 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, Episode 722 for Monday, August 13th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take them, we mix them all together. We create an agenda. Sometimes we follow that agenda, sometimes we take tangents, sometimes we get back to the agenda. The goal is that no matter what path we take together, that we each learn five new things every single week when we get together, at least five new things, folks. You can learn more than five. That's OK. That's allowed. We've checked with the judges. Everything's copacetic. You can learn seven. It's no problem. It's just at least five. So as long as we're all in for that, that's good. Thanks for this episode. Include BB Edit from Bare Bones Software, Jamf Now. We're at Jamf, J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G. You can sign up and get your first three devices for free for life. And Ring, we're at ring dot com slash M-G-G. You can learn about something new. So we'll talk more about all of that shortly here. Here, me in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Bare Bones, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. How goes it today, Mr. John F. Braun? Technologically speaking, good. Your average day. Everything's working. Nothing's broken. So, uh... It's a good day, man. Pretty good run, yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Sweet. Let's hope it continues that way. So let's... Because last week, I wasn't so happy with Evernote, and we'll see if that remains. Let's jump right to it. Matt has a comment from a few episodes ago. He says, I was listening to 719 and the segment about a slow iMac. He says, I have a late 2009 iMac with 12 gigs of RAM and a spinning hard drive that is dog slow sometimes. What I do is simply leave Onyx open up in the corner. And when it slows down, I go to cleaning logs tab and delete everything with the IM logs. He says, I leave the IM logs because I don't want to lose all of my IM conversations. This cures my beach ball pauses for a while. I suspect this is similar to Dave's tip about disabling logging to speed things up on his MacBook Air. I tried that as well, but it seems to have reset itself in one of the recent updates. Since I don't use this computer much, Onyx is a quicker, simpler option. Very cool. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, as cash files get bigger, log files get bigger, you know, especially with a spindle drive, they can sort of be all over the place. So this is good with more and more people running older Macs or the Macs that we are running, getting older and older, it is good to come up with ways of doing that. Not that there's anything wrong as we talked about in the last episode with running a new Mac. It just is that many older Macs are able to do most of what we need to do. And so if we can just kind of tweak them out and keep them running smooth, that's a good thing. All right, John. It makes me sad though, because a necessary function logging is, you know, I'm looking though it, so I think I'm with this solution because there are different type of log files and I would say some of them are probably not entirely necessary. Right. The ones that I would consider necessary is that one in this list here is system diagnostic reports and user diagnostic reports because I think those go to developers and also mobile device crash reporters. So there's a few at the end of that category that I think are necessary for you to hold on to just to make the, yeah, I think a lot of the other stuff is just legacy superfluous, takes up gigabytes maybe and slows your computer down. Logs are handy when you need them. But when you don't need them, they're just taking up space. And processing. And processing, yeah. On my older machines, I actually turn off the share logs with Apple and share logs with developers things for two reasons. One, obviously selfish. It keeps this from being an issue. And number two, you know, if I'm running on a machine that's, you know, seven, eight, nine, even 10 years old, I don't think Apple cares about the logs from that machine. And my guess is developers don't either, you know, they're mostly designing for newer stuff anyway. So I don't mean to put words in anyone's mouth, but that assumption helps support my selfish belief that I don't want to have these things generated and sent out and, you know, turn off all the stuff that I possibly can. Right. You know, so. Cool. I learned something this week, John. And I will I'm going to count it amongst my five and maybe you folks can too. I read a piece by Sharon Zardetto over on tidbits. And it was all about system preference pains and all that stuff. And I I was blown away by by one of the items in her list. And that is where she talked about streamlining the preferences window. And that is in system preferences. I had no idea you can go to the view menu. Yep. At the top of the screen and go to customize. And you can choose which preference pain to get a little checkbox by all of them. You can choose which preference pains appear. And I can see this being super handy because, man, sometimes you come in and it's like, where is that stupid pain I want to use? And of course, you can search for it and you can, you know, view the list and the view menu and all that too. But cleaning it up a little bit. That can be a handy thing. So there you go. Streamline your system preferences window. So we'll put a link to the whole article in the show notes here so that you can read the other stuff too, of course. But I like that one jumped out at me. So there you go, John, did you know about that? I've dabbled in that area, but I've never had. I didn't want to go down the path of the process of determining what should be seen and what should not be. You know what I'm saying? I do know what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Disable the wrong one. And I really need it. Yeah. Well, then you just turn it back on. It's OK. Yeah. It's not. It doesn't remove them. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just for the benefit of listeners. Yeah, it just hides it. That's all. All right. Dominic from the most or the penultimate episode says, hearing about John's problems in trying to image listener. Johnny's what he meant in trying to image his old Mac to a 2018 MacBook Pro rang a bell with me. I went through something similar when moving from an iMac to an iMac Pro a few months back, like listener John, I could not boot the new machine from a carbon copy cloner image of the old. So rather than trying to reclone, I cut I cut straight to the chase and used migration assistant with the clone disk as a source. Migration assistant, although it takes a long time to work through all the files that need to be transferred, works fast once it gets going and does a really comprehensive job. So just a good reminder that you can you can use migration assistant from a clone or whatever you want. You know, it doesn't need to be an active Mac. So yeah, good. Right. It's my favorite. Yeah. I start with. I do like it. Yeah. And a correction from two episodes ago, listener Elliott says in show seven twenty, a listener emailed talking about how you can get a sixty nine dollar replacement if you lose a part of your AirPods, either one of the iPods or the charging case in a show. Dave said that you would be sent a whole new set that is not correct. He says, I want to clarify, the apple will not replace the whole set. They will just replace the missing part for sixty nine, i.e. an individual AirPod or the charging case. They'll also charge sixty nine for each missing part. So if you do lose all three, you're actually better off buying a whole new set. So thank you very much for that, Elliot. I appreciate the clarification. That's good. Or the correction really is the right the right word for it. So good. Yeah. Moving on to Dan here, John. Indeed. OK. Listener Dan writes, he said, I want to pass along this safety safety tip. As it happened to my wife's iPhone six, we keep our iPhones in Otterbox Defender cases, which encase the entire phone. My wife was having trouble with the sensitivity in the upper left portion of the screen on her iPhone six. I first thought the phone was starting to show its age. I rebooted the phone and tried other things. But the sensitivity issue persisted. I ignored it for a while, but then decided to try and determine if the sensitivity issue was a result of the case or the phone. So I took it out of the case. That's when I noticed that the whole left side of the phone had actually experienced had actually expanded due to a swollen battery. Needless to say, I talked with Apple immediately and set up a visit to the store the next day to get it replaced. Luckily, it fell under the twenty nine dollar battery replacement program. And even better, Apple just replaced the entire phone for that twenty nine dollar price. They said when the battery swells like that, the only thing they can do is replace the phone. So every once in a while, take your phone out of the case to look at it is the moral that Dan wants to share here. That's a good one. I like it. I like it. It's stuff. That's good thinking. Don't you think, John? Yeah, well, same with your portable. I saw on my Instagram feed somebody showing a picture of, oh, these are the batteries that came out of this MacBook and they were all like oval. Yeah. Yeah, that's bad. Which is like like oval like a football looking at them from the side. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that they started like mutating like they were turning into pods. They actually look like pods. And it was like, yeah, those batteries are kind of defective. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's not good of them now. Same thing. I'm surprised I've never had a battery expand or to the point of defect in a phone. Actually, I don't think I've had it happen on a laptop either. Though I've seen the results. Typically the trackpad doesn't work or something stops working because it's growing. Yeah, I've had it. My son had it in his watch. We talked about that over the summer. Yeah. And he got a new watch out of the deal. But yeah, I don't know that I've had it with a phone. I think I've had it with a laptop, but anyway. Hey, I'll take that opportunity to talk about our first sponsor, which is Jamf Now, because we're talking about managing lots of devices. And if you go to jamf.com slash MGG, J-A-M-F.com slash MGG, you can sign up for an account for Jamf Now and manage all of your devices, all of your employees devices, all of your family's devices. If you want all of your clients devices, right? This is where it starts to get really interesting and you can do it remotely. And the first three devices on your account at any time. So as long as you have three or less on your account, it's just free. After three, so the fourth device and later, you pay two bucks a month per device. That's it. So really simple, really easy. And it lets you do things like, you know, obviously checking your inventory. You can distribute Wi-Fi and email settings. Settings, you can deploy apps, you can protect data. You can even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere. You can manage on you can just manage all your devices where you want. Then you can focus on the other stuff that you need to do. So check it out. Go to jamf.com slash MGG. Sign up for your account now and that way you've got it and you can use it. It's just free to set it up. And then, like I said, once you hit that fourth device, then, you know, then it's just two bucks a month or thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you know, I am a big fan of QuickBooks and I actually used to train on it all of the time. And something came up this week that I know there's a lot of folks that listen to the show that run small businesses and quite a few use QuickBooks. So I wanted to share a tip. QuickBooks lets you use a thing called classes. And this can be done in the, you know, the desktop version on the Mac or QuickBooks online. It works in both. You need the it works just in the desktop version for online. I think you need like the Super Hoop desubscription. So, you know, this is why I like the desktop version better because it's cheaper. But it's called classes. And what it lets you do is, you know, normally a transaction comes in and you say, OK, well, I'll classify this as like, you know, a software expense or a hardware expense or whatever. And that's fine. And you want to do that and you need that for your taxes and you need it just to keep your, you know, your books straight. But it might be that you have several aspects of your business, right? You might have like a consulting aspect and then you might have a hosting aspect of your business. And then maybe you've got like a training courses or something. And you want to see what you're spending where the IRS doesn't really care whether that expense was for one, two or three, if it's all under the same umbrella, but you might. And that's where classes come in. So you can set up classes for like all of those three things and and mark them up and and get your reports that way for you. So I just wanted to let everybody know because I was talking with someone who was using QuickBooks and she had no idea that this functionality was even a thing and it's been there for decades. So I just wanted to kind of shine a shine a light on it for you. So there you go. QuickBooks classes. Don't forget about it. And I don't mean classes like taking classes. That's also a good thing, but this is different. So there you go. You can do the same thing with location locations in QuickBooks, too. Same kind of thing. You know, if you got a store here and a store there and a store there, you might want to tag things differently. So although in that case, you might want to listen to the small business show, a business show dot co, where we talk about why you might want to form different LLCs for that. But that that goes outside the scope of this. So that's we'll leave that there, John. What do you think? Good. Good. I think we have some I think we have some cool stuff found to go through. So shall we? Yes. Cool. All right. Oh, I love this one because it's, you know, well, here you go. Listener Jeff chimes in and says. I've never heard you mention this. So maybe you don't know about it. I recently came across this Mac OS utility called grab. It lives in the utilities folder or at the applications utilities folder. And it's a screen grabber. He says, I've always used command option shift three or command option shift four for screen grabs. But the grab app is heaps better. It even has a 10 second timer option. And it allows capture of the touch bar on a MacBook Pro. But even better still is that it allows saving directly to iCloud. And if the grab isn't quite right, then you can simply discard it and try again. I remember a recent conversation you had about someone wanting to save screenshots automatically in the cloud. Yeah, we talked about saving them to Dropbox. So maybe this is the best choice, he says, better than having lots of screenshot files all over the place. And there's more. If you access grab from notes, right? Or control clicking a note will bring it up. Then once captured, you can mark it up as required, very similar to how you can mark up a screenshot on iOS. You can then send the note via the usual export options, mail, air drop, etc. You may already use it, but I thought it was pretty cool, says Jeff. And I found it by accident, so I wanted to let you know. You know, I'm not convinced in the 13 years that we've been doing this that we've ever mentioned grab as a cool stuff found. We might have. I mean, we've certainly alluded to it in the discussion, John. But I don't know that it's ever been a cool stuff found, which is fascinating. But there you go. Thank you, Jeff. Great stuff. And looking at it, the copyright on it is actually 2017. So somebody's paying attention. And I think there's also a help page for it. So what's kind of weird, though, is where it lives, Dave. It lives like in in the folder of forgotten toys. That is true. You know, that's a tip on its own is to just go and look in there. That like, I love that application utilities contains not only grab, but some other things, some are critical, like activity monitor. And then some are like, you know, airport utility, Apple MIDI utility, Bluetooth file exchange. And you can look at the list on your machine. There may be third party things in there as well. But it's just like what a weird place to. You know, continue to isolate these. It's like, why? Why are they just not in the apple? You know, I mean, what qualifies them as utilities or just everything else in your application? That's true. Yeah, that's like that's where terminal lives. Yeah, yeah. So and Brother Jay is saying that grab gets another update. So somebody is paying attention, John, because in Mojave, at least the betas, it's called screenshot. So there you go. It's its name has changed it. And I'll say that Brother Jay from the chat room here at Makikev.com slash stream and I'll ask Brother Jay and maybe he'll comment back whether or not that is still in applications utilities. So there you go. Cool, cool, cool. Hey, in the post show last time, also in the chat room, Brian Monroe pipped us to this cool tool called net tool.io. And this is a similar. I think it's similar in that ethernet. It's a, you know, the network engineering tool kind of thing. We were talking about another one in the show last week. And so this one you plug it in via ethernet and then it wirelessly connects to your phone. And you can see all kinds of network interface information, you can see spanning tree protocol packets passing along DHCP packets, QOS, right? Capture to PCAP. That's what you want. Oh, what's this, John? Well, the line says capture to the PCAP. PCAP is a standard for data capture. So it looks like it does data capture too, which the other stuff is handy, but, you know, if I had a gizmo like this, I'd wanted to capture data so I could look at it later. Interesting. Yeah. So cool stuff, which is, you know, why I put it on the list. So thank you, Brian. Great stuff. Let's see. We have two from listener Greg that we will go to. So Greg, Greg's first one is which one are we doing first? I forget. He says, regarding the other Greg's question in the last episode, 721, for getting the file size for videos. I've been using this iOS app called Metafo, M-E-T-A-P-H-O. And he says it can give you the metadata for photos and videos and also batch remove metadata, such as location info and such. And he's totally right. It will show you. So so the thing we were talking about last week was, you know, we had to like save things to a different app to see. And were we getting the actual photo or video or were we seeing, you know, the result of some conversion or whatever. This looks right in your library and gives you all that information. And even cooler, John, once you install it, you can add a share sheet for it. So if you share a photo to it, it instantly just gives you all this data, which is great, you know, so you can kind of get this from anywhere in iOS. You don't have to, you know, run the app. You can just be somewhere and be like, Oh, what's that thing? And share and boom, there it is. I like creative solutions like that. Yeah, yeah, cool stuff. Thanks, Greg. That's pretty. Did you try this yet, John? I'm I'm hooked on it now. I like I think I already had it installed. Yeah, I think I got it free at one point and it was like, and I think it still is free. I think it is free. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. But a lot of things, it's nice that, you know, iOS currently has the hooks where a lot of these third party things, you don't necessarily have to run them outright. You can use the share sheet thing that's like, Oh, look, I'll look at you. Yep. No, it's a nice surprise to see apps, you know, but put themselves in the right place at the right time. Yeah, I exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's good stuff. Cool. All right. Let's see. Moving on. Oh, I said Greg had two things and he does. So Greg's second thing is he says, I've tried several months back, the same exact nifty drive that was in the link of the 721 show notes with my mid 2014 MacBook Pro and had issues with the 256 gig Samsung card. So similar to the listener where they had that SD card in the little kind of I don't know, adapter for lack of a better term. And he says, and then after much research, I tried the, I'll call it the base chi adapter. It's B, A, S, E, Q, I, he says, the base chi adapters are more compatible with higher capacity cards, perhaps. I'm sure that since you recommended the 128 gig card last week, that it must work fine with that nifty adapter, but not the larger size, larger sized cards, in my opinion. So we'll put a link to this base chi bestie card adapter in the show notes too. So did stuff. That's always I always like to know that it's so hard, you know, with these things where it seems like anything should fit, right? And then you realize, no, maybe not. Maybe it's not, you know, the same chipset or firmware or whatever. And yeah, it seems like they're all you would think they were all made in the same factory, but that's not necessarily the case. So we've got those links. They are. I think you're right. No, but but then why do they operate differently? Right? Well, I can do better than you. Right. Make this custom tweak to the firmware that's going to give me that edge. Yeah, it's going to break something that I hope nobody cares about. Right. Yeah. Right. That's right. That's the trick. That's the problem. All right. I want to talk about our second sponsor, John, because in the intro to the show, I teased about this a little bit. If you now go to ring.com slash MGG, you will be able to get the new ring alarm. So you've heard of ring before, right? We've talked about them a lot on here. In fact, they've been sponsoring the show, but we've talked about it as content, too, because John and I both use them and it's a great addition to the smart home. They're the ones who reinvented the doorbell so you can answer remotely and the floodlights and all that stuff. And now they've just reinvented the home alarm system. Right. Traditional alarm companies prioritize high monthly premiums and tie you into those long term contracts. And ring change that ring alarm, like everything else from ring, is easy to install. It's affordable. It's a home security system with no long term contracts. You build the system that's right for your home and then it's up and running in minutes. And, you know, John and I have talked about how easy it has been to install all this other ring stuff that we've got. They just think about so much. I mean, it's a very Apple-like experience in that way. And that's a very good thing. So the ring alarm security kit comes with everything you need to protect your home and 24 seven professional monitoring is only ten bucks a month. It's a smarter way to protect your entire home. And the ring alarm security kit is available at ring.com slash MGG and at retail stores across the U.S. So go to ring.com slash MGG to learn how you can get your home whole security for just ten bucks a month. Very, very cool. So you got to check that out. We'll be we'll be checking it out. That's for sure. All right, John. Alex has I love questions like this. So Alex asks as soon as I can pull it up here. Evernote is behaving so far this week. I should be knocking on all sorts of wood as I say that. He said Devon think has recently announced or read it recently added iCloud syncing between iOS devices as well as Max. I was thinking of using it to store important documents, but I'm concerned about security. Is the sync data that Devon think stores in iCloud encrypted? If hypothetically, my iCloud account were compromised, could a hacker view the Devon think data? So this is a really good question, right? Because there's several places where it could or could not be encrypted. And each of those places sort of matters in a different way. So I want to kind of pass this one around, John, here. But it on the surface, right? There's encrypted in transit, which all of iCloud stuff is, right? It's always a secure connection to iCloud with any of your devices. So anything syncing? Yes, it's encrypted in transit. But is it encrypted at rest? And while I'm sure Apple encrypts stuff at rest on their servers, I am also certain that that level of encryption is done with Apple's keys because they need to be able to decrypt it in order to, you know, to send it along to you. However, it's possible that the app in question that is choosing to use iCloud to sync could also be providing their own layer of encryption. I don't know if Devin think does. I do know that one password will, right? Your vault is encrypted with your key and not even the one password. People can decrypt it. But certainly whether it's at rest on your computer or at rest on Apple's computers, if you choose to sync with iCloud, it's encrypted because because the data blob, the data store is encrypted by the app. So if Devin think we're to encrypt it, then yes, that data is encrypted. Otherwise, anybody with access to your iCloud account could get it theoretically, right? Pretty much. Otherwise, yeah, I made a little article I found here that basically says what you said. Yeah, it's all backed up in transit and on the server and maybe someone else is doing additional encryption. And that's nice. Who you are like you turned into Mr. Robot there and not in like the good way. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to hang on one second. All right, let's try that again. So you want to share your thoughts again about this whole thing with Devin think data, but really it's not about Devin think data. It's about anything that's synced across iCloud because you were Mr. Robot the last time you said that. Oh, OK. Well, no, I basically found something from Apple basically saying, well, if it's iCloud, then it's pretty much as you said, the two terms would be in place and on the server in transit and on the server and that they claim to do it all. Yeah, well, they do it for you as well. So you get another layer. Is that important? Yeah, I think I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Craziness. OK, good. Then moving on here. Once we're as our next question, Joe. Oh, yeah, Joe. OK. I know I have it here and it's going to behave. OK, Joe says essentially what I want to do is recover at least my sent folder from my MacBook Pro laptop that bit the dust. He's talking about mail up until now. I've been using pop three to download all my mail locally. So any message that I sent was only stored on my machine and was not synced up to whatever mail server I use. So I had a local company make a clone of the hard drive from my old machine whose motherboard had died. I just opened the clone drive after connecting it to my new shiny MacBook Pro I7. Oh, nice. Through terminal, I made my library folder on that clone drive visible. Nice. I then see there are multiples of things like my sent inbox and other folders for mail. Well, I need to take each of these sent mail boxes and import it. So what he's asking, he's talking about looking in his library mail folder home library mail folder. And you will see in there and it depends on how old the machine was, either a V2 or a V3 or a V4 or a V5 folder that then contains a bunch of other subfolders and within those subfolders and the subfolders are either named with like email at, you know, like whatever, you know, Dave the nerd at gmail.com or whatever. Don't use that address for me, though. I mean, you could. But it'll get to me that there's better addresses, but that wouldn't that won't get to me. Anyway, you'll see him there and it'll either have that or it will have some like serial number type thing where it's just a bunch of, you know, numbers and letters in kind of UUID format. And within those, you will see things like deleted messages, dot M box and inbox, dot M box and junk, dot M box and things like that. These are the separate folders for each mail account that you have. And if they are pop accounts, this is the only place that data is likely to exist. So to answer Joe's question, do I need to import all of my sent messages, dot M box? M box is a format, thankfully, it's a relatively standard format. Do I need to import each of those? And the answer is, yeah, because each of them contains the sent messages from that account. So if you had, you know, three different accounts, then you're going to have sent boxes from each of those and you want to import each of them separately in so that you don't lose anything. And hopefully that makes sense. This is one of those things that's sort of borderline, whether it's good to describe audibly without visual cues or not. But I think I think you'll when you dig in there, you know, even if it's six months from now, you'd be like, oh, yeah, now I understand what they were talking about. And and you'll see it there. So, yeah, you want to go and get each of these things. That's how mail sort of compartmentalizes things by account. You see this in mail when you go and look at like if you look at your inbox, if you have more than one account set up, you'll see a little triangle next to the inbox, a little triangle next to the sent box, the trash box. And when you twist it open, you'll see the names of the accounts. That's how it's representing this. It's it's it's actually doing it the other way. It's doing it from the point of view of the mailbox, as opposed to the point of view of the account. But but it's the same thing. So that does that make sense, John? We get there. OK, it could. OK. Do you have anything in general? If you're close, if the version of mail that you're talking to is close, then copying the mail folder over may do it for you. It may be smart enough to say, oh, yeah, look, you're trying to import some stuff from before. Otherwise, I think. As indicated, importing mailboxes is your your only hope, really. Yeah, file import would be the way to do it. But you're right. Yeah, you might be able to just copy them in. I mean, I remember in the past, I think it brought so it was just like, oh, well, you're you're in the mail folder. So yeah, yeah, come on over. Right. See what we can do. It may not bring everything over, but at least to prop back the messages. But yeah, that's the the battle days of client based email storage. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. And it's no different with IMAP accounts, by the way. You'll see the same thing there. The the benefit is that it's most likely also synced to your mail server. So but your on my Mac folders would also be in this in this area. And so be aware of those because those even if you have IMAP accounts, if you've got stuff in the kind of on my on my Mac section, then that only exists on your Mac. So just be aware of that, too. So coolio. All right. Moving along here, David. I don't know if this question is too geeky or not, but I like it. So we'll go to it. He says it's been discussed on multiple occasions on how to set up custom DNS on your router or even directly on your Mac. But how would one do this on your cellular devices like an iPhone or iPad with cellular data? I've been trying to figure this out and there are no network settings to override when only connected to 4G or LTE. He says that I found so I can do it on Wi-Fi and I can set my custom DNS. And of course, I can do it if I'm connected through a VPN, but otherwise no go. It's an excellent question, David, and you are totally right. There's no way to use something like, you know, Google's DNS or Cloudflare's DNS, right? Cloudflare is 1.1.1.1 and is the one that, you know, seems to be testing out as the fastest sort of overall these days. You know, but if you want to open DNS or Google or Cloudflare, you can do it on a Wi-Fi connection and you can do it on sort of on your VPN, depending on how the configuration works. But you cannot change this stuff for your cellular connection. And my guess is that that is for good reason. I don't think this is some sort of decision they made willy-nilly. You know, because you're connected to, you know, a network that doesn't necessarily operate exactly like a standard IP network would. And, you know, they're trying to maximize data. So there might be some additional caching going on and that sort of thing. I don't know enough about it to say for sure, but it certainly seems to me like this is probably a good idea. What do you think, John? I think they're keeping me down. Well, they are. Why are they taking control away from me? Yeah. Yeah, it's true. But I agree, because in a lot of cases, with great power comes great responsibility in changing the IP addresses of things on a cellular network. It may not work out. Yeah. I mean, I remember first linear TCP IP and figuring out what happened when you set the IP address of your your computer, the same as the router. Yeah, that's not good. So yeah, yeah, I would keep the user away from that. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. It is time that we, as we do every week, I want to take a minute here and thank everyone that has contributed as part of our premium subscriber contributed program. And of course, you can learn more about that. Mackeycap.com slash premium. We talk about it every week and really we talk about it so that we can thank those of you that are willing and and able to support us directly, financially directly. You all support us simply by listening. So so thank you. And those of you that send in questions of which there are many that really is a form of it. It may seem like you're getting something out of it and you are. That's a good thing. This is not a zero sum game, right? But we are also getting something out of it because that allow that, you know, we call through those questions. We answer all of them, but we don't necessarily pull them all in the show. But we can pull the right ones up into the show. And that's our job to pick which ones are the right ones to display or to highlight for you all. And that obviously becomes our content or at least, you know, half of it. So I love non zero sum games because it means we all get to win. And so I do want to thank those of you winners that were able to contribute in the last week. Some of you on auto renews, some of you brand new on the biannual twenty five dollar a month plan. We have Josh Oh, Louis Michel, Paolo B, Margaret M, and Elliot G. So thanks so much to all of you, you rock. And on the monthly ten dollar plan, we have working smarter for Mac users, Bob L, Brian M, Neil L, Scott F, Abdullah B, John G, Frank A, James C, J C. No relation, no relation. Joe S. Barry F. REL, Michael P. Bob L, a different Bob L and John B. Thank you so much to all of you, you rock. And again, if you want to learn more about that, Mackeycom.com slash premium. All right, John, you want to take us to Devin? Devin's got a problem. OK. I think it actually, I don't know if I've necessarily solved it for him, but we'll let him speak. So Devin from Vancouver, cool, says, I'm kind of slumped in regards to this issue. I have a MacBook 7.1, MacBook Pro, 13 inch mid 2010. Note the year, folks, 2010 with 10 gigs of RAM. And I just purchased an SSD Kensington A400 with read speeds reported. And I confirm this in the specs of 500 megabytes per second and write speeds of 450. That's that's cool. When I run Blackmagic to speed test, I received the following 105 megabytes, right, and 200 megabytes read per second. OK. Well, that's disappointing. That's terrible. And I'll say why in a moment here. So so we use carbon copy cloner to clone it to to clone my old HDD to the SSD. And I think he where he didn't put the detail in here. But I thought he made the target APFS, though he didn't mention it in the initial email. OK, that's something to consider. So, yeah, I think that's right. That's pretty much it. But what's OK. So what's with the performance here? So then we had this sort of weird email thing, which we're not going to talk about. But. So my initial response is looking at the spec of the machine, Dave. So that's a 2010 machine. And oh, my gosh, that it's still working and you have that amount of RAM in there. I didn't know they'd allow that sort of thing. I'm recording this podcast this week and every week on a 2011 27 inch iMac with 32 gigs of RAM. So I'm surprised that this old machine. So this is classified as obsolete, not even vintage. It's like it's so old that. But no, I mean, hats off. I'm amazed it's running. Here's the bad news with that machine, Dave. While it didn't have a SATA one interface, it didn't have a SATA three interface. It's kind of the middle of the road. So it's SATA interface inside the machine is a three gigabits per second, which in theory should give you 384 megabytes per second. Now, remember, you're never going to see that number anywhere in real life because it's a theoretical maximum. Right. But you should see something in the neighborhood of that. So with this machine, because even though the drive will work, of course, with SATA three, and that's where the numbers they gave came from, you know, it'll do its best. Now, this is the weird thing, though, is that the numbers that he's getting are just so kind of pathetic, right? Like half of the duty cycle. It's like, you know, you should be getting 384 megabytes and you're getting like 200. It's like, what? So I don't know what's wrong. I speculated that APFS may be part of it. It things are definitely slower with APFS than they are HFS plus. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. This is one of those is this one of those things where the drive that's too fast causes the bus to go even slower, right? There was that whole thing where and is this the machine? This might be it, right? Where you've got the the three gigabit SATA bus, but when you have the drive that supports six gigabits, the bus actually runs at one point five gigabits. You actually, yeah, I was floating in the back of my mind, but now you bring that up. You can actually look at because, yeah, some max did stupid things in this. And now the reason that he gets numbers kind of bordering above SATA one makes you think that may not be the case, but it could be maybe intermittently. I don't know. But I don't know. But if you go to about this max system report and SATA and under hardware, there's the ATA or SATA category and you will see it will show you the negotiated speed. Because I had this one machine, it supposedly had a SATA three interface, but a clock or SATA two interface. And I think a clocked in, but it said, oh, by the way, the negotiated speed with this drive. Which is a piece of junk. It's only one point five. So the speed of the bus, you should verify with the Apple system tools to see what capabilities everybody thinks they have and what they've negotiated. A lot of times for a reason, it could be a bad cable, bad connection, I don't know, possibly, right? Cable, I mean, that's an old cable. It's an old machine. Yeah, I'm not. I mean, I'm tempted not. I'm not tempted. I am tempted. I'm going to resist the temptation to run black magic on this machine as we're doing the show. But I'm trying to think of what kind of speeds I get here. But it's, you know, I think it's right. I'm going to try my mini. I got a crux of M500. And I think I measured, you know, for 500 read, 400 write. Yeah, I couldn't resist which is a temptation, John. I couldn't. I couldn't resist. I'm running black magic as we type here. And I'm getting, yeah, you know, 100 megabyte per second writes and 100 megabyte per second reads is is what I get with the internal SSD on this machine. So. Oh. Like, I don't know. It seems it seems about right for the vintage machine that he has. I don't know. I mean, it could be that the SATA 2 controller that they use way back in the day, which you can also see in the system, info made out of in the greatest. Yep. I don't know. Yep. I've seen that too, or a lot of times on the older machines, they did some weird thing that would, you know, make it can negotiate a lower speed, maybe for reliability or something. Yeah. Yeah, could be. Yeah, I think, you know, we talk a lot and even earlier in this episode about how, for the most part, you can take an older machine and and still run just fine on it. I mentioned, and it's true. You know, here I am on a 2011 machine and it really doesn't feel old. It, you know, it runs great. It's fast. I've got 32 gigs of ram in it. It's got a big screen and, you know, the CPUs. Well, last week it was paid because I ever know it was, you know, chewing it all up. But but that's that was abnormal, right? You know, for the most part, it pegs the CPU when it boots up, which it should. And then, you know, everything's kind of totally fine. So but there are these inherent limitations in the hardware that was baked into these machines, like this screen will never be a retina screen, right? You know, this CPU and GPU together will never support metal. And so I've never been able to run metal games on this. And nor will I be able to run Mojave because Mojave because of its iOS, you know, translation slash emulation engine requires metal. And so I don't have that. So I won't be able to do that, right? But other than that, it runs fine. So, yeah, but but there are these things, right? If you want to run this stuff faster, well, then you need a faster map. That's just how it goes. But thankfully, I guess it's the in question. I mean, if you put it in a SATA three machine, I think he would be very pleased. So maybe. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. Yeah. I mean, I know I understand the pain of letting go of an old friend, especially one from. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Same. All right. You want to take us to Mike, my friend? Yeah. What's up with Mike, man? I just don't know. But I'm going to try to figure it out. So Mike says I have an eight terabyte external C gate drive that is partitioned into a time machine partition and another partition. At this point, I'm rarely using the drive, but you can hear it being accessed very frequently. Drive DX is even showing it as approaching overheating. I'm running a time machine editor and I've turned it way down to run only daily and have also turned off spotlight indexing to both partitions. There's a way to tell what process is currently accessing the drive so I can look into this further to know why it's always churning. I would say yes, Dave. All right, go. I mean, just start off. I think it's one of the charming things about rotational drives, Dave, that you can hear what's happening whether good or bad. OK, charming. I'm just I'm just I'm just it's like lights on our modems, right? We like stuff. Yeah, it's charming. It's charming. Yeah. All right. And I'm wondering if somebody if there's a market for making like a little SSD drive noise generator. I'm actually going to tell you right that up. No, that would be great. I would I would run that. We're going to patent it. Just write the app. That'd be fun, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah, I could start recording some. All right, so the first tool that I would use, Dave, though, if you have it and if you don't, you should get it because it's awesome. Is I set menus because what they have is a disks menu among all the other menus that they give you in the menu part that are super handy. And if you click on their disks widget, it's going to show you not only the throughput of the attached drive. So that could be one clue, but it's also going to show the top five processes that are doing disk stuff. Now, if you're hearing all that churning, I'm going to guess it's going to show up in that list, Dave. Yeah. And as far as I know, that is the most fine tuned responsive tool that'll let you see this. And then you can also. If you don't have, I set menus that you should activity monitor, that also has a disks tab and show similar information. I don't think it gets updated quite as frequently as I set menus does, but it does show totals. And if you watch them, you know, if stuff's happening, it's going to show the number getting bigger for both data read and data written. And I would think they're the ones that are most active would eventually float up to the top, depending how you sort it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Now also the third thing is if it's a mechanical drive, it could just be on its last legs. And the drive is making a desperate plea to the outside world, trying to shuffle the data about as best it can so that it doesn't get lost. But it's generating so much activity, trying to accomplish this task that it overheats the drive. I've heard it happen. Sometimes they call it the tick of death or this, but sometimes drives when they get way too chatty like chatty Cathy to me is a sign of impending doom. Seriously. Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is one of the, you know, from a troubleshooting standpoint, you know, you use the word charming, but it is even handy that you can hear when a drive starts to get to the point where there's a problem. And this is, you know, sort of in our general troubleshooting mindset here, we always talk about learn what normal looks like, or in this case, what normal sounds like so that you can identify when normal is not happening, right? And with an SSD, sound is not part of the equation. So that's not part of what normal can look like. Although if your SSD starts making noise, that's bad. Yeah, like really bad, like, like, yeah, like you might need it. Turn off the electricity. Yes, exactly. Pull power right away. Yeah. But really, I mean, that's, you know, that's just how it, I mean, it's... Because with most properly operating rotational drives, Dave, the proper thing you should hear is nothing. Right? Yeah. That's been my experience. If everything's great, you should hear nothing. Maybe if you put your ear up to it, you can hear the faint spinning sound of the motor. Maybe the, you know, the heads moving around if it's doing data access. But on that, you should be, you should never hear your rotational drive. It's always bad. Yeah, right, right. That's right. All right. I want to talk about our third sponsor for this episode, which is BB Edit from Bare Bones Software. And I want to read to you from Wikipedia a little bit. It says, the first version of BB Edit was created as a Bare Bones text editor to serve as a proof of concept. The intention was to demonstrate the programming capabilities of an experimental version of Pascal for the Macintosh. The original prototypes of BB Edit used the text edit control available in the classic, in the versions of the classic Mac OS of the time. BB Edit was available at no charge on its initial release in 1992, but was commercialized in May 93 with the release of version 2.5. This is a fascinating piece of software. It's a fascinating piece of history. I encourage you to go and read the whole BB Edit Wikipedia article, because it really does give some interesting history here. But BB Edit is something, it's surely it's used by programmers and web designers, but I use it all the time for things that have also have nothing to do with that, you know, counting text, counting words and characters in a text document, comparing two different files to each other. There's nothing better. It just, you know, the way the screen comes up with the two on either side, the two documents on either side and then the comparison list at the bottom. And as you scroll through the list, it moves you through each document automatically. I mean, this is built by people that A, know what they're doing and B, use this software all the time, right? So they are constantly tweaking and making this thing work in ways that you may never even realize it's awesome. So go check it out, go to barebones.com. And here's the thing, just like 26 years ago, you can download BB Edit and use BB Edit for free. Yes, it's still commercialized. And yes, there are some features that you only get in the 30 day trial. And then beyond that, you'd have to, you know, buy a license to use. But most of the features that you're going to want are just available for free all the time. No problem. So go check it out. Download BB Edit from barebones.com and our thanks to the folks at Barebones for making BB Edit and also sponsoring this episode. All right, John, Les has a question about AppleCare and really AppleCare Plus. He says, I bought a new 15 inch MacBook Pro. It was expensive, but AppleCare Plus was a crazy $400 for a two incident plan. And you still have to pay 99 or 299 per incident depending on the damage. I haven't bought a new notebook computer in seven years and was a little floored with the price. Okay, so on the surface, I thought, whoa, yeah, that's a lot of money. And then I started to think about it. AppleCare, AppleCare, not AppleCare Plus, right? So AppleCare on a MacBook Pro used to be, I think 329 is what it was retail. And sometimes you could get it for less than 300 bucks. You might be able to get it at 299 or whatever. It isn't that much more. If you go from 329 up to 399, which is what it is, to AppleCare Plus, that's not much more, right? And AppleCare gets you the extra two years of warranty, you get a little more love in the whole Apple ecosystem when you need support at the Genius Bar or whatever, because everything is just covered and they look at this stuff and it makes a difference. Arguably, it makes more of a difference now that they've sort of tightened down on the flexibility that the techs have at Genius Bars. So, let's assume that that's the 329 value and then adding, or even the 299 value, if you look at the discounted price. So adding 100 bucks to that turns AppleCare into AppleCare Plus. And of course, AppleCare Plus is the only thing you can buy now, so you have to. But for that 100 bucks, you get the two damage incidents whereas AppleCare, there was no damage of any kind, was just not involved. If you damaged it, AppleCare was null and void and it was a done deal. So when you look at it that way, I think it's still worthwhile. You're getting the three-year warranty, the better service attention, and the two incident support, which could be a big savings at some point. So that's how I look at the pricing on this. It's a little frustrating that third parties aren't able to sell AppleCare Plus currently, and I don't know if that's a yet or ever, but because they, you know, because maybe, you know, let's face it, this is a warranty, so it's an insurance plan. It's a 100% profit for Apple, right? So there was a lot of margin on that, and when third parties sold it, they could actually cut quite a bit off, and that was super handy. So that's my thought, I think. What do you think, John? My thought is that it'd be nice if they had both. Yeah, kind of, I like. Offer the old plan, which basically extended the warranty by two years. Yeah. It was the same terms, or if you want AppleCare Plus, including, you know, FumbleFinger's incidents and getting that fixed up. I can understand the need to, you know, streamline operations and only offer one option versus two, but, and you have a customer choice, I would, if I got another Mac, I think I would just want regular AppleCare that I've always bought for pretty much every portable Mac that I bought, I've got an AppleCare, because I felt it was worth it. So here's the thing. This is worth it too, but it's just, you know, it's just a little more money, you know, for something I don't know if I'm necessarily take advantage of. Maybe I will. Yeah. So I don't think this is necessarily a streamline from an operational standpoint thing. I think this is a, let's eliminate customer confusion thing, right? There were probably enough people coming in with some level of damage, right? And maybe their AppleCare incident didn't have anything to do with this damage, but the fact that the machine had some water damage or whatever meant that there was this, this scenario where Apple was like, well, technically this is the warranty's void because you have this water damage or whatever, even though this issue that you're bringing it in for has nothing to do with that, this gives Apple the ability to simply serve their customers. And my guess is that's why they made the decision they made is look, let's make it simple. Anybody with AppleCare, you just covered. And if there's water, then it might be a $99 or whatever, $299, but you know what I mean? Like I think that's how I read this when they, you know, when they made this change. It was like, ah, you know, but I don't know. Now it's like, okay, so Apple people can tell other Apple people, oh yeah, well if you get their coverage, then you get coverage against accidental damage and no matter Mac OS or iOS. It doesn't matter. That's right. I get that angle. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I know. Doesn't make me happy, but, because I'm with you, right? Like you and I, and perhaps even most, perhaps all listeners to the show understand the distinction there between AppleCare and AppleCare Plus. And you're right. Like for you, you would know, okay, yep, I did not buy the one that has the accident coverage. So like that's on me. But, you know, from a general consumer standpoint, that starts to get lost. I don't know, maybe not. I don't know. It just makes things simpler. There is that. So maybe you're right. It's just the streamlining. Wes, not Wes. Why did I say Wes? Oh, because we just did less. Mark writes, I have several printers connected to Ethernet via Ethernet cables, several Synology, DiskStation, NASA is connected via Ethernet cables. I use a switch to connect them all. My internet service from Comcast Business has been dropping several times per day because of past storm damage, and they are still doing repairs. I can live with that for now until they get things fixed. But when the internet stops, my NAS devices disappear from my desktop. And if I'm printing something, it stops printing. This is becoming a very expensive issue if making a very large print because it's ruined. I have to manually add my NAS devices back to the network each time. Should this happen? And is there some way to set this up so it will not? I have limited access to the Comcast Business Modem because that's how they configure it. It's a static IP address. So, yeah, I mean, I guess it makes sense. Because what happens is your cable... Let's look at this, right? We're using that router, right? I just want to make that clear, although it may have been applied. Yeah, so you're right to ask that. I was going to sort of address that in a different way. This device that Comcast... No, you're right. This device that Comcast gives them is really three devices in one, right? It's the cable modem, it's the router, and then it's the wireless access point. Now, in most terms, these days, we refer to the device that has a router and a wireless access point as simply a wireless router or a router, right? So, for him, he's got his cable modem and his wireless router baked into the same device. Okay, now, what happens when the cable connection drops? Well, the cable modem starts to try and reconnect, right? And it goes through... It's got like a series of addresses that it's gonna try and tune into and make work. And if it goes through its series and it fails and still hasn't succeeded, what it does is it reboots itself. And then it starts from the top. It's like, okay, let's do it again. And it'll go through the series and reboot itself and keeps doing that until it locks in. And then it obviously stays powered up and all that stuff. When your cable modem is also your router, that means your router reboots itself every time. So I'm thinking that's what's happening here to Mark. Now, should your Ethernet devices on your network go offline when your router reboots itself? No, I don't think so. Unless... Shouldn't. Right, I mean, unless you're using the switch in the router, like, you know, if there's a four-port switch on it or something, unless you're using that as the backbone between the two. But if your printers and if everything, if you only have one cable coming to your network from your router and that is to your Ethernet switch, then you should be fine. And maybe that's the issue. Maybe Mark is sort of using both. And if that's the case, then, you know, move everything off of the network or off of the router and just, you know, plug them into the switch and hopefully that would work. And if that's not the case and something about that device rebooting brings down your Ethernet network, well, then maybe what you should do is get a separate router that you put in between your devices and this thing so that your wireless network and your local network, both Ethernet and wireless, simply remains up and active. Now, it's possible that, you know, so let me read this another way. He says he's got printers and Synology NASs connected via Ethernet cables, but his computers may not be connected via Ethernet. They may be connected wirelessly. And certainly in the scenario we described, the router's rebooting, which means the Wi-Fi goes down. No network can't connect, lose your print job, got to manually reconnect things. That's probably the most likely, but same solution is the answer. Put your own router in place, let the cable modem do its own rebooting whenever it needs to, but at least your network stays up. So there you go. That's, there's my thought process. My closing thought, because I think we're closing. Hey, you might you take that away. So I think it's Comcast business beta testing there. Let's all take the day off feature. I like it. And that they disrupt not only the WAN, but the LAN, your LAN as well. Yeah, just go home. Down's good. Take the day off. Yeah, that doesn't really work. It's not, yeah, most people using Comcast business internet service are probably not companies that are large enough where some group of people taking the day off doesn't like significantly negatively impact the flow of operations. So, yeah. Yeah, I am never happy when my internet connection goes down in the middle of the work day. It's not like, oh, cool. I get to go, you know, screw off for a couple hours. Like, oh, holy crap. The business is classified as a business internet line? My internet line here? Yeah. No. But it wouldn't, I mean, it wouldn't be any different if it were. I mean, it's the same physical lines coming to the building. So it's like, yeah. That was kind of my question because it's like, what makes this, what makes it a business internet service? Just they charge them more? You get some different, well, yes. But also, you get some different options, right? You get, you can get a static IP in an easier way. And depending on where your speeds are, it can be a better deal. But for me, it's not. Yeah, yeah. All right, but hosting, so let me do hosting and stuff. You can do some hosting. Yeah, I could see value on that. Yeah, that's nice. Yep, exactly. So, Apple changed their DMARC policy, John, D-M-A-R-C. What are you talking, when you were to... No, I've actually run into this in the past. When you have one email provider having to interact with another, Right. This is what happens. And you went through the latest version of this, so go ahead. Yeah. I think I'm going to love hearing about this because I had to wrestle with this at one point, too. Yeah, so what DMARC is, and I forget what it stands for. Maybe you can look it up. But essentially, it's a way where Apple in their DNS listings can say, okay, hey, only accept email from our domains if it comes through these servers. And if it doesn't come through these servers, we recommend that you either bounce that email or quarantine that email as spam for further review. And Apple has changed their policy recently in the last few weeks such that it says quarantine. And the email servers that they list as being allowed are Apple's email servers. So if you're getting email from any Apple domain, iCloud, MobileMe, or me.com, Mac.com, iCloud.com, or Apple.com, and it's not being delivered by one of Apple's servers, then it's not. Apple is suggesting that this should not be treated as valid email. Right. And what we're talking here, folks, is domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance. And there's some details, which I'm sure you're going to go over momentarily. So what this means is we used Google Apps for domains for some of our email here. And I had added my Mac.com addresses to this and set it up so that I could email from my Mac.com addresses via this one account. So I could just have one account set up and send everything through it. Makes life easier and simpler. And I noticed that any email I sent from my Mac.com addresses, which I use for very few and very specific things, but people weren't replying. And I thought, but this is weird. You know, I sent four emails out yesterday. I can see where one person might choose not to reply. But this was like two vendors that I was basically saying, I want to buy something from you. Can you answer this question for me? And all four of them went unanswered. Thought, well, this is not good. Like what's going on here? And did the emails go out? Yes, the emails went out. But these emails do not make it to their people. And it's because Apple changed this policy. So I've been trying to fight with this with Gmail. And I'll link you to a thread in our forums where we're talking about this. But you can set it so that Gmail sends through Apple's servers. And when I do that, then things work OK. But what's weird is that it only does that if I'm sending from Gmail's web interface. If I'm sending from my computer, you know, using mail or whatever, it does not seem to honor that. And it tries to just send it direct through Gmail. And of course, then it is treated as verboten and quarantined never to see the light of day. So this is just one of those things. And it's, you know, it's spam prevention. I totally get why Apple is doing this. It's just frustrating. So I might, it might be time to leave Gmail behind because it doesn't seem to be behaving right, you know, but I don't know. Anyway, so I just threw that out there. Yeah. I remember a while back when, you know, I signed up with Yahoo. All of a sudden, they tightened up their requirements here as far as, you know, the servers. And, you know, we're not going to leave forward. And it's like, oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. And you would even authenticate, you know, there were some, you know, basic like, okay, we'll send an email to this address. And if you reply, then we'll assume that it's a valid forward, whatever thing. And we're not going to flag it. All right. We have three questions left on the full agenda. It has been a long time since we have made it through everything that we've put on the agenda. So I think we can do this. I might be wrong. We might stretch goal, but I think we can. It's a stretch goal. Exactly. Come on. I'm doing the corporate. No, that's it. Yeah. So Damian writes out of curiosity, does anyone know or have any info about Apple script now that the main guy at Apple has been purportedly let go? Just kind of wondering if Apple script will stick around in future versions of macOS 10. So this is a good question. And Damian's referring to Sal Segoyan. He is a heck of a dude and was internal to Apple anyway, a force to be reckoned with there. He's a great guy. I consider him a personal friend. I've known him for years. But he, you know, he is a force to be reckoned with. As the stories go, he was one of the few people that Steve Jobs knew at times to back down from. And that says something about Sal. He didn't. Steve didn't always back down from him. I mean, the two of them went toe to toe many times. But Sal definitely was OK holding his ground when he knew he was right. And Steve knew it. And I think perhaps, you know, that's part of why there was no longer room for Sal at Apple. I don't know. I did mention that Sal's a personal friend. We really haven't talked about his departure from Apple. So I can speculate freely here. And without betraying any confidences. But, you know, just like, you know, other people have been have been let go from Apple because they just didn't they didn't fit the corporate personality or their projects didn't fit the corporate goals. I think I think that the Apple leadership had different views about how to manage scripting and how to deal with that stuff. And it just didn't fit. But you're right. Sal was a hell of an advocate for scripting inside of Apple. And and I think we're all wondering this question. The good news I will say is the acquisition of workflow for iOS, which then has turned into shortcuts on on iOS 12. That's a huge thing because that really means and shows that Apple is OK with the concept of scripting. So I don't think Apple care. I'm sorry. I don't think Apple script is going anywhere. I don't think Automator is going anywhere. I hope they continue to get the love and attention that Sal was able to at times fight tooth and nail to ensure. Without that advocate in there, though, someone will need to take up that that charge. Otherwise, you know, I think it'll be there. I think we're safe with Mojave. Probably safe with the next one. It's, you know, 10 dot 16. That's the one that, you know, makes me kind of scratch my head like, yeah, what are we looking at? But keyboard maestro exists, right? And I keep saying that is the future of automation on the Mac. It's the it's the present of automation on the Mac. So there you go. Thoughts on this, John? I miss hypercard. Wow, which actually, you know, don't laugh. But if you look at the history, the thing is hypercard was the precursor to Apple script. So definitely hypercard was was an environment at the time, which was more visual, a bit more visual. But away for a user to do something quick and dirty without having to learn X code, which I think. I think I'm with you is that Apple's always going to keep that somewhere. I mean, yeah, especially since Automator is actively, last I checked, supported. And Apple script may not get to, you know, it may fade into the mists of time. I hope not. Because it's a super handy thing. Or just leave it. I mean, even in its current state, it's very useful. It's like tons of content out there. Yeah. And I don't think I, from what I understand, no one is is looking to kill it. Right. But the question is, will it continue to have, you know, someone advocating for it internally so that it grows? That that's the, to me, that's the real question. We'll find out. Yeah. All right. Eddie has a question. Eddie says, asks, I have a late 2015 retina iMac with an i7 processor running 10.13.6. And I have a brand new 4K Dell monitor via DisplayPort slash Thunderbolt that will not wake up after I put the computer to sleep. It does wake up, but then the monitor says it's searching for a signal and then it finally goes black. If I hit the power button on the monitor and turn the display off, then power it back on, it comes on fully and everything works fine. So for now, my temporary solution for this is to manually turn the Dell on and off, which is annoying. I don't think I had issues before the 10.13.6 update. And then he has another similar issue with an HP display. So here's the thing. Listeners of the show that have been listening for about a year, well, maybe even less might remember me talking about similar scenarios with a mono price display. Now it's entirely possible and likely that the electronics in this Dell display that Eddie's talking about and the mono price display are exactly the same because mono price often will sort of model their stuff after what Dell does and just find a way to make it less expensive. So and I dealt with mono pricing actually went pretty deep with them on it. And what they said to me at the time was so there were two mono price displays that I was that I actually had here. And one of them experienced exactly the symptom that Eddie described. And another one were totally fine. And the comparison between the good one and bad one for lack of better terms was the bad one uses the standard eight bit frame rate controller. Like with a lot of monitors, varying computer configurations can cause handshake issues. So it really comes down to the individual setup. Frame rate controls have improved in the last year. And the good monitor is using the 10 bit frame rate controller, which gives it more bandwidth to handle EDID. And EDID is extended display identification data. So it's all about this handshake between the computer and the monitor. And that's exactly what you're seeing here, Eddie, is that it once it's once the handshake is made, it's great. But during that wake from sleep process or even sometimes the startup process, but more often than not the wake from sleep, the handshake seems abbreviated. And some monitors just don't get the message almost by definition. We've had other listeners that have put their monitors on smart switches, like smart plugs, and had them power cycle during the sleep cycle. So if your computer is going to be at sleep at night, have it power cycle off and then on. Lawyer Jeff sent us in a thing, a quick tip a number of months ago, essentially describing that. That's sometimes the answer. But really, it's some third-party monitors. And it probably is this 8-bit frame rate controller versus the 10-bit one. Some of them will deal with this handshake, waking from sleep just fine. And some simply won't. And that's just how it goes. And you need to power cycle the monitor. Thankfully, your Dell has a switch on it that lets you do that. My monitor price did not. I had to pull power and put it back in in order to get the monitor to re-sync. So that's the answer. That's last from the past, man. How about HDCP error? So boy, I used to have those. Really? Yeah. And what would they do? Well, it's the HDMI copy protection. So I think it's called HDCP. And if the chip in the one thing wasn't on the same level as the chip in the other thing, they'd be like, no, I assume you're still in content. So I'm just not going to talk to you. It's like, dude, stop. Ah, all sorts of craziness. HD, I've had the best experience with pure HDMI connections no matter what I'm talking to, whether it's my TV or my computer. Okay. That's interesting. And I actually believe that. But they are lower bandwidth connections than you'd get with DisplayPort, right? HDMI, the frame rate, or the something, not the frame rate, but the something was different. Maybe it is the frame rates different with HDMI and limited there when it's coming from a Mac. So yeah, that might be the answer if the picture is good enough for you. So, yeah. All right, we're going to do it, John. One last one from Kaz. After years, and well, I mean, this is a big topic, but I think we have a sort of a good answer. And it really puts a bookend on this episode, because it brings us right back to where this episode started. It says, after nine blissful years of Mac computing, I've decided to retire my 2009 iMac. Thanks to your excellent advice, I've been able to make and tweak and make modifications that allowed me to extend its life. However, it's time to move on. So I just purchased a mid-2017 iMac. I want to do a clean install and minimize migrating the old junk I have accumulated. After doing some Google Foo, I have more questions than answers, and I don't want to get caught. I'll be migrating from a 2009 iMac running Sierra 10.12.6 with a two terabyte drive, and the new iMac has a two terabyte drive. The largest dataset by far is my photo library. It says I use Lightroom, and it's a 1.5 terabyte library that I want to move to an external drive. It says I have an up-to-date backup, which is good. And then he asks a few questions. How should I migrate user accounts? How should I migrate Apple Mail? How should I migrate my Keychain? How should I migrate my apps, including all of my app preferences? How should I migrate contacts and calendars? How should I migrate cloud services? And what should I do about an external drive, especially knowing, as he says, that he wants to move his Lightroom library to an external drive on the new machine, to give him more room on that two terabyte drive that's going to be his boot drive? And he wraps it up by saying, I know that migration assistant makes all this much easier, but I really want to start as clean as possible. You know, I'm totally really honest, except with all the questions you asked, migration assistant really does come in as the one thing that really will take care of all of this, other than the move to the external drive. But that's fairly easy. You just take your Lightroom library and move it, and then delete it or copy it, and then delete it from your internal drive, and you're done. Yeah, you know, with user accounts, the question was when to create them, I would say create them right away, create them with the same names, and if possible, create them in the same order. Because when user accounts on your Mac are created, they are assigned user IDs as a number. And generally, those numbers start with 501, and permissions are assigned by number, not by name. So if you can get the user numbers to match between the two, you're way better off when it comes to moving this data around. But guess what? Migration assistant will take care of that for you, right? Moving mail, we actually talked about that in this episode, your home library mail folders where all that stuff is, including all your account settings and preferences, you can just move that to a new machine. That's pretty easy. Your key chain, I would trust the cloud to do. Yeah. I mean, I would see if that would be the first step, right? If the cloud fails, then you got to dig into home library key chains and start migrating stuff around. But if you have iCloud key chain turned on, then that should work, right? And the same is true with calendars and contacts, right? And really all of your cloud services, he asked a good question. He said, do I need to sign out of my cloud services first on the old machine before I sign in on the new one? And the answer is no. I don't think so, right? I don't. I mean, like drop box and that kind of stuff? I thought there was a... Couldn't hurt. Well, why would you do that, though? I mean, you want to sign out of them eventually, but cloud services are meant to be signed into on multiple machines so that you have the same data everywhere. Yeah. No, I'm just thinking you may reach a limit which may... No, you should be able to. No, I agree with that, but... Yeah. I don't know of any cloud services that have limits on the number of clients that can connect. Yeah, I just think, you know, they make it confused. Like, oh, you're logging in like twice from the same place. It's like, what are you doing? But no, most people handle that. No, all right. Yeah. And apps, you know, that's the one where it's like, you know, he asks, how do I get the data and the preferences and all that stuff to migrate over? It's like, well, every app is different. Yeah, it's the worst, right? Well, App Store is the best. If you bought it in the App Store, then you're golden, man. Well, not necessarily. Or any other set app and stuff like that. And any app marketplace, potentially. Well, not for the settings. The settings, you still need to go. And are you going into... Oh, right, right. Right, home library application support, or for stuff from the App Store, home library containers, and then dig into, you know, home library application support inside the containers folder, right? You know, that gets really convoluted. And again, migration assistant will take care of most of that. It's not a guarantee it's going to get all of it. No. But... And when you start getting to that level of detail, then to me, that's like, okay, this is where it... Well, you know, so here's the thing. Here's my thought process on this. It's starting to get almost too complicated. Or, I mean, if you have a list of steps like we do here, awesome. But you know what I'm saying? I do. Well, and at what point... Purity versus... Just completion of the task. Like, at what point are you going to be... You know, are you halfway through the project when you say, oh, man, like, whoa. You start digging into the application support folder and you're like, oh, crap. And so instead of digging in and picking out the individual files that make the most sense, you just start wholesale, like, barfing things into your new... And then why do you do this to begin with? And then why do you do this to begin with? No, that's right. Right? Like, like, are you truly avoiding the cruft? Because migration assistant is really good at not bringing over things like, you know, your caches and your temp files and all that stuff. It's good at that. It will bring over settings from apps that you don't use because it doesn't know what you don't use. Understood. But, you know, maybe you're better off taking a clone of the drive, right? And putting something like App Cleaner or Hazel on there and then going through your applications folder on your phone machine, right? And delete all the old... All the apps you don't use. And as you do that, App Cleaner and or Hazel will offer to delete all the support files for those apps. Let them, right? And now you've got a clean thing to migrate from. That might be a better option now that we're talking about it. All right. All right. Did we make it? I think we made it. Yeah, man. Where did we make it? We made it to the end? To the end? Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. I like it. It's crazy. But remember, the end is just only the beginning. Right. Well, we ended where we wound up. Wait, no. We ended where we started. We started where we... Uh-oh. Feedback at MackieGab.com is where you can send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, whatever it is, your comments, just send it all to us. We love it. And if you don't know if you're going forwards or backwards, feedback at MackieGab.com can try to tell you, but probably not. John, John, it's 13 years. It's feedback at MackieGab.com. Which direction are you saying that in? I don't know. I don't know. Premium at MackieGab.com is the address that all of you premium subscribers get access to. And we answer the questions that come in there first. The not-so-secret secret is that we really do every week, try to make sure we answer everything that's come in. And most weeks, I would say probably 50 weeks out of the year, we succeed at that. Traveling stuff sort of forces us at times to back off a little. And that's OK, right? But we usually try to get to everything. But we do, because you folks are directly supporting us with the premium stuff and helping us keep the lights on, we prioritize your stuff. So thank you very much for that. Come visit us in the MackieGab forums. Go to MackieGab.com.com forums. We're in there every day. It's really great stuff. And there's some good discussions happening. We would love to have you participate there. And really, it's a much better place than Facebook in terms of being able to organize answers and highlight answers and all that stuff. So we're really stoked to have it. And can't wait to have you there if you're not there already. That's what I have, John. I want to thank the folks at CashFly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all of the bandwidth to get the show from us. To you, I want to thank everyone in our podcast marketplace. Of course, you mentioned Ring at Ring.com slash M-G-G, Barebones at Barebones.com. Jamf at J-A-M-F.com slash M-G-G. Of course, Smile at Smile Software.com slash Podcast, if I remember correctly. O-W-C at MaxSales.com. Code Weavers at CodeWeavers.com slash M-G-G. To you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you. All of you have one thing to say, and I mean it. I care about you. And because of that, I want to make sure that you do everything you can this week so that you don't get caught. Maid on the back. Don't get caught, John.