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Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



tuyop posted:

QuickTime file/new screen recording

Yep, I use QT all the time to create training vids. It’s super easy, and I usually do short takes and then stitch them together with transitions and title cards in iMovie.

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Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer
Does anyone have any elegant solutions for backing up iCloud shared photo directories? I am the most technically savvy of my grandmother's offspring and we all use iCloud to share photos that she can see from her home. Right now the shared album is totaling 15GB. Unfortunately, although you can keep your Photos album on an external drive, shared folders are not included. I have resorted to using an rsync script to backup ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd to an external SSD but this is inelegant. Wondering if anyone has a better solution.

japtor
Oct 28, 2005

Smashing Link posted:

Does anyone have any elegant solutions for backing up iCloud shared photo directories? I am the most technically savvy of my grandmother's offspring and we all use iCloud to share photos that she can see from her home. Right now the shared album is totaling 15GB. Unfortunately, although you can keep your Photos album on an external drive, shared folders are not included. I have resorted to using an rsync script to backup ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd to an external SSD but this is inelegant. Wondering if anyone has a better solution.
Huh never knew they were there. Not really backing up but if you want to just keep them on an external along with the rest of the photos, you could try copying/rsyncing/whatever, then replacing the folder with a symlink to the external and see if that works.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer

japtor posted:

Huh never knew they were there. Not really backing up but if you want to just keep them on an external along with the rest of the photos, you could try copying/rsyncing/whatever, then replacing the folder with a symlink to the external and see if that works.

Thanks for the tip. I'm attempting this as a test on a VM but running into trouble with copying the /com.apple.cloudphotosd directory to the SSD. Drag and drop is not able to copy all files and sudo cp -a runs into a lot of this error "could not copy extended attributes to...XYZ". Any clue if this is due to the formatting of the SSD (Case sensitive, journaled) vs that of the VM's disk (APFS)?

Mister Speaker
May 8, 2007

WE WILL CONTROL
ALL THAT YOU SEE
AND HEAR
My old machine is giving me a bit of grief since some mild upgrades. It's a Mac Pro 1,1 running 10.6.8 that I use for media. I dropped in an SSD and cloned the boot drive to it using Carbon Copy Cloner, and I'm currently doing the same with three HDDs containing various media.

Since I switched over the boot drive to the new SSD and removed the old HDD, it seems to think programs are already open. Firefox, when opened, gives a "Close Firefox: A Copy of FIrefox is already open. only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time" error. F.lux, which opens on startup, gives me a similar error. I haven't tried every application but I suspect there's a similar issue with a number of them.

Searching online, there seem to be some fixes for this in Terminal. Only problem is, Terminal is giving me "login: login: Could not determine audit condition [Process completed]" on open, and I can't type anything into it. Any ideas?

Toast Museum
Dec 3, 2005

30% Iron Chef
Is it possible to prevent the menu bar from appearing when the cursor nears the top of the screen when I have a fullscreen app open? It's a real pain in the rear end with VMs.

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



Toast Museum posted:

Is it possible to prevent the menu bar from appearing when the cursor nears the top of the screen when I have a fullscreen app open? It's a real pain in the rear end with VMs.

You ain't lying. I'd be interested in this as well. I can always swipe to a new Desktop if I need to access the menubar.

Actually, I only have this problem with anything NOT VMWare. VMWare manages to suppress the menubar in full screen mode. MS RDP, Jump Desktop, VirtualBox and almost all other apps (like Word, Excel, etc...) do not suppress the menubar when in full screen mode.

Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jan 11, 2019

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



Toast Museum posted:

Is it possible to prevent the menu bar from appearing when the cursor nears the top of the screen when I have a fullscreen app open? It's a real pain in the rear end with VMs.

Sounds similar to my job of trying to trigger the spaces hot corner, or get the dock to appear when I'm on a remote connection. God bless the need to be pixel perfect.

Axiem
Oct 19, 2005

I want to leave my mind blank, but I'm terrified of what will happen if I do
In the past, if I've had computers I tended to primarily remote to, I would intentionally put the dock on a different side of the screen than where my primary computer's dock is, just to avoid the double-dock problem.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



That's a pretty good idea, it's not so bad when I'm in Windows at least, but yeah when mac>mac that's definitely gonna help. Nothing more fun than hitting cmd-space and then wondering which machine you're getting Spotlight for.

Axiem
Oct 19, 2005

I want to leave my mind blank, but I'm terrified of what will happen if I do
It's command-tab that gets me every time

its HIM
Oct 22, 2013

Smashing Link posted:

Does anyone have any elegant solutions for backing up iCloud shared photo directories?

Why are you backing up shared albums? They're not the original files - shared album photos are downsampled to 2048px max on the long edge (panos up to 5400px) and videos are downsampled to 720p. Whoever took the photos should be keeping the originals in their actual Photos library and backing up *that*. The files in the com.apple.cloudphotosd are very likely treated as cache; their location is undocumented and they may be redownloaded from the cloud at any time, so there's no guarantee Photos is actually storing every single one there (as opposed to just those you've viewed recently or based on some algorithm related to remaining space on the drive). If you want to permanently save photos from a shared album for yourself, you should drag a copy over to your local library.

Edit: doing a symlink to a direct child of the Containers folder seems really unlikely to work, for sandboxing reasons... Though I know symlinks to things *inside* those folders can work (I do it with Mail) so I could be wrong. Still, a bad idea overall, since that goal is based on unsafe assumptions about how shared albums are cached.

its HIM fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jan 13, 2019

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten
So I've been having my audio device randomly gently caress up its speaker balance and change its sample rate on its own. I'm assuming this is a bad USB sound card inside it?

nitsuga
Jan 1, 2007

One thing you could try is seeing if the built-in audio does it or not.

Boris Galerkin
Dec 17, 2011

I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!
I have a pdf on my computer that was created in 2013 and is password protected with something I don’t remember. I don’t remember how I password protected it but I think I did it just in Preview, and if it was 2013 then it would have had to been on a Mac. I named it in the format “MY_NAME_WPS12345678” for a reason I don’t remember anymore and the actual numbers in it don’t remind me of anything. Google for WPS tells me it’s apparently the name of a software suite but I don’t think I’ve ever used it unless it was just to password protect this one pdf.

Anyway, is it possible for me to crack this password and if so how? I wanna say it’s just a password protected scan of like my driver’s license or something but I have no idea. I haven’t needed to access this file in 5 years now so most likely it’s just junk by now but I’m just curious what I put in it.

tuyop
Sep 15, 2006

Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted

Fun Shoe

Boris Galerkin posted:

I have a pdf on my computer that was created in 2013 and is password protected with something I don’t remember. I don’t remember how I password protected it but I think I did it just in Preview, and if it was 2013 then it would have had to been on a Mac. I named it in the format “MY_NAME_WPS12345678” for a reason I don’t remember anymore and the actual numbers in it don’t remind me of anything. Google for WPS tells me it’s apparently the name of a software suite but I don’t think I’ve ever used it unless it was just to password protect this one pdf.

Anyway, is it possible for me to crack this password and if so how? I wanna say it’s just a password protected scan of like my driver’s license or something but I have no idea. I haven’t needed to access this file in 5 years now so most likely it’s just junk by now but I’m just curious what I put in it.

Just google pdf password cracker. There’s an online tool for just this purpose.

Boris Galerkin
Dec 17, 2011

I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

tuyop posted:

Just google pdf password cracker. There’s an online tool for just this purpose.

I found websites that let me upload them onto and that sounds like an awful idea. The other options I found are very questionable looking Windows crackers that will probably give me cancer.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002

Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Boris Galerkin posted:

I found websites that let me upload them onto and that sounds like an awful idea. The other options I found are very questionable looking Windows crackers that will probably give me cancer.

Spin up a VM?

tuyop
Sep 15, 2006

Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted

Fun Shoe

Boris Galerkin posted:

I found websites that let me upload them onto and that sounds like an awful idea. The other options I found are very questionable looking Windows crackers that will probably give me cancer.

Ok, install Kali Linux on a virtual machine and brute force the password with PDFCrack. It sounds like your password will take a very long time to brute force, though.

https://teachmehacking.com/pdfcrack-cracking-password-pdf-files/

IUG
Jul 14, 2007


I think I've finally accepted that I'm not going to get ISO files of my blurays on Kodi like I did DVDs. So I'm going to start looking at MakeMKV to rip the main movies, and if I want to see special features, I'll grab the disk.

However, I'm also looking at taking my Rifftrax MP3 collection and putting those directly into those MKV files as a secondary audio track. Has anyone been able to pull this off, and if so, how? I imagine I'll have to trim it to length of the film and really figure out how to delete exactly the right amount of header time from the MP3 (for their intros), and then inject it as a track, but I don't know if there's a better way.

Weedle
May 31, 2006




MKVToolNix can add audio tracks to video files. I used it to make a nice self-contained 1080p version of Wizard People, Dear Reader.

IUG
Jul 14, 2007


Weedle posted:

MKVToolNix can add audio tracks to video files. I used it to make a nice self-contained 1080p version of Wizard People, Dear Reader.

How did you find best to determine how much to trim from the commentary track to get it to sync to the movie before embedding it? My video editing experience is limited to iMovie, about 2 decades ago almost.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Sister in-law's 2011 MacBook got wrecked.

Luckily she uses Time Machine!

All her photos/work are on external drives/cloud so she's fine there. She just wants to get her website passwords etc back from Safari.

She won't be able to restore that to a new Mac since it was on....El Capitan or whatever, but is there a simple way to just go pull your keychain or whatever from Time Machine?

Maybe I'll try to find her a 2012 and she can upgrade to a 15"

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



Was she not using her iCloud account? Because that’s where the keychain has lived for some time.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Proteus Jones posted:

Was she not using her iCloud account? Because that’s where the keychain has lived for some time.

Nope

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013




Oh hey, look what I found

https://library.panic.com/general/keychain-migration/

unidef freeman
Sep 18, 2014

by R. Guyovich
I did a search for Unison Mac on the forums and found a GT of 6 posts from 2012, but Unison is now free (*NOT* open source, I found this out the hard way) but it is unsupported. Chances are you'll run into bugs, but Unison could be the defacto Usenet client for Mac

Toe Rag
Aug 29, 2005

I have an iMac14,1 and it is unusably slow. Do I just not have enough RAM? My swap file is 2GB, but I have never seen the swap use more than 1GB. Is there a reason for that, and would it make any difference?

This is what Activity Monitor shows right now. I feel when I checked in the past the "pressure" would be green, but the computer's performance would still be poor.



I'm not sure if the problem is RAM or HDD. SMARTS and AHT do not report any HDD problems, but I feel like if I kill Dropbox, the computer becomes more responsive. I do not have problems with Dropbox on my other computers, so I don't think it's necessarily a software issue. Sometimes I will also see Time Machine struggling with making its backups. Microsoft's Outlook and Excel are also ridiculously slow on the iMac compared to my MBP.

Is there anything I can do to check which is the source of the problem, or has anyone had similar problems? The RAM and HDDs are not easily user-accessible on this iMac, so I want to avoid needlessly paying Apple money for the wrong thing(s).

Oneiros
Jan 12, 2007



Toe Rag posted:

I have an iMac14,1 and it is unusably slow. Do I just not have enough RAM? My swap file is 2GB, but I have never seen the swap use more than 1GB. Is there a reason for that, and would it make any difference?

This is what Activity Monitor shows right now. I feel when I checked in the past the "pressure" would be green, but the computer's performance would still be poor.



I'm not sure if the problem is RAM or HDD. SMARTS and AHT do not report any HDD problems, but I feel like if I kill Dropbox, the computer becomes more responsive. I do not have problems with Dropbox on my other computers, so I don't think it's necessarily a software issue. Sometimes I will also see Time Machine struggling with making its backups. Microsoft's Outlook and Excel are also ridiculously slow on the iMac compared to my MBP.

Is there anything I can do to check which is the source of the problem, or has anyone had similar problems? The RAM and HDDs are not easily user-accessible on this iMac, so I want to avoid needlessly paying Apple money for the wrong thing(s).

Does it have the original 5400RPM HDD in it? Because that's gonna run like dogshit compared to just about anything, even contemporaneous or older machines, with an SSD.

eames
May 9, 2009

Extreme slowdowns during I/O intensive tasks (including swapping) often point at impending HDD problems.

Personally I'd make a second backup with Superduper/Carbon Copy Cloner ASAP and then look at replacing it with a SSD like the Samsung 860 Evo, though I'm sure that's not a fun task with an iMac.

edit: You might also get a decent speed boost out of cloning your internal HDD to an external Thunderbolt SSD and booting from that.

eames fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jan 16, 2019

PRADA SLUT
Mar 14, 2006

Inexperienced,
heartless,
but even so
I'm looking for software which allows me to use screen-based macros on a computer I'm remoting in to. Like, I remote in with my Mac, run some sort of script on my Mac, and it sends mouse / keyboard commands to the remote window (or, remote space).

The commands are basically "move mouse here and here and here, click this, click that, hit these keys, wait some amount of time, repeat".


I'm having trouble since the remote window is basically a video feed coming back from the server, so I can't use something like Autohotkey's window detection or pixel detection.

Last Chance
Dec 31, 2004

Bob Morales posted:

Sister in-law's 2011 MacBook got wrecked.

Luckily she uses Time Machine!

All her photos/work are on external drives/cloud so she's fine there. She just wants to get her website passwords etc back from Safari.

She won't be able to restore that to a new Mac since it was on....El Capitan or whatever, but is there a simple way to just go pull your keychain or whatever from Time Machine?

Maybe I'll try to find her a 2012 and she can upgrade to a 15"

You can restore a full time machine backup or use the migration assistant to restore a user directory + Applications from an older version macOS to a newer one no problem (eg, backup made on El Capitan, but restored on Mojave). You just can't go the other way (restoring a Mojave backup to El Capitan)

MrBond
Feb 19, 2004

FYI, Cheese NIPS are not the same as Cheez ITS

WithoutTheFezOn posted:

While Photostream will work, for info there’s another option — for some reason any photos you put into a Shared album also don’t count towards your iCloud space.

OP's use case actually happens to be the exact one photo stream is designed for I think, as long as you manage to copy them before they hit the 1000 photo/30 day limit.

Bonus is that on a Mac the photos are in full resolution but shared photo albums are downscaled.

edit: lol I guess there's the potential apple killed it off for newer users because it's so niche:

quote:

If you recently created your Apple ID, My Photo Stream might not be available. If My Photo Stream isn't available, use iCloud Photos to keep your photos and videos in iCloud.

MrBond fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jan 16, 2019

unidef freeman
Sep 18, 2014

by R. Guyovich

Toe Rag posted:

I have an iMac14,1 and it is unusably slow. Do I just not have enough RAM? My swap file is 2GB, but I have never seen the swap use more than 1GB. Is there a reason for that, and would it make any difference?

This is what Activity Monitor shows right now. I feel when I checked in the past the "pressure" would be green, but the computer's performance would still be poor.



I'm not sure if the problem is RAM or HDD. SMARTS and AHT do not report any HDD problems, but I feel like if I kill Dropbox, the computer becomes more responsive. I do not have problems with Dropbox on my other computers, so I don't think it's necessarily a software issue. Sometimes I will also see Time Machine struggling with making its backups. Microsoft's Outlook and Excel are also ridiculously slow on the iMac compared to my MBP.

Is there anything I can do to check which is the source of the problem, or has anyone had similar problems? The RAM and HDDs are not easily user-accessible on this iMac, so I want to avoid needlessly paying Apple money for the wrong thing(s).

I’d suggest a good, thorough backup, and a clean install from an official OS X disk

There’s always eBay

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


Update on that beachballing issue I had: I connected the SSD via USB and it works perfectly now! It looks like that SATA cable might genuinely be the problem. That said, I think it's about time to retire this old gal... 6 and a half years is pretty drat good.

...just as I was about to post this I experienced a good 30 seconds of beachballing. Far from how awful it was before, so I wonder if that's just the tradeoff for SATA to USB. Either way, I think the SSD itself is fine, so once I salvage what I can from it I might just repurpose it for my desktop or something.

Toe Rag
Aug 29, 2005

Oneiros posted:

Does it have the original 5400RPM HDD in it? Because that's gonna run like dogshit compared to just about anything, even contemporaneous or older machines, with an SSD.

Yeah, it does ... I forgot it was 5400rpm :smith:

eames posted:

Extreme slowdowns during I/O intensive tasks (including swapping) often point at impending HDD problems.

Personally I'd make a second backup with Superduper/Carbon Copy Cloner ASAP and then look at replacing it with a SSD like the Samsung 860 Evo, though I'm sure that's not a fun task with an iMac.

edit: You might also get a decent speed boost out of cloning your internal HDD to an external Thunderbolt SSD and booting from that.

Yeah, I tried to get Apple to give me a quote to replace the HDD over the internet but they wouldn't for some reason, and I haven't had the time to take it into a store. I wonder if they'd replace it with an SSD or just the same HDD it comes with. I'm suspect labor + materials would be halfway to a new computer.

unidef freeman posted:

I’d suggest a good, thorough backup, and a clean install from an official OS X disk

There’s always eBay

Haha, I don't want to dump a poo poo computer on anyone :(

I might just trade in this iMac and get a Mac mini instead. I still want to have a desktop Mac, but iMacs are a little too inflexible/poor value for me at this point. Target Display Mode only works with other Macs, right? :sigh:

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy
Time to buy a new mac. Bend over and spread em.

nitsuga
Jan 1, 2007

Toe Rag posted:

Yeah, it does ... I forgot it was 5400rpm :smith:


Yeah, I tried to get Apple to give me a quote to replace the HDD over the internet but they wouldn't for some reason, and I haven't had the time to take it into a store. I wonder if they'd replace it with an SSD or just the same HDD it comes with. I'm suspect labor + materials would be halfway to a new computer.


Haha, I don't want to dump a poo poo computer on anyone :(

I might just trade in this iMac and get a Mac mini instead. I still want to have a desktop Mac, but iMacs are a little too inflexible/poor value for me at this point. Target Display Mode only works with other Macs, right? :sigh:

You’d be surprised. A 2014 iMac with an HDD really isn’t a bad computer. If you were willing to throw in an SSD yourself, it’d fly for pretty cheap.

And if you’re not, sell it. Someone else surely would be.

unidef freeman
Sep 18, 2014

by R. Guyovich

Toe Rag posted:

Yeah, it does ... I forgot it was 5400rpm :smith:


Yeah, I tried to get Apple to give me a quote to replace the HDD over the internet but they wouldn't for some reason, and I haven't had the time to take it into a store. I wonder if they'd replace it with an SSD or just the same HDD it comes with. I'm suspect labor + materials would be halfway to a new computer.


Haha, I don't want to dump a poo poo computer on anyone :(

I might just trade in this iMac and get a Mac mini instead. I still want to have a desktop Mac, but iMacs are a little too inflexible/poor value for me at this point. Target Display Mode only works with other Macs, right? :sigh:

Did you know amazon has SAME DAY SHIPPING!!!

If you order your Mac Thursday night it’s there Friday morning, time it right and if you order before a cut off it comes within 8 hours

Remember to get 4K, your iMac has potential for audio recording and mastering, get as much ram as possible; more ram = more apps open in macOS world.

Apple sadly removed the dac in the newer macs modules that made it so you could hook up your Mac to a 1/8th to toslink spdif optical so you could hook it up to a receiver, I use a 1/8th to rca when I hook up my expensive as poo poo laptop to my display and sound system



I might just trade in this iMac and get a Mac mini instead. I still want to have a desktop Mac, but iMacs are a little too inflexible/poor value for me at this point. Target Display Mode only works with other Macs, right? :sigh:

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Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!


Didn’t work for some reason

I guess I’ll try migration assistant.

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