iPhone iCloud Keychain not syncing

So recently my iPhone stopped syncing my keychain information from my Macbook.

I've tried updating my iOS on my iPhone to the latest & OS on my Macbook to the latest, but that didn't help.

Nothing from apple support pages (https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT203783) helped too.

I was almost going to use another password manager to store my passwords that could sync. I was starting to use google to save my new passwords.

Then I chanced upon this thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8187366). Specifically this post:

"I did have some luck removing one device from my iCloud. In this case, I removed my MacBook Pro because I didn't want to re-do all my Apple Pay cards on my iPhone. But, when I did this, it triggered some kind of re-authorization of all my existing devices. So I basically had to re-enter my password on all my devices, and once that was done my iCloud passwords started synchronizing again. I don't know if it will stay that way, but we'll see."

I didn't have any spare device that I could remove from my iCloud, so I added a spare iPhone I had at home to my existing iCloud by signing into my iCloud using that spare iPhone.

And that did the trick! I can ditch my plans to use another password manager.

Hope that helps.

Safari 8.0.7 Don't show more alerts from this webpage

In this version of Safari 8.0.7, it allows you to mute alerts from a webpage that is repeatedly showing JavaScript alerts. The JavaScript alert dialog has 2 new visible changes

1. The title now shows "From [webpage_name]"
2. A checkbox with the text “Don’t show more alerts from this webpage”

To be more precise, the checkbox with the text “Don’t show more alerts from this webpage” will only appear when a confirm or alert box is triggered multiple times. Checking the box will mute future alerts from the page. This allows you to mute alerts from pages that either accidentally show the same alert over and over, or use alerts as an attempt to prevent you from leaving the page.

When it first occurred, I got curious and decided to test out this new feature. Unfortunately there isn't a setting in the preferences of Safari to enable back the alert boxes.

After some trial and error, I found out you could enable them back by:

1. Closing all browsers on that page and loading them again
2. Clear the related website data found in the Privacy section (See screenshot below)

Mac Photos Flickr upload problem

Recently I upgraded my iPhotos to Photos. As most humans, we tend to be resistant to change. I was quite hesitant about it, but it was a matter of time before iPhotos get phased out and it's about time iPhotos got some upgrade.

I feel more comfortable with the side bar (I also show the side bar for iTunes), but I'm not organising them into albums anymore since they don't have the option for me to sort them. So I'll just stick to the  Moments/Location/Year views.

I also realised the thumbnails (when zoomed out) of my photos look corrupted and they are not reflecting the correct photos. I haven't managed to solve that yet.

But the problem I want to talk about in this post is about uploading to Flickr. I realised that when I right click on the photos to upload them, sometimes they would show the Flickr option and sometimes it wouldn't. After lots of trial and errors, here are what I found out.

Scenarios when the Flickr option wouldn't show:

1. 100 or more photos are selected

100 photos selected

When selecting 99, it has the Flickr option

2. Videos are selected

I also realised that when trying to upload more than 50 photos at 1 go, it causes the upload to hang and no photos get uploaded at all. The sweet spot is any number below 50.

Conclusion

Select less than 50 photos with no videos, and your upload to Flickr should work fine. Hopefully. ;)

Here's my Photos version and I'm running on OS X Yosemite.

Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X

One of my gripes when using a mac was that I could never get my mouse to track fast enough. Even the highest option available in the System Preferences wasn't fast enough for me. Especially when you're using an external monitor, and if it's quite large, your mouse pad would not be big enough for your mouse to roam in order to get from one corner of your screen to the other.  Generally, I just want to keep my hand movement to minimal. ;) Here is a solution that worked for me.

1. Open a Terminal Window. 

You can Spotlight for "terminal"

2. Check your mouse speed.

Enter the following command to see what your current setting is:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

This will return a numeric value, the speed of your mouse.

3. Set your mouse speed

To speed up (or slow down) your mouse tracking, you can simply change this number accordingly by typing the following command, replacing the “your_mouse_speed” with a new number such as 5.0. Notice that read has been changed to write:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed

The maximum mouse speed on mac desktops is 3.0 (when maxed out in system preferences). I use 5.0 and it works well for me.

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling  5.0

You may need to restart your mac to see the changes take effect.

Hope that helps.

Dreamweaver CS5 doesn't load on Mac

Problem

When trying to start dreamweaver, the application hangs before the splash screen appears. Here is what I mean by the splash screen.

There is an indicator on the dock that shows the application is open and the menu only displays the Dreamweaver text and nothing else.

And the application just remains in this state for eternity.

Possible Solutions

I found a few possible solution online from https://forums.adobe.com/thread/628554.

- Disable File Vault (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4790)
- Repair Disk Permissions using Disk Utility (Spotlight for Disk Utility or go navigate using Finder and go to Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility

Unfortunately those solutions didn't work for my situation.

Solution that worked for me

I managed to find a solution from https://wordimpress.com/nothing-happens-when-launching-dreamweaver-cs5-on-mac/

1. First quit Dreamweaver CS5 if you have it launched (or kinda launched)
2. Open Finder and navigation to: Macintosh hd/users/your_user_folder/library/application support/adobe/dreamweaver cs5/en-US/
3. Here you will find the folder "configuration". Rename this folder to ‘configurationOld’ and restart Dreamweaver

What this will do is to force Dreamweaver to create that configuration folder again.

Hopefully one of these solutions will work for you. :)

Solution to Time Machine that's constantly in "preparing" state

Does your Time Machine application take forever to prepare? Like more than 7 hrs...? And while it's preparing, it's starts to hang your other applications? And somehow you can't seem to get it to stop despite pressing the 'Stop backing up' option. Well then you might be in a situation that I was once in.

Here's a solution which worked for me. What I did was to reduce the number of items to back up. And then slowly increase it back to my intended items I wanted to back up. And here's how you do it:

Step 1: Go to your Time Machine settings in your System Preferences

Step 2: Click the Option button and include your larger size files/folders to be excluded from the backing up process. (eg. Photos, Movies, Music... etc).

Step 3: Run your back up.

Right now as your Time Machine starts to back up, the preparing time should be shorter as there would be lesser files needed to back up. One possible reason why the previous preparing time took so long could be because "Time Machine keeps hourly backup for the past 24 hours, daily backup for the past month and weekly backup until your disk is full." (as mentioned in your Time Machine settings page). So if you haven't backed up your huge hard disk for a long time, imagine how long the preparing stage would take.

And once your backup is successful, you could remove the files to exclude and backup your remaining data. By now, the preparing phase should be significantly shorter.

Hope that helps, happy backing up!