Should you trust the Storage bar?
My Mac mini has an internal 256GB SSD, so my large Photos and iTunes libraries are on external 4TB and 8TB drives. The Storage tab in About This Mac reports that there are over 100GB of photos on my internal drive, but Disk Utility and Finder show a total
Trust Finder and Disk Utility over anything in the Storage tab. The former calculate the total space actually used by all the files on a drive, regardless of what’s in them. Although they’ve occasionally had glitches, those figures are pretty robust, and have been since OS X 10.0 in 2001. The Storage tab in About This Mac is the upstart, and has been revised for Sierra’s new Optimized Storage feature. Somewhere in that process, the method it uses to work out how much of your startup disk is used by different types of files has become less reliable. On some Macs, the colored bar never completes, and still shows “Calculating…” months after upgrading to Sierra. A few users have reported problems similar to yours, which may result from the tab incorrectly trying to include large linked libraries, such as your Photos library, in its math.
Hopefully Apple will get round to fixing these bugs soon. In the meantime, you should altogether ignore those conflicting figures listed in the Storage tab.
Up close and personal
What’s the best macro lens to use with an iPhone 7?
Moment ( shopmoment.com) and olloclip ( olloclip.com) offer top-quality options, but note the differences in their mounting systems. Neither can match the performance of a good compact camera with a macro-capable lens, and those in turn are inferior to a DSLR with a dedicated macro lens.
Unexplained shutdowns
Although my Mac mini seems to have been running sweetly with El Capitan, recently it has shut down of its own accord on two occasions. The shutdowns haven’t coincided with any interruption to the power supply, though. Why could that be?
These are almost certainly the result of kernel panics, in which the heart of the operating system has become so badly damaged that its In the log, the entry BOOT_TIME marks the startup after any shutdown or restart, and helps to locate the cause.
only option is to force your mini to shut down. As you’re still running El Capitan, you can check whether a shutdown is the result of a kernel panic by browsing its logs in Console.
Search Console’s All Messages view to find BOOT_TIME in the first instance, which shows the last time the Mac started up after shutting down like that. From there, show all log entries again and scroll backward in time to locate its last entries before starting up, and forward in time to look for “Previous shutdown cause.” The latter should give a code which you can interpret at bit.ly/sdcodes.
Next, run Apple’s hardware diagnostics ( bit.ly/appldiag) to ensure there isn’t a hardware problem lurking, such as faulty memory. Then start up in Recovery mode, open Disk Utility, and run First Aid on your startup disk to ensure it’s okay ( bit.ly/dufirstaid).
If those are good, suspect a rogue app, or the longstanding tendency to instability which is present in El Capitan. This is a very good reason for upgrading now to Sierra, which on most Macs is considerably less prone to such kernel panics.
Shedding light
Can I get an external flashgun for my iPhone 6?
Good solutions for this tend to be external LED panels that provide continuous light rather than flash. Tric has just started shipping its new wireless Xenon flash trigger, which syncs with external flash units such as speedlights; its fastest sync speed is 1/30s, with an iPhone 6, and 1/45s with 6s and 7. See tricflash.com.
Display or Wi-Fi problems?
I’ve had the odd display glitch on my iMac recently, so I ran Apple Diagnostics. I was surprised when it reported a code CNW007, which I’m told is a Wi-Fi problem. Should I be worried about this? Two particular Wi-Fi fault codes reported by Apple Diagnostics don’t necessarily mean that there’s a problem; CNW007 and 008 indicate that the diagnostic routines could not connect to a wireless network.
The most obvious potential cause, and the best outcome for you, is that your iMac wasn’t in range of a wireless network when the test was run. Apple recommends ensuring that there’s a good Wi-Fi connection available – say, from a reasonably close Wi-Fi modemrouter or base station – then repeating the diagnostic tests.
If they still return the same code, it’s likely there’s a fault in your iMac’s Wi-Fi hardware. Whether you choose to do anything about that is another matter; although that fault could potentially affect other systems in time, your iMac might well continue to work normally in all other respects for years. Unfortunately, none of this rules You can move certain configuration files to try fixing problems with Wi-FI – see below. out a graphics card or display problem. Keep an eye on that, and consider taking your iMac into a Genius Bar to ask them to run Apple’s full hardware test suite.
Bye bye, Wi-Fi
Why did my Mac lose Wi-Fi after a macOS update? Try moving all AirPort, Wi-Fi, and network settings files (with the
extension .plist) from /Library/ Preferences/SystemConfiguration to another folder in your Documents folder. Restart, then set up your Mac’s network interfaces again. Otherwise try safe mode ( bit.ly/sfmode), or run a Combo update on top of your existing macOS installation.
Keychain problems in Sierra
Following a security scare, I changed all the passwords on my Mac and online accounts. This has upset my Mac though, and it keeps asking me to enter my login password, when it didn’t before. It’s running Sierra, and uses a local keychain. How can I fix this? It’s annoying!
Keychain problems are common in Sierra, and often provoked by changing your password, which can disturb its previous settings. At worst, the keychain password may get out of sync with your normal login password; if that were the case, you’d have to keep entering your old password to unlock your keychain.
Open Keychain Access (it’s in /Applications/Utilities). It defaults to showing your login keychain, which should be called “login.” If its name has been changed, or you see another user keychain, that can be a cause. In that situation, you may need to copy items from that extra keychain and paste them into the one named login.
If the login keychain is there and looks correct, containing current passwords and more, make sure it’s unlocked. With it selected at the upper left of the window, use the Change Settings command in the Edit menu to ensure that your keychain doesn’t lock after a period of inactivity, or when your Mac sleeps; those options will result in prompts to enter your password to unlock it. Check again that your login keychain is unlocked, and quit the app.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to repair a keychain in macOS; that had to be removed from OS X 10.11.2 because it was a security vulnerability.
Wireless wrangling
How can I run Apple Diagnostics using a wireless keyboard?
If you have Apple’s Magic Keyboard, connect its charging lead to turn it into a USB keyboard. For any other wireless keyboard, if your Mac has trouble recognising input from it during startup, buy an inexpensive USB keyboard and keep it handy in case you need to enter macOS Recovery, Apple Diagnostics, or use one of the numerous other key combinations described at bit.ly/startupkeys.
Going large
Which Macs have the best support for 5K displays?
Thunderbolt 3 support in the latest MacBook Pro is needed for the LG UltraFine 5K display, and the 15-inch model can even drive two. iMac 5K and Mac Pro models support Dell and HP 5K displays by using two DisplayPort cables. Details are at bit.ly/4k5kdisp.
Retiming scheduled events
It’s important to keep apps up to date, of course, but every afternoon, the QuarkXPress updater pops up and interrupts my work. How can I stop it without missing out on those updates?
Many of these updaters and other periodic tasks are installed as Launch Agents, in either your ~/Library/ LaunchAgents or /Library/Launch Agents folders. In the case of desktop publisher QuarkXPress, the file you’re looking for is a property list named com.quark.quarkupdate.agent.plist.
These property lists specify which tool should be run, how often, and when. If they run an updater or other tool at a time which is inconvenient to you, change that.
You could do that with a good text editor – these files must be stored as plain text to work – but you might feel you’re getting into deep water with that approach. Alternatively, use Lingon X from
peterborgapps.com/lingon, which provides a friendly interface for this. Lingon X provides ready access to Launch Agent settings, which you can use to reschedule update checks.
Go carefully – this is not the place for experiments, but it’s simple and safe, for example, to change the time that this updater runs to when you’re on your lunch break – or, if your Mac is always on, to another time when you’re not using it.
You can also use Lingon to schedule your own Launch Agents. Once you’ve saved changes, restart your Mac to apply them.
Checking up on Time Machine
I have Time Machine backups turned on in Sierra, but they don’t seem to occur particularly regularly. How can I tell if they’re encountering errors or other problems?
Time Machine backups normally occur about every hour, but the exact time that they run is determined by a Use a utility like Consolation to check Time Machine backups and browse past events in macOS Sierra’s new log system. component of macOS called Grand Central Dispatch (GCD); this aims to minimize their impact on your use of your Mac, and also optimize its power consumption. As a result, they may occur at any time within a window of about 5 to 10 minutes each hour.
If GCD develops a problem, however, backups can become much more irregular, skipping several hours, and running more frequently at other times. Currently, some Macs which are left running without putting the system to sleep can develop these issues after about 14 days; Apple is aware of this. If you let your system sleep, or shut it down periodically, you are unlikely to experience it.
If backing up results in an error, Time Machine should notify you of that. In El Capitan and earlier, it was easy to browse the logs to check for such error messages, but Sierra’s new log system and its impotent Console app make this very hard.
You will be better off using a free utility called Consolation from eclecticlight.co/downloads. This has a Help Book which shows you exactly how to inspect the last few backups, confirm when they took place, and most importantly, that they occurred without error.
Can you hear me now?
How do I fix FaceTime, which has been broken by the 10.12.3 update? Download and install the macOS 10.12.3 Combo update from bit.ly/102-3-combo (or a later version). If that doesn’t help, try entering safe mode ( bit.ly/sfmode), and refer to bit.ly/ fctmissues for help with FaceTime specifically. If the problem persists, contact Apple Support.