How often should one shutdown a MacBook instead of just closing the lid? I have found contradictory opinions on this. Some say Windows users tend to shut down but that it is not necessary, and I tend to do that too.
Others say it is preferable to shut down, as it does not take too much time to boot anyway, and that in this way the battery is protected. While others say that it is in fact better not to shut down to often, including for the battery, etc.
An interesting opinion - cannot find the link for that now - was that shutting down / restarting serves no purpose for Macs, except when that is needed after installing or upgrading applications or the system, unlike in Windows, where shutting down was (is?) very important. Also, that Macs do periodical system maintenance work during operation and even sleep, which eliminates the need for restart; possibly restarting would even come against all this, etc., and "not shutting down" is in fact a typical differentiating Mac feature. Is this true?
I need a competent opinion on this - not just a description of the most common use - preferably reflecting some advice from the manufacturer.
I have a Macbook Air.

Update after answer:
Although I got a good answer, a crucial point in it (that the system has to be shut down, but only from time to time) is not yet clear: how often should I shut down the system. So, I will bring my question down to this formula.
As pointed out by that answer, my question cannot be answered in relation to a tangible benefit for the system, but rather in relation to the battery life. So, I guess this last point can be answered by some information on how how is battery life dependent on how often the system is shut down.

Whether to shut down or keeping it in sleep state (by closing the lid) depends on the time usage in between. The short answer is:

If you use it daily, enter sleep mode is recommended.
If you rarely use it, shut it down.

So let‘s see the difference between each option.

We’ll start with this statement:

  An interesting opinion - cannot find the link for that now - was that shutting down / restarting serves no purpose for macs, except when that is needed after installing or upgrading applications or the system, unlike in Windows, where shutting down was (is?) very important. Also, that macs do periodical system maintenance work during operation and even sleep, which eliminates the need for restart; possibly restarting would even come against all this, etc., and "not shutting down" is in fact a typical differentiating Mac feature. Is this true?

It’s true that OS X has a periodical maintenance script that runs daily, weekly, and monthly. Each script has  a different purpose to remove logs, rebuild whatis database, and bunch of maintenances on user levels. I can say that it doesn’t affect our day to day usage. It’s more like system maintenance to clean up and sort logs.

In fact, for MacBook models, we should decide whether to shut down or enter sleep state by focusing on which method can keep the battery healthy. Healthy in the way the battery can maintain a maximum capacity in its lifespan.

Most of the MacBook models use Lithium-ion polymer batteries which requires low level discharge to get the maximum usage. Based on the explanation by Battery University:

  Similar to a mechanical device that wears out faster with heavy use, so also does the depth of discharge (DoD) determine the cycle count. The shorter the discharge (low DoD), the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid full discharges and charge the battery more often between uses. Partial discharge on Li-ion is fine; there is no memory and the battery does not need periodic full discharge cycles to prolong life, other than to calibrate the fuel gauge on a smart battery once in a while

For the maximum battery health, you should use your MacBook Air at least until the it depletes to ±60% level before you keep it plugged in again.

It‘s okay to just close the lid without harming your MacBook. Beside, it can run the maintenance script on time.

The only time when you should consider shutting down is when you’re not going to use the MacBook for more than 36 hours. Apple recommends to discharge the battery around ±50% before shutting them down.

  If you don’t plan on using your notebook for more than six months, Apple recommends that you store the battery with a 50% charge. If you store a battery when it’s fully discharged, it could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding any charge. Conversely, if you store it fully charged for an extended period of time, the battery may experience some loss of battery capacity, meaning it will have a shorter life. Be sure to store your notebook and battery at the proper temperature. (See “Notebook Temperate Zone.”)

I know I’ve emphasized too much on battery health in this answer, but instead of asking if shut down or sleep is better, the decision affects your battery health more than the performance of the operating system.

Feedbacks and corrections are welcomed in the comment below.

I'm no expert either, but I know that if left on sleep/having the lid down but the power on can build up enough heat (if on long enough) to catch on fire.
iOS devices are different though, as they do not release heat.
If you need to charge the MacBook quickly, shut it off completely as this increases charging efficiency.


iMessage went from showing what time it was read to just delivered? I sent an iMessage and it showed it was read at 18.01. Few hours later it just says delivered and the message i sent before the last one shows the time it was read. Why did it go from read at 18.01 to just delivered? Have i been blocked by this person or what?

I have seen this too on my own device. It is a bug, though it has persisted through several iOS 9 releases. (I think it started with 9.3 but I'm not positive on that.) It does not affect read receipt display on Messages for Mac.

Read receipts are not retroactive, so even if you were blocked or the other person changed their read receipt setting, this would not occur. If you watch, when a future message is received, you will likely see that the last read receipt shown will move forward one message, to the message immediately before the latest message (in other words, the one where it is not displaying right now).

You can use the iPhone feedback tool to report this bug to Apple.

If you -or you recipient- go to Settings > Messages you can disable "Send Read Receipts" which will have the effect described to the other party using iMessage.

From an article on the subject:

  however it’s also important to note that this setting only applies to the current device. If you’re using iMessage across multiple devices — such as on a Mac and/or iPad — you’ll need to turn the setting OFF individually on each of your devices if you don’t want read receipts sent from those devices. Note that users will still see that messages have been “Delivered” — there’s no way to turn this one off


Are there third-party keyboards that have the Apple layout? Apple keyboards are different than PC keyboard because the Command ⌘ and Option/Alt ⌥ keys are switched. This causes a workflow disruption for me, because I use keyboard shortcuts for everything. I can't really use a Windows keyboard for my Mac, because of this problem.

Here's the Apple keyboard:

And the Windows keyboard:

Are there any third-part keyboards that have the Apple layout?

Yes, there are several companies producing keyboards with Maclayout, e.g. Logitech: http://reviews.logitech.com/7061/4741/logitech-dinovo-keyboard-mac-edition-reviews/reviews.htm, and also Keysonic: http://www.computerbild.de/artikel/cb-News-PC-Hardware-Keysonic-ACK-540-MAC-RF-Spezialtastatur-fuer-Apple-Rechner-3364609.html

The happy hacking brand keyboards are made with Apple's OS X in mind.


Removing phone number from iMessage I'd like to remove my phone number from my iMessage account, but still have my phone enabled to receive messages sent to my email address (also used on iPad, Mac). Is there a way of doing this?

You can remove your phone number from Messages on your Mac and iPad. On your Mac, go to Messages > Settings > Accounts. Select your account. Uncheck the box corresponding to your phone number. On your iPad, go to Settings > Messages > Send & Receive. Uncheck your phone number.

You cannot remove your phone number from receiving messages on your iPhone, because this is also where your text messages come in. However, you can set your email address as the default. This will guarantee that all new messages sent from you will show your email, and all responses will come back that way. Go to Settings > Messages. Select to "Start new conversations from" your email. I hope this helps.

If you want to remove your phone number from your iMessage account, go to http://appleid.apple.com and press the button for "Manage your Apple ID".


iPhone 5S vibrating constantly when I view a message My iPhone 5S (iOS 9.2) is having the following problem: it can receive text messages and iMessages as normal, but when I view them my phone vibrates constantly until I stop viewing them, and moreover it doesn't consider the message to have been read. So far, my only attempt at fixing this is turning it off and back on, but this hasn't helped.

(Possibly related: over the last couple of days, apps have been quitting very frequently. I only bring this up because prior to the last two days, I've had no problems with my phone.)

There are a few more things that you can try to perform.

You can try to restart the device by holding both the home/sleep and the wake button for a few second until the Apple logo appears on the screen. And the phone restart.
Another option is to perform the restore of the phone. You need only to perform a backup using iTunes and then restore the iPhone from the last backup available on iTunes.

If these two options doesn't resolve your problem. You can ask assistance in a Apple Store center because clearly this is a problem the shouldn't occur.

I had it happen when I had no space left. Try clearing a few files and see if it clears


Can I use iPad 1 or iPad 2 accessories (such as cases / covers) on the new iPad (3)? Does the new iPad have the same form factor / dimensions as the first two iPads?  Can I re-use accessories from the first two iPads?

It depends. The iPad (3rd Generation) is slightly thicker than the iPad 2, but there are reports that many cases designed for the 2 will work on the new model. Both of these iPads can use the smart cover technology too. Check with the case manufacturer or online forums to be check the compatibility of specific models.

Update: It seems not all Apple Smart Covers are created equal. Early smart covers may not work with iPad (3gen) because Apple changed the polarity of the sleep sensor magnets at some point during the production run.

The original iPad was the thickest of the lot and had no smart cover capability. Most cases (if not all) were not interchangeable between the newer models.

Accessories should work unless they're truly dimension critical or require a technology not present in a previous model.

My inCase Origami case and the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard it protects continues to work with all iPad models, as do my car chargers, video adaptors and the Apple Camera Connection Kit. The OtterBox Defender case on my original iPad won't doesn't work on newer models.

About this topic also is written in this report:
http://ipadaccessoriesforwork.com/about-page/


Is it possible to use Boot Camp with Windows 10 from an external HDD? I need to run Visual Studio on my MacBook Pro and I need Windows to do that. The easiest and well known way to install Windows on a Mac is by running the Boot Camp app on the Mac and let it do what's necessary. The problem is that I don't want to partition the Internal SSD so the remaining option is to install Boot Camp Windows 10 on an External Drive and boot it every time I need it by plugging in my external USB 3.0 HDD. Is this achievable?

Here's an updated procedure for Windows 10, based on orkoden's excellent answer.

I tested this process on a MacBookPro11,1 running OS X 10.11.5 (15F34). Throughout the process, directly connect all devices to your Mac. I found that certain operations failed more frequently if I used the USB hub in my monitor.

In addition to the external drive that will host your Windows installation (the "destination drive"), you will need another USB drive (the "driver drive") to temporarily store the Boot Camp drivers.

I used these parts:

Destination drive: Samsung T3 Portable 500GB USB 3.0 External SSD (MU-PT500B/AM)
Driver drive: SanDisk Extreme 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ80-032G-GAM46)

Here are the steps:

Install VMware Fusion 8.1.1 from VMware's site
The non-professional free evaluation version is sufficient
VMware Fusion 7.1.3 couldn’t connect my external USB disk to my Windows VM
I downloaded VMware-Fusion-8.1.1-3771013.dmg (SHA256: 29cad381a36374e58a85fb58f7aaad8cae41ad50ef07fdda0db6d782c95c0a95)
Download the Windows 10 ISO file from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
I chose Windows 10, English, 64-bit
I downloaded Win10_1511_1_English_x64.iso (SHA256: cf5cff9e23c853fed769cf382e18b29889dcc0055b69226f0164ab51eca3069c)
Download the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5753
I downloaded KB3AIK_EN.iso (SHA256: c6639424b2cebabff3e851913e5f56410f28184bbdb648d5f86c05d93a4cebba)
Prepare the driver drive.

Run diskutil list to determine the device name. In my case, the device name was /dev/disk2.
Erase the disk using diskutil eraseDisk fat32 DRIVERS MBR /dev/disk2
Open Boot Camp Assistant

In "Introduction", click "Continue"
In "Select Tasks":

Uncheck "Create a Windows 7 or later version install disk"
Check "Download the latest Windows support software from Apple"
Uncheck "Install Windows 7 or later version"
Click "Continue"

If "Select Tasks" is not there, try "Action->Download Windows Support Software".
In "Save Windows Support Software", choose the driver drive, and click "Continue".
Wait for the process to complete.

Eject the driver drive: diskutil eject /dev/disk2
Disconnect the driver drive.

Prepare the temporary Windows VM. We’ll use the temporary Windows VM to write the disk image to the destination drive. In VMware Fusion:
Create a new VM:

File > New
In "Select the Installation Method", choose "Install from disc or image", and click "Continue".
In "Create a New Virtual Machine", choose "Use another disc or disc image…", locate Win10_1511_1_English_x64.iso, and click "Continue".
In "Microsoft Windows Easy Install", uncheck "Use Easy Install", and click "Continue".
Click "Finish".

Start the VM and complete Windows Setup. The settings don’t really matter, because we’re just using this VM to write the disk image.

Choose "Next"
Choose "Install now"
Choose "I don’t have a product key"
Choose "Windows 10 Pro"
Choose "I accept the license terms"
Choose "Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)"
Choose "Drive 0 Unallocated Space" and click "Next"
Choose "Use Express settings"
Choose "I own it"
Choose "Skip this step"
Enter a username

Install the Automated Installation Kit:

From the "Virtual Machine" menu, choose "CD/DVD (SATA)" > "Choose Disc or Disc Image...". Select KB3AIK_EN.iso.
From the Start menu, choose "File Explorer", and then "This PC". Double-click "DVD Drive (D:) KB3AIK_EN".
Choose "Yes"
Choose ".NET Framework Setup"

Choose "Download and install this feature"
After installation completes, choose "Close"

Choose "Windows AIK Setup"

Choose "Next"
Choose "I agree"
Choose "Next"
Choose "Next"
After installation completes, choose "Close"

Prepare and image the destination drive:

From the Start menu, choose "All apps". Choose "Microsoft Windows AIK". Right-click "Deployment Tools Command Prompt". Choose "More", then choose "Run as administrator". Choose "Yes".
Prepare the destination drive:

Run diskpart
Plug in the destination drive. In the "Choose where you would like to connect " prompt, choose "Connect to Windows"
Run list disk to determine the disk number of the destination drive. In my case, the disk number was 1.
Run: select disk 1
Run: clean
Run: create partition primary
Run: format fs=ntfs quick
Run: assign
Run: active
Run: list volume
Note the drive letter for the selected volume (marked with a *); this is the drive letter of the destination drive. In my case, the letter was "E".
Run: exit

Image the destination drive:

From the "Virtual Machine" menu, choose "CD/DVD (SATA)" > "Choose Disc or Disc Image...". Select Win10_1511_1_English_x64.iso.
Run: imagex /check /verify /apply d:\sources\install.wim "Windows 10 Home" e:

For Windows 10 Pro, use "Windows 10 Pro"
For Windows 10 Education, use "Windows 10 Education Retail Technical Preview"

Run: bcdboot e:\windows /v /s e:
Run: shutdown /p
Quit VMware Fusion

Restart into Windows to complete installation

Restart the Mac while holding the Option key
When the startup disk list appears, use the arrow keys to choose Windows.
Complete Windows Setup. If Windows restarts during Setup, restart again while holding the Option key to return to Windows.
Insert the driver drive. Open the Start menu, choose “File Explorer”, choose “DRIVERS (E:)”, open the “BootCamp” folder, and open “Setup”. Complete the installation.

Windows is now installed and ready.

To restart into OS X, click the Boot Camp icon in the notification area and choose “Restart in OS X…”.
To restart into Windows, open “System Preferences” from the Apple menu, choose “Startup Disk”, choose “BOOTCAMP”, and then choose “Restart…”.
To choose an OS at boot time, hold down the Option key.

This is all once upon a time. Apple's new SIP security would complicate matters. OS X 10.11.4 open Bootcamp Utility and

Action > Download Windows Support Software

Disk Utility to prepare external T2 SSD as exFAT, then run Windows Support Software. Select your external drive. Then Bootcamp Utility would pick up where your manual preparation ended, and install a Bootcamp Windows 10 on the external drive. Or it might install internal. Try it. See what your hardware supports. Bootcamp quickly removes accidents, or Disk Utility "-" delete and First Aid.

SIP may not support Windows 8 external Bootcamp. and older hardware. You can read more on that at Two Canoes Blog, How El Capitan Boot Camp is Affected by Apple’s New System Integrity Protection (SIP).

How long until Bootcamp evolves into Mission Control Windows widget. Something like that at University Hospital for decades now (1996-present). SIP is helping to make Bootcamp more fluid than it used to be.


view all windows in Mavericks keyboard shortcut In Mavericks (and any other version of OSX) when pressing CMD + TAB you see the typical list of open apps to switch to.

I just discovered that when this list is open (before releasing CMD) if you press 1 you see all the windows of currently the selected app.

What is this feature called?
Is it possible to use it outside of the CMD + TAB list?

I am pretty sure this feature is called "Application Windows". If you go to System Settings -> Mission Control, in the bottom section is a list of four items you can attach to keyboard shortcuts. This feature is called "Application windows" in that list.

Additionally, you can enable a Hot Corner for it: Click the Hot Corners button in the bottom left of the Mission Control settings; you should be able to specify a special action for moving your mouse into each corner of your screen. This feature is called "Application Windows" in the list of options.

You can also configure hot corner to achieve this.


Very strange partition table: Missing a sector between Main and Recovery partition So I have been trying to get Windows 7 on my machine using no DVD or USB (I have only an ISO to work with). I used various combinations of Boot Camp, Toast Titanium, Virtualbox / VMWare, Disk Utility, and rEFIt to attempt this, and after realizing that nothing had worked and getting a DVD-RW, I set about putting everything back to normal, i.e:

Changing my MBR table back to a single EFI protective partition spanning the entire disk (apparently, Boot Camp magically did that for me)
Making my OS X partition fill my whole disk again (in the EFI table, using Disk Utility).

So now everything looks pretty much fine from the outside, but there's on detail that bothers me a little bit. Here's the output from diskutil list:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s4

As you can see, I have no disk0s3 partition. My Recovery HD partition should be in disk0s3 and I should have no disk0s4. But I have no idea how this came about or how severe it is, and only the faintest idea how to fix it (deleting, making a new Recovery HD, not sure if that'll work)

As well, here is the output from rEFIt's Partition Inspector:

*** Report for internal hard disk ***

Current GPT partition table:
 #      Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1             40       409639  EFI System (FAT)
 2         409640    975503591  Mac OS X HFS+
 3      975503592    976773127  Mac OS X Boot

Current MBR partition table:
 # A    Start LBA      End LBA  Type
 1              1    976773167  ee  EFI Protective

MBR contents:
 Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable

Partition at LBA 40:
 Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
 File System: FAT32
 Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)

Partition at LBA 409640:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
 Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+

Partition at LBA 975503592:
 Boot Code: None
 File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
 Listed in GPT as partition 3, type Mac OS X Boot

Which confirms that my MBR table is in the right place, and also tells me that my disk0s2 and disk0s4 are indeed right next to each other, so there is no invisible partition in between.

Thanks for your help!

Matt

Rebooting the system reorganized the list on my mac


High CPU and energy usage in Safari Energy impact of Safari is extremely high on my Macbook Air Mid 2013 El Captian 10.11.2. It lead to high usage of CPU (Temperature ~65.0°C) and the CPU fan is running in full speed (6500.0 RPM) constantly.

I have tried so far:

Clear all Safari cached
Restart laptop
Remove/disable all extensions
Uninstall all the software that might possibly affecting e.g. Anti-Virus

The issue is only happening in Safari. Chrome and Firefox are both OK.

Thanks for helping in advance!

CPU:

Energy Impact 1:

Energy Impact 2:

CPU Temperature and Fan Speed:

Network Activity:

I know this is probably a little late but I hope it helps someone else.

I found the reason Safari was using so much CPU was due to faulty permissions. It was stuck in a loop trying to access a file it couldn't.

To see if this might be an issue for you run:

sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs /

And see if there are any files wile damaged permissions.
For me it was:

Permissions differ on "Library/Java", should be drwxr-xr-x , they are drwxrwxr-x .
User differs on "private/var/db/displaypolicyd", should be 0, user is 244.
Group differs on "private/var/db/displaypolicyd", should be 0, group is 244.

So it is a good chance Java permissions are the culprit. To fix run:

sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --repair --standard-pkgs --volume /

And then restart Safari. For me this immediately dropped CPU use from 150% to 14%.

One should note if you have 100s of faulty permissions, it could be an early sign of disk failure. As always, keep backups.

I hope this helps someone else out there.

developer mode seems to be buggy; acknowledged today by Apple with recent consumer reports with the new MacBook Pro 2016.  A patch is on the way in beta testing now.


Deactivate automatic mark as read in Apple Mail 7.3 I just changed from Windows to OS X Mavericks with Apple Mail App 7.3. The first thing I'm wondering about is that I cannot disable the automation to mark an email as read by default when I just clicked on it. Is there any way to do so?

I found TruePreview. But the tool does not support Mail 7.3 any more. Another solution would be to use a different mail client like Thunderbird. But there I miss the integration of the address book and the synchronisation with my iPhone and iPad.

I've been using Mail Act-On. It's overkill (does a lot more than just keep messages unread) and kind of pricey at $30 (with free trial), but since it's a paid app, they keep it up to date. Even when TruePreview was being maintained, it'd sometimes be weeks or months before it was updated to work with the latest version of OS X.

Use the standard keyboard shortcut, cmd+shift+u to toggle between “read” and “unread”. You can also go to System Preferences → Keyboard to customise your own keyboard shortcut.


Using Preview with an old PDFkit With Mojave, I use to open multiple pdf at once with the old Preview9.0.app  (version of Sierra)

It doesn't work anymore with Catalina because of a conflict between Preview9.0.app and the new PDFkit framework.

Is there any way to embed the old PDFkit framework in Preview9.0.app ? Or redirect PDFkit calls to the old one ?

I'm sure it was possible ! Cormiertyshawn895 dit it ! Thanks to him ! https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive/issues/1

Preview, like many other Apple-bundled apps, is designed to use the Operating System's frameworks. There is no practical way that the application can be reconfigured to use a separately supplied framework without having the source code and altering the application before compiling an altered version.

It's also worth mentioning that PDFKit in Sierra has many critical bugs!


Is there a way to bring back swipe to unlock in iOS10 I there a way to restore the swipe to unlock in iOS 10?

No, not with the stock, non-jailbroken device.  Apple has decided to move away from that method of opening the iDevice.  I don't see them changing their mind and putting it back so it's probably best to learn how to use it going forward.


Set my default address for auto-fill? Since updating to 10.7.2, the email addresses in my address book card seem to have re-prioritized themselves. Now when I use Auto-Fill, the wrong address pops up, and I don't see any way to change it.

Can I set a "primary" or default address in Address Book? (I still hate this new version of Address Book by the way.)

Or, can I select which address is used in auto-fill in Safari?

I had the same problem.  I went into address book and put my desired address as the first one on my card.  It worked.

Select or make the contact you to use as your autofill then go to card menu and select "make this my card"  I hope this helps!


There's a folder shortcut on my dock, next to the trash. Why is there and how do I remove it? I want my dock to be purely for shortcuts to the programs I use the most. Frankly it annoys me that you can't remove the Trash from the dock, but I can live with that.

What I really want to get rid of is this folder shortcut that I have next to the Trash. I think it's called a stack? It's to the right of the dividing line that separates my application shortcuts from the trash icon. When I right-click it, there's no option to remove it from the dock.

My question is two-fold-

Why do I have this shortcut there to that specific directory?
How do I get rid of it?

I'm very new to OSX, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here.

Edit: Screenshot of what I see when I try to remove it:

Edit2: I'm on Mountain Lion, 10.8.1.

Edit3: I should mention that the folder in question is not on my local machine. It's a networked drive, mounted at /Volumes/Student/Home/6514944/.

Simply click on it to hold it then drag it off of the dock and release the click. It should disappear in an animated puff of smoke.

I thought this may be late but it can help you to sort it out. Open Terminal in Utilities and use this command line:

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock


how to re-mount USB drive Possible Duplicate:
  How do I mount ejected external USB flash storage?

So, I plugged a USB drive.
Then ejected it.

But it's still connected to my machine.
is there a way to force a re-connect and avoid having to plug it out and plug it in again?

Same goes to a password protected volume on my SSD or HD. It asks me for a password. I cancel. As a result the volume is not mounted. Is there any way to force it to ask me again without rebooting?

For the USB, you will have to go to the extreme trouble of plugging it out, and then back in i'm afraid

For the SSD, you could try and open up disk utilities, and the volume should be greyed out on the left, all you need to do, it select the volume, then click the mount button on the top. I have done that with a volume on my MBP, but it might be different for a password-protected drive.

Hope this helps!

Rory Costello


iMac gets stuck on the "White Screen of Death" during startup I have a 27" iMac (from 2011) that's running Yosemite and each time I turn the power on, it shows me the Apple logo, it starts to load, and the screen goes white and simply hangs there.

To solve this problem, I've done all of the standard procedures: resetting the PRAM, trying to reinstall the OS from a USB stick, attempting to use the Internet recovery feature, etc. But no matter what, it ends up on the same white screen.

When attempting to launch into safe mode, this is the last thing I see before the computer cuts to the white screen:

Any help in getting the computer booting again would be appreciated.

If you're lucky, this is a common, and easily remedied iMac problem.  Just tell me this: does your system come up in a usable state if you hold down the shift button while powering up?  (That combination gets you into "safe mode".)

Boot in Safe mode -  it will take you through to complete the startup.


How can I access an iOS Mail password stored in Keychain? I upgraded my wife's iPhone to a newer model but she can't remember her Yahoo mail password which is stored in Keychain on her old phone.  She uses the standard iOS Mail app which successfully fetches mail from Yahoo on the old phone.

I've tried syncing the old phone's keychain to iCloud then syncing it back to the new phone using the same process, but with no success.  If I add the Yahoo account on the new phone I am always presented with a blank field for the password.

Should I reset the new phone completely and do a restore from iCloud?

Also I can't use Yahoo's 'forgot password' options on the web because the she also forgot the password to the rescue account.

If you can sucessfully recieve email from your wifes old phone, maybe try restoring the password.

There's a way using your jailbroken IPhone.
Just follow these instructions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQFFedPArB8


iOS 8 Health data: backup and iCloud I hat to bring in my iPhone for repair and I backed up all the data on iCloud and with iTunes (just to be sure). I then got a replacement phone for one week.

I was not able to recover my Health data:

The data seems not to be synchronised with iCloud (no other device as my iPad or the replacement phone see anything)
The data was not backed up. I got everything back but for the Health data

Is there a way to back Health data up?

Looks like you need to encrypt your iPhone backups for your local backups to retain health data:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6357

Hope this helps?

iTunes and iCloud are good tool for iPhone data. You can backup your iphone with iCloud or iTunes. If you lost data, you can recover from them
You can restore iTunes backups to your iPhone at any time. Follow these steps to choose a backup and sync the data to your iPhone.

Connect the iPhone to the computer with a USB cable.
Open iTunes.
If you have a new or erased iPhone, iTunes will prompt you to restore from backup.
Otherwise, Control-click on your iPhone under DEVICES in the left menu.
Select Restore From Backup...
Choose the backup you wish to sync and click the Restore button.

You will be prompted by Setup Assistant by a new iPhone to set up as a new phone or restore from backup.

Make sure your iPhone is connected to Wi-Fi and plugged into the charger.
Select the option Restore From iCloud Backup.
Enter your iCloud account and password.
Choose the recent backup you wish to restore to your iPhone.
Enter any passwords required when prompted.

Or you can use some third-party programs like Tenorshare iPhone Data Recovery, you can check it on Google


Is it possible to throttle the iCloud photostream sync in OS X? I have a large iCloud photo library. Once in a blue moon my iMac running Yosemite decides to forget all about the synced libraries, and I have to re-enable the iCloud streams. However, my little DSL line will then be clogged for hours on end, because OS X downloads gigabytes of pictures.

Is it possible to throttle the speed to a certain setting, say 1MBit/sec? Or at least to pause the sync, without having to re-download everything?

You can't. :(

I solved with QOS on the DSL Modem. (ASUS)


Troubleshooting HDMI connection between MBP and Sony Bravia TV I'm trying to connect my MacBook Pro (late 2011) running Mavericks to my Sony Bravia television like so: MBP thunderbolt port -> Mini DisplayPort cable -> HDMI cable -> TV HDMI 1 port.

However, I'm not getting any picture or sound on the television. Neither device has recognised the other.

Have I missed something out?

This problem could also be caused by a missing or improper HDCP signal coming from the MiniDisplayport-to-HDMI adapter.

I experienced the same issue with my MacbookPro (late 2008) and a Bravia TV. I tried one cable with a MiniDisplayport connector on one end and HDMI plug at the other. This worked fine between my MBP and a computer monitor or a beamer, but would not transmit any signal to a Sony Bravia TV. An adapter (of the cheaper kind) displayed the same behavior. The used HDMI cable was fine (tested between PS3 and the TV). Again, adapter and cable produced a proper signal on non-Bravia displays. A Dr. Bott MiniDisplayport-to-HDMI adapter finally solved the matter for me.

It is a known fact that Mac to Samsung monitors or TVs do not work.  I spent $500 on dual Samsung monitors and it didn't work correctly.


truecrypt 7.1a requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later on Yosemite 10.10 After reading articles about the state of Truecrypt in February 2015, I decided to download the last stable version of Truecrypt that allows full usage of Truecrypt: that is, version 7.1a

  7.2 version that can only be used to view, but no longer to create new, TrueCrypt volumes.

see https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm

I then proceeded to install this on my Mac, running on Yosemite 10.10

But I got the error message "truecrypt 7.1a requires  Mac OS X 10.4 or later", see below.

I guess it's simply a schoolboy error from a developer of the Truecrypt team, as it considers 10.4 being above 10.10, or maybe it's rather Apple who messed up & should have consistantly used 2 digits after the dot (i.e. use 10.04 rather than 10.4).

In any case, I find myself unable to install Truecrypt. Anyone found a solution for this?

Copy the mpkg from inside the downloaded disk image onto your Desktop.
Right click the mpkg file and choose Show Package Contents, then open the Contents folder.
Open distribution.dist with a text editor.
Remove lines 13 to 18.

Save the file and open the mpkg normally.

Open Terminal and enter
sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
and enter your admin password.
Change the two strings "10.10" to "10.9". Leave the minor version number (e.g. 0, 1, 2...) like it is. Hit ctrlO and Enter to write the file to disk.
Hit ctrlX to quit nano
Leave open the Terminal window.
Install TrueCrypt 7.1a
after the installation is finished change to Terminal and enter
sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist again
Change the two strings "10.9" back to "10.10". Hit ctrlO and Enter to write the file to disk.
Hit ctrlX to quit nano
enter cat /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist to recheck the correct system version (e.g. 10.10.2 or whatever it was).


Is it possible to disable spell check systemwide? I've just done a clean install of Yosemite, and in practically all of my apps I'm noticing those red underlines whenever I've "misspelled" something (or, more accurately, used an unrecognized name, technical term, piece of code, etc.). I have been disabling it app by app, although even then it doesn't always work - for example, when doing Google searches in Chrome it still shows up, even though I've disabled "check spelling while typing."

I've also gone to System Preferences/Keyboard/Text and unchecked "Correct spelling automatically," but this still doesn't seem to do anything.

Has something gone wrong on my system? And is there any more reliable way to completely disable this unwanted "feature?"

Renaming '/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources' did not work for me since that file doesn't seem to exist on this install (10.11). What did work was disabling it for the languages I usually write in, under System Preferences->Keyboard->Text->Spelling select menu. It's set to 'Automatic by Language' by default, choose 'Set up…' at the bottom and deselect your languages. Restart the applications that use the Spelling service.

This work for me on El Capitan: https://www.osx.news/mac/turn-off-autocorrect-on-mac/

Edit: This is not a solution to the question asked. Auto-correction is not spell checking.


Safari appending .EXE to the end of .PDF I have had reported on occasions when Safari on Mac is downloading a PDF from one of our sites it will append .EXE to the end of the file. The MIME type is correctly set to be pdf but it still does it occasionally.

I have found http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24293 which seems to indicate that this is a known issue with Safari on Mac however as official as this is (Since it is from Apple themselves) our clients don't seem to want to believe it. So I want to know if there is a solution to this problem?

I say "occasionally" because we have some Macs that this is happening on and some it's not. So maybe it's a setting or something, it downloads perfectly fine in IE, Firefox, Chrome and even downloads fine on mobile Safari. It is just Mac Safari.

HTTP Header: Content-Disposition

Have the server include an additional Content-Disposition header when serving the PDFs:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="<MyPDF.pdf>"

This provides the browser with a strong suggestion for the desired filename and suffix. See How to encode the filename parameter of Content-Disposition header in HTTP? for a discussion about limitations and implementing this feature.

MIME Type

Additionally, make sure the server's PDF mime type in the Content-Type: header is set correctly. There are variations in use. application/pdf is the recommended type.

  The standard MIME type is application/pdf. The assignment is defined in RFC 3778, The application/pdf Media Type, referenced from the MIME Media Types registry.

Test with curl

Use curl -I http://example.com/mypdf.pdf to test and ensure the correct headers are returned by your server. curl can provide credentials to work as a logged in user.

Potentially related question: When sending headers to download a PDF, Safari appends .html

Download the file, then double click on it and choose Open With. Under this menu, select any app capable of opening PDFs like Adobe Reader and the file will open.


XAMPP VM and text editors I recently installed XAMPP for OS X (XAMPP VM PHP 7.2.1) which now virtualizes the entire box for obvious benefits of higher security. Although I admire the new concept and see its benefits, I cannot put my head around one thing that puzzles me.

I would like to enable the PHPMyAdmin tool, which requires me to change a file, based on this well described set of instructions:

http://localhost:8080/dashboard/docs/access-phpmyadmin-remotely.html

This document basically describes the steps needed to relax the security concept that prevents directly accessing the PHPMyAdmin login. It asks you to edit the /opt/lampp/etc/extra/httpd-xampp.conf file in order to allow access to PHPMyAdmin. One can get to the file system via the stack manager. In this file, the following block:

<Directory "/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin">
  AllowOverride AuthConfig
  Require local
  ...

needs to be changed into:

<Directory "/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin">
  AllowOverride AuthConfig
  Require all granted
  ...

Strangely, and I am extremely puzzled by it and cannot actually believe it, I seem to not be able to find neither pico, vi, vim, or nano (all very standard editors in any Linux distribution) on this virtual machine. Since I am on the VM, I have no access to tools on my own machine (i.e. everything in /Applications).

Did I overlook something? What is going on?

As the documentation suggests, you need to locate and edit the file: /opt/lampp/etc/extra/httpd-xampp.conf

The hard part for me was locating this file. The solution I found was to ensure the stack volume was mounted:

From there, you can click the explore button, which will open /opt/lampp/. You can then navigate to etc/extra/httpd-xampp.conf from the Finder window that is opened and edit with any editor you want.

Alternatively, once the drive is mounted, you should be able to access the volume through Finder:

Hopefully, this helps.

try this, it just worked for me with xampp vm on os x

apt-get install vim


Turn Wifi off/on with a single key? Is there a way to assign the WiFi on/off function to one of the function keys like F4 that I otherwise never use? I assume Applescript would be required. However I may want to use a BASH script instead.

Thanks to budakpisang for this:
In Terminal, run
networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder | sed -n '/Wi-Fi/s|.*Device: \(.*\)).*|\1|p'

to get your WiFi network device (usually it's en0 or en1, depending on the Mac model you have). Substitute it for en1 in the following steps
You can turn wifi off and on with these commands
networksetup -setairportpower en1 off
networksetup -setairportpower en1 on

Here's a one-liner to toggle between on and off
networksetup -getairportpower en1 | grep "On" && networksetup -setairportpower en1 off || networksetup -setairportpower en1 on

Create a keyboard shortcut that runs a shell command

Start Automator, and create a new Service.

Set "Service receives selected: to "no input" in "any application".

Add an action named "Run Shell Script". It's in the Utilities section of the Actions Library.

Insert the bash command you want into the text box and test run it using the Run button (top right). It should do whatever the script does (off, on or toggle), and there should be green ticks below the Action.

Save it, giving it a service name you can remember.

Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard, and go to the Shortcuts tab

Go to the Services section, and scroll down to General - you should find your service there. If you select the line, you can click "add shortcut" and give it a keyboard shortcut.

Just press the wifi key on the keyboard. f12 on US standard keyboard. why are you guys making it too hard.?


Can I make Safari under iPad save passwords? Is there a way I can make Safari on my iPad 2 save passwords or auto-fill forms.
for example, I want it to save the user/password for my wifi router so I can access it easily without typing the user/password each time I access it.

(I am using the latest firmware on an non-jailbroken iPad 2)

Yes. Go to the Settings app, and select safari. There will be a section called "Autofill", and you can enable it to save your passwords and auto-fill your personal information taken from the address book. Also, iOS automatically saves all Wi-Fi passwords, so there is no need to save it manually yourself.

I really prefer LoginBox which is simple


How do I update the Mac Pro (2013)'s display drivers under Windows? I'm trying to run the HTC Vive setup software (yes, I'm aware the Mac Pro's GPUs are underpowered for VR; I've got an external GPU enclosure on its way, and am trying to do some initial room setup and installation while I wait.); but I'm getting the following error when I attempt to launch ViveSetup.exe:

Failed to create OpenGL context for format QSurfaceFormat(version 2.0, options QFlags(), depthBufferSize 24, redBufferSize -1, greenBufferSize -1, blueBufferSize -1, alphaBufferSize -1, stencilBufferSize -1, swapBehaviour 2, swapInterval 1, profile 0). This is most likely caused by not having the necessary graphics drivers installed.
Install a driver providing OpenGL 2.0 or higher, or, if this is not possible, make sure the ANGLE Open GL ES 2.0 Emulation libraries (libEGL.dll, libGLESv2.dll, and d3dcompiler_*.dll) are available in the application executable's directory or in a location listed in PATH.

Does anyone know how I can upgrade the drivers for Apple's AMD FirePro D700 (which appear to be at "FireGL V") to something supporting OpenGL 2.0?

use at your own risk but bootcampdrivers.com may have a solution for you...


How do I completely uninstall Setapp and it's helpers manually? The Setapp.app helper missed my first attempt to Trash the app (maybe an earlier version?). So I need to clean out it's various helpers and plugins manually.

Here's what I've found so far:

/Applications/Setapp.app
/Applications/Setapp/ <- if you have installed anything

~/Library/Application Support/Setapp/...
~/Library/Application Scripts/com.setapp.*
~/Library/Containers/com.setapp.*
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.setapp.*
~/Library/QuickLook/SetappQL.qlgenerator

If I delete all the above will that completely remove Setapp? If not, what else do I need to do?

The correct way to uninstall it is :

If you did not undo it in this way, you must use the "Remove Setapp" tool that is delivered to you in the support.

I've used AppCleaner (https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/) for ages now with great results. You just open AppCleaner and then drop the app to be cleaned to the AppCleaner's window and it returns with a handy list of files related. From there trashing them is just a click away. Hope it helps.


iPad stuck on Guided Access with broken home button My iPad is stuck on Guided Access. I do remember the passcode but my home button is broken. I've been using the on-screen home button but that too is disabled. Will draining the battery out fix my problem or is there another way?

After a quick google search, I found this video that may help you, depending on what version of iOS you have. There are many other tutorials on youtube that you should check out as well.

Good Luck!


Is it possible to make an application’s window smaller than intended? I’ve always had issues with some application windows in macOS where I can’t make them smaller than a certain amount.
Audio Midi Setup is the perfect example of this.

If you look at the image posted, you’ll see that there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be shorter, there’s a lot of vertical space which is absolutely pointless.

Airdroid, same story, lots and lots of wasted space.

I find this infuriating as I really need some windows to be smaller in order to have my desktop tidy and the apps easily accessible without having them overlap.

Does anyone know of a way to “force” an application’s window on macOS to be smaller?

Thanks!

No.

You can't force an app window to get smaller than the minimum size it is programmed to be. There's no 3rd party app or macOS feature that can let you do otherwise.

Using the "Moom" app you can quickly force apps into whatever tile size and grid position you want using keyboard shortcuts. Super-helpful when using large screens and/or many screens. My biggest productivity booster app! But yes, even "Moom" can't force app windows to be smaller than their minimum size.


Why won't my iPad sync photos ("not enough memory") when it's half empty? When I try to sync my iPad, it aborts on the last step, indicating that it can't be synced, becuase "not enough memory is available":

But I have LOTS of room:

And it all fit before - I actually have about 8GB of photos that all fit with  ~20GB to spare until today.   The above image is after I set it to only sync the last 20 photo projects (I'm using aperture) to see if space was really an issue, and it's clearly not.

However, photos do seem to be a part of the problem:   if i turn off photo sync, it works, but if I reduce the photos being synced (sunk? syunk?) to a de minimis number, it doesn't.

The catalyst for the problem is pretty likely either the new version of itunes or of OSX, as both were upgraded just before the problem manifested.  Any help?  I miss my pictures.

I have had iTunes go off the deep end thinking there were far too many photos.

I have had luck with several tacks so I presume there are a few bugs - one of which you may have run into:

Take the device to another computer (or another iTunes library on a shell account) and let it sync and erase all photos on iOS. Taking it back to the main iTunes library which has the correct photos sometimes works. I presume the error was an accounting one on the iPad when this works.
Change photo sync to a simple folder with a jpeg or two, sync it, and then change back to the settings I prefer. (rarely works)
Rebuild the affected library in Aperture or iPhoto - this seems to force new data into the media browser so iTunes is forced to take a better look at the sizes for your albums and photos as organized.

Sorry I don't have a sure fire answer - but maybe you haven't tried all of these or it sparks an idea of something else you can try.

Okay I Had the same problem when I tried syncing my music on my Iphone I did some messing around with my itunes and I finally found the way to fix it and what I did was unselected evrything that I wanted to sync to my phone basically did a blank sync between my phone and computer which I guess let itunes know what was on my phone and what was on the computer because after I had done that I resulected what I wanted to sync and it worked perfect. Hopes this helps because I spent hours trying to find a solution on the internet and nothing worked.


What would happen if I use a power supply with a different wattage than the system is designed for? My girlfriend has a Macbook Air.  The power supply is smaller and lighter than the Pro.  It has an output of 14.85V and 3.05Amps.  My Pro Retina has a power supply that is 20V and 4.25 Amps.

Both supplies have the same Magsafe adapter, so the power supplies seem interchangeable at a physical level, but what would happen if one of us plugs in using each other's adapter?

Could damage result from under-powering my MacBook Pro? (like a brownout)?
Could damage result from over-powering her Air? (like a power surge)?
Will the Macbook Air charge faster with a Pro adapter?

You can safely use the 85W adapter on any Mac, it will only draw as much power as it needs. The 45W adapter from the MacBook Air may just about manage to power your MacBook Pro but it won't charge it. It will not damage your Mac, but you may notice the battery may still deplete when using it.

Here is the information, straight from Apple:

-Will the Macbook Air charge faster with a Pro adapter?

Don't ever do this, it could permanently damage MBA.

-Could damage result from under-powering my MacBook Pro? (like a brownout)?

Actually, there's a few things interesting with how power system work on MBP.

As far as I know, my Retina MBP runs at 12392 mV (12.392 V) while I'm just browsing, and bumps up a lot when I'm gaming. So, it is possible to give it only 14 V, but it will charge extremely slow, and "Please Don't Try That If You're Ready To Take Risk! More Importantly, Don't Blame Me For Any Damage!"

Also, I want to mention one thing, that is the MagSafe Airline Adapter:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB441Z/A/apple-magsafe-airline-adapter?fnode=5a&fs=m.manufacturer%3Dapple%26m.productKind%3Dadapter

This adapter by Apple connects to Airplanes, and they are basically one end MagSafe, another end this EmPower thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmPower_(aircraft_power_adapter)

It's 15V, and at the end of that Wikipedia page it reads,

  Apple offers an EmPower Magsafe power adapter for their MacBook, MacBook Pro, and
  MacBook Air lines of notebooks, and also includes a cigarette lighter
  socket adapter. However, this system only runs the computer and will
  not charge the computer's battery, and Apple indicates that users
  should not plug this device into a car's cigarette lighter outlet.

So my guess is, it will work, but not well.

It's ultimately your choice, and if I were you, I'll test it secretly on my friends' laptop.


Finder does not open Clicking on the finder icon in the dock has no effect. To open the finder I have to open the context menu and choose "New Window".

I already stoped the finder process, without success.

How can I fix that?

Have you tried simply clicking on the Finder icon in the dock ?

That always works for me.

I would delete my Finder .plist

I would also "zap my PRAM"


Video player on iPad that doesn't stretch to full screen I'm looking for a video player that doesn't stretch my 640x480 video files to full screen (1024x768), which degrades the quality IMHO.

Is such an app available?

OPLayerHD allows you to select the stretching mode, so you can select between full screen and actual ration of the video.

There is also a lite version, maybe you can try that one before buying the complete OPlayerHD

Alternativelly there was AVPlayerHD, which seems to be not available now.

How about nPlayer? It allows you to adjust the size of the video you're watching.

  nPlayer provides high quality video play performance and easy control-UI supporting almost all kinds of video formats and codecs without file converting efforts.


Revert to El Capitan I'm having major 'disagreements' with Sierra, compatibility issues with software etc, & have decided to revert to El Capitan.

I have done this many times in the past, tested an OS then gone back to the earlier version. I make a clone of the old drive, then update; clone back after a few days & all is well. Most I lose is a few non-essential emails which doesn't bother me.
This time, I've left it too long to do that.
My clone is 2 weeks old, my POP email will only sync back one day. I have no real trace of what else may have changed in that period, but let's say with the best of intentions I'll miss something that I later discover I should have made a safety of.

I have Time Machine, up to date, but of course it's now syncing Sierra.
I also have Backblaze.
So ultimately I should have the resources to go back & find anything I may have missed.

My worry is if I use a clean install & migrate from Time Machine, some old authorisations on the drive will be lost. Some cannot be retrieved if they break because the servers that authorised them no longer exist. [Old pro audio plugins etc, still working but no longer supported.] These survive a clone, but I don't know if they'd survive a migrate. [I didn't migrate from my old 3,1 to this 5,1, I just moved the boot drive from the old to the new machine.]

I have all old installers in my Purchase History, so obtaining El Capitan is not an issue.

I'm on a Mac Pro 5,1 so dropping in a spare drive is no problem, if that would help.
I've never tested whether this machine will boot from USB, my older 3,1 never would - I shall test that & update the question.
Edit I've tested, it will successfully boot from an El Capitan installer USB.
I've also made a clone of the boot drive as it is right now, belt & braces.

I see my options as...
1. Restore from the clone & try to find anything I missed.
2. Nuke & pave, then migrate Time Machine

Is there a 3rd option?

Some method to restore to my current backup, but sitting on El Capitan rather than Sierra?

Late Edit
Well, option 2 just went away. The installer simply refuses to migrate from a newer OS to an older one, whether from a mounted or remote drive, or Time Machine.

Restore Mavericks from Time Machine may help future Googlers too.

Next time I'll remember to set my POP3 server to keep mails for a month before I ever upgrade again :/

Simplest solution seems to have been to re-clone back from my two-week-old El Capitan clone - the one I made right before the upgrade.
That successfully took me back to El Capitan - but from 2 weeks ago.

That left me with having to remember/pick through what had been changed in the past two weeks.

Carbon Copy Cloner makes a Safety Net folder containing older versions - though in this case it was more useful for finding newer versions of apps I'd updated in the meantime.
Mainly what it had dumped in there was "Sierra".

My most important stuff was my photography folder, so I simply copied that in its entirety from a safety copy [yesterday's Sierra clone].

A Parallels VM I knew I had been working on I did the same.

Because Mail had changed its library structure I lost two weeks of relatively unimportant emails - I can live with that.  If I remember anything hugely important I can boot to my Sierra clone & forward it to myself.
Time Machine proved to be completely useless in that respect. It claimed to be able to restore missing emails, but as everything in the past two weeks was in a newer format, it couldn't actually find anything.

So, job done. It actually took about 45 mins in all; once I'd figured out the structure & the potential sacrifice.

The moral of the story... sometimes two clones & two complete backups still isn't enough to get back all data.

I'm still open to alternative suggestions.
I'm in a position to simply repeat the process, as I still have copies of all the 'originals'.

You could look into using an installation of El Captain on a separate partition, which should give you access to your files and enable you to test what you can successfully migrate to that OS if you need to, if not (and providing your partition is large enough) you could likely just boot to (and use) El Captain from there.  I encourage you to do some additional reading before you jump in.

...be sure to back your data up first, I believe this would be essentially a non-destructive effort.


OS X El Capitan and older not available on App Store? So it turns out I can not install Sierra because I have a Mid2009 Macbook Pro. I wanted to update to El Capitan, but it turns out its no longer available on the app store?

Any ideas, how to get El Capitan?

I am downloading it now from the App Store and it seems to be working fine.  I did not go through the App Store, but used the following link:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886

After going to the link there is a section on how to get El Capitan from the App Store if you do not meet the system requirements for MacOS Sierra.  Click on that link (pasted below) and it will open the App Store to the El Capitan App download section.  Simply click on 'Get' and it will start downloading.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/os-x-el-capitan/id1147835434?mt=12

Here is the answer I got this morning from Apple support:

Here is the direct download link for El Capitan. Once you download it, you will need to click on the El Capitan Installer in your Applications folder for it to complete the installation -https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1845?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US


WiFi connectivity on iPod touch I have an iPod touch and its WiFi seems to have this "awkward" feature.

Lets say that A and B are two WiFi networks to which I have the passwords or are free.
When I move out of the range of A into the range of B, I seem to have to manually reconnect my WiFi to B.

Is there a way out of this continuous manual intervention?

I thought that WiFi connectivity is a one-time thing. Once I have logged into one network then I will again be automatically logged into it the next time I get into its range. But that doesn't seem to be happening on my iPod touch.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way around this issue?

"Forget" WiFi networks you don't want to automatically join.

Your iPod touch will automatically join any network that it has previously joined.  In order to prevent it from jumping on any of these network automatically, you must "forget" them.  Go to the wifi settings, tap the little blue arrow to the right of the network you want to prevent your device from joining, and then at the top, tap, "forget network". (exact wording?)

Hope this helps.


Is there a way to see if a macbook had a time machine backup done? I was wondering if there's any way to see if someone did a Time Machine backup on a macbook.

From what I'm gathering you want to see if anyone accessed your computer to make a backup of it. I found this thread which might answer your question for how to retrieve the time machine backup logs from your Mac. Run the following command in Terminal

log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

which will show the most recent backups made. There is one change needed since log files can show activity of another account, if your Mac doesn't have your log in trusted as an administrator, you need that permission to do the search. Just add sudo to the above command as shown below:

sudo log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

Time Machine preferences will show you all disks used to back up the machine, and date ranges for the backup. Unless someone was particularly malicious and deleted that backup location from the MacBook prefs after completing it, you should be able to determine the date of last backup to a given drive.


How to disconnect iPhone from WIFI without 'forgetting' it? My internet connection died whilst my router still continued to work (so I could still pick up wifi but had no internet connection). I wanted to tether my laptop to my phone so I could use 4G instead, but my phone was still connected to the shody WIFI.

I couldnt just turn off the WIFI on my phone as then my laptop would not be able to tether. I didnt want to 'forget' my WIFI connection as I do not know the password.

Is there anyway to simply disconnect from a WIFI signal?

Turn off auto-join.  I’ve searched for this several times and always thought it was a stupid design by apple but I finally worked it out.
In your iPhone settings, turn WiFi off then back on again. If it connects to your home WiFi automatically, click on the i (information) symbol next to the connection. Turn off the ‘auto-join’ option. Then you can turn WiFi off then on again to drop the connection without forgetting it.
As the original post I’m replying to is five years old now maybe I’m the only one dumb enough to still be having this problem. But maybe not.  :)

Turn off "Handoff" in "General" and turn off "Calls on other devices" and try, it worked for me.


Yosemite turns on "reduce transparency" at every login or wake after battery failure Recently, I was using my rMBP on battery power, with about 20%-30% remaining battery, according to the battery indicator. It suddenly shut off, and would not power on (not even showing the "battery low" screen) until I plugged in. After starting back up again, Yosemite now keeps enabling the "reduce transparency" option when I log in or lock the computer.

A SMC and NVRAM reset was done, and I also tried repaired the filesystem and file permissions. Both actions did not help.

are you using Duet? If so, that is the problem.


How to attach files to emails on iPhone running iOS 8? Here is my dilemma/situation:

I download a PDF (or any other type) file from somewhere (i.e Safari, Email, Google Drive, etc.) into an application that can open it (i.e. Documents by Readdle)
I make some adjustments/edit the file using the app (i.e Documents by Readdle).
I go to the Email app and open an email that I want to reply to. I type up my message.
The problem: Now I want to attach that file I just edited in the app (i.e. Documents by Readdle) into this email reply that I am typing up.

How do I do this?

Documents by Readdle lets you send any arbitrary file over email. Select the file in Documents, tap Actions, then Mail to. This composes a new email with the file attached.

Upgrade to iOS 9 and you can attach arbitrary files from Apple's mail client. Documents can export files to iCloud drive for easy attachment or you can just save the file to iCloud drive from the get go and skip the Documents unless it ads value to your workflow.

You can also use myMail app from the AppStore


Finder alternative with New File Coming from the Windows/Ubuntu world I enjoy a lot of macOS things, but one thing that drives me crazy is the lack of new file button in the finder. I know that you are supposed to save the file from the proper application but I hate it.

Is there a Finder plugin (or anything like an Alfred workflow) or an alternative explore manager that have this functionality?

I can offer you 3 options:

Option 1.

I think the most popular alternative to Finder is Path Finder and it has the "new file" feature.

Option 2.

If you search the App Store with "New file", you'll find quite a few Finder extensions that do this.

I'd maybe suggest:

New File Menu Free

You'd probably want to set the template to be Blank Document

New File Menu (~$2)

I believe the key difference is that the free one only allows one new file item to be added at a time and the paid one allows you to add multiple.

I haven't really tested many of these so I don't know if this is the best one or not.

Option 3.

I've made myself this applescript:

This could be triggered using Alfred or pretty much anything that supports applescripts.

A dialog window will open up asking for filename and when you press enter, new file will be put in the current Finder or Path Finder folder. It is restricted to only proceed if Path Finder or Finder is the active application.

This is the icon I use in the script (not that it's important or anything...)
If it was unclear, in the code the path to the icon is the root of the user folder: ~/new-file.icns and it is defined in the iconfile variable.

if application "Path Finder" is frontmost then

    tell application "Path Finder"
        set currentPath to the path of the target of the front finder window
    end tell

    makeNewFile( currentPath )

else if application "Finder" is frontmost then

    tell application "Finder"
        set currentPath to (folder of the front window) as alias
    end tell

    makeNewFile( currentPath )

end if

on makeNewFile( currentPath )

    set userPath to POSIX path of (path to home folder)
    set iconfile to POSIX file (userPath & "new-file.icns") as alias

    display dialog "For instance:
My File.txt, index.html, Markdown file.md" with title "Create a new file..." default answer "" with icon iconfile
    set fileName to text returned of result

    tell application "Finder"
        make file at currentPath with properties {name:fileName}
    end tell

end makeNewFile

The app "Forklift" does just what you're asking for, plus much, much more!

http://binarynights.com/forklift/index


Can you apply jailbreak tweaks to a non-jailbroken device using a file browser such as Phone Disk? Is it possible to use an iOS browser for Mac such as Phone Disk to apply a jailbreak tweak to a non-jailbroken iOS device?

It depends.

There are some hacks, such as a hidden panorama mode, which reportedly work without a jailbreak. The App to use on your Mac or PC to make the necessary changes to tweak your iPhone is called iBackupBot. I'll bet if you dig around those files, you may find more cool things.

Remember, a jailbreak consists of a firmware image which has been modified, presumably at the binary level. (Odds are that jail breakers don't have access to iOS's actual source code. So, they'd use tools like binary/hex editors.) Hacks that require binary changes can't be used without changing the code that the phone executes. Changing the binary code is the essence of a jailbreak.

However, sometimes, as in the case of the hidden panorama mode mentioned above, apps (or even parts of iOS, more below) will read "settings" or "preferences" from external files. In those cases, simply supplying another value by editing property-list files may cause the app to act differently.

Apps that tap into the Settings app to store their settings write those settings to the phone's persistent storage as property-lists, which are simply a special form of XML.

In the panorama mode example, the Camera app looks inside the relevant property-list file to check for a "flag" or a switch which will turn panorama mode on or off. There just isn't any user interface for turning the mode on or off. (For clarity's sake: The XML to turn panorama on is not in the same place that most settings are.)

Using the tool mentioned in the article, I've noticed that technically, which icons are shown on SpringBoard is also editable. There are tens of property-list files which configure the system, you just need to have access to them and know what values might be useful.

iOS uses a lot of "Property Lists" and XML, and knowing what does what can yield interesting results. Just bear in mind that most of the "useful" hacks are either available via Settings, or only via a binary jailbreak.

If the tweak is for a specific app that is in the Appstore. for example phantom for Snapchat. since you can get to the app folders of Snapchat could you manually extract each file to where it goes


Why does the Google Chrome icon appear like this in Applications? I am using OS X Lion 10.7.4.

The Google Chrome application seems to work fine and the icon appears normal the Dock and Launchpad. What does this error icon mean?

I have not seen this happen and it is quite uncommon, but usually it means that the app hasn't fully loaded the icon from the dmg file to the memory. It could've been because you moved the app over very quickly or you must not have followed the standard procedure, which is Download app → Drag icon to Applications folder.

Either way, it should fix itself on a reboot. If you don't want to do that, there's an answer on Super User to the same question:

  Drag the app to your desktop first, and wait for it to finish loading from the .dmg file. It will get its proper icon. Then drag it to the Applications folder, or on the alias in the .dmg, if one is supplied.

Either the App has been downloaded and not opened yet, or the App is not compatible with the current OS.


Can I pair an iPhone6 running 9.3.5 with an iMac using 10.9.5? I've been trying desperately to pair my iPhone 6 which is running iOS 9.3.5 with my 27 inch iMac (late 2009) running 10.9.5 with no success. I have tried turning Bluetooth on and off on both devices, and was able to get the pairing code to show up each time, however when I click on the computer name the iPhone message says:

"Connection Unsuccessful- Make sure the computer is turned on and in range".

or it says:

"Connection Unsuccessful- "Username iMac" is not supported"

It should be noted that on the computer the iPhone is showing up in the Bluetooth drop-down menu from the top right. Also, it shows up in the Bluetooth preferences, but goes back and forth from being paired, and not connected.

It is not supported to pair an iPhone and a Mac via Bluetooth and use the either of one as a Bluetooth speaker/receiver. Both are in simple terms in the wrong device class

But you could use a third party tool to make your Mac an Airplay receiver. The one solution I found was AirServer. Start this tool on your Mac and it should show up on your iPhone as an Airplay destination.

As stated in this article, many older Apple machines, and specifically the hardware specified in the question, have no Bluetooth 4 support.

The information on that site provides links not only to iMacs, but most Apple machines.


How do I clear the Diagnostics & Usage data from my iPhone? Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage > Diagnostic & Usage Data

I've elected not to send this data to Apple, so is there a way to clear or delete it?

They are usually deleted when you do a sync.

Open iFile. Go to var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and delete all files leaving the 3 folders undeleted. Done.


"Could not activate cellular data network" - cellular data not working on iPhone I am getting an iOS system error:

  Could not activate cellular data network

  Turn on cellular data or use Wi-Fi to access data.

while I'm not connected to Wi-Fi and I'm trying to use any apps that need a data connection. Cellular data is turned on, and I'm not in airplane mode or anything. LTE was working just fine yesterday.

I have tried Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings with no success.

In case this is relevant, details from General > About:

iPhone 6 (Verizon; MG642LL/a)
Carrier: Verizon 25.1 (I'm subscribed with PagePlus MVNO on Verizon's network)
iOS: v10.0.2
Modem Firmware: 5.24.00

Is this likely a problem with my phone, or with PagePlus? How can I resolve it? Thanks!

ETA: Go to ivzwentp.tracfone.com and install the configuration profile. This fixed the problem for me. (That's what the text I got last week instructed me to do. I was able to find a copy of that text online, at a different site.)

Same problem here, also on PagePlus. I've tried to chat with PagePlus customer service but have been unable to get through. I did get a weird text message last week about iPhone data issues on PagePlus - maybe that was related? I thought it was spam so I deleted it...

I had the same problem in December and that is what Tracfone told me to do as well. It works. I will say I seem to have this issue every time I add data to my phone.


Always show markup toolbar in Preview As the title says: is there a way to permanently show the markup toolbar in Preview?

(working on OSX 10.10.1 Yosemite)

In addition to the already mentioned Shortcut ⇧+⌘+A Preview in El Capitan (and Yosemite I guess) features a toolbar icon that allows to open the markup toolbar with a single click instead of clicking through the View menu:

To make the Toolbar visible, go to View > Show Toolbar in the menu. (Thanks to Rachel for this aditional hint!)

I found out! Just press cmd+ many times (zoom in), then press cmd- as often and it should appear again. I found this out by accident!

Hope this helps


What are some great OS X Dropbox uses? There are a number of ways I use my Dropbox with OS X apps, or iOS devices.

Some of them include:

Recipe tracking: I keep a 'recipes' folder inside Together's dropbox-synced-library, so from my Mac I can drag recipe web pages to the folder keeping them as PDF's, and view them on my iPad while I cook. It also works with text-recipes I've created inside Together.
iCal sync: I have The Hit List synced with iCal and keep its library to Dropbox, so iCal's library is being synced to all computers, along with all other apps relying on it (Alarms app)
PDF to iBooks: The easiest way to send a PDF to your iBooks..

I can't wait to read about yours clever/unique/nifty ways you're using Dropbox on your Mac / iOS devices.

Rules

One answer per post
Please search before answering. Duplicate answers will be deleted.
Please keep the answers relative to OSX/iOS. No general Dropbox uses!
It would be nice if you provide a bold title to your answer. That way it would be easier to parse/search them.

1Password sync

Syncing 1Password's stored keychain across my Macs. I use 1Password for managing passwords and, more importantly, auto-generating random passwords so that I never use the same password twice. Dropbox makes this much easier.

1Password's secure keychain file lives on my Dropbox, and each time a password is added or updated it's automatically sync'd across all my computers.

Sound Effects Library

I use part of my Dropbox space for my (not very big) SFX library. It's great because I can send someone a link with a sound effect and they can access it on Dropbox.


Toshiba 2TB External Drive Stopped Being Recognised After a lot of searching on the internet I have been unable to find a solution to my problem. There are many people having similar problems, but no solution seems to work for me.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro and I have a Toshiba 2TB External drive which I have used for the past 5 or 6 months to keep copies of my iPhoto Library and my Time Machine backups on. Everything has been fine up until yesterday. I plugged the drive into the USB slot to find it no longer appeared on the desktop. I have tried everything I can think of to get this to work. Here is a rundown of the situation:-

I have tried both USB ports on the Macbook.
The drive doesn't appear in Disk Utility or System Profiler.
I have bought a new USB cable.
The drive has it's own power supply and lights up and makes regular noises when on.
I have connected it to a PC and managed to access the files using HFSExplorer, which leads me to believe the HDD is okay.
I can browse both partitions and extract files to my PC using HFSExplorer.
The drive shows up in Disk Manager on Windows and shows the partitions.
I have another external drive, my old MacBook HDD in a caddy, which works perfectly, so I don't think its the USB ports either.

This is what I get in Terminal:-

-laeO@ /Volumes
total 24
drwxrwxrwt@  4 root           admin  hidden  136 17 Oct 13:36 .
    com.apple.FinderInfo      32
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_inherit
drwxr-xr-x  32 root           wheel  -      1156 17 Oct 12:18 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 rebeccaholmes  admin  -      6148  7 Dec  2013 .DS_Store
    com.apple.FinderInfo      32
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root           admin  -         1 17 Oct 12:54 Macintosh HD -> /

It really is bizarre. I am left thinking my only solution is to go through the arduous process of copying all the files to my windows PC and reformatting the HDD :(

Does anyone have a better solution to this problem?

Edit - Since posting I have also tried resetting the MacBook PRAM and SMC. Neither has made any difference.

Edit - Using DiskUtiliy after entering "defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1" command lists no external drive.

   "diskutil info disk1s2" returns the message "cannot find disk"

Please quit Disk Utility if it is open and launch Terminal in the folder Applications/Utilities/ with your external drive connected
Enter the following command at the Terminal prompt:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Press Enter
Quit Terminal
Start Disk Utility and enable 'Show every Partition' in the Debug menu
After a few seconds all partitions should be visible
Mount the partition 'NameOfTheMainPartitionExternalHD' if it is present and greyed out with the blue button Mount. The partition should now be visible on your desktop.

In the above example the external drive is an SD card and the usually visible partition of the external drive is gDisk. Don't touch disk1s1 (Lion) or EFI (Mavericks)
Please check the format of the partition

If the format is 'Mac OS Extended' you might check the drive for inconsistencies.

Connect the drive to Windows machine and go to that folder in the Windows explorer and then right click in empty space and then select open command window here.

Then run the following commands

del /s /q /f /a .DS_STORE
del /s /q /f /a ._.*

Run this command only and only if you are sure that you don't have any important files starting with "._" I had such files in the skype chat history and unfortunately I have lost those.

del /s /q /f /a ._*

@gmellor1978

Thank you so much for the answer as you have explained I have done the same things and now I recovered the hard-drive without formatting.


Some keyboard keys are not working on login to Yosemite The problem is that every time I start my MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011, some of the (native) keyboard keys stop working. However, if I click a restart button - it is all fine.

It is definitely not a hardware issue and this did not happen on Mavericks ever.

On the Yosemite login screen, you should see the current Input Method (keyboard) icon in the upper right corner.

If you click on the current input method, a drop-down menu will let you choose which alternate keyboard you can use. That should let you enter it in.

If your keyboard isn't listed, the dropdown menu also has an exhaustive list of other input methods, so you can select one that should let it work.

Note: I haven't tried to change my password to use an alternate keyboard just to see if it works. Maybe for 1000+ rep... ;)

Also, it took about 5 seconds for the input method menu to drop down, so just keep at it until it drops.

I had this: Numlock had been toggled on.


Two-Step Authentication, iPhone Mail.app, and SMTP I have setup Two Step Verification for my Google account and all is well getting into email from a browser, or from the Safari browser on my phone.

However, I cannot get Mail.app to work. It just tells me the password is wrong. I am using an application specific password generated from the account access page in Google, tried two, still no go.

How can I get the Mail.app to actually work with this?

Open up the keychain application and locate the password that it has stored for your gmail account.  Now delete it.

Then retry the process you have, ensure you put in your application specific password, and then ensure you press the checkbox that says to save password to keychain.

Further instructions and Mail.app specific screenshots here.

I believe that mail.app is using an older stored email and this is preventing access.  I am assuming of course that mail.app was working perfectly for you before you started using two step authentication.

Two step verification didn't worked for me, I tried both Exchange, and Gmail. The following solves my problem

1) The display captcha https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

2) Then using the Mail -> Gmail worked (Exchange still didn't worked).

PS: You always need to use your 16 digit generated password in the above steps.


Change tabstop in TextEdit.app How does one change the tabstop in TextEdit.app for Snow Leopard?

The current tabstop is 8 spaces. I would like to change this to 4 spaces.
Is there any way to achieve this?

For plaintext tabs, you don't need to replace the entire TextEdit app to change it. I looked at the source code and it provides the simpler answer: Open the Terminal and type

defaults write com.apple.TextEdit "TabWidth" '4'

Where '4' is the number of spaces a tab should be.

TextEdit bases its tabs on distances, not number of characters.

If I set the text to 30pt, the tabs are four spaces. At 14pt, they are eight spaces.

Consequently, there is no set "number of spaces" that could ever be modified.

One solution is to:

change your font preferences for RTF files to match my TXT preferences.
temporarily convert your TXT files to RTF while editing (cmd-shift-T).

(do some editing)

convert back to TXT when you quit (cmd-shift-T).

The RTF tabs default to 4 spaces for me -- it depends on the font and size.


What application can open the .waveform file that the Voice Memos app creates? I plugged an iPhone into my Ubuntu desktop and browsed the available files. In the Recordings directory I could see my voice memos, including a .waveform file, which I understand contains the visual plot of the audio. What application can open this file?

the .waveform file looks to be a vector file to display the audio waveform on a grid.
- jdio -


Changing Creation Date of a file Could you please let me know how I can change the creation date of a file in Lion.  I realise there is the touch-t command but that does not work in Lion.  A couple of people have mentioned another way, but I think they've written the solution in "coder" language rather than layman language - would someone be able to answer it in a way a layman can execute?

Many thanks for your help.

touch -t normally only changes the modification and access times. It only changes the creation time if the target time is before the original creation time.

touch -t 199912312359 file.txt
touch -t $(date -jf %FT%T 1999-12-31T23:59:59 +%Y%m%d%H%M%S) file.txt

SetFile -d always changes the creation time.

SetFile -d '12/31/1999 23:59:59' file.txt
SetFile -d "$(GetFileInfo -m test.txt)" file.txt

SetFile is part of the command line tools package which can be downloaded from developer.apple.com/downloads or from Xcode's preferences.

The easiest way I found was to create a new folder, copy all the sub-folders of the greyed out folder into the new folder, and voila, the new folder is not greyed out.  You can even do this in the finder.


How can I quickly navigate through man pages in the Terminal Is there any way to quickly scroll through text-heavy output in Terminal such as man pages ? Using the up and down arrows only move the screen one line at a time; is there any way to scroll faster?

If I understood you correctly, you want to skim through manual pages more efficiently.

By default, man uses less as its pager. In less, you can use:

Space or f or Control ⌃-f to advance one page
d or Control ⌃-d to advance half a page
b or Control ⌃-b to go back one page
u or Control ⌃-u to go back half a page

You can get the full list of less keyboard commands in its manual page. If you don't like the default pager, you can set MANPAGER or PAGER environment variables to specify a different program for controlling the pagination of man pages that are longer than one screen.


moving mail folders to gmail labels - sublabels and hierarchy is lost I use Mail.app and iOS Mail to access 3 different gmail accounts.  Currently I have all of my mail in folders "on my mac", but I'd like to be able to access them from my mobile devices (iphone, ipad) or when logging onto email from another computer (using the webapp).  When I drag and drop folders into my gmail accounts (as per this answer), the nesting/sublabels/heirarchy is lost.  How can I migrate preserving the proper structure?

My Folders looks something like:

Group/
|- SubGroup1/
|- SubGroup2/
   |- SubSubGroup/
   |- <some messages>
|- <some messages>

and the new gmail labels look like:

Group (messages)
Group/SubGroup1
Group/SubGroup2
Group/SubGroup2/SubSubGroup
Group/SubGroup2/SubSubGroup (messages)

The key is that this process doesn't seem to make the top-level folders appropriately.

1) In gmail settings add a label with the missing top level.  For example, for my example above, If I create a label called Group then instantly the sub-labels get properly moved to it automatically.

i.e.

Group (messages)
Group
|- SubGroup1
|- SubGroup2
   |- SubSubGroup
   |- SubSubGroup (messages)

2) Manually move the (messages) emails to the new label (i.e. move everything in Group (messages) to Group and from SubSubGroup (messages) to SubSubGroup ).  Repeat this for the missing labels further in the tree

You'll then be left with the appropriate

Group
|- SubGroup1
|- SubGroup2
   |- SubSubGroup


Is there a Java IDE for iPad which can compile and run Java locally? I'm about to have a coding session with some buddies. Problem is, one doesn't have a laptop. He's pretty new to programming so I was going to set him up something either on a rickety laptop or my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard / mouse.

Is there any app that would give me these capabilities:

Java IDE
compile java locally
run java locally

There are web-based IDEs that support Java like IDE One and CodeBox that should work from an iPad. Obviously there are limitations with both but they might suffice.

This is my immediate thought, because I believe Apple have rules against people creating apps that include their own runtime. Which I'd assume you'd require if you wanted to compile Java code directly on an iOS device.

use PICO COMPILER APP on AppStore, works well, but you cant use SWING components as far as i am aware


How to Auto-Hide the address bar in Google Chrome? How can I hide the address bar in Google Chrome?  I found this article but I am unable to find a solution for macOS.  Ideally, I would like all toolbars to disappear similar to how they do in QuickTime. see images:

Is there such a solution available?

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're asking, but I think you mean in full screen mode judging by the tags.

Simply uncheck View > Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen (⇧⌘F):

If you want a windowed Chrome app with no menus the steps are as follows:

navigate to

chrome://flags

Enable the following two options:

"The new bookmark app system"
"Allow hosted apps to be opened in windows"

Restart Chrome to enable the options. Then navigate to the page you want to turn into an "app".

In the tools menu (three dots) click More Tools > Add to Applications

Finally, navigate to

chrome://apps

and right click on the icon for the newly added Application. Enable the "Open as window" option.


Bluetooth keyboard not working after update to Windows 10 I updated my (native) bootcamp instance to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1, but now the apple bluetooth keyboard doesn't seem to work anymore. The bluetooth screen says 'driver error' on the device.

I've tried:

Ran Apple Software Update and updated boot camp
Uninstalling the device
Unpairing + pairing again

Can someone provide guidance to get this to work?

The new Keyboard driver on Bootcamp broke the connection for my keyboard under Windows 10 and it might break yours too.

So after using the solution from Zidad for the last couple of months (thank you) I decided to find a better solution to be able to use the Fn button and all the volume and multimedia functions of the Apple keyboard, here is what you need to do:

You need the Apple Keyboard driver that comes in the Bootcamp 5, you can either download the full pack from Apple (version 5.1.5621 works), or download only the keyboard driver from my dropbox (64bit windows only):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jexvjcg2zlmjg3e/AppleKeyboardInstaller64.exe?dl=1

   •If you downloaded the file above proceed to step 4.

Unzip the BootCamp 5 pack
Navigate to the unzipped folder and go to BootCamp/Drivers/Apple
Run AppleKeyboardInstaller64.exe
It will tell you that it's installed, but it won't work yet.
Open Device Manager and go to 'Human Interface Devices', right click Apple Keyboard and select "Update Driver Software"
Click 'Browse my computer for driver software', then 'Let me pick a list of device drivers on my computer'
Select the Apple Keyboard version 5 that you just installed (NOT the newest version 6).

Profit!

I've used SharpKeys to map the eject key to del. works fine.. Often, after windows update runs apple's wireless keyboard and mouse no longer work.

One one occasion running Apple's software update showed and update to the bluetooth driver and installing and rebooting worked. That option does not always show up.

I mostly work on a mac these days.. With over 500 updates applied in 2 days, six reboots, I'd like to know if anyone has found an auto-fix-apple-keyboard-again script.


Looking for a black/white only terminal emulator on Mac My original question on Stack Overflow can be found here. Basically, I ssh into my linux work station from my Mac and I would like to test my program (that runs on the linux machine) if color output is not supported on my terminal emulator. Currently I am using Terminal.app and I've tried setting Preferences > Settings > Advanced > Declare terminal as different terminal types but all of them still seem to print colors.

Does anyone know a black/white only terminal emulator for Mac? Is there a way to completely turn off colors on a terminal?

I use iTerm, which allows you to set styles, including black and white.

Here's a black and white terminal for Terminal.app (download linked file and remove txt).
This maps all the colours in Terminal to be black and white, therefore disabling colour.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>ANSIBlueColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
    ABADgALSEBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3Rf
    EA9OU0tleWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSFBdZGdpa3B7hIyPmKqt
    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightBlackColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
    ABADgALSEBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3Rf
    EA9OU0tleWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSFBdZGdpa3B7hIyPmKqt
    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightBlueColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
    ABADgALSEBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3Rf
    EA9OU0tleWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSFBdZGdpa3B7hIyPmKqt
    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightCyanColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
    ABADgALSEBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3Rf
    EA9OU0tleWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSFBdZGdpa3B7hIyPmKqt
    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightGreenColor</key>
    <data>
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    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightMagentaColor</key>
    <data>
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    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightRedColor</key>
    <data>
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightWhiteColor</key>
    <data>
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    </data>
    <key>ANSIBrightYellowColor</key>
    <data>
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSICyanColor</key>
    <data>
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIGreenColor</key>
    <data>
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    ABADgALSEBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3Rf
    EA9OU0tleWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSFBdZGdpa3B7hIyPmKqt
    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIMagentaColor</key>
    <data>
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    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIRedColor</key>
    <data>
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIWhiteColor</key>
    <data>
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    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OV05TV2hpdGVcTlNDb2xvclNwYWNlViRjbGFzc0Iw
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ANSIYellowColor</key>
    <data>
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    sgAAAAAAAAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC0
    </data>
    <key>ProfileCurrentVersion</key>
    <real>2.04</real>
    <key>SelectionColor</key>
    <data>
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    dF8QD05TS2V5ZWRBcmNoaXZlctEXGFRyb290gAEIERojLTI3O0FITltiaWttcn2GjpGa
    rK+0AAAAAAAAAQEAAAAAAAAAGQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALY=
    </data>
    <key>name</key>
    <string>Black &amp; White</string>
    <key>type</key>
    <string>Window Settings</string>
</dict>
</plist>