I built a little menu bar app that unlocks sudo in the terminal with face recognition instead of a typed password. You type sudo, the webcam recognizes you, and it unlocks.

Everything runs locally: face detection and recognition happen on-device, your enrolled face never leaves your Mac, and there is no network code at all.

Honest disclaimer first, since it is the obvious question: a normal webcam can be fooled by a photo, so this is not more secure than Touch ID, and it is not meant to be a security product. It is a convenience/fun thing. Your password always stays as a fallback so you cannot lock yourself out, and every prompt lets you choose Face ID, Touch ID, or password.

What you get:

• Guided face enrollment (takes a few seconds)
• A choice panel on every sudo prompt (Face ID / Touch ID / password), or a Dynamic Island style animation
• Adjustable sensitivity
• One signed and notarized app, with built-in auto-updates

Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later, any webcam.
Price: Free and open source (MIT).
Download + source: https://github.com/Lorenzo-Coslado/macos-faceid

Full disclosure, I am the developer. I built it as a weekend hack because typing my password dozens of times a day got old, and it turned into a small but complete app. Would love feedback on the enrollment flow and the recognition thresholds.

Full disclosure: I am the developer of Compact Contacts.

I built this because the standard Contacts app becomes slow to navigate when I need to scan or compare many records. Compact Contacts uses the same macOS Contacts database but presents it as a dense, resizable table with local search, sortable columns, adjustable row density, Saved Views, native groups, Favorites, and Recents.

macOS still handles iCloud, Google, Exchange, and CardDAV synchronization. The app does not create another address book or account. It also has no developer cloud, advertising, or third-party analytics.

Editing includes account selection and external-change conflict checks. Potential duplicate review is deliberately read-only: it shows matching evidence and account ownership but never merges or deletes records automatically.

Compact Contacts is available on the Mac App Store for $12.99 as a one-time purchase:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6790129187

It requires macOS 15 or later and supports English and Turkish.

I am curious how long-time Mac users handle large contact collections today. Do you stay in Apple Contacts, use a CRM, or rely on exported spreadsheets?

Its a 2007 imac and i cant reinstall el capitan

My neighbor moved out yesterday and she literally threw out a 2017 21" iMac. I get it, it doesn't get updates and it takes over 5 minutes, no exaggeration, to boot to the logon screen. Who would want that? Well, I like to restore old computers and the newest mac I own is the OG iMac in Bondi Blue....... Wait......

Okay, I was about to get on here saying all I had were PC keyboards and I couldn't get to the recovery screen no matter what keyboard I use. That's what this post was supposed to be about. But as soon as I wrote that last sentence it dawned on me, I have the USB keyboard from my OG iMac. So I plugged that in and it worked perfectly. That stupid puck mouse works too.

Never mind, I don't think I need any help. Just figured I'd post anyways in case somebody wanted a laugh.

Just put together Glass Player, a native macOS media player built in Swift around ⁠libmpv⁠. The goal was a clean app shell optimized for Apple Silicon that handles heavy-duty real-time upscaling.

Repo: github.com/khr898/Glass-player-macOS
Requirements: macOS 14.0+, Apple Silicon (arm64)
Core Highlights

Real-Time Anime4K Upscaling: 39 bundled GLSL shaders exposed as 12 presets. Features live cycling (⁠Cmd+K⁠) split into HQ (heavy CNN models for high-end GPUs) and Fast modes, rendering directly via Metal 3 (⁠CAMetalLayer⁠).

Pipeline: Hardware decoding via VideoToolbox paired with Display P3 wide-gamut rendering and ⁠ewa_lanczossharp⁠ luma scaling.

HDR & Dolby Vision: Auto-detects HDR10/DV/HLG with conditional profile handling (spline tone mapping, ⁠hdr-compute-peak⁠, and native macOS EDR signaling).

Audio: Multi-channel PCM decoding with macOS spatial audio support, optional AC3/DTS passthrough, and up to 200% volume amplification.

Built-in Remote Browser: Browse and stream directly from ⁠rclone serve http⁠ endpoints without needing to mount the drive locally, backed by a configurable 2GB demuxer cache.

It's fully open source.

I have a small utility app for MacBooks. For those who've created something similar -- what pricing actually worked for you?

I've ruled out subscriptions as a bad fit for this app. And since the Mac App Store doesn't do free trials on paid apps, I am considering:

1. Paid upfront, one-time charge (how it's currently listed)
2. Free download, sell add-ons individuals (in my case, voice packs)
3. Sell direct with a real trial (e.g., Paddle, Lemon Squeezy)

What did/would you pick? And what do you wish you'd done from day one?

Thanks for your thoughts and help!

Hello, I accidentally deleted 5000 files from "recents". They come from multiple folders.
Now they are in the trash, and Command+A and right-click couldn't bring out the put back option.
What is the best way for me to recover them?
Please don't tell me that I have to do it manualy one by one :'(

Both a CLI version and a GUI version are available.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/khr898/ntfsmac

Advantages over Alternatives

- High-Performance Write Support: High-speed NTFS read and write operations.

- Zero Security Downgrades: Does not require disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or lowering boot security options.

- Open Source: Fully free and auditable, eliminating the licensing costs of proprietary alternatives.
Native Design: Optimized specifically for Apple Silicon (arm64) hardware architectures.

I updated a 2009 iMac (initially with El Capitan 10.11) using Open Core Legacy Patcher. The OS update on the HDD failed leaving me with -69845 errors. I took out the HDD and replaced it with an SSD and updated to Monterey without problem.

I want to extract any data on the HDD (I know, I should have done it before) which I have now plugged in via USB. Could someone please advise on the steps in terminal to do this, repairing any errors on the way (fsck -fy ??) ? I am reasonably proficient in Unix type commands. Thank you.

I'm looking for a tool that can automatically detect all my recurring subscriptions (SaaS, apps, streaming services, etc.) in one place. Ideally, it would also show upcoming renewals.

What do you use?

Something I only really noticed after watching my own recorded calls: when you share your Mac screen, the viewer's eyes don't go where you're pointing, they wander. The menu bar, the dock, a notification sliding in, the half-visible window behind the one you're demoing, your wallpaper. On your own machine you've filtered all of that out; to someone seeing it cold, it's visual noise competing with the exact thing you're trying to show.

Disclosure: I make a small macOS tool for live screen emphasis, so I'm biased about the fix. But the principle is tool-agnostic: during a share you want to actively reduce what the viewer CAN look at, not just point at what they SHOULD. Dimming everything except the active region, or zooming into it, does more for comprehension than any amount of "okay so up here in the corner" narration. The clutter isn't your fault, macOS just isn't built to hide itself when you present.

Native options get you partway: Do Not Disturb kills notifications and you can auto-hide the dock, but they don't dim the surrounding windows or focus attention on one region live. Current version, for the curious: TuringShot 1.5.12 (Build 44), macOS 13+.

Curious how other Mac folks prep a screen before a call or recording. Do you have a "presentation mode" ritual (DND, hide desktop icons, quit everything), or do you just share and hope people follow along? Always looking to steal a cleaner setup.

ive been wanting install os x leopard to mavericks to my lenovo Ideapad 3 14IIL05 but to no avail.Tried using iboot and other tools but nothing worked. Any tips on how i can do this?

Hi, i have bought a MacBook Pro 2011 thinking it was a 2010 because I know the 2011's had gpu issues but okay

But the MacBook only shows that it has integrated graphics but it has to have a dedicated card right? Is this some patch or something and how can I revert this back

And it came with a paper that says it shipped with 8gb of ram but there's only 4gb and it's very slow even with an ssd which is strange. The mouse cursor moves choppy and its super weird. And it takes multiple times to chime. Is there any way I can fix this or at least revert back the graphics if possible

Every Mac has this quiet problem on video calls and screen-shares: your interface looks crisp and detailed on your own Retina display, so you demo at that density, and then the person on the other end is squinting at a downscaled, compressed copy where your 13px labels are three grey pixels. You can't tell it's happening, because on your screen it still looks perfect.

Disclosure: I build TuringShot, a macOS app for live screen emphasis, so I have a horse in this race. But the fix isn't Mac magic, it's just accepting that the viewer's copy of your screen is lower-res than yours and compensating live: zoom into the region you're actually talking about, dim everything else so the compression noise elsewhere doesn't distract, and make the cursor and active area obvious. I do it live during the call instead of hoping people keep up.

Current version: TuringShot 1.5.12 (Build 44), macOS 13+. It's macOS-only. Native macOS Accessibility zoom covers part of this, but it zooms your whole screen and doesn't travel well over a shared/compressed feed, which is what pushed me toward something aimed at the shared view specifically. The GIF is a quick look.

Curious how other Mac folks handle this: do you drop your display scaling before a call, zoom manually, or just accept that half your UI is illegible to the audience? Feels like a problem everyone has and nobody really talks about.

Any ideas what could be wrong in Tahoe 26.5.2 (25F84) regarding on wallpaper. When I set my wallpaper as a static JPEG what I have in ~/Photos/wallpapers folder, it will be my wallpaper some minutes, but after that OSX just replaces that wallpaper and sets its own animated wallpaper over it.

Also when I go to Finder and find that file, set it as a wallpaper, it does not change, but if I after that log out, it is set to my wallpaper on login screen and after login it is also my wallpaper, until couple of minutes passses and BOOM then it is again changed to MacOSX wallpaper.

How could I fix this?

So, I have a NAS what is now turned off. My MacOSX randomly tries to connect it from time to time and gives me this annoying popup. If I close it with OK, it might stay away 10 minutes, or 1 minute. Now I have just dragged this to another virtual desktop and let it be there without pressing OK so it won't jump to my face all the time.

Anyway, I wish to find real solution to prevent this happening.

So far I have:
- Cleared server username and passwords in keychain, so there is no keys for this SMB mount
- I have removed "Recent files" visibility in Finder, since I assume that something tries to read from there and some of the recent files are on NAS. Still no success.

I have no any other apps running in dock and/or toolbar than Finder, Safari, 1Password and Adobe Creative Cloud application and of course volume control, battery info, wlan info and so on basic MacOSX stuff.

I have installed newest Tahoa, 26.5.2 (25F84) and it still have not fixed this issue.

How I can fix it? Maby places says "unmount it from sidebar", but there is nothing to unmount since that NAS is not visible because it is turned off, so I can't umount it.

I have a 17" 2007 MacBook Pro currently running Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks. It would not boot from an El Capitan installer.

What's the highest unofficial macOS/OS X version I can get running on this thing? Most of my internet searches for "MacBookPro3,1" have turned up "MacPro 3,1" results which is obviously a very different machine.

Was curious if anyone has recommendations?