My WD external drive unmounted itself and now does not work I have a strange problem. Working on an OS 10.9.5 MacBook laptop.

Last night, I was exporting a 20-something GB Aperture library from my WD 2TB drive to another hard drive. I left, and when I came back the next morning, my computer warned me that I should properly eject my hard drive. I hadn't disconnected it, and my settings are set so that the computer will NEVER go to sleep or shut down when the power supply was connected (which it was). Now, my mac won't recognize the hard drive.

Is it dead?
How can I prevent this from happening again?
How can I recover my files if I can't see the disk???

I've tried:

Powering my computer on and off
Using a different USB connector
Using a different power cord
Plugging the external drive into another mac (did not work)
Plugging the drive into a windows computer (nope)
Mounting through disk utility, or using disk utility to repair/verify the disk (got this error message: Disk utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files).
Suggestions on these sites: External drive does not mount after plug off without eject and Sometimes Mac doesn't recognise my external hard drive e.g., going through terminal to unmount OR eject OR view files in read only mode (all just say the volume timed out)
Read suggestions on this thread about drives disconnecting on their own - wasn't sure what to do, but realized the problem might have had something to do with exporting Aperture files? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2597920?start=120&tstart=0

This is my time machine disk, and it has some other stuff on it I need. I also don't know whether to trust my machine to plug another hard drive into it. I can't update to a newer OS just yet. I'm terrified to plug in my other hard drives because what if the same thing happens to them!? Unfortunately all my Aperture libraries are stored on external disks!

Info:

Last login: Sun Mar 26 16:39:26 on ttys000
ericaneomputer2:~ erica$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            319.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS NEWTON_WD               2.0 TB     disk1s2
ericaneomputer2:~ erica$ diskutil info disk1
   Device Identifier:        disk1
   Device Node:              /dev/disk1
   Part of Whole:            disk1
   Device / Media Name:      WD My Book 1140 Media

   Volume Name:              Not applicable (no file system)

   Mounted:                  Not applicable (no file system)

   File System:              None

   Content (IOContent):      GUID_partition_scheme
   OS Can Be Installed:      No
   Media Type:               Generic
   Protocol:                 USB
   SMART Status:             Not Supported

   Total Size:               2.0 TB (2000365289472 Bytes) (exactly 3906963456 512-Byte-Units)
   Volume Free Space:        Not applicable (no file system)
   Device Block Size:        512 Bytes

   Read-Only Media:          No
   Read-Only Volume:         Not applicable (no file system)
   Ejectable:                Yes

   Whole:                    Yes
   Internal:                 No
   OS 9 Drivers:             No
   Low Level Format:         Not supported

Either your WD MyBook enclosure has failed or the disk itself has failed.

I am basing this assessment on two factors:

Points 4 & 5 above - that plugging it into different computers didn't work.  If it doesn't work on different computers you have narrowed it down the the WD unit itself.  If the problem was with your Mac, it wouldn't be present on a different computer.
The correct response  provided by diskutil for disk1.  It's highly unlikely (though not impossible), that if the enclosure wasn't functioning you would at least get erroneous information back or no information at all.  The WD enclosure is reporting back that there is a drive but it has no operating system.  Chances are, it's the drive.

However, you can take it a step further and do some additional diagnostics.  The key here is to isolate the major individual components of the WD enclosure - the logic board and the drive itself.

So, to diagnose this you will need either of the following

a known working hard drive
a 3.5" HDD to USB adapter (I recommend this option for reasons that will become clear momentarily).

You will need to disassemble the MyBook.  From my research, the case appears to be held in place with "snaps" which you just pry off so it shouldn't be too difficult to get into.  There's a straightforward set of instructions on Instructables.com

Depending on the option you took above - you either need to change the drive in the MyBook  or plug the old drive into the USB to SATA adapter.

If one component works (i.e the drive), then you know for a fact that the other (i.e. the enclosure) has failed; or vice versa.

If it is your drive, the USB to SATA adapter will allow you to attempt to recover your files.  I have personally used Disk Drill with excellent results (it's free to use the diagnostic portion and to see if you can recover data).  You will be able to make an image of the drive and attempt recovery on the image lessening the chance of total failure of the drive.

If it happens to be the enclosure, the USB to SATA adapter will allow you to continue to use the disk drive while you come up with a more permanent solution (the MyBook is essentially the same thing but with a more elegant enclosure).

If you choose the "drive method" you will still be able to get the same diagnostic results, except you won't be able to transfer or rescue any data if it happens to be the MyBook enclosure that's bad.

Now, as preventing it from happening again - well, this is a spinning hard drive which means it mechanical.  It's going to fail.  The only thing you can do is mitigate data loss by having a backup

I dont belong this this software company, but I just mount my external drive successfully with it. I tried Disk Utility on 2 different MacBook Pro which didn't work.
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

I installed this for testing purposes on different format usb. and tried mount on this works.


How to fix a Macbook Pro trackpad where the mouse pointer is randomly moving? The trackpad on my Macbook Pro just started acting oddly. It's randomly clicking (which might cause me to switch programs), right-clicking and even once my screen even showed the swiping animation as if I was trying to switch to a different desktop.

Part of me fears that this is some sort of joke hacking attempt (I know of a USB device you plug into someones computer and it randomly moves their mouse and types on their keyboard), but there is nothing plugged into my machine and I just turned off the Wi-Fi and watched as this web page tried to close, the mouse right clicked twice, highlighted a word and clicked "Paste and Match Style" in the Chrome right-click menu.
Also as I've been typing (with my Wi-Fi turned off) the mouse has randomly been clicking inside this question and changing where I am typing.

I just plugged in a USB mouse which seems to work fine but the trackpad is now nearly useless. I can't even move the mouse cursor more than a few centimeters with it.

Is this a common issue?
EDIT
I think it is dying actually. I can now click but not move at all with the trackpad, while a regular mouse works fine.
EDIT 2
And now it seems to be working again. I turned on the option for "Ignore Trackpad when Mouse is plugged in" under Universal Access. I cleaned the trackpad with rubbing alcohol, I whined and complained for a few minutes to my dog, turned off the "Ignore Trackpad" setting, unplugged the USB mouse, and the Trackpad appears to be working mostly normally.
If I run my finger across it at the top or bottom portion of the mouse, it works, but there is a line horizontally across it (almost exactly where a physical trackpad button would end on the old trackpads) that is "dead".  The mouse stops moving, or moves sluggishly when hitting that spot and that "spot" goes across the whole trackpad.

This was driving me crazy, too. It just started happening yesterday, but was dangerous as the cursor kept selecting everything--making selection rectangles especially on the desktop, opening programs I didn't want to open on the dock, and generally jumping around like a drunk rabbit.

Searched forums, read about others saying this happened to them after updating their Mac software, etc., etc. Got so frustrated I literally slapped the trackpad with my open palm. And what do you know -- that fixed it! Now my trackpad is working perfectly again. Must have been something pinching or pressing against the underside of the trackpad.

Don't know if you're all going to believe me 'cause it sounds ridiculous, and if you do believe me I don't know if you're willing to do it. But I swear on my soul it's true and I'm posting this solution for all to see because I want to help.

Shift/control/option and turn off the computer wait 10 secs and then start-up,it should stop that annoying cursor.


Will Parallels be safe while upgrading to El Capitan? The new update seems pretty legit, so I am considering updating my macbook.

I have Parallels installed on my computer, and I don't want it to be removed or damaged during the installation of El Capitan.

If I use time machine to back up my macbook, will it back up everything and keep Parallels and the files on it safe? Or, will it only store original Mac files, ignoring parallels?

If you haven't set Time Machine to exclude any files from the backup, you should be fine.

If you want to be really cautious, you can find the Parallels virtual machine file and manually copy it onto your external hard drive, free space permitting. Put it at the top level of the drive, not in the Backups.backupdb folder.

This will keep your files safe on your external hard drive no matter what happens on your computer. To make sure you can keep actually using Parallels, though, you'll need to make sure you're on Parallels version 10 or 11. Version 9 will not be supported in El Capitan.

I know I'm not directly answering your question: on my Book Air i7 8gb ram, after upgrading to El Capitain, my Windows setup (Win XP and Win 10) are running extremely slow from an external usb 3.0 SSD.

Before upgrading all was running much quicker!

My Parallels version is last one.


Simulate iOS's "reduce white point" feature on OS X El Capitan I've become fond of iOS's "reduce white point" accessibility feature to reduce the intensity of bright colors, which makes the screen much easier to use in the dark -- nicer, in my opinion, than simply turning down the brightness.

On OS X El Capitan version 10.11, is there a way to simulate this feature using native OS X tools, or ones available on the internet? I couldn't find anything.

Thanks for the help.

This is a solution that work nicely, but it is not free.

Gamma Control - is a professional app to control the brightness of color on your mac. Really useful to correct color & black on any projector, that's why I paid for it at first ~25$.

Get it in the App Store

The put these setting on:

1- Max brightness on you mac

2- In Gamma Control put the White Point Luminance as you like (between 0.3 and 0.6 I enjoy)

Using the built-in calibration tool in System Preference > Displays, you can adjust the whitepoint of your monitor:

and save as many profiles as you wish:


macOS is "Unable to Check for Updates" The hard drive on my iMac died & I had it replaced.  They installed a new drive, wiped it clean & re-installed the OS.  When I brought it home, I went through set up, pointed it at Time Machine, and viola! next memory my machine was up & running.

With one catch...

I can't get any OS updates.  It keeps saying it's unable to check for updates, make sure you connected to the Internet.

I've tried rebooting a few times to no avail.  I can also connect to websites just fine, including apple.com.

Any suggestions of what to try?

Seems like the App Store may be having some problems today.

https://twitter.com/macrumors/status/1091369924847558658

https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

I experienced the same problem on a Mac mini (2018) running macOS 10.14.2.

Based on the comment from JBis, using softwareupdate --list was useful to confirm that an issue exists.

$ softwareupdate --list
Software Update Tool

Finding available software
The operation couldn’t be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error -1012.)

On a MacBook Pro running macOS 10.12.6 (Sierra) I was getting similar behavior.  The difference on macOS Sierra was that the App Store Updates tab would generate a popup indicating that "An error has occurred", which also included the last line of text from the softwareupdate output.

Try restarting your computer. That solved it for me.


Saved passwords in Safari keep coming back So I had saved some some passwords in my Safari on my Mac (Mavericks). I went to Safari > Preferences > Passwords > Remove All to remove all the stored passwords. But no matter how many times I do it, all of them keep coming back. All autofill options are disabled. I also disabled the cloud keychain on my iPhone.

I don't want to have any Passwords stored in cloud or anywhere. What am I missing?

Found the solution. I searched for keychain in spotlight and found something called Keychain Access. All the passwords were here under Login. When I deleted them from here, it removed them from Safari as well.

Safari's preference to Remove All just removes the locally stored passwords in Safari and not the ones that are in the user keychain.

Additionally, go to System Preferences and make sure that keychain syncing is disabled if you don't want any data stored in iCloud. You can empty that keychain if desired using Keychain Access before disabling the sync for extra security if you are sure no other devices depend on keychain syncing.

I had the problem that for a particular website that I would occasionally log in to the username field started autofilling with a huge bunch of gibberish. However, no matter how many times I looked in the Safari saved passwords on my Mac that bit of gibberish was no where to be found, but would also autofill. It would even autofill on my iPhone, but it wasn't in the Safari saved passwords.

So the other answer helped me figure it out. That gibberish was saved in the Keychain and not in Safari. Deleting it there fixed my problem. However, if that gibberish was saved in my keychain but was also on my iPhone then that means the keychain was being synced as well, and not just what Safari has saved. So be aware of that as well if you want to remove everything from the cloud. I also know that the keychain shares across the cloud because as soon as I've put a wifi password in on one device then my other devices will connect to that wifi automatically as well. There are several things that get shared and not just your Safari passwords.

UPDATE (restored after being deleted): I'm sorry I couldn't just make this a comment on the other correct answer but at the time of writing I didn't have enough reputation to leave comments so I was forced to write this as an answer against my will. I hope I'm forgiven. (And please don't censor me. I'm all for editing what I wrote for clarity, but what I said in this update is the truth and so help me I might just give up on SE if someone removes it again without asking me about it first.)


Using Photo Stream and ICloud I am taking py ipad on holiday and plan to take pictures with my Digital camera and at the end of the day transfer the pictures from the memory card to the ipad via a card reader.

Will these photos go into the photo stream?
If I set up iCloud on my PC, which will be left at home will the pictures be synced to that automatically? In which case the 1000 picture limit wont be an issue?
Am I right in understanding that the pictures will lose some resolution when viewed on the ipad but will keep the resolution when viewed on my Windows PC?
Does all of the above only work when connected to WiFi?

Thanks

Yes, photos imported into an iPad do get shared through Photo Stream. This feature is mentioned in this Apple KB article.

The 1000 picture limit is a per hour limit. Apple says (in the same KB article) that…

  If you exceed one of these limits, your uploads to Photo Stream will be paused temporarily and you may see a notification message on your device. Your uploads will resume automatically once you no longer exceed one of the limits (such as the following hour or day).

In addition to the 1000 picture limit, there are further limits…

  Uploads to My Photo Stream per day: 10,000 photos
  Uploads to My Photo Stream per month: 25,000 photos

These limits can not be circumvented (as far as I know) by having your computer constantly sync to Photo Stream.

This Apple KB article explains Photo Stream resolutions:

  On your Mac or PC, your photos are downloaded and stored in full resolution. On your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV, your Photo Stream photos are delivered in a device-optimized resolution that speeds downloads and saves storage space. While actual dimensions will vary, an optimized version of a photo taken by a standard point-and-shoot camera will have a 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution when pushed to your devices. Panoramic photos can be up to 5400 pixels wide.

According to the same Apple KB article as the previous, yes, Wi-Fi is required for Photo Stream to work (emphasis not mine).

  On an iOS device, new photos you take will be automatically uploaded to your photo stream when you leave the Camera app and are connected to Wi-Fi. Note: My Photo Stream does not push photos over cellular connections.

Then again, if you are at all concerned about Apple's cloud services, as any sane person might be, why not sign up for DropBox - a thoroughly reputable, dependable service that is free up to a certain limit. And you can increase your DropBox size by registering friends etc. The iPhone and iPad apps have automatic Camera Upload service (when you have a connection) and installing the Mac desktop application means that those photos--and anything else synced to DropBox is available to any and all of your Macs. I use it for LAN syncing, moving things around my home network, as well.

Just makes sense to me to have real backups of photos somewhere, and on your machine as well. Also, photos are readily shared from DropBox - though you can make as many photostreams as you like, sending them pretty much instantly to anyone with a Mac who accepts the invitation.


iphone thinks it's up to date when it's not I have iOS 9.0.1 and today i want to update to 9.0.2 but my iPhone 6 thinks it's up to date. I was using all of the betas without any problem since iOS 9 beta 1 then i updated to GM version. I really don't wanna hard reset or iTunes update to my phone. Any idea?

You can always find full lists of download links within 24 hours of a release going live.

9.0.2 is listed here - http://www.redmondpie.com/download-ios-9.0.2-links-for-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch-ipsw/

The links are to Apple's own download servers - just make sure you pick the correct version for your device.

Initiate the update from iTunes by holding the  Alt ⌥  key as you click Check for Update & navigate to the file you just downloaded.

Update iTunes to latest version
Wait few hours /a day and try again


Would an app, featuring only a Webview component, get approved for the AppStore? I am not a mobile app developer, but we do feature responsive design in our website which works very well across all mobile browsers.

So if I were to make an app that only contains a fullscreen WebView component that loads the website, would that app be approved to get on the Appstore?

Apps which are just web views are specifically against the App Review Guidelines:

  2.12 Apps that are not very useful, unique, are simply web sites bundled as Apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

Source: App Store Review Guidelines

In my experience....no, would not get approved.


How can I disable wireless captive portal support? On a particular wireless network, most internet access is blocked by a captive portal but certain websites are not blocked, e.g.:

http://www.apple.com/ is redirected to a captive portal login page.
http://www.my-university.edu/ is accessible without having to log in.

I want to access a website that is not blocked. When I try to connect, however,

iOS automatically displays the captive portal after connecting.
iOS automatically disconnects after I close the captive portal.

How can I escape this aggressive automation?

As documented in the Apple knowledge base:

  If you cancel before logging in to the network

  Tapping Cancel on the Log In screen disassociates the device from the captive Wi-Fi network.

  If you joined the network from the Wi-Fi screen using the ⓘ button, or you joined less than eight minutes ago, you'll see a message telling you the network isn't connected to the Internet. You can choose one of these options:

  Use Without Internet: this option will dismiss the Welcome screen, turn off Auto-Login for the network, keep your device associated with the network, and allow you to interact with the network in other ways.
  Use Other Network: this option will dismiss the Welcome screen, disassociate your device from the network, and return you to the Wi-Fi Settings screen. From there, you can choose a different network.
  Cancel: this option will return you to the Welcome screen.

Therefore you can (now—I don't know in which version of iOS this was introduced) click cancel and then "Use Without Internet".

I'm not sure you can disable the captive portal system; can you log in to the captive portal so apple.com is reachable?


How to restore Spotlight user interface after killing it with Cocktail? I installed an App called cocktail and disabled spotlight. But now the Application does not start and it gives an error of some sort. I deleted the App and I do not have Spotlight anymore.

Can I enable it from some other place? How?

pastebin.com/Yw8czsFU

try

  sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

then

  killall SystemUIServer

The easiest thing to do is go back to Cocktail >> System >> Spotlight >> Uncheck "Hide menu bar icon".


Is there any antivirus software that DOESN'T slow down Time Machine? Time Machine making a backup to my TimeCapsule has been extremely slow.

I finally figured out that it was an issue with Avira Antivirus. So I looked for a better software. Seeing the reviews I went for Sophos which is another free software.

What a mistake! Same problem there and some others too.

So, let's forget about free software then, I thought. Let's get the number one software (according to Tom's Hardware) Bitdefender instead! But this time I won't be so naive. I'll do my research first. And after a quick googling I find they have the same problem as the previous to contenders.

So, is there any antivirus software that won't break vital functions for my Mac?

I'm not really sure if this fits the ask different format, however, according to AV-TEST (the closest thing to an authority on the subject) BitDefender comes out very high on their scores, especially on the 'slowdown' tests.
I do use it on Windows & it's a lot less irritating than some I could mention.

Avast on the Mac is a known resource hog, btw. I could even feel it on a dual 6-core Mac Pro.
oops, Avast/Avira... they're both near the bottom of the speed tables, so I'll leave it as is

I've had some really bad experiences with Bitdefender. They may be good on Windoze, but their Mac version is not "full-featured", and burdened with all sorts of annoying installation issues, non-existent tech support, and other sketchy practices... but I'll stop there.

I've been reasonably happy with Malwarebytes.


Trying to set boot-args with nvram gets "general error" on Sierra I'm trying to temporarily disable KEX signing enforcement on my MBP since my company's VPN client (GlobalProtect) is failing the signature check now.  This started yesterday when I did the OS upgrade to Sierra yesterday.

The solution should be running this command:

sudo nvram boot-args=kext-dev-mode=1

The problem is that I am getting the following response, and I can't figure out what it means or what to do about it (meaning I can't connect to my company network, too).

nvram: Error setting variable - 'boot-args': (iokit/common) general error

Does anybody have any ideas of things I could try or otherwise look at to track down the problem?

Thanks.

The kext signing restriction was integrated into System Integrity Protection starting in El Capitan, and as a result the old disable flag no longer works. But there's a new way to do it: boot in recovery mode, and run the command csrutil enable --without kext. I haven't tested it, but my understanding is that this will turn off the kext requirements, while leaving the rest of SIP enabled. If that doesn't do it, try csrutil disable to turn SIP off entirely.

You need to apply that when in recovery mode. Enter in Recovery mode and then apply the following in the terminal:

nvram boot-args="serverperfmode=1 ncl=262144"

Then, reboot. After rebooting, check the parameter on the terminal via nvram -p


How can I insert symbols on iPad or iPhone? How can I insert symbols like copyright or degree symbols?

For many symbols or characters with diacritics (e.g. accents) you can press and hold a related key to insert variations.

º - For the degree symbol, press and hold the 0 button (on the mac you can press Option+0[zero, not letter o])
© - For the copyright symbol, on the mac the shortcut is Option+g. Unfortunately pressing and holding g on the iPhone/iPad doesn't provide an option for the copyright symbol.

As an alternative, you can use glyphboard, or copy and paste the symbols from a note, email that you create on your computer.


iPhone iOS 5 showing incorrect time zone Recently (and only while at work) my phone has started to claim that its 8 hours ahead of the correct local time (e.g. it is currently  a little after 1230 and the iPhone is showing a little after 2030).

If I disable automatic time setting (Settings > General > Date and Time > Set Automatically) and manually confirm my location, all is well and the iPhone shows 1230. (Location services are switched on.)

Of course, this isn't sustainable because I'd like my phone's time to be kept in sync.

From researching a little it seems as though this is a carrier related problem, can anyone confirm that?

Update: After discussing the issue with my carrier's helpdesk they confirmed a problem with one of their cells which they subsequently fixed and which caused my timing issue to go away.

Moral of the story: it's not always something that you can fix by yourself!

You should see the Location you are in under the set automaticly button. As below. It is greyed out, as this is taken from your current location, so you must have location service enabled.

I found that calendars had time zone support on, which means all times are shown at that time zone, instead of the time zone of the current location. To turn it off, go to Settings>Mail,Contacts,Calendars>Time Zone Support>Off


Is there a way to securely erase an SSD on my MacBook Air? I have a late 2011 MacBook Air with an SSD and Lion. I used it for a while and then I activated FileVault 2. Now the data is encrypted, but I need to securely erase it so I can sell the computer.

I thought about erasing it with gparted by installing it on a USB.

Any suggestions?

If you have a USB Flash Drive of 8 GB of size, you can make a Lion Installer and use it to securely erase the Drive.

http://macintoshhowto.com/osx/how-to-make-an-os-x-lion-usb-thumb-drive.html

You can also make a USB Bootable Recovery Disk as explained here by Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

Once you have done either you can hold down the OPTION key while restarting your computer and booting from it.

When it loads up, it will give you a few different options, you will need to use the Disk Utility part and highlight your HD and choose the Erase Tab.  Under the erase settings will be a security option when you can write the disk to 0 once or even multiple times.

There is a guide on it here:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3251

See the part where it says

  How to Zero erase and install OS X

I hope that helps you out.

Updated

The guy at the bottom of this post:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1267158

points out a work around to securely erase the SSD drive in the MacBook Air through encryption.

This is what he says:

  cmace127

  I found a workaround.
  Restart the computer and hold option to enter the setup screen. Go
  into disk utility and select the drive. Erase the drive using "Mac OS
  Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted). Make a password for
  the encryption, it doesn't matter what it is because you won't need
  it. Hit "Erase". Now select the volume and the "Erase Free Space" and
  "Security Options" buttons should no longer be grayed out. Click and
  select your level of security and off you go. I presume "Erase Free
  Space" and "Security Options" should do the same thing because you
  just erased the drive so all space is considered free. This worked for
  me so let me know if it helps.

Let me know if that's works, this should securely erase the drive since it will then be encrypted.

Also, in the future with Lion be sure to use FileVault 2 so that you don't have to worry about this again.

So you mean if you format the drive, someone may use the recovery software to see your data?

Just delete the files you don't want anyone to see then copy dummy data until the disk is full, delete the dummy data, and your previous data is completely gone.


How much more storage than iOS 7 does iOS 8 ACTUALLY use up? I have read so many reports about iOS 8 installation storage requirements that I've lost count, and none of them even answer this very basic question.

“The download is 1.2 Gb… the free space requirement for the install is 5 Gb…” etc... But honestly, who cares? We get the space back after it’s done. It's a one time requirement.

What's ultimately of interest when I install iOS 8 on my iPhone 5 is: how much space will I never get back?

The Ars Technica iOS 8 Thoroughly Reviewed article pegs it at 600MB difference on the iPhone 5.

DEVICE  SPACE AVAILABLE    (IOS 7.1.2)  SPACE AVAILABLE (IOS 8.0 GM)
32GB    iPhone 4S (AT&T)    27.4GB      26.6GB
32GB    iPhone 5 (VZW)      27.3GB      26.7GB
32GB    iPhone 5C (AT&T)    27.2GB      26.5GB
64GB    iPhone 5S (AT&T)    56.0GB      55.1GB

it takes up barely more than 7 once ckmplete


Can OS X Lion Server automatically set up Mail using Open Directory information? This is my first experience with OS X Server, I setted Open Directory up and added some accounts through Workgroup Manager.

When I login in on one of the remote Apple computers with one of the network accounts it mounts the file sharepoints nicely. But it doesn't automatically configure the Mail.app.

I searched on the internet but Lion differs a lot from (Snow) Leopard at this point. Is there anyone who can help me find the right setting to configure this?

Log into profile manager as an administrator using Safari and set up a profile for a user to change mail settings.

https://server.local/profilemanager/

You will want to spend time making sure DNS and SSL are correctly installed - starting with making a self-signed certificate if you don't want to pay for a real SSL cert for your server.

Here's what to look for when you want to test setting IMAP settings for users.

As you might be able to see - pick a user, then edit their settings and finally choose email.

you need to use profile manager, your users can setup their entire mac enviroment with installing just one tiny profile


How can I stop my iPhone displaying "iCloud Backup requires that you verify your password" repeatedly? Due to what turned out to be a (I assume unrelated) sim card problem, I recently wiped my iPhone 4, and then reinstalled from a backup.

Since then, multiple times per day, my iPhone displays a "iCloud Backup requires that you verify your password" message, and then prompts for my iCloud password. If the correct password is entered, the prompt is dismissed, only to return after a few hours (I've not noticed any specific triggering action I'm performing).

How can I stop this prompt from appearing repeatedly?

Presumably disabling the iCloud backup, as suggested at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3406796 would do the trick, but I do still want the backup enabled.

I personally had this same message. I turned off iCloud backups, then turned it back on. Settings > iCloud > Backup. While it did ask for my password the first time, it has not asked since.

If that doesn't work, I suggest to again, turn off iCloud backup, delete the backup, then turn it back on.

Settings > iCloud > Backup, turn off.
Settings > iCloud > Storage >
Manage Storage, locate the backup, tap edit in the top corner, and
delete.
Settings > iCloud > Backup, turn on.

If you delete your iCloud account and start a new one it should work again.


How Do I Fully Flush Cached Redirects From Safari? I have a device with a web-based control panel, and accidentally set it to redirect all http pages to https, even though some don't work over https. Although I've since corrected this, Safari seems to have memorised the redirect and is refusing to forget it, instead constantly attempting to redirect me to the invalid https address.

I've already closed Safari, cleared ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/ and ~/Library/Cookies/HSTS.plist but it still seems to be remembering the redirect when I re-open it.

Where else could Safari be storing this information? I can access the correct page via Firefox or Chrome, so it may not be a system wide service, or if it is it's not one that the other browsers use.

Unfortunately because the web-panel is provided by a device I don't believe I can adjust headers or setup a redirect back to the correct URL, which seem to be options offered in other similar questions, so I really need to find out where this data is being stored so I can destroy it with fire.

Based on quanta’s answer:

I wasn’t able to use launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist because I have System Integrity Protection enabled:

$ launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist: Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engaged

However I was able to work around it by doing the following:

killall nsurlstoraged (stops your user’s nsurlstoraged process; I actually ran sudo killall nsurlstoraged, but I suspect it isn’t necessary to stop the system’s nsurlstoraged as well, since the cache is in the user Library folder)
rm -f ~/Library/Cookies/HSTS.plist (deletes the HSTS cache)
launchctl start /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist (restarts nsurlstoraged)

Try this then, go to
Step 1: Go to ~/Library folder,
Step 2 :Delete Safari folder from ~/Library/Application Support,
Step 3: Delete below folders from ~/Library/Caches,
Step 4: then Delete ~/Library/Safari folder
P.S:Keep safari closed during the above operations


How do I change Sourcetree icon shown in Dock? I have an app that is very useful, but from time to time it changes its icon in the Dock, which I found disturbing for my workflow.

I would like to prevent that as I am perfectly satisfied with the standard icon.

I've tried following the instructions in the article, How to change Mac app icons but as soon as the app starts, it changes the icon back.

I've also poked around Contents/Resources directory in the app bundle, but could not find the said icon.

Does anyone have a workaround?

If anyone is interested, the issue was Pride icon on SourceTree app. I've found the solution here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Sourcetree-discussions/The-way-to-change-icon-for-Sourcetree-app/td-p/1110914

Go to https://github.com/alexzielenski/ThemeEngine
Switch to releases tab (I took the latest pre-release)
Download .zip and extract it
Open the Sourcetree.app with right click - show package contents and navigate to Contents/Resources
Copy Assets.car and sourcetree.icns to any folder
Run ThemeEngine from the zip in step 3
In ThemeEngine click "Open Document" and open the Assets.car
Find the icon named Pridetree
Open sourctree.icns with your preferred app - I used preview. Clicked on second icon pressed cmd + a to select whole image and pressed cmd + c to copy it.
Clicked on first image in Pridetree ThemeEngine and pressed cmd + v to paste it.
Repeat with second image.
Save the document
Replace Assets.car in the app Contents/Resources with modified Assets.car.

Do not forget to backup your files. Your are doing this on your own risk as I do not know if it actually breaks the EULA.

Without being sure (I'm not in front of my mac now), an .app file is a zip file ... which contains icons. Maybe you can try to change them.

In any case, work on a copy of the .app file, and try to load from that copy (maybe there are some integrity checks).

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/0596004605/ch01s12.html


I want to install Windows 7 on an external drive I've read two articles about booting Windows from external drives as opposed to a stock Bootcamp install. Here are the links:

http://kevtg-compuproductive.tumblr.com/

http://bleeptobleep.blogspot.fr/2013/02/mac-install-windows-7-or-8-on-external.html

The latter of the two seems more difficult, plus I do not have an external hard drive with USB 3 compatibility, so I think I would use the other one. Though I could just buy a new external drive...

Has anyone tried these methods? I want to make sure they're legitimate before I try them.

Thanks! :)

I'm not sure if you are still looking for an answer, but here it is:

I haven't tried those specific methods, but I have installed Windows 10 on an external hard drive. It should be the same, although you will need a Windows 7 iso image.

Step 1: Download a virtual machine to run Windows on. I used VMWare Fusion and used a 30-day trial.

Step 2: Search "windows 10 iso image" and click the first link from Microsoft. Download it.

Step 3: Open the VMWare application and upload the Windows 10 iso image onto it, and run Windows.

Step 4: Go on your virtual Windows and download WinToUSB from this: https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/.

Step 5: Find and download a Windows 7 iso image. The official Microsoft website has it, but you will need the product key you received when you first installed windows.

Step 6: Open the WinToUSB tool and upload the .iso image onto it, and choose which version to install. Connect your external drive to your Mac, make sure it connects to VMWare, and select it once it shows up on WinToUSB.

Step 7: Wait until the tool installs Windows 7 onto the external drive. While this is running, go to the Bootcamp app and ONLY download the Windows Support Software.

Step 8: Once the WinToUSB tool finishes installing, you can close out of VMWare by shutting down from the virtual Windows. The connected external drive should show up on your mac again, and drag the Windows Support Software folder into the drive.

You should now have an external drive with Windows 7 on it, and the Windows Support Software on it as well. You can boot from it by restarting and holding option and choosing the external drive. Use the Windows Support Software to install the correct Apple Drivers in the external drive when inside the Windows 7 boot.

This was the method that worked for me on an Early 2014 MacBook Air on High Sierra.

For info and future searches ... With steps identical or very similar to those mentionned in the 2nd tuto (BleeptoBleep)
i managed to install Windows 8.1 on an external SSD /thunderbolt and a late 2015 iMac 5K 27 retina i7 4G but not Windows 7 due to a potential incompatibility (havent found out the reason) with hardware and/or OS El Capitan (boot disk not showing up after "Alt" start-up with W7 but OK while OK with W8). Managed W7 installation on an older 2014 MacBook with Yosemite OS though, also on another external drive also bypassing the BCA (bootcamp)


How can I prevent an SSH session from hanging in OS X Terminal? When I close my MacBook with an active SSH session in Terminal and then wake it up,  the prompt goes unresponsive.

In about five minutes it says

  Write failed: Broken pipe

and terminates.

This also happens when I don't type anything in the Terminal in about fifteen minutes.

Can I force OS X to:

Keep SSH connection alive for longest time possible
Kill it immediately once it becomes unresponsive

?

For keeping the connection alive, you can check in /etc/ssh/ssh_config the line where it says ServerAliveInterval, that tells you how often (in seconds) your computer is gonna send a null packet to keep the connection alive. If you have a 0 in there that indicates that your computer is not trying to keep the connection alive (it is disabled), otherwise it tells you how often (in seconds) it is sending the aforementioned packet. Try putting in 120 or 240, if it is still killing your connection, you can go lower, maybe to 5, if with that number it doesn't happen, maybe it is your router who is dumping the connection to free memory.

For killing it when it gets hang up, you can use the ssh escape character:

~.

That is, press the tilde and then the period, if it doesn't work, press Enter before you press that, that will kill the connection immediately.

Add these two lines to /etc/ssh/ssh_config:

ServerAliveInterval 60
TCPKeepAlive yes


Some songs are skipped over/broken on my iPhone; how can I find these? Sometimes when I go to play a song on my iPhone, it skips over it entirely and goes onto a song after it in the list.

The same happens when I try and play it in iTunes directly from the device - it gets a exclamation-mark-circle icon to its left when I try and play.

The songs have all been copied on by drag/drop from MP3 folders, so I suspect the copy process didn't completely properly.  Is there a way I can find all these songs so I can re-copy them?  (Trying to copy the entire album over again creates duplicate entries.)

Finally found an answer to this, thanks to Galley from iLounge!

Create a standard playlist called "Not Missing".
Drag your entire library into that playlist. Missing tracks cannot be copied to a playlist.
Create a smart playlist called "Missing" where:

Playlist - is not - Not Missing
(additional to this post)  Media type - is - Music

You now have a playlist which contains only your songs with the dreaded exclamation mark, and you can re-add them from your original source.

On your iphone, tap on music.
Swipe left or right on a song, album or artist and a delete button will appear.
Delete whichever item you don't like.


Save downloaded file to iCloud Drive with Safari on iOS8 I would like to download a simple text file using Safari on my iPad and save it to iCloud Drive. However, there is no "Open in..." options in Safari to save to iCloud Drive.

I have an iPad2 with iOS8 and I have upgraded to iCloud Drive.

Then, I would like to be able to select this same file in iCloud Drive so that I can upload it to a website using Safari on my iPad2 on iSO8. Right now, the only files I can upload are from the camera roll or take a new picture/video.

Is this possible?

For anyone else who comes acros this question via Google or some other search engine, there is a way!

The most excellent app, Workflow, once again comes to the rescue.  You can create a file downloading workflow that works perfectly:

http://www.guidingtech.com/36337/file-downloader-safari-ios-8/

I'm on iOS 9 and works great.  I really need to pay attention to Workflow more - it really is the glue that solves many of the little niggling edge cases for iOS lacking what is easily done on a desktop.

I'm sorry, you can't manually upload files to iCloud from your iPad. You can only upload files to your iCloud Drive using a Mac..
OR any computer.


iPhone vibrates in spite of "Do Not Disturb" When i switch my iPhone 5 (iOS 7) to "Do Not Disturb"-Mode, and also activate "Always" in the Silence-Settings, it vibrates when it is unlocked.

  So when i am reading an iMessage, and it arrives a new one, my iPhone
  vibrates.

I want to switch my iPhone completely silent with this option, but it is really possible? I can turn off vibration, of course, but i really don't know what Do Not Disturb really does!

It turns of Vibration and Sound when new Notifications arriving, but when i am using the Phone, it should be complete silent as well.

  Is this a bug or just a missing feature?

It's my understanding that this is by design.

Do Not Disturb mode is meant to be active when the phone is not actively in use. The idea behind it is that, if the phone is unlocked and you are working with it, you do in fact WANT to be notified of a new item.
However, when the phone is locked and dormant, the logic is that you no longer wish to be disturbed, and it will suppress vibration / notification indicators.

So for example, if you are sleeping, and DND is on, then it will remain silent, and not vibrate. If you roll over, pick up your phone to check messages, and it's active, the DND will still allow vibrate to indicate new messages while you are using it.

Use Airplane Mode. Simply pull up Control Panel and tap the Airplane icon On and Off.


Can't partition SDD with odd error Whenever I try to resize my OSX partition on my SDD from 251GB to 210GB, I get this error:

  Couldn’t modify partition map because file system verification failed.

I've tried

Booting into recovery mode and trying from disk utility there (repairing and partitioning)
Booting into single-user mode and running fsck -fy like seemingly every website suggests

but whenever I try to do this in any situation, I still get this error. This is frustrating because AFAIK only OS X knows how to resize an OS X partition.

How can I get around this?

EDIT:

Apple Diagnostics gave no errors.
I first had this error when I had filevault (full disk encryption) turned on. I have since turned off FileVault and repaired any errors I caused by trying to partition the encrypted disk with Disk Utility in recovery mode. I have checked again that FileVault is off, and it is.

EDIT2:

$diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            248.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             1.7 GB     disk0s3
$ diskutil cs list
No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

In order to change the size of a partition, the partition can't have any errors.

The easiest way to repair the partition is to reboot while holding Cmd+R, and start the Disk Utility from the menu that is presented after the recovery system has started.

Then select the partition and click the 'Repair Disk' button. After it has finished, it should say that there are no more errors. The partition can now be resized.

NOTE: Unfortunately, because of HFS+ it is possible that Disk Utility may display "Could not be repaired", at which point you would need to reformat the drive and restore from your latest backup. I hope this is not the case!


Disable steps count in iPhone 6 Today I opened Health on my iPhone 6 and I realized that it is counting my steps.

However I never enabled this functionality.

Is there a way to disable it?

iOS 8 has Settings => Privacy => Motion & Fitness => Fitness Tracking (On/Off). I don't know if it works; it was on when I just discovered it, yet Health app can't find any motion data. I do walk ...

In Health, you should visit the Steps settings under More then Steps, and change the setting to Don't track steps. It should stop counting!

Hope this helps!


hdiutil convert/rsize resource temporarily unavailable When trying to convert or resize a dmg image I get the error:

hdiutil: convert failed Resource Temporarily Unavailable error

or

hdiutil: resize: failed. Resource temporarily unavailable (35).

(hdiutil error code 35).

The problem appears to happen when you unmount the image using umount.

Remount the image (either using hdiutil attach or just double click the image) and use the command hdiutil detach it again. This will unmount and eject the image.

hdiutil detach /Volumes/<your image>

restart your machine and it run it again it should work.


Any way to have iPhone microphone only active if sound level is above a certain threshold? I'm not sure what the proper terminology is, but I've used online gaming apps years ago where sound through microphone can be set such that it doesn't go through unless it's above a certain noise threshold.

Is this possible to do with calling from an iPhone? This would be really useful if you're calling in a noisy area because all the background noise would be filtered out .

I have an iPhone 11.

You're describing VOX (Voice Activated Transmit), which iOS does not have as a feature.

Unfortunately there's no way to get this ability for calls.


How Do I Show External Disks on Second Display's Desktop? I can see my external drives on all the spaces on my MacBook Pro's display, but I cannot see those drives on my external display. Is there a way to make them show up?

The external display is not set as a mirror of the main display but rather as an extension of it.  So you can drag the external drive icon (or any file/folder/window) from one display onto the other.

However, this will not 'stick' as when you disconnect the drive and reconnect it, the system will mount the drive icon back onto the primary display (the one with the Dock).

Also, when you disconnect the external display, the system will move any files/folders/icons that were showing on the external display onto the main display.

Right-click on the drives on the main display
create an alias
move alias icon to second screen

As I've only one screen, I can't verify whether this works in all situations.


What port does iPhone native Facebook app use? The network at my place is using a proxy. So I have set up the proxy in iPhone. I can connect to the internet and access Facebook using the Safari browser without any problem. However when I access Facebook using the native app, it gives me a connection error. Why is this so? Does the native app use different ports instead of getting JSON objects through HTTP port? I am quite new to this, so bear with me.

First, this is a really good question. Wow. I've been trying for days to figure out how to attack this one.

I set up "Charles Web Debugging Proxy" on my Mac and set up my iPhone to hit it.

First, it hits http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php, which spits this back:

<chat_connect_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/1.0/facebook.xsd">
<host>9.channel</host>
<port>80</port>
<channel>p_123456789</channel>
<seq>0</seq>

Meanwhile, it also connects to iphone.facebook.com which gives some XML. Then it connects to 0.9_channel.facebook.com:80 and sends some requests which return JSON.

It looks like everything is done over port 80. Are you sure theres no other problem on your end?

facebook use port 443 to communicate between iphone


Is there any limit to the number of users connected via Personal Hotspot? How many users can be connected to an iPhone's personal hotspot? Does the limit differ from device to device? I want to know the limit of maximum users.

Quoting from an Apple support article about Personal Hotspot (emphasis mine):

  When you connect a device to your Personal Hotspot, the status bar turns blue and shows how many devices have joined. The number of devices that can join your Personal Hotspot at one time depends on your carrier and iPhone model.

I believe the typical limit is usually between 3 to 5 devices.

You can have up to 21 people join I have had that many people and I have 5s


"Swift Programming Language" iBook Not Updating I've recently been researching Swift development as I have grown tired of Objective-C. However, the book I am reading (Apple's official guide) will not update to the latest version on my Mac. It updates fine on my iPhone, but it still has the same version from June that I initially downloaded on my Mac. Is there any way to update it?

I have tried deleting and re-downloading the book, and there is still no update option from the Downloads menu. I tried viewing in the iBooks Store—there is definitely a new version available. When I have iBooks check for available downloads, it says that I have downloaded all Updates and Purchases. Suggestions?

You should be able to download a fresh copy by right-clicking on the book and selecting Delete. Then once the delete is complete, right-clicking and choosing Download "The Swift Programming Language".

Alternatively...

All books downloaded through iBooks are stored in the following folder.

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

On both my Macs the Swift Programming Language book is contained in a folder called 881256329.epub. You can confirm this is the same on your Mac by checking the iTunesMetadata.plist file in that folder. You should see the book title towards the end of the file.

Close iBooks and delete this folder.

Then open iBooks again and try to open the book. iBooks will tell you This book can't be found. The original file can't be found. Then if you try to access the book again, iBooks will download a fresh copy.

Using the terminal:

1.- Go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/

2.- Find out which folder contains the Book and go into

3.- Execute: zip -rqX ~/path/to/store/the/Swift.epub .


View files on PC from iphone backup without itunes? I need to view files from an old backup that i put a password on but cant for the life of remember the password. Is there anyway i can view these files on PC? I need text msgs and emails that where on the phone at time of backup.

You can try TotalSaver Encrypted Recovery Service from MyPhoneData


iPhone 3GS shuts down and cannot power on again Last night I was still using my iPhone 3GS to play Kart Rider Rush game. My iPhone was still on 80% battery. Then in the middle of my game, my iPhone gradually gets heated up a lot and then it automatically shuts down. I thought maybe the iPhone just needs to cool down and left it on my table.

This morning when I pick up my iPhone again, I realise I couldn't turn it on. When I plug in the iPhone into my computer to charge, it gets unusually hot. I attempt to do a reset by pressing and holding the sleep and home button but nothing happens. I'm so worried now.

What could have happened to my iPhone 3GS? Any other ways to get my iPhone working again?

I used to see this occasionally when I worked at the Apple Store. If it gets really hot while it's charging but there's nothing on the screen, it's most likely still alive. It could be hard locked up by a runaway process from the app you were using that can't quit .

For phones with a removable battery, you might just pull the battery for a few seconds and replace it and then restart the phone. You can't pull the battery on the iPhone, but sometimes attempting to restart it while it's on power will break it out of the black screen. Try plugging it into your computer and holding down both the sleep/wake button and home button (same as how you tried to reset it before) for at least 15-30 seconds and see if you get the Apple logo.

The other thing you might want to try is putting it in DFU mode and then rebooting it normally again. You can find the steps here. Don't try anything crazy, just boot it into DFU (screen should be black) and then restart it how the instructions say.

If it's still not restarting, take it off the charger and let it sit overnight to try and allow whatever charge is left on the battery to run down. Then, plug it in to a power source and attempt to restart it by holding the sleep/wake and home button. This is really tedious to wait on, but I had people bring me phones that could magically be rebooted after sitting all night until the battery ran out.

One last method, as a last resort: If you have a backup, you might want to attempt to put it in recovery mode and restore it. Sometimes it will go into recovery even if there's nothing happening on the screen. To do this, plug your cable into the computer, and then hold down the home button on the phone. Keep holding home and plug the other side of the cable into the phone. Continue holding down the home button until you see the message in iTunes that the phone is in recovery mode. RESTORING YOUR PHONE WILL ERASE ALL YOUR DATA so don't do this right off the bat if you don't have your stuff backed up. Try less the less destructive methods of troubleshooting first. You can also do a restore from DFU mode if iTunes will recognize the phone.

I'm pretty sure your phone isn't going to explode, but if you just can't get it going again, it might be a good idea to take it to an Apple store if you can get to one. There's never a charge to look at your phone and you're not under any obligation to have service done on the phone if there will be a fee. But if you want to, you can check the status of your warranty (a very few of the 3GS phones are under warranty still, especially if there's been AppleCare on the phone) at selfsolve.apple.com.

If the phone can be powered on eventually, they have a diagnostic tool called Behavior Scan that they can run at no charge that will tell you if your phone is overheating or what particular apps are hanging the phone up. However, keep in mind that if you've recently restored your phone it won't return much useful information.

It could be a poorly written app that's hanging your phone, or it might need a software update or a restore. If you can get it going again, it would be a good idea to check if you're running the latest software and that your apps don't need updates either. These things tend to be more software related than hardware, but if it keeps shutting off and a factory restore won't fix it, you might be looking at some bad memory in the phone or a logic board issue so keep that in mind.

I am assuming that the phone has not been wet or been subjected to physical damage. If it has been, that might be a factor as well. I'm also assuming the phone is not jailbroken. If it is, be careful with restoring it because you can end up bricking your phone if you're not paying attention.

I've noticed the iPhone gets hot during 3D games, but combined with the spontaneous shutdown is a cause for concern.

It's possible something has shorted out.  Don't use it or it may explode.  This can be caused by a manufacturing fault, dropping it one-too-many times, or a build up of dirt.

First, clean out the charging port with cleaning alcohol and a cotton bud or compressed air.  Try to charge it or turn it on any see if it still gets hot.  If so, get it serviced.  It'll likely be something wrong with the battery or one of its circuits.


Devices with different Apple IDs responding to the same FaceTime calls This is really weird. Whenever my sister-in-law calls my wife via FaceTime, my phone and Mac also ring at the same time. When my wife answers the call, then both of my devices stop ringing.

It's exactly as if all three devices were using the same Apple ID for FaceTime, but they're not, and they never have. My wife's phone is signed into her iCloud account and uses her phone number and email address for FaceTime; likewise, my phone and Mac are signed into my iCloud account and use my phone number and email address.

Furthermore, this only happens when my sister-in-law calls, not anyone else.

Why does this happen, and how can I prevent it? The only thing I can think of is that maybe my sister-in-law has both my wife's phone number and my phone number in the same contact card, so when she starts a FaceTime call, it goes out to both our numbers (and my Mac by extension)?

Yes - this technology seems to be driven by your contact card info stored by calling party. If calling party has info for you and someone else in same contact card, then both phones will ring for FaceTime even if not same Apple ID.

In our case, we had friend who had stored my number and husband's number (not email) under my contact card. Both our phones would ring when friend tried to FaceTime me, even though husband and I have separate Apple IDs and caller never selected the other number.

Solved it by having calling friend remove the additional phone number from my contact card on his machine.

based on the information that I've read from the Apple forums, go into settings>facetime> and turn your iphone cellular calls off. Do this on both devices,  this should stop the calls from going to both devices.


Making an AppleScript that holds down a key So I'm trying to make a script that holds down a key like Left option. But I don't want to use something like

tell application "x"
    keystroke *keycode*
end tell

I tried doing that, but the app I'm trying to make it work for won't accept it.
So I thought of trying to make a script that just holds down a key (specifically a modifier key) for an indefinite time.

Is there any solution?

Try running your code using the key down & key up features of AppleScript.

code:

tell application "System Events"
    key down option
    delay 5
    key up option
end tell

keystroke is actually part of the application "System Events, so try something like this:

tell application "x" to activate
delay 1
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "x"
        repeat n times
            keystroke "keycode"
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Where x is the application/process and n is a number.


iOS: App to search All Content in PDF files? There are many apps that have search over the names of the files but not all content in the files. It is very slow to test all apps such as iAnnotate, PDF Expert, Amazing PDF Expert and GoodReader. Which app search over all content in PDFs?

For non-PDF files and files without OCR, please, see

  Search over different types of documents such as DjVU sometimes without OCR?

iAnnotate had the ability to search in all the pdf's That are in it's library (easily import from for instance Dropbox). It's also fairly fast in searching

PDF Search is the app you are looking for. It indexes all content of PDF documents and has a very fast and accurate AI-powered search algorithm.

PDF Search WEB Site


Ways to find messages from blocked contact info Is there a way, or ways, to retrieve iMessages or text messages sent to me by a number or email address I have blocked on my iPhone 6?

Text messages that are blocked are not saved. So you cannot go in to see old text messages.

If you have been blocked the phone will ring once then go straight to voicemail  or it will go straight to voicemail without ringing. A text message will show as delivered but the person will never see it. If it has a single green tick next to it it means you have been blocked.


Applescript - Contacts: Why can I get addresses and emails from a contact but not phones Errors when getting phones

In Script Editor, if I run:

tell application "Contacts" to get the vcard of person 301

the result is:

"BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//Mac OS X 10.13.6//EN
N:Bar;Foo;;; FN:Foo Bar
EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:foobar@gmail.com
TEL;type=HOME;type=VOICE;type=pref:555 555 1212
CATEGORIES:Address Book
UID:1e6e6e410a662666
X-ABUID:18B18941-E2B7-48CE-BB34-4A26CC0E23BB:ABPerson
END:VCARD
"

Note that this person has an email address and a phone number. If I run:

tell application "Contacts" to get the value of emails of person 301

the result is:

  {"foobar@gmail.com"}

However if I run:

tell application "Contacts" to get the value of phones of person 301

I get

  error "Contacts got an error: Can’t get value of every phone of person 301." number -1728 from value of every phone of person 301

and if I run

tell application "Contacts" to get the phones of person 301

  error "Contacts got an error: AppleEvent handler failed." number -10000

What happens if the person doesn't have a phone number?

Edit: Based on one of the proposed answers to this post, I tried

tell application "Contacts"
    set thePhoneNumber to value of phones of people
end tell

which gave me something like

  {missing value, {}, missing value, missing value, ...}

with a lot more "missing values" and "{}s" because I have about 2000 entries in the database.

Investigating this, I found that the "missing value" appears for people who have phone numbers, and the "{}" appears for people who do not have phone numbers. If I run the same command with "emails", I get a list of email addresses for each person who has emails, and an empty list "{}" for people who don't.

This is on Mac OS 10.13.6, Contacts 11.0 (1808.8).

Have I discovered a bug or is there something wrong with my script?

This should work for you...

tell application "Contacts"
    launch
    delay 1
    tell its person 301
        try
            set thePhoneNumber to value of phones
        end try
    end tell
end tell

This also works for me...

tell application "Contacts"
    set thePhoneNumber to value of phones of its person 301
end tell

You can also try running this following code

tell application "Contacts"
    set thePhoneNumber to value of phones of people
end tell

Then you will go to item 301 of that result and if there is no phone number... That may be why you are getting the error.


Clicking on external links opens Chrome but not the link When I click on an external link and Google Chrome is not running yet, Chrome will launch but will not open the linked page. Instead, it starts at my last opened tab (which is the behaviour I expect), but the clicked link should also open in another tab.

When I click the link a second time, it will open correctly in a new tab.

Why is this?

EDIT:
For clarification, it's about macOS. Furthermore, I found it behaves different to how I described above. The link is opened in a new window the first time, instead of a new tab in the existing window. The problem is, that it does not come to the front, so the old window from my last session in Google Chrome is in the front. You don't notice the new window behind the old one unless you use mission control to see there is a second window.

EDIT 2:
Since this question got a lot of attention I finally accepted the top voted answer, though this wasn't my problem in the first place at all. I can see that there are two problems here:

When there is a pending Chrome update, Chrome does not open the external link at all, just opens another window with the default start screen. (Bug)
When Chrome is up to date, external links are opened but this time still a new window in the background and not as a new tab when restoring the last session. (bad design)

Hope this should be clear now :)

I had this happening all afternoon. Then I checked Chrome | About Chrome and it was waiting for me to relaunch to update. That fixed it.

I uninstalled Chrome with AppCleaner and did a fresh install. This solved the problem for me.


How to run a keyboard macro with automator in a background application? I'm trying to figure out how I can automate a repeating key press within a specific application on automator. Essentially, I want it to run in the background while I'm free to do anything else on my computer.

I'm new to this, so I don't know if it (or anything for that matter) can do what I'm describing

It cannot be done, afaik.

Only the frontmost app will accept keypresses.

I don't have an absolute reference to confirm this, but there are discussion at Apple Communities, Stack Overflow & MacScripter that would appear to agree with my belief.

This can easily be done e.g. with python keyboard (https://github.com/boppreh/keyboard).


Colors by file type in terminal (running bash) I'm new to Apple (coming from Linux) and have been stymied in every attempt to use my .bash_profile to get my terminal to color files by their extension (a process which was a single line in my .cshrc file!).  I've had some promising leads via google searching, but all end up having a fatal flaw (e.g., requiring dircolors, which in and of itself has led me on several seemingly doomed google searches, or tweaks on "export LSCOLORS" commands which don't seem to get any further than coloring directories, etc).

I'm on OS X 10.9.2.  I've installed coreutils and MacPorts.  Can someone point in me in the right direction?

Edit:  In case it wasn't clear, I'd like to be able to specify that, e.g., .tex files appear red, .txt files appear green, .pdf files appear blue, etc., when viewed in a terminal via ls.

Edit2:  Just to show I've done my research (or some research), here's the superuser question and answer which addresses this for Linux.  The coreutils idea for replicating this on OSX does not seem to actually give me dircolors, or suggest an option for progressing in its place.

https://superuser.com/questions/468966/colouring-output-of-ls-according-to-file-extension/468969#468969

Have a look at http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/l which sets up colors among other things in an attempt to give the same output on different platforms

Add two lines to your .bash_profile

export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced


How to make the Notification Center menu icon glow, (like Twitter does) when notifications are present? Notification Center is pretty great, however, it's very annoying that I have to click the menubar icon or make a gesture to actually open the notification pane.

How to make the Notification Center menu icon glow, (like Twitter does) when notifications are present, or something similar?

The only solution is jailbreak - which is not advised... In iOS 7 you don't get it either (I'm running the beta) and there is no hidden setting.


Is there an audio player with waveform seekbar? I'm looking for a player with seekbar that displays the waveform of the playing song, like http://foobar2000.org + http://foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_wave_seekbar

Specifically, a seekBar is an extension of ProgressBar that adds a draggable thumb and also provides a waveform preview of track in the background of the bar's on-screen area.

Its more of an audio editor than a player, so might not be exactly what you want, but Fission from Rogue Amoeba is an excellent tool that displays the waveform of the loaded audio file. You can zoom in and out of portions of the audio and drag the play point to wherever you wish.

waveform seekbar comes as default for AIMP player, also can download more skins.  In screenshot, I'm using Bliss skin.

AIMP for windows


How to delete partition disk0s4? A while ago, I dual booted with ubuntu linux and followed a tutorial on youtube to do so, but later I wanted all of my hard drive to be for osx, so I deleted the ubuntu partition, but now I am left with the following in diskutility:

The problem isnt the disk0s4 partition size, but rather the fact that it prevents me from accessing another 70 gb of hard drive space. This wasn't previously a problem as is reflected by my current data use, but I need to install alot of new software on the computer which exceeds the 180 gb on the current partition...is there any way I can delete disk0s4 and access the extra 70 gigabytes of data on my hardrive? Thanks alot!

Two things come to mind - booting from recovery HD might let Disk Utility be more free in changing the filesystem where your OS resides. You could also try removing it using diskutil in terminal:

diskutil unmount disk0s4
diskutil mergePartitions ignored ignored disk0s2 disk0s4

You will want to have a backup or be familiar with command line and also verify that your Macintosh HD is really disk0s2 by reviewing diskutil list before making any changes.

Once the disk0s4 is subsumed by Macintosh HD you may need to expand that to fill the drive:

diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 R

If done properly on a system with no issues, all the above commands are non-destructive to disk0s2 (presumably Macintosh HD) and the boot volume support. You will need to go in and set your startup disk to the resized volume using System Preferences to avoid a long delay each time you start your Mac as it looks for the old location of disk0s2 from which to boot. The bless command would work to set the boot destination as well.

go to the partition, mine was named disks03, i then went to the ERASE tab, then select security options, here i raised it to the max option which said something about the standards of U.S department of defence.

once you've set the security option to max, hit erase, and it begins the purge!

Worked fine for me


Are non-Apple iPhone chargers safe? I discovered today that there are a lot of non-Apple low-cost iPhone (and iPad) chargers. The cost is very low, so I am concerned about the quality of such chargers.

Are these alternative chargers safe or can they damage the iPhone (or its battery)? It is better to buy Apple components or can we safely buy third-party components?

Most of the third party iPhone ones are mostly safe most of the time. However there isn't a good way to tell which ones aren't. Here is a teardown of an Apple one and a clone.

I say most of the time since some of the safety issues are only problems if there are faults. But in a poorly designed one, faults can cause fire and/or shock. Also poorly designed ones can get hot, which might be a problem in an enclosed space.

I personally would avoid anything that claims to be from Apple but is priced lower than theirs. That demonstrates the seller is willing to lie, so they are questionable to begin with. A reputable seller wouldn't try to pretend they are selling Apple chargers.

NEVER trust a third party charger and buy the apple one it's worth it


How do I force iTunes Match to re-evaluate certain tracks I have a little over 9000 songs. Between yesterday and this morning, iTunes Match is finally done evaluating and uploading songs, and it seems to have made a few mistakes.

If I show the iCloud Status column in my song list, in a number of albums I'll see "Matched" for most of the tracks, but "Uploaded" for one or more track. If I look up that song/album/artist on the iTunes Store, Apple has those songs. I've even looked at the track info to see if they might have been encoded differently, but on the few I've spot checked they have the same encoding as the other songs in the album that were matched.

I've been able to force iTunes Match to re-evaluate songs that showed "Error" before (no errors now), but I can't seem to figure out how to force it to re-evaluate these songs that were non-matches even though they're in the store. How do we do this? Do I turn off iTunes Match and start over again? I've been reluctant to do so considering how long it took yesterday.

You may not be able to get complete matches, but here's what I have been doing in the cases where one or two tracks don't match.

Select the item(s) to attempt to re-match.
Right-click on them, and select "Create AAC Version"
When this is complete, hit alt-backspace, and choose to remove both the original and the iCloud version. Also choose to delete the items from disk.
Go to the "Store" -> "Update iTunes Match" menu item.

Note that this will keep the play counts, etc on your tracks. It may not succeed on every track, and sometimes repeating the process picks up another track.

Occasionally, I'll get a "Removed" icon there after doing this: just right-click and choose "Add to iCloud" on these.

Select and right click one track or multiple tracks and select "Check Selection".  Worked like a charm for the albums I had uploaded by CD.


How to quickly scroll to top of long list in iOS? I've recently hooked my MS Exchange account into Mail.app in iOS, and consequently, the list of email in my inbox is extremely long. iOS has the unfortunate habit of scrolling the mail list to the middle of the list whenever I rotate the iPad, and it takes me a very long time to scroll back up.

I'm wondering if there's a way to quickly scroll back up to the top of the very long inbox list in iOS Mail.app, so that I can see my unread messages?

Tap the Status Bar at the top of the screen.

  In Safari, Mail, Contacts, and many other apps, tap the status bar at
  the top of the screen — which displays the network information, time,
  and battery level — to scroll quickly to the top.

  Source: http://www.apple.com/iphone/tips/

option and the up arrow.  If you are using outlook on a mac, this is the fastest way to get to the top.  I hope that helps because I had the same problem.


Preview is not responding since OS X Mavericks update Preview is not responding for me since the OS X Mavericks update. I cannot open JPEG images. If I try to go to full screen view, I just get the beachball and have to hard reboot. I am a photographer and use this feature extensively to check images. This worked fine before upgrade to OS X Mavericks.

Is there anything I can do to resolve this issue?

The first thing to try when encountering something like this is to move the preferences files to a new folder. I usually put them on the Desktop.

First, Quit Preview and then go to the Finder and move these files to the Desktop:

/Users/<short user name>/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview
/Users/<short user name>/Library/com.apple.preview.*

Run Preview and see if it is fixed.

In the case of Preview, there probably isn't any information in these files that you will really miss, It should be stuff like the previously viewed files, and whatever is in the "Preferences" dialog.


How do you disable opening Safari on macOS? I would like to disable opening Safari on my Mac. I don't want to delete or modify it in any way, I only want to prevent myself from opening the application itself (If I search for it, or try to open it, it shouldn't run).
I tried using Screen Time's Content Restrictions by going to the Content and Privacy Section > Apps > and unchecking Safari.
But Safari still opens when I am distracted and look for it.
Is there any way to stop Safari from opening?
I'm using macOS Catalina. Would updating to Big Sur / higher version help?

You could perhaps configure the Parental Controls to prevent browsing by limiting the websites you can view. (Big Sur may have slightly improved controls than Catalina.)
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl8490d51e/11.0/mac/11.0
Though of course, there's nothing to stop you from turning the controls off.
Ultimately, I would suggest that the best solution is a non-technical one.

Install another web browser and make it as default. Also remove the Safari shortcut from the dock.


Is there a way to create a shortcut in Finder to an Apple Note? I like to use Apple Notes to organize details and checklists for my projects — it's very convenient. However, it would be more convenient if I could access a project note directly from the project folder in Finder. I understand that I can export the note as PDF, but as that I'm constantly adding to and changing my project notes, I'd prefer the shortcut to open the note (or note folder) in the Notes app directly.
Here's a mockup of what I'd like to accomplish:

I've tried to locate the note in Finder, but Apple stores all the notes together in one file. I was just going to create a shortcut to that note (which is still pretty inconvenient). Ideally I like to change the save location for an individual note, share to finder, or create a shortcut link. Can this be done with AppleScript or Automator, or even a simpler method?

I think you will like this following AppleScript solution.
STEP 1: Save this following AppleScript code as a Script File to your /Users/YOUR SHORT NAME/Library/Script Libraries/ folder. (with the name “Make Link To Note Library.scpt”).  Just compile the script and save it and don’t even bother running it from Script Editor.
This following AppleScript will be used as, what is known as a “Script Library”.
property destinationSuffix : "Contents/Resources/applet.icns"
property iconFile : missing value
property thisApp : missing value
property noteName : missing value

if iconFile = missing value then changeMyIconToNotesIcon()
if noteName = missing value then chooseNote()

try
    tell application "Notes"
        activate
        show note noteName
    end tell
end try

to changeMyIconToNotesIcon()
    set iconFile to path to resource "AppIcon.icns" in bundle ¬
        (path to application "Notes")
    set thisApp to path to me
    set replaceThisIcon to POSIX path of thisApp & ¬
        destinationSuffix as string
    do shell script "cp " & quoted form of POSIX path of iconFile & " " & ¬
        quoted form of replaceThisIcon & " ; touch " & ¬
        quoted form of POSIX path of thisApp
end changeMyIconToNotesIcon

on chooseNote()
    tell application "Notes" to set noteNames to name of notes
    activate
    set noteName to (choose from list noteNames) as text
    return noteName
end chooseNote

STEP 2: Save this following AppleScript code as an application, with the name, for example “NOTES Make Link To Note Template.app”
property loadedScript : load script alias ¬
    ((path to library folder from user domain as text) & ¬
        "Script Libraries:Make Link To Note Library.scpt")

run loadedScript

Taking this concept one step further, and making life much easier for everyone planning to use the code in my solution. Instead of copying and pasting the code from STEP 2, into a new Script Editor document and saving it as an application etc. , every time you want to create a “Direct Link To A Specific Note” , This following STEP 3 should make the process seamless.
STEP 3: Save this following AppleScript code as an application, with the name, for example “Make Link To Note CREATOR droplet.app”
Now that we’ve created the Script Library file "Make Link To Note Library. scpt”, from STEP 1’s Instructions, we can access its handlers and their commands, directly in this code by inserting the use command at the top of this following script.  This line set noteName to (notesLibrary's chooseNote()) & ".app” is an example of how to utilize a command from a Script Library file.
use notesLibrary : script "Make Link To Note Library"
use scripting additions

on open theFile
    appletFileIsAcceptable(theFile)

    activate
    set saveToFolder to choose folder with prompt ¬
        "Save Your New \"Link To Note.app\" To Which Folder?" multiple selections allowed false ¬
        with invisibles and showing package contents

    set noteName to (notesLibrary's chooseNote()) & ".app"

    tell application "Finder"
        set duplicatedApp to duplicate item 1 of theFile to saveToFolder
        set name of duplicatedApp to noteName
        open (((saveToFolder as text) & noteName) as alias)
        reveal (((saveToFolder as text) & noteName) as alias)
    end tell
end open

on appletFileIsAcceptable(theFile)
    tell application "System Events" to if name extension of ¬
        item 1 of theFile ≠ "app" then return -- decide if theFile is acceptable
end appletFileIsAcceptable

In Finder, drag your new created Script Editor applet from STEP 2. directly onto the icon of the Droplet from STEP 3. This will create a duplicate of the”Template.app” to a folder of your choosing and name it to the name of the chosen Note and then launch it automatically. When the process is complete, the new “Go To Specific Note.app” will be completely configured and revealed in Finder

notes is a valid url protocol. So you can type notes:// into the URL bar of a browser, and it will open Notes.app.
However, I haven't found a way of opening the app to a specific note with a specific URL. Using the UUID from the iCloud.com URL of a note doesn't select a given note. It may be possible, so , yes, a bit of a half-answer.


Unable to partition external disk after using diskpart in Windows I was trying to follow a tutorial online that included using diskpart on Windows 10 to format my 1TB external drive, with commands such as clean and partition. But after learning that it would not produce the results I wanted, I decided to stop and erase the disk from Disk Utility on macOS Sierra (10.12.4). So I completely erased it and formatted it as Mac OS Extended Journaled, but now I am unable to partition the drive because the button is greyed out.

I have tried erasing the drive multiple times, including writing zeros over the data (which took forever) but nothing has changed. Help?

Mac mini (Late 2014)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i5
macOS Sierra 10.12.4

This might be a volume error that can possibly be fixed with the first aid functionality of disk utility.

Go to disk utility and select your disk exactly as you have in the picture. Do not select the volume. Next you need to run first aid. Click on the button that says first aid and let the magic happen. If it doesn't work, you can give me an update.

Good luck!


Why does Google Chrome require a Force Quit when Restarting OS X I am very rarely able to close Google Chrome on my Macbook Pro without force quitting the application. Is there a way to detect why this is happening?

What Extensions do you have installed in Google Chrome?
Check for updates for Google Chrome - By going to Help > About Google Chrome, and the application will automatically check for updates.

If none of the above work, remove Google Chrome and re-install it (check or any saved passwords etc., before removing Google Chrome).

Yes try checking in the Console application logs for a crash reporter log for Google Chrome.

Additionally I would try pulling the Preference files relating to Google Chrome to verify if there is a problem with corrupt preferences that Chrome is having trouble with.


JPG & RAW file transfer iPad to MacBook How can JPG & RAW files be transferred from iPad to MacBook Pro & still maintain the albums built in iPad?

In the iPad Photos app I've put my photos in different albums. On iPad I'm using Photos & Affinity Photo. On my Macbook I've used Photos, Image Capture and iTunes & they import everything but not the albums, which is daunting because I've got 10,000 photos I'm importing. Which is also the problem with iCloud because it wants to backup everything & it's not obvious that it also imports the albums (at least Apple Support can't confirm that either)>

Photos app on macOS, via iCloud syncing maintains album structure. If the photos are in albums in photos app on iPad, turning on selectively iCloud for photos app only and turning off backup on iCloud can do what you want to achieve.

Though some offline method would be great too!

@ankii Thank you. That's useful information (you know more than Apple support.) I'll have to get more iCloud storage first to do that since iCloud wants to do all photos & with 10,000 to upload more space needed. An offline method would be nice. I thought once I plugged in my iPad to my Macbook it'd be more or less drag/drop op but apparently Apple in their wisdom haven't put that functionality into their system.


Yosemite can't call numbers that contain two hash characters My iPhone (running iOS 8) and my MacBook (running OS 10.10.3) are in the same WiFi network, and I can answer incoming calls from my MacBook.

Initiating calls from the Contacts application on the MacBook also works - I click the phone symbol next to the phone number and it opens the call:

This works perfectly fine unless the phone number contains more than one hash character (#). When using conference systems, the hash sign is used to terminate input, e.g. after entering the conference or leader code.

Example:

This number works fine: +112345678,,,1234#
This number does not work: +112345678,,,1234##

The only difference is the second hash sign at the end. I've simplified that here, in real life, there are a couple more digits between the two hash signs, but the above also reproduces the error for me.

What happens is that as soon as there is a second hash sign in the number, clicking the phone symbol next to the number will not have any result.

The strange thing is that I can open FaceTime, click on audio, then start typing the name of the contact in question and call from there, including the second hash sign, and it will work fine.

One more note: The same can be reproduced by trying to open the number from the terminal:

open tel://+112345678,,,1234#

works, while the following will not work - it will open FaceTime, but will not dial...

open tel://+112345678,,,1234##

Is this a known issue with FaceTime/OS X - or am I missing something?

Confirming that this bug is still present in El Capitan. Frustrating. Curious if anyone has come up with a workaround using AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, or other tool.


Clear photo cache when iCloud Photos optimization is enabled I started using iCloud Photos recently and love it. I have photos syncing on my iPhone(16gb), my MacBook Pro(240gb), and in the cloud of course.

My issue is that I have 12 photos on my phone that are not syncing to the cloud. I am on WiFi, the phone is fully charged, and they are just stuck on my phone. I've looked on my MBP and they aren't there. I've looked on the iCloud via the web app and they aren't there.

When I go on my phone to iCloud / Photos, the message says "Low Disk Space - Uploading 12 Photos" I have 163mb of free space on my phone, and 125gb of free space in iCloud.

My Question is, is there a way that I can manually clear the cache of photos that have downloaded to my phone. I have 750mb used in the "Photos & Camera" application, and I am sure a good chunk of that is from me browsing old photos which are temporarily downloaded to the phone for viewing. When I typically look at my library on my phone, the photos start off as empty white squares and that's okay. I've looked at a bunch, and it downloads thumbnails and lower res images of the files. Can I clear these caches to free up some space?

Also, I've read that the system requires at least 300mb of free space on your phone to upload photos to the cloud. Is this true? I can't see why this would be a requirement.

Apple doesn't list a required/minimum free space, so you'd need to work with Apple support to get that sorted. As for the cache, you've already done all you can.

iOS has several low storage warnings it sends to each and every app to clean up cached files and with < 500 MB of free space, I'd wager you've exercised those limits continuously and it's surprising to me if this is the only thing that is broken on your device right now.

I would:

Delete one or two large apps that you know the data is safe/unimportant. Try to get 2 GB of free space if you can but 1 GB of free storage should be sufficient.
Power off the device and power it on to let system cache files re-generate
Open photos on the device and on iCloud and see if normal operations resume. I've had good luck with photo libraries coming back from all sorts of intentional abuse like you've unintentionally performed. It can take 24 hours or more (if you hit any upload limits) for the cleanup script(s) to trigger so you might wait 48 hours to see if the added space lets iOS complete the upload work that is queued.

Also, Apple does offer debugging profiles for iOS cloud sync if you call in for support and if their "cookbook" method doesn't yield results. If your case get escalated to engineering specific error messages contained in the debug logs can often assist you in further diagnosing why all the photos are not syncing.

You could also just push the photos to a computer or other iOS device using AirDrop or USB and upload them to the cloud from another device and then remove iCloud Photos temporarily from your iPhone to allow enough space to resume normal operations and then re-enable the library with the option to reduce file size.

Basically, the system is designed to stop working when there isn't enough space for temporary files to work. This is the same design as OS X and other unix in general.

These operating systems use free storage space to cache things and make your experience better by accelerating slow resources like network and CPU by saving work when it's done to reuse it later. When you deprive the system of that buffer, things slow and eventually stop.

Go to youtube, search "One Weird Trick to Free Up Storage Space on iPhone", site under iTwe4kz.  I searched for a while and finally found the solution in this guy's youtube channel, published Mar 28, 2016.


Automatically migrate to Family Sharing? Before Family Sharing, my wife and I always used her iTunes account for all purchases, including iOS apps. Now that Family Sharing exists and also now that two-factor authentication makes it annoying to keep my iPhone authorized to her iTunes account, I'd like to find all the apps on my iPhone that were downloaded under her account, and re-download them under my account (by way of Family Sharing).

After upgrading to iOS 13, I keep getting prompted to sign into her account, presumably because some app on my phone was downloaded under her account, so it's only authorized to run if my phone is signed into her iTunes account.

Is there any easy or automatic way to find all the apps on my phone that are only authorized for her account, and delete and re-download them from my account so I don't have to stay signed into iTunes as her?

Unless I'm misreading your question, doing the following will make the process easier for you:

Launch the App Store app on your iPhone
Tap on your account at the top right corner
Tap on Purchased
Now you should see a listing for all accounts in your family group
Tap on your wife's listing
At the top, below your wife's name, you'll see two buttons All and Not on this iPhone
Make sure that the All button is selected
Now you'll see a listing of all apps* ever purchased under her account
The ones that have the OPEN option at the right are the ones installed on your iPhone
Now make a list of the apps in question so you can delete them from your iPhone and install them under your account

* Accept for any apps she's actively hidden.

First of all, make shure you have iOS 13.1 installed (available yesterday 24th sept 2019). iOS 13.0 was full of very annoying bugs...
After that, since most of your purchases were made from your wife's account, verify she's the Family Organiser and that Purchases Sharing is ON on every family user's account.


Suggestd Crash due to SGSqliteDatabaseError I'm currently working in an environment with some Openldap users and nfs mounted homes. Everything is working like a charm, but I'm facing some issues regarding some ReportCrash that keeps writing in the users /home/user/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports thousands of logs suggestd_2017-07-12-095040_e5r1p1.crash

When I give a look in /var/log/system.log, it's completely saturated with ReportCrash full log here

  suggestd[2792]: *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception
  'SGSqliteDatabaseError', reason: 'Error(5): database is locked (SQL:
  PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL)'

I'm wondering how to perhaps, unlocked that SQLite database ? or simply disable suggestd to write down files every 10 seconds.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7264893?start=15&tstart=0

I've tried to unload theses services, with no changes at all.
I'm looking to either fix that "crash", or simply disable that suggestd once and for all.

Try to unload the daemon:

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.suggestd.plist


How to remove automatically subscribed calendar for public holidays on my iPhone? As you can see in the screenshot below, somehow my iPhone subscribed to a calendar which is called "Deutsche Feiertage" (German public holidays).

How can I find out where this is coming from and how can I remove it (not just hide or disable notification)?

I am not hundert percent sure, but I think it is there since I upgraded my Mac to macOS 10.12. It was also there in the calendar app. There it was really easy to delete it. But I cannot find I way to get rid of it on my iPhone (using iPhone 6 Plus with iOS 10.2).

You can't delete the iOS holidays calendar, only hide it. It is a subscribed calendar but it's part of iOS.

Go to calendars, open calendar at bottom middle of the screen, scroll down to other, there should be a “birthday” item ticked.
Untick said item this will then delete all national birthday items.