 The Mac Observers' Mac Keekab, episode 683 for Tuesday, November 14th, 2017. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Keekab, the show where you are going to learn at least four new things each and every time we get together, because we answer your questions, we share some tips, we share some cool stuff found, and that's how we make it to our goal. Sponsors for this episode include the new BB Edit 12 from Barebones Software at Barebones.com, Stamps.com where you can visit Stamps.com, click the microphone, enter MGG, and you get a free trial and all kinds of stuff that we'll tell you about in a minute, and Harrys.com slash MGG, where you also get a free trial and you can shave yourself with it. We'll talk about that in a few moments as well. Here, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, after a weekend in Austin, Texas, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, back here after popping in in Manhattan for a mini CES-like event here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How you doing, Mr. John F. Braun? Good. Good. Keep it warm. Yeah, I was gonna say it got colder here while we were gone. And we were only gone like five days or something. But you know, it's how it goes. Tis the season, as we say. Let's dive right in, shall we, John? We'll just get right into it. Phil has a question. He says, my AirPods, when connected with my MacBook, the audio cuts out for like a second every 10 seconds. He says, I surmise that it is my Bluetooth module in my MacBook. So yeah, I mean, it could be that there's something wrong with your Bluetooth module. It could be something wrong with your AirPods, but it could also be a conflict between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Very specifically in the MacBook. And I, you didn't say what vintage, but I think this is true for all, if not most of them. There are multiple antennas in that MacBook for 2.4 gigahertz radios. And your MacBook decides which one to use for Bluetooth and which one to use for Wi-Fi. And it will bounce that back and forth prioritizing, as I understand it, the Wi-Fi on the most, you know, on the best one for that particular connection and then shoveling Bluetooth connections off to the other 2.4 gigahertz antenna. But of course, that could cause, if that keeps happening, if Wi-Fi for some reason keeps bouncing back and forth between the two, that could cause interference, especially given the tight tolerance in terms of, you know, very little buffering and all that stuff with the AirPods so that you get near real-time sound and all of that good stuff. So my advice would be if you can jump to a 5 gigahertz radio for your Wi-Fi and see if that helps. If it does, then you know that's, you know, sort of where the problem lies. If you can't, maybe changing the Bluetooth channel or even just temporarily, just for troubleshooting sake, reorienting your MacBook so that one side of it is sort of definitively closer to your router and see, again, if that helps, that'll at least let you narrow down if this switching thing is the issue. I don't know. But that's what I think, John. What do you think? I think I'm going to tell you what Apple thinks. And Apple thinks that you should read a support article called potential sources of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth interference, which we will link to in the show notes. I just popped in there for you. Cool. And they talk about a lot of things you did. The basic problem is the 2.4 gigahertz is a mess. Well, it's crowded. Yeah. And there's all sorts of things. So your suggestion, and they hinted this too, is, you know, if you can get as many things out of there as possible, I think that's, and they mentioned some other things. Some may surprise you that also generate 2.4 other computer peripherals. Yeah. Again, it gets real crowded. So I think you have the best advice there, including repositioning things. I mean, that can never hurt, right? No. Well, I mean, it can. It can totally hurt. But that's sort of the point is just start, you know, one by one, changing things and test and see. The nice part is, of course, the same thing that's very frustrating. This happens routinely and frequently. So it's not difficult to test for, which is sort of a blessing when you're troubleshooting things, but it's frustrating when you're trying not to have to troubleshoot and just get worked on or listen to music or whatever it is you're going to do. So yeah. All right, John, you want to take us to Karsten? Yes, I will. All right, let's see. Karsten. Okay. My wife has her own travel agency business and upgraded from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 8. She used her iPhone 6 with a wired headset. And she used the lightning port for charging. With a new iPhone 8, she can only charge the phone or plug in the wired headsets. True. Question. Do you know of a way to still charge an iPhone and have a 3.5 millimeter slash lightning wired headphone connected? I tried a wireless charger, but that uses a low charge and is not enough. She does not want AirPods because they do not always connect fast enough when she wants to take a client's call and they run out of charge. She places one AirPods back in the case and takes the other one out, but it does not work for her. Really prefer a wired charge and wired headphones. I tried all sorts of adapters from Amazon. They all charge the phone, but phone calls are not routed to the headset. You can listen to music but not use it as a headset. Any advice is appreciated. And I got exactly. This is the talk of the town. When the seven came out because this is a feature that they introduced, if you will, that there's not a 3.5 millimeter jack for a headset anymore. And believe it or not. So I have one too, Dave. So I still have an analog headset and I use the adapter that came with the phone. But as pointed out, I mean, you mean a wired headset? Yes. So I have a wired headset that goes into the 3.5 millimeter to lightning adapter that then plugs into the phone and that works great. This is also an analog saying analog is is not incorrect. I just wanted to kind of get it framed. Yeah, but it's a wired wired headset. Yeah. Well, the answer is pretty simple. So I did the same thing. I bought an adapter and I'm like, well, I should just need a, you know, like a lightning splitter kind of gizmo. Sure. I saw one on Amazon and I'm like, oh, well, let's try that. And I ran into the same problem. It has to be designed very specifically to put audio through one port and power through the other. And the advice, it's pretty straightforward here. It's the Belkin lightning audio and charge rock star. I don't know what makes it a rock star. But well, maybe the fact that it does what you're asking it to do. I mean, you know, but that's it. And I think the retail from them is 40 bucks. And you may be able to get it for less elsewhere. That does it for me seven on Amazon. How much? 3307 on Amazon. Yeah. So, you know, it lets the iPhone seven kids get in on the whole, you know, needing dongles to do anything useful. Yeah. Club, right? Yeah. Well, I, well, no, I mean, I, I don't have a dongle like that. And I happily can use a wireless headset, which is what I've been using for several years. I used to use wired headsets. But when I got sick and tired of having to walk around with my phone, I like to walk around when I'm on the phone in the office. So for a while, I used to plantronics headset. And, and now, of course, I use the AirPods because they are, in that sense, the best wireless headset I've ever used. They sound good. They work well. Yeah. Not an inexpensive. Yeah, you mentioned it. That was probably the thought process with the seven. They're like, you know, hey, all you dinosaurs, stop using wired stuff. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And my last experience with the Bluetooth headset and, you know, just, I mean, we just had a Bluetooth question about problems with Bluetooth. Right. You know, I'll have to revisit it. Yeah, it works pretty well. I also, depending on which wired headset you have, you might be able to get one that has a charging port built into it. Like those Pioneer Raise headphones, they are lightning port headphones. Like that. That's the only thing that these will plug into. And in addition to that, being able to give it some really kind of smart functionality because it's got a chip in it and it's connected digitally to your your phone or your iPad. They put a little port in the cable that you can plug a lightning cable into for charging purposes only. So I can plug these headphones in and and still charge my phone or charge my iPad. I was, you know, I was using them to raise on the plane last night. And it's they're great. They sound charged. You know what? The only thought that I have about that, Dave. Yes. Is it if someone like Pioneer could build something like that? Couldn't Apple have made their adapter have a charging port in it? Sure. Technically, they could have. But of course. Yeah. They could make a product. Right. Right. Yeah, they could have. Yeah. Yeah. But they just, you know, I mean, there's a lot in that little thing, right? There's a little DAC in there and and everything. So yeah, I remember we did. Yeah, I think it came or was available for pre-order. I think at the last CES and then I didn't pre-order it. Yeah. Yeah, it's another solution. Yeah, she may want to give those a try. Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes and stuff. Cool. In the last episode, we had some conversation. I shared my my crazy theory about doing a wipe and restore on your iPhone as effectively a way to clean caches and functionally as a way to get your iPhone running a little more efficiently and battery life would be improved. And sure enough, many, many of you have written in and said that that worked. So I'm glad that that we went down this path together because that's important. However, some of you have not had it work until you did something else. And listener Scott wrote in and he said, I tried it, but it didn't seem to make a difference. He said, but then I decided to calibrate my battery. And he said, but it only lasted six minutes after hitting one percent before shutting down. So essentially calibrating the battery in this sense, we're talking about just letting it run down until it literally turns the phone off and then plug it in and charge it all the way back up. We've had several of you. In fact, we mentioned it in the last episode where it went, you know, almost an hour before dying from one. And that calibration matters. But even in Scott's case, where it only lasted six minutes before hitting one percent, he says now after doing both of those things, he says, my battery life is significantly better. And he says, my Bluetooth problems have almost gone away. So that doesn't make any sense correlating with these other two things. So it might be something different, although it might not. Your Bluetooth problems might have been something where the wipe and restore helped. We've certainly seen that in the past. So and he said he sent us that report after five days. He said his battery life is now very usable, maybe as good as iOS 10. He said, I haven't hit 20 percent in five days. And I used to always hit it. So and in Scott, you're not alone. We've heard from other folks, too. And for this is the crazy thing about experimenting, you know, you don't know until you have a control group. I routinely would let my phone die, get down to one percent and then just let it die. And then, OK, I'll plug it in. So my phone was already calibrated in that sense before I did this wipe and restore. So I did both things and I saw this great increase in battery life. So I think certainly at least those two things are related to this with iOS 11. Perhaps there's yet another factor that we're not aware of. But but I did want to share that. So thanks, Scott, for for for chiming in with us on this. Any thoughts on that, John, before we. I'm almost certain that at some point in the past, Apple still has a section on their side. I don't have it in front of me right now, but I think in the past, they used to suggest. Yep. On a support page that you calibrate your battery, you know, bring it up, down and up. Well, that was true with the MacBooks. I don't think they've ever suggested that for iOS devices, but I could have missed it. You're you're certainly more in tune with knowledge based articles than me. Yeah, I thought that you could be. But it's funny because their position now, I think, is pretty much that you shouldn't need to do it. Unnecessary. That's right. Yeah, I'm not. I still do it right now. And clearly, it's a good thing. I mean, even if it doesn't help actual battery life, just running it all the way down so that you at least get a accurate measurement is helpful. But but what I like is that so if you try it and then all of a sudden you see that the apparent capacity, the battery and milliamp hours, which several utilities can report has gone up, then you can pat yourself on the back and say, boy, I'm smart. I calibrated it and I made the battery better. Right. That's right. Which is like what I think that happened once. And then I'm like, OK, well, I've convinced myself that this is a good thing to do. Right. That's right. Yes, of course. And it can be like Lisa's phone was it. I think that we still need a new battery for it. It's a it's a plus sized phone. So it had twenty seven hundred milliamp hour, you know, native factory battery life. When I plugged it into coconut battery, it said that it was seventeen hundred milliamp hour capacity. So way down. And I did the whole deal with it. Both things, letting the battery run all the way down, come back up and the. You know, the the wipe and restore. And that brought it up to, I think, like twenty two hundred or something. I mean, it's not great. It's not twenty seven. But, you know, way above the seventeen that it was reporting. So it definitely helped. The guideline pretty much across devices is after a year, you should have about 80 percent of the maximum capacity. That's right. Yeah. Otherwise, something may be wrong. Yep. And Apple may replace your battery for you. Correct. Correct. They've done it for me at least once. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the OS, I don't know if it still reports it, but yeah, or it'll say a service battery. So on the MacBook, yes, a service. Oh, yeah, the phone. Yeah, the phone won't. But but I think that same 80 percent is if it's in warranty and your battery has less than 80 percent of its factory capacity left. I think that's that's generally the rule. But if somebody out there knows better, please let us know. Of course, feedback at MacKicab.com is is the best place to to do that. Mm hmm. Despite the shenanigans of the cable guy earlier, Dave, I think I did hear you write in that you said feedback at MacKicab.com. I said feedback at MacKicab.com unless you're a premium listener in which case premium at MacKicab.com is the email address that you can use because you're taking the extra step in supporting us directly. In fact, I want to thank this week's premium subscribers, John. Those that had contributed, we had many, many. In fact, Brian D did a one time $40 contribution in David. Why did a one time $100 contribution? Thank you to you, too. On the monthly plan, 10 bucks a month, James B, John G, James C, Joe S, Ari L, Paul M and JC. And then on the biannual, twenty five dollar every six month plan, Robert S, Neil L, Scott G, Brian W, Art K, Chris F, Daniel M and Daniel W doing 50 bucks every six months. Thank you so much to all of you. If you want to learn more about our premium program and all of that good stuff and you want to support us directly, we certainly would appreciate it. You can visit MacKicab.com slash premium. It is not mandatory, of course, but for those of you that can and would like to, we certainly appreciate it between that and our sponsors. That's what it takes to to put this show together for you every week. So it you you are an integral part of that. And thank you. I can't say thank you enough. So I don't know what else to say other than thanks. Yeah, good. Thank you for your support. Yeah. Hey, you know, something I wanted to talk about. We've been talking about High Sierra a lot and and it made some changes in terms of compatibility and apps and all that. And so it's forced a lot of us to sort of stop and think and perhaps do those upgrades that we haven't done for many, many OS versions. And in Microsoft office comes up on that. The Adobe software comes up because that was a change from Sierra to High Sierra. Many versions of those things just got got cut out because of the way High Sierra is sort of addressing libraries and that sort of thing right now. FileMaker for me was that one. And we have been running here. We've been running FileMaker 11 for many years, largely because the file format changed from 11 to 12 many moons ago. We are now at FileMaker 16 and we took High Sierra as a reason to really dig in and and just, of course, upgrade everything internally here to FileMaker 16. We have custom databases that that we wrote for our Mac Observer contacts and for Backbeat Media, really, our entire CRM system is something we built from scratch. It does in addition to all of our customer tracking, it does all of our invoicing and billing and like everything. The entire business runs on it. And and so we migrated that stuff up to FileMaker 12, which was amazingly smooth. It took almost no time at all. But now that we're on FileMaker 12, there's some really interesting things that that can happen. Sorry, did I say we upgraded to FileMaker 12? We could have. FileMaker 12 won't run on High Sierra either. FileMaker 13 and later does. We upgraded all the way to FileMaker 16. FileMaker 12 is the file format that we're on. But the version of FileMaker that we're on is FileMaker 16. And they've done some really cool things with it, John. I've been impressed. One thing that they they've done is on the server side. So it they've like the mobile experience with FileMaker is stellar. And they've really upgraded things both in the the the mobile client on on iOS, as well as the server software. Now they've got this whole PDF engine built into the server so you can create PDFs from your mobile apps. You can sign PDFs and create that happening inside of FileMaker. All kinds. I mean, it's it's crazy how well that works now. And it's just smooth. For those of us that create our own FileMaker databases, they've added two things that really blew me away. When you're trying to edit for those of us and I know we have a bunch of listeners who who create FileMaker stuff here. When you're editing inside of the layouts of FileMaker, you have a lot of objects like you have like like like literal objects on the in the layout like a label and maybe a field. And then maybe you would have a graphical object to have your background color and things like that just to make it look nice. And it used to be really difficult if you needed to kind of dig in and click with the mouse just to find the right spot. They've added two commands, hide objects on top and hide all other objects. And it doesn't hide them from being visible in the layout. It just hides them while you're editing so you can really get in and see what you want. It's one of those things that you understand what I'm saying, John, where, you know, you're trying to like edit something and you can't quite click because something else is there or maybe overlapping it and you just it's frustrating. So now you can tell it. Nope, get rid of this other stuff just while I'm editing. I know it sounds silly, but man, it has made a huge difference for us in terms of what it's designing. Yeah, what you're telling me is that stuff gets in the way. Stuff gets in the way. Yeah, I'd rather not see. So yeah, no. So that's a yeah, a nice tweak to. So this is when you're designing the database when you when you're designing the layouts for the database. That's right. That's sort of the visual aspect of it and there the the web engine works really well. Now, with with FileMaker Server 16, it takes your layouts that you built for the desktop client and like it's always sorted on this, but now it really makes them work well on the web. Like no difference whatsoever. In most cases that we've tried, which is great because then it, you know, you can scale way faster. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the whole promise of web services. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you, you know, we I used FileMaker Go 16 on my iPhone the last time we were at PEPCOM, John. And and I tell you this now, I wouldn't tell the person this that I that I walked up to, but I'm walking up to the booth and I couldn't remember the name of the person that I normally deal with. I know I knew they weren't there. But as I was going up to the booth, I wanted to say, hey, I'm Dave from MacKicab and I normally talk to. You know, so and so it's a pleasure to meet you, but I couldn't remember so and so's name. And so in like the 10 seconds that I was walking up to the booth, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, launched FileMaker Go, it authenticates with at that point it was touch ID because I didn't have an iPhone 10 to do face ID, but it authenticates with touch ID. I typed into the search field, the name of the company, whatever it was, saw it come up, saw the person's name, put my phone in my pocket, as I was saying, hey, I'm Dave. I normally talk with Tim, but you know, it's a pleasure to meet you and it was perfectly smooth, really easy over even just over a data connection. Really impressive that a lot of the stuff they've done here and they've got if you want to if you don't want to have to worry about hosting your own thing, they've got FileMaker Cloud now, we'll put a link in the show notes to that that's their own service. They partner with Amazon Web Services to do it. And then they've also got Custom App Academy where they'll teach you how to do these things. I'll tell you, you do not have to be a programmer to create like a usable functional database custom inside FileMaker. Most of the backbeat media database, I coded up some of the crazy stuff that we do, but it's not really coding. It's more just saying, you know, do this with that and a lot of clicking, but Greg Snyder who was, you know, one of my co-founders at Backbeat Media, he laid out our database. He's not a programmer by any stretch and he was just like, yeah, I want this field here and this field here and that there. And it's, boom. Can you do SQL if you wanted to or that's what they do? You know, it, no, I think maybe there's a way to do SQL like stuff. You know, like queries, but you can do queries. Yes, you can do queries in FileMaker's own way. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so like, so they have their own language, you know, some, you know, select whatever from whatever, where whatever equals whatever and, you know, links to the tables and then you get. Yes, but you don't have to say select. You just kind of what you what you do is you create a series of linked find requests. So yes, it's that, but it, but you don't have to understand like the semantics of SQL to do that. That's sort of the beauty of it. So they have their own the textual language, but you're not you're not writing it out. You're you you can do it graphically. You can say, OK, I want to find this and this and then open a new find window and, you know, omit that from this. And it becomes this very visual thing. So you don't you don't actually think about the fact that you're doing this and creating this very complex find statement. And the cool part is after you do it and you do it all visually, you can say, all right, save this find. You're good to go. I you know, we keep looking at different CRMs and stuff and FileMaker is the one that that comes around for us every time because it's so flexible. Anybody here can, you know, edit stuff and and put things in and really manipulate it the way we want. Dave, guess what? The answer is, yes. How do I know this? Because Brian Monroe in our chat room. Yes, find it. Mekikeb.com slash stream. Found something at FileMaker saying, oh, yeah, you want to do a SQL query? Here you go. Oh, yeah, I knew. I knew I had heard something about it. But yeah, SQL is a standard that everybody. Well, SQL is a standard for dealing with databases. Right. People like it because it's standard because it's standard. Yeah, absolutely. But no, I much prefer, you know, I mean, back in my Microsoft development days, visual tools rock because. Yeah, and FileMaker's always been this way. I mean, for, you know, whatever, 20 years or 30 years, it's crazy. They really, it's a great piece of software. I can't recommend it enough. It's been around forever. They've been around forever. Yeah, they're a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple now, but that's not how they started life. But that's how they are now. But they run their own thing. Anyway, I just wanted to take a minute and kind of talk about FileMaker because it's it's something very important to me. And I know we get a lot of email from folks about FileMaker. So I figured it's time to maybe, you know, roll this into the show and see where it goes. So yeah. Cool. All right, John, you want to take us to Edward? Edward's got a good one. I'm not going to laugh. No. Edward says, my wife dropped her iPhone 6 in the toilet about six months ago and borrowed another iPhone 6 from a co-worker. She's now getting her iPhone 10 and wants to return the iPhone 6 back to her co-worker. However, she has some correspondence in the messages that she does not want anyone to see. I'm not sure if he means the messages app. Probably messages app or could be mail. Yeah, but. Or could be email. OK, yeah. All right, but I think what I'm going to say applies to both cases. She's very paranoid about someone being able to get into it, even if I do a clean install on the phone. Is there a way to do something similar to a secure erase on the Mac for the iPhone? I do have a copy of IMAZING, if that helps, not helps, helps them. You guys are amazing. Thanks for your help. No, Ed, you're amazing. My reply is as follows days. So for a device that uses RAM rather than a rotational hard drive, the concept of a secure race, and my interpretation is secure race. At least as far as disutility is concerned, if you try to run disutility is when you erase a rotational drive, there are a number of increasingly complex steps that you can take. So one is, well, just wipe out that. You know, of all the stuff on here and and ship it. Thing is, all the data is left over. And if somebody knows what they're doing, they could retrieve it. So another option is, I think it'll write over every piece of the drive with ones or zeros, or it gets more complex, you know, the different patterns and things like that. That's a secure race for rotational hard drive, Dave. Magnetic hard drive, that makes sense. But for RAM devices, it did. Because of the way they arrange data. And let me see if you're with me on this, or at least SSDs. And I would assume the iPhone as well. The way the data is laid out, the erase in the device itself, I think, is going to do it for you. That is, well, it either is going to do it for you or isn't. But you could, you could attempt to do something along the lines of a secure race to an SSD. It wouldn't actually do what you want. It's not going to go and write cells to... There's no way to address individual cells, memory cells inside an SSD, the way that you can address individual sectors on a rotational drive. So you could say, go right, let's say you've got a 100 gig drive just for the sake of argument. You could say, with a rotational drive, you could say write a 100 gig file of all zeros. And when you do that, it's going to fill out the drive, right? If you do that on an SSD, things start getting a little weird. And you won't necessarily overwrite everything the way the drive is. So there is no way to secure a race in SSD. And... Well, I'll... Some SSDs at one point would actually have a special command saying, hey, can you do something called a secure race? It was totally outside of the OS. But I've seen mention of some that will do that. But it has to be specific to very few SSDs. Yeah, and it's bad for an SSD to, you know, just write nothing because you get a limited number of write cycles for every memory cell. Well, I think a lot of utilities, if you try to do a secure race, this is a SSD you really don't need. Yeah, it's not going to do anything. Yeah. But in the case of an iOS device, Dave, there is no option to do a secure race. No. And you could wipe your phone and restore it and give it to this other person. And if they really dug and really knew what they were doing, they might, might stumble across some of your old data. Now, two things. Number one, all your data is encrypted anyway. So if you wipe it, the encryption or the decryption key for the old data isn't out there. So I don't think you're going to get anything off of it. And number two, there's really no other way other than to, like, take a hammer to that phone and just smash it. So it's... Yeah, you don't have to do that. So there are two articles that I'll refer you to. One is an article from Apple. I'm not actually entirely thrilled by it. Well, I don't think it tells you everything, Dave. But it's an article that we'll link to call what to do before you sell or give away your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. And it goes on. Use these steps to remove your personal information from a device, even if you don't have it anymore. The thing that you want to keep in mind with an iOS device, Dave, is that... So once you tell it, and at some point you'll get a step saying erase all the data on this device. So once you do that, the data's gone, right? Correct. So it's a way for a normal individual to get it back because it erases it or, you know, removes the directory entries, but there's no tool that I'm aware of for your average person to pick up the phone then and say, oh, I just restored all your data. Right. And just to be clear, because there's been some discussion in the chat room here with Brian Monroe, yes, your data will likely still remain on the device, but it was encrypted when it was put there and the key is not there. I know I said that before, but I just wanted to say it again, just to make it clear. So somebody could get it, but if they don't have the key, because they don't, and you don't either, because you've wiped the device clean, you're not going to get the data. I mean, I verified this. The last time I traded in my phone is, I went through the steps they told me, and I erased everything, and then I pretended that there was a new phone, and I started going through it, and it's like, yeah, I mean, the phone is like, who am I? I don't know who I am. I'm a clean slate. But here's things to keep in mind with an Apple device, and you and I actually went through this in some fashion a day of a while ago. You want to make sure that you disconnect it from the Apple ecosphere. So I wouldn't worry about the data. I would worry that you have not unassociated it with various Apple services, and they tell you how to do a lot of this, like unpair with your Apple Watch. Log out of iCloud. Log out of iTunes in the App Store. Now, the Apple article doesn't mention this, Dave, but iMazing has an article also called Safely Wipe Your iPhone or iPad Before Trading and Reselling it, and they have an interesting addition that I think it's worth pointing to their article because they specifically say, and log out of Find My iPhone. Hmm, because you and I ran into this, Dave, when I sold you one of my old machines, I had not gone through all the proper steps to disassociate my Mac from the Apple ecosphere, and all of a sudden one day I'm running iCloud and Find My iPhone, and it said Lucas's MacBook Pro, and I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. Yeah, right. Because it was the machine that I sold you, and I guess I didn't either log it out of Find My Mac or I didn't kick it out of my iCloud database, so it still appeared. Now what they say, the way to solve that problem, so I couldn't be evil and wrongly accessed, this stuff is change your iCloud password, maybe when you're switching things in and out. So even though I could see his machine, assuming he selected a password that wasn't the same as mine, I wouldn't be able to do anything. You couldn't, yeah, right, right. That's exactly right, yeah. Cool. So I would not worry about it. These two resources follow the steps and... Yeah, I agree, yeah. Once you erase all settings and data, no one's going to get anything off that phone. And even before that, they might not get anything unless they have the password. But yeah, settings, general, reset, erase all content and settings. And the nice part is, at least with iOS 11, when you do that now, John, it'll tell you to sign out and find my iPhone when you do that. It'll also ask you if you want to make a last kind of final backup, too, which is handy. So, yeah. Yes, yes. Alright, Larry, while we're in file system geekiness here, we will go to Larry because there's some things that have changed with APFS. Larry says, you guys are mentioning snapshots, and that's the first time I'd heard about them. He says, I'm trying to partition my drive. Oh, never mind. He had a separate issue. But he was talking about repartitioning drives and with APFS. And he said it was getting hung up, you know, snapshot X out of 13, where X is the number of the snapshot. He said, so that it's making, he said, so that is making it take a lot longer than I have time for. So, snapshots and really repartitioning with APFS is, everything changes now because with APFS, you don't carve out specific space on the drive. You just carve out one blob of space for APFS and it's shared amongst all your volumes. So, there's no fixed sizes on partitions and it's just an important thing to remember. And I know we've talked about it on the show here before, but if you go into disc utility and you go to repartition something, really all you're doing is saying, take this blob of storage here and add another volume to it. And you can say, I want this volume to have, you know, a minimum reserve size of X or a maximum reserve size of X, but it doesn't force you to actually carve out physical space anymore, which is handy because you can have things kind of, you know, malleable and move space around. Have you done any repartitioning, John, with high Sierra? Nothing outside of it converting my volume over. Sure, yeah, of course. Yeah, so it's interesting. And I know this is going to keep coming up. So, I just kind of wanted to reinforce that message. So, when Larry's question came in, it was like, yeah, let's just say it again. So, I'm trying to think of the right analogy to use. You know, think about it like this. This is going to be crazy. It's not going to be my final analogy on this, but it's going to be my first one. Think about that you have a bag, okay? And it's a watertight bag, right? So, you could fill that bag up with water. If you take, and that would be your one volume, right? And so, if you fill it half full of water, will your volumes half full? If you go all the way up, it's all the way full. And we don't go half empty because, you know, we're optimistic dudes here. If you put another bag inside that, that bag's not going to really take up any room until you start putting water in it, right? It's just sharing the space of the first bag that it's inside. That's what's happening with your storage with APFS and partitions is you can put lots of little bags inside the one big bag, they can all be the same, they can all grow to the full size of the bag. It just depends on how much water is in each one. The big bag's still only going to hold whatever the maximum amount of water that it could hold is, but you could partition it out into little ones and they don't talk to each other because they're all watertight. Does that make sense? I know it's crazy, but, you know, I like my extended analogy. I just came back from Texas. That's the land of the extended analogy. Well, I was doing what you were talking about today in that I double-bagged my groceries. See? There you go. I put one bag inside the other and it took up nearly the same amount of space. Correct. Not quite because it's inside of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the second bag was kind of like a partition. Yeah, and you could have put a third bag, like two inside one big one. But at some point, at least with bags, physics is just... How many times can you fold a piece of paper? As many as you like. No, I think it's eight. Folding it and then folding it again? I think the limit is eight. It's physics. It depends on how big the piece of paper is. No. There is a limit. It doesn't matter how big the piece of paper is. I see what you're saying. I think the limit with today's paper is eight folds. Maybe it's less. It depends on how thick the paper is. No, it doesn't. Oh, it doesn't, really? No, I don't think it does. Yeah, it's a head scratcher. But anyway, speaking of head scratchers, I think Alan has something. We're going to take a minute though, John. I mean, this is good. Don't get me wrong. I like where we're going here. But I do want to... I want to talk about our sponsors. If that's okay. All right. Our first sponsor today is Harry's. We're at harrys.com. You can get a free trial set from Harry's. This is a $13 value. You get it for free. 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Or just, you know, kind of let it go because it doesn't matter. I don't have to go anywhere and see people generally. You folks don't know what I look like when I do the show. So I could be a hairy mess, but I'm not. Because I really like the way Harry's makes me feel like it. It feels good while I'm shaving. And it feels good after I shave. I mean, it's so smooth. So perfect. I really it has changed me. I used to be an electric razor guy for decades. I was an electric razor guy. Started trying this hairy stuff. I don't even I think the battery of my electric razor is dead now. I mean, I guess I haven't charged it, you know, years. So you got to check this out. Go to harrys.com slash MGG. That's where you're going to get the free trial offer. $13 value. If you're doing some holiday shopping, you can get it done early because they just released their special edition holiday sets that make great gifts. They got a button for gifts on their site. Go check that out. Really cool stuff. 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They've now got an outline view there for improved navigation. You can preview things right inside BB edit windows. If you're editing HTML, they've got a new text extraction feature that extends the searching capabilities and allows you to locate and collect search results into a single document. It's amazing that they can find ways to continue to improve this and then show them to us. It's like, well, I didn't know I needed that except I need it. It's a very Apple way of doing things for a text editor. You got to check it out. Go to barebones.com. Our thanks to barebone software and all the great people there for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor for today is stamps.com where you can go to stamps.com. You go there, you click on the little microphone in the upper right-hand corner of the page. I think it's in the upper right-hand corner. And you're going to enter in MGG. And what that gets you is a four-week free trial of stamps.com. It comes with supplies, postage, and a digital scale. This is the time of year when we're all shipping stuff like crazy, business, personal, all of it. You get discounts. This is the time of year to check out stamps.com. And I've been totally impressed with it, really blown away. I had heard about it, of course, before they came on board as a sponsor, but I'd never really checked them out. Man, you can ship anything. If you can do it at the post office, you can do it here. The nice part is you don't have to wait in line, right? You can. If you like to wait in line, you can go to the post office and wait in line, but you could bring your stamps.com, printed postage, you get the discount. And if you don't want to wait in line, you just, you know, drop it off there. Our post office, probably like yours, has a place where once everything's prepaid, you can just drop it off or you can have them come pick it up for free. You can do it all from your desk any time of day, literally any kind of postage or whatever you can print at the post office or you can get at the post office. You can print it home, including just regular, you know, stamps for your letters. Actually, you just print the letter. It has the address and the postage right there on it. So you got to do this. Check it out. It's the right time of year. Just visit stamps.com, click on the microphone, enter the code MGG. And that gets you the four week trial. It includes postage and a digital scale. Before you do anything else, just go do that. It's really, really great. We've been using it here, not just to send letters, but also to put postage on packages, all sorts of stuff, certified mail, whatever you want. It really, really works. Check it out. Click on the microphone, type in MGG, and you're going to be blown away, just like I have been. Our thanks to stamps.com for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to Alan? Alan's got a disk-based mystery, but we're going to solve it and learn something, maybe. All right. I use the utility program Mountain to manage my external disk drives attached to my laptop. It enables me to dismount all external disks with a single click when I want to go mobile. Cool. Since upgrading the High Sierra, Mountain has been notifying me of the mounting and unmounting of disks I've never seen before and do not understand. Pre-boot, recovery, VM, Watson at Snapdash 704845, and so on. Watson, by the way, is the name of my internal SSD. Hmm, what are these disks? And why is the system mounting and dismounting them? I'm going to tell you exactly what they are. Well, first, I wasn't quite sure. So you're going to have to maybe go to the terminal or disutility, but I prefer terminals for this. But my reflection, Dave, is that this does something very similar to something that I use called Harburg Raller, and that's kind of how I knew what some of this was. And it's also a tool that tells you about disk mounting and unmounting events via the OS or sometimes installers get sneaky, Dave. I still see some things do this. And OS things, like every now and then, it says, yeah, I'm just mounting recovery just because. And it's like, OK, that's cool. And then it's like, yeah, I unmounted it, or yeah, I'm mounting EFI. I'm like, OK, which is the firmware. Because sometimes it updates it. So it's kind of neat to see what's happening behind the scenes that the OS is looking out for you or updating itself or self-healing, if you will. But if you go to the terminal and you type disk-util-list. Well, disk-util, of course, is disk-utility. And then list, it's going to list every disk and partition thereof, Dave. And now these things kind of make sense here. So pre-boot, I think that's something new in High Sierra, Dave, or APFS. Recovery, OK. Well, I just talked about that, right? Well, recovery is your recovery partition, which you normally get into and has all sorts of handy utilities by holding down Command-R. VM, Dave, I'm going to bet dollars to donuts. Is virtual memory? I don't know why it's exposed here. What do you think, or virtual machine? I don't know. Yeah, I don't. Let me see how big it is. Hold on, let me see how big it says it is. Yeah. Let's see. All right, it is right now showing VM. All right, so on my Mac Mini, it's showing VM as 1.1 gigabytes. That kind of sounds like virtual memory. Oh, wait a minute. OK, so it used to be right. It used to be that in Sierra and prior, virtual memory was created by way of creating actual files. Like the OS would start using files and say, OK, I need a gig more of virtual memory. So let's write a file that's a gig. And then we can use that one. And if we need more, we'll create another one. If we need less, we'll start deleting them. With APFS, based on our bags and water scheme, it's way better to treat it like Unix likes to treat virtual memory, which is its own partition. But because we can use another bag, it just throws another bag in and says, put the virtual memory here. Keep it compartmentalized. And that looks like it's exactly what it's doing, because I've got the podcast machine here is a Sierra machine. So it still does it the old way. So when we're talking about this, I'm like, oh, dude, I'm not seeing it. And then of course it was like, oh, yeah, ding, ding, ding. Got to look at a high Sierra machine. So I SSH'd into my iMac downstairs. And I'm seeing the same thing. I've got 5.4 gigs of virtual memory or VM, which I assume is virtual memory on my APFS. Well, it's definitely is, because so I'm looking with iStat menus and it shows my swap memory is, well, it's using 5.20 out of 1 gig, 5.20 megabytes out of 1 gigabyte. But it is 1 gigabyte. Yeah, there you go. So it's absolutely what that VM is. That makes sense. And that'll shrink and grow as it needs to, and it can do it inside the container now, makes all the sense in the world. Yeah, it's actually this machine. Okay, this machine has 8 gigs. So I can understand it having a 1 gig swap partition. Oh, dude, my computer downstairs has 32 gigs of RAM and it's using 5.4 gigs of swap. There's still issues with the way Mac OS manages RAM, but we won't get into that. Well, I think Unix in general always likes to have VM, just... Yeah, oh no. It needs some level of it. Correct. Yeah. Remember, I think there were some crazy people in the past that said, you know, you might disable virtual memory and just run everything in RAM and it's like, ah, Unix doesn't like it when you do that. That's been my experience, because I think when I tried that, it was, it wasn't pretty. No, but... The OS reacts un... Unpleasantly. The OS gets angry. Yeah, it does. Yeah. All right, so I think that's the answer. So a handy little thing to see... And it also shows other attached volumes. So it's also showing my external backup and it's like, oh yeah, there's, you know, EFI and boot OS X and back up. Sure. So it shows my backup drive as well. Just so everybody knows, though, that, you know, because we had another question about somebody was saying, oh, I see this pre-boot volume. What is that? Oh. Just so, kind of, because we like to know what normal looks like, I'm going to assume my machine is normal because it's not, you know, failing on me at the moment. My APFS volume, my boot volume has four partitions on it. The top one, five, if you count APFS container scheme, but that's not a partition, that's just sort of the thing. And then it's got four volumes. Let's not call them partitions because they're not partitions. They're volumes. And there's four APFS volumes. One is the actual, you know, the drive that I think of it as, which for me is half Nelson because, of course, that's the name of Miles Davis song. No, I name all my hard drives after that. All right. And then there's three others that are hidden from me, except in this disc util list. And they are probably the same as what you have, John. Pre-boot, recovery, and VM. Yes, sir. And so that's, okay, the fact that you're seeing that too, now we know four APFS volumes on your boot drive is normal. And specifically pre-boot recovery and VM are there. It's totally okay. Don't freak out if you see pre-boot and you're good to go. So, yeah. All right, that's good. Well, in this case, you shouldn't freak out if you see pre-boot data. Correct. Yeah. If it starts appearing on your drive, like if it starts appearing on your desktop, that's not necessarily a good thing. I don't want to mention that because I did have that happen. And I think it was lack of proper cleanup code in a high Sierra installer because I had a folder on my root drive, Dave, called pre-boot. And it's like, that shouldn't be there. Or I shouldn't be able to see this. Right. Right. So I threw it away. And now some may say, that's crazy, John. What are you doing? But I'm like, you don't belong there. No, I'm sure it was left over because normally the installer will copy a lot of things to the local hard drive and then reboot and then do something clever. But sometimes it doesn't clean up its mess. Right. And I think that's what some of us have seen. Yep. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Oh, and then Snapshot. So last thing, of course, Snapshot is a new feature in APFS. So when he saw a volume at Snap, I don't think it was saying, oh, Snap, I think it was saying, no. I'm, you know, here's a couple of Snapshot partitions, I guess, or volumes. They're just trying to think what to call them. The thing is I've run this utility under. Hi, Sierra. And if you do first aid at some point, it'll say, yeah, I'm just checking out these Snapshot things just to make sure that they're consistent or they look reasonable. And that's the only time I've ever had a Snapshot made visible to me, Dave, is through a disutility first aid. I don't know about you. Yeah. No, they, I'm looking to see if there's, there's no real way to manage these Snapshots that I've found. But hopefully somebody, maybe Apple, will write a utility where we can actually start, you know, managing them from like a backup. And I'm almost certain at one point, maybe it was creating one or doing something or changing the state of one, I'm almost certain at some point, Dave, also at the root of my hard drive, and you might be asking yourself why you keep looking at the root of your hard drive, and it's like because I can. Because we're geeks. Yeah. But I saw a folder called like com.apple.something.snapshot, but it had the circle with the line through it, which means, uh-uh, you can't get in here. And sure enough, you know, I double clicked on it, and it's like, you don't have permissions to get into that. And it's like, what are you talking about? It's my computer, man. So I don't know why that happened. Maybe it had been a permissions or visibility or something bug. But I saw at one point something, a folder that looked like it contained snapshots. And it was somewhat visible to me. Yeah. So Alex is saying, uh, he posted a video on Facebook. And to be fair, I haven't caught up on everything on Facebook since my travels here. But, um, but he's saying, uh, in, in the video, the guy installed a bunch of stuff and then ran, uh, booted to the recovery recovery partition and did like a time machine style restore to choose the snapshot to bring up. And it went, it rolled everything all the way back, came back up almost instantly, but was, you know, where things had been prior so that that's how these snapshots can be used. Um, and Alex is saying he could choose for more than one snapshot. So we gotta go watch that video. We'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. That's great. Thanks, Alex. But at this point, snapshots are kind of an internal mystery feature in that I, I, I don't. Yeah. I have no, I don't know how to say, like, take a snapshot right now. Um, but yeah. Oh, wait, no, no. Can you? I mean, it may sound like we're babbling incoherently here, but, but actually this is part of our strategy folks. Right. Yes. But I'm, but I'm curious where we're going. Yeah. Well, no, I think we had someone mentioned to us that this utility has additional goodies. He's saying from the terminal. Yes. The word additional. I don't know. Commands. So we'll, we'll dig into it. We'll find it. Yeah. It still talks about journals. I'm looking at the. Yeah. I don't see anything. I just typed discutil space APFS on the, on the command line. And I'm not seeing anything about snapshots there either. So we'll, we'll dig into it. We'll follow up on another show. That's, that's good. Keeps this, keeps things interesting. We do have a bunch of cool stuff found to go through though. So, uh, let's see, let's see if we can get through this. I think we can. Uh, starting with listener mark who says he's got two things for us. Cool stuff. Found number one beyond compare. He says, I found this gem a few years back when I needed to migrate files from one server to a replacement. And I wanted to check the outcome to make sure everything made the move beyond compare compares and syncs folders. It compares and merges text files. It works across local disc servers, FTP servers inside of zip files, inside of subversion repositories, et cetera. Says licenses are available for single or multiple users. Their trial period, at least some time ago he says before he purchased the license was for 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days, which allowed for a thorough shakedown. So very cool. We will, uh, we will put a link to beyond compare there in the, uh, in the show notes. That's, I'd never heard of that one. That's pretty cool, man. So thanks for sharing that. And then, uh, and then cool stuff found number two is volume control. He says, uh, again, it's still listener mark hence number two. Uh, I recently bought a Raspberry Pi three and configured it as an airplay receiver. It says a topic for another time changing the airplay volume was frustrating. He says, as I needed to get focused to itunes rather than just use the volume controls on my IMAX keyboard enter volume control. An installer is available and you can use the command key as a modifier to change the volume in itunes while not affecting your computer's speaker volume. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Very, very cool. I like it. It's good. Good, good, good. Yeah. Moving along, John. Mm hmm. Okay. Uh, and then we move on to Steven. We talked about VPNs recently. We actually have two cool stuffs found. Uh, Steven brings us to, uh, he says air VPN. He said, uh, I'm trying to think of where we get to here, but the, but the, but uh, oh yeah. He says, I choose to use your VPN. What I like about it is that I can choose which port and protocol to use. Commonly public Wi-Fi hotspots will block VPNs. He says, but I can generate a config, for example, using TCP port 443, which of course, for those of you who don't know, is the port that all of your web, uh, encrypted web traffic, all the HTTPS traffic goes over. So if you've got your VPN running on that port, chances are people aren't going to block that because they're going to want to let you browse secure website. Uh, he says, I have a config for the very exceptional lockdown Wi-Fi hotspots, even on TCP port 80, which is where non-encrypted web traffic goes. He says, uh, these configs are easy to set up and they work over open VPN and are designed for massive range of OSs. So air VPN.org is his VPN of choice. So that's pretty cool. I like the idea of running a VPN on, um, on port 443. On standard port. Or standard port. Yeah, just non-standard for a VPN. But, um, but, and, and just to be clear, even though he's talking about running these things on the, the HTTPS, which is encrypted web port and, and HTTP, which is the non-encrypted web port, all the VPN traffic is encrypted. He's just using these ports because, uh, the hope is that these, you know, even people that are blocking VPNs aren't, aren't blocking web surfing. So, yeah. If the admins any good, they'll figure it out. Well, they could do deep packet inspection. Yeah. Exactly. If they're looking at the contents and they're like, oh, that's, that's an open VPN. That doesn't look like traffic that should be in the support. So, uh, right, right. Uh, Walter also is here and, uh, was talking about VPNs. He said, uh, I wanted to add a MULVAD, M-U-L-L-V-A-D dot net to the mix of VPNs you mentioned. It is not based in the U.S. and it is very privacy oriented. They're based in Sweden, but they have servers all over the world that you can connect with. For some reason, he says, I like to have a non-U.S. option tinfoil hat time. For total anonymity, he says you can even pay by cash in the mail in any currency, which is awesome for getting rid of those extra euros, pounds, or Australian dollars you may have picked up on vacations. He says it's a little wacky to mail cash to Sweden with nothing but an account number. Seems dicey perhaps, which is maybe he says why I like it. It's kind of a dirty thrill and works like a charm. They have their own app for Mac and Windows and Ubuntu Linux. He says, uh, I think they just rolled one for Fedora Linux too. You can connect with, you can also connect with an open VPN client. So very, very cool. I like this stuff. It's crazy. Uh, mailing cash to Sweden, John, for your VPN. I feel like maybe they should use, uh, Bitcoin too, although maybe they do PayPal. Come on. Oh, PayPal is trackable, dude. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that is the, uh, one nice thing about cash. Correct. Oh, as far as we know, it's not. They accept Bitcoin. So you can do it that way too. Yeah. Okay. As far as we know, cash is not trackable. Well, unless you consider the magnetic inks inside that, uh, RF receivers can pick up all your, Right. Out and about, but I don't know anything about that. And it certainly would suggest that that's even being done. That's correct. That's right. Um, all right. Oh, now I lost where we were. I had a roll going, but then I got into it. Um, yeah, you know, I am, uh, I have been a fan of the new breed of escort radar detectors. Uh, and we've talked about it on the show a couple of times before I wanted to throw a new one out the, the ones I've talked about in the past are they're not inexpensive at all models in the, you know, five to $700 range. And the reason I like those, uh, what I really liked the feature I like the most out of these things is that they know my speed and they know the speed limit on the road. And they can start alerting me when, uh, I'm going X miles per hour over the speed limit ways actually can do this too. Uh, but it's nice having this device that's also scanning for all of, uh, you know, any, any radar or laser or anything like that. Uh, the max series, uh, escort, the passport max series, uh, radar detectors that I've tested before have their own GPS built in. They have a database in them of all kinds of little things that you can update and, uh, and they sync with your phone just to get speed limit data because your phone can look that up over a data connection using the escort live app. Well, the new x 80, the escort x 80 changes this a little bit. Instead of it being a six or $700 detector, it's a $300 detector because it doesn't have GPS in it. It doesn't have any of the extra smarts that it doesn't need that are already in your smartphone. So you run the escort live app on your iPhone, it auto Bluetooth pairs with this thing, and then it's your iPhone that's doing the GPS to do the speed. See this, John. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I was going to say, um, I mean the speed feature you can get with ways. And I constantly, I don't even know why I have it on because it's almost always red when I'm on the highway. Yeah. But you can set it to only alert you when you're like 10 miles an hour over the limit or, you know, whatever your, if you know your local, like here in New Hampshire, I know that judges won't take anybody that was going less than 10 miles an hour over the limit. So it's like, perfect. I set it to 10, then it alerts me and you're good. Yeah. I think 10 is outside of the margin of error that I think most would consider reasonable. Yeah. So yeah, if you were clocked at going one mile over the speed limit, I think most would be just like, dude. Yeah, dude. Yeah, they're not going to pull you over for that. Yeah. Not here in New Hampshire anyway. I can't talk about your state. And you also have to look at the local laws. I think we have at least one state. I think Virginia still doesn't allow radar detectors used in the U.S. and then of course other countries are different. It was Dom in the chat room reminded me, pre-show that Canada basically doesn't allow them anywhere. But this is a cool thing. Like I said, I like the fact that it uses the functionality of your iPhone to do the things that your iPhone can do so that you're not paying twice. And that's a good thing. What I really like is I think cars should do this more and more. We wound up, which is a funny story, but I'll tell it another time. We ended up renting a Chevy Malibu for the second half of our trip in Austin. Yep. But it had... We could use the My Chevrolet app to display stuff on the screen, but it didn't have its own GPS built in. It didn't have all that. It was like, well, that's really smart because why pay twice? So anyway, that's what I like about this X80 is you're not doing the pay twice thing. So I wanted to share that. Let's see, moving along to James, John. Unless there's more on that one, are we good on that one? We're good. We're good. Okay. James says, you guys were talking about YouTube downloaders. He says the one I use is clipgrab at clipgrab.org. It is a Mac app that is a very fast downloader and converter to use it simply copy the YouTube link and automatically... And it is automatically added to the app for download. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. I like this stuff. It's fun, John. I like when I can pull stuff off of YouTube for offline viewing. It makes life easier. I watched something on the plane. What did I watch? Oh, somebody had put up the Getty Lee interview that... Getty Lee, the singer and bass player from Rush did with Dan. Dan rather. I watched it on the airplane because I was able to pull it off line. These things are good. Moving on to Allison from... Oh, that Allison? It is. That Allison from podfeat.com. She said, I learned something. Well, four things. During last week's show when you talked about Stay to help the doctor get his windows to stick when he was unplugging a monitor and logging out and in. She says, for this type of thing, I use Moom-M-O-O-M for many tricks to create scenes that I want to have static. I said, for example, I have one called Live that puts my digital workstation, her audio workstation rather, in the upper left, her show notes in the upper right, her chat in the lower left, an audio hijack and nice cast in the lower right for when she's doing her show. She says, and then it banishes Chrome over to my non-primary monitor so I don't see the Hangout video. She says, it's also really useful when doing video screencasting critical to get windows not to jump around if you stop recording and then go back later to continue. That's very true. Yeah, if you've got something that's, you know, targeting a very specific section of the screen using an app like Moom or Stay or any of those to sort of narrow in and make sure that your windows are in exactly the same spot. It saves a lot of headache. So thanks for that. I love the guys have many tricks. Rob Griffiths was the founder of macOS 10 Hints before he left that and started many tricks. Today I've got a quick one because it just happened today. Yeah. So shortly before the show, I noticed that there was a van for my cable company outside of my house. And I'm like, OK, that's interesting. Then just as I'm about to start the show, I see the guy pull out a ladder and climb the pole and start fiddling. And I'm like, you know what? I bet I know what's going to happen. Sure enough, Dave and I are doing our pre-show. And all of a sudden the light on my ear goes red and the lights start flashing on my cable modem. And of course, no more John. Yeah. So apparently he, I assume he was adding a new station or connection or something like that. He was fiddling with some cable thing. But anyway, so I got knocked offline. How did I know that Dave other than the lights and all that stuff here? Well, on the fact that we weren't talking to each other anymore. Yeah. Exactly. But when I checked my email later on, Dave, which I could have done then, but I didn't, UptimeRobot.com. So basically I have right here, Dave, 406 p.m. UptimeRobot says, hey, your your DDNS is down. And at 408 p.m. it said, yep, it's back up. So just thought I mentioned them. I signed up with them at one time and I almost don't think about it because 99.9% of the time, my connection's up. But I guess this pings it in 30 second intervals. And is UptimeRobot an app you run on your Mac? No, it's a website. Oh, it pings you, not you pinging it? Correct. And if something's wrong, it sends you an email. Cool. I get that from my disk stations. But it didn't get a disk station. No, I was going to say you wouldn't have, you'd have to be offline for like a half hour for your disk station to start complaining. Oh, that's interesting. Huh. I have a Fingbox and I wonder if that would be a little more aggressive about it. We'll talk more about the Fingbox in another show. I'll test that before we do. Hey, I was a proud papa at the airport yesterday, John. We... Huh? Well, we went through, you know, checking in, going through security. I paid for TSA PreCheck for me a couple of years ago. And generally these days when they've really limited down so the extra people that they just randomly give PreCheck to. But when I book a reservation, they generally give it to me and everybody else on the reservation. Yeah, I travel with you once and I got it. It was like, wow, this is how it should be. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. So, yeah, you're welcome. So the four of us had PreCheck. We go through and my son was in front of me and he's almost 16. He's taller than I am now. So, you know... He's strapping young lad there. I'm not so young anymore. He's not so young. My goodness. Yep. So they asked him, they said, you know, he put all his stuff in the thing. He knows what to do. It worked fine. He went through the metal detector. No problem. They said, oh, do you have a cell phone? And he said, yeah. And he said, but it's in my bag. They're like, right. No, when it comes through, it's just a random check that the machine beeped. So you were randomly selected. We just want to take your cell phone and like wipe it down and, you know, make sure there's no explosive residue. Okay. So they swab it and put it in. They wanted to swab it. And he agreed to this. And so I saw him and, you know, he, once his bag made it through to the other side of the thing, he pulled his cell phone out and handed it to him and give it back. And then as we were walking away, he's like, oh yeah, I got to reset my touch ID. I got to type in my password. I'm like, why is that? He's like, well, as I grabbed my cell phone out of the bag, I hit the lock button five times to turn off touch ID. He's like, I don't have anything on there I want to hide, but I didn't want them to be able to force me to unlock my phone. And he's right. Because they can force you to use touch ID or face ID, but they cannot force you to divulge information that you know. Hold on. So number one, what was the action? Oh, yeah. So it's five, five presses of the lock button on your phone. Now, before you do that... Wait, the lock button, which is the... Well, it's not the volume button. The power button? Wait. Yeah, you can call that the power button, sure. So if I hit that five times... Wait, wait, wait. Before you do that, here's the thing though. Go into settings, go into emergency SOS. On your iPhone 10... Oh, because that... Oh, it activates a 911 call. It can. There is an option in here called... And this is on everything. All right, emergency SOS. So I'm in emergency SOS and it says, rapidly click the sleep wake button five times to quickly call emergency services. Correct. An auto call is off. Okay, if auto call is off, then what you'll get is a screen that comes up that allows you to swipe to call emergency. If auto call is on, it will start calling right away or if you have the timer set, it will count down three seconds and then it will call emergency services. So before you start experimenting with this, be aware, on the iPhone 10, one additional option. The emergency SOS gesture on this is to press and hold one of the volume buttons. It doesn't matter which. And the lock slash side button, whatever you want to call that, just hold them down and then it will go into this same mode. And you can... The extra option on the iPhone 10 is you can choose for it also to work with five clicks. Five clicks is a little bit of a... A weird motion to do. It's much more natural to just squeeze the two. I mean, the other head scratcher is that while I thought that if you were coming from outside the U.S., into the U.S., even if you were a U.S. citizen, then they could... Right, they could... ...through your data, but if you're traveling domestically, I don't think they can demand to look through your... Correct. Correct. And he said he had this in mind from his trip to and from China earlier this year. Where there may have been a threat of that. Sure. And so I was proud. I'm like, oh, that's pretty smart, man. Pretty good. Yeah. So a child was not actually born, but... No. A child... Yes, no, it was... I was just a proud papa. A proud new papa. Right. That makes sense. You taught your boy rap. Right. Yep. To trust no one. That's exactly right. Yes, that's right. We've watched the X-Files, man. It's good stuff. Hey, I do have one other... I know the band's playing and all that good stuff, but I have one other thing to remind everyone of. We've talked about it on the show, but if you are... If you want to print or send a PDF of, say, an email to someone else, right? Like, we wanted to... I don't know. While we were away this weekend, somebody made a reservation for something, and it was like a multi-page email, so taking a screenshot of it wouldn't have worked because you wouldn't get all the pages, and we wanted to send a PDF. But, you know, that's not an obvious thing to do on the iPhone. The way you do it is you say print. So this was on Lisa's phone. She said print. Or maybe it was my daughter's phone, actually. Doesn't matter. Print and then go to preview the print, and then if it's a 3D touch-capable phone, you can 3D touch on the preview, or if it's not, you can just pinch out to zoom. And as soon as you do that, you'll get a different screen that has a sharing button on it, and when you choose share, you can say share it in messages, and it sends that preview PDF via whatever message you want. So there you go. That's how it's done. It's pretty good. All right. Now, we've told you all how to contact us. You can find us on Twitter. Go to twitter.com. We are happy to take your questions there. Although a much better place for your questions these days is Facebook, because everybody gets to see them. So go to macgeekub.com. Facebook, and you can ask questions there. We're happy to take things anywhere. We like to hear from everybody. It's kind of how we roll, John, huh? I think, hey, we even rock at old school by offering you this thing called a telephone number. Oh, dude, that's right. At last I checked, Dave. The number is 206. No, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me get in reverse. OK. You could call 224-888-Geek-Dave, which is 4-3-3-5. Almost made it. I want to thank everybody at Cashfly, hosting C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, and then I want to thank our sponsors, which are Harry's at Harry's dot com slash M-G-G. BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones dot com. Stamps dot com, where you click the microphone and type M-G-G for your free trial deal. You've got to check that out, by the way. Really, it's good stuff. I want to thank Otherworld Computing at MaxSales dot com. It's good stuff. There's some more coming too. Plex dot tv slash redeem, I believe. Check the, check mackeycub dot com slash sponsors. That's where you can find everything, and we really appreciate it when you visit our sponsors and just check them out. If you decide to buy, that's great, but really it's our job to get you to check them out and then it's up to them and you from there. So mackeycub dot com slash sponsors. John, I'm rambling. You're rambling, but you have a right to Dave. I think so. Because, you know, he told us a little story here and it made me very happy. Because he went to the airport. You had your son. He's on the ball. And the good thing, Dave, is that he made sure that he didn't get caught.