Delete pending Calander invites - without notifying sender

So we all get these calendar (iCal) invites which the MacOS/OSX Calendar app then notifies us about in its badge icon and on the '+' button in the app. But what if you don't want to accept or reply to these invites - annoyingly enough there is no way to just delete them without sending some form of notification.

So how to go about getting rid of them? Well there's actually a way to do it - You create a new Calender (File->New Calendar->iCloud) and just leave the default 'untitled' name, then you find those pesky invites and right click on them and assign them to this new 'untitled' calendar. Then you right click on the untitled calendar and select delete - it then finally asks you if you want to delete without notifications! Gone. Done.

Fix Handbrake crash on OSX(10.11) El Capitan

I just tried to use Handbrake (version 0.99) to rip a DVD on OS X 10.11.4 and it crashed halfways through so I ran Handbrake's update (0.10.5) but it still crashed ;( It turns out that OSX El Capitan has removed a software library that is used to decrypt DVDs (libdvdcss) from the system - so if you've got an older dodgier version (of libdvdcss) lying around it works but crashes. Either that or Handbrake fails to find anything on the DVD you're trying to rip, as mentioned on Reddit.

To fix the problem you need to install an up to date version of libdvdcss - either by downloading a slightly old version and copying it into the /usr/loca/lib e.g. if the downloaded library file is in Downloads:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/libdvdcss.2.dylib /usr/local/lib

Or you can build/install the latest version using Macports, homebrew, or from source. If you use Macports then you may need to link the macports installed version to /usr/local/lib (so that Handbrake can find it):

sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libdvdcss.2.dylib /usr/local/lib

Now start Handbrake and you should be good to go...

Sharepoint access fixed in Office 2016 for Mac

Some people may have noticed that the previous Office update (15.18 (160109)) broke their 'Online Locations' access to Microsoft SharePoint woskspace servers on Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The latest update (15.19.1 (160212)) fixes this problem - Get it by going to Help->Check for Updates.

MythTV on Kodi (XBMC)

I've been playing with Kodi (once known as XBMC) which is a slick open-source media centre system that runs on almost everything (OSX, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Android, Windowz, even [jailbroken] iOS). I wanted to connect it to MythTV, which is rather a handy open-source DVR for TV streaming and recording. So in Kodi (v15.1) I went to System->Settings->Add-ons->My Add-ons->PVR Client->MythTV PVR Client and then added the IP address of my MythTV server. That's all then I thought... so how does it work...?

It's not entirely obvious - but very simple when you know how - you then need to go to System->Settings->TV->Enable and just enable it! Then a new TV menu item appears on the main screen with various options for interacting with MythTV - like watching live TV, or recorded shows etc.

Also it seems that one can reduce the CPU load when running Kodi with the current versions by switching off the RSS display on the main screen by going to System->Appearance->Show RSS news feeds and disabling the option.

Apple Bluetooth keyboard problems

If you've got an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard it may be working fine then one day it just seems to stop working (in a variety of ways such as; the caps/shift lock light not coming on, certain keys working (like alphanumeric) whilst others do (e.g. arrows keys)). So you search the Internet for 'Apple keyboard reset' or 'Apple keyboard fix problem' etc. There's a bunch of pages out there suggesting to just take out the batteries on the keyboard and then put then back in and reconnect the keyboard over Bluetooth.

But it can also be caused by [temporary] software issues on your computer (with the Bluetooth drivers) - so try rebooting your machine (or iPad etc) and try again. It may well fix the problem - as the lack of a caps lock light etc isn't necessarily due to the keyboard itself.

How stop an iOS app from being upgraded by iTunes

So there's that app that you like the current version and newer ones just suck but iTunes doesn't make it easy to stop arbitrary apps from being upgraded. The problem with trying stop an old app from being upgraded is that it's all or nothing - you can either switch off automatic updates or you have to manually select the apps you want to upgrade every time.

The way to stop this is to change the permissions on the app so that it's can't be deleted (nor upgraded) by iTunes - first locate the app (e.g. /Users/test/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/Twitter\ 2.19.ipa ) Then you set the immutable flag on the app from the Terminal:

chflags uchg /Users/test/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/Twitter\ 2.19.ipa

When iTunes tries to update the app it tries to delete and replace it with the newer version but it fails ('Saying the original file can't be found'). But you can ignore that warning.

If you want to upgrade it at another point you'll need to just delete it and rerun iTunes so that it fetches the new version.


Note: That apps are unique to your user ID so you can't just copy an app (an .ipa file) from someone else an install it on your device, though you can with if you have older copies of an app for your device installed with that user ID.

Update:27nov15: Unfortunately it's not clear that this technique does stop iTunes from upgrading the apps in all situations;(

Update:23feb16: If this doesn't work you can copy the desired version of the app ipa file elsewhere and then delete the app from iTunes and then copy in the older version and sync again.

iTunes stopped syncing with iPhone?

The other day - as had happened a few times before - when I plugged my iPhone/iPad into my Mac iTunes failed to automatically start. Indeed iTunes didn't even seem recognise that my iPhone was plugged in - neither when directly plugged into USB nor when trying to 'sync over WiFi'. Another odd symptom was that my iPhone suddenly started to ask if I wanted to Trust this computer (that I have always synced to the past). A reboot had usually fixed this in the past but that's a pain so I snooped around for other answers - The usbmuxd daemon seemed to be complaining about weird stuff in the logs so I figured lets try and kill it! And low and behold that fixed the problem - usbmuxd restarted (probably care of launchd) and all was well again - iTunes saw my devices and wanted to talk to them again - a handy quick fix.

Here's the command line way to kill it - to be safe quit iTunes and unplug your iPhone beforehand:

sudo killall usbmuxd 

Spotlight not working?

You just tried to use Spotlight and it found nothing apart from a dictionary word?! Spotlight seems to shut itself down for a variety of reasons  - one being lack of disk space - it seems to need about 5% of your disk space to free to operate effectively. Here's one way to fix it.

Firstly you can check if Spotlight has indeed stopped (from a terminal):

mdutil -s /

If it says: "No index." then you can re-enable it again - making sure you have about 25GB free if you have a 500GB hard drive - you'll need to type in your password as it requires root privileges:

sudo mdutil -i on /

It should say "Indexing enabled" - sometimes you have repeat this last step a couple of times until it says "Indexing enabled".

If you have no joy enabling it you can go one step further and try erasing and rebuilding the Spotlight index:

sudo mdutil -E /

Or as a last resort try removing it manually - firstly you should disable Indexing:

sudo mdutil -i off /

And then remove the index:

rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100

And finally re-enable Indexing:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Once you have enabled Indexing again be prepared to wait for a few hours before it's finished (it'll tell you roughly how long if you click on the Spotlight icon). However you can actually use Spotlight whilst it is building the index - it starts to provide some results fairly soon after it begins indexing.

Uninstall Silverlight on OSX

It seems that even Microsoft can't explain how to remove their own software (they omit the first step) so here's how to do it:

sudo rm /var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.SilverlightInstaller.*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight.pkg

Mounting OSX Time Capsule shared drive on Linux

If you've been trying to mount an OS X Time Capsule disk over the network using Samba/CIFS/SMB and you've recently run into the problem: "mount error(13): Permission denied", and you KNOW the password is right then this may help. Basically you now need to inform Linux CIFS of the specific security mechanism to use (sec=ntlm). E.g. To mount the drive as root (where share_pwd is the password required to access the drive):

# mount -t cifs //server_ip/Data /mnt/Data -opasswd=share_pwd,sec=ntlm

As an alternative it is also possible to use the Netatalk package under Linux to mount the Time Capsule drive using Apple Filesharing Protocol (AFP).

PS: If you were hoping to mount the Time capsule drive that you either had plugged in or removed from inside your Time Capsule see my earlier post.

[28jun14: Updated to clarify that this regarding network mounting]

Viewing Preview's PDF annotations on iOS

If someone sends you a PDF document that has been annotated on a Mac using OSX Preview the default PDF viewer in iOS (Iphone/iPad) does not show the annotations (which is a bore). A search doesn't reveal an immediately useful answer so I thought I'd create one. So far I've found two free apps to view Preview's PDF annotations:

• PDFMate by realazy
• Documents Free by Savy Soda

Compressing videos quickly

I was compressing some videos today using the venerable ffmpeg and noticed things going rather slowly. Then I spotted that the H.264 library libx264 was saying: "using cpu capabilities: none!" - Ah that might explain it...

I'm on a Mac OSX machine using a version of libx264 from MacPorts. It turns out that the default install does not enable any CPU optimisations. So I just needed to rebuild it with asm variant to enable it's assembly code based optimisations:

sudo port -u install x264 +asm

I reran ffmpeg and libx264 logged that it was using a whole string of it's CPU specific optimisations and running a whole lot faster!

If you're on Linux/Windows/Raspberry-Pi you're probably running the same problem. This is because the people who ship software need to compile it in a way that runs on most machines - which means it's not going be tailored to run best on your particular machine. So the helpful folks at ffmpeg have put together a compilation guide on how to do it yourself.

Accessing the contents of a Time Capsule disk

So I took my (1st Gen) Time Capsule apart and switched the old 500GB drive for a 3TB drive - which worked in principle. I was impressed that the old thing could handle a 3TB drive ok. The problem that I increasing encountered was that Apple's File Sharing (AFP) server kept crashing - which basically meant my Time Machine stopped working and I had to go and manually switch it on and off every day.

To fix this issue I took the disk out of the Time Capsule and put it into an externally powered USB 3TB capable enclosure so that Time Capsule finally worked reliably again (and no longer crashed). The reason this worked was because the crashing was down to overloading of the power supply (which led to the crashes) in the Time Capsule itself - by moving the disk outside meant that the power to main board of the Time Capsule was now more stable, plus it wasn't getting over heated (which is another problem that besets such small embedded systems).

But along the way when I took the hard drive out of the Time Capsule and tried to look at it on my computer I only found two rather oddly named partitions - APswap APconfig. After searching on the net it seemed there should have been a third partition named Data but it was not showing up?! I was very puzzled as it showed up when inside my Time Capsule. After a lot of faffing about I finally discovered that problem was down to a hardware issue - all the harddrive enclosures I had tried with my drive were not actually capable of reading a 3TB drive - though they were all happy reading a 2TB drive (but quite few enclosures can only read 1Tb or less - so check this if you're having this issue). So I finally managed to find a 3TB capable enclosure and it reads the disk fine and mounts the Data partition (and may be used for external connection of the disk to my Time Capsule so it works as I explained above).

I did also try to mount the disk from Linux but the default filesystem used by the Time Capsule is Apple's HFS+ with journaling enabled used to be not so straightforward to mount. It seems that Linux now mounts hfsplus disks with journaling switched on without a problem (though I'm not clear whether what happens to the jornaling?). On older versions it's also possible to force mount the drive using Linux's hfsplus filesystem driver. It seems that under Lion it's no longer possible to switch off journaling on HFS+ using Disk Utility which is a pain - though I understand that it can be switched off using the diskutil command.

One final thing I tried was set up a Linux box as Time Machine capable network drive. One thing I learned along the way was that Linux's HFS support (i.e. Apple formatted disks) is not rock solid and it would crash when running the backups so I had to change the disk format of my backup drive to use Linux's ext3 filesystem instead (then I could use the ext2/3 fuse filesystem to mount it on OSX). This basically seemed to work on one of my machines, but unfortunately it seemed less reliable on another (It lead to this error message every so often: "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you." - which makes it useless) so I've gone back to using the old Time Capsule with an USB external disk (having removed the internal one which means it no longer crashes).
[updated:9sept13]

Airport update 7.6.3: IPv6 OK

I just loaded up the Airport/Time capsule update 7.6.3 and everything works fine so far: my IPv6 tunnel is working fine (contrary to some other articles out there..). We'll see if it brings stability enhancements to the Apple networking...lets hope so....

I had some issues with my Hurricane Electric dynDNS setup (Very useful if you have a dynamic address for your ADSL) in conjunction with my IPv6 tunnel, but I fixed the problem by removing the dynDNS entry from the ipv6 tunnel Advanced settings and reinstating it. It may also have been down to making sure Ping (ICMP) was unblocked for the he.net servers.

Messages beta due for the chop

So it seems Apple have announced that its Messages (beta) app is gonna bite the dust (expire;()on Friday 14th December. You're up the creak if your box won't go to Mountain Lion land (like quite a few older machines).

Darn. I might even have paid for a real app along the same lines as it has been quite handy to be able to use a real keyboard to send iMessages.

Apple's Messages beta expired....NOT

Final Update: It has now expired - see here.

Update: No it had NOT died yet, but it had just seemed to be dead - but after rebooting my machine it came back to life and worked fine again. I'll update the post if I discover what made it appear to be dead...

Well it seems that Apple's Messages beta app (on Lion) expired today (the app started but most menu items were greyed out) which is a shame as it was quite useful to be able to send messages to pals that had iMessage. I don't know why they don't do a separate app available for download as Mountain Lion is only installable on newer hardware. I guess they want people to upgrade...

Although under the hood it was really iChat and as a matter of fact so was Facetime (aka: Viceroy 1.5.0) with a couple of extra features...

Let me know if you find any tweaks to bring it back to life (I tried the basic ones like changing the date back with no luck).

How to change the 'original' date on a JPEG photo

So you've got a photo with a weird date on it - how do you change it? Well on OSX or Linux you can do it the terminal using a handy utility called exif (which you'll need to get from macports or apt):

exif --tag 0x9003 --ifd='EXIF' --set-value='2012:10:17 16:30:37' myphoto.jpg

It will create a new file with the new date called myphoto.jpg.modified.jpg which you can then rename to the original or something else.

There are of course other tools but this one works for me. I'll list others if/when I come across them.

Note: In theory you could use iPhoto on OSX but it is unfortunately buggy - so if you have a date like 1/2/1911 and you try moving it forward with iPhoto then it sets a date earlier in time?!

Windows networking more reliable on Time Capsule

So you're trying to connect/backup to your Time Capsule (1st Gen OS7.6.1) and it seems like it just died...? But you can still connect using the AirPort Utility? And it still pings.... Oh but wait you can connect to the disc using...... Yes Windows file sharing protocol (SMB/Samba). What's going on?!

It seems that Apple's File Sharing (AFP) server just dies - quite often. Indeed it would seem that the Time Capsule's AFP implementation is flakier than their Windows (SMB) server. That's handy for an Apple product?!

The annoying thing is that whilst you can connect to the thing using the AirPort Utility you can't restart it - it just hangs. So you have go and turn it on and off.

Time Machine: Indexing backup......yawn....FIXED

Yeah it's getting boring seeing that message (and/or 'Waiting for index to be ready' in system logs /var/log/system.log) when your Mac is supposed to be actually backing up. I had this problem on Snow Leopard and then for a while on Lion but I now seem to have sorted it. I tried a few approaches and removing the spotlight index actually fixed it this time (though other times it has just been a question of waiting):

• Wait: It can take a loooong time to complete backups and indexing of backups so wait a few hours or even a day or so to see if it just sorts itself out.
• Repair Backup:
1. Turn off Time Machine in the preferences.
2. Mount the Time Machine Backups as follows: In Finder you navigate to your backup disk and then find your machine's actual backup file (your_computer_name.sparsebundle) and double click on it - it will put a new disk in Finder's sidebar: 'Time Machine Backups'. 
3. Then open up Disk Utility and select the 'Time Machine Backups' disk and click repair.
4. Eject the 'Time Machine Backups' disk and re-enable Time Machine in the system prefs.
• Remove Spotlight Index: Follow steps (1) and (2) above then open a Terminal window and type the following:

  sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/.Spotlight-V100

  
  Then follow step (4) above. After this your backups may take longer for a day or so whilst Time Machine rebuilds its indexes but it should settle down soon.
• Disable Spotlight for TM Backups: Spotlight can be disabled by firstly ensuring that 'Time Machine Backups' is
  mounted (see (2) above). The going to Spotlight Prefs and adding the disk to the 'Privacy' section. Alternatively it can be done on the command line as follows:

  sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups

If you don't get anywhere with these approaches then check out this guy's page which has plenty of other things to try.

[Updated: 26oct12: Cleanup and Pondini link]

iCloud deleted/moved All on My Mac contacts?!

So I just tried adding my iCloud email to Apple Mail on my Mac and kept the 'contacts' checkbox ticked when Mail asked me to create the account setup. My iCloud account worked fine in Mail.

Then I went to Address Book and noticed that 'All on My Mac' contacts had been replaced with 'iCloud' on the first page of the address book (click on the red bookmarky thing on contacts to see it). Where had my 'All on My Mac' contacts gone??!! Well they had been copied over to iCloud with asking me.... So I thought I'd go and disable the iCloud account in Address Book - and 'All on My Mac' contact returned but they were completely EMPTY?! I don't necessarily want all my stuff synced to some [US] server farm - especially when I'm not even asked about it.

I sat back for a moment and thought about it... I then tried deleting the iCloud account and then it asked me if I wanted to delete all my contacts... or Keep them. I kept them and low and behold my contacts returned to 'All on My Mac'!