My Mac Fixes

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 ...