 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, Episode 691 for Sunday, January 7th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you come to Las Vegas and confuse your hosts. This is, of course, Mac Geekab, and the goal here is that we answer your questions, we solve your problems, we share your tips, we share your cool stuff found so that every single one of us can learn at least five new things each and every time we get together. And one of the things that I'm learning right here in Las Vegas is how to podcast from a different setup because here in Las Vegas, getting ready for CES, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, also in Las Vegas, Nevada, John F. Braun. Sitting right across from me, in fact. And just marveling at the rat's nest of wires in front of me here. Well, you know, we've got to make this work. Yeah, so John and I are sitting in my hotel room here at the Mirage in Las Vegas where we flew in yesterday for CES, where we're going to be here covering it both for you folks and for our readers at Mac Observer. Our CES sponsors this year are Elgato, Otherworld Computing, and Smile. So we really thank those folks for doing what they do to make it possible for us to do what we do, frankly. Let's dive right in and see if we can get a little more comfortable, even though we're not in our comfortable setup. So we're going to go to Daniel, who has a great question. He says, I was poking around in Disk Inventory 10, and I found a hidden folder at the root of my hard drive called Volumes. Inside it, I found quite a few little folders. One of them was called Cloned Macintosh HD, and it contained an app, Keynote, that was taking up 600 megs. So I deleted it. But I did a little digging on to what the volumes folder is, but why are these other folders in it, and can they safely be deleted or removed? So this is a good question, man, because the volumes folder is where we see macOS exposing its Unix roots, right? When Unix, any Unix, including macOS, when they mount a drive, what they do is they assign it to a folder. I know that sounds a little weird, right? But that's how it works. And so Apple chooses in macOS to put all of these folders inside another folder called Volumes. Different Unixes do it differently. On Linux, it's often slash MNT for mount points, but it could be anywhere. In fact, we've done servers in the past when drives were much slower and smaller, where we had like three or four drives in a server, and so we'd mount one at root, which is just slash. Then we'd mount another one at slash USR so that it could hold all the user data and another one at whatever, slash TMP or slash swap you often used to do. So this is just how Unix is. When it mounts a drive, it puts it in a folder. MacOS puts them inside the volumes folder. Normally, this folder should be pretty clean and should have entries about any mounted drives. Now that includes network drives, disk images, and your boot drive, which is aliased or shortcutted to slash. It will also have an entry, depending on which version of MacOS you're running, it will also have an entry for com.apple.timemachine.local snapshots so that Time Machine can do its thing and put that stuff there. Those are sort of the interim backups that Time Machine does before it can transfer them over to your big Time Machine backup. But anything else that's in there that doesn't match either that or a currently mounted drive is usually the result of a mounting error. So think about this. When it mounts a drive, the first thing it does is it creates, when I say it, it's macOS, it creates a subfolder inside volumes with the name of your drive. Then it sort of attaches this drive, whatever it is, network drive, physical drive to it. It's possible for that process to be broken though and only one of those steps to happen. So it's possible to have a folder without a drive attached to it. And if, say, you were in the middle of a clone and your drive became detached, but your cloning software said, where I know to put this is at volume slash volumes slash, what was your thing called? Your cloned Macintosh HD. It's going to copy it to that folder, but now it's just a folder. It's not a mount point. So that's what happened to you. Is this folder just happened to be there without a drive attached to it? And so it just saved it on your local drive as a folder, just like anything else. So you were totally right to clean that out. Hopefully that makes sense. I've been trying to think about a different analogy to use for this, but I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward, but it's one of those weird things. What do you think, John? I've seen this before, too. And here's the thing that bothers me. I'm looking right now, Dave, in my volumes folder, and I see two things. Macintosh SSD. Good. Right. Just my boot drive. And something called pre-boot. Pre-boot. Okay. I don't know about you, but the High Sierra installers, I don't think clean up their mess, because this is a partition that's created under High Sierra. Right. And if you do this to a list, you'll see it. It's listed there. It's called pre-boot. I don't know why it's existing as a folder in my volumes folder, and I have to keep getting rid of it. But the thing is, I keep running, because I think I'm trying to solve a problem. Yeah. And I'll reinstall, typically from recovery, I'll reinstall the OS, and it leaves this mess behind. It baffles me. I have this on mine, too. And I did a clean install. Oh, no, I didn't do a clean install of this. Yeah. And I've deleted, yeah, one's called pre-boot, another... Huh. That's the only one that I've seen left over. And when you deleted it, comes back? Well, I think it only comes back if I run the installer again. So it's... Hmm. Again, my theory with that is that the installer is leaving things behind. Another time that I had something very strange happen, and it ended up to be a problem within the volumes folder. So I was doing a rip with Handbrake. Okay. And I wanted to save the result to my Synology, and then use a video station. Right. Handbrake a lot of times, when you're running it, if it starts to try to do a rip, and then it all of a sudden quits immediately, that's usually a problem. Now, it could have been like I had in the past where the lib dvd css, I think is what it's called, right? Yep. That is expired, or not linked properly, or something, and you have to put that in again. But in this case, what was happening is I saw various folders in my volumes folder. They were folders with a line through them showing that I didn't have access. What I think I had done is use the wrong protocol to mount them, and the permissions were wrong. So I was like, oh, you want to save to, you know, the video folder on the Synology? Right. Well, what you mounted says you can't. So stop it. Huh. I had that one time. I think I was mounting it with SMB instead of AFP. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. So that's why I think about that. The only thing is I'd be cautious. In this case, it makes sense, especially that folder folder. You should never see a folder folder. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That indicates that something went wrong. It just something went wrong. And then is let's say, you know, Dan had this cloned Macintosh HD there and then went to mount his drive called cloned Macintosh HD. What would happen if you looked in the volumes folder is you'd have the folder and then you'd have cloned Macintosh HD one. And that would be the mount point for the drive that came in. It's just OS 10 or sorry Mac OS doing its job and making sure things don't conflict and crash into each other. So it just adds a one or a two or a 10 if it has to, if you've got all these folders out there. So it, it would, it would maintain the user experience as best it could because you would just see it on your desktop as cloned Macintosh HD and it would work just fine. But, but yeah, cleaning it up. It's a good thing. So cool. Yeah. Now looking at our chat room here. Yeah. You can always reach at macigab.com slash stream. I saw Brian Monroe pointed to an article on stacks exchange. I don't know if I necessarily believe their conclusion. Their conclusion is that it has to be there in order for you to boot APFS. And I can tell you that that's not the case on my machine. So. Oh, okay. Huh. I mean the person who and one of the person people that answered it, they're correct in that the pre-boot volume is a new system partition. But I don't think you should be seeing it in your volume, in your volumes folder. Yeah. It, that's, uh, is it mounted? Um, uh, how do I. Distribute to a list. Thank you. You knew the question I was going to ask before. Yeah. Because I just did that too. Okay. Oh yeah. So it is that pre-boot is not just a folder. It, it truly is the, um, it is part of the, the, the disk structure that container. Yeah. I wouldn't delete that man. I think that's supposed to be there. Yeah. I've deleted it and everything seems to still work. All right. I would leave that one alone. I mean, you know, obviously the esteemed Mr. Braun here is, you know, able to take these risks with this system. I don't know that I would recommend that to anyone willy-nilly, but feel free. That's interesting. All right. Cool. Let's move on to, uh, to David and see what we get with David here. You have to pardon me because I'm on a very small screen compared to what I normally have. I'm on my 11 inch air, which by the way, this 11 inch air is, I told you a couple of weeks ago and I published that article about it too. This air has a new lease on life now that I've disabled Apple's tailspin D and spin dump processes and I'll put a link in the show notes to the instructions for how to do that. I mean, it's awesome because what would happen before is, uh, when a task would start using a lot of CPU like I'm doing now, right? Cause I've got audio hijack running. I've got the app that plays all our, like our sound files and all that stuff is going on because we're, you know, we're doing a show. We have the thing to stream to the chat room and it's fine. But what would happen is tailspin would notice that these apps were using lots of CPU over a period of time and it would, it would fire up and take sample logs of these processes and that process in and of itself ate up tons of CPU and, uh, and so I just turned them off. Uh, it's relatively easy. The only difficult part is on OS on Sierra and high Sierra and maybe before I can't remember, but you need to turn off system integrity protection to, uh, to let it work. But, uh, I've done it as far back as El Capitan and it, it's, um, it's a great thing. So I'll put it, I'll put a link in the show notes about that. And now, uh, while I was vamping about that, we will move over to David and, uh, David says, oh yeah, I'm still going to have to vamp here because it just, I just got to make this file bigger. That's what it is. David will get us there though. David had a support ticket with Synology. Oh, and he was asking us, uh, do we have any thoughts about speeding up the initial time machine backup to his Synology? He's got a Synology, uh, DS, uh, 218 plus. So relatively new, uh, Synology unit to bay with a pretty fast chip in it. And he says, you know, doing the initial backup, he had sent a support ticket into Synology to see if he could say connect with USB or something else to do that direct attached as opposed to over the network. Uh, in order to get that first backup, you know, all that data across. And he says, it seems like it's taken quite a while and he thoughts or tips are appreciated. Well, um, and Synology told him, no, you can't connect USB to a Synology. That's just not how it works. It's a network attached device, but there is a way to do. You can. Now you can't connect a Mac to it USB. You can connect a drive off of it USB, right? But, but you can't. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You can connect the USB drive and transfer data to the. That's true. Yeah. But it doesn't have a version of time machine. Right. In theory, if they could get time machine or license it from Apple, then they could execute that. But they don't. They don't. Right. So while there's no way to backup your Mac connected to your Synology via a USB cable, don't forget about the other wires that you could use because you can do a wired backup over Ethernet. Now your laptop may or may not have an Ethernet port. You might have to buy like a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter or something. But Gigabit Ethernet is pretty darn fast, right? It's a thousand megabits per second full duplex, which is much faster than USB two at 480 half duplex, although not as fast as say USB three at five or 10,000. Right. But chances are that your Synology unit doesn't have the internal speed to take data much faster than Gigabit Ethernet. And so, you know, it's worth remembering that Gigabit Ethernet is really fast and it's a wired connection. And it can work very, very well. So that would be my advice to you. That's what I always do. Well, it's not always what I do. Sometimes I just let it happen wirelessly. But you may also find that because time machine is backing up lots of small files that even over Gigabit Ethernet or if you do happen to be doing it, you know, USB to something else, obviously not your Synology because we just talked about that. But you may find that it's not going to go as fast as the interface or even the drive's maximum speeds would allow. It's going to be slower because it's doing a lot of different things. So thoughts on that, John? Whenever I have to do a fresh time machine backup of my MacBook Pro, I hook it up to Ethernet instead of wireless. There you go. Well, one, because this has slower wireless. It's 802N and not AC. Oh, really? This is a 2012. Oh, yeah. Okay. Right. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a company that was offering a module, but they never They never happened. They're still working on it, actually. I went to their webpage and they were like, coming soon. Yeah. Sure. I ordered it and they took my money and I was waiting for like four months. No, no, no, no. Okay. No, Berek's theater is cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'll see if I can dig it up. Okay. Very, very good. All right. Well, let's see where we go next here. Jason writes in and Jason asks if I can find it, which I can, I think. He says, he's been trying to get his contacts to sync. He has an iPhone, an iPad, I believe, an iMac and a MacBook Pro. And contacts sync just fine on everything except his, let's say, his MacBook Pro. I'm paraphrasing as I'm reading the question, but one of his Macs won't sync contacts. So he's tried a few things. He's tried the whole log in and log out of iCloud. That's usually the answer. That didn't work. I know. And so any of you following along, like that that is the thing that often fixes this, but for Jason, it didn't. So other things to try would be adding a new contact on the affected iMac. Sometimes that can kick it into gear because you're you're telling it to make a change that it has to push to the cloud as opposed to just waiting to pull from the cloud. A lot of times, and I'm oversimplifying here, but it helps to think about the concept. A lot of times with syncing, what will happen is you even though you have lots of different records, what you what what each computer has is it maintains a last updated version number, right? And so when something changes, it increments that version number and pushes that to whatever server is syncing these things so that if, you know, let's say you have version 10 on all your devices and then you with your iPhone, you make an edit, it makes an edit to one of the contacts or whatever and then increments that version number from 10 to 11. Now, all the other devices check in and say, Hey, have there been any changes? They don't need to look at every contact record. All they need to do is look at that version number and say, Hey, do I have what you think is the latest? And if iCloud says, I have version 11 and the computer says, I've got version 10. Now it goes through the process, figures out what's new and goes through the change logs and pulls them down. So by adding a contact on your Mac, you are sort of forcing it to increment the version number to something that iCloud might take. And that can really often kickstart that process. Failing that, rebooting in safe mode, and then, of course, back into regular mode and or using Onyx to clear out all your sort of normal caches, sometimes that can help because iCloud syncing uses a lot of caches to make it more efficient. And sometimes, as we know, those caches can get to be a little weird. Going past that, you know, if that doesn't work, it's worth looking at iCloud in general are calendars syncing, right? Is that something that's happening in a reliable way? And of course, with Jason, he tried all of these things. Calendars are syncing fine, all of that. So now that we're here and I get into the what would I do if it were my computer scenario, the first thing I would do whenever I whenever I start asking myself that question, the first thing I do is back it up because I know I'm going to start trying things that are possibly quite destructive. So I would back up my computer, but I would also for about what we're about to do, make a contact specific backup on your Mac. So go to contacts file, export and choose contacts archive. Frankly, I would do that from not only the Mac that's having trouble, but from the Mac that's syncing properly, because it's possible that what we're about to do here might blow away things on iCloud. And it'd be nice to have a backup of what was actually good. So do that. Um, and then within contacts, select all and delete. Um, right, but you got to wipe this out to force it to come back down. Um, I would before, so there's a couple of ways to do this, but that that's the core of what we're doing. You could do that while it's live with iCloud that may or may not push things the right way. This is why we make backups first. The other way to do it is to first turn off iCloud syncing and then delete all the contacts, let it settle in, maybe even reboot. Then when it's all settled in, turn it back on, see if that says, Hey, you want me to slurp down everything from iCloud? Yes. Okay. And that might get you there. And in fact, that's it. Now that I'm talking it through, I think, John, that's what I would do first is turn off iCloud, delete everything locally, and then turn it all back on and, and, uh, and see if it comes back down. Thoughts from you, my friend. I think one thing that you didn't mention, but an initial step would be to, yes, the thing we all love doing, turn it off and on again, and that just turn off contacts with an iCloud and then turn it back on. Sure. That way. Um, of course, the next one is, you know, logging out entirely of iCloud and logging back in and that says you pointed out take a while. So, and didn't work for poor Jason in this scenario. So, uh, you know, yeah, we'll find it. Hey, I'm going to do something here, John. So I apologize if it makes noise with John's mic, but I'm afraid that John's, um, I'm going to call it his mic stand was going to cut his headphone cord really our mic stands. I'll post a picture of this to Twitter. Uh, our mic stands are sitting on top of ice buckets because we needed to get them up higher so that we could talk with you and have the mics close to our faces. So it's a, it's a funny little setup, but the rim of the ice bucket was about to, uh, potentially put a, put a nice dent in John's headphone cable. So. All right, moving on. Yeah. Next up. Okay. I was trying to, uh, yes, I was trying to find where the data file was located and I'm not coming up with a good answer immediately. Oh, where to go? Wipe it out on, uh, on your hard drive. Well, not so much wipe it out, but so you can look at it. Sure. And like see the last date on it. Yeah. See. Yeah. I've had to do that in the past. Uh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that would be a helpful thing to find. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's application support address book. Is that right? Is it still stored in, uh, in address book? Is that still the name that we, uh, that we assigned to it? Because I know calendars are in, um, not, yeah, home library calendars. I, there is home library. No, there isn't. Huh. Huh. Yes. I don't know, man. Yeah. It might be in home library application support address book. I've got, I've got quite a few data databases in there. And actually on my machine, they all look old with data 2016. So, oh, really? That's current. Oh, I don't know. On mine, they're, they're updated as of last night. Or actually that may have been from what I did a local copy versus I don't know. Okay. All right. Moving on, uh, Avram had a question. Hope I'm pronouncing your name right, my friend. Uh, we've emailed a lot, but we've never spoken. Uh, perhaps we should fix that. I mean, you might be an interesting person to have on the show sometime. Uh, anyway, Avram writes in, he says, I travel a great deal and use a VPN when I am outside of the USA to stream various video services like HBO. However, some services use location services as well as their IP address or your IP address, my IP address to determine where you are. Evidently, location service does not use the VPN to decide where your device is. I can understand if one is using a cellular phone, which can use GPS, but I'm using an iPad that doesn't have cellular or GPS. Two questions. How does location services know the true physical location and what can I do to get around this? So yeah, this is interesting, right? Because I've experienced this before too, and it does seem like location services happen sort of outside of any VPN connection that might be linking you to somewhere else. Um, and I don't think location services uses that data at all. Certainly not as its priority. It might use it to do some confirmation, but, uh, but I don't think it does IP address look up. Certainly not as step one. Um, so we'll talk about how location services might get your data in a second. One solution though would be to disable location services entirely. That might serve your purposes. It might also make HBO choke and say, I need location services to work. Um, and if that's the case, I'm not sure there is a work around. Uh, but yeah, to my knowledge, the way location services works is that it uses either like GPS, but you, you would only have GPS on an iPad if you had a cellular radio. Otherwise there's no GPS. Those are in the same circuit. Uh, so assuming you don't have GPS, which don't location services mainly uses Wi-Fi triangulation where it looks at not only the Wi-Fi network that you're connected to, but all the networks that it can see around you and looks up the MAC addresses of those routers in a database like potentially skyhook wireless.com. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Now I don't know if Apple uses skyhook or uses something else, but there are these databases that correlate GPS coordinates with public or not even public, but just, uh, Wi-Fi networks that broadcast their SSIDs. So you can just say, even though you're not connected to a Wi-Fi network, that can give a hint as to what your location is, especially if you can see three or four of them, uh, you can really, you know, sort of compare them all and say, Oh yeah, they all say they're in the same location. Awesome. That's where we are. Um, if it is skyhook and I don't know if it is, but if it is skyhook, uh, you can go and change what skyhook has as your GPS location in their, in their database, but beware it will change back as soon as someone connects to that network and also does it with a device that has GPS like an iPhone, it'll immediately, or not maybe not immediately, but eventually update that database. So I'm not convinced that there's an answer here, but it is an interesting thought process to go through. What do you think, John? I think that Apple has a dandy article, huh, let's you understand a bit more about this. So I wanted to add something to what you said. So here's what they say in this article. So the title of the article is turn location services and GPS on or off on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Okay. But here's the statement that they make to clarify what you said. iOS devices might use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to determine your location. Oh, Bluetooth, because when you think about it, Bluetooth has a lot of the same parameters as other protocols, their MAC addresses, their IP address, or maybe not typically people don't do IP with Bluetooth. But Bluetooth can certainly do the similar thing is saying, like beacons, you know, right, right, that Apple offers. Oh, yeah. So he probably doesn't have a beacon at his house, but certainly. Yeah, that's possible. And I remember in the past, I had actually used, at one point I was using a program Strava, I think it was to get my bike rides. Yeah. And at first I used my phone, but then I'm like, you know, I wonder if this will work with an iPod touch, because the iPod touch doesn't have GPS. Sure. But as Wi-Fi. And the thing is, because I have a pretty densely, you know, a lot of Wi-Fi in my neighborhood, yeah, it worked pretty good. And so there was one point where it couldn't find any Wi-Fi. So it looked like you jumped, you like teleported from one place to another. I drove through a swamp. Yeah. I biked through a swamp, but it couldn't get the data. So it just extrapolated and it's like, oh, I saw it here. Assumed you went the shortest distance. And I saw it here. Huh. And that's pretty cool. Oh, I like that. Yeah. So I'm not sure there's a magic answer here. They do everything they can so that location services is not misled. It's really what it comes down to. It's not Apple trying to be nefarious. In fact, it's Apple trying to make sure that location services is accurate, regardless of where your internet traffic may or may not route. So yeah, it's good stuff, man. Good stuff. Where else are we? Let's go to Bill. Let's see what Bill has to say. Uh-huh. And Bill has to say, where is he? I know. Sorry, I'm usually much faster than this. He said, I may, I think I may have heard of the white screen of death the first time on your show. Lately, he says it started with the settings app on my iPhone. Choosing it gives a white screen. If I just let it sit, it quits and then usually launches properly the next time. I started having the same problem with the messages app. I have several backups of my iPhone with iMazing, which predate this problem, but I'm not sure what to do. Of course, I have tried restarting my device. Yeah, it's like, I know we talk about this regularly, but restarting your iPhone is definitely something to try when lots of things don't work. I've had it fixed Bluetooth problems. I've definitely had it fixed Wi-Fi problems. Of course, I've had it fixed app problems, but it's just not one of those things we think about doing because we just don't restart our iPhones regularly. And that is sort of the reason that maybe some of these things sort of, you know, cascade and get get foobard. Sometimes if you connect your iPhone to your Mac, sometimes you can see the debug logs in console on your Mac from your iPhone. That could be handy in telling you what's going on here. It sounds like a RAM issue, though, that the app doesn't have enough resources to load into. And what's happening is it's trying to quit other background apps to free up RAM in time to launch the settings app. And then it sounds like a timeout has happened. But by the time you relaunch the settings app, all those other processes that iOS was telling, you know, quit, quit, quit. I need your RAM. Come on, come on, come on, give it to me. Like that's already happened. And now settings can launch just fine or messages can launch just fine. So the question would be, what do you have running in the background on your phone? And those logs in console or that you can see from console with a USB connected iPhone might give you an indication as to what's running in the background, what's triggering, what's using RAM, what's holding on to RAM. But that that certainly seems like what it is. And you could another way to troubleshoot this bill would be to take a look at what apps you've installed since those backups where you didn't have this problem. You know, there's a couple of ways to get there. But really what you've got to do is find out what changed. And in this case, most likely, what app did you install specifically one that's got permissions and need to run in the background? That's that's where I go with this, John. I've had this once it was with or it could just be a random bug. Sure, it could totally be a random bug. Yes. Well, no, I had it one time. It would happen. Not all the time, but frequently with Pokemon Go, and it would only happen entering a battle. Yeah. Oh, so now we just got a white screen. I could click on my home button and dismiss the app and come back. And it was like, oh, OK, now I work. It's like, well, why did this happen? Yeah, that makes sense, right? Because Pokemon Go is I mean, games tend to use lots of system resources, RAM and CPU and all that stuff. So I mean, I can see that. Yeah. Mm hmm. Another thing it does is does it typically doesn't work very well if you're on a VPN because they think you're trying to fool them. Oh, yeah. Well, there are all sorts of hacks. My son found one of those hacks for Pokemon Go. I mean, it was a while back. I don't know if it still works where he could put himself anywhere in the world that he wanted to be. I don't seem to work out OK for him. But I think if they see something unusual, yeah, like you're teleporting around the world like a maniac. Yeah. Well, if they see you coming from a place that they don't expect you to be coming from, it's like. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Good, good, good. Well, we hope it we hope it still sounds good. We know we know we recently moved to discord for our. Remote shows, which is what most of them are. And we get that sounding delicious. But, you know, different bikes, different room, bouncy walls. We did turn off the air conditioning just for you. So you didn't have to hear that hum in the background, though I'm sure there's other homes for you to hear. All right. Well, let's see where we are here. I swear I'm going to find this agenda again, John. There it is. Um, yeah, let's go to let's go to less here. We've had this question actually hanging on for a week or two. And. And I like it because it's it's interesting. It's all about Thunderbolt. He said I've always liked having my iTunes and photos files on my Mac's internal drive for both speed and reliability of syncing. However, the number and size of these files is now forcing me to think of external storage. My iMac has, which I believe is the same year as yours, Dave, Thunderbolt two ports, which are inside the mini display port ports. And that is what I have. Yeah, he says, if I were to buy a Thunderbolt two hard drive or a Drobo or a Synology, would I be able to use it on the new Mac with Thunderbolt three ports? I know Thunderbolt three ports use the USB C interface. Could a simple adapter be purchased and would such an adapter slow transfer rates to USB three speeds? So, yes, there is an adapter. Apple sells one. I think you could probably find them from third parties as well. And it's exactly what you need. That said, you might want to consider the efficacy of buying a Thunderbolt hard disk. There are not a whole lot of single drive enclosures that will benefit from using Thunderbolt over, say, you know, USB three because single drive speeds, especially rotational, which is probably what you're going to do for, you know, this type of library. It's exactly what I do for this type of library. Won't even begin to hit those USB three speeds, right? Let alone what Thunderbolt might bring to the table. And the thing is with Thunderbolt, you'll be paying a lot more for an interface in those cases like you just and you're you're paying for it on both ends. Now, you already have a Thunderbolt interface in your Mac, but now you're paying for an adapter to go to Thunderbolt to go to something that's going to be slower than Thunderbolt anyway. I'm not convinced this makes the right sense. I've used Thunderbolt hard drives, you know, I have the benefit of testing things that I don't have to pay for often. And I mean, it works fine. It's a it's a perfectly good interface. But you're going Thunderbolt to SATA Thunderbolt to, you know, whatever is in the in the drive enclosure, but really then you're going from SATA or whatever down to the speed of that particular drive. Now, if you're talking about something like a Drobo, where you've got a direct attached device with multiple drives that are all sort of, you know, rating together as one. Now Thunderbolt could make sense, right? Because you've got multiple drives and you're taking advantage of the sort of the combined speed of all of them. Definitely worth considering there. But for a single drive or even for like a mirror drive or a dual drive kind of thing, I don't I don't think that Thunderbolt is worth the expense. Obviously, if you can get it without without having to pay for it, then it's not going to it's not going to be a bad thing. But it's not going to do just by having just by adding Thunderbolt to a drive, it's not going to make your life magically better. And in most cases, you won't notice a difference other than the hit to your wallet. What do you think, Mr. Braun? If I'm hearing this right, the confusion here is that Thunderbolt to use the DisplayPort type port versus pointed out the three uses a USB. So yeah, sure. Yeah. And he would need an adapter. Yeah, I sort of took it in a different direction, but you're right. Yeah, it's just, you know, just using the adapter, slow it down. No, not using the adapter. But but what you're connecting to the adapter is sort of where I went with this. Like, yeah, let's let's let's reject the premise for a second and just explore that some. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's the right thing. Anything else on that, John, before we move on? All right, I still get to join the Thunderbolt Club. Do you not have any devices that support your that computer's got the one right here has to support Thunderbolt, no? I've plugged the display adapter into it. It's got to be Thunderbolt. If my 2011 MacBook Air sitting next to this supports Thunderbolt. Hold on, look at my system report. I do have a Thunderbolt. I think I've got a Thunderbolt. Yeah, 10 gigabits times two, it says. OK, so you have two Thunderbolt ports on there. You look at the other. It's not on this side. It's on that side. No, there's one here. All right, then that's it. OK, yeah. So I don't know if it's two channels. Maybe. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see. This is probably the place to be. Yes, that's true. To help people evaluate their Thunderbolt. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Sure, we'll go to we'll go to Karsten here. Karsten, Karsten had a good. A good question this week that's always worth exploring. He says this might be a bigger subject in and of itself and too large, but we'll try anyway. He says with all the buzz surrounding Internet of Things devices, I think that's a relevant conversation to have as CES is about to kick off here and their firmware vulnerabilities and default passwords never getting changed with IoT devices. He says I wanted to reach out to see what the gate gap communities thoughts are on this. There are so many products on the market. So let's focus on the Elgato Eve product line. He says here's my concern. Almost all the products support home kit and the Android equivalent. And that's where my concern lies. We know that Apple updates their products regularly, which is great in aids and keeping our smart home devices here. My concern is adding an IoT device which also supports the Android platform. Since I will be using home kit, I will never configure the Android components, which means I will never reset the admin portion. This seems like a problem or vulnerability. Now, he says one might say since I do not use the Android portion, I have nothing to fear. He says, well, just because the Android portion is not an operation, the feature sets there, the doors are open and the right command could enable and exploit it. So the main goal is to ensure that the dark side, meaning the buggy Android features cannot be invoked in any way when not configured. He says I could go the crazy route of getting a separate internet line, separate router, different Apple ID, only connect home kit to the new wireless network, et cetera. That would work, but it's crazy and I would lose a lot of functionality by doing that. He says, so what are your thoughts? Should I not be concerned about this? I know of viruses that infect Macs and PCs, which hunt for IoT devices and try to log into them. He says I'm really interested. So this is a great question. And I actually wrote a piece back in the end of 2016 about exactly this, because you're right. Apple does a great job securing home kit, which really is the connection, really where the focus of the security is, is between your iPhone and the devices. And that's so that nothing can hijack that connection and get personally identifiable information off of your iPhone. And that's great, but you're totally right that most of these, not all, there are some IoT devices, I think Belkin's got a few that are home kit only, but by and large, because home kits not even close to the most popular IoT standards, I think Amazon's Alexa is, oh, sorry, Amazon's A word is. I think that most of these devices are always gonna have the ability to be connected via Google Assistant or, so G word, A word, C word even, right? Not just S word, which is, of course, home kit. And you're totally right that all of these other doors are wide open and Apple imposes no restrictions otherwise. I've talked with Apple about this. They certainly have their standards for how you work with home kit, but there is nothing in their standards that says, and thou shalt not employ any, you know, awful standards also. There's nothing in there that says that. You are welcome to have anything else. So you could secure it all down with home kit and then leave the door wide open with no password whatsoever for somebody to connect via a web browser and boom, it almost doesn't matter that home kit security is there. Almost, I say, because still the connection between your iPhone and that device is still encrypted and secure, so somebody can't do a man in the middle attack there. So, yeah, you're right to be concerned and you're right that default passwords aren't gonna get changed on this stuff and there's no magic answer. I mean, I think you need to look at each device and even though you're not gonna use the Android stuff or the web stuff or whatever it is that your device also has, you do need to go in and change those passwords and update that stuff if you wanna make sure that it's not vulnerable to those attacks, right? Yes. Thanks, John. I think they're, no, I agree with you. And it's because there are, you know, standards are great because there are so many of them, but the problem is you're always gonna run into developers, probably not on purpose, but leaving little back doors or and things like that and they forget to take them out. And then of course, if you can just log in as Root and Root and everything. Yeah. I think part of the hope is that a lot of these network overseers, if you will, like Eros products, things that, and even, I think they have a new version here, we're gonna check them out, but the box device that I looked at advertises this feature, but it didn't do it in the way that I expected, but it said it would tell you if there were bad passwords that either didn't exist or were not that great. Yep. You told me, I think it was the, you have the Euro plus thing. I have not enabled that. Okay, what product were you using? Because you had one where- I was using the Fingbox. Oh, the Fingbox, okay. And that does some of this. So what we're talking about is devices that sit on your network, and this could be your router, as John was pointing out, or something else, like the Fingbox that sits there and looks for some level of nefarious activity and warns you when it sees it, which is really the right way to do this because you can't expect every device vendor to do it right. You need, if you want 100%, well, you're never gonna get it, but if you want something approaching 100%, you need something on your network, and it could simply be you being very diligent or with the help of a device, like we're talking about here, that monitors what's going on in your network and tells you when it sees something that's like, huh, this doesn't look right. You should look into that. So, yeah. And like you've seen, like, for example, the one day that you were running it and Pete came over, it said, hey, guess who logged into your network because you had given him access. Right. And some of us have seen mysterious devices appear on our network, whether it's, well, I don't know why that happens sometimes, but do you see stuff appear that shouldn't be there? Once, hmm, once or twice. And I'm not sure if it's because I had guest access on or something. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. I saw it was either a printer or a device and it was like, that's not mine. Whoa. Well, when I tried to connect to it, it said it failed. So it could have been something that fleeting, I don't know. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah. Still, that's kind of scary. Yeah, I mean, it hasn't happened in a long time. So that's good. It could have been again that I had some guest access on and someone stumbled across and then I disabled it. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, it is good to have something that the Thingbox doesn't do it all, but it certainly makes it easy for the things that it does. And for me, it does enough that it's, I really find that Thingbox a very good balance between knowing what I need to know and not pestering me all the time so that I have not learned to ignore its warnings. When the Thingbox tells me something, I look at it. Now, for the first day or two that you have the thing, it's a little overwhelming because it's telling you about every device that's new to it, which is, of course, everything initially. And it is worth going through all that. It pays and it doesn't take you very long. But then after that, like the other day, yesterday, I got off the plane and I got a notification that Nathan's iPhone had joined my network at home. I assume that that's my kid's friend, Nathan. And so I texted and asked him, like, hey, Nathan was over. They're like, yeah, that was Nate. Like, okay, gotcha. Great, no problem, all good. But I have had things like, you know, just appear and it's like, what is that? Or it also warns me about when a device opens a UPNP port on my router, which is really nice. That's where like the danger can happen is when devices start opening things to the outside world without your knowledge. And this is a really nice way to be alerted to that, so. It's good, it's good. All right, man. You wanna take us to Zach or Kent, John? Do you have a preference? Let me get to the page here. Yeah, I know, we gotta vamp a little bit as we find our way around with our smaller screens. Yep. I should really, I should be using my iPad Pro as a second screen here. I just didn't think to do that until really until we started doing the show. And I was like, okay, are you ready? Yeah, I think Zach is a good, short and sweet one, but it's a good question. So here we go. Hey guys, my church just got a new Synology NAS, DS218+, okay? It's the second time we've mentioned that one in the show. All right, it's a popular one. Actually, that's a really good one for a small starter. Yeah. And we have a Lycee two big network two drive, which is a NAS, just to be clear. Lycee makes, under that name, they make both NAS and direct connected devices. So I checked this one out. Okay. We were trying to transfer files from the Lycee to the Synology and was wondering what the best way is. We have files that contain periods. I know, right? Good old Dostays. Well, no, you can do that on MacOS as well. All of our files contain periods, most of them do. And using FTP seems to jack things up. Also, is there an easy way to bulk remove a character out of a file name in previous FTP uploads? The period got changed to a question mark contained in a box, which I think is the mystery character. Right, the universal mystery character. Yes. All right. So here's the answer though. And I've actually done this, Dave. I'm just gonna, sorry. I'm just gonna aim your mic down so that you don't have to crane your neck, man. Oh, and your mic's gonna fall. Sorry about that. Don't touch my mic. Okay. All right. Like many features on the Synology, it may not be worded quite the way you'd expect it to be or just buried somewhere. And this is a feature that is buried somewhere. So what you can do with the Synology is you can connect to a shared folder on another NAS. So for example, what I do is that I have the 2-Bay Synology running DSM, of course. Of course. And then I have a Drobo. Okay. Which supports both SMB and AFP connections. Here's what you can do when you're in File Station, which is a Synology's Files Manager. If you go to File Station, Tools, Mount Remote Folder, SIFS Shared Folder. What is SIF? Well, SIFS is Common Internet File System, which I think is another name for SMB in the Windows Protocol. Okay. So it's kind of weird that they name it that because I don't think many, I think only people that have been around computers for a while even understood, have even heard of SIFS. I don't think anybody refers to it. Is that, if anything, you refer to it as SMB. Okay. Oh, I didn't even, I didn't realize that that was, huh, okay, all right. Or I've seen you call that at times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Otherwise, and then I think they have another choice. I think NFS is the other one. Again, kind of an obscure one. Network File System or whatever. Yep. So what you do is then you, in the Dialog, you enter the path to your shared folder. Something like backslash, backslash 172.16.1.100 slash my stuff. The username. The password. And then what folder, so this is very similar to the volumes folder. You say what folder on the Synology is like the map it to. And then once it's done, voila, it appears. Then what you can do, or at least I did, so every now and then I'll do a full backup of what's in my Drobo. Yep. You just copy that newly attached folder and then paste it somewhere else on the Synology. And it'll go through the entire operation of copying everything from that remote folder to the Synology. Takes a while. Huh. Huh. I don't know if you've ever tried that, but that's how you do it. Okay. There are a few other ways you could map drives and all that, but that's the one that I just came across that did what I needed. That's pretty simple too. Wow. Huh. That's pretty good. Yeah. The only disappointment is that it only offers SIFS and NFS. That's kind of weird. I don't know why they're... Right, but like you said, SIFS is essentially SMB, or at least in the way Synology implements it, it works that way. So, okay. Yeah, just to be nice if they had like AFP or something. Sure. Yeah, well. Yeah. All right. As for the second question, if you got file names with weird characters in them, I can suggest that you look at something that's called a better finder rename. Yeah. And trying to do some of this from the terminal can get kind of squirrely or from the finder, especially if it's a wide-ranging problem. Right. You know, bogus characters and all of the file names. Right. I think it'd be really difficult to craft that with like a move command or a rename command. Sure. Well, it's move, right? In Unix, it's move. MV. Yeah. So say, you know, MV, this to that. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'd give them a try and they're at www.publicspace.net slash a better finder rename. All right, cool. So I think you could probably go through that and say, hey, get rid of all the, you know, these crazy question mark characters. Yeah. Because that can confuse, I think it may confuse some file systems. Yeah. And it's worth remembering that Mac OS may support a character set that is larger than your NAS supports. And a lot of them, especially with their SMB or, you know, if you're still using AFS implementations, will try and map those characters. But you can wind up with exactly the scenario where even though your Mac knows what that character is, there's no way to save it on your NAS because your NAS is not using HFS plus or APFS. It's using, you know, whatever it has, like EXT4 or maybe BTRFS or who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just be aware of that. Maybe try not to use, and I know this is an awful thing to say, especially, you know, if you've got like gigabytes worth of files, but try not to use overly special characters. And you're right, John, a better finder rename is the way to go with that. Oh, that's good. You want to take us to Kent, man? Yeah, Kent's got one from the ages here. Hi, guys, and happy new year. Thank you. Just a quick one. Try not to bother you with this, but after a Google lookup couldn't seem to find a real answer and I don't enjoy being caught. Ever since I've up to high Sierra, I keep getting this pop up on my startup on the desktop. And by this, it's Java SE6. Which he said in the subject here. I thought he would do a screenshot, but he mentioned in the subject. Sure. So we've got Java SE6, which if you don't know, Java SE6 is not the latest. Right. Java SE7, and now the current is from what I could find is Java 8. But there are some things that still require Java 6, which is why it's still available. Yeah, somebody told me, I think Creative Cloud, or some Adobe product, seemed to require it. Yep. Yeah, I seem to remember running something that needed Java 6. So, two things. So I surfed around here, and the thing is, so Apple at one point did offer their version of Java, or Mac specific. Sure. Java 6 installer that you could get from them. You could also get it from Oracle, who now owns Java. Right, right. But, so here's the thing. I found that with the Apple stuff, the place that you want to look. So there are two places that I suggested our friend looks, and then I have some additional information. So, the two places to look, Dave, I would say are, if installed by Apple, the information I found is that it's in system, library, Java, Java virtual machines. Okay. If it's installed by Oracle, then it should be in library, Java, Java virtual machines. Then you'll find the various pieces of Java in there. So you could go to either one of those, and whack it, and that should get rid of the Java virtual machine. So that's interesting. So it's basically the same location. One is inside the system folder. One is just the library folder. And that's how you decide whether it's been Apple that put it there, or some third party. The other thing is that you probably have a Java preference pane. And so you probably want to get rid of that as well. And for pretty much any preference pane, if you right click on it, you'll get an option, remove Java preference pane, or whatever preference pane it is. Sweet. Then Oracle had an article, which I'll point to this one as well. And it took a slightly different path. But I thought I'd mention it because number one, I mean, well, they're making the recommendation and they do Java. Right, right. So they suggested a few other places. I haven't actually tried removing it because I still want to run Java. Yeah, right. Well, I don't have the Apple version. I wasn't willing to install the Java 6. Well, I didn't want to create this Java mess of all these different versions of Java flying around. But yeah, I have their article too, and so I'll link to that. Which is called how do I install Java on my Mac? So I will link to that. And between those two, I think you can get rid of that because I've seen a lot of people get pestered for that, which I keep saying, hey, you gotta update Java. Right. Right, right. There we go. Cool. Hey, I want to take a minute and thank, really, I would like to thank everyone that's contributed this week to our Mac Geekab Premium program, which you can find out about by going to either just macgeekab.com or more directly to macgeekab.com slash premium. This is something we set up years ago in response to so many of you that wanted to reach out and support what we do here directly. It has made a huge difference. I don't want to say that the show wouldn't exist without it, but it might be fair to say that the show wouldn't exist without it. So I'll say it. I also said I would like to thank everybody that has contributed this week. I can't. I can thank some of you, but I prepped this show before I left for Vegas and most of these records, at least in the way that I work with them, are only on my home Mac. I mean, they're backed up. Don't worry about any of that. They're of course on our web server in a secure way and all of that stuff. But in the way that I pulled them and make sure that I'm properly acknowledging every one of you, that's all done on my iMac in the office. And so there have been many more of you that I'm about to thank here because when I prepped this on, I think it was Friday, so many things came in over the day, Friday and then yesterday. And I want you each to know that I have both PayPal and Striper, the ways that we process your payments for these things. And I have them both now buzzing my phone and watch when payments come in. So when that happens, I get the little happy friendly reminder that you folks are out there doing what you do and it's actually a great thing to have throughout the day. So thank you. And I know that lots of these came in, but I do want to thank the ones that I have proper logs for here. And then of course we'll catch up with the rest of you next week. No one's lost. On the biannual plan, which is 25 bucks a year, sorry, 25 bucks every six months by default. We have Norton B. We have Michael P. We have Tony G. and John O. Thank you very much. We also have putch on the biannual plan at $50 because you can set your amount to whatever you'd like it to be. So thank you so much. On the monthly $10 plan, the only one that I have on my list is Abdullah B. Thank you very, very much. And then a one-time contribution of 100 bucks from Karsten. Thank you, my friend. Thank you all. Thanks to everybody that I didn't yet mention. Like I said, we'll definitely catch you next week. I just wanna make sure I do it right and don't miss anybody. I've only got like half the records here. Or I mean, I actually have all of them here but only in like half the way and I can't mark them properly. So again, thank you so much. It means so much to John and I that you do what you do so that we can continue to do what we do. And thanks. All right. You wanna talk a little bit about Spectre, John and Meltdown? I kinda do. A lot has been said about it. And thankfully, on Thursday, Apple said something about it. And Apple put together a pretty good one-pager to explain not only what these things are in general but also what they have done and are doing to mitigate against this. So these two things are attacks that could target features in modern CPUs. Both of them are centered around speculative processing. Specifically Spectre. In fact, that's where its name comes from. What that means is that your CPU guesses at what work it thinks it should do next. It looks at where your code is gonna go and how your program is written and then it goes and says, all right, I think the next thing that might be asked for is this and then this and then this. And if it's correct, well, then things just got a lot faster because the work's already done by the time it's asked for. If it's not correct, okay, well, no big deal. We did some work, we'll throw out the result, we'll do the next piece of work. So that's at the core of this. There are two attacks that Spectre can do. One is specifically this, and they call it the branch predictor. Unfortunately with that, the fix is updating CPU architecture to turn off the branch predictor or turn off certain features of it. And some CPUs can actually be modified with what effectively is a firmware update or a microcode update. Presumably this is because the engineers of those CPUs have put in the ability to disable the branch predictor for their own testing. I can only assume that that would be the reason that that's there. So that can be turned off, but not as easily. Another one is for Spectre. And this is I think what Apple will be fixing in Safari coming up is that it is attacking the array bounds, which means that a program can look beyond the memory that it is built to have if other programs are being too quick about storing their data in memory before they sort of reserve it. And this is again, common practice. And I'm trying to simplify all this down, but this is common practice to just make your code more efficient. If you don't put the box around your data before you put your data out there, other software could be looking at what's in those memory locations. And so the fix is, my mic stand didn't work, John. The fix, and this is what Apple I think is doing with Safari is rewriting those bits of code to say, no, no, like go and reserve the memory and wait until you hear back from the operating system that the memory has been truly reserved and then go put data out there. So what they're calling this is serializing that as opposed to parallelizing that. So it's happening one after the other as opposed to potentially one next to the other. So that's Siri, that's Spectre, sorry. And Apple is updating Safari to protect against that. And then Meltdown is an attack that's based on the way operating systems share memory between user programs and the operating system itself or what's called the kernel. The kernel should be reserved and no one should be able to see it. But the problem is the CPU of course can see both things. It has to be able to, that's how it works. Operating systems though can be patched to keep this from happening with potentially a minor performance hit. Apple has already updated all current versions of macOS and iOS and TVOS. WatchOS isn't affected for this Meltdown thing, but they say that there's no performance hit in any of their testing and they're gonna keep testing it. So we'll see. Anything to add to that, John? This is, you know, it's aggravating that this is so common after all these years, but I think at least one of the attacks, the generic name for it is a buffer overflow attack. And as you explained in more detail, if you blow past, and I actually did this in some early days of C programming. Yeah. You can tell earlier versions of C, I think they fixed this, but you could say, hey, can you put something in location 15 of this 10 byte array? And it's like, sure. Oh. Some compilers will warn you. It's like, well, why are you trying to go past the ends of this buffer? Right. And they even have products that'll look for this sort of problem or detect when, cause the problem is is that the data, you can interpret, if you know how to do the attack, you can interpret the data rather than data as instructions to execute. And that's, and I don't know why things were architected that way. Yeah. But it seems it's pretty common is that these, one area of memory that's meant for data storage is next to the part of memory that has the code that you're running. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. It's... But I like the branch prediction thing too. I mean, it's almost taking in, it's almost like looking into the future. Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah, the processor is making guesses. It's like, okay, well, one of these four things could happen, but I don't know enough yet to make it so. Right. But at some point, it's like, oh, yeah, okay, that was the right guess. So let's get rid of all these others. So let's get rid of all these others. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty fascinating how all this goes. I think the general advice though is that I heard from, you know, especially a lot of people are complaining that certain outlets would be focused, that they were saying that this was only an Apple problem. And the thing is, it's a problem for Intel ARM and I think multiple processors just because a lot of the way you architect a processor is... Yeah, this is the kind of thing that's going to ripple back through the curriculums at universities for microprocessor design and just software engineering in a general sense. I mean, there's, you know, we've gotten... We've started taking advantage of so many of these efficiency features that, you know, somebody who finally stopped and thought, hey, wait a minute, could this be used to attack and read really what the problem is, is in theory, someone could read data in memory that does not belong to their process. I mean, that's the core of the problem and we've talked about sort of the details of it, but that's it, that's what this is. Apple's patching Safari because it's possible that a website, like if you don't install software from nefarious or questionable, I don't wanna say nefarious, but questionable sources, like if you're only installing things from either vendors that you truly know and trust or the Mac App Store or the, you know, of course the iOS App Store, then your chances of having an app that's gonna do this are pretty slim, not impossible, but slim. On web pages though, where JavaScript can run and start doing a lot of these types of things, it's possible that without installing any extra software just by visiting a site, things could start poking in and maybe stumbling into the area of RAM that's holding your password manager's data, and maybe it's gonna grab something unencrypted at that point because who knows how that's, I mean, at some point, your password manager needs to decrypt that data to populate a field. So where is that holding in RAM and can something access it? So that's why Apple's patching Safari for this. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I think we're getting the gist of it. So I just wanted to go through that. Hey, man, we had a few follow-ups from the last episode. The first one I wanted to talk about was what I thought was my network loop. Remember, like the show had to stop in its tracks? So the way I fixed it temporarily was I disconnected the ethernet cable that runs between the house and the office. The router is in the office. I was recording in the office, essentially. I was in the studio above it. So that just disconnected the house and immediately, as I mentioned, that dealt with the problem. So everything came back online. There was obviously some packet storm happening on the network and it was definitely sourced at my house. So I disconnected the house. Everything was fine. I assumed it was a network loop and it may well have been. An hour and a half later, we finished the show. I decided it was time to troubleshoot. I plugged the house back in and everything's been fine ever since. I made no other changes. So what I think, as I mentioned, I put a new switch in place, too. I think switches have something called an ARP cache, ARP cache, that remembers where which port on the switch to go out to get to a certain device or whatever and it just makes things more efficient. The problem is when you start changing things about your network, that ARP cache might well be wrong. What I should have done when I installed my new switch because I have many switches throughout the network is I should have powered down every switch that I have and forced them all to come up from scratch and sort of relook at the network that way. I did not. I just plugged this new switch in place of an old one. And I'm thinking that may have been part of my issue. But that problem's gone. So I just wanted to follow up because several of you were asking and I wish I had a magic answer, but perhaps that's it. So there you go. Any thoughts on that before we go on to the other followups? I like ARP. ARP is good. I remember, and what you'll see, if you wanna see ARP in action, get a packet sniffer like Wireshark and what you're gonna see are messages where it's gonna say, okay, the type of message is ARP and it's gonna be a message of the format. Who has this IP address? Could you please tell this other IP address, which I suspect is the router? What you can do, and I remember doing this in a security challenge long ago, you could do something called ARF spoofing where you can forge the response to this because typically a lot of these protocols don't have any sort of security. No security, right. So what happens is somebody on the network asks this question, the person who should answer answers then you send an answer with different information and we actually... Oh, interesting, that makes sense. Yeah. And we actually did this. So this was proof of concept, I guess. Sure, sure. We convinced someone who was a client to come to a different machine to retrieve our webpage because we sent enough packets to it saying, no, no, no, you wanna go there. Go this way, go this way, trust us, go this way. Yeah, huh, yeah, yeah. I had to do that in a hotel room once. I think I talked about this where there was a machine with a virus that was just constantly taking over the network. And so I used ARP to blast it off the network. And then I put my machine as the IP address that that one had so that when it tried to come back on the network, it would stop. I knew it was a Windows machine just from the data that I saw from it. And I knew that it would just stop in its tracks with an error message up on the screen. So yeah, ARP can be fun. So I think that was my problem last week. We talked about, we talked with, I think it was with Michael where we were talking about power issues and USB power issues specifically. He had those anchor USB hubs that were powering his hard drives or connecting his hard drives, I should say. And his Mac was occasionally throwing messages that said no power, not enough power. And we walked through a lot of that. He tested both of these anchor hubs with his iPhone and it's very interesting. It's got, one of them is their 10 port hub. It's got seven USB three ports and then three, what they call power IQ charging only ports and it plugs into the wall. Here's the interesting thing, John. He plugged his iPhone in to one of the USB three ports and disconnected the hub from his Mac. So it wasn't gonna sync with his Mac but the hub was still plugged into power. His iPhone did not charge. His iPhone would only charge if A, he plugged it into one of the power IQ charging only ports or B, he plugged it into the USB three port and connected the hub to the Mac. So those seven USB three ports are getting bus power from the Mac. They're not providing their own power. I never would have assumed that but I mean, he tested it and confirmed it. I'm gonna ask anchor about it this week here because that seems weird to me. Like why wouldn't the hub be provided? There might be a very good, like a USB related reason why they don't, but that was really weird. I mean, you're adding seven hub, seven ports to USB. You'd think you might wanna get involved in adding some power help to it. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, thought that was interesting. Moving on from that, Brian. Oh yeah, we talked about Brian not being able to connect to anything but his home Wi-Fi network. And in the show, I suggested that maybe it was a profile that was causing this problem and told him to go into settings profiles. I think maybe settings general profiles if I remember correctly. Well, it turned out that helped. He found the tunnel bear VPN profile in there and a recent update to tunnel bear gave the option to automatically run the VPN on any Wi-Fi network unless you select it as trusted. And he said on his iPhone, that option is on and his home network, the one that worked is trusted. On the iPad, that option is off. He says he turned it off on his phone and now he can connect to any Wi-Fi network as before. So he submitted a support request to tunnel bear to kind of work with them and see if there would be a solution to this problem. So it's pretty good, Brian. Thanks for the follow up. We always appreciate that. One last one, I think from Paul also about Wi-Fi, although we know what Brian's specific issue was, Paul had something to add for anybody else that might be going through this. He said he has an iPad that won't connect, had. He reset network settings. He told it to forget all the networks. He had a profile, but that didn't solve it either. And he said the only way he can get on hotel Wi-Fi is to be using, oh, he can't get it to connect to his Mi-Fi, but he can get it to connect to everything else. And he doesn't have any other Wi-Fi settings out there. So I think even though he's done the reset of network settings, I think there's something more in the network settings that's not getting reset. I would try disabling that profile from your company though, because that really can get in the way as we've seen. So very interesting. Any thoughts on that before we move on from Paul, John? Nope. Okay. I think, I'm gonna look at the time, but I think it is, unfortunately, John, time for us to start moving on from our day here. I do have one cool stuff found to add though, and that comes from listener Kevin. Kevin writes, he says, I frequently have to transfer large files long distances over a flaky corporate network. And in order to verify that the files arrive intact, I generate hash values, specifically SHA-256, before I send it and after the transfer. Says I used to do this using a terminal incantation involving open SSL, but I recently found a free open source GUI app called QuickHash that will generate and compare many different types of hash values. It's available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. He said, I wish I had found this long ago. It saved me a lot of time and typing, and it makes sure that after a very large file transfer, I don't get caught. So that's pretty cool. This used to happen all the time in the modem transfer days. You would get a CRC, a cyclic redundancy check, right? I think that's right. That would, the server would send that to you and your computer would do it because there would be line noise and all kinds of things that could corrupt a transfer without you knowing any other way. And what this does is this just does a calculation on this file that comes up with what should be a unique number or series of numbers and characters that should be the same on both end. You run the same calculation on the same file. It comes up with the same number, but if you run the same calculation on a different file because the file got corrupted in the transfer, then the number's different. You know it doesn't match. You gotta resend the transfer. So that's pretty cool, Kevin. Thanks for that. That's a good, cool stuff found. And with that, I think it truly is time to see if I can bring the band in out of the not quite as cold, but I think I found them. There they are, John. Somewhere. I don't know where they are. That's what we got for today. You got anything to add before we start diving into the outro here, my friend? Just one thing. What's that? Feedback.atmacgeekab.com Feedback.atmacgeekab.com? John, are you sure about that? Feedback.atmacgeekab.com. What about the premium listeners, though? They get a special one. That's premium.atmacgeekab.com. And we really appreciate it. We do prioritize the stuff that comes in there. You can also call us 224888geek, which John is. 4335. As far as you know. And also visit us on our Facebook group. Visit macgeekab.com slash Facebook. That'll redirect you to exactly the right place. And that's where you go. If I can find the right app here, I will move us to the outro. There we go. I think I'm doing it. I think it's happening. I don't know why it's so quiet. I'm gonna crank it up a little bit. It feels quiet still. I don't know. All right. Well, I'm gonna say this. Thanks to Cashfly, C-A-C-E-G-F-L-Y.com. Thanks to our CES sponsors. Smile, Elgato, Otherworld Computing. And of course, thanks to Bear Bones and Eero, all the folks that sponsors here at MacGeekab all the time. John, you started us down this mess. I want you to end it. Do you have anything to add or perhaps reiterate that we went through throughout the show? Well, I think I do. And it's especially appropriate since we're in Las Vegas. And the answer to your question, Dave, is don't get caught. Made up.