 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 788 from Monday, November 11th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab. We are, in general, the show that takes questions, tips, cool stuff found, mixes them all together into an agenda so that we can learn at least five new things. Those things this week include, well, at least as the agenda looks right now, you never know where it winds up by the time we hit all our tangents, but right now we've got some discussion about back to my Mac replacements, cleaning up your photos libraries, protecting against ransomware, some cool tips about remapping keyboard shortcuts, and some other kind of interesting quick tips and other things that come up along the way like that, too, which is a good thing. Sponsors for this episode include textexpander.com slash podcast, linode.com slash mgg, and barebones.com will talk about what you're going to find at each of those URLs or what you will have already found at each of those URLs because you just went and visited them because that actually helps us. It's our job in terms of our sponsors to just get you to go visit their stuff, whether you buy or not, that's between you and them. But we will talk about why you want to go visit them a little bit later in the show. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Truffle, Connecticut, this is John Efron. So John Efron, I found a quick tip this week, and I'm not sure if it works in Mojave or not. It does. I just tested it. So I can't find this documented anywhere. And that this is that's the epitome of quick tips. But if you go into the finder and are in a list view, so that's view as list from the menu at the top, or I believe for all of us, it's the same. It's the second one from the left on the set of four, right? So go in as a list view, right, John? And then hit command plus where you don't have to hit the shift key. You can hit command equals or command minus. And that will expand or reduce the size of the preview image slash icon that is to the left of the name of your app. I had no idea. I did it accidentally. And I was like, wait, what, how do you undo that? And what's interesting is when I do it, I see it highlight the view menu, but I can find nothing in the view menu that matches this. So go figure. See what I'm talking about there? Command plus, command minus. Did you know about this? No. So there we go. We've got quick tips galore. Quick tips galore. I love it. And did yours highlight the view menu as though you're triggering some menu item there in the in the view menu? Because, yeah, yeah, I know it's it's weird. Just one of those things, man. Huh. And it looks like it's not in the menu of the menus. OK. That's y'all. Yeah, neat. All right. Good. Fun. I like this stuff. Stumble across it. Dumb luck. Thankfully, I figured out it like I my path into this was I don't know how. Maybe I was meant to hit command delete to, you know, to delete something. And I fat fingered it and hit command equals. And that's another. So there's a secondary quick tip. A lot of times if if something is built for you to do command plus and command minus to like increase volume or increase size or something, you don't have to hold down the shift key to get the plus command equals sort of is the is the thing. But anyway, I wanted to pin and command equals and it got bigger. And I was like, oh, crap, how do I make that smaller? And I hunted around in the view menu. No. Oh, wait. No, it is there. I'm seeing it. View options has zoom in and oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, never mind. Never mind. I don't see. Oh, it's in show view options. John, this is it. Kiwi Graham in the chat room at MacKicub.com slash stream has found it. It is an undocumented thing, but you could do this by going to view show view options and you have icon size and it can be small or large. Now, there's no like the fact that these are mapped to those key combinations is, you know, not visually apparent, but that is how that's done. So that's what it is. I like it. I like it. Cool. Listener Paul has another quick tip for us. He says, I have found something cool with Catalina 10.15.1 and my Apple Watch. If you have use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac enabled on the general tab in security and privacy, you will now get an alert on your Apple Watch to provide authentication. This comes in so handy when you need to unlock your preferences or add a website exception in Safari. Just double click the side button on the Apple Watch and bingo, you are authenticated. That's pretty cool. That yeah, Catalina makes the watch more and more involved in your in your Mac life in terms of that, which is super handy, I think. So. Fun, you're still you're I'm still on an apple watch list. You are Apple Watch List and I am as close to Apple Watch List as someone with an Apple Watch can be. I still have my very original arrived on day one Apple Watch. But yeah. Yeah, I did see one time someone. Yeah, I don't see people using Apple Pay and stuff as often as. I would expect. But I did see one time someone presented their Apple Watch to present their loyalty card at the local. Grocery store, which I thought was going to need. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I I certainly have used my Apple Watch to to pay for things. But quite frankly, I always forget about it. And it's also not the most ergonomically, logistically comfortable thing to do. It's way easier to just pull out my phone and tap it on the thing. So so that's what I do is is that. But yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty good, pretty good. All right, Richard has something he has found. Tell us, Richard, what it is you have. He says, I used Google Maps last night for the first time in a very long time. I says, I usually just use Waze with the release of iOS 13 Google's own voice commands in their Maps app will control the iPhone just like Siri. I don't know how they got this to work, but you can use Hey, G Lady in the app and it will start any song from Spotify and Apple music, podcasts, control the volume, et cetera. Try it out. You won't be disappointed. I was amazed because in the past, Apple wouldn't let apps talk to other apps and control system functions in this way. But at this point, it seems to work great. That's pretty cool. I have not tried that. I I've actually been using Apple's Apple's Maps more frequently in the car now than Waze even only because they integrate so nicely into the new car play displays. And also I have found myself, you know, this is hockey season for us and we're traveling with our son in his final year, at least as a high schooler to, you know, various hockey rinks or whatever. And when leaving the rink, you know, you're never quite sure which way to go because sometimes you'll be like the Maps will tell you to go out the way, not the same way you came in and Waze doesn't seem to be able to tap into the compass as well as Apple's Maps does. So when you're leaving a parking lot, like you need to move for a little bit before Waze will know what direction you're oriented. I think it uses motion and the delta between the two to sort of intuit which way you're facing, whereas somehow Apple Maps, at least with car play, seems to be able to get like it just gets it right out of the gate and it's right 100 percent of the time, at least for us. So so we've been using Apple Maps more and it's it's actually been pretty good. I kind of like the the display of it. But but I'll have to try Google Maps. There was something recently where we wound up using Google Maps. I I find it valuable to have all three on your phone. The really nice part about Google Maps is you can be very intentional with it about saving offline maps. So maybe this is another quick tip here about Google Maps because saving those offline maps can be really handy when you're, you know, in the far corners of New England here, where perhaps maybe service isn't quite what you might want it to be. But if you go to the in Google Maps, go up to the hamburger menu in the upper left hand corner of the three lines and go to offline maps. It will download maps of areas that you have recently gotten maps from, which is great. And then you can say custom map and you actually get to draw or sort of scroll around with your fingers inside a box area and then say, yep, this is the custom map I want to have. I know that I'm going to be in this area, et cetera, et cetera. And and then you can just say download and boom, it'll start downloading. And there you go. So saving offline maps in Google Maps is a handy thing to have. So. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I didn't I don't know if this is new. This just came up the other day. But so, you know, I went to an event this week in Manhattan and I put it on my calendar and I also put the address. And the cool thing I think they added this is that I think for a while now it would show it would let you click it would show where the word is on a map. But here now it also has another entry, which I think is new. And it says look around and it shows you a picture of the general area. I don't recall look around being there in the past. And this is in Apple Maps. Well, if you go to calendar entry that has an address in the calendar, got it, got it. Below the entry, you know, it'll show some options and then it'll show you, you know, a little pin and where it is on the map. Like, you know, this is, you know, 125 West, the 10th Street. Yeah. And then. But it also shows a picture of the front of the Metropolitan Pavilion, which I don't think the picture, I don't think the picture was there before. Huh. I don't use Apple's calendar app. I use busy Cal. So I just haven't encountered this because I I haven't I tried, you know, for for lack of a better term. That's interesting. Huh. That's cool. I'll have to try the calendar app for that. It shows previews and look around. Huh. I like this. This is good. This is good. All right. Where are we here? Keith has something to share. So let's go. Hi, Japs. This is Keith in Essex, England. I've just been listening to show 787 and Val described the same problem that I had when he upgraded to Catalina and found himself in the iCloud authentication loop. I think a few people have had this problem. He said he logged out of iCloud, logged in with a different account, logged that one out and then back in with the original account and that fixed it. I resolved this by simply logging out of iCloud and back in again. I didn't need to take that additional step of logging in with a different account. So it may have been the same for him and any other listeners and that additional step wasn't needed. As an extra note, even though I turned on photos through system preferences and iCloud settings, I had to specifically go into the photos preferences afterwards and enable iCloud photos in there as well because otherwise my photos weren't syncing back from the cloud. And this happened on both my machines and my MacBook and my iMac. Thanks for the show each week. Been listening for years. Look forward to it every week and I still love it. I'm learning those five things every show. It's absolutely fantastic. And this is where you cut me off. Is it though? I don't know why you cut me off, but I've always wanted to say that. See you later. I'm glad we gave you the chance to say that, Keith. Yeah, no, the this is where you cut me off thing started a long time ago, perhaps even with the first question, because we would get notes from people and they would just come into the voicemail or whatever, which I think Keith's may have. I can't remember exactly how that came in. It might have been an audio file that he recorded on his phone in the Mac Geekab app, which you can do. It'll just do that automatically for you in addition to lots of other things. But but people would often want to include, you know, personal contact information like an email address or something like that, that they didn't necessarily just want shared with the, you know, the massive of the audience. We all trust each other here, but, you know, there's no reason to have that stuff out there that doesn't need to be there. So that's where the this is where you cut me off thing started. But I like it. It's, you know, that's kind of a fun, you know, it's a nice little meme for us. So yeah, there you go. Thanks for that, Keith. Yeah, I did the same thing you did. I just signed out and signed back in. The nice part about signing into a different account is it doesn't turn off iCloud for you. And I've got a problem that I'm running into that we'll discuss later in the show that might be related or might be completely unrelated to to me having done that. But there you go. We also recently discussed Apple's trade-in program. And listener Joe said, with the numerous trade-in options you've been mentioning, I wanted to cast my vote for Apple's trade-in program. I brought my father-in-law to the local Apple store this past summer to replace his iPhone 6, which had serious battery issues and would not last past midday with minimal use. The Apple employee inspected the phone and quoted the same price I received from Apple's website. I thought $200 was a very good deal for this phone in this shape. I expressed my concern that the battery health of the device was significantly degraded and worried the trade-in amount would change after the device was evaluated by a technician. The Apple employee explained that his evaluation of the device and trade value would not change and we would never see that iPhone again. Additionally, the battery condition would not matter since the battery would be replaced during the refurb process. So if you worry about the trade value of your changing after you ship your iPhone to any company, including Apple, I recommend visiting your local Apple store to get more details. Yeah, I actually totally agree. The Apple of all the trade-in things that I dealt with recently, Apple's was the best price and the best experience in that regard. But they won't just buy it from you. You have to... I don't think... Please correct me if I'm wrong here though. Feedback.com. I don't think Apple will buy it from you outright. I think it's only a trade-in for another phone. And that's why I also wanted to test the others and came up based on all of your recommendations and my experience. Declutter was the winner for that. Right. Feedback.com. It is. I think I heard you say. You're right. It's feedback at mackeekab.com. And you know what you could do, John, if you wanted to remember how to get in touch with us, you could use our first sponsor, TextExpander, to bake in that email address. Feedback at mackeekab.com into a short little snippet so that you didn't forget. Like you use FMGG, right? And then boom, anytime you type that, boom, feedback at mackeekab.com comes right out. Because this is what TextExpander does. It takes things that you type regularly and puts them into little snippets. I mean, that's what it is to increase your productivity so that you don't have to look and make sure, did I type everything right? A, you don't have to spend the time and it doesn't just have to be an email address, though certainly it can be. I have all of my email addresses in TextExpander so that I can put an email address into a form or anywhere really, really quickly without thinking about, did I fat finger the way I type mackebserver.com or something like that? Nope, it's right there. But it can also be big, long paragraphs and paragraphs of text. It can be formatted text or unformatted text, however you like it. Fantastic for things like email replies where you're saying the same thing over and over again. I know a lot of us do support here for folks and we wind up saying the same thing. Take that, put it into TextExpander, then you don't have to go digging through your sent folder in mail to find the snippet that you want, copy it, paste it. Now it's got those weird reply marks on it. No, you got to remove those. No, put it into TextExpander once, get it right and then you can just invoke it either with, like I said, a little shortcut or you can do it from a menu if you rather do it that way and not have to remember shortcuts. TextExpander makes life super, super easy and makes you able to be both efficient and accurate simultaneously. That's huge. And show listeners, because you listen to Mackie Cab, you get 20% off your first year of TextExpander at TextExpander.com slash podcast. That's TextExpander.com slash podcast to get 20% off your first year our thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. Hi, Mr. Braun. Let's go to some cool stuff found that we found this week. I don't know about you, but on my Macs and on my iPhone, I don't use Google as my default search engine. I use DuckDuckGo. I find it most of the time. It gives me the results I need without being creepy about how it uses the previous things I've searched for to inform it and mark it to me and things like that. So I was very excited when I saw that DuckDuckGo has an app for the Mac that gives you a Safari extension. Actually, it gives you two Safari extensions. There's one called Privacy Protection and another called Privacy Dashboard. So you can have it kick in some automatic protections where it blocks certain trackers and things like that automatically. Of course, you can whitelist different websites if you want them to be able to see what you're doing but by default, it blocks them. And then the Privacy Dashboard pops a little thing up in the corner of your web, in the toolbar there of your web browser, rather, and you can see what trackers are there and all that. I've got it running on my main machine and so far it hasn't gotten in my way, which is the key to these types of things. It hasn't broken anything yet. So I share because that's what we do here with cool stuff found. Did you check that out, John? Not yet. It's a cool thing. Do you use DuckDuckGo or are you still on Google? Yeah, I usually default to Google. Yeah, there are times when DuckDuckGo, I search in DuckDuckGo and it's like, oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. Google's going to get me there better. And so then I will just copy and paste my search terms into Google or whatever. And it's fine. I'm not religiously against it. I am just habitually against it. So Google knows everything about me anyway. We just talked about using Google Maps and all of that. So maybe this is just to placate myself and isn't actually performing anything valuable for me. I mean, I use Google for my email and things like that. Oh, you know. But there you go. Kiwi Graham says, Apple trade-in can give you a credit. Is that towards anything at an Apple store? Kiwi Graham circling back to the thing about Joe. That is interesting. Okay. So maybe there is a greater value here. It is a trade-in and it is a credit, but it's not necessarily for a new phone purchased right at that point. So you could put that towards other stuff at the Apple store. Really interesting. Huh. All right. Cool. Cool, cool. And Ari in the chat room is telling us about Brave, the browser that exists. It is a privacy browser. I have not used the Brave browser. Have you, John? No. It's a free and open-source browser based on the Chromium core base. Since the browser blocks ads and website trackers by default, the company is proposed adopting a get paid to serve business model in the future version of their browser. So that's interesting. Interesting. Very privacy-focused browser. Yeah, I haven't tried that one yet. My experience with browsers themselves that are like super privacy-focused is that they didn't really work for me. I mean, to be fair, Safari with the way everything syncs with it, and I can use iCloud tabs and all of that across all my devices, it would probably take a lot to get me to not be using Safari as my main browser. But we will put a link to the Brave browser in the show notes. And thank you for recommending that, Ari. It says, in his opinion, it's Chrome, but it's really fast. So that's actually interesting. I may wind up using that for some things. So, especially, I find it difficult to manage. I have several different Google accounts, you know, John? Lots of them, in fact. And some of them need to be the primary account, primary Google account logged into a given browser for the functionality to work the way I want. So, I have, between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, I have this weird mix of which one is primary there, and adding a fourth browser to the mix just for that purpose would probably be helpful. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there you go. All right. You know, I love me some mesh stuff, John. And I love me what Ubiquiti has done with their Unify lineup, which is, you know, it's definitely professional mesh Wi-Fi, but it's also built to be able to be used by, you know, the prosumers, the people here that you want a good mesh, which you can get with a lot of different options, but you want the ability to tweak and, like, you know, you enjoy that sort of thing. Well, Ubiquiti has finally released their Unify Dream Machine, which bakes a lot of the core functionality of Unify together. Previously, when we've talked about Unify, it's, okay, you need to buy a router, you need to buy a switch, you need to buy a Wi-Fi access point. A lot of times, from other vendors, those three things come packaged into one box. With Unify, it had not been that way. You bought them separately and then you had to buy a fourth device, which was what they call the Cloud Key Controller that let you manage the other three devices. Now, you didn't have to buy the Cloud Key Controller. You could have, you know, run their Cloud Controller software on a Mac or a Raspberry Pi or something, but you needed something in order to manage your network. So it was these four devices. Well, the Dream Machine marries those four devices together. It has, it is a router. You can use it to control your Unify ecosystem. It has a four-port gigabit switch in it, and it has a dual-band 4x4 radio in it. And it's got a really fast processor so that its routing can do intrusion protection up to gigabit speeds. I have not tested that yet, but I have one on the way. So I will test that and let you know. And it's only 299 bucks. So this is kind of an interesting thing to me. This takes the Unify brand and with this one device puts it in people's homes that might not have wanted to go so a la carte. Now, the cool part is it's Unify, right? So you can use all their different form factors of access points and other various hardware to build the system that you want. So if you need some stuff for outdoors and some stuff for indoor or whatever, like you can use all of their existing stuff and stuff that keeps coming out. So this is very interesting to me. I'm reserving any judgment on it, of course, till I test it, but I'm excited. The only router off the shelf router that has really worked for me as a router has been a Synology because it has so many features built into it and it lets me get geeky without using some custom firmware or things like that, which is what we used to do. We used to be really obsessed with that DDWRT firmware because it gave us all of these features. The Synology firmware and their routers gives me that. So right now, and it changes, but by and large, my network default is to use the Synology router in router mode but with Wi-Fi turned off and then Eero in bridge mode as my Wi-Fi. And that has been the rock solid connection stable for me with all the geeky features that I want in a router. So it's truly been the best of both worlds. It's a little bit decadent, but whatever. I'm curious to see how the Dream Machine... I'm curious to see how it performs in general and then I'm also curious, secondarily, to see is it a contender to step in and be that thing for me personally. That's separate from my recommendation as to whether it works for you, but it's all sort of tied together. Yeah, I'm curious to check this out, John. So, you know, warm ash. It's good. I'm glad to see iteration happening here. This feels potentially feels a need. I haven't tested it yet, so I don't want to speak. But, you know, in theory, baking all of these things into one 299 little box, that's a smart thing. Yeah. So it's got plenty of radios. That makes it stand out a bit. It's got two radios, right? Oh, I thought you said it had four. Oh, it's a dual band thing. So it's got 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and both radios are four by four radios. Oh, OK. That's what I heard. Yeah. Yeah. So you're right. It has two very powerful radios is what it is. So, yeah. Yeah. I'm excited. We'll see, you know, proof's always in the pudding, but I've used Unify's stuff before. Like, I've got actually quite a bit of it set up here is, you know, I bounce, you know that I bounce back and forth between all kinds of different mesh stuff. And the Unify stuff has also been rock solid. So, and it's really configurable. Like you can go nuts tweaking how each access point reacts if you want, like, and this was handy for something. I can't remember what, but I can go to a specific access point and say, OK, on this one and only this one, I had some devices. I don't know. I was having a Sonos problem in the past. Maybe it was Sonos. I can't remember. But it was some smart home-ish kind of thing where there were multiple devices, but they all needed to be connected to the same access point, which with mesh you can't do, right? Because it just, you know, that's the point. You get one SSID and it's spread everywhere. But I knew I wanted these things all connected to one. I was like, oh, wait a minute. So I went into the Unify interface and I said, OK, on that access point that's in the master bedroom, create another SSID only on the 2.4 gigahertz band and name it this. And don't create it on any of the other access points and don't enable five gigahertz on it. So it was just this one SSID on one access point. I was like, yeah, no problem. Turn it on and boom, it appears. Everything could connect to it. It solved. Like I said, I forget what my problem was, but it solved it, which was, you know, the point. So it's fun, fun. Enterprise level mesh, truly enterprise level mesh in your home with that Unify stuff. So we'll see. Kiki, but, you know, fun and way more affordable. Like that's way, $299 is way cheaper than it would be if you bought just those four pieces to, you know, that it replaces. So what do we have here? We have a cool stuff found from Martin. He says, I found something interesting called Black Hole for the sound people among us. And what Black Hole is, is it's a replacement for something that was called Soundflower. And what Soundflower did and what Black Hole now does, it's an open source thing, it creates a virtual audio device on your Mac and it's just a pipe from output to input and input to output. So this is a thing a lot of podcasters run into and we've all, we use Soundflower for years and years and years. Now we use an app called Loopback from Rogamiba that actually adds a ton of other features, but it all starts at this core as Rogamiba calls it, cable free audio routing for the Mac. And Black Hole just does this with one audio device. So it adds a device, it's a 16 channel device, and you can point anything on your Mac at it and then, you know, that becomes the input and then you can take output from it and go to something else. And where that's really handy is let's say you're using something like Skype or FaceTime audio. The only thing you can select in terms of the input is an audio device. So what happens if you want to say play theme music for people? How do you get that into an audio device? Because that's just coming out of your speakers and you can't map that as an input device to things like Skype and FaceTime. Well, this is where Black Hole or Loopback or in the past Soundflower came and solved you a problem because it now is this internal audio device. You point your sound into that using something maybe like Audio Hijack. And then you can map that, you just choose that device. You choose the Black Hole device in this case from the list for your microphone and boom. Now you've got what you want in an audio device that you can use for any of those purposes. Because there's so many apps that won't like, you can't tell Skype go captured audio from iTunes, right? But you can use your Mac to say, hey, iTunes play out to this audio device. And then you just use Skype to say, oh yeah, get me the input from that audio device. And really it's just happening inside your Mac. As Rogan Meeba says, cable-free audio routing. So Black Hole gives you one audio device, the thing like Loopback, which is a commercial product, expands greatly on that and it gives you multiple devices if you want and configure them like crazy. So very cool, nice find, Martin. And it's free, which at least for a lot of us would probably be all you need, but it certainly gets you going and you can kind of see how it works. So pretty good, huh, Mr. Braun? Hmm, I'm gonna have to figure out what I need to fix so I can use that. That's right. I think we need to look at your audio setup for the show and give you a little more control over what's happening on your end. Because I think if we put like right now, the noise gate that I have on you is happening so far after, I mean it's happening on this end, right? So things are being modulated and compressed and all of that stuff through whatever VoIP engine we're using and all that stuff. And we, don't get me wrong, I think we have great sound, but I always like to improve it. If we could noise gate you on your end before it ever got to Discord or anything like that, I think some of these like background sounds, what's happening is we're also compressing your sound, dynamically compressing it, which means taking the highs, the loud parts and bringing them down so that when, if you fade away from your mic just like I did here, it doesn't get that much quieter, right? Because audio dynamic compression makes sure that those, those loud things like you're hearing now for me are softer so that the soft things don't seem that much softer, right? And I'll stop fading away from my mic. Sorry about that, folks. I know that's a pain in the neck when you're driving to hear things like that. But that's why we use compression to sort of mitigate some of that. But we're compressing everything you send. And so it's hard for a noise gate to work properly because it's like, well, where's the, you know, where's the soft stuff? It's already been like, you know, compressed via Discord and all that stuff. So I think if we set something up on your end where you've got a little, where we shift some of the control from here to there, I think, I think we can, we can further improve on the sound. So I have some ideas about this. So and, and something like, you know, like Black Hole or whatever, might very much be a part of that. So fun geeky stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, I just, uh, just did a search here for, and I found an article. Hmm. I don't know if I haven't heard of any of these five best noise canceling apps for Mac. Well, we would, we, uh, yeah. Well, we don't necessarily want noise canceling. That's it. That would be a different thing. We want, we want like a noise gate or really what they call an expander, which is sort of a soft noise gate so that it's not just a hard cut off at whatever level you set. We just, we want, we don't want it canceling anything. We just want it not letting stuff in, right? Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, here's an article. So, um, oh, it says use sound flower. Right. Yeah. I'll do some more surfing. Yeah. Well, sound flower, you know, right. Take any time. This is probably what you just highlighted here is the, the takeaway for everybody listening to this segment that's gone on for six minutes, probably four minutes longer than it should have. If you're searching and somebody says, you find an article that says use sound flower, go grab black hole. That's the current Catalina compatible Mojave compatible. Sound flower was deprecated a long time ago. The folks at Rogue Amoeba actually were there, were it's stewards for a while. And, and now are, you know, they kept kind of let it fade away, which is fine. So black hole is your sound flower replacement. That's, that's really, I'm just going to put that sound flower replacement. So now it's right there in the show notes. Speaking of audio and moving us along, but thank you, Martin. That was good. Listener Todd says, I thought you might enjoy learning about the mix pre three two, which is a field audio recorder. It is, it has what's cool about it. Well, there's a couple of cool things about it is it's a three, it has three XLR inputs on it. So you can plug three microphones into this thing. And it's a small little box, probably not. It's a little fatter than your iPhone, but it looks to be about the same size as an iPhone. So it's, it's pretty small. Three separate levels for each of the mics, of course. And then you have stereo audio in as well on top of that. So it's truly a five track audio field recording device. And it will do 32 bit float on the on the on the sound, which means that you have a far, far lower chance, perhaps almost impossible chance of getting digital distortion because of peaks. You can get distortion in your microphone. If you overdrive a microphone, like there's there's a point at which any microphone will just distort. That's fine. But the digital distortion that happens when you peak above zero DB, it does not would not happen nearly as frequently again, if at all using 32 bit. So that's a very interesting thing to to have on the market. It's not cheap. It's 650 bucks or something, but but you know, nice little thing and it's got a SD card in it so that you can record right on it and all of that good stuff. But it can also be an audio device, a USB audio device for your Mac. It's got both USB A and USB C ports on it. So thank you for sharing that, Todd. Very, you know, very cool stuff. Yeah. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? All right. Our second sponsor for today is Linode, another geeky company or a company that took something geeky and opened it up for anyone. And that is server hosting because chances are, you are going to need some kind of hosting at some point in your professional or even personal life. And you may want to host like locally in your house, but not for something mission critical. That you want to host in the cloud and Linode makes hosting in the cloud super easy and affordable. The way they do this is everything in their cloud infrastructure runs on SSDs. And we all know here from our own experience that changing from rotating drives to SSDs makes all the difference in the world in terms of responsiveness and speed even on hardware that may not have say the fastest CPU or the most RAM or anything like that. The SSD really is the first bottleneck and the folks at Linode know this too because they're smart. So even their $5 a month server, which they call a Nanode is running on these SSDs. So even though it's only five bucks a month so it's limited in RAM and it's got a constrained CPU, but for what I would say most of us do, it's all you need. It's certainly the place to get started and then you can expand up from there. If you find you need more CPU or more RAM for something, but I've set up like a WordPress site there, fine, set up a VPN server there, fine, which is great because it's not on the sort of like published lists of IP addresses that VPNs are on. So you can access it from all those places that filter all the known VPNs, which is great. And you can set all this stuff up without ever touching the command line. Of course, you can touch the command line if you want. They're totally fine with that. But you can do it all in their cloud manager interface, which means you just go to their website and say, okay, I want to set up a WordPress site. It will ask you a few questions. You know, what do you want your username to be, things like that. And then boom, within like a few minutes between starting the process and your website being ready. It's just, it happens that quickly. And you never had to see the terminal if you didn't want to. So you got to check this out. Go to linode.com slash mgg. And as an added bonus, if you use promo code MGG2019, you get a $20 credit on your account right out of the gate, no restrictions. So remember I said their nanode is five bucks a month, five bucks, $20, four months, right? You can get four months for free of a nanode just by going to linode.com slash MGG promo code MGG2019. Please go check it out. You will appreciate it. We will appreciate it as well. All right, John, not you. Well, but yes you, but also listener John has a question. And I think host John F. Braun, you have the answer. Is that right? I did find the answer. Basically the question, well, there was a lot of background, but questions about how to set up a 32 bit VM. But it sounds like John solved that. But he had one small question. How do you disable that annoying warning app is not optimized, blah, blah, blah, that happens in Mojave? I was like, huh, that's a good question. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a way to do it in the GUI. It'd be nice if you could say stop it. But I found a little article called, and the title is how to suppress alert this app not optimized for your Mac. And it's basically a defaults write command. I'm not going to read it out. Sure. But yeah, we could probably just paste it directly in the notes there or link to the article. Yeah, defaults is interesting. What it's really doing is it's just writing a value to a P list file. But where do you get these values? I guess is my head scratcher. You know, I mean, where's a list of all the defaults? Oh, I know what you're saying. I don't know that I have an answer for that. Do you have an answer for that? Yeah, I wonder if the developer side has that. Well, I mean, I think it would be different for every P list. Right. I mean, like, I don't know that I don't know that anyone. I don't know that there is a comprehensive list. That's interesting. Yeah, we'll have to noodle on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, we'll look on the I mean, they may have it on the developer. There may be a developer document. I mean, this value, the article actually references a guide that I guess Apple put out and, you know, they obviously know what the value is. Sure. Well, yeah, they know what this value is. I wonder, though, if Apple even has a comprehensive list, my guess is they probably don't. I mean, they could probably make one, but I don't know that they have one. But maybe. I mean, who knows? But one would think they would. Yep. All right. So. Yeah. Cool. That's not cool. All right. So listener John, a different listener, John has a question about ransomware. He says, I have heard the best way to protect yourself from ransomware is to back up your data. I'm using Time Machine and a one gig external hard drive to back up my MacBook Air. Will this provide adequate protection? So ransomware is an interesting thing. But by ransomware, I would define that as some piece of software that unintentionally, presumably runs on your device that encrypts your data and then presents you with a ransom note saying, hey, pay us X amount of dollars or X amount of Bitcoin usually because it's way less trackable. And we will give you the password that we used to encrypt your data so that you can decrypt your data. And I've helped some Mackie Keb listeners with this. Several of you have written in over the years saying, crap, I got caught. You know, my drive, I need my data. My backup is also encrypted. So any any drives you have online, and if your Time Machine drive is online, that too could get encrypted. So Time Machine alone is often not the solution here. But because I've seen that happen. And a few of you have needed it. And so we've actually helped you procure the Bitcoin. We've got some Bitcoin in various wallets here. So I think actually we've just sold it to people and made that life easy. Because procuring Bitcoin is kind of a pain in the neck still. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's not the easiest thing. But we've seen it enough that we don't want this to happen to anybody. An offline backup is perhaps the best way to prevent against this. Against this. And offline, by that I mean something that's not directly connected or always mounted on your Mac. So your network drives locally would be mounted on your Mac. And therefore, no, that wouldn't necessarily be it. But some kind of thing like a backblaze or one of those could be the right answer here. Because they do have copies of your files. But they are not, your backblaze volume, if it doesn't really exist as a volume, it's not mounted on your Mac. So something that is going to encrypt everything it sees would not see that. Backblaze's client just reads your files and sends them to the cloud one by one. So in that sense, it's sort of a pull, not a push, even though it is your Mac taking them and pushing them. It's just a different way of looking at it. I know that Acronis Total Protection, I think is what they call it, ACRO and IS, I'll put a link in the show notes. I know that they have anti ransomware tech built into their Total Protection suite of stuff. And it's constantly doing checksums on your data. And they say that that helps them and they've tried it. Like they've thrown ransomware at test machines and things like that. And it catches it in the process with a lot of them. So that's another way to protect against it. But really that safety net is the offline backup, which could be a time machine volume that you backup to and then remove. But of course, you've got to make sure you know that there's no ransomware running at the time that you plug it in because it's not going to tell you it's there until it's finished encrypting all your stuff. So that's the trick. But so I would say an online backup like a backblaze or ARQ, any of those sorts of things would really be the best solution there. What do you think, Mr. Braun? Yeah, one of my physicians asked me a related question this week. He was like, yes, I'm surfing. And all of a sudden a window comes up saying, yep, you got a virus. You got to download this to fix the problem. It's like, is that legit? And I'm like, what do you think? Yeah, right, right. Then he's like, how does this happen? And I'm like, well, you know, ad networks and this and that. Yeah. And yeah, he couldn't get rid of the get rid of the window. It wouldn't dismiss. So I'm like, yeah, sounds like a scam. Exactly. Yeah. Don't install stuff. They try to scare you into. Yeah, right. Doing that. Right. I don't know. I haven't gotten one of those for a while. For a while, I was getting things that say, you know, you got a virus call this toll free number and I'd call it, you know, just to goof with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because what they do typically is they try to get remote control of your machine and then they may, yeah. Right. Tell you to install some ransomware. That is usually the path there for those types of scams. And yeah, usually whatever the ransomware comes in in the type of, you know, it's a Trojan horse, right? It seems like a thing you want to install. So you willingly agree to install it and then it turns out, aha, no, I didn't want to do that. And that's really where it comes. And none of us are immune to it. Those of us that have, you know, I mean, a lot of, if you're listening to this show, you're probably just naturally more immune than most people because you hear us talk about these types of things. You're like, wait, that doesn't sound like a normal thing. I've never heard those guys talk about this. Okay, well, that, you know, it sends up the red flags, but none of us are immune to this. You have to assume that someone is going to create a piece of ransomware that will fool you. And so you need to be protected in that sense and make sure that your data is stored somewhere that is not susceptible to a mistake that you make. Because that's really what it comes down to. It's, you know, as we call it, the error between the chair and the keyboard. None of us are perfect. We all can be fooled, right? We're, in fact, we're all fooled every day. So just bear that in mind and I think you'll be all right. But we've got some links to that stuff in the show notes. And as Brian Monroe in the chat room says, you know, versioning is the key. Again, as long as your entire backup volume isn't susceptible to the same ransomware attack that your main volume is susceptible to, yes, having versions of those files. So when your backup software, you know, even your online backup software copies the encrypted version of, you know, your latest and greatest presentation that you absolutely can't lose, you know, that's up there. As long as some, it has an older version of it that is not the encrypted version. That's what, that's great. Just roll back to those and you're good to go. So, yeah, yeah. So what are you saying that we're in the matrix? You said we're constantly being fooled. We are constantly being fooled. Oh yeah. No, no, I mean, the world fools us, right? I mean, it's, it's, you know, marketing messages, trick us into thinking we're wanting things that we would not have otherwise decided we want. We're constantly being fooled. Oh yeah, like subliminal messages. Yeah, well, I mean, not even subliminal. I mean, look at the, you know, the sponsors in this show. I mean, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just how the world works. We are all constantly being manipulated, right? And again, it's just sort of how it works. When I ask you, you know, like for today's show, we wanted, we needed to record 30 minutes early. So I imposed my will upon you. I mean, I did it politely. I asked, hey, can you do this? And you were like, sure. But, you know, would you have chosen to do this 30 minutes early if I hadn't asked? No, you know, wouldn't have dawned on you. So in that, and this wasn't a malicious manipulation, right? But it was like, we all have our, our, our agendas. We all need to get through the day. And so we naturally have to, you know, benevolently manipulate others to, to get through it. I mean, it's just how the world works. So, so we're all always, I assume that, you know, that of all the things that I know that I've been asked or were, or encouraged to do, I know that there are probably, you know, for every one of those, there's probably 10 others that I'm completely unaware of. And I try to be pretty aware, but it's just how, how the world works. I got pretty deep there. I like, I like it. We didn't even get into linear time. So then, and how that's just a foolish thing that, that really only exists because of our feeble human brains can't really perceive time the right way. That's just, you know, how it goes. But that's okay. We're all feeble. Yeah. It's like, what was there before the universe was created? It was all here. It's all here. Or is it always here? It's all here. I really, yeah, yeah. We just, we just can't perceive time in the way that time actually exists. So we call it linear. It's fine. It's fine. This is what you signed up for, folks. I know. All right. Let's, let's answer Ewan's question. Shall we? Ewan writes, he says, some friends of ours have asked me to look at their old computer to see if I could work out why it doesn't print anymore. It worked fine. And now it doesn't. I was expecting I was going to go back in time as they haven't updated their Macs since they got it. They're still running 10.6. Surprisingly, he says the machine works really well, except for this one thing where it, for whatever reason, no longer prints. And he says, I agree with them that for what they need, spending money on a new Mac doesn't really make sense just to use one printer. So he says in the printer settings, the interesting thing is you can see it disconnects when you unplug the USB cable and reconnects after you plug it back in. So the computer is seeing the printer. He says, when you print, it looks like it starts the queue for printing, but then the printing window closes slash disappears without actually printing anything. It doesn't look like it's crashing, but maybe there's some crash happening in the background. The printer works fine. When I plug it into my 2015 MacBook Pro, it also works fine wireless to that device. It says the printer is a HP DeskJet 2632. And it worked using the HP DeskJet 2000 series driver on my printer list. He says, I tried putting the printer software I used onto their computer, but it said it needed a newer version of macOS in order to install. Fine. So he says, should I upgrade them to 10.7, which is the minimum required by the printing software that I found? Or is there a better version or a better solution here? Okay. So it might even be simpler than that, maybe. It's been a while since we've talked about this, but if you go into sometimes the some part of the printing subsystem gets corrupted. And we haven't seen this in a while, but this machine is using a version of the OS that, you know, we haven't used in a while. The first thing I would try is to remove the printer entirely, like go into system preferences. I'm pretty sure it's called system preferences back then. Printers and maybe it's called printers and scanners, but you know where to find it. Highlight the printer, hit the minus sign, quit system preferences, relaunch it, hit the plus sign, and re-add the printer from scratch. Simply deleting the print queue might be the answer here. That holds a lot of things and it sounds like the document is getting to the queue and then for whatever reason, not actually moving from the queue to the driver that's going to send it to the printer. So delete the printer and re-add it. That might do it. If it doesn't, in that same window, system preferences, printers or printers and scanners, you'll see your printer or printers listed and then there'll be some white space in that window. In that white space, right click and you will see an option that pops up that says reset printing system dot, dot, dot. The dot, dot, dot as Mr. Braun always points out and I love this, means that it's not going to do anything yet. There's more that you will see before any action is taken. And sure enough, at least on my Mojave machine here, it says, are you sure you want to reset the printing system? This will delete all of your existing printers, scanners and faxes and all their pending jobs and then you can reset or cancel. I have seen this solve that exact problem many, many times. So I'm hoping that this is it. Now, when you do that, it will, as promised, hopefully, delete your printer. So you will need to re-add it. But Mac OS probably that version, even that version of Mac OS, probably has the driver that's necessary to see that printer and it should just work. So that's my thought. What do you think, John? Another thing you may want to do is to see if there's a newer driver. Could be that the driver is dated or messed up. That's sort of the problem is the driver is dated and the new version of the driver doesn't... The currently available version of the driver that he can get from HP anyway doesn't work with that version of Mac OS, unfortunately. But yeah, you could try digging around HP's site to see if they've got something old, but I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I haven't gotten one of those messages in years. But every now and then, I'll see it. I used to see it come up. It's like, oh yeah, there's a new version of a printer software for your printer. You want it? Yeah, I'm trying to think of where I... I did see that recently. I think it was with my Catalina machine after I updated to maybe 10.15.1 on my laptop. It was like, do you want to install the Epson stuff? Yeah, okay. But it's only because we have an Epson printer on the network here at the house. So I don't... I think you're only prompted to put those things in if you're used... You know, if you've got something that needs it. So, oh, Kiwi Graham in the chat room also has an option. There is a project called Gutenprint that has open source printer drivers for all sorts of printers and operating systems. So if you can't find a printer driver for your printer, visit Gutenprint and I will actually link people to the Mac specific Gutenprint website here. But yeah, that's a great, great idea. Good thinking, Kiwi Graham. I like it. Good, good, good, good. All right, John, let's go to listener Michael here and see what Michael has to say about photos. He says, at severe points in time, I must have done an import of my old iPhoto library into iPhoto's or photos. And now I have three differently sized photos libraries, all varying in size. In addition, I have two iPhoto libraries, also varying in size, that are named something like iPhotoLibrary.migratediPhotoLibrary. How can I be sure the latest, most likely the largest photos library has everything the others have, plus anything added since, so that I can delete the others? Well, so let's talk about these. The iPhoto library, anything ending in .migratediPhotoLibrary is changed. That name is changed when it is migrated from photos, from iPhoto to photos. Now you need to make the presumption or choose not to make the presumption that one of your photos libraries was the one that migrated from that. And if you can be relatively certain of that, then you can ignore the iPhoto libraries in this process. If not, then you will need to migrate those, again, from iPhoto to photos. And you can open them up and do that, or Apple has a tool that you can get one linked to. Although I don't know that that tool will run in Catalina. I think it was a 32-bit tool. In terms of having multiple photos libraries, really the tool that I would recommend is called Power Photos from Fat Cat Software. They have been a sponsor of the show. At times they are not currently a sponsor, but man, this is the tool that takes over where photos and they had a tool prior called iPhoto Library Manager that took over where iPhoto ended and Power Photos takes over where photos ends. I have used this, I've used it for myself and I've used it for countless clients, friends, neighbors to do exactly what you're talking about here. It used to make sense to have multiple photos libraries where you had some over here with the archive and some here and that. And then of course there's just the ones that happen perhaps unintentionally over time. Well, you kind of have things spread around. Power Photos now, especially with iCloud Photo Library where you might want everything all in one. Power Photos totally takes care of that and merges them together. You can merge into a new library so that you're not messing with any of your existing ones or you can merge into one of the existing ones. It will do a duplicate search that I'm sure it's not perfect. I have yet to find an imperfection in its detection and I have tirelessly gone through because it'll show you, it'll be like, all right, here's the dupes that we think we found. Go for it. I haven't found anything where I disagreed with it. It's really good but it is worth going through and at least doing some spot checking, that sort of thing just to make sure you don't get caught. But Power Photos is what you want. It's well worth whatever it is. I think it's $39 or something like that. And you get iPhoto Library Manager for that same price. So there you go. And I'm going to check here. I think there was a Mac GeekGab coupon. I'm going to try it here. MGG being the coupon. Yeah. So it's $29.95 for Power Photos. If you use the coupon MGG, you save $5.99. So it's $23.96 and that's from when they used to be a sponsor. So there you go. Smart. So you can save some money. By the way, we track all of this stuff for current and old sponsors at macgeekgab.com slash sponsors. So go check that out because like there's some stuff that you know that works even though they're not actively paying us to talk about it on the show or whatever. So yeah, make sure you check that out macgeekgab.com slash sponsors. And I'll put a link in the show notes to it too. So there you go. Yeah. Good Mr. Braun. Yep. That's what I do. Okay. Cool. I'm curious what you would do in my predicament. I have a problem Mr. Braun and it's that my photos won't sync to one of my Macs. And it is, I alluded to this earlier in the episode, it is the Mac where I had to sign it out of and then back into iCloud in order to get it to be happy again. My photos in the Photos app are frozen basically as of that day. And it will say that it's syncing and downloading from iCloud and it gets stuck. And I've dug into this in a couple of different ways. All my other devices sync fine. If I look on iCloud.com on the web, I can see all of my current photos. So I know that iCloud is on the web is happy enough anyway to get all the stuff back and forth. I've dug deep. A lot of people have suggested that there's some like either old photo file or an old video file that might be incompatible in some way and just causing it to stop. So I looked, I did my favorite little, one of my favorite little tricks. I opened up activity monitor and I looked at cloud photos D. There's a lot of different photo and media indexing processes that run as part of this whole iCloud photos syncing thing. But I looked in cloud photos D and if you double click on something in activity monitor, John, as you know, you get up that information like detail pane. And the third tab on that is files and ports or something like that. And so I went into that and I did find it hanging on on a dot three GP file. And three GP is an old, old video file format that was used on, you know, probably like my my razor flip phone or something like that. And I found a video file that of a video I took of Paul McCartney playing live and let die. Now, you know, in a live concert setting. Now the audio when QuickTime plays this file does not sound like Paul McCartney playing live and let die. It sounds like you know, because it was over driving the microphone on the on the little razor. But I remembered where I was sitting at that show and I remembered I wanted to take a video of that for my dad who at the last minute couldn't make the show because he had a work thing. So I deleted that file from my from my drive. I also deleted it. I created a smart album in in photos that found all three GP files and removed those. I mean, I copied them out first. So I have these terrible videos saved somewhere. I also let's see, I created there is a I created a smart another smart album that that filters by files that are unable to be uploaded to iCloud. I'm not getting the terminology right, but that you can you can actually filter that. And I thought, OK, well, if there's something that won't upload that we should get rid of that. So I did the same thing. There were like 800 photos that it was saying it couldn't upload. Great, no problem. So I copied those off. You know, I exported the originals to a folder locally so that I wouldn't lose them. And I deleted those and no dice. So I'm not sure what to do that. What's interesting is that three GP file keeps coming back even though I've deleted it from the cache. So my guess is that it lives in iCloud and is, you know, coming back down from iCloud and then photos won't re-import it. Maybe the problem is in iCloud.com on the web. I don't see a way to search for photos, which I felt was a little weird. I looked briefly late last night, but I didn't spend a lot of time, but I didn't see a search functionality on the web. I suppose I could search on one of my other Macs and perhaps manage it there. So that's sort of where I am with this, but it is frustrating to be now, you know, whatever, two weeks old on my Mac. And of course, the Mac that this is happening to is the one Mac where I have it set download everything to this Mac. So this is the one that keeps my own local copy of all my photos. So what do you think, Mr. Braun? Well, I'm sure you checked this already. I was just checking it on my machine here, but photos, preferences, iCloud. Right. And there's three check boxes that I'm sure you check to make sure that they're all activated. They are. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the problem. So there's a couple of things I could do. I could launch photos with command and option held down, which would let me rebuild that local photos library. Yeah, that's the repair option, right? Correct. So I might try that. In fact, maybe I'll try that right after I've finished recording here and see if that'll run and do anything. As Brian Monroe in the chat room suggests, he says, why not delete your local photos library and let it redownload everything? Well, I wouldn't even have to delete it. I could just create a new one and have it slurp everything down, but that that's actually a great suggestion. I have enough room on the drive to have a second copy of it. So maybe that's the answer right there. That might in fact be the simplest solution of them all. Because it starts the new process right away without wasting time trying to fix it before it slurps them all down again. So yeah, yeah. So those are two things. I know there was a third and I'm flaking out on it. So I don't know, man, but it's crazy. It's just frustrating, you know, just one of those things. Really, I share this stuff, A, because if any of you, you know, have an answer, please tell me and maybe Brian's is the right one. But B, you know, we run into these problems too. And John, you have a problem that I would love to have you detail after I talk about BB at it here, which is our third sponsor for this episode. Man, you know, BB at it is is one of my most used apps. It is it's something that's always running on all of my Macs. I use it for so many different things. I'm using it to manipulate the show notes and craft them in the right format so that they can be baked in as metadata into the, you know, mp3 or AC file that you download from us, that it works in your podcast apps. I use it to compare files all the time. I use it to count words and files. I use it to make sure that things are truly raw text because anything you paste into there is, I mean, BB at it only works in raw text. So anything that's in there is raw text. If you copy it out, it's raw text. But now in BB at it 13, Dave added something that I have needed in my life. And that is their regular expression or as some people call it grep pattern functionality. Really, they've totally expanded it in a couple of ways. First, they have something called the grep cheat sheet, which shows you in very, very simple terms, but also with great examples, how to type these regular expressions. It's this arcane invocation of the way you represent text to search through files or folders or whatever. And it can be massively helpful if only you understood how to use it and BB at it. Now, like this, when we were talking to them about BB at it 13, they showed us this functionality. I said, you know, you could spin this off into a separate app. Like this is its own thing and Rich Siegel said, well, yeah, or you could look at it as you can buy this great grep tool and then also get an awesome text editor with it for free. And so, sure, I like that too. Or you can buy this great text editor and get this awesome grep slash regular expression tool for free. But what they also have in that vein is the new pattern playground window, which provides an on the fly live interactive interface for experimenting with these grep patterns. Part of the problem with it is, you know, you type this pattern and you're like, well, did it work? Like, I don't know because I don't understand. I can't parse this stuff. How's the computer parsing it? It will show you how the computer is parsing and matching your regular expressions against other files that, you know, you have there. So you can see it live in real time. And when you make a change, it changes things. And of course, the grep cheat sheet is right there. Go check it out. Be be at it. It's one of my favorite apps. It's one of the most useful apps I have. I can't use a Mac without it. Go check it out at barebones.com. And our thanks to barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, Mr. Braun, tell me what you got. What's going on? I don't know what I got. And that's my problem. That's the problem, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to diagnose this. This time machine takes forever on my MacBook Pro. Okay. And this is since Catalina. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So it may or may not be related to Catalina to be fair. Just, you know, because that's how that stuff goes. But yeah, it was, you know, I tried to migrate my old time machine backup file, which you can do because I had a backup of it. But sure. At some point, I realized I thought, no, let's start start fresh. So I started fresh and I made a new one. But it starts up, it shows, you know, this much of this much data. And then it gets to a certain point, like, and then it just stops. Okay. The like, you know, like 10 megabytes out of one gigabyte. Sure. And it just sits there for hours sometimes. Other times it just marches right along. At first I thought maybe it was something with the network because my old connection was AFP. So I'm like, oh, maybe maybe it's an AFP thing in Catalina. Because I'm getting on my MacBook also every now and then when I'm connected to my Drobo with AFP, it'll say server disconnect. And I'm like, what? What do you mean? So I'm like, maybe there's some bug in the AFP portion. So I'm like, let's change it over to SMB for the network protocol. Sure. Seem to fix it. And you know, I disabled AFP on the Synology, which is where I send it. Right. That didn't seem to work. Then force it to use SMB. I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Wasn't it? It's not the network connection. At least I don't think it is. Because, you know, everything else, you know, email and surfing and all that works. Sure. Then I'm like, let me run this first thing. See if there's any corruption. And uh-oh. Error. Cross check. Mismatch between extent entry reference count two and calculated FS root entry reference count one for extent and a big long hex number. I'm like, hmm, that's not good. So wait, this is discutility on your, oh, this is on your Mac because your time machine volume is across the network. So this is your local drive. Okay. I'm just trying to get the picture here. Right. So I'm like, maybe there's, you know, some corruption. And based on this message, it sounds like there is some corruption on the drive. So maybe that's what it's, what's wrong is that it's struggling or it's getting confused because there's two conflicting entries of, you know, how big something is. Sure. What I think that message is saying. So I don't know. I think what I may have to do is, um, I, this drive is still a migrated APFS. I have not freshly formatted as APFS. So maybe that's it. Well, we saw problems with that, you know, starting, what about a year ago? Right. When, when we had gotten to a point where time machine, where APFS had been on Macs for about a year, right? So yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I thought we had gotten past that, but you know, never a guarantee. So yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I think what I'm going to do is restore from carbon copy cloner. Okay. Okay. Restore from a, restore from a backup and see if that helps. So yeah, make, make a clone. So I'm going to reform. Yeah. So I'm going to clone, reformat the drive in my machine and then do a restore. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm assuming it's been written correctly to the clone or maybe not. I don't know. Well, you can boot from the clone to test that. You can and should boot from the clone to test that. Oh, yeah. Well, if you do that, they actually, it actually comes up and says, Hey, I noticed that you're booting a clone. Do you want to, do you want to restore? Right. Right. For the last, the last time I booted from a clone, the carbon copy cloner was smart enough to, to figure out that that's what I'm doing. So that's right. Or what you may want to do. But yeah, it's an offer. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's the right answer. But in the interest of, you know, learning for what we do here, Kiwi Graham in the chat room, I think it was him, but it was someone certainly smart in the chat room suggested anytime I see time machine problems, I go to eclectic light. That's Howard Oakley's site. Howard is, you know, one of the file system geniuses that really one of the macOS geniuses under the hood, he knows, he just, he's learned so much. He's the one that makes what's the, the consolation, the log tool and those sorts of things. But he has a piece of software called the time machine mechanic or version two now is T2M2. And it will give you real insights into what's going on with time machine. So I've put a link to that in the show notes for you, John. Okay. Yes. And I use that actually in it. Oh, you did. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. But it'll go through. Yeah. So it goes through the logs and I guess tells you if, you know, time machine has any problem and it said no errors reported. Okay. Okay. So it's like, maybe you should reboot your machine. Yeah. But yeah, if there were errors, this tool would probably bring them to light. So yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, it would eclectically bring them to light. Sorry. I couldn't resist. All right. Well, that's, that's cool. We, yeah, you know, we geeks have problems too. It's just the other thing is what, so, you know, the report of Sarah came from while I actually ran first aid on the disc. Yeah. But yeah, it didn't offer to fix the problem. Yeah. Which is kind of disappointing. It's like, well, you know, there's a problem. Can't you do something about it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it knows that there's a discrepancy. It's like, well, can you underscrap? Can you underscrap and see the disc for me, please? Well, so this is the problem, right? I mean, APFS and, and I, you know, I don't really intend to give Apple any, any guff about this. They, they have brought a file system from, you know, the, the, the, the, the twinkle in a programmer's eye to full, you know, production rollout on millions and millions of machines with great success in a very, very short amount of time. Like this file system is so new that if, if we look in the past, nothing has been rolled out at this scale successfully in, in the amount of time that, that APFS has existed. But one of the pieces of collateral damage there is that it really only has been out for a short period of time compared to the decades of HFS slash HFS plus prior. And that means that all of the tools to fix things don't know, like the programmers that write those tools, haven't seen enough of all the things that need to be fixed to write the, you know, to figure out what the fix would be, and then write the code to reliably fix it without, you know, routinely destroying all your data. So disc first aid, like it's great that it can identify these problems, but it doesn't surprise me in the least that disc first aid, and really even the third party tools just aren't there yet. We just haven't had enough time in the wild to get there. So yeah, it's kind of a bummer, but. And Kiwi Graham in our chat room, I'm glad you asked this question because I have the answer right in front of me. And the question is, is this warrior APFS aware yet? And the answer is no. Really? Well, I went to their webpage and they say, oh, yeah, APFS this are recognized by this were 5.2, but are not able to be rebuilt. There you go. That that's really, really. Okay. Fair enough. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Because that that that was the first thing that occurred to me is, you know, what, you know, what out there. And yeah, I think also. And what is it? Yeah, drive genius also yells at you saying that, yeah, I'm not quite APFS aware yet. You've probably gotten that message coming up too. Yeah, it's been a while since I've tried that. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if anybody has a good repair tool. No, that's what I'm saying. It's it we don't have enough data to have created a good repair tool yet. I think that's the issue is just having, you know, we got to you got to experience the problems in order to get there. Yeah, just reformatting being the answer. Yeah, but that was the answer. I mean, I did that. In fact, the machine that's sitting in front of me was, was the recipient of that treatment. I had I had done a clean install recently enough that I didn't want. I didn't feel that that was warranted. But I did know that I needed a non migrated APFS drive. And so I did exactly what you're talking about. And it took, you know, an hour, maybe two. I mean, as long as you're cloning off to an SSD, it's going to go fast. And then, you know, then just format and bring it on back. And everything was hunky dory. It really was was an easy, easy thing. Obviously make, you know, several backups, you know that, you know, because you don't want to get caught. But otherwise, it's good to go. All right. Well, we don't want to get caught doing a show that's too, too long. So it's time to bring in the band, my friend. The show that started out in our eyes as a 45 minute show 15 years ago is now a 90 minute show. So it's like double the content every week. So it's like we're doing two shows. We're just doing them at once. Actually, you know, I'm going to throw that question out there. Would you, knowing that we're going to do 90 minutes of content every week, would you prefer it to be in one episode? Or would you prefer it to be in two? Because to John and to you and me, John, that doesn't, that wouldn't make any difference. We'd record one stop, maybe go get more water and then record the second one. So it would take us pretty much the same amount of time that we get together. We could do it all at the same time. And would you like an episode twice a week or just one big long one once a week? You let us know. We already told you in the show several times, but we'll say it again. We'll break the rules. It'll be like it was a separate episode. Feedback at mackeykev.com. We'd love to hear from you. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's what we got. Thanks to everybody. This was a good one. Lots of great interaction, lots of great questions. I learned a ton this week, as always. But I feel like I learned more than usual, which is fantastic. I like that. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, linno.com.mgg, barebones.com, textexpander.com, slash podcast. Of course, our sponsors in the podcast marketplace, including otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com, ero.com, slash mgg, ancestry.com, slash mgg. And there's one other that I'm missing. So you'll just have to listen next week to find out. That's how we do it. Thanks for recording early today, Mr. Braun, for me. John, I know we've said it many times in the episode, but from this episode, is there any advice that you've sort of gleaned that sort of wraps it all up and puts a button on it? A button? I'm going to put a bow on it. I'm going to put a bow on. There's three words. Don't get caught.