Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal

Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal - e.g. if you've got a windows PC on your network, that you share disks on. Then open the network location in Finder, and then double click to open the disk.

Then in the terminal type "df -h" and it will list the location in which the drive is mounted.

e.g. //xxxx@xxxxxwin7pc/H  931Gi  611Gi  320Gi    66%        0 18446744073709551615    0%   /Volumes/H

Then all you need to do is type "cd /Volumes/H" to change to the disk.

Voila, done.

Spotify not working on MacBook Pro Retina

Spotify stopped working, first I was getting the error regarding "Missing framework", then it wouldn't even start. This is on the MacBook Pro Retina, Mac OS X.

To rectify the situation do the following;

1. Close spotify
2. Delete spotify app, and empty trash
3. Hold down the "option" key and click "Go" in the menu, Library will now appear.
4. Find the caches folder, and delete anything with "spotify" in it and empty trash.
5. Now reinstall spotify
6. Should work.

Wifi issues long term fix - Mountain Lion dropping connection

Further investigation on the Apple site - I found that 10.8.4 has a wifi diagnostics facility. Access this by pressing the option button and clicking the wifi connection. This just let me know there was an issue. I rang Apple and the first thing we tried was rebooting and holding down cmd-r until the apple logo and spinning icon appeared. This went into diagnostic mode.

From there we tried browsing the internet, and again the connection dropped.

Very strange that it was only the two Apple MacBooks (Air and Pro) that were dropping. iPhones, iPads and windows PC were fine.

So we tried turning of the router (Time capsule) for 30+ seconds and turning it on again. When it rebooted the two Macs now reconnected and maintained consistent wifi connection - perfect! The helpful Apple support analyst explained that sometimes with too many wifi devices it can switch channels to compensate, and then get stuck on a channel. Hmm, not sure I fully understand that how that causes this. But anyway restarting the time capsule router has resolved the problem, thankfully.

I'm also doing an update of the other computer to 10.8.4 which includes an update of the time capsule firmware, which should ensure the problem has gone for good.

How do I get rid of the duplicate contacts in contacts / the address book?

How do I get rid of the duplicate contacts in contacts / the address book?

Since Mountain Lion’s Facebook contacts integration, lots of my contacts have two entries, one I created, and one created from Facebook, where iCloud did not realise they were the same person. So the resolution to this one was to select both contacts, and under the “Cards” menu item you can “merge” the contacts or “link” the contacts - this resolved all the duplicates.

OS X Finder tips

I was doing a bit of investigation into the Finder options accessible here;

And here's what I found;

The options I found useful (under General) was that you can choose to see Hard drives on the desktop and also Connected servers  - which is very useful. Additionally you can choose to change the default folder that Finder opens up each time you do a new Finder window - this is a great option.

Under "Sidebar" you can choose what appears on the sidebar in Finder, and adding your computer is useful, as you can then expand the computer and expand the network and connected servers, providing a very useful way of navigating.

Under advanced you can turn on to "show all filename extensions" which I find useful.

How to restore Mac to factory settings / how to sell on your Mac

I did a google for “How to restore Mac to factory settings” and all the hits back seemed to be talking about deleting everything manually and then restoring the operating system from a disk! There is a much better way; I’m assuming your intention to restore to factory settings is because you want to sell on or pass on your Mac to someone? Follow these simple steps and you will effectively do what the title suggests.

1. Make sure you have a full back up of all your files, and you have transferred them to a new Mac and it is working and you have verified all your files have been copied.
2. De-authorise your computer in iTunes on the Mac you are getting rid of
3. You should have already disabled Time Machine on the Mac you are getting rid of, as part of the transfer to the new Mac.
4. Now create a user account with admin privileges for the person you are passing the Mac onto, if you don’t know who this is going to be make it something generic like “Administrator” - the most important thing is that you give them full admin privileges that you current account has.
5. Check that you can log in to the new account, and that it has admin rights. This can be done by unlocking a setting in System Preferences where it will ask you for your admin password.
6. Make the hard drive appear on the desktop by going to finder > Preferences > and choose “Show hard drives” on desktop.
7. Change the hard drive name to take our your name; right click on the hard drive > get info > update the name.
8. Change the name of the computer to take our your name. Go to System Preferences > Sharing > the change the computer name.
9. Now under System Preferences > User & Groups, unlock for changes and then choose the user account you want to remove and click the minus sign. It may take up to 10-15 minutes to process (giving a bouncing ball and even saying “unresponsive” in system monitor - however it will come back).
10. Once you get to the next screen you will be able to choose to delete the home folder of this user and its contents and choose “delete securely”, then click ok/apply.
11. Leave the computer to delete the account - this may take up to 12+ hours depending on the size of the user account (for me it took this long for 200GB+ user account). You can monitor progress by doing a get info on the hard drive and watching the available disk space increase over time.
12. Once deleted there should now be lots of spare space.
13. The remaining steps are manual, if you have any files stored outside the home directory then these need to be deleted. Apps do not get deleted, so these too will need to be manually deleted if you don’t want them transferred to the new user.

And that in a nut shell is it - you’ll then be giving the new owner basically a brand new laptop reverted to factory settings.

Things email integration

Wonderful things are a foot; I have discovered email integration with Things. There are two scripts;

1) Send email to Things https://culturedcode.com/things/wiki/index.php/MailToThings - This allows you to send an email to yourself with subject line "Add to things" and a task will be created in your Things inbox on your Mac with the message body added as the task in Things. Brilliant! This is going to be very useful when I want to set myself a task at work or forward an email that I want as a task; I can change the subject to "Add to things" and it will be waiting for me in my Things inbox when I get home, brilliant! It just requires downloading an AppleScript and adding a rule to to Mail; follow the link it's all explained.

2) Add email to Things https://culturedcode.com/things/wiki/index.php/AppleScript:Create_new_tasks_from_Mail_messages%2C_adding_Growl_notification Similar to the first one, but this is for when you receive an email that you want to make a task out of (which is a regular thing), instead of manually adding to Things you can now select the message(s) and run an AppleScript and each of the messages will be added to the Things inbox as a new Task, with the subject as the task, and message body as the notes of the task. Brilliant! It even gives you a notification message when it creates the task - you just need to install Growl (notification app) you can download that from the App Store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/growl/id467939042?mt=12&ign-mpt=uo%3D4.

Loving Things, and love this email integration, brilliant! :-)