Can I undo the upgrade to iOS 7 by restoring to iOS 6.1.3? I recently attempted to follow this tutorial to upgrade my device (iPhone 4) to iOS 7 without being a developer or registering a UDID.

I loaded and installed iOS 7 and got to the configuration screen. However efter attempting to go through the configuration process it says:

  We’re unable to complete your activation. This device is not
  registered as part of the iPhone Developer Program. If you are a
  member of the Program, please register your device in the iPhone
  Developer Program Portal.

The problem is this is also what it says on iTunes so there is no way to access it from the computer.

How can I downgrade back to 6.1.3? I suppose I could register as a paid developer for iOS 7, but that involves forking over $99 and I'm not even sure I could revert to iOS 6 even then.

Additional Information:

I started with an unjailbroken iOS 6.1.3.
I downloaded iOS 7.0 CDMA for iPhone 4 from here
I have Verizon
I Have the iOS 6.1.3 version for my iPhone downloaded from here, but I am unsure how I can restore from it because iTunes will not let me do anything because of the above mentioned message.

Update: I managed to entere recovery mode by pressing "power" for 3 seconds, "home" and power for 10 seconds, and just "home" until it had entered recovery mode. I have then begun to restore the phone which requires iOS 6.1.3 to download again through iTunes. Note that the first time you restore it may not work. Mine still booted to iOS 7 until I tried again.

It is likely the baseband was updated along with the OS, but if you have a good backup of the phone, I might try restoring it in recovery mode.

Power off the iPhone
Plug in the iPhone to your computer via USB.
Press and hold the "power" button with one hand for 3 seconds
Hold down the "home" button as well for ten more seconds
Release "power" button but continue to hold "home" button until device enters recovery mode.

I don't have a device to test this and it might not work. You might have to get a jailbreak tool to modify the OS and/or firmware of the device and then restore 6.1.3 on it.


Unable to join Photo Stream on OS X 10.8.5 I received an email invitation to join a Photo Stream. When I clicked on the "Join this Photo Stream" link on my MacBook Pro, I was taken to a page with the following message:

Photo Stream
Follow these steps to join a shared photo stream

Make sure you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 6 or a Mac running OS X 10.8.2 with iPhoto 9.4 or Aperture 3.4 or later
installed.
Sign in to iCloud on your devices.
Open the invitation email on an updated device and tap the Join this Photo Stream button.

I was running OS X 10.8 at the time, so I upgraded my OS, and I now have 10.8.5. However, when I click on the link to join, I still am taken to the same page. There doesn't seem to be a caching issue, because I cleared my cache and also opened the link in a different browser.
I'm logged in to iCloud, and I'm able to create a Shared Photo Stream through iPhoto (v. 9.4.3) and share it with others, and they can see the photos in the stream. However, I don't see the Photo Stream that was shared with me, and I still get the above message when I click on "Join this Photo Stream" in the original email.
I already tried copy/pasting the link from the email to the browser, and I still get the same page and message. I've also restarted my machine, logged out of iCloud and back in, quit iPhoto and restarted it, and pasted the link into both Chrome and Safari after clearing the cache.
Is it possible that I need to have OS X 10.8.2 instead of 10.8.5 in order to accept the invitation to the Photo Stream?

No, you would not want to be on an out of date software. Try applying the most recent OS X update (10.14.6) and trying again. Software being out of date is a usual suspect of things not working as expected. All of the devices you are accessing the Stream on would need to be current as well.


Does iPhoto need to be open in order to download Photo Stream photos? Apple's official documentation on Photo Stream states:

  My Photo Stream stores the last 30 days of photos taken with your iOS
  device or imported from a camera to your Mac or Windows computer, and
  automatically pushes them over any available Wi-Fi or Ethernet
  connection to each of the devices that you set up to work with iCloud.

  For example, if you take a photo on your iPhone (or save one to your
  Camera Roll), iCloud automatically stores the photo and pushes it to
  Photo Stream on your iPad, iPod touch, and other Mac or Windows
  computers.

What's not clear to me is this: does iPhoto actually have to be open in order for Photo Stream photos to be pulled down to my Mac?

The reason why I ask is because whenever I open iPhoto, there's a noticeable delay before I see any new Photo Stream photos appear, which suggests that those photos are being downloaded right then.

If this is indeed the case, given that Photo Stream only stores the last 30 days' worth of photos, does that mean that I'll start losing photos if I go longer than 30 days without opening iPhoto?

iPhoto doesn't have to be open. There's a background process running called iCloud Photos in Mavericks that runs as a system daemon that's taking care of bringing down your Photostream photos.

The photos are downloaded to ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub on your Mac. You can press Cmd-Shift-G in Finder and enter that path to browse the location. You'll see a lot of funny named sub-directories and in them: your Photostream photos. I don't recommend messing with this structure though.

What doesn't happen without iPhoto running is your photos getting imported in to iPhoto and organized in to events. So when you open iPhoto it's discovering new Photostream photos that have downloaded since the last time it ran and then importing those photos to bring them in to your iPhoto library. This is where the delay is coming from.

If you just want to view your Photostream without having to endure iPhoto you can try MyPhotostream which gives you a simple, read-only way to see your Photostream photos without having to launch iPhoto. It doesn't make iPhoto any faster on start, but if you need to get at your Photostream photos often it can make the process a little less cumbersome.


How to send a group text to more than 10 people? How can I send a group text to a group of 11 people that do not all have an Apple phone?  I have iPhone 6.

A group message can be sent either as an iMessage or an SMS. Just create the group to which you wish the message, the Messages app will automatically choose the appropriate message type based on recipients' settings, network connection, and carrier plan.

In depth guide on sending group message can be found in the Apple Support Document, Send a group message on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.


Script that checks for apps with open window asks 'Where is Electron" in Electron apps I have a script that prints the bundle ids for all apps with open windows. When an Electron app is open (for example VSCode) the script asks "Where is Electron" and it shows all apps in the Applications folder except Electron apps. How to fix this behavior?

The Code:

set bundles to {}
tell application "System Events"
   set names to get the name of every process whose visible is true
end tell
repeat with name in names
   set bundles to bundles & id of application name
end repeat

You need to use a different name for your repeat statement’s loop variable - the term name is an AppleScript property and is also in System Events scripting dictionary.  Your usage isn’t generating a syntax error, but it is probably causing more confusion than usual and is winding up targeting the wrong item (welcome to AppleScript).

You can use pipes around variable names like this where there may be a conflict (e.g. |name|), but CJK’s solution also avoids the repeat statement altogether.


Java is eating up 300% of my CPU Can anyone help me find the cause behind java taking up 300+% of my CPU? I've shut down almost every app and am still having trouble trying to locate the cause.

Ian C. put me on the right track. I checked out the items that were running in Java by using the Open Files & Ports tab on the process.

This lead me to ElasticSearch running on my machine. So I removed that and now it looks to be running without overheating again. Yay!


Install Bootcamp on external drive where OS X installed I have 128G SSD internal storage.  And wanted to install Bootcamp on external drive (USB storage).

Found out that Bootcamp could not be installed on the external drive.  So I thought to install OS X on external drive.  Boot external drive with OS X and then try to install Bootcamp on that external drive.

I made my way up to Bootcamp, while running Bootcamp is says that my drive should be journaled, whereas it exactly is.

Anyone maybe tried this or Bootcamp can be installed strictly on internal Mac storage?  It just I'm seeing external drive should some kind of a internal when OS X is booting from there.

Any thoughts?

Ivan.

http://twocanoes.com/products/mac/winclone

When deploying bootcamp, accommodate ever-evolving OS X capabilities with some research. Bootcamps are always temporary.


Restoring iTunes/iPhoto Libraries After a Clean Install I have an iMac i7 that's got a collection of files, settings, etc. that's the culmination of being transferred from past machines (originally an iMac G4, then a PowerMac G5).

I finally decided to start from scratch, erasing the harddrive and doing a clean install of OS X Lion. Everything was backed up to a Time Machine backup on an external drive, but I didn't want to just bring it all back over, re-introducing all that crap back into the clean install.

I want to selectively move some stuff back, and I know how to bring apps back selectively (as long as they were a drag-to-Applications type of install), but what do I need to do to bring my iTunes and iPhoto libraries back completely?

Very simple, just copy the old 'music' folder from your user folder to the clean install user>music folder and relaunch iTunes.

I have tested this on a mac, coz i manage my iTunes Library on my Windows machine (MBP has just 500GB HD and my library is almost 100GB :-)  ) . Please try this and let me know if it works.

No need to dig any Application Support folder AFAIK.

Hope this helps


Moving iMovie (10) libraries to external hard drive I have a friend who have a 13" macbook pro from 2014.
The OS is Yosemite 10.10.15.

My friend would like to upgrade her OS to either High Sierra or Mojave or even maybe Catalina or Big Sur, however she has a pretty big iMovie library and thus she can't upgrade because the iMovie library takes too much disk space.
Also she would like to move her iMovie library to an external hard drive, which would also solve the disk space problem.
Obviously, even if the iMovie library is on her external hard drive she'd still like to be able to work on it with her macbook.

The issue I have is that I found plenty of ways to do this with iMovie 11+ but with iMovie 10 the tutorials I found sometimes specify some particular manipulations and sometimes not, so I am not very confident about the manipulation I should do on her macbook.

Could anyone point me to a safe tutorial to do this ? Or explain me step by step how should I do this ?
Also I guess that after upgrading her mac OS she will want to upgrade her iMovie software, is there any compatibily issue I should be aware of ?

I am pretty tech savy, but I don't know a lot about mac OS and even less about iMovie...
As a side note, I made her format her external hard drive in extended mac OS, and I did a partition for time machine and an other partition for her iMovie stuff.

You can just move it, anywhere, then tell iMove to find it again on next launch.
As the library presents itself to the Mac as s single file (even though technically it's a 'special' folder) then dragging to a new location, or Cmd/dragging to move rather than copy, is all that's required.
You can force a new library to be requested if you hold the Opt key immediately after double-clicking to launch. iMovie is capable of switching between multiple libraries this way, if required.

If it doesn't show in that list (which it won't if it's moved) then use Locate… & navigate to it.
It will continue after that to use the new location until told otherwise.
Older versions of iMovie used to keep the original footage separately - so if you see separate folders named iMovie Events, Exports, Original, Projects etc, then move those too. If any of these folders contains a file called UpdatedToiMovie10 then you should be OK without them, but better to check inside iMovie itself before permanently discarding.


How do you list items with and without labels from the terminal? Is there a command that can tell the label status (labels as applied in the info menu in the finder cmd+i) of an item from the command-line in OS X? Essentially, I just want to list all the items with or without labels in the current directory, but I can't find any way to pull them appart.

This will help in creating a timed script that runs in the background. Then I can apply a label in finder and expect an action automatically apply to that file without having to make special conditions or keep a curated file with a list.

Using ls, you can show the extended metadata of files:

$ ls -l@
-rw-r--r--@ 1 andrew  staff  1292910 Aug  9 11:36 labelled_file.jpg
    com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_hlsi7t7nerhynemqvydgeb26de       50

However, the quickest way to get labelled and unlabelled files is with an attribute search using mdfind:

$ mdfind -onlyin . -literal 'kMDItemFSLabel > 0'  # labels have value 50
/cwd/labelled_file.jpg

$ mdfind -onlyin . -literal 'kMDItemFSLabel == 0'
/cwd/all.jpg
/cwd/other.jpg
/cwd/files.jpg


New Snow Leopard ... "Select All" won't Trash Just ran Snow Leopard on my 10.4 Tiger iMac6.1 desktop.  All has gone swimmingly.  But now ... the way I work, I have several icons, photos, on desktop when I'm finished and I Trash them.

Clicking Edit, "Select All" highlights all, and when I drag all into Trash, it doesn't Trash.  I can individually select an icon, click and drag, into Trash.
But "Select All" doesn't work.

Ideas?

Likely there's an item in your 'select all' that cannot be trashed; a .dmg in use or a mounted disk (your hard drive, a CD-ROM, a flash drive), for example.
That'll prevent anything in your selection from going into trash.


How do you cope with tons of web fonts when copying and pasting from web pages? Whenever I copy something from the web and paste it in my Mail or Evernote, or Apple Notes, it always brings the text style from the page and inserts those weird looking fonts in my mail, or notes.

My solution for that is to paste it in a plain text editor, VIM in my case, and then copy and paste where I need it to get rid of the style. It's pretty elaborate process, especially when I need to copy/paste often during research.

I'm wondering how other people cope with the fonts, and what's a better solution?

Most people I know set the paste shortcut to invoke paste and match style. Here is the command to change:

You can paste with style when you really want it, but for me 95% of the time I don’t want the style and only the raw text.

Open System Preferences
Select Keyboard
Go to the Shortcuts tab
Select App Shortcuts
Select the + button
Type Paste and Match Style into the Menu Title field
Select the Keyboard Shortcut field
Enter ⌘V as the shortcut.

You can then have another shortcut for the “normal” paste that includes styled text when desired. (Or just click paste on the rare occasions you want that.)


Audio Chipset for 2011 Macbook Pro I have a 13-inch Macbook Pro from late 2011 and recently upgraded it to macOS Mojave using this patcher tool: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/. It has some preinstalled kext files that make the Mac work properly, but not everything works perfectly.
One of the main problems is that the built-in speakers are not being discovered by the computer. I tried plugging in headphones, but that didn't work either. I did a bit of research and found a kext file that might do the job, but I would need to find what audio chip the Mac uses.
If anyone knows what chipset the 2011 Macbook Pro has, or know another way to fix this issue, please let me know! Thanks!

The first thing you can try is doing a Reset SMC.


HD screen recording of iOS App I'm struggling to record a high quality video of my iOS app. There are several similar questions out there, but my focus is on high quality. To my knowledge there are only two options to record a screen and both have some serious limitations.

Screen recording in the simulator

The quality is just not as good as on the device because of two reasons. First, OS X (Quicktime) has a built in screen recording function but the compression is very high and non-adjustable. I found screenium to give me much better result. However, even with the issue of compression solved, the color depth in the simulator is not as rich as on the device creating very visible artefact (even before recording it).
The performance of the iOS app in the simulator is much worse than on an actual (modern) device. Especially when using OpenGL, I notice a substantial drop in the framerate.

Recording the app on the device

I could just hold a camera and record the iPhone with the app running on it. For obvious reasons this doesn't seem like the ideal solution.
I could use a third party app to record the AirPlay mirrored screen on a Mac. Again, this would involve some serious performance decrease and compression artefacts because of the encoding process.
I could use a VGA adapter and record that, but the quality of the VGA signal is also not the same as on the device (RETINA display).

I'm looking for any kind of advice on this topic. A way to increase the color depth in the simulator, a way to increase the speed of an app in the simulator, a professional way to record the screen from the device, an efficient way to encode frames on the fly in the app...

The iPad 2 and 3, and iPhone 4S and 5 can do screen mirroring over HDMI, using Apple's Digital AV Adapter. Combined with an HDMI capture device, this should give you the best possible quality.


Backup, share, or save iPhone voicemail messages? Is there a way to export, save, share, or e-mail voicemail (not Voice Memos) from the iPhone?
I am guessing there are some under-the-hood ways to get at the files once you sync to a desktop, but is there any way to do it straight from the iPhone?
I have seen this response for jailbroken phones.
How can I backup and archive my iOS voicemail messages?

I believe there are applications that can extract the voice messages from your phone but they cost money and required the phone be plugged in to the computer.

The simplest way is to connect your phone to your computer with a 3.5mm audio cable. Use a simple audio recording app, such as Audacity, click record and play the voice message.


How to export Calibre's library for Database Support? I have used Calibre but I would like get more freedom in exporting it elsewhere for edits.
I would like to do quality assurance of my books, papers and literature.
Calibre does not communicate with database systems like MySQL, PostgeSQL and Oracle, discussed here.
I would like to bind Calibre to PostgreSQL to do the data verification of each document in database.
I think the best way would be to export Calibre´s library.

How can you export Calibre's library?

Calibre is based around a SQLite database so you can do SQL work including adding tables on it directly - I think calibre only creates extra tables with books_ or custom_ as a prefix so your own tables would not be affected by it.

Extra fields can be added which appear in the GUI to be extra fields in the Book table but are actually each in tables with a 1-1 mapping to the Books table

To extract data any sql tool can be used including the command line sqlite which Apple includes in OS X .

There are plugins like Multi Column search that allow more complex searches to be done.


how to check if a specific UI element is in focus apple script I've searched a lot for this, but all answers talk about how bringing a whole window (or dialogue.. which is still a window really) into focus via activate etc.

But I couldn't find any way of detecting if a specific UI element was selected, in focus etc.

I'm wrote an apple script that automatically jumps to alfred create custom web search, but the script failed when the features tab wasn't selected by default.. so this is what my code looks like:

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "," using command down
    delay delay_time
    tell process "Alfred Preferences"
        delay delay_time
        -- hack: to ensure that the the "Default results" button isn't selected
        -- by default, we select another tab first, then select the "features" tab
        click button "Appearance" of toolbar 1 of window 1
        click button "Features" of toolbar 1 of window 1
        delay delay_time
        UI elements of scroll area 1 of window 1
        -- bring the left menu to focus first (see hack above, without hack this would work sometimes only)
        keystroke tab

I'd much rather not do this nasty hack (which causes the app to flicker rapidly between tabs whenever i call the shortcut).. i'd rather make a simple if else statement.. ideas?

This definitely works on my system running Alfred 3.  You may need to adjust the delay times but as they are now, this script works for me.

activate application "Alfred Preferences"
delay 1.5
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Alfred Preferences"
        click button "Features" of toolbar 1 of window "Alfred Preferences" of application process "Alfred Preferences" of application "System Events"
        delay 1
        set selected of row 3 of table 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Alfred Preferences" of application process "Alfred Preferences" of application "System Events" to true
        delay 1
        click button "Add Custom Search" of tab group 1 of window "Alfred Preferences" of application process "Alfred Preferences" of application "System Events"
    end tell
end tell


Using the keyboard to bring up the File, Edit, View... menus Possible Duplicate:
  Can I open the menu with keyboard?

In windows, in most applications, if I hit Alt+F it opens the "File" menu.  If it hit Alt+E, it brings up the Edit menu.  Is there an OS X equivalent?

This is a handy way to get to those windows and choose an option without grabbing the mouse.  I know there are keyboard shortcuts for things inside those menus (say Command+C for copy).  But, is there a way to simply bring up the menu so I an see what's in there, then choose my option with arrow keys and return?

You can do this easily; by default, under System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard, an option involving the "f" function keys may be unchecked. If this is the case, check it, and then click the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab. Go to "Keyboard & Text Input" and find the command for "move focus to the menu bar". Use this command (I believe it's control+F2 or control+F8 by default). Then, use the F key for file, the E key for edit, etc. (or use arrow keys) and hit enter (or down) to show the menu.


Bluetooth dealing iOS I have got a BeoPlay 7 bluetooth headphone. If I double press the headphone it dials the last person I spoke to on the phone.
Is there anyway to disable this behaviour in iOS 11?

No, that's a functionality which is built in iOS and is not customizable.


Time machine slow and stops Recently I've a problem with TM, i do usually attach the HD every week, but lately it's not backing up and it's extremly slow.

In particular, If i start the backup it says something like: backin up 21GB taking 10 hours . Which is way too much.

Moreover, I left the pc on (using caffeine) the whole night and this morning no backups were made. But TM is set up to take backups every hour. If I start it manually it runs for a while and then suddently stops. Saying nothing.

Any thought on how i can investigate the problem and solve it?

EDIT
Apparently there's a file/folder that makes the problem
. It's been stuck at the same amount 15,6 GB for 1hour without moving. I think the problem is there. any way that I can know what's going on?

A few hunches based on non-TM file transfer errors I've seen on macOS:

I would use Disk Utility to scan the drive and repair errors. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22243?locale=en_US (Usually I tell people to back up any critical data first, but I assume you have a semi recent backup :))
Is the problematic folder a symlink to an external drive by chance? (Rare but something I've seen.)
How is the external attached? Check/swap cables & ports if you have spares available.


Resetting in-app purchase promo code limit App Store allows only 100 promo codes for the app and for each in-app purchase. App's promo codes are reset with every version update but it turns out that IAP promo codes are not – after spending 100 of them, there's still 0 available after updating the app's version.

Is there any way to reset them other than creating a new IAP (which would be troublesome for a non-consumable because of the purchase restore).

You can't manually reset the in-app purchase promo code limit. These reset twice a year.

You can provide up to 100 promo codes for each in-app purchase item, with a limit of 1,000 total in-app purchase codes per app every six months (resetting on January 1 and July 1).

Manage promo codes - App Store Connect Help


Why I'm getting this message: "Interface cannot be used (error 229)" I've plugged an USB NFC/RFID reader, model ACR112U-A9 provided by ACS Ltd.

Although it is plugged I can't read anything and I keep getting this logs in console:

09/06/15 14:13:00,901 com.apple.SecurityServer[83]: reader ACS ACR122U PICC Interface: state changed 16 -> 34
09/06/15 14:13:00,902 com.apple.SecurityServer[83]: token in reader ACS ACR122U PICC Interface cannot be used (error 229)
09/06/15 14:13:01,249 com.apple.SecurityServer[83]: reader ACS ACR122U PICC Interface: state changed 32 -> 18

How can I solve this issue? Do you know what is the error 229 and why it's triggered?

I found a solution: You need to download the ACS ACR122U Drivers for Mac OS X 10.x.

Here the download page and the direct link for PC/SC Driver Installer 1.1.0 (Mac 10.5, Mac 10.6, Mac 10.7, Mac 10.8, Mac 10.9, Mac 10.10) (2014-09-17 306KB).

You have to install it even if the installer is not properly signed.

It will install the useful driver in: /usr/libexec/SmartCardServices/drivers/ifd-acsccid.bundle

Now you are able to use the card reader.
If you want to test it out, I made a simple project here.


Jailbroken iPhone 5s stuck in boot loop and can't be seen by iTunes I got my iPhone stolen and I'm guessing he tried to do a factory reset, but I know jailbreak does something differently with that but it's stuck in a bootloop and I've tried just about everything I can do with iTunes and putting the phone in different modes.

Power + home for 10 sec then just home = Apple update logo then crashes and goes back to boot loop.

Power and + volume = nothing

The computer can't recognize the device, it did once but I don't know what I did but it stopped and went back to unknown.

You can enter DFU mode during a bootloop:

Connect the device to the computer and open iTunes. It won't be detected—that's fine.
Hold down the power and home buttons together.
The display will turn off, then an Apple logo is shown. Keep holding until the display turns off for a second time.
As soon as the display turns off the second time, keep holding home but release the power button.
The display will remain blank and iTunes will prompt you to restore the device. Now release the home button.


Diskless NetBoot images served from a 10.8/10.9 server will not consistently boot When hosting a diskless Netboot image from a server running 10.8/10.9 (I have witnessed this with both) the client machine will frequently not boot giving an error:

mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error 1, error is 3
waiting for local drives (retry 1/10)...

When hosting the same image from a 10.6 server I never get this error. The image can be 10.9 or 10.6...does not matter. If the client is restarted it may boot normally the second try or may take several attempts to finally boot normally.

The rc.netboot file is configured for "Netboot-only" yet it still goes through the process of looking for local drives before it shuts down. From what I can find the error points to not finding a network volume to write the shadow file to????

The issue is not the image, but the version of server the image is hosted from and/or some configuration I am missing on my 10.9 server that causes the AFP share not to respond correctly? Maybe because server in 10.8/10.9 is not the same as 10.6 (separate OS)???

Any thoughts?...I'm currently having to keep 10.6 servers on line to host my 10.9 images because of this issue.

Upgrading the 10.9 boot servers to 10.9.2 seemed to fix the problem. I have not witnessed the error since the upgrade.


Recover photos from iPhone memory Is there way to recover photo directly from iPhone memory in case if user already cleanup deleted pictures and doesn't have backup in iCloud or iTunes. Can you recommend any way or any specific software?

You would want to power off the phone immediately and then get a quote from a forensic / data recovery company if the data is worth paying for. I’m not aware of any tools to do recovery yourself, but perhaps someone else has that answer or an explanation why that’s not viable or cost effective.

There are going to be all sorts of scam software, so here are two reputable companies that do recovery. One says they work with iOS, the other does not but I trust them for Mac recovery and they might have some recommendations worth exploring.

https://www.ontrack.com/services/data-recovery/mobile/
https://www.prosofteng.com/data-recovery-services/

Since iCloud has a deleted photos album, be sure o check that as it works even without an iCloud backup. Sorry you’re in this place, too late to make a backup when the data is already gone. Try not to lose the lesson now...


iCloud storage always full I am clearly missing some with iCloud storage, every few weeks I get an email saying my storage is nearly full and I only have a couple of hundred MB left. So I am always deleting my back up and letting it back up overnight. When I back it up it's only about 3GB. Why is it consistently over the weeks always full? I have no apps being backed up to it either, they're all off. So how do I stop this and what is causing it?

Here is an example of what I mean. It backed up yesterday. I have all the apps off and it wants to back up another 192MB. I haven't sent s load of images in iMessage or anything like this in the last day so I don't know where the data is coming from. I don't take many photos anyway so it's not photos. Unless it has anything to do with Apple Watch? I can't see or find anything about activity app being backed up the cloud, but that's the only thing left I can think of

Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage. Under the iCloud section, tap Manage Storage. This will show you everything that is using space in your iCloud account. If you see something you do not want backing up to iCloud, then disable and delete it here. iCloud Photo Library may be the culprit.

On the bottom of this page you can also select Change Storage Plan to purchase additional storage; in the US, the $0.99/month plan gives you 50 GB, which should be plenty for you.


Custom spaces with external monitor I have a MacBook Pro plus an external 24" monitor. I'm also using 4 virtual spaces. With the external monitor they double, so I have 8 virtual spaces.

What I'd like to achieve now, and I don't know if it's possible at all, is to have 5 virtual spaces. 4 on my MacBook and only 1 for my external monitor. The reason for that is, that I have different applications (IDE, Terminal, chat, etc.) on my MacBook spread over the spaces, but on my external monitor I'd like to have always my web browser (the exact same window) showing, regardless on which virtual space I am on my MacBook.

Anyone an idea if that is possible?

in Spaces Preferences you can set the browser application to appear on all spaces. that's how i have my Terminal set up, among a few others. unless you move more apps onto your secondary monitor, the browser window should constanly stay visible even when switching around Spaces.


M1 MacBook External Display Scaling I just purchased an M1 MacBook Air that I would like to attach to an external display. When I do so, the video quality is pretty terrible. It almost looks like the the output is being slightly scaled. However, I've verified from my monitor's OSD that it is outputting to the correct resolution as well as from MacOS. There isn't any oversampling or other scaling effects from the monitor (it's outputting 1:1). Just as a sanity check, I took a screenshot and it outputs the correct resolution and looks beautiful on another computer attached to the same display. I've tried various output cables (USB-C to DP and HDMI) and this doesn't seem to have any effect. I've read elsewhere that there can be some colorspace issues on Dell monitors in particular, but this isn't a Dell monitor and it really doesn't appear to be the issue.

This problem has been there for a while and it is because of the PPI.
I believe Retina displays just don't work well with Full HD resolutions. Try a 4k resolution external monitor and it should work fine.


Winebottler's IE 7 looks different to my PC's IE 7 I've been testing my new site on my PC's IE 7 (actually IE 8 in 'IE 7 mode'), and yesterday I installed WineBottler's 'IE 7'.

Testing across both, WInebottler's IE 7 looks significantly older, and significantly worse.

Do you know why this is and how I might be able to fix it?

Related question, if I decide Winebottler isn't working and I'd like to go with Parallels or VirtualBox, do I need to shell out the $200+ for Windows as well?

Your description about IE 7's looks is a little too unspecific to give you a definite answer. I'm guessing that you are referring to text rendering. Wine uses a few open source libraries to render texts. These produce different results from Windows' built in text rendering. Also, it replaces some (all?) fonts with free alternatives because of copyright issues. The result is that text does look different between Wine and Windows.

As for your second question, yes, you'd need to buy a separate Windows license. If you don't need to test with IE 9, you can go with an XP license. They are dirt cheap these days.


Mouse pointer stuck to edge when switching to smaller monitor in dual display setup I have 2 different size monitors that I am using in dual monitor setup. While switching from the larger to the smaller, often times the mouse pointer is stuck at the bottom corner between the monitors.

Is there a setting somewhere that I can set so that this annoying issue doesn't happen?

A quick video showing the annoying state.

Open system preferences, click 'displays', and then click the 'arrangement' tab. Here you will see a scaled down representation of your displays' positions relative to one another. Drag the displays around until the mouse switches over at the correct position. For your case, it'll probably look something like this:


"Open at login" settings are ignored I work in a research group whose employees use Mac Minis currently running OS X 10.9.3.  The other day one of our employees mentioned being unable to get Thunderbird to start at login or cause Mail to not start--Mail was somehow set to start at login, and he couldn't change the setting persistently.  Since then, we have found that no matter how we go about setting login options, they are ignored and reset upon logging out/in.

It may be worth noting that we use LDAP-authenticated accounts with homedirs mounted via NFS.

I've previously been through Apple's standard protocol of checking and changing these settings by right-clicking icons in the dock as well as in System Preferences -> Users and Groups, and checking the contents of /Library/StartupItems (which is empty), followed by deleting the ~/Library/Preferences file and letting the OS recreate it.

UPDATE: I've since found a workaround which is quite clumsy, but works.  It appears to be some sort of strange issue with the permissions issued to ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist (though they are the same as the permissions for every other file in that directory).  Running chmod 777 com.apple.loginitems.plist prior to making a single change, then waiting for the permissions to be reset before making each subsequent change to the list of login items allows the settings to work as expected.  The file must again be chmoded prior to a reboot or it won't be read properly.  In addition, these settings work as expected for the local administrator account, so I imagine the fact that we use network accounts is relevant.  For whatever reason, I didn't think to check that prior to my first post.

Your workaround is the beginning of the right problem analysis.
Verify that the ACL on ~/Library/Preferences are correct.

Let's say your user name is BOB.
Within Terminal or xterm type:

$ cd ${HOME}/Library
$ ls -del Preferences
drwx------+ 9 BOB  staff  6324 Jul 31 14:10 Preferences
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit
$

If your ACL aren't exactly as above, and most notably completly empty,
check that your NFS server is correctly configured to manage ACL.

On your Mac which is the NFS client, check with the mount command that the noacl option isn't turned on.


How can I store my iPhoto Library and iTunes library in Lion Server (Mini) and access it via my MBP? My iPhoto and iTunes library is taking up most of the space in my 128GB SSD MBP.

I'm considering to buy a mac mini to store all of my media for iPhoto and iTunes libraries and sync a few of my favourite playlists/events to my MBP.

Is this possible? If not, is it better to just buy a 'Little Big Disk' and store everything there and back it up via my Time capsule(can this be done too?)?

Unfortunately you can't easily do Mac-to-Mac syncing of iTunes libraries in that manner. Your best options for networked iTunes access are:

iTunes Library Sharing: put your library on the server, and you can get streaming access from your MBP. Downsides: no remote/offline access, you need to be on the same network as the server; all media/playlist management has to be done on the server.
iTunes Home Sharing: same streaming access as above, but you can also copy files from the server to your MBP. Downsides: it's not syncing, you need to manually select and transfer the songs you want.
Store iTunes Library on a Network Share: change the iTunes folder location (Advanced section in the iTunes Preferences) to a shared network drive on the server (or any shared drive, doesn't have to be a Mac). This gets you local control of the library, just like any standard functions. Downsides: have to be on the local network to get access.

With this option you could make a second library (option-click iTunes when you open it) on the local drive with a smaller collection of songs you want for off-network access, but again, you don't have any syncing abilities, you have to manually add what you want.

I don't know that much about iPhoto sharing, I think it's more limited, but you can always put the iPhoto Library on a network share, as in the third option above, with the same limitations. There's also iCloud's Photo Stream, which is fairly limited, but may work if you just want to get recent photos from point A to B.


How to skipt the prompt for time-triggered automation Shortcuts in iOS13? I have created a simple shortcut that collects certain data and displays it via a push notification. I just told the app to run my shortcut every day at 10AM.

The feature certainly works, however there’s this annoying thing when the first thing I get is a notification asking me if I want the shortcut to be run. It runs only after I confirm it. This is very annoying since it defeats the purpose of automation which implies that the shortcut should be run automatically without any input from me.

For people here that are familiar with the matter, is there a way to bypass this annoyance?

There is a workaround that I have gotten to work in my testing, but if you use automatic do not disturb you might have to set it to only run at the specific time that DND is enabled automatically.

Basically set auto DND and then make an automation for when DND is turned on. In order to ensure that it won't run whenever I use DND, I created a few shortcuts.

MatchTime
and DND Auto

Just set a DND enabled automation to run the "DND Auto" shortcut


Numbers: Can I highlight the row and column of the selected cell? When reading larger spreadsheets, it would be helpful to highlight the row and column that the currently selected cell is in.  I'm not talking about conditional formatting or anything in the spreadsheet itself, I'm just talking about a viewing option.  I couldn't find a similar option anywhere.

If I understand your question, Numbers does this by default - note the darkened row and column identifiers in the image below at AK50.

Edit: ah, I see.. okay, I found an inconvenient hack:

Select the Column containing your target cell
Cmd click the cell above (or the Cmd Click the row index of the cell above)
Cmd click the Row containing your target cell
Cmd click to reselect the cell above your target

Like so:

Maybe you could use automator to make this less painful?


Upgrading and selling my MacBook, how do I clean install Lion and iLife? I have a Unibody MacBook (late 2008) which shipped with Leopard (specs here).

When I sell it, I know I can move my data and settings to my new Laptop through Migration Assistant; for the new owner, I'd like to wipe everything except the standard software (plus all updates).

Given that the machine's original OS and install disks were 10.5.5 and iLife '09, what do I have to do sell it with Lion?

A) Just wipe everything except standard OS X apps + iLife?

or

B) Make a Lion USB drive (and give it to the buyer), and do and erase and install (or equivalent)

And if B) - How do I get iLife on there?

If you want to sell your machine but also include installed software, there is a way to set this up that will ensure none of your personal data is on the machine, as well as provide a better box opening experience for your buyer.

I would suggest doing a secure erase of your hard disk first. Then, install Lion.
Configure a dummy user account named "test" or "admin" or something generic
Install the software you want to include
Restart your machine in Single User mode by holding ⌘ + S on startup.
Very carefully, do the following:

  mount -uw / (This mounts the root volume so you can make changes to
  it.

  rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone (This removes the flag that tells Setup
  Assistant that it's done)

  rm /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/"shortname".plist (Replace
  "shortname" with the user account name you set up before. This removes
  the user plist)

  rm -rf /Users/shortname (Replace "shortname" with the user account
  name you set up before. This removes the User directory)

  rm -rf /Library/Preferences (This resets preferences)

  shutdown -r now (This restarts the computer)

Verify that your machine starts up to the Setup Assistant and you're done. That way, your buyer can start up the machine to the Setup Assistant and still retain the software you want to provide them with.

Good luck.


Override keyboard shortcut in Safari 6 In Safari 6, the keyboard shortcut ⌘ Command-1 opens the first bookmark on the bookmark bar. In Safari 5 I used a macro activated by that same shortcut to activate ⌘ Commmand-] to go forward a page.

The reason is that I have another macro activated by the shortcut ⌘ Command-` to go back a page.  It is convenient to use one hand and the two adjacent keys: thumb on the ⌘ Commandkey, middle finger on the ` and 1 keys.

How can this key binding in Safari 6 be changed?

You can add/change any Key Command from
System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts

Click the + button then add the info you require. [Later removing any custom binding will revert the app to its default binding]


My Mac is opening new tabs with different ad sites It all started with the installation of software from mac-torrent but probably it was Adobe Flash Player. It said that I had an old one and the system needs to update, so I gave the right to install it. But I think it was a malware that opens ad sites like "one x bet", "aliexpress malls", and mac control site and some business sites.

The only way to stop this irritating behavior was to install Adblock, however, I don't want my mac to have that malware. Is there any way to get rid of it?

How to install adware So you ignored all the red flags given in this apple support post.

  installation of software from mac-torrent probably

If you're using torrents, use some reputable sources to get them.

  probably it was adobe flash player.

So if it is not your intended app, why go ahead and install what is dumped on your device?

  said that I had an old one and the system needs to update,

Did you really have an Adobe Flash player version installed? It is not installed in an out of the box setup. And if you installed it from Adobe's site, you'd know what a genuine package look like and you'd be able to update it using the app itself.

In case you don't know where Adobe Flash player can be seen, Safari Preferences → Extensions, and System Preferences → Adobe flash Player.

  so I gave the right to install it,

Boom.

  the only way to stop this irritating behavior was to install Adblock, however, I don't want my mac to have that malware,

Ad blocker apps certainly won't solve the underlying problem. They don't even operate outside the browser.

  and has anyone experienced it?

Apple Discussion forums are full of it.

  is there any way to get rid of it?

Restore from backup is the best way.

OR

Quit or Force quit(cmd shift escape/ Apple menu → Force Quit... ) Safari. Hold shift and click on it from the Dock. Go to its preferences → Extensions and remove any unknown extension there. Go to Websites tab and remove extraneous items like Flash Player from the lower left corner.

https://www.thesafemac.com/arg/
https://www.malwarebytes.com

Get MalwareBytes app and/or BitDefender, from the genuine source and run a scan.

Can .mp4 files infect my Mac with malware/adware/spyware?
How to remove Trovi malware from Safari?


Safari not rendering web-page correctly Any idea why Safari (11.1.2) for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 is not rendering this web-page correctly?

On my machine (iMac late 2015, macOS 10.13.6, Safari 11.1.2), the cause of the bad rendering was the AdBlock extension. I removed it, restarted Safari, and Safari rendered correctly. I then re-downloaded AdBlock, and Safari continues to render correctly.

I moved too fast doing this, and didn't note the version number of the AdBlock I removed, so don't know if the not-working AdBlock I removed was the currently-downloading version. In any event, the just-downloaded version doesn't interfere with Safari's rendering.


iPhoto does not recognize already imported pictures I had my iPhone replaced, and restored my data from the iTunes backup. Unfortunately, now iPhoto thinks the photos that were restored from backup are new photos, and so it does not hide them when I choose "hide already imported" in the import screen. Is there a way to get it to recognize that these photos are already in the library? I'm using iPhoto '09.

Unfortunately, the only way seems to be to import the duplicates and keep them, while manually deleting the original copy (i.e. the one imported from the old iPhone).


Macbook pro wont turn on? My mac wont turn on,

first the battery indicator only blinking, after SMC reset and unplug the battery than plug again, my laptop turn on, after turn on, i tried tu shutdown to put plat cover.

after that my mac wont turn on and when i try SMC charging only change to green and back to orange, but notting happen, unplug battery also not work, evrthing keyboard combination not work, i cannot turn on my mac,

how to fix this?

Many MacBook models will not power up if the battery is basically dead. And, reading between the lines I'm assuming this is an older model MacBook which probably still has its original battery - and therefore at much greater risk of having a dead battery.

You could try powering the MacBook up while connected to AC power and without the battery installed (this was possible with some models), but otherwise you'll need to replaced your battery (something I would recommend even if you could power it up without the battery).

Further info

Most MacBook batteries have a life expectancy at or around 1000 cycles.  It's not uncommon for batteries to exceed or fall short of this number; it's just an estimation of how long it can last.

Your options are to have the battery replaced or to only use it while connected to an AC power source (if this works for you). There are many 3rd party battery options available for purchase, so if you're still happy with your MacBook then that's your best option. If not, then it's time to upgrade.

If you do decide to replace the battery, then I would ensure that you purchase a battery from a reputable online store dealing with Apple products.

For example, the following are some well-regarded sites:

Mac Sales
Simply Mac
RAM City
Macfixit

By buying from a reputable store you'll be sure to get a battery fit for purpose, regardless of manufacturer. Being reputable means they're only going to sell something that works and they'll stand behind the product they sell, regardless of the brand.


What does "Always Allow..." actually do? That is, what files does it actually change? I am deploying a new version of an application on to multiple machines (100+) and when I test it on a machine, the "You do not have permission to use the application" box pops up, due to quite strict restrictions on the machine. If I click "Always Allow..." then everything works fine. However I do not wish to have to click this box on 100+ machines. Is there a command line alternative which can accomplish the same thing?

If you can't work out what "Always Allow" does, I would suggest running something like fseventer to see what OS X changes. If it hits a plist file then you'll be able to run defaults on it.

I'm assuming its probably in the com.apple.applicationaccess.plsit. (But not tested)


Using Two External Monitors for my MBP (E. 2015) but resolution is low on the other one I'm using my MacbookPro Early 2015 to connect two external displays. One is an Asus display connected via HDMI to HDMI, the other, is a samsung display (Both are 24 inches 1920x1080) and is connected through VGA via adaptor to my Mini Display port.

However, the Samsung monitor does not seem to use the 1080p display. I tried using the Alt/Option method and it is able to use 1920 x 1080 but the resolution is squezzed horizontally.

Any way to fix this?

PS: It also detects the display as a projector for some reason and my Asus as a TV

If the Samsung display has other inputs, you're likely to have better luck with digital inputs (DVI or HDMI) than with analog inputs (VGA). You'll need a different Mini DisplayPort adapter for that.


10.9 server keeps losing correct permissions on /private/tmp about 2-3 a week our 10.9 server machine starts filling logs with 'unable to write to /private/tmp/..." errors.  many per second.  the permissions to go 755 apparently.

it's easily fixed with a manual setting of permissions or a disk util repairpermissions.  but if uncaught, it causes problems for the server (of course).  nothing obvious in logs just before these errors start.

i can't figure out what's causing this to go wonky repeatedly.  has anyone seen similar behavior?  not sure what's causing it.  nothing suspicious in chron or launchagents/daemons.

i'm using sns iscsi initiator, in case anyone else out there has seen this problem.

Maybe resetting the permissions on a user's home directory helps:
This is easily accomplished by resetting ACLs on the desired home directly by using the Reset Password Utility in the Recovery Partition:
    1   Restart your computer from the recovery partition (restart while holding CMD+R).
    2   Open Disk Utility and run a permissions repair on your startup volume. After this is complete, close Disk Utility (doing this just for good measure).
    3   Open Terminal from the Utilities menu. Type in resetpassword and select your user account (NOT System Administrator/root) from the drop down menu.
    4   Click the Reset Button at the bottom of the window in the Reset home folder permissions and ACLs section.
    5   Quit the Password Utility and go back to the main recovery screen.
    6   On your keyboard, hit CMD+Q and restart your computer. It's very important that you don't hold down the power button to exit the recovery session, or the ACL reset won't occur.


How can I blacklist filetypes from Spotlight search results? Spotlight has a quirk that I want to fix, if possible. When I search for certain keywords, such as categories in System Preferences, Spotlight will place a document as the "Top Hit" in the search results, even though System Preferences have a higher priority over Documents in Spotlight's preferences. I want to be able to blacklist certain filetypes while preserving the "Documents" category.

For example, typing "sharing" will return the top hit as "sharing.qml" from the Qt5.1.1 directory, followed by Sharing in System Preferences. I can't then immediately press enter to open "Sharing" without first pressing the down arrow.

What I am able to do to fix this individual issue is blacklist the Qt5.1.1 examples directory.

You can see that it returns "sharing.html" from the gtk-doc directory now. So I blacklist that directory as well.

Now I am able to search for "Sharing" with no issues. However, there are other search results that exhibit similar behavior, such as when typing "mouse". It is too tedious to block each directory that I find.

I want to be able to blacklist individual filetypes from Spotlight. I have set "System Preferences" to have a higher priority than "Documents" in Spotlight as well. Nothing seems to affect the "Top Hit" other than individually blacklisting each directory that holds a file that I don't want to see.

Is there a better way?

Find the importer used to import that type of file.

mdimport -d 4 -n /path/to/file 2>&1 | grep Imported

mdimport -d 4 -n ~/Desktop/avatar.png 2>&1 | grep Imported
2014-06-19 11:17:04.929 mdimport[30911:412893] Imported '/Users/grgarside/Desktop/avatar.png' of type 'public.png' with plugIn /System/Library/Spotlight/Image.mdimporter.

The above example shows the type as public.png in the Image.mdimporter importer.
Open /path/to/importer/Contents/Info.plist in an editor.
Find the item of the same type as the type of the file that you found from the above command and delete it.

Reimport the importer.

mdimport -r /path/to/importer

mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Image.mdimporter

Don't forget to have backups and note this procedure may be overridden on OS X updates.


Keyboard and Trackpad behave erratic MacBook Pro 13 (early 2015) i have a slight problem with my MacBook Pro early 2015. For some reason the keyboard strokes are not correctly registered by the OS. On the login screen typing either triggers the “can’t type here” sound or wrong letters / erratic movement occur. For example pressing the louder button usually first turns the sound down twice and then mutes the Mac. Also a trackpad click only triggers the secondary click. A normal click or tap is not possible. The same stays true after login.

This is already weird but I also checked the virtual keyboard and there the right buttons are highlighted on stroke meaning that at least there I see full function. Also the Option + keys correctly types each special symbol. Also weird is that on the virtual key the acute is always lid in orange. Sometimes the keyboard completely works for some time just to revert to the no-function a little later. What i also noticed is that I can trigger the failure the following way:
if the keyboard works the acute on the virtual keyboard is always lid. If I press the left shift key, the acute is not lid anymore and the keyboard strokes are not recognised by the system anymore. However, the virtual keyboard is still recognising everything just fine.

The error is also present when booting from an USB stick. P+R+Option+Alt does not work and neither does triggering the recovery mode.

What did I try to fix it:

Warranty has run out, therefore I thougt: go for it!

I already exchanged the cable that connects the trackpad to the logic board, I reinstalled the OS, exchanged the trackpad itself and cleared the nvram. I do not know where to look for error reports or such. Thus any pointer would be highly appreciated.

I'd be super happy and grateful if someone could help me!

The keyboard was broken. Apparently very little amounts of liquid can completely brake it. After exchanging the top case/keyboard everything works like a charm.


My external monitor goes grayscale on the non moving parts of the screen (mid-2014 Macbook Pro Retina) I have a mid-2014 Macbook Pro Retina 15". I also bought a 27" Acer K272HUL and I've connected the 2nd monitor to my Macbook via HDMI.

So now I have 2 screens, my 15" and my "27". I usually play videos and streams on my larger 27" and periodically the stream is in color and the rest of the screen is in shades of gray. More specifically my external monitor goes grayscale on the non moving parts of the screen.

Is that normal?

Turns out it's not a Mac thing -- it's a "feature" of the Acer monitor. In the monitor's menu, disable "Detect Video." Confused me for a bit, was glad to discover I'm not going crazy.


How to add new keystrokes to the system settings from Terminal I am currently creating a list of terminal commands to set up a new mac system according to my needs. Now I would like to add new keystrokes to Preview (normally in the system settings => keyboard) from the Terminal. This is probably possible using the defaults write command but so far, I haven't found the concrete plist or path I would have to change.

Has anybody already tried this or knows a good resource for such settings?

You can add an NSUserKeyEquivalents dictionary to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist.

defaults write -app preview NSUserKeyEquivalents '{
"Single Page" = "@1";
"Two Pages" = "@2";
"Continuous Scroll" = "@3";
"Adjust Size..." = "~@i";
"Adjust Color..." = "@u";
}'

The shortcuts for all applications are in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.

defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents '{
"Show in Finder" = "$@r";
"Reveal" = "$@r";
"Delete Row" = "~@\b";
"Delete Rows" = "~@\b";
"Delete Column" = "$@\b";
"Delete Columns" = "$@\b";
"Minimize" = "\0";
"Minimize All" = "\0";
}'

The shortcut format is described in the Cocoa Text System article. The -app option doesn't work with some applications like Finder or Notes. If a menu item was assigned to nil, pressing L would trigger it in Audacity.


MacBook Pro will not shut all the way off When I tried to shut off my MacBookPro, the Apple Insignia, on the outside case, is still illuminated, and the screen is black, but I have the outline of the mouse pointer.  It will not turn back on.  None of the keyboard keys do anything.  It seems to be locked up.  Has anybody experienced this issue, and have a solution to fix?

If you tire of waiting, press and hold the power button.

If you want to run a disk check, reboot to recovery and use Disk Utility. Usually, it's just a stuck process and you won't need to fix things. Test a power off to see if the hang was incidental or if it happens 3 out of 3 attempts.


using mac book pro (mid 2010) as monitor for a DVR I recently bought a DVR and set of security cameras. The DVR has a VGA port and an HDMI port. I connected my MBP to the DVR VGA port using a Mini Display port adapter. However, I do not see the DVR display on my MBP. I'm assuming that I cannot use my MBP to view the DVR. Is that right? Or do I have to buy a monitor separately to view the DVR? Thank you

You'd just be better off buying another monitor, as that is Mini-DVI out not in. I'm sure that there are ways around this, but buying a separate monitor would be way easier.


Apple Pages insert equation greyed out after 8.1 update I've been using Pages' insert equation functionality to insert LaTeX equations for a long time now. However, recently after the new update I am unable to do so as the option is greyed out.

I tried copy-pasting an equation from one of my older files just to see if I can edit it. And I can!

Not sure why I cannot insert new equations though. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

I had this exact problem too, and after about 24 hours of frantic searching and panic, I found a solution.

Install MathType.  Just the trial is fine.  Open Pages, go into Preferences, and uncheck "Insert equations with MathType."  Without MathType, this option is obviously greyed out and unchecked, but installing MathType checks it by default.

You should now be able to insert equations using the built-in editor.  You can uninstall MathType and it will continue to work, or has for me at least.


How to execute this brew installed tool 'gigtools' My goal is to to run this 'gigtools' folder which extracts and converts .gig [audio] files into .wav files.
Website: https://command-not-found.com/gigextract
So I've installed the commands with Xcode- and the 'instructions' say this :
SYNOPSIS

    gigextract [ -v ] GIGFILE DESTDIR [SAMPLENR] [ [SAMPLENR] ... ]

I'm not good at basic level coding by any means, but I would love an example string to type into terminal to properly execute this, assuming my .gig files are in my /Downloads folder for reference.

The syntax is:
gigextract [-v] GIGFILE DESTDIR [SAMPLENR] [ [SAMPLENR] ...]

The following would extract the files in Downloads folder.
gigextract "~/Downloads/myfile.gig" "~/Downloads/"

Optionally add indices of samples you get from
gigdump "~/Downloads/myfile.gig"

A bit more help is at gigextract --help

For multiple files, you can use shell loops like
cd ~/Downloads
for g in *.gig; do gigextract "$g" ./; done

or, if you downloaded a whole directory structure of .gig files,
cd ~/Downloads
find . -name '*.gig' -execdir gigextract '{}' ./ \;

A less elegant way is to create a shell script like extract.sh which contains
cd ~/Downloads
gigextract "myfile.gig" ./
gigextract "myfile2.gig" ./

and run it with sh extract.sh


Accidentaly converted from a basic disk to a dynamic one I got a MacBook Pro (13-inch late 2013 retina)
So I installed Windows 7 using bootcamp and all was fine. I then needed to create a 32MB FAT16 partition, when Windows prompted me to convert to a dynamic disk, I mistakenly hit enter. When I rebooted PC, the Mac option was gone and if I tried booting into Windows it would BSOD and restart.

I read some guides about using TestDisk, so I tried to do that.
I booted with a Xubuntu LiveCD then I scanned and I found an HFS partition that seemed to be the partition I was looking for, so I set it to [P]rimary and wrote it to disk, but it still failed to boot.

Please help! I don't know what to do, I reran TestDisk with Deep Search and uploaded the log file: http://pastebin.com/kpzYuFDp

I don't care about my Windows data, I just want my Mac partition back.

PS: I read that I could do something with pdisk (I assume this is manually editing partition table data), but I have no idea how to do this.

As requested fdisk, gpt and diskutils output:

fdisk /dev/disk0
Disk: /dev/disk0    geometry: 14751/255/63 [236978176 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: EE    0   0   2 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -  236978175] <Unknown ID>
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

gpt -r show /dev/disk0
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34   30666498
   30666532  138412290      1  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  169078822   67899321
  236978143         32         Sec GPT table
  236978175          1         Sec GPT header

diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                  Apple_HFS                         70.9 GB    disk0s1

Windows' Disk Management has overwritten the GUID partition table with something unknown. This usually only effects the partition table but not the content of your disk (though it seems to be gone)! A proper GUID partition table has to be restored.

The particular obstacle here is: the OP neither has a thumb drive nor a second Mac.

Preparation:

Backup the whole SSD to an external drive using a Linux Live DVD with dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/file. The resulting file's size should be 121.3 GB or 113 GiB!
Restart to Internet Recovery Mode by pressing alt cmd R at startup.

The prerequisites are the latest firmware update installed, either ethernet or WLAN (WPA/WPA2) and a router with DHCP activated.
On a 50 Mbps-line it takes about 4 min (presenting a small animated globe) to boot into a recovery netboot image which usually is loaded from an Apple/Akamai server.

I recommend ethernet because it's more reliable. If you are restricted to WIFI and the boot process fails, just restart your Mac until you succeed booting.

Alternatively you may start from a bootable installer thumb drive (preferably Yosemite or El Capitan) or a thumb drive containing a full system (preferably Yosemite or El Capitan). If you boot to a full system and login as admin you have to prepend sudo to execute some commands like gpt ... or newfs_hfs ...!

Modify the GUID partition table

Open Utilities->Terminal in the menubar, enter diskutil list and gpt -r show /dev/diskX (with diskX: the disk identifier of your internal disk (probably disk0)) to get an overview. In the commands below I assume the disk identifier is disk0.

You should get the following listings:

gpt -r show /dev/disk0
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34   30666498
   30666532  138412290      1  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  169078822   67899321
  236978143         32         Sec GPT table
  236978175          1         Sec GPT header

diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                  Apple_HFS                         70.9 GB    disk0s1

# disk1-disk13 are volatile disks belonging to Internet Recovery Mode

Now remove the bogus HFS+ partition:

gpt remove -i 1 /dev/disk0

Add the EFI partition in the partition table:

gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B /dev/disk0

Now you can either install OS X to a new partiton - without overwriting your old OS X partitions - and try to detect the sizes of the old partitions with appropriate tools (like wxHexEditor) or you can guess the old content of the GUID partition table (with the help of the TestDisk result - not recommended)

Installing a new OS X

This will destroy the content of the Windows partition(s).

Add a new partition in the (old) OS X part of your disk to protect it.

gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s 179590360 -t FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF /dev/disk0

This might be superfluous.
Add new partitions in the (old) Windows part of your disk. The first one (i=4) is a new system partition, the second one (i=5) a recovery partition. The new OS X partition starts at ~91 GB and has a size of ~26 GB - which shouldn't affect the old (hidden, "lost") OS X partition:

gpt add -b 180000000 -i 4 -s 50000000 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 230000000 -i 5 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

Now you have to format the new 26 GB partition:

diskutil list
newfs_hfs -v "TempSystem" -J /dev/disk0s4 #use the proper partition found in diskutil list. It should have a size of ~26 GB
newfs_hfs -v "Recovery HD" -J /dev/disk0s5 #use the proper partition found in diskutil list. It should have a size of ~650 MB
diskutil mount /dev/disk0s4

Exit Terminal by entering exit and quit it.
Open Restore OS X and install OS X to the partition TempSystem.
Configure the new system and enable internet access. Don't initialize any "unknown" volumes if asked.
Enable the root user
Log-out as admin and log-in as root
Download and install wxHexEditor

Detect the start block and type of your old OS X volume and the start block of your old Recovery HD with wxHexEditor:

The approach is similar as in my answer here: HFS+ invalid number of allocation blocks

Since the start block of a main partition and the size of a recovery partition have fixed sizes/boundaries you can usually calculate the proper GUID partition entries of your old partition(s).

Hint: While working with wxHexEditor don't use copy and paste. Enter everything manually! You might accidentally write directly to your disk.

JHFS+ or CoreStorage partition?

First you have to determine, if you had a JHFS+ or CoreStorage partition at index number 2.

Open the Calculator. Open wxHexEditor. Check that you work in read-only mode ("Options" -> "File mode" -> "Read only"). In the menubar go to "Devices" -> "Open disk device" -> choose the appropriate diskNumber. Probably it's disk0. The disk should have further partitions (disk0s1 - disk0s5). Please try to arrange the wxHexEditor window like in the examples below with straight red lines.

Then hit the "Go to offset"-button (marked with the green circle) and enter 409640 exactly like in the picture below. Sometimes you have to do that twice to jump to the correct sector. Re-check the correct sector by entering the offset (marked red) in the Calculator and divide it through 512.

The first 3 sectors of a CoreStorage partition look like this:

The first 3 sectors of a JHFS+ partition look like this:

If you get a fundamentally different picture stop here.
Where does the Recovery HD partition start?

That's probably the most difficult part because you have to find a string which is not very specific.
Jump almost to the beginning of your new main partition (in your case to sector 179999900)

Then enter "HFSJ" like in the picture below, search for this string several times and make readable! hand-written notes of the different offsets. To restore your old OS X you have to boot to Internet Recovery Mode later and all on-screen findings in the current temporary OS X will be lost!

The reason to search for the string "HFSJ" is that all HFSJ+ volumes contain this string in the third sector of its partition. The magic string may occur up to 40 times cluttered over ~10000 sectors! Sometimes it's really difficult to find the proper sector. A second indicator for the beginning of the Recovery HD is at least one block of 0xFF in the tenth sector (or block(MagicString)+7) of the partition.

You may have two really different results depending on the partition type:

Calculate the sector number of the second last finding. In my example (see picture above) it's 68069452800/512=132948150. Continue searching and calculate the sector of the last finding somewhere in the middle of the disk and surrounded by empty sectors. In my case it was 68069454848/512=132948154 (no picture).
The difference between the two finding is 4 blocks (=2 KB).

This is typical for the boundary between a JHFS+ partition and the Recovery HD. The Recovery HD starts then at the sector of the second finding - 2 (in my example 132948154-2=132948152).
Calculate the sector number of the first finding. In my example it was 67733904384/512=132292782 (no picture). Continue searching and calculate the sector of the second finding. In my case it was 68069454848/512=132948154 (no picture). The difference between the two findings is 655372 (~336 MB)

This is typical for the boundary between a CoreStorage partition and the Recovery HD. The Recovery HD starts then at the sector of the second finding - 2 (in my example 132948154-2=132948152).

With these results you should be able to restore your GPT properly. Quit wxHexEditor. If you are asked to save changes don't save them!

Boot back to Internet Recovery Mode and open Terminal
Enter diskutil listand gpt -r show /dev/disk0
Remove the second partition (the protective FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF type partition):

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0

Since the EFI and the Recovery HD usually have fixed sizes you can calculate the start and end block of your main volume.

Calculate the size of the main volume: the start block is 409640.
The end block has been found in the section "Where does the Recovery HD partition start?": 1 less than the start block of the Recovery HD.
The size is then StartBlockOfRecoveryHD-409640.
If you've found a classical JHFS+ earlier the following command should fix partition 2:

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s StartBlockOfRecoveryHD-409640 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

If you've found a CoreStorage partition earlier the following command should fix partition 2:

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s StartBlockOfRecoveryHD-409640 -t 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

To rebuild the Recovery HD enter:

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -b StartBlockOfRecoveryHD -i 3 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

Now you may try to mount and verify your old OS X volume:

diskutil mount /dev/disk0s2
diskutil verifyVolume /dev/disk0s2

If you get an error mounting or verifying the volume its boundaries might be wrong. Stop here and consult me.
If the verification was successful you may either boot to your old OS X volume and check if it works and delete TempSystem and the new Recovery HD later or delete both immediately. The downside of booting to your old OS X volume first is that you have to boot to Internet Recovery Mode once more to delete TempSystem and the new Recovery HD.
To delete both dispensable partitions booted to Internet Recovery Mode enter:

diskutil list
gpt -r show /dev/disk0
diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 4 /dev/disk0 # remove the partition starting at block 180000000
diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0 # remove the partition starting at block 230000000
gpt remove -i 5 /dev/disk0

Depending on the partition type (HFSJ+ or CoreStorage) you may either use diskutil resizeVolume ... or diskutil cs resizeStack ... to expand your recovered OS X volume.

After accessing the remote Mac and inspecting the disk the final probable solution seems to be:

Remove the blocking partition

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0

Restore the old OS X partition table entry

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s 157173736 -t 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

Restore the old recovery HD:

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -b 157583376 -i 5 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

The volume (encrypted with FileVault) had a proper volume structure, the superior disk structure was corrupted though. After backing up the volume externally the disk was repartitioned to one partition and the backup was restored.


Apple calendar stopped showing events on Mac I have been using Calendar for a while and everything was working normally. However, suddenly it stopped showing some events in two of my calendars, and I dont understand why.

I can see all those events on calendar.google.com, but not on Mac calendar.

I've tried:

Refreshing calendars
Ticking on and off the calendars on the left-hand side of the Calendar app
Removing/re-adding the calendar permissions under Accounts.

I dont know how else to fix this. All help is appreciated!

Indeed, it was a more wide-spread and general issue with Google.

However, I had opened a formal trouble ticket with them, which eventually got recognized, acknowledged, escalated, worked upon and resolved, by about 10:30 am PST 8/23/19.

However, you may need to still purge your calendar cache files:

go to calendar.app, go to settings, go to accounts, uncheck the calendar to disable, then quit the calendar application.
then, go to your User Library folder ( ~/library/calendars/ folder),
(you can easily lookup how to do this if you don't know how to find it)
then, delete all items with the name "Cache" in it such as:
Calendar Cache-shm
Calendar Cache
Calendar Cache-wal
go back to calendar.app, launch/run it, then, go to settings, go to accounts, check the calendar to re-enable your Google calendar account
Then finally, you may wish to also click CMD-R to refresh calendar data and wait for enough time for all data to re-sync


How to erase photos from my iPhone 5S? I am syncing my iPhone 5S with my iMac. In iTunes it tells me I am over my 64 GB allowable memory with the majority of the space being used for over 4000 photos.

How do I delete the photos from my iPhone? I would like to keep photos taken in this year.

Plug device into Mac. Open Image Capture (in the Applications folder), select device in sidebar. Check the option at the bottom that says "delete on import" then import all files to the selected folder or program.

I used to do this manually, only deleting older photos, but with the iCloud Photo Stream, you will always have the last 1000 pictures available, so there's no reason not to just delete all after import.

You may end up with duplicate photos. There are several tools you can use to resolve dupes. Personally, I dump all imported photos into a specific directory, then run a dupe resolver, then add the new images into my photo management programs. (Not an iPhoto user because it doesn't sync well between Macs. Don't know if it has any in-built dupe resolution. YMMV.)


I am using a Mackbook Pro that I purchased in 2011 using OS X 10.8.5 and want to upgrade it to Yosemite I want to upgrade to Yosemite but before I do, I need to know if the upgrading process will require I reinstall all my apps once the upgrade is done. I am in the middle of a lot of work and don't have time to re-install every app again such as Photoshop, Lightroom and a host of other phoography related software.

Thanks for your help.

Charles

No, it won't - Since at least Snow Leopard, the upgrade is just done over the top of the original install. The core of the system doesn't change much these days, it's more about adding features/apps.

I'd recommend backing your work up anyway (even if you don't upgrade!) and if you have an urgent deadline, upgrade afterwards... base the time on the assumption you'll have to re-install, simply because installations can and do (fairly rarely) go wrong.


Email is shown by the sender email ID instead of receiver I made archive folder in outlook and shifted my all "sent" emails in that folder.

When I check my sent email in the archive folder, need to find a specific email, all email was shown by the sender email ID instead of the receiver.

This is the main problem to find the receiver email ID in an archive folder.

How I can arrange it by the receiver email ID.

Saved "Send" messages do not have the "To" (recipient) set as default sorting.

They are set by default to the "From" (you), so that is why you have that sorting.

In order to sort them by the recipient (To) use following:

Arrange by: To:

Then choose the as Default view for that folder here:


Does Universal clipboard works on ethernet? I have a mac mini 2018 connected to the same router/network, but using ethernet cable, and iOS device, connected to the same router/network, but using wifi.

But i can't use universal clipboard to paste text from ios to mac and vice versa. Should i connect my mac mini to the same network via wifi only in order to get it work?

I had to turn off / on handoff on ios (or restart it), then it worked. So it works even without wifi on the mac, you only need to have bluetooth on and being connected to the same router.


AppleScript icon (ICNS) not changing i create a little app using Script Editor and exported to .app file. now im trying to change the icon to a custom .icns file. the icns file was converted from a png using this website. also tried using this website.

after copying the icns to Contents/Resources/applet.icns and modifying the below lines of the Info.plist:

<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>applet</string>

also tried Contents/Resources/customFilename.icns and Contents/Resources/customFilename:

<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>customFilename</string>

the .app icon doesnt change. im sure the files are in .icns format. how can i debug and figure out why the .app isnt taking the .icns's?

App made in Applescript Icon wont change

No image conversion was necessary.  In Finder.app, just (control + click) on the file that you want to change its icon, and choose the "Get  info" command.  Next, just drag your icon file from Finder, directly onto the actual icon image in the get info window you previously opened... Then you're good to go


What is SafariDAVClient doing hogging up memory? I felt that my computer was slow today so I checked Activity Monitor. What I found was a process called SafariDAVClient hogging up 3.32GB of memory.

I am not even running Safari. Has anyone seen this problem? I've recently updated to 10.7.2 and my first suspicion is iCloud syncing. If anyone else is having the same problem, we should probably file a bug to Apple.

I ran into the same problem after updating to 10.7.2. SafariDAVClient also caused CPU-spikes all the time.

Disabling Bookmark Sync in the iCloud preferences, coupled with a reboot "solved" it.

It wouldn't hurt if you would file a bugreport with Apple as well. My ID is rdar://10280447, it's still open.


What is the maximum amount of RAM a 2011 MacBook Pro can utilize? I know macs can be picky about how much their max memory capacity is, so what is the maximum RAM I can install in my two available memory slots?

Model:  Early 2011 MacBook Pro 13-inch 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5

Can I put in 16GB with 8GB in each slot?

According to the Apple support, my specific model can officialy take 8gb, 4 on each slot. But many people say that we can put double the official, is this true?

**EDIT: It works, and I wrote an article about this whole process here **

Yes.You can install and use 16GB of RAM in that machine. There are several discussions in Apple's forum on this subject.

I Have same same model MBP and upgraded two weeks ago. Works great.

Edit: (as to the comments)

This is the product I have purchased to my mac. Please, before you buy make sure that the memory fit your specific mac model. Apple  do have a good webpage of How to identify my mac model.

Here, you can find a similar discussion in iFixit forum

In my original answer I have mentioned SSD. Thanks to @tubedogg clarification, the SSD and RAM are unrelated in this discussion. Yet, when upgrading considering to upgrade the SSD is not a bad idea.
Sorry for the bad analogy: it is like replacing parts in your car that will make it runs great, but it takes 15 minutes to start it.
For me, I decided to start with RAM. Upgrading the Hard Drive, made it even better.

I didn't see the Mac going over 8MB yet, so I opened every application on my mac just to get to 51%. Since the update it usually runs between 30%-45% of RAM used.

Which brings me to the following conclusion:

Can You install 16MB RAM? Yes
Do you need it? depends on your usage
Why would you still install it? Upgrade once, even if you don't use it right away
Should you also upgrade your hard drive? If you have the resources (money, time, transfer method), then yes


Hide the cursor from the terminal I want to be able to hide the cursor programmatically. I am okay with giving any required permissions to the script.

so what i just did was to download cursorcerer pref pane.  then i unzipped it.  then showed package contents.  then simply double clicked the resource called cursorcerer.app.  now my cursor is invisible -- even after moving.  so you could call this app from the terminal.  quite debilitating in my environment, but could be very helpful in others!

http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer-hide-your-cursor-at-will/

i was able to get my cursor back by running the preference pane.


Do I have 2 routers for my wireless network? I use an Airport Time Capsule and have a wireless router. Which one should I use for Wi-fi and how do I know which one I am using now? Thank you.

MacBook Pro 11,3 with Retina display; OS X Mavericks (10.9.5); Airport Time Capsule 802.11ac; Actiontec GT784WNV Router

I presume you have Verizon (FiOS) for your service provider, as they use Actiontec routers.  Another router (such as an Airport Time Capsule) can be connected to your Actiontec router, but you cannot substitute another router in place of your Actiontec router.

I recommend turning off WiFi on your Actiontec router, as it has known security issues which enable it to be easily hacked into.  For example, WEP cannot be disabled.  Your ATC can be used as a WiFi "access point" instead, providing superior security and speed.

To know whether you are connected to your ATC, you could try unplugging it to see if you still have access through your Actiontec.

To configure your Actiontec and ATC together, as I've described, is too complex to explain here, as you seem to be a novice user based upon your past questions.  You can be forgiven for not knowing the differences between modems, routers, gateways, LANs, WANs, etc.  Such things are complicated, and weren't designed to be user-friendly.


Is there an easy way to look through a directory, preview file by file, and choose to keep or delete it? I'm mostly looking to do an initial pass of a folder of 10k images and I want to go through one by one and mark each for deletion or for keeping. Any easy way to do that on a mac or is there a photo organization program that will do this?

Open the directory then instead of opening the image, you can press space to open a preview of that image. Now you can navigate through the images using your arrow ( ←→ ) keys.
If you want to delete any one of them then just go back to finder and the same image will be selected that you were previewing.


With Safari, can I allow pop-ups for specific sites? I have chosen "Block popup windows" in Safari's security tab, yet there are a couple of sites for work that still use popups for login etc. Is there a way to add exceptions (in advanced settings or directly in the plist file perhaps?) Or maybe via a Safari extension?

Yes, with Safari Version 12 or higher, you can allow popups for a specific website. Here are step-by-step instructions:

Right click on the URL (when you're NOT in a text entry mode)

Select "Settings for This Website..."
Select "Allow" under "Pop-up Windows"


Applescript problems with renaming a file and getting the alias to change it's name as well I have run into a particular problem with a larger script that I am writing. I am trying to rename all the files in a folder with a prefix of "temp_" and in doing so have the alias to that file still be addressable from AppleScript after the prefix has been added to the file. The following code works on SOME machines but not others. I have tried it on a 2018 MBP running 10.13, a 2012 Mac Mini running 10.13, and a 2015 iMac running 10.13 and 10.14. The iMac is the only machine that has problem with this code:

tell application "Finder"
set theSelection to the selection -- so you must have a folder with files selected in Finder before running this code.
set theFiles to the files of (item 1 of theSelection) --get the files
end tell
repeat with f from 1 to (count theFiles)
    set aItem to item f of theFiles -- set a variable as an individual file
    set pdfName to name of aItem --get the name of that file
    set aliasItem to aItem as alias -- get the alias of the file
    tell application "Finder"
        set the name of aliasItem to (("temp_" & (name of aliasItem)) as string) --rename the file
    end tell
    display dialog (aliasItem as string) buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" --this is just here for testing the script, to see what the system still thinks the file is named
    set posixPath to (POSIX path of aliasItem) --THIS is where the code fails on some machines.
end repeat

The code fails on SOME machines when I try to convert the alias into a posix path. On the machines that this script works on, the test display dialog lists the file alias with the new name. So foo.txt becomes temp_foo.txt. On the machines that the script fails the display dialog comes back with just foo.txt as the file name.

On the machine on which this is failing, the file will be renamed temp_foo.txt like it should be, but the alias never updates, so it still thinks the file is just foo.txt. On the failing machines, the last command to set the variable to the posix path of the alias fails because the alias is incorrect since it is still pointing to the old file name.

If need be I will just rename all the files in one loop, then come back around and get the posix paths in another loop, since doing a new

set theTempFiles to files of (item 1 of theSelection)

Should get a new list of the files, now with their "temp_" prefix. But it pains me to put in a repeat loop that I don't think is really necessary since the code works FINE on some machines.

Who can help me to get my code to run fine, and who can get it to fail? I just would like to see how big of an issue this is. Also it would be nice if someone could tell me that I am doing something horribly wrong in my code, and that is why I am getting unpredictable results.

I think that got broken somewhere, as an alias is supposed to be a reference to a file item that remains valid even if it gets renamed or moved.  If you are going to be using POSIX paths anyway, you might take a look at using Cocoa's NSURL class (via some AppleScriptObjC) to keep track of the file references, since that is ultimately what is getting used (or is supposed to be used).

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

tell application "Finder" -- get the selection
    set theSelection to selection
    set theFiles to the files of (first item of theSelection) as alias list
end tell

repeat with anItem in theFiles
    set anItem to POSIX path of anItem
    set fileRefURL to (current application's NSURL's fileURLWithPath:anItem)'s fileReferenceURL() -- get file reference from path
    tell application "System Events" to set the name of disk item anItem to "temp_" & (name of disk item anItem)
    set posixPath to (fileRefURL's |path|()) as text -- get path from file reference
    display dialog "Before:" & return & anItem & return & return & "After:" & return & posixPath buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK"
end repeat


How to unlock my new iPad by just sliding to the right? On my iPad mini, when the screen is locked, I unlock it by just sliding to the right. This is very nice.

I want to be able to do the same on my all new iPad Air 2.

It seems that the only way to do that is to turn off Touch ID (the fingerprint reading). I don't want to turn off Touch ID.

How can I be able to unlock my new iPad by just sliding to the right? Without turning off Touch ID.

On the new iPad, I have iOS 8.2.

This isn't possible. Enabling Touch ID enables a passcode, which must be entered on the lock screen. If you do not wish to have a passcode, then you must disable Touch ID too. Also, because you have Touch ID enabled, you are unable to adjust the Require Passcode time in Settings → Touch ID & Passcode → Require Passcode.

The only workaround is to go to Settings → Touch ID & Passcode, disable iPhone Unlock, then set Require Passcode to After 1 hour. This means that you won't be prompted for a passcode if you use your device less than an hour after you last used it.

Video demonstration of workaround: Touch ID Require Passcode Timer


Is it not possible to sort albums by artist on the iPad? So I recently picked up an iPad 2 and promptly loaded all my music onto it. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to have it display my albums grouped by artists like they are on iTunes.  Am I just missing something (probably obvious) or did Apple not bother to provide this functionality?

On the iPad, you'll have to use the "Artists" tab at the bottom, then tap the desired artist to see their songs grouped by album.

It is silly that they don't let you sort the "Albums" tab by artist.  Hopefully they'll remedy this in the future.


What are some alternatives to Shazam for iOS? What are some good alternatives to Shazam?

Whenever I hear a song and I want to know the name of it, I use SoundHound on my iphone. So far it has identified all of the songs I've searched. Even if for some reason I don't have network access, it will store the search and you can send it to their servers once connectivity is restored.

By the way, SoundHound and Midomi are the same thing. Midomi changed its name to SoundHound.


How to fix brew after OSX upgrade to Yosemite? I faced some issue with Homebrew. I upgraded to Yosemite. After the upgrade, homebrew seems to be broken.

I would run any brew command and get this error

/usr/local/bin/brew: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
/usr/local/bin/brew: line 26: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: Undefined error: 0

How to resolve it?

I decided to look this up and found that there is an issue. The issue is closed but it is not possible to simply run brew update because you will still get the same error.

So here is what you need to do:

cd /usr/local/Library
git pull origin master

In case you have changes in the directory (/usr/local/Library), the git pull will throw an error. In that case, you'll have to fetch the master branch and set it forcibly as master:

git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master

This will upgrade your homebrew and you can use brew again.

If you installed Homebrew as a non-root user, you'll need to cd to /Users/yourusername/homebrew/Library instead of /usr/local/Library.


Trying to drag & drop sometimes is reset multiple times during drag with mouse Logitech M510 on macOS Trying to drag & drop sometimes is reset multiple times during drag with mouse Logitech M510 on macOS Mojave and Catalina. This issue is new, I can reproduce it switching macs, usb receivers. Using a M705 mouse seems to work fine.
Report from Logitech Unifying software, using original Unifying Receiver dongle:
Logitech Unifying Software 1.3.375
Mac OS X 10.14.6 (18G8022)

Unifying Receiver @ 14100000
  Product ID: 0xc52b
  Firmware version: 12.10 (32)
  Location ID: 0x14100000
  Bus enumerator: -
  Hash: sanitized
  Devices: 2 (1 mice, 1 keyboards, 0 number pads)

  Mouse M510 @ 1
    Product ID: 0x4051
    Subclass: 0x2
    Bitfield: 0x4
    Serial Number: 0x4051sanitized
    Connection status: active
    Location ID: 0x0
    Receiver location ID: 0x14100000
...

For my case, unfortunately the solution was replacing the 4-years-old Logitech M510 mouse! Looking at some Amazon reviews, this model frequently start to have issues after a few years.


Major problem creating more problems, spiraling out of control endlessly: cannot install OS I started the day by receiving the following message, spontaneously:

  your computer restarted because of a problem. Press a key or wait a few minutes to continue starting up.

So I upgraded High Sierra. But the problem continued, I kept getting the message above.

So I uninstalled all my apps which came from outside the Apple store.  Throughout this process, the problem continued.

Finally, I thought I might as well just reinstall everything. After all, everything I have is in one cloud or another anyway. I started the computer in recovery mode and just wiped the main drive. Easy! And very possibly stupid.

When I went to install High Sierra again, I got the error, though I tried twice in a row.

  could not create reboot volume ...

Yikes. So I started her up again, CMD R, and a little globe starts spinning. Eventually, I am given the option to install OS X Yosemite. Ok, fine, better than nothing.... but then when it says select the disk you want, there are no options... just the external USB drive...

When I go to disk utility, I see “500.28 GB APPLE SSD...” with a little grey “disk0s2” beneath it.

What should I do now? I feel WAAAY over my head here...

Having a bunch of kernel panics is not normal. While it can be a software problem, it often is a hardware problem.

First, run Apple Diagnostics or Apple Hardware Test. If no errors are reported, start from Internet Recovery, create a new partition on your SSD, and reinstall the OS.