Mac thinks external Dell display is a built-in display So I have a Macbook Pro running OS 10.11 with 1 additional Dell display. For Christmas I received another Dell display, but I'm having issues with this mac thinking the new display is a "Built-in" display. When I bring up the Display Preference, it shows my old Dell display as a DELL E2414H, but the new Dell display is showing up as Built-in display. Both displays are exactly the same, with the only difference being how they are connected. The older display is connected via the display port adaptor which is connecting via VGA, while the new display is connected to a USB 2.0 adapter also connected via VGA. Since the new display is being recognized as a built-in display, the resolution is all fuzzy and the task bar is outside of the screen. When I look at the resolution settings and view the scaled options, everything is set to 1920x1080 ( as it should be).

When I open up the About this Mac menu, it shows that I have 2 additional displays, but says the new one is 30.5 inches ( It is actually 24 inches, just like the other display). I'm assuming that since the Macbook thinks the display is much larger than what it is, this is what is causing the bad resolution. Is there any way to fix this? How do I forced the Macbook to recognize the display for what it really is?

There may not be drivers for this monitor set up for the MacBook. Check if you can find drivers online for this monitor.


Music stops during movie in Keynote I've inserted music into the presentation and the song is 5 mins long. There are 21 slides. After exporting the presentation to a movie, and then playing the movie, the song stops playing at 41 seconds, at about the 4th slide. It doesn't matter if I move the slides arounds - the music always stops at 41 secs when saved as a movie.

When I am in Keynote the song continues throughout if I play the presentation from the start. I want the music to play in the movie through all the slides.

The music file is 5 mins long. It is set to play continuously per slide.

I just wanted to say that I have exactly the same problem. My music file is 2:10 and in the exported movie it always stops after 1:04... Maybe it's a bug? A possible workaround could be to add the audio file in imovie.


Does a Contacts Nickname transmit to anyone else; iMessage or email? iOS 9.0.2

So I asked Siri to call me Sugar Daddy... Hilarious, right?

Well I was using the e-mail app this morning, and when looking at a few e-mails I sent last night, I noticed that my name was put as "Sugar Daddy" in those e-mails as well. I then realized that Siri had put "Sugar Daddy" as my nickname (while retaining my real first and last names) in Contacts and that the e-mail app displays the nicknames of contacts.

Is there any chance the people I sent e-mails to also saw my name as "Sugar Daddy" in the sender field? At least one of them uses iOS himself. Please tell me this is not possible... I realize this is unlikely, but I just want to make sure.

Btw, I'm honestly not trolling, this seriously happened to me.

I had to laugh - but there's a serious question here, for sure.

Does a nickname in your Contacts show to anyone else?

Empirically, I would say no - neither a nickname you give yourself nor any other contact will be transmitted.
My partner & I have each other listed in Contacts with the nickname "ICE" [In Case of Emergency] yet it doesn't show up in any messages or emails we send to each other.
Similarly, my own nickname of Tetsujin is not seen by others in any communication I send.

I'm pretty sure you're safe asking Siri to call you Sugar Daddy… unless she does it in public, or if you ever intend to pass your vCard to someone, because it certainly will be in the exported card  ;)

Unfortunately, the nickname does indeed transmit. I just received an email and chose “reply all.” The sender’s nickname for herself and for the other contacts in the CC box included her nicknames for me, my husband, and her husband. Even her unicorn emoijo for her husband appeared.


How can I add login and logout sounds to OS X 10.8.x? I would like to add login and logout sounds to my Mac. How can I do this?

Save a script like this as ~/Desktop/test and make it executable with chmod +x ~/Desktop/test.

#!/bin/bash

afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Blow.aiff

You can then add a LogoutHook key to /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist with sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook ~/Desktop/test. It can be deleted with sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook. You can run a script at login by adding a LoginHook key or by using launchd.

See also these questions about running scripts on logout and login and Daemons and Services Programming Guide: Customizing Login and Logout.

Just write this  Shutdown   maybe that will work

Shutdown


Can't set automatic downloads on iPod Touch 4g (Required for Find my iPod functionality) Settings > Store

The automatic download options for Music and Apps are OFF, and whenever I try to set them ON the switch returns to OFF immediately.

This is supposed to be the last step to set up the Find My iPod app.

The check boxes for these automatic downloads are already checked in iTunes on my Windows 7 machine. iCloud is set on it too. I don't know what to do. I'm signed up in icloud from my iPod and laptop.

I don't think you need to turn on automatic updates to activate Find My iPod. Anywho, I suggest you simply log out from your iTunes account and log back in.

Do this by going to Settings > Store and tapping Sign Out. Then Sign back in again.

Try signing out of your iTunes account on the iPod. Do a hard reset (hold the home and sleep/wake buttons together until the device turns off, releasing the home button (but still pressing the sleep/wake button) as soon as the device turns off (release the sleep/wake button when the  logo appears). Then sign back in.


ios Mail app shows Welcome to Mail screen even though I have already set up and have been using my account I have an iPhone 4S currently running ios7.0.4.  I have been using the built in Mail app since I bought my phone years ago and it has always worked fine.  I have two accounts set up in the app.  Recently (within the past month, maybe two) when I open the app, I am met with the Welcome/set-up screen that lists the different account types that you can set up (iCloud, Exchange, Google, etc.) even though I already have my accounts set up and they were working that morning.  If I double-tap the home button and swipe up to close the app, and tap the app again to re-open it, it loads both accounts like normal.

This wouldn't really be too big of an issue because it has a quick fix, however because it doesn't recognize that a mail account is set up, it also does not alert me when I receive a new email.  So I have to manually check my emails every hour to make sure I don't miss anything.

While the mail app is being weird and showing me the welcome screen, I can open up the mail settings and still see both accounts that I have, and notification settings are all as they should be.

Either I don't know how to phrase the questions properly to get hits on Google, or no one else has ever had this issue. Has anyone heard of this, or have any suggestions?

Thanks for the suggestions, tried both with no luck, then I actually went in and made sure every setting was set the way I expected them to be set.

Somehow, without my doing, the settings had been changed. I noticed this once before, my phone crashed and all of my custom ringtones/vibrations were unset for my contacts. Not lost, just unset.

In case someone reads this and is still wondering what settings you've missed, the particular settings that I had to fix were:

Notification Center > Mail > (Account) >
1. Alert Style [Alerts]
2. Show on Lock Screen [Yes]

I'm sure we all have those moments when the most obvious solution just can't be it and there's no point in checking because you're SURE there's NO WAY it could be it... oops :)

Just do a BASIC reset of iPad, that worked for me.
D


IPhone 4 won't charge? When I plug it in, it doesn't charge. But when I turned it off and plugged it in, it turned on, but didn't charge. What's wrong with it? Is it the charger or the phone?

UPDATE:
the charge is going up, but it doesn't say it's charging... I don't know if that makes sense. It doesn't vibrate when I plug it in, it doesn't have the charging symbol, and it doesn't have the charge on the lock screen, yet it's charging(?)

most likely your 30pin dock port is full of dust and dirt, take a tooth pick, and verry carefully remove any dust that may have been stuck there.

Mine was doing that too. Apparently, this is due to contact wear, so it needs more pressure closer to the home button to work.


Extract images from a pages document I want to extract all of the images out of a large pages document. I found an article about it from 2006 ( see http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060324033125571 ) which states you can open the pages file as a package and extract the images. Right clicking shows no 'open package' item and using pkgutil --expand mydoc.pages . errors with "Could not open package for expansion" I'm guessing the pages file format is now somewhat different.

So how can I extract all of the images from my pages document in one go? (there are around 100 pictures, so too many to do by hand unless I absolutely have to)

The Fastest way to to do this is to change the file extension from name.pages to name.zip (actually manually click on the file name and change the extension to .zip)

Now just unzip your document and you will get a folder with all the images in it.  Same works for ePubs.

Open the Pages application
  Open the document which contains the images you want extracted
  Select the image
  Copy the image by either clicking 'Edit' then 'Copy' from the menu that pops up or clicking command and C keys together (on your keyboard)
  Open the 'Preview' Application
  Click 'File'
  From the menu that pops up click 'New from Clipboard' (should be first option). Preview will create a new document of file type png with the image that you want.
  Save the document to your desire location. If you wish to

Extract Images from Pages using Preview


How can I disable the macbook keyboard with Shift key held down on a password protected macbook? This question is a bit strange, but here's the scenario:

macbook air laptop with El Capitan Mac OS X
currently logged off any account
liquid damage on keyboard has caused shift key to be permanently pressed
password to admin account has some lowercase letters and numbers
restarting enters "safe mode"

The machine has no sensitive data, so I'm happy for a solution even if it wipes out the admin account. I'm also happy to buy a USB keyboard/plug into an external screen if that will help.

How can I disable this pesky shift key? Or disable the built in keyboard all together?

Disable keyboard:

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext/

Enable keyboard:

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext/

For manipulation, you can use the virtual keyboard:
System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Display panel "Keyboard" and "Symbols" in the menu bar

same problem here, thought of changing the keyboard. make your login all CAPS letter and install karabiner software where you can disable left shift key..


Annotation of a PDF file in my Dropbox in iPad and keep it the last version in Dropbox I have a folder in my Dropbox that I keep my eBooks in it. I want to find an app for the iPad that can do these to me:

Let me open a PDFs file from my Dropbox
Let me annotate on that file
Annotation getting applied to the Dropbox version of my file, instead of creating a local copy that its changes does not affect the Dropbox version

In my PC, when I open a PDFs file from my Dropbox and make Some highlights, when I press the save button in acrobat reader, the Dropbox version is instantly gets updated and whenever I open my Dropbox folder I have the latest version of the file. I need similar functionality in my iPad.

What iPad app has this functionality?

I am using PDF Expert for exactly this. You can choose to sync folders from Dropbox (and other sharing services). Those folders will keep a local copy and will automatically sync back as well.

our app, Xodo, has all these features from annotating PDF documents to syncing with Dropbox. You can manage and organize all your documents from within the app. Also it is completely free.


If i cancel Apple Music subscription, and then resubscribe almost immediately, will my previously downloaded music still be there? I need to change from another country's App Store to the US App Store as I have relocated. Some apps, like Venmo, are only available in the US App Store. So to download them, I need to change to the US App Store. But to do so, I have to unsubscribe from Apple Music.

My intention is to resubscribe to Apple Music as soon as I am on the US App Store.

My question is: would my downloaded music from Apple Music (not previously purchased) still be there when I resubscribe?

I'd rather not the hassle of having to search and download all the tracks i previously downloaded when i resubscribe.

Is this documented or explained by Apple or someone’s personal experience?

Google venmo for the App Store to change it if you go via browser you won't have to cancel subscription ; now to go back if you don't intend on staying in us App Store you'd have to find an app only available in whatever country/region your needing to go back too hope that helps


How can I make You Tube full screen on my iPad when using Safari? I recently updated my iPad and now if I go to You Tube (i.e., youtube.com) using Safari and try to make a video full screen the navigation bars etc... still take up about 1/5th of the screen at the top.

Is there a way to get it to show the video on the entire screen?

(Note I am not using the You Tube app and I would prefer a solution that doesn't require using it)

Use the 'desktop' mode instead: it's found at the end of the YouTube menu (click on the logo at the upper left).

Mine fixed itself after I installed the you tube app,I watched a few videos on it came back fired up safari forgetting I had installed YouTube app and couldn't full screen well I was full screening wtf.yay.i then deleted YouTube app safari still full screens.


What are some good two factor methods for logging onto your Mac? What are some options I can deploy to require users to use multi factor authentication when logging onto their Macs. In the same fashion you use your password and Google Authenticator code to log into Gmail, GitHub, Slack, etc., is there something for logging into your Mac.

How about something like Knock?  http://www.knocktounlock.com
It's not exactly the same as looking up a time-dependent code, but does require the 'second factor' in order to unlock.

The neat thing is that many apps (I think Knock included) run on Bluetooth, so when you walk away from the Mac and the BT disconnects, it automatically locks up the machine.

A quick Google gives a few viable options, but true two-factor authentication is extremely difficult to implement on a Mac. Since Apple does not provide a solution for this, a third party would need to create an app that works with either a SMS or a companion iPhone app. The only problem is Apple does not let developers make a way to prevent the person from using their computer. You could find a solution that creates a new password and sets the account password every time you sleep or log out, but it would still not be as easy and smooth as iCloud or Google two-step verification.


NO audio on macbook air 2010 so I have my macbook air (late 2010) and it has been working fine for a good while, now all of a sudden for no reason (Ok i may of dropped it but the drop was less than 1 foot and mac showed no damage after) but the speakers dont work and when i plug my 'kotion each' (headphones) into the port the audio symbol is grey and no audio ANYWHERE.

yes I have tried to wiggle the headphones and have looked many other places no luck...

A drop is a drop - 1 foot or 10 feet - you dropped it.

More than likely, you broke something on the I/O Board

This goes for around $70 on Amazon.  I just purchased one to fix a friends 2012 MBA and it was super easy to fix.  You just have to remove the back cover and one screw holds this board in place.  It removes pretty easily.


Is there an app I can use to automatically track screen time for each desktop on my MacBook? I usually forget to start/stop time trackers when I'm working on different projects and tasks.
So I think it would be better if there is an app that can automatically track my screen time on each desktop. That means I can create a separate desktop for each task, and when I switch to it, the time tracker would automatically start. When I switch to another desktop, or when I lock the screen, or when the computer sleeps, it should automatically stop the timer.

I don't know about a solution that tracks time per desktop but what I use is Observe (https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/). It tracks the time you spend in any application and you can add filters so screen time in one app is allocated to a specific project. You can even define working paths. So every time you work on a file in specific directory it also gets allocated to a specific project.


Can I charge a 4th gen iPod touch with the Galaxy tab's charger? Can I charge a fourth generation iPod touch with Samsung Galaxy Tab's charger?

You can plug a standard Apple 30pin USB Charging cable into the Galaxy Tab charger and it will work fine.  Both the Apple and Samsung chargers deliver 5v output (although the Samsung one delivers a higher current).  It is perfectly safe to use.


Have to press down hard for keys on keyboard to work? My mid-2010 MBP is malfunctioning. For all the keys I have to press down quite hard to get a response. "slow keys" is off. I spilled some water around the keyboard a few days ago, that's about when this started. I started popping keys off and it was rather dirty under each key, I cleaned them with a cotton swap and rubbing alcohol. Has made an improvement, more responsive but still hard to press. Is there another method for cleaning them better. Or something else that could cause low responsiveness?

The link provided in the comment has good advice, but not everyone can take their Apple gear to a professional — this is especially true if you live in a country that does not have an Apple Store or do not live in a larger city.

So, if you can't get your laptop to a professional, then you'll have to take care of the keyboard yourself until you can.

Double-check your keyboard settings in the System Preferences, you
mention "slow keys" but there are two settings in there: "key repeat"
and "delay until repeat" which affect the timing of keystrokes to
response.
Hook up an external keyboard (any USB keyboard will work, though you
may loose some Apple-specific functionality if using an non-Apple
keyboard). Pressing extra hard could cause more damage and further exacerbate
the situation you already have.
Get a repair guide from a site like ifixit.com which will show you
how easy or difficult (it's usually on the difficult side) it is to
remove and replace the keyboard or at least get to it for a closer
look to find a hardware cause. This will help you to clean,
dehydrate, and reassemble you laptop as the linked comment suggests.

Depending on what was in the water and how much of it was spilled and how long before cleaning under the keys took place, you may have a corrosion problem where the residue left behind after the liquid evaporated is gunking things up.

From your settings go to accessibility
Scroll down to keyboard
Click on keyboard , it will be highlighted in blue and
a pop up will appear on the right, uncheck enable slow
Keys.Hope it helps!


MacBook discharging while plugged in under load I have the latest Retina MacBook Pro MacBookPro11,2

I quite often have the CPU at about 400%-500% usage (e.g. 4-5 cores at 100%) and also do GPU intensive tasks. While this is happening, the battery can actually discharge even though it is plugged in. This has happened since I first got the MacBook and is not something which has developed over time.

I have the model without a dedicated GPU (Intel Iris Pro only), and I have an 85 watt power supply which came with the MacBook

This is very irritating for me, is this a fault or normal behaviour?

It is a known problem: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3069428
Someone has calculated the max wattage draw of a MBPr, but I can't find that a.t.m.

I see this as a design choice - works as designed and functioning as built situation. All engineering and hardware design is an exercise in tradeoffs and many of the goals compete against each other:

reliability of the parts as they age
ability of manufacturing to make the device reliably and repeatably
cost of parts
cost of manufacture
speed to diagnose and repair
durability of repair (nothing makes us mad like looping repairs when the issue isn't fixed or more issues are caused by a repair for something else)

I haven't even got into the more relevant design decisions like which CPU chip to put it and whether the higher CPU model gets the same power supply and battery as the lowest performing CPU model. Or whether the CPU you chose can out run the power supply since the battery can and has always for the last 10 years been able to supply far more current on demand than the charge rate of the battery from the AC power supply transformer. The only intel based Mac product that can't outspend their power supply are ones that plug into mains. No portable Mac can keep up with a fully running CPU/GPU when cooling is good enough to keep thermal throttling from kicking in.

I'm not at all saying you are wrong to be irritated, just that this was a conscious decision made by teams of people knowing some times their design won't keep up and then management trusting / approving those design decisions and shipping years of product with that decision. When viewed from the lens of CPU shouldn't outpace the power supply, this is a compromise. When viewed from other lenses (lightness, parts management, reliability, supply chain management), this is an excellent/beneficial decision (or still compromise). I hope this helps you know you're not wrong and that this would be something you consider when you choose how your processing load gets run. Whether you can offload some tasks to the cloud or if you need to be tied to mains power since you can't accept this sort of tradeoff for your needs.


Can I upgrade to OSX 10.9 and format my HD along the way? I want to upgrade from ML to Mavericks but I want to erase and format my HD to a single partition along the way. Is this possible?

Yes you can use disk utility to reformat the Macintosh HD partition during the installation of Mavericks, however if you want to create a new partition using disk utility the you will have to create a Mavericks install USB so you can boot from there.

You can't create a Partition when booted from the same drive hence the need to boot from a USB installer.

Creating a USB installer is as follows, Format the USB thumb drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and name the USB thumb drive Untitled

Download Mavericks from the Mac App Store,

Copy and paste this command into terminal,

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app —nointeraction


Cellular Data Annoying Popup with ios8 Ever since I updated my iPad Air to iOS 8, I've been getting constant reminders for the setup cellular data plan. I bought the iPad with the SIM chip just in case I wanted to get data for it, but have so far decided that I don't need it. This popup still comes up even when I go into settings and turn cellular data off. Has anyone else had this problem since upgrading to iOS 8?

Disable cellular data in settings. If you haven't activated a plan with a carrier yet, there's no option in settings to disable cellular data.

As a workaround, you can tell Siri "Turn off cellular data" to disable the setting and you should no longer get the message.

Problem solved!     Turn off blue tooth!    I thought only cellular data needed to be turned off but Bluetooth needs to be turned off as well.   After 2 months of annoying pop ups the  problem resolved when I turned off Bluetooth!   It is amazing apple support did not mention this.


How can I force Mountain Lion's Messages app to refresh a conversation? Sometimes when an iMessage comes in and I switch to the Messages app, the conversation doesn't contain the new message.

I know the message was received because an alert banner popped up with the correct message text, but it doesn't show up in Messages. It also doesn't seem to be present in Notification Center, despite being set to show 5 recent items.

Sometimes if I quit and reopen Messages it will refresh the conversation with the new message included, but sometimes not. And they still don't show up in Notification Center.

Is there any reliable way to force Messages to refresh or reload the current conversation? Or make it receive messages reliably in the first place?

Is there any reliable way to force Messages to refresh or reload the current conversation? Or make it receive messages reliably in the first place?

No. Messages is very buggy for many users and there is not a known fix at this time. I believe the most prominent client-side issues are resolved in Mavericks, but I am not running the it yet so perhaps not.

As far as I know, the best solution is to sign out of your account, log back in, and then restart Messages. For me, this fixes the ordering of messages (so they are sorted by timestamp) and generally keeps Messages running smoothly for a little while. However, the fix doesn't seem to last longer than a few days.

restart it (and wait), otherwise set status offline, and online again (also wait)


How do I share my location on more than one iOS device? To take advantage of Mac-continuity, Safari, Photos, Passbook, and Keychain sharing features, I have to use the same account on all my devices. But, location sharing is also enabled through iCloud and it only allows one device to be specified. I want to share the location of each device at the same time.

All devices are using iOS 8.1.2.

This is not possible using a single Apple ID. If you wish to share the location of each device specifically, you will need to use a unique Apple ID on each device.

It's annoying I agree.  But just use the "Find iPhone" app/iCloud web function when logged in, and you should be able to see all your devices.


Recommended MacBook Pro 13 (mid 2012) SSD upgrade? I am going to buy the high end MacBook Pro mid 2012. I want to get an SSD, but the BTO options given by Apple are too pricey in my opinion.
Which third party SSD (512 GB) are recommended (for performances and prices)?

Edit: at a local shop they told me that changing the drive of an Apple product invalidates warranty. Do you know if it's true?

Your warranty won't be invalidated although Apple can refuse to work on it until you reinstall the original drive (so put it away on a shelf).  A local shop might be more flexible. Or not.

With the Macbook Air 13" you get an SSD and a screen with an higher resolution for the same price.

the MBP has the same core features, only offers some more ports and a CD/DVD burner, if you don't need this features i higly suggest a MBA 13".

the downside for the MBA is due to the fact that it gets hot under heavy load and the MBP has more room for the air and the cooling system.


Having keystroke issues with macOS Sierra on two different Macs I'm having a series of problem with my macOS Sierra 10.12.1 every once in a while after a random period of normal operation. The series of problems include:

My 3rd-party Chinese input methods (Sogou & Rime) both start double-typing on every letter. English isn't affected, but cycling through the keyboards do not help with the problem.
Launchpad starts taking double keystroke and double touchpad swipes on arrow keys, basically skipping any odd-numbered pages
Any keystrokes plus the return key would launch an app whose name starts with those keystrokes (which is a Spotlight behavior) regardless of whether Spotlight is on. This problem is somewhat intermittent.
There are no apparent log traces (that I'm aware of) in the console.
All above problems begin together, and persist until restart.

I have cleared any keyboard-related config files in /Library and ~/Library, as well as purged all apps with access to accessibility function, but nothing would work. The problem has been observed on both the MacBook Pro 13" (2011) and MacBook Pro 15" 2016, with Touch Bar, which migrated the system from the former.

Anybody could give me a clue what could be happening?

A friend of mine, who works at an Apple Premium Reseller, told me that:

It's a known problem that has to do with MacOS Sierra;
Results in all different sorts of weird behaviour until reboot;
Only happens on factory installed Macs (running MacOS Sierra);
Is not harmful for your computer (hardware); and,
Advised to wait for a software update from Apple.

I have come up a solution to this double keystroke problem using a tiny piece of double sided tape to help the key cap stick to the key switch.

Watch my video to see the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhUdXhoDWDk


I never want the phone to go to the " lower power mode" even if the phone battery drops to 10 % . I entered low power mode on my iDevice and the battery level indicator turned yellow. Now I've plugged it in and it's up past 23% and the battery is still yellow. Does that mean I'm in Low Power Mode still? How do I get out of Low Power Mode? Update: It's at 55% and it's still yellow.

Also, let's say I enter Low Power Mode accidentally, it pops up that alert dialog awfully fast sometimes. If I entered low power mode on accident but don't want to be in it how do I exit out of it then?

Go to Settings -> Battery -> Disable Low Power Mode

Low Power Mode will also turn off automatically once your device has been charged up to 80%.


External disk - Unrecognized file system (-69846) I have an external storage with 2TB that was working nicely. But since last week, when I unplugged the USB before eject it, the disk is not readable anymore.

When I insert USB, I can actually see this message box:

I also tried to repair it on Terminal:

diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk2
diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk2

That results on this error:

Error starting file system repair for disk2: Unrecognized file system (-69846)

Can anybody help me please?

EDIT

Terminal comand sudo gpt -r show /dev/disk returns:

  gpt show: unable to open device '/dev/disk3': Resource busy

(even after umountDisk)

Terminal comand sudo fdisk /dev/disk returns:

Disk: /dev/disk3    geometry: 1003/16/63 [1011242 sectors]
Sector size: 4096 bytes
Signature: 0x0
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

Try this in the exact order:

#FOR THE WHOLE DISK
diskutil eject /dev/disk2               #Eject the disk
diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2           #Re-mount the disk

#FOR THE VOLUME(S) OF THE DISK
diskutil list                           #list volume identifiers.
diskutil mount /dev/disk2sXXX           #Mount the Volume. Dont enter a disk ID
diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk2sXXX    #Repair the Volume. Dont enter a disk ID

Basically you are trying to correct previous mounting/ejection related errors by making sure the disk is safely ejected before you do anything else.

Once that is out of the way, have the disk re-mounted. Next, have the volume re-mounted. Finally, repair the newly mounted volume.

Additionally, double check for any human error. Did you want to repair the volume or the disk because you specified a disk identifier to repair a volume. You typed:

diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk2

it should be

diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk2sXXX

Or use repairDisk if you wanted to repair a disk.

Just check the format. You probably have to format it correctly:
GUID Partition Table, Mac OS Extended (journaled).


External Microphone input for MacBook Air 2012 I am trying to get an external microphone (this Sennheiser ME3) into the TRRS jack of my 2012 MacBook Air, through a headset splitter such as here.

(this is so that I can use speech recognition software -- the Sennheiser is especially good for speech recognition)

The first check I do is on the headphones: I go to System preferences -> Audio -> Output, and notice that inserting the splitter registers as "Headphones/Headphone port" whereas removing it registers as "Internal speakers/built-in". So, that is behaving correctly.

I also note that actually plugging and unplugging headphones into the other end of the splitter doesn't register.

I also check that audio output works correctly TRRS -> splitter -> my headphones.

However, audio input does not behave correctly. System preferences -> Audio -> Input does not change when I plug and unplug the splitter (which has the Sennheiser ME3 attached). It states "Internal microphone/Built-in" regardless.

I've also done a simple experiment to confirm that the MacBook is indeed receiving audio from the built-in microphone. I.e. it is completely ignoring the fact that the Sennheiser is attached. I did this by launching QuickTime and creating audio recording, then putting on the Sennheiser and counting "123" with my face next to the screen then "456" with my head as far from the screen as the cable permits. The first recording comes out much louder, so it is indeed using the internal microphone.

How can I get to take input from the Sennheiser?

Related questions:

MacBook Pro (mid-2012) Microphone Input

MacBook Air audio input/output, mic/headset

Recommendations for headset (+ mic ) for macbook in 2012

MacBook Air audio input/output, mic/headset

PS If all else fails I will try another splitter.

That TRRS socket actually has of odd configuration of 4 pins so that you can use the genuine Apple headphone/microphone all-in-one 4-pin combo that comes with iPods & iPhones etc. Generally they look like this:

Here is your microphone, right? The Sennheiser ME3. Notice there is a locking ring on that plug? Also, notice how there are two little black lines on the end there? That is the insulation separating the 3 conductive contacts aka 3 pins This is a TRS plug: ( - )( + )(⏚).

It comes with the following caveats:

  1. The plug on your microphone has a rotating "locking ring", you have probably found that the microphone isn't working, or works only
  sporadically depending on the connection. The issue is that locking
  ring prevents the non-standard plug from fully engaging when plugging
  into your sound card.
  2. Please note that all versions of the Sennheiser ME3 are wired differently than usual headset microphones and are not electrically
  compatible with many computer sound cards.

First of all, you're probably going to need something like this:

  3. Additional Note:  This adapter does not change the unusual wiring scheme used by Sennheiser in the manufacture of the ME3.  The ME3 is not compatible with all sound cards.  If you are having trouble, we recommend you interface your ME3 with an external USB sound adapter, such as the Andrea Pure Audio (MA) adapter, Buddy 7G or the SpeechWare MultiAdapter.

I don't know what's up with the strange wiring scheme. Maybe it's a stereo microphone, maybe it has something to do with their noise cancellation feature, maybe they use some weird shielding in their cable, maybe they're using balanced cables, maybe they just decided to use an odd wiring scheme and call it a proprietary connector, preventing people from using aftermarket accessories, maybe it was an accident. I can only speculate without digging deeper or seeing a schematic or something. If it were me, I would probably cut the plug off and wire it in a traditional manner. Apparently though, these are compatible with the Sennheiser ME3. They are known as The Andrea Pure Audio USB-SA Adapter & The Andrea Pure Audio USB-MA Adapter, respectively.

If by some miracle you have an ordinary connector, or you find a suitable line-level adapter to make things "normal", you're probably still going to want one of these;
1/8" TRRS male to 1/8" TS female input & 1/8" TRS female adapters:
Yes, it looks and sounds weird. The 4-conductor TRRS plug on this cable uses the CTIA standard configuration, which puts the microphone signal on the sleeve (versus being on the second ring in the OMTP standard). The CTIA standard has always been used by Apple and HTC, while older Samsung, Nokia & Sony Ericsson devices (for instance) initially used the OMTP standard.

Plug the 3.5mm (1/8") male TRRS plug into the audio jack on your laptop.
The smaller of the two 3.5mm (1/8") female jack bodies is the TRS stereo headphone output. Plug your standard earphones, headphones, speakers, or other output device into this jack.
The larger of the two 3.5mm (1/8") female jack bodies is the TS mono microphone input. Plug your (hopefully, now) "standard PC style microphone cable" into this jack.

OK,
your Sennheiser has one cable/plug at the end. The connector is a standard 1/8" (3.5mm).

Unless you have the  Sennheiser ME3 Combo ( with USB adapter), that is different story.

That plug has microphone and headset in it.

Sticking that in a splitter to Mac wont do anything since you have nothing to plug in to the other hole!

So you have to first split the Sennheiser cable/plug in to two cables, Microphone and headset separate using a female to 2x male splitter for that.

Then use the the two ends and plug them in to the Mac splitter, one for microphone and one for headset.


Remove useless files from a Mac I want to find a way to delete all the useless files: binaries, log and cache files, duplicate files and app's leftover.

How can I do that?

Onyx (free)

Verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc. tasks of system maintenance

Configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Login window, Spotlight, and many of Apple’s applications

Delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, and more.

...

Removing duplicate files is not supported by Onyx.

I use CleanMyMac, which has the following features:

reset outdated cache files to zero
remove log files
remove the binary files that are not executed on your computer, from applications with an executable for PowerPC and Intel
remove useless files created by applications
remove leftovers, and clean the trashcan
keep the trashcan under control, and delete the files when the size of the files contained in the trashcan reach a limit you can set
uninstall applications


Is there a way to send a text message via voice command in iOS after dictating it? I know that there are voice commands for inserting a new line or inserting punctuation, but I was wondering if there's a voice command to send a text message once it has been dictated. I tried saying the word "send," but that didn't seem to work. Is this possible?

P. S. This question was written using the voice dictation feature! :-)

If you have asked Siri to Send a new Message to some person, Siri Normally asks " Do you want me to send it" when it thinks you have finished.
Saying "Send" normally works. And Siri will say "Ok then I will send the Text message.."

I do not think there is a way to do it after you have used dictation.

Apples dictations command list

There is no enhanced dictation feature on the iPhone


Is there any way to backup and restore your iOS apps *without* re-downloading all of them? I've got a problem. The first step, as they say, is acceptance. My problem, is apps.

I've got over four hundred on my phone, generally. It floats around that count, anyway. I think, perhaps, it comes from when I was a Boy Scout: “be prepared, zing-zing bong-bong,” and all that.

But in all seriousness: waiting two or three days, without leaving WiFi range (meaning, since I travel a lot, two or three days being phone-less while it sits at home) for all of my apps to re-download themselves … is painful, at best; and lifestyle-restricting at worst.

I'm a techie. I know quite a bit about these things, generally; and I know that there must be some way, complex as it may be, to backup the actual .app folders and restore the same, without excruciatingly-slowly re-downloading dozens of gigabytes of apps every single time I drop my phone, or update to a new iOS beta, or suffer some other data-calamity.

Anybody know?

You can backup the iphone from itunes from a mac/windows pc and the when you need to restore choose to restore from an itunes backup.

You could use iFunbox to save all your apps individually or you could use iTunes to sync all your apps at once


Swapfile and sleepimage file creation? I recently installed an SDD into my MacPro, and was paying attention to the storage used, both to be comfortable the SSD size was going to be enough, and also that the TM backup hard drive wouldn't fill too fast. This morning I noticed the /private/var/vm folder had swapfiles totaling 64GB. My question would be how to reduce this and to understand why it happens. The SSD size is only 128GB, and was running 60GB or so. This runaway issue was about to create a 'no room' problem, although I suppose that would have forced a reboot anyway.

I read What are the “sleepimage” and “swapfile” documents? and it warned not to delete these files. I searched some more, and found that a reboot wiped it all out. After the boot, there’s one swapfile of 67MB, versus the 64 files each a full GB.

I never saw this before. I understand a reboot is the answer, but is there anything to do to prevent it occurring? I’d at least like to understand what process or app set this in motion.

I am running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard

Probably one (or more) process on your system was running wild.

Use your Mac as usual. From time to time check the folder /var/vm and if you run across a lot of swap files open Terminal.app and enter:

ps xa | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 sudo vmmap | grep -A3 'Summary' > /Users/YourUserName/Desktop/vmmap_summary.txt

Depending on the number of running processes this will take about 30-60 seconds. Your account has to be able to run sudo (=usually an admin account).

This creates a text file called vmmap_summary.txt on your desktop which contains some memory and swap information of all running processes sorted by PID. Some will fail because their process id is already gone.

Example (truncated to the first four PIDs):

==== Summary for process 1
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=51.8M resident=12.9M(25%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=38.9M(75%)
Writable regions: Total=92.9M written=808K(1%) resident=2112K(2%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=90.8M(98%)

==== Summary for process 21
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=77.0M resident=30.9M(40%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=46.1M(60%)
Writable regions: Total=88.5M written=1116K(1%) resident=5144K(6%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=83.4M(94%)

==== Summary for process 22
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=150.1M resident=60.1M(40%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=90.0M(60%)
Writable regions: Total=93.2M written=1460K(2%) resident=5440K(6%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=87.8M(94%)

==== Summary for process 23
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=77.2M resident=31.3M(41%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=45.9M(59%)
Writable regions: Total=96.9M written=1412K(1%) resident=2036K(2%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=94.9M(98%)

Check for any bad behaving process (swapped_out>>>0k).

To get the process name of a misbehaving PID and some more information enter:

ps aux | awk '$2 == PID  { print $0 }'

Example output for a process with the ID 21 — ps aux | awk '$2 == 21  { print $0 }' — would be:

root              21   0,0  0,0  2507740   6552   ??  Ss   10:03am   0:01.48 /usr/libexec/kextd

Now hunt down what may be wrong with the app or daemon.

Swap files are a fact of Unix life. The only way to reduce them is to add more RAM to your system, so that they are not needed as often.

Once a swap file is created, the only way to reclaim that space is by rebooting.

(There are webpages out there which will tell you how to disable swap files. I strongly recommend that you do not do this, as Mac OS X expects them to be there.)


App Store on Mojave: "We could not complete your purchase. cancelled" Whenever I try to Get then Install any app from the App Store, I get this message:

  We could not complete your purchase.  cancelled

I did some searching online, but barely found any useful hits. What is this about?!

From https://ericasadun.com/2020/05/22/broken-app-store-downloads-on-mojave-we-could-not-complete-your-purchase/:

Quit App Store
In Terminal: open "$TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.appstore/"
In Finder: trash everything in that folder including any pending updates / stuck items.
In Terminal: killall -9 appstoreagent
Relaunch App Store
Done

If you feel confident with Terminal you can also quit the App Store and then run
rm -r "$TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.appstore/"*
killall -9 appstoreagent

I finally "upgraded" to Catalina. This resolved my problem.

Incidentally, this also solved my other problem:
AppleScript error: “Finder got an error: Network file permission error.”


Preview Fails to render zoom properly for large png I made a 32768 × 32768 pixel Mandelbrot png, because it's a fun thing to do.

It renders fine in preview, until I attempt to zoom in (which is the whole point of making the image as big as I made it).

When I do attempt to zoom in, it starts to grey out the rest of the image, and if I zoom out again, the rest of the image grays out.

It doesn't ever load. Is there a recommended way that I could render this large image?

[SPECS]

2017 15" MBP
2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 1536MB
Radeon Pro 555 2048 MB
Image format: .png
Image resolution: 32,768 x 32,768 pixels
Image file size: 49MB

I would try to open the image in a brand new user account, you can set that up in System Preferences > Users & Groups or just use the Guest account. If you see different results here it must be something in your profile interfering with Preview.

But I'm betting the preview developers didn't account much for people opening 49MB, 32kx32k images. In the likely chance that this is a genuine glitch you could quickly report it at https://www.apple.com/feedback/ or sign up for a developer account & do a full bug report over at https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/.

In the short term I would recommend trying to use a different application to view this. A browser or photo editing application might be a good fit. For an image like this there is also a good chance that JPEG would more efficiently compress it & cause less issues, maybe look into converting it with Photoshop or similar.

Not enough power; suppose so. I think your problem can not be solved.


Why won't my USB drive power down on eject? I've just upgraded from High Sierra to Mojave. I have a Lacie Porsche USB-C drive that I use for Time Machine backups. In High Sierra when I ejected the drive, it would power off and I could safely unplug it. However, now it doesn't spin down and I can't safely unplug. All I can do is put my Mac to sleep which in turn powers down the drive.

I have tried excluding the drive from Spotlight indexing and even disabling indexing altogether but this hasn't helped.

Anyone else having this problem or have a solution?

Use this Terminal command  sudo lsof | grep DODO

to find out who is using the USB.

Wait for it to respond, it might take 10 seconds.

If no one is using it, it is safe to eject the disk (pull out).

I did not answer your question "Why it does not Power Down" ? I do not know, probably missing the handshake saying I am done.


Guest account on Lion vs Mountain Lion When you enabled Find My Mac on Lion or ML, it creates a guest account for you.
In Lion clicking on the guest account would restart the computer into a Safari only mode.
In Mountain Lion the guest account is traditional account except the user's data is deleted when they log out.

What was the point in the Lion guest account, I heard something to do with helping to locate the Mac if you lose it, but I don't understand how having a guest account enabled and not normally in use helps? If someone finds a Mac, and happens not to steal it, how would logging into the guest account help? It seems like this is a very small use case, and not really enough to warrant having the feature, so I'm sure I'm missing something?

Why is Mountain Lion's guest account enabled when you enable iCloud/Find My Mac? What is the connection between them?

I can't see any reason to keep the guest account enabled on Mountain Lion?

The Guest account is enabled in Lion and ML for the Find my Mac feature as it enables the location function for the Find My Mac feature to work. Without the guest account, the location feature will not turn on and therefore will not work.

Disabling the Guest account will effectively disable usage of the Find My Mac feature.

See this Macworld article for a useful explanation of this behaviour.


iPad typing by itself I have an iPad that I've been using for 9 months or so already. And I was using it just today (reading an article from the Internet) it accidentally flops (forgive my English) over my chest but when I open it up for reading again it starts to type by itself or at least it will not respond when I touch a button on the screen for example.

I tried to turn it off (by pressing the two buttons) but once It shows the slider to finally turn it off. The slider does not badge at all. So, I forced to cancel the shutting down of my iPad and here it is again going back to typing by itself.

And I was looking in the Internet and lo behold I am not alone. There had already been many case like this and it looks it has no solution at all for the moment.

I am living in an island nation (actually group of islands) called Federated States of Micronesia and we bought it from the mainland (USA) and I know probably some of your suggestions would be to ask for replacement. However, it would take very long if ever I will be allowed to return it to them.

So, my question then is, does anybody has this similar experience or at least from someone that they know of? And is there any possible solution to this one?

It has almost the same problem as this video except that mine does not open an application but keeps on typing by itself when the keyboard is up or it just simply freezes that no matter where I touch on the screen it does not respond except if I press the Home button.

Any good advice will be much appreciated.

If you are typing, and it is not responding, but yet it starts typing by itself afterward, this is probably the effect of a slow down of your CPU or running out of RAM. When this happens, the keyboard does not show a key clicked, or a word typed until after you actually tapped the key.

In order to fix it:: try shutting down all open apps by double-pressing the Home button, holding down one of the apps until little red badges pop-up on all of them, and tapping that little red badge on each app until they all disappear.

Then do a hard restart:: Hold down the Sleep and Home buttons until the device turns off, then hold the Sleep button until you get the boot screen to turn it back on.

Test it out. Hope this helps.

UPDATE

In newer versions of iOS, the method to shutting down applications has changed. Instead, your open applications appear as tiles that you may scroll left to right. Swipe each of these up to shut off all of your open apps.

Shut down the Settings app, then all the other apps should work okay. There seems to be a problem with just that app. Unfortunately, you can't delete it and download a new one because it's an Apple app.


Why am I experiencing random bluetooth disconnects? I have an iPad Air 2 64GB now running iOS 8.3. I've experienced problems where when using Keynote on my iPhone 5S to remote control a keynote presentation on my iPad, the connection will be dropped at random times during the presentation. I attributed this to Keynote bugs, but then my iPad also started randomly losing connections to my Logitech Ultrathin keyboard cover (the onscreen keyboard would appear) or I'd type a certain character and it would start repeating ad infinitum. I removed the interference factor from the equation by noticing that the problem would also occur within my office with thick walls and no bluetooth devices nearby … so I had Logitech replace the keyboard, but the connection drops still occur. I also reset all settings on my iPad, which didn't help.

So my next question is this: could the bluetooth hardware on my iPad Air 2 be flakey? Everything else about it works fine.

It sounds like you are not alone and no fix in sight at the moment according to this report.
How to potentially fix iPad Bluetooth Problems

iOS 8 Bluetooth problems are among the most common iOS issues and they
were a big problem inside iOS 8. We ourselves have run into iOS 8
Bluetooth issues with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and while iOS 8.1
delivers fixes for Bluetooth issues, we expect Bluetooth problems to
persist inside Apple’s brand new iOS 8 update.
There doesn’t appear to be a cure all, we’ve heard about a few
possible fixes that iPad users will want to try. iOS users have
singled out “Reset All Settings” as a solid fix. It hasn’t worked for
everyone but there are a ton of people that are claiming success after
trying it on their iPhone. It should work for Apple’s iPad as well.
To do this, open up the iPad and head to Settings > General > Reset >
Reset All Settings. This is going to take a bit of time and users will
lose all saved settings but the pay off is that it seems to be fixing
Bluetooth issues for many people. It’s certainly worth a try if
Bluetooth keeps acting up after Apple’s iOS 8.1 upgrade.

For the time been, you can file your report with Apple and hope for the best.
https://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

its not hardware. I degraded to 8.3 and now it is consistently dropping Bluetooth to both my car and headset. That never happened before. Thanks Apple. Let's. Yosemite degrade was locking system for a couple minutes after it was sleeping.


How to remove iCloud alias from iMessage I created an alias for my iCloud email address and then added it as another address I could send and receive iMessages from.

I have subsequently deleted the alias from iCloud email. However, the alias still exists as a address I can send/recieve iMessages from.

On my iPhone I can still tap the i button to get info, and remove the alias. This allows me to remove the email address from my iPhone (it claims: You will no longer be able to receive iMessages at XXX@icloud.com on any device.) However if I turn off iMessages and turn it back on the alias reappears. The alias also shows in Messages on Mac, and there doesn't appear to be anyway to remove it from Messages for Mac.

Ideally I want to permanently delete the alias from iMessage.

Ok – think I've sorted it. I had to remove the email address from the Manage your Apple ID: https://appleid.apple.com/signin

The email alias had become an Alternate Email address. Deleting it there removed it from iMessages after signing out and then back in.

I don't know how to permanently delete the alias, but in the iMessages settings, you can find a list of the email addresses you can send/receive from, and you can uncheck ones that you don't want to use.  You could uncheck the email to remove it from receiving/sending iMessages, but I don't know how to delete aliases.


File with removed tag showing up in Finder I recently learned about the tagging system on macOS and tagged the file with name DA1 with a yellow tag. Shortly after that, I removed the yellow tag but the file keeps popping up in my Finder window. What should I do to remove that file from Finder?

I have not found a stable way in the finder to apply tags. Usually any new method I try works for the first 5 files, and then the problems arise. Even the Get Info window will not reliably work (the tags appear to be fixed, but if you close the Get Info window and open it again, none of the changes have been kept).

However, recently I have been applying tags through an application's Save dialog box. Often this works to add or remove tags when the Finder doesn't. Maybe that will work for this problem file.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you tagged a file with the "yellow" tag, then later removed the tag. But when you view all files with that tag, that file appears in the view.

I would try restarting the Mac. That may flush the system. I have found adding or removing tags in the Finder to be completely unreliable. The problem has existed for years and in Sierra it's still not fixed. It may be that you thought you deleted the tag on the file, but it isn't actually removed.


How to find all files that are larger than 1GB on the Mac HD? It seems that either one of these commands can be used:

sudo find / -size +1G
sudo find / -type f -size +1G

But when it gets to /Volumes, it actually look at all the back up files by Time Machine in the external hard drive. (and another hard drive for data).

I was going to cd to /Volumes/Macintosh HD and start the find there using find . instead of find /, but then I did an ls and there is a Volumes right there again.

Any option to use the Finder as well (the GUI)?

Another thing I found puzzling is that none of the manpage of find on Mac OS Lion or on the web mentioned the +1G... all they mentioned were the format 1G for exact match.

You can use the -x to avoid traversing mounted drives:

-x      Prevent find from descending into directories that have a device number different than that of the file from which the descent
        began.

You command should then be

$ sudo find -x / -type f -size +1G

Regarding the fact about the missing documentation: is not missing is just not easy to find. At the end of the PRIMARIES section of the man page

  All primaries which take a numeric argument allow the number to be preceded by a plus sign ("+") or a minus sign ("-").  A preceding plus sign means "more than n", a preceding minus sign means "less than n" and neither means "exactly n".

How about this command:

find / -type f -size +1G


How to change file names in different folders? I have lots of files with identical name, say "hello.jpg".

They are located in many folders, say

\aaa\hello.jpg
\bbb\hello.jpg
\adaage\hello.jpg

I want to change their name to

\aaa\aaa_hello.jpg
\bbb\bbb_hello.jpg
...

How can I accomplish this?

You can run this command in Terminal:

find . -name hello.jpg -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "${1%/*}"/"$(echo $(dirname "$1")_$(basename "$1"))"' -- {} \;

This will find all hello.jpg files inside directories and prepend dir name in front of the filename. NOTE: this search only inside current dir You're in - not the whole partition.

EDIT: fixed spaces in dir/filename.

This is what I find when googling around for batch renaming files, hope it helps you. http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3-easy-ways-to-batch-rename-files-on-the-mac--mac-46999


When you terminate multi display in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, what happens? Here's a question by a non-developer who cannot touch OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but I hope some developers help me in this issue -

I have one 27-inch display and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and when I'm out of home I use the Retina laptop, and when I'm at home I use Retina but also with 27-inch display in order to take advantage of larger desktop. However, in OS X 10.8, when I terminate the multi display functionality to get it out of home, then screen on laptop becomes messy, with apps being viewed on 27-inch display being scattered around on laptops. That's why I've been considering recently buying iMac and use it on home instead. That said, I hate using two Mac.

So here's a question: When you terminate multi display in Mavericks, then apps on 27-inch display return back to the location on which those apps were before connecting to another display, or are those still messy much like on Mountain Lion?

If hopefully it is the former, then I want to wait for Mavericks and new thunderbolt display… If the latter, then I have to buy iMac right now…

If you're using Mountain Lion there's an awesome app called Multimon.

Unfortunately it does not work as it should on Mavericks :(


Is there a way to make the Function keys act as standard keys with a Logitech K811 keyboard? I changed the Fn key on my Macbook Pro to actually work in the reverse way (so, just hitting the F1 key actually sends the "Function 1" signal, rather than the brightness decrease signal when the Fn key is not pressed, and the brightness decrease signal if the Fn key is pressed). I did this because, as a developer, it's much more useful to me to be able to utilize the function keys than the other (what I consider auxiliary) functions.

However, when I'm at home, I use an external keyboard (a Logitech K811). It's a great keyboard, but it doesn't seem to sense the preference change I made with the Fn key. That is, on my macbook keyboard, I don't have to hold Fn to activate the function keys, but on my Logitech keyboard, I do.

Is there a way to make the Logitech keyboard also act the way I have it setup in my System Preferences?

According to Logitech you need they Preferences Manger download and installed.

Make sure you pick the right OS X and follow the instructions.

In 2019 Logitech utillity to redefine Fn keys is called SetPoint. There you can redfine all FN button, even f1, f2, f3 button can obtain classic behaviour. Hope this helps.


Which are the OS X Dashboard Widgets you can't live without? I don't use widgets that much, but one particular widget makes the dashboard useful to me. That's iStat

  iStat Pro is a highly configurable
  widget that lets you monitor every
  aspect of your Mac, including CPU,
  memory, disks, network, battery,
  temperatures, fans, load & uptime and
  processes. iStat Pro can do it all.

And it's FREE

Do you have one outstanding widget to share? How do you use it?
Please follow these simple rules:

Please search for duplicate answers before posting. You can search
this question like this: inquestion:this iStat Pro
Limit one dashboard widget per answer.
Add a link to the website in the name of the application if possible (no direct downloads).

Tea Timer

It's simply a timer. Notifies with:

Sounds
Speech
Growl

Text completely customizable (food pictured). ready in can be changed to just in.


Installing .pkg with terminal ? Is it possible to install a .pkg using a terminal ? (I wanted to install an app through ssh).

/usr/sbin/installer

The installer command is used to install Mac OS X installer packages to a specified domain or volume.  The
installer command installs a single package per invocation, which is specified with the -package parameter ( -pkg
is accepted as a synonym).  It may be either a single package or a metapackage.  In the case of the metapackage,
the packages which are part of the default install will be installed unless disqualified by a package's check
tool(s).

See man installer for the full functionality. Often
sudo installer -pkg /path/to/package.pkg -target /

is all that's needed. Here / is the mount point of Macintosh HD volume. -target accepts path like "/Volumes/Macintosh HD", or /dev/disk0 also.

Install all .pkg files from the current folder to /Applications:
for f in *.pkg ;
    do sudo installer -verbose -pkg "$f" -target /
done

As an alternative you can install the packages to your home folder with -target ~. They will end up in /Users/<your_account>/Applications unless a specific path is predefined in the installer.

If you need to see what exactly a pkg installer script contains and what pre- and post-install scripts will be run then check out SuspiciousPackage (freeware, can be installed with brew install --cask suspicious-package), and use quick preview from Finder when a .pkg file is selected. Pressing spacebar in Finder with the selected file should work too.


Recover accidentally deleted photos not shown in recently deleted I accidentally deleted a photo, and it does not show in the "recently deleted" folder. Is there any way I can get it back? I have iOS 8.2.

Their is no way you can recover a photo after deleting it from recently deleted unless you have a backup

Unless you're jailbroken, there's no way to recover them if you don't have a backup.


What tools exist to recover a file I clobbered using cpp in terminal? I accidentally typed cpp Scriptname.py DestinationDirectory, intending to copy the Python script into the folder.

I realized afterward that I should have used cp, but now my Python script is completely gone. I have tried the locate command, but it says that it's still present in my user directory. When I type ls in my user directory, it is nowhere to be found.

What are my options here for recovery? I'm asking the cpp angle on the unix site in case that tool saves a copy of files before it clobbers them, but what Mac tools exist to get my original file back?

Here is an exact replica of what I did, showing how the script 'MYSCRIPT.py' disappears from the home directory.

vav7:~ tuc40953$ ls
 Desktop            Dropbox         Movies         New.java
 Public         scripts
Documents       Library         Music           Peptoids      Theultimatescript.py
Downloads       MYSCRIPT.py     New.class       Pictures        rename.py
vav7:~ tuc40953$ clear

vav7:~ tuc40953$ cpp MYSCRIPT.py Desktop/Peptoids/Final-Structures/MyScript/
cc1: fatal error: opening output file Desktop/Peptoids/Final-Structures/MyScript/: Is a directory
compilation terminated.
vav7:~ tuc40953$ cpp Desktop/Peptoids/Final-Structures/MyScript/ MYSCRIPT.py
cc1: error: Desktop/Peptoids/Final-Structures/MyScript/: No such file or directory
 vav7:~ tuc40953$ ls
Desktop         Dropbox         Music           Peptoids          Theultimatescript.py
Documents       Library         New.class       Pictures            rename.py
 Downloads      Movies          New.java        Public             scripts

Here are a few options to recover a file from user error of this type:

TimeMachine - your best hope.
Dropbox also keeps deleted files and versions if you stored that file in a folder that synced.
mdfind MYSCRIPT.py #better than locate and searches inside files, not just file names
Check your repositories if you use code control software like git or mercurial or svn or other tools
General undelete software like Data Rescue

As you're now aware, the terminal is unforgiving and doesn't have an "are you sure you meant to clobber that file?" design mentality. It gets worse when you realize recursive commands and the fact that everything is a file (directories, disks, disk images, etc...) and errant commands can delete vast amounts of work in the blink of an eye.

If it is truly still in your user directory, perhaps it is marked as hidden. Use ls -a to see all files in your home directory, including hidden ones.


Has anyone turned off FileVault after it has completed? I have a 1TB SSD in a 15" Mac Book Pro

It took about 30 hrs to Encrypt, which during, the computer was virtually unusable. It just finished with that and now it says it is optimizing with 5 DAYS!!!! remaining. I wish I never agreed to do it. Has anyone turned it off after the whole process is complete and if so how long did that take?

Just go to System Preferences, click on Security, then FileVault then click the button that says turn off FileVault. But if you have it on, I would recommend leaving it on. It increases your security, and may take a while to turn off (decrypt) your files, but it's your choice.

NEVER EVER TURN ON FILEVAULT....WORST THING YOU WILL EVER DO.
if something goes wrong in the startup process you mac will not turn on and you will need to call support.  They will walk you through several steps and then have you turn it off.  I just spent the better part of two hours doing this.  And by the way you may lose the contents of your home directory during the decryption process..


Whiter screen on MacBook Pro 2014 I have a MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2014 model, with 2 GPUs: Intel and NVIDIA 750M.

Last Monday I turned it on and I noticed that the screen is white as you can see in the picture.

I don't know what is the problem with it. I tried some solutions that I found on the web like resetting the NVRAM & SMC without result. I tried also to deactivate the dedicated GPU using gfxCardStatus but also no result.

The problem is that when I keep the Mac turned on for some time (>2 hours) the screen goes back to normal without white edges.

When I turn it off and keep it turned off for a while, then turn it on again it becomes white again and I must wait >2 hours so I can see my screen without this whiting effect.

Can you suggest a solution? We have no Apple Store or Apple repair in my country.

I tried to use my Mac HDMI but it's not working too. It was working before I got this problem. The mini DisplayPort to VGA is still working.

According to this Apple discussion:

  The problem is that the expose window is stuck. In order to force a
  refresh take these steps:

  launch terminal
  type killall Dock

This computer is slow, and can't keep up with the app. Click and hold the app Chrome, or Safari, or Fire fox. Press quit,then wait for a few seconds, reboot. There you are, this should work!


How to cd to a directory with a name starting with a "-" (minus)? We have some folders where the names are starting with a "-". If I try to enter them with terminal, cd interprets the "-" as an option. How could I manage this?

This should just work:

cd /path/to/-folderthatstartswithdash

EDIT:

According to this question, this works if you only want to input the name:

cd -- -folderthatstartswithdash


How to Wipe Badly Imported Contacts from iCloud My boss has a MacBook Air and an iPhone, and pays for iCloud. We also use Outlook here. We discovered that her contacts weren't being synced properly between her phone and Contacts.app, and attempted to merge them. What we've discovered instead is that we've somehow created inexact duplicates, with the duplicates containing vCard flags marking what kind of data each contact is using:

I don't recall exactly what we did to achieve this - I assume we imported some vCards and hoped that iCloud would sort through the duplicates - but is there any way to erase these contacts without manually stepping through, and has anyone seen this before and can advise how to stop this happening in the future?

Run a search for data that would show up in a corrupt vCard, but not a legitimate one. For example: "type=VOICE". You may have to do this several times with different strings. I would take the results and export them before selecting all (⌘ A) and deleting them. Make sure you can always undo, if needed.

You can log into  iCloud's site, navigate to the contacts page then you can either individually select contacts or select all and delete in the lower left hand corner cog. This requires you have iCloud syncing enabled for contacts.


Is there a way to show the calendar on iPhone lock screen? I used to be a Windows Phone user and I loved the way the calendar (a today's agenda) is shown on the lock screen. So I was wondering if there's a way to see a days's events on the iPhone lock screen. It happens that I feel I am out of sync with day's events without having it on my lock screen.

Swipe down the screen from the top, it will show events you have set to show at the lock-screen.

You can decide what to show in Settings > Notifications
& whether to allow it at all in Settings > TouchID & Passcode

You can simply swipe left from the Home screen to see all Calendar, Reminders, Travel, News, Weather, and much more!


Can we partially jaibreak our iOS devices for enterprise management? We manage a large number of iOS devices in an enterprise environment and are finding Apple's management utilities lacking. I wonder if there are any options for jailbreaking which do not entail completely opening the system up.

I have no intention of thwarting the code-signing system and having to deal with the complications that raises, or installing unauthorized apps; my thoughts are merely that our administration options would be greater if we were able to access the system partition so we could manage plist files through ssh or another tool.

Is this possible? Or is access to these setting files intrinsically linked to the code-signing system for apps?

Old question, and I'm sure you have answered yourself already, but I'll mention the Apple iOS management tool "Apple Configurator" (didn't find a good link for a tutorial).

It looks like you can lock down a few things.

One interest for "home use": it's the only way to lock down device pairing. Lets say someone wants the info on your iOS device. If it's unlocked for any reason, you just plug it into some device with iTunes, say "Trust" and now you have iTunes-level file system access (which is a lot).

LATE EDIT: Apple has mostly filled the “iTunes hole” in recent iterations of iOS. You need a password to pair the phone now, and iOS 11.4 seems to want a password every 7 days (much like TouchID requires a password after a bit of time).

Jailbreaking is jailbreaking, but you could install tweaks (or hire someone to write them) that patch up on system files and folders.


Which APP should I use if I want to draw a workflow with mathematical expressions on Mac? I want to find a graphic application that can draw basic workflows with mathematical expressions. For example, I want to draw something like the following figure from "Implementation and Optimization of Differentiable Neural Computers" by Carol Hsin.

Keynote on the mac can do both. It has standard shapes and the ability to draw lines connected to those shapes.  It's a simple way to draw a flowchart. If also supports mathematical expression thru latex. There is an option to insert an equation and you can define anything you like by using latex.

Here is a link to help you with Latex. On this link, you can see what the latex command is for most any symbols you can imagine. I use this page to help me find the correct latex command to put in Keynote.

I have included a very simple and crude flowchart I made in about 5 minutes using Keynote.  The math equations are bogus as I was just trying to show the capabilities of Latex.

Photoshop and InDesign could do some of that. I am not sure of fonts being mathematical, so see if you can find 3rd-party fonts for the same. Adobe Illustrator is used for vector graphics extensively.

  The industry-standard vector graphics software  is used by millions of designers and artists to create everything from gorgeous web and mobile graphics to logos, icons, ..

https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html
Autodesk SketchBook can also help draw basic shapes rectangles, lines.
Same for https://draw.io
I'd still add LaTeX as an option. You shouldn't be scared of it.
https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/LaTeX_Graphics_using_TikZ:_A_Tutorial_for_Beginners_(Part_3)—Creating_Flowcharts gives an introduction. Use templates given on that site to start drawing. Use https://tex.stackexchange.com/ for reference or asking doubts.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/168314/how-to-use-latex-commands-to-draw-a-flowchart gives you a working solution too.


How to disable WebGL in the Chrome browser on Mac OS X How does one disable Google Chrome from using WebGL on a Mac (Mac OS X 10.6)?

(There currently appears to be some sort of security advisory regarding this component.)

Chrome lets you disable WebGL using the about:flags page.

Type about:flags into the URL bar and press return.

Find the Disable WebGL flag and enable it. Restart Chrome for changes to appear.

Not sure how to do this in OS X, but you may be able to do so by running chrome from terminal with the "-disable-webgl" flag.


Customize external HDD spindown timeout? It's possible to enable spinning down of mechanical hard drives using the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" option in Energy Saver, and it's possible to customize the timeout period with sudo pmset -a disksleep MIN.

However, if I understand the man pages correctly, this applies to all hard drives connected to the system. Is it possible to only target one HDD (ideally, by UUID)? I have no objection to installing a 3rd party app to accomplish this functionality.

The Terminal command diskutil eject <disk_identifier> is what you are looking for.
<disk_identifier> can take the UUID of the drive as an argument.
To get the disk identifier of all mounted disks, execute the mount command.
On my Mac, the mount command gives this:
/dev/disk3 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk4s2 on /Volumes/iTunes (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners)
/dev/disk5s2 on /Volumes/TM_Backup (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

To spin down /Volumes/iTunes, I'd execute either one of the commands
diskutil eject /dev/disk4
or
diskutil eject /Volumes/iTunes.
To spin up /Volumes/iTunes, I need to execute the command:
diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk4. mountDisk only works with /dev/disk* disk identifiers.
See man diskutil for more information.


How to combine unzip and cat to work as one in the terminal I work for a webhost as a front level tech and often we need to install a SSL for a customer. I'm on a Mac now but am familiar with Linux as well.

What I'm looking to do would be to take the zipped file, download it to my mac and then run the command to both unzip it and cat at one pop. Thus eliminating the tedious process of unzip file.zip and then copy each file, one at a time to run cat.

I'm lame when it comes to writing a script and have played around with multiple commands, none that worked out.

So I've done some testing, and it seems that gzcat (and event zcat) on OS X only work for gzipped files, and not files using standard zip compression.  That being said, I believe this is what you are looking for:

"sub.domain.tld.ssl.zip" contains 2 files:

"sub.domain.tld.crt" (SSL certificate)
"sub.domain.tld.key" (RSA private key)

In order to print all files to STDOUT, you would use unzip -p

To "cat" the certificate, you could use the following command:

unzip -p sub.domain.tld.ssl.zip | sed -n '/CERT/,/CERT/p'

To "cat" the private key, you could use the following command:

unzip -p sub.domain.tld.ssl.zip | sed -n '/KEY/,/KEY/p'

Afterwards, of which you could do what you wish, such as create a little script or function:

#!/bin/bash
unzip -p "$1" | sed -n '/CERT/,/CERT/p' > "/etc/ssl/Certs/${2}.crt"
unzip -p "$1" | sed -n '/KEY/,/KEY/p' > "/etc/ssl/Private/${2}.key"

The above script would take 2 arguments (which should ideally be enclosed in quotes):

File name of zip file
Naming convention of cert/key files

If the name of the script was sslinstazip.sh, you would run it like so:

./sslinstazip.sh "sub.domain.tld.ssl.zip" "sub.domain.tld"

There are obviously many ways you can modify this to fit your own personal needs, but in this case, unzip is actually your friend.

Skip the unzip and use gzcat directly. I'm not sure what "install a SSL" involves, but if you ask a follow on question with that detail, link it in a comment here and I'll have a look.

Also, making a short shell script might help you pick apart the requirements of your automation if Automator isn't powerful enough for your needs.


Add anniversary to calendar iOS calendar add birthdays but no anniversary.
How can I add them from the contacts to the calendar?

Another work around would be to add a contact, called for exemple Wedding Me and My Wife and add a birthday to it. So it will show like a birthday in the calendar but you'll not it's an anniversary.

free tool to remeber anniversaries..

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/anniversary-reminder/id614159715?mt=8


How to make script to convert lower case characters into upper and vice versa Need to create 2 scripts in automator.

Select text in any application (textedit, pages etc.) and change all letters from lower case to upper.
Same, as above, but from upper case, to lower.

Scripts should work not only with English, but with other languages as well. Thank you.

You can do it for a lot of apps [not all, but certainly all Apple apps] from

System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App shortcuts

You can convert a text file's content to lowercase or uppercase using the dd command in Terminal.

Convert to lowercase:

$ dd if=input.txt of=output.txt conv=lcase

or uppercase:

$ dd if=input.txt of=output.txt conv=ucase

Tip: If you're working from the desktop then it may be easier to cd into the directory, rather than copying the file path or dragging and dropping the file into the Terminal window:

$ cd ~/Desktop


Xcode from App Store Stalling at About 11 Minutes Remaining I'm trying to install Xcode from the App Store onto a Mac mini (the vast majority of my experience with PCs involves Windows and Linux). I've tried three times, and each time it stalls out at around 11 minutes remaining.

What could be causing this problem? This is a refurbished Mac mini, with the latest version of Sierra installed, and very little else.

Is there another way to download and install the software?

The Xcode install takes an unusually long time even on a modern system, and the time estimates are often inaccurate. Just leave it be for a while -- it may take as long as a few hours.

Installing an SSD in the Mini will help significantly.

Sounds like it could be the drive as well. Examine for errors and perhaps use drive recovery software to rebuild it. DiskWarrior or SpinRite for example. More than likely should update the drive regardless.


How to disable the No SIM Card Installed warning in iPad when using it without SIM? I have not managed to find a way to disable the warning No Sim Card Installed while using iPad Air without sim-card. I disabled using Mobile data in all parts of settings. I have done this now in three generation of iPads unsuccessfully. The notice window looks like this

How can you disable the warning No Sim Card in iPads?

Ask Siri to "turn off mobile data".
Worked for me on an iPad 4 with iOS 10.2.
Found in this Apple discussion.

You can tell Siri to turn off Mobile Data or turn it off in settings.

  I solved the issue on my 1st-gen mini (on iOS 8.0.2) by telling Siri to "turn off mobile data" and now it just says "iPad" in the status bar, instead of "No Sim".

(Source)


Simple way to disable Cellphone (data & call) without disabling WiFi & Bluetooth on iPhone Airplane mode is fine sometimes - but sometimes I want a quick way to turn off my cell circuits (calls / sms / cell data) - without turning off WiFi & Bluetooth.

And no, I don't want to turn on Flight mode then re-enable Cell & Bluetooth (this is specifically not a duplicate of that question).

I may be playing music on a Bluetooth device, and connected to Wifi - turning those off and on can be extremely disruptive.

Are there any widgets that can do this say? You should be able to customise control centre to do it

Thanks.

Turn on airplane mode, then re-enabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is currently the only option.

You can send feedback to Apple here about wanting the ability to turn of Cellular.

I agree you should be able to customise the control centre.

What about keeping the sim card pin gadget on your keyring and popping out the SIM tray a little? Too risky?


Any way to save/manage finder states? Not just the windows, but their location and layout too? I'd like to be able to hit a hotkey and load a saved state of the finder. Not just the window locations and size, but also their location, layout, (history?).

There seem to be many solutions for saving window size/location, but nothing specific to the Finder windows themselves.

Is there an app or script that can do this?

If not, where do I begin to try to script something myself?

I'm not sure this would do everything, but if you could get something to put in a file the path to every open Finder window, and then put that file and the .DS_Store from each of those paths into a tarball, I think you would have most of it.

To restore, first put each .DS_Store back, then open all the directory names stored.


Adding new contact to iMessage group chat With iMessage there is a group chat feature similar to the feature in Whats App. But I can't find a way to add new people to an ongoing group chat.

Is this possible?

No. Its not possible, though its nice feature to add to in next version.

You can, go create new message then where it says recipients (or to:) add as many people (On imessage) as you like.


Which iPhoto folders are least useful to save space? I'm cleaning up my iPhoto folders since I am short on HD space. Looking inside iPhoto, I see four folders that consume a lot of space: Masters, Modified, Originals, Previews. Which of these are must keep and which can be deleted or recreated?

For example, I did do some editing but I would rather have the original since I can reproduce it.

PS: I do use an app called PhotoSweeper to help me clean up my iPhoto library. I used it to remove duplications and photos that look alike.

Before any of these, I would check your iPhoto's trashcan. Most people don't realize that the iPhoto trashcan is completely separate from the systemwide trashcan. Depending on how many photos you take, this can sometimes amounts to GB of space quite easily. I would otherwise leave those individual folders alone, as iPhoto uses those to generate the pictures that are in your iPhoto library. Depending on which folder you target (such as originals), you may end up with a bunch of question marks in your iPhoto library where images used to be. The best way to get rid of pictures is to manage them from within the iPhoto application itself.

Many files can be "cleaned up" to recoup space.  Previews is one of them and will be recreated as needed.  A blanket statement of "Don't delete anything or it will break" is silly.  Do some simple testing with copies of libraries and try to break it by deleting educated guess directories like thumbnails and such...


Minecraft not opening in portable drive, only opening in Applications When I try to launch Minecraft on my portable drive, I get the error message "Minecraft.app" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Bin.:

but, when I move it to /Applications and double click, it starts. You can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/Oo4R8UthaEM

This only happens when opening Minecraft. How can I stop this? Why is this happening?

I am using MacOS Catalina 10.15.1.

I believe Minecraft was created so that it can only work when i's in applications folder because they don't want people to be able to play it on other peoples hard drives, they want them to pay money to buy it for themselves. This is just another trick they use to make themselves more money.


How can I find the macOS version codename? I want to find the codename of my version of OS X / macOS.
E.g. Lion, Leopard, Mavericks, etc.
If I click the Apple symbol, then "About This Mac", I only get the version number.
Where can I find the Big Cat or California Location marketing codename?

The version number is the correct thing to report when you have issues. You should also include the subversion.
The marketing names are from macOS - Wikipedia article, up to and including macOS Catalina.
╔════════════════════════════╦════════════════════╗
║          Version           ║      Codename      ║
╠════════════════════════════╬════════════════════╣
║ Rhapsody Developer Release ║ Grail1Z4 / Titan1U ║
║ Mac OS X Server 1.0        ║ Hera               ║
║ Mac OS X Developer Preview ║                    ║
║ Public Beta                ║ Kodiak             ║
║ Mac OS X 10.0              ║ Cheetah            ║
║ Mac OS X 10.1              ║ Puma               ║
║ Mac OS X 10.2              ║ Jaguar             ║
║ Mac OS X 10.3              ║ Panther            ║
║ Mac OS X 10.4              ║ Tiger              ║
║ Mac OS X 10.5              ║ Leopard            ║
║ Mac OS X 10.6              ║ Snow Leopard       ║
║ Mac OS X 10.7              ║ Lion               ║
║ OS X 10.8                  ║ Mountain Lion      ║
║ OS X 10.9                  ║ Mavericks          ║
║ OS X 10.10                 ║ Yosemite           ║
║ OS X 10.11                 ║ El Capitan         ║
║ macOS 10.12                ║ Sierra             ║
║ macOS 10.13                ║ High Sierra        ║
║ macOS 10.14                ║ Mojave             ║
║ macOS 10.15                ║ Catalina           ║
║ macOS 11.0                 ║ Big Sur            ║
╚════════════════════════════╩════════════════════╝

Click on the black Apple icon in the leftmost upper corner of your display when in Finder.
Your Operating System is listed under the bold-faced "OS X"

Note:  If you click on the icon reading "More Info" you will get all of the hardware info related to your Mac.


How can I see how long my computer has been active (as in not idle) I've seen a variety of solutions to check how long my machine has been idle, and I know I can check how long since last reboot with uptime, but I'm curious if there's a way to see how long since my computer was last idle. Maybe since the last time the power save settings kicked in, or last time since the screensaver turned on / monitor turned off, etc?

I'm fine using an applescript or shell command to determine this, if those are the best solutions.

You can also find the idle time in UNIX by running

ioreg -c IOHIDSystem

And looking for the returned HIDIdleTime

Or you could run a shell script on idle like so, just call it every 30 seconds or so using LaunchD. Make sure to put the launchd xml file in /Library/LaunchDaemons so it runs even when no user is logged in, or /Library/LaunchAgents/ if you only want it to run when someone is logged into the machine.

#!/bin/bash
idl=$"`ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk '/HIDIdleTime/ {print int($NF/1000000000); exit}'`"
idletime="600"
if [ $idl -gt $idletime ]; then
#Your
#Code
#Here
fi

Here is an example LaunchD XML file.

http://u.wanttogo.to/I9p4

Either place it in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ if you want it to run even when nobody is logged in or in /Library/LaunchAgents/ if you only want it to run when someone is logged into the machine.

Place your script in /Library/Scripts/

You need to make sure your LaunchD plist file is owner root, group wheel and permissions 644.

chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.my-company.my-name.plist
chgrp wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.my-company.my-name.plist
chown 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.my-company.my-name.plist


Can't select option in OSX Utilities I'm having a pretty bizarre problem in OSX Mavericks. I'm attempting to install a fresh version of the OS, so I boot to OSX Utilities (Cmd+R). The option that I'm looking for is listed (re-install operating system), but I can't select it or anything else from the list.

I can move the mouse around, but clicking does not work. I tried with both the trackpad as well as a USB mouse. I can navigate through the options with the arrow keys, but pressing enter has no effect.

How the heck am I supposed to do anything from the utilities?

To get around this problem I went to the option I wanted with the arrow keys then got frustrated when I couldn`t click.

What I proceeded to do was start in the bottom right with the options key and push all the buttons across and up the next two rows skipping the Cap Locks. The continue button then illuminated. To then select it I pushed the space bar. Hope this works

As per the above - I had this issue, but I found that although I couldn't 'tap' on my trackpad, I could 'click' (press on bottom left of pad). Alternatively, the Tab key will move the cursor between sections of the window, arrow keys high-light an item within it, and the space bar selects it


Change Dock Icons only? I just want to change the dock icons instead of system wide.

It it possible to only change the icons in the dock, and not elsewhere?

Use Candybar. It's free now as it's not as effective in Mountain Lion as it used to be.

Can you be more specific? If you mean add or remove new dock icons on Mac OS, this should work.

To Add icons: simply drag any icon from system onto the dock. This should add it automatically.

To Remove icons: just hold any icon which you want to remove and drag it onto the desktop and leave, this should remove them.


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

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

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

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

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

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

By unchecking this options, I solved the issue.


Storing my iTunes library on an external flash drive in a MacBook Air I have approximately 90 GB of music and it is taking up too much of my Macbook Air's 256GB internal SSD space. I see I can buy a 128 GB flash card which can be left in the MacBook Air's flash card slot. Can I just move my library on to the flash card? Has anybody done this? Any advice? Would it be backed up with Time Machine correctly?

Has anybody done this?

Not with a flash drive, but with an external drive. I've kept my iTunes library on a USB-attached drive for years now. Semantically, the situation is identical to storing it on the flash drive. The OS see's a remote disk in both cases.

  Any advice?

Format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Most flash media come pre-formatted as FAT32 these days. You don't want that.

For moving your iTunes library the correct way see: What is the safest way to move the iTunes Library from one hard drive to another?

  Would it be backed up with Time Machine correctly?

As long as it's not listed in the Exclusions list in Time Machine, yes: it will be backed up. To check the exclusions list: System Preferences -> Time Machine. Click on the Options... button and make sure your flash drive volume isn't listed in that list. If it it, select it, and click the - (minus) button at the bottom of the list to remove it.

You are able to specify what gets backed up with TimeMachine, so if you want to backup just your music you can do that and use the flashdrive as your TimeMachine backup. However, this won't allow you to erase the music off of your harddrive.

I would suggest simply putting all of your Music files onto an external (as you mentioned) by simply dragging and dropping the files, and then deleting it all off of your harddrive (except for any particular music you still want on your machine for regular access). If and when you want to pull a song off of your flash drive, just plug it in and pull it off.

Another idea is to look into itunes match (stores all of your songs on the cloud for $20 a year and you don't need to keep the actual file on your harddrive).


Unable to insert disk into optical drive (MacBook early 2009 model) I have a MacBook (early 2009 model), and yesterday the SuperDrive stopped working.

On attempting to push a DVD into it, it is physically stiff and doesn't want to go in, with a lot of pushing it goes further, and the automatic mechanism tries to suck it in (or at least makes a noise), but nothing happens. On closer examination, it would appear that something is catching the disks around the middle of the entrance of the SuperDrive which is preventing them from simply gliding in as they used to. I'm unsure whether its something broken, or perhaps a locking mechanism that has somehow got stuck. I did think that something might be stuck in there, but I am not missing any DVDs and I have tried restarting holding down the mouse button to eject, and while it makes the eject noise (which sounds healthy), nothing comes out.

I have tried all the obvious things - resetting the PRAM and SMC, to no avail.

I don't imagine that anyone has a fix for this as its probably a physical problem, but I thought I'd try as I am not currently near an Apple shop and I don't particularly want to be without my computer for too long, so I'd rather attempt to find a fix myself before doing anything else.

I just had this problem with my 17" mbp early 2009.
ODD was blocked like there was disc already in, but of course there wasn't.
Tried many times SMC & PRAM reset and Force shutdown. Sometimes the drive clicked and I managed to insert one disc, which was read just fine.
But after ejecting it, the block was again there.

Then googled some more and typed "drutil eject internal" few times in terminal and all was OK again.

shut down the Mac. Restart holding down the trackpad.... worked for me.