Macbook swaps external displays when lid closed or opened I have a Macbook Pro connected to two external displays via a docking station.  With the lid open, it will use all three, with the primary set to one of the external displays, let's say display 1.  If I close the lid, the internal display shuts off, which is great.  However display 2 now becomes primary, and all the windows on display 2 move to display 1 and vice versa.  I open the lid, and it switches back.  Not that big a deal just a mild annoyance, but I have not found any information about how to make it stop.
Catalina 10.15.6, MacBook Pro 15 inch 2018
Radeon Pro 560X 4GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

You need to set the display layout in each scenario. For example set the display arrangement when the macbook screen is opened and you should do it once again for when the laptop display is shut.
That should do the trick.


I'm prompted on every reboot for a password for a stale iCloud account I have had an iCloud account associated with a Gmail ID old@gmail.com. I then switched to another ID new@gmail.com, so I removed old@gmail.com from my iCloud account and entered new@gmail.com. This was an year or so back.

A few days back, I found an entry in the Keychain for old@gmail.com, so I deleted it. After that, I'm prompted one every reboot to enter the password for old@gmail.com:

I cancel it, but it comes up after every reboot. I tried entering my iCloud password, but it doesn't work.

How do I get this prompt to go away and never come back?

The application icon suggests the password is being requested by Messages.app.

Messages.app

Launch Messages.app and check the accounts listed in the preferences do not include or mention your stale @gmail.com account.

Internet Accounts

Look for legacy accounts in your Internet Accounts within System Preferences.app:

Preferences

Check your preferences for mentions of the old address using the Terminal.app command:

grep -r old@gmail\.com ~/Library/Preferences/*

If this matches a file, modify the following command to examine the file's contents:

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist > ~/Desktop/output.txt

In the example above, a new file called output.txt will appear on your desktop. This file can be opened with TextEdit.app.

This file may hint as to which application or tool has your old account listed.

If you find a matching preference, consider deleting or renaming it. The preferences will be lost but they should never contain critical information.

Remember to log out or restart after altering the preferences file.


Changing a startup disk using AppleScript I have tried using AppleScript to change my startup disk for Boot Camp and Mac. Previously I have tried using terminal (do shell script) but it seems that that option requires me to enter an administrative password.

So:

How do I make it such that I can retrieve the password? I can use keychains.
How do I program the AppleScript/use Terminal through AppleScript to:

go into System Preferences/launch it if it is not already open
go to the Startup Disk preference pane
set the bootdisk to Windows/Mac and have the option to shut down/reboot. (I would like to be able to have a single script to handle everything even if I am restarting into macOS, or shutting down and will use Windows later etc.)

Thanks in advance! (P.S. I have tried searching for some answers and there is a really good answer here over at StackOverflow but it doesn't seem to work on Sierra. Also the other responses I have found on SO and Ask Different don't work.)

The two sets of code I tried (first one using System Preferences, second using Terminal, both using AppleScript):

display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons ¬
    {"BOOTCAMP", "Macintosh HD"}
if button returned of the result = "BOOTCAMP" then
set bootVol to "BOOTCAMP" as text
else if button returned of the result = "Macintosh HD" then
    set bootVol to "Macintosh HD" as text
end if

do shell script "security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl \"Insert Password Here\" | awk '{print $2}'"
set myPass to (text 2 thru -2 of result) as text

do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/" & bootVol & ¬
    "\" -setBoot" user name "username" password myPass with administrator privileges

do shell script "shutdown -r now" user name "username" password myPass with administrator privileges

(Insert Password Here refers to the generic key. What I found:

when running the command in terminal without backslashes the command works and gives me the password assigned including the quotes like this "Password"

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    set the current pane to pane id "com.apple.preference.startupdisk"
    get the name of every anchor of pane id "com.apple.preference.startupdisk"
end tell

try
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences" to click button "BOOTCAMP Windows" of radio group 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of splitter group 1 of window 1
end try

try
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences" to click button "Restart..."
end try

I need to be able to unlock System Preferences, preferably using the same keychain password as I have mentioned in the first script. The second command tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences" to click button "Restart..." does not work.

In my environment the script works as expected. I used a different name for the generic key though: boot_key

The attributes of boot_key:

The password is self-evidently also klanomath's login password. security is always allowed to use the key!

To debug the Apple script enable "Show Log" with cmd3

The script:

display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons ¬
    {"BOOTCAMP", "Macintosh HD"}
if button returned of the result = "BOOTCAMP" then
    set bootVol to "BOOTCAMP" as text
else if button returned of the result = "Macintosh HD" then
    set bootVol to "Macintosh HD" as text
end if

do shell script "security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl \"boot_key\" | awk '{print $2}'"
set myPass to (text 2 thru -2 of result) as text

do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/" & bootVol & ¬
    "\" -setBoot" user name "klanomath" password myPass with administrator privileges

do shell script "echo \"shutdown -r now\"" user name "klanomath" password myPass with administrator privileges

will then reveal - after choosing "Macintosh HD" - in the "Replies" part:

tell application "Script Editor"
    display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons {"BOOTCAMP", "Macintosh HD"}
        --> {button returned:"Macintosh HD"}
end tell
tell current application
    do shell script "security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl \"boot_key\" | awk '{print $2}'"
        --> "\"Passw0rd\""
    do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/Macintosh HD\" -setBoot" user name "klanomath" password "Passw0rd" with administrator privileges
        --> ""
    do shell script "echo \"shutdown -r now\"" user name "klanomath" password "Passw0rd" with administrator privileges
        --> "shutdown -r now"
end tell
Result:
"shutdown -r now"

You may log various variables explicitly by adding log $variable lines (which is redundant with the "Replies" in some cases):

display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons ¬
    {"BOOTCAMP", "Macintosh HD"}
if button returned of the result = "BOOTCAMP" then
    set bootVol to "BOOTCAMP" as text
else if button returned of the result = "Macintosh HD" then
    set bootVol to "Macintosh HD" as text
end if
log bootVol

do shell script "security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl \"boot_key\" | awk '{print $2}'"
set myPass to (text 2 thru -2 of result) as text
log myPass

do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/" & bootVol & ¬
    "\" -setBoot" user name "klanomath" password myPass with administrator privileges
log bootVol
log myPass

do shell script "echo \"shutdown -r now\"" user name "klanomath" password myPass with administrator privileges
log myPass

which then reveals:

tell application "Script Editor"
    display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons {"BOOTCAMP", "Macintosh HD"}
        --> {button returned:"Macintosh HD"}
end tell
(*Macintosh HD*)
tell current application
    do shell script "security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl \"boot_key\" | awk '{print $2}'"
        --> "\"Passw0rd\""
    (*Passw0rd*)
    do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/Macintosh HD\" -setBoot" user name "klanomath" password "Passw0rd" with administrator privileges
        --> ""
    (*Macintosh HD*)
    (*Passw0rd*)
    do shell script "echo \"shutdown -r now\"" user name "klanomath" password "Passw0rd" with administrator privileges
        --> "shutdown -r now"
    (*Passw0rd*)
end tell

or as a screenshot:

Now you should be able to detect the error in your script or your environment.


Why is this bar appearing in Safari? Sometimes, when I try using a special character (⌥+U for ¨) a strange bar will appear at the bottom of my screen. This doesn't happen every time, just on and off for no apparent reason. I haven't changed any Safari settings or preferences since upgrading to Lion, and I'm using Safari 5.1.

Could anyone explain what this is and why it's appearing when I try using my special characters?

That looks like the front-end processor window for some non-Roman scripts. This gets pretty far into the weeds if you don't normally use them, but in case you're curious:

With a writing system like Japanese, you type using English characters to produce phonetic Japanese characters, and then convert those into ideograms. For the most part, this happens "inline", that is, right where the cursor is, wherever you'd be typing if you were typing in English. Back in the old days, however, it happened in a separate window (the FEP window), and once you had a chunk of text composed in that, you'd send it to the main window.

I use Japanese on my system. The FEP window still exists, and every once in a while it will pop up for a second—then the system seems to get its composure back and I go back to inline typing. I'm guessing that you're trying to produce a character that involves multiple keystrokes, like ü, and somehow that's invoking the FEP window. I can't say why it's happening or how to stop it, but in my experience it is harmless.


Sharing iCloud storage between family members Is there a way to share iCloud storage between family members?

I included my wife's iPhone into Family sharing, but I would like to have one storage bucket (20G) that would allow us both Apple ID accounts to backup more then default 5G per device. Is it possible?

Update 2017/2018: It appears Apple finally allows sharing iCloud storage between family members (see the newly accepted answer). Glad to hear it!

Original:

The correct answer is No, there is not.  Apple does not let you share iCloud Storage with family members, unfortunately.

Here's a forum link where this has been discussed:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6543858

You can share your account and password, but then the storage is yours and not really sharing with a sub-account. Each individual Apple ID gets their own paid/gifted/free storage quota and any one account can bump up their storage only and it doesn't affect any other AppleID storage capacity - family membership regardless.


Display formatting symbols (invisible characters) on webpages and text forms I am using various online tools for translation and proofreading, and I find that it would be very interesting to be able to display the most common formatting symbols in a browser.

(Spaces and non-breakable spaces are be very different and important, as is being able to count line breaks at a glance for example).

I believe that since they are encoded by different HTML codes, there should be a way to display them within a webpage, but couldn't find any way to do this no matter what browser I looked into.

Here's what the difference looks like in the HTML between non-breakable space and regular space:

jusqu'à 19&nbsp;heures

It seems that it would be so simple to program it into an app or as an add-on (replace regular space with the regular space symbol, replace   with non-breakable space symbol, etc), that I can't understand how there's almost nothing about such a feature online.

I don't know of any browsers that will show invisibles, but there are work-arounds. Since you are already "using various online tools for translation and proofreading," I assume you are also copy and pasting between the tools. The easiest solution would to just paste the text into a different text editor as an intermediate step. This should reveal tabs vs. spaces, and different types of line endings.

This will not show the difference between non-breaking spaces and spaces, though. You could view the source and search for "&nbsp;" but that will be hit or miss, because people aren't consistent.


mdls does not work on mounted sparse bundles mdls does not return anything when I run it on a mounted (originally encrypted) sparse bundle:
❯ ll ./test
.rw-r--r--@ 0 evar 14 Sep 18:34 ./test

❯ mdls ./test
./test: could not find ./test.

Trying mdutil to turn on the indexing:
❯ sudo mdutil -d /Volumes/sth
/System/Volumes/Data/Volumes/sth:
Error: unable to perform operation.  (-400)
    Error: unknown indexing state.

PS: I use mdls to extract the tags a file has. I'm open to using any other solution for doing so.

Using https://github.com/jdberry/tag works:
command tag --garrulous --list "$file" | gsed 1d


Opening emacs from TextMate I want to launch emacs from TextMate, I tried the method with OTC in here, but it would be great if I can learn other methods that I can launch emacs from TextMate.

You can make a Bundle with a Command that launches emacs.

Or

You can install the GITMate plugin, that adds Git badges and an Open With… menu in the drawer.


After market upgrade of the new MacPro (late 2013) CPU? I was thinking, anybody having there hands on a new MacPro (the late 2013), would it be possible -in time- to swap the CPU from a new MacPro?

Its the CPU soldered to the motherboard?

Looking forward for your thoughts.

While there is no teardown of the 2013 MacPro yet, digging into Intel's Ark DB might be useful.

For example the i7 processor used in the MacBook Pro Retina late 2013 is a 4750HQ registered as using the BGA "socket" (Ball grid array) which is synonym of soldered to the mainboard.

For the MacPro Apple tells us there is either a 3.7Ghz w/ 4cores or a 3.5GHz w/ 6cores or a 3.0GHz w/ 8-cores or a 2.7GHz w/ 12-cores. All the processors that have these specs in ark are listed to only using the FCLGA2011 socket (see here the Xeon E5 v2 spec sheet).

So to me it's pretty sure that yes the cpu is not soldered to the mainboard and is therefore upgradable.


Why do alternate web browsers want access to "Chrome Safe Storage" in my Keychain? When launching some alternate Mac web browsers such as Vivaldi, I get a message asking me:

Vivaldi wants to use your confidential information stored in “Chrome Safe Storage” in your keychain.
Do you want to allow access to this item?
[Always Allow]  [Deny]  [Allow]

What information is stored there?
What are the benefits of "Allow"?
What are the penalties for "Deny"?

There's probably a couple of things going on here:

Vivaldi - In terms of Vivaldi this is something that's been happening for at least a couple of years, although it's not always triggered. You may want to read What is the Chrome Safe Storage discussion at Vivaldi's forums.
More generally - There seems to be an issue recently where a number of apps are requesting access to Chrome Safe Storage. It's not just happening with browsers, but other apps too. I first noticed this in mid-July on an iMac running a 3rd party video downloader/converter. I'm not sure what changed, but some of these app developers have had to issue updates to remove this behaviour.

In terms of the info that's stored there - it's basically a secure location to store credentials such as passwords for sites you visit.

The advantages and disadvantages will differ depending on the app:

in the case of browsers it will mean things like having to manually log in to sites you want to visit. Obviously the benefit is not having to do this.
in the case of other apps (such as the video downloader/converter I mention above), the user whose iMac had this issue could only convert videos, but not download them. (Note: In their case an update fixed this).

Further reading

The following may be of interest:

Google Chrome wants to use your confidential information stored in...your keychain
Bug 178358 - A pop up message "Google Chrome wants to use your confidential information stored in your keychain"


Can MacBook Pro get slower after SSD is almost full? MBP 13, 2015 with 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM.

I have noticed, that after only some 20 GB of SSD was free my Safari browser was very slow.

RAM was used 4-6 GB from 8.

Is it general possible, that SSD can slow the MAC or it was some other reason?

While this is certainly not the only reason you may experiencing a slow down, a filled up SSD is one possible reason for slow downs.
The first reason connected to that is inherent to the filesystem macOS uses. If the filesystem is HFSplus, then the free space usually needs to be above a certain percentage to ensure smooth operation. If the free space falls below 25% things start to get complicated and the directory structure gets more and more inefficient. To name just one reason connected to the filesystem.
Why is it important to keep lots of freespace on OSX? What is the impact? and How much hard drive space to leave free?
Next it depends on whether you have trim enabled or not. Without trim it gets harder and harder to know which cells to use next as the wear leveling is designed to use each cell ideally equally compared to the others. On an original Apple SSD trim should be enabled.
Then all currently sold SSDs age and get indeed slower over time. This should not be that much noticeable, though.
More importantly, all the above combines to something like a perfect storm on all SSDs, as they fill up:

 Why Solid-State Drives Slow Down As You Fill Them Up
The benchmarks are clear: Solid-state drives slow down as you fill them up. Fill your solid-state drive to near-capacity and its write performance will decrease dramatically. The reason why lies in the way SSDs and NAND Flash storage work.
Filling the drive to capacity is one of the things you should never do with a solid-state drive. A nearly full solid-state drive will have much slower write operations, slowing down your computer.
Empty Blocks and Partially Filled Blocks
When you write a file to your solid-state drive, it looks for empty blocks and fills them. Writing to an empty block is the fastest possible write operation. That’s why new operating systems (Windows 7 and later) support the TRIM feature, which automatically deletes a file’s data from the solid-state drive as soon as you delete the file in your operating system. This works differently from magnetic hard drives, where bits of deleted files sit around on the hard drive.
They don’t sit around on a solid-state drive — TRIM ensures that the block is emptied so the SSD can quickly write new data to the empty block in the future. Writing over an already-written sector is just as fast as writing to an empty sector on a mechnical hard drive, but a solid-state drive must erase a block before writing to it.
NAND Flash memory writes data in 4 KB pages inside of 256 KB blocks. To add additional pages to a partially filled block, the solid-state drive must erase the entire block before writing data back to it.

As your solid-state drive fills up, fewer and fewer empty blocks are available. In their place are partially filled blocks. The solid-state drive can’t just write the new data to these partially filled blocks — that would erase the existing data. Instead of a simple write operation, the solid-state drive has to read the value of the block into its cache, modify the value with the new data, and then write it back. Bear in mind that writing a file will likely involve writing to many blocks, so this can introduce a significant amount of additional delay.
TRIM Doesn’t Consolidate Partially Filled Blocks
If you fill a drive to capacity or near capacity, it’s likely that you’ll end up with many partially filled blocks after you delete files. The TRIM command just directs a solid-state drive to remove file data when the file is deleted. It doesn’t force the drive to do any sort of cleanup operation.
In other words, fill a solid-state drive to capacity before deleting files and you’ll likely end up with many partially filled blocks. The drive won’t go out of its way to consolidate these partially-filled blocks into full blocks, freeing up empty blocks. The drive will still be full of partially filled blocks and write performance will be degraded.
Overprovisioning and Garbage Collection
To prevent consumers from filling up their solid-state drives and ending up with severely degraded performance, SSD manufacturers are going out of their way to counter this.
Consumer-grade solid-state drives often set aside about 7% of their total flash storage and make it unavailable to the user. This is known as “overprovisioning” — extra storage hardware is added to the drive but isn’t visible to the computer as available storage it can use. The spare area ensures that the drive can never become completely full — there will always be some spare capacity to help keep write performance stable.
Each solid-state drive’s controller has a garbage-collection algorithm to try to mitigate this problem. When the drive becomes full, it will look for partially-filled blocks and start to consolidate them, freeing up as many empty blocks as possible. Different solid-state drives run these operations at different times and thresholds — that depends on the drive’s controller.
Benchmark Evidence
Anandtech performed a variety of benchmarks with different drives to tease out the relationship between a solid-state drive’s spare area and the consistency of its write operation performance. When filling up an empty drive, they found high write performance very early in the process and a significant drop as the write operations continued to fill up the drive.

Setting aside more spare area on the drives helped the performance to remain consistent, as it ensured the drive should always have enough empty blocks ready.
They found that “minimum performance improves substantially once you hit 25% spare area for these [consumer] drives.” Their final recommendation was that you should “plan on using only about 75% of [your drive’s] capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity.”
If you have a solid-state drive, you should try to avoid using more than 75% of its capacity. Buy a larger drive with more storage than you need and you’ll ensure that you always have consistent write performance. Luckily, SSDs are gradually becoming much cheaper, so this isn’t as expensive as it once was.

Apart from these general considerations, if the perceived slow downs are exclusive to the browser, then the browser itself is the more likely culprit.
Using the same amount of free space on the SSD but with a fresh browser profile, and a freshly launched browser, things will likely look much better in most cases.
An easy test for this might be creating a new user, log into that and try it out. If things look better, it's time to cleanup your browser profile. Caches, cookies, icons, local storage, extensions, the lot…


Completely remove an application and its data on iOS 8 I have an application that is not working properly (I always get an error). I know other people who have the same app and for them no errors appears.

I thought that maybe there are temporary data stored and getting rid of them would solve the problem.

As suggested in this answer I tried to remove the app. I tried to delete it in two ways:
* By holding my finger on the icon and pressing the x.
* And from the menu Settings -> General -> Storage -> Manage Storage.

None of them fixed the problem and I believe that some app data are not removed. I think so because when I remove the app and reinstall it, as soon as I open it I'm already logged in.

Is there a different way of getting rid of app data?

No, there is no other ways of erasing app data. As a developer you can't save data out of your bundle, and when you delete an app on your device, all bundle content is deleted.

Regarding the logged issue, one posible answer may be that the app is identifying your device and saving your configuration on internet. To ensure that is your case, you can delete and reinstall the app, turn off wifi and celular data just after install and without open the app. Then open up and check if your info is there.


Prevent backup of iPhone on macOS Catalina I don't want to back up my iPhone in any way; not to my Mac, and not to iCloud. However, it seems the backup to macOS is forced whenever I connect my iPhone to my Mac, since I have opted out of iCloud backups. The dialogs are all grayed out and the process starts without my consent:

Is there any way to prevent this?

If you scroll down to the Options section, and uncheck "Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected", does that help?


Do alternatives to the default Twitter app use less data? I'm currently using the default Twitter app, and it's apparently used 13.9 GB since I purchased my phone in December. Do alternatives to the default Twitter app use less data, and if so, what are they?

Ideally, the app should not have a purchase price, but that isn't a hard requirement. I'm only using one Twitter account, not multiple accounts. I have an iPhone 5S.

I'm not aware of another app that uses less data but you can reduce your data usage on Twitter for iOS 10:

Settings -> Data -> Video auto play -> Use wifi only

This will stop videos from playing automatically. I suggest you reset your cellular statistics and see how much data you use now. If you want to go even further you could turn off Image previews on that same "Data" page.


Playlist on ipod nano 5th gen I have been trying to sync my playlists from itunes with my new ipod nano 5th gen, but the podcasts don't sync (they did sync on my old 2nd gen).  Any suggestions for how to fix this?

The music playlists sync as do the podcasts, but the playlists with only podcasts don't sync.  I sync automatically when plugging into my Macbook Pro with iTunes version 10.
I don't have any playlists that have both podcasts and non-podcasts.

You might need to provide more details (are you getting any error messages? Are you manually managing you iPod's music or automatically?) but here's the best place to look:

Connect your iPod to your computer, fire up iTunes and click your nano's icon on the left of the iTunes window. Look for the podcasts tab and make sure the sync Podcasts and 'automatically sync podcast' tick boxes are selected.

There's a really clear step-by-step here.


Why I am unable to switch bash to the one installed by homebrew? I'm trying to update bash to version 4.x. I did brew upgrade, then brew update, then brew install bash. I ran sudo bash -c "echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /etc/shells" and sudo bash -c "echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /private/etc/shells". I've tried symlinking /usr/local/Cellar/bash/4.3.32/bin/bash to /usr/local/bin/bash. I've closed Terminal.app. I've even logged out of Mac completely. Nothing I do has updated $BASH_VERSION to the right thing. bash --version does say the right thing, but I think I read somewhere that that is less reliable then echo $BASH_VERSION (maybe). Here's a summary of what I'm seeing:

I just need to know . . . what version of bash am I actually on? And if it's not 4.x, how do I reliably, definitively make it that?

I am on Yosemite FWIW.

Edit:

$PATH was too long for a comment. Here it is:

/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1/bin:/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1@global/bin:/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.1/bin:/usr/local/heroku/bin:/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/Cellar/grep/2.18/bin:/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/opt/gnu-tar/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/heroku/bin:/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/Cellar/grep/2.18/bin:/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/opt/gnu-tar/libexec/gnubin:~/activator:/Users/AndrewNichols/sonarqube-4.5/bin/macosx-universal-64:/Users/AndrewNichols/sonar-runner-2.4/bin:/Users/AndrewNichols/bin:~/activator:/Users/AndrewNichols/sonarqube-4.5/bin/macosx-universal-64:/Users/AndrewNichols/sonar-runner-2.4/bin:/Users/AndrewNichols/bin:/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/bin

Here's one split on colon, for readability:

'/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1/bin',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1@global/bin',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.1/bin',
'/usr/local/heroku/bin',
'/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin',
'/usr/local/Cellar/grep/2.18/bin',
'/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin',
'/usr/local/opt/gnu-tar/libexec/gnubin',
'/usr/local/bin',
'/usr/bin',
'/bin',
'/usr/sbin',
'/sbin',
'/opt/X11/bin',
'/usr/local/heroku/bin',
'/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin',
'/usr/local/Cellar/grep/2.18/bin',
'/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin',
'/usr/local/opt/gnu-tar/libexec/gnubin',
'~/activator',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/sonarqube-4.5/bin/macosx-universal-64',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/sonar-runner-2.4/bin',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/bin',
'~/activator',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/sonarqube-4.5/bin/macosx-universal-64',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/sonar-runner-2.4/bin',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/bin',
'/Users/AndrewNichols/.rvm/bin'

Some of the duplication there is because I have terminal set to run tmux on startup, so .bashrc gets sourced twice.

Okay, so apparently this was happening because tmux was holding on to the original bash version (even though I had exited tmux and reloaded it's config). tmux kill-server followed by relaunching tmux fixed it for me.


Blank/Black Screen on AppleTV when mirrored from iMac Using macOS Sierra 10.12.5, iMac 27-inch Mid 2011, AppleTV Model A1469 7.2.2 (8015)
Connected via WiFi

I have an Apple TV that used to work, however, now whenever I mirror or extend my display from my iMac it only shows a blank/black screen with audio.

I found this post, Apple TV Black screen (OS X Yosemite ) however, the solutions there did not work for me, and I am not sure how it worked for the OP.

I also found How to Fix an Apple TV with a Blank Screen and reset my Apple TV to factory settings, but still the same problem persists.

The audio works fine and I can switch between internal speakers and the AppleTV but there's no video on the AppleTV.

Any ideas at all are greatly appreciated...

I had a similar issue while using an Apple TV to connect a TV to my MacBook Pro (via LAN) and playing around with the different display modes as it suddenly stopped working.

Unfortunately, I don't remember any details any more but (after several failed attempts) I solved it by explicitly selecting Off in System Preferences/Display/Monitor/Dropdown Box Airport-Monitor (maybe detaching and reattaching the ethernet cable and/or turning off/on Apple TV were also involved) and reselecting Apple TV again.

This might be important, as deliberately selecting might have reset and/or stored parameters, which may explain why some people experience negative results.

Sorry, if this was too less of information.


Magsafe 1 Charger to Replace Magsafe 2 Charger My current Magsafe 2 charger broker, and I was wondering if my other Magsafe 1 charger can replace this Magsafe 2 charger?

It can, but you will need a Magsafe 1 to 2 adapter. Apple store


How to use the flag -p of BSD split? Manual

-p pattern
         The file is split whenever an input line matches pattern,
         which is interpreted as an extended regular expression.  The
         matching line will be the first line of the next output file.
         This option is incompatible with the -b and -l options.

Code

seq -w 1 1 10 | gsed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g' | split -p '060'

which makes a sequence from 1 to 10, removes empty lines to have a megastring and then splits at 060 into two files unsuccessfully giving split: invalid option -- 'p'.

Command seq -w 1 1 10 | awk -F'060' '{print "field1: "$1 "\nfield2: 060"$2}' in comment gives

  field1: 01 field2: 060 field1: 02 field2: 060 field1: 03 field2: 060 field1: 04 field2: 060 field1: 05 field2: 060 field1: 06 field2: 060 field1: 07 field2: 060 field1: 08 field2: 060 field1: 09 field2: 060 field1: 10 field2: 060

which is not what I want.
I want to split the file at the mark 060 to two files. You can include 060 to either file.

How can you use the flag -p in BSD Split in OSX?

The issue is caused by BSD split being later in your path than the GNU split (which doesn't support the -p option). If you do an echo $PATH you should see this - /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin will be before /usr/bin in the output.

To call BSD split directly, use the full path - pipe to /usr/bin/split instead of split.

Your original command will then become:

seq -w 1 1 10 | gsed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g' | split -p '060'


How to "merge" my Messages transcripts in OSX? EDIT:  Perhaps a better way to say all of the below, is this:  Is there a way to restore my Message (iChat) history onto my iMac, from my iCloud backup?  All of my iDevices have the complete chat history, so this seems reasonable.

Original post follows...

My system got into a very weird state today, so I decided the best option was to restore to a new HD from a Time Machine backup.  The last backup I had was from a month ago, but it restored fine.

Now I have my new HD with 1-month old data, and my old HD with current data that I want to recover parts of.

I found today's messages transcripts in ~/Library/Messages/Archive and I can view them just fine.  But even after I added today's folder to my live Archive folder on the boot drive, Messages will not see the current chats at all.

How can I "import" or "merge" or otherwise get my latest Messages transcripts to be blended in with the old ones?

How about restoring from your backup just the Messages Archive folder contents? (Open that folder in the Finder; then choose "Enter Time Machine" from the Time Machine menu in the Menu Bar; then select the most recent backup that has your full Messages history.) On restore, if anything presently in that folder has the same name, you'll be offered the choice to keep old/new/both.

Relatedly, check out this answer:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/117558/10581

As far as merging goes, there are two ways: in the Finder, or in the Terminal. Both of these would require restoring your Time Machine backup of ~/Library/Messages/Archive to another, temporary location.

The Finder method is done by holding the Option key while dragging things to a location containing other things of the same name(s). If the destination contains items with the same name(s) as what is being dragged, it'll offer an option to Merge. But if what is being dragged contains items that are older than those in the destination, no Merge option will be offered.

The Terminal method is to use a command-line tool called ditto. This is something like using the command cp (to copy items), but it will automatically merge if there are name conflicts.


Deleting a Mac Partition on a drive that has bootcamp? I have the following setup and am looking for a solution to delete a partition on the drive that has bootcamp. Below is my system setup -

Primary SSD: Contains mac OS Sierra. Bootable - I boot from this drive.

Secondary SSD (in place of Optical Drive): Windows 7 Bootable (100GB) + Empty Mac Partition (130 GB) + Another Empty Mac Partition (26 GB).

I would like to delete the partition that has 26GB and 1) merge it with my Windows 7 Partition OR 2) merge it with my 130GB Partition.

I have tried to merge it with my Windows 7 Partition which is when i created the 26GB partition using Disk Utility. I realized that made my Windows 7 partition unbootable before i could merge the 26GB GB to it. I was able to recover it by recreating the MBR, but now the 26GB partition still remains. Does anybody have any ideas as to how to add this to windows partition? Or if that involves reinstalling windows i could just let go all the hassle and add it back to my 130 GB partition. Either solution works for me. The key thing is I don't want to corrupt my boot config again.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

From within OSX you should be able to delete both the empty mac partitions, then create a new one, all using Disk Utility.

Here's a good guide: https://www.lifewire.com/resize-mac-disk-utility-volume-os-x-el-capital-later-3573395

Given that both partitions are empty there's no risk of data loss here. Just wipe them both out and create one large one.


In-app purchase or third party payment vendor for app subscription model for a physical device? We are developing an application which allows user to synchronize fitness band data, such as step count and sleep tracker with mobile device. we give the hardware (fitness band) free to users with premium subscriptions.

We also have several other premium features such as expert consultation, goals tracker etc. all this feature are available with premium subscription. We also have plans to sell few fitness products in the future.

My question is, whether apple allows us to integrate third party payment vendor or It is mandatory to stick with In-app purchase. I went through App Store Review Guidelines. and It does not seem clear enough on the policy with respect to our model.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#payments

Thank you.

late but may be useful for new people

for unlocking features/content you shall use in-app purchase
for products/consumables (that not implies the previous item) you can use external payments like Stripe
if you want to avoid in-app purchase, you can do the netflix way, give the app without register/guest, just login with an account previously purchased in the web or android device. But for this your app should have a known brand, otherwise no one will go to your web, make a purchase, come back to your app and login.

source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#payments


What do the "Energy Impact" numbers displayed in the new OSX 10.9 mean and how are they calculated? I love the new energy tab in OSX 10.9 mostly because I love data about my machine.  I'm curious how the energy impact is calculated, and what the number represents.

It seems clear from using the OS for a week that apps that are running more CUP/memory intense processes (for me: Mathematica and MATLAB) use more energy, or apps that can't take a nap (like listening to pandora in google chrome).

What isn't displayed are some of the bigger energy hogs on a portable: Display settings, WiFi, Bluetooth.  I'm wondering if some of this is wrapped into current apps (i.e., if i'm using safari or chrome full screen, will the display power be lumped into this app?) Do display preferences for the app change the energy being used (i.e., working in a text editor with a white-on black scheme instead of black-on white would theoretically use less energy to display).

If these are percents, they do not sum to 100, which is a little annoying.

I don't think you would want this numbers to be percentile and adding to 100 at any point because that would mean that your battery would die nearly instantaneously.

If I was to make an educated guess just to help you out a bit, your computer (specifically MacBooks) have their battery capacity measure in mAh or milli Ampere-hour typically somewhere in the ballpark of 6500 mAh or 6.5 Ampere-hour. I would hazard a guess (if the moderators allow it) that your are seeing the actual usage to the second of how many mA are going to the specific app per refresh (call time by the Activity Monitor daemon).

So if you were to add up the average power draw of your active apps and multiple that per second you would know how long your computer battery would last without power (roughly). Additionally you have to factor in what internal components are working hard (AirPort, Bluetooth, Display brightness, hard drive rotations) and you have yourself the estimated time until depletion.

Oh, and as to how they are calculated. There is a tiny integrated circuit on your main logic board called the SMC and it's job is to allocate DC current to the resource that needs it most. It keeps  track of energy usage and demands by the RAM, CPU, GPU, etc. so that it can help make sure your computer stays energy efficient.


MIcrosoft Outlook stopped working on Yosemite I ran Outlook for a day after updating to Yosemite, but after a reboot, it no longer works.

When I click on the Outlook icon, it bounces a few times but never runs. Looking in system.log (via Console.app), it complains about a call to gestaltSystemVersion from both Outlook and Microsoft Database Daemon. (see below)

I rebooted again, and I reinstalled Office for Mac 2011. My Outlook is version 14.4.5. I've found very little regarding this error searching Google, and most of it is from the beta stage for Yosemite.

Has anyone else seen this, or better, solved it?

Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB Microsoft Outlook[1664]: objc[1664]: Class OnClickLinkAction is implemented in both /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/OutlookLegacy.framework/Versions/14/OutlookLegacy and /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Outlook. One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB Microsoft Outlook[1664]: objc[1664]: Class ERExtraKeyedTableColumn is implemented in both /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/OutlookPaletteItems.framework/Versions/14/OutlookPaletteItems and /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Outlook. One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: WARNING: The Gestalt selector gestaltSystemVersion is returning 10.9.0 instead of 10.10.0.
    Use NSProcessInfo's operatingSystemVersion property to get correct system version number.
    Call location:
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 0 CarbonCore 0x9ba5e7e7 ___Gestalt_SystemVersion_block_invoke + 135
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 1 libdispatch.dylib 0x9021c130 _dispatch_client_callout + 50
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 2 libdispatch.dylib 0x9021c0b5 dispatch_once_f + 251
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 3 libdispatch.dylib 0x9021d0d8 dispatch_once + 31
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 4 CarbonCore 0x9b9f0fb8 _Gestalt_SystemVersion + 1050
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 5 CarbonCore 0x9b9f0b69 Gestalt + 150
Nov 4 08:42:15 JLGPB.local Microsoft Outlook[1664]: 6 OutlookCore 0x0180563b _ZN6carbon22HasSnowLeopardOrBetterEv + 45
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: WARNING: The Gestalt selector gestaltSystemVersion is returning 10.9.0 instead of 10.10.0.
    Use NSProcessInfo's operatingSystemVersion property to get correct system version number.
    Call location:
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 0 CarbonCore 0x9ba5e7e7 ___Gestalt_SystemVersion_block_invoke + 135
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 1 libdispatch.dylib 0x9021c0b5 dispatch_once_f + 251
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 2 libdispatch.dylib 0x9021d0d8 dispatch_once + 31
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 3 CarbonCore 0x9b9f0fb8 _Gestalt_SystemVersion + 1050
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 4 CarbonCore 0x9b9f0b69 Gestalt + 150
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 5 MicrosoftComponentPlugin 0x0035f3be McpInitLibrary_ + 505
Nov 4 08:42:16 JLGPB.local Microsoft Database Daemon[1666]: 6 MicrosoftComponentPlugin 0x0035f1ee McpInitLibrary_ + 41

After to Alistair's comment, I did some more general googling. I found some suggestions that the best solution was to rebuild the identity, so that's what I did:

go to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data
make a "backup folder"
drag the contents of ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011
Identities into the backup folder
relaunch Outlook and configure
as if it's a fresh install.

This has things working again.


Macbook pro wont update format or shut down and hangs everytime I have mid-2015 MacBook Pro.  My Mac first started to hang and a round mouse cursor with colours would appear.  The only thing I could do is to force it to shut down and restart.

I tried to fix this many different ways:

Cmd+R didn't work.
Disk format would freeze at “checking mount status”.
Internet recovery would not work.
Cmd+Option+P+R didn't fix it.
I tried fsck_apfs
Googled the problem and tried many other solutions but nothing fixed it.

My MBP runs well sometime and sometimes it freezes and I can't continue, so it's an intermittent problem. What else can I do to troubleshoot this problem?

Even if you have an SSD MacBook Pro, I would immediately make a backup at the first signs of stalling. It’s almost always software and the fastest way to test that is to reboot to recovery, erase your Mac and then install a clean, new OS from internet. You will know immediately that the OS is clean and fast and then can move files back with Migration Assistant.

You need to trust your backup / restore though. You can also mess around with trying to eliminate things like user settings by making a new user account - see if it freezes, uninstall all old kernel extension and intrusive apps like AntiVirus or other things like Adobe that are heavy handed, but that takes a lot of time and most people have dozens to a hundred apps to triage that way. Much more efficient to just test a new user account, reboot and erase in my experience.

Also, it could be the storage failing, which also means it’s much better to get your backup solid - so good you know you can use it. All the time you spend triaging when hardware is failing, means you lose time to get your backup complete.


Can't click with trackpad or mouse (OS X 10.9, MacBook Pro) I have a new(ish) MacBook Pro running OS X 10.9. When it boots up to the login screen it will let me move the cursor around, but it won't recognize click events.

I thought it was the trackpad, so I connected a wired mouse, and the symptoms persist.

After a little searching online I found that MacBook Pro owners have been having this same issue, and that Apple recommends closing the lid for 60 seconds, which causes some reset.

This has also worked for me, however, a few minutes into working, the cursor will stop accepting click events (even though I can still move it).

I can't keep closing and opening my lid every few minutes. Anyone got any ideas?

One of the most common causes of this is a magic mouse turned on in your laptop bag or somewhere similar.

Turning off bluetooth will ensure no remote button is being held down.


MacBook Pro unable to communicate with Apple Watch Apple Watch won't unlock MacBook Pro

Up until yesterday, my MacBook Pro worked just fine with my Apple Watch - I walk up, touch the keyboard or trackpad, Mac unlocks and I get to work. No worries! Yesterday something changed and now my watch won’t unlock my laptop.

I’ve tried everything in the Apple Support post, including repairing my phone/watch, re-establishing two-factor authentication (2FA), and rebooting my laptop, iPhone, and watch. All to no avail. I tried the @Morwen suggestion with Messages because there was a gap in my message history, but that didn't do it.

When I try to enable my watch, I get the error message shown below (albeit after about 6 or 7 minutes later, not quickly like the gif image). My watch, iPhone, and MacBook are all signed in and communicating with Apple.

The only thing I can think of that might play into this is that I was setting up a personal VPN on my home router last night, but I’ve turned that off as part of my troubleshooting (and couldn’t replicate the issue).

Digging a little further, I found this message (repeatedly since yesterday) in my Console logs. It looks like I have two permissions conflicting, but I can't tell which is which, nor where to go to change one of them...

  Oct 21 02:17:54 Johns-MBP
  com.apple.preference.security.remoteservice[790]: objc[790]: Class
  AWDSecurityPrefAutoUnlockSetup is implemented in both
  /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Security.prefPane/Contents/XPCServices/com.apple.preference.security.remoteservice.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.preference.security.remoteservice
  (0x10d6018e0) and
  /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Security.prefPane/Contents/MacOS/Security
  (0x10fd0b210). One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.

Environment includes:

2017 15" MacBook Pro with Mojave (updated)
Apple Watch Series 3 with Cellular (updated)

I had a similar issue when I updated to Mojave.  These steps solved my problem:

Turn off bluetooth on the Mac
Open Finder and navigate to ~/Library/Preferences
Delete the file com.apple.bluetooth.plist
Turn bluetooth back on
If Allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac is off, check the box to turn it on
Test if your Watch unlocks the Mac


Hide application menu bar How can I hide the Menu Bar? I am on mac Osx moutain Lion (10.8)

Yes, one can full-screen an app, but it does not solve my problem. Here are 2 scenarios to explain my problem:

Scenario 1:

I am running macvim in one space and Chrome in another. Chrome by default 'merges' it window top bar with the tabs, but macvim does not. So, on my macvim I can see both the menu bar and the window's top bar. While chrome's window is indeed useful (It contains tabs..), macvim's top bar is useless. All the info is in the powerline I'm using.

Scenario 2:

I have 2 displays, full-screen apps appear only on one screen and there is no way to have another app on the other screen (Unless if I missed that!). So I'd rather have, again, macvim on the first big display and chrome on the small one.  But then again, macvim's window topbar is here, taking useless space.

I hope I made the point clearer!

You can make the menu bar of an application hide automatically by adding this to the Info.plist:

<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
<integer>4</integer>

Windows can't be moved over the freed up space though.

If the application is signed, modifying the Info.plist invalidates the code signature. It also makes sandboxed applications like TextEdit and Chess crash on launch.


Finder window file view header looks odd - fix? I think I set this up some time ago and it looks like a search or something but I want it to just be like my apps folder where I can sort. My mistake but very unintuitive how to remove this:

and make it look like this:

How do I remove thhat so it works like my applications folder?

Click on the "arrange" button on your Finder toolbar, then choose "none".  I agree that this is quite unintuitive.


Is it possible to install siri on iphone 3gs? I have an iPhone 3GS, and I want to know if it is possible to install Siri on it.

It is not possible to install Siri. The iPhone 4S is the only iPhone that includes this system-wide functionality. You may have read about the Siri app, which is what the Siri team originally developed before their company was acquired by Apple. This app was available for older iPhohe models. However, when the iPhone 4S was released, the Siri app was discontinued. Hope this helps.


How can I simply and sustainably remove Chess from my macBook Air, Mojave? I have a list of applications I was interested in possibly removing as long as the OS does not need them to function.

For starters I want to remove Chess and Stocks as I never use them.  However when I right click on them on Finder, there is not option to delete.

I can't imaging that Chess is integral to the OS working so how can I delete it?

I need it deleted it in such a way that when my computer automatically updates it does not show up again.

Thanks.

Tricky to keep them from coming back.. I would create a LaunchAgent to monitor the path(s) to the apps, & include a "sudo rm -r /path/to/app" command to delete them.

https://www.macissues.com/2015/02/02/how-to-use-launchagents-to-monitor-folder-contents-in-os-x/

You would likely have to keep SIP disabled (but even this can be re-enabled through OS updates!)


Rsync exclude-from not working I have created a rsync script which has been working fine until I made recent modifications adding exclude-from clause to it.

When running the script it returns the following error:

  rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at
  /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-42/rsync/exclude.c(1005) [client=2.6.9]

The bash script is as follows:

echo "Starting sync..."
rsync -vrtL --delete --exclude-from 'sync-music.exclude.txt' ~/Music/ 'remote:/Music/'

The sync-music.exclude.txt file consists of this...

*.ipa
.DS_store
Cache/*

EDIT:
I have noticed that it works when I am in the CD'd into the folder where the bash and exclude files reside. It must be something to do with the the paths.
I have tried adding the path in front of sync-music.exclude.txt but that has not fixed the issue.

I encountered a similar problem.

If you use full paths it should work (note using ~ does not appear to work).

I found comment in a Ubuntu book "scp assumes that all paths are relative to the home directory of the user unless a full path is given". The same seems to apply to rsync


How does one type circumflexes in El Capitan? After updating to El Capitan I discovered that I was no longer able to type circumflexes. Before I was able to enable the "International Extended" keyboard in settings. Now it seems to be replaced with "ABC Extended", which does not permit me to type circumflexes in the way that I was used to. How can I input circumflexes in El Capitan?

ABC Extended behavior has not changed from that of US Extended, you type circumflex via option 6 and then the base character.  Or the base character then option shift 6.


Change Mac OS X Wireless Card Country Code I have problem connecting to a wireless router using Mac OS X which is on channel 13. This is because there is some other router nearby which is broadcasting the US country code. The only way around this i have found so far, is to each time go to the router and restart the computer.

I have asked google and it seems to be a mixture of people who think that it is setting the locale changes it, or that it is fixed in the router firmware. Both i have shown to be wrong. man ifconfig also has not been too enlightening.

Does anyone know of another way to force the card to use a different country Code or channels?
I would rather not change to another channel, as there is alot of interference near by (shown with KisMAC).

Thanks

Edits

Found

  /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport

Which appears to allow for an arbitary channel to be set on the card, but not county code. This seems to have no effect.

802.11d is the protocol that wireless access points use to broadcast (among other things) the regulatory domain (i.e. country codes) in which it is supposed to be operating. It seems that there may be no clear rule for what to do when various equipment is broadcasting conflicting regulatory domain information.

The ideal solution would be to disable/replace/reconfigure the equipment that is broadcasting the incorrect information.

I found an (oldish) Apple Discussions thread that indicates that indicates that a Mac’s AirPort hardware will use the first country code it hears after powering on or waking from sleep. Later postings in the thread (on the second page) indicate that it is sufficient to just power off/on the AirPort hardware itself and not the whole system. A couple of people reported success using a script to repeatedly turn the AirPort interface off and on (using networksetup) until it happened to acquire the desired state (as reported by system_profiler).

Based on TA25972, it seems that older equipment (presumably models that do not listen for 802.11d information) may not even be able to switch “country codes”.


need to script connection to telnet and send commands to remote device with no user input Ok I need some help making a script that will connect to a server and send 2 commands

Ideally I would have telnet 192.168.2.230 9993

and once it logs in (no user name or password required - the server is air gapped)

once the connection is created the script would send the following commands:

remote: enable: true

record: true

So far I can only get it to connect to the remote device - any help is greatly appreciated!!

Expect

Mac OS X includes the command line tool expect:

  expect - programmed dialogue with interactive programs

expect is ideal for scripted interactions with other tools, like telnet.

The following questions discuss how to use expect and telnet together:

How to automate telnet session using Expect?
expect script to automate telnet login
Shell script successful telnet login, how to issue commands after that?

Connect and Send

The following shell script may be enough for your two commands:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn telnet 192.168.2.230 9993
send "remote: enable: true\n"
send "record: true\n"

There are a number of ways to use the above script. One is to save the script as a text file called myscript.command; opening the file will then launch Terminal.app and run the script.

Alternatively, the script could be wrapped in an Automator action or AppleScript.


How to fix Run-time error 53 every time I open a document in Word or a worksheet in Excel on Big Sur? Since I installed macOS Big Sur, I have run into this problem every time I opened a document using Word or a worksheet using Excel or a slide show in PowerPoint:

Run-time error '53':
File not found: Library/Application
Support/Adobe/MACPDFM/MacPDFM.framework/Versions/A/MacPDFM

This is very annoying, as I have to dismiss this window up to four times in a row every time I open a document on these Microsoft Office applications. I searched everywhere, including the official Microsoft website, macOS tip websites, but the information was incomplete, obsolete and did not offer a practical solution.
Does anyone know how to fix this really annoying problem?

After looking really hard for a solution, I finally found in a very obscure page the answer, which is quite simple and works with the latest Microsoft Word on Big Sur:

Close all Office applications
Go to /Users/your-user-name-here/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Startup/Word
Remove linkCreation.dotm
Restart Word and problem solved

Unfortunately that does not solve the problem for PowerPoint or Excel because if I remove SaveAsAdobePDF.ppam inside the PowerPoint folder or the SaveAsAdobePDF.xlam inside the Excel folder will trigger another error on application launch.
To fix these errors, you need to:

Remove the SaveAsAdobePDF.ppam and SaveAsAdobePDF.xlam from the PowerPoint and Excel folders next to the Word folder.
Launch Excel and PowerPoint and go to the menu Tools -> Excel Add-ins... and Tools -> PowerPoint Add-ins..., respectively, and remove the Save as Adobe PDF add-in, by unckecking it and removing it with the "-" button and then click OK.
Restart Excel and PowerPoint and the problem should go away. If not, try several times to remove those options from the Tools menu until the problem goes away. I had to repeat this procedure in PowerPoint until this got fixed.


Cannot install bootcamp because of disk error, but disk utility says it's fine? I'm trying to partition for bootcamp but it fails because of that error. I ran disk utility's first aid multiple times. And it's always fine.

What do I do?

Edit:

My mac is the newest imac from this year. The windows I'm trying to install is Windows 10 Pro x64.

You are probably asking the wrong question. If I were you, I would be asking about the 296.6 GB of free space which appears in your Logical Volume group. If you can get most of this free space added to you Logical Volume, the bootcamp install would probably work.

According to the accepted answer to How do I recover free space from my logical volume group?, you would probably be better off recreating the Fusion Drive, instead of attempting a repair.


15" Macbook Pro: Radeon 555 or Radeon 560? How different is Radeon 555 and Radeon 560 in the 15-inch Macbook Pro 2017? Are there any notable differences between the two?

Introduction
I think we need to agree that both of these graphics cards are the best they have ever been in a MacBook Pro. Naturally, the type of card you require is heavily dependent on the work you plan to do with the MacBook Pro (you didn't mention it). If you don't yet own one of the devices and are simply doing some research before you buy (as one should), you may find the next generation (releasing around June 2018) may be a better alternative - ahh, when will the time ever be right!?

Notable Differences

The AMD Radeon Pro 560 has twice the memory of the AMD Radeon Pro 555 (4GB vs 2GB respectively).
The AMD Radeon Pro 560 has about 10% greater Clock Speed than its rival (925 MHz vs 850 MHz respectively).
The AMD Radeon Pro 560 has around 25% lower thermal design power (TDP) (75W vs 100W respectively, lower is better).

Reports
There are GPU benchmarking sites like GPUBoss and Notebook Check if you are interested in further reads. Otherwise the difference is next to none.


File not found: file is in ~/Library but not on 'This Mac' A program i run cannot find a specific file. The file is right there where it is supposed to be. When i use Finder to locate it:

it is found if i tell it to look in ~/Library
it cannot be found when i tell it to look in 'This Mac'

Surely ~/Library is on 'This Mac', so everything in it is also on 'This Mac'?

It is not a matter of user rights, the file cannot be found looking in /Users/myname. I have used chmod to set the rights: -rwxr-xr-x
Other files of this type, at the same location are found without a problem. Is there some invisible OSX setting i am missing?

The program is latex, the file is a .bst file, located in its own directory in the ~/Libraray/texmf/tex/latex/ directory. I'm still running OSX 10.5.8.

Spotlight is intended to let users find their own files; since the Library folder normally contains files the user doesn't need to (and indeed shouldn't) access manually, it's left out of the search results (along with other "system files"). You can find files in it by either searching it explicitly (as you mention), or by telling spotlight to include system files in its results (see Apple's KB article #HT4355 -- note that it only mentions OS X 10.6, but the same procedure works in 10.7 and 10.8 as well).


How do I change the name of an album in Photos on my Mac How do I change the name of an album in Photos my Mac?

Select name of album in the sidebar
Click on the name again to edit
Or: click on album name at the top of the pictures to edit


OS X Internet Recovery Globe stuck I've deleted my recovery disk;  or you can say more accurately, I've completely erased, by mistake, my SSD.

Now, my only option is to recover via Internet, but the globe on Internet recovery keeps on spinning and stuck at estimated time at 2:53.  The Internet is working fine, all other websites and download working fine, but the globe is stuck.

Please help, what should I do? I can't log in, I just see a blinking folder and Command R takes me directly to Internet recovery!

Model is Macbook Pro Mid 2014

Without a recovery partition and (for whatever reason) your Internet Recovery just won't work, you are down to about 3 options to get OS X installed:
Option 1:  Install (or Recovery) at an Apple Store
If you are close to an Apple Store you can go into one and download the latest OS (if you have a working Mac) or run Internet Recovery using the Apple Network.
Note: Internet Recovery will only install the last version you had, it won't upgrade.  For example, if you had Mavericks before and want to go to El Capitan, you will have to recover to Mavericks then download the El Capitan Installer.
Option 2:  Download and Make a USB Installer
This involves using another Mac from a friend, family member or acquaintance.   You will need an 8GB flash drive.  There are many guides on how to create the USB installer so I won't belabor that point here, but the command you will need to execute in Terminal is as follows:
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/<USB Volume> --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app --nointeraction

Where <USB Volume> is the name of your USB Flash Drive (don't use spaces - it makes it easier)
After about 10 minutes you will have a USB Flash drive to install OS X on your Mac.
Option 3:  Acquire a premade USB Drive
This is not an official recommendation but sometimes when you are in a pinch and Options 1 and 2 are simply not feasible, it's nice to know that there's another option.  You can find these on eBay.  I have used this option  before when I had to restore a Macbook, Internet speed was slightly above dial up and the closest Apple store was in the next State.
Just make sure you you deal with a reputable US based seller with good feedback.  If the seller is too new or feedback to low, look elsewhere even if the price is good.


Can you override app sandboxing, force app to use working directory? I'm trying to configure asymptote on my mac, which is a mathematical graphing language for LaTeX. The program is a Unix command line utility. According to the configuring instructions at http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/doc/Configuring.html, you can set the PDF reader for automatic opening with this utility. When I set pdfviewer="/Applications/Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview"; (which is the path for the command line executable for Preview.app), then rending a graphic with asymptote results in this error:

2012-10-10 10:15:08.758 Preview[45884:707] PVPDFPageContainer initWithURL:out.pdf -- file://localhost/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/ failed, error = Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The file “out.pdf” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file." UserInfo=0x7f99f2c6d590 {NSFilePath=/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/out.pdf, NSUnderlyingError=0x7f99f2c6d500 "The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory"}

Clearly Preview is attempting to open the document by filename in its local sandbox directory ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/. Can I somehow override this behavior, and force Preview to look for the file in the process's working directory?

Create a shell script - ie asympdf.sh with the following content:

/Applications/Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview `readlink -f $1`

If you put that script somewhere, ie near to the asymptote binaries, you can then set the pdfviewer setting to point to that script instead.


Mavericks QuickTime player not recording computer audio I was recording the screen on my computer that I had updated to Mavericks, and when I replayed the video, there was no audio except the audio captured by my mic.
The old Qucktime worked fine, but now it's not.

I was able to do this by going to Utilities>Audio Midi Setup

Click the + sign to add a new device, choose Create Aggregate Device and click both the Built-In Microphone and Built-In Output checkboxes. Then right click the Aggregate device you just created and choose. Use this for Sound Input. Now this device will appear as in input choice in QuickTime Player X.

Now open QuickTime Player X, choose New Screen Recording and click the drop down arrow. You will now see Aggregate Device as a Mic choice.


RAID Disk Space not Recovering I have a RAID disk where I keep my virtual machines.

Recently I created and deleted a few and noticed that the space taken up was not being reclaimed.

I tried deleting the .Trashes directory via Terminal but nothing changed.

Has anyone experienced this?  I don't want to have to transfer 1.5 TB of data to another disk and back just to fix this.

Update: I tried Verify and Repair disk in Disk Utility which did not fix it.  Here is the log FYI.

Verifying volume “RAID”
Verifying file system.
Using live mode.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking volume bitmap.The volume RAID appears to be OK.File system check exit code is 0.

Verify and Repair volume “RAID”
Repairing file system.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume RAID appears to be OK.
File system check exit code is 0.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

I had the same situation two days ago, not on a RAID although I doubt that matters, and I ran Verify Disk in Disk Utility on the drive and it said "Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks" so I then ran Repair Disk and it cleaned it up and my free space was what it should have been after emptying the Trash and it wasn't at the time.

Note: I ran Verify Disk and Repair Disk in Disk Utility and was backed up before doing so.  As a general rule one should always have everything continually backed up and especially before performing Disk Level Operations of this nature, even thought I've never yet had a disk messed up doing so.


How to recover precious photos in iCloud from stolen iphone? My iPhone was lost or stolen and I have lost all  my children's photos and need  to know how to get into my iCloud account by using a kindle, tablet or a windows phone.

If you have Windows Phone 8 you can set up iTunes on your phone and try to access your photos on iCloud.

It might not work but it is worth trying.

Follow instructions here how to:

Then try this to get the Photos moved over to the sky-drive.

iCloud Photostream sync with Windows Phone.

There are some good instructions here, but I can not verify for you since I do not have Windows 8 Phone.


Does the macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) installer install a Recovery Parition? Just upgraded from 10.12.6 to 10.13.3. Everything seemed to go smoothly... except I see I have no Recovery Partition any more - holding down Option at startup just gets me my macOS and BootCamp boot options. Here is the results of mount:

~>mount
/dev/disk1s1 on / (apfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s4 on /private/var/vm (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse)
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Bootcamp (ntfs, local, read-only, noowners)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

So is no Recovery Partition expected with 10.13?

With macOS 10.13 (High Sierra), the recovery partition is moved to inside an APFS container. This container houses your main OS partition (what used to be HFS+ in macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and older) and the recovery partition, as well as a swap partition called VM (Virtual Memory) and a Preboot partition. You can see these by running the command diskutil list:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         499.9 GB

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +499.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume macOS                   496.0 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 21.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.8 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk1s4

You can see it listed here as disk1s3. None of the partitions in the container are automounted other than disk1s1, though you still can mount them (taking the recovery partition as an example) by running diskutil mount disk1s3.

The recovery partition is still accessed the same way as before at startup (holding ⌘R at the startup chime).


Can I safely delete a “.keychain” file from Keychains when there is a corresponding “.keychain-db” file? In the folder “Keychains” in my Library folder (~/Library/Keychains), I have a file “login.keychain” and a file “login.keychain-db”. Is the file “login.keychain” still being used in macOS Sierra, or is it safe to delete it?

I have a few other keychains with pairs of these files “name.keychain” and “name.keychain-db”. But when I create a new keychain in Keychain Access, there’s only a file “name.keychain-db”. Based on this and the modification times of the files, I’m guessing Sierra only uses the new files (“name.keychain-db”), but that the upgrade left the old files (“name.keychain”) in place as a backup? So it should be safe to remove the old files?

Yes, the .keychain files are the old format.

.keychain-db is the new format.

Modify a key in Keychain access and observe the modification dates. I deleted those files years ago without issue.


locate is not finding a zip file that exists The com.apple.locate.plist daemon is running, and I've updated the database using sudo /usr/libexec/locate.update, but the locate command is still not finding a .zip named OldPhoneCamera.zip in /Users/CAJ/Pictures/.

I use this command locate -i OldPhoneCamera, and it returns nothing. The directory is not hidden, and the file has been on the system for 6 months. The database has been updated multiple times since then.

I can use find successfully, find / -name OldPhone*, but I prefer using locate because find takes a long time. Why is locate not finding OldPhoneCamera.zip, and can that be fixed?

The shell script /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb is run by the non-privileged user nobody. Here's the snip it:

if [ "$(id -u)" = "0" ]; then
rc=0
export FCODES=`sudo -u nobody mktemp -t updatedb`
chown nobody $FCODES
tmpdb=`su -fm nobody -c "$0"` || rc=1
if [ $rc = 0 ]; then
    install -m 0444 -o nobody -g wheel $FCODES /var/db/locate.database
fi
rm $FCODES
exit $rc
fi

The script will barely touch anything within your home folder.


Reference book or websites on how Mac OS works I'm looking for a good book or other set of reference materials on how MacOS works.  I'm not concerned with the GUI tools or advanced Finder tips or things like that.  Rather, I'm interested in the UNIX underpinnings.

I primarily used Linux for several years and still have a few Linux machines around, and much of my Mac use is in a Terminal.  But I have a basic grip on how a Linux machine works that I just don't have for a Mac.  For instance I know most Linux distributions use systemd, so I can poke around in that documentation.  I know the Mac uses launchd.  What would be nice is a book that explains these sort of technologies.  Other examples would be how application bundles work, or how kexts work.

The rough equivalent of "How Linux Works" from No Starch Press for the Mac would be good, but I can't find any books like that.  Even some decent webpages would be good - I can't find any on Apple's site.  Right now the best I can do is rummage around through the manpages on my system.

https://developer.apple.com has a lot of information, basic registration is free.
The books from http://newosxbook.com/index.php have more technical content than most macOS users/developers need in their lifetime.

Besides that you should be able find a lot of information by just googling for "macos launchd getting started" and similar search terms. For specific questions about problems in getting something done there is also always this site here :-)


Can I virtualize Lion on Apple hardware running Linux without violating the EULA? I have a MacBook Pro and have been single-booting Linux on it for some time. I now need to do some iOS development for work, so I need access to OS X in some form.

I could dual-boot or virtualize Linux on OS X, but I'd really much rather keep Linux as my main OS and not have to reboot to start doing iOS work.

I've read that Lion's license explicitly allows virtualizing on Apple hardware.

Does that permission extend to virtualizing within Linux?

If yes, how would I go about setting that up?

If it matters, my laptop shipped with a physical copy of OS X Snow Leopard. I will not do anything that violates the Apple EULA so please do not suggest anything just because I might be able to get away with it.

Unfortunately you cannot virtualize OS X Lion under any other OS except OS X Lion. It's not enough that it's running on Apple hardware.

The OS X Lion EULA says:

  Section 2, Sub-Section B:

  (iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or
  instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system
  environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already
  running the Apple Software.

Bolding is mine and it highlights the relevant passage that prevents you from virtualizing OS X on Apple hardware where the host OS is not also OS X.


How can I increase the font size in the Help system? If I open the Help for an application, the size of the font is (for me) quite small. Is there any way to increase the size of the font?
By "Help", I mean the help system/viewer that is presented after pressing ⌘ command? or selecting the help option from the Help menu bar item in many applications. Once the Help system opens a window and text is visible, pressing ⌘ command+ does not have an effect. I could not find any obviously-relevant options in the macOS System Preferences, though I may have missed something.
Update 2020-12-18: I was wrong – I was actually pressing ⌘ command=, not ⌘ command+, and that's why it didn't work. In one of the comments, I explain what led to this.

Click into the text area and just press ⌘ Command +


Arrow sign appearing in top bar after upgrading to OS X El Capitan After upgrading my Mac's OS to OS X El Capitan, an arrow sign appearing in top bar, Nothing happens whenever I click on this icon.

Yes, it's VMWare Fusion. If you launch VMWare and go to Preferences, you can disable that menu item.


Tech consideration for ios application I am thinking about publishing an application for a client,
We are considering two approaches

An application which basically is a wrapper for a responsive website
A native application

I came across this article:
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality
stating that apple will reject my application.
If i try to upload my application will it be rejected?

The app will not be rejected if it provides functionality outside the scope of the standard website.
Apple only rejects apps which are specifically just wrappers on a site.
Example, I wrote an app that was basically a wrapper on a site, they rejected it, I added the ability in a second tab to draw and post the pic to the site (a novel feature), they approved it.


How do I troubleshoot Siri? I just got my 4S yesterday (thanks AT&T for the early upgrade date!).  I've noticed two problems with Siri and I don't know any good methods to troubleshoot.

1) When I hold the phone up to my head from the home screen, Siri starts, beeps and etc.  When my wife holds the phone to her head, nothing happens.

2) I've tried to set "geofenced" reminders -- "When I leave here, remind me..." sort of stuff.  I've not yet actually gotten the reminder to trigger, even though Siri told me it was set.

I'm sure I'll run into further Siri issues as it becomes a bigger part of my life.

What I'm asking for is not specific answers to the problems listed above (though they would be cool).  I'm trying to get a better feel for generalize Siri troubleshooting techniques.

There isn't a lot you can do about holding it up to your wife's head, perhaps it isn't close enough. You will notice that if you try to fool the phone by holding it up to your had or arm siri will not activate.

As for the geofenced reminders, you need to have location services turned on for reminders.

You will also need to set the address in your contacts, so add your home and work address to your contact.

For troubleshooting you will really need to look into the apps you are trying to control from Siri, as Siri itself is not an app, it is part of iOS. It is each individual app that will need to be looked at when troubleshooting.

Remember that Siri is still in beta and you can expect some teething problems with it.


What is the monitor-like icon on Remote App screen? There is a monitor/display like icon at the bottom of the Now Playing screen of the Remote app on iPad. It's just to the right of the genius icon. What is it?

That icon activates the visualiser in iTunes


How do I post a screenshot from Mac OS X Lion on askdifferent? How do I take a screenshot?  On the other Mac I was using, grab was installed, but paying for screenshots seems excessive.

System Software Overview:

  System Version:   Mac OS X 10.7.5 (11G63)
  Kernel Version:   Darwin 11.4.2
  Boot Volume:  Untitled
  Boot Mode:    Normal
  Computer Name:    a MacBook
  User Name:    thufir (thufir)
  Secure Virtual Memory:    Enabled
  64-bit Kernel and Extensions: No
  Time since boot:  53 minutes

More specifically, how do I post that screenshot here on askdifferent?

I see that you can take a screenshot...but...where is it saved?

To take a screenshot of the full screen hit cmdshift3.
To take a screenshot of a part of the screen hit cmdshift4. You'll get a crosshair, click the mouse button to define the first corner, hold the button, move the cursor and then release it to define the transverse corner. The grey overlay spanning between the two corners will be the screenshot.
To take a screenshot of a special window hit cmdshift4 then the spacebar and choose the window with a symbolic camera.

The default location for saved screenshots taken this way is on the Desktop.

To change the default location enter:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /path/;killall SystemUIServer

Example:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/

Hit the return key to set ~/Pictures as the location. You’ll need to follow it up with a SystemUIServer relaunch too:

killall SystemUIServer

If you want to save them in a new folder create a new folder first with

mkdir ~/Screenshots

To upload it hit the symbol pic (with the red circle in my screenshot) and choose your screenshot:


SSH (or SFTP) upload files from OSX terminal I'm trying to upload a file through terminal (didnt managed to do it trough transmit.app)

I'm connected to SSH to my server.
I want to sent a file from my Local desktop to my server.

That the command I'm trying :

scp /Users/username/Desktop/ad-blocker.sh user@IP:/var/packages/DNSServer/target/script/

I always have this error though " No such file or directory "

not a expert of SSH, but if I'm connected to my server to SSH, how would terminal access my local file anyway (/Users/username/Desktop/ad-blocker.sh)

Kind regards.

You have to make sure that the path you are copying to exists.

Before executing your scp command, ssh into your remote host, cd to the directory, and issue the pwd command.  That will give you the current working directory.

Copy that to your clipboard.

Exit SSH, then re-issue the scp command with the directory (paste from your clipboard).


How many monitors iMac 21.5 4K can handle? Well, Im a programmer and I want bunch of monitors.

I have a 21.5 Inch 5K iMac, from 2017

Just bought a DUAL HDMI Adapter from StarTech.com

My intention is to have 3 extra displays because the Mac has 2 thunderbolt 3 ports so in 1 port I connected the StarTech adapter and in the other one a simple Thunderbolt 3 to HDMI adapter

But when they are connected together I have 2 random displays working, I cant get the 3 extra display to work!

In the past I have both thunderbolt ports with the single HDMI adapter and worked fine.

Im afraid that this iMac, due its 4K resolution, can't handle 3 extra monitors.

What do you say? Thanks.

Apple documents the supported displays now from the installed OS:

  Check how many displays your Mac supports: Choose Apple () menu > About This Mac > Support, then click Specifications. On the web page that appears, the number of displays your Mac supports appears under Video Support.

I don’t recommend using more than the official, but sometimes people are OK with adapters that split up a display if they don’t care about full resolution or refresh rates as much as maxing out the total square inches of display.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202351

Another option is using an external GPU. See Use an external graphics processor with your Mac on Apple's website.

From your comments you should expect three 4k displays - up to 2 4K external displays and the iMac integrated one.


iOS 8.4 does not update apps I have an iPhone 5 with iOS 8.4

Never had an issue untile three days ago.

I went to update some apps from the app store, and it just won't do it. The little circle keeps spinning without ever showing the "stop button" next to the app that also shows the download percentage.

Now I have something like 14 unupdated apps and I can't seem to do anything! I restarted the phone twice but nothing changed.

What to do now?

In addition to the answer of DDPWNAGE and user138479 you may try to update directly via the app site and click on "update" there instead of using the "update all" button in the update tab.

Click "App-Store" ➡ "Updates" ➡ Click on App Name ➡ In App Details click on "Update"

Another option might be to check if there is another download hanging which blocks all of the other updates.

Click "App-Store" ➡ "Updates" ➡ "Purchased" ➡ Check if any Apps have a running circle hence an update symbol and stop the update.

One more option is to connect your iPhone with a PC/MAC and switch it off. After that:
Press the "Power" and "Home" Button at the same time for exactly 10 seconds. The iphone switches into DFU mode and kills all the running processes. The display is supposed to be black. If the apple logo shows up a second time, youve pressed the buttons too long.
After the 10 seconds, release the "Power" button but remain pressing the "Home" button. Your PC/MAC should recognize your iphone and probably install the DFU drivers. After that press the "Power" and "Home" buttons again for another 20 seconds, which causes the iphone to leave the DFU mode and to restart.
Try again to update your Apps.

Those are the solutions I was able to find. Unfortunately for me none of them worked, but maybe you'll be successful.


Windows Key when running Win 8.1 in Boot Camp on a Mac I'm running Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp under Mountain Lion on a MacBook Air.  I've tried every combination of Command, Option, Control and Shift and I can't figure out how to produce the equivalent of the Windows Key.
I'm also using Parallels to run the Boot Camp image of Win 8.1 in a window alongside other Mac apps, so I'm not sure if the Windows Key maps differently to the Mac keyboard under Parallels versus Boot Camp alone.

Is this just a problem with Windows 8? With Windows 7 running in Boot Camp, the ⌘ Cmd by itself acts as the ⊞ Win. If I tap just the ⌘ Cmd, the Start Menu pops up. If I type ⌘ Cmd-L, my screen will lock.

Within Windows, you may want to check "Apple Software Update" to see if any new drivers are available. Also check the Keyboard tab in the Boot Camp control panel. In the Boot Camp control panel there is also a Help button, and one of the topics mentions that you can use the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel to remove the Boot Camp drivers if you want to reinstall to ensure a fresh installation.


iPad 2 freezes constantly on the same wifi network an iPhone 6 works smoothly I have an iPad 2 and an iPhone 6 on the same wifi network.

Making a facetime call using the iPad is a nightmare. The video freezes constantly. An iPhone 6 on the same wifi works like silk.

My internet is DOCSIS, cable 35 MBPS down and 3 MBPS up.

My ISP replaced the old router I had (a motorola) with a new more "modern" design a (thompson DWG874B).

What can be the problem?

If one device works fine on the network with a network-bound app and the other does not then it is not likely the fault of the network. And as you have replaced the WiFi router on your network and it still has problems you need to look at the iPad.

The first thing I would do is reset the iPad's network settings like this:

Settings > general > Reset > reset network settings

If that does not fix the issue I would back up the iPad to your Mac/PC via iTunes and go back to:

Settings > general > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings

And wipe the iPad. Once you do that restore it from the backup you just made and try again.


Why is Photo on MacBook Pro automatically importing my photos from iPhone? I'm not plugging in the USB cable from iPhone to the MacBook. Every time I add new photos on my iPhone, they automatically import to Photos to the MacBook. If I delete them from my MacBook, they also are deleted from my iPhone.

How do I undo this?

You have turned on iCloud sync of your Photos on both your MacBook and your iPhone. To stop this from happening, you need to turn this off.

On the MacBook, System Preferences > iCloud. Uncheck the box:

On the iPhone, Settings > iCloud:


How to paste multiple email addresss into iPhone mail To: field? If I copy and paste multiple email address into iPad email's To: field, e.g.:

a@b.com, b@c.com, c@d.com

the mail app will consider it as one address, not three. Is there a way to copy and paste multiple email address in a new mail?

In order for mail to distinguish them as separate addresses, they must be formatted as follows before pasting:

<a@b.com>, <b@c.com>, <c@d.com>


SSH problem after security update 2016-001 with an Ethernet to USB adapter After installing security update 2016-001 whenever a remote server outputs a lot of text very fast, the SSH connection is dropped with this error message:

Corrupted MAC on input.
debug3: send packet: type 1
ssh_dispatch_run_fatal: Connection to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX port 22: message authentication code incorrect

This happens when using an Ethernet-USB adapter only (which was fine previously,) over wifi it works fine.

It turned out to be an issue with the Ethernet adapter or its driver (TP-Link Gbit USB3 adapter.) After that update it just started dropping packets sporadically, whereas another adapter was working just fine. Unfortunately, the latest version of the driver was published in October 2015, so no fix for this one.


How can I configure Aquamacs auto-save? Every so many typestrokes Aquamacs tries to auto-save. Unfortunately where it autp-saves is a folder that doesn't exist.

The result is that it freezes for several seconds.

How can I configure it - be it the frequency or turing it off, or the save location?

I've tried to find where but no success.

Can you help please?

The auto-save folder is determined using the variable 'auto-save-file-name-transforms', which you can customize.

The default value of this variable is "~/Library/Caches/Aquamacs Emacs/AutoSave".  The easiest thing to do is to simply create this folder (no customization required).


Vertically arranged multiple monitors: some apps won't let me drag them "above" the menu bar I'm working on a MacBook Pro, with my external monitor arranged on a higher shelf, and "arranged" within my display preferences as being "above" my MBP display.  I use the larger monitor when I'm coding, using the terminal, etc., and the MBP display for browsing, IM, and other things.

My problem is this: some apps won't let me drag them to beyond the menu bar on the MBP display.  If I arrange the displays in a horizontal configuration, or with the MBP display "above" the external monitor, I can drag the windows wherever I want.  An example of some apps that do this are Sublime Text 2 and XCode.

Is there some trick to getting this to work that I'm missing?

Thanks!

You are able to choose which monitor will have the menubar in the 'Displays' section of System Preferences.

Go to System Preferences, click 'Displays', and choose the 'Orientation' tab. If you click and hold on the small white rectangle signifying the menu bar, you can move it between screens and move it to the top most display.


How to kill google photos process? My Google Photos service on osx is hung.  There's no obvious process to kill and try to restart.

I'm on OSX 10.11.2

Open the Activity Monitor app (found in the /Applications/Utilities folder) and select the process from the list. Click the stop process button at the top left of the Activity Monitor window. If the process is a background process, you will have to select the memory tab to see the list of background processes.


What is the iTunes Connect role I need to add a new app? I don't see explicitly said in https://help.apple.com/itunes-connect/developer/#/dev82a173c41 what is the role I need. I guess it is 'admin', given 'Access to all sections within iTunes Connect.', but maybe other role can do it.

The Role Permissions documentation includes a table My Apps: App Store that states Create apps and submit versions is available to:

Legal
Admin
App Mgr

  iTunes Connect Developer Help

  Role Permissions > My Apps: App Store


How can I contact the owner of a lost iPhone who has a password lock? I want to return their phone, but can't access their contacts, etc.

1) Find the phone number, then find the owner

I think the iPhone is locked but not the SIM card. If this is the case, pop the SIM card out. Put it in another phone. Find the number. Now, use the web to do a reverse lookup, find them, find their email or alternate phone, and call them.

2) Find someone who knows the owner

When you set the password, by default the "Voice Dial" is still active. Try holding down the home button for 4 seconds. Even when locked, you might be able to say "Call so-and-so". Try some random names. If someone picks up, explain the situation. They will probably have an alternate means of contacting the owner.

3) Turn the phone on and see if there are recent callers - then use any of these names to try voice calling as in 2 above.


iPhone has WiFI turned off, but router is asking ARP to IP I am using wireshark to diagnose a WiFi problem at my house. I turn everything off, except me of course, and traffic looks normal.

However, when I turn my iPhone on, the router instantly starts sending ARP packets to the IP address. Even when I have WiFi turned off!

Why is this happening?

Turning WiFi off on the iPhone means the device shuts down the radio - it means it doesn’t establish a network connection and route traffic.

We would need to see what “the IP address” is and know details about your network to dig deeper, but here are how the system is designed. WiFi can work in airplane mode and turning off wifi is more like releasing DHCP reservation than not broadcasting.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204234
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086

It also matters which iPhone and which iOS you have.


How do I turn off "Close windows when quitting an app" with `defaults write`? It's easy to manually turn off the "Close windows when quitting an app" feature, but how do I do it in a script with defaults write?

Tested on Mojave:

Turn off: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
Turn on: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool true


How can I disable password for system preferences lock? How can I permanently unlock all system preferences? Is there any way to disable the "Click the lock to make changes" needing a password, or is there a way to permanently unlock all settings in Mountain Lion?

More specifically I'm turning the Network Link Conditioner  ( to simulate slow connections ) on and off frequently from its system preferences pane and it needs a password each time and it's getting annoying.

I'm comfortable with the security issues this presents if I could revert to the default behavior at some point.

Edit

I'd just like to point out that in the time it takes to think up a sarcastic reply to an answer ( but ultimately not send because you're too polite ), the lock locks itself automatically.

The settings stay unlocked, just do not click the "lock". This will keep the stuff unlocked until you want to lock it again.


How reliable are the iOS data usage stats? I have a dispute with my carrier such that my bills for the past 6 months list 10GB more usage than listed by my device's (iphone 5 running ios 6) data usage stats. They have told me that they can't do anything because they can't know how reliable the data usage stats are on the device. Are there any documents to which I might refer them that pertain to this question?

This is the extent of Apple's documentation on cellular data usage:

  Go to Settings > Cellular Data > Usage to view your usage. Contact
  your carrier directly if you have questions about your cellular data
  usage.

It doesn't sound like this is going to be very helpful. There are also threads online, such as this one, that seem to indicate that iOS6 may be using cellular data while connected to Wi-Fi and misreporting it.


Is there any way I can hide all files and folders from the OS X Desktop, but leave the Hard Drive(s), CD's, External Drives, Network Drives there? I was hoping there was a way I would be able to make all folders and files hidden on the OS X Desktop, but leave the Hard drive(s), network drives, CD's/DVD's, etc. But if I was to go into the Desktop Folder using Finder, the items would still be there. So, basically the opposite of the Finder Preferences of showing specific items on the desktop, to hide the files, etc. but leave the HDD's, CD's, etc.:

Thanks a lot

What I do is just have a folder on the desktop which I occasionally throw things into when the desktop gets too cluttered - at least you only have one thing visible on the desktop. You could also try https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/48203/desktop-pirate


Why do you need to use iTunes to delete photos? I've asked a question about how to delete images on the iPhone 4s, but the delete button doesn't show up. I've seen on the internet that you need iTunes, why?

If the photos were taken on iPhone or transferred to iPhone, they can be deleted on iPhone.
If the photos were synchronised with iPhone using iTunes they must be deleted with iTunes.


Webcam not working on Macbook Pro 13" At some point this year I noticed that my camera was not working. (Skype, Google, Facetime)

I tried this https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT2090

But under devices for Camera it says no devices found.

Mac OS 10.10.4

It might be some VDCAssistant programs using it.

Try this ,Open a terminal window and type the command below.

sudo killall VDCAssistant

This will kill all other programs and you will be able to use your camera again.