Deleting home folders ~symbolic links in Mac OS X I bought an SSD, so now I have SSD + traditional HD on my Mac. On SSD OS + Applications. On HD data.

I wanted to keep applications and library on the SSD and move my home folder from SSD to the traditional HD.

I used this solution of creating symbolic link on the  HD to follow my purpose.
I opened the terminal and in my /Users/Homefolder I've typed

 sudo rm -rf examplefolder
 ln -s /Volumes/nameofHD/pathofexamplefolderontheHD

So one after one I deleted all folders on my home folder on the SSD and created symbolic links on the HD.

The problem for what I'm requesting Super User's help:

One folder, exactly the one named "Download" any time I reboot the system reappears. So now I have two "Download" folders and I'm not able to delete the one on the SSD (the original) anymore, precisely anytime I use

sudo rm -rf examplefolder

After rebooting it magically reappears. Sometimes using terminal it says to unlink the folder but after some time I'm able to delete it

For trying deleting the file I've also used this app/script called Trashit, but that didn't work either.

That’s not the recommended way of configuring a two-disk OS X install. Steps:

Make a clean install on the SSD. Or you can just copy over the System Files. This would make steps 2 and 3 unnecessary.
Create a temporary admin account on the SSD.
Add a new account in the Users and Accounts preferences. It should match the credentials of your old account on the HDD.
Right click on the account after it has been created, then click on Advanced Options.
Set the home folder of this account as the previous home folder on your HDD.
Transfer the necessary apps, libraries, etc by using a disk cloning app or good old copy-pasting.

The Download folder reappears because OS X thinks that the home directory is on the SSD, not on the HDD.

Source: http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-to-speed-up-your-mac-with-a-ssd-drive.html


All-Day Events in iOS 9 Today When I pull down the Notification Center, the "Today" view seems to exclude all-day events.
For example, I have 2 events for today:

"Lunch", scheduled at noon
"Ask A Stupid Question Day", an all-day event

My iOS9 Today view says

Wednesday, September 30th
The first thing on your calendar today is "Lunch", in 46 minutes.

If I delete "Lunch" from my calendar, the Today view simply says

Wednesday, September 30th

Why doesn't an all-day event get the same respect as a normal event? Can I change this (stupid) behavior? Am I missing something?
Note: I'm not talking about the Notification Center's Calendar widget (although, it too doesn't not display my all-day event. I guess at least my all-day event is being consistently ignored).

All-day events don't show in Notification Center.

You can provide feedback to Apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html


MacBook turned off during Time Machine initial back up - What do I do? My external hard disk was partitioned to 3 partitions and one of which (300 GB) was set up with Time Machine. The initial back up started and was 3 hours through (around 65% of 211 GB complete). I lost track of time and my MacBook turned off on zero battery power.

When I turned it back on, it says that the disk was not ejected properly. When the external hard disk was re-connected, I don't see the Time Machine icon on my TM partition any more. Time Machine status states that the backup was delayed. When I gave the "back up now" option, the Time Machine started normally with status 10 MB out of 85 GB. After a while, the back up was complete.

My question is simple: would my backup be corrupt due to this incident? Is there anything I should do to ensure it? Or is everything just fine and that there is nothing to worry about?

It would be hard to tell with out looking at the backup. If I was in you situation and I was not sure if the first backup was successful I would wipe that partition and start again (assuming when you say initial backup you mean the first ever!)

From my personal experience however when similar things have happened to me during a backup I've had no corruption issues. This being said it was not my first ever Time Machine backup.

Honestly the safest thing to do is wipe that partition and start again (assuming when you say initial backup you mean the first ever!)


Temperature logger compatible with Mac? I'd like to measure the temperature in my fridge over a few days and graph the results, since I think the fridge may be starting to fail.

So I'm looking for a cheap device which can run independently on battery power, which logs the temperature and timestamp every few seconds to a file.  I want to plug this in to my Mac and retrieve the data.  I don't particularly need software to generate the graph: I can do this with Numbers, Excel etc.

This "RC-4" unit pictured below is the sort of thing I'm imagining.  However, it doesn't seem to be Mac compatible.

Can anyone recommend a suitable product?

Alternatively, I could set up a Windows installation for this device in VirtualBox, but I wonder if that would handle the USB drivers correctly.  Can anyone offer any experience here?

The Go!Temp from Vernier works a charm for me! 50 USD with free software download.


Last password change in macOS Objective is to determine the last password change time for all the user accounts in macOS (Catalina).

sudo dscl . -read Users/swastibhushandeb accountPolicyData

Output:

<dict>
    <key>creationTime</key>
    <real>1570887333.512722</real>
    <key>failedLoginCount</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
    <key>failedLoginTimestamp</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
    <key>passwordLastSetTime</key>
    <real>1570887334.500102</real>
</dict>
</plist>

date -r can be used to convert the epoch time stamps to human readable format as:

date -r 1570887334

How can the above be wrapped in a  bash script/one liner code?Thanks in advance.

date -r $(sudo dscl . -read /Users/username accountPolicyData |
  tail -n +2 |
  plutil -extract passwordLastSetTime xml1 -o - -- - |
  sed -n "s/<real>\([0-9]*\).*/\1/p")

date -r <seconds> takes some seconds.
$(…) runs a command and captures stdout.

sudo dscl . -read /Users/… accountPolicyData returns accountPolicyData as XML.
tail -n +2 drops the first line of the output of the previous command, because dscl prints some extra information before the plist starts.
plutil -extract passwordLastSetTime xml1 -o - -- -

-extract passwordLastSetTime xml1 extracts the value for the key passwordLastSetTime in the input, outputting as xml
-o - outputs to stdout
-- - reads from stdin

-- to stop parsing options
- for stdin

sed -n "s/<real>\([0-9]*\).*/\1/p") extracts just the integer from the output.

-n suppresses the default of printing every input line
s/a/b/p substitutes a for b, printing matching lines (overriding -n for individual lines)

<real> matches the start of the line containing the integer we want
\(…\) is a capturing group

[0-9]* matches digits any number of times

.* matches to the end of the line, thus removing content in the line we're not interested in
\1 is the first capturing group

| pipes stdout from the left command into stdin of the right command

You can put this command all on one line if you prefer.


Why does my iPhone5 playing songs through my Apple TV times out after three songs? I want to play songs on my Apple TV from my iPhone5 running 8.1. After about three songs, it stops playing (tested three times). Is there any possible explanation for this?

My question is: Why does my iPhone5 playing songs through my Apple TV times out after three songs?

--

EDIT:
Router: Netcomm NB9WMAXX

Terminology: I'm calling it 'timing out'. Perhaps a more correct term would be 'arbitrarily stopping' - except that we can repeat the behaviour multiple times at roughly the same time period.

Error: seeing no error on either device

Library: Stored on iphone

Network usage: Nothing else was using the network at this time


How can iPhone see android emoji? My girlfriend has an Android phone and when she text me on my new iPhone, emoji like ;-) appear as is and not as a winking smiley. Is there a way to change that?

The emojis sent by the iPhone are particular characters (cf Emoji on Wikipedia)

If you see a smiley, it means that the android phones is probably converting the smiley into images on the phone directly but it seends only the text corresponding to the smiley to the reciever.

Since the iPhone does not change the smileys into emojis (at least without jailbreak), you will not be able to see the emojis.

NB: You can also make a test by sending emoji between an iPhone and a Windows Phone. You'll see that each phone will display its own emojis, since it's the system who has a set of images corresponding to the emoji characters.

TLDR : Your girlfriend's phone doesn't seem to send emojis characters but simple smileys.


Disable wireless network card Mac OS X I wonder if there is any way, how to turn off / disable the wireless network interface or driver, so I cannot connect to WiFi from running OS. I have MacBook Pro with OS X Mavericks.

The reason for this is I have some exams at the University and if I want to use my own notebook, I have to turn off the WiFi in some more permanent way (for example from BIOS, if I had PC).

I have installed rEFIt so I can enter to some kind of EFI Shell, but I honestly don't know, what I can do here to not destroy my computer.

You can move the IO80211Family.kext from /System/Library/Extensions. The Wi-Fi won't function without this file, so moving it will prevent the Wi-Fi from working. If you leave the file on an external drive, you won't be able to re-enable it without the file.

Alternatively, if you're able to disable the admin account, it's a bit easier. Go to System Preferences → Network → Wi-Fi → Advanced and require administrator authorisation to turn the Wi-Fi on.


MBP refusing to boot from fileVault encrypted SSD after motherboard replacement Changed the motherboard/logic board of a MBP 13" 2014 model. After the operation it just shows a blinking question mark when starting. I can however boot it from a High Sierra USB drive and when it logs in there it asks for the password to unlock the internal SSD, showing that it can read the SSD.

I can also mount the SSD in a MBA 13" 2013 that I have and it will boot from the SSD, like it happens with FileVault encrypted disk, it boots and the log in screen appears very quickly.

I have tried SMC reset and NVRAM reset on the MBP but no luck. I don't understand why it won't boot to the login screen with the encrypted SSD on the MPB? Is there something I can do about it?

It's kind of a work around but why not try decrypting it with the MBA, then seeing if the MBP boots it. If it does, then re-encrypt it and see if that works.


Are rc.shutdown and rc.shutdown.local still usable on OS X Lion? Are either of rc.shutdown or rc.shutdown.local still being use in OS X, or have they been replaced with something else?

I realize that launchd is replacing most of this, but I thought you could still use rc.shutdown.local to run a script.

I couldn't even find rc.shutdown anywhere on my system.

I have no idea, really. There is a mention of /etc/rc.shutdown.local in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.SystemStarter.plist, but I am not at all sure what it means. The manual page for SystemStarter is not a great help, beyond informing us that it is deprecated. The program is running on my system, though. Oh, and the string /etc/rc.shutdown.local is found inside the SystemStarter binary as well. My guess is that files there will be run at shutdown.

But if I may answer your implicit question of how to run something at shutdown: Here is what I have done. First, I wrote and compiled this little C program. What it does is simply to sleep until it receives a SIGTERM, at which point it exec's its arguments:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <signal.h>

char **args;

void sigterm(int s) {
  execvp(args[1],args+1);
  fprintf(stderr, "%s: exec failed: ", args[0]);
  perror(args[1]);
  exit(1);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  args=argv;
  signal(SIGTERM,sigterm);
  for (;;) sleep(0x7FFFFFFF);
}

I have a launch daemon set up to run this program at startup. Come shutdown time, launchd will send the SIGTERM that causes the program to do its thing. Of course, it has to do so fairly quickly, or launchd will apply a bigger sledgehammer.

Here is my launchctl plist, named no.ntnu.math.hanche.quietboot.plist and placed in /Library/LaunchDaemons/. Its sole purpose is to run `nvram SystemAdioVolume=%01' at shutdown, so I can reboot without the chime.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>no.ntnu.math.hanche.quietboot</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/local/bin/atshutdown</string>
        <string>/usr/sbin/nvram</string>
        <string>SystemAudioVolume=%01</string>
    </array>
    <key>Disabled</key>
    <false/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <false/>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>


Ignore apps on clone system disk Daily I create a clone of my system disk using Carbon Copy Cloner and this is working nicely. However, having a clone connected to your Mac may present a problem in starting apps automatically, for instance at startup. In some cases OSX will start the app from the clone rather than from the system disk. One of the examples is 1Password, which has a little component, called 1Password Mini, which is starting automatically for each user. The app is not listed in the login items. 1Password Mini is often (or always ?) started from the clone and other components of 1Password, interacting with 1Password Mini (such as the update process) will notice this and issue a message.
I wonder if there is a way to force apps to be launched from the Applications folder on the System Disk and ignore the one on the clone. Taking the clone offline is not an option for me.

The cleanest (and safest; see below) solution would be to set up Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically mount the clone disk/partition before the backup starts and unmount it once the backup is finished. See:
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/performing-actions-before-and-after-backup-task

Not only would this prevent the problems you have described, it would also protect you a bit better against ransomware, which unfortunately made its appearance for the first time on OS X a week ago, because your backup would only be vulnerable during the daily cloning window and not all the time.

Short of doing something radical such as stripping the executable rights from all your files on the backup disk (which would also break the backup), I don't see how you could prevent applications to be launched from it, and even that might not prevent helper code to be executed by a main application.

What you could do is add the backup disk to System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy. That would at least prevent you from accidentally launching apps from the wrong disk yourself using Spotlight (or launchers that rely on Spotlight such as Alfred).


Sync iOS device from terminal Since I work with Xcode and plug in and out iOS devices multiple times per day, I don't want iTunes to automatically backup them every time I plug them in. But at the same time I would like to have a daily backup of the devices.

So I was wondering - is there a way to trigger iOS sync with a terminal command, so then it can be scheduled to run every day?

Find your device Product ID and Vendor ID from System Information.app in the Utilities folder.

Run the following

/System/L*/Priv*/MobileD*/V*/A/reenumerate_ios_devices vendorid productid

Replace ‘vendorid’ with your Vendor ID and ‘productid’ with your Product ID.


How to import .eml files into Mail? I'm using readpst to extract emails from a bunch of old outlook .PST files.

It does a great job of pulling out all the emails .EML files, with attachments included.

But how do I bring these into Apple Mail?

Any of the "Import..." options create a separate mailbox for each message.

I want to be able to import groups of messages into a particular mailbox.

(I know that readpst can also generate mbox files, which Apple Mail handles OK, but slowly; but this is not what I want to do.)

If you put the exported e-mails (*.eml files) into a folder structure, then just select the outer folder as the import folder.

The test import I just did is like below:

Select "Apple Mail" as the "Import data from":

Select the outer (root) folder of the e-mails to import:

Confirm the selection:

The imported .eml e-mails is now in an 'import' mailbox (only one mailbox) with the same folder structure as the folder the import came from:

Now you can move all or selected e-mails from the import folder to the mailbox of choice. When all e-mails has been moved, just delete the 'import' mailbox.


Iphone 6 plus will not default to SMS when other user iphone is not on wifi My iphone 6 plus will not revert to SMS when another iphone user is off wifi.
No problems before when I had an iphone 4s full plan and hubby had iphone 3gs go phone (no data) the imessage app worked great.
Now the iphone 4s is a go phone (no data plan)upgraded to ios 8.1.1. The iphone 6 plus is also 8.1.1. full plan.  The send as SMS is on on both phones.

Is the difference that imessages makes you sign in with an apple id which is an email address?  The phone number and email is checked on both phones for receive and send.  What a pain that my imessages never get to my hubby until he gets to wifi.  The 6+ does not sense or revert to SMS like the 4s always did.

If any capable device receives the iMessage, it's considered delivered.

Log out of iMessage all other devices/computers & then it should resend as SMS.


How to submit a bug report to Apple's bug tracker? I managed to write a piece of code that made Xcode 5's LLVM compiler segfault. Xcode prints a message that asks me to submit a bug report at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/. I try to do that, but all that site does is tell me what makes a good bug report, with no link or button where I can actually submit one. I have a developer account already.

So how do I submit a bug report to Apple's bug tracker?

Turns out that it's possible to log in without logging in.

Apple, if you send me to a page that makes me log in, LOG ME IN. Don't accept my login then send me right back to the landing page as if nothing happend.

Terrible UI design, Apple.


Lookup up cell values in Numbers I want to build a simple word translator which may look like this:

COLUMN A: I have a list of words, each on a row. (1:Airplane, 2:Car, 3:Cat, 4:Dog etc..)
COLUMN B: I have a list of the same words in another language, each on a row. (1:Aereoplano, 2: Macchina, 3:Gatto, 4:Cane etc..)
Then I have two cells. In the first one, I can type any word. The second cell is the formula that I want to create. The formula should:

check if "my word"(the word that I type) is in the list of column A
if it exists, it should return its adjacent word of the second column
If no words match, the formula should not return anything.

I'm struggling with finding the correct functions to accomplish this, any pointers are welcome.

UPDATE
I finally found the solution. Best solution for me is
=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(B7;'Table 1-1'::B4:D53;3;FALSE);0)
REALLY thanks for your help.

This answer to a related question explains how to use VLOOKUP in combination with IFERROR.

If VLOOKUP cannot find the exact match, then it throws an error.  To catch this error, wrapping the formula in the IFERROR function allows the author to supply a default (in the OP's case, an empty string "") to display in the event of no match.

The following example uses a third table to display the translation.  That table is then locked so as to protect the formula from being inadvertently overwritten.  The words NOT FOUND are used here to show the error event.

If match is found:

No match:

From the documentation:

  VLOOKUP(search-for, columns-range, return-column, close-match)

  search-for: The value to find. search-value can contain any value.

  columns-range: A collection of cells. columns-range must contain a
  reference to a single range of cells, which may contain any values.

  return-column: A number value that specifies the relative column
  number of the cell from which to return the value. The leftmost column
  in the collection is column 1.

  close-match: An optional modal value that determines whether an exact
  match is required.

  close match (TRUE, 1, or omitted): If there’s no exact match, select
  the row with the largest left-column value that is less than or equal
  to the search value. If you use close match, you can’t use wildcards
  in search-for.

  exact match (FALSE or 0): If there’s no exact match, returns an error.
  If you use exact match, you can use wildcards in search-for. You can
  use the wildcard ? (question mark) to represent one character, an *
  (asterisk) to represent multiple characters, and a ~ (tilde) to
  specify that the following character should be matched rather than
  used as a wildcard.


How to select single word in URL in iOS 13? Given a text with a link inside:

Prior to iOS 13, i could long press a word that was not part of the URL to select the word, then drag the finger over a word in the URL to select only that word of the URL, without opening the URL.

In iOS 13 this is not possible anymore. When dragging the selection of a single word, the selection gets extended with additional words.

How can I select a single word in a URL to copy the word without opening the URL?

Double tap on that word.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/06/14/ios-13-overview-text-editing-gestures/ says:

  Select a word: double-tap on it.
  Select a sentence: tap on the text with three fingers.
  Select a paragraph: tap on the text with four fingers.
  Bubble menu: bring up the shortcuts menu by tapping once with three fingers.
  Select multiple contiguous items: tap with two fingers, then drag to quickly select emails, files and folders.


Is there a menu bar tool which will let me eject external drives easily? I usually have a lot of external drives connected to my MacBook, such as flash drives, hard drives, and SD cards. It so happens that I need to eject them quite often.

The usual way I eject these is by either showing the desktop using a shortcut and dragging the drives I want to eject to the trash, or navigating to the finder and ejecting the drives from there, or by using a script which ejects all my external drives at once. However, when I want to do something simple like ejecting a flash drive or SD card (which I do quite often) I'd prefer not to break my workflow and simply be able to, say, click on a menu bar icon and select which volume I want to eject.

I haven't yet seen a utility which can achieve this. Does anyone know of one?

Try Semulov - it is designed to eject volumes from the menu bar. The author has even made the source available on GitHub.


How can I download files directly from Safari to ”on my iPad”? I am using the latest iPad Pro model and iPadOS, and I’m still new to how iOS handles files and such.

Whenever I try to download a file (e.g. a pdf article), hit the option ”save to files”, and choose a location for the file on my iPad, I am greeted with a popup telling me that the action is not permitted, and the download is aborted. I’ve tried Googling for how to do this as well as looking in the digital user manual, but I just can’t figure out how to get the files directly from Safari to the local storage.

On the other hand, I can easily download it to third-party apps and drives, such as Google drive or Notability, and even AirDrop it to the local file storage of my iPhone, to then AirDrop it back to the local storage of my iPad!

How do I download files from Safari directly to ”on my iPad”?

It's anybody's guess what could be the problem. But restarting the ipad is always a good thing to try when you run into inexplicable behaviour.


Just turned on icloud for phone, but moved contacts from Outlook on local machine Hi and thanks in advance for any help provided! I just upgraded my phone to a 6s and turned on iCloud. That moved all my contacts from phone and Outlook on local machine to the cloud.  I would like to maintain contacts and calendars locally. How to I bring items back out of the cloud?
Jim

Open the Settings app of your iPhone, and scroll down to iCloud. There, switch off the slider at "Contacts". After a warning message, the contacts will be deleted from your cloud and are stored only locally on your device again. You can then start to sync your contacts with outlook again, probably by using iTunes.


In terminal (bash), should I be in a folder to move it to another? In a directory named World, I've been asked to move a folder within it--South_America--to another folder also within World--North_America. 1. I can't figure out if I should be in South_America or one level up. 2. Wherever it is that I should be, I don't know what code to write. Thanks (I hope)!

Assuming You are in World directory (check with pwd command) and dir tree looks like:

World
 |___ South_America
 |
 |___ North_America

You simply do:

mv South_America North_America/

When You are in South_America already, You can:

mv ../South_America ../North_America/


What's the canonical name for the "sunburst" waiting animation? Is there an accepted name for the spinning animation that's displayed when one needs to wait for an indefinite amount of time?  It looks like this:

The canonical name is the "asynchronous progress indicator" but in most user documentation it is described as "a progress indicator (that looks like a spinning gear)". The Apple Publications Style Guide (non-Apple source!) is a nice reference for learning what Apple considers the correct terms for writing about these details correctly.

The four specific types of generic progress indicators that Apple provides to developers are:

asynchronous progress indicator (spinning gear)
determinate progress bar (moving bar)
indeterminate progress bar (spinning striped cylinder)
spinning wait cursor (colored pinwheel)

I'm writing a short postscript since many confuse the spinning gear with the colored pinwheel:

The colored pinwheel is colloquially known as the spinning pizza of death or SPOD cursor due to user frustration when it appears to signal a hung process. It is the worst indicator for the user to see since it means the programmer either didn't or couldn't keep the main program responsive. We as users have no clue what part of the program is waiting for something to progress, only that it's stuck.


Can't update to Java SE 8u181 from 8u171 on El Capitan as part of my update routine, I wanted to upgrade from the installed Java SE 8u171 to Java SE 8u181. Before anyone asks, yes, one software DOES need Java (LibreOffice).

Problem is, the install window abruptly closes, and the installed version stays at 8u171, according to the Java preference pane.

In a terminal windows, I found things even more confusing:

  $ java -version java version "1.8.0_161" Java(TM) SE Runtime
  Environment (build 1.8.0_161-b12) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
  (build 25.161-b12, mixed mode)

I don't know exactly what is happening. Console doesn't say why it's failing.
I already tried to manually install 8u181 from the .dmg found on Oracle's website, but the result is the same.
Same goes when I try to install the update in Safe Mode.

Any clues?

Solved. Basically, I forgot that I had to install not the JRE, but the JDK as a workaround for some LibreOffice bug. The JDK does not allow updating through the Java preference pane.

As soon as I manually updated the JDK, the Java preference panel said I had the correct, 8u181 update.


Configuration profile reinstalls itself after I delete it A few days ago, a configuration profile disguised as an app called TweakBox, popped up on my brother's MacBook. He repeatedly attempted to delete it permanently, but it always magically reinstalls itself. Now the "virus" is on his phone too, and also seems to not be possibly deleted. This app/configuration profile does absolutely nothing, but it's annoying to have it pop up continuously. How can I remove it from both MacOS and iOS?

Good news is it's not a virus.

Bad news is it sounds like he's been trying to install some hacked/cracked apps! https://www.tweakboxapp.com

So you'll need to remove the TweakBox App (from home screen) and the TweakBox Profile (Settings > General > Profiles) that is installing it. Profiles can be shared between devices by iCloud so that's probably why he's seeing it on his laptop too.


How to install command line tools without error that is not currently available on Software Update server? I am using maverick, and have Xcode 5.0.2.

I am trying to install command line tools using xcode-select --install, but I get message that is not currently available on Software Update server.

What may be wrong?

Make sure you have an Apple Developer Account, then visit this Site.
 If you don't have an account, you can register one with the link I provided too.
After that you can download the package from the before mentioned link.


How can I print a path with a home directory replaced by ~ in terminal? How can I print a path in Terminal with the home folder path replaced by a ~?

pwd
/Users/denz/projects/coolApp

But I want to something like this

~/projects/coolApp

Here's a function:

pwdr () {
  pwd | sed s,$HOME,~,
}

Add this function to a profile file and use pwdr.

In bash you can also use parameter expansion and avoid the call to sed by using the rather magically looking

echo ${PWD/~/\~}

The ${...} expression can be used anywhere a shell variable can be used as well, the echo is just for demonstration purposes.


apple music automatically plays song 20 times When hitting play in iTunes on a song or album this song is automatically added to the play next list 20 times.
I added a GIF to illustrate whats happening:

So far I've only restarted my Mac multiple times and quit and reopened the music app to no avail.
Is there any way to reset this?

Do you have "repeat title" or "repeat all" switched on?
I assume those are all the same titles, not like an album with 20 remixes.


How to disable notification badges for the iPhone Mail app (iOS4)? Any way to turn the notification badges for the Mail app off without turning all notifications off?

What I've done is disable "Push" for Mail.  That way, I only get new mail when I go into the Mail app and refresh it.  It saves on both distractions and battery life.

In Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, I set Push to Off and the frequency to Manually.


iOS - Getting iPhone 6s plus storage full alert message Since yesterday, I'm getting a storage full alert message (not iCloud) on my iPhone 6s plus, iOS 9.2.1.

Overall, my apps installed would take at most 10GB.

Within Settings, the iPhone says it has 4.8 GB free.
Inside of iTunes, it says 8.4 GB free.

Also from iTunes, the Documents and Data section seems to take a lot of space (55% to 60% aprox.).

Has anyone have a solution around this?

I'm also having the same issue like you are. I was using the Public Beta version 4 of iOS 9.3 and that suddenly happened, it threw 710MB of free space on my phone into an unknown black-hole. I forced installed the iOS 9.2.1 (13D20 version) onto my iPhone 6 last night, freeing 16 GB from the phone. However I've lost them all again today with only 2.2 GB of free space left. The documents and data cannot be seen in the storage settings on my iPhone 6 at all. You're not alone on this one.


Is there a keyboard shortcut in Mail.app for moving the active email to the top of the inbox? I'm trying out Mail.app on Lion (10.7.3) for the first time and, nice as it is, I'm frustrated that I have to use the mouse to jump to the top of my inbox after using the search function.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a quick demo:

option-command-f to search your inbox for something a couple weeks old
tab out of the search field and navigate mail in the mailbox with the arrow keys
option-command-f to go back to the search field and delete your search terms
now tab back into the mailbox view- the old email is selected, and you're miles away from the top of your inbox

Hitting "home" shifts the view to the top of the inbox, but the "cursor" is still on the last active email (i.e. the one that was highlighted in blue), and as soon use you hit the up or down keys, the view will snap/jump back down to show you where the active email is, relative to the top. you're miles away from the top of your inbox again!

command + up arrow, option + up arrow, fn + left arrow, or any combination of arrows, home, and page up keys- none of them will make the topmost email in the mailbox active! It looks like I either have to hit home, then search for a keyword in the topmost email, or use the cursed mouse. Help!

Edit: I couldn't get jtbandes' exact AppleScript to work (I'm an AppleScript oaf; probably my fault), but this worked for me, with the caveat outlined in my comment on his answer:

tell application "System Events"
    tell application "Mail" to activate
    tell application "Mail" to set the selected messages of message viewer 1 to {} -- deselect messages
    key code 115 -- scroll to top
end tell

It's annoying that there isn't a simple keyboard shortcut for this. I suggest providing Mail feedback to Apple if you'd like to see it work properly.

For a workaround, try the following AppleScript:

tell application "Mail"
    set the selected messages of message viewer 1 to {} -- deselect messages
    tell application "System Events"
        key code 115 -- scroll to top
    end tell
end tell

You can make this into a Service and assign a keyboard shortcut to it from the Keyboard section of System Preferences.


What is OS X's equivalent of Linux's NSS? Anyone familiar with the internals of Linux knows about NSS; it's the subsystem that services, like gethostname() and such, delegate to. The code that actually makes DNS queries or reads /etc/passwd, etc., is in the form of NSS modules. Furthermore, additional NSS modules can be compiled and linked to, allowing developers to provide different ways to lookup hosts, users, etc.

I'm trying to find the equivalent subsystem in OS X, but it seems to be something that has changed frequently over the years. Apparently an old system called NetInfo was used since the NeXtStep days, but that hasn't been around since 10.4. This was apparently superseded by something called lookupd, but I don't think it's present in Lion anymore either, since there's no lookupd process running on my system, and man lookupd redirects to dscacheutil.

What is the current system Lion uses to delegate these kinds of lookups? Does Apple provide any documentation for writing new plugins for whatever this subsystem is, to allow for different backends to provide these services?

Another way to think of this question is: Which subsystem in OSX is responsible for reading /etc/hosts and resolving lookups based on its contents?

I'm not very familiar with Linux, but it sounds like you're looking for Open Directory.  Warning: Apple uses this term to refer to all of the various parts of their directory service architecture, so if you google "Open Directory" you'll find both Apple's LDAP-based directory server, and the daemon that runs on OS X and does the function you're looking for.

Let me try to give you a historical overview of its development (and hopefully I'll remember which changes happened in which version):

NextSTEP (the OS that OS X was based on) had a daemon called lookupd that was, as I understand it, very similar to NSS.  Most of the actual data was stored in NetInfo databases (which could be either local on the computer, or accessed over the net from a server).

Early versions of OS X added another deamon, named DirectoryService, which did similar things (but a little differently); since it didn't do everything lookupd did, any query it couldn't find an answer to would get handed off to lookupd.  Result: a certain amount of redundancy and confusion.  IIRC, there were actually some queries that got directed to lookupd first, and them it might have to hand them off to DirectoryService.  There were also two different sets of plug-ins (equiv to NSS modules): those for DirectoryService and those for lookupd. Local users & groups were still stored in NetInfo, but it was deprecated for network accounts in favor of LDAP.

I don't remember the details anymore, but over the versions responsibilities gradually got shifted from lookupd to DirectoryService.

In 10.5, NetInfo was removed; local users, groups, etc were stored in XML property list files under /var/db/dslocal/.  The plug-in (excuse me, they're called "connectors" now) to access them has the not-at-all-generic name "Local" (it's sometimes referred to as "dslocal" to disambiguate it a bit).  At this point, the only thing lookupd is still responsible for is DNS lookups (although it hands off multicast lookups to mDNSResponder).

In 10.6, lookupd was removed; mDNSResponder now handles all DNS lookups, both standard (unicast) and multicast.

In 10.7, the Open Directory daemon was renamed from DirectoryService to opendirectoryd.


Is there a way to refine my "current location"? I recently purchased the Day One journaling app, and it geotags my posts. However, it really bugs me that it sets my home location as the wrong address. It's close, it's within a few hundred feet, but the address isn't quite right.

Is it possible to "calibrate" at a given location? That is, if I'm on 123 Main Street and it thinks I'm on 200-300 Main Street, can I tell OSX "If you think you're at 200-300 Main Street, you're actually at 123 Main Street"?

That'd be useful to me; I'd get more precise directions and more precise posts in Day One.

Register your router's MAC address with Skyhook and enter your correct latitude/longitude coordinates.
http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

After a few days, your location should be correct in any website or app that uses Skyhook's database, which is fairly ubiquitous.


Blue color lines on display I recently updated to Mavericks OS of my MacBook Pro 13" inch which was bought on October 2012. I am having blue colored lines and strange shapes all over the display. I dont know whether its hardware or software issue. The following images will reveal my issue.

Could be graphics card issue, check my question Macbook pro checkered display, safeboot works

I ended up replacing the logic board.

P.S: Talk to customer relations instead of call center and ask for free service in case of hardware failure.


Uninstalling Parallels Desktop 14 - Aren't there drivers or kernel extensions too? When installing Parallels Desktop For Mac version 14.1.3, I was prompted for a password. I assume that means some kernel extensions or drivers were installed into macOS.

The official Uninstall Parallels Desktop for Mac page says simply to discard the Parallels app.

➥ Does that mean some macOS alteration is left in place?

Also, according to this page there is some other stuff left behind as well.

Aren't there drivers or kernel extensions too?

Yes, apparently Parallels does use kernel extensions.

If in the Finder we select Parallels Desktop.app and context-click to choose Show package contents, we can navigate to nested folder Contents > Library > Extensions > 10.9 to find some .kext files such as prl_hypervisor.kext.

Are such kernel extensions copied somewhere else upon installation? Yes. Doing a sudo find / -name prl_hypervisor.kext in the Terminal.app shows two hits, one inside the app and one copied elsewhere into a StagedExtensions folder:

/Applications/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Library/Extensions/10.9/prl_hypervisor.kext
/Library/StagedExtensions/Applications/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Library/Extensions/10.9/prl_hypervisor.kext

I have not yet tried deleting the app via the Trash yet. So I do not know if doing so removes the copy as well as the original.


Open Favourites Page in Safari with search bar text There is a question where someone answered topsites://:
Open Favourites Page in Safari with Javascript

Is there any text which navigates to favourite bookmarks? Like favourites://?

I don't use Top Sites because it's so messed up and preview images are never correct and I want to change the homepage to the favourite bookmarks.

If you just want to set the favourites as the home page, you can do this from Preferences → General: set ‘New windows open with’ and ‘New tabs open with’ to ‘Favorites’.

There doesn't appear to be a URL to navigate to favourites. When I wrote my answer in your linked question, topsites:// went to the favourites page if that's what you had selected, but nowadays it doesn't and there doesn't seem to be a replacement.


Macbook Air - battery drains while sleeping (but not when shut down) My macbook air (13-inch, mid 2011) battery drains from ~100% to ~85% over night.  The problem only started a few months ago.  I'm currently running yosemite, but the problem started while on mavericks.  My battery cycle count is ~130.

I tried completely discharging the battery and then re-charging, but that seems to have had no effect.  I've also read through apple's battery documentation, but I can't find anything there either.  Unfortunately, most of the forum posts I've found are about batteries going from 100% to 1% overnight -- I'm having trouble finding anything about losing ~15% overnight.

Results of pmset -g

Active Profiles:
Battery Power       1
AC Power        2*
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         4200
 standby              1
 womp                 1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            1
 networkoversleep     0
 disksleep            10
 sleep                10
 hibernatemode        3
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         10
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

Here are the results of syslog | grep -i "Wake reason" for the last 24 hours.  I put my computer to sleep yesterday around 6pm and woke it this morning at 9:56am.  Over that period, the battery went from 100% to 85%.

Nov 18 09:51:00 prime kernel[0] <Notice>: Wake reason: EC.LidOpen (User)
Nov 19 09:56:57 prime kernel[0] <Notice>: Wake reason: EC.LidOpen EHC2 (User)

I have had the same problem occur to me after a completely new battery was installed in a MacBook Air from late 2011. From 100% I woke up the next day to find the battery at 28%.

So I dug up some research I had done and it comes to this command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

From examining your setting I see yours is not 25 but 3, if you have not found a solution for your problem, this could be it.

Here is some additional read on this from the Apple Discussion Forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4729695?start=0&tstart=0

You can see some pros and cons of doing this. I quote the documented differences:

hibernatemode = 3 by default on supported portables. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore from disk image.

hibernatemode = 25 The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will remove power to memory. The system will restore from disk image. If you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery life, you should use this setting.

If I notice better results I shall do well to post them here as backing evidence. Good luck!


Dock isn't responding to mouse movement in Yosemite when external mouse (Cyborg R.A.T. 5) is attached For the past few days now, I've come across a peculiar error with my Dock. It won't respond to my mouse moving down to the bottom of the screen until I click it, and when it does, it won't change the active icon when I drag my mouse over it. Here's a video of what happens.

This is accompanied by a peculiar error in Mission Control where I can't click on windows to enter them until I drag them a little bit. Here's a video of that phenomenon.

Update: I've found out that this happens when I attach my external mouse (a Cyborg R.A.T. 5) to the computer. I'll test other external mice and then maybe file a bug report with Apple.

Okay, so it turns out the thing I was doing wrong was having an external mouse attached to the Macbook. As soon as I detached the mouse (an old Cyborg R.A.T. 5), everything started working normally again.

But it's still weird that that happens.


Safari 'Download' Icons are stuck showing incomplete Here is an image of what I am talking about

I have two 'download in progress' icons in my Safari window that won't go away.  They two 'download in progress' icons are not clickable either.

There is no progress bar under my 'Downloads' Folder in my icon doc as you can see here:

How do I make the two 'download in progress' go away?

I have:

Restarted my computer
Restarted Safari
Screened my downloads folder to find any 'in progress downloads' or unknown files... All files in my downloads folder are mine and none are 'in-progress'

What do I do?  I am a windows/Linux guy and really not familiar with bugs like this in Mac/Safari.

Note: I have OSX 10.10.2 installed

Try right clicking on the toolbar, selecting Customise Toolbar and dragging it away, it should disappear in a poof of smoke.

Also are you sure you've actually quite and restarted Safari, often rebooting relaunches where you last left off... You have to actually quit the application from the Menu bar...


Plugging in external monitor "logs out" (crashes?) user session When plugging a second external monitor, macOS Sierra "logs out" (crashes?) user session. I get presented with the login window. No error message.

It's not just "show login window", because all apps load anew after logging in (which takes a very loooong time, killing my productivity).

macOS Sierra 10.12.3 (16D32).

DisplayPort external monitors.

MacBook Pro Retina Late 2013, 13".

I don't recall this happening on El Capitan. I upgraded to sierra yesterday.

There is no error message, like "was not closed normally", therefore I believe this is not a duplicate of After Installing El Capitan I Will be Logged Out Frequently (and mine is about Sierra).

I do not see anything interesting in Console logs (although maybe someone could point me to where to look).

What could be causing this?
How to prevent this from happening?

What diagnostics can I do?

Edit: Some other considerations:

I was fiddling with SwitchResX for custom display modes (HiDPI on external displays). As described in: 1280x720 HiDPI resolution for 2560x1440 monitor
there is no corrupted graphics like in the other question(s)

Edit 2: The main monitor is: LG 27UD88-W Monitor 27" UHD 4K USB-C USB 3.0, connected via DisplayPort

Edit 3: The problem also happens when I unplug the monitor (or switch the monitor, in its own menu, to use another input cable)

Edit 4: Also posted on Apple support: https://discussions.apple.com/message/31686056

Edit 5: Also uninstalled SwitchResX (via their menu). Problem still happens!

If the issue occurred after an update you may have a potential software issue. I understand you have tried a lot of troubleshooting in the comments but I listed the steps that I would follow below.

Make sure you backup all your files first before continuing troubleshooting: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250
Follow this support article from Apple regarding video issues using external displays: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201177
As @Stefan suggested, Try reseting SMC.
Shut the machine off. Press Shift-Control-Option on the left side of the built-in keyboard, then press the power button at the same time. Hold these keys and the power button for 10 seconds. Release keys. Power Machine on.
SMC: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
Try reseting NVRAM: Shut down your Mac, then turn it on and immediately press and hold these four keys together: Option, Command, P, and R. You can release the keys after about 20 seconds, during which your Mac might appear to restart.
On Mac computers that play a startup sound, you can release the keys after the second startup sound. NVRAM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063
Try booting in Safe Mode as @Allan suggested and see if you can reproduce the issue. Restart machine and hold down the shift key till you see login screen.
Safe Mode: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262
Run diagnostics on your device locally and check for potential hardware issues. Restart machine and hold the "D" key till prompted to run diagnostics. Even if you machine passes the diagnostics, you may still have a hardware issue.
note the Apple Store Genius Bar can run deeper tests on your machine if you schedule an appointment. Diagnostics Mode: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731
If hardware diagnostics passes, you can use Recovery Mode to reinstall the operating system or erase the machine and do a clean install. In recovery mode, if you choose to reinstall the macOS it will preserve the files on your system. You can also perform a clean install from macOS by reformatting the storage drive before installing the macOS. Recovery Mode: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904
You can try updating to the latest macOS. I was having issues using display port and external monitors, updating to High Sierra resolved the issue for me. Update the software on Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201541

At the end of the day, the issue you are having is either software or hardware related. By performing a clean install, we eliminate any potential software issues, not factoring in bad display driver code (typically these drivers get updated when you run system updates or upgrade macOS). If the issues continue to happen you may have a hardware issue of some sort either with your MacBook Pro, the displays, or the cables.


Writing equations inline in Mac Word This may be just something that I'm going to have to lose with the conversion from PC to Mac, but:

On the Windows version of Word 2011, when you click equation, the program immediately goes into equation mode and you can start typing the equation right there on the line.  Once you're done, you just hit the right arrow key to exit.  If you want to edit the equation, just click in it and the cursor will move inside it.  It's incredibly convenient for someone who has to use equation mode every ten seconds to add an integral or something, like me.

On the Mac version, equation is a button that you press.  A window comes up (it takes about five seconds to appear), and then you have to type your equation in the window and click X.  If you want to edit the equation, click on it and the window will pop back up.  It's very inconvenient and makes writing math documents take a lot longer.

Is there a way to get the Mac version to behave like the Windows version?

The 2007 version of Word for Mac was quite different from the Windows counterpart and Microsoft didn't maintain a 1:1 release schedule for the Windows version and the Mac version. Consequently the Windows version got ahead of the Mac version and this can lead to some confusion and frustration with the different behaviours when you move between then platforms.

The good news is if you upgrade to Office for Mac 2011 you'll get inline equation editing in Word that works very much the same as the Windows counterpart. And it's as fast as the Windows counterpart on similar hardware.


Can MacFusion be used under Mountain Lion? I have bought a new MacBook Pro with Retina display which has OS X 10.8.3. I have installed MacFusion from the version on their website, but I cannot mount it, getting this error: Could not mount filesystem: Mount process has terminated unexpectedly.

Can you help me with that?

Unfortunately Macfusion no longer works, it hasn't been maintained in a long time. Newer versions were around for a while but as near as I can tell, none of them work anymore either. Your best bet is a commercial product which can mount FTP or WebDAV disks such as Transmit. For mounting disks via SSH, I believe we're out of luck.

Such is progress.


No User Account or Text on new install I have an early 2015 Macbook Pro, and had High Sierra installed, on which I started having booting issues, due to which I finally resorted to a clean re-install via recovery mode to Catalina.
I was expecting some kind of new user setup on the new install, but when I fired it up, it reached the login screen. I could see the wallpaper, boot icons, text boxes and the blank user icon, but there was no text visible anywhere(No Username below the user icon, placeholder text in the text-boxes, {Sleep, Restart, Shut Down} below their respective icons)
P.S. On the upper tray, battery percentage and the Time still showed up as text.
Here's what I've tried-

I booted into safe mode. That made the text show up, but now I had the issue of no user being available on the system. The username below the blank user icon was "Other...". I tried logging in with blank parameters, the login on my previous install, the classic root/toor. None of them worked.

I booted in recovery mode, opened terminal-
/sbin/fsck -fy
#found no errors(It showed underallocated memory on my previous install, so guess that was fixed)
/sbin/mount -uw /
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
#This file was not found, confirmed with `ls -al /var/db/`
reboot

Didn't change a thing.

In recovery mode, clicked Apple > Startup Disk
Selected 'Macintosh HD C macOS, 10.15.6'(the only available option) and then Restart
Again, took me to the text-less login screen.

Opened Disk Utility in recovery mode
This was the disk structure-

INTERNAL
|-Macintosh HD C         APFS    MacOS 10.15.6    11.08GB/500.07GB
|-Macintosh HD C -Data   APFS    MacOS 10.15.6    40.25GB/500.07GB
Disk Images
|-macOS Base System      DI Vol. MacOS 10.15.6    1.35GB/2GB
Ran the first aid on all volumes, no issues found, and didn't fix my problem.
Any help with this issue would be appreciated. This was my first time using a Mac, I hope I haven't made any blunders in the above solutions.

This was resolved, leaving it up in case anyone gets into a similar problem.
Took the Mac to an Authorized Repair Shop, and they installed Mojave OS from a flash drive and this worked.
An explanation they provided was that Downloading and Installing OS via Recovery mode may not handle network errors gracefully, and simply installs just the partial files which have been downloaded, which may have resulted in the above errors.


ImageMagick complains when image is missing while stitching together tiles of an image I have to stitch together pictures (first vertically, then horizontally) with a varying amount of tiles via the command line on macOS 10.14.5. I usually use this command:

convert -append 0_0.jpeg 0_1.jpeg 0_2.jpeg 0_3.jpeg 0_4.jpeg 0_5.jpeg 0a.jpg &&
convert -append 1_0.jpeg 1_1.jpeg 1_2.jpeg 1_3.jpeg 1_4.jpeg 1_5.jpeg 1a.jpg &&
convert -append 2_0.jpeg 2_1.jpeg 2_2.jpeg 2_3.jpeg 2_4.jpeg 2_5.jpeg 2a.jpg &&
convert -append 3_0.jpeg 3_1.jpeg 3_2.jpeg 3_3.jpeg 3_4.jpeg 3_5.jpeg 3a.jpg &&
convert -append 4_0.jpeg 4_1.jpeg 4_2.jpeg 4_3.jpeg 4_4.jpeg 4_5.jpeg 4a.jpg &&
convert -append 5_0.jpeg 5_1.jpeg 5_2.jpeg 5_3.jpeg 5_4.jpeg 5_5.jpeg 5a.jpg &&
convert -append 6_0.jpeg 6_1.jpeg 6_2.jpeg 6_3.jpeg 6_4.jpeg 6_5.jpeg 6a.jpg &&
convert +append 0a.jpg 1a.jpg 2a.jpg 3a.jpg 4a.jpg 5a.jpg 6a.jpg 0_final.jpg

where I first add all corresponding tiles vertically (here 6 tiles) and then add all columns (here 7) horizontally to the final picture.

The issue is that sometimes, I have less pictures in a column (0 to 4 instead of 0 to 5 as given here) or more columns (0 to 10 instead of 0 to 6 as shown here).

Is it possible to adjust the above command so that imagemagick does not complain that, for example, picture 0_5.jpg or 7_0.jpg does not exist? Currently imagemagick complains and stops the process of stitching together the existing tiles.

You should be able to do this with wildcards. The shell will expand to existing files:

convert -append 0_*jpeg 0a.jpg &&
convert -append 1_*jpeg 1a.jpg &&
convert -append 2_*jpeg 2a.jpg &&
convert -append 3_*jpeg 3a.jpg &&
convert -append 4_*jpeg 4a.jpg &&
convert -append 5_*jpeg 5a.jpg &&
convert -append 6_*jpeg 6a.jpg &&
convert +append *a.jpg 0_final.jpg


How to write out a NORMAL tilde sign (~) in Mac? I switched to Mac recently. The only thing that's disturbing me until now is the missing of the tilde sign (~). The closest thing I achieved to this sign is the accent tilde (˜). My passwords are not satisfied with that second little tilde sign.

I'm using a U.S International PC keyboard layout.

How do I make the tilde sign work on my Mac?

You type the accent tilde (shift `) then space: ~


Find files in Terminal by kind - not extension? I have about 50,000 files in a folder tree which show up as the correct "Kind" in Finder ("Sound Designer II audio") but which have no extension.

I want to find all these and rename them to *.sd2 in Terminal.

Can the find command be used to find by "kind" without any extension?

To search all files with a distinctive kind use the command:

mdfind 'kMDItemKind="Sound Designer II audio"'

If this is not sufficient you can also use the type code (yyyy below is a place holder only)

mdfind 'kMDItemFSTypeCode="yyyy"'

You should be able get an (unknown) type code of a Sound Designer II audio file by executing mdls "/path/to/Sound Designer II audio file" | grep kMDItemFSTypeCode


Why can't I add new m4v videos to my iTunes library? Using iTunes 11.0.1, I tried to add some newly converted movies to my library for consumption on my Apple TV 2. This used to work well: ripping some movies from my DVDs, converting them using HandBrake with the AppleTV or AppleTV 2 setting and adding them to my media library. However, now nothing happens when I add the movie using Cmd-O in iTunes or via Drag-And-Drop from the Finder. Opening the movie via right click in the Finder in iTunes works however, and I can even stream to the AppleTV then. So what's wrong? I checked in the console logs, and can't find any iTunes related error messages.

Are you sure you're looking in the right Media section of your library?  Try looking in Music Videos, TV, etc, in case iTunes is putting it in the "wrong" section.


Root Device UUID Error while installing Mountain Lion on VirtualBox 4.3 While installing Mountain Lion on VirtualBox, it starts booting, then stops at the line "root device uuid: xxxx-xxxxx-xxxx". I've allocated all the required RAM and memory, but even after looking online and fiddling with my settings I still can't get it to work. Any thoughts on how to fix it?

I ran into this problem recently while attempting to install a Mountain Lion VM on my Mac Pro (10.10) using VirtualBox 4.3.2.  I was trying to follow the instructions here, but I got stuck in the EFI boot sequence.  I attached a screenshot, but I think its where you got stuck too.

I tried the same process on my macbook pro laptop (with the same iso), and it worked fine.

I fiddled with it for a while and found a solution.  If you follow those same instructions, but before you start the VM remove everything except CD/DVD from the boot order, it properly boots to the installer and you can continue with the process.

Forgive VM name typo

Make sure you restore the boot order before it restarts.


iMac wireless speed drops precipitously after extended time away I had a correct connection to the Internet:

But as of a few days ago, whenever I come back to my computer after a while and jiggle the mouse to turn off the screensaver, my internet speed plummets:

I fix it by temporarily joining a public network near me, and then going back to my own personal network (turning wireless on and off doesn't work, I have to actually join a different network to fix it).

What could possibly be causing this? Other devices (my iPhone and iPad) have great speed all the time, even when my iMac is slow, so my computer must be misconfigured somehow.

Also, it's not necessarily the screensaver itself: if I activate the screensaver manually, my internet speed seems unaffected. It's only when I come back to my computer after an extended period of time away. (I have my computer set to never sleep; it's my home Plex server)

My Internet connection is established through an AirPort Extreme.

My Mac is running Mavericks.

I tried renewing my DHCP lease, with no improvement.

Screen shot of the Wi-Fi menubar when it's working correctly.

And here's what it looks like when it's slow:

Looks like the only thing that's different is RSSI. What's that?

PS Everything is the default. For example, the location is "Automatic." Wi-Fi is green and connected in Network System Preferences (ethernet is red, obviously), when opening up Airport Utility everything is also green (the router and internet), the light on the AirPort Extreme itself is also green, the cable modem is flashing green, and as I mentioned OTHER devices have no problem getting on the internet. Pinging the router works fine, ping 10.0.1.1. As I mentioned, it's not like the internet is down, just REALLY slow.

PS I realize this is incredibly difficult to diagnose, so thanks everyone for trying. Can you think of anything that MIGHT cause this, I've checked the obvious stuff. Anything to point me in the right direction of more testing and prodding.

PS I don't know what changes, it just happens when I step away from my computer for an hour or so. When I come back, the internet is very slow.

From your analysis you have a typical interference problem within channel 6 and 802.11b use. This interference problem might have appeared after a move of only a few centimeters. The day before you were protected from your neighbour interference with a glass, this day when moving out of the shadow of this glass you are under the full light from the AP (or iPhone) of your neighbour.

If you want to investigate this problem and really choose the best wireless channel in the exact position you are using your iMac at the period of the day you are using it there is one uniq tool to know and use:

iStumbler

Please note: the 802.11b channels [1 ; 13] are a field of interferences for Bluetooth equipments and leaking microwave owens (they are both on the
ISM band of radio frequencies).


Sharing my VPN connection on macOS Sierra via WiFi Using MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) with macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73), I have a VPN connection through Pulse Secure on my WiFi, and I would like to share it with my mobile device, so I got a D-Link DWA-131 Nano USB WiFi adapter, and tried to connect through the new adapter to VPN, whilst sharing the connection through AirPort WiFi using Internet Sharing.

The sharing works, internet works, but VPN is not shared, only internet connection, so I tried to share my VPN using pfctl but with no luck, I've done it before through Ethernet, but I'm not able to do it through WiFi.

Here's what I do:

# sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
# sysctl -w net.inet.ip.fw.enable=1
(this generates sysctl: unknown oid 'net.inet.ip.fw.enable', no idea what is needed)
# pfctl -d
# pfctl -f nat-rules -e

My nat-rules file contains:

nat on utun1 from en0:network to any -> (utun1)

This is the only rule, it worked before when I was forwarding VPN from Ethernet to WiFi (different BSD device names of course).

Have you tried such thing before? It seems that the main problem is around creating a WiFi network without Internet Sharing, which doesn't seem to be possible

As a test, I'd try setting things up totally from the macOS GUI rather than using Terminal. You may already know how to do this, but broadly the steps would be:

Connect your Mac to the internet via your Pulse Secure
Set up your VPN connection in System Preferences > Network
Click on the Advanced... button
Ensure you tick the Send all traffic over VPN connection checkbox
Click OK
Ensure you also tick the checkbox for Show VPN status in menu bar
Now go to System Preferences > Sharing
Highlight (but do not tick) the Internet Sharing service in the lefthand pane
On the righthand side, select the VPN connection you created at Step 2 from the Share your connection from drop-down menu
Now select the Nano USB Wi-Fi port (i.e. tick the checkbox)
Click on the Wi-Fi Options... button
Give your new Wi-Fi network a name, password etc
Click OK
Now tick the Internet Sharing service in the lefthand pane

Now test this to confirm that whenever your Mac is connected to the VPN, it will share the connection via the Nano USB Wi-Fi. This means you should be able to connect your mobile device to the new Wi-Fi network you created at Step 12. To do this, follow the steps below.

Using the VPN connection

To make this work with your mobile device:

On the Mac, click on the new VPN Status icon in the menu bar
Select the Connect option pertaining to the VPN connection created previously
Once the connection is established, your Mac should start sharing the VPN via the Nano USB Wi-Fi
Now go to your mobile device and connect it to this Wi-Fi network


How can I free up storage on my MacBook Air? My MacBook Air is out of storage but I can't figure out how to free up storage. I've tried deleting videos and photos but this doesn't change anything. I've also tried deleting videos off iMovie but thus also doesn't help. I'm quite stuck, and would really appreciate any suggestions!

Have a look in storage manager, Open spotlight (cmd + space) and type sm then enter. It will show you what's taking the most space and you can delete items there.

In High Sierra it looks like this...


Playing and editing DV-AVI files on a Mac I have loads of video files that I have transferred from MiniDV tapes and onto my computer. I used firewire cable and something called WinDV to transfer them and as far as I know they are saved in the DV-AVI type 2 format.

I copied the files onto an external hard drive for a friend, to edit on his Mac. But there is a problem. The files are there, but won't open on the Mac. They play fine on all my PCs.

What do we do? Is this a file type incompatibility issue, or a software issue, or what? I was under the impression that the files on MiniDV tapes are natively DV-AVI (or is this wrong?). Do you have to convert these to MOV or something else while transferring if they are going to be used on a Mac? What do we do?

Handbrake can convert almost any movie file to MP4, which then works fine on everything Apple.


Does the "purge" command damage any thing in my system? I am using OS X 10.5.8 and in spite of having 5GB of RAM memory, I face a lot of inactive RAM, and go to the terminal and purge it via the "purge" command (of course without quotes).

I do this almost every two days, some application(s) is(are) probably not freeing up memory.

I would like to know if this command is harmfull/if it can "damage" anything in the system/in open applications?

No harm will come to your system through using the purge command. The purge command clears out pages which have been written to memory which the system thinks it may need again. Usage of purge can cause some applications to temporarily run slowly if resources need to be reloaded.
From the purge man page for Xcode 3.2.5:

DESCRIPTION
Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.


External USB drive connected to Airport Extreme doesn't show up in Airport Utility I have connected an external drive to my Airport Extreme, but it doesn't show up in Finder, and it doesn't show up in the list of drives when I connect to the Airport Utility.

The same drive worked previously, but I have since reformatted it. The drive works fine when connected directly to my Mac via USB cable.

Update
I don't recall how the drive was previously formatted, except that I had both a Mac and Windows partition, and the Airport Extreme recognised both of them. Now I've formatted it as a single partition, with format: Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted)

I had the same problem with my Western Digital USB drive. I re-formatted it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, not case-sensitive, not encrypted) and it worked.


Find out applications using a lot of bandwidth, I have an iMac (early 2009) with El Capitan loaded -- 10.11.6. Immediately upon start up, without starting a single program, something in the system starts producing wifi traffic. A lot of it. A program I got from the App Store called Bandwidth+ indicates the rate is between 400 to 500 kbps. Its eating up the bandwidth to the point its preventing others on the same wifi network from accessing the Internet. I haven't found any kind of Process Manager in the System Preferences.

Is there a way to detect the process that is causing the traffic, something that might be running in the background, so I can terminate it?

Use the Activity Monitor program to view the CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network activity associated with running processes.  It is in the /Applications/Utilities folder.


How to share ethernet between MBP and iPad? I have an MBP that is connected to the internet through ethernet. I've enabled internet sharing through wi-fi, my plan being to allow my iPad to connect to the internet through wi-fi.

I've created a wi-fi network and told my iPad to connect to it. When I do so I get a warning that the wi-fi network does not have an internet connection and if I force the connection my iPad cannot connect to the internet (duh).

How can I share the ethernet connection between my laptop and my iPad?

Update: Screenshot

This is what you do:

Make sure the ethernet cable is plugged in, and that the MBP is using ethernet to connect to the internet
Open System Preferences and click on Sharing
Tick the checkbox that says "Internet Sharing"
From the drop down list, select Ethernet. Tick the WiFi (thanks Mateusz Szlosek) checkbox. It should look something like this:
Click on Wifi Options, and configure your Internet Sharing network.
On your iPad, connect to the network you created.

Be sure to verify that internet sharing is actually enabled by making sure the checkbox is ticked!

Instructions are taken from these 2 websites, so if I'm not clear, please visit here and here.


why is the .HEIC suffix sometimes uppercase and sometimes lowercase I just took five pictures on an iPhone 11 and then Airdropped them to my Mac Mini. I noticed that every other image has the file extension .HEIC in uppercase.
I am pretty sure that I have noticed this before, only just today thought to ask about it. Does anyone have any idea why this might be?

There is no functional difference, it's solely down to the programming decisions of the originating program. Some choose to do it fully uppercase, some do not.


Update a software that has been downloaded with an apple ID associated with a deleted email address I am trying to update XCode. When I go on the AppStore and try to update XCode I receive the following message:

You have updates available for other accounts

Sign in to <email.address@PastUniv.com> to update applications for that account.

email.address@PastUniv.com is an address email I had in my previous university and this email address has now been canceled!

How can I update XCode with the Apple ID I am using today?

As long as you don't have any user data stored within the xCode.app file structure, just delete the xCode app.  Then re-download it from the AppStore using your new AppleID.


Taking screenshots with the command line of a specific window I wanna take a screenshot of a specific application using the command line. Doing

  screencapture -h

Shows option "-o"

  -o  in window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window

Which sounds like it might do what I need, but I am lost on how to actually use this option. Google did not turn up any answers

Thanks!

To capture a window using screencapture in Terminal, you have two options:

Interactively

-i         capture screen interactively, by selection or window
               control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
               space key   - toggle between mouse selection and
                             window selection modes
               escape key  - cancels interactive screen shot

You can use the -o option in conjunction with the -i option to not capture the shadow of the window, e.g.: -oi

Programmatically

-l<windowid> capture this windowsid

The -i option appears to be self-explanatory while the -l<windowid> option gives no additional info as with the -i option.

The <windowid>, for some windows can be ascertained by using AppleScript in the following example:

screencapture -l$(osascript -e 'tell app "Safari" to id of window 1') test.png

You can use the -o option in conjunction with the -l option to not capture the shadow of the window, e.g.: -ol

Some applications will not work with this method, however here are some alternatives:

screenshot: Better macOS screenshots via the Terminal
GetWindowID

Reference: How do I find the windowid to pass to screencapture -l?

Note: I am not affiliated with these projects.


Replace text in Firefox, Pages, Terminal, BBEdit I have a MacBook Pro running the latest Sierra.

I often find myself wanting to type I²C and have created System Preferences/Keyboard/Text to replace I2C. I can't seem to get this to work in any program (Firefox, Pages, Terminal, BBEdit).

The inbuilt omw doesn't seem to work either.

Is there any trick I am missing? I have set "Correct spelling automatically" and selected "Check my spelling as I type", which works for normal spelling errors.

The specific parameter is Substitutions > Text Replacement, which isn't actually in System prefs at all.

It's usually in the View menu of individual apps & as far as I'm aware needs to be specifically enabled wherever it appears.

Apps that don't have that menu item won't do replacement. BBEdit is one of those. Most Apple apps have it, but not Terminal.


WeTransfer email received without ever using the service I'm am using a MacBook Pro 2012 using El Captain version 10.11.3

I received 5 minutes ago an email from WeTransfer (noreply@wetransfer.com) saying that "Your file has been sent to ***@libero.it. As soon as the recipient will have downloaded the file, you'll receive a confirmation email. Name of file: IMG_0508.mov", dimension: 30 MB", and there was a link to download. After 1 minute I received another email telling me that the file was indeed downloaded by the recipient.

The problem is that I never used WeTransfer, wasn't even aware of its existence 10 minutes ago! Apparently it's a legitimate service, which I never used. I don't know whose that email belong to (even though the email provider is well known in Italy) and I have no clue what is going on. Obviously I did not click on any link on the email, thinking it was just a scam mail that tries to make you click on the download button to install some malware.

But given that the company seems genuine, I'm worried that some hackers have somehow compromised my system and sent themselves a file with my stuff, and immediately downloading it (30 MB in one minute means the recipient is ready to receive the email). On the other hand I wonder why they would put my email address for me to receive such an email...

I disabled the wifi of the Mac and I am writing this from my phone. I also started a full system scan with BitDefender virus scanner (don't know how helpful it is, but still. I do it once in a blue moon though, never found anything)

So what has happened? What do I do now to protect myself?

Edit

I received another email just now. Apparently this person just sent me back this file, and WeTransfer informs me that I can now download this. So to recap: 1st email is about me sending file A to person B, 2nd email one minute later is to tell me that person B downloaded file A, and finally 10 minutes later to tell me that person B has sent me file A.

P.S. having trouble adding tags from the phone

Or person C mistyped their email address and you're receiving their notifications.

Not at all unusual.


Accented characters and terminal redirection I'm having problems dealing with accented characters in file names in the Terminal.  Consider the following:

$ touch leão.png
$ ls > test.txt
$ open -a TextWrangler test.txt

The accented characters in test.txt are incorrect. Here are some possibly relevant facts:

I'm using Terminal with the default settings; the character encoding is set to UTF-8 and "Set locale environment variables on startup" is checked.
the output of locale in the shell is:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

TextWrangler's default encoding is UTF-8; trying to reopen the file in any other encoding just makes matters worse.
I'm running OS 10.6.8.

Update

In response to the comments, here is some more information:

The output of od -tx1 test.txt is:

0000000    6c  65  61  cc  83  6f  2e  70  6e  67  0a  74  65  73  74  2e
0000020    74  78  74  0a
0000024

If I do echo leão.png > test2.txt the text shows correctly in TextWrangler
Opening test.txt in TextEdit displays: leaÃÉo.png
Opening test.txt in jEdit displays: leaÃÉo.png
Opening test.txt in AlphaX displays: leaÃÉo.png
Opening test.txt in emacs from within terminal displays: leão.png

I'd really like to be able to work with non-ASCII filenames from within the shell. How can I get this to work?

I might not be able to fully solve your problem, but I can explain some of what's going on. The shell is behaving correctly; TextWrangler is not coping correctly with a slightly advanced requirement.

In test.txt, you have an a (garden-variety lowercase letter A) followed by a combining tilde (Unicode character U+0303). Combining characters generalize characters with accents. For all intents and purposes, ã (U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A followed by U+0303 COMBINING TILDE) should be equivalent to ã (U+00E3 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH TILDE).

Quite possibly, if Unicode was invented now, only combining characters would exist, and we'd always use a; but Unicode also has many characters for compatibility with earlier existing encodings. Because these are the characters almost everybody uses, many programs do not support combining characters so well, if at all. In particular, it looks like TextWrangler does not support them at all and shows a “I don't know what this is” mark instead.

Generally speaking, OSX prefers decomposed characters (i.e. letter + combining accent). In particular, as far as I know, all file names are normalized to this form. Normalizing file names (i.e. making sure that if there are several possible forms of a file name, then a specific one will always be used) is very useful, because it avoids being unable to find leão.png when you're looking for leão.png. (You don't see a difference between the two? Good, your browser handles combining characters correctly.)

The ideal solution would be for you to use an editor that handles combining characters correctly. If you want to stick with TextWrangler, make sure you have the latest version, and if you do, contact the authors for support. With TextEdit, jEdit or AlphaX, there's hope yet: they're showing the file as Mac Roman instead of UTF-8; try to switch them to UTF-8.


How to copy iPhone Notes to Pages How can I copy all of my IPhone Notes that are in ICloud into a Pages doc. I have been googling this for a couple of days but haven't found any answer. I don't want to use iTunes & a computer. There should be a simple way to move all my notes into one Pages doc.

It's possible to get notes out from the device itself using a idevice explorer such as iTools or iFunbox, but with some research the tutorials and questions for "where's the notes stored on my idevice" is outdated and doesn't work with iOS 8 ~~~

So, doing it manually, I recommend hooking up your iCloud to the notes, (which you've already done) and load it up on your mac using the Notes app. Open Pages alongside, and copy and paste the good old fashioned way. Command+c and command+v

  I don't want to use iTunes & a computer. There should be a simple way to move all my notes into one Pages doc.

You could do this on your iPhone/iPad too


Set page for PDF to open to In Adobe Acrobat (2019) you can set the page that appears when you open the PDF in the File > Properties > Initial View (tab). Preview always opens the document to page 1. Adobe Acrobat Mac/Win will open the document on the specified page. Does Preview support this functionality?

No. Preview does not respect the PDF Initial View metadata. Other Readers, such as Skim and PDFPen Pro, also do not. Instead, all of these apps open at page 1 and then remember the last page viewed for the next time the document is opened. Foxit Reader does respect the Initial View.

Your best solution is to provide a Table of Contents (aka Bookmarks, Outlines), so that users can easily click to the desired page.

It's worth noting that Preview's own 'Bookmarks' are not PDF-standard, and will not be displayed by any other PDF Viewer.


Diff between diskutility and finder on free space I came across this today :

At first I was like : "Caching bastard." but no... The finder is right and the diskutil is wrong... Why ?

The reason is probably that you have local snapshots of time machine backups (http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht4878). The difference is that the Finder calculates the free space you can use (the backups would be deleted if necessary). They are stored at /.MobileBackups (at least that's what it has been in Mavericks iirc) if you want to have a look and verify how much space it is consuming.

Other possible causes:

some people claim that if you have disk encryption enabled those
values may differ
maybe Disk Utility was opened before you removed
some files and didn't refresh?


2 Apple IDs - 90 day ban? I have 2 Apple IDs but I think I read that if you use a second ID, you cannot use the first again for 90 days. Is this true? If so, I need another solution!

95% of my app purchases have been with Apple ID #1, the original one. Apple ID #2 has only been used for a few important and more-expensive apps. I just want to log in occasionally to Apple ID #2 and download a purchased app, then go back to Apple ID #1 for all downloads, purchases, etc.

Here is what we have. It's pretty simple because I do all the setup; my husband just uses the phone, iPad, etc. My husband and I have 2 iPhones and 1 iPad. He is still using a PC after all these years, but I have a Mac desktop with an iTunes account. Over the years I have created 2 Apple IDs.

Currently the 90 day restriction is only for automatic download of additional purchased content.

This also is a per device limitation and not something about the account being banned from working elsewhere.

For 90 days after you turn on the "automatic download feature", you can't switch another account to start automatic downloads on that one device. You can always trigger updates manually. As long as you disable automatic downloads on the second account (or both) you won't have any issues with your two ID on multiple device setup until you run into the 10 total device limit for a given Apple ID for store purchases.


Numbers help me work out my gas consumption Trying hard to work out my yearly gas and electricity consumption.

I have forumla for SUMIF:
=SUMIF (B,"="&F6,Gas Reading)

But I think I want to do (IF the year is 2015 [F6 entry], then find the MAX and MIN values - which I can then work out consumption with subtraction.

Can anyone help... my experimentation with MIN and MAX isn't working!

Many thanks

Presumably you mean that you want to compare each entry of B, so first you need to correct your SUMIF command to have a B:B rather than B.
SUMIF(B:B,...)
That will indicate the full B column.

However you seem to have the good idea of looking at the max and min readings on in 2015. In this case, you want to find a maximum among a range. In excel this is secretly doing two things: first, finding which cells happen to equal 2015 and picking those out. Then, find their maximum. To get the values for the Gas Reading when the year is 2015, you create a vector or "array" of values that are only the Gas Readings you want. This is the output of an if statement:
IF(B:B=F6,C:C)
which has the effect of looking at each entry of the B column, asking if it's equal to F6. If so, then return the corresponding element of the C column. Notice that it spits out a bunch of numbers not just one, so you can't just enter that expression above and see all the numbers. It's not a "function" (with one output).

You want the maximum of these numbers, minus the minimum of the same numbers, to get the amount of gas you used.
Therefore the function you seek is
=MAZ(IF(B:B=F6,C:C))-MIN(IF(B:B=F6,C:C))
Caveat!! Make sure to use control-shift-return. After you enter the formula, while your cursor is still in the function box, press "control-shift-return" rather than just return. This allows excel to deal with the array, i.e. all those values inside the max() function, all at once.


Problems with opendiff I have a application, I wrote 6 years ago, which includes functionality to compare files. Recently this seems to ignore the compare files command. I did a little digging into the code, and this uses opendiff to perform this function.

I will try to dive into the code to follow up, but my question relates to some of my findings.

There are 2 instances of opendiff

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/opendiff
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23712  5 Jun 13:22 /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/opendiff

/usr/bin/opendiff
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18304 30 May 09:35 /usr/bin/opendiff

Running the first works as expected.

Running the second produces the following error

xcode-select: error: tool 'opendiff' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

This error is incomprehensible (at least to me), and I do not know where this came from.

I suspected Command Line Tools may be implicated, and I did install brew 2 days ago (to get an up-to-date rsync)

I would just delete /usr/bin/opendiff, but cannot - probably due to SIP.

I just booted up my MacBook Pro running 10.13.3 and all seems OK.

/usr/bin/opendiff runs, and starts FileMerge 2.10

Switch your active developer directory to the correct one as opposed to the one that was chosen (the one in the error message) when brew installed command line tools with:

xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer


MBP Retina screen, shows facebook page faded even after closed I'm experiencing something a bit odd on retina screen of my MBP 15".

When i stay on facebook homepage for like 10-15 seconds then close it. Then switch to a greyish application, i can definitely see; search box, friend list on right etc. faded on greyish application.

After a minute or so, it totally disappears... I tried to capture its screenshot but it wasnt same on screenshot. So obviously it is hardware-related, not something specifically designed into software.

Do you experience this too?
Should I contact Apple about this?

EDIT: I tried it with other "too white pages" but it didnt result same or it wasnt obvious enough.

Apparently it is called ghosting and happens on MBPs with LG display units.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=3435647


How to specify non-breaking space on Mac Excel - Mac version of char(160) On Windows, you can specify non-breaking spaces in Excel formulas with char(160), for example:

=A1&char(160)&A2
=substitue(cell_ref,char(160),"")

On Excel for Mac (2011), however, char(160) maps not to the non-breaking space character, but to the "dagger" character, † (†).

What's a Mac-friendly way to specify non-breaking space? (this is probably very easy for anyone who knows what encoding Mac Excel uses and how to look up character codes)

I can input a non-breaking space with opt-space, and Excel (so far) seems to treat it as a non-breaking space, but it's not great for readability - in a formula, it looks just like any space.

Bonus points for any answer that works consistently between Windows and Mac versions of excel - but for this question, Mac-only is enough

try char(202) instead of char(160).   That seems to be the code in Excel Mac

The reason is that your Excel Mac is working in the old MacRoman character set, where 160 is a dagger (U+2020) and 202 is a no break space (U+00A0)

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/macroman.html


mac mini stuck on boot since I was not longer using the Server options on my mac mini I wanted to install os x mountain lion, so I downloaded the app and selected the appropriate hard disk. now, after it booted i'm stuck on the grey fabric background.
there's no signal of life and nothing printed on the screen.

I have several macs around here at the office, how can I try to finish the installation at this point?

the mac mini is the 2007/08 version i think

thanks!

According to this support article, the system requirements call for a Mac Mini from 2009 or newer. The model number A1283 corresponds to each of the three Mac Minis that were manufactured in 2009 (Early 2009, Late 2009, and Server), so your hardware is compatible. The install image has disappeared because you began the installation process; this is supposed to happen, as the image was not designed to be persistent. The reason that the image is not persistent is partly because (if the installation is successful) if your file system were to become corrupted, for example, you would be able to boot from a separate partition that is made at the time of installation, called the Recovery Partition. In your case this did not happen, so you have neither the recovery partition nor the install media.

To fix your problem you will need to use another Mac, at least to begin with. The first step comes in two, simultaneous parts:

Re-download the Mountain Lion installer from Apple. Afterward, follow the instructions from this article to create an installer on a flash drive. While that's downloading, go ahead and start with #2:
Re-install the OS X version that was originally on your Mini. You'll accomplish this by booting from the installation discs that came with the machine. This is important! Do not use discs that came with another model or generation! Depending on your exact model, this software will be one of the following:

Mac OS X Server 10.6 (10A433; Server)
Mac OS X 10.5.6 (9G2030; early 2009)
Mac OS X 10.6 (10A432; original OS), OR, for the SAME generation, Mac OS X 10.6.2 (10A2234)

This will take a while, so be patient.

The next step is to upgrade your Mini to at least Snow Leopard (10.6.6). Although this really is a requirement only so you have the Mac App store on the machine. This was a requirement to download 10.8, which is available only through the Mac App store. Since you're downloading 10.8 from a different machine, I guess it would be possible to go from 10.6.x to 10.8, but I've never heard of anyone doing it. Probably just the safest to go ahead and get things updated to 10.6.6 or higher.

Once your Mac Mini has been restored and updated, go ahead and run "Verify Disk" through Disk Utility, just to be sure that the file structure is squeaky clean. It can't hurt, even though you've gone straight from a clean installation through some upgrades without anything in between, so go ahead and run it to make sure everything is spec.

Once that's all been done, go ahead and use your flash drive installer to attempt another installation of Mountain Lion. Not all installs work perfectly the first time through, so it may be that this one goes perfectly smoothly for you.

Good luck!


Unable to drag icons in Dock Running Yosemite 10.10.2 (14C109). The icons in the Dock cannot be dragged. When I click on an icon, it darkens, but then moving the mouse simply removes the focus on the icon. I cannot move the icons around, or off of the icon bar.

Things I have tried:
 - killing Dock process
 - deleting/moving preference files
 - restarting

Do you have Parental Controls enabled? "Allow user to modify Dock" is a setting that you might possibly have unchecked if you have them enabled.


where are the pictures of the skype contacts saved (see if someone is invisible) i just thought you could see if someone is invisible in skype, if you just delete (reset) his profile picture. Because i know if you install skype on a new device the profile pictures are saved only if he is online (or invisible). That means if i just want to so if someone is invisible you just delete or reset his profile picture and if you see after a few seconds his picture again = he is invisible.

BUT...
i don't know where the contact picture are saved on on my mac (running mountain lion). I just couldn't find theme...
so if you know where they are saved, would it be great.

On Skype 6.3.xx the avatars are stored in

~/Library/Caches/com.skype.skype/(your skype name)/SKAvatarCache

in TIFF format. You can view them by in Preview by opening Terminal and running

open ~/Library/Caches/com.skype.skype/(your skype name)/SKAvatarCache/(name of the file)


Does DevonThink Pro Office support the Macbook Pro Retina display? I'm considering getting a Macbook Pro with retina display, but I can't seem to figure out if DevonThink Pro Office, which I use for my research, will support the retina display. Since it is a program which primarily processes text I will be very disappointed if it doesn't display properly.

The manual, on page 9, states that retina graphics were added in version 2.5 (the current version is 2.5.2). So you should be ok.


Which US Apple stores accept iTunes Gift Cards? From time to time, retailers will discount iTunes Store Gift Cards and I'm tempted to stock up since discounts are enticing ways to shop. It appears that Apple has three sorts of gift cards available in the US. I am interested in the usually colorful or music related one.

Originally, these cards only worked to buy music from the iTunes Store, but now my Apple ID works with several other store fronts in addition to the expected iTunes music store on iOS, Mac and Windows:

iBookstore on iOS
iCloud to buy additional storage space annually
iTunes match annual subscription service
App Store on iOS
App Store on Mac OS
Apple Store app on iOS for ordering product online or for pickup in Apple Retail Stores.
Apple Store on the internet at http://store.apple.com

Which of these will accept a US purchased credit from a physical or electronic iTunes Store Gift Card if your Apple ID has a US billing address? Which of these will not be able to spend credit redeemed from the iTunes gift card. I do know that the Apple Store gift cards are accepted at the Apple Retail stores, but I've never seen them discounted or available anywhere but from Apple Retail.

You can use redeemed value from an iTunes gift card to buy from the following stores:

iTunes music, movie and TV stores for iOS, Windows and Mac
iBookstore on iOS
App Store on iOS
App Store on Mac OS

The only gift cards that are accepted at an Apple Retail Store are Apple gift cards. The Apple Retail Stores and the Apple Store online do not accept iTunes gift cards as forms of payment.

You can not use redeemed value from an iTunes gift card to buy an Apple gift card or anything else from the following stores:

Apple Retail Stores
Apple Store on the internet at http://store.apple.com
iCloud yearly storage space increases
iTunes Match service


Finder Services - Cannot get specific service to appear/run I cannot get the default Finder "New Terminal at folder" service to work, no matter what. I've tried every trick I could find online.

So I created a new service and it appears in the Services list, but again, cannot get it to appear in the actual services menu nor does mapping a hotkey work.

The kicker is that this exact service was working for the last few months with no issues. Suddenly just stopped working. I haven't updated the OS or anything.

I'm on Sierra.

The script is below:

on run {input, parameters}

    tell application "Finder"

        set myWin to window 1

        set theWin to (quoted form of POSIX path of (target of myWin as alias))

        tell application "Terminal"

            activate

            tell window 1

                do script "cd " & theWin

            end tell

        end tell

    end tell

    return input

end run

I really need this service to work, it saves me so much time and I really hate how it's not a reliable os feature.

macOS Sierra has two built-in Terminal Services, New Terminal at Folder and New Terminal Tab at Folder.

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Files and Folders, and check one or both and add a keyboard shortcut if you’d like.

Then in Finder you can select a Folder, right-click and select the service from the Services context menu, or from the Finder > Services menu or use the keyboard shortcut if assigned.

There’s no need to use AppleScript unless you really want to.

Here's some example AppleScript code that works of me:

try
    tell application "Finder"
        set theTargetPath to quoted form of (POSIX path of (target of front window as string) as string)
    end tell
    tell application "Terminal"
        do script "pushd " & theTargetPath & "; clear"
        activate
    end tell
end try

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and aside from the use of a try statement, does not employ any additional error handling and is meant only to show one of many ways accomplish a task. The onus is always upon the User to add/use appropriate error handling as needed/wanted.


Files created by Terminal are not visible in my Finder So I've been trying to create a text file using Git, I punched in the command "touch home.html", then I punched in the command git "add home.html", then I input "git status" and the file doesn't want to appear, I have relaunched the finder multiple times, nothing.

You're running git status in the wrong repository (your home directory, ~, i.e. /Users/adam). You need to move into the repo that you want to act on, i.e. cd ~/Desktop/Tools/Git/MyFolder, or a subdirectory of this, and then run git status.

You've created the home.html file in ~.

You must have run git init on your home directory or a parent of it, i.e. /Users/adam, /Users, or /. The first is most likely, as the others would require use of sudo. You can forget about / get rid of this repo by running rm -rf .git within that directory.

I encourage you to learn the basics of Git by watching this video.

Here's a good video on Linux terminal basics as well. macOS isn't Linux, but it's Unix-based, just like Linux, so the principles are the same; the knowledge directly applies to macOS.