 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 729 for Monday, October 1st, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take all of your questions, your tips, your cool stuff, found the stuff that matters. We mix it all together. We curate it. We organize it. And then we come and deliver it with the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing. We'll talk about their new Thunderbolt 3 10G Ethernet adapter shortly here, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in trivial Connecticut, this is John F. Brown, a beautiful fall day here in Durham. It's awesome. I actually have an outdoor gig this afternoon. We're recording this on Sunday, which is, I believe, International Podcast Day or something like that. So there you go. But we are recording Sunday just due to some scheduling stuff, but of course releasing on Monday. But this beautiful fall day. It's awesome. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Yeah. I'm going to go to our food truck festival, I think. Oh, nice. Yeah. I love these outdoor fall things. It's good. Let's do it. Let's get into some questions here. So David asks, he says, is there an iOS terminal app for SSH-ing in to my Macs so that I can do this from bed? And yeah, absolutely, man. I use prompt from Panic. Now that I'm saying that, it's the only one that I know of. But I bet there's other iOS terminal apps. But prompt from Panic is great. You can set up your keys and all of that stuff so you don't have to type a password or even have a password involved in the exchange. SSH allows you to do key gen and stuff. For those of you that are wondering what we're talking about here, SSH is a way of connecting. It's a lot of things. But in this particular scenario, it's a way of connecting to the terminal on another computer. So being able to remote terminal into another Mac is super handy. I use it for a lot of different things, to be perfectly honest. But one of the things I use it for is if my Mac is frozen and I want to avoid just powering it down, I can use an app like prompt and if I can connect that way. And I'll say more often than not, if the mouse and keyboard on my Mac is frozen, often terminal remotely will accept a connection no problem. So I can SSH in and then I can issue one of my favorite commands, which I'll put in the show notes. But it is sudo sudo shutdown-r now. And what that does is it says sudo means do this as a super user. And then shutdown, it's pretty obvious, except with the dash lowercase r, switch, it changes it from a shutdown to a restart. And then of course now means do it now. And you don't have to remember that, although it is a worthy thing to remember because but you can read it in the show notes. It's already there. So yeah, that's so prompt from Panic software. They've been making Mac and iOS software for a very, very long time. Good folks over there. And I like Panic and everything you can choose to sync your settings across your iOS devices so that you have, you know, you set it up once and it just boom propagates everywhere you've got it on your iPhone and your iPad, you know, you're good to go. So fun, right? Do you use prompt or any other terminal on the on iOS yet, John? I'm looking on my phone here and I have something called Mocha VNC Lite. I haven't used it in quite a while. But that's for a remote graphical section. Correct, yes. Session, not a remote terminal session, yeah, yeah, yeah. So while we're on the subject of remote graphic sessions, Panic also, oh no, that's not Panic's app. I relate them because they are next to each other on all of my devices. But it's not Panic's app. I use an app called Screens from Adobe to do my iOS remote access. And again, it's, you know, very robust and syncs and is pretty and all that good stuff. But yeah, Mocha and is that Mocha VNC Lite, John? Correct. Yes. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it's handy to be able to remote access in, I think, to your, you know, from your iPhone to your Mac in various ways. Yeah. Kind of a challenge since you don't get a lot of screen real estate. Right. Right. Right. You need to connect and find out why your machine is unresponsive. Yes. Yes. Yeah. The kick in the, kick in the processor. Yes. Well, sometimes it's really helpful. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Moving on. Well, we'll stay on the iPhone for a minute. And Joe, we will go to here and Joe asks, Hi, Dave and happy birthday. Yeah. Thank you everybody for all the, all the birthday wishes after last week's show. Much appreciated. He says, I heard there is a way to put important medical info on your iPhone so that it is readily available. How is this done? And I will say back to you, Joe. Happy birthday as well. On your iPhone, launch the health app and then in the lower right hand corner, tap the medical ID section. In here, you can hit edit in the upper right and add all the information that you want. You can control, you know, what's available from the lock screen and all that stuff. And that's, that's actually what's handy here is, is you're setting up what someone could learn about you if you were to be, you know, found unresponsive or whatever you can put. Do you have allergies? Who are your emergency contacts? And if you make an emergency call, I think a note is also sent to those contacts as well. Now, at least with iOS 12, I can't remember if that was iOS 11 or not, but yeah. So handy stuff. I, you know, obviously consider what you are putting in here and know that it can be made accessible to people that can't unlock your iPhone. So think about that, but, but, you know, I think it's a good thing. So have you filled yours out, John? I did once. Okay. And I think it'll ask for, you know, what medication you're on that may be important if you're unresponsive. Maybe like, I don't want maybe he needs this medication or she, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I'll have to fill it out again. Yeah. Oh, did you fill it out? But on an older phone, is that what it was? Yeah. Yeah. And I guess it didn't, I guess that doesn't migrate over. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I think you're right. I think that's not synced across iCloud. Did you set your, when you got your iPhone 8, did you set that up fresh or did you restore from an iCloud backup? I restored. Interesting. And that didn't migrate over. Huh. I thought it didn't. I'll fill it out again. I'm pretty sure mine, I'm pretty sure I didn't re-enter mine. Now that I'm looking at this, the first place I've seen my new age listed, my new ripe young age of 47, actually thought I was 45. So there you go. Thanks iPhone for reminding me of that. I can never remember my age. But yeah, I'm pretty sure I didn't fill this out when I got this phone, but who knows? I don't know, man. I'm getting old. Can't remember. That's why we have these phones to cyborg us and make us better at remembering these things. Speaking of Max now, Helma writes in and says, and this is just a good one from a troubleshooting, you know, a lot of times we actually, we get a lot of questions that you folks don't hear about because so many of them don't hit what I call the 20% rule, right? I feel like what we should do on the show here is answer questions or discuss topics that appeal to the largest number of people. And obviously we can't hit 100% because if you don't have an iPhone or, you know, even if you don't have a Mac, right? Like we can't hit 100% with everybody, but I do like to hit the 20% rule. And this one, you know, as, as with everything, the questions start with a very specific setup and device and all that stuff, but from a troubleshooting standpoint, I think there's some, some valuable stuff here. So she says she's got a Mac mini and she thinks it's one generation old. She says that has not much more to do than serve as a media server. She says her music and photos are on there. She says I've made backups with Time Machine, but never checked the backups are actually okay. A few years ago, she says it runs, it runs headless as an iTunes and media server. It says over the last week or so, I would find that sometimes, maybe twice, I couldn't screen share into it. So running a headless Mac, she's using tools like we discussed or, you know, screen sharing from a Mac to connect. And she says I couldn't screen share. And also that SSH would not work. She said, so she rebooted the machine and it worked Monday, everything was fine. Tuesday, I was out the whole day and when I got back, it wasn't playing music. So I rebooted it and nothing happened. It was late. So I left it. The next day, I tried again, nothing. When I press the power button, the light comes on briefly for about a second and then goes out. No power chime. Nothing. I had a chat with Apple support and they referred me to find pages about how to reset the SMC and NVRAM or try the discussion forums. I've tried the SMC reset, but it doesn't help. NVRAM reset is not possible because it doesn't get to the point where it boots. The command option PR, as we used to call it, the PRAM reset. She says, so that was a silly suggestion. She says, well, not necessarily. Trying that anyway might have worked, but it didn't. So there you go. I've read all the posts, et cetera, sort of taking it to the genius bar, which I can't anymore. She says, what could be wrong or differently put is the machine revival? If not, I have to figure out if I can take the drive out, which she has done since this particular message. So and she was able to get the data off of it, which is good. So these things are, like I said, from a troubleshooting standpoint. Interesting. It's always fun, and I use that word, diagnosing things based on an email and remotely and without having hands on and all of that stuff. But my remote diagnosis based on what we now know is that this is likely the power supply. I've seen things like this in my IMAX in the past and other people's IMAX for clients and things like that. The symptom of that brief light and then nothing is consistent with what I've seen when the power supply is unable to do what it needs to do. But, John, I think you have this same Mac mini model or something similar to it. And is there a battery inside that might be at issue or do you have any other thoughts? No, OK. No, not this one. I don't think. No, some older Macs have a battery to retain in settings. And that could be a cause of grief. I seem to recall that there was some one series. So I have the 2014, the one before that was the 2012, which I had also. Did I or did I have the one before that? But I have the 2014. No, no, no battery. I seem to recall them having some sort of power supply recall on the mini or maybe it was the power adapter. I'm looking at their recall program here and I don't see it listed. So it may have expired. Sure. But yeah, hardware problem. It was the AC wall plug adapter. Yeah. Oh, maybe not. I mean, there was one on the wall plug adapter. I don't know. That was just. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I don't know, man. So, yeah, it's probably the power supply. They are internal to that as they are on most Macs. So replacing it is, you know, a challenge, but it's not a terrible challenge, you know, a company like other world computing or I fix it or whatever would have, you know, guides to to walk you through that and the parts and all of that stuff. So yeah, yeah, I found a thing that I fix it on how to reply power supply. And actually, if and I remember when I upgraded mine, you actually have to in order to swap out the drive, which I did as soon as I got this thing, you do have to take the power supply out to get at the insides. Oh, OK. So that's actually that that's actually a good sign because it means the power supply is one of the first things you encounter as you're peeling back the layers of the onion that is that Mac mini. And that means less layers that you have to peel back to do the power supply. So that's not bad. Yeah, it's still a pain. They made it a pain to replace all that stuff. Yes. Well, yes. Yeah. Well, they just don't prioritize it being. I don't I don't think they intentionally designed to make it a pain. I think they don't intentionally designed to make it easy. They they designed for elegance and and heat distribution and functionality. And they could care less about repairability. So, yeah. Yeah, you could give it a go. I mean, I see they have a guide here on how to do the 2012. And I think they'll even sell you the part as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So cool. Hey, I do want to take a minute here and talk about our sponsor, which I just happened to mention because they are a place that we go regularly for all kinds of things that we need for our Macs. And that is Other World Computing at MacSales.com. These folks, like I said, you know, when I need RAM, when I need a hard drive enclosure, when I need really just about anything like they've been doing this so long that they're trusted. They know what they're doing. They understand all of the stuff that they sell, which is really like I can't stress how important that is. And as I mentioned in the intro to the show, they have their new Thunderbolt 3 10 G Ethernet adapter, right? So this is I mean, it's pretty amazing, right? This allows anybody with a Thunderbolt 3 equipped Mac or PC to download content 10 times faster than gigabit Ethernet. And it just plugs right into your Thunderbolt port. It's a nice little form factor. And this is the cool part about OWC is they're always kind of looking at what you need to either restore your Mac to previous functionality if you had a problem. But even more than that, how to expand your Mac beyond the walls that exist when you get it. So how to make it do even more for you. And if I and that really is sort of my synopsis of what OWC does is they provide the tools and the parts to and the knowledge to expand the functionality of your Mac and breathe extra life into it and all that. So check them out at MacSales.com. Our sincere thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, speaking of episodes, I will rewind us a few episodes to number 726. We were talking about deleting or moving apps, settings from one computer to another. And Allison over at No Silicast says when you were guys were trying to help someone with the clean install process and looking for a method to save an app settings, there is a great option. App delete from Reggie Ashworth dot com will create an archive for you of any app support files. This few and she'd sent a screenshot where you when you're deleting the app, it comes up and it says there's an archive button and you can archive that and it will zip it up into a little file allowing you to later retrieve them. And when you extract the file, it puts each bit into a folder that is named for where you need to put it back. So when you unzip this file, you get a thing that says like slash applications, which is where apt delete would go or where whatever it is would go, you know, whatever she was deleting here. I think it was telegram she was deleting. And then it shows, you know, in this private var folder was this and in home library preferences was that. So it tells you where to put everything, including the app itself. So this is super handy for for migrating to another computer, I think. So very cool, very, very cool. So we will put a link to that in the show notes for sure. I have no idea that apt delete would do that, John. We talk about apt delete fairly regularly here and and this is a first. So pretty good, right, huh? Nice. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah. Also in show seven twenty six, John, you mentioned that there was a way to see the entire history of everything you'd ever downloaded in Safari. And we talked about how that might be for some a little concerning. Well, listener Mark shared an article with us that shows how to delete that list of downloaded files. It's over at OS X daily dot com. And it's not it requires launching the terminal and entering a few commands that sort of purge out the contents of a SQL lite database, which is just a built in database on Mac OS and and is used for lots of different things, including this. So yeah, get to go clean it all out. Just just crazy that I'm still blown away that that's there. But pretty good. So thank you, Mark. Very good stuff. Thoughts on that before we move on, John. Now, you got to sometimes you got to clean up your tracks. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I would be I would assume that everything's worth testing because we know what happens with assumptions. I would assume that if we were to go into private browsing mode and download something that it would not populate that database with whatever those downloads were, and that would be worth testing. But I but I would be in fact, I would be shocked if it if it didn't do that. So but but again, you know, we've been shocked before it happens. So anyway, moving on, we've got some Mojave stuff here, John. And Christopher says he upgraded his 2012 MacBook Pro to Mojave. That Mac has a fusion drive that he made himself with an OWC kit. He says the install was taking a long time, so he went to bed, woke up in the morning and the install had finished the fusion drive. Again, not one that came from Apple, but one that he made himself has been converted to APFS automatically as part of the Mojave update. He says this is intriguing to me because I don't recall and he mentioned that Mojave would support converting fusion drives to APFS. Yeah, it does it would. And as you found it does, he says, I know it was technically possible under 10 dot 13, but that Apple didn't recommend it. Nor would Apple let you boot from it without a lot of jiggering. He says, but I guess they are OK with it now. And yes, they are OK with it now. And I think that, you know, APFS. So APFS still isn't quite as fast as HFS plus, if you're looking at raw speed. But it is the platform upon which Apple has chosen to build their future. And I think that's a good thing, right? I mean, it's still a very young file system, but obviously has proven to be really reliable for, you know, for SSDs and and will take advantage of some things that SSDs do. It's built for the way SSDs work. So with a fusion drive being the marriage of an SSD and a rotational drive, it makes sense to me that that, you know, this would be supported. Obviously, it's a little more complex than doing it on just a single piece of physical media. But the whole concept of APFS creating a blob of storage and then letting you sort of, you know, use it and compartmentalize it the way you want. I don't want to say partition because that's not actually happening. But compartmentalization, yeah, like it makes sense that a fusion drive would would probably be very well served to be under APFS. Now, whether straight rotational drives make sense as APFS or not, you know, I could make some arguments on either side. APFS wasn't as far as I understand it wasn't built at the core to be. It was built at the core to take advantage of SSDs and the fact that there is no set physical location and no heads to move around. So I don't I don't know that I see enough benefits to move rotational drives to APFS, although the big one is, again, that blob of storage that lets you compartmentalize. But I can see that getting really messy with a rotational drive when there are like the concept of partitioning actually makes sense because you're keeping the drive heads in the same spot. So I don't know. What do you think, John? My carbon copy cloner destination drives are rotational and I did format them. I know. And that's been OK for you so far. Yeah. And I tried to boot from one the other day and booted fine. So booted fine into Mojave or High Sierra. This is High Sierra. Really? Yeah. OK. Well, that's good to know. And I say. You know, I remember we talked about this and then that episode I actually linked to they have a whole article about their support for APFS, so says it'll work. Cool. That's good. That's good. Cool. All right. Well, yeah, you are you are my my closest test case for that. So. But yeah, I've been thinking about it. Here's the thing. If you if you take a rotational drive that you've partitioned and you migrate it to APFS and then you take a very similar rotational drive and format it as APFS out of the gate and then you go and look at the structure of how APFS has laid out, you know, all the core storage stuff there, it at least based on my testing of, you know, six months ago or whatever, the two will be radically different from one another. The upgrade concept, especially when there's multiple partitions, it feels like and this is, you know, again, it less technical. This is just my gut feels like it's way less efficient in in the end than just formatting and starting from scratch with with APFS. But but maybe I'm seeing some nitpicks that don't really matter. I'll ask around. I have some we have some friends and contacts in the right places to maybe get some some of those answers. Yeah. All right. Well, Chris also Christopher, sorry, also shared a very cool tip, which is that Disk Utility in Mojave has a new command that to him and and us looks like a real time saver. And that command is reset fusion with a capital F and it is for fusion drive machine hardware configurations. This resets the disk devices in the machine to a factory like state, meaning one empty fusion volume. The command requires the machine to contain exactly one internal SSD and one internal rotational drive. If so, you are prompted and if you confirm, both devices are repartitioned with GPT maps and a core storage fusion drive volume is created. No system software is installed and no user data is restored. All data on the machine is lost. So you'd have to do this from like recovery partition or, you know, some other way you can't do it from the drive from which you are booted, but that's that's handy to create a fusion drive because that used to be a real pain in the neck. So now Disk Utility space reset fusion. And like in theory, that would just do it and you're good to go. So that's handy. What's that, John? How did you have to what steps did you have to go through before? It was a laundry list of steps to you had to manually build the core storage containers and put everything in them and all of that stuff. Yeah, it was not fun. It was not fun for, you know, especially for a scenario like Christopher where he had to make his fusion drive himself. Now, there was there was a big long list of these steps that you had to follow. Just right. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's good. So that like that that's awesome to see that not only did Apple do the the upgrade or conversion, I should say, of the fusion drive to APFS, but that they've got this tool, like they're they're embracing this fusion drive thing. And that's that's good. You know, I know you could go back in the archives and find a bunch of Mackie Kebps episodes where we were waving our arms in the air and shaking our fists and saying, do not trust fusion drives. This sounds awful. And it's still I still agree with the sentiment that it sounds awful. But the history since then in our experience and all of your experience since then says it's really not awful. It's it's pretty darn reliable. So still have a backup, but otherwise you're, you know, carry forth. Yeah. So Jason in the tip realm here shared an article with us, which of course we will link to and the name of the article, it's from to canoes.com and it is 12 customizations for Mojave's login window. So you can do things like switch between user and password mode. There are some secret commands where you can shut down or restart your Mac. If you type in as the username greater than power lowercase, it shuts it down greater than restart, restarts it greater than shut down also shuts it down greater than sleep sleeps it. So there's some cool, excuse me, cool things there. He says, and this is where it gets even more fun. You can enable a secret status menu item that shows computer info, things like host name, system version to enable it, run a command in the terminal. And they they list this command. It's a sudo defaults write command. And then and then once you've run that command right from the login screen, just click on the lock in the login screen there and it will start displaying these. You can log in with a pin instead of a passcode. You can show the login window with full disk encryption. You can hide some buttons and there are some commands for that. You can run a script at the login window. Yup, you can have it show an onscreen keyboard, which is actually a handy thing. If your keyboard dies, right. So anyway, there in all the how to like most of these require some terminal commands and stuff, so it's not worth going through it audibly here. But the link is handy, super handy. And good to hear from you, Jason. Thank you for sharing this very cool stuff. Yeah, man. Fun, huh, John? Yeah, I have to try some of these. I don't know if you could type in commands. I know it's pretty good. I wonder how many of those are available. Like are the commands new to Mojave or could we do that on High Sierra? And we just we weren't aware, so. Yes, good. All right. And then moving on, we mentioned full disk access in the last segment right there and listener James will dig us in a little bit deeper. So there is this thing. We talked about it briefly last week. In Mac, he kept 728 where if you go to, oh, man, does he have it in here? And yeah, maybe they have it if you go into it is in security and privacy. And then the privacy tab. I'm doing this from memory, but I think I got it right. Security and privacy in system preferences. So let's start at the beginning. System preferences, security and privacy, the privacy tab. Then toward the bottom of the list on the left is a thing called full disk access. And this is where you need to put apps that you want to be able to access all of the data on your Mac, including things like your photos library, your mail archives, your messages, Safari data, home folder, you know, all kinds of stuff, right? Otherwise, Mojave will prevent apps from accessing this data. And as we, and I apologize for not going deeper into this last week, because it's clearly become an issue, backup software really needs access here. And the problem is it can't, it doesn't seem like it's possible for the software to just ask Mac OS to to to grant to have you grant permission for it. Like you can with, you know, when it says, I want to use the microphone and you say, OK, and then boom, in that same spot, you've got, you know, your microphone or I want access to your location or your contacts or your camera or whatever. Like that Mac OS can like there's a process that Mac OS can display a dialogue and say, hey, this app is asking for this specific permission. Do you want to grant or deny with full disk access that does not seem to be a thing and apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and Acronis backup, which I just started using this week and I have a lot of really good things to say about that. We'll talk more about it in a future episode. But they've been we've we've known about them for a long time. And I'd never dug in until recently. And now I'm sort of regretting not not having dug in sooner. But apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and Acronis and Backblaze need this access. Carbon Copy Cloner and Acronis had built this into their apps before Mojave was released. They took advantage of the developer beta period. They tested against their apps and realized they needed to do this. And it's a it's sort of a clunky thing. It they can have it open that preference pane. But then you need to drag one of their icons into that preference pane. And, you know, they like they've done it in clever ways so that it doesn't feel as cluggy as it actually is. But that's the way to do it. Backblaze seems to have been taken by surprise on this, folks. And that concerns me. Like it wouldn't have concerned me if we were at August 1st because we're in beta period. Like that's the whole point of beta. But for them to I mean, they're a, you know, a Mac focused company and for them to have have missed this is a little shocking. I mean, they put up a knowledge base article that walks you through exactly what we were just talking to. And we'll we're talking about and we'll put that we'll put a link there. But it's just was, I don't know, just seems like I'm a little shocked that that they were caught with their with their pants down, as it were on this. But anyway, there you go. Yeah, I've had to do it for a couple of programs. So a carbon copy clone or their instruction, you actually have to drag a little blue fish. Yeah, it's clever. Blue fish. Well, it's basically a shortcut to one or more programs. And then the other one that I had asked me was drive genius. And actually, when you drive their icon over it, both drive genius and drive Pulse would like to have full disk access. So I'm like, OK. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that these apps would want slash need this. And it's it's also makes sense that Apple, you know, knowing who Apple is and what kind of company Apple is, that they would build protections in so that this wasn't just available willingly anymore. But but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. It's good, right? Fun stuff. Full disk access. And and as anyone who has either installed Mojave Fresh or even those of us that have upgraded and it reset all of those permission grants for me, even the microphone and camera and, you know, contacts and all of that stuff. I am constantly being asked, hey, do you want to give this access? Hey, do you want to give this access? And, you know, and I was talking with Adam Christensen over at Maccast about this the other day, and he brought up a good point that, you know, too much of this and users will get numb and blind to it and just start blindly hitting except, except, except without reading, you know, kind of like virus protection and malware protection on windows were 10 years ago. So it's or maybe 15 years ago. But but anyway, but, you know, it's it's what it's what Mojave does. So get used to it. But the good news is you only need to do it once for each app. And then, you know, and then it remembers some. Yeah, I'll tell you another thing Mojave does. Yeah. May break some of the stuff in your mail program. I'd also like to share my disappointment with SmallCubed. Yeah, I rely as you do, John, I rely on a couple of SmallCubes plugins, their their I think their most popular one is a one called Mail Tags that that I I've used, but I don't use. But I do use Mail Acton, which we talk about on the show all the time, because it lets you automate a lot of cool things about mail. And of course, we use Signature Profiler or SIGPRO. And they are now baking all three of those and maybe even one more into something called Mail Suite. And that is the only product of theirs that will be Mojave compatible, and they are late with even a beta. And that's frustrating for us users who responsibly waited until release day, in part because we wanted to be able to use that software. And now we can't. And really, like I screwed up a bunch of MackieCab outbound emails this week, because I just instinctively and inherently rely on things like both SIGPRO and Mail Acton to to do things to my outbound messages that that are not being done right now. Well, yeah, I was replying to something and I'm like, wait a second, where's the signature? Well, and they were in the Signature menu, but one didn't get enabled automatically because that's what SIGPRO does. So I had to, you know, like a caveman had to manually activate the signature. Yeah. Well, and the, you know, like I like to when we when we reply to your emails, I always like to CC our MackieCab address. We send it from that address, but I always also like to CC it because that way John sees it and you do the same thing. And I see it and and I don't like to have to do that manually. And I don't like to have to go into Mail's compose thing and turn the automatically CC myself option on and off because then I forget and and so now I use Mail Acton and it automatically knows because I told it I created an outbox rule that says if it comes from this address, add this address, which is the same address as a CC and then I don't have to think about it. And I like Mail Acton's delay and sending so that if I hit send on a message and then say either I missed something or maybe I didn't want to say that and I have another outbox rule that looks for the word attach in any of my email, you know, any of the text and if it has that word, but there is no attachment. It I have it pop up a little dialogue that says, hey, Dave, you sure you want to send this message or did you forget to add the attachment? It's like, all right, good catch. So I don't have any of that. And they said they would have a beta out on the 24th with Mojave, but as of as we said, we're recording this on Sunday, the 30th as of today as of right now. No go, which is sad. It's a sadness. So I'm a little disappointed as I believe you are too, my friend. Yep. Yes. What does not disappoint me is all of you. In fact, all of you make my week fantastic every week. And I specifically want to call out thanks individually to our premium subscribers, whose contributions came in over the last week and a half or so, actually, we didn't do this segment last week. And again, our premium program at macgeekab.com slash premium. If you want to support us directly and you certainly don't have to, it is an optional thing. We are still happy to answer your questions, although premium users do get priority in the queue. They get answered first. That's one of our ways of saying thanks. So you can learn all about out there, but if you don't want to or can't, that's totally okay. Please still listen. Please still send in questions. All of that stuff that said thanks to the following who are on our every six month $25 plan, which is thank you to Craig R, William P, Andrew B, David H, Fernando F, Gary R, Jeffrey F, Lyndon N, Michael E, Andrew S, Royce T, Brynn T, James H, Daniel H, Martin S. Well, actually I'll come back to Martin S. Roger Y, Robbie R, Sharon F, Randy B, and Michael or Michelle D, all at $25 every six months. And then at $50 every six months is Martin S and Lee F. So thank you to all of you. And then on the monthly $10 plan, we have Ken L, Clive S, Dave G, who's also in the chat room. Hey Dave. Gary B, Jeff F, Joseph B, Tony Z, Everett T, Nick S, and Robert D. And then a one time $25 contribution from Leslie B. Thank you so much to all of you. You rock. All right. Let's stick with that new stuff here, John, and questions. And let's go to listener Paul, who asks, I hear podcasts of people loving the new shortcuts, aka workflow app on iOS 12, but I'm struggling. As a lot of the things I do are less than three or five taps, like tweeting photos or finding friends, un-find my friends. Things I feel take a lot of time and would be great as a shortcut. And from what I can tell are not an option are things like choosing which AirPlay speakers to connect with, defaulting for AirPlay 2 to connect to multiple speakers or to create a group in some way, telling my iPhone to have the Apple TV use the AirPlay speakers. I don't have a home pod to tell. He says, I would love to say something like good morning Siri and have it connect to speakers, start the news podcast, turn on lights and start the coffee. He says, hopefully the workflow slash shortcuts team keeps fleshing this out. And yeah, I agree with you, right? Workflow, aka now shortcuts built into iOS 12 is a good start. And the fact that it's now under the Apple umbrella is a good thing, I think. You're, you know, like you're good morning Siri thing, isn't that far away from being a reality, right? Because that is essentially what you're describing as a home kit scene. And now you're asking for that scene to trigger a shortcut to do some actions. And of course, it's some actions that it cannot yet do. But like I can foresee a future, it might be a year from now, where that's a that's a realistic possibility, what you just described. Especially now that shortcuts is, you know, part of iOS and again, under the Apple umbrella, there are a couple of things that are sort of sad things that we've lost along the way, collateral damage, like there's no more slack plug-in for workflow where they're used for shortcuts where there used to be for workflows. So I can't like have it post to a specific slack group or whatever. And there's some other things like that where it's like, oh, OK, I wonder if that's coming back or if that's just dead. But but yeah, I think what you're describing is doable. I wish my big wish list or the thing at the top of my wish list is that I could control the suggestions, right? You know, when I when it says, oh, hey, do you want to call, you know, your wife back or whatever. And it's like that Siri suggestion thing. It's it's doing things like I mentioned last week, our our Mac Geek app. Oh, maybe I didn't mention this last week. Well, good news. I mentioned it on TDO or daily observation show. Our Mac Geek app now has been updated with iOS 12 support, including support for not only Siri actions, but Siri suggestions. We publish to Siri, not to anywhere else that stays on your phone. We publish to Siri when you when you listen to an episode, right? And especially when you listen to the latest episode. And then if Siri realizes that you listen to, you know, MGG's latest episode at lunchtime on Thursday, it might, in its infinite wisdom, choose to offer you that as a suggestion that you can then take advantage of. I would love to help Siri be more wise and more infinite in its wisdom. And I would love to get control over that and say, hey, on Thursday at lunch, can you remind me to play Mac Geek app? That would be awesome. Please, thank you. So, um, but you know, we're like, we're just at the beginning of this. And we know Apple moves slowly with these things so that the features actually work and all of that. So I think so. What do you think, John? I haven't made a shortcut in a while. Okay. I think I have to make one. Okay. I don't use Siri that much though. Yeah. Well, I mean, understandably, I don't either. I use shortcuts in different ways. You can't trigger shortcuts from your watch anymore, which is sort of weird. That's one of the collateral damage things, which I feel like should come back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there, I think they're expecting you to trigger them from Siri, which is one way, but it is an audible way. And sometimes you want a quiet way. So, yeah. But I like, I think they see the value in automation over there at the fruit company. So I think, I think so. So, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. I don't know. What do you think, man? I think we're moving on. We're moving on. Move, move, moving on. All right. Let's go to, let's go to Jeff. Jeff asks, he says, due to a lovely cloudy weekend here in New England recently, I decided I would spend the day playing photo cleanup and backup. I have a two-part question. Realizing Hi, Sierra on the new 5K iMac using photos for OS 10, he says, or Mac OS, I guess, I realized I have two photo libraries that I want to merge into one. All online directions say to import and merge libraries into Aperture 3.6 and then convert back to photos. Aperture doesn't show my original library in the selection list. And when I search for it in the finder, it's grayed out. The library has been converted to work with photos and is no longer an iPhoto library. And then part two of his question is relating to backups and fault tolerance. He says, I decided that my seven-year-old hard drive isn't necessarily the best spot for both old and new photos libraries. Can I store them on my Synology NAS, my Synology Disk Station? Photos is saying no because it's a NAS drive. Should I buy a reliable external? Seems like a waste not to be able to use the NAS. So as always, we will answer these questions in reverse. Yes, do not use the NAS for storing your photos library. I have tried this and it is terrible. There's a reason that photos tells you not to do it. It was possible but not great with iPhoto in that I only had to deal with library corruption say three or four times a year. Whereas with photos, it was almost constant dealing with it. And I think it's that photos takes advantage of things like hard links and things like that, which are inside of both HFS Plus and APFS. An external hard drive is the right answer there for your photos library. Now, actually, before we move on to the next question. I never even tried it. So it'll actually yell at you if you try to create a library on a... On a network volume. It says don't do that? Yeah, and it is right with that advice. That is good advice right there. How about just backing it up? What if you just want to copy the whole thing? Is it okay to store that on a NAS? Absolutely. And I do that. I use carbon copy cloner to backup my photos library to my NAS for sure. Yeah. But just don't activate it. Yes, right, right, right. Yep. Again, I think it's exactly what I said. They do things that they want to know what the file structure is. And again, iPhoto libraries are the same way, but you could get away with it. Now, I guess they're just doing more or something bad, no bueno. But to answer the first part of the question, the advice of going to aperture and back to photos, bad, bad, bad, bad advice. I would absolutely use Power Photos from Fat Cat Software. They are not currently a sponsor of the show. They haven't been in a little while. They do ad campaigns according to their schedule, because guess what? It's their business. But I mentioned that only because the lingering benefit for all of you from their ad campaign with us here at MGG is that there was a coupon code that is, at least as of the other day, still active that might save you 20%. So I share that. But Power Photos, regardless of their sponsorship status, as you can tell, is absolutely the tool that I not only recommend, but that I use happily for myself and any clients. What you are asking about here, Jeff, is the most common thing that I am asked about by my local Dave the Nerd clients that asked me to help them with stuff. We've got a million photo libraries from over the years, and we want to consolidate them so that we can take advantage of iCloud Photo Library and all of that stuff. And it's like, yeah, now is the right time to do that. And Power Photos makes this super easy and reliable. That's the answer. It's really simple. Just use Power Photos, merge them together. It'll convert iPhoto libraries to photos if you still have old ones of those around, and it works really well. So that's my answer there. Do you have anything to add or share? I think that's the best answer. Yes. Okay. Good. Cool. All right. We talked a little bit about Mojave now, and we talked about some of the positive stuff and just some tips. Now we've heard some Mojave upgrade woes to John, and we will go to listener David, who said, and this is consistent with what I've heard from other folks, who are having problems, obviously not everybody's having problems. But for those that are, I hear this. He says, trying to go from High Sierra to Mojave on a non-retina but supported 27-inch iMac, I'm getting repeated random re-logins and rebooting. He says at 4am, finally I decided to nuke and pave, and I restored back to a High Sierra backup, and I'm going to try again. And he said it did not work. So, yeah, there are some setups where the current Mojave installer does not get it right. And let's be fair, this is not a huge surprise, that there would be some significant number of untested scenarios where something's just not right. And we've seen Apple fix this stuff in the past where the installer for whatever Mojave 10.1 is more reliable than 10.14.0 and fixes some of these things. And so my advice would be either sit tight with High Sierra and wait for a new installer, or install Mojave as your fresh install and then let its migration assistant slurp in things from your High Sierra backup. Thoughts on that, John? Yeah, I'm thinking back. Yeah, you had problems like this with a previous OS somewhere. You know, and one, it was funny is that I ran the installer, it got to a certain point, the progress bar just stopped, and like everything stopped, and I'm like, and we fixed it was shutting it down and running it again. The other thing is check the, you may want to use this utility and check the structure of the volume that you're trying to install on, because it may be running into some inconsistencies, and that's why it's not working. I've had that happen. Either just utility or something else, and if one time, yeah, I do that now before I do an OS upgrade is I run just utility just for good measure every now and then it'll find something that's like, oh, you know, the number of index blocks is kind of off and stuff. That could be why that's happening as well. Well, and you're totally right. I think in David's case, given that he nuked and paved, that's probably not it. But we don't know exactly what nuked and paved meant in that scenario. So it's possible. Cool. All right. Moving on to more generic questions, although nothing's generic here at Makgeekab. Jeffrey writes, he says, I have a 2011 MacBook Air, similar vintage as you, Dave, running High Sierra. For some time, I have not been able to reliably use USB memory sticks. I can see them in system profiler, but nothing shows up in disc utility. In my searches through the internet, it appears the USB kernel is not working, but no fix is offered, any suggestions. So yeah, this is interesting, right? So my first thought is go into safe mode and then also try this in recovery mode. And the two are different, right? Because recovery mode is essentially a completely separate, albeit limited, build of macOS. It is not the same as the one that you're booting from. I mean, it could be the same version, but it's not the same files, right? It's a separate partition or a separate container going back to our earlier discussion. And so it's a good way to test things like this that would be reasonable to test. You can't test everything in recovery mode, but you can test this. So that would be one. Safe mode is your boot volume, but you're telling it to skip a bunch of, you know, non-critical extensions, third-party stuff and things like that. So if it works in recovery mode, but not safe mode, then that does indeed indicate an issue with that USB kernel slash driver. But if it works in both recovery mode and safe mode, then it's some third-party extension. But if it works in neither of those, then maybe it's a hardware or a reset SMC problem. And we heard back, and it worked in recovery mode, but not safe mode. So now we know, right? Okay, so it is an issue with that particular build of macOS. The computer's fine, good, no problem there. So it's either, right? So now that we know, we got to fix some low-level driver in macOS. If you know exactly what files to replace, then great, I don't. That's not necessarily impossible to find, but also not necessarily the easiest thing. My, what I would try with if you don't want a nuke and pave is to reinstall High Sierra on top of itself and then do the combo updater on top of it. In theory, that will replace the USB kernel slash driver in High Sierra. And I think that would fix this. What do you think, John? Uh, wouldn't just doing a reinstall from a recovery be enough? That's what I'm saying. I'm curious. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but then you said, but also run the combo. I guess that's true, right? Because a reinstall from recovery would pull down the, that's an internet reinstall. That's true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fair. Because I don't think you need to do it twice. I agree with that. Yep, yep. And it's also possible that the combo updater could do it, right? If the USB driver has changed since High Sierra 10.13.0, then it would be in the combo updater and you'd be good to go. If it has not changed since 10.13.0, then you need to do, like you said, John, just the recovery mode thing. But yeah, you're right. You don't need to do both. Good call. I mean, for fun, if you want to see what's happening underneath the hood, which some of us like, I mean, you could look in the system information, software extensions. And if you do that, wait a while, like I'm waiting right now, and a little wheel spins, and then it'll show you all of the kernel extensions that are either loaded or not loaded. And some of them will have the word USB in them. Just out of curiosity, you may want to look through that list and see if anything that has the word USB in it is loaded, because it'll show you. It shows you the version, modified, loaded, obtained from. That's another, actually, that's another interesting thing, is that it'll show you if the extension is from Apple or from someone else. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, diagnosing that could be a chore. But if you're curious to see all of these kernel extensions, some of which will talk to your USB stuff, that's a place to look. I like that. Yeah, most likely. I.O. USB, H.I.D. driver hosted. Yeah, there's a boatload of them, but not all are loaded because it doesn't need all of them. Yeah, I would look at Apple, the USB mass storage driver is the one to look at. And I will tell you, now going from generic to very specific, on the latest build of High Sierra, the I.O. USB mass storage driver is version 140.70.2, and that is loaded even though I don't have any USB devices, USB storage devices attached. There is also something called I.O. USB mass storage class, and that is version 4.0.4, and that is not loaded, and probably because I don't have any USB drives attached. But on both of those, I will say they were last modified on May 8th, 2018. So it's possible the Combo Updater would solve this problem possible. But to be safe, just do the maintenance reinstall, just reinstall over the top. Yeah. All right, fun. See, this is why I like this stuff, man. We have fun with it. It's good. Okay. I don't know where we're going to go with this next one, but we're going to go there because why not? Jason brings us a fun little issue. He says, I have hurt my iTunes library. The one thing on my computer that I've been lovingly growing and tending to since 2001. And I was very nervous about turning on iCloud Music Library until last year for fear of hurting my library. A few weeks ago, I noticed that there were doubles of several songs in my library. Somehow, Apple Music had decided to add them to my library, but they weren't downloaded, perhaps because they were in some of my playlists. I don't know. So I deleted the extra copies that weren't on my local drives and then happened to look under file library show duplicates. I found thousands of duplicates. Some songs had the iCloud status of matches, some Apple Music, and others uploaded. And that's a handy tip right there. Turning on that iCloud status column in iTunes is really handy for this. And you can do that by going to Ho View. This is in iTunes. View, Show View Options. And I believe is it there? Oh, man. I believe it's there. Maybe not. Yeah, iCloud downloaded. And it will show you. Well, it just shows you if it's downloaded. Oh, yeah. Then there's iCloud status. Sorry. Yeah, so it's View, Show View Options. And then right at the top in the music list there is both iCloud downloaded and iCloud status. Really handy to see what has happened with those things. So moving on. He says, I figured I could just erase the Apple Music ones. I have added very few albums to my library with Apple Music. I'm still a dinosaur that prefers to own my music. He says, so I delete all those songs and then my horror I realized a few days later that basically 90% of the songs in my 100 or so playlists have disappeared. I found 5,000 music files in my trash. I added them back to iTunes, but the playlists had lost the links to their songs. The playlists were empty. He says, but we have backups, right? So I grabbed an older version of my iTunes library.itl file from Time Machine and popped it into my iTunes folder. When I rebooted iTunes, everything was fine. Success? No. Within moments, iTunes realized it was out of sync with its cloud and promptly deleted all of my playlist contents. I couldn't seem to find a way to tell iCloud Music Library that I wanted to reset it than to create a new master to populate the cloud. I deleted everything from the cloud from my laptop, but that made iTunes want to delete all my playlists every time. So he says, however, now he says, I with some digging, I learned that you can import all of your playlists at once by importing the iTunes library.xml file. So I did that and got my playlist back. However, he says, now I'm seeing four copies of every playlist and worse. It seems like any song that was used in any playlist is now missing from my library, even though the audio files themselves haven't moved anywhere. So, yeah, bad. Really, what it sounds like is you need to reset your iCloud Music Library on the cloud. That's way easier said than done and it would involve Apple support and you turning off iCloud Music Library on all of your iOS devices and all of that. But that honestly might still be worth it, especially since you have that older backup. You could just, you know, get them to reset it, turn it off everywhere first, get them to reset it, put everything back and see what happens, right? That might be the best thing. Because otherwise, you are thrice deleting quadruplicate playlists and then rematching songs and the rematching of missing songs is actually the refinding of missing songs in iTunes. It's not actually as bad as it sounds. When iTunes says, you know, I don't know where this song is, can you show me? When you do that with the first one, so you dig into where your music library is now and you say, yep, yep, okay here, that's where this particular song is. iTunes then learns from that and says, okay, if this song is in this location on that drive, then I can look back and see what's the same about all the other songs that are missing and it often can just match those without you having to do any manual work. It's smart enough to do that. So you have a couple of choices. Depending on where you are at this point in time, I think I would still go for the, you know, call Apple support and see if they can push this change for you because hopefully that would do it. But you never know. What do you think, man? My friend, Mr. John, F. Braun? I think Apple's music products are very confused. That is a fair statement. Certainly iTunes and iCloud Music Library can be very confused. I am just like Jason, right? I have a very carefully crafted, intended iTunes library and when I turned on iCloud Music Library, I mean, I made all kinds of backups, obviously, as Jason did. And I never had any of the problems that anyone went through, but that I am aware of all the problems that people like Jason went through and many others before you. And we do know that Apple has the ability to participate in solving this, and at least in the past, has been interested in doing so. So I would call them, see what they say. Yeah. The way I solve the problem is I don't use any of their cloud-based music services. So there. Well, that's one way. I mean, you miss out on a lot. Like our listener, all of my music is local. You miss out on a lot, though. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, finding new music and stuff. My library now is most definitely a mix of Apple music stuff and stuff that I owned and uploaded. And I really, I mean, there's times when that's frustrating, like when I want to grab an MP3 of a thing to, you know, a song to chop it up. And I realize, oh, I actually don't own that song. That's just an Apple music thing. I can't go chop that up, that kind of thing. But otherwise, you know, the flexibility of streaming music, it is the right, it is the way of the, I was going to say, of the future. It is the way of the present. You know, owning your music is most definitely a way of the past, especially for those of us that are playing music from our electronic devices. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I'll admit it. Yeah, I was there for a while too. I, you know, I resisted this and then, and then suddenly realized, oh, I sort of open the floodgates and okay, it's fine. Like, it's better this way. I don't want to go back. So yeah. Yeah. And also one word of wisdom, well, number of words of wisdom here from Michael in our chat room. Where's our chat room? If you ever want to chat and listen, you would go to MackieGab.com slash stream. And what Michael had to say is iTunes is a bag of hurt and needs to be fixed. And I concur. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. Right. I don't know. I think Apple knows this too. But I don't know what the, I think, I think the magic answer is, you know, splitting it up into separate apps and getting the whole sinking thing out of my music app and all of that. And who, you know, actually, wait a minute, Marzipan is the answer there. Right. Because with Mojave now, it's much easier to take an iOS code base and port it over to the Mac. Right. And we've seen that with news and home and stocks and what's like, I can never remember the fourth one. But, but those are all iOS apps that have been recompiled and built to work on the Mac. And this is why Mojave won't run on older Macs because it needs metal, the graphics or the GPU framework, I should say, because iOS assumes metal is is there. And in order to do this whole Marzipan thing, Marzipan being the tech that allows this recompiling of iOS apps, iOS apps for the Mac, you need metal. So, but iOS has a music app. They have a, you know, video app. Right. So those could presumably be easily ported over. I don't want that UI for my browsing my music on the Mac. But like maybe this paves the way for an easier transition for Apple to solve the iTunes problem. I hadn't really even thought about that. You know, so is Mojave the answer to the iTunes problem? Could be, right? I don't know. I don't know. It's worth pondering. Todd has a question worth pondering my friend. He says, I am annoyed that my Mac will wake up its screen for notifications when my Mac is asleep. He says, I did some research and went into system preferences notifications and found that there is a setting called in the do not disturb section for when the display is sleeping. And he says, I thought this was, so he checked it. And there you go. He says, I thought this was working, but I saw a glow from my office and saw the screen with some notifications on it. He says, how can I get my Mac screen not to wake up for any reason when it is asleep? Yeah. And he's running high Sierra. So that's a really good question, man. I, my guess is that by turning on that setting in system preferences notifications for do not disturb when the display is sleeping, my guess is that that is being honored by the OS and that your Mac is waking up for another reason. And there are lots of things I've got backup software that will wake up my screen. I've like there's all kinds of things. So I don't know what the magic answer is, but I don't know that there is one, but digging in and thinking about those things that are running overnight or scheduled to run. You could look at a piece of software that I like to use. It's called Lingon. And that really allows you to manage all your launch launch services items. But you also get to see what those items are configured to do on your system. And you might see, oh, look, you know, it's 630 p.m. every day, carbon copy cloner is set to launch and back up. It's like, right. Yeah. Because I told it to do that. And, and, but you can see all of that in one place. And that's actually really handy. So what do you think, John? I think I'll have to dig into the past and find this. Remember that log command that I came up with that one time? So there's an event, if you want to know why the heck your machine is waking up. You can run this command from the terminal that basically rips through your system log and looks for any sleep wake event. Sometimes the codes are kind of cryptic. Yeah. So I'll update that. I don't want to read it out to you here. Okay. Well, wait, no, I can copy and paste it. Oh, you got it. Okay. Cool. I would, I would actually love to have you write that up as an article for us at TMO because that would be a great resource just to have it so that we can, we can point to that. Oh, yeah. All right. Let me, I'll put a note in the show notes. So you'll see it when you're, when you're processing through the show notes. So there you go. Cool. Yeah, again, sometimes the codes it gives don't make any sense, but sometimes it does. Like, for example, one that I saw one time with one of my machines was like, oh, HID. I'm like, huh? What's that? Oh, human interface device. I think what happens sometimes is if you, some mice maybe or input devices may be very sensitive and, and just like walking near the computer and, and jostling it causes it, causes the computer to think, hey, there's somebody here. I better break, better wake up. Huh. Yeah. Yeah, right. That can happen, for sure. I have, you know, I still have the dead hard drive in this iMac here in the studio because it was the pre-fusion drive iMac that had the parts of a fusion drive. It's got a 256 gig SSD and then a dead one terabyte hard drive. And as I said, I think over Thanksgiving sky and I'll take this thing apart and rip that drive out. But when it tries to, when the machine wakes up now, it, the drive makes a lot of noise because it tries to spin and can't and it sounds sick because it is. And when I have band practice in this room, often there's enough motion or enough low-end, you know, that sort of jostles the mouse on the table here and that causes the machine to try and wake up. And occasionally you'll hear it, you know, going through its try to wake up the drive sounds and everybody's like, what is that? It sounds awful. Like, oh yeah, it's dead hard drive. It's fine. So now I run caffeinate during band rehearsal and the machine stays awake and doesn't try to wake up that or doesn't try to mount that drive. So, yes. All right. Let's see, my friend. What else do we, what have we here? Two cool stuffs found, John. The first is actually from listener, John. And in fact, I think both are from listeners, John. And I'm not sure. Is it the same, John? Nope. Two different listeners, John. The first will be the Skywin wireless charging receiver for AirPods. Listener John says, I made a wireless charging Cluj for my AirPods and it worked out, but it was butt ugly. And I paid about $15 in Chinese parts. A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this, the Skywin wireless charging receiver for AirPods. It is an AirPods-compatible Qi charging lightning adapter sleeve that goes over the AirPods, over the AirPods case, plugs into the lightning port, allows Qi to charge it. And he says it looks great and functions just as well. It's only $20 on Amazon. And he says it would make a great Christmas present if Apple doesn't get their case out first. So, thanks for that, man. Yeah, good stuff. We'll put that in the show notes with cool stuff found. I like it. Are you an AirPods guy yet, John? No. Okay. Okay. And then I highly recommend them. And it's crazy. Everything says I should hate these things, but they're super convenient. And it's the best headset I've ever used for my iPhone, bar none. Like wired wireless doesn't matter far and away the best headset I've ever used for any phone, really, not just my iPhone, but any phone. And it's really nice not to have to... I used to use a wired headset because that's where I could get the best sound quality, but it sucks having to carry the phone around with you when you're talking. And so now I just leave the phone on my desk and I can walk around and I'm good to go. And they work for music, too, as you might guess. Second cool stuff found from second listener, John, is the Verizon Fios' network extender. So what he says is, I moved into a new house and we have Verizon Fios service. He says, but their modem router Wi-Fi combo didn't make it to the other side of the house. This is no topic, of course, has been covered more thoroughly on Mac Geekab than Wi-Fi extension, mesh routers, and Wi-Fi solutions. So I started looking into solutions you've recommended, but while doing that, I got an email from Verizon about their Wi-Fi extender, which we'll put in the show notes. He says, it uses coax. And he goes and explains how it uses the coax cables in your house as its ethernet backhaul. So you don't need wires in your wall or you don't need to put new wires in your walls because it takes advantage of the existing coaxial wires that are in your walls to send the network signal across. And instead of it being just a Wi-Fi repeater, this now becomes a Wi-Fi broadcaster device that you can put in another part of your house. And it made me realize that we've described this many times, but never quite that way because the technology that he's talking about is called Mocha, MoCA. And Mocha is the thing that allows you and Verizon and Comcast and many others, and ActionTech really is the company building a lot of these Mocha adapters. It allows you to use some of the channels on your coax signal or coax lines to send data across. And it doesn't get in the way of you watching TV across those or sending other data across them because it's just using channels. And there's tons and tons of bandwidth available on coaxial cables. So it made me realize we kind of needed to come at this Mocha thing from a different way because this does work. And if you can take advantage of it, it can be a great way. Even if you have a mesh system like me, I've got mesh system du jour in the house at any given point in time, as I'm testing something. But I do have coax cable going from one side of my house to the other because it was built that way or at least retrofitted that way for television. And that way I can do wireless backhaul or wired, sorry, wired backhaul without having to run ethernet cables and it makes my wireless network work really well. So I highly recommend if you have coax in your walls taking advantage of this and letting your mesh or your repeaters use that. So yes, John. Yes. Yes. Thoughts about this. I'm following. Okay. I'm with you. I thought you I thought you were preparing to say something. So I was, you know. Well, I am, but you'd have finished first. I am finished, my friend. Yes. Oh, okay. Well, I thought, well, we talked about this earlier, but I thought I'd mentioned this now since we're talking about cool stuff. I learned something new about power. Okay. You may ask, what did I learn? Well, I learned it. So you and I were just at a show and I got a goodie and I was like, Oh, what do I do with it? What was the goodie, John? The goodie is the Ventev Walport PD-1300 ball charger. It's a USB-C charger. Okay. All right. Then I had to PD stands for power delivery. I'm going to I'm going to point that out because that's a that's a term now. If you haven't heard it, it means high, high power, high power being high, high charge voltages being sent across or amperages, I should say, right? Yes. High charge and amperages being sent across whatever USB-C cable. Yeah. Right. And then, and there's something called, there's a technology here called fast charging that you can do with certain devices, Dave. And guess what? I have one of them. Okay. iPhone 8 and later supports fast charging. And Apple even has a little article titled fast charger iPhone that explains this to you. And it explains what you just explained. It's like, so fast charging their definition, and I verified this last night, is that it'll charge your device up to 50% in 30 minutes. And I verified it and it did. I ran it down all the way and actually I think it was at 52% after 30 minutes. Wow. It's like, so that's cool. But they say here is that this only works with Apple's USB-C adapters or one that supports what you just said, which is USB power delivery. I also had my cable. And looking around, it's interesting online. So I went to the local store here and they had the Apple USB-C lightning cable. So I got that. It's funny because I was looking online to figure, maybe I was going to order one from Amazon. Apparently, there are some cables that claim to not work with fast charging, which is weird. But I found at least one that explicitly said, okay, even though I got USB-C on one side and lightning on the other, I don't do fast charging. And it's like, why would you even want to limit your product like that? I don't know if they're using cheap wires or what. So be careful. Yeah. All I know is I just found one that explicitly said, we don't do fast charging. We'll do charging charging, but not this, but we don't support this, I guess, the US power delivery. So this doesn't make sense because, well, I mean, I'm reading a thing about power delivery right now from a company that sells power delivery products. So bear that in mind. But what they say, and they describe it well, is that power delivery is a spec for handling higher power and allows a range of devices to charge quickly over a USB connection. And it's why the MacBook and MacBook Pro can charge over USB now, right? That USB-C allows this. It says it operates by facilitating a conversation between two devices to negotiate a power contract so they can determine how much power can be pulled from the charger. Power delivery starts at the five-volt setting and is configurable up to 20 volts. So it is variable voltage. Using a standard USB-C cable, it can handle up to 60 watts and will go up to 100 watts using a designated EMCA cable. I'm not sure what EMCA is, and I'm not going to look it up during the show. So that's interesting. So maybe the cable you're talking about, John, is a charge-only cable and doesn't allow data to pass across it? Maybe, right? And without data, they can't do this negotiation to say, hey, I can take more than you're giving me, lay it on me, brother, right? Maybe it's not doing that. So that could be the reason. Yeah. Yeah, but it's neat. And looking at this specific product, now it dawns on me why USB-C may actually be a good thing, is that this thing will do five volts, nine volts, 15 volts, 20 volts at various power levels. It's like, oh, wow, I can have one charger for both my computer and my phone. And then the light bulb went on. Yeah, right. Right. Oh, no. That's definitely why, yes, exactly. Exactly. Right. You just use the USB-C and yeah. That's it. So, thanks for helping me get on the USB-C bandwagon, guys. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. That's fun. I'm looking forward to this new USB-C world. Other than my Apple TV, I don't think I have any devices that even have USB-C ports yet, other than some chargers, of course. But there you go. Yeah, it's fun. Yep. Crazy. I have one. Well, you don't know. You don't have any, I mean, you have a charger, but you don't have any devices that will take a charge with a USB-C port, right? Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm really curious to see what's in the next gen iPads, because that will tell us where Apple's going with this, right? Is it USB-C? Are they doing away with lightning? Which would make sense. It's rumored that, yeah. I mean, the pain in this case is that I had to buy Apple's magic cable in order to do this charging here with lightning on one end. Yeah, I mean, I used to have standard connectors on both ends. Correct. Like the MacBook is now, right? And the MacBook Pro is. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen the rumor mill talking about Oh, absolutely. Being from lightning to USB-C, it kind of makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Of course, you wouldn't have joined the special program and by the special chip that, you know, does the MFI dance, right? Right. That is true. Oh, yeah. Huh. That's true. Well, but the iPhone does that dance on its own now, right? I mean, and so does your Mac, right? It says, hey, like iTunes wants to talk to this device and your device says, hey, do you want to let this Mac talk to your or this computer talk to your iPhone? And so I don't think like you need that anymore. I think they've solved that in the software, which is a good thing. So, yeah. All right. Well, that does it for us this week, folks. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, you can write into us at feedback at mackeekab.com. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's feedback at mackeekab.com. That is feedback at mackeekab.com. Unless you are one of our premium subscribers, in which case, and I shouldn't say subscribers, premium members, because you don't have to have a subscription, you can. But you can also, as you heard early in the episode, Leslie B made a one-time contribution that certainly makes you a premium member. And so, yes, please, you know, use our premium at mackeekab.com address for any of you. 224-888 Geek is the number any of you can call. And John Geek is four, three, three, five. And come visit us in the MacGeekUp forums at macgeekup.com slash forums. I'm really considering just shutting down the Facebook group. It's it's crazy to kind of have the community split into two places. The Facebook group is great, though. That's sort of the problem. That's why I've been hesitant. Let us know your thoughts on that. Would you please let us know, send an email, leave a phone message? Let us know what you think about that, because I'm I'm really and I'll post something to the Facebook group about this too. So yes, yes, man. Well, it's not just that. It's just, you know, it's too many places for it all to be. It's like we want we want a home and we have built one. So I think it's time to to move into the new house, move everybody into the new house and not have these two separate things. But maybe I'm missing something and maybe I'm not seeing the bigger picture here. So let us know. Please, please let us know our thanks to cash fly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And then, of course, in the podcast marketplace, thanking all of our sponsors like other word computing, as you heard earlier in the episode, Smile at Smile Software or other world computing at max sales dot com. Smile at Smile software dot com slash podcast. Bare bones software at bare bones dot com ring at ring dot com slash M G G and others, which you can visit. Mackie cub dot com slash sponsors. And you will learn about all of them. And you can see the deals even deals from non current sponsors. John, what do you think? You got any final thoughts before we before we all go our separate ways for the week and reconvene next week? I think so. And that I learned one thing, Dave, at least. Yes, good. Hopefully. No, actually, I'm lying. It's too thin. No, it's three things. And the three things that I learned are don't get caught.