macOS

I am sharing Mac apps and tips on Artifact

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My recent experience is no -- the first backup went just fine, but all subsequent attempts to add to it have failed, giving various errors in the logs, including mounting problems, timeout during the initial write test, bad database, etc. I did rename the drive between backups, maybe that was bad? The log shows Time Machine using the new name and finding the drive just fine.

Googling this I see that people have these same problems with external hard drives, though, so I'm wondering if anyone has been successful using a thumb drive and if there's any trick to it.

I have a 2015 iMac 21.5" that has slowly ground down to crawl. I had this great idea of installing macos on an external SSD (Kingston 2TB) and run it from there instead but no matter what I try I can't get it to work.

At first I downloaded the installer for Monterey but the HDD isn't great and it kept crashing and restarting partway through.

Then I tried installing to the SSD from Recovery (internet recovery wouldn't get past wifi choice so had to use non-internet) but even though the installation went ok it continued to boot from the HDD and in Startup Disk the SSD wouldn't show at all.

Then I made a USB boot stick and did the same steps above with the same result.

The SSD has GUID map and I tried both Mac OS and APFS formatted.

Does anyone have an idea what might be going wrong? Thanks in advance!

I haven't been able to find good info on this, or it could be that there's nothing to speak of.

New to MacOS (last time I used it was c. 2001). My intention is to use it as close to "as intended" as possible, including using all of Apple's productivity apps. I also have an iPhone.

I am using iCloud Drive and have Desktop and Documents sync turned on. When I used Pages for the first time it made a Pages folder in iCloud Drive.

I know I don't HAVE to use it (I can open docs in the Documents folder and its subfolders from either device) but is there any special advantage to using the dedicated Pages or Numbers (etc.) folders that I'm not seeing? Or am I missing out on nothing by ignoring them and filing docs where I want to. TIA!

I’ve got Lockdown enabled on my mac. Most things are fine. But MS Office for the web is not.

For most web pages, you can select whether lockdown applies. I have done this for Office:

When looking at office in the browser, a red message appears in the top right “Lockdown Off”. But when the office web page shows, all the icons are blank:

I looked at the web page source - and can see that some material is being loaded from here:

res-h3.public.cdn.office.net

I have also set this to be excluded from lockdown. But that didn’t help.

Has anyone got MS Office for the web working under Lockdown Mode? Thx

After installing Mac OS sonoma for a few weeks my mac quickly ran out of storage. I did a scan using cleanmymac and found this huge folder in /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/:

I opened the folder and found it full of high-quality landscape videos, which is probably used for screen savers. Would anything go wrong if I delete everything in the folder and use the old screen saver?

rcmd is a great tool that lets you switch apps using the right command key and the first letter of an app's name, but I found right command to be a bit out of the way to hit when my right hand was on the mouse. I did a bit of research, and found some resources on how to use hidutil to rebind keys, and bound caps lock to right command. Now I have a super useful quick app switcher key that is easy to use and doesn't punish me for accidentally hitting caps lock! Yay!

I just got my new MacBook (upgraded from an air 2018 to a pro). Second Mac, first time replacing one.

Should I do a Time Machine restore immediately? Or should I boot up and do updates then Time Machine restore?

When I got my iPad and then MacBook Air I was still an android and windows user, so I used a gmail address for my Apple account. Eventually I used a custom domain and switched the account email address.

I am currently trying to wipe my MacBook to give to my daughter for college. But it needs me to sign out of find my and it has the original gmail address. It is not accepting the password, and when I do to find my nothing is signed in. Any tips? The only thing a search turns up is how to sign out nothing about it being a defunct account name.

I'm on Mac OS sonoma beta and I've been using the solar gradients wallpaper since it exists. But a few days ago white vertical bars appeared on the wallpaper. When I switched to another wallpaper and switched back the white bars disappear. Yesterday the same issue happened, but when I switch back to the solar gradients wallpaper, the vertical bars are still there. Although any other wallpaper doesn't show vertical bars, I really want the solar gradients wallpaper back, how do I fix this?

Screenshot of wallpaper with vertical bars (the black squares are the dock and documents on my desktop):

If anyone else has dealt with iCloud Drive constantly getting stuck uploading I wanted to share the best solution I have so far and ask if anyone has fixed it another way.

What I've figured out from reading Apple support and Reddit threads is that there's a daemon called bird at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CloudDocsDaemon.framework/Versions/A/Support/bird that handles syncing, and killing it forcing it to restart usually gets things working again.

My oneliner script to kill it to force a restart: pid=$(ps -ax | pgrep bird | awk '{print}'); kill $pid

But sometimes it restarts and gets stuck the same way. Do you get this issue? Figured anything out about it?

Just launched updates in App Store and it suggests this app that is not even installed on my computer. What is doing there?? Is this some scam?

new MBP user here with M2, 13", 2022.

I'm trying to backup some stuff to dropbox from my hdd (~300GB of photos and videos), but my hdd keeps being disconnected on its own? and how the hell do I clear all notifications?

Hi, just got a MacBook air m2 running latest stable Ventura. Safari has no trouble autofilling passwords from keychain, but there's no autofill in desktop apps. I thought macos had universal keychain autofill. Or did I remember this wrong?

New MacBook user here, M1 Airbook here with the latest MacOS. I have an SD Card from my old Android phone. I'm trying to transfer some stuff from there to my MacBook. I'm using a SD card adapter, the card is readable on my Windows machine. But when I plug it into my MacBook I get an error it is not readable. I think the card is exFat formatted, though Disk utility says FAT32, either way MacOS should be able to read it.

Attached screenshots of the errors and disk utility.

Any help is appreciated.

Hi guys,

So I've been experiencing a lot of issues lately with my Macbook losing WiFi after waking up from sleep. I have no idea what is causing it, it was never an issue until about 3 weeks ago when I started using an external monitor and a dock (but have no idea whether it is correlated).

Tried all the tricks I read online: Reset SMC, PRAM, remove all saved WiFi networks and locations, create new ones, reset router... The only thing that seems to fix it is if I reboot the Macbook.

I fiddled around with the Network settings and set the macbook to use "DHCP with Manual address" and that seems to give me partial connectivity: some apps will work, some won't. Some websites will load, some others won't.

Does anyone have a permanent fix for this? It's incredibly annoying that I step away from the workstation for 5 minutes, come back, and find that I have no internet again.

Hi all, I am currently using a MacBook Pro 15" mid-2014 with the following specs:

• RAM 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3.
• Processor 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7.
• Graphic cards Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB/NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB.

It is running with Big Sur 11.7.9. Recently, I had its battery replaced because my old one was in bad shape, and it had even swollen a bit. The new battery is from the manufacturer Simplo, according to coconutBattery app.

I've been experiencing some issues, particularly when using macOS on battery power only, something I hadn't done in a long time due to the poor state of my previous battery. The problems I'm encountering are as follows:

1. Overall slowdowns, laggy cursor, and beachball, especially when the battery percentage drops below 80%, most noticeable when it goes from 60% to lower.
2. Freezing my Mac, causing macOS to crash and returning to the login page.
3. In the worst-case scenario, a kernel panic, followed by a reboot.

Through my investigation, I have identified two processes, configd, and powerd, as the main culprits. Configd always uses 100% of the processor when the battery is the power source and I'm engaging in moderate to heavy usage with my Mac.

By this, I mean using applications like Spark mail, Safari, Activity Monitor (to track down issues), Telegram, Evernote, Todoist, Discord, and occasionally Notion and Element app without any image or video processing apps (which I would refer as heavier usage).

Reproducing these issues is quite simple – just let the battery drop below 80% and start using the aforementioned apps while unplugged. If issues arise, quickly plug it in, and you might regain control (though sometimes this approach doesn't work, depending on how long it remains stuck).

While I've found some information about configd and its behavior, the available advice mainly consists of workarounds, like manually killing the process (which doesn't work in my case because it auto restarts quickly). The closest source I've found addressing this is a macrumors forum, which also happens to be from this year. I also found a comment that describes my experience accurately.

I'm wondering if this might be a hardware failure or perhaps some kind of battery-related issue (battery gate, maybe???).

I also use BootCamp with Windows 10, and I haven't noticed any slowdowns or crashes when running on low battery. It seems to be isolated to macOS albeit my usage on Win10 is minimal compared with macOS.

Here is a list of workarounds and fixes I've attempted so far, without success (in what I believe is chronological order):

1. SMC and PRAM reset immediately after battery replacement, but it didn't help.
2. Testing on Safe Mode with Safari and some other tabs opened plus YT playback, almost instant macOS crash.
3. Reinstalled macOS without using Time Machine backups to get rid of any lingering issues from previous setups.
4. Removed my ethernet driver (using the Asix USB Ethernet app).
5. Minimized usage of the aforementioned apps, which seemed to help a bit, but I still experienced crashes when using Evernote with a background YouTube video in Safari.
6. Tried turning off Wifi and BT (one at a time and both together) using the ethernet adapter to maintain Internet connection, but it didn't resolve the issue.
7. Another user on a macrumors forum suggested that having another administrative account active somewhat might help, but it didn't make a difference for me.
8. Attempted to kill the configd process, but it immediately auto restarts, causing further issues with macOS.
9. Reduced peripherals such as my MX Keys keyboard and mouse (since my trackpad is faulty, likely due to the previous battery, and the stock Apple keyboard works fine for about 8 seconds then it stops registering any inputs for 1 second and repeats this behavior).
10. Removed my Ugreen dongle to rule out hardware issues, but it didn't fix the problem.
11. Someone else in the macrumors forum mentioned that disabling IPv6 support could help, but I couldn't do it with my Ethernet adapter, then I disabled it for Wifi, it didn't resolve the problem.

I may be forgetting some workarounds or best practices, but these are the most prominent ones that come to mind.

Here is some information about my new battery:

Model Information:

Manufacturer: SMP

Device Name: bq20z451

Pack Lot Code: 3230

PCB Lot Code: 3230

Firmware Version: 2d31

Hardware Revision: 322d

Cell Revision: 3036

Charge Information:

Fully Charged: Yes

Charging: No

Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 8500

State of Charge (%): 100

Health Information:

Cycle Count: 18

Condition: Normal

I've also included my last kernel panic report for reference.

What are your thoughts? Could this issue be related to old software and hardware, or could it be linked to my hardware or the new battery itself?

This is the most bizarre issue I've faced with my Mac so far, and as I mentioned earlier, it's possible that this problem has been present for a while because I used it plugged in for so long, both for me and others.

I want to backup my Mac onto my ssd drive so that I can safely upgrade to Mac OS sonoma beta, but time machine gives the error message that the disk doesn't have enough free space. I always thought that time machine automatically deletes older backups when it runs out of space, but it appears that it doesn't. I searched for tutorials on how to delete backups but none of them seem to work for the time machine interface on Mac OS ventura (most of them involve clicking a gear on the finder window in time machine but on my mac there's no gear icon). Any ideas how should I do that?

I have two identical WD Passports 1TB external disks - one orange one yellow (crucial information :D). On one of them, I store all my data - design files, family pictures etc. Second one, I used to use as a backup. Before formatting my macos I had an app that worked like that: I would plug both of the to my macbook, after clicking a button, it would compare orange and yellow, and whatever was on orange but was missing on yellow, it would copy that file to yellow. I could set it up, that if something was missing from orange, but was on yellow, it would also delete it from yellow (or if I wanted, it would leave it there). Now, for the love of me I couldn't remeber what it was called. It was very basic looking...

Any idea what it was, or maybe a suggestion for a similar app? It was deifnitely 100% free.

EDIT: I remember that backup option were presented like this A>>B, A=B etc.

I'm relatively new to MacOS and I frequently find myself needing to copy a file to my clipboard so that I can paste it somewhere else. Every time I click the share icon, I'm disappointed to see no "copy to clipboard" extension.

This is most frustrating when editing a screenshot or opening up a file in safari.

Anyone have a recommended app for this? I found this one but haven't tried it yet

I do alot of photo and video editing on my MacBook Pro M2, and I've noticed the "low power mode" was on by default. Tried to find out what it does, but Apple's own website didn't help me much.

This article is a bit better at describing what it does and how it affects my MacBook

I didn't know about textutil, mdfind, and networkQuality 🤯

Let’s make this the place for all news and questions related to Apple’s laptop OS, macOS.

Please, let’s be considerate of all OS’s and people's choices, and do not belittle anyone in discussions here. Let’s just have fun and share information that could help everyone.