 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 710 for Monday, May 21st, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show that takes your questions. We take your tips. We take your cool stuff found. And we mix them all together. It's really more of a like this morning, we're recording this in the morning. So we're not having salad. It's like a frittata of all sorts of tasty ingredients that are meant to inform, delight and entertain all at once. Sponsors for this episode include Euro mesh routers, where coupon code MGGs saves you on the overnight shipping fees here in the US and Canada. We'll talk more about more about them later in the show, of course the show being the show with the goal of consuming that frittata and learning at least five new things here in 2018. And here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Truffle, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How you doing, Mr. F. Braun today? I'm doing okay. Good. Good. Good stuff. Now my house is falling apart. But aren't they aren't they all? I mean, that's like our job as homeowners is to stay, hopefully stay one step ahead of or catch up to nature, who is constantly trying to return our homes back to the earth in every way possible with bugs and weather and all of those things and sunlight, you know. Right? Yeah. That's just how it works. It's just disconcerting to find, even after all these years, there's still some design surprises or poorly work that was poorly done or not thought out. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's how it goes though. That's sort of the fun, right? It's like, it's like you get to go on a treasure hunt every time there's a there's a problem with your home. So I, you know, while we're not on the subject of Mac stuff, I will say this, I had, I won't go through all the details, but I had an issue with my car where three of the four tail lights basically all died within the same period of time. It's because they're LEDs and it was a crappy step down converter in there. And so I replaced it. Somebody online had figured out how to do this with a six dollar thing. So it cost me $24 and about an hour and a half of my son and I did it. But the, which is great. It was fun. And now it's fixed. But the reason I bring this up is during that repair, we use two things for an electronics repair that I had never used before. And I know this is one of them is going to sound really stupid. But one was a hot glue gun. We had to fix this new step down converter into place. And so just having a hot glue gun in the house, which we've had for kids crafts for, you know, a decade was really super handy because it really did exactly what we needed and it allowed us to kind of mount it where we wanted to and still leave airflow where we wanted to and all that stuff. So so that's a handy thing to have or remember that you have because my guess is like, like me, a lot of you probably have these things for other reasons. And then this is going to sound ridiculous. But I though I have had a package like a huge bulk package of heat shrink tubing for years, I've never used it for an electronics project. I used it initially because the what do you call it? There's a name for it. The thing in the back of your glasses that sort of wraps around your ear that like that it like eroded or broken off on one pair of glasses that I wore like around the house or whatever. Watching TV, I really only wear them for distance. And and it was, you know, bother my ear. And I thought, oh, I could get some heat shrink tubing and just, you know, like put a couple of sleeves on there and sort of rebuild this thing, which is exactly what I did. But I finally used it for an electronics project instead of wrapping, you know, tape around something to separate it. I just put some heat shrink tubing on and a little lighter and boom. Everything was good to go. It was way faster. So and you can get a thing of heat shrink tubing from Amazon for in all different like diameters for, I don't know, I mean, it's like five bucks or something ridiculous, and you'll probably never use it all and pass it along to your children as an heirloom or something. So heat shrink tubing and glue guns. Because why not? Have you ever used heat shrink tubing, John? I know this is like, perhaps I'm like discovering, you know, fire again. But, you know, there you go. It's it's interesting stuff, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, you've used it. Not recently. Hmm. Well, it's good to have around the house. It's fun. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the show. Ken, we'll start off with some tips. And Ken said a tip I didn't know. I had no idea that I could use the function key, the FN key on the keyboard and the arrow keys up and down to scroll the app window up and down. He says, I first tried it in mail and then I realized it works in all the apps that I have and he's right. It's it's just like using the the scroll key on your on your keyboard or on your on your scroll wheel on your mouse. It just kind of moves things. I think it moves a page at a time actually with the with the function key. So so there you go. It's really handy. And of course, like in Safari, if you're just in a regular view, you can hit the space to scroll down. And of course, because option always does the opposite option, space bar will scroll up. But what's cool about function and arrow is it allows you to scroll even if you're in an edit window. Because if you start if you hit the space bar while you're in an edit window, obviously, it's going to just insert a space into the edit window. So pretty, pretty cool. Stuff. Anything to add to that, John? Yeah, I found if you do command. Arrow that does something interesting as well. Well, what does it do? Should I do it? Well, it goes recording here. Sure. OK, I did it on our page there. It goes to the top or top or bottom. Oh, no kidding. He also mentioned function left and right actually goes to the beginning or end of the line. Oh, yeah, look at that. Oh, I like this. I didn't even know that. I just I'm like, oh, I wonder what all the other modifier keys will do with the arrows. Oh, that's pretty good, man. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Cool. All right. This is why we do this show. I think I've already learned three new things. So look at that. We're almost finished. Quick one today. All right. Listener John is up next. And he says it is relating back a few shows ago. We were talking about serial numbers and and why it's important to keep them and all that stuff. And he says I had something happen to me for the third time and wanted to pass it along. If you have just done a repair with Apple or a third party and as part of that repair, you've replaced the motherboard on your computer and suddenly your I message is failing. You will now know why. This is because serial numbers for computers are printed on the outer case when a motherboard is replaced. The motherboard has to be coded with the serial number. This is a one time flash and can't be changed. Can't can't be changed once it's put in. But sometimes Apple forgets to do it. And you will know if you go to the Apple menu and choose about this Mac, if no serial number shows up in the window, then you don't have a serial number encoded on your motherboard. He says you will have to go back to Apple with your computer to get it flashed properly. He says or you can Google foo and torrent. He says the utility is out there in places. The cool part is that the reason I message fails to work is because part of the end point encryption for I message is based on your system's serial number as a hard coded to the mother board. So we talked about I message having end to end encryption in the last episode, part of the key for each device. You actually get a per device key, because that's the only way it could do that without being insecure. Is a and part of that key is the motherboard. He says I message is based on your system's serial number as hard coded to the mother board without a serial number. The encryption algorithm cannot initialize and will fail to communicate. This can also apparently cause problems with app store licensing, push messaging and software updates. So in any case, just a side note that can be really annoying to track down. So if you get your mother board replaced and suddenly you can't send an I message anymore, check to see if you have a serial number. In fact, I think as a preemptive strike, if you get your mother board replaced, check to see if you have a serial number and avoid waiting for these symptoms to show up. So and as Warren in the chat room at Makiqab.com slash stream is saying this is why hackintoshes don't get I messages or FaceTime. I had no idea that was a limitation of hackintoshes these days, but it makes total sense, given given what we just discussed. Thoughts on that, John? Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So of course, you can find that if you go to about this Mac and it's listed right there. Right. Also, if you go to the system report and you look at the hardware, I think this is another value that's used by a lot of things is called the hardware UUID, which is a unique value for that machine alone. And I think that changes per motherboard, right? Is that hard coded? I guess it is, right? The UUID. I mean, like if I the reason is, you know, let me let me explain my thinking because what I just said probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Because, of course, it's a hardware UUID. Why would it change? I know there's some UUID that changes with each reinstallation of Mac OS. Like if you were to wipe your hard drive clean, there is a UUID, perhaps for the volume, which makes sense, that would change. And I'm just curious what if this one persists. I mean, I imagine it does. It would otherwise, why would it be a hardware UUID? Yeah. And I remember actually some software. Another thing is that, you know, if you get a repair, your Mac addresses may change. I know that a lot of software on other platforms or one strategy was, well, let me, you know, marry myself to the ethernet, you know, Mac address or something like that. I remember having to diagnose something that had to do with that because, yeah, we use the different network interface or something and all of a sudden the machine, that the software we're saying, hey, I'm on the wrong machine. It's like, no, you're on the right machine. Oh, interesting. So this can be a pain in the neck if you do a restore to if you restore from a backup and then all of a sudden all your stuff is, you know, including iMessage, right? Working, it could be because any one of those values have changed. Then Apple has the magic tools that can set them to what they were before. Well, very interesting. Huh. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. Shall we move on, my friend? Sure. Sure. All right. Let's let's take it to Scott. Scott actually has an audio comment. So Scott, why don't you take it away? Hi, this is Scott from Virginia. A few episodes ago, you had a listener asking if it was possible to restore minimized windows from the app switcher. And one suggestion was to use a program called Keyboard Maestro. Well, there's actually a way to do this without any additional software. It's a bit tricky at first, but all you have to do is press command tabs you normally would. And when you have the app that you once selected, keep the command key held down. But instead of pressing tab to advance to the next app, press and hold the option key. Then let go of the command key. This will open the most recent minimized window for that application. Or if no windows are open for that app, it will make a new window for certain apps like the Finder, Techset, et cetera. Hope this helps and thanks for the great show. Very true. Very good, Scott. The one thing I will say about that tip, just so you guys don't get caught with it, is it will only restore a minimized window if that if all of the windows are minimized. If there is a maximized window, it will not bring it up. It will bring the maximized window up. It will not bring the minimized one up, but that's I like it. That's handy, that little roll of the hand to make that jump from command option. I like it. Good, John. All right. We have a note from another Scott. We'll kind of dive into a little bit of mesh Wi-Fi here. And I will remind you, of course, that Euro's the sponsor of this episode, we'll probably be talking both positively and negatively about Euro. We'll be talking honestly about it. I don't know whether it'll be positive or negative. Then we'll do the sponsor spot later, but I always just like to be. I like to make sure people know that we're, you know, our sponsor spots don't don't influence our our thoughts on things. But but our thoughts on things do influence who we allow on his sponsors. So there you go. Scott, I think this is a different Scott, but it could be the same. He says, in the course of the your episodes, there's a active discussion slash debate about various Wi-Fi and mesh solutions. He says, after my airport routers finally gave up the ghost, I decided it was time to do some research of my own and get meshed. After comparing stats, reviews and prices, I purchased both the Euro and Google Wi-Fi devices. I returned the Euro package within a week for one simple reason. Google Wi-Fi performed equally well for me or better, in some cases, and at a far lower price, I rarely hear this product mentioned on a show and wanted to give it a shout out because it is elegantly designed, inexpensive, extremely functional and simple to set up. It allows some geek level tweaking, but most isn't necessary. Just one take out of the box designated as the main unit or take one out of the box designated as the main unit and add the rest by scanning a QR code and just plugging them in. Nothing against Eury says they make a fine product, but I just couldn't see spending the extra money for it when the Google Wi-Fi device is the same job for me for much less. In the end, it leaves me more money to buy other stuff you guys recommend. And that's a good thing, right? So I guess you could say the extra money I would have paid for the Euro didn't get caught. There you go. OK. Yeah, you know what? I agree that Google Wi-Fi works well in terms of the dual radio mesh systems. The dual band, I guess is the right way to call it. That's the that that was one of the best performers when we tested. We don't really obsess about speed a whole lot when I at least I don't when talking about these mesh products because by and large, they all do perform, you know, fast enough, right? For what what most of us have in our homes, given, you know, with some with some exceptions, of course. But my only issue with Google Wi-Fi is the amount of attention that they pay to it. And that is that the low amount of attention that they pay to it. Software updates kind of roll out here or there. But in terms of just like getting their attention, maybe this is because I'm kind of on the inside, but like even getting their PR department's attention about it, I mean, they'll engage. It's they're fine, but they're definitely not proactive about this. They're not really this doesn't this product does not appear to me like a priority for them, which, given Google's history, is not surprising, right? We've seen a lot of products that they just sort of, you know, they throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks. There's nothing wrong with the Google Wi-Fi. Like I said, I've I've tested it and price wise, you know, especially for a dual band, it's it's pretty inexpensive. You may Scott may have been comparing it to the Euro tri-band stuff because all the Gen 2 Euro main or units anyway, the base units are all tri-band. And so that adds the extra five gigahertz channel, which can really help with with, you know, faster backhaul. So if you're doing a lot of multi-hop stuff, meaning you're connecting to a mesh point and then that mesh point is relaying your signal back to the quote unquote router unit, having it, you know, the extra radio can in depending on the layout of your home and how you're doing things that can actually really make a difference, or it can make zero difference at all. And and so, you know, that that's why you don't hear me talk is about Google Wi-Fi as much as I do. I do have one set up very close by here with at a, you know, kind of I have the I have these test houses sort of around. And, you know, friends and family members and clients that, you know, are the right type of people for me to have test these things. I have I have them going so that I can have all of these mesh systems actually in production as opposed to in just like little, you know, controlled environments that I would do here. I can just have them running and then I get to hear what real people say about them and all that stuff. And the real people that have Google Wi-Fi love it in my test case here. So then it could because it just works. They're not geeks. They don't care about, you know, things like the Google Wi-Fi currently isn't doing anything to prevent against buffer bloat. But they don't do anything where that's a problem. We'll talk about how Eero just added some features to fix that. But I'm saving that for the sponsor spot. But but, you know, it'll support ethernet backhaul and and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's it's good stuff. You know, like hardware wise, I have no problem with it. I just worry about the longevity of it. But maybe maybe I worry too much. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on. Google does have a history of losing interest in things. That's exactly it. And then their interest in this doesn't appear to be high. So, yeah, there you go. Then again, I mean, Eero is a, you know, fairly new company. Right. Well, and they are a single purpose company, right? Like if if Eero stops being interested in their mesh product, well, they better pivot to something else because otherwise they have no revenue, right? It's so so, you know, like they're they're focused not to say that there aren't some engineers at Google that aren't focused on Google Wi-Fi, but it doesn't seem like a priority. That's all. What do I know? Let's go to Bill, shall we? And Bill, what do I do? There we are. It bill kind of brings us into, you know, what I call the quasi mesh realm, because you can certainly create a mesh without buying something called mesh. He says, I've been running a time capsule as my router and wireless access point and for wireless and wired ethernet storage for a time for my time machine backups. He says, I recently added a Synology RT2600AC to my network to uses my router and wireless access point and to add 802.11AC, which my time capsule didn't have, and to add QoS. He says, my question is, how do I configure the time capsule to still be able to access the hard disk for wireless time machine backups? First, I presume I put the time capsule router function in bridge mode. Second, do I put the wireless capability in extend a wireless network or off? And he says, number three, if I turn the wireless off, how do computers access the time capsule? Do I connect the time capsule to the RT2600AC by ethernet or USB? So some good questions. As for your time capsule, the way I've done it until the drive died in mind, I think you were kind of in the same boat, John, is I set mine to bridge mode. I had another device as a router, right, where you've got your Synology, which is great. And I set mine to bridge mode Wi-Fi disabled. In that config, the time capsule would be accessible to any device that can see the ethernet network. And since, and this is the important part, yes, the time capsule has both Wi-Fi and ethernet in it. And I've encountered this before where because it has those things, the assumption is that if you turn the Wi-Fi off, then Wi-Fi clients might not be able to connect to the hard drive that's inside the time capsule. But generally, that's not the way your network is configured. In this case, your Synology router is providing your Wi-Fi and your routing capability. But what it's also doing is bridging all of your network. So when we say that we're putting a router in bridge mode, really, we're just turning off the routing functionalities. The bridging, in most senses, is still happening. Right? The bridging happens all the time. So your Synology router bridges on your local network, Wi-Fi and ethernet. And then, because the router is turned on, it also routes traffic in and out from the internet. So having bridge mode enabled on your time capsule means that things that are connecting over ethernet are basically, it means that its router is off and it's just an ethernet device at that point. It could also be a Wi-Fi device. We'll talk about that. But because your Synology bridges Wi-Fi to ethernet, then anything that's connected to ethernet, including your time capsule, will be visible to your Wi-Fi clients. And that's why that would work. Does that make sense before we move on from this, John? Yeah, it's been a while since I think I had to do that as well. When I was phasing it out. Yeah. Or he could pull the drive out of it. I think I did that, too. Yeah, then he has to put it. Well, then, yeah, I mean, if the, for what, wait, for what reason? I mean, I know there's a lot of reasons for why, but like, which were just if you're going to decommission that device. No, I think he still wants to use it for his time machine backups until until the drive dies. I think that's kind of his point. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once I decommissioned mine, I actually took the hard drive and put it in, I think I put it in one of my tropos. Oh, interesting. I'm not going to use this anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, smart. Yeah. Yeah, because a lot of those had, well, actually, if it's lasted this long, but a lot of the later units had power supply issues in that just die. Yeah, that was that was the issue I had with mine. But thankfully, because I had it connected to an AppleCare covered Mac, they repaired the power supply as part of AppleCare. So there was like, yeah, OK, I mean, I don't I don't know if AppleCare kind of goes that far anymore. I think I think the only it goes, I don't know, but used to they used to do that anyway. So on this, though, if you wanted, and again, I'm not sure I would recommend this, but in the in the whole quasi mesh scenario, if you wanted your time capsule to be a part of your wireless network in terms of extending your wireless network. So now we're talking, you know, that quasi mesh mode where you've got, you know, other you've got your main router, which has a, you know, wireless access point in it. And then you want to put other wireless access points around the house because your time capsule is connected to ethernet. You would not use the extend a wireless network setting because generally what that will do is it will try to sort of be a wireless relay. You don't want wireless relay. You want to use ethernet backhaul, not Wi-Fi backhaul. So in this case, it seems weird. But what you would do is you again, keeping your time capsule in bridge mode so that it doesn't try to do any routing, you would set your time capsule to turn to create a Wi-Fi network. And then and this would be true of any router, any router that you want to use as a quasi mesh. Right. So we're using the time capsule as an example. It's actually kind of a bad example only because the wireless radios in it are not 802.11 AC. Like, no, maybe. Well, maybe his aren't. Did they ever make an AC time capsule? I guess maybe they did. So you could do this, but really with any router, you'd put it into bridge mode so you'd turn off its routing capabilities. And then you tell it to create a wireless network just like you normally would if it were a router. Right. So no special settings except that you give it the same SSID or network name as your main router has and the same security setting. So if you're using WPA2, which you should be, set it to that and give it the same password, you could and probably should use different channels for the radios on your main router versus your access points, you know, your your quasi mesh points there so that they don't overlap with each other. But you've got to use something like iStumbler to dig into that. And, you know, make sure that you're not overlapping with your neighbors and all of that. So there's there's a little bit of sort of situational decisions that need to be made, but otherwise, yeah, you set it to different channels. But that's the trick is putting it into bridge mode and then creating a Wi-Fi network with the same credentials and name. And that will allow your devices to just connect to either or and again, it's a quasi mesh. It's not doing the some of the handoff. It's not doing the centralized management of anything because the two devices, you know, in this case, the time capsule and the Synology router don't know about each other, but that's OK. You know, it can work. I ran something that way for like 10 years here before mesh really, you know, caught on and it works great, especially if you've got ethernet in the walls. There are some performance efficiencies that you don't get, but by and large, it'll work pretty well for you, I think. So thoughts about this, John? Yeah, that's I just jumped straight to mesh. Right, right, right, right. Well, you know, like for a lot of folks, one router is either enough or almost enough in your home such that you didn't need to like go nuts and figure out, OK, crap, how am I going to, you know, solve this problem? Like for me, because of how spread out like the house and the property is, I had to figure this out right away. Like there was just no option. But but for most folks, you don't, you know, it's like, it's OK. Yeah, there's a dead spot over there. It's not as fast over there or whatever. And that's why mesh entering the market really was sort of a blessing, because we're totally able to have our cake and eat it too without having to like geeky engineer a solution. And it's not so much engineering it. I mean, we just talked through it from a top level. It's like, yeah, OK, you can, you know, fine, make sense. But it's the management of it. Like when things don't work, you're like, OK, well, now I have good news. I only have four different places to look or whatever it is, you know, whereas with, you know, with some one of these mesh products, you know, just just one place to look and it tells you everything that's going on, which is really super handy, makes life way easier. Anything more on that, John, before I jump to our our Euro sponsor block here? Let's go. All right, cool. As I mentioned in the intro to the show, Euro is our sponsor for this episode. And Euro is as far as I know, the longest running consumer mesh creator in the market, and it shows, right? They're already on their second generation systems, which, as I mentioned here in the show, include a tri-band radio in the Euro Gen 2, but also their second generation products introduced the Euro beacon, which is a really cool thing. It just plugs right into an outlet and sits right on the outlet. Like there's no cord that just plugs in and joins your Euro mesh and does its thing and relays these things around and really can make it super easy to get this stuff, you know, anywhere in your home. The cool thing about Euro, and I've seen other mesh products that don't do this well, is that you can mix and match Euros from first generation, second generation. So if you've got a first generation Euro and you want to add, you know, some beacons or even you want to add a second generation point so that you've got the tri-band in one spot and dual band in another. No problem. Just all works together. No issues whatsoever. In fact, I do that very often here at the house. Very, very cool stuff. And as we've mentioned, you know, the single routered thing just doesn't work for a lot of folks. Euro, I'm going to take this one a little bit longer because Euro just added a feature that we that really matters to us. And, you know, we talk a lot on this show about QoS. So this is sort of the content portion of the of the ad that I'm sort of blending together today. So this one will go a little long. We talk a lot about QoS, and there's a lot of things that fall under the QoS umbrella. The one that is important to most of us and the one that we focus on here when we say QoS, what we mean is that scenario when all of your devices or even just one is using all of your upstream bandwidth, either to upload your photos to iCloud Photo Library or, you know, backup to a place like, you know, Backblaze or, you know, whatever. And that then slows down everything else because your upstream pipe is now soaked and not properly managed. Well, the act or the technology that properly manages that called is part of QoS. Iro introduced with version 2.17 something called SQM, which is Smart Q Management. Smart Q Management is not Iro's term, it is a term as part of the whole QoS discussion. And this is it. By managing that queue of data that's going out, it can control it and make sure that no one bit of traffic is causing everything else to slow down. And this is now available. So you can enable this. Go to open your Iro app, tap on the menu button, tap on Network Settings, tap on Iro Labs and switch the toggle to On. Very, very cool stuff, what they're doing over there and they're staying right on top of these products. It's great to see. I was really impressed they were able to add this sort of after the fact to even, you know, the Gen 1 stuff. So very cool. And we have a deal for you. As I mentioned in the show intro, you can get free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada by visiting Iro.com. Pick whatever, you know, products you want, packages, all that stuff. And then at checkout, select overnight shipping and then enter our special promo code MGG and that will make the shipping free. Again, go to Iro.com and at checkout, select overnight shipping and then enter promo code MGG and that will make it free for all of you in the U.S. and Canada. And our sincere thanks to Iro for being a sponsor of this episode. Good, right, John? That QOS thing's pretty cool. You've, what have you done to, yeah, I haven't actually tested it. So the way I test it is, because that's a really good question, the way I test it is I start, I open up a terminal window and I start pinging a server out on the internet and generally speaking I use ping space www.apple.com, right? And that gets a ping trail going and you can just kind of look at that and see what a ping is, is it sends out a request to a server one per second and in this case the server is www.apple.com and then apple.com responds by saying, yep, I'm here. That turnaround time is reported in milliseconds as part of this and it's doing it one per second. If you want to stop a ping, control C in the terminal will stop it. Otherwise it just keeps going, which is great for this next test. So run that for, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 seconds and you'll get a feel, right? For me, I just started running it while we started doing the segment because that's how I go and my average is about 25 milliseconds. Yours might be remarkably different from that. Hopefully it's not triple digits. If it is, that's not such a good thing, especially, well, I was gonna say, especially if you're in the US, but I think Apple's got servers all over the place. So really it shouldn't happen anywhere. But unless you're on a connection with a lot of latency and there's a lot of turnaround, there's a lot of time for it to turn that packet around. So the idea is you get this ping going because it tests how long it takes for a packet to get out of your network and come back in and then I'll just go to like speedtest.net or whatever or I'll start an online backup or something and I will do my speed test and I will watch those pings as the download happens and as the upload happens. And that will tell me if I'm experiencing what's called buffer bloat, right? Where if those ping times increase, meaning it takes more time for a packet to do a round trip, if those ping times increase during either the download or the upload test, then I know I have a QOS issue here, most likely because you're using all your bandwidth, at least in theory, depending on how much speed you have on your internet connection, sometimes speed test can't see all of it on the downstream. But for most of us here in the US, especially those of us that aren't on fiber, those of us on cable connections, it can certainly use all of our upstream and that's really where QOS matters the most is on a cable modem connection with the upstream connection. So that's how I tested, John. Did you do any of that testing while we were talking here? No. Okay, cool. So have you enabled SQM on your era? Okay, cool, yeah. Yeah, I moved the slider. Right. Yeah, that I was able to handle. Yeah, no, I tested it that way. I mean, it absolutely makes a difference. It does exactly what it's supposed to do and those ping times don't change. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. That's how I test QOS. You also can use the speedtest.net, no, sorry, dslreports.com slash speedtest will let you, will sort of do that for you and give you a buffer bloat score. But that's what it's doing is it's starting to pay, it does it all within your browser. But yeah, dslreports speedtest, easy for me to say. But that'll do it in the browser. I prefer to do it manually because that way I can see what's going on and I get a feel for how much something is impacting it, like that kind of thing. And that's what they're doing too. They're just applying a grade to it, A plus down to F, so. Good, yeah? Moving on, okay, cool. In episode 709, which of course was our penultimate, was that the right word to use? I don't know, our most recent episode before this one. I don't know, but it's not like this is the last episode. This is just the most recent episode. Unless you're listening to this like a year from now and then it's not at all the most recent. In episode 709, which was our prior episode, we talked about how frustrating it was for me and many of us with iPhone 10s to have to be told to ask Siri something while we're driving and have our phones say you need to unlock your phone, of course, which means either looking at the phone with face ID or entering your passcode, neither of which are really good things to do while you're driving. I think, I think in fact they're really bad things to do while you're driving. I'd much rather have a fingerprint sensor where I can just float it, especially if I'm telling Siri to do something like, hey, launch ways, that's sort of a thing and it happens if your phone goes to sleep. So, Eduardo wrote in and where are we here? Oh, I had the wrong thing up. Yeah, of course I did. Eduardo wrote in and he says, on my iPhone 10, he says, when the do not disturb while driving feature is enabled, Siri doesn't ask to unlock the phone first. He says, I tested it without do not disturb while driving enabled and it did ask to unlock. So, I tried this last night and I re-enabled do not disturb while driving and then I drove and it was enabled and it was obvious because when I invoked Siri, the screen looks different, right? You just see like a little face or something but nothing else. Like it's not showing the dictation of your words on the screen, which I've always thought was really dangerous when you're driving. So they were smart, they turned that off when it detects that you're driving. So that was good. But I told, I asked at the same thing. I said, hey, launch ways. And it said, yeah, you would need to unlock your iPhone first and I can't. Oh, actually it said I can't do that while you're driving. And then I asked it to launch maps. So, similar app, but one made by Apple, one made, not by Apple. And it says, you would need to unlock your iPhone first, but I don't recommend doing that while you're driving. It's like, well, I just asked you, like I asked it, you know, I didn't say just launch maps though. I said, hey, get me directions home. So it was like a very all-inclusive request. Like I want you to do something for me that makes perfect sense for me to do while I'm driving. And it was like, yeah, you need to unlock your phone first and I can't do that. Well, I don't recommend doing that while you're driving. So, I'm not sure about any of this, John. You know, it's frustrating. I guess I could turn off Allow Access When Locked. Now I have all those things on though. If you go into Settings and Face ID and Passcode or Touch ID and Passcode, depending on what feature your phone has, kind of at the bottom of that, there's a section saying Allow Access When Locked and there's, you know, Today View, Recent Notifications, Control Center Siri, Home Control, you know, Return Miss Calls, that kind of thing. And I have them all turned on. So that is the least secure mode you could be in. And it doesn't matter. So I might turn off Require Attention for Face ID so that maybe it won't need me to look at the screen while I'm driving to get it to... So I'm going to do that. I'm turning that off. I'll report back. Crazy stuff, huh, John? Me? If you're going to fiddle with your phone, pull over. Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally agree with you. Yes, absolutely. That's what I'm saying is I would love to be able to just have it, you know, say, hey, bring me home without it saying, no, you must unlock me first. Yeah. Can we have an arrangement going on here? Like, would that be okay? I want voice recognition. In fact, why don't we have that? What do you supposedly do? No, I mean, like, voice print recognition. So that while I'm driving, I could say, hey, unlock my phone. And it would say, yeah, okay, you know, like, I'll do this only when you're driving, right? So if do not disturb while driving is active and, you know, my voice, like, I feel like we have the tech to do that, right? I don't know how reliable it is or how foolproof it would be. Right. I don't think it's totally foolproof. It's not nearly as foolproof as, like, Touch ID or Face ID. But what if I was willing to make that compromise and say, okay, like, don't trust my voice any other time, but while do not disturb while driving is on? Yeah, man, trust my voice print, you know. I think, like, to me, that's, I'm kind of liking this idea. I think we need to, we need to champion this, John. Do we have a new thing? Is it, is it time? Like, if I do that, voice print while driving, right? Because, you know, we got iChat with tabs a decade ago by doing that. So now that's what we want, right? Are you still with me? Okay. Yeah, I'm just doing, I'm searching for something here because I had a thought in my mind about what this could be. Yeah. Well, we'll see if the reverb effect can get any results going. So speaking of driving, we had an interesting conversation on our Facebook page, John, about, you know, we had talked on the show about the Qi wireless, you know, the Touch whatever, Qi chargers, the wireless charging, I guess we call it wireless. It is wireless. In the car mounts, right? So that you just put the thing in your car, and I love that, right? I put it in my car and it starts charging right away. But Ari on Facebook noticed something that is quite true. If you have your screen on and you're doing like GPS activity, like maps or whatever, the Qi charging path is not strong enough to actually charge the phone at best. I mean, it charges it a little bit, but it basically keeps it from discharging, right? It's just enough to get enough power into it that it's not going to, you know, you're not going to lose charge by doing that. But you're not going to gain charge. Whereas with a lightning cable, you would. And so he said, yeah, so what I have to do is, you know, I get in my car and I have to unplug the cable from the Qi charger so that I can still use it as a mount. And then I plug a lightning cable into my phone. Well, here's the thing. I did some testing. I took one for the team. I made a guess and I think I guessed right. But I left my Qi charger plugged in and I plugged in a lightning cable anyway. And I am now certain that charging priority goes to lightning first and then to Qi only if there's nothing charging the phone via lightning. And the way I have to do this is twofold. I've done this for hours. I had to drive down and back to Princeton or whatever and I did this and I didn't cook my phone or any of that stuff, which is a good sign. But also, when you put your phone on charge, it, you know, if it's on mute, you feel the little buzz and if it's not on mute, you also hear the sound, right? So when I put my phone on the Qi charger, it buzzes, right? And then even while it's on the Qi charger, if I plug in the lightning cable, it also buzzes, which tells me it has changed chargers. Now, if I do it in the reverse, if I plug a lightning cable in, it buzzes. And if I put it on the Qi charger with the lightning cable already in, nothing happens. So it's not even trying to negotiate a Qi connection based on the fact that it's already charging via lightning. So it's up to the phone to negotiate this and it does not. I mean, really, it's up to both devices, but they both have to participate. It's not just, I see a Qi coil, I'm going to barf power at it, no. That's not how it works. There's a negotiation that happens and then it starts barfing power at it. So I think you're totally fine if you want to switch to lightning for that particular drive, just plug a lightning cable and you don't have to unplug your Qi charger. It's going to be okay. Make sense, John? I'll have to play with this, but the way I check to see which one is active is... Amazing, Mini has this info screen and among the things it shows is if your phone is charging how many volts and amps. Because I was curious when I bought the charging pad for mine, I'm like, gee, I wonder how much power it's offering. And it had some bizarre combination of voltage and current. It was like 700 milliamps of current and the voltage is really weird and it came out I think to like 6 watts. Okay, okay. And you get more than that if you do a lightning connection. Yeah, I have found those reports with Qi charging to be incorrect and unreliable in terms of... It's reporting that there is charge happening and maybe it's reporting the maximum available from the Qi pad, but I've never... It doesn't charge at that rate. Your normal little charger is 5 watts, right? The little wall charger thing. The small one that comes with an iPhone and that charges your phone way faster than the Qi charger will. So maybe it's reporting the amount of power that the Qi charger is putting out, but the phone probably gets about half that because it's lost in translation. So maybe that's what's going on. I don't know. Have you tried it with a... Because Apple phones support... Did they support the 15 or the 12 and a half? We had these numbers somewhere and now I'm forgetting them, right? But there's different amounts. There's like the 10 and then there's a 15 watt charger to a Qi charger. And I think the Apple phones support up to that, but only in their own way. Maybe somebody in the chat room can remind us that Macky got a conversation. But anyways, there's definitely different values whether I'm on Qi or Lightning, and Lightning is more and faster. That makes sense. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll buy that. And did you do this with a 10 watt charging pad, John? I'm not sure how much. Mine is off top of my head. Okay. It's probably 10 would be my guess. Here it is. Let's see. Samsung wireless charging pad. Let's see if they give me information here. How many amps is it? I guess that's the question. Maybe it's only five watts, right? Because one amp is five volts. What's the formula, John? Power goals, current times voltage. Yeah, so this one is a 10 amp one. So two amps, five volts. Two. Oh, you have a two amp one. Okay. Yeah, okay. So that's a 10 and you're... Okay. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I believe you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Huh. All right. Fun. Somebody else in the chat helping out. Oh, Warren says, remember air power? Yeah, me neither. I'm with you on that, Warren. That was a product that I think was conceived perhaps days before it was announced. It felt like a last minute addition to that keynote announcement. We set it at the time and is perhaps the closest thing to vaporware that we've seen from Apple in a very long time. It's not their MO to do something like that. And yet it's very much felt like, hey, look at our concept design. Wouldn't you like one of these? We would like one of these. Wouldn't you like one of these? That would be cool. And then, you know, there you go. Where's it at? Where, where is it at? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Okay. Where are we here, John? Coming back around. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, another related but important topic. So I did agree with you as we just spoke about if you need to mess with your phone, pull over. I think we were in more agreement, but potentially then, then our conversation led on in the last episode when we were talking about earphones and cycling and all of that stuff. I think we both wound up, at least I certainly wound up kind of digging my heels in on it and losing the point that I was trying to make. But Allison Sheridan from, from NoCillicast at podfeed.com wrote in and said, interesting debate on the headphones while cycling question in many states, including mine, it is illegal to have headphones on in both years while driving anything bicycling bicycling on the road is governed by the same laws that govern cars. I checked, she says, and in your two states, there is no such restriction. AAA keeps a keeps tabs on all this. It would suggest, however, that having headphones in your ears can impair your hearing more than speakers in a car as she believes you were trying to say, John, which perhaps was what you were trying to say. Yes. Yeah. In that, I like, I'll come back to that. She says Bart Bouchotte's has a good solution. He uses bone conduction headphones. And she says nothing blocking his ears at all. And he avoids wind noise problems to not great audio. But for podcasts, they were great. It worked great. And she said he uses the aftershocks treks titanium. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes so that we can all kind of be on the same page. But so here's the thing. First and foremost, yes, in case it wasn't clear in the last episode, I am not convinced that wearing two headphones while cycling is something that I could ever bring myself to do. Whether it's a good idea or not, sort of even beyond that, like I can't. I'm not sure I would feel comfortable doing that, even on back country roads. But certainly in anywhere where there's like cars, because when you're on a when you're in another car, when you're on a bike, you are, you have to assume you're invisible to every car you see, right? They cannot see you. When you're in a car, it is also a good thing to assume and is sort of the foundational principle of defensive driving. But the reality is other cars do generally see you. And so chances are you've got somebody else also on the same page as you that doesn't want to crash into you and is working to avoid that and is looking to avoid that. Whereas on a bike, that may or may not be the case. That said, I'm not convinced that non-sealable headphones, which is the conversation we had last week, things like AirPods, would be any different than speakers in a car. So in that sense, I disagree. Because I often find myself either turning down or completely pausing the stereo when in high traffic, density scenarios like or parking garages or anywhere that I want to hear what's going on around me. The stereo cuts that out, at least for my brain. Yes, I could hear a horn, but I could also hear a horn with two headphones, especially non-sealable headphones into my ears on the bike. It's the distraction level of the radio. And I definitely find like if I'm on a highway drive, OK, fine. Everything that's happening is predictable and the road's long enough where you can see and that sort of thing. But often as soon as I pull off the exit, it's like, whoa, this music is way too distracting. Like I'd turn that off right away. So I don't I don't know that I don't know that it is any different, but at least not for me. I don't think so. So I don't know. What do you think, John? There you go. No headphones or earphones. We're driving. That's what I think. But do you notice that like music or whatever coming out of your stereo is also distracting like when you're when there's other cars around and you have to like negotiate things like that? No. Interesting. Now, I don't listen to the. I guess I don't listen to music that would. Overrule my awareness of what's happening. Sure. Yeah, OK, so it's just background noise. Yeah. Yeah, classic rock mostly. Well, but whatever it is, you're not like for me, when I can't listen to music without being like intently focused on music and the same would definitely be true of listening to podcasts. Right. I am aware of what's going on inside the song or I'm paying attention to what the podcast host is trying to tell me or whatever. And I like it. I can't have that as background. So so perhaps that's where that that difference comes. And I realized, you know, all of us aren't wired the same way. And then for many of you, especially you included John, you know, music can be a background thing. Like if somebody if I'm in a car with somebody and they have the they have music on, but it's at that level where you can barely tell what song is playing that. And I know I'm in the minority on this that to me is perhaps the most distracting volume level that could possibly exist because my brain is just trying desperately to pay attention to some level of that. And I can't. And so it's entirely distracting. It like takes all my focus away. It's like, can we just either turn it up or turn it off? And but again, you know, that's just me. So anyway, there you go. But I got to try those those bone conduction things. Again, I'm not convinced they would make a whole lot of difference in for this. But, you know, I'd still want a way to pause it when I hit like, you know, traffic lights or anything like that on a bike. Like I, you know, I don't want the distraction. So I don't know that I would ever know. I tried some of the bone conduction. There were a couple of them at a CES. Yeah. It was that that's one thing that I actually, you know, occurred to me is, well, I can still hear what's going on around me. Yeah. But I can also hear the music while you're not really hearing. Well, you are kind of, you're hearing the vibrations, which is what hearing is, right? Right. That's what it is. Yeah. Just via a different, just via a slightly different channel. Right. Yeah. But it's still getting in there. Yeah. Yeah. I just wonder who were the thought of that? Let's vibrate your bones so you can hear something. Yeah. It's pretty amazing, actually. So. All right. Fun discussion. Thank you, Allison. Especially thank you for that link about the laws. We've definitely got that in the show notes for you all. So very, very good stuff. So, you want to take us to Andrew, John? Actually, it was Tim that wrote this in. Oh, okay. Follow up to Andrew. So, Andrew asked the question, how do I get an SSD for my aging 2009 XServe? And I'd suggested one product, which is a bracket in which you place an SSD, and then you plug it in the SATA 2 port inside your XServe. Right. That's a good solution. But then Tim wrote in and suggested another one, which I think I started going this path and then got distracted by something. Because the XServe, like older Macs, often had more than one way to expand them. And basically Tim said, well, I'm doing, here's what he said. He has 2009 XServe. It's chugging away. It's running 10.11.6 and Mac OS server. And he uses it for iTunes, Plex, Time Machine, Calendar, FTP. Wow. File sharing, caching. That's crazy. I guess he just can't run High Sierra because it's too old to run on it. Got it. Or I guess you can't easily install it. It'll say, no, your machine's too wimpy. Yeah. Well, if it's an XServe, it's not an Intel box, right? They make Intel XServes. No, no, it's a Xeon. Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Sorry. But here's a solution that I just, well, we'll let you know. This is another option. He added an SSD by using the OWCSELSEAR-S. Well, what's that, you ask? Well, it's a different way to, it uses a different technology called PCIe or PCIexpress. And the XServe had some slots. The good news here is that this, so it's similar in concept in that you plug it into a port in your XServe, but PCIe, what this does is you plug in PCIe and it gives you a SATA3 port because PCIe is faster than SATA2. So that's good news. That's cool. So if you want to, so if I had to choose between the two, I mean, there's still the same thing. You know, you could afford one or the other, but I would say going with this would be a better choice if you want to go SATA3. And I think card itself is 49.99 and then you put your own SSD in there. So, cool. Yeah, kind of missed the days of expandable max. Well, you know, Thunderbolt is that answer, right? A slot. Or a slot driven expansion. Let's say that. Yeah, but okay. But I mean, let's just talk about expansion because I mean, I get that the process of putting things into a slot on the motherboard of a computer is actually kind of a cool thing to do, right? But there is no practical difference between connecting something to the Thunderbolt bus via a Thunderbolt connector than there would be connecting to, you know, on a machine like that, the PCI bus versus a PCI connector, right? I mean, it's a low-level high-speed bus that you can plug different things into. Yeah. I'll go with you on that. You know what I mean? If you're plugging in a Thunderbolt hard drive, for example, you are not plugging in a hard drive that has a Thunderbolt interface. You're plugging in usually, well, a box that has a hard drive in it and usually that hard drive is going to have a SATA interface. And then also in that box is a SATA to Thunderbolt interface. And then that's what gets plugged in, you know, to the Thunderbolt port. So in PCI terms, essentially what you've done is you've gotten a SATA card and plugged it into your PCI bus and then you plug your hard drive into that, right? I mean, that's essentially the same thing. And therefore it makes, it does make things expandable, I think. It's not, again, it's not that same sort of romantic process of like, oh, yeah, there's the motherboard and I'm plugging something directly into it. You don't get to see the motherboard with Thunderbolt. So, you know, it's not as, it doesn't feel the same, but it's the same, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Kind of, I think back to the days when they had, oh man, what was it called? PCI Express or whatever. Maybe it was PCI Express. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought that was kind of a general purpose and you could get SSDs and RAM and all sorts of things. Yeah. Yeah, it was handy for sure. Yeah, people built all kinds of cards, but not a lot of them sold. So it was short-lived. Yeah. There were a few different ones. Right. Right. Yeah. While we're on the subject, let's jump to Mark's question for this week where Mark asked, I've created a, oh, never mind. He says, I have a question about SSD USB 3 enclosures versus Thunderbolt 2 mechanical drives. Kind of a quandary says, but I think that maybe a USB 3 enclosure with a fast one terabyte SSD will be better to use as a boot disk on my iMac than a Thunderbolt 2 tough drive with rotational drives inside. Let me know your thoughts. So I'm guessing that the reason we're sort of comparing, you know, apples to oranges here is we're not saying Thunderbolt versus USB 3 on a SSD or Thunderbolt versus USB 3 on a rotational drive. We're saying Thunderbolt rotational USB SSD. And I'm guessing, but I can't tell that cost is a factor here because my guess is that they might be similarly priced. Maybe not, but you will pay more if in fact this were, say, rotational drives with USB versus Thunderbolt, you're going to pay for the Thunderbolt version because of essentially what, well, what we call the Thunderbolt tax. But, you know, you're buying the extra interface. You're buying the cable, right? None of which are cheap Thunderbolt cables in fact are kind of ridiculously expensive, but because of the types of data that they need to be able to support. Whereas USB doesn't come with that because it's not as low level of thing. And I think for a single drive, you're not going to see a lick of difference between USB 3 and Thunderbolt. But there will almost always be a huge difference between the speed, the effective speed, the perceived speed of an SSD versus a rotational drive, especially as your boot disk where you've got lots of little files that need to load and lots of things happening all the time. You're not just, you know, barfing video streams to or from the drive. You're, you know, you're using it in many different ways, sometimes simultaneously. And so for that, I would definitely go for an SSD. And that way you can avoid the Thunderbolt tax in your comparison scenario and go USB 3 SSD. And I really don't think you'd notice a difference going USB 3 SSD versus Thunderbolt SSD in this scenario either with a single drive. When you get into multiple drives, Thunderbolt, you know, the throughput thresholds are much, much higher, right? So in theory, you can, and also in practice, you can get much faster speeds out of Thunderbolt. But out of a single drive, it's not going to happen. And probably not going to make a difference from your boot drive even in a scenario where you could say, yes, okay, this drive on Thunderbolt is a little faster. That's, that's my thought. Nice little follow up to the Thunderbolt discussion I thought. But what do you think, John? Yeah, I think it's all about the numbers. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, USB 3, you're talking five gigabits per second. Right. Thunderbolt, you're talking more, but you're going to be limited by the throughput of USB 3 is good enough, I think. Fast enough for a single drive. Yeah. Right. It could be a potential bottleneck, because, all right, so five gigabits is 640 megabytes per second. And some SSDs may exceed that, but I think for most applications it'd be fine. And yeah, as you pointed out, probably less expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, yeah. That's a good way to look at it. That's 640 megabytes a second. Megabytes, right? 40 megabytes a second, megabits. Can you correct me on this, John? It's early in the day. Megabytes. Five gigabits, 640 megabytes, or at least that's what the article is about. Yeah, no, no, no. That math makes sense. Yeah, okay. So, you know, take a look at that and say, yeah, okay. Like, is the drive going to go any faster than that? If not, then no reason to go with a connection method that would support faster speeds. So, yeah. There you go. Just be aware that USB 3 drives will potentially interfere with Bluetooth and 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. So, just be aware of that. Right? Because the frequencies are, well, multiples of each other. So, they get in the way. So, just be aware of that. I had one guy at the PMUG meeting down in Princeton a couple of weeks ago that was like, yeah, you know, my Bluetooth mouse has worked for a long time and now it's gotten flaky. And I was like, hey, did you add a USB 3 drive recently? He's like, yeah, why? Try moving it to the other side of the computer or around or something so that, you know, it's not as likely to interfere. That can make a difference. Good, yeah? Mm-hmm. All right. Sweet. I want to thank this week's Mackie Keb premium subscribers. If you visit Mackie Keb.com slash premium, you can learn all about this. We really, really appreciate your support. I know we say it every single week and it's because it's true. So, this week on our monthly $10 plan we received contributions from Jeff P, John V, Stephen A, John D, Santiago M, Ken L and Gary B, thanks to all of you. We really appreciate it. And on the biannual $25 every six month plan we received contributions from Rick S, Harvey H, Ian T, John P, Mark P, no relation, Timothy B and Jim D. Thank you to all of you. You rock. If you want to learn more about it, go to like I said, Mackie Keb.com slash premium and we have all sorts of information there for you. And it's all working well. The credit card processor that we're using isn't criminals anymore. We changed away from those and life is good. So, very, very good stuff. All right. Let's talk, let's stay with the geeky stuff, shall we, John? And let's talk about APFS a little bit. Is that a good place to go here for you? No, it's been behaving. Good. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, you've got a little bit of history there with it. All right, well, let's go to listener John and then we'll kind of move on from there. So, John says he's running a 2012 27 inch iMac with 24 gigs of RAM and an internal one terabyte hard drive. He says, I'm planning to get an external 500 gig SSD and then running a bootable USB installation to install a fresh high Sierra on that. And then I'll run it as my iMac's boot drive and leave the internal hard drive for data. So, very similar kind of to the scenario that we just kind of talked through. And that sounds great. I would do a USB 3 SSD based on the previous conversation, John. He says, I'd like some advice on pre-formatting the SSD as APFS or HFS. Also, can you offer advice on whether or not it would be wise to leave the hard drive as bootable as a fallback precaution or just remove the OS from the hard drive? Okay, so two good questions. The first, I would do APFS on the external SSD assuming that Disk Utility lets you. Sometimes it gets wonky and it's because APFS is new. I wouldn't, like, this isn't necessarily the hill to die on. If Disk Utility does not let you do this, it's fine. You can convert to APFS down the road and use HFS plus for now, but assuming you don't run into any problems getting it formatted that way, yeah, I'd go with APFS for the SSD. That's what it's built for. Would you agree on that, John? No, I would, yes. Okay. You had problems with a rotational drive or what was the... No, it was an SSD also. Oh, it was. No, it was just Drive Genius was just getting us set because I was getting an error code. But now all his life is good? I'm looking and... Yeah, I'm looking in the event log and I don't see those reports anymore. Okay, cool. Either Apple fix something or ProSoft fix something or they probably both fix something. Right, right. Well, that's good. And that's, you know, like we've said all along with this APFS thing, it is we are in the, you know, active evolution of APFS. So you've just got to kind of bear with that. That's, you know, it's just where we are. It's a very young file system and so utilities and history and experience and all of that. You know, I mean, you heard John say, well now I would recommend that. But he said, like you say that, but six months ago your advice would have been absolutely the opposite. Maybe even three months ago, right? So this is actively evolved. Well, because the utility was saying, you know, it's critical damage to your volume and I'm like, all right, let me try another tool and it's like the old tool says everything's great. Right, right. I mean, I even did a, so carbon copy cloner has a verify option that you can run after a backup and it basically compares every piece. As far as I can tell, it basically compares every piece on the source every piece on destination and it said, yeah, looks the same to me. So I'm like, okay, I don't think there's damage. Right, right. All right. Well, good. In terms of leaving the internal drive bootable, as a matter of course, I wouldn't do that. I always find that having two bootable drives mounted at all times can get a little wonky, but there's nothing wrong with having a clone. So if you want to partition part of that internal drive and use part of it as a clone and then part of it as your data, having a clone is good and a clone if your boot drive will by definition also be bootable, but eject that and only bring it online when the clone operation is happening. That way things don't get confused and you're not winding up with using, say, a Pages document on your clone instead of a Pages document on your main drive, which can happen. I've seen it. I've experienced it. And the good news is our favorite cloning utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper both support this mount clone eject process in their own ways, but the net result is that the drive is only mounted when it's being cloned to and then that's that. So that would be it. But otherwise, no, I wouldn't leave another OS there. I mean, look, I know people that do and it's fine. And if you're happy managing that and just being aware of that and knowing that sometimes things are going to come up, especially when you're doing installations and it's going to ask you about different drives, that's fine. There may be a scenario, especially with an external boot drive where if it doesn't mount fast enough, the system may fall back to booting on the boot drive that it finds, which is internal. So have something change the desktop picture on that so that it is painfully obvious to you that you are not booted from your main drive. I've seen customers with that with my Dave the Nerd business where it's like, you know, it's like, oh, yeah. And now I've like for three weeks now, I've been booting from this old drive and now I've got this mess where I've got to, you know, merge things and put things back and it's like, yeah, okay, let's not, let's avoid that scenario. So that's where my advice comes from is just avoiding the scenario of confusion. But if you're willing to do it, and again, like I said, changing the desktop background is sort of a nice way of instantly knowing that, oh yeah, why am I booted from this? Right, you know, something. Right, John? Okay, all right, cool. So I would do that. And then, but here's the big question, John, because I shared this advice with John and listener John and he wrote back and he says, okay, cool. How do I remove macOS from my drive but still leave all my data on there? And I didn't have an instant answer for him, John. Oh, it's easy. Is it? Maybe it is. I don't know how to do that. You know, I may try it on a duplicate, but how about whacking the system folder? That's not enough. You don't think so? No, I mean, it's a start, but like, he's asking... I don't know if your drive's going to be bootable if you can even whack the system folder without it getting upset. Right, no, you're right about that, that whacking the system folder would make the drive unbootable, but that wouldn't remove macOS from the drive, right? There's also, what, there's the... Hang on, you know what, let me pull up to Finder... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. New Finder window. Yeah, there we go. Okay, cool. System and library maybe. Yeah, well, okay, so I'm comparing a non-bootable drive with a bootable drive and I've used our favorite little trick of command shift period in the Finder to show me all hidden folders. So on the non-bootable drive, there are five hidden items. There's .apdisk, .fseventsd, .spotlightv100, temporary items and trashes. On the bootable drive... Hang on, one, two, three, four, five. There are 22 hidden items. Document revisions, V100 file, fseventsd, my SCM server info, which probably is related to some old app I have. PK install, Sandbox Manager, which also might be related to some old app I have. Spotlightv100.trashes, okay, .vol, bin, cores, Etsy, installer, failure request, net, network, opt, private, Sbin, TMP, USR, VAR, and then also the app... And then there's the system folder, which is not hidden. There's library, and there is applications, all of which should also be removed unless you need something in the applications folder, which you should probably move to your boot drive. Right? So this is like... You know what? Just format it and copy your home directory. That's that idea. Yeah, copy your data. Yeah, I would copy your home directory somewhere else. Format the drive and then copy it back and then use that as your data drive. But even then, I would say, if you look in your home directory, how much of that do you need, right? I mean, your documents folder, sure. Do you need maybe your desktop folder if you're someone that stores things on your desktop, which a lot of people do. I'm certainly one of you. The downloads folder may be... You know, but do you need your library folder? Maybe, depending on what you've got there, but you know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of stuff. I like your idea of... Really, the best would be to take that internal drive and clone it to something external, right? Then format the internal drive empty. And then only copy things back to that external drive that you need. So, you know, grab your documents folder, grab your desktop and downloads if you want, and call them old desktop and old downloads so that you're not confused and you're navigating around. But then, like, you know, only bring things back that you would need. So... Yeah. Brian Monroe has another suggestion. He says, what about just using iCloud documents and iCloud photos to sync everything via the cloud and then maybe you don't need anything? So, the problem with that is it's going to want to put all that stuff by default on his new boot drive and the goal is not to do that, right? The goal is to keep things separate so that he's not filling up his new boot drive with things that don't need to be on the SSD. So, yeah, it's not an easy process, right? Interesting. Curious. Yeah. Right, because actually the way I'm set up, yeah, I was looking in my user directory and I didn't have a documents folder. I'm like, huh, why is that? Oh, because I'm storing it in the cloud. Oh, right. Well, because it moves it to your iCloud directory. Right, right, right. Yeah. Actually, you may have already solved the problem for yourself. It's possible. That's right, yeah. And you can't relocate that directory, right? Like, if he wants his iCloud documents folder to be somewhere else, is that... Can you relocate that? I don't think... I have... I have that folder in my sidebar. Sure. Well, right, just for quick access, but I mean, could he put it on a different drive? But no, I don't think you get any flexibility. I think by default, it... Yeah. Huh. Yeah, I don't know that he... I don't know. Yeah, so Brian Monroe is pointing out in the chat room that it's way too easy for, as he calls himself, Brian the IT guy or Dave the Nerd type folks, to overthink these things. And he's right. But that's, of course, what we do on this show, which is, you know, why Brian's a listener. Because we like to talk through these things, but he's right that using iCloud documents and then setting it to optimize storage will not download... It will not fill up your drive, right? Because it intentionally will will not download all your documents. But if you want local copies and you have all this storage right there, well, then I don't blame you. Like, I would want that too. It's part of the reason that I haven't moved to all that, so... Yeah. Huh. Yeah, I don't know what the answer is here. Let's locate the... iCloud drive. There's got to be a way, right? iCloud drive on external drive. Yeah. How many people have solved this problem? Uh... Well... Yeah. It's doable. We will, uh... We will visit this in a future episode. But, um... Yeah. I think it's a no. I think it's a no. If anybody knows, let us know. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com is the... is the place to send that type of information, John. Call it a Geek Challenge. Are you sure about... Are you sure that it's Feedback at MacGeekGab.com? I am sure that it is Feedback at MacGeekGab.com unless... unless you are a premium subscriber and then you get to use premium at macgeekgab.com which, uh... you know, we answer first, we pay, uh... pay more attention to. Not that we don't pay attention to everything else, you know. We... our goal, and we hit it nearly every week because our systems are in place to hit this, is that, uh... unless the systems break down, which means we're traveling or whatever, but otherwise, we get to everything every week. The systems are on the premium list or get priority. There you go. Because, you know, that's how it works. Uh, all right. So, uh... So that's that. You can visit us on Facebook if you go to macgeekgab.com slash Facebook. But, uh, we have started our, uh, alpha test of the new Q&A system that we're implementing locally here at macobserver.com at macgeekgab. Because Facebook is kind of terrible for Q&A-type systems, to be perfectly honest. So, uh, so we've got quite a few of you from Facebook over there. If you want to join that alpha test, that's... it's great. I actually want it to be fairly large because I want it to be representative of all of you. So, uh, so we can get you access to the alpha server and, you know, you can start commenting and playing with it and just putting data in and messing with it and letting us know and we'll work together to get it to be the system that we want it to be and then very soon we'll just move it over to the live server and, uh, then there we go. It's, you know, we're off and rolling. So, check it out. Let us know. Uh, what else you got, John? Anything? I'm talking to my Tebow. Okay. How are you doing that? Oh, they, uh, they added a skill. I got an email about it. They're like, oh, yeah. You didn't get an email about that? No, I did. I was just going to let you tell the story. Well, there's not much to tell. Yeah. It uses the Amazon device, the A-Lady that, uh, that lets you talk to your Tebow. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, pause. I said, pause. And I'm like, okay, that works. My only concern is if my volume of my system is too high she can't necessarily hear me hear what I'm saying. So I'm thinking is this a feature I'm going to be using that often? Yeah. You don't know what I'm saying? I do. I mean, I mean, now I'm in left field with you, which is great. This is one of the things that I love about you because, you know, here we are in the outro to the show. I was asking perhaps if maybe there was, you know, Twitter accounts that you wanted to mention or anything. And now we've got yet another topic going. While the band's playing, which is cool. I like it. It's good. It is, it is one of the things that makes doing this show an absolute blast. Yeah, I set it up. It's not as full-featured as the Tevo Vox remote, though. In that with that thing, I can, you know, just press the voice button on it and say, hey, you know, find me all the Chevy Chase movies or whatever. And boom, it finds them all for me. Right. And so or just say the name of a TV show like I want to watch the Royal Wedding and boom, it, you know, it'll find it for you if for whatever reason, that's your thing. You know, so. So there you go. You can't do that with the skill that they added for the A-Lady this week. But I wouldn't surprise me if it gets there. Right. So. Yeah. All right. Cool. Anything else he asks with trepidation? Nope. Sure. Come on, it gets fun. All right. Well, there you go. I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank our sponsors. Of course, Eero that we mentioned during the episode MGG saves you and gets you overnight shipping for free. We have sponsors like what just happened. What did I do? I hit the wrong button. Let's try that again. Let's get the band rolling. Come on, band. Let's go. There they are. OK. We have sponsors like Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. We have sponsors like owcatmaxsales.com Barebones celebrating their 25th anniversary of BB Edit at barebones.com Very, very good stuff. Fun stuff. I like it. New sponsors coming too, which is always good. Visit our sponsors. You don't necessarily have to buy it. Go to mackeygov.com and visit them. That helps us immensely, believe it or not. They like to see that you are visiting them. So please do that, John. Anything else? I got not one, not two, but three things for you, Dave. I'm waiting with baited breath. Those three things are don't get caught. Made on them.