 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 684 for Monday, November 20th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you come to learn at least four new things each and every time we get together. How do we do that? Well, number one, we share your tips. We share your questions. We share your cool stuff found. We discuss it all, and that's how we get there. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing with their new Aura Pro X SSD. They are now High Sierra Compatible. We'll talk more about that a little bit later here, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in rather windy and chilly, fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Yeah, this is like my least favorite kind of weather. I mean, it's kind of fun because you can have a fire, like in the fireplace every night. And so we'll obviously be doing that as soon as we finish recording the show here, or maybe before maybe my family will light one, my son likes to light them. But yeah, it's a little crazy, you know, with the wind and the cold, but you know, it's all good. Let's dive right in, shall we, Mr. Braun? Surely. Surely. Stop calling me surely. My name's Dave. But you'd call me whatever you want. Scott writes in, he said, Dave, I do believe you were going to do some cable modem testing to determine which would be a good option for DOCSIS 3.1 modems. Just curious because I'm looking to get a backup modem. I had a panic moment when I realized I couldn't get online this morning. Luckily, the modem was fine and it was something else, but I want to have a backup modem, so I might as well get something new and use the current one as the backup. Yeah, so this is interesting. There are, at the moment, three commercially available DOCSIS 3 modems that you could buy on your own. I think there's a fourth one, and I forget the name of the company that only provides it through ISPs. And they're all right in about that $150 to $190 range. So, and they're all DOCSIS 3.1, but they're all backwards compatible with DOCSIS 3.0. So let's first quickly go through why this matters. Right now, all of our cable modems for the last several years have all been DOCSIS 3.0, which allows bonding of the channels and lets you get speeds up to the way providers in the US work. Let's not talk about theoretical maximums. Let's talk about what's actually being provided. The way they work here, those speeds are going to be upwards of maybe three to 500 megabits per second on the downstream and generally not much higher than 50 or 100 on the upstream. That's just the way the providers work. And obviously it depends on what service level you buy from your provider and all that good stuff. DOCSIS 3.1 changes that dramatically. It brings in a different type of channel. I think they're called OFDM channels, John, and that means you can get more bandwidth into one channel so you don't have to bond together all these other ones, although they can do bonding and will allow you to get to gigabit speeds or even faster. But remember that your router probably only has one gigabit ethernet port. So, you know, that's where that can change. So, wanting gigabit speeds is one reason to get a DOCSIS 3.1 modem, but there is another one that we've discussed on this show and is absolutely a reason that anybody buying a new modem today should just go and get a DOCSIS 3.1 even if you have no plans to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 service. And that is that we've talked a lot on this show about buffer bloat in the past. Buffer bloat being when you're trying to upload something using up all your upstream bandwidth as you would like to because you've got it. You might as well use it. Cable modems are notoriously terrible at managing the queue of data and wind up slowing down everything else on your network or on your outbound, on your internet connection when you are sending lots of data out the upstream. And that can happen a lot. It can happen with online backups. It can happen with iCloud Photo Library. It can happen for me when I'm uploading podcasts, those kinds of things. So we've talked about getting a router that can manage buffer bloat and all that stuff. Well, here's the thing. Cable labs mandated with DOCSIS 3.1 that they had to build better queuing management right into the cable modem. So instead of us having to worry about it in our routers, the cable modems are supposed to take care of it. And they do. Here's the even better part. They do no matter how you're connecting. So a DOCSIS 3.1 capable modem, even if you're just connecting with DOCSIS 3.0, like most of us still are, you still get that better queuing management and buffer bloat in that sense goes away entirely. It's pretty awesome. So that's why I think you might want to get a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. Obviously, Scott, you're already on that bandwagon. So there are three. There's the Netgear CM1000, which when I checked and put this together was 172 bucks on Amazon. There is the Ares CM8200, which is 189 on Amazon. And there's the Motorola MB8600, which is 158 on Amazon. The Motorola, surprisingly, is the only one that has four ethernet ports or more than one ethernet port that are built for bonding. So you could bond those together and get faster than gigabit speeds because your provider can give you faster than gigabit speeds if you want to buy it. The Ares modem has two ethernet ports, but they are not currently built for bonding. They're built for creating two separate networks. I'm not sure what the use case for that would be. The Netgear has just one ethernet port. So you get gigabit maximum out of that thing, and that's it. The only other thing that's interesting, and this is really a geeky feature, is Docsis 3.1 modems have a Spectrum Analyzer page built into them at Port 8080 on their IP address. So yeah, it's cool, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what value it would have, but it's cool. You know, you can see it, right, John? The Spectrum Analyzer being something that shows frequencies and power levels. And also, it's a rather interesting technical tidbits, yes? Yes. Yes. So what do you see on that? Does it show you? I mean, what are the parameters that it displays? It shows me the frequencies. It's a frequency graph, and then it shows the amplitude of the signal at any given frequency. And it goes from like, you know, zero megahertz up to 1,300 megahertz. And megahertz? Really? Megahertz. Yeah, megahertz. You can look at, I'll post a picture. Well, that's the frequency, but then it shows another thing, right? The power or the signal to noise? Oh yeah, amplitude is measured in dBm. dBm, or dBmv, or that's what I see on mine. OK, all right, so frequency and power. So you get a, because now most of them, they show you a table that has the numbers. So this shows it graphically? That's kind of nice. Yeah, it shows it graphically. Again, I'm not sure what value this has. Here's the weird part. The cable companies have been requiring some of the vendors to block this in their modems. So Motorola, at the moment, the firmware that's being pushed by Xfinity, Comcast, for the Motorola modem, has this turned off. But the Eris modem has it turned on. It's weird. It keeps changing. I would, honestly though, any of these three are fine modems. I have all three of them. I've tested all three of them. They all work great. I've used them each for a couple of weeks. So heat-wise, as they kind of get running and rolling, it hasn't been any problem with any of them. I would recommend any of them. I wouldn't really stress right now about how many ethernet ports it has unless you really know that you're right away going to start using some weird bonded connection that most of us probably couldn't do anyway. So I just shop based on price with these. So if the Motorola is 158 bucks, that's the one I'd buy. But I'll put links to all three of them in the show notes and figure it out from there. Right, John? Now, I'll offer you an interesting observation I made about mine, which is a 3.0. But something has changed. OK. Not only the cable guy unplugged me during the last episode. Right, of course. But so I purchased the, as recommended by OptOnline or CableVision, or whatever you want to call them this week, the TM-1602. OK. Now, what's kind of funny is that at first aid, when I looked at the specs for this modem, it said, well, it has 16 bonded downstream channels. But it may have 24 with a separate downstream license. And I'm like, well, who obtains that license and how does that even happen? Right, right. And then this also advertises up to four upstream or eight also with a separate upstream license. So apparently my ISP has to pay for that. The thing is, I'm certain when I got this modem, Dave, I only had, I think I had 16 downstream channels. OK. And four upstream, which for the speeds I'm getting works fine. But now, Dave, I just look today and how do you look at these magic numbers? Well, you go to the Docsis status page. For most modems, it's 192.168.100.1. And I have 24 downstream channels now, Dave. How many of them are bonded? They all are. Oh, OK. So the thing is when I got the modem, so they must have pushed the firmware update or license update or whatever, because before I had 16, the thing is having more downstream channels spread across your spectrum is, I think, always a good thing. It is. With Docsis 3.0, having that spread is a good thing, because it can, especially if you're in a congested area, it can give you more, essentially, it gives the modem more options in terms of being able to get the bandwidth that you serve. That's kind of a shock to me, because I'm like, I didn't see that before. So thank you. I think Comcast will always bond 20 down, no matter. I mean, up to the limit of your modem, but 20, if you've got a 24 channel or even a 32 channel modem, I think it stops at 20 down. And that's just how they work. But even that, again, it's good to have the options. I think for most of us with the speeds that we get and the speeds that were the maximum speeds were offered with Docsis 3.0, eight channels down is actually enough. But again, it's helpful, because then the modem can sort of pick and choose and pick the best one. Yeah, it's interesting. Very interesting. So I think that kind of answers that question there. Like I said, the Spectrum Analyzer is interesting. I'm currently running the Eris modem here, so I can see the Spectrum Analyzer. I don't think they've changed the firmware on me yet. Let's see. Nope, there it is. Spectrum Analyzer's up. So I'll put a link in the show notes to what this looks like so everybody can see it. Nice. Yeah, why not? We'll go from there. Yeah. So there you go. I'll put a link right there. And we'll put a link right here. And everything will be good. So you can see my Spectrum Analyzer. I'm not sure it matters. At least until Dropbox says too many people are looking at that link. There you go. OK, so moving along here, finding something. You know, I'm not sure. I think we might have kind of covered everybody's questions all at once. We had Michael and Mike. But I'm not sure if we even need to talk through that. I think we've got. I think we kind of went through everything. Look at that. Three questions in one, John. Why don't we move to some of the tips that we got? How's that sound? Sounds great. All right, great. I'm bringing us to Brother Jay here. And preach on brother. Yeah, Brother Jay says he does preach on, I think. Yeah, I've been a silent but loyal listener to Matt Geekab for quite some time and was compelled to compose and send this in in the midst of the latest installment, episode 683. When I heard the mountain utility by name, I immediately knew the answer to the listener's question. We were talking about APFS and snapshots and what was going on. And he says, as concluded during the show, the pre-boot and VM volumes are APFS specific and EFI is no longer there. I believe they are in some manner associated with the recovery volume. If they were not, carbon copy cloner. And I think Chronosync would not mirror them to the backup drive. He said, mountain alerts me too when any volume is mounted or dismounted. He says, with regards to snapshots, the mount and dismount of those volumes occur during the local snapshot backups. He says there's a program that we've actually mentioned on the show many times called Time Machine Editor. And the new version of Time Machine Editor, version 5, supports the optional capture of APFS snapshots. It's on by default. You can turn it off with the new version of Time Machine Editor. And we'll put a link to Time Machine Editor in the show notes. He says, and whenever a snapshot is either captured or backed up, its volume is mounted for approximately 30 seconds and then dismounted thereafter. With regards to a tool to manipulate them, he says, I use Tinker Tool System. The latest version has support to capture view and delete local snapshots. And then, moreover, for added granularity and manipulation of the Time Machine backups and possibly snapshots, I use Backup Loop. We'll put all those in the show notes. He finishes by saying it's a well-known fact Apple has not adequately documented snapshots in the realm of APFS. If they have, I must have overlooked it. No, they haven't. And he says, so I hope this information helps someone somewhere. Yeah, this is good stuff. Thank you very much for the. Oh my gosh, I didn't even know they updated it. I didn't either until I read Brother Jay's email here. I had no idea that Time Machine Editor had been updated. Yeah, so there we are, John. You said you have some stuff to add to this, yeah? Well, I had one stuff, or thing. But I noticed this the other day. So Dave, when we were talking about all the kind of weird stuff that's happening with High Sierra and the pre-boot and the stuff that leaves behind, I noticed this even today, Dave. For whatever reason, I had the volumes directory listed in my finder. And all of a sudden today, I noticed this per the discussion about local snapshots. Yeah. When my system is doing a Time Machine backup, I noticed this in the volumes directory. All of a sudden, a folder appears, com.apple.timemachine.local snapshots. Makes sense, OK. Here's what kind of doesn't make sense, is that it has a circle with a line through it on the folder. And if you try to get into it, if you don't know what that means, typically when you see a folder with a circle, a red circle and a white line through it, that means nope. So things like this. Your user account doesn't have permission to read it. But that's what I see mean. That makes sense, because it would be a root-only option. That would be backing up everything, including things your user account can't see. So it's just an interesting observation that it made this visible but inaccessible. Right. OK, whatever. So if you want to know if your local snapshots are working, then mount your volumes directory or look at it through the terminal. And you're going to have a little surprise. But you won't be able to see what's in it. I was just going to say it, but you can't browse through them. Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm going to find a way to get in there, Dave. Yeah, we're working on this. And with your help, we'll get there, folks. That's good stuff. In fact, if you want to help, feedback at MacGeekab.com is where you would send us an email. Yeah, I've heard that, Dave. I've heard if you send an email to feedback at MacGeekab.com, somebody will probably read it and maybe even get back to you or address it on our show, right? Yeah, that's feedback at MacGeekab.com. There you go. That's right. We'll talk more about premium stuff in a little bit. But I was thinking a lot this week and actually talking with somebody else about APFS. And it hit me that with APFS, the way that it is, the fact that it's new, I believe that just this week, ProSoft announced Drive Genius for APFS. There's a beta. They're going to fix it. Yeah, it's not fixed. They're going to enhance it, right? I mean, that's really what it is. Well, what they basically said is, well, we don't support APFS, so we're just not going to run. Right, which is smart. I mean, really smart. Well, it made me sad because I love Drive Genius. Oh, I do too. But it doesn't make me sad that they are doing this in a very methodical way. I mean, this is a brand new file system. We don't want utilities coming out without them being tested. I mean, the whole reason to run something like Drive Genius is when you're having a problem, you want it to fix it without it being built properly. It could make the problem worse, right? So, I mean, it makes sense. But to that very point, they're really OK. So this week, we have a version of Drive Genius that at some level works with APFS. I haven't been able to test it because I haven't had a problem with APFS yet. But it's basically that right now. And fsck underscore APFS, which is more commonly known in the GUI, is Disk Utility and its Repair Function. But that's really all we have right now. And with that in mind, if you're not doing clones of your Drive, I highly recommend doing so now. Because that may be your only recovery option. If you run into a problem where, for whatever reason, the file system gets corrupted, and who knows, we may find that APFS gets corrupted a whole lot less than HFS Plus did. That's certainly possible. But we don't know. We haven't run it in production long enough to really say anything about it. So I just wanted to share, make sure you're doing your clones. It's especially with APFS. It might be your only saving grace there. Well, I'm going to tell you, Dave. OK. I'm still, at least with Carbon Copy Cloner, my target drives, neither one. They're still using the old file system. And everything seems to be working just great. Of course. Right. So should I reformat my backup drives to APFS? No. Because everything is working. So the thing is, if it's working, my backups are being made, and there have been no complaints. So I'm like, well, why should I? The problem with backups, as opposed to clones. And you need both. But the problem with a backup is the restoration time from it can be measured in many hours or even single digit days. If your drive goes to pot right now and you can't fix it with Disk Utility or maybe this version of Drive Genius, then you have to restore from a backup, which first means formatting the drive and going through that process of pulling all your data over and rebuilding the drive and all that stuff. So that's a lot of time right there. You might lose, again, the remainder of whatever day you're in and perhaps some of the next one. Whereas if you could fix it with something like Drive Genius or Disk Utility, that's an hour or less, maybe even a half hour, maybe even 10 minutes. There's a big difference there if you're relying on your machine to actually do the work you need to do every day. So that's why I suggest and recommend highly having a clone. In all instances, I suggest that. But especially now, when if you have any problem, really, there is no answer. It's go straight to restore from your backup. And that can be a time-consuming thing. So that's my thought. That's why. Yeah. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. But you do clones, right, John? Well, yeah. Like I said, I do clones of both my machines at varying intervals. And the only thing now is that the source is APFS and the destination is HFS+. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. No. No. Oh, that's a good thing, I think. What I should probably try, and I have not yet done this. So shame on me. But and we should all do this, especially with our clones, is make sure you can boot from your clone every now and then. Yes. And I'll admit I have not done that with either of my clones in a while. So I really should do that just to make sure that. Well, I mean, along the same lines, it's good to make sure you know how to restore from your backups and that you can restore from your backups that your backup disks are readable. Readable because otherwise they're not backup disks. They're just one little desk. If you've got a couple hours to kill or days or whatever, try to recreate your system from a backup or a clone. You don't have to recreate it to test it necessarily. Just do some spot checks. Go and pull three files from different folders out there and make sure that they come in. If they do, then that's a pretty good indication that, yeah, OK, I'm in good shape. Because we've had people say, well, when I tried to restore my data from my time machine backup that I've been running for ages, the stuff I was looking for isn't there. And you know, time machine is kind of known for not being very forcoming when things go wrong and that it doesn't, you know, self-repair anything. It's just like. Michael King in the chat room at makiqab.com slash stream says, once a week I boot from the clone and he does his clones every day. Yeah, it's smart, man. That's good. It's because he cares about it. He doesn't want to have to make it up. All right. Again, from last week's show, we heard from Matt who says we were talking about the APFS Secure Erase. Sorry, rewind. Different acronym, the SSD, or different set of initials. SSD Secure Erase and how that wasn't really possible. And he says newer drives do support the Secure Erase feature. He says, the drives that support it have a non-accessible AES key that is used to encrypt the hard drive at a very low level. It does this no matter what. Then when the Secure Erase command is issued, the key is destroyed and a new one is generated. Thus, all the data on the drive is worthless instantly. This is supported by the Samsung Evo drives as well as many others. And he'd give us a few links. So it looks to be, from what I can tell, looking at a post on SuperUser.com, it looks to be a standard ATA command that you can do. And it's called the security underscore erase command. And it just tells the drive, yep, go do your thing. And boom, that's it. Done, yeah. So we had speculated as much, but it's good to get a confirmation. So with rotational drives, this isn't a thing. Right. In that they slog through rewriting different patterns and stuff like that to do what they call a Secure Erase. But on an SSD, it's new and improved. New and improved? Yeah. Good to know. Yeah, it's very cool. I wonder if mine, because I think both of my SSDs are crucial, so we'll have to wrap with them. Yeah, find out. We'll have to do Secure Erase in there. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty cool. It's the, really, it's the only way, but it certainly is a smart way of doing it. So I like implementations. Well, as we talked, the dumb way is do not do a Secure Erase with something like this utility on an SSD because that's just silliness. Yeah, and it wouldn't work anyway, so. It won't work the way you think. Right. Yeah, it won't actually do it. That's right, yeah. Cool. Craziness. Craziness, craziness. All right, moving to the next tip from Joe. You want to take us there, John? I will take it to Joe. All right. Wait, Joe disappeared. No, there he is. OK. So Joe wrote us a little while ago, and he was having a problem installing High Sierra. Welcome to the club, pal. But he followed up with us because he was having this weird and he was not the only one. He was having this error where during the High Sierra install process, they would say, I can't unmount the drive that you want me to install this on, so I give up. And it's like, dude. So he wrote back and said, solved. So we want to share it with you. So one piece of advice that worked for a lot of people that had High Sierra install errors is download the latest installer. They definitely had some problems, and I think still have some problems. But he said he wanted to follow up. He was finally able to install High Sierra on his Mac Mini with an SSD. Initially, he wanted to do an over-the-top or upgrade installation, I think. So I wouldn't lose any of my settings, nor have to reinstall apps. There still is no solution for this as the installation hangs because it can't unmount the drive. What I decided to do was, number one, create a time machine back up on a locally attached external drive. Next, boot the system off of a High Sierra installer loaded on a thumb drive. Then load terminal and force unmount the drive. OK, that's annoying. But it works. Then next, run this utility and format the drive with APFS. Then install High Sierra, and then the installation propited me to restore the data from the time machine back up. Voila. Well, he said, buh. That's how you spell voila. Voila. That's how you spell voila. What? Correct. No, it's not. No, voila is W-A-L-A. Wait, so what language? Moving on. I have my system back. This is the standard fresh install method you guys talked about, or as my colleague likes to call it, Nuke and Pave, I think. This is a modified Nuke and Pave, right? No, I think it's full Nuke and Pave, right? I mean, he's starting fresh, and then restoring from a backup. He said he attempted this several times in the past and had to back off and reinstall Sierra for my time machine backup. What got me each time I failed was that I instinctively formatted my external locally attached drive to HFS plus case sensitive. Ooh, I don't know if I do that. Let's talk about that later. Before I created the time machine backup, what I didn't realize is that my Mac mini was formatted with a default HFS plus case insensitive format, mixing the two as I'm sure you're aware, as a no-no migration assistant could never complete the task. I know you're sporting a Mac mini server yourself. Yes, I am. Have you upgraded yet? If not, I believe this method is your best bet. Apple still has yet to address the fault with the drive. Can't unmount when doing it over the top insulation. Cheers from Joe. My follow-up, Dave, is that I had absolutely no problem. What occurs to me, though, is that reading, as I was reading this back, so the only problem I had, Dave, so I was able to do what we'll call an over-the-top or an upgrade installation of High Sierra. Both my mini and my MacBook Pro, Dave, and the only problem I had I think was on my MacBook Pro is that at the point where you run the installer and it does some initial busy work and then wants to reboot, my machine wouldn't reboot. And I was like, okay, patience. I usually wait five minutes. If five minutes, which is an eternity in computer time, if nothing happens, then I'm like, all right, the thing is I force them down. It's like a shove-in deja vu. Five minutes is an eternity in computer time. Yes. So I held down the power button, which on nearly every modern computer, if you hold down the power button for five seconds, that forces a shutdown. So I did that, restarted the MacBook Pro, and then it resumed. It was like, oh, okay. I'm in the middle of an OS installation. Here we go. And it worked. That was the only problem that I had, Dave. The only thing that concerns me about what was said here is formatting something as HFS plus case sensitive? I don't think I've ever done that. I'm not exactly sure why one would want to. You see where I'm going with it? I'm just kind of speculating as to why he was having issues. HFS plus case sensitive isn't very common in my world. I don't know about you. I mean, have you ever formatted a drive intentionally? I mean, the default is case insensitive, which kind of makes sense, I guess. Well, not with APFS, right? Is an APFS case sensitive all the way through? Is it? I think so. Well, let's find out. I think so. My concern is that I think the reason he may have run into an issue was this disparity between the case sensitivity of the various machines and backups and stuff. Yeah, I agree with you. The default for prior versions of macOS, but even now with macOS, is when you're formatting HFS plus that it is case insensitive. So I seem to remember there was one app. It might have been something from Adobe short lived. There was something about case sensitivity with it. It either required it or it totally broke with it. I think it was the latter, in fact. I think it totally broke with it. I don't know that I've found anything on the Mac that requires case sensitivity in the file system prior to, but again, I think APFS is case sensitive by default. We gotta look into that, but I'm pretty sure. Yeah. All right, but that was great. So, Joel? Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. All right. And while we're on the High Sierra's and the installs and all of those things, Michael did ask this and it's possible Joe's path would work for him, but he says I downloaded the installer twice now from the app store for High Sierra. It says it's installing. It shows my internal drive. It restarts and I'm back in Sierra running a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. It says I have 100 gigs available on my one terabyte internal SSD. Do you think that's the issue? And no, I don't think that's the issue. 100 gigs should be more than enough space, way more than enough space, but there's clearly something going on and I think kind of following Joe's path, but a little bit differently perhaps is just creating a bootable installer of some kind. And we can put links to Jim Tannis over at Tech Review, put a great piece together about how to do this from the command line. It's actually built into Disk Utility now to make its own USB installer. So we'll put that out there, but also diskmakerx.com is really a great piece of stuff. I think you meant the installer itself has the ability to create a version of itself. Sorry, the installer does not Disk Utility. Thank you for that. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally right, totally right. Yeah, so it's a command line incantation that lets the installer make a version of itself on a USB drive. On a USB drive, yeah, it's great. Or, well, there's another way to do it, of course. Yeah, which is even easier is just go run Diskmakerx. Yeah, which I guess runs the one or two lines of stuff that you have to do. I guess so, it didn't used to, right? I mean, Diskmakerx is something that's been around for, I think it was initially for Lion? I mean, it's been around a long time. I think initially it was clever because the thing is Apple did not, as far as I know, include the ability within an installer to create a USB bootable version of it. Until now, right. But now it does within the last couple of versions. Yeah. But still good utility, I think it does some other things. Yeah. I remember using it. So I recommend, again, just for preventative measure, I recommend everybody go and create a USB installer for High Sierra and also one for Sierra. Yeah, because what happens if you need to do this? I mean, you can go through the net boot and all that as long as your internet connection's working, right? But if you don't have that, then how do you get it back up and running? If you take 10 minutes today and go build a USB installer and just tuck it away, I actually leave mine in my travel bag for my laptop. So it's always with me, home or elsewhere. I know. Yeah, man. It's kind of smart. I mean, me, I just have installers going back to, right? I'll let you know in a moment. I have the installers themselves. I haven't actually run the command to make a USB bootable, but maybe I should. Well, I do the same thing as you. I store all the installers out on my disk station and it's there forever, but I need to be able to get to the disk station and that can, it's just, it's time, right? And perhaps this goes back to when I was doing a lot of consulting and I always wanted to A, everything I needed with me, no matter where I was to be able to solve somebody's problem. That wasn't always the case, but that was the goal, you know? But also even for myself, just I wanted to be efficient about it. And so, you know, having to like go to another computer and download the installer, whatever it was like, now, you know what? I'm going to be doing this enough. I'll need it at some point. Let's just put it out here and you're good. Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, now you mentioned it, something terrible is going to happen and I won't have a USB bootable. Yeah, well, you've got two computers. I mean, you can make one. It's not going to kill you. But, you know, it's just I think it'll happen to me when I'm traveling and I don't have a spare. Right. So, you know, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And we have with some geeky people, you know? The thing is that Dave, I think the chance of. Yeah, especially within our TMO group of someone having what we're looking for. Hey, does anybody have a charging cable? Well, even bootable, whatever. Right. Well, now you're the guy. So you're the guy, Dave. So when I'm not always traveling with the TMO group, right, I'm always the guy no matter what. Yeah, sometimes I'm on my own. And so there you go. It's like when we go to CES or another event, you're the guy that's going to have the installer when our computer crashes violently and we can't do anything. Correct. That's right. Outstanding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about. I think it's going to be two sponsors here, John, but you've got to bear with me. I might not do the second one and you'll see why. We'll see if I'm brave enough to the. But the the first one I'm very happy to do and that's Otherworld Computing at MacSales.com. This time around, they've. Asked me to talk about their Aura Pro X or perhaps Aura Pro 10. I'm not sure. I think it's X. It's there's a big X on the screen. So I'm going to say X. But these are their drives that are built to upgrade your PCIe equipped Mac and now several things. Number one, they're designed for high Sierra. The new Aura Pro X SSDs, they take full advantage of APFS, including strong encryption, copy on right, metadata, space sharing, cloning, directories, snapshots. All of that stuff is right in there. They've upgraded them in terms of their speed. Two point three times the right performance they used to have and now up to 16 times the capacity. These things, they've got benchmarks showing over a thousand megabytes per second writing and thirteen fifty two megabytes per second reading. That's fast and they can go up to two terabytes now. So this is for your, you know, your your I think 2013 and later MacBook Airs that are PCIe based. The MacBook Pros, I think up through 2016 were that way from I think 2012 to 2016, maybe 2013 to 2016. And what's cool is you can get it with their Envoy Pro enclosure, which means when you take out the one that's in there to upgrade it, you put this new one in. But the one that you took out, well, it's still got storage space on it. That's what the Envoy Pro enclosure is for. You put it in there and you're good to go. You can use your old storage externally. It's pretty good stuff, really, really cool. And here's the thing, customers can save up to 320 bucks by trading in that original Apple Drive. Or if you had an OWC drive that was smaller and you're upgrading, you can get the same thing with their OWC flash up rebate program. We'll put a link to that in the show notes too, because, you know, it's how we are. So you can you can check it all out, very, very cool stuff. And we're happy to have OWC as our as our sponsor for this episode. So I said that I wasn't I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about the second sponsor, John, but I think I'm going to do it. You folks have convinced me of something, not all of you, but several of you. I mentioned how I used to do a bunch of consulting. And I sort of stepped away from that for many years, using MacGicab as the as the sort of the way to flex that that that part of my brain and keep that going. Lately, though, and over the years, people have asked if I would help them out. And I've always found a very polite way to either help, you know, casually via email, kind of like we do in our questions and all that, John. Or, you know, by directing them to someone else. Two of you, though, recently succeeded in getting me to to consult again. And I really liked it. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed doing that. So I am not advertising this anywhere but here right now. I need to make sure I keep my my schedule from getting completely overloaded. But but the two people that I helped I was able to do remotely. It worked really well. And and so I'm happy to open this up to any of you. I think we'll see how it goes. But DaveTheNerd.com, I haven't fleshed out that website in quite a while. But if you go there and you can contact me any way you want. But that's that's one way to find me if you're interested in having me have me do any any direct work for you. Well, of course, what we do here is what we'll always do here. But but there you go. So there you go, John. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy to open that door up. But but I think it's good. I think it's good. Yep. Yeah, you are. I know, I know, I know, but I really enjoy it. I enjoy helping people. So, you know, there you go. DaveTheNerd.com. So only for Mackie cab listeners. All right, because I reflect, Dave, that you have too much free time. How many podcasts are you doing? Six? Three, just three. What I thought it was six. No, it's just it's this one. It's a gig and the small business show. Oh, OK. I thought you did more. No, no. So were you guessing on others? I guessed on quite a few. Yeah. OK, I think you told me at one point. Yeah, I have like six podcasts this week and I'm like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, some weeks I do. That's right. Oh, and I just because I know people are going to ask and I am someone who firmly believes in leading with the price because it's never good when there's a misunderstanding about that. We've talked about it on the show. So my rate's one hundred and fifty an hour for remote work. It's a 30 minute minimum, so a half hour minimum. For onsite work, I always did a one hour minimum just to cover my travel time and all that stuff. But but there you go. So that that's Dave, the nerd, that's me. And the doors are open until I close them again. But I won't leave anybody in the cold. That's not my style. So there you go. OK. Moving along to our quick tips, how's that sound, John? Yep. I'm petrified opening this door, by the way, folks. I mean, I, you know, it's because because I who knows, it's new. Again, something anyway, like I like to tell my friends that get engaged in new endeavors, Dave, the worst that can happen is you'll fail. Right. Right. But failure. So this now sounds like a conversation on the small business show, but failure can come in in a variety of ways, right? Failure could be that that everybody that well, that nobody asked me to work for him. OK, failure could be that too many people asked me to work for them and I'm totally overloaded. Or failure could be that people asked me to work for them and I can't help them in any meaningful way. I'm not so concerned about the final one. I take pride in what I do and I think I do OK. In fact, I know I do OK. So that one's not so bad. And the other two really, if no one asked me to do work for him, well, that's like that's kind of OK. I mean, I would miss out on doing it, but it doesn't overload my schedule because there's nothing on the schedule. It's really the one where that I'm worried about is how it does the schedule get too full. But I'm pretty good at managing my schedule. So, you know, there you go. Anyway. Yeah. So, Greg, I think that's how Greg, G-R-E-I-G. I'm not sure how to. I've never seen this. I know it's a new name. Could be Gregor. Could be Gregor. No, it's not a typo. Yeah, because that's how I'm assuming he signed his email as well. But to get to the tip, Greg says, Greg, Greg, iOS 11 finally lets you save a note to a specific folder in iOS 10. At least for me, it would only save a new note to the all all iCloud folder. I haven't seen this highlighted anywhere, but it has been high on my wish list ever. Since I started using notes rather than ever note or one note. Very, very cool. Thanks for the tip, Greg. That's good stuff. I like it. What's the problem, John? No, OK. No, I'm looking. I'll try this later. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I see if I'm in notes and then I try and I hit on the share sheet. One of the newer options that I haven't seen before is saved to files. I wonder if that's it because it shows a little folder. Right. Right. There you go. OK, doesn't seem to be on OS. We'll fiddle with it. But thanks for the. Yeah, it's definitely there on iOS 11. I found a thing, John. You know how we use eight dot eight dot eight dot eight as a good IPv4 domain name server, DNS server for for testing or even for long term use. Who is that? Pray tell. That's Google. IBM perhaps combined with others. But I think it's no, it is just IBM. Brings us nine dot nine dot nine dot nine. But here's the interesting thing. This isn't just a DNS server. It is a filtered DNS server filtering out malware. It says from the Quad 9 site, it says Quad 9 brings together cyber threat intelligence about malicious domains from a variety of public and private sources and blocks access to those malicious domains when your system attempts to contact them. When you use Quad 9, attackers and malware cannot leverage the known malicious domains to control your systems and their ability to steal your data or cause harm will be hindered. Quad 9 is an effective way to add additional layer of security to your infrastructure for free. So it starts to sound a little marketing speaking. But so there's nine dot nine dot nine dot nine, which has the block list in it. It has DNS sec and DNS sec. What is it that do you know what that is? I absolutely know what it is and I know why it's required. I don't know if we want to go down that rabbit hole. But it's a way of saying that server there has the rights to be my and get correct me if I'm wrong. But but it's a way of further saying that this domain name server has the ability to be authoritative for me. Right. Is that right? Um, I would say my brief understanding, having dabbled with it at some point. So the problem is DNS or domain name server, the system that converts names to numbers or to IP addresses. Yeah, it's not secure in any way, shape or form, like many things. Right, which is created when it was designed. Email and stuff like that is that you have to add things. And so as far as I know, DNS sec adds a layer. That make I think it prevents DNS spoofing. That's exactly what it's for. Right. So you can if you're in the right place on a network and you want to fake out people and say, no, go here instead of there. It's not trivial, but it can be done. So you can redirect people to your I think ARP spoofing is one way to do that. I actually did a exercise in the past where we actually did this, where we've redirected somebody using ARP spoofing from one server to another because there's no authentication in DNS or I mean at the lower levels as well. So this no, that's a good thing. Yeah, nine nine nine nine has the block list. It has DNS sec and it doesn't allow E DNS clients subnet. Now, I don't know what that is and we'll but but if you want to use IBM servers without the block list or DNS sec, then it's nine nine nine ten. And then you have that stuff gets even better. They've got two servers for IPv6 as well. Twenty six twenty colon FE colon colon FE, which is like the first one with the block list and all the stuff and without the block list instead of FE at the end, it's 10 at the end. So now, yeah, I don't think Google's DNS was doing IPv6, but that may have changed. I haven't looked into that. But anyway, I just wanted to I wanted to point out this this quad nine thing. Yeah, but they're offering so the things that you mentioned the quad nine offer sounds like very similar to what Open DNS can offer you if you want. Yeah, except Open DNS isn't doing. Well, they're not doing well, they have a block. I think I think they have a block list. So they have a configurable block list. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, you can control it for your own network. Yep. Yep. Yeah, it's cool. Huh? I mean, I have to try them. You know, you don't remind me DNS. Oh, no, I do. Oh, OK. No, but the thing that, you know, I have to review this. So the thing is, name bench is something that I've used in the past, Dave, which basically benchmarks your computers performance with various DNS servers. I know they've been talking about a 2.0 for a while. Hmm. I haven't looked lately to see if they've released it because the current client, I mean, it's it's OK. But it's not, you know, it's a very basic GUI and stuff like that. But they've been promising an update. So I have to see. But name bench is something that you may want to use because the time that it takes for you to resolve domain names can affect your browsing experience. And if your DNS sucks, then your browsing is going to and everything is going to suck. Yeah. So Google does have, in addition to 8888 and 8844 for IPv4 addresses, they do have two for IPv6. And I'm not going to read them to you. I'll just put a link in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Cool. All right. And then we have two cool stuffs found. I think that's the way we're supposed to say it. That's how we pluralize that, right, John? The first from Elliot, he says, I keep. Is am I doing this right? That I, you know, freaking mail, man, man. Was this a premium one? It was a premium one. So let me look in the premium box. I'm just going to read Elliot's thing from from there because. Yeah. No. OK. So mail sometimes does weird things with with creating PDFs. I thought it had been fixed. He says, I keep a small square steel plate inside the case of my iPhone because I use a magnetic car mount on my dashboard. When I got my iPhone 10, I was disappointed that I could not move to wireless charging because of the presence of that plate. It interfered between the phone back and the inductive coils of the charging pad. The main attractiveness of wireless charging is that I am a doctor and I am on call around twice a week. My phone charges at my bedside, but I have to be able to grab it easily to answer calls essentially in my sleep. What a drag to have to take off my case every night to arrange the phone for charging at my bedside. It looked like I was going to have to choose between the convenience of wireless charging and the convenience of the magnetic car mount. Just for kicks, he says, though, I relocated the little plate as low down on the back of the phone's case as I could. The iPhone 10 is light enough that having the magnet support it from the bottom is firm enough and low and behold, that no longer interferes with wireless charging. So and then he recommends a this 1999 Cineo. Well, it went up. It's now twenty two seventy nine. Amazon's prices change all the time. It's a wireless charging stand that kind of props the phone up nicely for you. So we will put that in the show notes. Looks pretty cool, actually. So and if you have an iPhone 10 or an iPhone eight and you haven't tried wireless charging, I highly recommend it. Don't pay apples, you know, sixty bucks for the Belkin or Mofi wireless pucks that there's no reason you can get this one for twenty two or the modern price one. I actually have one on the order. It should be here Friday. That's nine nine ninety nine, I think. And I found I found one on Amazon that's still that I've been using for two or three weeks since I mentioned it on the show. And it's been totally fine. Yeah, as long as it's cheap compatible. Yes, it's. Yeah. So that's the standard. I don't know if there are others, but. But yeah, maybe. Yeah. So what's your experience? So currently with wire charging, you know, if you're plugged into a standard thing, yeah, it's one amp. And if you have a high current one, you know, it charges at two point whatever. Yes. Well, it up to two point one, depending on the size of the battery. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, they fall short of that. But has your experience been. It's as good or better. Or, you know, it's just it's wireless instead of wired. I don't manage. Does it manage the the charging the same based on your observations or experience? Oh, definitely. It goes fast for at first. And then it trickles down when it, you know, when it gets further up. Yeah, I haven't done enough testing to say whether it's, you know, faster or slower. I mean, it would stand to reason that wired charging could be faster because you're not losing anything to the inductive nature of, of, you know, not, but, you know, there's a resistance problem, right? Is what you've created with, with, you know, wireless charging. There's something in between the contacts. So, yeah, but I mean, it's certainly enough to charge overnight. Like I, you know, I put my phone down. It doesn't matter where it is. And OK, so you have, so you have a charger in the bedroom or nearby and you just put the phone on there. And when you wake up, it's it's good to go. Yeah, my biggest complaint is that it's got a bright blue light on it. And I don't tend to like that while I'm sleeping. But oh, well, that's what we have. That's why we have electrical tape. But the thing is, you need the light to know. I mean, the light has some status indication, right? As to whether or not it's ready to charge is charging or trying to charge but having an error. So it's good to see it. But maybe I just, you know, need to need to dim it. I think I'm with you in that I maybe have one or two devices around the house where number one, they choose a blue LED, which is kind of blinding. Yeah. Or it's just, it throws you. I mean, we didn't have blue LEDs when we grew up, right? Right. It's different. Yeah. And now we have it everywhere. But number two, I have some where it doesn't provide any useful information. So it's like, yeah, let's put the tape on the tape. It just gets the tape. That's right. Yeah. Hey, so I have one other cool stuff's found, John. And that's exciting. That is the thing box. Now, we've talked a lot about thing on this show, which is certainly one of our thing, one of our favorite network scanner information apps that will tell you as much as it possibly can with the confines of iOS on your phone. Even Mac OS. Oh, that's right. Oh, yeah. I always forget. Well, they have a command line. Well, I believe they have a command line version. So they don't have a graphical or a GUI client for Mac OS, but they do have a version of it where if you're willing to delve into the terminal folks, it does pretty much everything it does on iOS last I checked. So that's, that's fun. But anyway, so they made, they made a box. They made a little, it's a little puck. Yeah. And it, what's cool. So the concept behind the thing box is essentially two things. One, to give you more insight into what's going on with your network. And two, to be a type of security box, right? It can prevent attacks and things like that. Unlike all the other ones that we've mentioned though, that want all traffic from your network to flow through them, the thing box just has one ethernet port on it and you plug it into your router. That's it. And then you connect it. So it is, it does not like other solutions we've seen. So it does not demand to be the router. Or is that even an option? It's no, it's not the, it will not be your router. It is just. Okay. All I got to say right now, and then I'll let you continue. I'm sorry. So they rethought the problem because they did. I'm uneasy with devices wanting to take over your network to do the security thing because then you can't use the cold features of your current router. Correct. So they don't do that outstanding. So it just plugged into a port in. And that's it. One ethernet port. In your switch. Yes. Right. Yeah. But what's cool is it because they know how to like do the stuff that they do, I get a list of all of the devices on my, on my network and I can associate those devices with people. Right. And, and then I can tell it, like one of the things I can do is I can tell it, you know, I might have, let's say, five devices associated with my wife, right? The, I might have her phone and her, her computer and her Apple Watch and her iPad and a laptop, let's say. And all of those things are associated with it. But I set one of them to be her tracker, essentially. And I now know that my wife has been home for an hour because I'm looking at Fingbox or the Fing app and I can look at the Fingbox and it says, yeah, you know, her iPhone came home an hour ago. So she's been home for an hour. My kids have been home for two hours. Or I can see that they left 32 minutes ago or something like that. Well aware, but it shows me everything that's happening on my network. All the devices that are there, it alerts me anytime a new device joins the network so I can either like block it or say it's OK or add it to someone's profile or whatever I want to do. It, it measures my internet speed and whatever server they're using seems like it maxes out at about 170 megabits a second, because I can't like it just doesn't see my gigabit speeds, but that's OK. It'll do Wi-Fi performance, which is really kind of cool. Remember, we talked about that app, I think it was last week that you can walk around your house and have it tell you how fast your Wi-Fi is in any given corner of your house. The Fingbox will will do that for you. And it's your local server, so you're not worrying about anything online. Remember, we were talking about how you had to point that app at maybe a file on your Mac or something. Don't need to worry about that with the Fingbox. It's got per person and parental control and device blocking. So if I want to turn my kids off, I can turn them off to be a really bad idea they'd come storming in here right now and ruin the show. No, they'd figure it out. I mean, they just turn it back on. Yes, it did probably just go into the into the office and unplug the Fingbox and everything's fine. But but you know, you can block things and it alerts me whether I'm home or not. In fact, the other day I was at a thing at the school and then we had band rehearsal here at home afterwards. And as I'm at the school, I see on my actually it showed me on my watch. It's like some weirdly named iPad joined my network. I'm like, who is at the house? What's going on? And like one of the guys in the band has an iPad that's got the strangest name on it or something. It's like, oh, and then it somebody else joined. I'm like, oh, right. The guys are getting there to set up for band practice. It's all good. But it's also got this thing, John. It what do they call it? I want to get the name right. The digital fence, right? That looks for all it has its own Wi-Fi chip in it. The Fingbox does to scan for all kinds of things around you. So you can see if there's like dog walkers coming by your home, delivery people coming and going, it knows when people with Wi-Fi devices, even though they're not associating with your network, it knows when they get close, which is handy. So you can see. So does it give you a log of SSIDs that it's seen? It gives me SSIDs, but it also gives me devices. So if there's a device scanning for Wi-Fi networks in my area, it will see it. So if somebody's phone shows up and is looking for Wi-Fi networks, as phones always do, it's like, yep, we know you're nearby. OK, well, it's just like Fing the software. It does that. Like what about by, you know, I think I told you when I go to the most public Wi-Fi, when I get on them, if, you know, I got some time to kill. I'm like, hey, let's run Fing and see who's on here with me. Right. That's what I'm saying is it's not looking for people that are on your network. I mean, it does. It looks for people who are on your network, but it looks for people who are not on your network to just have devices nearby, which is cool. And then. So is it. Go ahead. Because you tell me. So my question is that we've discussed a lot of security products in the past. And for example, Little Snitch, I love to death. Though it can get kind of intrusive and it sounds like this product may have the potential to be like that. I mean, it hasn't been overbearing for me. It's been. OK. And the alerts that you get, you haven't found them to be. No, I only get alerted. I only get alerted once for any device that joins my network. And then from there, I have to decide, you know, what I want to do about that device. And if I choose to block it, well, then that's, you know, that's the end of that. It's also got a cool thing. You know how we talk about either UPNP or Nat PMP. But UPNP is the standard by which you can enable. If you turn it on in your router, then devices on your network can open ports in your router for you. And that's a really convenient thing. But from a security standpoint, devices that can just configure port forwarding for themselves on your network, you know, that's not necessarily something that you want to leave unchecked. Well, if it's malware, it could create a hole and then some evil software outside of your network and come into your network and wreak havoc. So that's right. That's well, the potential bad news. The thing box watches your router and constantly retrieves a list of any ports that have been opened with UPNP. And it alerts me when new ones are open. So I like I rebooted a device or I turned something on the other day. I was doing a bunch of stuff, the network. And suddenly it was like, oh, hey, you know, this device, the Playroom Apple TV. Oh, that's right. We were painting the downstairs. So the Apple TV was off. We turned it back on and I got a notification and I can see it right here in my Internet security section on Fingbox. It says, oh, yeah, the Playroom Apple TV via UPNP opened up Port 16402. Do you want to block this and you can close it by having the thing box go until the router also via UPNP close that port. It's pretty cool. So I don't have to worry about it. I know I'm going to get an alert. And what's cool is not only do I get a notification on my phone, but the light on top, there's like a ring of lights on top of the puck that is the fling, the fling box. Fling is the name of my band. Fingbox is the name of this thing. There's a ring of lights and normally it's just blue. Speaking of blue LEDs, you can turn it off so that normally it's nothing if you want to have it, you know, truly off. And then if a new device is joined, my network, it flashes. So I know that I have to go into the app and like do something about that. If there's a problem, it changes to a different color. So it has this way of just saying, oh, yeah, hey, by the way, you know, there's something that I think needs your attention. You should take care of this. And the colors, it's blue if it's not such a big deal. It's orange, it's red, it's green, does different things depending on what's going on. It's a pretty cool thing. And it all and it records Internet outages because it's aware of when your connections up or down. So and of course, everything I'm talking about here you can do remotely other than your Wi-Fi speeds, because if you're not there, you can't test the Wi-Fi speeds in your house. So it's pretty cool. I like it. I do, too, for one hundred and twenty nine bucks. It seems like a pretty cool thing to add to your network. So so there you go. Thing box, yeah, ten minutes on it. So well, because I'm looking now. And so I'm running a piece of software day, which still works under high Sierra because I just ran it here. Yeah, called Port Map. Yeah, you think it works. Well, it talks to my arrow and it shows me, well, no, it lists the mappings, but it doesn't do anything beyond that. Right. This clearly. That's right. That's right. Yeah, way beyond that. But just to mention it. Yeah, no, that's curious about what mappings are in your device and they don't offer an interface because the arrow last I checked there are most routers like I'll take that back. Some do, some don't. Right. Some will show you the UPNP mappings or the, you know, the weird, yeah, the alternative nap PMP. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Hey, I want to thank our premium subscribers that contributed this week, John. That of course, you can learn all about this at MacGeekUp.com slash premium and the way our premium works is you choose if you want to contribute one time thing or on a schedule, you can either do once a month or once every six months. And it's just for those of you that really want to support what we do here at the show directly, our sponsors, obviously, you know, help help pay our bills here. And and we really couldn't do the show without the combination of them and you. It really makes a huge, huge difference for us. This week on the monthly ten dollar plan, we had Santiago M. John D. Stephen A. John V. Jeff P. and Gary B. And then on the bank by annual twenty five dollar every six month plan, we had Mark P. Michael S. Jim D. Harvey H. and Ian T. So thank you so much to all of you. MacGeekUp.com slash premium is where you can go to learn about that. And once you are a premium subscriber, premium at MacGeekUp.com is the email address that we prioritize for you. It really it helps in a huge way. All right. So thank you to all of you. Thank you. Thank you. Where are we here, John? Why don't we skip? We have a section on like essentially Plex and private cloud movies. Let's skip that for this week and go down to the other one. Or do you want to do the Plex stuff, John? No, let's I will follow your lead. All right. So we'll skip the Plex up for this week. We'll get there. You know how we are. The cable modem thing that we started with today has been on the list for, I think, about a month and a half. So, you know, this stuff comes around. It's good. Going to listener, Craig says, I have a problem that I'm hoping you can help with listening to Internet audio streams on both iOS and Mac OS devices from both browser based and app based sources after successfully accessing the stream and after a seemingly random interval somewhere between one and 10 minutes, I lose the stream. Sometimes I can restart it immediately by choosing pause and then start. Other times I have to wait and retry later. And sometimes it spontaneously restarts after a seemingly random interval. Interestingly, I never experienced this signal dropping with video. All of this behavior occurs only in my house, not when I'm traveling, not in hotels, making my local Internet apparatus the suspect. My router is a Nettgear Nighthawk R7300. Access to the Internet is via cable. The problem is not related to my distance from the router occurring when I'm in the same room with the router or on another floor in the house. Any suggestions? So let's talk first about the difference between video and audio. Most of the time when you're streaming audio in the way that you described, you're essentially doing it in real time. There might be a very small buffer, but it usually isn't going to buffer the whole song or the whole whatever. It generally just comes in on demand as needed. So when there's a hiccup in your network, if the audio is going to see it after a short period of time, it might be five or 10 seconds, but that's it. And then and then it drops out with video. Generally speaking, it's exactly the opposite. As much as possible is buffered to you as fast as possible, regardless of the speed at which you're playing back the video, which of course would be one X. Most of us tend to play videos at one speed. So and that way, because they know that bandwidth can fluctuate. So when you're watching a movie, sometimes with a Netflix movie, you know, you'll get the whole thing at once, or sometimes they'll chunk it up into two or four or six or eight parts and then send you this part and then this part and then this part. But you're not doing a constant flow stream. It's it's coming in in bunches. So if you're having intermittent internet problems, but otherwise your speed is good, it makes sense that video would appear unaffected and audio would be affected. So now that we are operating under that assumption, yeah. Yeah, I'll run with you on that. Yeah, I mean, it could it might not be that. But that's, you know, there's there's nothing inherently incorrect about what I said. But in his scenario, like some of those things might not be true. I think we need to see what's going on with your network. And my favorite way to do that is to open up two terminal windows. And in each of them, I'm going to get what's called a ping operation going PING. What it does is you type ping space and then the name or IP address of some other computer or device. Ping sends out every second. And a little signal, if you will, a packet to whatever device you specify and the way ping works is that device is supposed to respond. And some devices are just built to never respond. But in general, it'll respond and you get to see how many milliseconds it took for each packet every second to come through. And it just starts ticking them off as you go down the down the screen. So the reason I open up two windows is because one of them we will ping a server that is outside of your network. So I always do www.apple.com because it answers reliably. It's awesome. So I get one going and you just type ping space www.apple.com hit return and it starts going to stop a ping control C. So now that you get that going, you just let that run. Now go to the other terminal window, File New Window, if you're in terminal and I ping my router, something local on my network. Ping space, if your router is 192.168.1.1, well, then it's ping space 192.168.1.1. Alternatively, or perhaps even in a third window, you could ping your cable modem, which is John pointed out earlier, is 192.168.100.1. And that's almost always going to be the address of your cable modem. So you can get all these going and then start listening to some audio. And when the audio hiccups go back to those terminal windows and take a look, see if any or all of the three had a hiccup. Now, depending on which one or ones had a hiccup, you now know where the problem was, right? So it's happening on multiple devices. So it's not just your computer or just your iPhone. So we sort of rule that out for now anyway. And my guess is you're going to see your connection to your router is fine. That Ping Trail will be uninterrupted, but the PingTrail to www.apple.com will see a few packets not having been returned to you. And if that's the case, then what you have is an internet connection with your cable modem that is cutting in and out. You could be pinging the cable modem too, just to make sure that the connection between your router and the cable modem is good. Then my guess is in that case, you'd see that hold steady. But it sounds like you might have an issue where your cable modem is sort of, you know, resinking itself initially. That's that's what I would head down at first. And then obviously, if you see that your connection to your router is dropping out, OK, well, then your internet connection is probably fine, even though that's going to drop out too, right? If you if you're pinging both of your router and Apple and they both drop out simultaneously, well, it's probably not a problem with Apple server. It's probably just that you can't get to your router. And then, of course, if you can't get to your router, you can't get anywhere else. Yeah, does that make sense, John? Kind of, but I'm going to take this in a totally different direction, my friend. All right, which I know you enjoy. OK. So while you were pontificating. Yes. I did a little search here. And apparently the Nighthawk series, I'm going to we're going to link to an article here, which may or may not be relevant, but I think it is relevant, Dave. But apparently the Nighthawk router has something called Dynamic QOS. And I'm speculating if that's not set up right, that may do that because as was indicated by Craig, this doesn't happen at other places, but it happens at home. So could it be specific to his Nighthawk router? And I'm suspecting maybe. Maybe. And then when you say if QOS is set up incorrectly, this would happen when I read their article. Yeah, I was percolating. I read their article, they have this feature in their router, which is good. Right, right, of course. But maybe it's not working right. Maybe you want to get a firmer update. Maybe you want to see if this feature is on. And if it is, turn it off. Or if it's not, turn it on. I would do the I would do the ping test first. Oh, absolutely. So no, I totally agree with your analysis. But but if it's the router, this would be a thing to look at. Yeah, yeah, I like that. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how I troubleshoot network stuff. I did not certainly not a week goes by. But but, you know, it's rare that even a day or two goes by where I haven't like fired up a couple of windows to just do ping tests and make sure everything's OK. I like this stuff. I obsess over it. I break my network a lot by testing things. And so it's helpful to do this. Yeah, yeah, I try not to. But, you know, I have had some Netflix. I only like signed up for like less than a year ago. I don't know why it didn't sooner, but I'm every now and then I'll get a video stream, Dave, and it's just garbage. And I don't know what it is and the way to solve the problem, sadly, is turned off and on again. And then I'll stop streaming. I'll go back to Netflix. I'll run it again and everything's great. And it's like, why? I don't know. Who knows? Yeah. Could be my IP could be Netflix. Well, we don't know. We don't know. We don't know. So we wrap it up with the. You want to wrap it up with Ken? I think we'll wrap it up with Ken. Ken has a very good question. We're going to reveal something that's hidden. I think, Dave, sweet. I like that. Well, he says thanks, guys, or hi, guys, thanks for all the help you give me and everyone Apple orientated with your advice and solutions. I noticed this today and wondered, what is the purgeable space mentioned? Are these cash files? I've attached a picture to make it clear what I mean, regardless, Ken. And so Ken sent a picture, which I assume is from his Mac. And it shows what I think you're going to see if you go to about this Mac storage. And it shows in high Sierra, right? Not in. I think I think Sierra. I think it started with Sierra. I'll test. I'll pull it up here. Well, I'm fairly sure the information I found is that it started with Sierra because I have a support article that says as much. Oh, then I believe you. OK, because you know why I'm all about support. You are Mr. Support article. And, you know, sometimes I think, oh, here he goes again with another support article. But I mean, I'm just being honest, but I've learned to temper that or to temper any reaction to that because many times you find stuff in support articles. It's like, oh, yeah, that's that. Wow. Well, Ken actually wrote back to me and said I couldn't find this stuff. Yeah, no, you're Mr. Support article. I got the Google foo, but here we go. So there is an Apple support article that goes into a bit of detail about what purgeable content is. And it's titled, appropriately enough, what is other and purgeable in about this Mac? And I think we're not the first people to wonder about this, Dave. Clearly not. Um, I think to sum it up. And so they even say in El Capitan and earlier, they'll say other files are, you know, this category. But then they say, and here's the bullet point and the important one here. They say in Mac OS Sierra, and I would assume following, purgeable content appears when you've turned on Optimize Mac storage. It's storage space that your Mac can automatically make available in storage spaces needed. Files marked as purgeable can always be downloaded again on demand. So that's pretty much the answer. So where do you where do you and I'm I'm I know I've been there, but where do you go to optimize your Mac storage? I do, you know, I think I know, but if you know definitively, I'll. I don't remember in front of you. I think it's I call it. So I'm finding I'm going to click on the link in the support article. OK, I'm fine. I'm finding it in that option, right? So you go to about this Mac, you click on storage and then there's a manage dot dot dot button. And there in the recommendations section, I'm seeing Optimize Storage and it says that for me, it says completed with a green checkbox. So good for you. Yeah, by sure. Hey, yeah, me. So basically what's happening here is that if you enable this feature, content is stored in the cloud. And if it's needed, it will erase it from the local hard drive if you need space for more important things. I think it's pretty much the answer here. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's another. That right, let's see. OK, and six colors, actually. You've heard of those guys, right? Yeah, I love six colors. Mr. Snell and Mr. Who's Mr. Dan Marn? Yeah, so anyways, they they dig in if you really want it. So it's called when free space isn't free. Kind of like that. That's good. Yeah, purgeable storage in Mac OS Sierra. So this is a this is a feature from Sierra moving forward. And they basically go in a great detail about the sort of things that are going to be classified as this. And if you need them again. So it's kind of a clever way to do things, but may throw you and and especially we've talked about this in the past, Dave. Sometimes the amount of free space that Mac OS tells you is available may not be entirely accurate or may not sink with. The amount of physical space available on your drive because they're including now because they're all cloud cloudy may include or exclude space that is used for things that are temporarily stored or in the cloud. So cool. Right. So it's a good question. In theory, the OS should handle this and that you shouldn't even know that this is happening and that when the space is needed, it'll delete it. And then if it needs the content that's in the cloud, then it'll redownload it. So purgeable, man. It's not it's not. Temp files and all of that, too. In my readings here, I didn't really see that mentioned specifically. That certainly could be the case because that kind of makes sense, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, if you get into a real critical low disk space situation, then maybe the OS will go in a panic mode and like lead all of that sort of thing. I didn't get that feeling from the articles, but that certainly could be the case as well. Yeah, yeah. So. So it's a good question. There's info out there. I found it for you. That's what we do. And now it's time to move on. You kidding? Man, this just. It only took five five minutes, John. The show took five minutes. I mean, I know five minutes is an eternity to a computer, but, you know, it's just five minutes. That's all. Are you mocking me? No, I love that. That's the title of this show as people listening already know. Five minutes is an eternity to a computer. Yeah. It is. I know it is, dude. It used to be megahertz. Yeah. Now it's gigahertz. I mean, I'm sure we're going to be getting the Terahertz processors if they're not already out there somewhere. There probably are. Yeah. In some lab somewhere. Yeah, you might be right. Sure. Oh, I'm sure. We aren't we aren't going at like Moore's law change, though. I mean, Moore's law isn't as true anymore because we started we found that going wider as opposed to faster is actually faster. Well, I think once Intel and others, but I think Intel takes the credit for this, and I don't blame them. But once you talk multi-core processors, yeah, right, you kind of break Moore's law because you're kind of cheating. It's like, well, I had one processor. Now I got four in one. In one. Yeah. It's the way to go. I think I think multi-core processors from whoever you get them from kind of break Moore's law. Right. Right. Or modify it. Yeah, you got to modify it. But yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, do you need a Terahertz processor? I don't know. I don't like I think you do better with multiple, you know, slower processors. And remember, remember, Dave, we're going to harp back to the days when you and I were Apple two people. I still remember I had a one megahertz. Yeah. As did you. Apple two with a 6502. Dude, when they came up with a zip chip with a four megahertz, I think it was four. Yeah. We were like blown out of our chairs. So it was like, oh my gosh. I couldn't put a zip chip in my... Did I put a zip chip in my 2C? I put a zip clock in my 2C, but I don't think the CPU was soldered. I couldn't replace the CPU. So. Right. But it was, um... But even back then, I mean, quadrupling, right? Quadrupling your processor speed. Back then was like, cool. Yeah, but it messed with audio, right? Because audio was all done by just clicking. Well, and then there's some things. I mean, you had to disable it or games and stuff. It's like some things you didn't want to put. You didn't want running four times faster because you'd get like slaughtered by monsters or whatever. Yeah. Right. But yeah, you know, you're right. Yeah, because it used the clock for audio and all sorts of other things. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These days, I think we got plenty of processor, Dave, and plenty of disk space and plenty of RAM. We always said that though, John. Yeah, I'm lying. Right? I mean, you know, come on. Ha! All right, so we did the email. That's done. We did the email. What else do we got? The phone number. 224888Geek, which John is four, three, three, five. And very quickly, here on the Twitter, it's still there. I can't believe it. I don't know. They expanded the... It's not twice as good. Well, no, it's twice as annoying. Correct. They doubled the tweet space. It's now 280 characters, I think. I tested this the other day. It's not so bad. But on Twitter, I am John F. Rohn. He is Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mackie Gab. The publication is Mack Observer. And that guy flying around somewhere. He's coming back. Pilot Pete. Yeah, he's coming back. So on the Twitters, hit us up. Hit us up, yo. There you go. What do you got? I want to thank everybody. I want to thank all of you for listening. I want to send out an additional thanks to our premium subscribers. And a special additional thanks to Dave G, who right in the chat room joined our premium program right while we were doing the show. So thanks for that. Wow. Yeah, I know. I want to thank CacheFly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank you, John, for doing the show. It's so much fun. Oh, no, thank you. You're welcome. I want to thank our sponsors, of course, all the world computing at macsales.com. Smile at smilesoftware.com. Barebonessoftware at barebones.com. We get a couple more coming all in DaveLinard.com. Thank you so much, folks. I hope you have a good week. Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all of you. And that's all I got to say. John, why don't you bring us out? I guess I'll bring us out with some advice that we should all take in our lives. And that is, don't get made up.