Monday, June 14, 2021

Recent Questions - Ask Different

Recent Questions - Ask Different

How do I allow any and all popups from a certain domain in Safari? (setting is not working)

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 12:10 AM PDT

I use a certain domain for work, it's developed in-house and makes liberal use of popups for functionality. Safari blocks these popup windows by default. I went to preferences -> websites -> pop-up windows, and set the option for the relevant domain to "allow", then I restarted my browser.

Most of the time popups open just fine now, but every now and then clicking a button does nothing and I get the little icon on the right of the url bar saying a popup has been blocked. Because the window is initialised with a bunch of data on click, clicking the icon to get the window to show doesn't help as the window remains empty this way. I have to refresh the page and navigate back to what I was doing in order to try again.

I realise this piece of software is not great. But that doesn't help me, turning off popup blocking should just turn off popup blocking. Not turn it off for most of the time and keep blocking the occasional window. How do I force Safari to allow all popups from this domain?

Login field won't show on external display when clicking a keyboard key

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 11:31 PM PDT

So this only started after I unchecked the "displays have separate spaces" in system preferences. Now when my external display shows the screen saver after being idle, clicking a keyboard key won't show the login field and instead plays the "not possible" chime, only a mouse click will do it. I use my mac in closed lid mode. Also worth noting that this only happens when displaying the screen saver, but when I put my display to sleep this is not a problem. I'm on big sur.

third party hdmi to vga adapter does not work [closed]

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 10:55 PM PDT

I recently bought an HDMI to VGA adapter and a VGA cable, and when I plug it in it doesn't work properly. I was having problems so I read that the HDMI port on mac does not work, and that you need to use the mini DisplayPort/thunderbolt ports on your mac and that the adapter has to made by apple for it to work properly, is the last statement true? and if it is do apple sell mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables or adapters?

Cannot export long projects (longer than 5 minutes) anymore in iMovie

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 08:10 PM PDT

I just realized that I can no longer export an iMovie project to get a video. When I export a project, there are several possibilities:

  • when the progress is around 50%, it fails
  • iMovie may crash, which may result in rebooting of the machine

Here is one error that I get: https://pastebin.com/RMzUNCgz

Note that exporting short videos (less than 5 minutes) works fine, but exporting videos longer than 5 minutes doesn't work.

Here is my disk info:

enter image description here

I tried to reboot the machine with safe mode, but iMovie could not be opened in safe mode.

I tried to move the project to Final Cut Pro, but exporting fails as well.

Could anyone help?

Thank you

Is there a way to completely disable mounting the directory of a usb device?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 05:36 PM PDT

I am using Novation Launchkey for music purposes and most of the time it is connected to my USB extender. Novation puts the setup folders inside a small storage space within the controllers in the last products, and each time I connect back to the usb dock or reboot my macbook, it gets mounted. Is there anyway to disable storage mounting of a specific usb device?

Thank you beforehand cheers!

macOS Calendar default not available

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 05:31 PM PDT

I am using the Apple Calendar app on Big Sur (11.4). I connected it to an Exchange account and can see the calendar events. However, I cannot set the default calendar in preferences:

preferences

There are no calendars listed:

default calendar

Why is that?

How to cd to a mounted ftp volumn on big sur? [closed]

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 10:37 PM PDT

$ open ftp://ftp.census.gov

I use the above command to mount a ftp server on Big Sur.

I can see it in Finder. But I don't have permission to see it in Terminal. Does anybody know how to make it viewable in Terminal?

$ ls /Volumes/ftp.census.gov  ls: cannot open directory '/Volumes/ftp.census.gov': Operation not permitted

What is Google Docs using on iOS for its text editing [closed]

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 03:29 PM PDT

I noticed that on iOS, the Google Docs app handles text differently than the rest of the system. It's clearly using a different kind of framework for text processing, newly introduced gestures like dragging the text cursor and triple tap to select sentence don't work. Are they building against a very old version of iOS or are they using a custom software?

"Disk you attached not readable" - PMBR/MBR corrupted?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 01:27 PM PDT

Background:

Purchased 2 12TB WD Gold drives about 2 years ago and have been using them in an external enclosure without problem.

After upgrading my Mac mini server to 11.4, the message "The disk you attached is not readable" was displayed for this one drive post-boot. All other attached drives are fine, including it's twin 12TB drive. The message follows the bad drive to other Macs.

Both 12TB drives are encrypted and APFS. They're simply used for storage, so they've never been partitioned or set up for booting.

Since I have a twin drive (note: not a RAID pair, just an identical physical drive), I've compared them side by side, and the main issue that I've found so far is that it appears that the PMBR in sector 0 has been corrupted somehow.

Here's output from gpt for the bad drive:

New-iMac:~ user$ sudo gpt -vv -r show /dev/disk2  Password:  gpt show: /dev/disk2: mediasize=12000138625024; sectorsize=512; blocks=23437770752  gpt show: /dev/disk2: MBR not found at sector 0  gpt show: /dev/disk2: Pri GPT at sector 1  gpt show: /dev/disk2: Sec GPT at sector 23437770751          start         size  index  contents              0            1                       1            1         Pri GPT header              2           32         Pri GPT table             34            6                      40       409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B         409640  23437098928      2  GPT part - 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC    23437508568       262151             23437770719           32         Sec GPT table    23437770751            1         Sec GPT header

The good, twin drive:

iMac:~ user$ sudo gpt -vv -r show /dev/disk5  Password:  gpt show: /dev/disk5: mediasize=12000138625024; sectorsize=512; blocks=23437770752  gpt show: /dev/disk5: PMBR at sector 0  gpt show: /dev/disk5: Pri GPT at sector 1  gpt show: /dev/disk5: Sec GPT at sector 23437770751          start         size  index  contents              0            1         PMBR              1            1         Pri GPT header              2           32         Pri GPT table             34            6                      40       409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B         409640  23437098928      2  GPT part - 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC    23437508568       262151             23437770719           32         Sec GPT table    23437770751            1         Sec GPT header

When I look at sector 0 on the good drive, I see what appear to be good/reasonable values when using iBored (old time Mac disk too which can read disk sectors, and show values for MBR partition table).

iBored MBR output - good disk

When I look at sector 0 on the bad drive, it (sector 0 only) is zeroed out completely.

All of the remaining sectors appear to be present (some other corruption notwithstanding). That is, data exists where I would expect it to exist and zeros exist where I expect zeros to exist. You can see that besides sector 0, gpt generates the exact same output that the good disk does.

My intuition - which I freely admit could be completely wrong - is that I may be able to edit sector 0 on the bad drive to match the values found on the good drive and then be able to at least try to mount the drive at that point.

However, I haven't done anything yet other than looking. TIA for any help!

'brew' command is not recognized by Terminal

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 02:27 PM PDT

I have installed brew on my system using the command

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Now, it seems that it was successfully installed. But when I type brew in Terminal, I get:

zsh: command not found: brew

Honestly, I do not know what zsh means. Some people say to just add some line to a certain file (I assume it is a configuration file for zsh). I think the file is ~/.zshrc, however, there is no such file on my system. How do I access it? Should I type vim ~/.zshrc in Terminal? How do I make my system recognize brew and all the other programs I would like to install?

I typed vim ~/ .zshrc in Terminal which opened vim. I then typed "i" in order to edit the file but I get please type the directory name:. I wonder what should I type here?

Is it feasible to repair the screen of an iPad 9.7" by myself?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 04:32 PM PDT

I have an early 2018 iPad 9.7" (not the pro version). Here is what it looks like currently: https://imgur.com/a/wPrl56r. The touch screen still works, so I think it's just the glass surface that's broken.

I tried googling and going on ifixit.com to find resources on how to replace the screen, but it seems everything that's available is for the iPad pro 9.7", so I'm not sure if that's applicable for me. I tried Googling as well, and it's the same issue.

Has anyone attempted a glass screen replacement by themself before? I'm not great with my hands, but at the same time, I'm not sure if I have anything to lose by trying. The iPad is out of warranty, and cost of repair at Apple or a 3rd party would probably be more expensive than the iPad.

How do I update my root certificates on an older version of Mac OS (e.g. El Capitan)?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 03:20 PM PDT

I have difficulty reaching various secure web sites. They give me a certificate expired error. They work on Firefox but not Safari or Chrome. They also work on newer versions of macOS (e.g. Catalina, Big Sur). This seems to be because Safari and Chrome use the OS root certificate store and Firefox uses its own, and El Capitan is not being updated.

From here there are:

  • Trusted certificates establish a chain of trust that verifies other certificates signed by the trusted roots — for example, to establish a secure connection to a web server. When IT administrators create Configuration Profiles, these trusted root certificates don't need to be included.
  • Always Ask certificates are untrusted but not blocked. When one of these certificates is used, you'll be prompted to choose whether or not to trust it.
  • Blocked certificates are believed to be compromised and will never be trusted.

There is a list of fingerprints of the current certificates there, but no downloadable bundles of certificates.

How do I update my root certificates on an older version of OS X 10.11

how to stop the keychain alert 'xxx want to use the keychain'

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 08:46 PM PDT

Recently my mac book pro(macOS Big Sur 11.2.3) always popup alert:

xxx want to use the xxxx keychain

sometimes it popup for 4-6 times. It popup so frequency so that I must enter password again and again, It make me crazy, why give that alert and what should I do to make it silient? This is the alert windows:

enter image description here

Cannot install Windows 7 on 2007 iMac

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 12:50 AM PDT

I'm trying to install Windows 7 32bit on a 2007 20inch iMac with a 2.4GHz however I can't get Windows to boot whatsoever.

I'm not sure what's going on, I've burnt like 4 different ISOs to DVDs and they just won't boot. Some of them don't even show up, some of them get stuck at "Windows is loading files", some give errors and others just hang when I select them in the Alt Boot Menu.

What's going on? Has anyone had a similar issue to this, and what can I do? I'm starting to think that maybe the SuperDrive is faulty but I'm unsure. I have an external DVD Drive but the iMac doesn't detect it in the boot options.

Batch rename (irregular names) in Automator

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 01:58 PM PDT

I need help to incorporate an AppleScript that allows me to remove all characters before the underscore _, including the first _.

The files have several _, but I only want to remove the text before the first one. However, the number of characters varies from file to file. It is not always as shown in the example, the key part is removing up to and including the first underscore, _.

The issue is that I need the script to keep the rest of the name intact, regardless of what it is. I need a script that supports different text below.

Example:

I have this item: "LPLLORMF_1023_PM_48_24_25"

I need to remove the first part of the name, in this case "LPLLORMF_"

Result: "1023_PM_48_24_25"

The second part, 1023_PM_48_24_25 in this case, wont always be the same, I mean that I would like to maintain this part whatever it may be. It could be "1433_PM_58_25_22" or "1483_FM_51_15_02".

set oriFilename to "LPLLORMF_1023_PM_48_24_25"    set newFilename to ¬      characters ((offset of "_" in oriFilename) + 1) thru -1 of ¬      oriFilename as string

This script correctly removes the first part of the name. However, it does not respect the original name of the second part of the name, it always uses "1023_PM_48_24_25".

The second question is how to get the script to batch rename multiple files once the first part of the text is removed?

I am trying to organize a massive file renaming in Automator.Every day I generate about 300 files, so I need to create a workflow to sort them. Depending on the original name, each one will be given a new specific name. Subsequently, each file will be moved to a different folder. At the moment everything works correctly in Automator.The only thing I have not managed to do, is to remove the first part of the text (which may contain 3, 4 or 5 characters and the subsequent underscore) without altering the rest of the original name.

user3439894, I really appreciate your help. When I run your Script, it does indeed remove the first characters (including the first underscore), but the following text is not retained. It is replaced by "1023_PM_48_24_25". What can I be doing wrong? Thanks again for your help!

Thank you very much for your interest user3439894. I apologize for so many questions, I am an engineer, not a programmer, and this is proving to be more difficult than expected. I currently have a worflow that works (except for removing those first characters), based on identifying files according to some characters in their name, renaming them according to their type, and moving them to different folders.

My idea, to make everything perfect, is to run the AppleScript at the beginning of the workflow, after "Ask for Finder Items". To this path, where the Original items are located, I assign a Variable named "Originals".

So I would have to modify this? return paragraphs of (do shell script "ls/Volumes/temp/"")??

I have tried to do this without success. How clumsy of me, sorry I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO IT.....

Magsafe-2 car charger for 2015 MacBook Pro?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 05:03 PM PDT

Is there such a thing as a Magsafe 2 charging cable that can be used from a car's 12V power outlet (UK).

This is for a 2015 MacBook Pro.

Thanks

What are the private and public keys associated with an Apple Distribution Certificate?

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 01:02 AM PDT

I'm following this guide on how to generate a new Apple Distribution Certificate, and on the 'Download your certificate' page it says

Download your certificate to your Mac, then double click the .cer file to install in Keychain Access. Make sure to save a backup copy of your private and public keys somewhere secure.

What are these private and public keys? Are they contained in the certificate? When I download the certificate and Get Info, it has information about a public key but not a private one.

Is it possible to decrease the size of the “activation area” for a hidden Dock in Big Sur?

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 12:21 AM PDT

Before Big Sur, a hidden Dock (at the bottom of the screen) would be unhidden only if the mouse pointer was moved to the very bottom of the screen — you literally had to slam the mouse into that last row of pixels.

In Big Sur, there's a wide "activation area". The Dock unhides when the mouse pointer's tail has only just disappeared off the bottom of the screen.

I spend a lot of time in JetBrains IDEs, which have a number of important controls in the status bar at the bottom. Working on Big Sur, the constant unwanted activation of the Dock has become a major irritation. My options are to work in a smaller window, giving up some screen real estate (but then why hide the Dock in the first place?) or to work in full screen mode (but I often need other applications open).

There are many lists of hidden Dock preferences available online, so I'm hoping that the width of this activation script might be configurable and not entirely hard-coded.

Edit: Using Apple's "Pixie" app from the "Additional Tools for Xcode" package, I've established that the Dock activates as soon as the point of the mouse cursor is in the bottom 20 rows of pixels.

Edit #2: In macOS 11.4, the size of the activation area has been significantly reduced. It's still more than a single pixel, but it's nowhere near as wide as before. Essentially, this is no longer the real problem it was before — to me, at least.

Edit #3: Playing with Pixie again, it seems to me that the dock now activates if the focus point of the pointer is in the bottom 4 pixel rows.

How to remove Disabled Software in macOS 11?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 01:07 PM PDT

I found three items in System Report. I've checked /Library/Extensions/, /Library/StagedExtensions and /private/var/db/Receipts. All related files has been deleted. But the three items persist after restarting.

How should I remove them?

OS: macOS 11.1

Three disabled softwares

How can I attempt to boot an older version of macOS than my hardware supports?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 01:20 PM PDT

I have a 2015 Macbook Air. The earliest version of macOS this model ever shipped with was OS X 10.10 Yosemite. However, I want to try installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks, because Yosemite makes my eyes bleed I like Mavericks.

This is probably not going to work. Mavericks was not designed to run on my computer and likely lacks the necessary hardware support. But, I'm stubborn and I want to try anyway. If it's going to kernel panic, I want to see the damn kernel panic with my own eyes!

So I created a bootable Mavericks USB installer and plugged it into my Macbook Air. I then booted my Mac while holding down the option key to reach the disk selection menu, and selected the installer USB drive.

As soon as I select the drive, my Mac immediately flashes a prohibited ("🚫") sign. This is not what a kernel panic usually looks like, and it happens too quickly after selecting the drive. Clearly, Apple has implemented some sort of arbitrary check to prevent me from even trying to boot this old OS on my machine.

Furthermore, there does not appear to be any way to boot the USB drive in verbose mode. Holding down cmdV has no effect.

How can I bypass this check and force my Mac to attempt to boot the installer?

Does TechTool Pro do anything that Disk Utility doesn't?

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 04:25 PM PDT

I have an 2010 iMac running High Sierra. My computer has been very slow lately and does a lot of beachballing. I've run Disk Utility on my internal drive and it returns that volume appears to be ok. I've read that TechTool Pro fixes a lot of disk-related issues. Does TechTool do anything that Disk Utility/First Aid doesn't? Etrecheck indicates I may have a disk drive problem. Will TechTool help me determine what is wrong?

How to enable Huawei Health app options for iOS that exist for Android?

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 12:28 AM PDT

I bought a Huawei Band 3 Pro some months back, and while using it with my Android phone, all the things I needed were working (using the Android Huawei Health app).

But lately, I switched to an iPhone 11 pro, and thus using the iOS version of that app. And it seems that the iOS app lacks in various aspects. But maybe I just didn't find the right place to configure it correctly.

What is missing for me:

  • With Android, I could enable "notifications" that go to the band per source. Meaning: I would first enable notifications in general, and then I could select "I want calendar events and phone calls, but I don't want facebook or WhatsApp". With iOS: I only found "notifications" that can be enabled. And now I get calendar events, phone calls, facebook, whatsapp ... just a lot of things I really don't want to be notified about. Question: is there a way to configure individual sources for notifications?
  • Beyond that, the band knows various forms of exercises. Like indoor cycling. Which ... the Huawei health app doesn't show me at all. With Android, I could see past trainings, for all the exercises that the band offers. With iOS, there is only steps, heartbeat, sleep ... and 3 outdoor (GPS based) activities. Question: is there a way to access these "missing" activities, like training data for indoor cycling?

Time Machine ridiculously slow after El Capitan upgrade

Posted: 13 Jun 2021 05:54 PM PDT

I recently updated to El Capitan, and told Time Machine to backup. It got stuck on Preparing Backup for hours, so I stopped it, deleted the InProgress file, rebooted and tried again. After ~30 mins, Time Machine was still preparing. I looked into activity monitor and backupd had only read ~140Mb, in 30mins... Looking into iStatMenus, I find that backupd tends to have a read speed between nothing, and 120Kb/s (If I'm lucky. It sometimes peaks up to to 500kb/s, and very rarely 1Mb/s). Spotlight is not indexing (As I heard sometimes Spotlight gets in the way of backupd), and the hard drive has gone to sleep in the time that I wrote this, rarely waking up for my Mac to briefly read something from it.

Here's what comes up in the console when searching for backupd: Console log

I'd rather not have to reformat my hard drive, in case I ever want to downgrade back to Yosemite, however I am willing to if it solves the issue.

Also, it seems like whenever I reboot my Mac, the hard drive loses its Time Machine icon, and reverts back to an orange drive.

Screenshot of Activity Monitor, Disk mode at ~50 min mark: Activity Monitor

EDIT: I've tried disabling and reenabling Spotlight for the disk, and I have also wiped the .Spotlight-V100 folder and rebooted. No change.

EDIT 2: What seems to be some errors has appeared in the console Err

EDIT 3: After many, many hours, Time Machine has finished scanning and is now backing up! I'd still like to know why it took so long (I didn't expect updating to El Capitan to take so long. I excluded system files as well, although I guess I'm in for another long wait since I just removed them from the exceptions list)

iOS: Is there a limit in the number of applications I can leave "running background" in the bar?

Posted: 14 Jun 2021 01:03 AM PDT

I know applications don't actually run in background but I was wondering how many applications I can leave open. Has anybody tried? Is there a limit? What is it? If you reach a limit, it starts closing applications by itself to make room for new ones?
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)