 This is Mac Geekab, episode 698 for Monday, February 26th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show that takes your questions, tips, cool stuff found, we put it all in, we mix it all together into a stew, we share answers, we share tips, we share all the stuff. And the goal is for each and every one of us, yes, me included, John included, you included, learns at least five new things each and every time we come together. Sponsors for this episode include other world computing who are shipping their new Thunderbolt Thunderbay for Thunderbolt 3 external drives. We'll talk about that and more shortly here, here in a snowy, rainy, slushy Durham, New Hampshire. Dave Hamilton. And here in just plain yucky, Fairfield, Connecticut, weather-wise, this is John F. Broad. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's Sunday morning, we were recording this a day early, schedules and all that crazy stuff being what they are, but yeah, it's, you know, whatever. It's fine. My studio is, I actually can't, I couldn't tell you from being in here, I mean I'm aware of what time of day it is because I was outside and I have short-term memory still and that's all good, but from my studio is totally enclosed. I couldn't tell you what's going on outside. I can barely hear things outside and I certainly can't see. So we're just here. We're doing our thing like we always do. That's how it works. Let's, let's jump into some quick tips, shall we, Mr. Braun? Sure. All right, cool. Jumping to Martin related to show 697, he says, when discussing, discussing, option X to skip the message, delete confirmation, pilot Pete mentioned that he preferred keyboard shortcuts, but disliked that the enter key on the confirmation box defaulted to cancel. A workaround for this is to enable full keyboard access and system preferences, keyboard shortcuts, and then under full keyboard access, change the radio buttons to all controls. Now when the dialogue appears, you can use the space bar to select the option which is outlined in blue or the enter key to choose the option which is filled blue, tabbing to the desired option and hitting space bar also works. Yeah, I've always turned that on. This is one of those things is why we sort of concocted the concept of a quick tip because it's these things that we do all the time and take for granted that we forget about and full keyboard access is most definitely one of them. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's cool. At least it was for me. Is that new for you? Or is yours already set up that way? No, on both my machines it's set up as text boxes and lists only, which I guess is a default. Yeah, it's nice being able to tab through all that. It really gives you like, I mean, like the option says, full keyboard access. You can really kind of move around and tab through things. I recommend turning it on and playing with it. It'll change a little bit about how you interact with dialogue boxes, but it might make you more efficient. It keeps me from having to jump to the mouse all the time, which is sort of the key or the point. The goal. What is it, John? Hey, you know, Eric wrote us, John, and he says, I have some insight into the issue that JT had with Launchpad. JT wrote us last week and asked if with a geek challenge, if we knew with High Sierra how to get the Launchpad to alphabetize the way that it used to and JT tried to tell us, but we were too thick that morning or that afternoon to process it properly. But JT tried to tell us that he thought this was APFS and I thought, well, that's crazy. Why would it be APFS? Well, in fact, it is. And then Eric and to his credit JT tried to explain this to us. There's a thread on StackExchange about this that in particular says, with High Sierra most, if not all of the FlashBase storage had their file system upgraded from APFS to APFS, to APFS from HFS, plus calling reader, R-E-A-D-D-I-R on a directory in APFS returns filenames in hash order, whereas HFS plus returns filenames in lexicographic, lexicographical order. So the defaults trick to reorganize Launchpad based on this still works, but on HFS plus disks in High Sierra will work as expected. And on APFS formatted disks, you see that it resets the order to something that is seemingly random, but most likely the order of the hashed name of the application. So blame APFS is actually the right answer on that one. It seems like we're blaming APFS for a lot, John. Oh, it's, you ain't seen nothing yet until later in the show. Okay. Yeah, that might be the theme of this episode, but it seems like that's the theme of a lot of episodes lately. So anyway, we'll keep moving with the tips and come back around. We're not done with you yet, APFS. All right. Let's see. So Teran writes and says, thanks for the show. I was listening to the recent episode where you were discussing the various benefits of different options for installing Windows on a Mac. One reason not to use Bootcamp is because then you have to virus scan and back it up just like a PC because in fact it is no different than a PC. It just happens to be an Apple branded piece of hardware running it. He says, I have used parallels to install a virtual PC for years. I have a few programs that still work in Windows and I have always had an old MS office license for Windows and installed that as well because why not? My backup routine is to take frequent time machine backups and periodical super duper image to a drive in an enclosure that I can boot to if something goes wrong. Well, something went wrong and I had to operate on my bootable image for a few weeks while I waited for a replacement. Everything worked great except Microsoft Office for Mac knew that it was installed on a new SSD. And when I tried to open it, it prompted me to reenter the key. Unfortunately, I was then on a business trip and did not have a record of the key with me. I tried opening the parallels Windows 7 virtual machine in Presto. MS Office for Windows did not even know anything had changed. The other benefits of running the virtual machine not in Bootcamp are that the Mac native virus protection prevents infection of the root and time machine backups see the entire machine is just another file. So if you have a problem, you can just roll back to a point where it was working and off you go. He says, PS, now if I buy software, the first thing I do is copy the key into my password manager of choice. So that's smart. Yeah, this is interesting, right? Because with obviously, as he pointed out, with Bootcamp moving to a new drive, the the system is aware that a new drive is there. Drives have I don't want to call them serial numbers, but they're unique IDs, right, John? And and systems know when things change and Windows is very, very temperamental with that, especially with licenses and all of the stuff that you sort of have to deal with there. Whereas with parallels, Windows thinks it's running on a one specific parallels computer that is just that container. And you can move that container to any computer anywhere and run it and Windows will still still see it as the same parallels computer, which is sort of interesting in terms of of, you know, how things have to go. And that that's where virtualization really comes into play, like in the enterprise, because you can have all your servers running virtualized. And if you need faster hardware, you just take the virtualized container and put it on faster hardware, bigger hardware, more RAM, whatever. And boom, it's there. You don't have to rebuild anything. The OS just follows you along, which is kind of cool. Any thoughts on that, John? I think we we probably do that for Mac Observer, right? We do indeed. We didn't used to and and we wound up living with, you know, old hardware for a really long time because the time it takes to move and rebuild an entire OS is pain in the neck. But yeah, once we virtualize now, I mean, we still we're going to need to do some kind of upgrades because we do, you know, Linux gets old. But but not nearly as quickly as hardware gets old. So then past, I think we actually had physical equipment hosted somewhere, right? Probably not like in your basement or something. No, never in my basement. Well, the only thing we ever hosted here was our own file maker server for a little while. But I even that wasn't good because anytime internet or power would go out here, nobody else could get to our file maker server. And that's kind of how we run things. So so we host that elsewhere now, too. I think I don't want to say we're the wrong company. I think it's file maker hosting dot com. We just moved. Yeah, file maker hosting service dot com, I believe is who we are with. But the advantage being is that you hope that they have a UPS and things like that so that they don't go down. Yes, that's right. Yeah. But they've been they've actually been pretty good. So we just moved to them in what? December, I think so. But but yeah, it's our servers actually hosted down in Virginia or servers, I should say, are hosted down in Virginia. But but yeah, the whole virtualized thing is great for that. And and handy as Taren points out for exactly this kind of thing where especially if, you know, you're doing something where your needs don't change all that quickly. You know, for those of us Mac users that wind up using Windows, it's generally for a very specific purpose, like one thing or maybe maybe two things. And if your environment isn't constantly changing like it is on your main desktop machine, where you're doing all sorts of stuff, being able to sort of take that with you as you upgrade Macs and do things without being forced to say, you know, rebuild Windows or upgrade Windows and all that stuff. Is is pretty handy and pretty efficient. It's a it's not a bad way to live, not a bad way. Moving on to John. John, is that right? Not John, John. Moving on to John, comma, John question mark is like, thank you understood. Anyway, Chuck, Mark, yes, perfect. John says. He says, has anyone come up? Well, first he asked if anybody had come up with a solution about the problem that we reported on six ninety seven with James, where he was having a problem unlocking his Mac with his Apple Watch. And John wrote us back before we were able to answer, which is good because we didn't have this answer that he says, I fixed my problem. It says I had forgotten that both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi need to be on in order for your Apple Watch to unlock your iMac. It's not just a Bluetooth thing. It's Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are required for that. So that's one thing with Apple Watch on locks. We have, I believe we have three, if I'm not mistaken. So the second comes from Alicia, who wrote in and and said, the problem is not the Mac. It's the watch you need to wipe and restore the watch from the iCloud or from its backup, which is actually on your phone. And the watch will work perfectly to unlock the Mac. She says that she's been through it a couple of times and it will work perfectly until it doesn't. And then you have to sort of go through this process again. So something about iCloud or perhaps the restorer that that fixes this. So thanks, Alicia. And then Dominic, John, which might lead us right into our questions. Dominic writes, it says, this may help with James problem with Apple Watch Unlock that you discussed. He says, I had so little success with my Apple Watch Unlock on my 2014 Mac mini that I gave it up. I gave up on it sometime later, doing something unrelated that required me to fire up iStumbler on the mini. I noticed that the signal to noise ratio on my 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi was only about 12 dB usable, but much worse than I expected with a base station, maybe it doesn't feed away through one wall coming in at an RSSI of negative 65 dB. The signal to noise ratio on five gigahertz, which the Mac mini was actually connected with, was fine. But the watch uses 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi for unlocking. To cut a long story short, an external white box USB 3 SSD enclosure was the culprit emitting an uncomfortable level of interference that got in the way of 2.4 gigahertz. Using a good quality USB cables for everything connecting directly to the mini and moving the SSD enclosure away from the back of the machine where the Wi-Fi antenna are to a few feet away beyond a USB 3 bridge, increased the 2.4 gigahertz signal to noise to a much more respectable 36 dB and has allowed the watch to unlock my Mac flawlessly ever since. He said, iStumbler might not be required for diagnosis, though it's convenient. You could use the option click on the menu bar Wi-Fi icon to see. So, yeah, this is this is that classic problem, John, right, where USB 3 and 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi fight with each other, right? Yes, and we're actually bringing it up right now. We're actually going to link to a little ditty that Intel, I think Intel wrote it up because I think Intel is probably. Makes a USB 3 chips, right, right? So they have a white paper that kind of goes into some detail about why this is happening. I think it's basically because 2.4 is close enough or a harmonic of five gigahertz in that in a nutshell, I think that's that's why you see it happen. So but actually a good tip to look up the SNR or signal to noise ratio, that's that's actually a pretty clever way of identifying the problem. Nice work. Yeah, I like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that that that way. You can see it, right? It's it's one thing to just look at the symptom. In this case, the Apple Watch unlocking it, but being able to see the actual readings that can. It's super helpful for troubleshooting, like you said, so I'll look at that. You beat me to it. I'd be yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have our we all work together on putting our show notes together as we as we create the show. Shout out to everybody in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream, where where we all help. It's a it's a team effort for sure. So pretty good stuff. Yeah, good, John. Let's let's stay on this USB three interference and things like that. And let's go to peer peer wrote in and said, I just replaced my 27 inch iMac 2012 with a brand new top of the line. I Mac, he said, when it came with the new Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad, I have a very strange issue that occurs every time I connect my iPhone 10 with a cable to do an amazing backup locally. The Bluetooth becomes unresponsive and disconnects both the keyboard and the trackpad. Sometimes it even comes with Bluetooth status unavailable after about one minute. My solution is to have an old wired mouse connected so I can wake it up again. Where do I start? Yeah, this is I would think this is the same thing that you are connecting. I guess I mean, I didn't I never thought about the iPhone being a USB three, but but I suppose it is now, right? Is it? I don't know. I mean, this certainly so if it's that, then the solution is to move it away from your Bluetooth keyboard. So and your iMac in general. So maybe a longer USB cable, maybe somewhere else, if it's not, it could be something about the iMac itself, right? Where perhaps, you know, you USB and Bluetooth are actually related inside your computer in that the internal Bluetooth chip is wired into your USB bus. And you can see this if you go into system profiler hardware USB, you'll see Bluetooth USB controller listed right in there. And if it's not this interference thing, I'd be curious what happens if you open up system profiler to that screen. Make sure you see it. Now plug your iPhone and now refresh that screen. You can either do it with Command R or if your keyboard is not working and you just have the wired mouse connected, go to file and refresh information in system profiler, which is also Command R to to get it to redraw that screen. See if the Bluetooth USB host controller still is there. It's possible that maybe there's and this is, you know, probably an oversimplification. So forgive me. But maybe there's too much data, you know, being as the data is being backed up across the bus. Maybe it's doing something to interfere with Bluetooth. The good news is if you move to a different USB port on your Mac, you might be able to jump to something that's on a different USB bus. And perhaps that wouldn't get in the way. But I don't know. So there you go. I'm curious if you have your your iPhone 10 with you. I do. There's a quick way we could find out it. Do you have a machine that's running? I amazing. No, but I mean, not this machine. Yeah, this in the studio. No, I don't have it here. Yeah. And I don't think I'm just noticing here. A light cable either. Because when I look here, so my iPhone, if you click on the info button in my amazing mini, it tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the phone. And I'm looking in at least mine, the iPhone 8, it says, oh, by the way, your USB interface speed is 480 megabits per second. That's at least the iPhone 8 that I have as a USB to speed. I don't know if they kicked it. I was trying to I couldn't find anything really definitive. Yeah, well, you and you can see that now you're seeing that in amazing or you're seeing that in system profiler. I amazing gives you a summary of all the aspects of the device that it's that it's backing up. Right. Right. I think it gives me. Yeah, it gives more than. Way more than the system profiler. Huh. Well, the system profiler would say that too. Right. I mean, it would say for the device up to, you know, 12 megabits a second, you know, I'm seeing that. I'm like my keyboards and the Bluetooth one gets 12. I think the mouse gets one point five or whatever. So yeah, if I had a. I had a lightning cable here. I would I would happily test that. But John, it seems like in me in my moving things about in the studio, I don't have a lightning cable up here. So I can't do that right now. So but that's how you would you. But you could query what I'm saying. Is that you can use a amazing mini and get the profile of the device wirelessly. You don't need to plug a cable in. Oh, yeah, but plugging the cable in would be very. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can see it then. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'd never thought of that that an iPhone could be causing the interference. Any USB three device, right? I thought it's not just hard drives, right? For some reason, I thought it was. But I guess there's no reason. Frequency of USB three is the same. It just doesn't. Yeah. Whether it's an SSD or yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, fascinating, John. Right. Well, we'll move on. But we will we will check that we will check that. We had an interesting tip or not an interesting tip. I guess they're all interesting. In the chat room this morning, we were talking about Google Drive and you noted, John, in the pre-show that Google Drive, the app, but not the service, the app is going away. And it's being replaced by two things, one of two things. One is for personal accounts, which is what most of us are probably using. It's being replaced by something called backup and sync. And if you're a G Suite customer, so on the enterprise side, it's being replaced by something called Google Drive file stream. So you'll have to if you use those apps alongside your Google Drive stuff, you'll have to replace the app. There was some discussion in the chat room, some very passionate discussion that Google's apps aren't all that great for this stuff. I wouldn't know. I don't use them. I use Google Drive all the time. I just use the web interface on my Mac. And then on my Synology, I run cloud. Was it cloud file sync, I want to say? And it logs into my Google Drive and my Dropbox and downloads everything from there and safely tucks it away on my Synology. So I have backup copies of all that good stuff. But you use Google Drive, right, John? Yeah. And the reason I know that this was happening is because a lot of things when they phone home or check for updates, may not do it on a regular basis. But I found a lot of times when I do a restart, a lot of things that I didn't know were updated will come up like software updates. Totally. Like a day ago, what happened is that I got a dialogue saying Google Drive for Mac slash PC is going away soon. And then it says, you want to do something about it? Do you want to install Drive file stream or learn more or not now? So that's how I, otherwise, I wouldn't have even thought of it. I like that I got deprecated and then then I'd be sad. I mean, yeah, you'd be sad. So how do you collaborate? Tell me, this is interesting, though. Well, first of all, the sort of sidebar tip here. Is that rebooting your Mac has lots of benefits. I certainly don't recommend rebooting every day, you know, like I like to say, we're not running Windows here. But I do find that rebooting once a week, if I don't reboot once a week, even though I have 32 gigs of RAM on the machines that I use daily. After about a week, things start to get funny and a reboot really, really solves that. But more frequently than that, generally is not necessary that I find. So that's the sidebar tip is that rebooting your Mac can be great, especially for the reason that you just mentioned, John, because it relaunches all of those sort of background apps or menu bar apps, whatever you want to call them. And they phone home when they when they launch for the first time. And we'll tell you if there's updates. So that's super handy. So that's that first tip. And I think pretty much the same happens if you log out. I guess that's true. Yeah. I think for the most part, it'll restart maybe not everything that gets restarted or reloaded when you do a restart. But I think some level of that is happening if you do a log out. So yeah, I like that. And I wonder, you know, I should try that the next time that things seem a little wonky and I decide, oh, yeah, a reboot will fix this. I should try just logging out and logging back in to see how much of a difference that makes versus reboot. I will I will do that. I will I will take one for the team and do that. But I wanted the conversation I wanted to have, John, is so we both use Google Drive. It is the thing that we use amongst ourselves here to organize the question queue and agenda for the show. And then you folks in the chat room that want to participate with us and help us with links and things like that actively during the show. And of course, we also use Google Drive for that. But I've never run the Google Drive app on my Mac. I always just go to drive dot Google dot com. And that's how I do it. So what do you how do you do that, John? I think you have a different workflow, right? Well, yeah, so I run the Google Drive app. And then what I get is a Google Drive folder in my in my sidebar. And I go to that and I double click on the GDoc file. And then it launches it. So I'm taking a different path to get to the same place. So when you click on so you have a folder that's kind of like a Dropbox folder, right? I mean, it's just OK. And when you double click on that file, it launches your default web browser. Is that right? Yes. Huh. Oh, yeah. So it maps a GDoc to. So I think buried within that is the URL of sure. Of the document. Let me see. Where is it? Yeah, so it's in my home folder. So when you install the Google Drive client, it puts a folder called Google Drive in. And your home folder. And then that's where all the. And then there's a MacGicab sub folder in there. Sure. Which is, you know, shared. For you shared or I shared or somebody shared it. Right. Yeah, either one of us owns it and then shares it with the other. Yeah, yeah. Huh. That I guess I mean, I never like this is. I had no idea that you could use Google Drive that way to be perfectly honest. That's great. No, I just I just like having and same with Dropbox. So we also have a Dropbox icon in my. Oh, sure. Yeah. Right. All right. Huh. Just having, you know, all the virtual drives in one place. Maybe redundant because I mean, they're in the menu bar as well. But yeah, see, I don't have it. I mean, I have Dropbox in the menu bar. I don't have Google Drive in the menu bar. I'm just not running that out. What I do, though, is I use a lot of things in Google Drive. And so I have a lot of shared folders with a lot of different people and it can get a little bit crazy. But Google Drive has this cool thing called starring something, right? Where you can like just right next to the title when you're editing, you can star a document. And then when you go to drive.google.com, you can click on a list of your starred items. And then you can have that list sorted, say by, you know, last modification date. And that makes life really easy to get to the things that you're sort of most frequently working on. So what I do because I use Google Drive a lot and because I don't have it in my finder is I have a pinned tab in Safari on all of my Macs that goes directly to the URL for the starred folder in my Google Drive. So I can just go there and you can star other folders in addition to other files. And it's very easy to, you know, unstar them and star them. We create a separate agenda file for every episode. So we have we haven't been doing Google Drive since the beginning. So we don't have 700 or whatever or 699 because we have next week's already going at this point. But but, you know, we've probably got several hundred of them out there. And and so the starred ones always just sort of float to the top because because I have it sorted by last modified. So different workflows. Yeah, that's pretty good, man. Pretty good. Anything else on that before we before we move on and moving on to whatever we do. OK, hey, I want to take a quick minute and thank all of our premium subscribers that whose contributions came in this week either because they initiated manual contributions with new subscriptions or direct just one time donations or the automatically recurring renewals of those subscriptions. So on the biannual twenty five dollar every six month plan thanking West G Jurgen G. No relation, I don't think Michael E. Stuart M. Michael C. Kershin S. Mark R. Fernando M. Alan C. and John L. Thank you to all of you. And then on the monthly ten dollar plan this week came in renewals from Clive S. Dave G. Nick S. No relation to Clive and Ev the nerd. So thanks to all of you. We I say it every week and I mean it just because I say it all the time doesn't mean it means any less. We couldn't do this without you. So thank you very, very much. It means it means the world. So I had a question this week, John, from someone who wanted to become a consulting client of mine. But I think I gave her a better answer. She has an iMac, I believe a 2013 iMac and the hinge has stopped holding its position. It's constantly aiming down all the way down. And there this is a known problem. The good news. Oh, you could you could change the angle of the screen. You can't change the angle of the screen. Well, you can. And as soon as you let go of it on hers, it flops back down to, you know, facing not flat down, but as far down as the, you know, the stand will let it go. So it stops, it stops holding its position. And that's kind of like, yeah. And she easy fix. Well, you OK, I'll hear yours first. Sure. Well, she she came to me and she said, so I know that Apple will fix this for me. But and they'll pay for the fix. She said, but but I don't want to have to bring my computer into them. You know, I'd rather somebody like come to my house and take it and do it or whatever. And I said, well, I could come and do it. I'm not authorized Apple. So Apple wouldn't probably wouldn't, you know, reimburse you for my time. I certainly could come to your house and take it into the Apple store for you, where they would at least cover the cost of the repair. I said, but, you know, it's a big job, right? Taking an iMac apart because the hinge is all the way on the back. And you basically have to take everything out of the iMac in order to get there to replace this this part. So better to have, you know, Apple do that kind of thing, I think, especially if they're willing to pay for it. But she doesn't want to carry your computer anywhere. And I can understand that. So I looked around a little bit and clever people have come up with solutions. So one person on the iFixit board suggested an adjustable rubber cane tip that you wedge in there and you can set to the height that you want. Height for the cane and boom, there it is. Or a thing called the Mac hack at the Mac hack.com is built to solve exactly this problem. And it clips on and you just adjust it and tighten it down when you get it where you want it. And it holds it right there. It's very, very ingenious. And so there you go. And and as Alex is pointing out in our chat room, AppleCare will, at least in some circumstances, do pickup for free. So maybe that's the right answer. And I will I had no idea that they would do that. I knew they used to do that with laptops. I didn't realize they do it with an iMac. I was going to mention that because when I when I got my phone repaired when I got the screen repair, yeah, I preferred to bring it in and wait an hour. But they also offer they're like, well, by the way, if you want to mail it to us, we'll we'll do that too. Sure. I didn't know they do that with an iMac, huh? That's great. Well, I'm always save your boxes. This is why you save the box. So you could mail it back to them. Yeah. Yeah. They may give you a prepaid shipping label. Right, right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So but you had you had a solution or a thought. Yes. Dave, it's it's the tool that we all use to solve the problem of anything that moves when it should. Duck tape. Yes. Just put a piece of tape between the screen and the base. That should hold it to be. It has to be a lot of you'd have to put like a roll of tape in. Now, you're right. But I mean, like, essentially, that's what the adjustable rubber cane tip solution is, right? That's what any of these are, is like, yeah, all right. So it's not holding. Guess what? If you don't want to hold it with your hand, use something else instead of your hand. Yeah, it's OK. It's clever, clever. But it is a known issue. So if you're having this problem, I think it's 2012 to 2014 IMAX are the ones that that had this this rash of bad hinges. So, you know, I think I had one and I think the mechanism, I think I had it with one of my early it was a power Mac, actually. OK, 12 inch had a problem. And I think the mechanism is called the clutch. And the thing is, it gets loosey goosey. And yeah, so my screen would like fall down. Yeah, yeah, I didn't want it to at some point. It just got there was no resistance. It wouldn't stay where you got it. I guess it's happening here. Now, again, I could have done the duct tape solution, but I'm like, I can't work like this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the nice part about the duct tape solution on iMac is when at least when you're working on it, you definitely won't see the whatever solution you've implemented because it's on the back. But but if your computer's out in a way where everybody sees the back, then maybe you want something a little more elegant or maybe you want to have Apple actually do the fix. So there you go. All right, let's see. Where are we here? We have, well, we have some more problems with APFS as we promised. John, I want to take a minute, though, quick and talk about our first sponsor, which is other world computing at MacSales.com, as I mentioned in the pre-show or in the pre-roll or whatever we call that. Their new Thunder Bay four is the thing that I was talking about after we got back from CES. And really, I'm blown away with what this thing is. I never really understood it before. This is a four bay box that you put disks into. And then your Mac manages the raid of it. It's Thunderbolt connected to your Mac. Your Mac manages the raid. And I always thought software versus hardware, hardware raid better. And the more I learned, the more I realized, no, no, no, especially not on the Mac because all this raid functionality is built or the stuff that matters for speed is actually built right into the CPUs. And so Apple's own raid is great. But when you go with an OWC thing, well now you get to start talking about soft raid. And that's really, really magical stuff. And you can do some great things with it. It's way more efficient than a hardware raid, especially when it comes to recovering from any kind of inconsistency problem, whether it's a new drive being put in or even just a faulty shutdown or an improper shutdown, I should say, that requires a re-scan. It knows what was happening because the OS is tied, right? The OS and soft raid can talk to each other at that level where hardware raid cannot. So it sort of knows what was happening and what it needs to recover from as opposed to having to guess and being stuck doing a lot of recovery that isn't necessary. Plus this is just a cool box and you can put up to 48 terabytes of stuff in it. It'll go, they've tested it past 1500 megabytes per second. And this is OWC's Thunder Bay 4. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. In addition to that, OWC, they're the place we go for RAM, for external hard drives, all that stuff. And I know you go there too because we just trust them because they've proven worthy of that trust to all of us, not just because they're a sponsor but because they make good stuff and they stand behind it. So very happy to have them on board as a sponsor. Really great company, really great stuff. And they really are my first stop for this kind of thing. So check them out, maxsales.com and our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Yeah, it's time to complain about APFS again. It's time. It's not us complaining yet. It's Bruce who says over the past week, I've experienced some problems with an external bus-powered SSD that's running APFS. I know it's APFS. Quick Synopsis, the drive is a 256 gig Apple SSD that was removed from my 2013 Mac Pro and installed in an OWC envoy enclosure that was part of the drive upgrade kit provided by OWC when I replaced and upgraded the drive. During my recent upgrade on the Mac Pro from the original OWC or a one terabyte SSD to the new or a pro SSD two terabyte, I ended up installing High Sierra on the external, allowing it to update to APFS, then using it as a boot volume to allow me to do the firmware update that was necessary for the Mac Pro to install High Sierra. I then installed High Sierra on the new internal two terabyte and stuck the external drive into my camera bag. While visiting my brother in Florida over the last two weeks, I took a bunch of photos and used Capture One Pro 12 on my MacBook Pro to edit them and then copied the processed JPEGs onto the external SSD so that I could give them to my brother. At some point, the external SSD just disappeared. I could plug it into either USB three port on my MacBook Pro and the drive light on the enclosure would come on, but it would not show up in the finder. It didn't even show up in disk utility. I tried using his MacBook Pro, but got the same result. I ended up using a spare flash card as the transfer medium. I'm running the latest build of High Sierra on my MacBook Pro and on my Mac Pro. When I got home this afternoon, I tried connecting the drive to my Mac Pro. Lo and behold, it appears on the desktop. Here's where my question begins. I ran disk utility on the drive, everything was fine. When I ran disk utility on the APFS volume, everything was fine. However, when I ran the utility on the container, I got an error that says warning, overallocation detected on main device at a specific bitmap address, but then it comes out and says volume appears to be okay, storage system check, exit code is zero, which is okay. Have you seen this error before? It says I'll probably give OWC a call when I get back into the office, but I had heard that carbon copy cloner folks had pulled support for APFS in sparse bundled disk images due to problems with the file system, not recognizing that overallocation had occurred. I don't know if this is at all related, but I thought it might be. So I don't have the magic answer here, John, but I certainly haven't heard of this overallocation thing before on anything related to physical disks, certainly on the sparse bundles, like we talked about and like Bruce mentioned, but the fact that the Mac Pro is the only one that sees it is also disturbing, although I feel like that might be a power thing, although it shouldn't be, that exit code of zero, which says it's okay after it reports the error, I just, I keep coming back to, you know, external drives are seen differently than internal drives, like things like smart, at least not by the file system or by macOS on external drives, there are other drivers that you can install to do that, but they're not seen the same way. And I'm wondering if we're gonna find that, at least in the current short-term, our APFS advice sort of keeps ratcheting back from okay on SSDs everywhere, just not rotational drives to okay only on internal SSDs and don't mess with it. And I realize in this case, like high Sierra was the thing that upgraded this while it was an external drive, this isn't like somebody going and doing an end around or something, I don't know, what do you think? I think I just had an event that may figure into this. Okay. Well, I got another scary warning from, so one thing I reformatted my, you know, per ProSoft's advice when they said, you know, you have consistency errors and FSCK underscore APFS said the same thing and it gave me, you know, an error code. Actually, that's one tip. If you run that from the command line, it'll explain what these numbers mean, but zero is almost always a good number. But no, I got this error. Critical error, system stabilities at risk. Disk 1S1 is critically low on free space. I'm like, what? And I looked at my disk and I think it did show that I had no free space and it's like, oh, last I checked I had about 400 gigs. So what's going on here? I restarted it, everything was fine. I don't know why, again, I'm having my doubts about APFS. Now it could be because, you know, I insisted on doing this on, oh no, I'm sorry, this was my internal drive it was reporting on. Really? Is a valid, is a critical problem is that if you have no space left on your... Yeah, that's bad. Boot drive, your system drive, the system will probably go crashing into the night, but no, I got this report that I had almost no free space left and it's like, yes I do. Huh. So I guess what I think is, I should report that to him too. But you said you looked and it definitely has, like it was correct that there was no free space, like the finder agreed with that or no? No, wait, no, let me think about it. No, okay, I'm sorry. No, I misremembered, I think I have a snap. No, it did show, yeah, about 400. So the thing is drive genius and or APFS at some point or drive pulse made the determination that I have critically little free space left and the device is, you know, this one S1 is my main partition, which has plenty of space. I mean, I got a one terabyte drive in here, again, about 400 gigs free. Huh, that's, yeah, all right, okay. But I decided, the other thing is every now and then I'll get into a state where my applications won't launch. Well, first, this has happened a couple of times. I won't see the icon for any of my apps, it's just a generic like document icon and then any app that I tried to launch crashes immediately. And once I'm in this state, it's game over. I got to restart to recover from this. Huh. No, I may want to consider, I'm wondering if I should go, we should go back to HFS Plus. Let's see, I'm not having any issues. I only have APFS on internal Apple provided drives, am I saying that, am I correct about that? Yes, yes, yes, so I have it on three machines and they're all factory SSDs, no issues. Now, I mean, that's only three out of millions that are running it, but we also aren't hearing from a lot of people, but is your SSD, I mean, again, start getting into like tinfoil hat territory if we say that, well, non-Apple SSDs, there's not really much difference there. Other than maybe trim support, right? But is your SSD that it's running on inside your Mac, is that an Apple SSD or a third party one that you put in there? Now, both my machines, I upgraded. Yeah, so both my MacBook Pro and my Mini, I took out the crummy rotational drive that it came with and both machines now running, I believe it's a crucial one-parabyte SSD, like the M5 something series. Yeah, yeah, and crucial, I mean, their SSDs are great. We've had like killer results with them. So I'm definitely not ready to say that third party SSDs are a problem with APFS. We need more data, right? Yeah, but like external drives with APFS, regardless of whether they're rotational or SSD, maybe we need more data on that too, but that's sort of the point of where we are here. So, here we are, APFS, it's been in production for almost a year, right? Cause it came out with iOS 10.3 or whatever that was almost a year ago, and then obviously with High Sierra now. So, but that's, it's still really young for a file system. So I think my advice stays the same. I'm curious if you feel the same way, John, but mine will be only use it on SSDs. I think it's okay whether they're internal or external at this point, but especially because of how much question there is because we just don't have enough experience with problems backup stuff like crazy. And don't feel like you have to migrate to this. A lot of our tests show that HFS, HFS plus in many instances, especially real world instances is still faster. So APFS is still being iterated upon by Apple. There's still improving it. And more importantly, we're learning more and more every day about how to troubleshoot and diagnose these things. So, you know, five years from now, we're gonna know a lot more than we do today. Kind of like this reminds me when Fusion Drive came out, right, where we were like, whoa, don't touch it, don't use it, like we don't know anything about it. And then of course now we look back, that was what six years ago, we look back and say, actually, you know, we can count on like one hand the number of people that have had, you know, catastrophic failures because of the Fusion Drive, otherwise it's been really good. So what do you think about APFS, John? No, I have mixed feelings. But okay, so like what's your elevator advice to people, right? Use it, don't use it, where do you use it? Is it match mine? Do you have your own? No, just because I've personally experienced, you know, various strange errors. Actually they've only been two, so the one is reporting consistency errors when I honestly don't think there was one. And two, this weird, you're out of usable space, panic thing. Yeah. So I'll stick with it. I mean, I'll take one for the team, but all my drives that I use are APFS right now, that can be. Including your external drive? Yes. Oh, interesting. I told you, I'm being stubborn. I know, yeah. It's like it says I can do it, so I'm gonna do it. Yeah, I like the idea. Like using APFS for an external drive is great, right? Because especially if it's the drive that you're cloning your internal drive to and using it for other things, because you don't have to, like when you decide on quote-unquote partition sizes, it's very fluid with APFS. It's just one blob of storage that things get sort of barf to and you can set quotas and that sort of thing, but you're not stuck with physical limitations of where those partitions are. So while that's sort of bad for rotational drives because physically carving it out makes things more efficient with an SSD, it's like it's a antiquated way of thinking. So I really like it for that. I haven't done it yet, mind you, but I really like it for that. So yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know. John, I have to, we should be done with APFS for now, but I have- It's not done with us. It's not done with us. No, no, we're not finished. I mean, we're finished with APFS discussions for this episode, right? I have to make a confession to you in our audience about something that I did for actually a client here in my neighborhood. They have a husband and wife. They have two Macs between them. Let's say two Macs, two iPhones and two iPads. I think that's actually right. They might not both have iPads, but it doesn't matter. And their goal is to simplify everything and have their pictures everywhere and also at least one local copy of their pictures backed up, right? And they're technically astute people, but they don't wanna be forced to be nerds. Like they can, if I sit down and explain anything to them, they totally get it, but it doesn't mean they like it. They just want it to work and I grok that. So thinking about this, it was like, well, really what I want is one iCloud photo library between the two of you and then your own iCloud accounts for syncing your own contacts and your own calendars and all of that. Like one iCloud photo, they're really okay with seeing each other's pictures in their camera library. We had a long conversation about, is that cool? And that's actually how they had been doing things, but they didn't quite understand why it was set up the way it was set up. And so I did something that I have completely advised against because it really seemed like the right thing, but I'm open to being told that I'm wrong, which is also the other reason that I'm sharing this here. So we left, but the problem is that you can have multiple iCloud accounts set up on all of your Apple devices, but the one that will sync with iCloud photo library must be the main iCloud account. So that's what I did. I set them up with the same main iCloud account on all of their devices and then for each of their, and I turned off mail and contacts and calendars and notes and all of those things I left backup on because on the iOS devices because why not, but reminders and Safari and all of that stuff turned off. And then with the secondary iCloud account you can turn on some of those things. And so I did, and that's where they get their, they don't use iCloud for mail, which made life simpler, thank goodness. But they do for their contacts and their calendars and that sort of thing. And so we let that sync that way. But I felt like this was not necessarily the right thing, but I didn't know of a better option. It would be nice to be able to tell photos to just sync separately, but Apple hasn't really solved that problem for family libraries that way. So that's what I did. And I just wanted to share and as Alex said, he asked to summarize the goal. The goal was to have all photos on all devices. And then one of those devices is a new MacBook Pro that has a 500 gig SSD of which they were using all of about 30 gigs or something, sorry. Yeah, no, a 500 gig SSD. They were using all of about 30 gigs. And so that one I set to download originals because they're photo libraries. I think it's just shy of 100 gigs. So it downloads originals and then that one backs up to their locally, to their time capsules so that everything's good. But that way they all have, they both have all of their photos without having to think about it. So what do you think, John? Did I do the wrong thing for these people? Did I lead them astray? I don't think I did, but I don't like the answer. As long as you help them understand your reasoning, which it sounds like you did. Totally, yes, yes, I made sure they understood that this was like, this is not how this is supposed to work, I never advise people to do this, but here's why. And they were like, yeah, okay, that totally makes sense. We understand the caveats, we understand the risks. And I did tell them, I said the day may come with OS 10.14 or OS 10.15 where iCloud is expanded further and further and uses some other service where you're like, ooh, that's really bad and we can't extract that. So now we need to do so. And they're happy. So as Cletus says, if so, then congrats. So yeah, there you go. I think that's the, and that's really what it comes down to, right, is do what's best for the customer, don't do what's best for your setup. So anyway, that's where I came down with that. Shall we move on, John? Any more thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I finally saw the light and got more iCloud storage and I got my phone, I got lots of RAM, so. Yep, yeah. So wait, why are you, I'm missing the correlation between RAM and iCloud storage. Well, I finally, it was kind of by accident, but once I did it, I'm like, oh, this isn't so bad after all. But no, I needed to, I had my plan so I could store all my photos in iCloud. Right. And then with my most recent device here, I wanted to make sure I got it with. The only downside was that at one point with my older phone, which didn't have as much storage, at some point it came and said, well, it's not enough, man. Like, oh, oh, right, right. Yeah, all right, yeah, there you go. Cool. All right, let's go to Douglas here and Douglas asks, I have a new 27 inch 5K iMac. I originally set it up using migration assistant from a clone of my old iMac. I've decided I want to nuke the 5K and start with a new clean install and then start adding apps as I need them. My goal in this is to get rid of all that old cruft that may be lingering from the years of updates of my old iMac. I would like to know the best way to go about this. I was thinking of making a clone of my current 5K on an external drive, running a copy of the high Sierra or including a copy of the high Sierra installer, then boot my 5K from the clone, format the 5Ks with disk utility and then run the OS installer selecting the 5K as the destination. 5K has a fusion drive, so is there anything special I need to do when formatting it or will disk utility handle it? Or is there a better way? Yeah, so first of all, yeah, disk utility will totally handle your fusion drive. No matter how you do things, it's gonna see that that's what it is. It's an Apple construct. It's an Apple utility. It's gonna be fine in most cases. Obviously a clone or two is a good place to start. But I would say if internet speed or bandwidth caps aren't an issue, I would do your clones and then disconnect them from your Mac. And then I would use the recovery mode method, boot into recovery mode, command R. And that means there's no risk of inheriting anything from your clone. Your fusion drive will very much be a part of the process. And recovery mode gives you a great way to boot from that separate recovery partition. It will download the latest installer from Apple. It will install High Sierra for you and it will be the freshest, cleanest install that you can have and really is kind of headache-free. That's my thought on that. What do you think, John? That was going on the back of my mind as well. It's a recovery. I'm trying to remember. I think once you start recovery, I think you can actually see this sub-build. No, maybe not. I think you can see that. Never mind. But yeah, you're right. You get absolutely the latest version, which I've done that on occasion when I've had problems with a machine and they seem like they're not going away. Right. Just lay down a new copy of the OS and by the way, it's a newer one. So it actually may, there's a good chance it may fix the problems since we've seen some early installs. Didn't always go smoothly. Right, so there's two things we're talking about here. With Douglas, he would boot to recovery mode and then from within recovery mode, he'd run Disk Utility and erase the drive. It's going to seem weird, but it's only going to let you erase the partition that non-recovery partition, like your full data partition, and then you would go and install and be good to go. That's the clean install way. What you're talking about, John, is the sort of the troubleshooting way of laying a new copy of the OS down in place without removing anything else from the drive and your data and your apps and all that stay intact. And you can do that simply, just don't erase the drive first in recovery mode, just lay down a new copy of the OS, just reinstall. And that can be a great, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That's good, man, yeah. Yes, yes, yeah, I think like, again, you know, it's bandwidth dependent because it's going to go download several gigs of data for you in this process, but there you go, so, yeah. Anything else on that before we move on to Putsch's question, John? Moving on. Moving on. Putsch says, fellas, I migrated my Mac Pros account to my iMac, but looking at the advanced settings of my iMac, so he's looking at the advanced settings of his user account on his iMac, which is done by going to system preferences, users and groups, and then right click or control click, I think, oh, you got to undo the lock first. I'm doing this in real time with you all to make sure I get it right. So undo the lock on users and groups, then right click on the account that you want to look at and choose advanced options. And he points out that the account name, which is the short username and the home directory name are called Putsch Mac Pro, but it's on his iMac and it's because he migrated this account over, so it inherited the account name and the home directory name, which must be the same. But he says, I don't want it to be called Putsch Mac Pro, I want to change it so that it doesn't have this inherited name that came over. Can I change the account name and home directory without screwing everything up? Or if I change the account name and reboot, will it rename the home directory for me? I hesitate to do anything without asking first. Yeah, so this is one of those things that's totally doable, totally okay to do. And if you do it the wrong way, you will head into a world of hurt. So I write, right? Apple actually has a support article about this, which is, I actually found impressive. This seems like one of those things that Apple might want to not advise users to do at all, but it really is like, totally okay to do. So we will link to the support article. It's called change the name of your Mac OS user account and home folder. And if, so there's two names in there, there's the account name, which is the really important one. And that's also sometimes called the short username, although it doesn't have to be shorter than the full name. The full name, like on my computers, my account name is Dave. My home directory name is Dave. It's all lowercase. My full name is Dave Hamilton. So the first thing on this knowledge-based article, whatever we call it, support page, is about changing the full username. But that's not what Push wants to do and that's not the dangerous part. He wants to change the account name and the home folder name. And it does point out that they need to be the same always when the account's in use. So you can't start doing this on your active account. What you have to do is, if you don't already have a test account that's an admin account on your machine, create one. You want one of these on every computer you manage, I think, because if something happens to the user account, it's really nice to have a test account that you can log into this admin account and relatively clean. So create one of those, then log out of your main user account, log into that one. The first thing you do is go to the users folder and rename the actual folder to be what you want things to be. So if in this case it's Push Mac Pro and he wants to name it, change it to Push, find rename the folder, then go into users and groups, go into advanced and change the account name to match the new folder name and change the home directory name to the new folder name. Shouldn't have any spaces or anything like that. It's all gotta be just straight. Once you've changed these things, save it, restart your Mac and you're good to go. Knowledge-based article walks through all that. So you don't have to remember the steps, just remember the concept of you have to do this to a non-active account and it's not going to do anything for you. So there's three things you need to change. You need to change the account name and the home directory name in users and groups. And then you actually need to go and rename the home directory to be what you want it to be. It's not gonna be, there's no built in check and balance in macOS that says, ah, if you changed the account name, you must have meant that you also wanted to change these other two things. I got you, no, it doesn't got you. You'll get caught is what'll get happen and that's bad, so don't get caught. That's my advice. Well, they even say as much. So in red letters in that dialogue, it says warning, changing these settings might damage the account, prevent the user from logging in, which is both hilarious and no, it's not hilarious. No, not all depending on who it happens to. Right. Oh, Ari points out a great thing on this screen. He says instead of typing in the home directory name where you might get it wrong, hit the choose button. There's a choose dot, dot, dot there where you can go and navigate, you know, in a file dialogue to the folder and that way you're choosing it and there's no question. It'll get it right because the folder exists and you've chosen it. So that's smart. That's advice from a gentleman who probably has done it wrong once and didn't like having to deal with that. So I like that. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Apple ID, has that always been there? It hasn't. So your Apple ID that's linked to your account is also listed there. That hasn't always been there but it's been there for a long time. Several OS versions. Yeah. Okay. And then aliases. Is that, where are the aliases here? I don't have any set. Do I? I think I did on the other. Is that the alias user? Yeah. So that's interesting. There is, an alias for mine is my Apple ID and then there's some other Apple ID that looks to be a serial number, hopefully of mine and not one of you folks logging in. And then, yeah, you could set up another alias. I don't know what these aliases are for. If you know, let us know. Feedback. At macgeekab.com. I'm not sure if I heard you right. I think you said feedback at macgeekab.com. I did. It was feedback at macgeekab.com. That's how, that's how we roll here, man. That's good. Oh, what else do we have? What else do we have, John? Yeah, all right. We can, yeah, we got some time here, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael asks, he says, I just got a new Western Digital External Drive that I wanted to format to APFS. And after starting Disk Utility, I got the message media kit reports, not enough space on device for requested operation. I dug around and saw that it's an issue with APFS. I didn't dig too deep into the cause and figured you may know more. I don't think I've heard you mention this on the show, so I thought I'd share and perhaps you could discuss. And yeah, it looks like there's an article that actually Michael sent to us, but you'll also find if you simply search for that error that the way those containers are set up now with APFS on the disks means that the sort of the core partition has to be larger than it used to be or the core, I don't even know the right way to say it. Like the container manager or the main containers, I don't know, anyway. You have to go and wipe out, you have to go into the terminal, use Disk Utility and wipe out everything on that disk so that it can create a larger, I'm trying to think of what they call the EFI partition. That's it. The EFI partition is too small in these cases. It's generally like 100 megs and it needs to be 200 megs for the way APFS needs to put data out there. It's just not big enough. And a lot of these third-party drives come with EFI partitions that were built for Windows and those are like 134 megs. Anything lower than 200, not enough. So that's the issue and it's not that bad. Obviously you wanna do this before you put any data out there because you're gonna lose all that data when you change the partition type anyway. But then just be careful when you go through these steps not to wipe out the wrong drive, but otherwise. Good to go. Did you check that out, John? Uh-oh. Okay, you're here. No, no, we're not enough. I wonder if that's what I ran into. Oh, no. I can't imagine. I mean, this was, you had an HFS plus drive that was migrated to APFS, right? Yes. So that, in theory, that shouldn't happen. But I mean, you know, we know how theories go. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, let's go to this. Let's see where we get with Mark here. So, Mark says I've got a parenting Mac Geek challenge for you. I have a friend with a 14-year-old son who is technically advanced. They, on the other hand, are not. They put parental controls on his account as he's a special needs child and they want to reduce his use of the internet. But the kid is smart enough to social engineer his mom into unlocking his account and such. This time he figured out if he gets into recovery mode, he's got unfettered access to Safari. Any thoughts on how to help a technically challenged person wage the parental control battle? I've always wondered about this, you know, because my kids are really good at understanding and circumventing stuff, right? And as all kids are, because they're, you know, kids now are, you know, the i-generation, right? Or the Google generation. They understand that other people have likely solved the problem that they are having and all you got to do is Google for it and somebody will tell you what to do to work around any sort of parental controls or any other problem you have. I mean, that's the beauty of it, right? That's what we do here. We help solve problems. So while my kids are comfortable implementing, you know, untested solutions, at least I am able to grok what they're doing and can just call them out on it. So like, if I see, you know, we use open, we don't, our parenting style, everybody comes up with their own parenting style to make it through, right? That's just what you do. And you make it up as you go along. And our style has evolved into one where we talk about everything at anywhere, but mostly at the dinner table, right? And I always tell, you know, innocent bystanders, beware, because our dinner table conversations can get, you know, for some people, weird and uncomfortable. But, so we don't do a whole lot of limiting from the technological sense here because I simply know that the kids can get around it. We do use open DNS and block like obvious porn sites and like other weird things and that, but that's more a network protection thing than it is a parenting thing, if I'm being perfectly honest, you know, but because I know if I look at one of my kids' devices and I see that they've put, you know, 8888 in as their DNS server, I know exactly why they've done that, right? It's to get around. To get performance. Yeah, right. Yeah. Our network performs really well, man. My kids don't have any problems with performance with the network. So I know like why that's gonna happen. And like I said, I can call them out on them. We can talk about it at the dinner table and things get, you know, interesting. But, and we embarrass each other. They do it to me, I do it to them, it's fine. But like I said, we're, you know, not everybody is the same and that certainly means that not everybody's like us. And I also understand that every kid is different and that's certainly true, you know, for a child who is, you know, labeled or called special needs. So talking and communicating can mean very different things with different kids. You know, if your kid's not able to be articulate and understanding, well then, you know, that obviously just presents a challenge that means you need to walk a different parenting path. And so for a technical solution, like there's nothing that's gonna be totally foolproof. But my first thought is to get a router that allows you to set network-wide parental controls and perhaps even tells you when a device is trying to hit something that you've blocked so that you can go and talk to the kid, right? Like if I see that one of my kids has changed their DNS to 8888 or whatever, I don't know. Like I don't, we don't monitor things like that. So I don't know why they did that or when they did that, but you certainly could. And then it would be like, all right, I see that you've worked around this. I know what you were trying to get to. Let's talk about why like that's maybe something that it's not good for you or whatever, right? You know, so having that data might be really helpful even though, you know, going in that the kid could circumvent it, you might get some level of like, oh, they hit that wall and then they stopped hitting that wall. I wonder why they've circumvented it. But at least, you know, they hit the wall the first time. So that could be really helpful is getting at some level of, you know, a router that has not just parental controls, but reporting in it. And there's a lot of these things. Like, you know, the Disney circle thing is built into a lot of routers now and that's pretty good. But some router vendors have just built their own things in and they work really, really well. Just be aware that, you know, like changing a DNS server, like I just said or installing a VPN client on their device will completely obscure anything that they're doing from other than you'll see they're connecting to a VPN. And then that's, then you'd know nothing else. So like, there's no magic answer but maybe something here helped. I don't know. What do you think, John? One thing I think this will prevent, there's something we haven't talked about in a while and does increase the security of your system a bit here. But I wonder if setting a firmware password. Oh yeah. Okay. Because setting a firmware password, I think that's the proper term. And they've changed what they call it. But from what I recall, it prevents you from using most startup key combinations like command R, which is going in recovery mode. Oh yeah. So you could do that and not give him, well, it sounds like he's already able to, as we heard, social engineer. So he'll probably just social engineer that one out. But at least, I mean, like even in that case, his mother knew that he was, knew that he had at least in retrospect, social engineer. So, okay, all right, great. I mean, every, it's not, there's no one clear parenting method or answer. Like, okay, she's aware. She got duped. Okay, great. Now let's think about that kind of stuff. The more knowledge you have, the less chances you are going to be duped about that same thing again at least. Wow. Right. But yeah, no, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah. The other thought is, I'm going to find out shortly if making it a managed device would prevent shenanigans as well. Oh my God. I'm actually, well, the thing is I'm actually looking into, and I think, so you know, Jamf is one. Right, right. And they're not a specific sponsor of this episode, but I guarantee you that code still works because we just said it last week, jamf.com.mgg gets you your first devices. And I believe you may be able to, I think you can do some level of, you know, configuration and restriction by using a product like that. Yeah. The other one, which we'll find out shortly, Dave, is I'm currently, so I've been asked to summarize some of the, some of the things that I learned. Once I learned that Mac OS server can actually do, I guess what we call MDM, right? Mobile Device Management, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Though actually what's interesting about, well no, I think both products do this. Whether you're using Jamf or Mac OS server, it's not just mobile devices actually. Well, it could be, but it may not be. Right. I was actually kind of surprised with the apples that you can create a profile for a Mac. Oh, totally. You can do it with Jamf too. Yeah. Yeah, whereas I was led to believe because, you know, these products are similar to Apple Configurator, but as far as I know, Apple Configurator is only iOS devices. Or maybe it is Macs, we'll see. I don't know. I've never, yeah, I haven't spent a lot of time with Apple Configurator, but that's only devices that you can, you can, that's local management, right? Not remote management. Well, it's a, yeah, it's a per, yeah, you got to have the device in front of you. Right, right, yes. Distributed or, you know, you can't do things like, you know, push a profile over the internet, which is another thing a server can do if you've got push services. And I would assume Jamf has some. Well, that's what Jamf does, right? I mean, there is no local management. It's all just remote. So you, it's all push services, yeah. So it's some sort of a, okay, so they have. Jamf's not the only one, right? There's, there's a Meraki out there. Jamf is probably the easiest one for like a non, like a home user to use, but there's Meraki out there, there's a monkey, I think is what it's called, M-U-N-K-E-E, there's lots of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so. Okay, and yeah, to confirm here. So Apple Configurator only supports iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV devices. Okay, okay. So if you want to tweak those, that's a good one too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, or just have a talk. Well, I mean, I think it's a lot of things. It's, yeah, there's no magic answer, right? You know, you just, like I said, you make it up as you go along. Hope you don't screw your kids up too much. That's all. I try to make a list. I told my kids, I mean, I've been telling them this for years and I'm making a list that I'll sell to their therapist when they're like 30 or whatever of all the things that I know of that I did that might have screwed them up and their therapist might get some mileage out of that. And then my daughter, when I started telling my kids this when they were like eight or something, which, and of course even telling them that I was making the list is probably one of the things that should be on the list. And my daughter told me, you know, daddy, she was like eight or 10 or something. She's like, I'm making a list too. I said, oh, she said, yeah, of all the things that my brother and I get away with that you don't know about. And I'll give that to you too someday. Yeah, Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, huh? Yeah. All right, back to the, yeah, we're gonna just do these two because they're good questions. Really one of them is sort of a geek challenge even though I shouldn't know this answer. So Stevie asked, do you have any suggestions for a FileMaker training program? I'm a beginner. However, I would like to create an MIS for my family business. Thanks for any suggestions. So yeah, FileMaker's pretty awesome. I happened to mention it earlier in this episode that we, you know, have managed our businesses on it for 20 years and we keep looking at maybe we should change to this or that or this other thing that's like a pre-built solution. It's like, no, thanks. Like what we've got here is better. Starting from scratch is tough. I would really recommend starting from a template and FileMaker's got some resources at filemaker.com slash custom dash apps that we'll link to here. And that's not a bad place to start. I also found FileMaker examples.co.uk are places to start with examples. There are classes, there's Linda classes and you know, all of those things too. But starting with a template and understanding sort of how that's doing things can be a really handy way to sort of get your feet wet with FileMaker just starting truly from scratch. I guess I've done it. The database we used to manage all our Mac observer contacts, I made that totally from scratch on a train ride actually down to CU one day many years ago. But that was after a decade plus of using FileMaker all the time and it's a pretty simple database anyway. So I wouldn't necessarily start with a blank slate but taking a template for something that does something similar and then just learning to modify it or modifying it as you go. Like, oh, we don't need this, all right, take it out. But it would be cool if we did that. All right, let's look and you can search online and take some classes or that kind of thing. But if you folks have something more concrete and specific than what I'm sharing here, by all means let us know and we will pass it along to Stevie, right? Yeah, I mean, a place to look also. So unless you really live in the sticks here, I mean, even my town has a, that they call it Fairfield Continuing Education. So your town or your library or if you have a school in your town, which most do, they may offer some, they may offer some training, maybe even get credit for it. Very, very true. Yeah, right. Yeah, I saw it, I looked through ours once and you know, they had photography courses that this is our pub, you know, our Continuing Education had photography and they actually had like how to get started on Mac, how to get started with Windows. And I think I even did see how to get started with FileMaker. Cool, cool. So where you could get a computer science degree and take database design? Yeah, that's still not gonna, I mean, it's gonna give you some of the foundations that would help you understand what you're doing in FileMaker, but it's still not gonna teach you how to use FileMaker. Like every tool is specific, yeah. All right, I know we're going a little late here, but I do wanna get this next one out. So Chris over in the UK writes, going back to the, we must have three copies of a file to consider ourselves covered for backup. I'm struggling with this now that I'm using iCloud for all my data, especially as my new MacBook Pro doesn't have enough internal storage and using the Optimize Mac storage option, I don't have many of the originals of my files and pictures to allow me to back them up. Suggestions, please, in this new era of cloud computing. Yeah, so this is sort of what I was talking about with that client earlier with their iCloud library, not putting them all in the same account, but having that one computer that could download all of them and then backing up from there. They happened to have that computer, right? Not all of us are that fortunate. So in this case, it's a very real problem that you don't have enough storage on any of your devices to hold it all and therefore from there, you can't back it all up. One way to do it would be to create, and this starts getting a little dicey, but like this whole episode has all the skills that you need to get there, create a second user account on your Mac and then change that user account's home directory to an external drive, okay? And make sure that external drive, of course, has the storage that has enough space to store all the things from both your iCloud drive, I assume that's what you're talking about here, and also your iCloud photo library. Photo library, you can actually point to any drive you want, your home directory, you have to sort of go through the machinations that we talked about earlier in terms of changing that, but we did, so you can make it happen. And then once you do that, you only need to have that external drive connected when you log into that separate account, so you don't need to bring it with you all the time, like when you're going out to the library or a coffee shop or traveling or whatever, come home, you log in, you connect the drive first, you log in to that account and then let iCloud drive and iCloud photo library sink everything down to that drive and then you can back that drive up too. Now you've got your cloud copy that's always there, you've got, well, hopefully always there, then you've got your local copy and then you can back up your local copy and now you're starting to get to a point where you've got lots of data. We haven't heard of anyone losing data in iCloud drive or we haven't heard of Apple losing people's data in iCloud drive or iCloud photo library. My guess is we never will, but that doesn't mean we should assume anything. So that's my thoughts. What do you think, John? I'm with you. The number is three. The number is three, at least, minimum, right? Minimum of three, that's how I go. Yeah, it does pain me though when I hear these tales of one not having enough, not anticipating their needs upon purchase and of course, now Apple makes it difficult, if not impossible to change that. Well, like Chris says, I mean, we are in this world where like our computers, the ideas that our computers don't have to store all of our data, we can leverage the cloud to do that. And when I say computers, I don't just mean our iMacs and our MacBooks, I mean our iPads and our iPhones too. We are very much running cloud linked devices but I certainly like to know that if the cloud screws up I have a copy of the data that's important to me. And then so like there is that, that's the, to me, that's the workaround. So, you know, yeah. All right, well, John, I think it's time. We gotta bring the band in. I think it's too snowy out there to leave them out there too long. Oh, you've got snow, which is good. Yeah, it was like slushy, snowy. Yeah, exactly. That's, yes. Yeah. That's actually sometimes worse than, yeah. Snowfall. Yeah, but one, they typically don't clean it up and they can do interesting things with the direction that your vehicle travels in sometimes. At least that's been my experience. Yes, I've been texting my son during the show because he had to drive, this was his first adventure driving in any, you know, snowy, sleety weather. He's his first year driving and so we don't, you know, we kind of made a policy that just skip the snow this year, get your, get some experience. Oh yeah. Yeah, like I did that when I started driving too. It's great. Like don't, you got enough to think about your first year on the road. Don't add snow. You just need experience to know how to deal with emergency scenarios. Like that, it's, you have to make it through them. That's the only way. If they don't kill you? Oh, I did that and I remember, oh, this was terrifying. For the instructor, but I actually took drivers out in high school. Sure. One of the lessons was emergency procedures. I think my favorite was where he put the clipboard in front of you to simulate your hood flying up and then you had to decelerate the vehicle. I'm saying that this guy must have aged at an incredible rate because I mean, he's. Yeah. Or what else did he do? The other one where he would slam on the gas to pretend you had stuck accelerator. And the proper response was to turn off the engine. Right. But yeah, having the guy jam on the, all of a sudden accelerating at a crevice. I don't think they do that in drivers at anymore, but they do do that when you're getting your pilot's license still for your, you know, small crafts and stuff. Anyway, parking lot and get some practice. I think that's what my dad did with me. That's right. Yeah, but it's just experience. So anyway, this was his first morning, the first time having to kind of deal with that. And, you know, I said, look, if you're not comfortable, just text me. I can pause the show and come get you. It's totally fine. You know, but he was like, no, it's a short drive home. And he took it slow and didn't want to back it into the garage after we got home, but. So he's already experienced in ice maneuvering. It's true. Himself on ice. Yeah, that kid, man, it's really amazing. Especially being on the ice with him, like he is just so comfortable on skates. It's ridiculous. It's like it's for him. It's no different than walking. But anyway, all right, where are we here? We told you about the main email address. For those of you that are premium subscribers, premium at mackeykev.com. For those of you that aren't, but are interested in becoming one, mackeykev.com slash premium is the place to go. And it looks like if I, if my phone is telling me the right thing, it looks like I can't tell the person's name here, but it looks like somebody signed up new during the episode. So thank you to, I don't want to read your email address on the air and I can't tell what your name was. So I'm just going to, we'll say it next week. There you go. That's premium at mackeykev.com. Any one of you can call us at 224-888-geek, which John is? Four, three, three, five. Where else can they find us, John? Well, they could find our various musings and little nuggets of wisdom and ranting and raving and all that. On the Twitters. I am John F. Braun. He is Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mackeykev. The publication is Mac Observer. And that other guy, Pilot Pete. So that should be enough Twitter for you. Yeah, that's a lot of Twitter. I want to make sure we thank Cashfly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, our sponsors, Otherworld Computing and the podcast marketplace here at macsales.com. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Fairbones Software with 64-bit BD. Edited at Fairbones.com. And of course, Roboform.com. Or coupon code MGG, save you some money on your subscription there. All right, folks. Have a great week. We will see you next week. And as I said earlier in the episode, do your best to make sure you don't get caught.