 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 787. We love palindromes here for Monday, November 4th, 2019. Take it away, Matt. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and other stuff, like tips, I guess, and things we've learned. And we mash them all together with the goal being that by answering all the questions and sharing all the tips and all of that good stuff, we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ero.com slash mgg, captera.com slash mgg, ancestry.com slash mgg, and expressvpn.com slash mgg. We'll talk about each of those in a little more detail throughout the episode, but for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Eh, hanging in there. Good, cool. We have, we actually, we have a ton of stuff to go through today. We've got some great, we've got some quick tips. We have some Catalina tips, including actually some beyond Catalina or prior to Catalina tips about finding the older installers. So we'll talk about how to do that. We've got some network troubleshooting things, which are always fun, you know, when they're fun to go through, they're fun to talk about. They're not necessarily fun to go through, but sometimes they're fun afterwards. You know how it is. And pretty much anything else that comes up, you're gonna tell us about some things that happen with your cable modem and all that. But first, let's go through these quick tips and see what we can do. So we'll start with, we'll start not by me resetting the entire show. I am so glad I built a dummy check into my workflow because I almost just reset the recording, John, but I didn't because I have a little thing that comes up and says, you didn't really want to do that, Dave, did you? And yeah, so I was just asked that question. Joaquim sends in a note, a quick tip. Mac OS Catalina tip of the day. He says, in the window menu of any app, hold the option key down and you will watch the windows you can move to the left or the right of the screen. And he's right about this. It's actually pretty cool, the options change. And of course you can do this with the little green box at the top or the green bubble at the top of the top left corner of windows, but you can do it from the window menu, which also means that you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts for this so that you can have, as Joaquim says, high productivity. So we will put a screenshot, actually we'll put a link to all of that on Twitter so that you can see how it all works. We'll put a link to his Twitter post where he shared that with us. So yeah, thanks, good stuff, fun, right? We love this. It actually was not fun for me. Uh-oh. Well, here's what happened. And I did this once in the past and this is with the most fuddling thing that happened because I couldn't figure out, it took me a while to figure out how to get around it. Sure. Have you heard of this thing called mouse keys? It sounds familiar. Yeah, I think it's inaccessibility somewhere. Accessibility, okay, yeah, yeah. But it lets you use the keyboard instead of the mouse to navigate the cursor. Here's the problem, if you enable that, your input device, like your trackpad on your MacBook Pro, will not work anymore. Okay, well, wait, wait, hang on though. So what I'm saying is I accidentally enabled that. But not from the window menu? Well, no, the one way to enable it is to press the option key five times. So I was fiddling with this feature and I was holding down option and then not and then holding it down and apparently I did it five times in a row. It's like, oh, okay, you want mouse keys. And then I saw something come up on the screen very quickly. It said mouse keys on and I'm like, and then I had the same thing is my cursor wouldn't respond because it was looking to the keyboard for input. Nice. So that sucks. That's a good tip. So to turn off mouse keys because this is the important part of this tip. So it's not to bury the lead. Same thing, option key five times. Okay, great. Five times. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, I thought the first time I had this problem that my trackpad was broken. Right. Right. Or there was something. I'm like, whoa, what is going on here? Yeah, right. All right, you wanna take us to Keith's first quick tip about iOS 13. This is actually pretty cool. Yeah, so Keith says hi chaps. I guess he's from across the pond there. Finally, an iOS 13 Apple has finally allowed apps over 200 megabytes to be downloaded. Settings, iTunes and App Store, app downloads. This is really handy for those of us who has unlimited mobile data. And if you look, they now have three choices. Always ask, always allow or ask if over 200 megabytes. Right. So that's pretty nice because, yeah, I mean, if you have limited data plan, I mean, actually I got, I upped mine from two gigs to five gigs Verizon had a deal at one point where it's like, yeah, for five bucks more, I get three more gigs a month. And they do roll over and stuff like that. That's a great thing. So yeah, so it's nice. I didn't know that was there until I've, you know, until you put this in the queue for the show. So yeah, it's one of my five things. This is great. No, I didn't know either, because yeah, if you're out and about and all you have is cell data, then, yeah, I remember that in the past. It'd be like, nope, can't download it too big. And I'm like, oh no, come on. Right, yeah, come on. I mean, I understand the intent, but you know, can I override this please? Like it's my data. Yeah, yeah. All right, listener John, man, I learned this new too. Says, you mentioned recently the PDF scan plus app being discontinued. Fortunately, he says, the files app now has the built-in ability to scan documents and it works really well. When you're in browse mode, what you do is you kind of pull down from the middle of the screen and it exposes more options at the top of the screen, kind of like how you would expose, say, the search bar, right, if it's not there in mail, you just sort of scroll the list down. You don't scroll down, you actually scroll up by pulling down and that exposes some more options. And once you do that, there's three little dots in the upper left-hand corner. So navigate to wherever you want the scan to be saved and then do this, you know, pull, scroll up, be above the top of the thing, right, by pulling down and you'll see these three little dots. One of the things there is scan documents. And once you do that, the camera opens up. If you have a document in the frame of the camera, it will, you'll see the, you know, it'll put like corners on it so that it says, yep, I'm detecting a document. It won't auto scan, at least I have not yet stumbled onto a way to get it to auto scan when it finds the document like PDF scan plus would. But if you hit the shutter button, it will save it and then you can scan the next page and save it and it will save to once you're, you know, you could scan, I didn't try hundreds of pages yet, but I tried four or five and it saved a five page PDF, you know, because I hit save once I was finished with all five pages, which was pretty cool. It's not exactly like PDF scan plus. Like I said, it's not just auto capturing. You have to manually capture, but, but it definitely does the scanning and saves it to a PDF. And I was able because Synology Drive integrates with the files app. I went to a folder on my Synology Drive. I scanned this PDF, I saved it and I got, I sat down in front of my Mac and boom, there was the PDF. So very cool stuff, John. Thank you. Good stuff. I love this. Oh, there it is. Okay. Yeah. It's tricky. You gotta go in the browse view, correct. Yeah. That's right. Wacky. Well, you get to where you want to be. And then you say, okay, here's where I want to save a document. Yeah, it's a little backwards and wonky to find. It's not, you know, it doesn't jump out at you in the interface, but it works. So pretty good. You want to take us to Bill, Mr. Braun? Yeah. Bill's got a tip for anyone with search issues in mail. Okay. He was having problems finding emails in mail. They were there, but searching couldn't find them. What was found seemed to be very recent mail than nothing until about four or five years ago. Lost time, I guess. I guess, yeah. This is a new Mac and I started from scratch. No migration. An unread mail smart folder also was not working correctly, only showing very recent unread mail. Onyx to the rescue. Rebuilding the spotlight index and mail index fixed both problems. I wonder with this, John, if just rebuilding the mail index would have solved it because I've seen other people. Charlotte Henry on staff here at TMO. In fact, I think she's got a tip coming out later today about how to rebuild the mail index and all of that because triggered by the fact that she went through the same thing. She did not have to rebuild spotlight. So it's possible that just rebuilding the mail index would have solved this. But I found after upgrading to Catalina that I had to rebuild spotlight too just to get my computer to chill out. In fact, mail would use 100% or more of ACPU core full time until 10.15.1. So I think there's some wonkiness with mail, Catalina. Okay. And he's got another tip. We'll give you this one here. Take the bonus tip. Yeah. The bonus tip. A side note on a new iMac. He purchased this as a refurb and then went to the local Apple store to pick it up. And when he got it, he mentioned, he said that his only disappointment was that I would have, he would have ordered the extended keyboard versus the standard keyboard. And the guy who gave him the machine said, oh yeah, I can do that for you for the difference in price. So that's kind of nice. Wow, I had no idea you could do that. Like, well, first of all, I don't even, I suppose I have seen the option to be able to pick up a refurb at the store, but I've never taken it. I've always just said ship it to me. But that's a bonus right there because, and he said he, you know, paid the difference in price between the two keyboards, but that's fantastic. I would always opt for the larger keyboard because I've got a bunch of those smaller ones that are like, yeah, whatever, it's like sitting around. You know what they're good for? Is I keep one now in the office, paired to my iMac in the office. I have a Logitech keyboard down there that's super loud. And whenever I'm recording, you know, on a podcast or something down in the office, I can't use that keyboard because it's just way too loud. So I have that little Bluetooth small keyboard to use down there. Here in the studio, I have, it's actually a wired keyboard, but it's one of Apple's quiet ones so that, you know, you folks don't have to listen to it clacking while I'm typing here while we're recording. So it is good for that. But other than the tiny little, you know, other than that, I'm not a real fan of it. Although, you know, the tiny little keyboards are good to pair with your iPad too. So there's another place to go with it. So, yeah. Pretty cool. Oh, and Brian Monroe in the chat room at macgeekyub.com slash stream says, I have had Apple change parts in the store for the difference on RAM too, which is, that's pretty good. He says it was for a new iMac for a client that a client wanted, but needed more RAM than the config that they had in stock. So that's pretty good. I know. So so you can, you can't customize it online, but you can customize it in store. Ish. I know. Yeah. Ish. Don't, but that's an iMac where the RAM is, is, you know, user serviceable. If this was a laptop where it's soldered in from the factory, the genius bar is going to be able to, they're not going to pull out the surface mount tools. Yeah. Cool. Cool. And Dan C says about the small keyboard, not only can you pair it with your iPad, you can pair it with your iPhone. He says, I hate typing on my iPhone. So I have one at work to use with the iPhone. I didn't, I don't know that I realized you could pair a keyboard with the iPhone. We're almost finished with the episode, John. I feel like, well, I've learned my five things. So. Yeah. Shut this down. Let's shut it down. That's it. Thanks very much, folks. We'll, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll see you. You know, we'll see you next week, I guess. We'll just bring the band in here and, you know, it's good, right? No, we got more tips, don't we? John, take us to Andrew. Would you please? Andrew writes, boys, boys, I love the fact that I can leave my house with just my Apple Watch and AirPods and do just about everything. But I have just discovered something. You are able to connect any Bluetooth speaker to your Apple Watch. I have a Bose SoundLink Micro Hockey Puck Size and it plays well with my Apple Watch. Why is this cool? Well, I can get great audio experience without taking my iPhone out of the house. Sometimes it is nice not to have the AirPods in and on. You can enjoy nature and still get quality audio. So I can walk with the speaker, clip my fanny pack or it's called a bum bag in Australia. Nice. I like it. When I go for a walk, I can clip the speaker to my golf cart. I can clip the speaker to my bicycle handlebars and the combination of the two makes a great speakerphone. And it is all for my Apple Watch. That's pretty cool. That's neat that they've, yeah, is that they've reduced. I mean, it's cool that the Watch doesn't really need the iPhone to do its thing anymore. Yeah, I'd never. I mean, you were always able to put some amount of music on the Watch that's gotten better too with apps that now, you know, you can actually load apps only to the Watch. Which is cool. Yeah. All right, you got one more quick tip for us, John. Ever, what's going on over there? You've got all kinds of things. Oh, OK, that was loud. All right. Yeah. All right, where's Keith? Oh, yeah, here's a good one here. Let me get Keith. This is like the geeky quick tip of the day. Yeah, another quick tip for Catalina. In Mojave, I had a couple of entries in my Cron tab, which no longer seemed to run when I upgraded to Catalina. Cron being a utility that lets you schedule things to happen. Actually, I think Cron is technically deprecated in macOS. I don't think it'll actually ever be removed. Launch D takes over all of that for the system stuff. But I think for Unix compatibility, they might keep Cron around forever. I don't know that, though, so. But for now, it's still there in Catalina. Yeah. So one of them deleted a cache on a regular basis and the other launched an app two minutes after the system boots. So that's kind of neat. But neither were working. I had to give Cron full access to the drive in preferences, slash security and privacy, slash privacy, slash full disk access for them to work. So yeah, if you go into that section, you click the lock on the bottom left to make changes, authenticate, and then click the plus symbol and hit Shift Command G, input slash USR slash SBIN slash Cron and then go to the folder box. Okay. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that you could do that. I thought you had to like drag it in there. Wow, that makes sense. I like it. Yeah, actually, you know, that's come up before. Remember when we were a Omni Disweeper? You had to kind of do this, too. You had to add terminal. You had to add terminal. Full disk access for it to work correctly. Yes. And actually, it's weird because I'm looking in my full disk access window and I have, I think I saw CSH, I saw one of the shells in there. I don't know how I got there. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know. Do you have any command line things in your full disk? This is a Mojave machine that I'm on here, still in the studio. I have yet to upgrade this, but there's still full disk access, so I am pulling this up. Security and privacy. So I got SH, I got SMBD in here. I have SMBD and SSHD as well. I don't think I added that. The system must have added that. Well, I probably asked for it, you know, when I, or maybe when you turn on remote access, which turns on SSHD and, you know, sharing turns on SMBD. So yeah, that's probably right. That makes sense. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, what Brian said is, yeah, so Brian suggested something here is that you could also just drag something like the terminal icon, if you can find it, into full disk access. Yeah, but that's not going to solve the cron problem because cron is running in the terminal. That's that terminal is only if you're doing it actively, interactively, I should say. But if you set up cron and it needs to run with full disk access, that's running without the terminal. I know we access that stuff with the terminal, but it is always just sort of there. So yeah, cool. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about our first two sponsors, if that's okay with you, my friend. Sure. All right. Our first sponsor today is Eero because Eero is the Wi-Fi that your home deserves, just like the Wi-Fi my home deserves and the Wi-Fi that Mr. John F. Braun's home deserves. And it is because that's what John and I use in our homes is Eero for all our Wi-Fi. And you know that we've tested pretty much everything out there and I keep coming back to Eero because it just works. It's simple to manage. I can manage it locally. I can manage it remotely. It just works. It tells me things that I want to know about devices that join the network and things like that so it's geeky, but it's also I can be geeky with it when I want to be, but I can also just let it be my home's Wi-Fi the rest of the time when I don't necessarily want to be geeky. And that's awesome. What's also awesome is there's an all-new Eero starting at just 99 bucks. Of course, we talked about this on the show when it came out. 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You got to use our URL to get the offer ero.com slash mgg and then you got to use code mgg as well. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is Ancestry Health from Ancestry because your genes aren't just about you. There's something you share with the people closest to you and you get them from, of course, your parents who got them from their parents and uncovering potential health issues early can help empower you with information so you and your family can move forward towards a healthy future, right? And that's what Ancestry Health from Ancestry is here to do. With Ancestry Health, you can discover how your DNA might influence certain health conditions and the steps that you can take with your healthcare provider to chart a healthier path forward. Ancestry Health gives you personalized health reports that are easy to understand with actionable insights, access to genetic counseling, a family health history tool to track generations of health. And of course, you'll also get your Ancestry DNA ethnicity results that reveal your origins, which can be really interesting because like for me, I found out I've got some Irish in me, which some people in my family had always said but I never quite believed them. Turns out they were right. So you got to check this out. Now, Ancestry Health includes laboratory tests developed and performed by an independent CLIA certified laboratory partner and with oversight from an independent clinician network of board certified physicians and genetic counselors. Ancestry Health is not currently available in New York, New Jersey, or Rhode Island. If you're anywhere else, learn from your genes and take action for your family. Go to ancestry.com slash m-g-g to learn more and get your Ancestry Health kit today. That's ancestry.com slash m-g-g our thanks to Ancestry for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. So this morning, we're recording on Sunday, releasing on Monday. This morning earlier this morning was when daylight saving time stopped existing for us here in the United States, at least in our states, not every state participates. Although my iPhone didn't seem to want to buy into that. My, yeah, my iPhone 11 Pro on AT&T with iOS 13.2. When I woke up, I saw the clock radio old, super old school clock radio. Like I think it's older than my kids. It was still on, you know, I knew that that would not have changed. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like I know what time it is, great. And I just grabbed my phone out of curiosity and I looked at it and was like, it says the same time as my clock radio. That's dumb. So I went into settings. I believe it's settings general and settings, yeah, general and date and time. And I turned off set automatically and instantly my time was right, which was weird. And then I turned back on set automatically and everything, you know, it got my time zone and everything was cool. So, but my wife's iPhone an hour later or so was fine. Hers had changed. And this was, this was, you know, seven, well, seven o'clock Eastern Standard Time this morning. So it had been, you know, hours since the cut over. So I'm not sure why, but I saw several people on Twitter and Facebook reporting the same thing and several people in our chat room were also reporting the same thing. Everyone that we've asked has been, that has had this problem has been on AT&T, but we haven't asked everyone and also not everyone on AT&T had this problem because my wife, her phone was fine and hers is also on AT&T just like mine. So I just figured I'd share. I guess it brings up the question as to where does the phone get its time? And I don't think we, we should dig into that. I think one place that it gets it from, and I know this because when I travel I see this happen is that it can get it from the cell data signal. Yeah, I think you use, but you suspect that it may also, there's something called NTP network time protocol. And I think the phone may use that as well. Yeah, it uses that it can also get it from GPS. Yep. Okay, so I think GPS cell, so I think there are multiple sources for the time and apparently it got confused. Yeah. Yeah. So I just figured I'd report it only not, by the time you're listening to this episode, if you had this problem you've probably figured it out and fixed it. Hopefully you didn't get woken up early because of the, your phone didn't get the memo. But I share because this is not the first time that we have seen a problem like this with a new iOS update. So next year, and that's the whole reason I looked because I was like, I wonder if iOS 13 is gonna get this right. The answer is no, at least not for me. So just be aware of it, file it in your, now it's filed, you don't have to think about it. And then next year when this happens, you'll be like, oh, I should check and hopefully you'll be all right. So, good. John, you had an interesting issue that unfortunately our listeners were aware of and that was that your cable modem was cutting in and out where your internet connection was cutting in and out which it turns out was your cable modem cutting in and out and it interrupted our show a couple of times. Right. You fixed it. First, we were like, well, is it my network or is it their network? Well, and first we thought it was me because the first time it happened, I was in a hotel room and you were at home. So the assumption was crappy hotel Wi-Fi turns out not so much. But yeah. So then I call their tech support and one time I called them in an odd hour and I was like waiting for like an hour to get somebody on the phone. So that was kind of upsetting. But because the thing is I was seeing packet loss and the thing is I was trying to get somebody on the phone when this was happening so they could do whatever. So they could see it too, sure. Yeah, I'm like, you know, I'm like, you know, it happened and then it went away again. But so I presented my case to them. I'm like, I think it's your network. And the reason I think it's your network is because the power levels that I'm seeing are all over the place and they're also the heiress that makes this cable modem has a page saying, oh, okay, well, if you, you know, with this channel type and the symbol rate, you shouldn't see a number above this. And I'm like, dude, I'm seeing numbers way above this. All right, so I'm gonna give some context here because these numbers are the same for everybody. It's not just your specific cable modem in your network. This is pretty universal. With a DOCSIS cable modem, you can visit the diagnostics page which is the same URL for all of us. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes, but this will bring you to your cable modem. But it's one, the address is 192.168.100.1. And from there, you can get your signal levels for both your downstream channels, you will probably have multiples, and your upstream channels. It bonds multiple channels together to get more speed. Very similar to what we do with Wi-Fi when we talk about a two-by-two Wi-Fi connection or a three-by-three Wi-Fi connection. What that means is it's three channels in each direction or for two channels. With your cable modem, it's probably something like 16 down and two up or 20 down and four up. It could vary. What John's problem was was his upstream channels, which is the amount of power it takes for your cable modem to get a signal back to the head end, to the cable company, were too high, meaning his modem had to work harder than it could to get a signal there. And therefore, packet loss because the signal was being interrupted. And your levels were touching on, if your levels are above 45 and closing in on 50 dBMV, that's too high. 50 dBMV is about where it stops and things start getting unreliable. And I would see 54. Oh, I'm surprised your modem would even report it. Wow. Yeah, it was trying. And so I called them and I said, you got to send somebody out here to check this out. And they're like, well, we may have to charge you $80. And I'm like, yeah, whatever. Sure, yeah. And so the guy came out. It could have been your fault. If you have lots of splitters in the line or you've got crummy cables or something in your house, that can, a splitter will add generally, and you can get different types of splitters, but a two-way splitter of cable will add 3.5 dB to that number. So you very quickly can get yourself there if you're not careful. Oh yeah. And I tried to address it myself. I got what some call a tap and actually the tech that came out here called it a differential. But I tried to add that to reduce the loss on one side. That still didn't help. So yeah. So one thing, yeah, for what you said, and I did this in the past as well, is that I had like two splitters between where the line came into the house and my cable bought them. And I got rid of one of them and I just did it straight through because I'm like, well, I don't really need this splitter. But anyways, so the guy comes out, gets up on the pole, pulls out his protocol analyzer or whatever it is. It was some big tool to measure the levels and he was he was at it for a while. Sure. And then he came, you know, he came back and I'm like, yeah, so what's up? And he's like, yep, it was us. Yeah. It could also have been your modem. Like, I mean, it wasn't in this case, but just for anyone that this is this is a classic problem with cable modems. I see this anytime someone is having an internet problem, it's like, okay, let's look at those power levels that like, especially if it's packet loss, that it is almost, and I don't wanna say always, but almost always upstream power levels that are the issue there. It was, you know, pretty classic scenario. I've seen it several times in different locales. One time it was a, you know, bad cable underground that they had to rip up and fix. One time it was that my cable modem was hit by lightning and it was, you know, no longer functioning properly and that was the symptom. But yeah, it's a pretty normal thing and it's worth, again, you know, we say this a lot on the show, but if everything is working okay for you, today is the day to go to that DOCSIS diagnostics page and learn what your normal is. Because for me, like in this one house, depending on how I have my modem configured and where it's coming from, I've seen those upstream power levels at 35 dB and I've seen them at 45 dB and both are okay, but I need to know what normal looks like so that I can look at it and say, hey, well, wait a minute, you know, my normal for this particular setup with those splitters, et cetera, et cetera, is whatever, 45, or if it's 35 and I see it at 45, it's like, oh, what happened? Something happened. Yeah, so yeah. So I think what happened because he didn't, the problem was not solved immediately. So he did replace, I think he replaced some components. He also came in the house and actually put new connectors on the end of all of my cables. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's the stuff in the basement because he had the tools neat. He did that very quickly and he also gave me a new cable to go from my wall to my cable modem. Nice. But he was like, you gotta wait 48 hours before checking back in because I suspect they had to replace a component or reconfigure something somewhere. Oh. So that's the only thing he said. So he didn't solve the problem immediately. And actually I verified that is that I was still experiencing packet loss. But then all of a sudden two days later, my levels have not changed. My power levels have not changed at all. They've been stable for the last several days. And that was the biggest sort of indicator to me was that you would check them and then refresh the page and they would be several DB difference. Like, oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. That like that should be steady Eddie. Yeah. It was electrically fighting with something that was broken somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And just so that we're not missing out, your downstream power levels are also important. That's the amount of power that your cable modem is getting from the head end. And that the goal for downstream power levels is to be zero. But there is a tolerance factor from negative 15 DBMV to positive 15. So as long as it's the closer to zero, the better negative 15 to positive 15, your splitters will impact that opposite of the way that they impact your upstream power level. So whereas adding a splitter increases your upstream power level, adding a splitter decreases your downstream power level. So there is a bit of a balancing act to do there. Just FYI, you kind of got to find your half. And actually my adding the tap, I can see the result of it is that my downstream levels were close to zero. Now they're all at six because the thing that I, because the tap that I got introduced, I forget the exact number, maybe six. Well, then you have it on the wrong side of the tap because the tap should only do one DB. Like so a two way splitter will cause you to lose seven decibels. A normal splitter splits that evenly between both outputs, negative 3.5 and negative 3.5. You can buy a special type of splitter that I call a tap. I don't, you said your guy called it something else. But the idea is it takes that seven and it goes one on one channel and six on the other channel. So if you're seeing six, I would say you've got that on the wrong channel. You only, you want your cable modem on the one side, not the six side. I don't know, it's, it could be whatever he replaced. Got it. Oh yeah, that's sure. Yeah, everything impacts this stuff for sure. Well, actually when I first hooked up the tap or the differential, as the guy called it. Sure. I did hook it up the wrong way because all of a sudden all my numbers got terrible. And I'm like, whoops. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, interesting thing. Yeah, there was an in and out and a tap. And I put, yeah, I think I put my cable on the tap side which is what I was not supposed to do. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the tap side is the high side. The, right, the tap side will do the 60B or whatever it is for that one. Yeah. Fascinating. And the thing is in all cases, cable TV was fine. It reported, it reported the same signal strength and the same signal to noise ratio, no matter what. And that makes sense because cable TV, for the most part, is only using downstream. It's not routinely using upstream. So it can be a little more, it's more tolerant in that regard. Yeah, cool. All right, so yeah. Glad they fixed that. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, right. No, it's worth killing the cable company in those scenarios that's like, I found with Comcast the best way, the best support I've gotten is through their online chat interface. Now, obviously, if you're having connection problems, the online chat interface might also have those problems because, you know, one begets the other. But if you can get them there with Comcast, the online chat interface is fantastic. Those folks have, I mean, I've been with them 14 years and they've been stellar every time, so. All right, let's get back to some Mac-based learning here. Listener Jeff says, back in episode 784, you were talking about booting Mojave into a virtual machine. He says, I got caught. The problem is that if you are getting the error, the copy of the install Mac OS Mojave application is damaged when trying to install Mojave in a virtual machine or elsewhere, you need to download a new installer from the App Store because the certificate in that old version of the installer has expired. He says, I like many of you other Mac geeks and I'm waving my hand here too. He says, I like to keep an archive of installers. Unfortunately, when those certificates expire, those installers are not as good. You can tweak the date on your system and try and ram them through and all that stuff, but Apple actually has a solution for us and their installers are available on the App Store or sometimes easier for direct download and we will put these links here in the show notes so that you folks can go download new copies of these installers. So Jeff, thank you so much for sharing this. This is killer to have all of these just available right there. It's good. Did you go download all your new installers, John? Mm-hmm, not yet. Okay, yeah. Go get them before Apple kills them off again. I mean, killing them off is not necessarily the right phrase to use, but they do make it difficult to go and get these things sometimes. So, there you go. We'll put links to all of them there and I think we've got Mojave, Hi, Sierra and Sierra. So, it's good. All right, and then on that same topic, Nibbs tweeted an interesting thing that I didn't quite realize. Nibbs said to us on Twitter, we are at MacGeek.com on Twitter, but Nibbs said in a recent episode, you talked about redownloading the macOS installer if it's corrupted. A new way to do that in Catalina via the terminal is to use the command software update space dash dash fetch dash full dash installer. And we will put that code in the show notes so that you, so you don't miss out on getting that wrong. We'll code it up so that it's easy to copy out of the show notes. And the show notes are always at macgeek.com or you can go to macgeek.com and put it in your email address and then we'll send you the show notes every week when they are released. But thank you, Nibbs. That's great. That will you, he says, I use it to download the latest installer and then create an up-to-date USB installer when an update drops. So yeah, that's pretty good because the Catalina installer that you download from the app store is often just this small little file. But if you want the true full installer, you issue that command and it'll go slurp down the whatever six gig, you know, installer that's out there. So I like this. This is good. We are in the right realm here, John. All right, Greg has a tip to share. Do you wanna take this one, John? Yes. Okay. So, Greg says, thought I would share this in case anyone else runs into this issue. I was helping a client yesterday that recently upgraded to Catalina. They asked me to completely erase and reinstall everything. They had good reasons to do that. They mainly had the default Apple apps and a few others. They had everything enabled in iCloud, including photos, desktop, and documents. So it was simple to restore, especially since they didn't have a lot of data. I did a manual backup in addition to Time Machine. I booted an internet recovery and opened this utility. I erased both the Macintosh HD and the Macintosh HD data volume separately. I clicked to reinstall Catalina to the Macintosh HD volume. After I restored the data in a few apps and I tested a few apps, at the end of the session, I ran Time Machine to make sure it worked and it failed fairly quickly. I got an error message that said this, two of the disks to back up to have the same name. Rename one of the disks name is Macintosh HD-data. And then it has a discussion thread that Apple discussion thread that I guess talks about this. I then noticed on the desktop two volumes with the same name called Macintosh HD data. I went to this utility and saw three volumes, Mac HD and two data volumes. I saw three people that commented at the link above where they fixed the issue by deleting in disutility the data volume that only had one megabyte. Since the other data volume had many gigabytes of data, it was simple to know which one to delete. I saw that in disutility and deleted that volume by highlighting it and clicking the minus button. After that, there were no data volumes on the desktop and it was hidden like it should be. After that, I was able to successfully back up to Time Machine. Wow. Huh, that's interesting. It somehow added a double data volume. I mean, it makes sense, yeah? Yeah, yeah. I'm having some Time Machine weirdness. I think it's because they've changed the file format. So it used to be a sparse bundle. Okay. And now it's called, now if you look at the file that it writes to, it has .backup bundle. Right. Oh, right. Dev, you looked up what the difference is between the two? I'm not quite sure yet. I think I found one article that said, oh yeah, they changed this. Okay. They didn't really explain why. Yeah, and I was having my Time Machine backup so I finally decided not to take the old file. Right. The one of my Mac Mini, it migrated that over to the new Catalina format without any problem. It was the one of my Mac Pro, maybe because I was doing it wirelessly. It was acting up. So I'm like, you know what? Let me start from scratch. I saved the backup that I have of the old one in case I need to go back in time. And I did it over a wired connection because that's gonna be faster than a and more reliable share and doing it wirelessly. And now it seems to be okay. At one point it would just stall. It would just get to like 10 megabytes and just sit there and it's like, what are we doing? Huh. So I found a post on Apple's discussions that talks about how if you just changed, someone wants to get inside their backup bundle. And one of the commenters said, just change the extension name from dot backup bundle to dot sparse bundle and you'll be able to open it up. So I'm not, they are certainly very similar if not exactly the same. So that's an interesting thing. Huh. Well, there you go. Listener Tim had an interesting experience with Time Machine as well. Tim said, I have a full-time job where I use macOS all day but I'm also a part-time grad student in computer science at a local university. For the school gig, I'm currently taking a class that requires Ubuntu Linux. So I want to set up a dual boot Linux macOS on my MacBook Pro. To do that, I need to shrink the size of the APFS container which holds macOS and my data volumes. Then use the recovered free space for the Linux stuff. The issue I ran into, Disk Utility flat out refused to let me shrink the container. The system is a 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro with a one terabyte SSD, and running the partition command on the APFS container in Disk Utility reported, this container has 350 gigs used, and its minimum size is 0.998 terabytes. Man, true to its word. The only thing it would let me do was to create a puny 0.002 terabyte, i.e. two gigabyte partition at the end of the volume. While Linux is supposedly able to fit into two gigs, I'm shooting for a little more like 50 gigs so I can actually do things and save files. So I did some web searching, and someone suggested using the command line Disk Utility instead of the GUI app. Figuring that my problem might stem from a Catalina permissions lockdown, I decided to check if running Disk Utility with SUDU would help. It didn't, but it did give an error message that headed me down the right path, and his side rant is, why wouldn't Disk Utility give me the exact same error message so that I didn't have to go through this extra step? And the error message was negative 69521. Your APFS container resize request is below the APFS system imposed minimal container size, and here's where it gets good. In parentheses, it says, perhaps caused by APFS snapshot usage by Time Machine. And so, he found another article now with this newfound wisdom in the error code that said you need to remove all Time Machine backup stores, disable all destinations, et cetera. You can re-associate your backups later, but following this, you should be fine and be able to resize the volume. Sure enough, that's what he did. He went into Time Machine, removed all his backup destinations, and he said, don't worry, he was able to re-associate them later and everything picked up where it left off, all good. No backups were harmed or lost in the process. He says, but after that, I ran Disk Utility and used the partition tool to shrink the APFS container, and then step four, he says, was enjoy a tasty beverage because it finally works, and that did it. So, very interesting that it makes perfect sense that Time Machine would sort of claim the extra space on the volume for its snapshots because Time Machine is taking those snapshots regularly, especially on a portable machine where you might not always be connected to your backup destination by turning off Time Machine, essentially, then really kind of disassociating the volume from Time Machine. It kills off all of those snapshots or processes them, but it also stops you from being tied to that volume size. So, it's entirely possible that there were some snapshots lost in the process, but backups were not. So, what you might wanna do before you do this is to run a Time Machine backup, which will process through all of those snapshots and get them onto your Time Machine volume, then disassociate so that you know that you've got everything over there and everything's good. Thank you for that, Tim. That's an interesting one, huh, John? Definitely. Definitely, he says. Yeah, you know what I definitely wanna do, Mr. Braun, is I wanna talk about our next two sponsors if that's okay by you. Dandy. All right. ExpressVPN is not only our next sponsor, but it turns out that they are the best VPN service that I've ever used. I've tested a lot of them. We started using ExpressVPN here when they became sponsors about a year ago and it turns out they're the best. Edge makes me really happy. It makes all of this very easy because we love to recommend stuff to you folks that not only do we use, but that we use because it's the best. And listener Ron has a note that he sent in that I'd like to share. He says, my wife and I, the kids are all grown, are heading to Italy on Friday and finally signed up for ExpressVPN using the expressvpn.com slash mgg promo, of course. He says, it could not have been easier to get my MacBook Pro, my iPad and our two iPhones set up and it just works. At the hospitals where I work, the wifi is extremely locked down, but I was able to access sites I never could get to before. Don't worry, he says, nothing nefarious. Don't know what took me so long, he says, but it's really quite seamless. Thanks for the tip and the discount. Yeah, that's the thing. You can do this. It's fast, it's reliable and ExpressVPN takes privacy and security to the next level with their technology called Trusted Server that ensures their VPN servers all run from RAM and no data logs are written to a server's hard drive or SSD or anything like that, even by accident because it's all in RAM. As soon as it's turned off, boom, it's gone. So, as Ron noted, there's a deal. So if you want the best in online security and privacy protection, head over to expressvpn.com slash mgg for three extra months free with your one year package. Protect your internet today with the VPN that we trust here to keep our data safe. Go to expressvpn.com slash mgg to get started. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. What if you could make your work take less work? Well, you can with our next sponsor, Captera because Captera helps you find the right software for your needs fast so you can get back to business even faster. You can compare thousands of software options, read over a million reviews of products and instantly narrow down to your favorites because these are reviews from real people. So you know that what you're about to pick for your business to use whatever software it is, they've got so many different categories, like 700 different categories. So you know what you're gonna pick is gonna work because other people have already tested it out for you. Find the right software right now and you can do it all for free at captera.com slash mgg. Oh yeah, that's right. It's free. Captera is the leading free online resource to help you find the best software solution for your business. Like it's amazing that this exists in the way that it does. And if you haven't checked it out yet, I encourage you to do so freely, truly. Go to captera.com slash mgg because would you rather be busy or would you rather be productive? I choose the latter and captera can help you get there too. captera.com slash mgg are thanks to captera for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, I'm a Quicken user, have been for a very long time and a few years ago, finally left Quicken 2007 behind because they'd gotten through their darker years in the middle there and actually created a product that was worth using. But Quicken 2007 lived for a long time on many of our desktops and really was truly an important piece of software. If you have not yet updated to Quicken for Mac beyond 2007, you have a problem because a Quicken 2007 is 32-bit so it won't run in Catalina. But even more importantly, the updater app that they wrote also must run 32-bit because it was all Cocoa code in Quicken 2007 and they didn't wanna rewrite that so they just used the parser to pull that in which means if you have a Quicken 2007 data file, Catalina cannot slurp it in. Well, Quicken for Mac, the latest update version 5.13 has a line in the release notes that talks about their solution. It says Quicken now uses a cloud service to convert Quicken 2007 and Quicken Windows files. This allows customers running Mac OS Catalina to continue importing files which I thought was really smart. So I'm glad they built the cloud service to do this because otherwise it would be a pain in the neck. So just wanted to share that for anybody that's on the still needs to import or if something happens and you have your old Quicken file, you're not left out in the cold, which is great. So thanks to the Quicken folks for doing that. Pretty good, huh, John? Nice little workaround. Yeah, you wanna take us to a quick tip from David about notes or not a quick tip but a tip he wanted to share about notes? An observation. There you go. Or he's sharing and I like it when you share. A couple of things regarding notes and here we're not talking Lotus notes. Have you ever used Lotus notes? I did. I mean, it was awesome, like in its day, the way it would do it's syncing and replication right from one node to another before we had like, you know, the internet. That was, you could dial up to different offices. Yeah. You could write apps I still remember though, is there was a page, I don't know if it still exists, but it was the notes user interface hall of shame and they would wag their finger at all the UI weirdness that was in the notes client. Anyway, David. But anyways, we're talking about notes on the Mac and iOS and a couple of things regarding notes. I've been using scanner pro for years and more recently the native notes app has added considerably more features. Saving scan PDF to file still feels like a workaround but still possible. I've also moved from Evernote to one note to note station and I've now moved to notes native. My needs are fairly simple, but the more I use native notes, the more I figure out how Apple has added features over time. The latest I figured out is import into notes and has a support article telling you how to do that. That's neat. This allows me to import folders of content into notes which isn't something that was available before and would have saved me a lot of time moving from one app to another over the years. Supposedly this was added in iOS 9 but I really didn't find it until today. My biggest issue as of late is as a family, we are paying the Apple tax of 9.99 a month for storage. So using their other services and yeah, and I looked and I think that's for two gigs of storage. But yeah, so you got to pay the Apple tax. So using other services like one note, Google, Zoho. Oh yeah, never heard that. We've all started to hit storage caps to the point of incurring charges. So going native is something the family users have been working towards. Synology note station was a true viable alternative but there are some quirky features and functions that I couldn't get past and using notes as its own issues but I don't seem to be as irritating as note station. We give a better note a long time ago. The cost model just doesn't seem worth it to me and never has and still doesn't. So thank you, David. Cool. Yeah, I like notes. Yeah, once they let us start sharing notebooks, right? We still can't, oh, I can't do that because I'm on Mojave, right? But we can, we will be able to do that in notes in Catalina. We can now, I guess. But we could look at that. We still use Evernote here for Mackie Gab because we can have a series of notebooks that we share that we can put PDFs into. We take all of your questions and put them in as PDFs and it works, the workflow. I mean, it's the best we've had so far. I think Synology note station would probably fit the bill for us. But, you know, Evernote, I don't know, Evernote works. So if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I do pay for a subscription on it though. So maybe I should think about moving my, not just our Mackie Gab stuff, but the entirety of my life over to note station. So I don't know, it's there. It was quirky for a while, especially before they had a desktop app. But now they have a desktop app so you're not forced to use it in a web browser. So maybe it's, yeah. Maybe it's worth checking out. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me correct myself. Apple charges 9.99 a month for two terabytes of storage. Correct, yeah, that's right. Okay, I'm on the 200 gigabyte plan, which is 2.99 a month because that works for me. Sure. Yeah, 200 gigs is probably close to what I use. I mean, we have the two terabyte plan because it's way cheaper to do that than to buy individual storage for each family member. And we can share our two terabyte plan among the family and that works out great. So, but yeah, I wouldn't, even with pictures and everything, I wouldn't need that much. So, yeah. Yeah, that's why I upgraded because once I moved over to iCloud photo library. Totally, yeah. And I still think their free space is five gigs. It's just like ridiculously small. Sucks, yeah. Yeah, for our whole family, we're using 800 gigs of our two terabytes. So we've got a 1.2 left, which is fine, you know, whatever. So, yeah. All right, yeah. D, I love this because it makes me feel better because I sometimes take the long road to get somewhere that's next door sometimes. So, D writes, I'm a recent listener, generally content with ditching windows for all things Apple and Mac upon retirement from corporate Microsoft systems took me a while to acclimate from office to pages and numbers, but I find for personal use, it's fine. And I appreciate the integration of iMessage contacts, podcasts, music, music lists and such between all of my devices. It says it wasn't until Catalina where I became discouraged. Well, yeah. Embarrassing as it is. He says, I enjoy and am probably addicted to an old DOS game called Master of Orion 2. I even went so far to partition a Windows OS to play it, although it was a hassle to switch back and forth. When I was able to emulate it through DOS box by buying it from Steam, I had all I ever needed on my MacBook Pro. Of course, that all came to a crashing end upon Catalina's release because DOS box was the only 32-bit app I used and it has not been updated to 64-bit. I don't think it will be, he says. When you discuss the ability to run Mojave within Catalina, I scan the internet how to do this. It is not intuitively obvious as we have discussed for sure. Downloading Parallels Lite from the Mac App Store to install Mojave was a complete crash and burn. It wanted an image and couldn't create it from the Mojave install package. I then downloaded Parallels directly from their site. This was easy without problems. However, running a Microsoft M002 program gave some weird error message, no joy. Given up, days later, I came up with a brainstorm to simply use Windows. I uninstalled Mojave from Parallels and went through the steps to install Windows 10. I even had a key, he says, from an old copy I bought for a previous MacBook Pro partition that I eventually had to wipe. And he says, anyway, today I am running the trial Parallels and my old DOS game just inside Windows. I'm amazed to be able to access files and transfer between the two operating systems and how smoothly Parallels works. If it wasn't for your show, I would never have had the idea to attempt this endeavor. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I said, reading this, you know, we all go through this where it's like, oh, I just need to get like that DOSBox app working. It's like, what do you need DOSBox for if you're just gonna run in a virtual machine anyway? Just run Windows. When I do things like this D, I refer to this as outsmarting myself. It's a phrase I stole from Pilot Pete and he nails it right on the head with that. It's like, yep, I made it way more complex than I needed to, but that's okay. You know, sometimes you just gotta throw up your arms and say, I outsmarted myself and D got a great solution out of this. So great stuff. Thank you for sharing that, D. Good stuff. Yeah, Mr. Braun? Kiss. Kiss, oh yes, keep it simple, stupid. Yeah, I like it. That's good. And RTFM. Read the Fantastic Manual. Oh, I thought it was the Fine Manual. Oh, well, there you go, see? Yeah. It could be something else, but we're a family show here. Family show, that's right, yes. All right, Thou, take it away. Hi, Dave and John. It's Val calling from London, UK. Just listening to the last show where you were having problems with your iCloud key chain. I don't know whether or not it was wittingly or unwittingly had the same kind of problem and it kept going around in loop, not recognizing my password and I kept seeing that little red dot at the top of the notification saying this. So at one point I thought, well, maybe I've done something wrong. So unwittingly what I did was I actually changed my iCloud email address to my iTunes email address and then logged in with my iTunes account and then once I did that, then I then went back and then put in my iCloud email and the iCloud password and hey, pressed or everything went fine. I can't remember if I had to log out first, but I think just simply changing it to something different meant that I didn't have to go through some of the heartache that you guys went through. So I don't know if, as we say over here, that was just like a fudge and it worked or there was something more significant behind it, but I remember having that particular issue and that's how I got around it. Thanks very much. Thanks, Val. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. There are two things about this that I wanna talk about. First of all is I learned a new phrase today which I have no doubt I will incorporate and that is, hey presto, I've never heard this phrase before and I like it. Like, hey presto, I outsmarted myself. Like things like that, I think I'll say. But secondly, logging into a separate account, that's an interesting way around this and keeps you from, by logging out of iCloud, of course you have to sort of shut that all down. The risks of logging into a separate account is if there is iCloud data in that account, you may be merging in things that you don't want, but if you were previously in your past life prior to the way iCloud works today, using a separate account for your iTunes purchases and you still have that and it's not, technically it is an iCloud account but you're not using it that way, then you wouldn't, hopefully, wouldn't have any data in there that would merge in. But I just wanted to warn everyone, in Val's scenario, you either were smart or lucky or both, but you didn't have data that was gonna get in your way. Just be aware of that, folks, if you're gonna do something like this. But I like that idea, that's pretty good. Thoughts, John? No, okay. All right, cool. In 786, we talked about NFC tags and triggering things for personal automations and Bartek offers a correction. NFC tags only will trigger on the iPhone XS or later and that's correct. So these are phones that were released last year, the XS and XR and XS Max all have the ability to do the auto NFC tag things, but not anything prior to that. So the X, even though they can read them, you won't get the personal automation trigger for them. So thank you for that clarification, Bartek, good stuff. Coolie, how did what I see happen? What are you, we're gonna need some context. I'm seeing in front of me an email with a tweet in it. How would you do that? Oh, so right, okay. So as I said earlier in the episode, way deep into now making the sausage. So I mentioned that we use Evernote and we save PDFs to Evernote. When I'm reading Twitter and someone like Bartek sends in a note to us that says, hey, here's a thing that you should mention in the show. We manage everything via our email box at feedbackatmakikev.com, right? So what I do is I take the, if I'm in Twitter, and just the Twitter app, and I use the Twitter app because it's the only one that actually gets notifications properly. And I just click on the tweet, I hit the little share thing and I say share tweet via, and that brings up the Mac OS share sheet. And then I could create an automation here, but I haven't yet. So I just say mail and I type in feedbackatmakikev.com into the to field and it sends the email. And then when I'm going through email later, I make a PDF of the email. Okay. I thought maybe you wrote a script or I could have like a bot or something that would see the tweet and then redirect it. Oh, I could. I bet I could use something like Zappier to look at any tweets that were replies to us and email those to feedbackatmakikev.com. So there you go. That's right. He said feedbackatmakikev.com. Which makes it four times in the episode. I don't know if that's an okay thing anymore. But do over. That's right. Wipe it clean folks, back to the start. But yeah, so thanks Bartek. Good stuff. And then listener Jay had a tip from a few episodes ago. He says, I think I've shared some of this with you guys in the past. I've traveled Europe a lot and have used cellular service on most of my recent trips. The US carrier international plans are very convenient but are very expensive to the tune of 10 bucks a day sometimes depending on your carrier. T-Mobile is usually free. He says, since there is a per day charge finding another option could save me a good deal of money when my trip is more than a few days. I have purchased international sims from companies that operate in the states and I wanted to share, this is important. We've had trouble doing this. He says, the company I use most recently is simoptions.com. I've used Holiday Phone in the past as well and just learned of a third company named internationalsim.com. I would just check the price on each of these sites for a sim with the data voice text service that I need. I usually spend 50 to 60 bucks to get a data only sim or mostly data plus a little voice for an upcoming trip to Germany. I just paid $49 for a sim options card with 20 gigs of data, 120 voice minutes and 1,000 SMS minutes messages rather. He says, this is fairly convenient but it's not quite as inexpensive as buying a sim from a local provider like Tim in Italy or when you get off the plane in the airport there's always options. He says, mobile provider stores are easy to find and it takes 15 to 20 minutes to purchase a sim and then install it. So yeah, interesting. That's great to know. I like that these options available makes life a little easier for folks that need a physical sim. Of course, if you can do it with a virtual sim you're in good shape even better. So we will put links to all three of those in the show notes at mackeygab.com. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? It'll be good to check these out if and when I travel out of the country. Don't have anything on the schedule right now. No, but soon they'll let you travel out of the country again. I think it'll, it's just a matter of time. No, that's not what I meant. Oh, okay. I'm allowed my passports up to date. Oh, as far as you know. Yeah. Yeah, I better check my passport. Mm-hmm. It drives me crazy. I went to get my driver's license renewed because you know, my birthday was in September and that was the fourth year, you know, I needed to get it done. And I figured, well, I'll go get the real ID. They need so much documentation to process that real ID thing. And what doesn't make sense to me is that the real ID is basically like a subset of, it's like a passport light, right? I can use it to get it in and out or back into the country from Canada and from Mexico. But like, I can't use it to go to Europe. And yet, if I had my passport with me, I wouldn't need the real ID at all. But they need more than just my passport at the DMV to give me a real ID. It's like, well, wait, this thing that I'm giving you has all of the rights of the thing that you're gonna give me back. And yet, it's not enough to prove to you that you should give me those rights. It's weird, the pain in the neck having to bring all that extra stuff down. Yeah, the last... Yeah, I did it a number of years ago. I'm just like, you know, you're gonna need it eventually in order to do certain things. But that's the thing is you don't... Venture, federal facilities... You don't need it eventually. If you have a passport and you carry it with you at all times, you do not need a real ID. And that's the part that like most people don't... The system doesn't seem to acknowledge that that is actually the truth of it all. It's weird to me, so. Yeah, the thing that, and here's a little tip here, in a lot of states, but not here in my county anymore, you can go to AAA and get a license. And that's actually where I got my real ID compliant license. And it took like... Interesting. Minutes instead of hours. Yeah, DMV and Connecticut is a disaster. The last time I went, but then the deal fell apart between AAA and Fairfield County in the state. The last time I got my license, I had to wait two hours at Narwalk DMV. Yeah, DMV and Connecticut's a disaster. Hearing New Hampshire, it's not bad. I mean, even for my real ID thing, that was the longest I've ever waited at DMV for anything. And it was like, maybe 30 minutes, maybe. So it was just a fiasco with all the paperwork. I mean, a lot of stuff you can do online, like your registration and stuff like that. But the license, you gotta show up. And it was also, they have a board showing the wait time. Sure. The thing is, I checked it for Narwalk and it was like, yeah, 30 minutes. Oh, cool. By the time I got there, it was two hours or two and a half hours. Of course. Of course. All right. So we promised that we had some questions about troubleshooting network issues. Javier writes, it seems that I got caught as I'm having quite a thorny issue with my iMac that I'm hoping you can help me solve. First, the setup. My house is wired with Cat5E Ethernet. The cables terminate in a box in my closet to which I have connected a 16 port Ethernet switch. The modem is connected to my router, a Synology 2600. The router is then connected to the switch to which everything else is connected. My Synology NAS, my Apple TV, my iMac, my smart TV, et cetera, et cetera. Recently, I have been experiencing extreme slowdowns in my internet connectivity to my Ethernet connected iMac to the point that it is unusable for anything that requires connecting to the internet. Any site I try to reach using Firefox or Chrome just never loads. Interestingly, Safari works a bit better in that some sites load, albeit with quite a delay. I've tried to run speed tests using Fast.com like everything else it takes forever to load if it ever does. What's interesting is that my wireless devices, my iPad and my iPhone seem to be working fine. They do anything I ask of them, zero delays. They load any websites and all speed tests work just fine. Back at my Mac, I've run Onyx. I've also rebooted my switch modem and router all to no avail. I've gone into my system preferences and renewed the DHCP lease on my iMac, but that hasn't helped either. Finally, I logged out of my main account and logged into a separate test account for troubleshooting purposes. Same thing happens. It is virtually impossible to connect my iMac to any website even to my router's own local 192.168.1.1 address. Finally, the problem seems to exist either with the wired or wireless connections from my iMac. And just to make absolutely sure that it's only my iMac, I booted a Mac mini and everything works as it's supposed to. Okay, iMac is running Catalina 10.15.1. So, he went through, so I know the answer because he wrote back in, but when troubleshooting things like this, the first thing to think about is it's clearly something with the network stack on that iMac in some way because it's affecting both Wi-Fi and Ethernet and it's not affecting any other devices. Okay, first thing to check, do you have any kind of VPN installed? Because a VPN gets in the way of the network stack in Catalina. And number two, have you set any custom DNS servers? Because those delays sound like it's not able to look up what it needs to get to. And you would look for that if you go to system preferences, network, and DNS settings are set per connection. So if you have Ethernet and Wi-Fi, you would do this for both of them, but for Ethernet, you click on it, you choose advanced, you go to DNS. Make sure there's nothing custom in there. Everything there should be gray, which means it's inherited from your router and not manually overridden by you. There might be some times when you wanna do some manual overrides, now is not one of them. So check that, and then also try booting in safe mode, right? Because that's gonna not load any third party extensions like maybe a VPN app or things like that. It turns out his problem was an incompatibility between Catalina 10.15.1 and Intego's virus barrier. Intego has since come out with an update that does work with Catalina 10.15.1, but that was the issue here. So that kind of falls into the VPN category, but not entirely, and it's not necessarily the kind of thing you would think about, but virus protection or any kind of protection like that is literally built to get in your way. It needs to really be tightly integrated with the OS and compatible with the OS in order to work. So these are fun things to troubleshoot, but it's worth bearing in mind how it all works. What do you think, Mr. Braun? Yeah, at first I thought it was maybe a network hardware issue. And I'll just offer one tip here is that Apple does offer a tool and that's their own network utility. So if you run their network utility, there's gonna be a info tab and then it's gonna show all of the interfaces. So like for example, Ethernet, and it'll show you the status as well as send errors, receive errors. So if it was like a bad cable or a bad Ethernet port, you would see it using this tool. Right, right, that's true. Yeah, well, you'd see some indications of that. Like yeah, you, well, maybe. But if something's wrong in the Ethernet stack, you might, or in the network stack, that tool may lead you to believe there's a hardware problem when there's not too. Oh, yeah. Right, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it could be. No, it's just at least on this machine. As far as I know, those are contained within the, oh no, it's not, okay. Yeah. No, I'm looking here, yeah. So in this machine, the Ethernet is actually a Broadcom chip and the Wi-Fi is an Apple product, so. Right. So for vendors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, but it shows link status and if your cable was flaky or the hardware was acting up, or if you see send or receive errors, which you should almost never see. Yeah. Yeah, but again, those can be, I mean, you can run that. What is that developer tool? I can't remember it off the top of my head, but there's a pref pane that you can install that will simulate like network problems by introducing packet loss and things like that just so that you can test your app and make sure that your app gracefully deals with those things and doesn't just die the moment a packet gets lost for the first time or something like that. I think it's called network tester or something like that. It's a pref pane you can install. So again, that stuff is, it is potentially influenced by software. And so I wouldn't like, the network stack is a touchy little thing. So I would, one other thing to troubleshoot that is go into network, highlight whatever connection or connections you're using and delete them. I know this sounds weird to go in and like highlight ethernet and click the minus button and it's gone. It didn't, you didn't erase your ethernet port. Don't worry, it's still there. Hit the plus sign and then add a new connection, either wifi or ethernet or both to your machine so that you're getting a fresh at least build of that portion of the network stack and that could, that could do it. So yeah, Brian and Ro in the chat room talked about network link conditioner is the little tool that does that. Thank you, Brian. Yeah, it's fun. We'll put a link to that in the show notes because, because why not, you know? Yeah, I still think there's something monkey with Catalina. Oh, well for sure. I mean, clearly moving from 10.15 to 10.15.1, you know, change something in the network stack for him. So I would say yes, there's definitely something. Yeah. Yeah, cause before, before I applied the latest upgrade, I would actually see when the Mac loses connection with the server, sometimes you'll get a message saying, you know, disconnected or something like that. And my Drobo would come up and it would be like, dude, your Drobo's gone. I'm like, well, no, no, it's there. I see it. Right, right. So I actually switched. So all my connections, I should have done this long ago. So all of my connections to my NAS devices were using AFP. Probably should be using SMB, right? Yeah, we talked about this, but for a show, I just don't, yes, all your NAS connections should be using SMB without question, I think. There are some folks, there were several discussions at Mac Tech where folks were like, I don't know, AFP is still faster when you do the right, you know, when you test it out. So there are folks that still find AFP to be a better solution. And then Time Machine, at least up until recently, I didn't think Time Machine would work over SMB. I thought Time Machine was only an AFP thing. And it would, you know, it would just find a way to mount the share with AFP using whatever credentials you gave to it. But you're saying that you're successfully, wow. You're saying that you're successfully using Time Machine with burning down the neighborhood or something. But you're using Time Machine successfully with AFP, is that, or with SMB rather? Yeah, so the Synology has a place where you can say, oh yeah, by the way, make Time Machine aware of SMB resource, and I disabled the AFP protocol and it's working, so I would say the answer is yes. All right, yeah, that sounds like yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Though it's weird though, I thought SMB was faster. I guess you're saying, based on your sources, it may not be. Yeah, yeah, a lot of folks were like, nah, I wouldn't mess with SMB. I go, oh, okay, huh. That, you know, I say this all the time, that's one of the things I love about Mac Tech is those people, everybody there, everybody there is an expert at something and even if you think you're an expert at something and you might be, there's definitely someone there that knows something about it that you don't. And because everybody there is in it all day, experiencing it, everybody has their own sort of environments that they manage devices and tech in and that's the beauty of it is there's just so much to learn, it's fantastic. Like the sessions are good, lunchtime and the hallway track are even better. Like that's where you really, really learn. So I love that conference and we will be sure to get our discount code even earlier next year. So I promise that'll happen. But for now, we are, it's really time to bring the band in not to, you know, not like we did before where it was just like a little tease at the 10 minute mark or wherever we were. Thank you, everyone for listening and contributing and sending in all your tips. Such a great episode. I learned so much today. Like I feel like I've got my, like all of November's worth of my five things per week of MGG. I feel like I got to check it all, check off all the boxes. So thank you for all of our premium listeners. You know, you know, the email address that's available to everyone, but if you're a premium listener, you can use premium at macgeekab.com. We would love to hear from you. We mentioned our Twitter address at macgeekab throughout the episode. Send us a review. Go to macgeekab.com slash reviews and review us on the Apple podcast directory. We would love to have your review there. It really, really does make a big difference for us. I wanna thank all of our sponsors. Of course, ero.com slash MGG, ancestry.com slash MGG, expressvpn.com slash MGG, and capterra.com slash MGG in this episode. And then of course, smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Otherworldcomputing at maxales.com, barebones at barebones.com, linode.com slash MGG. All good stuff. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next week. Hopefully, we'll all be used to the time change by then. John F. Braun, what do you got for me, man? What do I got? I got three things for you, man. And that is, don't get caught. Maiden.