Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and resolved

It's like a tech question and a bad sitcom plot in one!

Navelgazer — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:51:47 -0800

How do I either recover my Mac OS X password or else get around needing it? Several years ago, my then-girlfriend's father bought a family pack of OS_X Leopard, and gave one of them to me. A year later, she and I were broken up. About six months after that, my computer crashed, and the genius bar had to replace the hard drive and reinstall everything. This means that the update password was lost from memory, and I never knew it and can't easily find out what it might have been (ex's dad installed Leopard himself).

So now I've gone a year without updating and it's starting to drive me crazy. Not only can I not update OS_X, but I can't install any number of things I'd like to either.

Does anyone know how I can either recover what this password might have been, or work around it so that I don't need a password to update?

Much Thanks, and Happy Christmas/Hannuka/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/Holidays to you.

Help me bring back my wifi!

COBRA! — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:15:02 -0800

I'm having wifi troubles with my MacBook, and the lack of connectivity for the weekend gave me the shakes. Help me before the withdrawal gets worse! The gist: WPA2 Personal network, running on a Netgear router. Been up for a while, played nice with my MacBook (running Snow Leopard) and my wife's XP laptop. Over the weekend, the router rebooted during the setup of a new Roku, and my MacBook abruptly dropped the network; since then, I haven't been able to reconnect, just getting the standard "There was an error trying to join the network [SSID]. Please try again later."

My wife's XP machine still connects with no trouble.

As nearly as I can tell, it seems like my laptop sees the network, but can't recognize it as WPA2 Personal; when I try to connect, the SSID shows up in my saved networks as WPA2 Enterprise. Editing one of the Enterprise instances to Personal with the correct login information doesn't help, nor does manually adding a new Personal instance.

Other things I have tried:

- rebooting the router (multiple times)
- deleting the keychain storing network passwords
- deleting the plist storing network prefs
- deleting and re-adding the entire Airport connection in my network prefs
- reinstalling and updating Snow Leopard (update done with the MacBook connected by ethernet)

Any thoughts/suggestions/ideas?

Formatting Differences in MS Word on Windows vs Mac

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:35:47 -0800

How consistent is MS Office between Windows and OSX? Will using MS Office on my Mac solve this formatting problem I'm having? I'm have a MacBook Pro running Leopard,and I've been using Open Office to write my papers. It's great. I love Open Office (and love that it's free). When I need to turn something in, I just save it in PDF format, e-mail it to myself, then go to a computer lab, check my e-mail, and print off the PDF document. Perfect.

The problem is that I have a professor who needs some documents turned in via e-mail, and they use MS Word. I can save an Open Office document as a Word file (.doc or .docx), and for plain text formatting that's fine, but as soon as an outline or numbered list is created, things look crazy. It seems fine when I save it in Open Office, and it's fine when I then open that document using Open Office, but if the document is opened with MS Word, the formatting is horrible.

I can buy the MS Office suite for Mac at school using my student discount (it's around $35 I think). If I install that, and use Word to create these documents, will they appear the same when my professor opens them using Word, on her Windows computer?

If there will still be differences then I'll skip the $35 and just keep going to the computer lab to tweak things.

If I save a document in MS Word on a Mac and send it to a person using MS Word on a PC, are there formatting differences?

Help with a Mac whose apps all go non-responsive?

mark7570 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:50:54 -0800

Once a week or so, all the applications running on my Mac go into "not responding" mode, one after another. The only way I can recover is to turn off the Mac using the power button. Any ideas? It always happens the same way - a usually well-behaved app, say Mail, stops responding - just shows a spinning beach ball. I force quit, but the app doesn't disappear. The beach ball keeps spinning. Then I switch to another app and it starts spinning. And so on. At that point, here's a screenshot showing what I see when I try to force quit.

This is on a MacPro (the big desktop tower), just a few months old, running 10.5.8. As you can see from the screenshot, there aren't any strange apps being run.

Anyone seen this before, or have suggestions for how to prevent this from happening? It's a really bummer when it occurs.

Hard drive back from the dead. Should I trust it?

KirkJobSluder — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:42:14 -0800

A week ago as part of a Snow Leopard install, I wanted to wipe and resize my boot camp partition. Disk Utility wasn't able to fix the file system, and recommended a reinstall from backup. A restore from backup later, and Disk Utility was still showing problems. Shortly after that, the disk stopped showing up in Disk Utility at all. Fast forward a week, I'm running off of a firewire spare, and the disk reappears again. I repartition the hard drive, double-check with Disk Utility and a SMART utility, and the thing seems to test clean and empty. So what do I do from here? The other bit of data is that I started a restore, and at 5%, it seemed like it wanted an extra hour to do it. Perhaps I'm a bit stubborn, but are there other diagnostics I can run that might point to the nature of the problem? Or should I resign myself dismantling my iMac and just replacing it?

I just want my stupid games to be silent

NoraReed — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:00:55 -0800

OSXFilter: Is there a way to mute individual programs in OS X? Vista allows you to adjust the volume of specific programs in its volume control. I switched to Mac but that's one of the features from Vista that I really miss. (If it matters, I'm using Leopard.) I want to listen to my music, not my games/browser, dang it!

[Mark]down is the new up

natalinha — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:40:17 -0800

What happened to HumaneText.service? I have been searching about Markdown or Textile markup in OS X, and every couple of articles that come up mention this HumaneText.service, which is supposed to be cool and great. The site of the project seems to have been abandoned for at least a couple of months, and there does not seem to be anyone mentioning the service since 2006 or so. I really wanted to try it, but it just seems to have vanished into thin air.

Options for a small & cheap Mac laptop?

attercoppe — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:01:07 -0800

What are my options for a cheap, small Mac laptop? I'm on a tight budget, but would love to get a laptop. I've been looking at netbooks because I love the light weight and small size. However, I may be about to get a job at my school, which basically is an Apple campus, so now I'm considering a Mac instead. I'd still like to find something cheap, small and light, and with some serious battery life. Of course one option is to buy a used or refurbed Mac (maybe an Air?). Could I also buy a netbook and install OS X? Or install some *nix - how compatible (not look and feel but interoperability) would this be?

P.S. I could probably do some research and get some good info, but I thought I'd see what ya'll can tell me first. I've read other questions here, and they seem to be either out of date or about desktops (or both).

How do I rescue files from an internal drive when OS X won't boot?

wheat — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:26:26 -0800

OS X won't boot. Time Machine stopped working at noon. How can I nab some files before I reinstall Leopard? Due, I think, to my son playing with the power strip one too many times, my iMac will not boot. I can boot from the Leopard system disc, and I've run Disk Utility. It repaired problems, but it still won't boot.

I run Time Machine, so I'm willing to restore from that and/or reinstall Leopard. But I got a lot done today and would like to copy some PDFs I crated today. The last Time Machine backup was at noon. But I worked until five. I don't know why Time Machine stopped backing up.

When I use the "burn" option in Disk Utility, I can see the files I created, including the ones that are not in the most recent Time Machine backup. Is there a way to get them? This is my only Mac, so target disk mode isn't an option. What should I try?

Trying to print Word documents with a specific preset from the Finder. Impossible?

bigmusic — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:22:04 -0800

OS X (10.5) Printing difficulties: Trying to print Word documents with a specific preset from the Finder. Impossible? I hate clicking documents open to print and then having to close them. I have to print up about 20 word documents in a folder multiple times every week - those documents should be printed with a 4x4 layout - single sided. (n-up 4 in CUPs speak) - I'm switching from Windows and in windows I had two printers installed (actually the same printer) with different layout options, so all I had to do was make sure the default printer was the one with right layout options. However, on OS X presets seem to be ignored if you print from the finder [Finder |File |Print], it goes with the "Standard" preset no matter how I try it, from the automator, the terminal, applescript. If I open it directly in Word, the correct preset always shows up as the default preset.

Things I've tried:
I've located the PPD file and didn't see an option to set up the N-Up 4x4 as an option anywhere.

I've option clicked the print button with the correct preset.

I've tried switching the printer preset in the terminal.

I've tried using the automator, with the supplied word 2008 actions.

I've looked at the cups documentation, and see that there is an option for using the 4x4, I'm just not sure how I would go about setting that option for a specific printer instance, or how I would print to to that specific printer instance - any clues?

Snow Leopard upgrade

Science! — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:01:05 -0800

Does the $29.99 upgrade version of Apple's OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard come with iLife and iWork 09 like the box set, or will it update older versions of iLife and iWork to the 09 version? I own a macbook running 10.5 and I want to buy the $29.99 update, but I'd really like to also update iLife and iWork. I have the iLife apps that came with my macbook, and I bought iWork 08. Will the upgrade version of Snow Leopard update these apps or do I have to spring for the box set?

A link to an article or store site detailing this would be appreciated.

Sleep that's too deep

umbú — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:50:00 -0800

Why can't my Macbook Pro wake from a coma? I have a Macbook Pro 2.4 ghz pre-unibody 17” with 4 gb of RAM running Leopard (10.5.2 I think? 10.5.something). I’m having trouble getting my computer to start up from a sleep-like mode, and I’m not sure what has caused the problem, so here are the possible factors:

1. Since I bought the computer a year and a month ago, the graphics card had been malfunctioning intermittently. Sometimes when I would scroll, the screen would stutter, leaving a trail of whatever I was scrolling. Other times, when I played a video, squares of video would flicker, missing.

So I sent it in (I have Applecare, luckily), and 5 days later, they had replaced both the logic board, and some connector for the battery, which I hadn’t asked them to do. Ever since, there have been moments that the computer doesn’t recognize that there is a battery in it, which is odd, because even when the little battery with an x icon was present, the computer didn’t immediately shut down when I unplugged the AC adaptor.

2. A was doing a video editing project recently that took up way more hard disk space than I expected. There was one point when I received the warning “Your startup disk is almost full.” When I got this warning, I immediately shut down, booted up again, and transferred 30 gb to an external hard drive.

3. I started to have trouble waking the computer from sleep, but I could always hard boot by shutting the computer down holding the power key for a few seconds, and then rebooting. I wondered whether something was wrong with the sleepimage, so I turned off safesleep (hibernation) mode through the console using the instructions in this link.

4. That fix worked for a couple of weeks. Then, the other day, I took my computer out of my bag, and to my horror, it had been turned on with the lid closed for what I assume was an hour or two. Either it never went to sleep, even though I closed the lid, or it spontaneously woke up with the lid closed in my bag. The fan was going full throttle, and the screen was still on. I turned the computer off, let it cool down, and then later when I started it up again, it seemed fine.

5. Then, by accident, with safesleep still disabled, I let the battery on the computer completely drain. After that, even though I recharged the battery completely, when I try to boot up, I hear the beginnings of the process (the optical drive engaging, for one) and the sleep light goes on, but the screen never does anything. I’ve tried to use a flashlight on the screen to see if there was any activity, but as far as I can tell, nothing is happening. Target disk mode, safe boot, external hard drive boot, zapping the pram don’t change anything.

6. Another thing that I feel I should mention is the fact that I’ve been using the Freedom freeware program, which I assume affects the network preferences temporarily to block all internet connections while you’re using it. I include this because, based on what I’ve read on-line, a couple possible causes of this problem could be this one—that waking from sleep gets messed up if a certain system program isn’t present—or this one, in which somehow ethernet preferences being messed up causes the problem.

What do those of you who know about these things think? What should I do?

Rsync to Merge Disk Images?

kristi — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:18:10 -0800

Should I use rsync (instead of rsnapshot) to pare down Mac disk image backups? I've used SuperDuper to make several disk image backups of a boot drive.

Let's say they're called backup-090107.dmg, backup-090114.dmg, backup-090121.dmg, and so on.

I want to merge all these into a single backup directory, RETAINING incremental backups. So if file-a.txt changed on Jan 16 2009 (between backup-090114 and backup-0090121), I'd end up with a copy of how it was on 090114 and also a copy of how it was on 090121.

I tried rdiff-backup but gave up on it due to insane slowness. (It takes SuperDuper 5-6 hours to back up 60-70 GB over USB2; rdiff-backup was taking about 16 hours to back up just the 7GB applications directory. Yikes.)

I've started looking at rsnapshot, but I don't think that's what I want for this initial merge ... although it might be what I want for any subsequent backups, once I've got the disk images merged.

So:

* am I correct in thinking that rsync is best for merging these dmgs?

* would the following commands do what I want to do - so I end up with a single copy of any file that hasn't changed, plus incremental backups of each file that HAS changed?

rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded --xattrs --exclude=/this/ --exclude=/that/ \
/Volumes/backup-090107 /Volumes/BackupDrive/big-old-merge-directory/backup-090107/

rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded --xattrs --exclude=/this/ --exclude=/that/ \
/Volumes/backup-090114 /Volumes/BackupDrive/big-old-merge-directory/backup-090114/

* should I switch to rsnapshot after merging, or continue using rsync? If I continue with rsync, would I use something like

rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded --xattrs --exclude=/this/ --exclude=/that/ \
/MyHardDrive /Volumes/BackupDrive/big-old-merge-directory/backup-todaysdate/

Extra bonus points for lists of directories you like to exclude, or pointers to pages that list appropriate OS X (10.4) directories to exclude. (I DO want to back up even big directories; I don't need to back up the unnecessary or dangerous - for example, I know most folks exclude .Spotlight-V100.)

Once I've merged the backups (and verified them, of course), I'll be deleting the disk images to free up space for future backups. (And I'm doing full, bootable backups to a different drive; this is just my attempt to get good incremental backups.)

Many, many thanks!

Choose Details in OS X

reenum — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:43:43 -0800

Mac OSX Filter: How can I change the details displayed for files in a directory while in list view? This may be a really easy question, but Google has failed me thus far.

When I used XP and viewed directories as lists, I could go to View and then click on 'Choose Details' to pick which file info I wanted displayed.

I can't seem to figure out how to do this on Mac OSX.

The reason I want to do this is because I listen to a lot of podcasts, and the title in the file info is often more instructive than the filename.

Is there any way to 'Choose Details' on Mac OSX?

How do I stop my external hard drives from changing disk IDs when I reboot on OS X?

triolus — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:08:06 -0800

How do I stop my external hard drives from changing disk IDs when I reboot on OS X? I have a simple rsync script that I just made for my OS X machine to backup data on my two main drives to two drives in an external enclosure. I wanted the script to mount and unmount the drives so that they wouldn't clutter my desktop and to keep them "hidden".

The problem is that the disk ID under /dev changes everytime I reboot. Sometimes the drive mounted at /Volumes/backup1 will be at /dev/disk3s3 and sometimes it will be at /dev/disk4s3. Other times it will be at /dev/disk2s3.

Is there anyway to keep the disk ID static, or to just mount by the directory name? I'm running 10.5.8, with the latest updates. My script uses the `diskutil`command to mount and unmount the drives. Oh, and AFAIK, Time Machine only works with one drive as a backup.

Begone foul 10 bar

cellphone — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:06:15 -0800

What the hell is this? It's floating above all my windows, cannot be clicked, and is not any application in my dock or menu bar. Have you seen this before? Extended information. MBP, OSX 10.5. Boxers.

Pointless but beautiful classic mac game...?

progosk — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:28:51 -0800

Help me remember the name of the classic, meditative OSX game, where you float from level to level of black space through a swirl of coloured shapes to soothing gamelan-ish sounds, trying to catch stars in order to reach the next level? Was it something like "virtuality"? How can I have forgotten? (Oh, and: Does it exist for the iphone?)
Thx muchly.

Can I run a build of Firefox in X11 on OS X?

mikee — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:16:03 -0800

Can I run a build of Firefox in X11 on OS X (Leopard) in a window manager like BlackBox or WindowMaker? I want to stay fullscreen in X11 for productivity purposes. Recently I toyed with X11 and .xinitrc on my Mac running Leopard. Replaced the default quartz window manager system in my xinitrc for X11 with BlackBox for now and have been running several xterm in workspaces fullscreen which is what I was originally after (running a terminal fullscreen, no distractions for coding).

Now I want to take it to the next step and get all my web development tools in Firefox with me so I can preview and tweak stuff...but at the same time it'd be nice to not have to Command+Option+A back into Leopard and instead just toggle to workspace 4 or something to see my changes in Firefox.

Possible? I know this might be silly, but it's more of an attempt to avoid distractions. Kinda like Front Row for media but for my coding :P

Thanks in advance.

Morae for OS X?

needled — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:10:34 -0800

Is there an equivalent to Techsmith's Morae for OS X? I will consider running Morae on a Mac through Parallels or some such as a last resort, but was wondering if there was something similar that was OS X-native.

Just screen capture won't do, I want screen capture + audio recording + keyboard and mouse activity logging.

I need to transcribe some stuff, get some audio from A to B

booknerd — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:00:25 -0800

My library is doing oral histories with a Canon HD video camera, then migrating them into iMovie to eventually edit and burn to DVDs to store. I've been tasked with the tech-side of this, a job I'm woefully unqualified for. I need help converting iMovie files into some sort of audio format to transcribe them! Right now, the priority is to transcribe the audio from the iMovie files to print out and bind into books. I found this free software that looks perfect, and bought a USB transcribing foot pedal. Since I'm doing this on a new MacBook, I downloaded the OSX version of the software, although I suppose if I have to I can run the Windows version in Parallels. The audio formats I can use are wav, mp3, aiff and dct files. What's the best way to do this? I can export from iMovie to a 3gp Quicktime video, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to export the audio to any of those formats from either iMovie or Quicktime. Please help, so I can spend the next several months of my job listening to kooky zoo stories!

Powerbook: No Logo

DiscourseMarker — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:41:28 -0800

Powerbook G4 won't boot up. I hear the chime, get a gray screen, but NO apple logo or spinning wheel. This is a circa- late 2003 1.25GHz PB running OS 10.5. something. Yesterday, my husband was trying to open some Word 2008 docs he had saved on this laptop. Word would not open, it just kept bouncing in the dock, and we could not get it to force quit, so he did a forced shut down of the computer. Ever since then I cannot get the computer to boot past the gray screen.

I have tried resetting the PRAM, but it still sticks at the gray screen, same with resetting the PMU and trying a safe boot. It never progresses to the Apple Logo, just stays on the gray screen. When I pressed my ear to the keyboard I heard a few clicks from the HD after trying to start up, but now there's no sound.

Any suggestions?

Auto-click timer utiliuty for Mac default buttons?

ranebo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:03:34 -0800

A few years ago I used to use a handy Mac utility that would automatically click the blue default button after x number of seconds of inactivity. I have not been able to find it in recent attempts and, for that matter, do not know if it would work with OS X. Anyone have any familiarity with this or something equivalent?

Looking for a printer without the problems of finicky ink.

blueberry — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:36:09 -0800

[MomFilter] Looking for a reasonably cheap, reliable printer (for printing text) for an iMac. Leaning towards laser as the experiences with inkjets have been that bouts of little use lead to still full, yet dry and thus worthless ink cartridges. Looking for a printer for my Mom's iMac. She is wanting to print up a bunch of stories she has written, so the printer will only be used for text.
(No need for color, an attached scanner, or anything else)

She's had two cheap inkjets in the past where they were cheap to buy, but then you got gouged on the ink cartridges. These printers would up being a bit like "disposables" or white elephants—either getting gummed up after a while, or she'd not print anything for a month or two by which time the ink would have dried up or otherwise stopped working.

Fellow MeFites, do you own or know of any reasonably cheap (both pre- and post-sale), reliable b/w laser printers that you can recommend out there? Also, am I correct in guessing that laser toner has a longer "shelf life"?

Or, if lasers are too spendy, do you own or can you otherwise recommend an über-reliable inkjet that, say, you can just buy black ink for, and you've never had gum up or dry up on you?

Thanks all!

Better Visibility of Apple Mail's Flagged Mail

gkhewitt — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:40:01 -0800

Can I get a list of all my flagged e-mails from Apple Mail to appear somewhere more visible? I've been a Mac user for nearly two years now, and one thing has been bugging me for a while now.

I use Apple's Mail client with GMail and if I get an important e-mail that requires attention at some point, I'll flag it. However, depending on the volume of e-mail that I deal with, the flagged stuff can often get lost. And, using GMail, I have to manually go into the 'starred' folder in order to see all the mail that I've flagged.

What would be ideal - a desktop or dashboard widget that can display a list of all e-mail that has been flagged.

Essentially, I just need to be able to have more visibility of the flagged mails, as I can become very forgetful! I've already trawled Google looking for Applescripts and so forth that can do this, with no avail. I'm not an Applescript guru so don't even know if it's possible?

Many thanks for any help!