My Mac Fixes

 If you can't empty your Trash, and you've tried every suggestion you can find online, plus everything else you can imagine, chances are there are files in it subject to System Integrity Protection (SIP). As long as MacOS is guarding those files, there's not a thing you can do. (One way to identify such files is to check their permissions, which will show as "unknown.") Luckily, once you know what's happening, the fix isn't hard -- you just need to temporarily turn off SIP. To do that, boot into Recovery, start Terminal from the Utilities menu, and enter csrutil disable Restart to boot back into MacOS normally, then empty the Trash. Then return to Recovery and restore SIP with csrutil enable That should do it. And next time, maybe avoid putting anything in the Trash that you shouldn't be messing with in the first place! (That's me speaking from experience, after trying to delete stuff from /var/folders/. Grrrrrr.)

Because your Trash is not your Trash. In Apple Mail's sidebar, you likely see a mail folder called Trash in the section On My Mac. This is NOT the Trash used by Apple Mail. It's just a folder called Trash that contains whatever messages the app imported from the Trash in your previous setup. That's instead of moving them to the REAL Trash, where they belong.  Meanwhile, that REAL Trash, by default, is hidden from you -- along with the Junk folder. Yes, you read that right: Apple hides two folders that are essential to access. Dumb, right? And it's all the more irksome, because a simple Undo command no longer undeletes a message! To make the REAL Trash visible, hover your cursor over the "Favorites" label in the sidebar, then click on the plus sign that appears. You'll get a dialogue box with a pull-down menu. Select Trash and OK it. Then do the same for Junk. Your Trash folder, along with Junk, will now appear in the sidebar under Favorites, and your delet...

When I purchased Office 2011 in 2010, I assumed that a perpetual license was . . . well, perpetual. But apparently Microsoft has other ideas. It used to be that I could move Office 2011 freely among drives and Macs. After each move, all I had to do was supply the product key again. An online server would verify the key and activate Office in the new location, while deactivating copies in other locations. There were no limits on how many times it could be moved. So, basically, as long as you had the product key, the only thing you COULDN'T do was open copies of Office apps in two locations at once. Then Microsoft shut down the activation server. Users were now relegated to phoning Microsoft and going through a lengthy, tedious, exacting automated process to verify ownership and activate Office. It was nerve-wracking and nothing you wanted to do often, but you could still move Office or reinstall it when you needed to. Today, though, you can't even do that. Microsoft has decided ...

Adobe Bridge can be infuriatingly quirky if you've ever applied hierarchical keywords to your photos in either Bridge or Lightroom. What are hierarchical keywords? Those are the keywords organized in levels, like "Places > Washington State > Seattle" or "Events > Anniversaries > 50th." Besides being associated with each other, they can even be applied together automatically. Using hierarchical keywords is a safer practice in Lightroom, because the keywords and hierarchy for each file are kept primarily in a central database or "catalog" and can be instantly modified there for your entire photo collection. But Bridge has no such database -- nothing at all but a simple list of keywords to show in the Keyword panel. The keywords and hierarchy for each photo can only be written directly into the individual photo file or its associated XMP file. And if you modify your hierarchy in the Keyword panel, or discard it entirely, the original scheme ...

Because that's what you've chosen. When you start a keyword search or create a Smart Collection, you're given a default option to "Include All Non-Indexed Files." And right next to that appears the warning "(may be slow)." Folks, they're not kidding. When you leave this checked on a first search after starting Bridge -- or first view a Smart Collection created with this option -- the app goes through EVERY target file and folder and reindexes it, just in case any files were changed or added since the app was last open. This takes a LONG time. After that, Bridge relies on those cached indexes it just made, but it STILL scans all target folders to make sure no files have been added. This takes much less time, but it's still far from instant. Now, let's look at what happens if you uncheck this option. Boom, you're done. Bridge relies only on its cached indexes, and really, if you blink, you'll miss it. The downside, though, is that...

If you rely on old hardware or on old software you can't update, I suggest you leave Mojave alone. You're likely to run into a number of more or less serious incompatibilities without gaining much to compensate. In my own case, I had enough problems that I wound up downgrading from Mojave to High Sierra -- the first time I've ever had to revert to an earlier version of the operating system. Here are a few specific reasons you might want to stick to High Sierra. 1. Sketchy support for older Macs. With my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, I had to temporarily disconnect all internal drives except the boot drive before I could install or reinstall Mojave. Otherwise, the installer would stop partway through with an error message. Also, Mojave required a firmware update that caused some sort of error with the saving of startup disk info. TinkerTool System identifies it as a problem with NVRAM, and though the Mac starts up on the correct disk, shutdown times can be unusually slow when swit...

Adobe's Creative Cloud app is like a virus, and a poorly programmed one at that. Though the app needs a number of background processes when it's running, they don't need to launch before then, and especially not when you start your Mac. But how do you stop them? And beyond that, how do you keep Adobe from restoring them? Most of these processes -- all of which you can identify in the Mac's Activity Monitor by the Adobe logo -- are launched at startup by files known as launchagents and launchdaemons. There are three main locations where Adobe installs these: Library/LaunchAgents/ Library/LaunchDaemons/ Users/[Your Username]/Library/LaunchAgents/ (If you don't know how to reach the hidden Library directory, pull down the Go menu in Finder while you're pressing the Option key.) The names of the files that launch Adobe processes all start with "com.adobe", and NONE of these files are essential. Most of the advice you'll find on this topic sim...

A number of people have reported having Wi-Fi problems after updating to Mojave, and I did myself, with a disturbing lost connection in the middle of a big download. That's something I'm not used to. What I discovered was that Mojave had re-ordered my Preferred Networks. What really was causing the trouble was that I was now connected to a 2.4GHz network instead of my usual 5GHz. A 2.4 GHz network will often be subject to more interference than 5GHz, so the connection is more likely to fail. And sure enough, when I switched networks, the connection was fine. If you're having trouble, the first thing to do is check the network you're connected to and switch it manually if it's wrong. You can do this with the Wi-Fi pull-down menu on the menubar (if you have it there) or on the Network panel of System Preferences. It's common for a wireless router to offer both 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections, and you want to make sure you're on the one that has worked best for...

When it comes to new versions of MacOS, I'm not exactly an early adopter. In fact, I usually wait about nine months before daring to move over. That's usually how long it takes for all the bugs to get worked out of the MacOS version and all the software that's going to be updated for it. For Mojave, though, I wanted at least a sneak peak, because I wanted to see if my 2010 Mac Pro and aging software could weather the transition at all, or whether I was stuck at High Sierra. So, I installed Mojave on a test partition when it first came out of beta, and after playing with it enough to allay my fears, I forgot about it. Until recently, when I tried to update it for more testing. Then I found I couldn't. The installer kept failing with the message, "MacOS could not be installed on your computer. The installer resources were not found." So, one of the Mojave updates beween 10.14 and 10.14.4 had a bug in the installer, because someone at Apple wasn't paying ...

I have a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, and after downloading a High Sierra security update from the App Store last night, trying to restart landed me on a black screen with a cursor, and that's all. I could power down by holding down the power button and then boot back up, but my next attempts to restart failed the same way. Checking online, I saw that the update included new EFI firmware, and that gave me a clue how to fix it. My boot volume was on a Sandisk SSD, but I had another system volume on an original Apple SSD meant for this Mac Pro. For past firmware updates to this machine, I'd had to boot into the Apple SSD volume to get the firmware installed. So, I tried that again, and sure enough, I was able to download the update and restart, with the update proceeding just fine. Unfortunately, this boot volume didn't have my latest files. So, back I went to my Sandisk SSD volume, used SuperDuper to copy all files to the Apple SSD volume, then booted back into that and updated it ...

Generally, when you have an SSD or hard drive formatted with the new Apple File System (APFS), you only want a single partition on it. You can then create multiple "volumes" within that partition. These volumes act just like partitions, except they share a single partition's space among themselves as needed. This avoids the kind of wasted space you always get with multiple drive partitions and their rigid size allocations. The problem comes when you want to place more than one copy of a recent MacOS version on the drive -- say, both High Sierra and Mojave, or even duplicates of either one for testing or easy backup. An APFS volume with MacOS installed is accompanied in that same partition by three hidden, associated volumes, including the Recovery volume. Place another MacOS volume in that partition, and your system and utilities can become confused. So, in this case, you do have to partition the drive instead of adding volumes. But on trying to, you may run into quir...

Adobe installers and updaters and authorization schemes have always been the pits, and I recently had another major run-in with them. I'd read about another round of updates for the Creative Cloud apps, and I fired up the CC desktop app to collect them. What I got instead was the desktop app itself trying and failing to update itself, with this message: "Creative Cloud desktop failed to update (Error code: 1001)." There was a Cancel button, which led to another screen allowing me to retry the installation or quit. So, I tried again . . . and again . . . and again. Each time I got the same error message, and always at the 43% mark. And unfortunately, the "install or quit" screen gave no other option. In other words, there was no way to bypass the desktop update and go on to updating the other apps. If I couldn't update the desktop, I couldn't update anything. Following Adobe's instructions, I then uninstalled the desktop app and reinstalled with...

I recently had this question myself but couldn't find any answer that was reasonably non-geeky, even when it didn't deny the possibility outright -- so I had to invent one. The trick is to extend your hotspot as a separate, alternate wi-fi network, not try to connect it to your primary one! To do this, I used an old Airport Express I had lying around. Also, note I was using AirPort Utility on my Mac, not on my iPhone -- though you can probably do it with the iOS version, too. Of course, you'll need a data plan from your carrier. First, in your iPhone Settings, make sure Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Personal Hotspot are all turned on. Now follow the directions shown in Settings under Personal Hotspot to join the network with your Mac over wi-fi. (In your iPhone Settings, you can change the wi-fi password, if you like.) The easiest way to switch wi-fi networks on the Mac is on the menu bar, so make sure your Network Preferences are set to "Show Wi-Fi status" there. Also...

There are good reasons to resist the siren call of Adobe Creative Cloud, especially when relying on an Adobe app like InDesign that produces files in a proprietary format. If you stop your subscription -- ever -- you may not be able to access the files you created while subscribed. The price of sticking with an older version, though, is that you must contend with dwindling support from Adobe. InDesign users have been facing this for a while now with versions CS5 and CS6. Crashes on exit, text disappearing when any is selected, font names disappearing from menus, and undos being limited to one or two, have become standard occurrences. Fortunately, these problems have fixes, though some may cost you. Let's start with crashes on exit, a problem with InDesign CS5 (and Illustrator CS5 too). This is actually a new manifestation of a recurrent problem with Adobe apps: Adobe sets them to automatically access a server on the Internet that Adobe then eventually decommissions. The app can...

Apple has a compulsion to improve things. The problem is, they don't seem to care if that breaks the things they've improved. A case in point is POP mail and SMTP in Apple Mail for El Capitan. In case you don't know, POP mail -- or POP3 mail -- is an older email protocol for receiving email. Nowadays, it's mostly replaced by IMAP, but some of us still prefer it. SMTP is used for email sending. For security, both depend on another protocol called SSL, which is used to encrypt email and account sign-ins. It's SSL that Apple decided to tinker with, perhaps to enforce some obscure requirement that most people considered optional. Anyway, the upshot was that POP and SMTP accounts of mine that had been working flawlessly were suddenly unable to connect. My emergency solution was to turn off SSL for each POP and SMTP account in Preferences. That also meant changing the ports, since non-SSL email is generally handled by different ones. The specific port changes I made...

Probably because, as I was, you're triggering your cookie Javascript with "onunload" or "onbeforeunload." That won't work on Safari for iPad or iPhone. Modern browsers work differently from older ones -- they want to save your page off-screen, or "cache" it, rather than unload it completely. In some browsers, your use of "onunload" or "onbeforeunload" rules out caching, leading to slower performance for your site. Safari on iOS, on the other hand, caches the page anyway and just ignores your script! The solution is simple. In place of "onunload" or "onbeforeunload," use "onpagehide." That's right, just substitute that one term for either of the other two. Then your script will be triggered whenever the page is unloaded OR just cached. Not only will Safari now write your cookies, but this will speed up navigation back to your page in all other modern browsers! By the same token, you may wan...

Apple Mail uses a more restrictive standard than Thunderbird or Postbox do when looking for the start of a new message, so it simply misses many or most of them. On one attempted mailbox import, I saw the message count drop about 95%! The scary part is, if I hadn't checked the count in Postbox against the count in Mail, I might not even have realized I'd lost anything. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a commonly recommended solution for importing from Thunderbird to Mail, did exactly the same thing, for the exact same message count. (I ran it on Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine.) So, how do you import without loss? I'm going to make this very simple for you. Use Weird Kid Software's Emailchemy , a brilliant app for converting from one email format to another. In the Preferences, on the "Standard mbox" tab, select "Relaxed" for "Compliance to mbox standard when reading." I also suggest you choose "UNIX and Mac OS X: LF" for ...

Instructions for repairing your mailboxes commonly tell you to edit the files in a text editor, and BBEdit is usually recommended for the Mac. Unfortunately, for Thunderbird or Postbox mailboxes, this is about the worst advice you can get. More often than not, merely editing and saving the file in BBEdit will seriously corrupt the mailbox. Why is that? The problem lies in how both the text editor and the email apps work, and in how those ways interact. Thunderbird and Postbox store received email messages with Unix line endings -- "LF" or "line feed" -- as they should. But when you compose a message, those apps create and store it with Windows line endings -- "CRLF" or "carriage return, line feed." So, unless you keep your sent and received messages in separate mailboxes, you get mixed line endings in the same file. (Postbox was built on Thunderbird code, so the similarities should be no surprise.) As the folks at BBEdit explained it to me, s...

Update, Feb. 10, 2019—As Anonymous points out in the comments below, you can now delete your Wordpress account here: www.wordpress.com/me/account/close It works! But in case you're still interested, here's my original post: ________________________________________ Well, you can't, but you can nuke them so they're as good as closed. In the spirit of overkill, here's how to do it with Gravatar, which is actually a feature of WordPress. 1. Go to Gravatar and sign in. 2. Delete your image. 3. Find your Gravatar profile, and click "Hide" at the bottom right. 4. Go to WordPress.com and sign in. 5. Click on the personal settings icon at upper right. (It looks like a head and shoulders in a circle.) 6. Go to the Security tab. 7. Under "Connected Applications," remove Gravatar. For your WordPress.com account: 1. Sign in to WordPress.com. 2. Click on "My Site" at upper left and then on "WP Admin" to find t...

It's easy to find instructions on the Web for removing Dropbox from a Mac. But they all seem to leave out the crucial first steps -- and without them, you may not be able to remove a file. Here are those steps: 1. With Dropbox running, call up the app's preferences. In version 3, you can find them by clicking on the Dropbox menu bar icon and using the gear menu at lower right. 2. On the General tab, uncheck all the following: "Show desktop notifications." "Start Dropbox on system startup." "Enable Finder integration." 3. Close the preferences and restart your computer. You should now be able to remove any Dropbox file or folder with no trouble. My own way was to use TinkerTool to show all normally invisible files and folders, then to search for "dropbox" with EasyFind and use its contextual menu to "Reveal in Finder." Lesson: Think twice about installing an app that doesn't supply its own uninstaller. (And there...