 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekyab, Episode 781 for Monday, September 23rd, 2019! Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geekyab, the show where we take all kinds of questions and tips and cool stuff found and we mix them all together and talk about them, answer the questions collectively, individually, all together. The goal is that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include cashfly at mac.cashfly.com and we have a deal for you on the Mac Tech conference because I'm speaking there next month. You get 200 bucks off, so you want to check that out. So, we've got a link. Make sure you use that link because it's a great conference. We'll talk more about all this in a minute. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, pondering how to fix my grill. This is John Fron. John Fron, straight from left field for you, ladies and gentlemen, all for you. Larry wrote in response to the beginning of last week's episode where Monica gave us kudos for the chapters. Larry says, but don't forget about the MacGeekGab app on the iOS store because that brings the chapters on steroids. And Larry's right, Corey Imdik put together a fantastic app for us that keeps updating and I hear there's new features in the works, so very excited about that. But yeah, the app's available to all of you for free. And the chapters in the app, when you choose to leave us feedback in the app, it composes an email but tags the chapter so that we know what you're talking about and you don't have to explain the context because it puts it right there in the email that's automatically sent to us. If you're a premium MacGeekGab listener, the app knows because you tell it and then it sends the email to premium at MacGeekGab.com. If you're not a premium MacGeekGab listener, that's OK. We also get the email because it sends it to feedback at MacGeekGab.com. You know, I thought I heard you say feedback at MacGeekGab.com, Dave. It is feedback at MacGeekGab.com. And the MacGeekGab app, in addition to that, also lets you listen to the live stream and join the chat room in addition to listening to all of the episodes that are in our feed, of course. You will also get push notifications for when a new episode is out and also when we are live in the stream. So you definitely want to go check that out. Thanks for reminding us to remind everyone, Larry. That's I mean, we use the push notifications every week for many, many of you, but I do tend to forget sometimes to remind people about the app. So problem solved. But, John, lots of new things happened this week. We got iOS 13, Safari 13, iPhones 11 and plus a lot of other stuff that wasn't necessarily related to those that might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Let's start, though, with something that's important because there is a little bit of a mismatch happening if you have both iOS devices and Mac devices right now. And Greg helps us to explain. Hi, David and John. I am just sending in some follow up about the question about upgrading to reminders and iOS 13 and whether that's going to break or how that's going to interact with devices still on iOS 12 or previous versions of Mac OS. I am not running the betas and I'm recording this actually the night before iOS 13 comes out for the public. But based on what I have heard and what I've been following online, it sounds like when you upgrade to iOS 13 or iPad OS 13, you've got the option when you upgrade that when you first launch reminders, you have the option of upgrading your reminders database and you need to upgrade the reminders database in order to take advantage of some of the new features that are coming out like the sub tasks and reminders and things like that. As far as I can tell, at least in the betas from some people that I've heard and been following, you have the option of not upgrading your reminders and therefore being able to continue syncing your reminders from devices running iOS 13 and iOS 12 and, you know, Mac OS, Mojave and before. But as soon as you hit the upgrade button in the reminders app in iOS 13 or iPad OS to upgrade your reminders database at that point, they stop syncing back with prior versions of reminders. So I think as long as you upgrade the OS, but not the reminders database itself, you should be fine to be able to stay in sync with your previous devices and all of that. I don't know for how long that'll be the case, but that's my understanding. And I don't know if that sort of tiered upgrade where you can upgrade the OS, but not the reminders was something available only in the betas. If it'll be in the shipping version, my guess is it'll be in the shipping version, but I don't know for sure because it's not out yet. So that might help people get an idea of what's going on. I myself, I'm not planning to upgrade my iPhone tomorrow. I'm going to wait until the end of the month and do that because I run an iPad as my primary computer. And so I want to make sure that everything stays fully in sync across all of my devices, including reminders that I rely on on a daily basis. So I'm, I'm holding back a little bit. At least I'm going to try to and, and that. So maybe that helps shed some light on the reminder situation there. All right. Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Greg. That's great. Yeah. And indeed, for those of you that haven't tried this yet in iOS 13, the first time that you run reminders, it says it pops up exactly the message that Greg's talking about where it says new features require an upgrade. And it tells you that your devices need upgrading and tells you which devices are upgradable and which devices are not. I still would think, and I have not tested this, but I can see no reason why. It let's say you're running a Mac that cannot run Catalina, right? I really think that running something like busy Cal and connecting to your reminders database using the open source CalDAV protocol should continue to work and you should be able to get your reminders data. You won't get the reminders specific features that are sort of unique to Apple. But, but you will still get access to those via CalDAV. I believe, but I haven't tested it yet. So because I haven't migrated my reminders database. So if you want to wait until I do and test it, that is totally fine. But thank you for that, Greg. That's that's great advice. Yeah, so you can you can. And it's very clear like there is no way you could launch the reminders app and accidentally like blow past this. It's all over the screen and you have to choose whether to upgrade now or later. It's very, very clear. So I think it'll be all right. Have you upgraded your reminders database, Mr. Braun? I don't use reminders. So OK. OK. Yeah. No, and the thing is I have a device that apparently is not eligible for iOS 13. Yeah, you're your old air, right? Yep. That makes sense. Yeah, I went and you know, I said software update and it's like, yep, 12.0 you got the latest. Like, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense. But I guess it's just too wimpy. I mean, it's it's an old device. So right off the upgrade, get a new iPad, new hardware. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hey, one very cool thing that has really kind of blown us away here in our house in iOS 13 is the new slide to type feature. We've seen keyboards with this in the past. And the idea is you never you. I love it when the audio skips out on me. It's awesome. Oh, you looped. I looped. I did. But I think we're OK on the recording here. So I think we're I think we're going to be all right. Anyway, we are back. So there you go. There's some USB audio problem, perhaps with this Behringer mixer. But anyway, the slide to type feature. If you go into settings, general keyboard, you'll see it there. It was on by default for me in my upgrade. So my guess is it's on by default. But if not, it's there. It's called slide to type. And then there's another option called delete slide to type by word. And that turn them both on. The idea is you just draw your finger from letter to letter without picking it up from the keyboard. And it's amazing how well it works. Like the word flawless has been thrown around in my house with this, not by me, but like the other members of my house that are that are picky about technology and and not necessarily willing to suffer through some of the pains that I'm willing to suffer through. It really works well. It's pretty amazing. You kind of have to trust it that it's just working because it's not displaying letters as you type. It will start displaying the word that it's going to do in the, you know, in the suggestions panel there. So you get an idea for idea for it. But yeah, pretty amazing slide to type. So I highly recommend turn it on. It's good stuff. It is. You still with me, John? No, I'm with you. OK, actually, you did. Yeah, once I upgraded the next time I used the keyboard, it came up and said, hey, by the way, there's this new feature. And I'm like, yeah, OK, thanks. Yeah, that's pretty good. I told it to go away. Yeah, I, you know, I've been I've been impressed with with iOS 13. But there are some bugs and such. Apple did have to sort of race it out the door faster than they wanted to in order to have it available before new iPhones arrived in people's homes. So the good news is that iOS 13.1, which has been in beta test for several weeks now, public beta test and developer beta test, rather, for several weeks now is is scheduled to now be released on Tuesday, September 24th, instead of later a week later, which is good. So that's a that's a happy birthday to Dave from Apple. So there you go. I was 13.1 on Tuesday, which based on what I've seen in our tests here, I recommend doing that upgrade if you if, especially if you're already on iOS 13, get to iOS 13.1 on Tuesday when that comes out. So good. Yeah, more more thoughts about this, John. No, we've had some people have said you shouldn't upgrade until yeah, they come out with the the point release. But I'm I'm all right. Yeah, so far so good. So far, so good on this end, too. We have heard a report. At least we had one report of somebody who and this always happens where their phone got bricked during the upgrade. Who knows why it happens, but. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They they I'm not sure exactly how the how their upgrade process went. But definitely if you wind up with a bricked phone during any kind of upgrade, use use iOS or use IMAZING, if you have it to to get the phone into that what they call DFU mode. You can do it other ways by holding the right buttons, depending on your phone model and all of that. But it is the timing of getting your phone into DFU mode is tricky. So just be aware of that. You might not actually get it into DFU mode the the first time. And that's if your phone is in that state that we would call bricked. DFU mode is sort of the the firmware diagnostic and firmware upgrade mode. Is that what DFU stands for? But it's that mode where the phone is not running any of the software other than it's just core firmware and it is ready and waiting to receive. And that's what you want to get it into. I actually when I I decided because I had to come down and see you on Thursday and then we went to PEPCOM and we got some stuff to talk about that from that, John. But I decided to upgrade my phone. I had been running iOS 13, the betas on several other devices, but I upgraded my main phone on Wednesday in order to be able, you know, in order to have it and I upgraded to the gold master, which it turns out is the same as the release build. So all of that was really good. But when I did it, I I got impatient and I bricked my phone as well. The good news was even after having to go in DFU mode, I was able to tell iTunes to update my phone, not restore my phone and all of my settings persisted. So even from DFU mode, you didn't you don't necessarily lose any of your data on the phone. It's just that the software, the operating system is in a non usable state is essentially what goes on there. So yeah, is good. In the chat room at macgeekup.com slash stream this morning. AceNet suggested that they had to go in and disable it, go into general accessibility or I guess just settings accessibility on iOS 13 after the upgrade and disable the increased contact contrast setting in accessibility. I guess that acts a little differently in iOS 13 than it did in iOS 12 and was causing some issues there. So that is in settings, accessibility, display and text size, increased contrast. So just if things look a little wonky and you've upgraded, it might just be that you have some settings that were inherited. So thanks for the reminder there, AceNet. This is good stuff. Good, John. Anything else on that before we keep moving here? Keep moving. Keep moving. All right. Safari 13 also came out for macOS this week. It's built into iOS 13 and it will be built into Catalina, but it is available for Mojave and perhaps other versions of iOS I would assume this week. It does make some changes with the security settings. And one of those I noticed this morning, I went to download the image that you are seeing of the two apples asking each other questions in the episode image. And if you're not seeing that, go to maciekeb.com or look on the screen of your favorite podcatcher. It should be right there. But I went to download that because we use a service called Shutter Stock and they have great stock imagery and all that good stuff. And as soon as I clicked download, it asked me, it said, do you want to allow downloads on Shutterstock.com and you can change which websites can download files in website preferences? Yep, indeed. Downloads are now a thing that can be controlled. If you go into Safari preferences, websites, there are all kinds of things that have been here in previous versions of Safari, like camera and content blockers and all of that. But downloads are now another yet another thing that you have to approve and you can obviously go change those settings, which is great. So just an FYI, just an FYI. It's good. Yeah, the thing is, I already have that list populated with like three things already. Is it just your three things that for the open currently open websites and not configured websites? Oh, yes. Because you will always you will always see currently open websites at the top of every one of these sections of website here. And then any that you have specifically configured that are not open will also be shown, which is kind of cool. Oh, yeah, look at that. It says currently open websites. Yeah, Google, Google and the barbecue depot. So because of the aforementioned grill, yeah, that's right. If you got a new iPhone, some feature and you migrated all your settings over, that's really handy. But some settings do not migrate over. And every year we all have to realize that Wi-Fi calling has been disabled. So you have to go back in and turn Wi-Fi calling back on. And I believe that is in settings. Oh, is it cellular? Is it setting cellular? Yeah, setting cellular, then pick your plan. If you have multiple plans on your phone, as some of us do, pick your plan and go in there and you're right. Yes, John, just that's where you can turn on Wi-Fi calling. And so if you were using Wi-Fi calling with your old iPhone, you probably want to go turn it on. So just a friendly reminder, because that's sort of how this goes. Good. Yeah. And what you should see, or at least what I see, so in the upper left hand corner of your phone is that if it is enabled, then it'll say, like in my case, it says Verizon Wi-Fi, or I think maybe a shorter version of that. When you're on Wi-Fi, that's right. Yes. Right. When it decides that that's a better solution. Right. Which right now, mine just says Verizon. So apparently it doesn't think my Wi-Fi is a good choice right now. But Wi-Fi calling is enabled for you? Yes. OK, good. Good, good. I did get we actually got two iPhones here in the house, one iPhone 11, which Lisa got in purple. And that purple in person looks fantastic. It's a little weird online, depending on what screen you're looking at it with. But but in person, it looks fantastic. And then I got the 11 Pro in the whatever, the midnight green or whatever they call that. We wound up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday afternoon, right at, you know, the effective golden hour where the sun was just perfect and we happened to be right down by the water and taking some pictures and then we ate dinner and then came out of dinner. And of course, it was it was dark by the time we got out of dinner. And we were able to mess around a little bit with the with the cameras on both phones. And it really is impressive. The three lenses on that iPhone 11 Pro really do a fantastic job. First of all, the iOS does a fantastic job as you sort of zoom through each lens. The the transitions are seamless. I can't tell when it's switching from one lens to the other, which which means it. I mean, which means they did it right. But but if you look on either my Instagram feed or my Facebook feed, I posted or my Twitter feed, any of them that there. I'm Dave Hamilton on Instagram and Twitter, and I think I'm Hamilton, Dave on Facebook, but I'll put links in the in the show notes. But those cameras are really impressive with, you know, I took several shots of from me not moving, the phone not moving and just moving from lens to lens from what they call point five, the wide angle to normal to what they call telephoto. And and you can really see that, you know, the detail on the telephoto versus the the, you know, the wide angle obviously captures a whole lot more. It's really that there were there was a fairy house festival, for lack of a better term, in one of the public gardens in Portsmouth yesterday afternoon. And the festival, I think it ended, but all these fairy houses that have been built amongst the gardens were there. So we wound up taking some pictures of those. And it's really interesting. There's one shot or one series of shot, three shots that I put out there that really sort of highlight what those three cameras can do without you moving the phone. So it's pretty cool. I I'm I'm curious to see how it works. And the low light stuff is really amazing. John, the way that the the the night mode or whatever they call it works is the phone decides, OK, you're taking a picture. It's dark. I need a longer exposure. And it will show you what it recommends for the length of its exposure. And when you take the picture, it says, hold still. And then the image sort of materializes over the course of however long it has told you it's going to take. You can adjust that time. So if you don't want it to do any of its, you know, low light processing magic, it doesn't have to. You can also have it do more low light processing magic than it than it is recommending. But however long it's going to be, you know, it's and even in like pretty dark, it was still like maximum of three seconds. And it's just interesting you you tap the shutter button says, hold still and you just see the picture sort of appear. It's like a it's like a Polaroid from the old days, you know, where where the picture just slowly like comes to life, but much faster than it went than we got with those Polaroids. So it's pretty cool what they've done with the cameras and the software and the tech to make it all work in these iPhones 11. Yeah. Yeah. Really impressive. So very cool, fun stuff for sure. All right. Anything, any questions on that, Mr. Braun? No, I saw the pictures you posted there. Pretty good. Yeah. Thanks. One quick tip that is true of, I think, every iPhone, not just any iPhones 11, but certainly I believe would be the case here. Dan says, for anyone that suffers from their voice sounding muffled when calling from an iPhone, he says, mine was a 10R. But I think this would be true of certainly all iPhones 10, maybe even the eights. John, maybe you can help. He says, I annoyingly and surprisingly easily cracked the back glass of my new iPhone 10R when I got it. So in fear of further damaged, I purchased an Otterbox Folio style case, one where the front folds back like a book. Since I got the case, people have complained that I sound muffled when I talk on the phone. At last, I've found the problem and a solution. The microphone that's used to pick up your voice when on the phone is between the rear camera lens and the rear flashlight, hence folding back the case front to make a call means the microphone back there is completely covered. The advice I eventually found was to shut the case when speaking on the phone. This has solved the problem, but as you can imagine, causes other problems such as having to press numbers to go through menus on automated switchboards. He says, I must say I anticipated the microphone to be on the bottom of the phone, but it seems not and my testing suggests not as well. I think you're right that there is a microphone on the bottom of the phone and there's also one on the back and that back one participates in the whole process of isolating your voice and ensuring that background noise is not part of the scenario. But I think there are multiple microphones, but that is definitely one of them. And it seems participates a whole lot more than I would have anticipated based on what you're saying here, Dan. So yeah, and you can see it back there. There's just like, I mean, it's a little black little dot. Do you have that on the back of your iPhone 8 or is that only in 10 models, John? I am not aware of any microphone. OK, so you just have a camera and then the little flash thing, but not a little black dot anywhere in their vicinity. As far as I can tell, and I think here, I think the microphone it uses for. I think it's on the bottom, actually. Along with the speakers are right that. Yeah, and the 10s have that too. But they in addition, they have a microphone on the back, which is great for like capturing video, but it also when Apple announced it, I remember they said that it participates in the whole process of of isolating out background noise and things like that. So so yeah, be aware of covering that on your phone when you're talking either with a case or with your hand even. So thanks, Dan. Good stuff. Crazy. I never never thought of that. That's why we do this show. That's why we do the show. Another reason we do this show is because we love fun stuff. And we were talking at the end of last week's episode about Twain, a open standard for some scanners and can. Sorry, Keith says, I've just lived listened to 780 and I'm a little disappointed in you, too. He says, you're normally very good at explaining abbreviations and acronyms, but you missed out on a fantastic one when discussing Twain. That is technology without an interesting name. There is actually I researched this a little bit. That is the working version of of what what Twain means. Although there is no documentation by Twain's creators about what Twain means. So it is it is some it is up for debate. But I like it. So I'm sticking with it, Keith. That's great. I don't think I knew that. So that's that's an even better one. Thanks for sending it in. Yeah. And we did get Sharon, I think it was. At least one listener confirmed that at least with the Epson scanner that they have, it does show up in image capture. So I think Twain support is still in Mac OS. That's good. That's good. I wouldn't rely on it. Twain is I mean, the good news is that it's a standard and you can get you can access the basic functionality of the scanner. But something proprietary will probably give you more functionality. So I guess that's and I know that's the whole. I don't know of any current scanners that support Twain. I mean, I looked a little bit and couldn't find one. At least I find none that advertised support for Twain. So I would not I would not rely on relying on it. The person that it was interesting because the person that wrote in. So they had two scanners that they they weren't happy with the lack of support. So one was, you know, Fajitsu makes the scan snap, which is a really nice scanner. And I actually have one of their units, single page scanner. And it's really nice, but it's not Twain compatible. But then he said he had a neat scanner. And the thing is searching for information. Neat claims to be Twain compliant. OK, OK. That's good. So that's good. I mean, the whole story was, you know, I hate that my scanners gets obsoleted. Oh, yeah, no, mine is mine is about to mine is about to be obsoleted. My printer is because the software for that printer hasn't been updated to since 2007. I have it running on seven. Seven. Yes. Yes. Twelve years. That's a good run. It's a good run. Yeah. I mean, I bought it before that. That was just the last update to the software. But I cannot install the software on Mojave. I can. I don't even think I could install it on high Sierra. But it is installed on my 2019 iMac because I migration assisted myself up to it. But one that's the only machine I have where I can get the software on there for this. It's an HP laser jet. Oh, crap. No, I can't remember the name of the printer or the model. But it's suffice to say. And there is no way of scanning to this. It's a laser jet three zero five five. So anyway, the I once Catalina comes that software won't run even if I just upgrade to Catalina because there's no thirty two bit software that can be run inside of Catalina. So I got to get a new one. It's fine. If you are in a similar boat to me, though, a place to check before you decide to punt is a website called or a piece of software called ViewScan from Hamrick.com. And of course, the links in the show notes that we've talked about it before on the show. But the ViewScan, they sort of reverse engineered drivers for older scanners and then publish them and keep them up to date with current operating systems. Unfortunately, for me, my scanner only they've only done this with the Windows version of the drivers, not the Mac version. So I'm still out of luck. But that is the saving grace for so many of us. So make sure to keep an eye on. I would say ViewScan is going to be way better for you than looking into trying to get twain drivers because you'll actually get all of the features with a ViewScan driver. So. All right. A couple more quick tips here. One from Jeff who says, I always forget about this keyboard tip. But when using an iPad, instead of pressing shift to access numbers and the symbols, which appear above the letters, you can simply press the letter and slide down and it will input whatever is above it. For example, if I want to type the number one, I simply touch Q and slide down and a one is entered. Very simple and I forget to do it, but it saves two extra presses to get in and out of number mode or to quickly insert a symbol. I can't find a way to do this on the iPhone. No, you're totally right. This is one of those things. This is the epitome of a quick tip because it's the kind of thing I do on my iPad all the time. And I don't think we've ever talked about it on the show, but it's a super handy thing to do. So there you go. Thank you, Jeff. You you you did it. So you made us talk about it, which is great. One last quick tip here is from listener Dan, who says, Hey, guys, I know this isn't exactly Mac related, but it relates to info that I heard on your show. So I wanted to share something I found. Comcast slash Xfinity customers can pay their bills using Apple Pay. I think this feature has been around for quite a while. I just didn't know about it. You can easily use Apple Pay for either single payments or for auto pay. I got to find out about that. Is this by just visiting your payment preferences through Safari on a Mac or iOS? I thought this was cool because I recently got an Apple card. And as soon as I heard you mentioned that you get two percent for anything paid with Apple Pay, well, I went and now I'm getting two percent cashback on my Comcast slash Xfinity bill. So I got to figure this out. I got to figure out how they're doing. Auto pay, meaning recurring payments with. Apple Pay, because I would love to offer Apple Pay for our Makikab premium stuff and we can. But currently, the only way we can do it is for one time payments, not for your subscriptions. But I'm thinking that there must be a way. So I got to look into seeing how I can integrate that. But that's this is great. But anyway, for Apple Card, great. Awesome. Comcast Xfinity. Good. Yes. Fun. Yeah, John, anything nice on this? I know I'm still about it. I'm really. I actually had one of my cards change, change their cashback options, which is nice. So I got an AMX blue cash preferred, which is the only card I actually pay for. But they all of a sudden said, hey, you know what? We're going to get rid of three percent on department stores, which is like, OK, and we'll give you six percent back on select US streaming subscriptions. Nice. And also three percent back on transit. Cool, which is kind of nice. Though, oddly enough, they don't consider airfare transit. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, none of those things do right. That's a transit's more about your the surface stuff or under the surface subways and local trains and things like that. Brian Monroe says for the Xfinity thing, you can use the Xfinity My Account app. And he just went through and did that. He says, just did the Apple Pay on my Xfinity using the My Account app. So I put a link to that iOS app in the show notes so you can take care of that if you want. I want to tell you about our first sponsor, which is Cash Flies Web Optimization Consultation. They really know what they're doing at Cash Flies. Now, they have been providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you for almost the entirety of time that we have been doing Mackie Cab. But they know more than just delivering. MP3 and M4A files, they know how the web works. And they have this new web optimization engine and service, really, that can optimize all of your content before it's delivered to visitors and without requiring any development efforts from you. So you take your website, you use Cash Flies Web Optimization Tech. And now you're delivering faster, which makes search rankings higher. That means people can find you and your business and you are in really good shape. And what's cool is that they will do a free eval for you. This is not something that's normally offered for free. It actually takes some time for like human to go through and make all this happen. But because you're a Mackie Cab listener, go to Mac.CashFly.com. That's M-A-C.C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. Of course, the link is in the show notes and they will go through it. And and I actually signed up to do it with Mac Observer now that we are on our new server and all of that because I knew that there were some things that were slowing us down from the old server. And there was no reason to have somebody come in and tell me something that I certainly already knew, but now we can sort of focus on some other things. So I've actually signed up. I'll let you folks know how it goes. Our thanks to CashFly for sponsoring this episode. And as a reminder, I know I said it at the beginning of the show, but Mac Tech is one of my favorite conferences of the year. It is people like us there learning about cool technology. And one of the best parts is no one is ever the smartest person in the room. There is always something to learn from someone. And that is true. Even when I'm on stage talking about something that I have researched and studied, there is always something more to learn. And that is the beauty of Mac Tech. Everybody, there's, you know, about, I don't know, I want to say 300 people there, it's somewhere in that range. The way they put that conference together, they make it feel like you are all just at camp together. Everybody's on the same page, speakers and attendees. There's no, I mean, there's a distinction when someone's on stage. But otherwise, everybody is just everybody and it's fantastic. And we can save you two hundred bucks off of the current price, which is two hundred bucks lower than retail price or than it will be. So you can say four hundred bucks off of the end price of what you would pay to go to Mac Tech. I'm speaking there next month. There's going to be a lot of great people there. I can't wait to go. We've got a special link. It's it's far too complex for me to try and say. But good news, it's right there in the show notes at MacGeekGab.com. So go get that and and we'll see you at Mac Tech. All right, John, some cool stuff found, you know, it's new iPhone time, which means it's new iPhone case time. So we went to PEPCOM the other night and I was overloaded with iPhone 11 cases. One thing I always look for and most of the cases that I got were fantastic and and and all have their their place. But one thing I look for when getting a new iPhone is, especially with these new iPhones, 11, I want to show off the color of the phone. I want to see it, right? If I chose, you know, my midnight green, everything OK over there? Mr. Braun. Yeah, OK, you're coming in on like, OK. Where were we? Yes, right. So, you know, I want to show off the color of my my phone. I want to see it. And there are a lot of cases out there that say they are clear cases. They aren't all clear. Even some of the really what I would call, you know, high quality name brand ones that really identify as clear tend to have some opacity to them and and these levels of that. The one that I wind up putting on my phone every year in order to see the color of it right out of the gate is one from is the catalyst impact protection case. It's got like 13 feet of, you know, drop protection, and it's got a cool little knob on the side to control the the mute switch. Sorry, it's got 10 feet of drop protection. Right. My apologies. There's so many cases I keep getting confused. But the back of this thing is clear and it's actually clear like you can see the color of your phone. Light doesn't make the case go wonky or anything. So that's I've got lots of cases to talk about. But today that's the one case I'm talking about because it's actually clear and really is kind of fun when you get your new phone. And it's also it's like a lightweight protective case. I always find it really comfortable in my hand. So I'm stoked to have that on my new iPhone 11 Pro and wanted to make sure we we talked about it. So now we've talked about it. Nice. Yeah. Well, I'll mention one as well. So so the good folks at spec actually upgraded my case. And it's also a clear case. So it's the. No, it's not. No, it's not. I had the spec clear case on my phone. I love spec. You know this. That is not clear. That is well, the new one they gave me is clear. No, it's not. I have the same one. I'm just telling you there's a radical difference between what Catalyst is doing with clear and what spec is doing with clear for sure. Because I put them both on my phone this weekend. OK, all right. Well, I'll say it's clear to me. Right. No, I can see the phone itself. So I'll just mention it, the Presidio clear. Now, the other nice thing about this case and I got a link to it here, though you may have it already. But I'm eight foot drop protection. That's a nice feature. Yeah. So they actually advertise that they're going to protect you from drops, which not all cases do. So that's nice because I like the beauty of the phone to come through. So at least to me, it does with this one. And I think I have actually fumbled my phone once or twice. And and it's still in one piece. Yeah. So no, I love I love the spec cases. Don't get me wrong. They are one of my favorite case brands. And actually that that same that case you're talking about is the first case that I put on my phone this this weekend and then realized this green is like really getting munged by by this case and I could see it because there's a huge opening now for the, you know, there has to be for the cameras on the on the on the new iPhones. And it was like, oh, this is radically different here. And and so I swapped it out and I was like, much better. Good. So. But I mean, the spec cases are fantastic. I, you know, I often have one on my phones. And, you know, I think I famously tell the story of when Skylar, my daughter dropped her iPhone something a couple of years ago on her at the top of a roller coaster. And it bounced. It was like at a fair. So it was one of those, you know, all metal sort of contraption things. And it bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced. And she had to get the ride operator to go like underneath the roller coaster and retrieve what she presumed was her destroyed iPhone. There wasn't a scratch on this thing. So, yeah, the spec did a good job protecting her phone that day, which was a good thing. So cool. We all. All right. Listener Dan says. Where are we down? He says, for cool stuff found in your last episode, you were talking about cheaper Synology Nasses and the need to have one that can transcode multimedia. As my resources were limited when I bought my Synology, I got the two 18 J that doesn't do hardware transcoding. But I was recommended an app for the Apple TV, which is called Infuse. It doesn't require an app on the Synology. Rather, you just point it at a folder and it scours it for videos and does a good job of finding details and cover images, etc. It works really well, although obviously you can't watch videos on an iPhone at lower resolutions. Yeah, no, Infuse is pretty amazing. It will do it will use the Apple TV to do a lot of the the transcoding locally. Plex also does this. It there it is pretty rare, even though I have a disk station with hardware transcoding now, it it's it's not. Often, it's certainly not all the time that my that that it's doing any transcoding for on the fly stuff. It will certainly transcode when I, you know, sink it to my iPhone or iPad or whatever. But but yeah, it like Infuse isn't the only app that does this, but it is it is one of them and it's a it's a great app because you can just point it at any media library. It's really simple to use. But as Dan mentioned, really elegant as well. So. So. So there you go. Thanks, Dan. Good stuff. Yeah, anything on that, Mr. Braun, I should check that out. I think I can. You can. Oh, yeah, you definitely can. Yeah. No, Infuse is a great, a great app. Yeah, very cool stuff. You know, my daughter recently asked me. She's at college, John, as you know, and she said, I need an HDMI cable to go from my laptop to the TV that my roommate has in the room so that she could watch something from, say, our Plex library or, you know, from anything else. And so I gave her an HDMI cable and then it hit me. I've been checking out this thing called the I O gear share pro. And what it is, is it is a mini wireless HD transmitter system. So it's essentially an HD cable without the cable. You plug one of these little things into your Mac and you plug one of these things into your TV and they talk to each other wirelessly. And if your TV has a USB port, it's got power to plug to run this thing. Your computer obviously has a USB port, so you're good to go. And or you can plug it into USB power and your golden. Really freaking amazing the way this works. And that way you don't have to worry about a cable. I've used this thing in hotel rooms where, you know, sometimes I want to watch a movie on the TV or whatever. It's like, wait a minute, I don't need to run the cable. I don't need to bring a bulky HDMI cable with me. I just bring these two little adapters and I'm good to go. And they sit in my bag, my travel bag, and it's great. So this is a this is a cool thing. If you are HDMI from your laptop to your TV or even if you've got like a home theater setup where your TV is sort of far away from your switch box. That could be your magic little answer here. Or if they only ran two HDMI cables in the wall and you need a third one to go from wherever your, you know, your your home theater stuff is to your TV because your TV is mounted up on the wall. You could use this. So it's pretty cool. It's like 115 bucks, too. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But I love I love this stuff. It's fun, fun, fun. Any thoughts on that, John? I'd like it when you share. Oh, we've got lots of stuff to share. But Andrew has a cool stuff found to share as well. It's a Mac app called Keystroke Pro. It says I noticed that this app is coming to the set app family of apps. It seems unique in that it adds a nice graphic of your keyboard keys as you press them, which in my opinion is much nicer than the Greek looking characters that pop up when using most screencast software and enabling the show keys option, if the app even has that feature says you can choose to have it display all the keys or just key combinations. So when you hit like command or G or something like that, it shows that on the screen. Yeah, that's that's really handy when you're doing like how to videos for people, even if you're just doing quick ones for, you know, family members and friends or for your your clients for those of us consultants out there. I could see a value in this Keystroke Pro app. So we put that in the show notes for you all. So that's pretty cool, John. Indeed. Indeed. All right. Sonos chose to have last week as the time when the reviews for all of their therefore their new move speaker came out. And I chose to wait because there's been a lot of things going on in the Apple world. And I thought it might get lost in the shuffle. In fact, it almost got lost in the shuffle of this show as we were putting things together. But I didn't want it to be. The new Sonos move is fantastic. I know I talked about this a couple of weeks ago after I got to see it at their offices. But now I've had I've gotten to have one around the house, John, and mess with it. And they've really done a nice job with this speaker. And it's amazing how weather resistant it is. I found you were speaking of grilling earlier, my friend. Well, the Sonos move is like the ultimate grilling accessory because I can just grab the speaker from inside the house and bring it out onto the deck with me and have it out there while I'm, you know, grilling dinner or whatever. And it's the same sound that's playing on the other Sonos speakers in the kitchen, of course, because that's how Sonos works or that's how you can make it work. And it sounds good. It auto true plays itself. When you're, when you move it around, it has a motion sensor in there. So it knows to sort of retune itself when I bring it outside or bring it back inside. But one night after grilling, John, I left it out there. I did this intentionally. It was really hard to do, but I did it because it had started raining and I needed to see how it would do. And I left it all night in the rain. I had to go back out and cover the grill because, you know, once the grill cooled off, I didn't want the rain getting all over that. So I covered the grill and the speaker was still out there and I left it out there, which was hard to do. But there it was in the rain and I woke up the next morning and it was wet and had some leaves on it. And I brushed them off and it didn't even look like anything had happened to it. And of course, nothing had happened. I was able to just play right to it and it worked just fine as expected. And then I left it out all day in the baking sun because that's what we have right now here in New England. We have like cold, you know, sometimes rainy, but cold nights and pretty hot sunny days, which is sort of gorgeous. It's a perfect time of year. But, you know, it's fantastic. It's just the way they've built the material for this thing, it just sort of resists any impact from all of that stuff. It's really well done. And then of course you can switch it to Bluetooth if you want to take it with you away from the home where your Wi-Fi is. And then it's a Bluetooth speaker. And they say it's got a 10 hour battery. I've actually gotten a little bit more than 10 hours out of it. Maybe I didn't have it cranked up as far as I could or whatever. But, you know, it's definitely a cool thing. The, I've got a review written that I'll put up this week, which sort of goes into more detail for anybody that wants it. But the only drawback really to me is the price. At $399, it seems, I think it should be $100 less. I think it should be $299, given where it fits in the lineup. You know, I compared it to we have some plate old that are no longer available, plate threes in the kitchen. And it doesn't put out the same kind of sound as that play three. It doesn't have the same low end. It's, they still sound good. You know, AB, either AB them together and you'll notice sort of this difference in the low end and the fullness of the sound. Of course, the play three won't survive outside and the play three doesn't have the wide range. You know, the wide dispersion of the sound that they built into the move. But it's $399, I think it's a little pricey. But it's a nice speaker and it could be, if you want to get into Sonos, this is a great speaker to use because it doesn't have to live in just one room of your house, right? You can have Sonos in every room. You can have it follow you around because it's got a little handle on it and just grab it and bring it with you. So from that standpoint, you know, I am not surprised by the price. Let me put it that way, but I think the sweet spot would be a little bit less. So there you go. And so there you go. There you go. Any questions on that, John? No. Okay. I got to try out a different spec product this week, John, while heading to PEPCOM and spec has sort of a new sub brand, if you will, called spectravel at spectravel.com and they've got both luggage and backpacks there. And I've had the chance to check out both, but what I checked out this week was their business backpack. This has all the things that, all the things but one that I would want in a, oh, actually no, it has everything that I would want. Sorry. Everything that I would want in a business backpack. The one thing that I didn't realize it had because I wasn't using it with a suitcase is I didn't realize that it had a way of fitting over the handle of my roller suitcase, but it does, which is awesome. It's got the right compartments inside for your laptop. It's got a little charging port on the outside that you can plug into a battery inside so you don't have to open it up and to charge. You can just plug into a USB port on the outside of this thing and it works. It's got water bottle containers that'll hold like one of those huge weaponized hydro flask things that are crazy that my kids insist on using that they will fit in there and it will hold them, which is even more impressive. And the cushioning on the back of this thing, as soon as I put it on, John, when we started going to PEPCOM, it was like, oh, this thing is cozy and delicious. Like it's really comfortable to wear. So it's a hundred bucks for this business backpack and it's got a laptop compartment and all the stuff you would expect. So I will put a link to that in the show notes, but really, really impressed with it. And I'm also impressed with their, they sent me one of their 22 inch carry-on suitcases that I like that too. It's a little bit smaller than, why can't I think of the other one that is popular out there now? It's one of these, oh man, I can't even off the top of my head. I have one, I can picture it. But anyway, I will come up with it. I will put the link in the show notes. Why can't I, they sponsored the show even years ago. Suitcase, roller, huh. I don't know, why can't I think of the name? Away, thank you. It's a little bit smaller than what would be advertised as the same size away bag, but it's very similar to that away bag where it compresses your stuff inside it and really kind of fits everything together. It's just like an inch smaller all the way around. But a really nice bag. But this backpack is fantastic. Really, really, it has now become my default travel backpack. Coolio, anything else, Mr. Braun? Is that the one that you were wearing that when you came down here? Yeah, that's the one that I brought, the gray one that I brought with me to PEPCOM. Oh, OK, with the plug. With the plug, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's neat. Yeah, yeah, it is, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right, we have some questions, John. Should we go to these questions here? We've got more cool stuff found, but we've got more episodes coming. Good news, we're going to record again next week. Are you sure? Yeah, well, that's the plan. I don't know. Steve has a question that really applies to a lot of people. I think the problem is over, but if you saw it, you'll probably won't be comforted by some discussion about this. Steve writes that he says all of my iCloud mail and all of my wife's iCloud mail started going to junk. All mail coming into my iCloud account goes to the junk folder. He says I've been snooping around the internet to troubleshoot and was going to look at like advanced settings in the mail. But it seems like other people are having this problem too. And indeed, I saw people conflating this with iOS 13. They said, I upgraded to iOS 13. Now iOS 13 is making all my mail go to junk. And that was the thing that actually helped me get an answer to Steve's question because while the Mac certainly can do client side filtering of messages, iOS does not. So anything that was happening that was affecting iCloud mail on iOS was happening on the iCloud servers, not on people's phones. And that tells me that there was an iCloud server problem with mail going to junk for lots of people, certainly not everyone, but lots of people were affected by this. And now as of Sunday morning, the 22nd, when we're recording this episode, it seems to be gone. The problem seems to be gone. So I think we're OK with it, John. You experienced some level of this, right? Yeah, so I was looking in my junk and stuff that I thought I had deleted was put in junk instead. That would be interesting about that. I can see that happening. Sure, if the filters ran awry, they grabbed it and put it in junk, not trash. Yeah, OK. Yeah, but in my case, something else happened, which was kind of weird. So if you go to mail preferences, accounts, iCloud mailbox behaviors, my junk mailbox had changed to a mailbox that was not the junk mailbox. Oh, interesting. So I changed it back. So this may have been a server side problem, but it also may be a client side problem on the on the Mac. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Correct. That makes sense. So weird things are happening to your mail. Be aware of this mailbox behaviors section within mail. You know what would cause that, John, is if the IMAP server or the server stopped advertising the mailbox that right that was set for that particular thing. So it would have to default to something else. So if your junk, if whatever was your junk mailbox stopped existing, right? Then mail has to, like, I got to put it somewhere and so it chooses something else. That's really interesting. Yeah, it makes sense, though. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, it seems like iCloud mail, just specifically junk mail had had some server side issues here. But yes, but go check your like John said, go check your mailbox behavior because even if you didn't see the results of this junk filter fiasco, you your your preferences may have been affected by it. So yeah. Craziness, crazy, crazy, crazy. All right. Anything else on that before we go to Jan? No, no, it's just want to chime in there that, huh? Yeah, what? Why are you there? Yeah, yeah. OK, all right, Jan. Well, Jan says. Hi, Dave and John. This is a French listener, Jan. Well, I think there's a worldwide issue there with Safari, the new version that was installed a couple of days ago. I was trying to set up my new Mac mini and trying to set up the Google accounts. So I've got a personal Gmail and two G suites account. And basically it asks at one point to open Safari in order to do the authentication process. But Safari opens with a blank page. I mean, there's nothing happening. I've tried many things and nothing works. And looking through the forums and the web, I found that a lot of people were asking this. We're having this problem too. So well, I just wanted to put you a note. Maybe there's a way to revert to a previous Safari version or do something. I don't know. But well, maybe you can help. Thanks for the show. It's great. And have a good time. Have a good day and have a good show. Cheers. Bye bye. Thanks, Jan. Yeah, very interesting. So you can I've tested this on several machines and it happens 100 percent of the time. If you go into system preferences and this is on Mojave with Safari 13 and you go to internet accounts and hit the plus button and choose a Google account. It will open. It will offer to open Safari. And then it won't really do anything. Or if Safari hasn't been launched, it will launch. But it's not passing a URL over to Safari, which means it can't. Safari can't bring you to where you need to authenticate for that particular token, right? So you are doomed. And I have tried changing my default browser from Safari to Chrome because I figured Chrome, Google. Great. Nope. It still only goes to Safari because that's how system preferences token all off thing is going to work. So the default browser is not part of this scenario. It is simply broken. And if you need to add a Google account to internet accounts, you cannot right now if you have iOS 13. One work around is that you could use app-specific passwords to connect your mail to Google by not calling it a Gmail account, but by not calling it a Google account, but by calling it just a regular IMAP account or a CardDAV account or a CalDAV account for your calendars and cards and all that stuff. Presumably this will be fixed very, very soon, I hope. But my guess is it's part of the new security features of Safari 13 where perhaps it's not letting third party apps open links or I don't know, but clearly it's doing some more and maybe that's the problem. So if somebody knows of a work around, please let us know, of course. But somebody knows of a way to actually get this to work. I don't want to say it. We already know of a work around is using app-specific passwords and creating a different type of account that you can still connect to. But, and I'll put a link in the show notes about kind of how to create those app-specific passwords on Google. But yeah, very interesting that it just, is it doing it the same for you, John? I haven't come across. You didn't try it. Okay, like I said, it's a really easy thing to test. Just go to system preferences, internet accounts, hit the plus sign and choose Google and it'll offer to open Safari. And you can click the button and you know, assuming Safari's already opened, literally nothing happens. If Safari's not open, it will launch the app. But that's all that will happen. Something has to be happening, just not what you want. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe. You notice, John, that Safari 13 turns off or invalidates a lot of plugins you may have had. Yeah, I ran it and all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, by the way, your extensions, including Honey was the only one it mentioned. It's like, yeah, they're not gonna work anymore. And it's like, well, could you kind of give me a list of? Or could you upgrade them for me? No, they can't upgrade them because extensions, sorry, I said plugins, but extensions are what I meant. Safari 13 only allows extensions that are available via the Mac App Store. If you want to use an extension that is not available via the Mac App Store, Apple is fine with that. So long as you're using it in a browser that's not Safari. So Chrome, Firefox, like you're good to go. I get it, you know, we've seen browser extensions as like, I don't know how many times on the show we've talked about, you know, someone that had some sort of browser hijack happening where, you know, their homepage was the wrong thing or searches were going via some, you know, spyware or malware or whatever. And many times it's like, well, look at extensions. And it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the problem. Or somebody that says, like, we had somebody this week that was saying, I go to maceacab.com and I can't see the player for the podcast in Safari. But if I go in, you know, Chrome, the player for the podcast is there. It's like, okay, well, what kind of blocker extensions do you have in Safari? They're like, oh, we have, you know, I have these three ad blocker extensions. Like, okay, well, they're probably not written all that well. And they seem to be blocking a little bit more than they were supposed to be blocking. You know, those types of things are gone now, right? Because the only extensions that you can put in Safari are those that have been through the app store approval process. And I actually support this. Extensions have been the root of, I'm sure for Apple, a lot of customer service time spent. And they're also a massive attack vector because basically anything could install them previously and now they have to come through the mac app store. So like for me, one password was still there in my Safari extensions. You know what, that's fine by me. I'm good. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I'm just not happy that the upgrade experience was inconsistent between my two machines. On one machine, I still see Honey and LastPass up in my menu bar, but some things are disappearing. I guess my problem is that it could have been, it could have given me a little more information about what it disabled. Sure, sure. Because I remember I had Honey and LastPass installed, but I'm like, you know, I had some other things installed, but now I have no record of... Of what's missing. Yeah. What's missing? Yeah, so I think that was... That makes sense. Fish shake. I give them a fish shake for that. Take a look in your backups, right? Like those extensions. Oh, they may be, yeah. It could be somewhere disabled or whatever. I'm sure it didn't totally eradicate them and just put them somewhere. I just gotta find where that is. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, where are we here on the agenda? Oh, yeah. In iOS 13, Scott asked. He said, in iOS 13, they asked about allowing Bluetooth to basically track you. Where do you go to find out which apps you have given permission to in this new function of iOS 13? And yeah, you go to the Settings app, go to Privacy, and now there's a Bluetooth section right there, and you can see what you've given permission to. You can also control what you've given permission to. Just like everything else. They've just expanded this. It's the same sort of user interface that it's always been now Bluetooth has just been added here, which is handy, I think. I think it's good, I like this. Bluetooth's been weird for me, though. If you are migrating iPhones, Bluetooth devices will not come with it. You have to repair your iPhone, your new iPhone to your old Bluetooth devices. That includes your speakers like that Sonos move I talked about, but also your car and other stuff like that. I have noticed that I had lots, like I test a lot of things and I don't necessarily remove them from my phone, so I probably had 15 different Bluetooth devices to find on my old iPhone. As I have repaired, that's not you. It's just a function of how that worked. It's okay. It doesn't cause any problems. It's actually really good. No, it's just a lot. It's a lot, yeah. I think I go. So, but there's nothing wrong. Like it's not gonna cause trouble on your phone to have lots of things paired, but when you are migrating to a new, or when I migrated to a new phone, I've found it do weird things in terms, like when I went to repair to say my escort, you know, passport, max, whatever, radar detector that does all its Bluetooth stuff, which is great, because it puts the speed limit up there, which I really, really like. It's actually the main feature I use it for. I'm looking in the Bluetooth settings. It shows up as handset, which is what everything in the car seems to show up as first. And then the name changes to what it actually is. And the name changed. My son was driving. I wasn't doing this while I was driving. My son was driving and it changed to a speaker that I had tested two weeks ago. And then after another 10 seconds, it changed to the radar detector. That speaker was nowhere nearby and it wasn't plugged in. So something got wonked, like it clearly has the list of the old things that I had paired, but because they are not paired to this phone, they don't show up in that list. My advice would be, if you're getting a new phone, go in and you're gonna migrate your settings. So I did the direct device to device migration, which is really handy now. I've done it with Max recently and I've also done it with the iPhone, which is great, right? It's just straight, like peer-to-peer connection. Great. I would go into your old iPhone and unpair it from every Bluetooth device that's there. You can hear Apple Watch and there was something else that Apple's gonna automatic. Oh, and AirPods. Those, it's gonna sort of redo anyway, so you can leave those. But every third party device, I would just remove just to make life easier for that migration. So, there you go. Yes, and Brian Monroe in the chat room asked, peer-to-peer migration went well. It really, really did. And like I said, I've done it. I talked about, I've been testing that new lower end MacBook Pro recently too and bouncing back and forth between other machines here with that, that peer-to-peer migration is fantastic on all the devices. We did it with three iPhones the other night. We did it with a couple of different Macs and that MacBook Pro back and forth really well done. It's really nice to see that it doesn't clog up your Wi-Fi network. It gets the fastest wireless connection it possibly could. Of course, with Macs, you could plug them in with USB-C or Thunderbolt and it would do that too. But the wireless is just super easy and it's really fast, so. Any thoughts, Mr. Braun? Tons. Okay. Just not about this. Got it. All right, you want to take us to Mace then? Here's a good one and it's pretty timely because this is something that you're going to have to deal with with Catalina coming up here. So Mace writes in and says, I get this pop-up once every time I restart the machine. I can't figure out what it's part of, any clue should I wait for Catalina and hope it goes away. And the dialogue he gets, which some of you may have seen once or twice. So this one says, DL Connect Monitor is not optimized for your Mac and needs to be updated, blah, blah, blah. What that's really saying is that this is a 32-bit thing and it's not going to work on the next OS. So to answer your question, no. Well, actually what's going to happen is it won't work anymore. It'll probably get thrown in a, once you upgrade, it'll probably get thrown in a obsolete or 32-bit. Or it may just kind of like with Safari, they're just obliterate everything and not tell you what's going on, right? Yep. So I brushed up on my Google foo skills and I actually found a specific article in the Apple support forms. From someone saying, I'm receiving an update request from DL Connect Monitor and someone answered it and apparently DL Connect Monitor is a piece of software for old Philips direct life software. Apparently with some sort of health monitor. Oh, got it. They have since, have since obsolete it. And so I guess that's still kicking around on his system there. And yeah, from what I could tell it's in, I think library application support direct life was the specific directory that it's in. So he could either, you know, wipe it out or my suggestion was, you know, if you still have the app, then use an app deleter like app cleaner is one of my favorites here. But he did confirm that, yeah, he had one of those devices. So I guess he just didn't fully uninstall the sure software. Now he also said spotlight doesn't see it so here's another suggestion that I offered. Normally you won't be able, if you do find within the finder, normally you will not be able to find what we're gonna call, I'm gonna call this a system thing. Okay. Yep. Are you with me? Yep, I'm with you. Now the thing is if you're in the finder and you do find, you're gonna see that it has a certain criteria and one of them that you can invoke that's normally not invoked is called system files. And normally system files are not included. So if he changed that, then I think he would have been able to locate the specific location of this one, right? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, so app cleaner was one thing I mentioned, but it sounds like he, yeah, that didn't work for him. So it sounds like he deleted the app, but not the pieces. The other thing is you may wanna get this, you may wanna get, I'm sure this would have found it, get go64 from St. Clair software, which is a program that's gonna tell you about all the 32-bit nastiness on your system that you're gonna have to deal with before you upgrade to Catalina. So check that out as well. Yeah, that goes 64, that is awesome. Because they really dig deep. I mean, it's not only apps, but that they also detect like, a lot of apps rely on libraries provided by Apple or someone else. And sometimes the guts are 32-bit, although the app is 64-bit. And as far as I know, that's not gonna work. On Catalina, it's gonna be broken. So I don't know, I can't wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I think we're gonna, I'm just interested in how smoothly this migration is gonna go for a lot of people. I think for most people, it's gonna be fine. You know, I mean, we've talked in this episode about some scenarios, this one being one, my printer software, my printer slash scanner software being another. Like there will be those things where we've all sort of ignored these messages over time. And now it's time to pay the piper, you know, and find a different solution or just move on from it. It is a good thing though. Like, I'm not sad to see this happening. I just, yeah, it needs to happen. Yeah, well, I guess. You don't think that we need to leave 32-bit code behind? No. Do you have a good reason for this? Well, if you have old software that still has 32-bit stuff that the developer hasn't updated, or maybe they're out of business, you know what I'm saying? I know people that run an older OS specifically because an app that they need to run doesn't work on future versions. Oh. Lots of people do this. That happens all the time. And I expect that to happen here, for sure. But in terms of, like, moving the platform forward. Yes. I mean, from a technology point of view, because yeah, so 32-bit code is not as fast or efficient, can access certain system resources at 64-bit code. So, yes and no. Well, again, if you have legacy software that's never going to be upgraded, then it's a bad thing. Well, actually, I've seen some people have suggested that what you should do for legacy software that is never going to be updated to 64-bit is maybe run a virtual machine with the older OS. And that is true. Right? Mojave is fully virtualizable. And so you can, you know, you can run that inside of, you know, VMware Fusion or Parallels and keep your environment. In fact, I always recommend this, but now especially, you know, what I always recommend is once a year at least take a clone, a snapshot in time to a disk image on your cold storage, be it, you know, your network storage or something so that you've got a snapshot of where that Mac was at, you know, that point in time. And that saved my bacon in a variety of ways. It's not only is it a backup, but it's a, again, it's that snapshot in time. But before you upgrade to Catalina, do that. And now you can just boot from that disk image inside of a virtualized environment to run anything that doesn't run in the new OS. And that might save your bacon. So I think that's going to become part of my, part of my upgrade thing. Bacon. I'm with the bacon part. Yeah. Yum. Hey, you know what I'm with is, is Apple's podcast reviews really make a difference. And you folks have been doing a fantastic job. We've got three reviews that came in in the last week. And if you just go to mackeygab.com. That's reviews that'll get you as close as we can get you to leaving us a review there. The first from a laughing camera from the US. The title is saved my a asterisk asker asterisk more than several times truly a great podcast, not strictly for geeks. Lots of great tips and they answer questions that I would ask if I wasn't so embarrassed. Thank you laughing camera. There's really no reason to embarrass. We're wrong all the time here, but we learn and that's the best part about it. So absolutely. Then WMSN KY from the US says a must listen Mac iOS podcast. Very informative and helpful. I truly learned multiple things each time I listen. Thanks for a great show. Well, thank you for the review. And lastly, moto rev from Canada says essential, entertaining, excellent. I've been listening to Dave, John and occasionally pilot Pete for years now. It's the one podcast I must listen to every week. Their goal is to have us learn five new things every week. And I'm sure I learned much more than that more than just being informative. However, these guys are fun to listen to. They've helped me out of more than one jam in my computer and they've made me laugh many more times this pod. This is podcasting at its best. Well, thank you for that. That's great. So yeah, leave us a review. It really does help in addition to being something fun. We can sort of read for you here on the on the air as it were. It also does help our rankings on Apple podcasts. And that's good for all of us because it means more listeners coming in and more people participating in the conversation and all of that good stuff. So thank you. I looked at the list the other day. We actually showed up in the podcast that have been around for a real long time category. That's good. That's great. That's awesome. I didn't see that we were there along with a lot of our respected colleagues. Yeah. Colleagues. Mac related podcasts. Colleagues is one of those words that like, do you expect somebody to be like, you know, the top button button and looking up in the air pompously and insert my monocle. Yes. There you go. Twirl my mustache. Yeah. I don't have. I don't have. How about that? Yeah. There you go. That's a bit too familiar. Yes. That's right. All right. We also do have a, our premium offering as we have mentioned several times. And, and I want to make sure we call out and shout out to the folks whose contributions have come in in the last week. So on the monthly $10 plan, we would like to thank Jim from San Jose, Jeffrey from West Haven, John from sinking spring, Santiago from Palm city, John from Wake Forest, Barry from where is he? Tony from Middleborough, Ken from Honolulu, Michael from Robbins, David from Mount Prospect, Scott from Bourbon A's and Clive from Burgess Hill. So thanks to all of you. And then on the 25 every six month plan, we have Mike from Derby to thank, Graham from Gleeb, Craig from Costa Mesa, Erica from Netcong, William from Getsville, Fernando F from somewhere, David from Owensboro, Jeff from Windsor, and Michael from Spencer. So thank you to all of you. You all rock. Fun stuff for sure. Faux show. I like it. That's what I like to say, John. Is that Barry Berry? Barry Berry from wherever he is. That's right. Oh yeah. He's a last I looked. Yeah. He's in Czechoslovakia. Could be. Could be. Yeah. He's a yeah. I think he posted some pictures. Yeah. Or did I get it through Pokemon? Yeah. Yeah. So he's a Pokemon gift. And it's like, Hey, I'm in Czechoslovakia. I'm like, wow. He's everywhere, man. Yes. Yes. So thanks to all of you. And if you want to learn more about Mackie Cup premium, please go to MackieCup.com. Premium. Brian. In episode 780. Sent in a question because we were talking. He says in 780, Dave described using Synology Drive and Synology Cloud Sync to keep a folder on his Mac synced with Dropbox without using the Dropbox. Client and effectively bypassing Dropbox is three device limit. My question says Brian is why since you can access all the files on various devices using Synology Clients or use the Synology Drive web portal. Why put your files in Dropbox at all? Is this just for backup or archiving? What am I missing? This is a great question. Yeah. I don't use it for any of my own files except for those where an app specifically will only save to Dropbox. And I have a few of those. You know, I think there's some backup engine that we use with WordPress or something that makes life really easy and it will send a copy to your cloud service of choice as long as your cloud service of choice is Dropbox. So it's like, yeah, fine. Okay, great. Send it there. That's good. But mainly what I use Dropbox for and the reason that I want to keep it, you know, for those backups, it wouldn't matter if they were just synced to my disk station. I don't need them on my Mac all the time. I just, you know, knowing that they're there. But what I do want on my Mac all the time is all of my collaborative stuff. So Dropbox is ubiquity and long tenure means that it's really often the best service to use when somebody says, hey, can I share some folder with you of things that we can do a thing with? It might be my band mates. It might be, you know, somebody, like when I speak at Mac tech conference, they want to have a Dropbox folder for my talk so that they can send me the format of the slides and I can put in my slides so that they're there and like every, you know, it's a good backup for them. Those kinds of things, collaboration, Dropbox rocks because of its ubiquity. Yes, I certainly could do all of these things with my, with Synology Drive, but it would mean creating accounts for each of the people that I'm going to work with. I can share with you without creating you an account. I can put something out there and just say here, good, but if I want you to participate in the syncing of it, of course you need to be able to log in in order to do that and you need an account just like you do at Dropbox. The difference is you already have an account at Dropbox. You don't already have an account on my disk station. That's the difference. So that may change in Synology's DSM7 based on some of the features I'm hearing. They're doing more cloudy things. So it might be the kind of thing where you could just have a Synology account and I could give you access that way. That would be awesome because now it just becomes a little more ubiquitous because then it would work. So anyway, but that's why to answer your question, Brian. So it's a good question. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? No, I'm with you. Okay, cool. Let's go to Doug. We will, we will end this with sleep. Doug asks, he says, he says, I'd appreciate your thoughts on a problem that's been plaguing me for months. I've got a 2017 iMac running Mojave. Two USB ports are in use for a two terabyte hard drive for backups and clones and a dongle for my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. My computer doesn't always wake from sleep. Sometimes the desktop will appear and I can move the cursor with my mouse, but nothing responds to clicking. Occasionally, this resolves itself after 10 minutes. Sometimes I can see the black screen lighten softly, but then nothing happens and sometimes the screen just stays dark. It happens most often on the first use of the day after the computer's been in a deeper sleep, perhaps. Maybe it's related to that. Maybe it's related to my nighttime carbon copy cloner tasks. When things are going badly, the refusal to wake happens daily. Sometimes even two or three times a day. I've tried all the usual remedies. PRAM and SMC resets. I ran Onyx. I installed the latest combo update, but the issues always there. The only midterm solution I found was a reference to deleting the file that defines the sleep state, the sleep image. There was a method described to do this from the terminal, but the easier for me solution was to use the command R restart. That gives me relief for a week or two. Any thoughts? Yeah. So there are a couple of things, but, you know, whenever my Mac doesn't want to wake from sleep, I often find that that is a console issue. And by that I mean the Mac has actually woken up. It's just not showing me that it's awake and it's not letting me interact with it. But the Mac itself is up and running and it might be able to tell me something if only I could get into it and see what it's saying. And that's when I make use of a protocol called SSH, Secure Shell. Really it's just a remote terminal session that you can create. And once you are connected via a remote terminal session, then you can look at your log files and see what's going on in real time. The first step in this is to go to system preferences sharing and enable remote login. On that screen you'll see something that says to login to this computer remotely and it will give you a command and it will start with SSH. Make note of that. As soon as your Mac you start to wake it up and it gets kind of in its stuck state go to another Mac or if you don't have another Mac you can use the prompt app on iOS to connect via Secure Shell. iPad is a little easier to see than iPhone because you know bigger screen but it works on both and I've done this on both. And once you get there then you can take a look at a file that's var log system log and there's a command that you can use called tail that will show you the contents of that file in real time. So as things are added to it it will scroll and show you what's being added. Oftentimes if it's in that stuck state things won't be added all that quickly and you can see what's hanging there or what it's waiting for. That can be really handy and I'll put that command it's tail dash capital F var log system log but I'll put it in the show notes so you don't have to remember because remembering that stuff audibly is no bueno. So that's that's what I do and I've had that at least identified I don't want to say it has solved my problems because it doesn't solve anything but it other than the mystery of why being able to actually solve it so thoughts on that Mr. Braun my colleague colleague no no that's a that's a good one yeah yeah yeah yeah it's crazy yeah hey guess what I just figured out why something changed on my phone from left field wrapping it up for the episode Mr. John F. Braun what happened well well we were talking about you know our friend Barry and so I was like oh let me see where he's at let me let me run find find my friends yeah this also explains why I thought something was missing on my phone the thing is now Dave there is no more find my friends right well it's fine it's fine of course yeah it's find my okay and I think I think they may have mentioned that during the talk and I wasn't paying attention but yeah all of a sudden I'm like well where's find my friends oh they integrated yeah so it's just called find my so there's a new find my app so you won't find find my iPhone or find my friends because they've now been mushed together in this right single app which I guess kind of makes sense it does you want to know where your friends are or where your Apple stuff is I mean it's all right there yep and one thing I will say is and actually this is good to do even if you didn't get a new iPhone because Mr. Braun we realized was sharing his location from his iPad not his iPhone or from his like iPod touch or something when we were out in Chicago we realized that go into this find my app and again if you've got a new iPhone you definitely want to go confirm this but if you even if you didn't it's worth going to make sure launch find my in the lower right corner the the right most tab is me tap on that and make sure that where it says my location it says this device or at the very least it says whatever device you want it to be using to share if it is not you can change it to this device right there and for most of us I think our phone is the location there's a device we'd want to use to share a location but you know obviously making whatever you want just make sure you are intentionally doing that because as you found John you can unintentionally change that perhaps so yeah I I don't know why but for whatever reason it was set to my iPad yeah which when I was in Chicago good because yeah I thought you were nuts it's like well why can't you find me it's like it shows that I'm here in Chicago and it's like well not really you know something because yeah I didn't intentionally change it I think when I did an upgrade to my iPad at some I don't know the thing is I did not go in there and say yeah use my iPad as the source of my location right but it probably missed you and you probably just said yes very quickly or maybe yeah through stuff yeah yeah it could have been yeah cool well we are at our hour and a half here and then some for a show that we 14 years ago intended to be 30 to 45 minutes so you know that we got a we got a hold on to this hour and a half thing I speaking of long shows though I will be on MacBreak Weekly on Tuesday September 24th with Leo Laporte and the gang so come in and you can actually wish me a happy birthday because that's Tuesday as well so but I get to go do that again which is fun I love doing that show with those guys so always a good time but always a long time it requires fluid management active fluid management so just to make sure it always well you got to make you're going to sit for three hours you got to make sure you have the right amount of fluid both inside and outside so there you go when you get started because there's no you know there's no breaks it's good it's fun yeah you may have to get a Texas catheter they call it oh no no no no no definitely not what are you supposed to do if you need to do your thing you figure it out beforehand you manage your bladder that's right when my you know I I love flying I'm like planes you know especially small planes and I was up with my brother in a flying lesson with him at once and we were flying in a SESTA 172 which is a four seater single engine plane sort of the canonical four seater single engine plane oh yeah I've been one of those yeah and he asked this guy that was his instructor they joked about him in the you know in the in the office they're like oh yeah you've got Lloyd today that guy's great he's been around forever he's soloed Orville right and this guy was like this salty old pilot that knew what was going on and you know we're up and we're cruising along and Matt asked him he's like so what's the you know what's the range on this thing without missing a beat Lloyd says what's the range on your bladder and he made a really good point that you know you're gonna you're gonna have other needs like food and that sort of stuff before usually before the plane runs out of fuel so he's like just manage your trips based on on that and you're gonna be fine so it's really interesting then he reached then Matt asked him what happens if the you know if the engine turns off and again without missing beat Lloyd reaches over and kills the engine and he's like nothing happens immediately your plane's still gliding you're still flying you're doing fine he says the only thing the engine's gonna do is allow you to maintain your altitude so now you gotta start thinking about where you're gonna put this thing down he's like but otherwise it's gonna be fine I remember this was probably one of the most terrifying parts of when I took driver's ed one of the things emergency procedures was the episode and one thing the guy did is he would show you how to handle if your engine shut down and you then didn't have the benefit of power accessories like power steering and stuff like that so yeah he would just randomly at one point when he felt it was safe for him and you he'd just reach over and turn off the engine and he's like deal with it they don't do that anymore that's it's not what if you lose your power steering you should know how to handle that situation power steering is power assist now though it's not full power like it used to be so it's really not all that difficult to steer a car especially at speed in fact when your car is moving along your power steering is not engaged it's not like the old days where it was on it gets harder as you go slower but still I thought it was a valuable lesson yeah alright folks well you know how to reach us you know we've said thank you to you you know well we haven't said thank you to you I think we did during the episode but again thank you I was gonna say you know we've said thank you to CacheFly and I sort of packed it all together but thanks to you for making it possible for us to continue doing the show it's fantastic thanks to all of our sponsors of course CacheFly being one of them and all of our sponsors in the podcast Marketplace, Like, Smile Like, Other World Computing, Like, Parabones Like, Eero, all of them great stuff thanks to everybody in the chat room at makikev.com go download the app would love to see in the chat room and you can do that from the app it's pretty cool