenode IRC Service: The onion address of Freenode has changed: p4fsi4ockecnea7l.onion
You can always check this by using dig +short irc.tor.freenode.net cname from a Un*x command prompt.

The basic idea is to use socat to create the TORified connection for us, and our client will connect to socat.

Install Tor. I'm using the Vidalia bundle from the Tor download page.
Install socat. This is a command-line power tool for manipulating network connections.

I recommend using the Homebrew package manager (also a command-line program) to install it. If this all sounds confusing and scary, just open up Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), paste the following line, press enter and wait for it to finish.

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)" && brew install socat

(Pasting commands into the Terminal like this can do anything to your computer, so it's usually a bad idea unless you trust the source.)
NOTE: This step is not nessecary as we are already using socat which can handle the mapping for us.

The rest of this step is left for historical purposes.

Edit your torrc file to create an internal IP address to use to connect tor and socat by adding the line

MapAddress 172.28.184.12 mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion

(replacing the .onion address if you're not using freenode). Tor has an FAQ entry about how to modify your torrc file, but if you trust me and are using Vidalia as well you can just enter this in the Terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.vidalia/ && echo 'MapAddress 172.28.184.12 mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion' >> ~/.vidalia/torrc

Create a new launch daemon (background system process) to initialize socat when you turn your computer on. Enter the following Terminal command to create the configuration file and open in in your editor...

Couple of things:

Find the correct path to socat by typing which socat in your terminal
If you don't use IRC alot then a LaunchAgent is probably overkill, you can just start socat manually by typing: socat TCP4-LISTEN:6666,fork,bind=localhost SOCKS4A:localhost:p4fsi4ockecnea7l.onion:6667,socksport=9050

Or you can create the LaunchAgent by pasting this into your terminal:

mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ && touch ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.dest-unreach.socat.irc.plist && open -t ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.dest-unreach.socat.irc.plist

...then copy the following text into the file, save and close it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.dest-unreach.socat.irc</string>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <false/>
        <key>Program</key>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/socat</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/opt/local/bin/socat</string>
                <string>-s</string>
                <string>TCP4-LISTEN:6666,fork,bind=localhost</string>
                <string>SOCKS4A:localhost:p4fsi4ockecnea7l.onion:6667,socksport=9050</string>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>SOCAT Relay for Freenode-TOR</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Load / Run the new LaunchAgent (or run socat from the command line)
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.dest-unreach.socat.irc.plist or you can just restart your computer.
Launch Tor/Vidalia and wait for it to connect.
Open Colloquy, and add a connection to localhost:6666 and connect to it. Ta-da! You're on IRC, through Tor!

If you need to stop the socat LaunchAgent (i.e. for debugging) you can type the following into a terminal: launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.dest-unreach.socat.irc.plist


How can I check whether my Mac OS El Captain network is tracked? I want to check how (if) and what of my files and network data is logged when using my MacBook offsite. This is a work computer and I know almost all data is tracked when I am onsite. How can I check if this happens when I am offsite not using the VPN (company provided).

Can someone tell me how this is tracked by IT, is there something like syncing drives to a network drive whenever a particular person gets connected on Office network?

Best bet is to install a program like Little Snitch:

It comes with a time limited (first three hours after booting - the network monitors expires after 30 days) free trial of the full app but you can always use the network monitor to see what connections are happening too / what is using bandwidth.


How to see file name in Finder search results using macOS Sierra It appears that Finder search results are displayed using metadata instead of the file name. I want to know the file name for the file in the results.

You can see in the first screenshot there are 3 files that simply say "Altitude" in the Name column, which is extremely unhelpful. The second screenshot shows the folder they are in outside of Finder's search results.

Open finder, go to finder preferences in the left corner.

Go to advanced.It should appear a window like this:

Select show all filename extensions and you're done.


Is there a way to have iOS remember passwords to HTTP authenticated sites? There's a page I frequently access on my iPhone that's protected by HTTP authentication, and I'm finding it annoying having to type in my username and password every time I want to access it. I tried saving the logged-in page as a home screen icon, but I'm still prompted every time. There isn't option to save my password when I'm logging in, and I can't find one in the settings either.

Is this possible?

example authentication screen to show what I'm referring to

It seems that Safari on iOS doesn't support this natively. You have a couple options:

Workaround:

If you're not too worried about security, you can embed the username and password in the link itself, and bookmark that:

http://username:password@hostname.com/...

(Also of note: it sounds like iOS may pop up a warning when you visit a link that includes a username and password.)

Alternative:

There is another browser called Atomic Web Browser [App Store link] that can autofill HTTP authentication, among many other neat features.


If the brightness of the built-in display is turned black, can it be considered off? Model: MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) OS: 10.13.6

I connect an external monitor to the macbook, set the Arrangement to be Mirror Displays and then use the keyboard F1 to dim the built-in display to black. It seems it's off and even the back apple log is black (since it's using the same light as the monitor).

So, can I consider the built-in display it's off? (means it will not use any hardware/software resources such as CPU/RAM etc..). Thanks.

The display is still using resources. You can prove this by opening the Digital Colour Meter. Just hover your mouse to the built-in display which is currently dark. You will still see the content in the Digital Colour Meter on your second screen.


Text deselecting when using Logitech mouse scroll wheel in Sierra I'm using a Logitech Performance MX mouse and since upgrading to Sierra I'm having difficulty when using my scroll wheel to select large amounts of text. Usually, I scroll while holding left mouse and this has always worked. Now when I scroll, it deselects the text that I have selected.

Could this be a driver issue?

TL;DR
Not really a final answer, but as a workaround, to select long texts, you can

make the initial selection
release the mouse button
scroll to the destination
press Shift + mouse click/hold again, to finish the selection.

Just sharing my findings, since I'm also annoyed with this issue: as Dolan Antenucci commented, uninstalling LCC will normalize the behavior of hold-mouse-left-button combined with scrolling, but at the cost of losing mouse customization. Not an option for me.
Curiously, I've been searching and searching for hours, and seems no one else here is complaining about this. The closest I could find was a report of a bug in a UI framework written in Python, but so close in behavior that for a second (or a couple, or more ;-)) I had to question myself if it's really a coincidence (I now, I now..).
See https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/5058
There they describe (almost?) exactly what I believe is happening here: Scrolling generates a mouse up event for previously pressed button.
To verify, you can try this: on a browser, press and hold the right button. Then move the mouse over an option of the pop-up menu (say, "back"), then scroll the wheel. The option is selected, as if you had released the button.
The same is occurring with text selection. Do this: with mouse left-click-and-hold, select some text, "freeze any mouse movements" (explain later), then scroll down (but not too much, keep the already selected text visible). The text that remains selected is only the one who was selected just before the scroll movement (as if you had released the button just before start scrolling). Then stop scrolling, hold shift, and do some mouse movement. In response to the smallest move, the text between is automatically added to the selection, and after this you can even release the shift, no matter anymore, go keep moving the mouse (provided that you don't move the scroll) to continue tuning selection. This is exactly what should have happened if you had released the button just before start scrolling (aka mouse up event), do some scroll, then pressed/hold shift, and next clicked/hold again the mouse button, to do the final mouse selection movements.
The only catch is that, if while holding the button and after some scrolling (who "wrongly" generated a mouse button up event), you do any mouse movement, in response to this move, (maybe in an attempt) to honor the fact that the you are still holding the button, the system immediately generates a mouse button down event.
That's why you think the scroll de-selects the text: normally, when someone do some scroll to add selection, do without moving the mouse, but tends to make some final mouse movements after the scroll, tu adjust the end of the selection. Try holding the button, make some selection thru moving, freeze mouse movement, scroll (keep freezing), release button, move mouse (note, the selection don't go away), then shift + click/hold, when the mouse reach the destination point. Since you released the button just before restarting mouse movements, when you do the new moves, the system will not generate a mouse button down event, once there is no need to "honor" this state (after all, the button is already up).
It's not the scroll who de-selects the text: it's the mouse movement, after scrolling, while keeping the mouse button down.
I think it's an attempt to maintain/regain system consistency, since the last info passed thru was, essentially, wrong: the mouse button up event, as a consequence of a scroll movement, should never been occurred.
I'm going to report this to logitech, maybe if presented with some more tech explanation they will fix the problem. (God, is so painful to use they site send a simple message, anyone knows a easier way?)


Does Google Photos Backup keep album structure? Will the Google Photos Backup for OS X also back up the album structure from Photos.app? That is, will albums be available as collections on Google Photos after uploading?

No album structure uploaded. raw upload of the pics.


Test iPhone SE without a battery. Possible? In this thread, apparently you can test a iPhone without a battery.

Test iPhone 4s hardware without battery. Possible?

What about iPhone SE? Is it possible to check if the mainboard and screen is working by disconnecting the battery and then connecting the lightning cable to the mains?

The reason I wnt to do is to check if the lightning connector pins are damaged. By applying 3.8 V directly on the pins where the battery would have been connected and then pressing the power button, the phone booted up ( I see a current fluctuation between 0.15 and 0.72 A on the multimeter ) . But if I do try to power on the device just with the lightning connector, it doesnt. So, if it is possible technically to boot an iphone SE without a battery, then the connectors are damaged.

The battery is required to boot the device. Once it has booted, you can leave the Lightning cable connected and then disconnect the battery.


Time Machine stopped recognising backups on the NAS storage and does not make new backups anymore I have a disk that is attached as a NAS storage to Time Machine. It's just a hard drive connected to my router.
I started doing Time Machine backups to this disk rather recently and until several days ago backups were done without any problems. But now Time Machine complains about incorrect credentials (based on what it tells me) and for some reason no backups are found on this disk anymore.
I tried to add and remove the storage many times and run a few commands with tmutil but without a deep understanding how it works it's hard to fix anything or even find out the cause of the problem...
This is what it looks like:

I start with a pristine and uninitialized Time Machine screen and there I select the NAS storage.

It asks me to provide credentials for the NAS storage.

After entering the correct credentials it says that there is an existing encrypted backup already and asks me if I want to use it or start over:

After I click on Use Existing Backup button it asks me to provide a password for my existing backup, and that's where things become interesting... I know the correct password but whatever I enter the result is the same.

At first it shows that there are no backups on the disk:

Then it starts looking for the backup disk:

And then a popup shows up saying that "The network backup disk could not be accessed because there was a problem with the username or password":

But the credentials are ok. Whenever I try to open the .sparsebundle file on that disk (even when it is connected directly to my MacBook) it is mounted successfully and I can browse all snapshots without even typing the encryption password (which I find particularly weird because KeyChain on my MacBook does not contain any keys which are related to the backups - I removed everything intentionally to check if that will work).
And this is what happens when I try to run most of the commands with tmutil:
 ~ % tmutil machinedirectory
 No machine directory found for host.

 ~ % tmutil latestbackup
 Unable to locate machine directory for host.

Any suggestions?
UPD:
I figured out why my Time Machine sparsebundle didn't require password. It was saved in KeyChain but under some strange GUID with the suffix/extension ".sparsebundle". I found it by searching "disk". And then after I removed these items completely I need to enter the password every time I access the sparsebundle image.
And... After playing around with tmutil associatedisk I managed to change the behavior of Time Machine. Now, instead of accepting any password and then displaying that there are no backups found, it rejects any password and says that "Password is invalid" although the password is obviously correct assuming that I can access the sparsebundle contents directly through Finder.

So it seems that the problem is related to my router or one of the recent MacOS upgrades that probably introduced something new or broke compatibility because just weeks ago it worked properly. Just for the record the model of my router is Keenetic Giga.
How did I understand it? I created a blank HFS+ partition, connected my HDD to the router and fed it up to Time Machine. I got the same error as described in my question. So it is clear that the cause of the error is not associated with the backup itself.
So I decided to migrate all my backups to a new partition on that drive and use it as a local backup storage instead of NAS. And because I had that .sparsebundle file I needed to figure out a way to "burn" it (copy its contents) to the new APFS volume. It seemed like an easy task to do but it's really not...
I'll skip a story with all my tries and failures and move directly to the solution.
So to convert a .sparsebundle file to APFS volume there is a feature called "Restore" in the Disk Utility. But UI is not much helpful because in general this functionality sucks when it comes to the .sparsebundle format. So we need to arm ourselves with patience and Terminal. And at first we need to mount the ".sparsebundle" image through Finder and then change metadata of the mounted volume a little:
diskutil apfs changeVolumeRole /dev/diskXsY t
where diskXsY - is the identifier of your volume which you can find running diskutil apfs list

This command will change the role of your volume and MacOS will no longer know that it is a backup storage. Without doing it the next command will fail (due to a bug).
sudo asr restore --source /Volumes/EXTERNAL_HDD/{the name of your computer}.sparsebundle --noverify  --target /dev/diskAsB --erase  --debug --verbose
where /dev/diskAsB is the identifier of a volume that you want to use as the backup storage.
--noverify is needed here because there is also another bug in this utility.

After you enter a password (if you have an encrypted backup) and agree to erase the volume this command will replicate the contents of your ".sparsebundle" onto the target volume. It will take a while...
After it finishes you will almost receive a functional (unencrypted) backup storage. To make it fully functional you should run:
diskutil apfs changeVolumeRole /dev/diskAsB T

This command will assign a Backup role to your target volume and Time Machine will recognize it.
Later you may want to encrypt your storage with "hdiutil" (warning: it will take hours to complete).
At this stage I configured Time Machine to use the drive as a local backup storage and after doing that one of the folders changed its suffix in the name from .inprogress to .interrupted.
At the end of the day Time Machine copied an increment only and it looked like this:

After the backup process finished I looked into the contents of the drive and found out that Time Machine killed my old backups and during the Cleaning up phase it went from this:
$ ... % ls
2021-05-06-201324.previous  2021-05-22-195414.inprogress
2021-05-06-212814.interrupted   backup_manifest.plist

to this:
$ ... % ls
2021-05-22-212814.previous  backup_manifest.plist

I believe that it is due to the interrupted backup which you can see above but I don't want to spend any more time on that. So technically I still didn't get my old backups back and all I got was pain from multiple Apple bugs and inconveniences but at least I have more knowledge now how it is built under the hood and probably this information will be useful for someone who want to convert .sparsebundle to APFS (or to be more concise - to a local backup disk formatted as APFS).


Can the Time Capsule serve an Apple TV without a powered on Mac? We have an Apple TV (3rd gen) and a 2 TB Time Capsule on which we know how to store movies already. One can use the Time Capsule and simply add movies stored on it into the iTunes library.

However, how could we use the Apple TV to play media content from the Time Capsule without having to run iTunes on the Mac?

NB: we want to cut out the middle man, so suggesting to use iTunes on another OS doesn't really answer the question :)

Sorry this is not possible without an intermediate device or jailbreaking the AppleTV to run xbmc. Not sure what the policy on this site of advertising jailbreaking links so i'll leave this for you to search.

By default the appletv is looking for a shared itunes library either through the old network advertising method or more recently the HomeSharing method.

The Timecapsule can only present the files via AFP if the disk is formatted as HFS and SMB/CIFS if it's formatted as FAT.

By using xbmc you can mount smb network shares. ie. forum.firecore.com/topic/4116

Of course the other method but still requiring an intermediate ios device would be to download something like VLC and airplay the content. But this doesn't meet your requirements.


HFS+ case-sensitive or case-insensitive -- which type to use for the primary drive partition? What reasons are there for choosing the case-insensitive version of HFS+ when formatting the primary drive partition? Would case-sensitive not always be the best choice?

Use the default (case-insensitive) unless you both a) know what you're doing and b) you absolutely have to. There are several programs (Norton Antivirus comes to mind) that won't work properly on a case-sensitive file system.

HFS is, by default, case-insensitive but case-preserving (i.e. it doesn't care what you type for comparison purposes, but it will remember what you type).


iPhone 4s iOS 9.0.1 Won't update Im having problems updating iOS 9.0.1
I've deleted most apps so memory is fine, yet the phone appears to be frozen.

I can't restart or reset it. I've updated only 1 other bit - can't remember how I did it.

I've no laptop or PC & the wifi isn't great.
Any suggestions very welcome.

You can try pressing the home and sleep button down at the same time until you see the apple logo.
You can wait until the battery is empty.
You can ask a friend or family member for a PC / Laptop (should also work on an public computer) and download and restore it with iTunes.

I hoped I helped you out!

*Mark


Why the app is not on the App Store but it's on iTunes? This is really weird, my App Store is set to my country, Portugal and I checked on the iTunes browser using "pt" at URL, and the app I'm looking for it is listed there.

But when I search the app on the App Store in my iPad with iOS 10 it doesn't show up.

I'm not using any type of filter in the App Store, I'm just searching for the app.

By the way the app is AndroMoney.

Thank you!

More or less, yes. It means that the app is not tailored for the iPad, so you'll get the same user interface on the iPad as you would get on an iPhone.

You usually have the option of "zooming" it in and out, but even then it will not be as great as an app that is customized to take advantage of the iPad's screen size.


Problem with disk repair I have HDD connected to my Mac which is formatted with HFS and I use for backups.
I have noticed a problem while running fdisk and fsck_hfs:
sudo fsck_hfs -rd /dev/disk1s1
Password:
journal_replay(/dev/disk1s1) returned 0
** /dev/rdisk1s1
    Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=65536 cacheSize=2097152K.
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-522.100.5).
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
   The volume name is Backup
** Checking extents overflow file.
** Checking catalog file.
** Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
BlockFindAll:  found 1489232 blocks but needed 1572864
   Disk full error
** The volume Backup could not be repaired.
    volume type is pure HFS+
    primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
    alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
    primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
    alternate VHB is at block 1953521662 0x74705ffe
    sector size = 512 0x200
    VolumeObject flags = 0x07
    total sectors for volume = 1953521664 0x74706000
    total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x00
    CheckHFS returned 8, fsmodified = 0

The disk is not full.
Is there anything I can which does not involve reformatting or buying a new disk?
It's a WD Red 1TB about 5 years old. Perhaps it's time to buy a new one after all?
Thanks

Honestly the best bet is to copy the files on that disk elsewhere, reformat your disk and then copy the stuff back. That would be your cheapest and safest procedure.
The next thing to do would be a third party disk repair tool. I use DiskWarrior and as it is an HFS disk it will work fine (DW doesn't work on APFS disks) There is also TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and others. But I have no specific experience with those.


Time Machine backup of an external drive (to another external drive) I back up my internal drive to an external backup drive using Time Machine. I would also like to back up a 1TB external drive of mine, to another 1TB external drive of mine.

Is it possible to make Time Machine-styled backups of my external drive to the other external drive?

By Time Machine-style backups, I mean the way that Time Machine makes easy-to-browse "snapshots" on the backup drive, where you can view the source drive at different times by accessing different folders on the backup drive.

I considered two ways to achieve this:

rsync using the --backup option

This moves all deleted files into a separate backup directory wherein it preserves the original file structure. Good, but not exactly the Time Machine styled backups I'm looking for.
This also (to my knowledge) won't work for finding old versions of editing files.

Carbon Copy Cleaner

This has the disadvantage again—all the deleted (and I believe modified files) are moved to a "safety net" directory.

However, neither of them achieve the "browse different snapshots" behavior, à la Time Machine that I'm looking for.

Is there any way to achieve what I'm requesting?

I realize that it's possible with Time Machine itself, but from what I understand, it will only back the external disk up to my main backup disk. I want the external disk to backup to a secondary backup disk, keeping these backups separate from each other, mainly due to space limitations.

I have finally found the perfect answer to this. Behold the aptly-named rsync-time-backup project on GitHub. This is an easy-to-use bash script which can back up a source folder to a destination folder. Each backup made will create a time-labeled folder in the destination directory containing a full mirror of the source folder at that time, à la Time Machine.


How to upgrade from iOS 4 to iOS 6 without losing app data I am still on iOS 4, and I understand that I need to erase my iPad before upgrading. But I don't want to lose the game data stored locally, particularly Candy Crush. :) Is there a way to preserve data while upgrading?

Make a backup and then restore the backup once the update has finished.

A step by step guide is available here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4972, which states the following:

To update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from iOS 4 to iOS 5 or later, you must erase and restore your device first, before completing the update.

As part of the update and restore process, iTunes will (in order):

Back up key elements of your device, such as settings, Contacts,
Calendars, Notes, and your Camera Roll. iTunes will not, however,
back up media content from your iOS device, such as music, apps,
books, movies, and TV shows.
Update your device to the latest version of iOS software.
Restore your device from your most recent backup.
Restart your device.
Sync back media content from your iTunes Library to your device.


How to obtain Bluetooth ID (OS X) I need to remotely grab the Bluetooth ID from multiple machines throughout my network. What are the best ways to remotely obtain the Bluetooth ID in OS X?


How do you specify the type of file you're looking for in an 'open file' dialog with a pattern? On every other operating system except MacOS, when you bring up an Open File dialog, you can type (for example) *.txt or even *recipe*.txt to narrow down the list shown on the screen.

On MacOS, there's just a predefined list of filename extensions that you can choose from, but I don't see anywhere to type a file match pattern myself. I want to filter by the whole filename, not just the extension. How do I enable this very basic feature that I take for granted on both Windows and Linux?

You have Spotlight available from every file-picker dialog.

You can search by name or extension/file type, either in the currently open directory or the entire machine.

Sidebar hidden to save unnecessary extraneous detail

If you know the name rather than the filetype of the document you are looking for, then, same as in any Finder folder, you can start to type the name & the selection will jump to the first match for that string.

eg typing t,e,s will find the first match on test.txt, but you can't use this to find a file type .xml etc as it only searches from the beginning of the name.


What is the ribbon in this picture of a 2006 MacBook? I accidentally ripped it when removing an old hard drive. Now the computer won't power up. What is it and can it be replaced?

The orangey cable? I can't say exactly what it does, but it's clearly a data cable of some sort, and so an integral component.

You might want to look through a complete tear-down on ifixit.com, which might identify it. You're unlikely to find that as a spare part, unless you buy another similar model (eBay 'For Spares') and strip out the part you need.

Given the age of the Mac, you might be better off putting money into a newer model. A 2009 or higher MacBook would give you significantly better hardware, more compatible with newer software and hardware.