 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek, Gabb, episode six, five, eight for Sunday, May 21st, 2017. It is, folks, and welcome to the Mac and Mert Mac. Wow, easy for me to say Mac Observers, Mac Geek, Gabb, the show where you send in all your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We share everything with the goal. Beanie, beanie, man, it's going to be a long show. The goal being that we each learn four new things. Every week when we get together, sponsors for this episode include other world computing at MacSales.com. It's certainly my first stop for upgrades and hopefully is yours too. We'll talk more about that a little bit later in the show. And Bitbucket from Atlassian. Bitbucket.com or Bitbucket.org slash for the code. We'll get you a free repository for all of your code. We'll talk more about that later, too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? I'm good. Good. But earlier in the week, I had a Count Floyd scary moment. Oh, scary. Second City Television, I think that was. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, this is what happened. So some people probably know they had a released a round of OS updates. Right. Including. So I don't know if this had anything to do with it. OK. But it was after I upgraded my machine to 10.12.5. Of course, I do both time machine and full backups on my MacBook Pro here, my daily driver. And usually when I'm out and about, I'll put the machine to sleep. Sure. Just save energy. And yeah. Be a good little citizen. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, put the machine to sleep, did my thing, got back home, lifted the lid and saw a flicker of activity. And then the screen went dark. And I'm like, that's not good. I'm like, OK, well, maybe I turn the brightness all the way down because sometimes I'll do that as well. Sure. Increase the brightness. Nothing. Oh, my God. All right. Put it to sleep again. Woke it up again. Sometimes you have to do that. Yes. Same thing. So I'm like, all right, wait, how did you put it to sleep again? Well, I lowered the lid. Oh, OK. Yes. Of course. All right. I'm just just, you know, look, I am. We hosted an after prom party for the kids last night. So I got very little sleep just being up, maintaining the the peace in the house. Actually, everything was fine. It was just that was more me. So I'm a little slow today. So I was just just asking. So thank you. All right. All right. So I'm like, all right. This isn't good. So the only option, you know, rather than trying it again and again and again, right, didn't seem to work was, well, kind of the fourth shutdown, which if you don't know the way to do this on pretty much any machine, not just a Mac, is you hold down the power button for several seconds and then the machine will. And it's something you really don't want to do. Right. You know, it's it's kind of a panic. It's a last resort. Right. When something's not right with the machine is to force it to shut down. So shut it down. Then I hit the power button started up. It came to the point where it asked for my file vault password. Put that in and then I see the little progress bar. I'm like, oh, good. Well, the progress bar marched along for, you know, several pixels and then the machine rebooted again. Oh, like, OK, that's like, oh, I wonder if that's due to, you know, the recent OS update or something. Because right now, no, that's not it. So I'm like, all right, you know, so restarted and the progress bar went under my password again and the progress bar went a little ways and then it restarted again. And I'm like, oh, great. That's not good. So what probably happened, I suspect, is some cache file or some some file got corrupted. Sure. And it was unhappy with that. So I'm like, all right, well, let's make sure it's not. So I thought maybe it's a hardware failure, like a GPU failure or something like that. So all right, well, let's let's go into troubleshooting. Let me take my carbon copy cloner back up and try to boot from that. Sure. Using startup manager, which to do that. You hold down the option key. OK, yeah. So I did that and booted from my carbon copy cloner back up and that booted up fine. So I'm like, OK, it's not a hardware problem. It's a problem with the contents of the drive in the machine. Right. Right. So then I went into recovery, which recovery is a feature of the OS that gives you it boots off a different partition and it gives you a set of tools that you can use to help resolve problems due to all sorts of useful things. So when it's a recovery, ran this utility and check the drive to make sure there was no corruption. And to boot recovery, it's just command R for those of you following along at home. Yeah. Right. So one of the options is you can run this utility. So I ran this utility, scanned the drive and it said, yeah, everything's good. I'm like, all right. It indicated it did some minor like logical volume resizing or something. I'm like, all right, but it didn't report any serious damage. I'm like, OK, well, let's let's reboot and see what happens. Same thing happened. And I'm like, oh, boy, not good. So here's what I did, which solved the problem for me is another choice when you go into recovery is you can reinstall OS 10. Yeah, takes a while. Of course. And this is this is what I would call what I always referred to as a maintenance reinstall. You're installing you're installing over the top of your existing OS 10. So it's just replacing all of your OS files, but it's still theoretically at least inheriting all of the apps you have and data and even all of your settings or at least most of your settings. Right. Yeah. So my suspicion was the force shutdown had damaged some file or put some file in a weird state. And that's why it was not not booting up. So did you try safe mode? I couldn't seem to get into it. OK. It was weird, which you should. I believe you you hold down the shift key. Yeah. Yeah. Because safe mode will do a couple of things, right? It does the file system check, which you had already done, but it'll do that. And then it wipes out a ton of different cache files. And and the boot cache may very well have been the one that was corrupted for you. When your machine boots, it loads a ton of different files and drivers and extensions and all of these things. And when any of those change, of course, it it it reads them all from their original locations. But when it does that, it caches all of that data so it can read it as one file very, very quickly and efficiently. And if that boot cache gets screwed up, well, then, you know, your system has trouble booting. But safe mode skips that and also deletes it so that the next time you boot, it it has to rebuild that. And sometimes that can solve a problem exactly like this. Yeah. But the good news is reinstalling doing a reinstall of the OS fix the problem. Yep. And it may have done what you suggested is, you know, doing a reinstall rebuilds that rebuilds all of that stuff, too. That's right. Yep. Yeah, it just takes a little longer than safe mode. So yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, I've always felt like, though, I mean, there are some things that a maintenance reinstall will replace that you don't want at times. But in general, it's a pretty safe procedure. And it's not a bad idea to get a fresh copy of the OS out there on the drive, especially if you're having just wonky problem. I mean, you were having problems that needed to be addressed. But even if you're having wonky problems, I've seen it where, you know, just doing that reinstall over the top. I mean, I say this very cavalierly, but it's because I assume we've all got backups. And hopefully, a very easy to recover from backup like a clone, where if something just goes totally sideways, say, well, never mind, go back to the clone, come back from that and we'll go from here. But but I've seen it, we're doing a maintenance reinstall or even just rerunning the Combo Updater, which which basically does the same thing without the core files. It's but all the changes that have happened to the OS, especially as the OS matures like this time of year, maintenance reinstall can can also be kind of the thing. In your case, much easier to do the full reinstall because that's what recovery mode lets you do. If you wanted to do a Combo Updater over the top, you would have had to jump through some hoops to to get the system in a place where you could do that. So for in your in your case, way easier and probably more time efficient to do exactly what you did. So yeah. And that fix the problem. So I'm cool. That's good man running back up and running. Yeah, that's good. And all good since then. Yeah. Yeah, I could. So just wanted to share that in case it happens to anybody else. And actually, I had at least one other person comment on my Facebook saying, oh, I had this happen to me, too. Yeah, so it could be. Some issue with that. That's why I was wondering, you know, was it something with the latest OS update? Sure. That just fought with this machine for whatever stupid reason. Right, right. Huh. It could be. Yeah, all right. I mean, it could have been that that sort of uncovered some latent issue that was already there and sort of brewing or who knows. Fun stuff. That's why that's why we do what we do. All right, let's run through through some follow ups that we had from the last couple of shows. And then. And then we got some questions and I actually have a I have a surprising story to tell you, John, so we will. Yeah, you know, we'll keep it interesting. We'll start, though, with Rico going back to all the way back to last week's show and we were talking about home wiring suggestions and Rico says, you guys did a great job with all the suggestions for the guy building the huge house in Colorado. He says, I'm with you on it all. Number one, the fact that he should wire the heck out of the house while it basically costs nothing extra to do so. He says, number two, wire it all to a technical space, a.k.a. server room or a closet. Yep. And I said, I'd like the router recommendation to do a little bit of a hero so that you could do hardwired mesh and everything's good. But he says, I would, however, recommend an even more future proof way. Ducks, he says, yep, ducts or conduits, he should definitely wire the ethernet and coax as you mentioned, because we all know he will need that now for the future proof third path, make it a duct. You can even leave a thread inside to allow him the future him to easily pull whatever cables he or she says. My younger brother reluctantly did exactly that a few years ago with my advice. He says, last month he called me quite happy because he wired his access points and his internet was like never before. So yeah, that's true. If you're building a house, especially a kind of a large and sprawling house, certainly putting wires in the walls is, you know, without question, just do that. But ducts can make a conduit, you know, it's sometimes what people call it can make a huge difference because now you just have this path that you can pull new cable through. And as he said, leaving string in their thread, I think he called it, but I always called it string or some people call it tagline. But having string in there is great because what you do is you tie a you tie the cable to the string at one end and whatever the new cable is, you need to pull and then you just pull on the string from the other end and the cable comes with it. But I have a piece of advice for you. If you're going to do that, tie a second piece of string to that cable so that you leave new string in the run. So there you go. Fun stuff, though. Very, very cool. And thank you for that follow up, Rico, duct work. I wish I had ducts underneath the in the underground cable that I have, but that was run direct burial. So I can't easily just pull new cable through that. But I wish I could. Yeah, you may also want to, you know, if you're building a new place, you may want to consider instead of setting up some Jeffery's tubes as well. Jeffery's tubes in case you need to access the warp core. Yeah, man. Now you're that's the right kind of dude. I'm totally hiring you as my my architectural consultant next time I build a house or the first time I build a house, whatever, whichever that is. I'm not sure which time period we're in right now. You know, time is very time is abstract. A lot of people think about time as a very linear thing. I'm not convinced of that. Anyway, let's move on to Steve and you'll see what I mean about time when we when we go to Steve here, Steve says, I had the same issue as JP did back again in episode 657. We were on holiday in Hawaii when I started getting notifications from my security systems, including a nest outdoor cam, et cetera, that they were offline. It was frustrating not to be able to check in on the home from vacation. We had a similar problem in our cottage and a network outage there caused us to lose the ability to remotely turn on the heat before we got there. It made to a for a cold start to a weekend getaway says I found a great solution to this and it's something we mentioned almost exactly a year ago here on this show. He says it's called the reset plug at resetplug.com and it sells for 60 bucks. It plugs into the wall. Then you plug your router and modem into it. The reset plug connects your networks, connects to your network's Wi-Fi as an IoT device. He says, he says, so I have it connect to my guest network. He says, while connected to Wi-Fi, it will automatically regularly ping different servers outside of your home to ensure it still has an active internet connection. If it can't get to any of its internal ping lists after a configurable amount of time, he says it's defaults to five minutes, but you can set it. He says, it will shut off the power to its outlet, wait five seconds and then power everything back on and it'll keep doing this in a configurable way. So it's for exactly this problem where you know you just need to hard reset your router and things will likely come back up, but you can't be there to do that and that's what the reset plug does. And you know, when we were talking about this last week, there was, I had this feeling in the back of my head like there's something that solves this, but I couldn't remember exactly what it was and it's the reset plug. So thanks for bringing that back to top of mind for Steve. It's good stuff. Yeah, John? Good. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's somebody thinks of everything. There's an opportunity at every corner and Bob brings us one of those two follow up from quite a ways back, 648, so not that far back. He said when Nick was having issues with overriding iCloud SSID priorities, Bob points out that and Nick's problem just to reframe it for those of you folks was that when he was at home, he wanted to make sure that his iOS devices all connected to the home Wi-Fi network, but he also has a work Wi-Fi network at home and he needed to be able to connect to that. So but changing the defaults on his MacBook would have meant iCloud syncing those changes to his iOS devices. So he had to find another way to make sure his MacBook would connect to the work network when he wanted it to. And so Bob's suggestion is to use control plane to select which SSID gets used and it can be done by having control plane look for a specific app running and switch to the work SSID or the home SSID based on whether or not the app is running. He says, in my case, I trigger a switch when I fire up the VPN client, which is what I need to connect with work. But if Nick doesn't need a VPN client, he could just write a little automator app that does nothing but sit and ask for confirmation. Control plane can select a different SSID based on whether or not that app is running. Control plane is a cool thing. It's a little, as we've said many times, it requires you to think like it in terms of the triggers and the actions and all of that stuff. But it's it's it's fairly straightforward. It's just a little different than any other sort of scripting thing I've used. But once you get your head into it, it's totally fine. So thanks for that, Bob and stuff. You like that, John? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. What I I'll have to I don't really rock control plane. But yeah. So it's worth spending a minute on it here. The way control plane works because it really is handy for for doing these types of types of things is you have you have evidence sources. You have contexts. You have rules and then you have actions. So for me, I have what I use at the moment, although I because of our conversations, I'm actually trying out different options for this. But but I'll say in Nick's scenario, right? So this would be the the contexts would be home Wi-Fi or work Wi-Fi, right? Or home mode or work mode is what I would call the contexts. And then you that's it. You just name them that. And that's it. And then you add evidence sources. And for him, it's going to be active application. And there's, you know, probably about 15 different evidence sources, active application, active network adapter, assigned IP address. Like there's all kinds of things that that also have nothing to do with network, like, you know, shell script time of day, sleep, wake events, that kind of thing. So you pick the evidence sources that you want control plane to pay attention to. And then you build some rules. And with the rules, what you say is, OK, well, when I have the active application is, you know, whatever, the VPN client, change the context to work. Otherwise, change the context to home. And then you go to actions and you say, OK, great. When we're when you can pick where you are in the process, but with him, you would say on arrival to the work context. Do this thing, which is select that Wi-Fi network. So it's this it's this linked together bit of separate pieces of data that that makes it all very configurable. But again, as I, you know, as I talked through it here, you probably got a little like what? So it's better to just relisten to this segment and have control plane in front of you and you'll totally see what I'm talking about. So there you go. That's my that's my quick control plane lesson for the day. And even saying it that way, help me like re grock it a little bit, because it's just a little weird, but it's not too bad. It's not too bad. OK. Dan has a question for us, John. And Dan says, I have a genuine Apple Bluetooth keyboard, not the one with the lightning socket. A few days ago, some orange juice was spilled over it, and I followed some advice, which was to remove the batteries, give it a rinse under warm water and leave it to dry in the airing cupboard for a few days. As a result, it now works fine, except the number one key says, which on my keyboard is between the at key and the crazy squiggly S key. I don't even know what that's called, but it doesn't matter. He says, I mean, it does matter, but we'll move past it. So I've tried taking the key off and cleaning it, but no joy. Is there a way of changing the behavior of that squiggly S key to make it look like the output of number one? He says, I could then simply swap the keys and all would be well. And he pointers from you or the listeners would be great. He says, I wanted to use an exclamation mark there in my email, but for obvious reasons, I cannot. So I thought about this and honestly, I think OS 10's got what you want. OS 10 has built in key replacements. So go into system preferences, go to keyboard and go to text and you will see a list that says replace on one column and with on the other column. So what you would do is put replace and put the squiggly S character in the replace column and then in the with column, you put the number one. And of course, because I know Dan can't type the number one, I put it there for him in email so he was able to just copy and paste that into that field. And I tested this here and it worked splendidly. You see the character that you typed appear and then immediately it's replaced with in this case, the number one. And you can bypass it by hitting the escape key. If you if you really want to kind of get away from that. But I think that's that's the workaround I have. John, what do you think? Anything any other thoughts? The other way you could accomplish this, it's kind of hokey. But hey, hey, if you go to system preferences, keyboard input sources. You can then click there should be a box that says show input menu and menu bar. You'll then get a menu and you can say show keyboard viewer and it will show you a little baby keyboard. Right. And you can actually click on. Oh, yeah. And it'll put it in the field. So it gives you a virtual rights second keyboard. So that's another option in case you lose a key. Right. I kind of like your solution better. But this is another way for you to access. Yeah, all the all the characters. Yeah, I forgot about that. That's a good one to remember if you run into this problem. And like in Dan's case, if he needed to type a one for the in the in the replace with list, but he doesn't have a one to type if, you know, instead of waiting for my email with a one in it or going and finding the character one somewhere that he can copy and paste in, he could do it this way. Yeah, good stuff, man. Hey, while we're at it and thinking about the keyboard, one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts that I always forget about, but is totally handy if you want to type emoji in OS 10. And I built and this certainly works in El Capitan because I'm doing it right now on an El Cap machine because I still have to do that because thanks Tascam. But it obviously works on Sierra to control command space when you are typing will bring up a little emoji picker that you can even search inside of. So that gets pretty handy because sometimes it's it's fun to use emoji. Don't you think, John? You know, and then it's right thumbs up. That's exactly right. Exactly. All right, moving right along. Man, you know, the problem is I have command or control command space does the emoji picker. As I said, I use keyboard Maestro to do all the podcast chapters. And when and my my keyboard shortcut for that is control option command space to just pop that in because that just lets me roll my my hand across the bottom of the keyboard and boom, the timestamp appears. But as I just went to do it for the next question, I was like, wait a minute, that's not right. But no, it's right. I just needed to I needed to get there. So OK, moving on to Andrew. Andrew says, I sometimes consult with clients who want to start with a new OS from scratch, but they want to bring over their saved printer presets after they install a new printer. Things such as resolution and paper type and all of that are saved when you choose save current settings as inside the printer dialogue. Is there a specific file or multiple files somewhere that I can copy to the new system to retain those settings? And the answer is yes. Those are stored in home here. So your home folder library. And if you can't see library in your home folder, hold down the option key and go to the Go menu and you will see library magically appear there. So that'll bring you to your home library. And then inside of preferences, there are going to be files, a separate one for each printer that you have com dot apple dot print dot custom presets dot for printer dot printer name dot P list. And so this will work, but it will only work if you are using the same printer on the new computer, which in all likelihood you would in the scenario you're describing anyway, Andrew. So that's and just migrate those over replace the ones that are on the new system because I think it'll generate them anyway. Once it kind of once you attach to the printer and I would do that first. I would configure the printer on the new system, get it running and then copy this file over so that so that it doesn't get blown away during the reset up process of the printer when you do that on the new system. But yeah, like that'll do it, right? Yeah, John. So yeah, that's sort of the idea. It's kind of cool finding all this crazy stuff. That's why I like answering these questions. It's good stuff. All right. Moving on to Carsten, John. Is that right? Sure. OK. Carsten writes, he says a friend of mine gave me his old iPad Pro 12.9 inch 128 gigabyte iPad because it has a cracked screen. It still powers on and is fully functional. I wonder if you can recommend a good third party repair shop. I tried Techrestore, but they do not repair iPad Pro devices and it is something I do not wish to do on my own. So you're right. A lot of these repair shops won't do it because and I talked to Shannon over at Techrestore. He says their repair of the 9.7 inch iPad Pro. But the 12.9 inch requires micro soldering for the Touch ID that he says we have not yet found a great way to monetize how long it takes to get done. He says what that means is the cost for us to perform the repairs for parts and labor outweighs what the market is willing to pay. And so Shannon's advice over there, which echoed mine is talk to Apple. Apple will repair the screen on that device for five ninety nine and it's actually not a replacement. They or it's not a repair. It is just a replacement in most cases. They just swap out the device for you and then Touch ID continues to work and all of that stuff because if that micro soldering goes wrong, you burn out the Touch ID chip and then Touch ID will never, ever work again for that particular unit because only Apple has the super top secret machine to reset Touch ID. So and then and then the home button gets weird and all of that stuff. So probably best in this case to let Apple do it. And and there you go. Thoughts on that, John. I've never used these guys, but I have had people been happy with their service. But I rescue. Yeah. Dot com has a looking right now an iPad Pro, twelve point nine inch broken glass screen LCD repair for what are they charged for it? Four forty nine for forty nine. OK, so you're saving some money off Apple right there. All right. There you go. Yep. OK. Yeah, they say their regular price is five ninety nine. You're right. Four forty nine. There you go. Yeah, again, I've never used them, but I know they've been around for a while and yeah, they're still in business. So right. So I would assume they know what they're doing. Right. That actually I think was originally started. I rescue was was originally started by the same people that currently run Tech Restore. I think they had sold that business and then I think came back around into that. Shannon came back around into that that market. I think I don't know the exact story. So forgive me if I got that wrong. But but yeah. Yeah, that's right. I rescue twelve point nine inch repair. Nice find, man. Nice find another place that that I would suggest looking although for this it doesn't. It's not going to work because they don't offer this service yet. Is I cracked dot com and it's spelled just like it sounds. But but what they do is they will come to you to do this repair. So you you go to I cracked they you kind of tell them what happened. They will find the right tech to do this in your area and then dispatch that person to you. Of course, you know, you find out what the cost is and all of that ahead of time and they come to you and generally, you know, it happens same day. They say in under an hour, your device is fixed. So that's when you get a crack screen, man. That's what you want. So I'll put a link to I cracked in the show notes, too, just so just so we have it. Yeah, I'm wondering if did I did I tell you about my. Minor drop event I had with my iPhone. Oh, minor drop event that never that doesn't sound good because if there's a story to it, it might not be as minor as we think. What happened, man? Well, no, I it fumble fingered it when I was sure I was trying to do something and dropped it in a parking lot of a store that I was at. And I do have a case. I have the Otter box case here. Right. Unfortunately, the part of the phone that hit the hit the pavement there is not protected by the yeah, the case. Right. Of course. The thing is, and then, you know, it still works, though. But when I when I looked. So if I look very carefully, I can see that there is a crack on the non display portion in the lower left hand corner. And there's some minor minor abrasions on the I mean, the thing is you probably wouldn't unless I told you it was there. You wouldn't notice it. Sure. Has the crack. How long ago did this happen? Now, like a week ago. OK. And yeah, it hasn't gotten bigger. I was just going to say as with any crack, right, that they will never get smaller, obviously. But but they might get bigger, depending on how much stress is put on that. And, you know, it can cause the crack to kind of. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm because the phone is still functional and it's in again. It's it's the non display portion. Yep. Though, if I'm going to sell it, I think I'm going to get dinged. Oh, yeah, he definitely would. Yeah. Yeah. I have if Gazelle or someone, you know, the it's not in perfect condition now is it does have my I would refer to this as minor cosmetic damage, because again, it is cosmetic. It's it's non functional at the moment. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is fun. No, I mean, it's non functional damage. Sorry. I did the damage doesn't impede function whatsoever. Right. Right. Yeah. So I'll have to consider whether I want to get the screen replaced before I. Yeah. Yeah. If it's worth getting the screen replaced before I do something with it before. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. But you know, when it when it fell, I was like, you know what? I bet it's going to fall. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can see it happening. Yep. I I was on my way across the driveway at some point. I feel like I was on my way over to record a Makika, but I don't generally bring my iPad with me. But in this case, I did. And as soon as I came out the door, I must have had other things in my hand and the iPad went tumbling. And it had a spec. It was an iPad mini. It had a spec fully OK sonnet. But of course, it hit like just the the edge of the corner, which sort of peeled the case back and and it didn't crack the glass in so much as it crushed the glass on the corner and then scuffed up the metal on the corner, too. But that happened years ago and that iPad is still fully functional and has not gotten any worse. But but has an obvious little flaw. I mean, it again, you don't notice it when you're using it. But if you look for it, it's obviously right there. You would you would see it if I handed you the iPad, but you'd be like, OK, well, whatever, I'll just keep going. So so I'm sure that would ding me to on on the on the thing. Yeah, they seem to find a way of falling exactly on those corners and things where, you know, it's not so good. So. All right, I want to talk about our sponsors. Can I do that? It's a minor. It's a tale of minor. Well, that's right. Can I talk about our sponsors, John? Yeah, that is not a tale of well. No, no. In fact, I hope not. No, it's all quite good. In fact, other world computing at max sales.com is our first sponsor for today. These are the folks, like I said in the intro, if I need to upgrade my Mac, if I need to do anything, RAM, external hard drive, some weird adapter to make that work with this. OWC at max sales.com is the first place I go and I start looking there because they always just have that kind of stuff. They also have tons of videos to show you how to install some of the trickier stuff. Obviously, a cable adapter, maybe not, you know, maybe you don't need a video for plugging in that. But but if you got to dig into your Mac or your iPhone to replace, you know, something that you're buying from them, they're a part, you know, that you're getting from them, then they do. They've got great videos. They really think they they've been in business a long time. They know what they're doing and they are obsessive about customer service, which just warms the cockles of my heart and it's why I like them because they care about the customer and they know how to serve people and they understand their own technology, which is really sort of the key. One thing a lot of people don't know is that OWC sells both new used and refurbished. And yes, I said both and listed three things. It's OK. They got a 27 inch retina iMac starting at 1769. You can save almost 900 bucks on on some of those things. You can get, like I said, refurb max from them, even used max from them. And you get free parallels desktop free with any new used or refurbished Mac purchase from two ninety nine and up. So really cool stuff. If you have a USBC Mac, they've got their USBC doc. If you have a Thunderbolt based Mac, they have their Thunderbolt doc with four USB ports and toss link out. More Thunderbolt ports on it. Ethernet port. I mean, it's just they know what they're doing there. They make this stuff. They test it. They understand it. So you got to check it out. Go to MacSales.com and our thanks to other world computing for sponsoring this episode. While we're here, John, I'm also going to talk about Bitbucket at bitbucket.org slash for the code. That's F-O-R-T-H-E-C-O-D-E Bitbucket. Man, if you need a if you're doing any kind of coding, right, you need version control because the only way that you can make sure you're tracking all your changes and more importantly, if you introduce a problem that you can roll back to a previous version of your own code is by having a code repository that tracks all your changes. And the team at Atlassian created Bitbucket and it is the get solution for professional teams helping over five million developers build with a purpose. It gives teams of all sizes a free private repository with state of the art features like the world's best pull request algorithm built in continuous delivery and integrations with all your favorite tools like Docker, AWS, Azure and of course because Bitbucket comes from Atlassian you get the best Jira integration available which means with Jira you get all of your customer bug reporting and feature requests and all of that and then you can track that and relate it to changes that you make in Bitbucket and you can go and get Bitbucket for free. Go to bitbucket.org slash for the code F-O-R-T-H-E-C-O-D-E to start your free account. I use Bitbucket for a couple of pretty major projects and it just works. It's really, really simple. So you gotta check it out. Go to bitbucket.org slash for the code that's F-O-R-T-H-E-C-O-D-E and you get your free repo today. It's pretty awesome stuff. Our thanks to Bitbucket and Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. Okay, John, where do we go from here? Let's go to Jeremy. Jeremy, why don't you take it away so that people can listen to you explain your problem. We always like that. Gentlemen, it's Jeremy from the UK here and I have to warn you that I haven't been this frustrated with Apple since the days of my non-performing performer. This is really, really irritating and goes way beyond fish shakes and into the realms of wanting to do criminal damage. So I hope you chaps can point me in the direction of a solution. I've finally succumbed and subscribed to Apple Music just a day or so ago and now no end of my albums have got the wrong album art. If there isn't a solution to this, I'm going to cancel it immediately. It simply isn't worth it. There's something deeply irritating about having the album art messed up and God knows what other metadata has also been mucked around with. It's like someone shuffling your carefully organized vinyl and CD collection. It is so frustrating. So, chaps, if you know of a way to correct this, I would be eternally grateful, as ever. Many thanks. Yeah, I can grok that frustration because even though it might seem to you like album art is not the worst thing in the world to have confused. A to someone else, it might be. But B, as Jeremy pointed out, maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe more and more of the metadata is screwed up. So the way I look at this problem, John, is we have two things to discuss. Number one is fixing your corrupted album art. And then number two is keeping Apple Music or more specifically, iCloud Music Library, which, yes, is part of Apple Music, but that this is the important part that we're talking about here. You want to keep iCloud Music Library from doing this again. Of course, number two is the hard one. And I don't know that I can help specifically with it, but based on my experience, I'm thinking that if we succeed with number one, like you've gotten your stuff into iCloud Music Library, it's mucked with some things. But it's sort of, I think, finished mucking with those things. So if we go and change it back and get it right, then I think iCloud Music Library will accept that change for your library. Might not help the next person that that syncs those same songs, but at least it will keep it that way for you. That's been my experience anyway. So as for the first one, fixing your corrupted album art, my first suggestion always would have been a piece of software called TuneUp. But they went dark about, I don't wanna say a year ago, maybe even a little longer. And I think their assets were sold to an entirely different company. Everything there just sort of shut down. But it has very recently, within the last month, re-emerged as TuneUp relaunch. Similar name, but completely different management as far as I can tell. I have yet to use the new product though. So here's, you know, that's the rub, so I can't speak to its efficacy. But they do offer a trial version and assuming you have a backup, then I would say it's totally worth a shot. And TuneUp is one of those things where it's gonna fix a lot of things. It's built to fix your album art, obviously, because otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it, fixing mislabeled songs. It'll remove duplicate tracks. It's sort of built to be this one stop iTunes cleanup shop. So that's where I would start with it. But John, I'm curious if you have any thoughts about this. No. No, huh, okay. I can't find any other software on the market to do it. That's so, yeah. Yeah, I'm good with my music library. Well, I know you are, I'm good with mine too, but we gotta help Jeremy out here, so, you know. Yeah, it's just I've never had the problem, so. Right, right. Yeah, now TuneUp is, like I said, it's what I would have recommended. And so I'm thinking that maybe it's the solution for you now still. It's certainly what it seems to be. So we'll put a link in the show notes, try out the trial and report back. And if any of you have thoughts on this about other software that might work to help with this type of problem, please let us know. Obviously, we'll follow up in a future show. Okay, let's see. We wanna go to, let's go to Ed. Let's see what Ed has to say here. If I can find Ed. Yes, I can. Ed says, today the CPU fan on my mid-2007 iMac started spinning faster around the 3300 RPM mark per SMC fan control. He says, but the CPU itself is running cool at about 45 degrees C. He says, I tried an SMC reset a few times to no avail. I planned to get one of the new iMacs that Apple said they were coming out with this year. And I was hoping my iMac would hold out until then. If I do need to replace the fan, I'm willing to try it myself if I can find the parts. I replaced my hard drive for an SSD about two years ago and I'm comfortable getting my hands dirty, so to speak. Is there anything else I should try? Should I take it to the Apple Store for their free diagnosis? The free diagnosis wouldn't be a bad idea, but let's talk about this first. The fan running fast is likely not because of the fan. I mean, it might be, but it would seem to me that a problem with the fan wouldn't cause it to run fast because what causes the fan to run fast is that one of the temperature sensors is reporting a higher than normal reading. And so the computer spins up the fan to whatever it decides an appropriate level is to bring that back down. So is it possible that something else in your Mac is overheating or is it possible that one of the temperature sensors in your Mac is no longer reporting correctly for you? And I ask this because you talked about replacing the hard drive with an SSD. I'm pretty sure in that Mac because I have the same one here in the house, there's a temperature sensor that goes on the hard drive that you would have needed to stick, I believe, onto the SSD. It's possible that shook loose and now is reporting the wrong temp, too hot, whatever, and it brings the fans up. So, you know what I'm saying, John? Do you have any thoughts on this? I do know what you're saying. And you may want to use, so my favorite tool to see what all of your sensors say is our PAL iStat menus. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I'm looking here right now on my Mac Mini, there are one, two, three, four. Yeah, it looks there's about 15 temperature sensors. Yeah. Not only the CPU, but like you pointed out and actually it even lists individually the temperatures of both my internal SSD and I actually have an external drive and it's even shown the temperature of that. Wow. It's actually kind of cool. That's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, because drives typically report the temperature. So, I would get iStat menus and look at all of the values and unfortunately, you may not have a reference point as to what is normal. It'll also let you define like a cooling profile, if you will. I believe here, but I don't do that. Yeah, if he's got a sensor in the wrong spot, though, especially if it's the hard drive one, that can be dicey, but it's not an unavoidable problem. When I first did, I did one of the first SSD swaps, I didn't get the temperature sensor right and so the fans would just like scream all the time and it was like, OK, this is a bad thing. So, I did some searching and I found two pieces of software. One is from Sirti Studios called HDD Fan Control and then the other is from Exerion, E-X-I-R-I-O-N.net called SSD Fan Control and they both do something very similar. The one from Sirti Software is a for-pay piece of software. The one from Exerion looks to be donation but and is relatively old. The last time it was updated was October of 2013. People still use both, but I would lean towards buying HDD Fan Control and yes, you can download a free trial of both of these, of course, to test it out. And it is built to pull a different temperature sensor to read the hard drive self reported or the SSD self reported temperature as opposed to whatever the sensor says and keeps the fans lower slash slower slash quieter when they should be, but is still monitoring that temperature and will kick the fans up if it if it hits that, you know, whatever that threshold is. So I would I would take a look at this probably HDD Fan Control, but I'll put a link to both of these out there so that you can check them out. But that's the that's that's my advice. There you go. Right. Good stuff. Hey, John, this week I, you know, we talk a lot about network attached storage, NAS drives, right? And many times the subject of, you know, we talk very regularly about Synology's NAS drives. We talk sometimes about Drobo's NAS drives, especially lately, as they've been sort of rededicating themselves to that market. We rarely, though, talk about QNAPS NAS drives. And that may seem strange on the surface to people because QNAP and Synology, if you were to run one of their each of them, you know, if you were to run NAS drives from each of them, you would see a lot of similarities. In fact, even the names of things like, you know, surveillance station and and I think audio station, maybe even video station, they have similarly named apps that run on there. They both run Plex. They both sort of do a lot of the same things. One of the reasons, in fact, the only reason that we've sort of steered away from QNAP drives in terms of or QNAP units in terms of recommending them to you is that QNAP will not allow you to use multi-sized drives in a disk array. That's totally fine in my in my opinion. That's totally fine for the enterprise where, you know, you're in a business and you're just buying new drives and that's easy. But for us home users, that starts to get expensive if you need to just always have the same size drives and you can't. Like, let's say you have, you know, four two terabyte drives in there and you want to start replacing those with six terabyte drives. You won't see the benefit of any of those larger drives in a QNAP unit until you've replaced all of them. Whereas with a Synology, you'd start to see the benefit of those larger drives probably on the second one because it's got to have something to balance it to in order to have your fault tolerance. But but so that's the reason. And of course, when you're starting out an array on a Synology, you can just put drives of any size in and just build it up. And that can be very, very handy. So that's the reason we've stayed away from QNAP in terms of advice here. But aside from that, they make really, really interesting units. And, you know, I've always had a QNAP TS470 running here. And recently, I spent when I say recently, I mean, this week, I spent some more time with it, sort of redug in to this thing. And it's got some interesting features. So, you know, when we talk about NAS drives, John, we often talk about storing our media libraries there because it's an obvious place to do that. It's a, you know, big blob of storage that has a computer attached to it, in which is the, you know, the chip inside the NAS drive so it can do all these smart things like Stream Plex and all of that. But generally, what that means is you need to have some device on your network connected to your TV that will stream data from there. Right. And so, you know, you have your Apple TV that you can stream from video station to or if you have the fourth gen Apple TV, you can install Plex on there. You could have a Roku unit running Plex, et cetera, et cetera. This TS470 from QNAP has an HDMI port on it, John. And it's not the only one from QNAP that has an HDMI port. They have quite a few NAS units that have these, which means you can put this right next to your TV and plug directly from the QNAP unit into your TV. No middleman required, no other device required. And it even has an IR port on it. If you want to use sort of a traditional remote control, or you can use your iPhone or Android to do, you know, what we would call Wi-Fi or network remote control. And it all just works. So I reconfigured my office recently, I moved all sorts of things around and realized, you know, that I hadn't really spent a lot of time with this this 470 and also hadn't I had an extra monitor. It's like a 20 inch monitor, something which, you know, years ago was monstrous and now is not. But I thought, well, great. Now it that monitor had a DVI port on it. So I thought, OK, fine. So I found on mono price for like four bucks, a six foot HDMI to DVI cable. It doesn't carry audio because DVI doesn't take audio so that the audio from the HDMI is thrown away. But that's OK because the QNAP unit also has audio in and out with standard analog ports. So it's got its own little DAC in there. And so I plugged in some speakers. And now in the office, I can use the QNAP unit to play anything I want on the TV. And it could be stuff from my Plex library, but it also can be things from YouTube. And so I've had like, you know, I'll just let it loop through like those beyond the minds, I videos or whatever, just weird imagery. I turn the sound off and and just let it sort of loop. And I can see the stuff it's behind me. So it's not distracting when I'm at my desk. But if I turn around to like go sit on the couch and read something or whatever, even if I just go to get water or tea from the little water cooler that I have in my office, I see this thing just sort of looping and running and putting weird stuff. And it's been very cool using this thing. So I'm I'm I'm I wish there was a way that you could use multi size drives on these QNAP units because they're doing some cool stuff and maybe for you and I mean just you in general, whoever it is that's listening, maybe you find that there's value in having the HDMI port and you're OK swallowing the fact that you've got to always have the same size drives in your unit. And then and then it's worth checking out some of these QNAP things. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, yeah, I know. Kiwi Graham is asking how quiet it is for TV operations in the chat room. And of course, the chat room is at Mackeykeb.com slash stream. It depends on the unit you have. The one I have isn't terrible, but honestly, it's really hard to say because it's sitting next to a Drobo 5N, a Drobo 3rd Gen, a Synology DS 1815, a Synology DS 1817 and a Synology DS 213J. So, you know, it's sort of loud over there in terms of like drives and fans. So I can't really speak to to that in a in a real world way. I've listened to it and I don't think the fans on it are any louder than say the fans on the back of my plasma TV, if that's if that's helpful. So I think by the time you kind of crank up the sound and stuff, I don't think it's going to be a problem for you. So what do you think, John? I'll check it out. I know, it's pretty cool. It's I've seen him at the various tech events and they seem to make fine products, like you said, are. Naz snobbery, if you will. Yeah. We've always viewed them as in not as positive a light because they, you know, are lacking the flexibility, that flexibility, which is a big deal. I really think that, but maybe I'm wrong. And I'd be actually people. It's a big deal. Right. Right. For me, it certainly is. I'd like to have that flexibility and it's totally cost related, right? I mean, if money were unlimited or or you just hated having any of it around and you wanted to throw it all away, well, then great. Just buy, you know, monstrous drives. Those those like those 10 terabyte Seagate iron wolf drives, those are killer. And they're not terribly expensive. They're like three hundred and sixty bucks or something. But when you got to buy four of them, oh, well, wait a minute, that just changed everything, you know, so yeah. Anyway, so that was my that was my fun this week. I've actually had a really nice time rearranging my office. It was it's been 10 years, basically. So it needed it needed to happen. Yeah. All right. You want to take us to Ari, John? Oh, terrible, terrible story here. I think it's a. Just dive right in here. OK, Ari says I've recently had a puzzling issue while trying to help one of my clients import her photos from an SD card into Mac OS photos. She has about 1500 photos living on an SD card. That's about five years old. The card has been living in its plastic enclosure in a drawer away from the elements, and there doesn't appear to be any damage to it. The photos can be scrolled through by clicking the play symbol on the camera. However, when plugging the camera in via USB to her laptop, a 2016 MacBook Pro, only about half of them are able to import. The others show up with mostly blank thumbnails. And when you click on import all new photos, gives a dialogue saying unable to get metadata next to each file name and the operation of boards. I've tried importing the photos one at a time or in small groups or if you try to import when the thumbnails are blank, it will give this error and abort the operation. It gets weirder, though. Sometimes when you unplug the camera and plug it in again via USB, it will display a handful of thumbnails that do show up, and those can be imported. This is, of course, very tedious with over a thousand remaining and very inconsistent. The other odd thing is that the SD card does not mount in the finder and does not show up in disutility and only shows up in photos as an import source when plugged in to the digital camera and connected to our computer through USB. I tried using a USB-C SD card reader, however the SD card still will not mount and will not even show up in photos this way. I read in a form that image capture might help, and with image capture it was able to recognize the SD card and pull about 500 of the images off the card onto my flash drive that would still not open in finder. They look like salvageable files and that they're each one to three megabytes and have the proper metadata from when they were taken, etc. However, the files don't show a thumbnail on the blank preview icon for each also has a small lock on it. OK, and the question is, what do I do? And he also attached a couple of three images. Here's where things and it started going downhill from there. So we got the email and in the email I would have expected to see some images. Well, no, what I saw were three question marks. Oh, which basically means. The computers having a problem parsing them. Yeah, your your Mac doesn't see those as as valid images, huh? Correct. Or that's but you know, I wanted to. So what I did is I took these files and saved them on my hard drive. OK. And they would have a name that would make you think it's a like one of them was IMG underscores or is there a six dot JPG. Sure. It's like, all right. So then I downloaded them and I double clicked on one and the default program to or after checking. So I checked out the files, David, basically the only conclusion I could come to is that the data on the card has somehow been corrupted. I mean, it sounds like it was stored properly, but it could have been zapped by ESD electrostatic discharge removed from the camera at the wrong time, which may have corrupted the data. Yep. Or it's just old. Yeah, the SD cards I've found and and and this this is actually just like making me shake as you're as you're talking about this, because my daughter has a camera that she uses with an SD card. And my wife brought that camera with her to China. And when my wife got back, you know, my wife immediately wanted to pull all the pictures off the card and she's like, you know, Sky, you've got a ton of pictures on this card. Do you want to clear them off? Or, you know, do you want me to clear them off for you? And Sky's like, no, that's the only place those pictures exist. And I thought, no, that's not allowed. And I said, look, you've got a MacBook Pro with an SD reader. Let's just put the thing in and import it into your and I pay for storage for for iCloud photo library. And she was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, just trust me, it works. I leave them out there. No. So I keep wanting to just I'm just going to take some day I'm going to take the SD card and just put it in her MacBook Pro and slurp them in and that's the end of that. But but every time I think to do that, of course, she has it with her at school, so I can't. And I'll address that shortly. OK. But thank you for interjecting. Yeah. So you can't trust just one source of your data. Well, that's towards the end of my response. I basically say that. Yeah. Your strategy is to never have and this is just good general backup strategy is never have your data in only one place. Right. Right. I mean, personally, as soon as I take photos, I pull them off the SD card and import them, right? I don't want, you know, because they're valuable to me. Yeah. Or, you know, on the iPhone, it, you know, throws them in my photo stream. So that's nice. But to continue, as I reported earlier, when so when I tried to open the file, preview is usually the default app that will open it. And I got an error and it says the file I am G underscores there's a report on JPEG could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that preview doesn't recognize. Like, all right, well, let's use something different. Yeah. I decided to bring out the big guns. And by the big guns, I mean graphic converter. OK. Oh, yeah. And I've I've been a user of this. They're now up to graphic converter 10. And it's if you want to do anything with graphics, this is the program that you want. I think at least it's part of my toolkit. The one reason that I want to use graphic converter to open it is that reportedly right now, it can understand about 200 different graphic formats. OK. I think that's beyond way beyond what any other program understands. When I tried to open it with graphic converter, it also complained and said, well, I don't understand this file. But then here's what it does. Well, so the reason it complains, then I dug in a little bit. But what it what it does is if it can't understand a graphic file, what it will do is show you a preview. It'll show you the beginning of the data fork or the raw data. And here's the problem with the files that were sent that were attached to this email. Files have something called what we'll call a file signature. OK, which are certain values at the beginning that tell either software or the operating system what type of file it is. Sure. A JPEG normally should begin with one F zero four. Or I'm sorry, JPEGs begin with F F D eight. These files begin with one F zero four. I'm like, OK, well, that's not good because that's not what a JPEG should start with. And there were other weirdness with the with the data in the file as well. There was like certain repeating values that led me to believe. Again, it was damage and the data was corrupted. What I did try to do, Dave, was to see what. Type of file the OS thought it was. And how do you do this, you may ask? Well, there's a command from the terminal you can run, Dave. That's called file. Oh, that's right. And what it does is so you type file and then you type. So you navigate to the directory and then you file. And then after you put a file. And it'll tell you what the OS thinks it is. And for example, so I took a JPEG on my system. And when I typed file and the name of that file, it said, oh, OK, JPEG image data, JFI of standard one dot zero two aspect ratio density. Sure, you get it. So it's like, yep, this is a JPEG. So yeah, it knew that it was seeing something that should be a JPEG. Right. Unfortunately, when I tried it with one of the files that we were sent, it said, I am G underscores zero zero zero four dot JPEG. OK, so these were these were just corrupted files. Yeah, so it said this is a data file. Right. It basically means, yeah, it's a blob of data. So what to do? So there are a few. Here's what I would suggest. So one, a graphic converter does have a raw import feature. Yeah. And when you get a file, it'll bring up a window or it'll say, you know, hey, would you like to do a raw import and maybe try to reconstruct this? And then it'll give you some options here. It's like, well, you know, what do you think the dimensions are? Is it grayscale? Is it color? Is it? And it'll also show a preview of the image. What it'll probably look like once you define some of these values. And it just showed alternating bright and dark lines, which also led me to believe that the data is a horked. No, I mean, I think that we cut to the chase. This card got corrupted and the data is done. But as far as the options. So one is you could try to use graphic converter to reconstruct it. It may be tedious. You may be able to recover some images that way. You may also. So here's another for damaged files. Our friends at ProSoft Engineering make something called data rescue. I think they're up to data rescue for right now. OK. And specifically, one of the features of this software, they say is recovers digital pictures from your camera media, even after being erased or reformatted. So you may want to try that. And I believe it also has some smarts that can try to reconstruct. To the best of its ability. All right. Finally, though, it may, unless these are like really valuable photos. You may want to check. You may say, wow, you may want to talk to the folks at DriveSavers. You've heard of them, right? Yeah, I wonder how much luck they'll have with a with an SD card. Yes, the thing is, they do advertise that that's something that they can deal with. Right. And, you know, the thing is, you know, it's typically their services. I mean, you you're going to pay. Oh, yeah. It's not going to be five or 10 bucks. It could be hundreds of dollars in order to take advantage of their services. But, you know, if these are really valuable photos, you can see that they're really valuable. You know, if these are really valuable photos, you can see if maybe they could do something with it. And they advertise the fact that they've done this, that they have been able to. Sure. Yeah, it's worth it. You know, give them a call. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I say here, yeah, have you lost photos? And well, you get it. And so I sent a link to that. Yeah, good. And then, yeah. Hey, you got rid of that. Why don't you move that? Yeah. And finally, well, the very last thing that I said to him was to back up what you said. It don't have your data in one place. So I mean, obviously, when you're taking your pictures or videos or anything like that, it is being stored in one place. I mean, that's that's true of any sort of data generation or collection like that. But as soon as you have them and this is what's nice about something like iCloud Photo Library is if you took the pictures with your phone, they just automatically like as soon as they can start syncing up to the cloud and and that backup is taken care of for you so that you you're limiting the amount of time where these this data exists only in one place. But yeah, it it's you're right. Yeah, the final thing I would say is that you may want to have your client consider using a cloud service that is image aware. One of them is Dropbox. Sure. And that when you put in a camera media card, Dropbox will actually come up and say, hey, I think there are pictures on this. You want me to pull them off and put them in the cloud for you? Yeah. Yeah. And other other services, that's just the first one that comes to mind because I mean, iCloud Photo Library is that right? If you pull your pictures off of your SD card and put them into iCloud or into photos, sorry, I'll get there. Then up to the cloud, they will go from your Mac. In fact, yesterday was my daughter's prom, as I said. And so we went to the pre prom picture taking event at Friends House, not all the kids, not all the kids, but a group of the kids were there. And Lisa took a bunch of pictures with our decent camera. And then we had to run out and do some other stuff. So as soon as we got home, she pulled the card out of the camera, put it into her computer and just had it start slurping in. And then we were in the car taking my son to where he needed to be last night. And she's like, all these pictures are already on my phone. Like, yeah, that's because we signed you up for iCloud Photo Library. She resisted for such a long time. She's like, well, you know, we're going to have to pay like 10 bucks a month to do that. Like, yeah, but then I don't have to worry about your data anymore. And she was she was blown away by it when when she saw that she was like, oh, this is awesome. Like, yeah, backup, good to go. And also convenience, because it's everywhere. So yeah. All right, we do have at least one more question that I want to go through about UPNP that came up on our Facebook group. But first, I want to make sure we say a great big thank you to all of our premium supporters that contributed this week, either with new subscriptions or with renewals. And of course, if you want to find out more about MacGeek App Premium, you can go to macgeekapp.com slash premium. If you are interested and able, we are very, very appreciative of any direct support that you are able to give. It is not mandatory, of course, for listening to this show. But but we certainly appreciate it because it's it's a combination of the sponsor dollars and your dollars that really allow us to keep doing what we do. So really appreciative of this. And that's why we've started thanking people by name, or at least first name and last initial each week. So on the biannual plan, so the 25 bucks every six months, we had five renewals that come through this week, Daniel M, Ian T, Mark P, Tim B and Jim D. Thank you to all of you, you rock. And then we on the monthly plan at the sort of standard 10 bucks a month. We have Gary B, John V and Stephen A as renewals. Ken L is a new subscriber on the monthly plan and Micah P is a new subscriber on the monthly plan. But he chose to take advantage of our new flexibility and has done it at 15 a month instead of 10. So you all rock. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's it means a lot to us. And I know I say that every week and it's because it's true. That's why we say it every week. So all right, thank you to all of you and thank you to everybody that supports the show in all the ways that you can. All the rest of you, premium subscribers and everybody in the chat room that helps out with the show notes and all that stuff, the folks that help moderate our Facebook group at Brian and Roe, Michael King, Alex Santos, you guys rock. Thank you. And our Facebook group is where this next one came from. Daniel was asking a what might appear to be a loaded question, but that we love loaded questions. And and he says, is you PNP dangerous? I had started using it when I got my sonology disk station. But then I realized it seemed to defeat the purpose of a firewall. If any any potentially malicious software running on my machine can open ports up. So you PNP and then a similar but slightly less popular protocol NAT PMP allow devices on your network to set up their own port forwarding without any interaction from you. So what that means is if, say, your Synology needs port 5000 opened from your router to point directly to it. It can do that if your router has you PNP enabled. The Synology just says to the router, hey, take any traffic that's on port 5000 and send it my way. And the router says, yeah, OK, no problem. And it's a convenience thing without question. But as Daniel points out, it has potential security issues. It also just has potential headache issues. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I had a D-Link webcam that started grabbing port 80 port 443 and port 554. And I couldn't easily turn it off even when it was off. It was still grabbing those ports. And I was using at least one of those ports for something else. And I couldn't use it for something else because the silly webcam was stealing it all the time. So, yes, it can be dangerous. There's absolutely no question that it can be dangerous. Because it's creating. Basically, holes in your network that allow bad people to get in that could write any port forward, whether you create it or something else creates it could let someone in to do the wrong thing. And there's no way to say allow at least no routers that I know of where you can say allow that device to run UP or to submit UP and P request, but not any other devices. Right. That that would actually be kind of a nice thing to be able to say, yeah, look, I know my my NAS drive is going to need to, you know, have 15 different port forwards because I'm running all these services and I might want to install other stuff. So let's go ahead and trust that. And there could even be security implications with that, right? But let's go ahead and trust that and then just not trust any random device that happens to to let itself on my network. So. I leave it enabled on my network as as you could guess, because otherwise I wouldn't have problems with that webcam. But I've always run a router that lets me see what port forwards exist, both the ones that I've created and the ones that have been created with UP and P. And to me, that's that that's an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not saying it's acceptable for you, right? Everybody finds their own their own place on the as I call it, the continuum between security slash privacy and convenience. But as long as I can see it, I'm good. And the Synology router lets me see it. It doesn't let me remove them, which is sort of frustrating because the previous router I ran, I was running DDWRT and that did let me remove them. But at least when I can see them and know what's been created, I feel OK about it. Now, running a router that won't let me see them. I would be sort of sketchy feeling about that. But, John, I will un-sketch I will make you feel un-sketchy. That's that's why I love you, man, because, yeah. So I became aware of this discussion. Yeah. And because it happened on Facebook and our Facebook group, Mackeygab dot com slash Facebook is where you can go to have all these types of discussions. And there is a dandy piece of software. And actually, it is very old, but it's still for the most part works. Sort of. It's copyrighted in 2000. Yeah, it sort of works. But it's from the coding monkeys. I'm looking at version one dot three dot one is the latest, as far as I can tell, it's copyright 2008. John, give him the name of the software. It's called PortMap. Thanks. What you do is you run it and it will initially display your outside IP address. And also your internal router. So, for example, in my case, well, I'm not going to tell you what my IP is. No, not it's a big secret, but it's not important. And it also shows the IP address of your local machine. But then what it says below that, Dave, is it says you PNP Euro. And the IP address of my Euro because Euro supports you PNP. It's one of the advanced settings. You can turn it off if you want on the Euro, of course. So there are two things this will let you do. And one thing that it doesn't do properly and then you suggested this earlier. So one thing you can do is you can use this software to define mappings if you'd like to. Right. I personally don't do that. I have one mapping set up on my Synology because I run OpenVPN and it's on there. So I've set up one manually, but then I allow you PNP for other software that would like to do that. But then this has a little button which you can click on, which will list all of the mappings. Oh, nice. OK, so you can see them. Oh, well, there you go. Looking right now. So it actually shows. So it shows the one here. So I have a mapping for port 1194, which is OpenVPN. And it actually says manual port forwarding. So it's smart enough to realize that. OK, so you you didn't let your Synology do that with you PNP. You did that on your own. I manually set this up on the Euro Synology. Well, on the Synology. OK, so it is a UPNP. Oh, no, no, no. No, I'm sorry. I'm wrong. OK. I did manually do this port forwarding on the Euro. Right. OK, OK. Because the Synology could do that for you with if you enabled UPNP, that's right. Yeah, I was getting confused. Right. That's OK. That's what I'm here for. But yeah, so I create a mapping from the. Yeah, that basically points, you know, that allows Port 1194, which is OpenVPN, and it points it at the Synology. So if I want to get in, I can. Yeah. Then it will show other mappings that have been done. And the most notable here. And this is, you know, it's security versus convenience. But Skype has made some mappings because Skype works better if. Oh, yeah, you can allow certain traffic in. Right. And for whatever reason here, I don't know if this is standard report they use, but it has Port 30416 mapped under both TCP and UDP. Yeah. And then I see a bunch of others, which is kind of weird because there are IP addresses of devices that no longer are on my network. Yeah, and that's one of the problems with with UPNP is those mappings linger. They don't expire, you know, at least not in a timely fashion. I don't think they expire at all. I don't think there's it would be nice if UPNP were like, say DHCP, right, where, you know, there was a negotiation that said, OK, fine, you have this mapping for whatever an hour, a day, a week, you know, whatever they negotiate. And then the device that needs the mapping says, OK, great, I'll know that in slightly less than an hour, day or week, I've got to come back and re-up my my mapping. Otherwise, you're going to delete it. Got it. Right. That would be great. But that's not how it works. It's it's way less robust than that. And that's where it gets frustrating. Yeah, and I'll. And so the one thing that the software doesn't do, so although I can highlight the mapping or mappings and tell it to remove them, it doesn't. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes me sad. I know I tried that because I thought, oh, this would be a great way to remove mappings from mine. But when yeah, when you told me about this and we've talked about this before, again, it's one of those things that, you know, we've talked about a lot of things in almost 12 years on this show. So cool stuff. Well, that brings us to the end of another fun Mackie come. But do we answer the question? Is it dangerous? I guess I think it's up to you to decide whether it's dangerous for you. It certainly can be. Yeah. I wouldn't fault someone that said, yes, it's dangerous and I won't run it. So there you go. I don't know. It's crazy. Well, I'll tell you one thing I know, Dave. What's that? And that's the email address that you can send your comments, questions, tips, cookies, UPNP mappings. And that address, Dave, is feedback at MackieGab.com. Feedback at MackieGab.com. You heard me right. Feedback at MackieGab.com. Or if you're a premium subscriber, premium at MackieGab.com. Or if you have a phone, two, two, four, eight, eight, eight geek, which John is four, three, three, five. That's right. And come visit us on Facebook. That's, you know, as we said before, MackieGab.com, Facebook, great group and always good discussions all throughout the week. So you can get your MackieGab fix when you're not here listening to the show. I'd like to send a big thanks to Cashfly CACHE FLY.com for providing all the bandwidth. Of course, our sponsors, as we mentioned during the show, Atlassian for Bitbucket at Bitbucket.org slash for the code and other world computing at MacSales.com. Of course, you know, our ongoing sponsors with Barebones software at Barebones.com and Smile at SmileSoftware.com and some new ones coming that I can't wait to tell you about. Have a great week, folks. Enjoy the nice weather. If you're living in New England like John and I, it finally became like almost summer here. Enjoy the weather. Enjoy yourself wherever you are. And I have one lasting piece of advice for you. It really is, you know, I think the best advice you could give anyone at any time. And that is don't get caught.