Removing public beta failing Information:

Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,4
System Version: macOS 10.13.5 (17F77)
iOS 12

Read the first: How to remove iOS 12.0 Public Beta from iPhone 8 in order to restore archived iOS 11.4 backup?

I followed the instructions under "Problem Solved", but to no avail. I put my phone into recovery mode  > given the option to restore, which I did.

Unlike with other posts (e.g., https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iosapps/downgrade-ios-12-beta-3522302/ - I originally followed this one), I was not given the option to chose a backup or completely restore. Instead, it just booted up into 12 and asked me again if I wanted to install an update to connect to my computer. I don't even have the option to restore my phone to a clean backup.

Other thoughts:

I deleted the beta profile
I might not have backups from before 12, but then I still should be
able to just get rid of it.

you can get a recovery iOS on the development page:

https://developer.apple.com/download/

just sign in with your appleID download the recovery image and follow this introductions:

https://wccftech.com/downgrade-ios-114-to-ios-113/

the tutorial is for iOS 11 but it's the same for iOS 12.

Please make a backup before doing this!

Edit:

at https://developer.apple.com/download/ please log in with your appleID. after that you'll see a download list:

click on see all at the entry iOS Restore Images.
You'll see another list:

Download the restore Image for your iPhone.


How can I get Apple mail or Outlook 2011 to look up SMIME encryption certificates for users? I want the ability to lookup an encryption certificate for SMIME in Outlook for recipients who have SMIME certs, but I just don't have their public key.

I noticed the keychain has a directory feature.  Can I use this to add a compatible directory to lookup their public key for SMIME encryption?

According to the Apple TS article "Using Keychain Access to search directory services for certificates", if your Mac

is configured to use a directory service,
has the CA signing certificate trusted in either your login or the system keychains,
has a valid signed user certificate with the appropriate attributes,

then Keychain Access can be configured (Preferences → General → Search directory services for certificates) to search for certificates on the configured directory service.  Mail.app will also automatically search for certificates as well.

Unfortunately, I haven't done this personally, so I can't vouch for how well it works or have any advice on any issues.  This reads to me like a feature designed to be used with a centrally-managed IT infrastructure with directory and certificate services.  It does not sound like it is designed to work outside that sort of environment.

Not sure if this would help, but yes, you can create and retrieve certificates to save in your keychain.

You might also try this system:

Retrieved a free certificate from COMODO

http://www.comodo.com/home/email-security/free-email-certificate.php.

Please ensure, that you always select "United States" as you country of residence. Otherwise, you will not get a proper private key embedded into you certificate.

Alternatively, you can look up the public key:
Using WWW or email methods.


Headphone volume settings change after pressing play Here's an annoying iPhone 6 interaction I have on a regular basis:

I plug my headphones into my iPhone.
I open Podcasts and browse for what I want to hear.
I use the volume buttons to set the headphone volume to a pleasant low setting.
I put the headphones in my ears.
I press play.
The headphone volume changes to 100% volume, and Marc Maron blasts holes in my ear drums before I can turn the volume down or pull the headphones out of my ears.

How can I set the volume before pressing play? Or at least how can I keep an app from resetting my headphone volume when playback starts?

I share this problem--but my sense is that the headphone volume reverts to the last volume the headphones were on.  I have the volume loud in the car, but when I run I want it much lower--I have to either lower the volume before leaving the car or lower it before listening with phones.  Otherwise blasting ensues.  Wish there were another way.

back in 2006

http://www.dailytech.com/Man+Sues+Apple+Over+iPod+Hearing+Loss/article579.htm

In France, for example, all new iPods have limiting software inside the unit to govern the volume below 100 decibels -- the current models in the US can reach upwards of 125 decibels.

I believe this is the same for phones


Macbook air wifi problem when is on my legs I've a strange problem with my macbook air. When I use it on my legs, wifi doesn't work or disconnects. I need to raise up the mac in order to get the signal. I'm in a small flat and the signal is very strong.
Anyone has got a similar issue?

thanks

UPDATE 1

It seems the position won't cause the problem, but using a ping command through automator will help to not disconnect.

I have solved removing all ssid stored and then creating a new location in network preferences. However the issue seems to be caused by the energy saver system. In fact, using automator pinging the router ip address every 0.2 sec works too.


How can I take a larger screenshot on my iPhone? I would like to take a screenshot of an entire web page in Mobile Safari, not just the part that's visible on the screen. I'm running iOS 5 on an iPhone 4, but I'm pretty sure this functionality isn't built in anywhere. What app or trick do I need?

Natively available in iOS 13 and later
This functionality is now built into iOS 13 by Apple. Safari running in iOS 13 lets you screenshot the entire webpage as a single continuous image.
To do that, open the desired webpage in Safari, and simply take a screenshot as you would normally do on your device, and tap on the thumbnail shown immediately shown towards the bottom left.
You'll be presented with two options at the top in a segmented control:

Screen
and

Full Page

With the Full Page item selected, tap on the Share icon in the top right to share the capture via desired medium. AirDropping it for instance, exports a single PDF file, which can be easily exported into a desired image format.

Launch Mobile Safari on devices running iOS5.
Type the URL of the website of interest.
After the web page is done loading, touch the gray Reader "button"
to the right of the URL address.
Mobile Safari is now in "Reader" mode (note the purple text color), select the  icon and choose "Mail this Article". Provide a valid email address.  The entire web page
(photos, text, etc) including portions not visible or not displayed
will be appended into the email message you're composing.
Launch your email browser to verify. This is necessary because some websites may not render properly because they use frames, etc. Furthermore, the Reader function will not capture animated gifs, Flash animation, movies, and sounds.


Unexpected interfaces in ifconfig In the middle of installing a tool called mrtg, I bailed out from a perl script to set various configuration parameters for use of snmp because it became clear that I had no idea what I was doing.  I also explored some snmp commands myself, but didn't keep a record, unfortunately.

I come back to ifconfig and notice it shows three new interfaces (not there just before the previous adventure):

gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0<> mtu 1280
fw0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 4078
    lladdr 60:fb:42:ff:fe:f4:cd:9e
    media: autoselect <full-duplex>
    status: inactive

My laptop on the same LAN has a different new interface called p2p0 that I hadn't noticed before, as well as gif0 and stf0 but not fw0.

After I reset my Airport Extreme to factory default, and reinstalled OS X Lion on my machine, with a wiped disk, they are still there.  This:

sudo ifconfig gif0 destroy

makes gif0 go away, but on reboot it comes back.  There is a previous answer with some info but what I'd like to know is why are they still there despite a clean install, could they be a security risk, and should I or can I make them go away.  Should I be looking at the Airport or something in my StartupItems?

UPDATE:  Does my machine set these up at boot or does the Airport remember them?  And in either case, why didn't a clean install (or factory reset) restore them to the previous configuration?

fw0 is the FireWire network interface. It's benign.

stf0 is an IPv6 to IPv4 tunnel interface. It's a bridge connection that exists to help us transition from IPv4 to the IPv6 standard. It's benign. You can read more about it here if you like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

gif0 is a generic tunnel interface. It's used to tunnel IPv4 traffic to an IPv6 network and back. It's benign. You can read more about it here: http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=4&topic=gif

p2p0 interface belong to VirtualBox, after you installed VB into my Mac, you will get this interface.


Apple Safari Mac OS X 10.10.2 will not open I recently tried to download the Aldi photo upload program, although half way through the download Safari quit and now it won’t turn back on. I keep getting a error messages, but it never goes past reopening safari and back to the error messages. I have been onto Console and found the below details of the errors, can anyone help? I don't have another browser on the laptop

25/03/2015 21:33:43.335 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.ReportCrash[991]) Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.ReportCrash
25/03/2015 21:33:43.798 CoreServicesUIAgent[239]: unexpected message <OS_xpc_error: <error: 0x7fff7de6bc60> { count = 1, contents =
   "XPCErrorDescription" => <string: 0x7fff7de6bf70> { length = 18, contents = "Connection invalid" }
}>
25/03/2015 21:33:43.800 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.WebKit.WebContent.CBCE8120-BBE6-481F-9F96-7A071CADEAB0[989]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1
25/03/2015 21:33:43.800 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.WebKit.Networking.39FE4ACC-E1FF-4C76-81AE-3C1C5FC3F852[988]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1
25/03/2015 21:33:43.807 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.Safari.9404[985]) Service exited due to signal: Segmentation fault: 11
25/03/2015 21:33:43.955 ReportCrash[991]: Saved crash report for Safari[985] version 8.0.3 (10600.3.18) to /Users/andrewpope/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Safari_2015-03-25-213343_Andrews-MacBook-Pro.crash
25/03/2015 21:33:44.103 Problem Reporter[992]: Failed to connect (_imageWell) outlet from (ProblemReportWindowController) to (NSImageView): missing setter or instance variable

Make sure no parts of Safari are still running

Open Activity Monitor and use the search box in the top right corner to search for "safari". If there are any Safari processes running, select them and quit them using the left most toolbar icon. Once they are gone, try launching Safari again. If that doesn't work...

Delete Safari's Saved Application State folder

You'll find it at /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Safari.savedState and try launching Safari again. If that doesn't work...

Delete Safari's Cache folder

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari and try Safari again. If that doesn't work...

UP TO THIS POINT YOU DON'T REALLY LOSE ANYTHING. FROM HERE ON, YOU COULD SO...

Rename Safari's library folder

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Safari and try Safari again. If that doesn't work delete the new folder that Safari will likely have created and rename the original back and...

Rename Safari's preference file

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and try Safari again. If that doesn't work delete the new preference file that Safari will likely have created and rename the original back.

Let us know how you get on.

Shut down and restart in Safe mode or restart in the Recovery drive and use Disk Utility to Repair Disk.

That should give the best chance for getting Safari running again.

Now download Firefox or Chrome as a backup browser for the future.

If you have Time Machine running, you could revert your Home/Library/Safari to a date before the problem occurred.


128GB SSD and 23GB of sleep image + swap file, what to do? So I've got a 13" Macbook Air with 128GB, and recently I got a message showing that I'm running out of space, so I did a quick check to see what was taking up all of space, and I found out that I have 4GB of sleep image (which is normal), but 20 swap files, each taking up from 60mb to 1gb.  With a small disk size, this is really unacceptable so I was wondering if it was safe to delete some of the swap files and let the system build them up.  Or would a restart help (Though I'd prefer not, had a bet with my friend to keep my uptime as long as possible :p) Any suggestions appreciated.

You can disable Hibernate to regain your size in RAM on your SSD/HD:
First disable it:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Then free up space:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

... if you want to enable it again:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

Note: -a means on charger and on battery, -b means battery and -c means with charger.

Alternatively if you have more than one disk you can symlink sleepimage to an HD so it can physically locate there.

Swap

First disable Swap:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Later delete the files:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/swapfile*

... if you want to enable it again do:

sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

You can delete the sleepimage without damaging anything. The system will recreate it over time. Usually when I get a message that I'm running out of space I just go to the terminal and type sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage and I get about 9 gigs back but the system will rebuild it over time, so it's only ever a temporary reprieve.

To finish answering your question, and to let you know why you should trust me, you can delete every file in var/vm because they are caches of what is stored in your RAM currently. They are not critical... unless you lose power, and in a restart, most of the var folder is cleared automatically. Though, to provide users with steady reporting of their free space, OS X Lion and newer do not delete the older vm files at startup.

Basically, you'll always have VM files with size roughly equivalent to the amount of RAM you have used running programs. You can delete these and upon the next significant background activity event, the computer may re-create them. If you only have one program running, and doing nothing, but have huge VM files, that may be a sign of a memory leak in a program, but I have noticed that a lot of the preference panels and plugins on the menu bar are really huge memory hogs: If you run the Google Drive Synchronizer thing and the Dropbox app and the box.com app then those will call home 24/7 and move files around non-stop. They are more than enough activity to generate legitimate and huge VM profiles.

Hope that helps!


Thunderbolt Display's audio 'cracking, hissing' noises after El Capitan upgrade After an upgrade to El Capitan(*) audio played through the Thunderbolt display gets distorted after a while. This is regardless of the audio source played (Spotify, iTunes, soundcloud web).

Switching the output to internal speakers and back to Thunderbolt display solves the problem for a couple of minutes before the cracking, hissing noises start again (with the actual music audible in the background).

(* It was basically a fresh installation, as the upgrade initially failed)

I have the same issue since El Capitan upgrade (2012 MBA).  No other TB devices connected apart from the display.  A restart seems to help, for a short time, as does switching the audio output from the display to the internal speakers and back again.

Removing all USB peripherals plugged into the display seems to prevent it happening, but is not exactly a "solution".  Other devices are just a Apple USB keyboard, Logitech wired mouse, and a powered USB3 external HDD.

I thought it might be a grounding problem (no idea why the OS upgrade would affect this), but no amount of grounding the aluminum keyboard to the computer casing, or the display casing etc. seems to make a difference.

I am not aware of any core audio plugins installed - any way to find this out?

Same problem here - 2013 Macbook Pro Retina. If I pause for a few seconds, then play again, the audio then recovers. Not a 'solution' though!


iPhone 4S before upgrades I have upgraded my iPhone 4S to the iOS 8.0 version and it has made my phone extremely slow. Can I restore my iPhone 4S to its original state before any upgrades were done?

Short answer - 'No'

Apple stopped signing iOS 7 in Sept 2014 for any device capable of running iOS 8.

There is no going back, even if you have a legitimately downloaded ipsw file for iOS 7, as it will never validate.

I was told by an associate at a Radio Shack that it could be restored to iOS 7 by doing the following:

Delete your iTunes program from your computer.
Find an older version of iTunes on the internet that has the iOS 7 "attached" to it.
Download this iTunes to your computer.
Restore your phone to factory settings.
Connect your phone to your computer and it will automatically update to the iOS 7.

I have not tried this myself, as it seemed too complicated for me. So I have no idea if it actually works. But if anyone wants to give it a shot or has any feedback on whether this works, I would be interested to hear it.

My iPhone 4s is basically unusable since updating to iOS 8.


Possible to Recover Files from Remote Volume? Is there any software that will allow you to recover files from a remote volume? I have a NAS, and one of its volumes lost all its files. I can't just plug the NAS into a computer so I need to be able to do it over the network.

TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk


How to assign latitude & longitude to a photo "Location" in Photos 6? I have a specific latitude and longitude that I would like to assign to a photo that does not otherwise have any location information.
eg.  (18.352185, -64.792505) aka 18 deg 22' 26.46" N, 64 deg 45' 37.46" W
When I paste any formatting of these coordinates I can think of into the Photos (version 5.0 and 6.0) info panel "Assign a location",
Apple Maps does some sort of regional search and replace.  In this case, it populates "Caribbean Sea" and a pin hundreds of miles away from the actual coordinates position.
Arrg. this is maddening.
How can I assign a specific location?

Maybe the location is stored but not displayed.  You can open Photos and click on the photo of interest. Then from the menu bar click on View and about halfway down the menu the is a metadata line. Click on metadata and at the bottom of the displayed list is location. Make sure the location is checked.  Then go to the Window menu and click on info.  The location should be shown.


No compatible version of java 1.5 is available First thanks for reading my post and willing to help.

I'm trying to run a program (MultiWiiConf 2.4, last version now) on my Mac (Sierra 10.12.6) but it won't launch and error No compatible version of java 1.5 is available is raised.

Then, after searching the web, I checked Java parameters and I have version 9.0.1 installed. The main thing that I don't understand is that java is supposed to be installed in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/, but this folder is actually empty.

Moreover command line "java -version" returns :

Unable to locate a Java Runtime to invoke.

So I suppose that Java is not well installed but I tried to uninstall and reinstall it, updated it, problem still the same.

Could anyone help me ?

Java 1.5 is very old and is not available for current macOS - I think it predates 10.6. Java 6 came out in 2006

You can get Java 6 from Apple and Java 7.8 or 9 from Oracle.

As for where java is installed. It's complex. /Library/Internet Plug-Ins is for web app Java not from Apple this would not set a Java in the terminal.

The java -version result implies that you do not have any Java installed.

First step is to ask the program's author where you can get a modern version of their app from which does not use an insecure unsupported version of Java. Then install that Java

You are getting that command line error because to execute Java you need the full JDK
From Java.com

When I try to use java from the command line, why doesn't it work? I
have Oracle's version of the JRE installed.
Installing a JRE from Oracle does not update java -version symlinks or
add java to your path. For this functionality, you must install the
full JDK.

The main thing that I don't understand is that java is supposed to be
installed in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/, but this folder is actually
empty.

There's a difference between the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and the Java Internet Plugins. Downloading and installing Java allows you to launch Java applets on web pages, it doesn't give you access to execute Java apps via the command line.  To compile and execute Java applications (like the MultiWii controller software), you need the JDK.


Does Time Machine reserve additional disk space? I have a 1.25TB partition that I use for Time Machine backups. When I am in the system preferences for Time Machine on my Mac, it states there's 525GB of 1.25TB available. But when I browse to the partition, there's only two sparse disk image bundles present (one for my wife's laptop and one for mine), and the total size between the two of them is only 83GB. So why does Time Machine think there's already almost 750GB of disk space already being used? Does the Time Machine partition reserve space for future use and adjust the report of available disk space accordingly?

edit

Here's the (relevant) output from df:

Filesystem                                         Size   Used   Avail    Capacity   iused     ifree       %iused  Mounted on
...
//foobar@Extreme._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TIMACHINE  1.1Ti  764Gi  401Gi    66%        200229312 105076638   66%     /Volumes/TIMACHINE-1

Time Machine does an incremental backup. Thus it doesn't delete saved filesystem-objects that are changed on the source, but rather adds them up. Time Machine offers an interface that let's you browse through your backup history. You can access it through context-menu of the Time Machine-icon in the menu bar. If it ain't there, you can activate it in the system preferences.


Silencing "Your disk is almost full" notification After upgrading to macOS Sierra, I'm getting the notification that "Your disk is almost full. Save space by optimizing storage.":

The options appear to be to store my files in iCloud, automatically delete files, or manually delete files:

My problem/irritation is that I have 80GB free of my 440GB volume.

The question: is there a way to silence this notification in a (semi-)permanent fashion, or to change the threshold it uses for the notification?

The solution to disabling the "almost full" and "full" notification is to disable the daemon responsible for it:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist

or

launchctl stop com.apple.diskspaced

Alternatively, if you only want to prevent the "almost full" from appearing so often then you can lower the GB threshold via:

minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20

The default 20GB is too high for small SSDs and a possible bug causes the alert to be shown every day rather than just once, so as a workaround you can lower the free space before the alert appears, e.g. to 10GB:

defaults write com.apple.diskspaced minFreeSpace 10

The daemon only reads its prefs on startup so you need to restart it if you have system integrity turned off:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist

Otherwise kill it:

killall diskspaced

In case you are interested in the other preferences for these disk alerts you can view some of them using the help param:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/diskspaced help
---
  Domain: com.apple.diskspaced
  Supported keys:
  debugLog (BOOL) - log additional debug information. Default: NO
  checkAllVolumes (BOOL) - check all volumes. Default: NO
  minDiskSize (int) - minimal disk size in GB. Default: 128
  minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20
  minPurgeableSpace (int) - minimal purgeabe space size in GB. Default: 20
---
  Commands: removeAllNotifications - Removes all scheduled and delivered user notificiations.

And here are a couple of hidden ones:

warningInterval (integer default 0)
lastWarningDate (string e.g. 2017-05-05 16:48:29 +0000)

I didn't look too closely at but it is possible setting the last warning date to a date in the future would also prevent the alert displaying.

Turning on Do Not Disturb mode for notifications will silence the "Your disk is almost full" notifications. There is a downside as this will silence all notifications.

This will not help with the underlying issue of your disk being too full if it is in fact too full. Additionally, you may need to turn Do Not Disturb on again.
It looks like it may be possible to get it remain on for all but about one minute of the day, but I'm not sure the developers intended Do Not Disturb to be used continually.


Dock shows on only one screen on OS X Mavericks I understood that every display would behave independently on OS X Mavericks, and that it would get its own bar (top of the screen) and dock.

However, the dock shows only on the main screen, and not on the other screen, is it normal?

If you're using a stacked display configuration, as in main monitor with the secondary above, then the dock does not appear on the second display. If it can or does, I'd like to know because this is how I run my setup.

If you have them oriented right to left, then the dock will appear. In my limited experience, only one image of the dock appears at a time on whichever monitor you activate it on. You have to play with it, as the cursor motion seems to need to be elongated or dramatic or whatever. Not a big thing, just different.

It's there by default, trust me. HTH.

It worked fine here:

Moving the dock to a second display is not straightforward but it’s easy to do. Assuming you are using an Apple Magic Mouse, you can tell OS X to move the dock to the active display by following these steps:
First, click the desktop or any window on the display where you want the dock to move to. This will make the menu bar go active.
Then, place your finger on the mouse while moving the cursor towards the bottom of the screen. The dock will them pop up.


Can not find the Homebrew in the terminal But in the Mac OS, I use brew to install the setuptools:

aircraftdeMacBook-Pro:~ ldl$ brew install -y setuptools
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
==> New Formulae
adr-tools                                goad
allure                                   grakn
angular-cli                              iamy                                   zyre
get_iplayer
==> Updated Formulae
aalib                      gspell                     opencore-amr
......
gsl                        opencoarrays
==> Renamed Formulae
grunt -> grunt-cli
==> Deleted Formulae
autotrace  blucat     dvtm       libgc      libtess2   snescom    xplanetfx

Error: No available formula with the name "setuptools"
==> Searching for a previously deleted formula...
Warning: homebrew/core is shallow clone. To get complete history run:
  git -C "$(brew --repo homebrew/core)" fetch --unshallow

Error: No previously deleted formula found.
==> Searching for similarly named formulae...
Error: No similarly named formulae found.
==> Searching taps...
Error: No formulae found in taps.

I want to find the Homebrew, so I use:

whereis homebrew
whereis Homebrew
whereis brew

All find nothing. how to know the homebrew location, why use the whereis can not find it?

you should try locate Homebrew or locate homebrew.  The find command will help too.

type:  locate homebrew
or:    locate Homebrew


OS X esc key stops working (randomly) I have a 2011 MacBook Air with OS X Mountain Lion (I've upgraded from Lion). And ever since upgrading my escape key randomly stops working. And it's not that the keyboard on the laptop would be damaged as the same happens if I use Apple's Bluetooth keyboard. So I'm guessing it's a software issue.

Also in some cases pressing ctrl+esc achieves the same thing as just esc so I'm 100% it's not  a hardware problem.

Does anybody have any idea what this might be all about and how to fix it?

edit: the escape key stops working completely but it starts working again after I restart the computer.

edit2: this usually happens after the computer wakes from sleep. So it's not like that is just stopps working in the middle of using it, but rather after I put it to sleep (or just close the lid) and then open it again.

Has nobody got the same issue? Is there a better place to ask OS X related questions than Super User maybe?

For anyone who ends up here after installing the macOS Sierra release candidate. I had to disable Siri and then kill the Siri process using Activity Monitor.

Why not just briefly press the power button to wake from sleep like I do? No different from pressing a key.

Works for me!


Why am I asked for my Keychain password when the keychain is already unlocked? Why am I asked for my Keychain password when the keychain is already unlocked?

This behavior started suddenly after migrating to a new machine.

This happened to me after changing my login password. I fixed it thanks to article on Apple support: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6724601

Simply I had to change password for my "login" keychain.

But I was asked to input password to open "Local items" keychain. I solved that issue exactly according this post: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203897
You need to open folder ~/Library/Keychains/, find and delete folder with name similar to "A8F5E7B8-CEC1-4479-A7DF-F23CB076C8B8" and restart your Mac immediately.

I had to fixed both "login" and "Local items" prompt to solve it. Only changing password for "login" keychain seemed not to work although it should according Apple support. But I haven't test it heavily.

Hope it helps.

Not sure, but it's a protection of private data against other people in your house who use the same computer. When I open my mailboxes the system asks for it so my wife can't read my mail since she does not know this password.


IKEv2 VPN on macOS Sierra disconnects after eight minutes When I establish a connection using the integrated IKEv2 client on my Mac (OS Sierra 10.12.1), I get disconnected after eight minutes. Until then it works perfectly as well. Any idea how to resolve this issue?

The essence of the solution described there is plausible – that it has to do with the re-keying process which occurs periodically.  You ought to see something in the Console log, and perhaps also in logs on the server side, that will point you in the right direction.

At random times during the lifetime of the tunnel, the two sides will re-negotiate the symmetric-cipher keys that they are using, so that the conversation does not continue to use the same keys for too long.  If this process failed, the connection would be dropped, and if it consistently occurs "after eight minutes," this could well be it.  All of the parameters on both sides must match exactly, and there's nothing easy about debugging IPSec.  I'd start with Console as my starting point.  (There are several logs – look at 'em all.)

Someone posted a solution here: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=110790.0


Why is /tmp a symlink to /private/tmp? Why is /tmp a symlink to /private/tmp on Mac OS X? In other words, why isn't /tmp just a regular directory, like on Linux or BSD? I understand how it works and I don't mind it, I'm just interested in the (historical?) reasoning behind it.

As I understand it, it's a holdover from NextStep (which OS X is based on), and NextStep did it to support NetBooting.  The idea was that you could boot from a network-hosted volume (probably read-only, and certainly shared with other computers), and early in the boot process mount a local (writable) volume on /private; as g mentioned, this allowed runtime-modification of /var and /tmp, as well as per-computer settings in /etc.

This isn't needed anymore, as Apple's current NetBoot system uses a shadow disk image to store changes anywhere on the boot volume.  But some programs/docs/etc now assume the files live under /private, so it'd be too much trouble to switch them back...

Update: since I wrote this, Apple has stopped supporting NetBoot, so the original purpose of /private is even more obsolete. However, in macOS Catalina (version 10.15), they've added a new volume split. In this case it's for security rather than to support NetBoot, but it works in a fairly similar way.

Catalina's system volume is mounted read-only, with a read-write volume mounted at /System/Library/Data (analogous to the old system that mounted a RW volume at /private), and "firmlinks" making parts of the RW volume appear at their usual locations in the filesystem (again, analogous to the symbolic links that make parts of /private appear at their usual locations). For example, /Users is now a firmlink to /System/Library/Data/Users. The Eclectic Light Company has a good summary.

Catalina also still has the symbolic links to /private; thus, when you access /etc on Catalina, it follows the symlink to /private/etc, and then the firmlink to /System/Library/Data/private/etc

/tmp is a symbolic lynk to /private/etc so as to maintain clearly separated 2 filesystems:

/    which can be mounted as read-only, to protect it against
any accidental or unwanted modification, and to protect it of being filled with always increasing files (logs and temporary files),
/private    which can be mounted as read-write, and which hold any directory containing modifiable files.

If you look at / you will notice 3 directories which are similar
symbolic links for this same reason:

cd /
ls -al | grep '> private'

This separation of access between read-write and read-only filesystems
isn't used actually (in MacOS X), but everything is in place to achieve
this security separation.

Some admins are enforcing this security separation by defining a specific /private
filesystem with the appropriate size and appropriate mounting options
(most notably nosuid).


How can I delete a paused application download on my iPhone? I started installing an application from the App Store but forgot to check its size. When I check now, it is 50 MB. Now I don't want to download that application any more because I'm on 3G plan which is costly. I paused it but don't know how to delete it. Can anyone help me on how to delete a paused app download?

If you can't delete the paused download (which, I'm thinking, suggests you aren't on the most recent release of iOS), then the simplest option that doesn't require a restore is going to be to find a WiFi hotspot and let the app finish downloading. Personally, I'd go that route (especially if out-and-about or on vacation, etc.) before wiping my data and having to restore again.

Alternatively, leave it on paused until you get home to your primary network. Your phone doesn't care two cents about your paused app downloads, so it shouldn't get in the way of anything.

Download and open iTools.
Click Filesystem.
Go to the downloads folder.
Delete everything.
Reboot iPhone.
After reboot, don't enter your Apple ID.


How to work with 2 Applications folders? I have an internal 250 GB SSD. this drive was filling up and I bought an external 4 TB external hard drive. My Applications folder on my SSD was taking up a lot of space so I decided to create an Applications folder on my external drive. I copied many of the apps from the internal drive Applications folder to the external drive Applications folder.

Now however I realize the ramifications of having 2 Applications folders. The Applications folder on my internal drive is special in the sense that it can't be renamed or removed, and when downloads ask to be moved to the Applications folder it refers to the Application folder on my internal drive.

So my question is - what would be the best way to move my applications to a folder on my external drive but have that folder behave like the Applications folder on my internal drive? Many of the applications didn't copy because they were in use. Do I have to quit all my startup items to accomplish this?

Hints for solving your XY problem

Using an external hard-drive to store your applications is not recommended and will slow down their execution. Unless you are talking about a thunderbolt 4TB Solid State Drive, performances of your applications running on the external hard-drive will be very poor (especially if you compare with your internal SSD).
Try as much as you can to move your movies, pictures, documents out of your SSD and keep your apps there to make the most of your SSD. You don't need a big data read/write rate for: watching a movie, browsing photos or pdf.
If you are a professional and need to process photos/video, then a thunderbolt SSD will be life-saving.

Solution

If you don't mind about the three points above and stick to your idea, to come back to CoderX very bad answer, the proper solution to handle 2 applications folder is:

to keep your original /Applications folder.
Create a folder on your external hard-drive.
Create a symbolic link for each application stored on your external hard-drive into your original /Application folder.

Example

<InternalSSD path>/Applications/ contains:

drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-06-16 09:18 app1.app/
drwxr-xr-x+  3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-31 02:09 app2.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 12:15 app3.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 mr_bean    wheel  96 2018-08-16 07:09 app4.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 20:08 app5.app/

Then, <ExternalHDD path>/applications_2/ contains:

drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-06-16 09:18 app6.app/
drwxr-xr-x+  3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-31 02:09 app7.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 12:15 app8.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 mr_bean    wheel  96 2018-08-16 07:09 app9.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 20:08 app10.app/

In your terminal, for app6, 7, 8, 9, 10:

ln -s <ExternalHDD path>/applications_2/app<n>.app <InternalSSD path/Applications/.

Finally:

ls -al <InternalSDD path>/Applications

should return:

drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-06-16 09:18 app1.app/
drwxr-xr-x+  3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-31 02:09 app2.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 12:15 app3.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 mr_bean    wheel  96 2018-08-16 07:09 app4.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 20:08 app5.app/
lrwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-06-16 09:18 app6.app/ -> <ExternalHDD path>/application_2/app6.app
lrwxr-xr-x+  3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-31 02:09 app7.app/ -> <ExternalHDD path>/application_2/app7.app
lrwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 12:15 app8.app/ -> <ExternalHDD path>/application_2/app8.app
lrwxr-xr-x   3 mr_bean    wheel  96 2018-08-16 07:09 app9.app/ -> <ExternalHDD path>/application_2/app9.app
lrwxr-xr-x   3 root       wheel  96 2018-07-10 20:08 app10.app/ -> <ExternalHDD path>/application_2/app10.app

With this method, you don't modify your base system, don't break any path in your OS and symlink the content of your new app folder to your old one.

You'll have to symlink it as below:
Replace otherDiskName with the disk name where you've moved your Applications folder.

sudo mv /Applications /Applications.original
sudo ln -s /Volumes/otherDiskName/Applications /Applications

Source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2787316


Transfer RAM from MacBook Mid 2010 to MacBook Pro 2008 I ruined my beloved mid 2010 MacBook and planning to get a used MacBook Pro 2008 (not unibody) now. Currently, I have 2x4GB memory units in my MacBook and I would like to now if I can use at least one of them in the MacBook Pro. I heard that the 2008 Pro only supports up to 6 Gb, so I would like to use 1x4GB from my MacBook, and 1xGB from the Pro.

I am not fully sure if I want a 2008 Pro yet. These are some points that would influence my decision

There were several MacBook Pro models released in 2008. Only the Unibody models support DDR3 RAM, so keep an eye out for those. Fortunately, they're easy to spot compared to the non-Unibody models released the same year.

MacBook Pro 2008: SO-DIMM PC3-8500 DDR3-1066 CL7
MacBook Pro Mid-2010: SO-DIMM PC3-8500 DDR3-1066 CL7

Thus, you can freely put your sticks into the MacBook! :)


Microsoft remote desktop sends wrong symbol keys I'm using Microsoft Remote Desktop 8.0.9 from the app store and connecting to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2003 based PCs.

Although alphanumeric keys work properly, when I type certain symbol keys into the remote computer they come out as the wrong keys, it seems like a mapping issue. The remote machines are both set as "English (United States) - US" for the input language, which matches what my Mac has.

The following is example of the key confusion:

\ maps to <
< maps to .
^ maps to ?
{ (twice) maps to ^^ (but once does nothing)
} (twice) maps to -- (but once does nothing)

Most other keys work fine. What can I do to correct this keyboard mapping on either the host (OSX Mavericks) or the client (Windows 7)?

I had the same problem using microsoft remote desktop on a mac with OSX Yosemite. My symbol keys did not work correctly, for example the \ became < and @ became *. I opened system preferences on my Mac that was running the RD client, and under keyboard I noticed that my input source was set to Canadian English. I added US English, deleted Canadian English, and restarted the remote desktop session. The special characters were typed correctly after that.


iTunes asks to transfer purchased apps from iPhone even though app sync is off A few weeks after iOS 5 came out, I disabled app syncing with my phone. I still sync my media with the computer.

Today when I synced my phone, it asked to transfer purchases from my phone to my computer (picture below). I accepted and iTunes transfered all the apps from my phone to my computer. I deleted one of them from my computer and synced again, and the same thing happened. Once all the apps are on my computer, syncing no longer brings up the message.

I deleted an app from the computer then synced again, this time choosing not to transfer. The app was not deleted from my phone despite the warning message telling me it would, and the app didn't transfer. However, every time I sync it warns me to transfer the app again.

Can I get iTunes to stop trying to transfer app purchases from my phone? I don't want to use the "Don't ask again" setting because I still want to be warned about transferring music.

I have the following environment:

iOS 5.0.1
Mac OS X 10.6.8
iTunes 10.5.1

Device settings → "Sync Apps" is unchecked
Preferences → Store → Automatic Downloads → Apps is unchecked

The only change to my system I can think of was a week ago when my hard drive died and I restored my computer with a Time Machine backup. However, I've synced my phone since then without this problem.  I had also updated to iTunes 10.5.1 two weeks ago (before the backup was created).

When you purchase apps (even free) on the device, iTunes always backs this up - and when it Syncs, before it does anything it backs up - and it notices that you have purchased an app/apps - so it wishes to make a backup of these apps. Click transfer and it'll all work fine - happens to me when I buy songs off of the store as well as apps

Are you sure you have over the air syncing turned off? If not, your device will automatically wirelessly connect to iTunes if it is connected to the same WiFi network.

In iTunes, try unchecking the box which says "Sync with this iPhone over WiFi". See below for more info:


Backing Up OS X Server to Local Time Machine Server Folder I've setup Time Machine Backup services on Mavericks Server. I want to backup the backup server itself using Time Machine, but to the folder that I setup "Time Machine Backups" where all the other backups are being stored, instead of backing up to the root drive.

The only option I have when I select a disk using the server's Time Machine configuration is the drive itself, and not the "Time Machine Backups" folder I see from remote machines.

Is what I'm trying to do possible?

No, you cannot. Backing up to a local volume (what you're having the server do) uses a slightly different backup format than a network backup (what your server is allowing clients to do). With a local volume backup, the backups are stored inside a folder named Backups.backupdb which is at the root of the backup volume (not in a subfolder). With a network backup, the backup is stored inside a disk image, and the Backups.backupdb folder is at the root of the volume inside that. Because the network backup is wrapped in a disk image, that image can be almost anywhere (volume root, folder, subfolder, whatever); but this flexibility does not exist for a local volume backup.

Can't you point the OSX Server's Local time machine to its own share?

Like point it to afp://osx server ip

Or is it not possible to mount a local share locally?


macOS sierra 10.12 screen captures - how to edit system files? Is there a possibility to edit the following files in macOS 10.12 Sierra:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings

and

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist

I want to change the following things of the Screenshot-Files:

Filename
Location
Date and time Format in file name (no, that could NOT be done via System Preferences!)

Previous naming scheme: Screenshot 20161004_162222.png

Naming scheme now: Screenshot 2017-08-07 um 17.02.08.png

I want to revert to the previous scheme.

My problem is, that I can edit both files, but only on the second I can also save them.
BatChmod nor chmod in terminal can change permissions on first file

ls -la /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1390 Feb  2  2017 /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings

sudo chmod 777 /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings
Password: ***
chmod: Unable to change file mode on /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings: Operation not permitted

There is no need to disable SIP and hack /System files to change the filename and location of screenshots. Use the following Terminal commands to set your preferences:

#SCREEN CAPTURE
# Show/ Don't show date in Screenshot filename
defaults write com.apple.screencapture include-date -bool false

# Save screenshots in PNG format (other options: BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, TIFF)
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type -string "png"

# Save Screenshots to location:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/Screenshots

# Disable Screen capture's shadow
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

# Change the filename
defaults write com.apple.screencapture name [yourFilename]

You may need to quit and relaunch the SystemUIServer, (or restart).

If you need a more specific workflow, then you can modify or process the files with a Folder Action script, to run when they are created.

Sure, go ahead.

They are XML files, so you can just use a text editor, or an XML editor. XCode in particular has specialised support for plist files.

When you're done, remember to restart SystemUIServer using Activity Monitor or the Terminal command:

killall SystemUIServer


Downgrading the OS...restore apps from TimeMachine? So I’m downgrading the OS from Mojave to back to Lion..backed up hd with TimeMachine. I will erase the drive and install the older OS. My question is will I be able to restore my applications from my TM backup?

You will be able to restore everything from the backup which was done on the same or an older version of macOS Lion (10.7.5 was the latest, so if you just downloaded it from the App Store, you will probably have this one).

From later backups you have to copy/paste everything manually.

Also for Apple apps like Safari, iTunes, etc. only the latest version that was provided for the OS version your are about to install will be available, eventhough you haven't updated it to that version at the time of the backup.

I am afraid it may depend on if you use an external hard drive for Time Machine backup or not.
Since most methods to downgrade macOS are related to erase the internal hard drive which contains your original macOS. So it would be great if you have backed up files with an external hard drive because you can Restore your Mac from a backup.

Another suggestion is that, if your Mac was installed with Lion when you bought it, you can reinstall to Lion by rebooting and holding Shift-Option-⌘-R As this support post said Reinstall the macOS that came with your Mac,without easing the disk, unless you want to to. Like it said: You probably don't need to erase, unless you're selling, trading in, or giving away your Mac, or you have an issue that requires you to erase.


Opening a CBR with Archive Utility; avoiding cpgz/zip loop I'd like to use Archive Utility (the built-in OSX archive tool) to decompress some .cbz and .cbr files. Unfortunately, Archive Utility doesn't seem to recognize .cbz or .cbr as a zipped file, so if I try to "Open With" Archive Utility, it re-zips the file; if I try to "Expand Archive" from Archive Utility itself, it doesn't recognize the extension and won't allow me to select the greyed-out file.

When I rename a .cbz to .zip file, Archive Utility works fine.

With .cbr files, however, after I rename the extension to .zip, Archive Utility will rezip as a .zip.zip file (or .zip.cbgz file, depending on my settings in Archive Utility). If I open that .zip.zip file in Archive Utility, it will extract it back to a regular .zip file, but it remains an unopenable archive.

Any ideas on how I can force an unzip?

Due to administrator settings (I'm on a work computer), I must use Archive Utility and can't easily have any other unzip or archive software installed.

Edit: I've also tried it from the terminal using the "open" command with the same (.zip.zip) results.

The Apple's Archive Utility seems incapable to unpack some archives including some legitimate .zip files.

I looked at several GUI alternatives to set as default instead of the Archive Utility and settled on The Unarchiver which seems to be a seamless replacement.

If you have homebrew installed then it is:

homebrew cask install the-unarchiver

Open the app and set the default file types it should handle. You can also check to option to open the extracted archive in a new Finder window.

Also some file managers like Midnight Commander (brew install mc) or Double Commander (brew cask install double-commander) will handle the archive correctly.

You could use YACReader, to read the comic book file. From the description:

  YACReader is the best comic reader and comic manager with support for cbr cbz zip rar comic files. It is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.

At the time of writing, the current version is 8.5.0

Once opened in YACReader, you can save the images within the .cbr file, as JPEGs.


IBM Trusteer Rapport... Daemons... Is rapportd part of Trusteer or an Apple MacOS Daemon? Working here on problems arising from IBM Trusteer Rapport security software.

Problem: Their daemon rooksd has 60,000 ports open; mac slowed to a crawl.

Question: Is the daemon rapportd part of Trusteer or is it an Apple MacOS daemon? Other comments here say it's Apple. But, IBM Trusteer support says it's theirs.

rapportd, or at least /usr/libexec/rapportd, is an Apple macOS daemon. From the man page:

  Daemon that enables Phone Call Handoff and other communication features between Apple devices.

By examining RapportUninstaller.sh, the expected locations for Trusteer Rapport's rapportd are:

/Library/Rapport/bin/rapportd.app/Contents/MacOS/rapportd
/Library/Rapport/bin/rapportd

I believe the correct answer is:  /usr/libexec/rapportd, is an Apple macOS daemon.


MacBook Air Charger 45w vs 65w Can you use a 65W apple charger instead of the 45w charger that comes with the Macbook Air? How will this affect the machine.

Yes this is fine (assuming you refer to the 60W Magsafe) and this has been confirmed by Apple to be safe

  Although you should always use the proper wattage adapter for your Apple portable, you can use an adapter of a higher wattage without issue.

It DOES charge quite a bit faster. Just enough to make it more practical.

But I won't use it if it will spoil the battery sooner. I don't really trust the algorithms controlling the charging parameters.


List of all packages installed using Homebrew Is it possible to and how do I get a list of all the packages installed on my Mac using Homebrew?  I am not interested in packages installed outside of Homebrew.

brew list and brew list --cask
Running brew list will show a list of all your installed Homebrew packages.
In addition, brew list --cask will provide the items installed using Homebrew Cask.

You can use this snippet to list all installed packages and sort them by their size.
brew list --formula | \
    xargs -n1 -P8 -I {} \
    sh -c "
        brew info {} | \
        egrep '[0-9]* files, ' | \
        sed 's/^.*[0-9]* files, \(.*\)).*$/{} \1/'
    " | \
    sort -h -r -k2 - | \
    column -t


How do I upgrade git on Mac OS X? I have git on /usr/bin/git (I think was Xcode install) but it is 1.7.5.4 and I want to use the current version 1.7.7

Is there a way to uninstall that version and use the new one?

None of the current answers will upgrade Xcode git. They will only install a newer version of git.
Xcode has changed its mind several times about the best git location. Depending on how long ago you have been installing Xcode you will see git binaries at:
/usr/bin/git
/usr/local/git
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/git
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/libexec/git-core/git

Even if you update the PATH, Xcode will stick to its version. The only way I know to force it to use the newer version is replacing those git binaries by a link to the new one you installed.
ln -s /opt/local/bin/git /usr/bin/git

Repeat for the other path. Notice I use a symbolic link, not a hard one. Otherwise Xcode would replace your other installation during an upgrade

Download the latest binary from here and install.


Mac drive not showing up on resetpassword screen I am trying to reset my admin password using recovery partition. When I type resetpassword in terminal, a window shows up but I don't see my drive in the top box.

Is there a way to fix this? btw, I tried booting into single user mode, but it goes straight to the login page.

EDIT:

I may know why the drive doesn't show up. I checked Disk Utility and saw that the drive is locked. But I need a password to unlock it, which I don't have!

The drive is locked using FileVault encryption and cannot be accessed until you unlock the drive. This may be set to a master password of yours, and often is set a while back. You may want to try older passwords (or versions of them) to see if any of those work.

To unlock the drive:

Boot into the recovery mode
Launch Disk Utility
Select the drive in disk utility
Click unlock near the top of the disk utility window

Unfortunately, the drive will not allow you to boot into those options and/or work on it until you pass the encryption lock. It will require a password or for you to completely erase the drive.

For my problem, I tried the 'Boot into Recovery Partition' method and unlocked the volume because it was locked with FileVault password and fortunately I had saved the Filevault password. Here is the article with the steps I followed: https://iguruservices.com/support/reset-mac-admin-password/

It opened the disk utility first and unlock the disk and then opened terminal and type command resetpassword to change my admin password.


New MacBook Pro has a battery cycle count of 2 I bought a new 2017 MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar. I found that it had 2 charge cycles.

Is this normal for a new MacBook Pro or it is used?

To me this value looks completely normal. Apple needs to use the battery for quality testing.

  That represents the results of testing during build and Quality Testing.

(Source)

A used MacBook will have well over 2 battery cycles.

The maximum count of your unit is 1000. 2 is normal for new unit. You have 998 cycle count before you reach the maximum cycle count. Once you reach it you need to replace the battery.


How do I download macOS High Sierra for offline install? Yes, I found

Download macOS High Sierra for offline install [duplicate]

and

macOS High Sierra media installer

but they don't fit my use-case.  I need to update a number of Macs to High Sierra to address Spectre/Meltdown ASAP, and the questions linked above had to do with the High Sierra beta.

So: how do I download macOS High Sierra for offline installs?

Answering my own question:

From the App Store, grab the High Sierra installer.  It will launch "Install macOS High Sierra" after the download completes.  Click "Continue", accept the licensing agreement, select the install drive, then the installer will prompt for an admin password.  After that, it will begin downloading to "/macOS Install Data" on the local machine.

The main data file is

/macOS Install Data/InstallESDDmg.pkg

When the download is complete, the installer will prompt for a system restart.  Before doing that, inspect the download directory:

sudo find /macOS\ Install\ Data  -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 328        Dec  4 19:03 '/macOS Install Data/AppleDiagnostics.chunklist'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 2613173    Dec  4 19:03 '/macOS Install Data/AppleDiagnostics.dmg'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 1948       Dec  4 19:03 '/macOS Install Data/BaseSystem.chunklist'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 478740408  Dec  4 19:04 '/macOS Install Data/BaseSystem.dmg'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 2124       Jan  8 08:39 '/macOS Install Data/index.sproduct'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 4706541399 Dec  4 19:09 '/macOS Install Data/InstallESDDmg.pkg'
-rw-r--r-- 2 user wheel 1584       Dec  4 19:09 '/macOS Install Data/InstallInfo.plist'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 893        Jan  8 07:38 '/macOS Install Data/Locked Files/.disk_label'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 15         Jan  8 07:38 '/macOS Install Data/Locked Files/.disk_label.contentDetails'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3557       Jan  8 07:38 '/macOS Install Data/Locked Files/.disk_label_2x'
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23520      Dec  1 12:37 '/macOS Install Data/Locked Files/cleanup_installer'
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 269647     May 17  2017 '/macOS Install Data/OSX_10_13_IncompatibleAppList.pkg'

Then, copy the download directory off to another machine for future use.

I had a similar issue, but the above solution did not work for me. I'm still looking for a solution to upgrade to macOS High Sierra using previously downloaded install files.

I thought I found a solution below, but this also did not work.

Re-use install files on identical Macs (maybe)

This did not work for me, the installer complained about corrupt/bad install files after restarting. Perhaps this is because the install files were downloaded on 10.9 and I was trying to install them on 10.10 - so it might work for you

Get macOS install files on a computer

Use the App store (recommended)

Download 'Install macOS High Sierra.app' from App Store
Run installer, which downloads installer files, stop installer when it asks to restart
The files are now located in /macOS\ Install\ Data

Download files manually

See https://github.com/Jinsung-L/install-macos-high-sierra
See https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/329828-making-a-bootable-high-sierra-usb-installer-entirely-from-scratch-in-windows-or-linux-mint-without-access-to-mac-or-app-store-installerapp/
See https://7labs.io/tips-tricks/macos-high-sierra-direct-download.html
Problem: I'm not sure how to choose which InstallESD to download, this post might help https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/323497/18679

Use third party downloader tool (dosdude) -- not tested

See http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

Get the Install macOS High Sierra.app

Download from the App store (recommended)
Copy from first computer

Copy all installer files (±5 GB) from first computer to /Applications/Install macOS High Sierra/Contents/SharedSupport

Make subdirectory as root SharedSupport first if it doesn't exist (likely)
sudo mkdir /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/
Copy files to newly created subdir

sudo cp -p /macOS\ Install\ Data/* /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/

See macOS High Sierra media installer

Run Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app as usual
Installer should skip downloading and immediately ask to restart

This does not work (for me)

Copy files (as downloaded above) directly to  /macOS\ Install\ Data -- the installer program will delete these files and download them again

Sources

macOS High Sierra media installer


iMessage speech (applescript) timing out after upgrade to yosemite When I receive an iMessage, chat or Message on my desktop (iMac), it is read out loud.

After the upgrade to Yosemite it does not work. I continue to receive the message that "AppleScript timed out." I click on "wait" and it will read it. This occurs when I SEND as well as when I RECEIVE messages, although reading aloud is only on receive. - I would love if someone might address this issue! It still works great on my previous OS version on my laptop.

I originally wrote:

This bug appears to be resolved in 10.10.2

****I was wrong ****

For me, the bogus timeout alerts seem to take longer to start after enabling a handler script than they did in 10.10.1, but they still happen and make the AppleScript handler feature unusable. By loading up my handler script with debugging code (logging everything) and tracing Messages with DTrace, I've nailed down beyond a doubt that the timeout alert is triggered for every event passed to the script within milliseconds of the event before the script itself is in control, blocking its execution.


Is there a way to keep my iPhone from receiving calls/texts/alerts while listening to music? I like to listen to music on my iPhone when running, but it's really annoying for the music to be interrupted by calls/texts/alerts. I know I can put it in airplane mode, but that will keep me from using the GPS to track my mileage through apps like RunKeeper. Is there another way to "silence" calls/texts/alerts and just have them show up as missed when I'm finished listening to music?

Coming in iOS 6, you'll have the option to set "Do Not Disturb" mode in the device's Settings.  DND allows you to block out a time window where calls and alerts will be silenced.

You can optionally configure it to allow calls from "favorites" or repeated calls to still come through.

Go into settings and switch to aeroplane mode!! No calls or texts what so ever will come through yet you can listen to music.

The only problem is, you can't get Internet using this option so if your using a gps then this option is no good for you.


I bought a used iPod touch 5th gen on eBay, but it's connected to their iCloud! Is there any way I can sign out without their password? They refuse to tell me (would you tell someone your iCloud password?), and I can't disable Find My iPod. I'm on the latest iOS (8.3). Thanks for your help!

If you have access to the iPod, go to Settings -> iCloud and then press Sign out. I think that should work without having to enter any password. Then you can add your own or do whatever you want.
If you don't have access to your iPod because they're locking it using Find my iPhone, there are either two ways
1. They tell you the password to access the device
2. You force your iPod to enter DFU/Recovery mode so you can restore it using iTunes.
Hope this helps :)

You can delete the iCloud account without a password I think.

Does this help?


Why does a .DS_Store file keep appearing on the desktop? Every time I delete it from the desktop, I get the same file ".DS_store" created after some time. Is there a reason why this happens ? And can I permanently stop it from being created ?

Type this in Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app):

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

The first command sets the hidden files visibility to hidden; the second one forces Finder to restart. This is needed for the first command to take effect.

You can also log out/reboot instead of killing the Finder, but the first command is needed to change a hidden preference (one that the Finder can’t change using the normal Finder view options or preferences).

Apparently, it was due to an old Safari update that accidentally showed the .DS_Store file.


MacBook Pro suddenly started spinning fans at 100% while lid was closed for a couple of hours I've been noticing some issues with my MacBook for a while now. Firstly, kernel_task sometimes takes over extreme amounts of CPU and the whole computer starts acting slow even when I'm not using it for any heavy tasks.

Note that this is a 15" MBPro 2015, all specs maxed out.

Fans are also often at full speed for seemingly no reason (just browsing the net) but that has been going on forever since I bought it, and I heard that is relatively normal for those MBPros.

But last night the weirdest thing happened. I closed the lid and went to sleep. Several hours later in the morning, I was awoken to my MacBook fans going on at 100%.

I got up to check it out and the bottom plate was pretty hot and fans still going at 100%. I opened the lid and I couldn't get it to turn on. The screen would not show anything no matter how long I waited and how many keys I pressed.

I ended up force shutting it down (holding down the power button).

Any idea what could be causing this? Is there any way I can try to figure out the problem, or is taking it to Apple for repair the only option?

The first thing I'd do is a NVRAM and SMC reset (in that order). Before following the steps below, ensure you have no external hardware connected and that you're using the built-in keyboard.

Reset the NVRAM

Reset the NVRAM on your MBP as follows:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your MBP reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your MBP reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

Reset the SMC

There's a couple of ways you can reset the SMC on your MBP, however I prefer the following steps:

Shut down your MBP
Keep the power cable plugged in
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button

After resetting both the NVRAM and SMC, use your computer to determine if the issues still persist.

If you're still having problems, the it's time to test your hardware with Apple Diagnostics.

Run Apple Diagnostics

Follow the steps below to run Apple Diagnostics:

Fully shut down your Mac
Restart your Mac
Immediately press the D key and keep it down until you see the Diagnostics screen appear
Wait for Diagnostics to finish (this typically only takes a few minutes)
Once complete, one of two things will appear on the screen:

a No issues found message
a brief description of any errors found plus further instructions

If the diagnostics test does find errors, take a note of what they are

Note: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.

Regardless, take a note of what happens and let me know how you went.

It happened to me, it’s just a final step of the update install completion process.


Email-based FaceTime on iPhone 4? The new iPod Touch and the Mac FaceTime app both allow the user to send and receive FaceTime calls with their email address/Apple ID as the identifier. Is it possible to set up an iPhone 4 to send/receive FaceTime calls with my email address instead of my phone number?

On the iPhone itself, you are unable to add "e-mail address aliases" like in the OSX App. The only method of having people call your iPhone is by giving them your phone number.

As far as the iPhone making facetime calls, the only easy way I've seen to do it is to already have their Facetime address in your Address Book, or use Safari.

Open Safari on your iPhone, go to the URL bar, type: <facetime://their@email.addr>, then tap the "Facetime" acknowledgement button afterwards.

I think email address is the only way to do it.


iPhone Goes To Sleep While Navigating This is a new thing my phone does since I believe iOS 12. Is there any way to stop it?

I use turn-by-turn navigation on my phone all the time. But these days, the phone tends to go to sleep in the middle of my trip. It used to never do this. The phone would always stay fully awake while navigating. But now my phone goes black and I have to hit the home button to wake it up and go back to the map.

The phone is plugged in to power while all this is going on.
This "feature" is new and is a huge pain in the ass. Is there any way to go back to the previous behavior?

If you go to settings/Display & Brightness/Auto-Lock and set this to never, that should work?

Hope this helps


Is there any way to get OS X to keep the iOS Simulator icon in the dock across Xcode upgrades? I use the iOS Simulator often to check webpages so I run it and pick "Keep in Dock". That's works except every time Xcode upgrades it's no longer in the dock and I have to go digging for it again.

Is there any way to keep it in the dock permanently across Xcode upgrades?

SimPholders2 looks like what you want, can't prove it until next Xcode update, though.

Launch the iOS Simulator.app

Right click on it (or control click it) and select 'Options -> Keep In Dock'

That is a Dock-level preference and will survive Xcode updates.  You can see the data set in the com.apple.dock preference domain:

defaults read com.apple.dock


How do I add a custom alert sound in macOS Sierra? How do I add a custom alert sound in macOS Sierra?  I've made some sounds I want to use in a variety of applications but when I try to add them to the /System/Library/Sounds folder, it says The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have the necessary permission.  I also get the same message trying to add myself to the permissions on the Get Info window.

Copy the sound file to ~/Library/Sounds, which is in your Home folder not /System/Library/Sounds in the root of the Macintosh HD. The sound file will then show in System Preferences > Sounds > Sound Effects for you to select as the alert sound.

Note: To expose the Library folder within your Home folder, click Finder > Go > press the option key and select Library.

Update to address comment:

First you need to disable System Integrity Protection.

Reboot the Mac and hold down commandR keys simultaneously after you hear the startup chime, this will boot macOS into Recovery Mode
When the macOS Utilities screen appears, click the Utilities menu, at the top of the screen instead, and choose Terminal.
Type the following command into Terminal then press enter:

csrutil disable

You’ll see a message saying that System Integrity Protection has been disabled and the Mac needs to restart for changes to take effect
Reboot the Mac.

After copying the file(s) to /System/Library/Sounds you'll need to enable System Integrity Protection using csrutil enable following the steps above.

With System Integrity Protection disabled, then to copy the sound file(s) to /System/Library/Sounds you'll needed to use sudo with cp in Terminal.

Example:

cd /System/Library/Sounds
sudo cp /path/to/custom_sound.aiff .

Note that is a . at the end of the command, so as to copy the file into the current directory. You'll be prompted for an Administrator password when using sudo and when you type the password you'll not see any response as the typing of the password is hidden.  Just type the password and press enter for the command to execute.

From Apple level 9 user - an easy answer and fix for some reason not out on the net...

Open a Finder window, hold down option key and click GO....
GO>Library>Sounds (double click to open sounds- the folder will be empty if you have not added any personal sounds) then drag and drop .aiff sounds.


Macbook hangs when when unplugging external Monitor I have a Retina Macbook and macOS Sierra but the symptoms are the same as described in this post almost 10 years ago: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/822656?tstart=0

I am using external display and keep MacBook closed. However when I unplug the display and later open the lid it either thinks that it is still connected or just hangs up.

One would think there were some advancements in 10 years, but apparently nothing changed. Is there anything I can do?

I use Macbook Retina Mid 2013 with different displays and adapters, normally I have 1 or 2 different displays plugged in using two Display Ports depending on whwere I am working at the moment.

UPDATE Now I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2016 with Touchbar and dedicated video card and it's even worse. So I guess it's just a fact of life let's see if High Sierra changes anything.

It appears a SMC reset will fix your issue. I just answered another question pertaining to display issues. I've included the same information directly from Apple as I did with the last question.

Have you tried resetting the SMC (System Management Controller)?

With charger plugged in, hold Shift-Control-Option on the left side of the keyboard, then press the Power.

  The LED on MagSafe power adapters might change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.

  Indicators that your SMC might need to be reset

  The computer fans run at high speed, though the computer is not experiencing heavy usage and is properly ventilated.
  The keyboard backlight behaves incorrectly on Mac computers that have this feature.
  The status indicator light (SIL) behaves incorrectly on Mac computers that have this feature.
  Battery indicator lights, if present, behave incorrectly on Mac notebooks that have a non-removable battery.
  The display backlight doesn't respond correctly to ambient light changes on Mac computers that have this feature.
  The computer doesn't respond to the power button when pressed.
  A Mac notebook computer doesn't respond properly when you close or open the lid.
  The computer sleeps or shuts down unexpectedly.
  The battery doesn't charge properly.
  The MagSafe power adapter LED doesn't indicate the correct activity.
  The computer is performing unusually slowly, though it isn't experiencing abnormally high CPU utilization.
  Application icons may bounce in the Dock for an extended amount of time when opened.
  Applications may not function correctly, or they may stop responding after being opened.
  A computer that supports target display mode does not switch into or out of target display mode as expected, or it switches into or out of target display mode at unexpected times.
  The illumination around the I/O ports on a Mac Pro (Late 2013) does not activate when you move the computer.

Source: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201295

I would restart the computer. I have a macbook pro 2009 and the same issue pertains to me.


How to wipe certain files from Time Machine Backups history but keep recent copies of them in case of a full restore I like Time Machine simplicity but I'd like to make it a little more space efficient: since system updates, apps updates etc change GBs, I'd like to exclude these only from older backups, keeping the last 5 or so backups full, bootable backups.

For instance: Let's say I have 3 time machine backups:

2016-12-08-225622

Applications
Library
System
Users

2016-12-09-225622

Applications
Library
System
Users

2016-12-10-225622

Applications
Library
System
Users

I want to be able to wipe Applications, Library, System... from the first two backups and be able to keep only their latest version, in this case 2016-12-10-225622. So it would look like this after the "cleanup":

2016-12-08-225622

Users

2016-12-09-225622

Users

2016-12-10-225622

Applications
Library
System
Users

This would be similar to excluding system files from time machine + using a boot clone, except you can get some bootable history if you want to (ie. keep the last 5 versions bootable).

It also works for other folders: what about keeping the Downloads folder history of the last month but not from the last year? This is a middle ground between excluding files and folders and keeping them.

Time Machine doesn't create bootable backups in the first place, and apart from the initial one they're not "full" either.

Individual folders/files as not valid targets for tmutil delete anyways, so selectively deleting parts of snapshots like you want is not possible. But that doesn't matter much since system and app updates are infrequent enough and small enough I can guarantee they're absolutely dwarfed by your general day-to-day ~ throughput.

If you're tight on space and want to optimize what you need to do is get BackupLoupe and look for anything that frequently takes up a lot of space in your snapshots. Cache files are already excluded automatically but some apps do put stuff in ~/Library/Application Support that effectively is cache, without being marked as such. Usually gets flagged correctly eventually but I've kept some Spotify and Chrome databases excluded, for example.

Time Machine is space exclusive, and will fill up the entire space before deleting the older backups. If you want to save space on the hard disk of the backup, put rather this space on a second partition.

EG you have a 2 TB disk, split it in two partition of 1TB, and affect the first partition for Time Machine, and use the second for your personal storage, or vice versa.


Open two applications in full spit screen using Bash script I am trying to write a Bash script to open two applications in full split screen, for example:

#!/bin/bash

LESSON="$1"

echo operating on lesson $LESSON

open /Applications/Pages.app /Users/username/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~Pages/Documents/$LESSON*
open /Users/username/courses/chemistry/$LESSON*

This works, but I want to open Pages and Preview in full screen and split view.

Get the Magnet app from the App Store, far less effort and does exactly what you want.


Keyboard shortcut to switch between Google Chrome profiles in Mac OS X (10.10 Yosemite)? In Mavericks (OS X 10.9), I can simply Cmd+~ because it is another window in the same app group, but how can I do it in Yosemite?

I just discovered that it can be done by switching to the adjacent workspace using Ctrl + Left (or Right) arrow.

Update: After I restarted the OS (or maybe created a new user, sorry not sure) I noticed that when I switch to new profiles they are now created under the same app group so I can do again Cmd + tilde.

Update 2: I just discovered that the green maximize icon now in Yosemite will now full screen the app. The shortcut to maximize the length and width of the app window can be found in this question How to change the default behaviour of the fullscreen/maximize button?

  ⌥ + ⇧ + Click on green or outer right icon (plus icon)

⌘ + ` will switch between accounts in Chrome Web browser.


Cannot open Mail Preferences in Mountain Lion I have a user that whenever she tries to open mail preferences it consistently locks up with the pinwheel icon and requires her to force quit mail. Mac mail was fine until a gmail account was added to her list of accounts.

Aside from the prefs issue, Mac mail runs fine. She has 10.8.2 installed. When she called Apple, they suggested reinstalling the OS by using the recover option at bootup.

Is there a trick we can do at the terminal, finder or elsewhere to fix mail? The same issue exists in safe boot.

Does mail have a way to easily reset preferences while retaining the accounts configured and rules.

Go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences and move the file com.apple.mail.plist to the Desktop and restart Mail.

Other plist files exist in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/ but I'd start with the above plist first. In this directory you could also manually remove the offending account (particularly if the mail is also stored online) and re-add it.

Its very simple. Just open mail, you can see file drop down menu(at the top left). There will be your preferences.


Appstore multiple update of the same application When I open up the AppStore, under updates, the application thinks that I need to update the same application several times. In this case Command Line Tools is listed several times in a row. How do I remove these multiple entries from the app store.

The log of your updates are available in:

~/Library/Application Support/App Store/updatejournal.plist

The simple solution is to clear the update logs by deleting the mentioned file.

Here is the guide to remove duplicate if you want to keep the update logs.

Open Terminal.
Convert the updatejournal.plist by entering this line plutil -convert xml1 then drag the updatejournal.plist from Finder into Terminal to expand the path, then press Return. Mine is the following:

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Application\ Support/App\ Store/updatejournal.plist

Open ~/Library/Application\ Support/App\ Store/updatejournal.plist with your favorite text editor (TextEdit works fine).
Find the duplicate update logs. For example, mine is Command Line Tools (OS X 10.10). The point is to delete that entry which is inside the scope of <dict>. So you should delete the content between <dict> and </dict>. Here is line I need to delete. Save the file.

<dict>
    <key>__isSoftwareUpdate</key>
    <true/>
    <key>installDate</key>
    <date>2014-10-17T09:55:17Z</date>
    <key>productKey</key>
    <string>031-08844</string>
    <key>release-notes</key>
    <string>Command Line Developer Tools for OS X 10.10</string>
    <key>title</key>
    <string>Command Line Tools (OS X 10.10)</string>
    <key>version</key>
    <string>6.1</string>
</dict>

Convert the file back to binary1 by entering this line plutil -convert binary1 and drag the updatejournal.plist from Finder, and press Return. Here is mine in Terminal:

plutil -convert binary1 ~/Library/Application\ Support/App\ Store/updatejournal.plist

Open Mac App Store and refresh the Updates section. The duplicate line should disappear. Remember to only delete one entry of duplicate file. Imagine that plist as a spreadsheet with duplicate lines. Just delete one.

Feel free to leave question in comment if the tutorial is vague.


iOS 10 icloud calendars not showing up (gone after upgrade) After upgrading my iPhone 5 from iOS 9 directly to iOS 10.0.1, all my icloud calendars are gone.

They don't show up in the calendars list in the Calendar app, and dragging said list down to force syncing of the calendars doesn't even show the usual spinning loading bar indicator – the whole iCloud section is just missing from the list. Rebooting didn't fix the issue.

The following finally fixed the issue for me:

Sign out of iCloud (Settings -> iCloud -> Sign Out)
choosing "delete all iCloud data from iPhone"
sign in again
wait a couple of minutes

If you are missing past events, try this: go to Settings>Calendar>Sync. After an iOS upgrade, it defaulted to Events 2 weeks Back, which is why you may not see other older events. You can change it to 1, 3, 6 months back, or All Events.
That restored my missing older events.


Can't boot mac or fix it with disk utility I can't boot my Mac in any way, not even from my backup HD. Disk Utility and fsck says

Missing directory record (id = 33496403)

What can I do now?
El Capitan on MacBook Pro late 2008.

If you have a backup I'd recommend formatting the drive, reinstalling macOS and restoring from backup.
If you don't have a backup you could try 3rd party tools like Alsoft DiskWarrior or Micromat TechTool to repair the volume. Alternatively you could manually back up data via Terminal or by booting from an external drive (and using Finder) if the volume still mounts.

If that’s the case, If you had another mac, Make a Bootable USB Installer for OS X El Capitan. In your MacBook Pro 2008, Erase and Reinstall OS X.

NOTE: In the pop-up menu (OS X Extended should be selected), enter a name, then click Erase.

If you only had a MacBook Pro 2008 and did not have another one, there is nothing I can’t help with.


Transfer data from iPhone with no password to Apple ID My Apple ID got hacked a few months ago and it's still on the iPhone 5 and I can't access the password as it as hacked!

How can I transfer just the music from iPhone 5 to iPhone 7?

Your question isn't totally clear, so I'm making some assumptions (such as your Apple ID email is still the same and that you're talking about music you've purchased with that Apple ID).

As a starting point, visit iForgot to reset a forgotten password, unlock your account, or recover an Apple ID.

Once you've done that, you can sign in with your new password etc on your iPhone 7 and download any purchases you've made previously. Also, assuming you have a Mac/PC you can also sign in again on iTunes and use iTunes then to sync music etc across.

If I've misunderstood your issue, please clarify your question and let me know.

A tool called iMazing worked for me, when I needed messages from an old backup


iTunes freeze when on podcasts tab I have a problem with the latest itunes 10.2  When I hit itunes podcast tab it freezes. I found a workaround by creating new library, but it's annoying that every time I had to recreate my library to just got freeze again in new library.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this?

Operating System: on PC Window xp sp2

iTunes version: 10.2.2.14

I found a possible workaround myself. Firstly cut off internet connection of your computer, then open iTunes, hit Podcasts tab, then iTunes will hang for a while but not complete freeze, delete suspected podcasts that may cause freeze, lastly reestablish internet connection.

Switch to "List" instead of "Unplayed, my podcasts and my stations".


External Display Won't stay asleep: stuck in sleep / wake loop I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro (running Mountain Lion) connected to an HP Pavilion 23xi external display. The external is connected via DVI-->Thunderbolt adapter, is set as the primary display and the MacBook Pro is mostly in Clamshell mode.

When I put the Mac to sleep, the displays sleep as they should. However, if I put just the displays to sleep (ctrl - shift -eject or hot corner) the internal display behaves as it should but the external display goes to sleep for a second or so then immediately wakes up. It then gets caught in a sleep / wake loop.

The problem is similar to the one described in this question but, in my case, resetting the SMC hasn't helped. Wake for network access is off and the problem persists when the display is the only peripheral connected to the mac.

This is what the Console shows when this happens:

Any idea how to solve this?

I am having the same problem with this HP monitor connected to a Mac Pro.  My only solution was to connect via HDMI cable instead of the Thunderbolt/DVI cable.  That works.


Is there a utility for mac that shows the information of an SSD like the health etc…? I am wondering if there is a utility for the mac that allows you to see the details of an SSD like the health of the drive, TBW (total bites written), how many running hours etc... In researching for an app of such a kind I found (SSDLife) for windows? It looks like to me that a program like this would be exactly what I would need. The most important information that I need to know about is the TBW (total bites written) on the drive. Because I have heard that once an SSD drive reaches a certain amount of writes it becomes a read only drive, so this information would be invaluable to me.

If you're OK with Command Line utilities, you can always use smartmontools from http://www.smartmontools.org/.

You would need XCode to compile them from source (unless someone here knows binary distribution for Mac OSX), but if I remember correctly I had no issues compiling the package.

I have an OCZ SSD retrofitted into my MBP 15" mid-2010 and I can use smartctl command to monitor various stats, including your Total Bytes Written (called here Lifetime_Writes) as well as Media Wearout Indicator (shown as percentage).

To give you an idea, here's the example output:

MacBook:~  smartctl -a /dev/disk0
smartctl 6.0 2012-10-10 r3643 [x86_64-apple-darwin12.2.0] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Indilinx Everest/Martini based SSDs
Device Model:     OCZ-VERTEX4
Serial Number:    OCZ-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
LU WWN Device Id: 5 e83a97 49c31f44c
Firmware Version: 1.5
User Capacity:    512,110,190,592 bytes [512 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sat Apr 20 23:39:33 2013 IST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                    was never started.
                    Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:      ( 249) Self-test routine in progress...
                    90% of test remaining.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection:        (    0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:            (0x1d) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                    No Auto Offline data collection support.
                    Abort Offline collection upon new
                    command.
                    Offline surface scan supported.
                    Self-test supported.
                    No Conveyance Self-test supported.
                    No Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                    power-saving mode.
                    Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x00) Error logging NOT supported.
                    General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time:    (   0) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:    (   0) minutes.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 18
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x0000   006   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -       6
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2981
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       417
232 Lifetime_Writes         0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       14566414269
233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0000   100   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -       100

SMART Error Log not supported

Warning! SMART Self-Test Log Structure error: invalid SMART checksum.
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported

The exact parameters and stats shown for your SSD might vary, but as it's a free tool, you can try and see for yourself!

This isn't a software recommendation (I see there are already a few posted), but more of a tip. Although SSDs do have a shorter "life" than HDDs, it is still by far a longer life than you'd reach with normal conditions. Your SSD will outlast its own desirability and that of the computer it's in, i.e. by the time it craps out, you probably would have wanted to upgrade your computer anyway. Moral of the story: don't worry about it.
From OCZ's FAQ

"...Generally, you should get many years of solid use out of your SSD…"


Is there an app that lets me send email only? I'm looking for an app that will let me send email only.  Often in the course of my work I need to just fire off a quick email but don't want to get stuck firing up my mail client and reading new email.

The closest I've seen is QuickMailer, but it just fires up Mail.app and sends an email using that... then keeps Mail.app open.

I want a UI like QuickMailer's, but an app that sends the email right away without using Mail.app.

Does anything like this exist?

Command line will do the trick (with some configuration). You will need to set it up to use your Google account authentication (I noted you tagged the question with "gmail" so I am assuming that's your provider).

This site has the details on how to set it up. If you use two-step authentication with your account just create an application password for command line and use that token when adding in SASL password.

This setup works well but won't handle attachments. If you need to send a file, you'll probably have an easier time using the Mail GUI.

However, your problem is that you don't want to open a program to send a message, correct? Because this requires you to have Terminal open, or to open Terminal when you need to send. But it would be fairly easy to knock together an Applescript that will prompt you for destination address, subject, and text of email, then bounce that directly to the shell and exit. Throw this into your user scripts folder and make sure your Mac is configured to show Scripts in the menu bar for quick access.

Second Edit: Updated the applescript to work a little more efficiently; uses the code from here to write the message body to a temp file in your home directory, then simply uses cat to read the file contents into an email message, and finally deletes the temp file. I tested it and it works well even with characters that were mishandled by the original script.

try
    display dialog "Send email to:" default answer "email@domain.com"
    set theEmail to (text returned of result)
    if theEmail is "email@domain.com" then error "No recipient specified!"

    display dialog "Email subject:" default answer "Subject"
    set theSubject to (text returned of result)
    if theEmail is "Subject" then error "No subject specified!"

    display dialog "Message:" default answer ¬
        "Enter message text" & return & return & return & return
    set theBody to (text returned of result)

    set this_file to (((path to home folder) as text) & "message.tmp")
    my write_to_file(theBody, this_file, true)

    do shell script "cd ~/; cat message.tmp | mail -s \"" & theSubject & "\" " & theEmail & "; rm message.tmp"

on error theError
    display dialog theError buttons {"Quit"} default button 1
end try

-- this subroutine saves input as a text file
on write_to_file(this_data, target_file, append_data) -- (string, file path as string, boolean)
    try
        set the target_file to the target_file as text
        set the open_target_file to ¬
            open for access file target_file with write permission
        if append_data is false then ¬
            set eof of the open_target_file to 0
        write this_data to the open_target_file starting at eof
        close access the open_target_file
        return true
on error
        try
            close access file target_file
        end try
        return false
    end try
end write_to_file

I have QikMsg in the AppStore, that does messages to Facebook, Twitter, Tencent, and Weibo. The last two are Chinese sites. I will add email to it this week - good idea there.

In fact, the updated version, with simple email send only, will be on the way to the app store in an hour or so... Correction - It's in review now ...


Esc button on an iPad Hi i was doing a report and went on google drive and accidently clicked on full screen and it said I needed to click esc to get out of full screen.

I was just wondering where the esc button on an iPad is, because I can't find it and I need to insert a picture and I can't and it won't let me copy and paste.

There is no escape key on iPad.

Furthermore, I tried connecting my Apple Wireless keyboard to my iPad via bluetooth. I went  on Google Docs (desktop version) and went fullscreen. The escape key on the keyboard is not recognized. Same with the Smart Keyboard on the iPad Pro line - no physical escape key was made.

We can assume iOS has not support for that kind of key yet and with this long, it’s not in the cards for this platform.

That being said, all sorts of apps have custom on screen keyboards that let you touch to send escape key (like prompt ssh app by Panic). For many apps, the tab key serves the same function as esc but certainly not all.

The actual fix is to engage the vendor of the app (or designer of the web page that assumes an escape key is present) to get them to fix their app/design.

Well, there is no ESC key. but the homebutton on the middle bottom of the ipad functions about the same as the ESC key...