 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, Episode 669 for Sunday, August 6th, 2017. Meetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show where you send in tips, questions, cool stuff found, and we share the answers, share the tips, share everything because the goal is that all of us, each and every single one of us, you, me, him, her, that one, yes, all of us, learn at least four new things each and every time we get together. One of the new things that I'm going to teach you is about our sponsor, Smile, text expander from Smile. You can get free for 30 days. If you go to textexpander.com.geek, we'll talk more about that later in the episode here, here, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, still in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. F. Braun? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Good. I'm glad. All right. Let's go to Todd. Then we'll we'll figure out the rest of this later. It's gorgeous weather here, though. I have my window open. We'll see if that can remain. But for now, it seems allowed. Todd asks, he says, I use text edit very often, but lately it's been crashing on me. Ironically, when it happens, it's only when I hit Command S to save a file. I get the beach ball and I must force quit where it shows the app is not responding. Very frustrating, as you can imagine, to lose my notes by trying to save them. I like text edit because it's lightweight, fast and simple. It has rich text formatting for bold links, font sizes, images, URLs, et cetera. And it uses normal RTF or TXT files in the finder so I can organize, make aliases, et cetera, unlike Evernote or Apple's Notes app, where I have to live inside of their organizational structure. He asks if you know of another, if we know of another good app that fits these requirements, and I'm sure we could come up with one, but there's no reason to punt on text edit. It should not be crashing. No app should be crashing on you like this, especially not one that comes with the OS. So let's talk about this. Ironically, in the pre-show today, I was talking about how iTunes on this particular Mac is either launching slowly or quitting slowly and quitting slowly and won't let me download files. I had to stream some songs earlier instead of downloading them and playing them locally. It's a similar problem in my mind that's happening here. So I would say, and I'm not going to do this for myself right now because we're recording a show, John, but these are sort of the steps that actually I was just sort of musing on doing locally here. The first thing to do is either boot in Safe Mode or run Onyx in Automation Mode. Now, I don't always run, booting in Safe Mode will clean out a lot of cache files. It'll run a lot of the maintenance, and it'll do a lot of the same things that Onyx will do a little bit more. And some of the things that Onyx will do or let you do is delete saved application states and also delete the automatically saved versions of documents. I generally leave those off because I don't want to mess with my saved application states, but perhaps in this scenario, especially the one that Todd's describing, that might not be a bad thing to do. Just be aware that if you've got other apps like pages or numbers where you've got documents that are just in a state of flux that you sort of rely on that, you'll also be deleting those. But when I run Onyx, when I go to Automation Mode, I use slightly different settings than the default. So if you want to use the same settings as me, click Reset Defaults or Restore Defaults there, and then, oh, where's my, I have to make sure I get my notes. And then the ones that I change are, I enable Repair Permissions and Spotlight Index. So it's going to Repair Permissions and delete the Spotlight Index. I disable the Onyx cleaning of my web browser, browser cache and history, because I don't necessarily want to lose my web browsing history every time I need to run Onyx. So those are the three things that I changed from the defaults there in the Automation tab of Onyx, but otherwise, I just run it straight. So Repair Permissions and Spotlight Index enabled web browser cache and history disabled or unchecked. That's what I do. So I think, and again, like I said, for this particular scenario, I would also try in Onyx enabling the cleaning of saved application states and automatically saved versions of documents, because it's possible that's getting in the way here that when you go to save, it's trying to read one of the automatically saved things so that it can incorporate those changes and maybe that file is damaged or who knows what and then boom. There you go. Any thoughts, my friend? It's a cache somewhere. It's always a cache. Right. Right. I agree with you. Yeah, it's a well, it's a cache or I mean, I guess it could be a preference file, but this seems like I'm more with you that it's it's a cache or, you know, like you said, one of those saved application things, which is also a cache of its own sort. Right. As far as we know. Well, that's the idea is telling you as far as we know. And then the conversation continues. You know, for now, the conversation continues over on Facebook at MacEeCup.com slash Facebook. But Adam and I have been cooking up a little something internally at at MGG TMO central there. And there might be a change to that. So I'll keep you posted. There might be something for us to try, perhaps a better system. But we'll keep you posted on that. For now, MaceCup.com slash Facebook is a great place to to hang out during the week when we're not right here. Todd, I believe it's the same Todd, I didn't realize this when I put it together, but Todd also has a question about the Mac OS firewall. And Todd asks, and because he's a premium listener, we'll let him have a two for here in the same show. He says, I'm confused about the sharing and firewall system preference pains on my Mac. My firewall is set to block all incoming connections. But the sharing pain says, other users can access shared folders on this computer. So which is it? Do these prep pains not communicate with each other? Or is this just weak and confusing messaging by Apple? So what Todd's talking about here is if you go into system preferences, and you go into security and privacy, and go to the firewall, if you turn the firewall on, you will see firewall options. And one of those in that options tab, you can configure all sorts of specific firewall related things. However, one of them right at the top of that tab says block all incoming connections. And right below where it says block all incoming connections, it says just what Todd says, block all incoming connections, except those required for basic internet services such as DHCP Bungior and IPsec. So it will block all of the things where it's supposed to block all of those things that that like file sharing and iTunes sharing and all of that, so that it's an easy place to just block that stuff when say you're traveling or in a coffee shop and you don't want people to have local access to your Mac. Does that make sense? Sure. Okay. Though, the way that I set it up, typically, I do not have block all incoming connections check. No, I think that's meant to be used as a temporary stop gap when you're if when you have sort of all your setup and you you do want in most cases file sharing on and iTunes sharing and photo sharing on and those sorts of things. But then you get to a scenario like like I said, a hotel or somewhere public, where you want to just block that. This is a one checkbox place where you can block that. And then also a one checkbox place where you can unblock it and then everything that you had previously configured to let through is being let through. Right. And the other one, especially in an enterprise environment, I would say you do not want to check is this stealth mode, because a lot of enterprise management tools count on being able to detect your machine being there to ping your machine and know that it's there. Yeah, that's good to know. If you uncheck that, your sys admin may shake their fist at you and got it. Say, don't do that, please. Yeah, please right. My job more difficult. Yep. And but I agree this dialogue can be a bit confusing. Well, especially because once it's enabled, the sharing preference pain doesn't reflect that change. So that that's the that's the confusing part. And I totally get that Todd. Now, I, I like that Apple has this here, because it is nice to have just that one stop shop of checking that box and you're good to go. And it's really nice to have it built into the OS. What's even nicer, though, if it's automatic. And for that, I actually use a piece of software called Little Snitch. Now, Little Snitch is not not mainly built to do this. It's mainly built to let you manage all of the incoming and outgoing connections of your Mac all the time. I find that to be a little obsessive and and and frankly, annoying. So I have three profiles set up with Little Snitch. And one of them is for when I am either at home or at a, you know, trusted friend of family members house, and it will automatically set that profile knowing my wife, the Wi-Fi network that it's on from, you know, and this is on my MacBook Air. And when it's on a trusted Wi-Fi network, it lets everything through and it never asks me about anything. So it's as though it's not there. Then when I travel, I have a travel profile that blocks all of the stuff we just talked about. And, you know, let only lets through the things I want to let through. And then the third profile I have, and I've talked about this before, is my tethering profile that blocks anything, any background activity. So it won't let Dropbox sync. It won't let iCloud drive or Photosync or any of that stuff. It'll only let apps that I've manually launched run. And that's pretty handy. And it takes a little bit of effort to set this stuff up with Little Snitch. But but it's not terrible. And it's totally worth it once you've kind of got it straightened out. And then and then it's automatic. And then that way, whenever I join a new Wi-Fi network, Little Snitch pops up and says, Hey, which profile do you want to use on this network? And I can say, Oh, great, use travel normal. And I'm good to go. And then it and then, you know, anytime I'm at a Hilton hotel and I join the H Honors Network, it just knows. Okay, great. And it sets up a little alert. So it's telling me what it's doing. But handy stuff. Either way. Yeah. Dave, John, you may ask yourself, not how do I work this? Though sometimes we all ask ourselves this. Thank you for talking. Yes. But what if you want to see what your what your machine looks like to other devices on the network? How do you how do you even determine this? And I'm going to toss out three. Cool. Not one, not two, but three. So we've almost approached four. But here are some tools that I use when I'm on, especially on a guest network, just just to have fun. One is called Flame. Okay. And I think you've used it too. So it's this is a Bonjour or zero conf browser. Then result is if you run this and there is both a Mac and a iOS version of it, it'll basically show you all of the machines that are on your local network segment and what services they're advertising that they offer. So I like it handy. Another one that I think you and I both use is Fing. Yep. So we got flame and we've got Fing. And then the third one, and this is more advanced geekery here, you probably want to install this using a package manager, like a home slide. I mean, homebrew. But it's called end map. It's a very mature tool that can do very detailed profiling of a specific device. And it's a command line. I there may be a gooey version, but it's you're on from the command line and you basically target an IP address and say, All right, you know, tell me what's up. Higher learning, the others are pretty straightforward as far as what they do and letting you dig deeper. End map, you're going to have to read the man page to kind of figure out. Okay. Yeah, it's happening, but I've used that in the past as well. But I'd say the first two there are good to see not only what other machines, but also what your machine is advertising. You can scan your own machine, of course. So I'm trying to remember what that app is. God, I want to say like, like, it sits, I mean, it's a background app, but it has a little menu bar icon. And it does sort of the same thing that I'm talking about doing with little snitch where it blocks stuff. Jeff Gammett's written about it and I never remember. It's like pack away or trip, trip, trip mode, trip mode. That's it. So trip mode is the other one. I think and I think it's it like trip mode.ch. Oh, yeah, it is. Go girl. You know, that's like when I'm on stage and I can't remember the lyrics to the second verse of the song and I just start singing. No, no, no. It most of the time, like your brain knows this stuff, right? But you can get in your own way just like I was there. I was like frustrated the whole time you were talking instead of like always listening to you. I was half listening to you and and I should have just listened to you and let myself relax. Because then when I started talking, it was like, oh, I know, I know the answer. Of course. Yeah. So trip mode is the other one. I never tried trip mode, but but from those that have, I hear that it does similar things so that, you know, when you can choose what's going to have access to your your network and and stuff like that. Yeah, I should get that. I'm going to try to get that to spin. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And you have little snitch, right? So you I mean, you could set up profiles too. I could. I've always said that little snitch has there is they they have a thus far squandered opportunity to really like, you know, exist in in that space. But, you know, hey, they do their own thing. So it's fine. And I'm still on the version three. Oh, you haven't moved to version four. Oh, version four is really nice. It's way easier to to kind of move around and get stuff, you know, into place and all that good stuff. So yeah, I like it. And it's got a you know, like a GPS or not GPS, but but location based map where you can see where all the connections are going to and from for your computer, which is pretty cool. I think so. There you go. Yeah, good stuff, John. Always, almost always. Almost always. All right, we have we have three things that I think are going to fall into the Geek Challenge realm. We might be able to get an answer during this episode. But but I think they might fall into Geek Challenges. So easy for me to say, we will start with Nectario. And Nectario asks, as long as you can find it here, I frequently engage my computer in processes that take hours after effects, renders, copies of large raw footage, collections, etc. I would love to have a screensaver that will show a floating window with a progress bar for the active process in which the machine is engaged. That way I could let the monitors rest during the process. I tried putting the monitors to sleep. But if I have several consecutive steps or processes, I have to keep guessing and waking up the monitors to check if it is time to move on to the next step. I think the screen a screensaver like I described could make the whole thing a lot easier. Any recommendations? So I guess what I don't have off the top of my head recommendation. But I the way I can think of, you know, if I put on my my programmer hat or at least my hat now that the extra had to quit a bit of programming these days. But but a lot of times what I do is I put on my engineering hat and say, OK, here's how I would go about solving this problem and then perhaps ask somebody else to write the code. And with that, with either of those hats on John, the thing I'm thinking about is there's no way for one screensaver to just know what your machine is doing and and magically into it that which you would like surfaced on the screen. But if your app has a progress window, my thought is you bring that window to the forefront, like you make that the the focused window and then you let it go into screensaver mode and you have some screensaver that says, OK, look, take whatever the active window is, keep refreshing it, but keep moving it around the screen so that it avoids any burn in or anything like that that someone might be worried about. Right. I mean, I can't think of another way to go about solving that. I'm sure there is another way. It's just not one that comes to mind. What do you think? I think figuring out how long something will take is hard. Well, no, that's that's not at all what he's asking. He's asking to have the progress bar shown to him when the screensaver is on the screen. That's it. Oh, I know. That's it. I'm just musing. OK. All right. Well, a tangent. So any thoughts about like anything you know of that exists for this or somebody that's done something like that? I'm going to take that as a no. No, I mean, you know, the app itself knows, but, you know, how does the app itself? How can you get the app to tell you? Right. Communicate that. Yeah. Yeah, even better would be to have something that actually sleeps the screen so that you're not using power because a screensaver really doesn't turn the screen off. So you're not really saving power with the screensaver. What you want is the screen to actually be put into power saver mode and then have, say, an alert on your watch or your phone when the the activity completes. And I suppose that also is possible, but not necessarily you'd probably need to build some hooks into the specific apps to do that, maybe unless they they rang a bell when it went off. Now that I think about it is. Yep, a thought's coming here. So I mean, there are certain tasks that you can automate with automator. Sure. I mean, OK. Now, this is good. Now, now I just had some more coffee. So good. OK. The wheels are turning. He's back. But a lot many apps will expose certain actions to automator and allow you to automate them. Right. And you can have automator do something when an app is is when a certain task is finished to. Correct. So you could. Well, that's as soon as you said, bring a bell or something like that. I mean, that's something that's trivial for an automator script to do. Sure. Yeah, of course. I mean, if if the app itself exposes certain functions to automator, you could write an automator script to say, OK, you know, start doing this, you know, whether it be, you know, graphic transfer, whatever it is. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think like graphic converter, for example, exposes a lot of things. Yeah, sounds like some. Yeah, I don't know if After Effect does. Right. It would depend on, you know, the app publisher and how friendly they are. Sure. Yeah, of course. Of course. So you may want to. Yeah, I like. OK. Cool. All right. Well, maybe try automator or, you know, Apple script. Automator is a much friendlier way to try to go about this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you could also, you know, here's let's get a little let's go a little more specific. Why not? We're here for copying a file, right? He said he said one of the important things for him is copies of large raw footage collection. So he's got, you know, a big monster folder of things and wants to copy that over to there. So you could if there's no, although that I think might be really easy to do with automator, but you could also write a shell script that monitors those two folders or checks them routinely. And when the move is finished, the size of both of those folders or the number of files in both of those folders or something would be the same, right? There's some way you could say, OK, this is now complete. And then you could of course could have a shell script, you know, fire up an alert. It could send you an email. I mean, you can do anything you want. You know, that's just basically kind of a, you know, if this than that, although not using if to do it locally, although I'm sure there's also a way we could we could use if for something like an after effects render. My guess is it's rendering out to a specific file, right? And while it's rendering that file, the size and the modification time will continue to change. And I'm I'm I'm guessing here. I don't know maybe after effects renders to a temp file somewhere and then copies it all to the location at the end. I don't know. But if you could monitor that file when it stops changing, that's a pretty good indicator that it's finished, but it's a very good indicator that you want to get involved. If that modification time hasn't changed in five minutes or whatever, that's probably, you know, a good time for you to check on it and make sure things are either, you know, complete and you're ready to move on or that, you know, you might have a problem. So I don't know. These are the things I think about. All right. Good. You want to take us to Susan, John, who also has a bit of a geek challenge? Yes. OK. So Susan says, greetings, geekers. I have a problem slash opportunity for which I need a solution. My son is getting married in September. That's not the problem. And what's the setup? A photo booth for the guests to record their presence and have some fun. He would like to use my new 10 and a half inch iPad Pro connected to my DSLR, which is a Panasonic Lumix FZ 200. He wants to arrange it so that the iPad acts effectively as a monitor to the camera so that the guests can see the photos live and immediately is taken. At present, we are experimenting with an I-Fi card and can I, K-E-N-N-A-I software? While this works OK, the iPad refuses to stay connected to the I-Fi and promiscuously finds alternate Wi-Fi connections within minutes of the I-Fi taking a rest. Is there another way of connecting the Lumix to the iPad such that an iPad, such that the iPad stops bullying the camera? At present, if I connect them via USB, the iPad forces the camera to only behave like an external flash drive. I've not tried the mini HDMI port on the camera as of yet. I thought I'd ask before buying more cables. Many thanks for any suggestions. Even if it's simply no, it can't be done. May your wombettes run free and unfettered. All right. OK. I like wombettes, I think. Yeah, I've never met one, but they seem pretty cool. You know, off the top of my head, I'm thinking, yes, a lot of cameras have a mini HDMI output. I'm wondering if that in and of itself may do it. I've experimented with that and. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've tried it with my cameras that have it. And yeah, so you basically what you see on the camera is what you see on an external screen. That wouldn't that wouldn't display to it. No, correct. It would not. OK, you would need a HDMI monitor, of course, or TV or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That could be one way to do it. But here are some of the thoughts that I had, Dave. So. So I have had a Lumix camera, which is Panasonic and it typically has like a glass. And they're really nice. And this one's nice, too. The only thing that makes me sad about this one, I almost thought I had a solution here. Sadly, this particular camera does not have Wi-Fi. And that, in this case, is a bad thing because it would make it a lot easier to do what you want to do. Well, if I add Wi-Fi to your correct, in a sense. Right. And I'm getting to that. Yeah. The thing is, I have. So, for example, I have a Nikon Coolpix S 9700, which has Wi-Fi, but it also has a companion iOS app that can both take and display pictures. So if you had a different camera. And then I'll go no more detail about that. But Panasonic does have companion applications that can talk to other Wi-Fi-enabled cameras. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. And I have had the I-Fi card. So I think I have a suggestion in this respect, Dave. And that the Wi-Fi product has changed over the years here. But I think what it still does, in this case, is that it is setting up what's known as an ad hoc. Yes. Wi-Fi connection rather than an infrastructure connection. Well, there's two problems that. So it's doing that. But also it's built to preserve battery life. So after a picture is taken, its Wi-Fi network is only alive for a short period of time. At least I haven't used an I-Fi card in a in a, I don't know, maybe a year. But that's how it has always worked for me, that you save the picture, boom, it wakes up. Like you said, creates its network. I think there was a change so that it would be an infrastructure and not an ad hoc network, though, but but maybe not. I thought that was changed. But still, the connection is only alive for a short period of time. And then it says, OK, you got what you needed from me. I'm going to go back to sleep and save your camera's battery. Right. Now. I don't know if there's a firmware update or a setting buried somewhere that would make it not sleep. Yeah, that would be a good question to ask, because if you if you're in a a fixed location, you could leave the camera powered by a battery or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Or plugged into, you know, DC power. Right. Right. Right. Doesn't die. Yeah. Now, what you could do also, the thing is to typically Apple devices will will. Ad hoc is low low on the list. And actually, I remember we did experiment with this in a past question for different devices, but it was like, why is it my Mac talking to my ad hoc device? Why is it is finding something else? And one way you could do this, couldn't hurt to try this, is to create a profile right with Apple Configurator 2 and make that SSID of that ad hoc connection, set up a profile that has just that SSID and say auto join. And that may dissuade the device from looking for something else to talk to. Yep. Yep. And fighting with it. So that's another suggestion. Yeah. Now, one, you may want to try a different architecture. So it sounds like what's happening here is that so the the I-Fi is sending the pictures to the iPad. And then they're using this third party service, which looks to be a cloud photo hosting type of service. You could do something a little different. Now, unfortunately, the I-Fi used to be able to push pictures, at least when I used it, to various cloud services, like Flickr and services that had an option. It looks like that is no longer the case. The only cloud service that they offer is their own cloud service. And I think you have to throw them some coin in order to implement that. You may want to consider giving their cloud service a try. So rather than the I-Fi pushing it to the iPad. Oh, just have the iPad suck it down from the I-Fi cloud. Have have the I-Fi beam it to their cloud and then have the iPad suck it from their cloud. Again, you may have. I think there's a free trial or you may want to consider, you know, subscribing to their cloud base. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Cool. Yeah. Let's change the rules a bit. Yeah. Well, sometimes sometimes that, you know, you want to solve a problem a certain way. And really, the most important thing is to solve the problem, not use the solution path that you want to use, right? Well, I mean, we all get stuck in that. Yeah. So. And lastly, you may want to consider getting another camera. Oh, right? Yes, sure. Well, the thing is that they do have. So I looked in the App Store and there are at least two apps. One is called Panasonic Image App and another is called Panasonic Lumix Link. OK. That look to be free. And if you have a Wi-Fi enabled Lumix. Yeah, sure. That would do it. So maybe rent. You know, so your character. Well, that's true. You can you can generally rent cameras, too. I mean, the problem is, you know, Susan's not looking to get into the business of doing this. She's looking to do it once, you know, for one day. And so buying a new camera may or may not be the right answer, but renting something for the day might actually be the, you know, if, in fact, it's the right solution might be the right way to go. Yeah, that's good stuff. So renting and, you know, if you like, I mean, Lumix is a fine camera, so, you know, get a slightly different one that does have the Wi-Fi or even, you know, like, you know, I said, I got an icon and most major camera vendors offer apps that can control and display what's on the camera. There you go. Sweet. Yeah. So if you guys have any thoughts on this, send them feedback at MackieCab.com. We'd love to. We'd love to hear them. Yeah, we love it when you write to feedback at MackieCab.com. And also, if you have a thought about this next thing from Karsten, you could send us a note at feedback at MackieCab.com. And Karsten writes, I'm trying to find the best solution to ensure I am able to track my MacBook Pro 2017 if it is lost or stolen. I know that I can use iCloud and I will. However, I would like to add another layer to further secure my laptop. My goal is to maximize options for retrieving it and get a location. Second objective is ensuring the thief cannot even reuse the hardware. I have always used a product called Lowjack from Absolute Software. On the Windows side, the software activates in the BIOS and can't be disabled and you can't reflash the BIOS to remove it. That means that even if someone wants to reuse or sell the Windows laptop, they can't get rid of the tracking software. On the Mac side, I understand the software is just software and wiping the laptop also wipes iCloud tracking and the Lowjack software. My thoughts on how to ensure I can keep track of the laptop. It has FileVault enabled in macOS Sierra and I was contemplating just leaving a guest account enabled. This way my data can't be accessed because of FileVault. The thief can get in and log in as a guest and connect to Wi-Fi and then iCloud and the tracking software can now pinpoint a location. That's smart. My thoughts on keeping all the data secure to prevent the thief from using my Mac. Of course, using the firmware password utility via Command R under boot and set a firmware password. Combined with FileVault, that should do the trick or should I also reformat the drive with macOS Extended Journaled Encrypted plus FileVault plus firmware password. Lots of stuff here. So I have some thoughts, but I believe that macOS Extended Journaled Encrypted is either the same as or very, very similar to FileVault when you're doing it on a whole drive that you boot from. So I don't think you need to do that. FileVault is going to be enough. And if it's not enough, then doing anything else, you know, also adding encrypted and disk utility isn't going to help. So that's my that's my thought on on that. The LoJack software is certainly, you know, the one that comes top of mind for me. And I think, you know, the problem is if you set a firmware password on the Mac, then the thief can't log in and can't connect to Wi-Fi and then can't, you know, you can't find your Mac. So it's an interesting little catch-22. I like your idea about having a guest account enabled so that people can get in. That's, you know, smart. What do you think, John? What I think is I'm going to tell you about an article that I found, Dave, that has a lot of very good suggestions on how one can do this tracking. Yeah. And it's called how to track your stolen laptop without installing tracking programs. His thing is, like it or not, a lot of the software that you use day to day, assuming that whoever runs away with your laptop doesn't reform at it and leaves it in its state, I actually thought this article was very clever. So it's at trendblog.net. And there's something written back in 2014, but I think it still applies. So of course they talk about iCloud, you know, just talk about here, find my iPhone, find my Mac. And that's certainly a good service. But then I didn't really thought about this. And this helped crystallize this, Dave, is a lot of the services that you use, including Dropbox and Facebook and Gmail, buried somewhere will keep a log of sessions that are established. That's true. Your computer and them. And it will typically include something like an IP address and maybe even a location. And if you're out and about all the time, like Dave and I are, well, Dave more than me. But still, I've actually had when running certain software on a certain device, if it notices that I'm in a place that's not that doesn't make sense. Yeah. It'll be like, yeah, by the way, you seem to be in Chicago. Are you sure about that? And it's like, oh, yeah, no. That's me. Yeah. And it might ask you to do some second layer of authentication or something. Right. It'll repump for a password. Yeah. So if in all likelihood, you're probably using either Dropbox or Gmail or Facebook. And I think Yahoo, I use Yahoo Mail. And I think it does that as well. It does the same thing. Sure, yeah. So assuming that the machine is in the same state running the same software and the thief is, you know, overconfident. Right. You may, you know, from another machine be able to see where you're lost machine or stolen machine is phoning in. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, if you folks have any other thoughts, maybe some other third party software that works a little differently or something like that, let us know. We'd love to hear about it. And if you're a premium listener, send it to premiumatmackykev.com. And in fact, I want to say thank you to all of you premium listeners who wound up contributing this week, either manually or via your recurring subscriptions, which you can configure at mackykev.com slash premium. We had, I believe, four renewals on our biannual plan, James K. David H. David C. Allen W. Thank you to all of you. Tim M joined the biannual plan for the first time. Thank you, Tim. Actually, Tim might be a renewal like a lapsed renewal, we'll call it. I can't remember off the top of my head. But regardless, thanks to to all of you. On the monthly plan, we have lots of renewals. Elizabeth B. Jim E. Chris F. Dave C. Michael L. Jason A. Bob P. David F. Frank A. Martin T. Shannon K. W. Brooks Doug L. Barry F. Michael L. Mark R. All renewals and Ward J. Joining the monthly plan for the first time. Thank you to all of you. And let's see. We have three one time contributions. Stefan K. at 50. Bob B. and Robert F. Each at 25. Thank you so much. To all of you, I really mean it every week that I say this. I know it's part of the routine, but it is far from routine for us really. It means a lot. And and if you can help us out and you'd like to, we appreciate it. And if you can, that's OK to obviously the interaction engagement that we have with all of you is is awesome. And one of the ways that that is awesome is that you also support our sponsors whom we try to keep very relevant for you. And this week's first sponsor is TextExpander from Smile at TextExpander.com slash Geek. TextExpander, I say it all the time, is one of those things that I can't use a Mac without, you know, TextExpansion has become such a normal part of so many of our lives. If and if you're not using it, it might just blow you away when you start doing it in fact, surprisingly, John Donahue over at Backbeat Media hadn't been using TextExpander and Jeff and I got him rolling on it on a trial account this week and or last week, I guess. And he's already been like, too, this is amazing. And it is, you know, and you can do simple things with it. Right? You can put your I put my phone number in. You know, in fact, I put several of my phone numbers. I use C603 for my office 06 or C603 for my cell 0603 for my office because my area code 0603. It types out my phone number. I don't have to think. I don't have to worry about fat fingering it. What it puts in, I know is correct. I use DHADD for my address. I use JBADD for John's address if I ever need to put our addresses into things. I use different little shortcuts for my email signatures so that I can customize those on the fly if the one that's automatically pulled in by my male client isn't exactly the one I want. And the way this works is when I type, you know, like DHADD, text expander jumps to action and replaces DHADD with whatever I've told it I want. In this case, it's my address. So it's got, you know, things on different lines. It works just fine. But you can also do cool things like if I want to tell somebody that your, you know, your your product was mentioned on MacGicab, right? I can do, you know, MGGM, which is MacGicab mentioned. That'll do two things. Number one, it takes what's on the clipboard because text expander is smart like this, which I've already put the link to the show on the clipboard and it builds that into into the text that it's going to do. But it doesn't stop there. It also prompts me to put the person's first name in. So it'll, you know, it'll say like, you know, greetings. And then I'll say, Greg. And then it, you know, fills out the rest of the form and it'll say, I just wanted to let you know that we mentioned your product. And then there's another blank that it prompts me to fill in text expander on MacGicab. Recently, here's a link. It puts in the link from the clipboard. If you have any questions for us, blah, blah, blah, you know, thanks, Dave and John, right? And then there you go. So that email, I know I'm not going to screw it up. I know that it's going to be it's going to tell people what I want to want to tell them. It's going to have, you know, the right link to that. But I also put a link to like the general show and give them some data about the show and that sort of thing. And it's all right there. And they don't have to type it. Not only does it save me time, but it saves me stress because I don't have to worry about getting it wrong. You know, and every everything you do these days, text base, it's important. We do so much that way. So you got to check it out. Smilesoftware.com. Sorry. I mean, you can get there from Smilesoftware.com. But even faster, go to TextExpander.com slash geek. You can get a 30 day free trial of TextExpander right there. It works on your Mac. You can use it on your iPhone. It's totally cross platform. They even have a Windows version. So you're good to go. Try it for 30 days. TextExpander.com slash geek are thanks, very kind things to the folks that smile for sponsoring the show. All right. Maybe some little tips included in the, in the TextExpander spot as well, John. That's what we like to do while we're at it with tips. Let's go to Brett here, John because Brett has a great little tip about customizing your passwords. He says, I've run into issues using the password generator in one password when needing to include a symbol. The website that I'm on may only allow a certain limited number of symbols in the password or a limited group of symbols in the password. And without fail, the generated password always uses a symbol that's not in that website's list. Usually I just click regenerate until one shows up. The other day, Brett says, I clicked regenerate 23 times to finally get a valid password. Either the wrong symbol or the correct symbol, but it was the first character in the password. So I headed over to the one password forums to see if there was any way to pick the symbols. In one thread, one of the moderators said that the generated password can be modified. That's when it hit me. So here's the tip. Set the number of symbols to zero, generate a password and then click right in the little window there where it shows you the password, type in a valid symbol wherever you want. Now I get a good password on the first try, he says, and one password still generates this random thing and saves it for me. So that's a good tip. I like it. Thanks so much for that, Brett. I never knew I've been using one password for years. I never knew that that was editable. So I love tips like this. Well, hey. The same thing, you know, I've run into the same thing and this is a fish shake to any site that restricts what special characters who can use, get some better software people. Your parser is raw, is bad if you don't allow certain characters. But the other thing is this, you know, I can almost see and I'll throw down the gauntlet. Is that the right term to either last pass or one password? If they were watching what we know that they see what the website is saying, you know, they're parsing what the website is sharing. Wouldn't it be swell if they saw the error message saying you must use characters, blah, blah, blah and adjusted what they generated accordingly? I mean, I can see it happen. So if I can see it and do something smart, like type in my own special character. Oh, yeah. Maybe they could figure out how to do it. So let's see which one of them can figure out how to do this first because I know it's technically possible. Of course. Of course. The other thing is that couldn't websites have embedded somewhere? You know, maybe a hidden field or something that says what the valid characters are. I don't know if anybody's developed a standard for this. They're made. Sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a hidden field saying, OK, you know, left friend, right friend, star, but these are the, or here's all the valid characters for a password. Right. Mr. Password Manager here, please use this. Yeah, with everybody, not everybody, everybody should be using a password manager. But, you know, with people using password managers, it's not not ridiculous to think that maybe there should be a way to hint a password manager in the right direction for your website. And who knows, maybe that actually exists, John. I mean, I don't know for certain that it doesn't. So, yeah, I like it. Interesting stuff. Fun. All right. Where are we here? Let's, yeah, we've promised that we'd talk a little bit about this. And so we'll bring in the internal here to start this conversation about Mac OS. Hi, Sierra. And then we'll let it continue. It's it's it's certainly time to invite your questions about Hi, Sierra and iOS 11, to be fair. We're using both of them internally here. I'm actually relying on both. My I've got Hi, Sierra on my laptop and I've got iOS 11 on actually both now my iPhone and my iPad. I'll talk a little bit about my quote, unquote, my iPad in a minute because there's something else that we're testing. But but yeah, feel free to start sending in your questions about that stuff. Tantal writes, there's something very positive that I wanted to share regarding Hi, Sierra. I just installed the public beta on my 2013 500 gigabyte retina MacBook Pro and the install time was incredibly fast. The upgrade, which also included conversion to the AP AFS file system, right? I think he's got it written wrong here. Took only 30 minutes. I never had so fast an install time and or APFS is what it is for the file system. Yeah, and I would agree. I don't know that the install felt fast to me, but it certainly didn't feel slow. And I did it on my 2011 MacBook Air. So this is an old machine. And to be very fair, I had basically gotten to the point where it was like, OK, it's time to replace this. It's just too slow. Installing Hi, Sierra on it did convert it to APFS, which happened sort of, I mean, I didn't even know. I knew it was going to happen, but there was no great fanfare about it. It just happened and has worked fine. And my machine is usable again in a lot of different ways. But mostly it's all those background processes that seem to creep up like with El Capitan and definitely Sierra, where it wants to, you know, Photo Library D just wants to run and slurp up everything I have in the background or Calendar Sync or whatever it is that's really syncing your address book, even though it's called Calendar Sync or whatever. That wanted to run and use 100% of my CPU or MD worker, the spotlight process updater wanted to run and consume all of my CPU. Don't get me wrong, those things still exist in Hi, Sierra, and they still want to run. But I've never seen them totally consume the CPU and crater the system. They all seem to be throttled back so that there's always some CPU left for you. And it has made a huge difference for me in using the using that machine. It's like I can wake it up and just use it now as opposed to having to wait and it turns and stumbles and it's slow. That doesn't happen anymore. And that machine's limited. Its biggest problem is its RAM. It's only got four gigs and that's soldered in. There's no, either no way to change it or certainly no easy way to change it on that. But I've been very impressed with Hi, Sierra on that machine and I can't wait to test it on a newer beefier machine and I'll put it on my retina iMac soon, but I haven't yet. So thoughts on that, John? Well, of course the good news, Dave, the reason that you're probably seeing it perform quite a little bit better is it's all 64 bits. Perhaps. Yeah, I guess so. And I'm verifying this because I'm looking right now an activity monitor. So I'm running the beta I recently installed it and I have a tip on how to avoid some weirdness. But looking right now, all the processes, if you turn on the kind column and activity monitor, they're all 64 bit. I'll have to check that. I mean, you're right though because it won't run 32 bit. Yeah, yeah, all right. Yeah, the current OS still has some 32 bit artifacts. Totally. Yeah. Which, you know, 64 bits is better, it's faster. The one thing I want to add, so I installed it on an external drive and we'll talk drive talk in a moment here, but here's one thing I noticed, Dave. So the thing is I ran the beta installer download on my day-to-day machine, but I installed the OS on an external drive. Okay, okay. Here's something that's going to happen and I'm going to tell you how to make it so it doesn't happen anymore. What happens is that they turn on, because what's happened shortly thereafter, after I installed it, Dave, and then I was just running my day-to-day machine, all of a sudden it came up and it said, hey, there's a beta of Safari available. You want to install that? And I'm like, no, no, go away, go away. Here's the tip. Go to system preferences app store. You're going to see that there's a selection now that says your computer is set to receive beta software updates. You may want to turn that off if you did what I did in that you installed it from one machine, but you downloaded the installer in one machine but you installed it on a different drive. Sure. Because I don't care about the Safari beta stuff. So there's that flag. And I think that's actually what happens when you install this is that you run an app called beta configurator and it puts your machine in a mode where it will then attempt to install betas of any sort. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's for public betas, not for developer betas, right? Well, this was, I installed the developer betas. You did. I think it's for both. Okay, all right, cool. Cool. Yeah, so I've been, we were talking about this before the show too, but it's, Hi, Sierra, there's not a whole lot new, right? It's, in terms of UI, still there's some and it's fine, but this is the maintenance release, the under the hood just stuff that keeps it cooking thing, like snow, Sierra. I mean, I looked and you know, the thing is I looked Dave and as far as I can tell, nothing in the, you know, the system preferences, I looked at all of the pains in there and I couldn't see anything that jumped out as me is being different. I think there are different things. Okay, I did a quick run through and nothing jumped out as me is being very different from. Yeah, yeah, it's not very different. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty straightforward, but definitely, and I've heard this from other folks too, that have seen, you know, performance improvement and just an overall experience improvement. And to be fair, it's still beta, right? So there's probably some code that hasn't yet been fully optimized, although I'm not convinced of that. Things do change and they're, if you're gonna run it, know that you will have software that won't work or won't work properly yet. And that's just par for the course. And the same is true with iOS 11. I've actually been really, really liking iOS 11, especially on my iPad. So I first ran it on my iPad mini and I didn't put it on my phone or, you know, watch, update to watch iOS on my watch because I've been traveling so much. But as soon as I got back from my fishing weekend, this past weekend in New York, seeing the band fish, because it's tough to fish in Manhattan any other way, we, I installed it on there. And then I liked, and of course I, and I like it on my phone. I am finding slightly reduced battery life with the developer betas, which is not surprising, but it's been running quite well. But like I said, where I really find it beneficial is on the iPad. And I've been an iPad mini user for a long time and decided, well, it seems like that particular size of iPad has been deprioritized by Apple. And I thought, well, it's gonna, what's my next iPad gonna be? Where do I go from here? And I did some soul searching. And then I made a phone call. And from the angle of looking at it as perhaps an upgrade path for iPad mini owners, I'm now testing an iPad Pro 10 and a half inch, which I really, you know, I had played with in the hands-on room at WWDC and was sort of blown away instantly by a lot of things about it. You know, the refresh rate on it's amazing. The size of it isn't, it's certainly bigger than an iPad mini, but the way that screen, you know, goes closer to the edges and all of that. And I was really impressed with it. So I've only had it for two days. I'm just getting up to speed with it. I need to figure out what case is best. I've got Apple smart keyboard with it, which is very, very cool, but it isn't the right case to have on it all the time. But it is really nice to have on it when you want to type. And of course I've got an Apple pencil with it too. So we'll talk more about that as I've had more experiential time with it. But thus far, even like reading in bed with it, it's not, it doesn't feel as big as I thought it might compared to reading in bed with the mini. So that's the beginning of my 10 and a half review. We'll give it a few more weeks and then I'll dig in a little deeper for you. But feel free to ask questions about that because I am doing my very best to not pick up my iPad mini other than the, I have a separate iPad mini that I use for gigs and things like that. Although I've been thinking about using the iPad pro for gigs because the bigger screen is really nice. So anyway, yeah. So we're done with Heist here. Yeah, well, we don't have to be and come back to it. Okay. One thing that I think is interesting as you may know that Apple recently announced the piles of money that they raked in. Yes. And I believe the iPad pro was a cause for them for their iPad sales. That's a fair assumption. Yes. Which even when I saw it, I was like, wow, that's sexy. I may get one because it looks to be a much more usable or general purpose device than some of the others. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. And of course, Apple made more money than anybody. Sure. What did I see? They're actually one of the top holders of US debt. Of course they are. Yeah. That's kind of. Well, it's cheaper for them to borrow money than it is to pay trade money that they have overseas. So there you go. That's fine. The thing is they kind of own us. Apple kind of owns this country, right? Yeah, that's a great surprise. Yeah. But you want to go back to high Sierra? Well, the one thing that, you know, maybe I didn't approach the install properly. The drive that I put it on, I had it ready formatted as HFS. Now, I suppose what I probably should have done is run the installer. And I think within the installer, I could have formatted the drive using the new file system. But I didn't do that. Is it an SSD or a spindle? It's a rotational. Oh, then it would then, no, that's why it didn't offer to upgrade you to APFS. APFS right now is limited only to SSDs. And that probably will remain that way. It is an OS that is built with SSDs in mind. That's one of the major points of it. Yeah. But my question is, could I or should I? One, can I convert the drive that I installed it on to APFS or no? No, I don't think, well, I don't know. I've converted other external drives to APFS, but they've all been SSDs. I don't think you can convert a rotational drive to APFS right now. That may change. And I may be wrong about that. If it was an SSD, I mean, is there a conversion utility? There is as part of the installer, is there a separate conversion utility? I don't know if disc utility will do it, to be honest. It should, though. I mean, obviously, if it's there as part of the installer, it can be done after the fact. I think maybe there is. Talk to Martelero about that. I think he's done something like that internally here at TMO. Okay. Or I think somebody's posted it. There's some magic from the command line that I could do to maybe... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The same thing we ran into with our Synologies is that they have this new file system, but I don't think they have a utility that will convert from the old to the new. They don't. It's been driving me crazy. You got to reformat. But I've kind of been just waiting with the Synology for them to just say, oh, here's the utility. You're good to go. So I don't know. Yeah. I mean, the final things I noticed, so Safari has a couple of things that they talked about. It's interesting, so the, you know, videos, the annoyance of videos that start playing, they'll allow you to squelch that. I noticed there's a new item in the Safari menu saying settings for this website. So you can fine tune the behavior of web pages per website. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And of course, they also have this, you know, cross, you know, the thing that makes it so any site you go to has an ad for something that you bought from Amazon. It's like, dude, stop. I'll have to do more surfing, but you know, that seems to be on by default. So, and then I noticed in photos, there's, you know, some new editing tools. Photos is improving, I'd say it's, you know, still not at the level of, you know, some of the pro tools, but for most people, you know, they're absolutely making advances. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, we'll keep talking about it and feel free to send in your questions. We are both enjoying and suffering through running the latest betas so that we're ready for you. John, I want to have a little discussion and there's other things that we probably want to get to. So hopefully we can keep this condensed. I promise. You got a new cable modem recently and as you kind of, as you mentioned in the last show and you had an issue provisioning it. Yes, so the new cable modem arrived, you plugged it in, you got it up and running. All right, so what happens is, so I disconnected the old one and then I returned it to them so they don't charge me the fee. Then I put the new one in and the thing is, of course, they know this because the MAC address, the hardware address of it is different and so they're like, and actually the process was pretty straightforward except for one thing. So it came up and it said, yeah, we're going to redirect you to a page. They're like, yeah, it looks like you got a new cable modem. Do you want to swap out the old one? And they listed the MAC address of the old one. I verified that it was the same. It's printed on the modem. I'm like, yeah, let's do this. And then they go to the next page and they're like, okay, great. Can you put in your last name, your account number and your phone number? And it's like, oh yeah, I mean, of course I have my ISPs account number memorized. And the catch 22 here is that because you're in a mode where the only page you can see is the provisioning page, there was no way for, there was no way using that connection to get it. And it's like, guys, that's kind of silly. Fortunately, I have Wi-Fi through them. And I was able to go to the website or run their app. I think I ran their app and was able to then punch in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it made me chuckle that they put me in this situation and nobody's ever pointed out to them that that's not a piece of information that people necessarily have memorized or in front of them. So when you do this with Comcast, you have two options. You can do exactly that, just manually enter your account number and that the other option with Comcast, as I remembered, it's been about a year and a half since I've done this, is that it did offer to let me log into my existing account. And it was like, hey, here's this, but if you don't know your account, well then, or if you already have created an account on our system and you're an existing customer, you can log into that and then it worked. My guess is if you bought this cable modem from Optimum, oh, you didn't buy it from them, you bought it from somewhere else. Oh no, actually this modem, because I bought it through them, says Ares on it, but it also, the other one didn't, but it also has the Optimum logo on it. So it is the Optimum- So you might have had your account number on a piece of paper that came in the box with that modem. They claimed that that would be the case, but it was not. The only piece of paper that was in the box was some packing slip. So my advice to everybody is this, whatever your note-taking app of choice is and trust me on this, it's worth having one, even if it's just storing a few notes in Apple Notes, but it could be Evernote or whatever you like, but hopefully something that syncs amongst your devices because that's really easy to do now, especially even with Apple Notes. Apple Notes is really good. Create a note for your ISP, your cable company or your DSL company or your files company, whatever it is. Put in there their contact phone number, your account number with them, any other relevant details. And then you can also log things in there, like okay, on August 6th, 2017, I talked to Debbie there who helped me solve a technical problem with this, that or the other thing. And then you've got this history, right? And you've always got it right there. And I also use that to store, sometimes you get a secret phone number or a non-published phone number to say, hey, in order to call me back, do this. Put that there too, because six or 16 months from now, you might need that or you might find having it a handy thing. So definitely worth doing that. And to be fair, I do the same thing with my power company because when my power goes out, I need to contact them and it's way easier if I can log into my account, like from my phone or whatever. Obviously the same thing with your water company or whatever other services you have. Create that in your notes and that way you've got it so that it's just there and you don't have to think about it. And with Apple Notes and certainly with Evernote, you can share a note or even a notebook with Evernote with other people. So if you have family members that would also benefit from having that information or having one shared repository to put it all, well, share it up, there you go. And the one last thing with this, Dave, so hats off to Eero, because I think what they did was intentional. So I noticed then when I put in the new cable modem that I was all of a sudden now getting a paltry 100 megabits downstream. Right, yeah, first world problems. The thing is Optima has a promotion where until the end of the year, if you have 100 service, they say you'll get 200 service. So I got on the horn, called up, said, yeah, I just got this new modem. Can you give me the 200? She looked and she's like, oh yeah, that says it on your bill. Did it immediately. And I was shocked because I wanted to verify that they had actually reconfigured it. I ran the Eero app and the Eero app already had run a speed test and said, yep, you're getting 200 down. Nice. Like, thanks. So they must have seen the modem cycle and said, oh well, we should probably run it again. So here's another piece of advice for you is I recommend rebooting your cable modem once a month. And then the only reason is this. When you get a software upgrade for your cable modem, or I should say when your cable modem is provisioned to have a software upgrade, it usually takes a reboot of the modem in order for that upgrade to come through. Especially with Comcast, I've seen it where my modem has been provisioned for faster speeds, because Comcast does this pretty regularly. It seems like once every 12 to 18 months, they just say, okay, whatever you are, if you're on the Blast Pro plan, now the speed caps are 30% higher than they used to be. But without rebooting your modem, you don't get that new profile and therefore you don't get the speeds. It's actually your cable modem that decides how fast your internet connection will go, but it gets that instruction via a profile from your cable company. And no, there's really no easy way and really no way at all to pump your own profile into that modem. Obviously that would be a breach of your service agreement with your cable company, but also technically it's really just not possible. They've worked this out, trust me, but not that I would do that, but I looked into it for technical reasons. So that I could instruct and inform and save you folks from wasting your time. But, and I'm also really frustrated with 10 megabits upstream and I can't seem to get any faster than that. So, you know, sometimes frustration leads to experimentation. But by rebooting the modem, you get those speeds and I think Comcast would have eventually pushed a reset through to my modem, but in most cases I've found, and a lot of times actually I get an email from Comcast that says, hey, we bumped up your speeds, but you need to reboot your modem. And a lot of times it's like, yeah, I did that a week and a half ago and I already have them. So, that's my advice. It's just reboot, semi-regularly. You can log into your cable modem from inside your house. You have to do this. 192.168.100.1, again, 192.168.100.1. Put that into your web browser, you can log into your modem. It might ask you for a password, generally speaking, if you search up your modem's model number online, you can find out the default password and in my experience that's been what's set there. Once you log in, you can see all kinds of great diagnostic information that we've talked about, but you can also see your profile name. And it's usually a file name that seems cryptic. Take that, copy it, store it in that note we mentioned before. That way you can look and see did it change? Because sometimes it changes and that's handy to know. So, anyway, there we go, cable modem advice. I'm glad you got your new modem. That's good stuff, man. Yeah, I see this here in my event log. I see two events that happened when I first got it and they said SW download the knit by a config file. SW download, so that's downloading. Well, it's gonna do that every time you boot. It will download that profile every single time in my experience. It's not just when you get a new one. It pulls down that firmware every time. And that file has my speeds and other wonderful things. Wonderful things, yeah, but mostly speed limits. And the other nice thing I saw is in addition to having twice as many downstream channels as the old one is that my power levels are better and my signal to noise ratio is better. By how much? The power levels are all now close to zero, which is ideal for downstream, so I've read. And the SNR used to be in the 30s and the greater and the number, the better. And now my SNR signal to noise ratio is in the 40s. Well, plus I have twice as many channels. So, and then the downstream, it's 44 points. My upstream is fine. Yeah, but I think those numbers went in the right direction as well. Yeah, good, so cool. Exciting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. All right, we have several things from the last show to go through. Tips and comments and maybe even some questions that we're gonna try and squeeze into the next, you know, 12 minutes here. So, SJ writes in response to show 667. He says, I tried all the software you mentioned to recover from a drive, except for trying the service of drive savers. He says, none of them work to recover files from a drive that I had accidentally formatted. The only software I found that truly worked is R-Studio from R-Tools Technology. And we'll put a link in the show notes. That's just as their software saved me once on a Windows machine and once again now on a Mac. I've encouraged them to advertise but they never seem to. So, they are at r-studio.com. I'd never heard of them before. Not a great surprise for a company that's not doing any marketing. But, we will put their link in the show notes and we'll go on SJ's recommendation that perhaps it's worth trying. So, thank you for that. From show seven, sorry, not show seven. Show six, 68. Michael writes, he says, you helped out Todd who asked about the difference between iTunes and iCloud backups for iOS devices. His concern was that he only had five gigs of iCloud storage and didn't know how much stuff, particularly photos, his phone was likely to send. Your answer was good but didn't go far enough. What you missed was that you can individually select which apps are backed up to iCloud. Go to settings, storage, iCloud and usage. Go to iCloud from there, go to manage storage and go to backups, this iPad or iPhone. At this point you can see what the backup size is and also see when the next backup size, scheduled size will be, this is useful but there's more. Then select choose data to backup. Show all apps. This will show you a list of all of your apps and how much is being stored by each on iCloud. You can turn them on and off. Photos is included here so you can actually disable photo backups if you so choose. Very, very good. Thank you, Michael. I like it. It's good stuff, right John? Yeah, sweet. You wanna take Dave's John or is that up to me? Oh, we can take Dave. Okay, so Dave, Dave, Dave, hold on. There we are, okay. This isn't just Dave, this is Dave and Jeff and Michael and I'm trying to remember Andy. Yeah, we got a number of, I'll say fish shakes. Yes. Anyways, one of many pieces of feedback regarding this topic so we can be entirely clear. And he says, John, twice I've heard you advocate for the three to one backup strategy. Sadly, I think you've got the definition wrong. Three backups, two local one off site. As stated, the two in the one are saying the same thing and fortunately the one you are trying to stress is correct. But the way I first heard it on the twit network, I believe from the person who created it is this, three backups, two different media one off site. This is increasingly difficult with the amount of data we hoard but with photographs this could be achieved by having a printed copy of the most important photos or storing copies or rotating drives as well as SSD. Thank you very much, Dave. Totally right. We said it twice. We missed it both times. So it's three backups, two different media. So don't store the point being, and it's a very good point, don't rely on one drive to be two backups or even one drive to be your boot drive and a backup. I made that mistake. I had a big pumpkin drive and I partitioned it and I cloned to the other partition. Thankfully, I didn't get bit by the obvious problem with that. If the drive dies, guess what? So does the clone. So different media, very good. This actually came in handy for me recently too, Dave. And then I had a need to get some old tax forms. So what I do currently, I'm not quite caveman mode here but what I do is that I do PDFs and I fill them out and I mail them to the IRS along with the check. Well, I had a need to get some that are archived and of course they're stored on one of my computers and then I do the whole backup strategy is that I back it up to multiple different locations. Well here, I think what happened, Dave, is that at some point when I implemented the Save My Documents to iCloud mechanism, I think something got lost because some of the data wasn't there and that it was only in like two folders for two years. I still had the folders for the other years but there were no documents in them. I'm like, what do I do? What do I do? What I did, Dave, was I went to a time machine backup that was back in December before I did this iCloud migration and sure enough, they were there. So in this case it was different media. One was my local hard drive and one was my time machine backup. Totally, totally. So this is why you do this sort of thing. I don't know what hiccups in, I don't know why it didn't complete copying that stuff to iCloud. Right, and that's the thing is you, like the point is, yes, it would be good to know but the fact that it didn't copy to iCloud is the fact that matters and you had it somewhere else. So again, thank you everybody for keeping us honest on that good stuff. Laura writes and says, let me find Laura here. I was just listening to 668 when I heard you talking about the person that said not all of his devices were updating their apps and he couldn't figure out why. I've noticed the same problem happening in the past year to my iPad but not my iPhone or MacBook Pro. I don't believe it has anything to do with corrupt data because once my iPad freezes and reboots on its own without me doing anything, the apps will eventually continue to update without any problems. I believe it's a combination of three things that causes my particular issue. I have an older iPad with only one gig of RAM and less than one gig of storage left. I'm trying to update multiple apps in one sitting, sometimes eight or more, many of them larger in size and I have extremely slow internet. My only solution has been to update the smaller apps first, two or three at a time, then update the larger apps one at a time. So far it's been freezing and rebooting only with Facebook Messenger, so I usually wait and update that one last. The other larger apps have fortunately been updating. Fine, as long as it's time. Sweet, thank you Laura. Yeah, it could very well be that too. There's lots of different things. Craziness, craziness, craziness. All right, and three questions from the last two shows that I think we can squeeze through here, John. So number one comes from Alison Sheridan over at podfeat.com. We have an interesting story to share from her that we'll save for another episode. She said in show 667, you mentioned that by looking at all of the lights on your Switch, you knew it was in a loop. How did you know that? And what did you mean by loop? So the answer to the first question, how did I know is because I've seen it before and I know what it looks like, but to be far more clear about it, even the first time that I saw my network looping and by loop, I mean that my network was connected to itself, so every packet that went out of the Switch was then coming back through another channel and it was because one of my Linksys vellop units was malfunctioning and was sending packets out the Ethernet port and letting those same packets come back in wirelessly because it was trying to mesh it all. It had sort of forgotten that it had an Ethernet backhaul, so it was just linking everything together and not blocking the Wi-Fi one. So it created this loop and of course that increases traffic and things and then it can't pass anything, nothing on the network can pass. So that's what I meant by a loop. Normally, the way I knew is that normally the lights on my switches and your network switches, they flash, but not all at the same time and not in what I would consider a consistent pattern. They flash quickly, don't get me wrong, but when you look at them, it's very random and you can kind of see things happening. When there's a loop or some other problem where the switch is clogged, the lights are almost lit 100% of the time, but they're just strobing together very, very quickly with no deviation and it's a pretty obvious thing. If you go and look at your switch now, you don't have to spend a lot of time with it, but maybe put on some good music and trip out to it a little bit. You'll get a feel for what that looks like. You really only need to look at it for like five seconds. You'll kind of get a feel for it. If and when you have a network problem and you can't pass any data on your network, take a look at that switch again and if it's just, the pattern's different and it's just like almost fully lit and just strobing, then you'll know, okay, time to just power down the switch or like I said, I just started pulling things out one by one until it calmed down and then I knew. That's how I knew, John, it's crazy. You're better than me, man. I mean, I see the blink and lights but I couldn't tell just by that if there was a problem. I'm the switch whisperer. Uh, okay, two more. Let's see if we can get through these. Donna asks, she said, in 668 there was a suggestion to have multiple time machine destinations locally that you back up to. How exactly does one set that up? That's a good question. And I think this started in El Capitan, I believe, but in any event, most or all recent versions of macOS let you do this. Go to system preferences, go to time machine, click add or remove backup disk there. And then you can add another backup disk. You can add multiple backup disks here and it doesn't replace the previous one. Of course, you can remove one as the instructions say but you can add to it. Once you've got more than one here, it will start to cycle through all of them when you do your backups. And that's how you do it, it's that simple. So yeah, it's good stuff, Donna. And it's a great way to kind of hit that number two we talked about in the backup strategy to have multiple media to which you back up. This is one way to do that. So good stuff. Lastly, because we care, Joel asks, in 668, you indicated your family was using the two terabytes of data shared on iCloud and that they weren't running iOS 11. I tried and the only person who could join was my son who was on the public beta of iOS 11. All the other family members received a this page is unable to load error. I just wanted you to be aware. You are totally right, Joel. And I didn't fully explain how I got this to happen. So I will. I have a spare iPhone, but you could do this with a spare iPad or anything that can run iOS 11. And you can even do it with your main one but it gets a little tricky. I wiped that phone when I put iOS 11 on it. And then one by one I logged. My son is already on the public beta like your son. He wanted to be running it. So that was easy. But for my wife and my daughter who didn't want to start running the public beta, although my wife's on it with her iPad now. I logged their iCloud accounts in. I left their existing devices exactly as they were. Didn't have to do anything there. Logged in with their iCloud accounts on the spare iPhone immediately in the iCloud preference pane went and turned off everything so that it wasn't gonna try and like sync their contacts and calendars and mail and photos and everything all down to that one little phone. And then I went in to the storage settings and said join the family account. And then that was fine. That's all it took. I will say this and this will probably happen although Apple might fix it when this all actually rolls out. Both my wife and my daughter were on separate storage plans because that's how you have to do it before iOS 11. And when, so when they moved to the family one, you know, it said, okay, well you're, you know, we'll migrate you over and then we won't bill you anymore for your storage. But they still had, each had some time left, I don't know, 10 or 15 days or whatever in their monthly, you know, section of that plan. And for both of them, when that was going to come back around, both them and I, because we're on the family plan together, got emails saying, hey, look, you know, you're using whatever, 300 gigs of storage. Tomorrow your plan's gonna go down to five gigs and then you won't be able to add anything to it and in a month it'll all be wiped out. We ignored those emails and everything's been fine. They were and are part of this family's shared storage pool. It just was, you know, this weird thing in Apple's billing system is really all it was. And they weren't charged and it's just now we pay $9.99 a month for two terabytes for the whole family and life is blissful and cheaper, which is really the blissful part. So there you go. I think we got through that in about 12 minutes, John. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Any thoughts on any of that? Yes, and maybe. No. Well, maybe one last thing. All right. No, no. Sounds like you're... Well, we're at 123. So, you know, we try to aim for 115 and so we're squeezed. I'll share next time. All right, there you go. Sure. I had some hard drive flows. Oh yeah. We won't forget about those. All right, folks. Well, we told you about how to contact us. We told you about the Facebook group. We told you how great you are for just being you. We told you how great you are. If you can, in addition to being you, also support us on the premium level. We thanked everybody that did that this week. We thanked, we told you about our sponsor. We thanked our sponsor and then of course was Smile at Smile Software dot com. And we could tell you about Twitter, Dave, because it's a fountain of knowledge and wisdom. Sure. At least when it comes from us. Yeah. I am John F. Ron. He is Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mac Geek Gav. The publication is Mac Observer. And there's that pilot peak guy all on Twitter if you want to tweet. Sounds like fun. I like, Twitter's actually, it's quite handy at times. It's a great way to be in touch with each other. So, I like it. It's good stuff. Yeah. Like I said, I want to thank our sponsor, but techsexpander.com slash geek for this episode. Also otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com and barebonessoftwareatbarebones.com. I want to thank Cashfly at C-A-C-A-G-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Really, I just want to thank all of you. I know we did that already, but that's kind of what I want to do. And thank you, John. Um, you know, since we're in harmony here today, I kind of want to let the advice be shared by everyone simultaneously, not just any one of us. So, I think we'll do it like this.