We tossed DOSDude1’s patched Catalina on a macbookpro5,1 for a friend and noticed that when the MacBook Pro’s screen was closed and the sleep indicator on the front of the Mac illuminated, the MacBook Pro was not actually going to sleep and was unresponsive after reopening the screen.

This Mac is a 2008 machine, upgraded with a Kingston 240GB SUV400S37/240G. After the machine failed to wake from sleep and we restarted it, we found a crash log with a Sleep Wake Failure event.

Turns out the fix is easy. Go to System Preferences->Energy Saver and uncheck “Put hard disks to sleep when possible” for “Battery” and “Power Adapter”. Now the Mac goes to sleep and wakes up just as it should.

I downloaded 6.3.4 of the Cisco Network Assistant to configure this router, but it wouldn’t launch. I greeted with the error message “The application cna_mac_k9_6_34_en can’t be opened”.

To fix this, open Terminal.app and paste in the following string and then drag and drop the CNA app on top of the Terminal window:

chmod +x

In the my case, it looked like this:

chmod +x /Users/brad/Documents/Brad/Service\ Manuals/Cisco/WS-C2960S-24TS-S/firmware/cna_mac_k9_6_34_en.app/Contents/MacOS/*

After doing this, I was able to launch Cisco’s app!

I replaced an aging SMC 10/100 switch this weekend with a 7-year old Cisco Catalyst WS-C2960S-TS24-S switch that does 10/100/1000. The switch was easily returned to default settings by holding the mode button for 10 seconds; however, the web UI is then turned off by default. The web UI is enabled through the switch set up program, which required my MacBook Pro to make a direct connection to the switch console port using a USB cable. Previously, I would have relied on the ever-trusty ZTerm, but its not currently compatible with Catalina.

The following steps allowed Terminal.app and screen to make a direct connection to the Cisco switch:

Last login: Mon May 18 08:51:17 on console
brad@MacBook-Pro ~ % cd /dev
brad@MacBook-Pro /dev % ls –ltr *usb*
ls: –ltr: No such file or directory
cu.usbmodem14101 tty.usbmodem14101
brad@MacBook-Pro /dev % screen tty.usbmodem14101 9600

After making the connection with screen, I was able to run through the setup process with these instructions to configure Vlan1 port with an IP address of 10.0.1.2 and finally reach the web UI on my network.

I was trying to install Mac OS X Capitan on a macbookpro5,1 and during installation came across the error message:

“OS X could not be installed on your computer. No packages were eligible to install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance or quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.”

Turns out what is causing this error are Apple’s own expired certificates. The workaround is to install Mac OS X with the computer’s clock set in the past. Follow the directions posted on Apple’s website and re-posted here:

1. Use Disk Utility.app and erase the drive you want to install OS X on.
2. Connect to a wifi network or plug in ethernet and download OS X through the App Store. Install as you normally would and arrive at failure point regarding no packages being eligible and an option to restart.
3. In the upper right hand corner of the screen, turn off wifi (top right) and, if necessary, unplug ethernet cord.
4. Go to Utilities->Terminal.app type this without quotes “date 0115124517”
5. Quit Terminal and choose the option to restart (wifi will reconnect automatically or if using ethernet go ahead and reconnect the ethernet cable.
6. The Mac OS X install should continue as expected.

The above-referenced color laser printer has been a beast of a machine, easily the best color laser of the three I’ve owned, including an Apple Color LaserWriter and a Samsung CLP-415NW. The Brother is now over 4 years old and well off of its warranty, yet its still on the puny original toner cartridges that came with it. Part of that is due to the addition of these reset gears (search eBay for “Reset Gear for Brother TN331 TN336 MFC-L8600CDW HL-L8250CDN L8350CDW”) that tell the printer to keep going because plenty of toner remains:

Lately, I’ve noticed prints have been looking dirty, see left picture below, there is extra black toner all over the page giving the paper a gray look and some vertical black streaks are present in the middle. Cleaning the printer’s four scanner windows and four corona wires helped a little, but the output shown on the left, below, remained.

Each toner cartridge has a gear that slowly rotates over the life of the cartridge. The printer reads this gear and guesses how much life and toner remain. When I covered this gear with a reset gear, I had effectively told the printer “New cartridges have been installed!”, when in fact the same old cartridges were still in place. As a toner cartridge ages, it allows more toner to come out, which is what I was seeing in the picture on the left, below.

The fix is easy, just tell the printer to update its color calibration. The color calibrated procedure helps the printer adjust its voltage and reduce the amount of black toner that is released. Here’s the procedure and all you need is access to the printer:

1. Press any key on top of the printer, near its LCD screen, to wake it up
2. Press the “down arrow” button 6 times, the “OK” button 3 times, and the “up arrow” one time.

The printer will run through its color calibration process, which takes about a minute. After it finishes the calibration, try printing again. The printed output on my machine went from left (before color calibration) to right (after color calibration):

I’ve never seen good instructions for connecting macOS to a Windows Print Server, specifically when you want to manually type in the name of the Windows Print Server and printer, like you can do on Windows. Indeed, you can do this on a Mac too:

1. From the app you want to print from, choose File->Print…->Printer:->Add Printer…
2. This step is necessary once time and you can skip in the future: add an “Advanced” button by following these instructions.
3. Click the Advanced button, change “Type:” to “Windows printer via spoolss”, and in the URL: field, enter the name of your Windows print server and printer name, as shown in my example:

4. Customize the Name: and Location: fields to your preference.
5. For the “Use:” field, choose your printer driver and if it isn’t listed, you may want to install it now – you’ll need to know the Manufacturer and model of your network printer, otherwise try selecting one of the “Generic PostScript Printer” or the “Generic PCL Printer” options.
6. Click Add.
7. Enter details about your printer if prompted, I was connecting to a Konica Minolta network printer, so I had lots to enter, copied from a Windows PC. If you don’t want printer finishing options, leave the options on “none” or go back and choose a generic driver.
8. Click “OK”.

Printing via Bonjour/AirPrint is much easier, but my work is Mac-hostile and disables these protocols, so I’m forced to use the method above or manually enter each printer’s IP address and use LPD.

** UPDATE 5-4-2020**
The dark printing came back along with missing black toner vertically in in each printed page. Turns out my toner cartridge was low on toner.

Also, whatever you do, don’t do like I did and try running paper or cardboard along the toner cartridge’s roller. Seems I shoved a plastic flap in the wrong direction and wrecked the cartridge, so my attempt to refill a demo cartridge failed. I replaced with a high-capacity cartridge comes with the reset wheels. When the behavior above returns, I’ll know I just need to fill the dam cartridge with more toner, but the color calibration steps might help you get a couple more good prints and won’t hurt your printer.

Last week, I purchased a Silicon Power A55 SSD (1TB). I’m temporarily using the A55 to boot a 2015 MacBook Pro. The A55 boots up the MacBook Pro when connected via a USB to SATA connection, but the behavior is different when using a FireWire cable to SATA connection (Seagate GoFlex FW 800 cable).

With the A55 connected to GoFlex cable, the MacBook Pro boots part way up, but then a circle with a slash appears across the screen:

Anyway, I filed a support ticket with Silicon Power to resolve this situation. It could be that this drive is not fully compatible with FireWire interfaces – stay tuned.

For some reason, I never seem to see the keyboard shortcut in Pico for showing the current line number. This post will help at least one person, me.

Pico refers to the ability to see line numbers as “Cur Pos” and the keyboard shortcut to enable it is by pressing the Control and C keys. This works in Catalina on a Mac, yay!

I’ve found with some jailbreaks, including iOS 13.3 and unc0ver, that I’ll be trying to use wireless service with my provider T-Mobile and I’ll get the following error message “ Could not activate cellular data network” and my mobile data won’t work.

Fortunately, Luca Todesco’s fix still works! I found a way to shorten it if you’re jailbroken:

1. Download MTerminal with Cydia or connect to your phone via SSH.
2. Open MTerminal (or make a SSH connection), type the command “su”, tap the “return” key, enter “alpine” for the password, finally followed by “return” again.
3. Enter the following commands and press return after each line:

chmod 777 /var
chmod 777 /var/mobile
chmod 777 /var/mobile/Library
chmod 777 /var/mobile/Library/Preferences

That’s it! I didn’t even have to restart my phone.

Others out there say they’ve uninstalled TetherMe to fix this issue, but this had no effect for me.

After upgrading my Mac to Catalina, Skype for Business updated to 16.28.172 on its own a couple days later, but when I attempted to host a Skype Meeting today, everything worked except for microphone input. Other people on the Skype Meeting call couldn’t hear me and, yes, my Mac’s system microphone was set to use the functioning internal mic and it was showing feedback outside of Skype. Also, Skype has its own preference setting for which microphone to use and it was also set correctly to use the machine’s internal microphone. Bummer!

I reported the issue to Microsoft, and, fortunately, Fabiano posted a slick fix that worked wonderfully for me. I’ve re-printed Fabiano’s fix, below, with one modification to improve the first command after Open Terminal.app:

==========================================================================

First of all, disable SIP protection in your Mac.

==========================================================================

How to turn off System Integrity Protection in macOS

Click the Apple symbol in the Menu bar.

Click Restart…

Hold down Command-R to reboot into Recovery Mode.

Click Utilities.

Select Terminal.

Type csrutil disable.

Press Return or Enter on your keyboard.

Click the Apple symbol in the Menu bar.

Click Restart…

If you later want to start using SIP once again (and you really should), then follow these steps again, except this time you’ll enter csrutil enable in the Terminal instead.

To check if it is disabled, execute the command csrutil status

and confirm the message: System Integrity Protection status: disabled.

==========================================================================

After that,

Manually manipulate the security database TCC.db.

==========================================================================

. Open Terminal

. Make a backup copy of the TCC.db file using this command:
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC_backup.db
. Open the database by giving command:
sudo sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db
. Provide your password when requested Within sqlite3, For Skype for Business audio fix type in command:

INSERT INTO access VALUES(‘kTCCServiceMicrophone’,’com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness’,0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,’UNUSED’,NULL,0,1541440109);

. If you receive some error on INSERT, try REPLACE sql command below:

REPLACE INTO access VALUES(‘kTCCServiceMicrophone’,’com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness’,0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,’UNUSED’,NULL,0,1541440109);

. Type .exit to exit the sqlite3

Skype for Business should be visible in the Security & Privacy preferences Privacy-Microphone view. This is not something the user should be required to do, but until the application is fixed, this might be the only way.