 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 745 for Monday, January 21st, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, your queries, your ponderings, all of those things. Our queries, our ponderings, our cool stuff found. We mix them all together so that each and every one of us can learn at least five new things every time we get together here. Sponsors this week include LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG and Express VPN at express VPN.com slash MGG. We'll talk about what you get at those links and why you'd want to go there shortly, but you can visit them now. It's OK for now here in 3.4 degree Fahrenheit weather Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, where we're lounging in a balmy 15 degrees fair. Oh, man, look at you go. That's right. This is John F. Brown. Yeah. Well, you know, we had a little we had a little snow this weekend. We had actually we had a lot of snow this weekend here and and a lot of cold all around and and I've got some of it left some sort of a cough thing. So we're going to rely on you to drive the bus today, John. So I don't know how that's going to go, but, you know, that's how it's going to be. Sure, wasn't a CES crud? Oh, no, no, this this came on far too late after CES for it to have been that. Yeah, no, this this is a cough kind of thing that came on over the weekend. So yeah. Yeah. Oh, Daniel has a question, though, and we're going to do our darnedest to answer as many of these things as we can today before we run out of steam here. Daniel asks, do you know of a Mac OS app that would monitor disk usage and pop up a warning slash notice when the used or free space got to a set percentage? If not an app, is there another way to do this? Says it must work as a pop up for me or something along the lines of an obvious alert because users cannot be bothered to monitor this on their own, as you likely know. Sure, I'll go with that for now. You know, so there's one app that pesters the crap out of me about this, but not in what I find to be a useful way. But that is Drive Geniuses Drive Pulse. The problem is it's percentage based. So I think it's 10 percent of your boot drive. Once you're below that, then it's that's when it starts warning you. And you cannot alter that. So while it will do it, it's not. You know, probably not. It's certainly not what I want, because I would want something controllable. However, that said, I stat menus will do exactly what you want. You can go in to I stat menus into the notification center and add a new So this is the notifications tab or section. I should call it inside I stat menus. So not your system's notifications, although that's where it puts them. But if you go in there, you can there's all sorts of predefined ones, or at least they were for me. But but if you go in, you can add a new one. And so I set one that said show an alert when my boot drives free space gets below and then I set 10 gigs. So it's like, OK, great. If I'm below 10 gigs, I got a problem. I want to be aware of it. I don't want to find out when I'm at two gigs. So and and again, the beauty of that is I set that. So if you wanted yours to be 100 gigs, no problem. Just send it to that. You're good to go. Look at that. Right. I stat menus is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it shows you a plethora of sensor data, which which I love it for and we all love it for. But I had never really been in this notifications. Right. So you could, you know, like if you want to know if your CPU's temperature gets too high or if your processors are pegged for more than, say, 30 seconds at a time that sometimes can mean a runaway process, you can have it tell you. And, you know, if you want to know if your fan spins up to a, you know, certain point, yep, no problem. You can put that in like it's pretty flexible. I think you can do the fan thing. I know you can do the rest of them. I think you can do the fan thing. But certainly you can get a lot of useful information. It, you know, like, like you said, John, it it's always been great for what we'll call pull based information. Things where you go to look and find it and even at a glance, because there it is right in your menu bar. But if you want it to get in your way when something critical happens or even non critical, you can have it warn you about the weather too. For that matter. Yeah, I saw that. That's a default setting. Yeah. My friend, this brings up the question, though, especially when you're trying to calculate some number like the amount of free space. Yeah. Some may say that depending on what you do, that number is open to interpretation. We do. I'm just trying to lead us into our next question. Oh, well, well, you know, this is this is actually looking at how much space is used versus free on your drive, right? So I stat menus, doesn't guess around about this stuff. It doesn't do anything to the data. It's just looks at what the finder reports, I guess. Yeah, well, probably not the finder, to be honest. It's probably looking looking using like D.U. The D.F. The Unix command, right? But yeah, it's it's just looking at the disk. It's not trying to interpret anything. It's just looking at the disk. But we have had some discussions recently on the show. It started with actually you were having an issue, John, that or you realized you were having an issue. And I clarify that for for a reason that will become obvious where when you went to the Apple menu about this Mac, you go to storage and you let it sort of, you know, finish with its calculations and you had this system area that seemed huge and you couldn't figure out what it was. And you were on you are on a Mojave machine with this. And and it reached the point. So I kept data because always deep data if you're trying to solve the problem. And at one point, Dave, it was over 400 gigabytes. That's a lot of system classification. And I'm like, what? And that's sort of what is it taking up that much space? Right. And I know that in order to answer that question, you went and ran OmniDisk Sweeper, which has been long been our sort of go to for this stuff. Well, guess what, John? I ran into this, too, on two machines. One was a high Sierra machine, the one here in the studio. And then the other one was my machine in the office. I saw the IM you sent me. And I'm like, yeah, you're like now me, too. And I'm like, welcome to the club. Yeah. Well, I think we're all in the club and what I've realized and we'll explain what what we learned going through this because the mystery is no longer a mystery. Those numbers are correct. They're they're accurate and they're just not informative enough for us geeks or really for anyone when they grow to be, you know, half your drive or a quarter of your drive or something like that, right? Where it's like, OK, what is this? Because why is it so wildly different between, say, two different systems? So I started digging it. And like you, the first thing I did was I ran Omni Disk Sweeper. And what I neglected to realize until I dug in more deeply was that Omni Disk Sweeper was not reporting the same amount of space used as the finder was or as, you know, this this thing in about this Mac was. And and so, you know, what I did was I said, well, I have to. And I had already done this part. I know Mojave, I know we have full disk access in Mojave, right? This thing where processes can't see the entirety of the disk unless they're in this group. So we go into system preferences and I think it's in security, but I'm not on a machine at the moment, but that's where it is. And you go and you add Omni Disk Sweeper to full disk access and still nothing. Then I ran Daisy disk and Daisy disk asked me to add it to full disk access, which I did. And also Daisy disk allows you right from the user interface to run a scan as administrator, which is what we do with the hack that we've done for years where we run Omni Disk Sweeper from the terminal. This is the problem. I and I think you, John, had added Omni Disk Sweeper to full disk access, but we had not added the terminal to full disk access. And because we have to run Omni Disk Sweeper through the terminal in order to get it to run as root, it is subject to the limitations of that parent process. And so this is why Daisy disk showed me the light long before Omni Disk Sweeper did. Once I got ODS, and I'll call Omni Disk Sweeper ODS, so I don't keep saying it and bothering you with it. But once I got ODS configured right in terms of permissions, it worked great and that meant putting the terminal into full disk access, which is something that sort of made me feel a little sketchy because like I don't necessarily I kind of like being protected while I'm there sometimes. But anyway, doing that did it. So taking in, though, with with first with Daisy disk, the first thing I realized was that my drive genius logs were taking up over 20 gigabytes. Those were in home library logs, calm, pro stuff, engineering logs, drive genius DP. It doesn't matter. It shows you. That's the beauty of these apps like Daisy disk and Omni Disk Sweeper ODS. And I realized if you don't launch drive genius routinely, these logs just build up because I watched them disappear after I launched drive genius. And so I think it's as I mentioned when we were answering Dan's question, drive genius's drive pulse keeps these logs and it doesn't do anything with them until you launch drive genius. So by launching drive genius, I made tons of this data go away. So that was step one. That was really nice to find that. Another spot Omni Disk Sweeper would not even see my mail library, which is why it was so far off from everything else until I did this fix, because, of course, my mail library is hidden or protected by full disk access or the lack of full disk access. Digging in deeper, I realized that iCloud photo sharing causes your machine to keep tons of things on the local drive, even if you you store your photos library on an external drive. It there is a folder and it doesn't matter where it is because you wouldn't want to mess with it directly anyway. But if you go into photos and and check or uncheck the box for iCloud photo sharing, it either does or doesn't keep copies of all of those things locally for you. And of course, that locally is so that people can get to it if they are if they're on the same network or whatever. So by turning that off, I also cleared out like another 30 gigs worth of space that was just being used on my drive and not really being used. So this started getting very interesting. Now, of course, your mileage may vary and you might have different specifics. But by using the right tools, you can now solve this mystery that's really not a mystery anymore. And honestly, you know, the nice part is Omni-Diskweeper ODS is free. Right. So if you download it and you run it the right way, we'll put a link in the show notes to the article that explains how to run it through terminals so that it sees everything. But to do that, and I haven't updated the article yet, so bear with us. But to do that terminal now has to be in this full disk access thing. It's very convoluted. Daisy-Disk makes it way easier. It's a commercial product, right? Makes sense that they would go through the sort of the extra steps of making sure you're alerted when things aren't configured the way they should be in order for Daisy-Disk to function the way it should. But but yeah, there you go. It's craziness, John. It's craziness. But I've reclaimed a lot of space and I like I didn't reclaim as much as I wanted to. I was hoping that this, you know, 150 gigabytes of system that I was seeing on my Mac was somehow just like, you know, the like like the log files for DrivePulse where it's just I'm just going to be happy to throw it away and everything's good. Some of it was like that. But most of it was like, no, no, it's it's like, here's your mail. And, you know, here's this. And it's like, OK, yeah, actually, I do use a lot of space. OK, that's fine. Fair. Good to go. Yeah. So pretty cool, right, John? Sounds like a bird's nest. It is. It is. Well, it's the whole system. And that's why, like I said, at the beginning of this, I understand why Apple sort of lumps it all together as system and leaves it. If it starts telling you it's your DriveGenius log file, like, but it's not going to tell you it's your DriveGenius log files. It just it would just take them such such a small amount of effort to allow you to see the detail for the system category like every other frickin' category in that dialogue. But what detail? That's what I'm asking you is where do they draw the line? Right? What detail are they going to show you? Like, are they going to say it's in home directory that it's in? But I mean, they're going to break it down like again to what level? How far is this going to go? I want more data than they give you now, which is none. Right. And to do that, that's what Daisy does for. I'm going to call system, but I'm not going to tell you what exactly system is. You're just going to kind of have to guess. Well, to your point, right, you're a power user that most people that listen to the show are power users, if some degree or another. And that's what third party utilities are for. And thankfully, Apple has built a mechanism that allows third party utilities to see everything if you, the user, grant them that. So like, this is what Daisy disk is for. It's just we need to. And it's also what ODS is for. We just need to we needed to relearn how to use that properly in our new, you know, Mojave environment. Now we have the additional protections, call them restrictions, protections. Well, they're both. Yeah. Right. They're both exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So Apple is just looking out for you. They want to make sure that you don't get hacked. Well, or you don't get caught. So they're putting all these, they're putting these things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most utilities come up and say, hey, you got to, you know, that there's this new thing called a full disk access. And you got to do this thing. You got to do this thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy stuff. The thing is, is that since I've been monitoring this value on my system, it has consistently gone down. And now it's like in the 200 gigabyte range, which, which I can accept that. I believe that's a valid use of that drive space. But the 400 was crazy. And I wonder how much of that was your drive genius logs? Because I guess as you launch drive genius, no, I it would have dealt with it. The thing is, I did get rid of what I eventually determined were very old IOS backups that were just like hanging out in wherever those things hang out. I was just like, wait a second. There's like, yeah, I think it was actually a subdirectory of either iTunes or IMAZING, but it was just that was stale because I'm like, well, wait, there's like, you know, folders for like five different devices. I don't have five different IOS devices. So one of these must be from like an old device. And that that I think eventually is what solved my problem is that I deleted it and it just took it a while. It doesn't. And that's the other frustrating thing with this category. It doesn't immediately tell you if what you did made any difference, or at least in my case, it didn't. Yeah. It's like, I deleted like a gigabyte, tens of gigabytes of stuff. And the drive still says there's this amount of free space. The finder doesn't always update right away. I've experienced that too. Yeah, for sure. Hey, I want to talk about our first sponsor, John, which is ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash MGG, which is where you can go to learn more about getting this awesome VPN service. 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My in fact, my that web browser like Safari or Firefox or Chrome or all three, but not my mail or not my terminal sessions that I want to be able to connect directly, right? And you can either you can either add things in or add things out, right? So you can say, I only want it to be these or I want it to protect everything except terminal, right? Or whatever app you want. And that can be really cool. Like I found that super helpful while doing some stuff. Sometimes I only want one browser to be protected by the by the VPN, especially if I'm doing stuff here from home. I might want to, you know, test and do different things, makes life really, really easy to be able to do this and the app just works. Like I said, it's super, super simple. If you don't know what a VPN is, think about it this way. It's a tunnel that goes from your computer to the outside world so that anyone on your local network and your internet provider can't see what you're doing or where you're going. All they can see is that you've got a tunnel to express VPN and nothing else. So when you're at coffee shops and airports and all of those places where you don't know who's there and you don't know who controls the network. Now you can be in control with Express VPN. It's a very, very cool service and I'm super stoked to have him sponsoring us and super stoked to be able to use it. You can use it to protect your online privacy and online activity today and find out how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com slash mgg. John and I use this while we were at CES. It works. It's awesome. Again, that's expressvpn.com slash mgg for three months free with a one year package. One more time, expressvpn.com slash mgg are thanks to Express VPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, moving to Ben, John. Shall we move to Ben, right? Yeah, Ben's next. Yeah. All right. Ben writes, he says, I know Dave, you bought a new Mac mini for your wife and I have questions about your setup. Please forgive me if you have covered this. We haven't covered the questions you're about to ask. So great stuff. He says, I'm planning to upgrade my mid 2010 Mac mini, which is reached reaching the end of its life. I upgraded it several years ago with an SSD and it's still quite fast running high Sierra. But right now the SD card reader, the ethernet port and one of the SATA interfaces are all dead. So it will become, yeah, our family's new Plex and iTunes client attached to the TV downstairs. All my movies, iTunes files, but not server are located on a disk station. Actually, after the SATA failed, he says, I even moved all my photos to the distations moments and photo station, which I'm very happy with. But that's a separate thing he says. He says, I'm thinking of getting the lowest spec Mac mini the 3.6 quad core i3 with 256 gigs of an SSD. OK, yep, as I think this is sufficient for my means. But do you have any recommendations regarding monitors? My current monitor is an HD 1080p monitor 24 inch from Ben Q. He says, I bought it because it has a built in speaker, which is atrocious. Should I get 4K? I've heard some problems running some models with the Mac mini. I guess I'm looking at 24 to 27 inches. Is there a monitor with a passable built in speaker as I want to avoid clutter on my desk? He says, I really only need the speaker for YouTube videos. All right. Well, so a couple of things. I think relegating your mid 2010 Mac mini to the Plex and iTunes client is fine. Obviously, it would be better if it had ethernet, but it doesn't. So I think you'll do OK. It's a shame that that's like the last Mac mini that didn't have Thunderbolt because you could replace if it did have Thunderbolt, you could use like a Thunderbolt dock to replace those ports that died or not replaced, but, you know, add them back in, if you will. But that's not an option. So eight years is a good run. It's a good run. Yeah. And it's still going to run for him, right? Like he's found yet another another job for it to do, which makes me sad that it's slowly dying. I would almost say. I mean, using as a client, when I'm like, well, no, don't use it as a server. Right. But no, as a client, that's fine. Like, you know, it'll do its job until it doesn't. And then something else will do that job. And the bandwidth, even if you don't have ethernet, is sufficient for streaming most stuff. Totally true. Yeah. Now, I will say kind of piggybacking on on your conversation here, John, or your comment that that eight years is a good run. I would strongly consider upgrading the CPU or going with a faster CPU in the new Mac mini, not that there's anything wrong with that I three, right? It's a quad core CPU, but it's just four cores. It doesn't do hyperthreading to my knowledge. And I'm pretty sure I spiked all that out. And, you know, it's 300 bucks to go from that all the way up to the six core I seven. You know, like and that six core I seven can actually hyperthread, which means for many operations, it can run an effective 12 cores. And that thing smokes, right? The only thing faster than that is an iMac Pro. So in terms of longevity, and you're clearly someone who keeps a computer for a long time and finds other uses for it, you'll never be able to change that CPU. So that's my pitch 300 bucks, you know, there you go. That's why I bought what I bought, because for what Lisa's doing, you know, she doesn't need the I seven. I think so fast. It's ridiculous. But anyway, I digress. Those SSDs are super fast, too. Like I'm getting, you know, thousands. What right speed is about 1500 megabytes a second and read speed is like 2700 or something. Oh, yeah, you showed me that. I'm like four digits. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think most of us are happy if if either of those numbers are in the low three digits. Well, maybe mid threes, but sure. Yeah. Yeah. For an SSD, I would say you expect that for, you know, rotational drives. Well, yeah, good luck. Right. In terms of monitors, so I haven't really tested a monitor in terms of its speakers. I mean, I have tested a monitor with speakers, but like I've tested. I really like this mono price, UHD, you know, 27 inch display. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's out of stock right now. It sort of comes and goes. It's either its list price is three ninety nine. A lot of times it goes on sale for two ninety nine. And it's a great, great screen. The speakers in it totally suck, though. So and I think you're going to find out with a lot of screens. So if someone out there knows, though, if you have a recommendation, please, by all means, send it in, we'll pass it along to Ben. Feedback at MacGeekeb.com, of course. Did I hear you right, Dave? Did you say feedback at MacGeekeb.com? I did say feedback at MacGeekeb.com. And and again, I really like that. Go ahead. In this area, the only thing I have to say, Dave, is I don't know, I haven't done a lot of this. But even when I got my entertainment center, I was like, the TV is not the device that I want my speakers in. Right. I think you're much better off to provide your own solution, whether it be, you know, like a nice set of audio engine speakers, which are kind of, you know, they have a small version. I understand the concern for space, but you have to come on. You want to get there or. Well, for that matter. The Mac mini has its own speaker in it, too. And, you know, Lisa, Lisa, no, seriously, Lisa didn't want a set of speakers on her desk. And it's it's fine. She like she's been using it for for exactly what you're what you're talking about. So. So, you know, that that actually may solve your problem. And then it, of course, opens up all sorts of options for you. That said, I did want to make sure, you know, you had said that you've got a 1080p screen. That Mac mini, as with most Macs these days, will support. Well, there's many terms that are thrown around. Apple calls it retina, right? The the TV industry calls it 4k. The computer monitor industry calls it UHD. And when we're talking about screens in the size that you are saying, 24 to 27 inch, any of those terms would communicate that the screen has a pixel density big enough that you'll get you know, that retina of you where you're getting pixel doubling and the text looks, you know, like you're not seeing pixels anymore. And it's it's all very, very beautiful. So you might not want a 1080p screen on that thing. If you can find a monitor that suits your needs, that is UHD, which is what the industry calls it. And the mono price display that I mentioned is UHD. Another one that I'm looking at testing is the new ViewSonic. They called the VP 2768 4k, which is the same sort of thing. It's it's 3840 by 2160 resolution. And that's what you're looking for in a 27 inch display in order to get that retina experience for lack of a better term. So that that's worth considering as you as you do this because it really does look beautiful when when you're able to do that and not have to see pixels anymore and any of that. So well, you have to see pixels. The thing is, you want to see as many as possible. You don't want to see the edges of the pixels, right? You don't want to see the separation between them. You just want to see, you know, this this this seamless thing. And that that's where it really gets beautiful. So. Right. But looking a math tracker, the yeah, the chipset in the latest many absolutely supports either one or more 4k displays, depending on the configuration. That's right. Yeah. Now, they're not they're not going to be the fastest. Like it's got it's a built in it's Intel's built in, you know, graphics. Yeah. But still, it's a lot better than the other. It's better than the ones in prior machines. Yes, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, that's also the beauty of this new Mac mini is that you add an eGPU to it and now it's, you know, a monster and you can still do it for way less than you would spend on a Mac Pro. Didn't I see something on Mac Observer this week about or was last week about the release of some eGPU? I'm sure you did. Yeah, we talk about it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there were tons of them at CES. You know, OWC's got a great eGPU chassis that they can put different eGPUs into. And it and you're you're looking at like the chassis itself is is only I think it's two ninety nine or something. And then, you know, you can add a graphics card to that, obviously. And it's Thunderbolt three and it's fully supported and all of that good stuff. So again, you know, you get this machine for well, with the two fifty six gig drive, the I seven chip in the Mac mini is twelve ninety nine. And then you add the eGPU and a card and you're still probably at less than two grand. And then you add a monitor and you're still at less that less than three grand and the Mac Pro starts at five grand. So is the Mac mini the new Mac Pro? For most people, I think that answers. Yes. Yeah, for most people, I think that I'm comfortable with the two fifty six gig internal SSD, though. I just want more just because both of my machines right now have one terabyte SSDs. Well, so here's my argument, though. Of course, I'll pay the money. On the other hand, this has screaming fast ports. So. Right. You just put maybe just boot off the internal SSD and maybe and then store all your media and your documents and all those external things. You put that on external or not even if you want to get it with the one twenty eight gig SSD and get a much faster external or not much faster, much larger external SSD that you put somehow on a Thunderbolt three bus. And now, you know, just boot off that. Forget about the internal one if you want. Like it's a Mac mini. You're not taking it somewhere. Most of us aren't taking it somewhere. So yeah. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I want it, but I came back. Right. That's right. OK. All right. Well, welcome back, John. It's good to have you back. Yes. Let's see. Moving on to Julian. Who was having some trouble with mail, Julian writes. I have an ongoing issue with my mail app that doesn't regularly let me search for items. I typically file everything into one single folder and then search for mail by sender or title to access things. The system that has worked well for years. But now I'm forced to keep a Gmail browser window open every time I need to find something to search within the browser. Of course, works perfectly. I'm running just two different Gmail addresses and have approximately 20 gigs of mail in each of them, with the majority of each in just one folder per account, an archive folder. Since this has started, I've upgraded the operating system and rebuilt the mailbox and spotlight index as well as doing a complete Onyx maintenance run. Whenever I rebuild the spotlight index, the search starts working again for a few minutes. And I think the issue is resolved. But then within about a half hour, everything stops working again. I've been told that the issue has to do with me keeping too many messages and attachments on my computer. Since in my personal account, I still keep mails dating back 10 years. I'd be happy to archive them if I could find a straightforward way to do that. But I wanted to ask you guys first. OK, so this is this is strange. I like I have way more mail than Julian on my system. As I mentioned, when we were talking about space, I have 100 gigs of mail on my computer and I am able to search all of it. No problem. It lives in two Google apps accounts or Gmail accounts and then also in a local archive in my on my Mac folder. And I've never had any problem like this. And my mail goes back way more than 10 years too. So I don't think that's your problem, Julian. Obviously, though, something in there is the problem. And it almost seems like maybe you've got some corruption that is stumbling the spotlight process here, right? Because it's spotlight goes through indexes, everything. And then that's what's used when you're when you're doing your searches. So it seems like maybe there's some some data corruption in your mail index or something that's throwing it off. I don't know. What do you think, John? I mean, yeah, rebuilding things is always a good strategy. And I think you mentioned I was fiddling with something else. I'm sorry. But Onyx and other utilities. Yeah, he uses Onyx. He mentioned that. Yeah. Yeah. So there are various utilities you can rebuild. It's interesting, though, because, I mean, you got so you got two indexes or indices we talked about this before, whatever. So you have mail's internal one and then you have spotlight. And I'm actually now scratching my head over the overlap between the two. I mean, if you do spotlight, it'll find mail stuff. But how much does that rely on the data that mail generates? Do you see the question that I have here? I do. Maybe kind of crazy. But I mean, the answer is rebuild both or rebuild all of them. And then you'll find all your stuff again, because, yeah, as you pointed out, a damaged index and, you know, especially with email. I mean, I've had this and I think you've had this too, is especially when you're migrating email from one system or one provider to another is some of them are just. I remember this trying to transfer like doing a huge email copy from one server to another usually comes up. It I've never had one complete successfully. It's like, oh, invalid character or null character or this or that because something corrupted and it's too dumb to get past that point. Huh. I've always done it using IMAP, right? Where I just I move things from. Yeah. Yeah. And then IMAP sort of just deals with it, which has seemed to work great. Yeah, maybe it was when I was migrating my old pop stuff. That's possible. Sure. Yeah. But I still remember with IMAP, I still had my strategy would be to. Migrate small. Don't try to do the whole enchilada or burrito or whatever spicy food you'd like to have here. I'm getting hungry in some dinner time. OK. But. I found the transferring, especially transferring email from one world to another is best done in small chunks. So say you got 10,000 emails, maybe you just want to copy a thousand at a time or however many. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. In this scenario, yeah, I wonder. So here's an idea. You have everything stored in Gmail, which means it's all on the server. In theory, and you would make a backup before you even listen to my instructions, but make a backup locally. Then in theory, you could wipe out your entire local mail store, reconnect to your Gmail store and slurp down another 40 gigs of mail. I would do this one mailbox at a time and see if the problem gets solved. And if it doesn't, you know, the problem was in the first one, not the second one, but that way you're pulling down all new messages. Mail is pulling them down the way mail wants to pull them down to John's point. Right. Where, you know, there's there's different ways of storing it. Maybe something didn't get migrated properly or whatever. But now you're just pulling them down with IMAP. It mail is doing what it wants to do. It's saving them. And maybe that's the answer. So wipe out all of your mail accounts and, you know, or one at a time. But you could do you could do all. It will take some time to slurp all that back down from from Gmail, of course. But this might be the way to do it again. I can't stress it enough backup first, because otherwise no bueno. So I think you said people should make a backup. Did I hear that right? Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Yeah, good. So I like that I don't know the answer. And it's interesting. We've got somebody in the chat room that is that is saying they're having the very same problem on on a Sierra machine, believe it or not. So it could very well be that that's just what you have to do. And I've done that before. You can do it on a mailbox by mailbox basis, choosing rebuild mailbox from the mailbox menu and mail. But that doesn't necessarily wipe everything out. It gets most of it. But if you really want to do it, that would be the way to do it. So yeah, good, John. Yeah, all right. Yeah, I think I had that once for a while. I was forwarding my Google to Yahoo. And then I'm like, why am I doing that? That's silly. And I just started from scratch. And I said, you know what? Just blast there. Because, yeah, as you pointed out, the one maybe somewhat kind of disconcerting thing, but maybe a good thing is that Gmail saves everything forever. Gmail saves everything forever. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, it may be, right? Unless you've gone in and deleted things, in which case it does not save everything forever. And so you just need to be aware of that, too. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, but I think you have to do like the double secret delete, don't you? Or maybe not. Where in Gmail? Yeah. No, if you delete something, it goes to Gmail's trash where after 30 days or is it 90 or like I think you can send it. OK. Yeah. But yeah, no, it'll it'll go away. If you archive it, but you're right, though, they're like Gmail's all male folder does keep more things than you might expect it to. But, you know, we have I'm trying to think if it's if I queued it up for this show or not, where is it? Maybe not. Maybe not. I'm going to I'm going to use search here. Yeah. In fact, I will I will use I will use this opportunity to go to Mike's tip here because listener Mike shared with us an issue that he was having with Spark. But it also applies to Gmail. And Mike says I've come across a feature in Riedel's Spark mail app for Mac OS and iOS that despite having used and tested it for over a year, I did not appreciate the risks of their threaded only approach. He says, perhaps I'm alone and perhaps everyone knows this already. And he shared a text of a support the thread of the text thread of a support message that he sent to Riedel where he says, once a year, I go through my emails and delete any I don't really need. He says, I did that last weekend, including going back through the thousands of sent emails I built up during 12 months, including those duplicate emails forwarded to my wife, not job done. Nice, clean, sent mailbox. Yesterday, says my wife asked me what time our upcoming upcoming flight to New York is. I opened that trips folder. And to my surprise, it held just a few emails. All the important stuff was gone. I recovered them from a backup. So then I got to work to find out why they'd gone AWOL and came up with 100 percent way of knowingly of unknowingly deleting important emails in Spark. And this has to do with their threaded approach. Number one, receive an email in your inbox. Number two, forward that email to someone. File the received email in a folder is number three. Number four, delete the forwarded email from the sent mailbox. Because the forwarded email is attached to the thread that has the main email, both were deleted. He says, and I was gone. I went back to my filed email in its folder and it's not there. I've run into this deleting things in Gmail on the web before too. But my guess is if you ran mail in threaded mode, you could also get yourself into this problem where when you delete one email associated with a thread, everything goes. I was deleting things on in Gmail. I was doing a search to delete things that were old like this guy was Mike. And it wound up deleting new things that were part of that same thread. And that's not so good. So beware of that, folks. That's that's a, you know, it's a thing we got to think about, right, John? Yeah, I don't think I ever ran into that thing. Yeah. Well, if you're not deleting mail in Gmail's web interface, then you would not. But if like me, I, you know, I have a couple of accounts that that don't have a ton of storage on Gmail and I archive things, you know, more than several years old off and and then I have to go into Gmail and delete what's left or those messages once I've moved them because Gmail doesn't do it. Mail doesn't take care of that. Yeah. Of course, I'm a relic and I run mail in classic mode. Oh, same. Classic view. Yeah, I like to see all my messages. Yeah, you can you can have the multi-pane approach, right? So that you can. Yeah. Yeah. That's I think there's a lot of us that do that. But maybe it's because we got used to it the old way. We just can't change. Change is bad. I want to talk, John, about our second sponsor here, which is linked in jobs. We're at linkedin.com slash MGG. You can get 50 bucks off towards your first job post. I can tell you from experience that hiring the right person makes all the difference in the world, hiring the wrong person makes even more of a difference to your company, and it really, really matters to get enough people when you're looking to fill a position in order to make sure you select the right one. And oftentimes, the right person isn't necessarily looking for a job. So how do you find them? If someone's not looking for a job, they're not posting, they're not searching on job boards, right? They're doing the job they already have, but they're probably open to a new opportunity. And if they are being kept in their existing job, they're probably pretty good at what they do. Well, here's the trick. Here's where linkedin has a leg up on everyone else because 70 percent of the US workforce is on linkedin because it's a place to go share things, you can share articles, you can interact. They've got a social network component in addition to just tracking your resume, right? There's reasons to be on linkedin every day. And lots of people are, including people that are open to new opportunities, even though they're not actively pursuing, finding a new job. So on linkedin, you've got people that are qualified for your role and are ready for something new. And it's the best way to find the person who will help you grow your business. And that's why a new hire is made every 10 seconds on linkedin. Here's the trick. You can hurry to linkedin.com slash MGG and get 50 bucks off your first job post. I have posted and found someone by spending less than 50 bucks. So this 50 bucks actually might mean something for you and you might be able to do everything you need to do right within that 50 bucks. So again, that's linkedin.com slash MGG to get 50 bucks off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply as they always do. Linkedin.com slash MGG are thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, we promised last week that we would have a conversation about APFS and external drives and discutilities and all that stuff. It's one that we've been sort of carrying along with us in the agenda for quite some time and it is time to do it. Shall we, my friend? No, no. OK, OK, all right, good. I will start with going to to Mike, different Mike, who says hello there. I'm now on Mojave with all my Max. As I'm reformatting some of my external drives, I'm getting different options. For instance, I have two identical four gig Seagate backup plus drives. When erasing one of them, I'm given four APFS options, i.e. case sensitive as an option and encryption as an option. So four when you put them all together. When erasing the other one on the same iMac, I'm given those four options plus the four options for Mac OS Extended, MS-DOS FAT and XFAT. Ten options total. What's the difference and which would you recommend? Is it OK for APFS to be used on external rotational hard drives? OK, so here's my question. When I went through this on my Mojave Mac and I only have one external drive there, but I do see the 10 options that that that you talked about here. So I'm curious if that Seagate backup plus drive is already formatted as an MS-DOS drive and here's my theory, John. The reason that we're seeing HFS plus and APFS options on those drives is because they're already formatted as HFS plus. But for drives that are not formatted HFS plus, either APFS or FAT or something, we're just not shown that anymore. And that would be interesting to me. So I'm curious, do you have, John, do you have an external drive that's formatted APFS these days on? Oh, yeah. And if you go to reformat that, don't reformat it. But if you go to reformat it, doing it as you speak, because you want to show the options in tune. So I'm looking at my mini. I have a thing called one terabyte Mac mini backup. OK, fair. I'm going to go to a race, which I know. Be careful. And yeah, yeah, I'm not going to say race. Right, right. Right. We don't want you to. Fortunately, you're. So here we go. So oh, I only have four options. Aha, because it's an APFS drive. That's it. So if the drive is HFS plus formatted already, you can reformat it as HFS plus. But if it's APFS, you can only format it as APFS. Now, let me let me dig a little deeper with you. Are you clicking on the are you clicking on the volume or the drive itself? Well, I'm clicking on the drive itself. But what I decided to do, which I think you were leading towards, is I clicked on partition and it says, oh, Apple file system space sharing, which is like what? Yeah, well, that's no, that's that's not what that's how APFS works. That's a that's a great question. I've never delved into this part of it other than formatting the entire external drive to accept the backup. So I'm like, well, that's cool. And then there's a partition button in which case. You could add another partition. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's all taken up here. So well, but but that's the thing about APFS, though, is it really is just a blob of data and if you were to add another partition, it would it would happily or if you were to add another volume, it would actually ask you, do you really truly want to partition the drive or do you just want to add a volume to this drive and you could choose to click on that and I now get the spinning wheel of death. Nice, nice. But that but that's what it'll let you do. I'm going to I'm going to try to quit this utility. I would I would give it I would give it 30 seconds before you before you force it to I'm going to force quit and I know what I'm doing and go here. So let's not mess with that on the podcast. Yeah, right. No, that makes sense. But that's that's what it's asking you is do you really truly want to carve the drive up into separate partitions or do you just want to have another volume that's also within this APFS blob of storage and will let the file system hand and Mac OS handle it. So yeah, so I'm curious, though. So I think we've answered Mike's first question and second question is essentially, do we trust APFS on external drives? How has how has that been going for you, John? I as I think I told you, I have two SanDisk one terabyte 3D. Are they or whatever they call these days, but they're really nice SSDs. And I on my mini, it automatically does a backup every every day or every morning. And on my MacBook, I do the same thing, same drive. And I do that manually every Sunday, usually. Sure. And these are you've got these formatted as APFS. Correct. OK. And they're but they're SS they're not rotational drives, they're SSDs, right? Right. So both. So the internal drive, the boot drive in both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini are one terabyte, I think it's a micron M 500. OK. Back in the day was great. Sure. Well, it's still great. I mean, it's working great. The thing is it costs throughout twice as much when I bought them as they do now because price is very. So do you have any rotational drives that are APFS formatted? Not anymore. OK. No. How did I decided to move away from that? Yeah, I've heard. I've heard mixed reports. This is why I'm asking and why I wanted to share with our listeners. You know, when you moved away from that, had you still been having trouble on a on a regular basis or had that trouble sort of settled in? No, no. OK. I don't think APFS on a rotational drive, but I didn't notice any difference between actually, if anything, I probably noticed more problems. Like this whole system nightmare, I've probably noticed more problems with APFS on SSDs than I have on rotational drives. To be fair, that system nightmare has nothing to do with it being APFS or an SSD. It's just that's just more hobby. Yeah, it's something I want to blame on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Although you will, like I said, I experienced it here in the studio with with High Sierra exactly the same scenario. It's just I was able to very quickly find what was taking up that space because full disk access did not get in the way of that. That's all. Yeah, it's it's very interesting, though, because if I go to my MacBook Pro, which also has the micron and 500 inside, though, I'm looking at a different drive. But if I look at the internal drive and I say erase it, it will show me both the format and the scheme. OK. Right now it's GUID. Yeah. So it's Mac OS. And you should be able to see that for your external drives, too. Yes. Yeah. OK. All right. Moving on to Joe, who asks a very good question, he says, I thought I had heard you mention disk utilities in a recent episode that were APFS aware. But he says, and looking back, I can't find it. Am I dreaming that one was mentioned? So here's here's the thing. I looked and disk warrior says that Mojave is recognized but cannot be rebuilt at the moment. And I think I don't think that has changed. Yeah, recognized but not able to be rebuilt is still what it says on their website as of the moment that we're doing the show. The good news is that Drive Genius, have you used Drive Genius with with APFS? John, their website indicates that it can do all kinds of great things. I have not tested it yet, though. I think I ran a scan. I haven't had an occasion to actually use it as of late. OK. So. Have you run it? Have you run it when you're pretty sure you were using APFS? It seems like they've had this. I think I ran it once and I'm like, yeah, do a check. And it's like, yeah, sure, whatever. No, it seems they got over that. And then carbon copy cloner sort of kind of their support, well, slow down, slow down, slow down. I don't want to stop. Stop talking. The carbon. I'm mentioning it because they cannot hear me when I moved over. All right, John, we're going to we're going to pause the show. Carbon copy clone. All right. So the reason I was trying to interrupt you and you couldn't hear me, but we've solved that now, right? You can hear me now. We're good. Yes. OK, sweet. Yep. Good. Was that I did not want to confuse you. I started talking about carbon copy cloner, which is great and certainly has lots of great APFS related stuff. However, it is not a disc utility. So I did not want to confuse our listeners that right. The only two that they are the only one that I know of. And I tested it to and Drive Genius does seem to work with APFS. But that's the only third party disc utility in terms of like repair utilities that that I've seen work with APFS. Have you found any others? Well, this utility that's not third party. But yeah, you're right. Yeah. No, disc utility is is yeah. Yeah, it's we may get to this question, but I saw a screen that looked very similar to a screen that I saw, including reporting errors with my APFS volume, which made me sad. OK. Right. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I believe you that you got sad. Yes. There was something, though, that you were discussing with carbon copy cloner. So what go ahead and and and take us back down that path now that now that we're back in sync. Oh, the only thing I mentioned is the difference is that APFS is that they now support APFS snapshots. Which is weird, but it operates in a different fashion from safety net. Well, very much so. I'm not very happy with the safety net. So safety net was a feature where it's like, all right, if you delete a file, I'm going to put in the special folder. And if you need it back later because you deleted it accidentally, we'll we'll get back to you. The thing is that had a threshold and the thing is it would clear it out or make enough space available before it did a backup. It doesn't really do that. Quite as well. If you're using APFS snapshots to store your prior system states, at least I found that is that I've had a report. It's like, oh, yeah, you ran out of space and I'm like, well, but I told you like to clear out enough space like to handle the next backup. And it's like, well, yeah, sorry, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. So it's like, right. So snapshots are really just storing the delta between where the system was and where the system is and that can change over time. Right. So that's where it gets very interesting. It can be really handy. And and carbon copy cloner I found super handy as I was digging through this issue of finding where my space is being used. That's one place that it can be is it can be in those APFS snapshots, either the ones that carbon copy cloner itself creates or the ones that are created by a time machine locally on your system. And you can use carbon copy cloner to see and and even better manage those. And it'll show you how much space they're taking up and then you can choose to delete them, you know, one by one or or all at once or however you want to do it, which is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Let's see. Yeah. We've got one more and I perhaps this is what you were alluding to, John, with with listener Don here about an issue that he saw on an APFS volume. He says. Where is it here? Both my brand new refurbished late 2017 MacBook Air and my late 2015 27 inch iMac have begun to exhibit perplexing error messages when I run Disk Utilities First Aid on the built in SSDs of both computers. Any idea what the problem is? I've been in touch with Apple support and got no joy. And he showed us some screenshots that you were talking about that have things that say warning I node value object invalid BSD flags as it's going through and checking each of the snapshots. And so I'm curious when we've talked about this on the show several times, but I'm curious if these drives were upgraded from high Sierra and therefore migrated to APFS from HFS plus and not just formatted as APFS. Because as we've mentioned here, we've seen an increasing number now that we're at a year plus with a lot of these migrated drives. We're seeing an increasing number of reports from all of you folks saying that just weird problems with these drives and a lot of them have been solved by clone the drive, reformat it fresh as APFS and put the data back on. And I'm wondering if that, in fact, is Don's Don's problem and perhaps solution here. What do you think, John? Did he he didn't put it in his screenshot? Bummer. Oh, no, no, no. Here we go. The volume Macintosh HD was formatted by new FS APFS and last modified by. So wait, no, so he wasn't migrated. He wasn't. Oh, right. Because this utility will show you that when it says I'm looking at the line here, so would either say the volume was formatted by or it'll say migrated. Yes, his line says formatted. So true. So that is not a fail vector. I just I'm glad he put that. Yeah, yeah, very good point. So here's here's that that's true. You can see this in disc utility and you can see it when you I think you can see it in system profile or two. If I'm not mistaken. Oh, yeah. I know there's another place to see this. You don't have to run disc utility to see it. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe maybe you do. Maybe I'm just dreaming that up. But the solution running here, you could run FSCK. Well, which is all which is all this utility is doing. Yeah, right. I wonder I still would maintain that the solution may still be the same. Right. Disc utilities, including Apple's disc utility, but also, you know, we just mentioned that Drive Genius is able to see and repair these discs. But, you know, we don't have 20 years of history or 20, 30 years of history with the file system, we have like three and really not only one year of widespread usage on a Mac, so it would not surprise me if for a while the best answer or perhaps only answer to solving these pesky little problems is clone, reformat, restore until we get utilities that are mature and have, you know, and we've just had enough experience with, OK, here's how you fix this issue. Great. File that away, put it in there. Here's how you fix this issue. OK, great. File that away, put it in there. And then and then that's how these utilities. I mean, it's it's all sort of not trial and error, but but one by one. Here's a scenario. Great. Here's how we fix it. OK. Cool. Here's how this works. Here's how this works. I think that I think that might be his answer, even though he wasn't migrated, John, what do you think? I don't know. Yeah. OK, fair. I just think fair. Starting from scratch is just always a unpleasant option. Well, but I'm not talking about starting from scratch. No, no, no, no, no, no. The idea would be clone the drive, reformat it, restore from the clone. You're back to exactly where you were. You just have a new fresh format. That's all right. But in a sense, it is starting from scratch and that you're destroying something in place that didn't work right. So yeah, reformat it. No, I'm with you. You know, I mean, like I haven't felt a need yet and both of my drives are migrated and I haven't yet felt despite seeing some weird things. I mean, like I had one time where I think I rebooted into recovery and it showed like volume names that were not the names of my disks. It's like some weird Unix low level code and I'm like, oh, that's really bad. Yeah. And I rebooted and everything's great. Good to go. Cool. Yeah, it still gives you those little jolts of panic every now and then. There's a PFS. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, you like it there's some great things about it. But you absolutely need to have backups because, you know, we just don't. We just don't know enough to truly trust it or how far to trust it. I don't truly trust it. No, or what happens? Like what does failure look like? That's the thing we really don't know is, you know, like what what is that? What happens when the drive fails? How or what happens when the file system fails? Like with HFS plus, we kind of got to know, yeah, OK, you can live a little and get some data off it, then you're still OK. Like we don't like we just don't know with APFS yet. So all right. Well, we had some tips come in from from some previous shows. So I wanted to share some of those, John. Unless is there more on APFS to go through? All right. OK, then we will go to Gray, who says in 744, you were discussing situations in which cookies might be blocked or purged on sites requiring them, such as online banking pages. John mentioned ad blockers, which can indeed interfere with recognition and function of secure sites, such as banking, airlines, etc. If you open the website in question, go to the menu bar, Safari settings for this website and uncheck the box, enable content blockers, your ad blockers won't get in the way. So that's pretty good. I had no idea that you could do this. So get to a website and then in the menu bar, Safari settings for this website. How do we do that? Is that something? Huh. I don't know where he's doing. I'm trying to do this on my own. I see the image that that he sent to us. Can you do this, John? Like it looks like he did it once. OK. Yeah, I don't know where settings for this website is. If you open the website in question, no. All right. Go to a page. Yeah. Ready? Oh, I see it again in the Safari menu. It says settings for this website. Oh, yeah, I mean, it's new in Safari, but I think it's there. I think it's Safari 12. I mean, it's it's on my high machine too. Yeah. Oh, right. OK. And right, we can see it shows us things like this, what he mentioned, enable content blockers. You can set a website to use reader when available. So it would show you in reader view all the time. You can set a default page page zoom. You can choose your autoplay settings for for media, right? Stop media with sound, allow, never play. You can choose whether pop-ups are allowed, camera, microphone, location. Actually, I got to put that in place because the one time that this always happened. So I don't know why this is, Dave, but, you know, because I live near the water, I got to pay an exorbitant amount for flood insurance. Sure. And FEMA manages the sort of thing. The thing is the website that I go to to pay it every year, it always uses a pop up. Sure. Enter. At first, I was like, what's wrong with this site? It's like, I want to give you my money. I legally have to, because otherwise my bank will yell at me. So I got to get flood insurance and and eventually I figured out. And I think I ran one browser and it said, yeah, I'm blocking this pop up. I'm like, oh, gee, what could this pop up be? Oh, it's. Yeah, I logged that ass from my credit card or payment, you know, way to pay, but but it was like, why you bought why? Number one, why are you using this to ask me for money? Because don't you know that a lot of browsers are like pop ups are evil? So and they don't. So this is interesting because you you can control each of these. You can this is the way of looking at it from the web page, which is super handy, by the way. I just want to point that out. But you can look at it the other way from the feature. If you go into Safari preferences, websites and you say, go to the content blockers section there where you can control whether your websites use your content blockers or you can go to pop up windows, right? Which is also there in Safari preferences, websites, you go to pop up windows and then you can choose to let the websites open or not open those things. So you can you can configure this one of one of two ways. I had no idea, obviously, that you could do it this way. So that that's a good one. Safari settings for this website. Thank you, Gray. Very good stuff. Very, very good. See, this is how we learn stuff and that makes this show. Excellent. While we're on that subject, John, we did hear back from Leslie or less. I think it's Leslie actually, but he wrote back and said I had suggested, as we kind of kept going through this, go to system preferences, privacy, manage website data. Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, sorry, wrong place. Go into Safari. I had the wrong thing. If you go to Safari privacy, there is a checkbox there that says block all cookies. And for less, it was checked. And that's why all of those problems were happening. Banks weren't remembering him. Websites wouldn't remember him. He couldn't save logins, those sorts of things. Block all cookies was checked, unchecked that box and problems go away. We knew it was cookies related. We just couldn't quite get there. And we we stayed at it and he stayed at it. He found it. Block all cookies was checked. So Safari preferences, privacy. There it is right there. Pretty good, huh? Craziness, crazy, crazy. I like it when I can find all these things that we can all learn. It's good. Yeah, I don't know if you can really block. I don't I don't know how I feel about that choice. You can't block all cookies. I mean, well, no, you can. And it causes major problems as well. Yeah, well, you can. Yes, but it's probably not a good good. Probably not a good idea. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I like cookies. You like cookies. Doesn't everybody like cookies? Cookies are good. Cookies are good. They make life easier on the web and they're tasty. So I like I like peanut butter. It's my favorite. Well, there you go. That's everybody now knows. Send John peanut butter. All right. How about you? What's your favorite chocolate chip for me? All right. Yeah. Really? Yeah, I have a very, like very, very mild peanut allergy. So much so that I didn't realize it until about five years ago. But yeah, it's it's it's really not it's just minor anaphylaxis. I if I'm dehydrated and I have peanuts, I feel like a tightening in my throat. Oh, yeah. I mean, just like just like a little bit, not anything that's ever been a problem. And if I'm eating peanuts regularly, I don't notice it. Yeah, yeah. So. Or how about or my second favorite? Actually, maybe my first favorite oatmeal raisin. Oh, there you go. OK, so now people have people have options. No meal, right? It's healthy. It's got oatmeal and raisins. Sure it is. Could be better. Sure it is. Yeah. All right. Going to Joe from show 743, he says there was a gentleman that was cleaning an airport by spraying compressed air to clean out the rest. He says it is assumed from the description that the air was being blown into the device and as such, this is really not the best approach. Ideally, one would want to blow air away from the internals of the device, not into the internals of the device. The reason for this is that the dust then collects around the device, increasing the temperature and ultimately shortening the life of the device. The dust could act as an insulator is what what Listener Joe is telling us here. So yeah, if you you can certainly try and take things apart to blow air across them. But if you are going to blow it in from the outside, try and do it in such a way that the dust actually leaves and doesn't just get blown around inside the devices. Right. I mean, I would think of most of these things come with a small. Long tube that you put in the output of the compressed air, that's true. I would think if you can get that inside of the device so that you can then navigate that you're going to blow the dust out instead of in. Yes, it's a it's a good point, though. I'm going to step back and say moving anything that moves the dust around is probably a good thing, though, but I don't understand his point. Well, the thing is, I'm thinking the chances that you're going to make things worse by using air from the outside to get the stuff, the dust out. I mean, it's points valid, though. I mean, if you if if there is a spot, you could you could indeed make it worse by blowing the dust if there's one spot that catches. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But also make sure it's unplugged, even if it's unplugged. I remember back in the day that we had a computer nerds. Now, this is probably, you know, 25 years ago or something. But Sean, one of our guys was, you know, blowing out a motherboard and wound up shorting the motherboard because there was so much dust on there that is the dust move that our theory was that as the dust moved, it actually caused static electricity to move along with it. And then then, you know, that was it let the magic smoke out of the motherboard. And that was the end. So I mean, the one other thing I'll mention about compressed air, which you got to be careful with this because it's compressed gas. When it leaves the device, it's going to be very cold. You don't want to get this too close to a circuit board because if it gets too cold, it'll crack. You're going to break it. Yeah. You've got to break your circuits. So that's the only other thing I'd add is maintain your distance with compressed air. But I mean, you'll even see it. I mean, if you look closely, you'll see frost develop on the things that you spray it on. And if you want to do it on your skin. Well, no, I would say don't do that. Right. Right. If you want to feel the effect of compressed air on your skin, go for it. It's just to make a frostbite and hurt yourself. So don't do that. Yeah. No, I wouldn't recommend it. No, it's not good. It's not good. All right. One last one. And then and then I think I'm going to get my throat arrest for the day. If if that's OK with everybody. But listen to Robert wrote in and asked, he says, I remember hearing you guys talk about how nice the thing box was a year or so ago. He says, I'm considering picking one up and was hoping for an update on your opinion regarding a slightly above average network security box that won't cost a bunch. He says, I have ubiquity routers, switches and Wi-Fi access points and would like something a bit more automatic than pouring through my GitLab server logs for attempted logins. Any input would be nice and thanks for doing such a great job. You're welcome, Robert. Thanks for saying that. Yeah, I really like this thing box. It's it's super. It's exactly what you said. It's super simple. It sits on the network. It it monitors. I would say it monitors in a passive sense in that it doesn't require all of the traffic to route through it, but it sits there and figures everything out. And when a new device joins the network, I am alerted immediately. You know, one of my kid's friends comes over and joins with, you know, their phone, or if anybody in the house gets a new phone or whatever, instantly on my on my phone is where I have the notifications and also in my email, it shows up and it says, yep, here you go. Once a week, it sends me a report telling me what new ports have been opened on my router, right? Because I allow UPNP on my network. I know, I know, I know, but I know that's why I allow it. And and Thingbox tells me what new ports have been opened this week. It'll it's really quite fantastic. It'll, you know, it tells me who's home when they've been home because I can say, OK, you know, for Dave, this iPhone is the device that follows Dave everywhere, that iPhone follows Lisa, et cetera, et cetera. It checks my speeds. It will identify devices that are bandwidth hogs. And like it and then, of course, all the security and intrusion stuff, too. It monitors all that stuff and will tell me about it. Now, the one thing I've noticed, Dave, as of late, and you may have two. If you have Eero Plus, his Eero has recently added new device notifications. Yes, the other day it was like, oh, by the way, you want you want to know when devices I haven't seen before joined the network. And it's like, hey, that's like Thingbox. So they're taking a step in that direction. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Which is nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, if you have an Eero, you're getting most of this stuff already now as part of your, you know, Eero and or Eero Plus subscription. If you don't, yeah. The thing plus for that or was that well for the intrusion protection and that sort of thing. Yes. Well, the new device thing, was that a plus feature? No, no, that's not a plus feature. No, no, no, no, that's just a feature. Yeah, that's just a feature. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, no, the Thingbox is great. It's a hundred bucks and like super easy. And I, you know, to Robert's point, like what he described is exactly what I love it for. I have a super geeky network set up here to far more complex than anyone would actually need, but I like it. But but I like I also like to have this sort of, you know, watchdog that sits there and tells me what's going on without me having to like pour through logs and do all of that crazy stuff. And Thingbox does that and it just sits there happily. And it'll tell me when my internet connection has gone down and come back up. It, you know, it just keeps track of all sorts of things. But that, but that makes sense because the one event that you probably want to know about immediately is what is this? Well, yeah, new device. What happened? Yeah. What's going on? Exactly. That you're totally right. Yeah. Yeah, your kid being like, oh, yeah. Yeah, most of the time it's like the device that, you know, it shows me what the device calls itself to in the notification. And so it's like, oh, yeah, we see Jimmy's iPhone. It's like, oh, OK, well, Jimmy's, you know, the friend that makes perfect sense. Yep, exactly. But if it's something else, it's like, well, wait, what's this? They know really want to put those interlopers on a guest network. I don't know if I trust these strange kids at my home network, you know. Yeah, I think I. Yes, I do. You're not wrong. It would be. Yeah, it would be a pain in the neck. The problem with with Apple does not make this friend wants to share content, in which case, then, OK, you can be on the home. Well, but here's the other problem, right? The friend shows up, opens up the phone and says, oh, cool. There's your network. And then another friend or, you know, one of my kids gets a notification on their phone saying, hey, do you want to share the password with that person? It's like, yeah, OK, cool. So unless everyone in the house is super diligent about this, you're not going to get all the guests just on the guest network. I haven't had a problem with it yet. But there is a you make a very good point. It's it's, you know, yeah, yeah, because then it means my Wi-Fi password is on lots of devices that are not me. Plume makes this easy or easier to deal with because with Plume, you can have one Wi-Fi network with different passwords and different permissions assigned to those past. Why not? Plume, what's Plume? Plume is the mesh Wi-Fi that that I've been testing here for, I don't know, from last year or whatever, from Plume. Plume. Oh, yeah, we talked about it. Yeah, no, they're they're like they them and I mentioned this several times on the show, them Plume and Eero are the two, in my opinion, competing for the top spot in terms of mesh Wi-Fi for, you know, the home user. Plume and in many ways, you know, and that's the thing when when I say they're competing in some ways, Plume is better in some ways, Eero is better. Plume's hardware is better. It's it's a it's tri-band hardware and one of two of the bands are two by two, just like Eero, and then the second five gigahertz band or the third band is a four by four, and it will use it simultaneously for backhaul, but also for front haul so that if you've got like a MacBook Pro or an iMac, you can actually connect with three by three and get like killer bandwidth out of this thing. It's great. The management interface is awesome. The super pods just while we're here just to make sure Plume has their original gen stuff and then last year they released their super pods. That's what we didn't start looking at it until they had their super pods. I did not like their original gen stuff. I was not impressed with it. I when I when I encounter it, I am still not impressed. The software is the same like the software is great. But in terms of hardware and range and stuff, it just wasn't wasn't fantastic. That super pods are awesome site. Guests coming to visit with HomePass. You can create a Wi-Fi password unique to them. Yes, right. I haven't heard that before. It's pretty cool. Well, you have, but you just didn't know because I said it here. Yes, fair. Well, I'm sure you have. I was just doing something you were doing something else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Plume is Plume. Plume is just like that they're not part of like somebody else. No, they are Plume. Now they've partnered. They're not a part of like, you know, some corporate conglomerate or something. I mean, I'm sure they're using chips from Broadcom or Qualcomm is who makes all the mesh chips right these days. Yeah. I thought there was another player. No, everything's Qualcomm. Their booth at CES just has like, in fact, last year at CES, I think they pre-announced like the the new Deco or something because they were like, here's all the cool things that use or maybe it was the ASUS stuff. I don't know. But they had it, you know, in their booth, they're like, here's all the cool things that all the mesh that uses Qualcomm mesh. And it's like, I've never seen that device before. I was like, oh, yeah, sorry. Oops. But yeah, no, it's Plume's fantastic. It really, really well done. They have an interesting pricing model with their you can either buy a subscription or, you know, but but no, it's it's fantastic. Really, really rock solid stuff. They know what they're doing. So yeah, highly recommended. All right. Well, that's that's what I got here, my friend. And so we really didn't cut this show short at all. Did we? It's just how it goes. It's fine. Sure. It's all good. Had to hit the car. A few times. We tell you how to. What's that? I had to hit the cough button a few times, but that's OK. Come on. That's why we that's why we have the mute switch. You know, it's all good. It's all good. Yeah, I got one on my mic. I know you really like that. Yeah, doesn't your mic make a lot of noise when you hit that button? No. Go ahead. Let's hear. And I'm on. Yeah. Mechanical switch. Yeah, we heard it. Yeah, you'll hear it when you listen back. It's it's it's too conspicuous. No, yeah. I know you had a fish shake about the switch on this mic. I think it's the wrong position. Oh, is that right? Well, no, I think you said to me, it's like, well, what position do switches go in to turn things off up or down? And we were having a spare. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't I don't like switches on mics anyway. They just they cause more trouble than good. Well, yeah, because they make noise. Well, and like the only time that I've ever heard that I've ever thought about a switch on a microphone is after 10 minutes of troubleshooting and trying to figure out why there's no signal coming from a mic. And somebody says, oh, the switch is off. Well, why is that? OK, let's unwire that switch in that mic. Let's just do that. And then we won't ever have this problem again. It's cool. So you're all for open mic, I guess. I'm all for open. Yeah, we can mute it elsewhere and in a much more, right. You know, yes, it's a much better way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because if you mute it there, what happens is if you're using an app that's like, you know, like Skype or Discord or something where it the app is monitoring your input signal, especially if you're doing it without headphones on, like in a conference call type environment, it's constantly trying to figure out how much gain to give it before echo happens and it can hear the echo when you're not talking, right? It can it can sus that out. Well, if you mute that mic, it thinks that it can't hear anything and it'll gain it way up. Then you turn it on and everybody's like, oh, man, everything's echoing. Like it's just a bad idea. It's just a bad idea. That's crazy. All right. So we told you about the email. What else do we have? You know, we got, we got the premium, premium at Mac.com for premium business. And sure, tell them about Twitter, John. I'm John Efron. He's Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mac Geek Gap. The publication is Mac Observer. That guy who's flying around somewhere is pilot Pete. That is Twitter.com. And visit our, visit our forums, MacGeeke.com slash forums. All good. Her Twitter's gone away. What's that? Oh, is it? And Facebook and Instagram. I don't think they're going away. No, I see it's weird. I've been seeing some people in our feed with one person that you and I both know. I don't know if you've seen that, but she's like, I'm, I'm ditching Facebook and Instagram. Well, I see that all the time. Oh, yeah. Sure. Let's fan happens. It's fine because I don't like them because they did something bad. We ditched Facebook because we didn't like them for the forums. And now you just go to the forums. For the forums. Yeah. Makes more sense. You know, birthday and event and, you know, seeing what your friends and family are up to, I'm still. Yeah, me too. But I also get that that's exactly why some people find Facebook entirely creepy is because of exactly the things you just said. It knows everything. Some people want that. Oh, I'm with you, man. I mean, there are some people that, you know, I would try to friend that were like, you know, people that I knew back in high school and, you know, some of them were probably like, who is this guy after like, you know, for a long time, you could you could type in someone's cell phone number into Facebook and it would it would show them. I don't think that works anymore. So that was a pretty creepy way to find somebody's Facebook account. Just type in their cell number. Sure, they I'm sure they've associated it. Yeah, that worked up until about a year ago. So all right, folks, that's a that's how we're going to do it here. It's the show. The show must end, John. It's just how it goes. I want to thank our sponsors, Express VPN dot com slash M.G.G. LinkedIn dot com slash M.G.G. Of course, all the folks in the podcast marketplace. Ops, genie dot com. Eero dot com slash M.G.G. Bear boy, smile at smile software dot com slash podcast. Other word computing at Mac sales dot com. Indeed, have a great week. Take care of yourself. Have fun. Send us your cool stuff found because we've got some coming up next week and bite. All means to everything you possibly can to make sure that you don't get caught.