 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 747, the Jumbo Edition, for Monday, February 4th, 2019. To the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, you know the show where we answer your questions. We share the tips you send in. We share cool stuff found. In general, we get together so that every single one of us can learn at least five new things every week. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs at linkedin.com-mgg, PDF pen from smilesoftware.com-podcast, and Eero from Eero.com-mgg will talk all about each of those briefly in a bit here, here in downright balmy Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in likewise balmy Fairfield, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. Jonathan Braun? I went from zero to, like, spring almost. What's amazing? Zero to 60 in about a week for us here. Seriously. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, like, I think you could argue it was 60 degrees here at one point earlier this afternoon, so. Yeah, but the weather was nice enough in Atlanta. I think they had the game down there, right? Yeah, the big game. The big game, AKA the Super Bowl. We can say the Super Bowl. Yeah, we would love to get sued by the NFL and win because we would win because the NFL doesn't seem to understand how trademark law works, but that's OK. We're good here. Yeah, well, it was good. All I got to say, because we're not the football geek app. No, no, no, we are not. We're into sports, so I always enjoy it as an event. And I would say this was probably the least exciting event between the game and none of the people I knew that did the halftime show and all that. So it was still OK. Yeah, it was less than spectacular. I'll give you that. Yeah, it was. I thought it was a fun game to watch, but but less than spectacular for sure. Yeah, I'm trying to get my my candle lit here, John. And it's just not like I can't work. Oh, I like to have a candle lit while we're podcasting. And it's like the hardest thing I've ever done in my life to get this thing lit. So I just made it a mission and now it's lit. So really Jack Frost from Yankee Candle, a nice, a nice minty fresh smell, which is good stimulates the stimulates the brain a little bit. Well, you get yourself because I got one of these. They have one of these things that you can use. So I guess to light candles or like to light your grill, because a lot of girls, the starter fails. So it's like a really long tube and it makes it really easy. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I usually have a long like an electric match, you know, kind of thing here. And but no, I'm just using like a tiny little lighter here that I had to shove. I remember when I was an act, when I was a wee lad and I was an acolyte, we had this like special bar that we used to like like the candles on the this is really getting off track here. But I was one, I got to like the candles one time. It was really, it was really awesome. That's good. You ever used a candle snuffer? That's just another. That was on the end of the candlelight. It was the candle snuffer. Hey, I have a tip to share to change gears entirely. My mother was having some issues with her phone and some strange things were happening. And there were some strange accounts listed in her if she went to, you know, settings. What is it now? Passwords and accounts. There were some accounts here in addition to the ones that she had added. But unlike the ones she had added, she could not delete these that were here. And that made me think, aha, there's only one way that we can lock something in here. And that is via profiles. So I had her go to settings, general profiles. And sure enough, there were several things in here. I don't want to say that she didn't install, but that she wasn't aware of having installed. I think she these profiles can be added here by going to a website in Safari and it offering to install one for you. Perhaps if you say, hey, I want the weather or something, it's like, cool, if you want the weather widget, you need to install this profile. And in fact, it's, you know, like spyware or malware or something like that. So so the tip is well, twofold, number one, that that's where that stuff is. And number two, it's good for all of us to go and visit settings, general profiles every now and again, because you might have something there that perhaps you did intentionally put there, but you've since forgotten about. So there you go. You know, this is very timely because. I ran into something similar. OK, and that I was one of those. Was it malware? I think it was malware bites, but one of the pieces of software in my computer said, hey, you got a virus and I looked and I'm like, and it was like this installer for like this program I got. Like it was a really old zip file from a prior. OK, yeah. But all of a sudden it's like, hey, you got this thing called a crossrider. And I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. I mean, why does this all of a sudden come a because this isn't new. Right. I think it was just false positive. But then I researched this virus and we're going to link to an article. It talks about it. And this virus on the Mac does exactly what you saw on iOS is that it tricks you into installing configuration profiles. And if you don't know about that is that's usually not a good thing. Having someone else install them unless you know they're installing them because they can take control or, you know, read, they can do almost anything. Yeah. Now, to be fair, these things can't just magically get installed. You have to agree. Yes. Yeah. But they can they can trick you into agreeing to that if you're not entirely aware of what they're asking about. So, yeah. And on your Mac, where are those profiles listed on your Mac? I think it's just system preferences profiles. Normally will not see it only if you use something like for whatever. But it's in the system preferences. OK. The one, two, three, fourth. Row. Got it. And then you'll see next to accessibility. If you have any profiles, you'll see a little thing that, you know, it's like a little star with a checkmark and it says profiles. But if you don't have any profiles on your Mac, you won't see that icon in system preferences. Got it. OK, that's good to know. Yeah. But I have it because I have set up, you know, my machines for remote administration. Yeah. And I think the same is true on iOS that you won't see settings general profile until you have profiles installed. I think the same thing is true. Yeah. I think they show. Well, they show on iOS. I think they show up in the same place that your certificates do. Right. But it's all proof, isn't it? Yes. Right. No, I don't. Well, maybe. Well, here we go. OK, so I'm looking on my iPhone right now. OK. General settings and towards the bottom profiles and device management. OK, so interesting. So the name of that changes depending on what you have there, because I currently only have one thing installed and it's my Xfinity Wi-Fi profile. So the label for that section is profile, not even profiles. But unlike my mom's phone, it was profiles on yours. It's profiles and device management. So it depends on it's it's context. And I don't have any certs that currently I don't have my certs installed on my iOS device. So that's why it doesn't say just profile. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Cool. So that's kind of interesting that they tune that for whatever you got in there. Yeah. Yeah. If you got stuff in there and you don't know where it came from, then. Yeah, exactly. Well, actually, my experience is that at least on iOS, you should be able to get rid of it. Oh, yeah, I was able to get rid of it. She was or she was on her phone. She just went in and told it to delete the profile. And that was the end of that. I remember when I was playing this for a while, though, it's tricky to get a profile in a state where the user can't delete it. But you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? Well, you can. Yeah. If you're doing device management, yes, you can you can make it so that the profile is undelatable without without, you know, reformatting the phone or whatever. So yeah. Hey, I want to talk about our first sponsor today, John. We'll mix things up a little bit. Our first sponsor today is PDFPEN from Smile. And you would go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast to learn more about it. But PDFPEN, this is one of those tools, you know, Smile, they have a knack for this. They create tools that you can't live without. And just earlier today, I was using PDFPEN. I had sent someone an invoice and they wrote me back and they said, we need your company ID on the invoice. And it was it was somebody overseas. And I thought, well, company ID, like what ID do they want? I thought, you know what? It doesn't matter. I just need to put some ID on here. So I did. I pulled up our state tax ID and which is a public thing that you could get if you searched on the web. So I figured, well, that's pretty innocuous. And but I already had this invoice created. And of course, it was created using our normal templates and all that. And I couldn't go back to the templates because I didn't want to add this to it. And I thought, aha, perfect. I'll use PDFPEN. And sure enough, I used I pulled up the PDF. I placed this in. I matched the font close enough and put that right in there. And now I have a beautiful PDF that is there in voice. I didn't have to go and like reinvent the wheel. I just use PDFPEN boom to do that. There are other things PDFPEN can do, though, even though it makes that super easy, you can go paperless with scanning and OCR. You can search for an even redact sensitive info such as account numbers. In this case, I was doing the opposite of redaction. But maybe sometimes you want to do that if you want to share a PDF, but don't want people to see your credit card number or bank account number or things like that. You can even edit text in PDFs with PDFPEN. There is so much that you can do. It is your Swiss Army knife for PDFs and lets you do just about anything that you can conceive of. Very, very cool stuff. So and now PDFPEN and PDFPEN Pro version 10.2 includes support for, you guessed it, Dark Mode on Mojave, as well as smoother scrolling, faster thumbnail drawing and increased maximum zoom. So go check it out. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast, where you can learn all about this and more. And of course, our thanks to Smile and PDFPEN for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's go to let's go to Bob. Shall we hear, John? Let's see what we get to Bob writes. We'll dig right in. He says, my 2011 iMac with 16 megs of RAM, 512 gig SSD with over 100 gigs free has slowed dramatically. I get a two to three second initial delay with any typing and very frequently get the spinning beach ball for three to 10 seconds. It otherwise functions well, it's just really slow. I don't think it's the hard drive because I put in an SSD just two to three years ago. Checking the drive with disc utility and drive DX shows it to be good. Cleaned all my caches, reset SMC and PRAM, removed old programs and files, reloaded the operating system all without any improvement. Checking activity monitor never shows the CPU to be above 50 to 60 percent and is usually much lower. It has delays with just the simplest of tasks, such as opening and typing in Safari. It boots up very slowly and I cannot put it into safe mode, or it just takes a very long time and I am impatient. If I boot into a test account, it seems to be OK, leaving me leaning me to believe that it is a software problem. But where I was thinking of getting a new Mac anyway. So I ordered a new Mac mini core i5, 6 core i5 with the one terabyte SSD. My then question relates to setting up the new iMac. I plan to download all the apps from scratch when I can get the new machine. So I do not transfer whatever this problem is to the new machine, assuming it is software. My questions. Number one, I assume I can just transfer the data files, documents, music, photos, as they should not be a problem. I will download all the apps instead of migrating them over. What about the library folder? It contains stuff I do not understand and might contain the problem. Do I copy that over? I said, OK, not to. Should I copy any other folders? OK. So this is a weird thing, right? And I would I would let it. The first thing I would do is is commit some time and patience and see if you can get this thing to boot in safe mode. And then once that's up and here's the thing, here's the reason safe mode takes so long is it does a full file system scan and wipes out some some of the caches so that it's forced to really truly load the OS and not accidentally load something unintentional. If you can get it to boot in safe mode, the first thing you should know about safe mode is that on most Macs graphics will seem a little sluggish because it doesn't usually load the accelerated graphics drivers. So like when you drag a window, you'll see it sort of lag behind a little bit in safe mode. That's generally normal. So don't worry about that. Other than that, though, things should operate pretty lickety split and logging into your main account in safe mode would be the way to test to see does this problem happen on your main account even when you're in safe mode. If it doesn't, then you know definitively that it is, in fact, software. And you can start by hunting down software that might be a problem. You could look in system preferences, users and groups, look into your user and then log in items, see if something there sort of triggers any any thoughts. Lingon, which we'll put a link to in the show notes from Peter Borg's apps or Peter Borg apps.com is another way to dig into that stuff. But, you know, I would I would look for third party backup software, right, anything that's going to going to really do a lot of reading from the disk is what could cause the symptoms you're seeing. Things like malware scanners. If you've got something, you know, actively scanning for malware or viruses or whatever, that can cause that type of thing. Something doing a, you know, persistent index. Again, anything that's running full time and reading from the drive in the background is what you're going to look for. So let's let's let's chew on that for a little bit, John. Do you have any thoughts on that before we move on to his migration questions? I'm with you on this. So one thing, the first thing I looked at, I just want to see the capabilities of this machine and this machine using Mac tracker. So 60 megs of RAM, that's that's or gigs. Yes, actually, all the numbers he did are in megabytes. And I think he meant gigs. He made gigs. Yep. Yep. Like, I don't think you have a 512 megabyte assist. No, and I translated that when I said it. So it's not to confuse our listeners, but but it's fine was. Oh, well, do I have the, you know, it's my drive thrashing and you got it sounds like you got plenty of free space there. You know, I would lean towards that. I mean, if it's not processor bound, then it could be an IO bound thing. So whether with I step menus or activity monitor, look at what's happening as you suggested, Dave, see how much disc activity. It sounds like a lot of disc activity now could be. I mean, it could be a flaky SSD. So you may want to try one thing here. So that machine also has some, well, not a not terribly capable port. So it has SATA three, so six gigabits. So that's good for the internal thing. From what I saw, the external ports I think are still USB to though, it does have a Thunderbolt, a 10 gig Thunderbolt port and FireWire 800. So I'm wondering if cloning the drive and trying it on any other port. Why am I saying this? So the thing is, I'm wondering if the SATA is flaky on this machine. OK, OK, yeah, well, or the drive, just it sounds like. You know, I mean, there's there's different places you can look. So are you are you maxing your processor? He said no, OK, well, are you maxing your RAM? And I would assume no, 16 gigs is plenty. So what else is there to look and that's your storage, right? Yeah, the fact that he says this doesn't happen with a test user account, though, tells me that it's software, not hardware, right? That's that's what leads me to that. It could. But I mean, you know, hardware problems are weird things, right? Maybe he tested it in his test user account at a moment when the hardware was behaving like who knows? So yeah, it's it's yeah. All right, as for migrating, I'm actually going to share a little piece of advice first and then we can talk about migrating. In the if it were my category, the first thing I would do is spend some time figuring out what the problem is on your old machine, because if you don't know what it is, there is a very, very good chance that you will recreate this problem on your new machine. You know, you've got something assuming that it is software, and that's why I wanted to do those other tests first. Like if you can rule out software and that it's hardware, no problem, just, you know, at that point, migration assistant, good to go. In fact, if you can figure out what the problem is, and even if it is software, as long as it's software, you can disable and test and confirm that disabling it solves the issue. Again, I would go and do migration assistant. The migration assistant is is super powerful these days and can save you a lot of headaches. That said, if you want to manually migrate, yes, reinstalling apps, good manually migrating your documents, your photos, your music, that's good. The library folder, if you're reinstalling all your apps, I would generally stay away from the library folder, but there is one, at least one specific folder in there, which is home library mail that you're going to want to get and move in most cases. And you just move it to the same place on the new machine, and the new machine should pick it up when you first launch mail. So those are my general thoughts, John. Do you have general thoughts on this? I mean, you covered all the bases, you know, clearing out the caches. That's one thing I would look at, you know, stale caches or broken caches, but he claimed to have done that. Yeah. So, no, again, I kind of thought my idea of trying something from a clone is kind of clever, but again, the speed of the external ports on that thing made and make that unpleasant. Well, it has a fire word hundred. I mean, that's, you know, it has a fire word hundred. Oh, that would be fine. Yeah. Yeah. It also has, I think, USB two, so that I probably wouldn't do, but fire word hundred that. Yep. Yep. So again, it could be this. Yeah, I'm not that you talk about it more. I don't think it's the setup, but it could be. It could be. Try each thing. Yeah. Try different things and, you know. That's it. Yeah. But I would definitely do some more isolation testing just to keep yourself from finding yourself in this exact scenario with the new machine down the road. And there you go. Yeah. I mean, 20 of them. I mean, that's a pretty good run, though. Oh, yeah, it is. I'm not. No, I think he is making a good choice to migrate to a new machine. The question is, you know, but just don't assume that that's going to. Based on what you're telling us, I don't think that's going to be the thing that leaves this problem behind necessarily. And that's that's what you want to avoid. So all right, moving on to Todd with a I think is a quick question. He says, is there any utility or hack out there where you can force a new finder window to always opening column view to show full content with? I have searched, but I have not found a solution. Currently, he says I double click a column size or each and every time to set that column to show full content with or right click a column size or for right size, all columns individually. Yeah, this is one of those things where the finder doesn't do exactly what we would want it to do. There is the general school of thought that Apple sort of tries to live by, but doesn't is if you open a finder window, set all the size of it and the layout and all that and close it, it should save all that. And that's true for some parameters, but not all. And in fact, this is one of them. The column with will always reset to whatever whatever Apple wants to call default. So I'm not sure what the magic answer is here, Todd, but I figured I'd share it here. John, do you have any thoughts? We always open in column view. Yeah, which you can do. But the trick is showing the full content with of those columns. And that's where you cannot change that, which and that that's where it gets frustrating. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like there's something here, but not quite. So, yeah. So if you go into the finder and you go to show view options in the view menu, it has a little checkbox always open in list view, so close. Well, but no, no, no, no, no. Actually, it has group by and sort by. I wonder if you fiddle with no, I think these. No, it doesn't have quite the tag. No, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Slow down, though, because you you're missing something. The only reason that when you go to show view options, it says always open in list view is because that window is in list view. But if you change that window to column view, by either going to view as columns or clicking the little widget in the toolbar, assuming you have it, and then go to view show view options, there will be a checkbox that says always open in column view and browse in column view. But what you can't set here is the width of those columns. And that's where it gets frustrating. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm hoping someone else out there knows because it I feel like this is a problem that that maybe some developer has solved with a finder extension or something. So feedback at MacKicab.com, please, if you know the answer. I think I heard you right, Dave. You were asking people to maybe send an email to feedback at MacKicab. Right. Yeah, feedback at MacKicab.com is, you know, there you go. That's that's what that's where we got to that's where we'll do it. Yeah. Is it time to move on to Jeremy here? I feel like it might be. Let's see. Oh, let's see. Jeremy. Yeah. Jeremy says. Where where do we start this? He says, for the past couple of weeks, I've had a weird network issue that I can't explain. I have multiple computers on my network that are hardwired through the router and a LAN dumb switch. Also, hardware hardwired are a time capsule, an all in one printer and a Blu-ray player. My issue is that devices only partially communicate. My new Mac mini can see my Windows desktop machine and time capsule in the finder, but it can't connect to them. Though time capsule, though time machine backups to the time capsule work perfectly. My Windows desktop can see the Mac mini, but can't connect to it. My work Windows laptop can see my Windows desktop as a computer and a media player. It can even play music from it, though it can't quote unquote connect. All three can print to the all in one and connect to the Internet. I've rebooted the hardware. I've replaced the router in the switch and disconnecting everything one at a time from the switch in the router. Nothing is bringing the communication back. The only thing I haven't tried is to turn off Wi-Fi on the router to see if there's something there causing network confusion, mostly because I haven't figured out how to do that on the router yet. Something else I noticed today says that I don't I don't know if it has anything to do with this or if it's another issue. In Safari on the Mac mini, if I click the show tab overview button, my phone and MacBook Air are no longer listed as devices and the pages from my iPad are at least a couple of days old. Though, if I look at either the iPad or the iPhone, they have the current sites on the mini. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, so this is this is interesting. And I'm I have a few questions that I would ask if I were sitting there. And I will ask if we're if we're digging into this. The first is, are all the machines getting their IP addresses from the same DHCP server and have you confirmed that they're all in the same network range? I know this is this is a very basic question in terms of troubleshooting. The way to do this would be to look in system preferences network on your Mac and in settings, Wi-Fi on your iPhone. And just take a look at the IP address and make sure it's the one that your router is or in the range that your router is handing out. If somehow they are different, then that's potentially an issue because so much of what you're talking about here has to do with machines that are on the same network. So that would be the first thing to look at. And then the second thing to look at would be whether any computer out there is using custom DNS servers. Have you gone in and added a DNS server either on your iPhone? Again, settings Wi-Fi are on your Mac, system preferences network, either Wi-Fi or Ethernet there. It are they inheriting default DNS servers from the DHCP server that's handing them out from the router that's handing them out? Or have you put something manual in there? Because that can also mess with this as it's trying to connect if it's using the local network names. And yet you're forcing it to query, you know, maybe Google or Cloud Flayers or whatever. Somebody else's DNS server, it will not find it. And this probably the least likely scenario, but are you running any apps that would be firewalling things? And have you put anything on your router that firewalls things or that tells it to isolate your Wi-Fi network from your main network? A lot of times, if you have a guest network, you can do that and tell it to really isolate all that traffic. That too would cause symptoms like this. So any other thoughts on that before we start going into perhaps some workarounds here, John? One diagnostic tool that I think you should use because it gives you a view of your entire network is our PAL thing. So one tool you want to add to your toolbox here and their versions for both iOS and Mac. I think the Mac is only a command line, but it'll give you an idea of all the devices and tell you if there's anything wrong, it sounds like there's just something not quite configured properly here. Yeah, I'm assuming when he says connect and that he can't connect that he's in the finder seeing the item in the shared section or the device, I guess it would be the shared section, you know, in the finder sidebar clicking on it and then unable to effectively complete a connection to mount those drives, right, that's what I'm assuming here. But of course, if I'm mis-assuming that, then the path we're heading down is completely wrong, but if that doesn't work, try a manual connection and that in the finder is with the, you go to the go menu at the top of the finder there and choose connect to server. In here, I would type in SMB colon slash slash and then the IP address of the computer that you're trying to connect to. Well, worry about network names later, but Sieg, if you know the IP address and if you manually tell your computer, here's the IP address, can you connect? Is there something preventing the actual connection from happening or is it just the lookup that's not quite happening right all the time? That would be the first thing I'd try. And if SMB is the sort of the standard now, I think that's been standard since what, Sierra maybe? But you could also try instead of SMB colon slash slash, you could try AFP, Apple file protocol colon slash slash, that's the older sort of deprecated method of file sharing amongst Macs. But, you know, would be worth trying because it should still be supported by any OS as you're running. That would be the trick and sort of a bonus tip. If you want to connect and screen share to a machine, you can do exactly the same thing in the Finder, go connect to server and instead of typing SMB or AFP, you type VNC colon slash slash and then the IP address and you get to connect. So anyway, there you go. Any thoughts on that, John? One last thing to add here is you want to make sure that you have the protocols you think you have enabled enabled. And where do you see that? Well, I'm going to tell you where, Dave. System preference is sharing. If you click on file sharing, okay, well, there's a little checkbox, but then there's also an options button. And that's where, as you mentioned, you can say share files using SMB or share files using AFP. Yep. You may want to look there and just see what you have selected. What you have selected may not be what you think you have selected. Same thing on the Windows side. But I think Windows side is pretty much SMB. So. Right, right. Yeah, but fair. Making sure that it's actually sharing files is a good place to start. Yeah. And the other thing, last I checked is Fing will let you, does like a little port scan of the devices on your networks. So if you want to know, oh, well, how are you sharing stuff? Well, you know, highlight the device and then I forget exactly what the choice is. Right? But no, I know it's there. I think you can say, you know, show me all the services you're offering. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I like that. Just make sure everybody's offering, you know, SMB, AFP, VNC, whatever it shows it all. It should. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's possible. You didn't say what kind of router he's using. It might be that time capsule, though. If it is, then that shouldn't be blocking connections. But if it's not, there could be something in the router that's blocking those connections. Like I said, it's totally possible. It's just, you know. I mean, he says, now the other, you know, that occurred to me too. I mean, the thing is ports on switches go bad. And especially cheap switches, right? Or cheap anything. Things like that. Sure. But he says he replaced the router. I don't know if it's his ISP's router. It sounds like it's his ISP's because he says there's Wi-Fi in it. So I'm assuming we're talking a vendor-provided product here. I don't know. My routers have Wi-Fi in them, right? So I think that's pretty normal. Okay, yours, though, is mine. Mine doesn't. But your router doesn't have Wi-Fi in it. Yeah, you run Eero, right? That's your router. That's your Wi-Fi. No, you're right. Yeah, it's not vendor-provided. But no, no. Right, right. I know what you're saying. Yeah, okay. Right. So, yeah, I, yeah, it, it's one of those interesting things. No, I'm sorry, but he said he has switch as well. So I'm wondering if the switch is doing something weird. It sounds like he said he replaced this. He swapped it. Well, I think he said he swapped out both. And... Yep. Yep. And it didn't seem to make a difference. Because switches and routers can go bad, you know. Absolutely. The computing process, though, is, you know, plug things into different ports and see if anything changes. That's right. Yep. Yep. And I've seen switches go bad. You know, of course, here it's always lightning because that's what causes all our problems. But I've seen them go bad to where they light up and say they're connected, you know, like all good and no data passes. I don't, I can't say that I've ever seen one that would filter certain types of data. But, you know, anything's possible with a hardware problem. Yeah. I mean, that's weird. I mean, that's, that's pretty advanced stuff there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Yeah, look at this. Okay, so I'm running thing here and I'm looking at devices on my network. And yep, here's one here. And it's... Yeah, it says show open ports. Wow, that's handy. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's good. All right. Hey, I want to, speaking of Eero, I want to take a minute and talk about our next sponsor, which is Eero. And I actually, even if you are an already an Eero user, I have an Eero related tip that came up earlier today, believe it or not, that I'm going to share at the end. But, you know, the beauty of Eero is that for most of us, the single router model just doesn't work, right? Not only because of the range we need in our homes, but because of the high bandwidth that we need, right? The way routers work, they really, especially with Max, can only talk to one device at a time. Well, if you've got a lot of people streaming in your house, you might need more than one device talking at a time or receiving or listening at a time. And this is where mesh can really help. This is, to me, sort of the hidden place where mesh helps, because even if you've got enough coverage range, you might not have enough coverage bandwidth. And this is where mesh can really, really help you. Very, very cool. And a distributed system like Eero is exactly what you need. Offices have had it for years, because they have high density environments. Our homes are now those same high density environments with not just our Max and our iPhones and our watches and our IoT devices and all of that good stuff. And current routers are tough to manage and optimize, especially when you start adding extras to help your coverage. No, no, no, no. This is the beauty of mesh with Eero, because the Eero app lets you manage your entire network from the palm of your hand you don't have to worry about managing different devices and getting them to work together. Eero does that part for you. Everything is managed from one interface. Very, very cool stuff. And their customer support is stellar. It's pretty good to be able to call and get a human on the phone. Let me tell you, and this is how customer support works with Eero. Well, Eero also has Eero Plus, which is designed to provide simple, reliable security that defends all your home's devices against all the threats that are out there, like malware and spyware and phishing attacks, as well as unsuitable content. The combination of Eero with Eero Plus combines all of this together for complete protection for your network and all of your devices. And everyone who uses them are protected as they connect to the internet. Total network protection, advanced security, right? It checks the sites you visit against the database of millions of known threats, content blocking, Eero Plus automatically tags sites that contain violent, illegal adult content. So you can choose whether or not you want to let your family members, your kids, get to those. Add blocking. If you've got a site that's going nuts on that, it's right there. VPN protection built in from Encrypt.me, password management from OnePassword, antivirus software from Malwarebytes, all of this included in Eero Plus. So here's the deal. Eero Plus works super well. I've got it running here. I've got it running at my dad's house every week. I get a note that says how much was blocked. I can go in and look at the details. It's super cool. John's running it too. It really works. So you got to check it out. Go to Eero.com slash MGG. This is where you can go to never have to think about Wi-Fi again. You get $100 off the Eero base unit with two beacons. So you get a three-unit mesh package with one year of Eero Plus at Eero.com slash MGG. Again, you go to Eero.com slash MGG. You get $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package plus one year of Eero Plus. Eero.com slash MGG is where you go. And then at checkout, you enter promo code MGG. That's how this works. Super cool. And our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. Now, I promised you all that I had a little bonus tip for Eero users. Eero's been adding a lot of cool features in their betas, or in their beta labs, I guess I should call it over the last year. These features do not get turned on automatically. One of the best features is Eero's SQM, their smart Q management. This is their WAN-based QOS, which is the thing that we talk about a lot here. It totally keeps you from having an issue with your bandwidth when you've got one device that's like barfing a backup or sending pictures up to the cloud or whatever. So you definitely want to go and you're in the Eero app, you go to the hamburger menu in the upper left, go to network settings, go all the way to the bottom, and go to Eero Labs beta and turn on smart Q management. There's two other things there. Band steering and local DNS caching. Local DNS caching keeps, lets the router remember lookups that you've done for DNS stuff, and if it's within the time limit and it hasn't expired, it will just keep it right there. You definitely want to do this stuff, turn on local DNS caching. Lastly, band steering. Normally, your device picks whether it connects to the Eero's 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz radio. With band steering, Eero helps decide and it will put more devices on your 5 gigahertz network where there's more bandwidth and things can move a little more freely. So I recommend turning all these things on. I assume, do you have all yours on, John, with that? I figured as much, yeah. Cool. I think I had to shut them off one time. Sometimes some of these features will confuse some security software. Okay. Yeah, fair. No, benchmarking software. No, I had it the other day. I think I was doing a DNS bench and it was like, your router is doing something weird and I can't do it. And I'm like, oh, okay. Oh, yeah, because of that DNS caching. That would make sense. Yeah, sure. Right. So it was like, I can't do this because you got something in the way. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, easy enough to turn it on and off whenever you want. That's pretty good. Actually, I just noticed on my network settings screen and updates available. These guys just keep updating like all the time. There you go. Yeah, it's time to update. Fine tuning their product. And I have never heard of somebody call that the hamburger menu. Oh, really? Oh, that's a designer term. I've heard tons of designers call it that. I've never heard that. Yeah, it looks like a big Mac or a hamburger. Three lines. You've got the bun and the hamburger in the middle. Yeah. I don't know. That's what I, I don't know what else to call that. Right. That thing in the corner. I don't know. That thing in the corner. That thing in the corner, man. Yeah. Hey, all right. Moving on to, so I hope you folks don't mind that I took a little extra time at that sponsor spot because I wanted to, because it, because it didn't, because it wasn't the sponsor spot anymore. It was just us sharing tips. And it actually came up earlier today, helped a friend solve a problem. Hadn't turned any of those things on. It's like, yeah, there you go. They're not on by default. So it's good to check them. Anyway, Rod has a question relates to all this. It's been a while. Yeah. He says, I know you've talked about this in the past and maybe there's a particular show that answers my question. No, no. It's always good. He says, I'd like to know more about Wi-Fi speeds. It is my understanding that whatever package the cable company sells us, 300 down, 20 up, etc., your actual internet speeds when wired through the wired ethernet port will be that, but close, will be that or close to that. And he says, now, when it comes to Wi-Fi, I'm a bit lost. I've been told a number of things by people I suspect are trying to CYA. In my most recent situation, he says, I've signed up for 1,000 down and 20 up. Okay. He says, however, the Wi-Fi speed test results on my iPhone XS are between 200 and 300 down and about 19 up. The guy's installing told me two things. Number one, there's a limit on what Wi-Fi can do. He says, I know this is true just not why and how. And number two, something having to do with the back and forth from the router modem and my phone somehow means I should double the speeds or half the speeds I'm seeing. He says, which is still below the 1,000 down that I should be getting if I take the 200 to 300 and double it to 600. He says, I think this is a lot of BS. If you don't already have a show explaining this for simpletons to understand, would you mind doing so? We would never mind doing so. And there's no reason to call anyone a simpleton. This stuff's crazy and convoluted and when you get mixed messages, it's hard to decipher them. So let's start at the beginning. I don't know what he got was all BS, but some BS. But some, well, and certainly not in a package. Some of what they said was true. Some of what they said was true. And it also doesn't necessarily apply. So yeah, let's talk about what applies here. And you're totally right that the paid four slash advertised speed of your connection is, should be close to what you get when you connect via Ethernet. For example, some providers like Comcast or Xfinity, they actually over provision the cable modem. So I'm supposed to get one, I think it's gigabit down and 35 up. But it's provisioned at 1.2 gigabits or gigawatts down. And 42 up. And so sometimes on my upstream speed test, I'll actually get more than my 35. But it's right in that range. You're totally right. Wi-Fi is a different story. Yeah. Now, one thing I just noticed this here is that, because you're going to be talking about bottlenecks, so I'm sorry to steal your thunder. I just noticed something is that he has 1,000 down. What does that mean? That's a gigabit. Correct. And that's the speed of the port in most computers here. So I never thought we'd see this day where you could get Internet speeds faster than the speed of your Ethernet port. Well, that's what I just said. Mine is provisioned at 1.21 gigabits per second down. I don't have a device to do that. So you don't have, well, wait, don't you have a 10 gig? Oh, no, no. Not on my cable modem. No. Right. Your Mac mini has 10 gig, right? It could. It does not. I chose not to buy it with it. But my cable modem does not have a 10 gigabit port, nor does it have the ability to bond Ethernet ports together so you can't get more than a gigabit. Right, right. No, I'm just pondering that we're getting to the age here, and I assume this is fiber. I mean, it would almost have to be. Well, no. No, I'm going to cable. He's on a cable modem connection. That's the whole point of DOCSIS 3.1, is you can do this on the downstream. But it's interesting to see offered speeds at the speed of ports on the machine, or that the ports are now having greater capabilities kind of looking towards the future. Yeah, yeah. No, if he were on fiber, it would be synchronous, so he would get gig in both directions, which is what a lot of people do. Right, right. All right, so let's talk about your Wi-Fi speeds. And as John said, it is all based on the weakest link of the chain. So just like I can't get 1.21 gigabits, I really want to say gigawatts, jigawatts rather. But anyway, just like I can't get that because my Ethernet connection won't go faster than 1,000 or 1.0 gigabits, your Wi-Fi connection can also be the weak link in the chain. It didn't used to be this way. When our internet connection speeds were, say, 50 megabits down and five up, our Wi-Fi speeds were generally fast enough to not be the weak link. Our connection from the outside world was the weak link in the chain. That's not the case anymore with gigabit connections. Wi-Fi is often the limiting factor, and I'm pretty sure that's true here for you, Rod. So there's a couple of ways to look at this. And I'm just going to pick one protocol to drill down on. You can sort of apply what we're going to talk about here to any of them. But let's say you're doing this on your iPhone, right? And you're connected. Your router is some, you know, kick butt, dual band, quad stream router. Okay. What that means is that your router has two radios, dual band, one each at 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. And that each radio has the potential to use four antennas, streams, quad stream, four antennas simultaneously. Okay, great. These days, 5 gigahertz generally means 802.11ac. And we're going to ignore Wi-Fi 6 or any of that for now. Like I said, we're just going to focus on Wi-Fi 5 or whatever, I think it's Wi-Fi 5. 802.11ac, where each stream, theoretically, is capable of 433 megabits per second. Now you say, but my router has four streams. And that means 1,732 megabits per second because of multiplication. And you're right. But there are two tricks to consider here. One, that's the theoretical speed. And number two, and this is where you sort of cut things in half. It's different with every protocol. But by and large, let's say we cut it in half. Okay, great. So you say, great, Dave, we cut it in half. That's 866 megabits. Why am I only getting 2 to 300? Well, there's a reason for that, too. While your router might have four streams, sometimes called a 4x4 router, your iPhone does not. It has two streams. It is a dual stream device. It is a 2x2 device. So that means each stream 433 megabits a second times 2 equals 866 theoretical maximum, generally the real world max of 433. Now, as I said, this is not necessarily this cut in half thing doesn't really apply with 802.11ac the way it has with others. You can get speeds up over 500 megabits per second in a real world test. I've seen it. I see it pretty routinely if I'm really close to my router and there's no other interference. So you're seeing 2 to 300 could be the distance from the router. It could be other interference in the range, but that's not entirely rare. Somewhere in that 2 to 400 range is what is seen most of the time for an iPhone connecting to a router in general scenarios. So what you're seeing is totally normal. And until you change your iPhone will not change. And you could change to another iPhone, but there are no iPhones that support more than two streams. In fact, most Macs don't support more than two streams. The iMacs are three stream devices. MacBook Pros after a certain vintage or three stream devices. And I believe the new Mac Mini and new MacBook Air are three stream devices if I'm not mistaken. But by and large, dual stream is what is put in Wi-Fi chips, especially mobile Wi-Fi chips where your battery life is important and all that is the good stuff. That may change and of course with Wi-Fi 6 that all is going to change anyway, but that's typically how it goes. So that's why you're getting the speed you're seeing and what you're seeing totally makes sense and I don't think there's anything wrong. Hopefully that helps, not just Rod, but lots of you. Thoughts on this, John? Now there are some things you could do. Now one, the point that you make is excellent is that whereas wired connections, in theory, you can get the full speed of each port on a wired connection. If you're plugged into a switch that is built properly, whereas you're always going to be splitting them among everybody with Wi-Fi, as you stated. You got the limit to radios, number radios. Is that you don't get all the streams and then the thing is you have all your other devices. So the thing is you're not getting undivided attention. Right, but you may not be getting undivided attention. It gets better with the mesh product because it can kind of distribute it. Just like we said, yeah, exactly. But the other thing that occurs to me, just to mention one thing that I see sometimes, there's a certain room in my house where when I use my iPhone and I use the Euro software, which is great for this and most Wi-Fi routers will support you seeing this. What frequency are you connected at? Because there's one room in my house, Dave, where my iPhone is always connected at 2.4. I think it's because there's tile in it. That makes sense. Yeah, yep. So the thing is whenever I do a speed test in that room, it's always going to be terrible because it's like, I can't do five gigahertz. It's not a good idea. I'm going to give you 2.4. Sorry. Yeah. And that's just the Euro or the phone making that decision. I don't know who's making it. I think it's between the two of them. Right? Yeah. And with Euro, well, it depends on whether you have band steering on or not. I do have it on. And I think band steering, yes. You said it tries its best to get you on five. If it makes sense. Well, it chooses what it participates in the decision process. Your phone definitely has its vote, but the router can tell the phone what it sees. And really that whole band steering thing, the cool part about it is your phone can see which connection is strongest. That's what it uses to choose. Right? It's like, if the 2.4 connection is stronger, I'm just going to go with that. The router, however, gets to say, well, wait a minute. Yes, 2.4 might be stronger for you, but even at your weaker connection, this 5 gigahertz channel is going to get you more bandwidth, either because it's just going to be faster or it's less congested, which is something your phone cannot know. And it's like, yeah, I know. There's like all these other devices on the 2.4. Jump over to five. Trust me, it's going to be better. That's what band steering really does. So yeah, which is kind of cool. I mean, it's what it should be, right? Everything should be communicating and conversing and making the right decision, not just sort of an uninformed decision that our devices can make. All right, seems like we're on the networking show. So let's jump to Joe here who says, he says, I recently read an article about different DNS servers, publicly usable DNS servers. And he says, I drew the conclusion that using Cloudflare at 1.1.1.1 might be a good idea. He says, I listened back to episode 730 where you talked about this and I'm not sure whether I should go ahead. And if I do, should I set it up on the router or on my Mac individually? And will it interfere with my Synology configuration where I have devices accessible from outside my network? So to answer the last question first, generally no, whatever you set your outbound DNS to will not affect your anything coming in. Your IP address coming in is still the same. So however those devices are getting through, even if it's dynamic DNS. Yes, it's all DNS, but separate and you're all good. Whether or not you should use Cloudflare. So there are many publicly usable DNS servers. John, you mentioned that utility name bench that you like to use that will tell you which is the best one or at least the fastest one for you. Google's is 8.8.8.8. I think was it IBM that's 9.9.9.9.9 now. And then Cloudflare is 1.1.1.1. I have found in sort of general usage cases, I found that Cloudflare is the best in general. Again, there's lots of specifics. Name bench can help you here, although it too can be misleading. Cloudflare also has a very cool iOS app that they call the 1.1.1.1 app that makes it really easy for you to use their DNS and to use it in an encrypted way by setting up a VPN. The VPN only is used for DNS. All your connections otherwise are just sent over it. That's what we're talking about back in episode 730. But yeah, Cloudflare does a good job. They really have the interests of the internet in mind as much as any company can within reason. Thoughts on this, John? All I can say is, yeah, so I forgot who I put in the last time I ran this name bench. And actually, I think name bench is still in... It's in a weird state right now. I had problems running the GUI on top of it, but I think if you use a package manager and you run it from the command line, it'll still do the job. The last time I ran it, I had to do that because the GUI, there's something wrong with it. Or just doesn't show you the results, which is kind of the point. The thing I want to mention to people is whenever you set up a DNS, especially on a router, most people would say that setting the DNS value on your router and then having it propagate by a DHCP is probably the best way to go, right? But have a backup DNS server. The thing is in a lot of places you can put not only a primary DNS, but a backup one in case the first one fails, which, hey, things fail. Just keep that in mind when you're configuring your computer. And I think that was there also a question... Well, that was a question. Yeah, he asked the question, should I set it up on my Mac? And I would say no. I would say set it up on the router just for ease of administration. Yeah, I would do that. Well, yes, I would set it up on your router, definitely. When you're at home, having your Mac and all your devices use your router's DNS server can, if we circle back to one of the first questions we answered here, that would help mitigate any issues where you might not be able to, say, connect to another server locally on your network. Having all your devices use your router's DNS and then have the router use Cloudflare or whatever else you choose to use, that would definitely be the right thing. However, there are scenarios where you're going to want to do this manually on your Mac and one of them would be if you're out and about and you want to make sure you're using Cloudflare's DNS, then you would need to configure that there. And you can, like I said, for your iPhones, you can use their app and they make it really easy. So yeah, yeah, but I would put it on your router for sure. John, you don't, I don't think you know this while you may, but we just started using Cloudflare for our DNS and not our DNS lookups, but our DNS hosting. We have for the last 17 years been hosting our own DNS. We've run a server called Bind. Well, I think we started with NameD and then moved to Bind. But there were some reasons that we wanted to change that. And I started looking and Cloudflare actually has a really cool DNS hosting option. It is available for free to anybody that wants it. So if you're hosting your own DNS, for example, if you have your own website or something, you might be hosting your DNS at your provider or something. And that can be fine, but Cloudflare is very connected to the roots of the internet in terms of their DNS. So things work a lot faster through them or can work a lot faster through them. So we started hosting our DNS there. And they can also do things, even on their free plan, you can get benefits of their content delivery network and some caching so that if your website starts to get overloaded, they'll actually sort of help buffer that for you, again, even for free. Then, of course, because this is how Cloudflare works, this is how generally business works, they have things you can pay for if you want to use more and more of their services. But their freemium model is very much a functional thing. It's what we're using there, at least at the moment. And like I said, there's some altruism here. They have the best interests of the internet at heart, and by helping to solve these problems, they kind of make everything better. And again, then they have the things that they can do for you to help you and you can pay for. But yeah, we moved to that this week and it's been, end of last week, I should say, super smooth sailing. So yeah, it's good. Yeah? I think I'm running, I think I'm running them as my primary and I think I'm running open DNS as my secondary. Seems to have been working for the last time I changed it. Yeah, right, right, right. All right, I want to take, we have a couple of questions that you prep, John. And before we do that, I want to take a minute and thank our next sponsor, which is LinkedIn Jobs. We're at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. You can connect to the really, you know, the way I like to describe this is they have, LinkedIn has an unfair competitive advantage. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're looking to hire someone, you want to find the right person. You don't necessarily want to only be able to pick from the pool of people that are actively seeking a new job. Right? You want to be able to target your approach and get anyone that might be open to new opportunities, even if they haven't gone and posted their resume out on some job board yet. Well, this is where LinkedIn has a leg up because 70% of the U.S. workforce is on LinkedIn. And everybody's resume is right there. And because of that, LinkedIn can really help to tailor your search for the right people and can even get to people who have expressed that yes, they're open to new opportunities, even though they're not like out there pounding the pavement every day looking for a new job. This is why I say LinkedIn has this unfair competitive advantage because you want to find the right person, not just the right person that's actively looking. This is why you want to use LinkedIn. And here's the cool part. You can go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG and get 50 bucks off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get $50 off your first job post. I have used LinkedIn. I have hired people on LinkedIn. And I have done that in a scenario where I've spent less than that $50. So this isn't just like 50 bucks and you're going to have to pay a lot more. No, no, if you play your cards right, like this 50 bucks might get you your next hire. So you got to check it out. LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply, of course, as always. And our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to Jim? Yeah, I will. But you know, I had two encounters via LinkedIn in the last week, Dave. One was an old colleague and one was somebody I met at a gathering. I went to and it was both like one contact and he threw LinkedIn saying, hey, let's hook up and reminisce. And another was someone that I didn't know worked in the same company that I did years ago. And it's like, well, how are you going to link up LinkedIn? LinkedIn. Yeah, there you go. All right. So Jim has an interesting one. And I don't know what to think of this, Dave. Okay. You'll tell me what you think of it. I will. It's what we do. Jim writes, I'm trying to transition from Evernote to Apple's Notes app, but I am running into a problem. When I try and save a multi-page PDF to Notes, I only get the first page to show up. It seems to happen in both iOS and Mojave. My iOS devices, I'm using the print function from the share menu then expanding resulting document to get the options to save to Evernote, Dropbox, Notes, etc. On my Macs, I'm using the print to Notes function. For both Evernote and Dropbox, I get the full multi-page PDF, but for Notes, only the first page shows up as a safe PDF. Any idea on how to get the full PDF into Notes? I think it's Jim. I think that's already happening. I'm going to tell you why I say that. You may think I'm insane, but let me try to convince you otherwise. Well, I think you two are mutually exclusive. Let's just set that. Thank you. Okay. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. You're right. I mean, you could be right, and Jim can also be correct. So there you go. I could be right or I could be crazy. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Brilliant job. All right. Anyways, I think he may have either found a bug in the Notes app, Dave. Or if that's the way they want to deploy it, which gives me a fist shake. And I think actually he responded to my reply and shook his fist at Apple as well, because I think this is the way they want it to work. But I tried on my Mac, Dave. So I had a PDF. I opened it up, went to the share menu, and said share to Notes. Okay. And then I go to Notes, and sure enough, there's a PDF that shows up in Notes, and I click on it, and there's the first page. And that's the only page I see. Okay. So same thing with GMC. Yeah. Now my expectation would be that if you hit like an arrow or you scroll or something, you would see the additional pages. And I'm like, well, what's going on here? This is like lame. But then there's a number of options within the Notes program. And here's what I found, Dave. So if I right click on the PDF, embedded in Notes, and choose quick look attachment, because it considers it an attachment. I saw all the pages. I'm like, huh? But it looks like you're still in the Notes app. Now there's also another option, if you bring up the contextual menu, called open in preview. And sure enough, if you say that, Dave, it also opens it up and you see all the pages. Finally, in the embedded PDF, if you click on the pull down in the upper right, there's something called markup, which is Apple's kind of mini documented editor, I guess. And it's like, hey, you want to open this on markup? And I'm like, sure. And it's like, same thing. Saw all the pages. So when you export the document, as far as I can tell, Dave, all the pages are put into the PDF, but Notes is somehow making a decision to just show you the first page. And that's why I think we got to get a fish shake on here. Because to me, that's just not good design. So there's no visual indication that there is more to see here, unless you know to look for that. Not that I could see. No, no. I explored a PDF and it just showed me the first page. But the document is there in that if you offload it to another app, it shows you all the pages. So you can use Notes to store your PDFs, but you can't really effectively view them with the Notes native interface. You've got to either hand it off to markup or like I said, or hand it off to preview or... Yeah, right, right. You've got to... But you have to dig to find out if there might even be something more, and then you'll see it. Yeah, that's not good. I'm not into that. I want to love Notes. And I will say this, when we were at CES, we use Evernote here, right, for MacGeekab and it shares our Notes. And I generally use Evernote for sort of everything that I need to capture. Well, their iOS app has changed because I used to be able to go to one of these PEPCOM events or even just a general trade show, and I would create one Note for the show and I could just whip open my phone and tap Evernote and get right in and start typing about whatever thing it was I just learned and I wanted to save some data. This time, something must have happened in the Evernote update since maybe October, which is the last time I went to an event and used it in this way anyway, every time I launch Evernote, I see my Note, I go to Type and Evernote's like, whoa, man, slow down. I got to refresh everything and it takes like 10 or 15 seconds and refreshes everything, then displays me my Note again where I can tap and start to edit and all that. And it's not been this way before and it got to the point very, very quickly at CES where it was like, okay, this is non-functional. And I used Notes and Notes worked exactly the way I wanted. But Notes doesn't let us share entire notebooks like we do for Mac eCab. You can share individual Notes but you can't share entire Notebooks. So there's some non-starters with it for just some more business related workflows, I guess I would say. But otherwise, Note, there's a lot to love about Notes. I just wish some of these other things were right there because I think I'd like using it. I use it on almost the daily basis and I keep track of, you would almost say, John, why don't you use reminders? And the thing is I probably should but for a lot of things that are date-based and task-based, I'll do a little task list in Notes. Yeah, yeah. No Notes, there's some nice stuff in there. Yeah. Like for other things, I use the app itself. Like for example, Calendar. I use Calendar to schedule my bill payments every month. Sure. And I have an item saying, okay, well, I've got to pay these people love this date. And then schedule it and do my bill pay and everything's cool. And Calendar, doing a text note in Calendar is the best way for me to, because of the notification. But for other things, lists of like my stock trades, I do that, things where I want a history and see dates or I put the dates in myself. Sure. But yeah, in this one case, I would say Notes is a wee bit lacking. Yep, yep. There's just some things. Why would you only want to see the first page of a PDF? Huh? I mean, who even made that decision? Right. Well, and this is... If you made that decision, you can send in... Oh, I'm sorry. No, this is where it gets frustrating with... This is where it gets frustrating with Apple's sort of built-in apps because by creating something like Notes, they really do discourage anyone else from trying to enter this market. Because everyone that has a Mac or an iPhone automatically has Notes, with iCloud, it automatically syncs. So you really have to offer something compelling to get people to use your product instead of the one that's built-in for free and guaranteed to work when upgrades happen, right? And this is where I feel like Apple... They fall short, right? Calendar software was the same way for a long time until people finally figured out, oh, no, no, no, no. Like, there really is a market for third-party calendars because Apple's Calendar app is so weak. I don't mean to say that it's bad for you. I just mean to say that it's a weak app. And for many people, but certainly not everyone, for many people, the limitations, the walls that they've created there are non-functional. And Notes is that way, too. But is that... Should Apple even be playing in this arena? Or should they completely get out of it so as to open up the space and let third parties really do meaningful stuff here? You know, it's a tough balance. The calendar point is interesting because, I mean, Apple themselves came up, as far as I know, with the iCal standard, right? They came up with the CalDAV standard. CalDAV. Yeah, well, one guy. Or they were part of the group. No, no, no. Red Dutta, when he worked at Apple, he made CalDAV. And I think he might still be the only human on the planet that truly understands it. Unfortunately, he retired. So, you know, bear that in mind. But no, no, no. There's other people. I was involved in a project for a while where we were doing a lot with CalDAV. And it was like, oh, holy crap, like nobody really understands how this works. But yeah, no, they created that. And CalDAV, I think they also created CalDAV, too, for sharing contacts. But certainly CalDAV was them. CalDAV may not have been. But yeah, but it's like, you know, like you said, I mean, that's amazing, right? They did this thing to make it open source. And thank goodness they did, because now something like BusyCal or Fantastical can connect to iCloud servers. And it's the right protocols and all that stuff. And you can still all see the same data. And, you know, it's great. But with Calendar just existing there, you know, Apple's, they're sort of stuck, right? Because if they didn't offer a Calendar app, people would lambaste them. And they do offer a Calendar app, but it's not full-featured enough and they don't seem to put enough into it. So, and it sort of blocks a lot of the market, but thankfully not all of it. And then you get things like BusyCal and Fantastical. So you have options, which is great. The notes market's the same way. It's like, yeah, so anyway, I don't know. You want to take us to Paul? On to another one here. Yeah, now this one, this one's kind of wacky, but let's see where we can go with Paul here. So Paul writes in and says hi. In light of the FaceTime issue, here is another weird one for you. I did a clean install at Mojave on a Mac mini and copied some data files over from another Mac. I also logged into my iCloud account. In my services menu, when right-clicking on a file on the Finder on the Mac mini are BBEdit services. I'm not sure why they're there. I've never installed BBEdit on this machine. Nonetheless, when I use this service, excuse me, it opens BBEdit from somewhere. BBEdit is not my applications folder. This works even when disconnected from the internet. I then I tried the same with Cot Editor, Cot Editor. Okay, I'll never use that. For the first time, when not connected to the internet, Cot Editor opened. How did this app get on my Mac? And where are they? Spotlight can't find them. They are not in Launchpad. Scary. Oh, this is kind of scary. Well, okay, so I want to answer the first question, though. Just so anyone knows, if an app launches and it's sitting there in your dock and you don't know where it came from, your Mac will tell you, right-click on the app, go to Options and say Show in Finder. Right? There you go. Right? That's going to show you where it is. No question. Guaranteed. So at least there's that, because otherwise this is coming. There's the option here. Show. There we go. Yes, you're right. Okay, so something that's running in the dock. Yep. Option. Show in Finder. All right. So how do you identify, how do you drill down and find out what's happening here? The thing is, it has to be on, maybe not your hard drive, but it could be on another attached hard drive. Was that actually Dave, that was the thought in the back of my mind is that you have a backup drive mounted and it's getting confused. Absolutely. And this is why I, and I'm sorry to keep stepping in here, but I'm excited. I'm not fine. This is why I highly- You're trying to solve this. That's it. This is why I highly recommend when you do a clone, that you eject your clone after the cloning operation. And things like carbon copy clone are let you check a box that ejects your clone. Because- I always do that. Immediately. If you don't, you could have, like you could install an update to BB edit, let's say you clone once a week or whatever. You install an update. It could run the old one potentially from your clone drive if it's just hanging out online. And yeah, not, or you can pull up an old version of a document, even worse, right? So eject those clones other than while they are cloning. That's it. Sorry. So you may have, so look in your, you may have it hidden, but there should be, what is it, locations, I guess in the sidebar. And if you click on locations, it may say hide, it may say show, but then it should show all of your various mounted network volumes and take it from there. But to dig a little deeper here, Dave, did a little detective work here because it was really kind of fun. It's like, how do you find where this stuff is located? It has to be located somewhere, otherwise it wouldn't run. Right. First thing, if you want to find an application, I think the best thing to do, Dave, is to run system information. How do you do that? You may ask, well, you go to the Apple menu and you hold down the option key. And then the thing that says about this Mac is going to convert to something called system information, dot, dot, dot. You highlight that, then you run something and then you'll get a, it will run something called system information. And this will give you a plethora of data about your Mac, more than you'd ever want to know. But the place that you want to go to, Dave, is that there are major and minor categories here and they have a harder category. Don't care about that network. Don't care about that. Oh, software. And then if you go to software, there's an applications category. What you want to do is click on that. It's going to take a while. It's going to rip through your hard drive or other connected things and then tell you about every application that you have installed along with where it is. And I think that is going to be the thing of value here. Yeah, I'm going to assume it's going to show up there. So you're going to see BB edit somewhere in that list. And if you don't, then, I don't know, get back to us. The other thing you can try, Dave, is seeing weird things in the services menu. Now, this I kind of did a curve ball here or a Hail Mary or I don't know, but it seems to work, Dave. So if you want to find out more about a services item, here's a place to look, Dave. And it's a weird place. I agree. But it worked for me in the past. So system preferences, keyboard, shortcuts. John, where are you going with this? Oh, look at that. On the left side is different categories. One of them is called services. And then guess what? You see a list of services. Now, some are built into the OS, but then some are added by third parties. Like for example, Dave, let's see here. I think I have some open file and BB edit, right? Open PGP encrypt file. Yeah. Yeah. So what you do is if you see an action there, well, you right click on it. And then you know what you're going to see. It's going to say show in Finder. So show in Finder. It's going to show you where that shortcut is located, at least the folder within which it is located. It's like, for example, I just ran it. So I have some graphic converter shortcuts. Does this work? So show in Finder and it highlighted the application folder because graphic converter, which has the shortcuts, is in the application folder. Okay. That's what I was going to ask you, because when I did it, it just highlighted my applications folder. It didn't go and highlight the app itself, but okay, fair. Sometimes it'll go to a folder, like another one that I highlighted. It went to my services folder, like in my library folder. Yeah. Because shortcuts can be embedded within an app or they could be in a services folder that I think, again, is in your library folder. So that makes sense. I don't know of another way to see your list of services other than going through the keyboard thing, which seems kind of weird. That's what I'm saying. It was like kind of out of left field. I don't know if there's another way to get a list of all your services other than doing it through this like keyboard shortcut thing and then say show in Finder. But that will tell you where the service is coming from. And oh yeah. Yeah. Because open PGP or open GPG goes to the services menu. The services folder. If it is a built-in service, right-clicking on it will yield nothing. I tried it on the open terminal here or whatever and it's nothing. So yeah. Yeah, you don't get a prompt. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because it's built into the system. So it's like, but yeah, but it sounds like the issue here is that there are third-party utilities being run on your behalf and you don't know why. So yeah, between the two of those, and actually I had to dig a little, but I haven't been the services menu for a while. And I really should be because there's a lot of good stuff there. Well, that's, yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yep. And if you go back into keyboard shortcut services, like there's a lot of, if you bother to go through this long list and turn on the things you want, turn off the things you don't, you really can make your Mac work really well. Like, you know, I use this app called Image Optimized because it helps. With optimizing images and we make them all the time. And I'm just noticing now that I can have a service there for an image, which means when I right click on an image and I go to services, I see image optimizes right there. It's like, oh yeah, I got to like, I got to tweak these things. Because it's smart. So yeah, so the thing is, the services menu tunes itself to the type of document that you're highlighting. Right, right. Obviously you're not going to see a graphic converter thing on a text document. Right. Yeah, you get the idea. But again, the root cause of the issue, I think is a device being, I mean, the other thing you mentioned is that he connected to iCloud. Now, I don't know if iCloud on its own like, installed, I just can't imagine it, why it would find a reason to do that. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, I do. You had to get from somewhere. I mean, it's either, VB Editor is installed, maybe in a download folder. That's why I suggest this application thing, because it will show you a location. Yep. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it could be buried somewhere and you just, you know, forgot you downloaded it like ages ago. And that's why it's showing up in your menu. No, no, he said he did a fresh install, right? So how could it? Well, no, it'll show up in your menu if the app is there. Like that. Well, no, but the thing is, he said he did a clean install of Mojave on a machine. Sure. But like to your point earlier, if it's on an external drive, it's going to inherit it and index it and add the services. So, yeah, that makes sense. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. Yeah. What else we got? I think, I think, man, I think we're at the end. I think we're, it's how it's working. It's like the fourth quarter. I think, I think we're in overtime. Are we doing the Hail Mary? Are we doing Hail Mary? I think, I think we're good. I think we won the game, man. I think we're, we're fine. The good news is we had no opposition, right? Everybody here rooted for the same team. The goal was to learn five new things, and I think we did that. So, like, it's all good. It's all good. Yeah, I missed that one kick though, but you know. Well, it's okay. That's why we, that's why we stack the agenda the way we do. Every now and then, you know, you miss one, but there's, there's way more. At least five new things. We're not trying to hit the number. It's just in Blackjack, where you got to get, you know, two 21, but not over. No, no, no, no. We can go five new things. It can be 10. It's okay. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah. Well, we already told you how to contact us, at least via email. If you're a premium subscriber, premium at macgeekgab.com is the way that you can reach us. If you want to come and join our forums, we would love to have you at macgeekgab.com slash forums. It truly is a fantastic place. So much information there, and so many helpful people, all of you, all of us. It's just like again, we all win. Nobody's out there to get anybody. And like I say that, but and it's true, but I also understand that that is rare for internet forums. And we are very fortunate to have such a fantastic community. So this is, it's a good place to be. Macgeekgab, yeah. You should read the comments. Right, exactly. For a lot of other internet chat forums, I would say reading the comments is usually a bad idea. Yeah. Because it'll just get you angry or depressed. Right, right. Yeah, there's no battling happening here. We're all there to learn stuff and help. And if there is, we shut it down. You know, well, we're admins. So, you know, we can just, you know, crush anybody if we want to. Delete that we have. And we have some fantastic moderators. It's awesome. No, really, it's a great place. Check it out. Please do. All right. Our thanks to, of course, Cashfly for providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Our thanks to all of our sponsors. Of course, LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash mggpdfpen at smilesoftware.com slash podcastero at ero.com slash mgg. Of course, Otherworld Computing is an ongoing sponsor. Barebones, of course, an ongoing sponsor. Some great sponsors coming on board, too. Very excellent. Have a great week, folks. We'll see you next week. Thanks for hanging out with us in the chat room. Hey, everybody there. Backeakup.com slash stream. You can join us. I think the next show will be about 5 p.m. Eastern on Monday. So come there. Check it out. John. Dave. Is there anything that's on your mind? Maybe one. No, not one word. Maybe two. No, I bet you can do this in three words. Four. Five. Oh, no. What's happening? No. I'm sorry. That was just a Monty Python. Yes. Five. No. Three. And the three things that I have for you, Dave, and everybody else's listening, is don't get caught. Maiden.