Tag Archives: Mac

Touch ID Authentication For Sudo Commands in Iterm2

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While reading an article about possible new Apple Watch features, one sentence caught my eye: “The biometric mechanism can be used to unlock the Mac, authorize Apple Pay purchases, autofill usernames and passwords, and (for the more advanced users) authenticate with sudo in Terminal.” I have a Macbook Pro with Touch ID and this was the first I’ve heard about using Touch ID to authenticate sudo commands. A quick Google search uncovered the simple change. Add the following line to /etc/pam.d/sudo:

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

Simple enough. I made the change but didn’t get the Touch ID prompt when I issued a sudo command. I opened a new window and restarted Iterm2 but I still got prompted for a password when issuing a sudo command. After some more Googling I found this ticket in the Iterm2 issue tracker. Turning off the following Iterm2 option fixed the problem:

Turn off Prefs > Advanced > Allow sessions to survive logging out and back in

This is what it looks like:

Google Music Extension Hijacks Macbook Pro Media Keys

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I have a Macbook Pro and use the media keys (play/pause, skip, volume) extensively when listening to iTunes. I recently noticed that the media keys stopped working. I tried the standard things like restarting iTunes and rebooting. A few weeks back I upgraded to El Capitan (OSX 10.11). I was a bit skeptical of that being the issue since iTunes is a core part of OSX but you never know.

I did some Google searches that pointed at options in Accessibility solving the issue. None of these solutions worked. Finally I came upon this post on the Mac Rumors forums. I remembered a few weeks back installing the Google Music extension in Chrome; likely in a moment of weakness. I disabled that Chrome extension and BOOM my media keys started working again.