 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, Episode 786 for Monday, October 28th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff, found all kinds of things. We mash them all together, string them in a line and share them. We answer the questions, we share the tips, we share the cool stuff found, we share some things we've learned, we share some questions we have, and the goal is for every single one of us, all of us, us included on this side, we're all together, there's no real sides here to learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com, ifixit.com slash mgg, and a returning sponsor, macwelden.com with coupon code MGG. We'll talk about why you're going to use all of those things shortly here. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John Afron. Hey, man. How are you today? Things good? A lot better than last week. Good. Good. Well, we'll, we'll find out. Yeah. I'll judge them there. But we, we, all the pipes seem to be working. That's good. You're tempting fate, because I don't think we made enough changes for the pipes to work in. It's all going to fall apart. Yeah. Well, we have a good show. I mean, we have, we, we have an issue with, it seems to be semi-wide spread between iCloud or with iCloud Keychain on Catalina upgrades that we'll talk into solving. We have some tips for automating those as we've found to be unautomatable personal reminders of fixing some DNS problems on both iOS 13 and Mac OS Catalina. It's, but there's, but there's a, there's a common thread here. And I think we can get their mono podcast listing, creating disk images, all of that. And more, I'm actually very excited to get into it all. I'm also extremely excited that iFixit.com is our sponsor today at iFixit.com slash MGG. This is a place that John and I go regularly when we need to take a part of Mac, right? Because it's not easy. These machines, you know, Apple is obsessed with everything being flat and, and thin and, you know, therefore taking them apart isn't always the easiest stuff. And we like to do it ourselves sometimes, you know, because it's not only fun, but it can, you know, save you money and, and you can learn, right? Those, there's those five new things. That's perhaps the best part about it. You can even make it a family event and learn together with your family. And iFixit makes that possible. They have all their fantastic guides right there. Plus they have tools to sell you the right thing to open your Macs and all of that. So the guides you get, like they've got over 50,000 free repair guides and everything, and then you can go get their fixed kits. And here's the cool part, because if you go to iFixit.com slash MGG, you get $10 off your next $50 fix from them. So this is where you want to go. Make sure, again, iFixit.com slash MGG. That's where you have to go. And right there on the screen, you'll see how to get your $10 off on your next $50 fix, visit iFixit.com slash MGG, just like John and I do. Use their repair guides, use their tools and love them just like we do. Our thanks to iFixit for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode. John, we have some cool stuff found here. And the first one that comes from listener David, who tells us about a tool called Suspicious Package. It scans a package, not like the, you know, UPS or FedEx package. That would be cool, but I don't think our computers can do that. It scans an installer package and lets you know if there's anything suspicious about it, which is actually kind of cool. Because, you know, all those installer packages look the same. So it tells you, you know, where it comes from, whether there's a restart required about it, what's inside it. So you can see the details of an installer package without running the installer, which is pretty cool. So, you know, instead of install and find out that, oh, like, that's how this one works or that's what this one has. Or, oh, my gosh, this one has something I know I don't want. You can just run Suspicious Package. So thanks, David. That's pretty cool stuff. Have you have you installed this one yet, John? No, seems like something right up your alley, my friend. Well, I'll tell you another thing. Yeah. Because I was like, wow, you know, I think I have something that kind of does some of this maybe more. I don't know if you've used this lately. I don't think I have. Pacifist. Oh, does that still work? Well, I'm able to launch it. All right. OK, it's been a while since I've heard about Pacifist for MacOS from Charlessoft. But I mean, yes, yeah. Huh. But one option it has is open a package. Right. Open an Apple installer. And I think it'll I don't think it gives as much detail as as the new kid on the block here. OK. But but it's handy utility for you to pop things open and look inside of them and yeah, see what's going there. What else does it do? Search receipts. That's into an interesting feature. Got it. Got it. Cool. All right. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. That's great, man. Fun, fun stuff. All right. The next thing on the cool stuff found list is yet another in our series of apps that will keep our Macs awake. It's funny, we go through a period of time talking about things that we can do to keep our Macs from staying awake. And now we're talking about just the opposite how to keep them awake. But anyway, Bob, Dr. Mac, sends in and he says, I use a piece of freeware called Amphetamine. And Amphetamine, he says, includes a feature to ping selected drives periodically as well to keep those drives alive and spinning. He says, which I find helps keep my Drobo volumes from unmounting themselves, which is that's an interesting thing, right? So sometimes those external drives, you know, you don't want them to get sleep commands from Mac OS. Well, Amphetamine can make sure that that is happening. So that's pretty good. I like that. And you know, it's funny as everybody's been emailing in these suggestions, you know, we've probably had what, you know, six or eight of them so far, I found and this was true with Amphetamine, I found that, you know, probably 80 percent of them, I already have installed on my Mac. Like I've tried all of these over, like it's fascinating to me how important this type of solution is, at least for my workflows. There are definitely regularly times or times where I regularly encounter the need to make sure that my Mac is not falling asleep. It's doing some testing or something along those lines. It's like, no, I want this to stay awake, you know, so. And I really like about all these is that you can set a time frame so that it's like, yeah, keep it awake all day. But I don't want it. I don't want to forget it. Like I definitely don't want to go into system preferences and turn off sleeping or change the schedule there because then I'll go weeks without remembering to turn it back on, at least with all this stuff, including just running caffeinate from the command line. You know, when I reboot, that goes away and everything's back in business. So very good. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Bob. I have a quick tip to share, Mr. Braun, because I see it's one of those things that I take for granted. I mean, it's a perfect quick tip, right? Because I know how to do it and anybody that knows how to do it knows how to do it. But if you don't know, you might not even know that it exists. And you might not even know it with this particular one that it's affecting you and it has to do with images in mail attachments. When you go to send or create, compose a mail message in Mac OS mail and it has images in it, you will see a new entry in sort of the, you know, lower right corner of the headers of that message. So you got, you know, you two from your subject and all that stuff or your your your two and your CC and your BCC and your subject and all that. And sort of in the lower right corner of that, but still above where you're typing your text, you get to set whether your images are set small, medium, large or full size. Mail remembers whatever you chose last. And it's not uncommon for us to get screenshots from you folks and your emails, which is great. What's also not uncommon is for those screenshots to be so small that we can't see them. And it's mail that's shrinking these down to make your email smaller. But if you're not hyper aware of this, like there's no thing that tells you, hey, go look here, is are you sure this is what you want? It just sends it out. It assumes that you've seen it as soon as you attach an image. So check that out next time. And for those of you, certainly there are times where it makes sense to, you know, send with smaller or medium or whatever. But for those of you sending screenshots into us, send them as big as you want. Full size is great because that way we can see what's going on and help you better answer your questions. So but just be aware of that. It's one of those settings that it, you know, it sort of appears after the fact like you go through your headers and now you're composing your message and you drag your images in or paste them in, whatever you want to do. And you don't think to go back up and look at that thing. It's sort of out of sight in a sense, out of mind. So I wish there was a way to say, always do this or ask me every time I drag an image in that would be great. I wonder if I could I wonder if there's like an outbox rule I could do with mail act on about that, at least to warn me before I do something. I'll have to look into that, John. If anybody knows, email us at feedback at macicab.com. That's right, everybody. He said feedback at macicab.com. I did. I said feedback at macicab.com. It's good. Oh, a nice tip from Dmitri. He says for those out there and he's using text expander as an example in this, which is great. But I've seen this happen with others, too. You probably have, too, John. He says, for those out there with text expander version four and the latest iOS version, he says, as I was about an hour ago, a quick tip on upgrading to the very latest version. So he's got text expander version four point X on his Mac and then on his iPhone, of course, running the latest version. He says a quick way to make sure that you were always getting the latest version available is go to the vendor's website. And of course, in this case, it's, you know, text expander.com slash podcast, right? He says the wrong way or sometimes the wrong way is to go through an update section in preferences. He says I made the false assumption that going through the in-app update with this would get me to the most recent version. He says with this version of text expander, it only got me up to five point one point four. If I was on version four point X, whereas the current version is six point five point two. He says I landed in that trap and spent over an hour searching for ways to sync my Mac and iOS versions, but it would not happen. Version five doesn't sync with the latest iOS version. Lots of frustration. How would I know that the latest was six and not five? He says after a while, I tried, I decided just to go clean. I removed the app and downloaded from Smiles website and was amazed and surprised to find version six. I have seen this too. You're not alone to me treat like, you know, like I said at the beginning of the question here or the tip. This happens. I've seen this a lot. I've seen it even where, you know, like our friend Mac Updater at MacUpdater.net, which is also one of I think it's still my favorite new app, definitely will help in this regard because it sees things sometimes that, you know, an older version, especially if it's been a while since you've upgraded an app or, you know, you had an old copy lying around or something, it will see that, you know, often. But even with that, I have seen, you know, just in the last couple of weeks with all these updates for Catalina and everything, sometimes if you're having trouble with something, go visit the vendor's website and see what it says. Because sometimes those major version upgrades just don't get, you know, you don't get notified the right way or at all. And you just got to go to the vendor's website. So that's great advice. Demetri, good, good way to save headaches sometimes. So it's just good, you know, sort of the idea of what we do on this show. Any thoughts on that one? Mr. Braun? No, that's a good one. Hi. Yeah, I ran into a similar problem before I upgraded to Catalina. There's also an updater in Clean My Mac. Yep, right. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. And it failed. I think it did fail on one piece of smile software that I had. Yep. So sometimes, yeah, you got to go to the source. You just got to go to the source. Things happen. Yeah. And there's nothing, obviously, nothing wrong with that. No, it's in fact, it's the way we used to do things. And it's the reason that websites like Version Tracker existed for so long because there was other than going and visiting your vendor's website. You didn't know if an app had an update available. Like it's only a fairly recent thing, you know, last five to 10 years, maybe that apps, you know, would would routinely embed auto updater frameworks. I think there was one that was written called Sparkle. Yes. That finally was really easy for app vendors to sort of use on their own and bake in. And I think they would license it or, you know, whatever from the folks that wrote Sparkle. But prior to that, app vendors had to write their own every time, you know, to do their own, to do their auto updates. And that, you know, isn't necessarily the highest thing on the priority list. If your app needs to do other stuff, because most apps aren't on your computer just to auto update. They're there to do something else. And you kind of want the, you know, the vendor for that app to write the things that are necessary for that app. So, yeah, it's a relatively new thing that apps auto update and not all of them do it right all the time. So, yeah, no, it's good advice. All right, listener Paul shares. He says, I've taken the bullet to do a nuke and pave on my 15 inch MacBook Pro. He says, I did a fresh install when I set up the machine in 2016. But since then I've done migration assistant, which went fine. He says, but I've become increasingly perturbed by what I perceived to be a sluggishness with my Mac after the transition from HFS plus to APFS. He says, I'm not sure if it's just my imagination, but I can't get the thought out of my head that the upgrade might have something to do with it. The nuke and pave is to get a fresh native out of the box APFS volume rather than the one that's been converted. I'm going to stick with Mulhavi for the moment. He says, I've created a USB installer as I don't need the headache of Catalina not playing nice with the Adobe suite or any of my key work apps. He says, to that end, and the point of my email, having been a Mac user for decades and having done many clean installs over the years, I love the feeling of being on a fresh Mac, but become frustrated when my Mac is not set up as I am used to. This won't happen this time. However, as I've taken screenshots of everything I can think of that would affect how my Mac looks, my Apple system preferences, my docs, my doc, rather, my mail toolbar, my finder toolbar, my bartender menu bar, the order of my iStat menu items, selective sync, Dropbox folders, all of that stuff. He says, I've created a folder of all of these screenshots and I've put it both on iCloud and on Dropbox and he says, I've also saved it to my Synology, so I know I'll always have those screenshots as reference that I can refer to when my OCD takes hold, since I thought it might be an idea worth passing on, and I also wondered what other GeekGab listeners would do to make their Macs feel like home. So this screenshot thing, this is great advice, and I like this topic. I want to hear from you folks about this to find out what you do to make sure that even though you're setting up Nuke and Pave fresh on a Mac, what you do to make sure it feels like home. And I know folks out there, in fact, one of them, off the top of my head, I can't remember, but one of them speaks regularly at Mac Tech. He's written a series of scripts that will reconfigure everything to his liking when, gosh, why can't I think of your name, man? Anyway, when he sets up a new Mac, but the screenshot thing I've done before, I do that with my routers, or at least with my web-based routers. Although I guess there's no reason I couldn't do that with my iOS-based, like with an Euro or something. Just take screenshots of how you have everything configured, because even some routers, you can save a backup of your settings, but it doesn't get everything, even like my Synology router, it saves a backup of the core settings, but A, it's in a binary file that is, for all intents and purposes, a custom, unreadable file by anything other than another Synology router. But having those screenshots of the user interface and how you had things tweaked, that can help save some headaches down the road, for sure. So yeah, I like that idea, but I want to hear from everybody else what you have. What you have. So, what do you do, do you do anything in those regards, John, like to keep your settings around? No, not really. Okay, yeah, because I, you know. Well, sometimes I'll make a note of values that I know I'll need in notes. Oh, that's not a bad idea. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, just, yeah, something to, yeah, like you said, it's just the values that you'll need. I like that, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh, huh, yeah, that's good. Okay, all right, we had, we had another question about disk images or something that I thought felt like it would fit here, but I don't know that I'm finding it in my, in my searches, but maybe what's James saying? James had something from 784 that, well, we'll go there anyway, because why not, we're talking about it. James wrote, he says, when I try to create a disk image of my system disk using disk utility, the option image from Macintosh hard drive is grayed out. Oh yeah, this wasn't related at all, but that's okay. We're here, we're gonna address it. We switch gears, it's what we do. He says, I've tried numerous things, but cannot find a way around this. Your suggestions are really needed. So this is an interesting one. You know, if you go into disk utility, and you, the first thing I've found is go up to the view menu and choose view all devices. By default, it's on show only volumes. And I've seen it where if you're just on the volume, especially the boot volume, you cannot create an image, but which is weird, but in any event, there you go. Change that to view show all devices. And then you should see a hierarchy, especially if you're on APFS of three things. Your volume sort of at the bottom of the hierarchy, a container that holds it. And then at the very top of that is the hardware. For me it says Apple SSD media or something along those lines. And for you, it'll be something similar. And while I can't choose to create a disk image from the bottom two things, I can choose to do file new image, image from Apple SSD media. Which seems strange to me, but at least this utility will let you do it there. So that's one way to do it. And another way to do it is to use something like carbon copy cloner to make the image for you. And in the chat room, Fiek is saying you can right click on the volume. I'm not sure that that works for me because when I right click it, I don't see an image from there. I see it on the container, but it is grayed out. And then if I right click on the disk, I can choose image from Apple SSD media. So same net result. And this is on a Mojave machine, but I was definitely seeing, at least in the menu, the file new image from, I was seeing that on Catalina as well. John, what are you seeing? Are you looking at this? No. Okay. But I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I'm not, and I don't know why you can't create an image from the volume. That just doesn't, trying to, yeah, I'm trying to wrap my head around why that would be okay. Like why wouldn't, why couldn't you create an image from a volume? I mean, in this again, this is Mojave. So it's, we're not even in the, you know, split volume thing that happens now with Catalina with the separate system volume. So I don't know. So that's a weird one. As always, you know, every, even if we don't say something's a geek challenge, everything is a geek challenge. You know, if you have information to add because that's why we're all here. So Kiwi Graham in the chat room mackeygab.com slash stream is asking if encryption has an effect. And if it does, it would be that non-encrypted volumes cannot have their images made because I, maybe, I know I'm gonna get yelled at here, but that's okay. I encrypt the volumes on, I run File Vault two, you know, on my portable machines. But I do not run it on my desktop machines here in the, you know, that don't move around in the office and in the studio. And frankly, part of the reason is I like these machines to be able to boot up without me being here. And yes, I know I can like go through and then set it all to auto decrypt the volume and all that, but if I'm gonna bother to do that, then what's the point? So yeah, so I don't encrypt them. I like to be able to reboot these machines without needing to, you know, have it sit there asking for my password. It is not uncommon for me to, you know, VPN back into my network here and do something on one of these machines or have these machines just automatically doing things for me while I'm traveling. And I like to know that they are able to just restart without me being on-premises, touching a keyboard with, you know, magic knowledge that's in my head. So, so there you go. Yeah, so I am not encrypted and that's not causing that. But there you go. How about you? Do you encrypt everything, John? Pretty much. Really? So even like your Mac mini is, the drive on that is encrypted. Interesting, interesting. Okay. Yeah, I just found it frustrating. What's that? Well, it should be. Let me double check here. So yeah, so system preferences, file vault, yep. Okay. Interesting. All right, good. Well, yeah, and you know, there's nothing, I choose what I choose for me, whatever you folks choose for yourselves, you know, John chooses for himself. Like there's no, to me, there's no real wrong answer, but there is, it's important to make your choice eyes wide open, right? Know what you're doing, why you're doing it and what the risks are. And I know that if somebody comes in here and like steals this computer and rips the drive out of it, they can mount the drive and see all of my data. If somebody gets into the house, kind of feel like I've got bigger fish to fry. Of course, that adds to my problems. Yes, for sure. And there are things that we do store in an encrypted way, you know, for the businesses and such. So it's not just 100% in the clear, but you know, I always say there's a continuum and you choose your spot on it. And the continuum runs from, you know, perfectly secure to super convenient and you sort of pick where you want to live in the middle there. And you know, that's, I think I just explained where my home is. So there you go. Without even giving away my address, or at least not all of it. I guess at the beginning of every episode, I say where I live. So, you know, at least the town I live in. So that's good. Hey, I wanna talk about our next sponsor, which is Mack Weldon. And if you go to Mack Weldon.com, M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com, coupon code MGG gets you 20% off your first order at checkout. I have been a Mack Weldon customer for, I think three years now, since they first came on board. I did not know about them until they came on board as a sponsor for this show. And I've talked to some friends about it and I've talked some friends into it. Some friends say, I don't understand, you know, what's the difference there? Well, the difference is that Mack Weldon is better clothing than pretty much whatever you're wearing right now. Because like the fabrics that they use are so cozy. I'm a huge fan of their t-shirts. I mean, they've got this Pima cotton that they make. I mean, it's amazing. And they're silver t-shirts. They call them silver. I think they actually have some amount of silver in them, which helps with like anti odor and things like that. But when I travel, their silver t-shirts are like, that's what I'm wearing either just on the outside or under, you know, whatever else I'm wearing. They, they're super comfortable. Like they've got just the right amount of stretch in them and they're just cozy to wear. It really truly is a premium experience. It's so good. And, and they've got a great loyalty program. So they worry buy from them the bigger discounts you get. But they, they have great design, premium, you know, we like premium stuff where Apple users, right? Like we use Macs, we use iPhones because they're better than the alternative. Mack Weldon, based on my experience is better than the alternative. And they, it's like super comfortable underwear, which I've also worn, which is amazing. Socks, I have not yet experienced socks from them. I, this is something I'm going to change. Shirts, undershirts, they make now hoodies and sweatpants. So good. And they want you to be comfortable. So if you don't like your first pair of underwear, you keep it and they'll still refund you. No questions asked, understandably, they don't want you to send it back, which is, you know, fine. Yep, they, it's fantastic stuff. I really, I think you can tell from my enthusiasm how much I like it. My son is also, you know, a big, big fan of this stuff. So it always shows up, you know, in some way under that, you know, the Christmas tree in our house and that sort of thing. So as I mentioned, for 20% off your first order, visit Mack Weldon.com and enter promo code MGG. Again, promo code MGG gets you 20% off your first order at Mack Weldon.com. Of course, we'll have the URL clickable right there in the show notes because that makes it easy if you can't remember how to spell it and all of that other stuff. Check it out. Our thanks to Mack Weldon for making me feel so comfortable right now and for sponsoring this episode. John, take us, if you wouldn't my friend, to James. James has a tale of woe. He does. We can help him out here. So James says, my dad lost all his files on his iMac due to a hard drive failure and he had no backup. He was able to recover all of his digital photos with some recovery software. However, as you know, the recovery software just indexes all images on the drive with files or one.jpeg, files or something. You get the idea. There are no names or ways of identifying which photos are which. He can preview them, but there are over five. Whoa, 500,000 files to go through. That's a lot of files. Yeah. If he tries to import this with Apple's Photos app or Adobe Elements, it will grab everything from his photos, gifs, icons, website banners. You get the picture pun intended. Is there software out there from the Mac that can import photos via the metadata file size or make importing through this incredible pile of mess easier? And I think there is. So as he pointed out, since the file name data is lost, how about looking inside of the file as he suggested with the metadata? So I broke out the Google Foo and found what I found at least two utilities and then an article. So one is called EXIF Renamer. Okay. So that may be able to... So assuming that there's EXIF data, which yeah, there should be, which contains all sorts of details about the photo, mostly parameters, the lens parameters and shutter speed and all that stuff. But I think there may be some like date or other information in there. So that's one. Another is called Renamer 6. Okay. And we'll link to that too, but this is another thing that they claim to be able to do this sort of thing for you. Then I also found a related post over Mac rumors regarding the topic. And their approach, or at least the article title is rename files in Automator using EXIF data. Oh, that's interesting. But yeah, so apparently Automator can access that data as well, though writing your own script may be a chore. Well, but if they have, if the Mac rumors article has a sample script there, then you can just kind of take the, or yeah, a sample workflow, right? Automator's not really scripts. It's you're dragging instructions in or dragging blocks in. So Automator's not really that much of a chore. I mean, yes, you can certainly get yourself tied in knots with it, but if you're starting from something that you can see, it's all very visual. So yeah, yeah, I like this. And they also mentioned standalone pieces of software, including the one that I found beforehand, EXIF. Sure. Renamer. So between those three, hopefully that'll have something in there that can put your house in order. Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't dug into the particulars of this, but I wonder if, I mean, I would, one thing I would think about is, you know, the EXIF data of course doesn't know, usually doesn't know what you called it previously unless something like pumps it into there, but maybe it can pull, you know, location data or something. So it could say, you know, San Francisco and the date or something like that to help give you, right? You know, some context with the file name as opposed to just like the date or something like that. Yeah. Right. Yeah, most, well, any, yeah, any camera that has a... Well, if it's got GPS, that's right. GPS in it. That's true. So yeah, you could sort by that and maybe one of those pieces is smart enough to actually name it. Yeah, right. As you said, like, hey, San Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Cool. Fun. Yeah. Man, that's a lot of photos to go through. I hope one of these is able to kind of nudge you down a good path there, James. That would be, that would suck to have to, but you can, like, that's not, that's just not feasible to manually rename all of those. So yeah, good. All right. Let's see, where are we here? There's James and Ralph is next. Ralph asks, over the years, I have tried to develop and maintain a backup strategy that ensures I don't get caught. Has a certain ring to it, he says, don't you think? With a mix of external hard drives, cloud drives, time machine and carbon copy cloner, I feel like I have the redundancy I need. However, as my external drives age, I am starting to worry about their reliability and longevity. What to do to ensure reliability of my external hard drives? You guys have often mentioned Synology as your solution of choice. When I quizzed my local Apple reseller on Synology, he poo-pooed the idea as introducing another possible point of failure, the Synology itself. He says, I suspect he also felt Synology introduced a level of complexity beyond many slash most of his customers. Fair. He says, my uninformed thought, and I'd love your opinion on this guys or any information, would be in the event the Synology failed, could one recover the data by simply extracting and reading the drives directly themselves. My local Apple resellers assertion was that this is not possible that the Synology is proprietary and the drives would be of no use unless one replaced the enclosing unit. Is that correct? And do you have any other comments? So to quickly address that last point, no. The Synology does not use anything proprietary. In fact, there's an article on Tom's hardware that talks about how to, if you take the drives, your Synology is just, any Synology is just a Linux box in form. I mean, it's running some custom Synology software to give you the user interface and some of the features that you want. But in terms of owning the drives, those are formatted using open source stuff. Now, if you've chosen to encrypt your volumes, then you will need the decryption keys in order to access them. That makes perfect sense. But as long as you've got all of that covered, then yeah, you could in theory, take the drives out, put them into a, probably not a Mac, but as we've talked about here, but into a PC and mount them as a volume just like they mount in your Synology. It's doable. If you've already got a machine running Linux and set up to do this, then it's relatively trivial. If you don't have a machine running Linux set up to do this, honestly, your easiest solution is going to simply be to buy another Synology and put the drives in and you're good to go. But obviously that, there's a cost associated with that. And if Synology, let's say, were to have gone out of business or something like that, yes, your data is accessible. But in terms of the concept of network attached storage, NAS in general, for this, yeah, I think it's a great way to make sure your storage remains reliable because it's managing those drives all the time. You can even set it to run tests on each of the drives to make sure that the data's there. You can and should have it do something called data scrubbing periodically, once every, it depends. I think I have mine set to do it once a quarter. I feel like once every six months for my needs would be enough. But there are folks that say you should do your data scrubbing every month. And data scrubbing goes through and makes sure that everything on your drives is readable and that you haven't suffered any bit rot or anything like that, which is really handy, especially when you're archiving things that you're not going to be using on a regular basis. So yeah, you are right to be concerned about the longevity and reliability of your external storage and using network attached storage or some kind of managed raid, which is what network attached storage is in a sense, works really well because it does all of that and then more, which is good. What do you think, Mr. Braun? I'm with you. Okay. Yeah. Well, good. I mean, yeah. It's... Yeah, and we had a spirited discussion kind of related to this in the past, but they actually have an article saying, hey, here's how you can pull the data off of one of our drives because we're not doing anything proprietary. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But if you've got the link to that article, please put it in the show notes there because that would be a great thing for folks to have a link to and stuff. Cool. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense there, Ralph. It's good stuff. And the nice part about the Synology 2 is when one of your drives fails, note I didn't say if, but when one of your external drives fails, assuming you're using a Synology with multiple drive bays and taking advantage of some level of their fault tolerance, which is the default, as long as you don't bypass that. And it's not simple to bypass. You would know if you chose to bypass this. This would not happen by accident. But as long as you're using their fault tolerance, if one of the... When one of the drives in there fails, you don't lose any data usually. You just replace the drive and everything's good to go. In fact, you can even set it up that you can set it up that if you have enough bays and enough drives that it will automatically use an extra drive, you set up what's called a hot spare. And when one drive fails, it just says, oh, I'll jump over to the hot spare. Good to go. No problem. You don't even have to be there for it to happen, which is great. So yeah, no, it's good stuff. Alrighty. Let's see. Ah, yes, JT. Man, this has been a chore this week. And JT's gone through it. And I think I've gone through it, I know. And I think many of you have too. JT says, each day that I use my iMac, which I upgraded to Catalina, I get a notification that I need to update my iCloud settings and put in my iCloud password. In fact, the notification says, update Apple ID settings. This is inside System Preferences. Some account services will not be available until you sign in again. And this is in, if you go into System Preferences in Catalina, there's the new Apple ID thing that replaces the iCloud pane and that and family sharing are up in the top. And for me, it would have a little one badge on it saying that there was a problem and I would do this and it would say, you know, go ahead and type in your password, which I would do my iCloud password. And I would do that. And then it would ask me for my Mac password and I would see it crunch and crunch and crunch and crunch and then the same thing would come back. And iCloud key chain for me, and I think also for JT was the thing that was not working. He says, I've changed my iCloud password, which I also tried, which was a major pain in the neck because changing your iCloud password also wipes out all of your app specific passwords. If you're using things that can't, you know, that like third party apps to access, say your calendar or your contacts or whatever, and, you know, those are now gone or to access your email, those are now gone. You have to recreate them and then go populate them in all the apps that use them, which is sort of a pain in the neck. And so we went through all of this and after I went through resetting all my app specific passwords, I ran Onyx and that didn't solve the problem either. Of course I've tried rebooting my Mac and I felt like I was in the iCloud key chain versus Catalina cage match. It was like, this is driving me crazy. And finally I took the simple answer, although it never is truly simple when you do this, but I signed my Catalina Macs out of iCloud, rebooted, and then signed them back in to iCloud. And that did solve the problem. It's not the most fun process, especially if you're using things like, you know, syncing your desktop and documents folders because it will save those off and then has to repopulate them and now you've got two copies of it and it asks about merging and like all of this, it's sort of a mess that I wish I could avoid, but I could not have avoided this unfortunately. So if you are running into that problem where iCloud key chain and Catalina, or iCloud key chain isn't working under Catalina after your upgrade, you've got to sign out of it. Don't change your password, that only makes matters worse and adds more ripple effects and repercussions to the whole thing. Just sign out and you don't have to reboot, but sign out and give it a little bit to sort of finish, watch the CPU and like activity monitor or something, you'll see all the processes sort of going nuts as they clean up from having been a part of iCloud, wait till it settles down, sign yourself back in, they will all spin up again and you got to deal with it and all that stuff, but it does solve the problem. So, or at least it did for me and it did for JT and it did for several other folks too that we've been talking to about it. So, thoughts? Yes, Mr. Braun? Yes. So, my thought is iCloud could be having a bad day as well. I think this happened to me once. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, one of my devices was like, yeah, you got it. You know, there was an alert on system settings and I went in and it's like, yeah, your iCloud stuff is, or no, you got the same message that you got it. Right, right. But fortunately, Apple has a system status page, which will show you how all the little pieces, how all the little pieces that are iCloud, including iCloud Keychain, how they're feeling. And right now it looks like we got all green dots here. So, that's good. That's good. That's good. But I think, yeah, one time it just didn't take hold for me and I'm like, what's wrong with this thing? Yeah, that sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that unfortunately was not the issue. The Apple was not having an issue. It just seems like, and I had this on both of my Catalina machines. So, yeah, upgrade to Catalina and it just did not want to take for whatever reason with iCloud Keychain until I logged it out and logged it back in. My laptop I had updated, I had on the betas and then not and I updated to Catalina, basically the moment it came out and all of that. But my iMac in the office, I did not update to Catalina until, I think, well, it was until I was back from my travels and Mac tech and all that. So, I don't think there has been an update to Catalina since then. So, I was running the, I've never had to do a system update. So, I didn't get any of the first wave of bugginess of Catalina on it, but it didn't matter, same scenario. Yeah, this is, Apple has made a lot of changes to both iOS and macOS with this recent wave of 13 in Catalina, which is 10.15. And yeah, the quality control is not where we as Apple customers would like to expect it to be. But we've been through this before at different levels, maybe not with both iOS and macOS at the same time. But, I'm hoping what this means is that next year's operating systems are more of the snow leopard variety. Like, we're just gonna worry about stability and all of that. And remember, we all cheered for that. It was like, hey, they're not adding lots of new features, just making it stable, which is a new feature in and of itself or was at the time. So, I think an annual upgrade pace of operating systems is not necessarily necessary. You know, if you've got stuff to add at it, but I don't know that you need a big marketing push with your operating system every year. People didn't even use to care, you know, John, about like operating system changes. It was like, well, the operating system is what runs the computer, what do the apps do? Like, what's the fun stuff? We've gotten past that. And there's some value to that. And there's also some headache. And this is, some of this is the headache. So there it goes. Yeah. All right. Shall we talk about another headache here, John? All right. Listener Paul, he ran into a little problem. He says, do you have any thoughts about the best way to remove the Search Baron browser redirect? He says, it basically reroutes every search to Bing in Safari and Chrome. He says, most sites describing it seem sketchy and recommend downloading other software that I've never heard of to fix it. Do you know of any solid Mac Geek Gab-approved ways to do this? I'm helping a friend. Yeah, I've never encountered this particular one, but I've certainly heard about it and I have encountered other browser hijacks. If it happened today, the first thing I would do was run malware bytes for the Mac. That's, you know, it's not perfect, but it will, if it will fix it, then it will fix it. And that's all you need. So that's where I would start. If that doesn't work, and the, oh, by the way, the free version of malware bytes is totally fine for that because the main difference between the free version and the paid version is that the paid version runs all the time and you can schedule scans as well, but the free version, it's only for on-demand scans, but for what we're talking about here, on-demand is totally fine. If that doesn't do it, or if you wanted to try a manual removal, there are a couple of places where, depending on your OS version, I've found these things before. Catalina and Safari, what are we on Safari 13 now? Can't remember off the top of my head. Yeah, Safari 13 sort of changed the ability for extensions to be inside of Safari, which is a good thing, in my opinion, because it helps this stuff, but if you go into Safari, preferences, extensions, this is one place where those browser hijackers would live. This will be less and less the case now because extensions can't just be installed directly in Safari, they are part of apps in the app store, and therefore are, you know, better vetted. So, there you go, that's one place to get them. Well, actually no, I've been corrected on this before, so I will make sure that I offer that correction now. They don't have to be apps from the app store, but they do have to be apps, and they need to be signed to apps, so in order for you to have a Safari extension, it can't just be a standalone Safari extension anymore, it needs to be part of an app. The app can just be a shell for the extension, but the app needs to be signed, so in theory, that will help prevent most of these things, but it does not have to come from the app store. I stand corrected on that, so thank you to all of you that were banging on your steering wheels, saying, Dave, you're wrong again. I know, but I'm getting better at it, you know, trying to remember, trying not to be wrong about the same thing more than once, so. Anyway, that's one place to check. System Preferences Profiles is another place to check. Now, if you go to System Preferences and you don't have profiles there, that's okay. It just means you don't have any profiles installed. Once you have one installed, then it will be there. So, go there, look, if you've got a profile option, dig into that and see what's happening, because that's where some of these things will also sort of get their hooks in and live. So, have you seen any other places, John? No, I think some, I guess, yeah, as you pointed out, I mean, some, yeah, there's some P-list files that I think some malware will fiddle with directly, so. So for goodness sake, don't install that Flash Player Update because it's not a Flash Player Update. Well, I mean, you can install the Flash Player Update just to make sure it is the Flash Player Update. Right, the thing is I've, yeah, I've stumbled across, yeah, either, you know, you get redirected, like a good way to find one of those, and every now and then I'll go fishing around, but search for an episode of a popular TV show. Oh, yeah. And the page that you go to will, nine times out of 10 are kind of sketchy. And, but at some point, yeah, they'll say, oh, yeah, you got to update your Flash Player if you want to play this stuff you're pirating. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, cool. All right, so that's Search Baron or any of those other things like it. All right, Harvey in the forums asked, he was having some issue with iOS 13. He says, is anyone else having problems with iOS 13 and mail? I can read my mail once and then go to another message and read that. But if I go back to a piece of a mail I've already read, I often get a blank screen for that message. In order to reread the mail, I have to click on it and mark it unread in order for it to appear when I click on it again. So I've seen this too, not exactly the same way that Harvey has, but and certainly not happening all the time. But I'll get it where I get two things with iOS 13. One is this where I'll even go to click on a new message and it never comes in. Like sometimes you'll tap on a message and it's downloaded the headers but it hasn't pulled in the body of the message yet. And then eventually it appears. But even being on like solid wifi or something like that, no, I have it where no bueno, I cannot see the message. I've also seen, and this happens more and more with iOS 13, where there are say, it'll show me in the list or on my badge on the icon that there are say three new messages in my inbox but when I go to my inbox, I'm shown an older version of my inbox. Both of these problems for me, I'm able to fix by moving, by going in and force quitting mail, which on, you know, the iPhone 10 you sort of do by drawing, you know, on previous iPhones, you would double tap the home button. And for anybody left on team home button, you iPhone eight users and iPhone seven users, if you don't have a home button, swipe up from the bottom and then right. So you're kind of making an L or a backwards L with your finger and then that will bring you to the app switcher. And then you can, once you're there, regardless of how you get there, you swipe up and the app is forced quit and then you can relaunch it. And for me, that has solved this problem every time. Hopefully Apple can institute a fix that doesn't require this, but it seems like something about the way it's caching things to make it more efficient and not have to reload from the server. It's making some assumptions that aren't entirely in our best interests at the moment. So have you seen that yet with iOS 13, John? Yeah, but I think they got rid of it in one of the weekly iOS updates. Okay, okay. No, I would have something, yeah, I would look at my list of messages in my inbox and underneath it said no content. And I'm like, mm-hmm. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's crazy, it's not, and it's not good. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely gotten very, very, yeah, it's just flaky, but we gotta get there. I don't know that it's updated with 13.1.3 for me, so. So, I don't know, I don't know. Let's see, what is next here? We have, oh, I have a quick tip. And then I wanna talk about other world computing, but I wanna share this quick tip really quickly. Listener Keith, we were talking about in previous episodes about the personal automation and some of them that will run automatically and some that won't, things based on time and geo fencing and wifi, things that just sort of happen to your iPhone without you doing anything on the phone or to the phone, those won't run automatically. Plugging in a USB device, that will run automatically. And so, but you know, it like, that makes reminders a, it makes this personal automation more like a reminder. It's like a script, right, that can run. And that's nice, cause you do one step and then it could run 10 if you, you know, if that's what you've set it up to do. But the triggering of it, if it's not happening automatically, all you're basically getting is a reminder that's saying, hey, here's the criteria. Do you want me to run? It's like, yeah, I do want you to run and I would like you to run. Well, there is something you can do about that if you have an iPhone 10 or later. And that is that you can use, something we talked about in a previous episode, NFC triggers or NFC tags to trigger those personal automations. And that's pretty cool. So one guy wanted something to happen. Listener Kevin wanted something to happen in his, or sorry, not Kevin, why did I say Kevin? Cause I looked quick. Listener Keith was talking with us on Twitter and he says he wanted something to happen in his car. And so he put an NFC tag in the car right where he puts his iPhone in the mount. And now when he puts his iPhone in the mount, the NFC tag is one of the ones that you can tell it to use and run automatically without interruption and or without prompting, I should say. And there it goes. Now he can have his stuff run in the car on the right apps launch and everything. And he's good to go because the Bluetooth trigger in the car was not enough to happen automatically that only prompts you. So I like that. That's pretty good. And I think Keith might still be in the chat room. If you have a link to the NFC tags that you bought, Keith, I'd love to put those in the show notes. I mean, they're, you know, basically a dime a dozen. I mean, it's not quite that inexpensive, but they're, you know, an NFC tag is I think an NFC tag. So then they sell them by the, by the bushel full on Amazon. So we'll find a link. In fact, there it is. Feek just put it in the show notes. So we'll make sure that that gets into the episode. So fun stuff, fun stuff. All right, you know, we are very, very happy to have our next sponsor, not only as a sponsor, but just as a member of our Apple focused community here. And that is other world computing because they really understand what we as Apple users and specifically as Mac users want. But, you know, that doesn't mean they don't make products that work with your phone or your iPad too. In fact, their USB-C dock works really well with the new iPads and gives you lots of functionality that you wouldn't otherwise have. And the Envoy Pro EX is a USB-C device that holds a high performance NVMe M.2 SSD that can deliver speeds up to 980 megabytes a second. I mean, that's super fast for an external drive like this, you know, a single drive inside it. That, I mean, it's just smoking. And it's so great to be able to see that this exists. It's got Thunderbolt 3 compatibility. It's backed by OWC's rock solid three year warranty. And that way, for those of you that need that kind of speed, you can say goodbye to your desks knowing that you have the performance of NVMe and ultra reliable data protection to maintain all the work that you're doing out in the field. So you've gotta go check this out, the OWC Envoy Pro EX with USB-C. Of course, you just go to macsales.com. Capacities are up to two terabytes, which is also pretty amazing. And they, you know, they've got you covered for pretty much everything you're gonna need. It is the first place that John and I stop whenever we need something to expand our Macs or our Apple devices in that way. So make them your first stop to shop to. Check it out, macsales.com and our thanks to Macsales of the world computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, Johnny writes in. I think Johnny is the one that I was thinking about adding earlier and I just couldn't find it in the moment, but maybe not. Johnny says, you guys might or he says, oh, I assist a relative with tech support that has an older MacBook Air running 10.9. She is visiting currently and brought her air so I could upgrade the OS to Catalina. When I went to the App Store and started the Catalina download, within about two minutes, it says that the download was finished. So then I started the installation. When I got to the line about which disk to install on, the installer simply hung. I had to quit the installer and when I restarted, it now says that 10.15 is installed when I run the installer, but restarting the computer, everything, it's not actually installed. So I feel like the installer is damaged. I'm stuck about what to do next. How can I get the installer to actually restart the installation? So this is an older version of macOS, right? It's 10.9, maybe something about that is confusing it or maybe it's just something about the Catalina installer in general. If you have, you look in, I'm assuming if you look in the applications folder and this is where you're talking about that that's where the installer is, assuming it is, you could try just removing the installer and redownloading it. There have been a lot of issues. I experienced one myself where the installer gets damaged and just needs, you just need to download the new one. I had to get stuck one time. It was chugging along. I think it's like eight gigs or something. Yep. And it got to a certain point, good bandwidth and all that. And then all of a sudden it just stopped and like no more progress. And I'm like, oh man. Yeah. But I started it again and then it was fine. There you go. Yeah, I also wasn't too comfortable with the, okay, well, no, that's not an option here. I did it through the app store like he did versus on the newer OS, it's actually within system preferences. I just wasn't comfortable with that method. Though it may be accomplishing the same thing, right? Yeah. I mean, I think the system preferences one just pulls it down and runs the app as well. I think it does the same thing, but yeah, maybe there's a difference here for sure. Yeah. You know, in this case, I would download a copy of the installer, but don't let it run. It will sort of auto run when you pull it down from the app store, quit it. And it will leave itself in the applications folder. Once you've got it there, I would make a USB disk to install from. And Apple's got a knowledge-based article about this. You could use disk maker 10, which it does the same thing as Apple's. It just, you know, makes it a little easier because Apple's you've got to do from the terminal. And I think disk maker 10, it's at diskmakerx.com. Yeah, it's now compatible with Mac OS Catalina. So you can download disk maker 10, nine, 10 version nine, disk maker X version nine. You understand. You'll just go there and it'll all make sense. And let that create your USB stick for you and then boot from that and install. And that way you're clean and you don't have to worry, I think. At least it, at least that way you've got it. So, yeah, Keith in the chat room says that diskmakerx works perfectly with Catalina. I did it over the weekend. So, and Dave Ginsburg in the chat room points us to macdaddy.io. Do I, have I been there before? I don't know that I have. He says they've got an installed disk creator there. Ah, very nice. I will put a link to that in the show notes too. Yes. What is going on here? Okay, here we are. I've had a couple of times where I can't get into or I can't make changes to our Google doc and I have to reload, but anyway, it worked there. So yeah, install disk creator. So there's another one. Great, this is good. This is what I love doing about the show. This is what I love about doing the show. Sometimes I even say the words in the right order. All right, shall we go to Larry, John? Or is there more to say about this? All right, cool. Let's find Larry here. Larry says, in the past I've written you about drives not ejecting. This is similar, but opposite. I will just be sitting at my computer and suddenly all of these notifications will appear that say disk not ejected properly. Please eject disk name before disconnecting or turning it off. And I'll get all kinds of these all at once. Coincidentally, he says these are the same drives that in the past I've had problems getting to eject. They're all on the same disk, just separate volumes. If there's some kind of way I can find out why they are ejecting. So John, my default answer to this now, you have perfectly conditioned me to suggest using Hardware Growler to see if in the moment it is reporting that the physical disk disconnected from the Mac. Hardware Growler is a for pay application that runs and tells you, gives you notifications when it sees hardware changes on your Mac. I find it to be far too chatty for me to run all of the time because it's just unnecessarily distracting when it notices like Bluetooth things and stuff like that. But for troubleshooting, it is invaluable because you can know definitely whether something disappeared even just for a second like what happened. And if you know that it's hardware versus not hardware or a hardware disconnect versus not a hardware disconnect that can really help inform your troubleshooting, I think, right? Cause then you know, all right, let's take a look as there's a power issue with this. Is there a cable issue? You know, what could be causing the computer to think that it was actually physically disconnected? And it could be something on the computer too, but you know, it's just more data to kind of give you that coincidental like what did something else happen at the same time? So Hardware Growler is the place to be, I think. I know you think so or at least I think you think so. Is that right, Mr. Braun? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I had this happen and as it turned out, using Hardware Growler and just fiddling with things, it was the type of cable that my enclosure was using. It had a USB, I'm looking at what it's called right now. Yeah, it's called USB 3.0 Micro-B. It's kind of a weird-looking connector. And yeah, that connector was just not making a good connection. And then when that happens, the drive goes away. So cool, cool. All right. Listener Patrick had an issue with DNS on his iPhone. Although I've heard about this happening on the Mac too. He solved his problem. But the issue was, he says, I jumped on the iOS 13 public beta early. Things went okay. Although sometimes my watch battery would last weird times. This is toward the end of the beta cycle. My iPhone was having internet connectivity issues. The connectivity problems manifested in many ways. For example, Siri would never connect on the first attempt. Safari wouldn't load a webpage until the refresh button was pressed two or three times. Carrot weather, a third party app, he said, would produce a server error. He specified that the name could not be found. He says, in an attempt to fix this, I deleted the beta profile, upgraded to 13.2, and left the beta program, but that didn't help. Last Friday, he says, I backed up my iPhone with iTunes, iCloud and iMazing, then went into Settings General and reset the entire phone. I then restored the system and data from my iCloud backup. That didn't help. Either last night went to the Genius Bar and we reset, wiped the phone again, only doing it through iTunes, not doing it on the phone. The Genius said it worked better. And we talked about this in the past. Well, his issue was that it turned out to be his VPN. His VPN kept getting in the way and by reinstalling his VPN, he fixed the problem. And had he done what we had recommended in the past, which is doing the network reset, that too would have done it. But he says, a couple of years ago, I installed OpenVPN and DNS override to get remote access while it worked. To make this work, I'd launch OpenVPN and then go to DNS override and point my phone to the VPN. But it turns out that DNS override was, as it sounds, hijacking the DNS on my iPhone without me launching the app. It looks like I got caught. And you are totally right. Yeah, VPN is sort of the, for any of these kinds of things, we don't get to touch the network stack on the iPhone. But I say we, I mean, we as customers but also third-party developers. But there is a hack into it and it is via a VPN profile. Generally VPN profiles are built to connect to a third-party server somewhere. But they don't have to be. You can use a VPN profile to just mess with things like the DNS settings, which can be really helpful and handy, but it can also cause problems like this. And so, yeah, but if he had done that reset network settings, that would have wiped out all your VPN profiles, as we said last week, and therefore that would have temporarily, at least fix the problem until he ran that app and reinstalled that VPN profile. Presumably it was just something about the way that VPN profile was in there, that refreshing it, fixed it. But just be aware of that. I had somebody who upgraded to Catalina on their Mac and then was having weird problems. They couldn't figure out what was going on and then finally it was like, oh yeah, I reinstalled. I think it was ExpressVPN. It was like, oh yeah, now everything's good to go. Yeah, VPN profiles can definitely, I mean, they are built to sort of inject themselves early on into your network stack so that they can make sure you're going through the path that you want to go through. Unfortunately, that's part of the issue. So there you go. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? I had something kind of related. So I'll throw out this tip here. So I got, you know, I set up a new Synology or actually retired an old one and installed the VPN server. And I use OpenVPN. I still got to figure out how to use the other ones, but... Oh, on your Synology? Just configure the, that's way, OpenVPN is... I know there's two other choices. Yeah, but OpenVPN is probably the most convoluted to get working because of all the options and then you need to install a third-party app where as if you set up L2TP, your iPhone and Mac already have the client software built into System Preferences Network. So you just plug in the data and say Connect and you're done. Yeah, yeah. No, I know. I'll have to give it another go. The last time I tried to set it up, I must not have... I don't think I said, yeah, you gotta set up the right ports or open up the right... You do need to forward the right ports. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But what happened here? So I was checking out OpenVPN client on my phone and was setting it up also on the Synology side. And one thing it generates is a standard file called vpnconfig.ovpn and that's what the client imports. But when I set it up, it wouldn't connect and I'm like, what's wrong? Fortunately, it'll show you a log of what it's doing. And so I looked and it says, unable to reach your underscore server underscore IP. I'm like, that's not right. Yep. I had to manually edit the configuration file. So one, I added the DDNS of my Synology. 1194 is the port. So that, you know, that doesn't change. But then also I noticed there was a line in there as well. But it was commented out saying DHCP dash option space DNS. And my experience is that one thing that trips up a lot of VPNs is as we just learned here is it doesn't know the DNS to go to to make things happen. So once I set those two values, then everything's great. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, it's always driven me crazy with OpenVPN. I don't think I've ever successfully used an OpenVPN setup where I didn't have to go and make some edit to the OVPN file. Thankfully, like you said, it's just a text file. So it's not, you know, but it's still, it's like if you don't, if you get something wrong in there it breaks and doesn't work at all. But yeah, which is why I like L2T. Yeah, it just disappointed me because the server software should have set that stuff right but it didn't quite set everything. Yeah, there's some documentation on the Synology OpenVPN stuff that tells you like no, you're gonna need, like for iOS you're gonna need to go in and make these changes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not, it's, yeah. Again, you're like, I never recommend people use OpenVPN. Like if they want to and they wanna be a geek or whatever that's great, like, but you're on your own. If you want a VPN and you want me to help you with it L2TP, let's do that. Then you're good to go and everything's nice. The nice part about OpenVPN and the reason I run it here, or did until there was another option, but is that you can, it's so configurable. Now, as we just pointed out, that's, you know, that can be the downfall. But one really nice part is you can choose whether to run, what protocol to run, TCP or UDP. By default it's UDP, but there's a reason maybe you'd wanna run TCP. And you can pick what port, as you said by default it's 11.94, but you can pick. And so when Lisa and Lucas were off in China, I set it up with port 443 on TCP, which is the HTTPS port, knowing that no network in its right mind could possibly filter outbound traffic to another server on 443, because that's what HTTPS is used for. Like any secure website uses that, you know, same port and protocol. And it worked. Like, and I've used it on other networks too, you know, where people filter stuff and it's like, yeah, but you're not gonna filter this. And no, if they do deep packet inspection, they can see that it's not actually an HTTP request, that it's an OpenVPN request, and they can shut it down there. So it's not foolproof, but you know, that is a nice feature of OpenVPN is to, you know, be able to do exactly that. So anyway, you know, fun stuff. All right, where are we here? What do we have going? Oh, okay, so we have time for two things. The first is from listener, actually I don't know if it's Yan or Jan. I think it's Yan, but if it's Jan and I said that, oh, it's definitely, it's not definitely, but I feel based on the last name, I feel confident saying Yan. Yan writes, and if I got it wrong, my apologies, Jan. The last few podcasts, you've switched to a more stereo experience with a wider soundstage and stereo field. While that is great in the car, it for me, he says, is really annoying using my AirPods. I used to love listening to the podcast on my runs as they take about one episode to finish. Now I don't anymore because it messes with my hearing in some weird way, which I can totally get while you're running if there's stereo's. As I get distracted and disoriented, somehow switching from left to right messes with my running rhythm and I have to switch to another podcast. Is there any way to download a mono version? So it's just mono. Well, the interesting thing is your iPhone can do this for you. We switched to stereo mostly because every other podcast that I listen to is in stereo and it really does help separate the hosts, especially when it's like in this case two male hosts with similar enough voices that people get. I mean, for 15 years, folks have gotten John and I confused constantly, which is fine. But you know, okay, well, we can fix that. So that was sort of the impetus behind that. However, if you don't want to hear stereo, go to settings on your phone, go to accessibility, where lots and lots of fun little things always live. Find the audio slash visual section and turn on mono audio there and that will take care of it and that will set things to mono and you're good to go. So hopefully that helps if anybody else is having that issue. So should work with third party clients as well. I don't think it matters. And hopefully that deals with it. We certainly could do a mono mix, but there have been, you know, I can count on less than one hand the number of comments we've gotten that are sort of, you know, things like this where it's like, hey, you know, the stereo thing isn't quite working for me or whatever. Without prompting, we got more positive comments than I can count, which is great. So it means that, you know, for some, for the majority of you, because we didn't ask and, you know, usually when you don't ask, you don't get positive comments as much as you do negative stuff, which is fine. You know, that highlights issues. It's no problem. Happy to hear about anything. You know, it's no issue, but I figured the unprompted positive comments was a good thing. So anyway, thoughts on that, Mr. Braun, before we, before I go to perhaps our last segment here. All I know is life's the same when you're moving in stereo or not. Wait, where does that come from? That sounds familiar to me, but it's not. It's like ringing a bell, but it's a distant bell. Where does that come from? Oh, yeah, right. Remember? Yes, that's right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Yeah, that's good. All right. I forgot to do this in the last episode, but we're gonna do it here. John, I'm gonna read this all the way through so that I am certain to get it right. But please, I'm relying on you to ask clarifying questions. And what we're doing here is, we mentioned, I thought it would be cool if we occasionally had a riddle that we could all sort of ponder and you could send in your results. Of course, you can Google to get the answer to pretty much anything out there. If that's your speed, go ahead. But if you're gonna answer the riddle, let us know whether you came up with it on your own or you Googled it, because I think that'll make something fun. All right. So here is the riddle for all of you. And of course, we use chapters in this show so that you can come back to this if you wanna hear it again. There are four prisoners and four hats. Two black hats, two white hats. The prisoners are standing in a single file line and cannot turn their heads. They can only see the person or people in front of themselves. Three of the prisoners are facing in one direction. The fourth prisoner is facing the other direction and is also separated by a soundproof and lightproof wall. The prisoners are given one hour and are collectively allotted the ability to say one word. If the person uttering the word states the correct color of the hat that he is wearing, all four of them go free. If someone says the wrong hat color, all four of them remain in prison for life. The prisoners know that there are four hats, two of each color. They all know they have one hour and they are aware of where they are in time and how things are counting down and they all definitely know the stakes. What we know is that the hats alternate, black, white, black, white, but the prisoners do not know the pattern. So if we're going in order here, prisoners one, two and three are on one side of the wall and then prisoner four is on the other side of this wall. So prisoner number one sees nothing because he's looking forward. Prisoner number two sees prisoner number one with a white hat. Prisoner number three sees prisoners two and one with black and then white hats. And of course prisoner number four sees nothing. They have one hour. Which prisoner knows the answer and why. That's all I have for you. That's where we are for today. So we will let you ponder that as we bring in the band and move on with our days. Send us your thoughts, your answers to feedback at macgeekab.com or if you're a premium listener, send them to premium at macgeekab.com. Where else can they send us their answers, John? You mean questions? Well, they haven't answered to the riddle. Yeah. Yeah. Where else? Twitter? Yes. Twitter would work. How about Twitter, John? Well, I'm John F. Ron. He's Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mac Geekab. The publication is Mac Observer. And if you wanna talk to Pilot Pete, he's Pilot Pete. That's right. Very cool. I will ask, go to macgeekab.com slash reviews. We would love to have you leave us a review or update your review. We actually have, you know what? I have one to read and I think it's right here because if it is, I will read it. And if it's not, I will not. Yeah, there it is. Mlattif83 says from the United States, great info for any user level. Every episode, as is the goal, I'm learning new things. Whether it's how to do something or tools to make things easier, several apps the guys have talked about have been huge helps for my workflows. I cannot recommend this podcast enough to any user of any level wanting to learn more. So thank you Mlattif83. Yeah, that's good. We love your reviews and we love all the feedback too. It's absolutely fantastic. We just love being able to do what we do here. I'd like to thank all of you for listening. So thank you. I'd like to thank all of our sponsors of course at all the ones in this episode. Of course, macwelden.com and coupon code MGG is what you want to use there. Ifixit.com slash MGG and then of course macsales.com all sponsors of this episode. Other sponsors of the show in general smilesoftware.com slash podcast or textexpander.com slash podcast. Barebones software at barebones.com Linode at linode.com slash MGG Eero at Eero.com slash MGG. There it is. Enjoy. Have fun. And do me a big favor. Spend your week. John, good luck with your cable adventures and all of you. Please, please, please. Whatever you do. Don't get caught. Maiden.