 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab episode 688 for Monday, December 18th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in cool stuff found, questions, tips. We share the first and last one and the middle one. We try to answer. In fact, the goal is for every single one of us to learn at least four new things each and every time we get together. It's still 2017, so the number's still four. The jury's out on what's going to happen to that number in 2018. We don't even know. We don't even know. That's the future. We accept time as a linear construct for the purposes of this show. We know it's not, but we accept it that way. Sponsors for this episode include otherworldcomputing. We're going to talk about their USBC travel doc and there are a pro 10 SSDs, but first here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. Would we say that you're in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun at the same time as me? Is that like, does that fit with our acceptance of time as a linear construct? My understanding of the dynamics of the space time continuum is that, yes, this is entirely possible. Okay. All right. Well, it could be improbable. I mean, I really don't think that time is a linear thing. I think it's really an abstract concept that we've just all agreed to see in a certain way so that we can relate to each other. Hey, on Facebook, you know, Robbie posted, he actually posted a question and it was just... Were you just diving right in? I'm diving right in. Wow. Well, things are getting weird. Man, I don't know. Should we not? I'm going to stick with Robbie. Actually, I have a question to ask you. But Robbie posted a poll asking how many people use the natural scroll direction on their track pads or magic mice versus how many people use the unnatural or non... I don't want to say it's unnatural. It's just not natural. You uncheck the box for natural. And he linked in that post, so he linked in that post to a cool stuff found called scrollreverser from pilotmoon.com. And what's handy here is if you say, and this is not a weird thing for those of you that don't have both on the same computer, what scrollreverser does makes sense. You could set natural scrolling, which by natural scrolling, what Apple means by that is when you scroll up on a page, like you use two fingers and scroll around, when you do that on a web page, the page moves up. Whereas in the old days, scrolling up like that, it would go the other direction. And either can feel natural, to be perfectly honest with you, it's just whatever you're used to. Well, you might want it that way, the natural way, on your track pad. But on your magic mouse, because you're used to the whole concept of a scroll wheel when you have a mouse in your hand, you might want it to go the other direction and therefore you might want it to be reversed. And that's what scrollreverser lets you do. It lets you really customize all this stuff, which is pretty cool, right? It could be. It could be. Yeah. Depending on which way you roll, or which way you scroll. There's the title for the show. Well, this is scary. But I think your question to me, Dave, would be, what do you do, John? Was that your question? No, no. In fact, I'm just going to jump right over and go to my questions. So I was driving home because we're recording this late at night, not that late, but later than normal. And my son had a hockey game or whatever tonight. So we pushed the schedule later. And I was driving home and earlier today, it was snowing. The mid-twenties on the old temperature there on the thermometer. And it was snowing all day, not a lot of snow, but just kind of constantly drizzly snowing. And on my way home, it's raining, but it's 25 degrees outside. Now this happened three or four days ago with the same thing here. What that means is we get snow, nice layer of snow, then we get a crusty layer of ice on top of it. And anywhere that you might have cleared snow from just turns into icy death. Then this is happening because it's raining from up above. So it's water in the sky, but once it hits the ground, then there's a problem. Temperature here on Terra firma is well below freezing. Yeah. So what I need you to do, because you're a smart guy, I need you to figure out how to stop the clouds from acting this way. And if you can't do that, can you give us a quick tip on maybe fixing a bad handbrake rip? I could. I mean, the solution to the, you know, slippery problem is, you know, you have your local whoever does your roads, you lay down the salt of whatever sort. I'm not worried. Well, yes, for the roads. Yeah. But I like I'm talking about like my driveway and every like my decks and everything are just going to be a disaster for the next three days. Yeah. Well, I just say just, you know, hide in your house. That's what you do a few days and you have to collect some go to the store, get your bread, get your milk, get your eggs, make French toast. That's why I assume everybody people. I don't know. I still don't know why those specific items are all depleted when I go to my local grocery store when there's just it, that's it doesn't get me. So your question me, Dave, and it's a very good question. So the other day, Dave, as I often do, so I get some DVDs from various sources or Blu-rays and you've helped me with a Blu-ray thing with an article that you did. Yeah. Oh, for ripping them, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have to you have to do something extra. Right. The thing is, so the other day I was running handbrake, I had a DVD from the library and I had not yet watched it and they have a time frame. So what I typically do, which I think is within the spirit of the law is I'll rip it, store it on my NAS, use a Synology to watch it. And then when I'm done, I'll erase it. So I think that's within the spirit of the law. Would you do a? I'm sure you remember to erase every single one of those, John. Well, I do. No, absolutely. No, I'm quite honest for rentals. I do. Yeah. For things that I own. Well, that's different. Right. But anyways, the other day, so I ran handbrake and it goes through a couple of passes, typically. So it's like, yeah, I'm scanning your DVD, everything's great. OK. But then what happened, I don't know what I did. I don't know if it was a recent OS update. Is every now and then, Dave, I found, especially with High Sierra, I'd like to reinstall the OS to try to maybe take care of some lingering issues. I don't know if it's something you want to do every day or every week or every month, but I think it may be good practice. What do you think? Reinstalling your OS just. Well, go into recovery and saying, you know, download it and reinstall it. I had to do that last night on my laptop because I actually and we'll talk about this maybe a little later, but I wanted to turning off system integrity protection to do another thing. And after I went into recovery mode, I just went to the terminal. I disabled SIP and then rebooted back around. And it's like, yeah, OS won't. It was that standard issue where it said it couldn't find OS installer that MPKG or was like, oh, crap. So I just reinstalled it was easier that way. Serious, what happened? Yeah. So I put a DVD in there. It saw it. Handbrake knew it. You know, it saw it and it started going through its process. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I'm scanning it. I'm checking things out and then I'm getting ready to rip. And then it's like, yep, I'm done. And I'm like, hmm, that's not good. Here's the thing, handbrake and other ripping utilities need access to one of the. So the content on a lot of media is encrypted. Well, how do you unencrypted? Well, one way to do that is that there is this library called libdvdcss. And that's typically stored in your, let me do PWD, which is print working directory, which I'm looking at on another machine right now. So typically that's stored in user slash usr slash local slash lib. But it wasn't working. I'm like, what's up with this, man? So I did a bit of surfing and one suggestion was if handbrake immediately fails, maybe your decryption library needs fixing. Sure. OK. And brew install libdvdcss. Well, I used cake. Oh, cake brew. Yeah. Yeah. So I use cake brew, but here's what I did. So the thing is, but, but there was an additional Well, there was a problem here. So I tried to sort of like, you know, I should probably update that library because I looked at it and it was very old. Sure. On my system, I don't even know where I got it from. Here's the deal. When I tried to run cake brew or brew in general and tried to install. So one of the packages that you can install is surprise libdvdcss. Yeah. When I tried to install it, it's like, well, yeah, there's already a copy in this other directory. So I'm really not going to do what you asked me to. It basically said I already see something in the directory where this is supposed to be. So I'm not going to overwrite it and I'm like, OK. So the solution was to go into slash user local lib, delete anything that had libdvdcss in it and then. Run brew package installer, which I'm sure others supported as well. And once I did that and ran it again, everything was great. Yeah. So if you had run brew from the command line, and we're just talking about. I mean, it really is just installing a library that needs to be there for for handbreak. But if you had done that from the command line, you probably would have been presented with a more verbose failure message that included essentially instructions on how to invoke brew in a way that it would overwrite what was already there. And without having to go through the rigmarole that you went through, it's just it's a different rigmarole. It's no easier or harder. It's just like, if you do that, if you do brew from the command line, it's really good about saying, hey, I couldn't do this. However, if you want me to just tell me this way and I'm off to the races. OK. Yeah. Well, the. The client that I used did, I mean, it gave me an error. It basically said I see something linked from a place that I should put stuff so I'm not going to do that. Sure. Yeah. No, I get your point. But once I did that, we're great. So. Cool. I don't know what I did to break it, though. I don't know if it was reinstalling the OS. Oh, I bet reinstalling the OS did. Yeah, for sure. OK. So it broke some symbolic link or some. It sounds like it put an old copy of libdvdcss out there that Handbrake didn't like. Mm hmm. Right. I mean, because it was it sounds like one was there, just not the latest one. And there you go. Yeah, it's just, you know, Handbrake gave a kind of weird error saying I give up, I don't know how to deal with this because it was encrypted because the library wasn't. Yeah, up to date, I guess. I guess. Yeah. Well, that was a nice little jam session on a quick tip there. Six minutes, but, you know, it's all good. Let's see, we'll burn through some of these other ones. Alex on Facebook posted. He had asked a while back how to pondered if there was a way to change the color of a custom tag in the Finder. And he says there is. He says, I found it in Finder preferences tags. And and you can add a new tag and and change the color. Right there. So thanks for thanks for letting us know that, Alex. Alex, sorry. And then also on Facebook in our Facebook group, Mackie Keb dot com slash Facebook, Aaron posted, he said, I just got a free Apple TV 4K from Direct TV. Now, all I had to do was sign up for four months of service at thirty five a month, a no brainer for me as I was on the PS view at forty dollars a month. But even still, even if you don't need a. Direct TV subscription, getting an Apple TV 4K for 140 bucks, that's a pretty good deal. So, you know, there you go. Sign up for Direct TV now for a short period of time. Good to go. I know it's pretty good. First, I'm going to need a 4K TV. No, you don't have a 4K TV. I don't know the TV that we got. Whatever it is, we've got a 60 inch plasma. It's it maxes out at 1080p. You still got that thing? Wow. No, you're you you're I don't know that you've seen this one. We have a we had a 42 inch plasma originally that we got, you know, whatever, 10 years ago or something, maybe more. But yeah, it was 11 years ago, actually. But but then we we upgraded in the living room. But I I've always preferred plasma and to be perfectly honest. It just the way our living rooms laid out, we really like and need sort of a wide viewing angle. And we've tried out, you know, some of the LCD TVs and stuff. And they just didn't quite cut it for for what we needed there. So I'm hoping to go and this was my plan. I bought like the last model year Panasonic plasma that existed and then jumped to I'm hoping to make the jump all the way to OLED, right? And skip the whole LCD LED like mess in the middle. That's that's my goal. Let's see if we'll see what I have. All right. So plasma. Based on what you've told me, offers superior, I think, contrast ratio. Is it the blacks or blacker? Correct. Yeah. Or can and I think OLED. Oh, it exceeds that. Correct. Yeah. And then LED may or may not. Right. Depending on. Yeah. OK. And LEDs got some some issues with viewing angle, like like your colors and things change as you again, it depends on the TV. But as you certainly go from center to the edges and then, but also like standing up and down, we watch a lot of TV both on the couch, but also on the floor. We have a fireplace kind of right there. And sometimes it's nice, especially when it's cold to sit by the fire and watch TV or whatever and watch a movie. And there you go. All right, John, you want to take a quick tip? This is going to be so quick, you're just going to be amazed. All right. Everyone, if you're a pro soft drive genius fan, I got an email from them, as did many of you, I'm sure. Drive genius 5.1 supports high Sierra. Get it. Wow, that's it. Wow. As far as I can tell, it does everything that your old favorite did, except it works with high Sierra and especially APFS. There you go. Are there any limitations to this? I mean, I went through it and the interface seemed to be pretty much the same. So I think they just, you know, it took them a little while to upgrade it. But it's one of my favorite tools, and I think one of your favorite tools for just general drive maintenance, you know, in addition to. So on the one machine I upgraded on, I didn't upgrade it on the mini yet, but I upgraded on the Mac Mac Pro and it also updates the. Drive pulse, right, of course, which is their monitoring utility, which now makes me question. Now, the other thing, of course, drive genius introduced recently is that they do malware stuff. So the thing is now I'm wondering if I should be running malware bites, which had its own bout of. Incompatibilities and I'm still running it on one of my machines. But I think do I need to anymore? Because it's kind of as far as I can tell, it's kind of built into well, it's overlapping now. So the reason that I switched over to malware bites, even though they had some RAM issues, was that drive genius didn't work, including their malware detection. So yeah, I don't know about you. I don't know if you I don't run any of that stuff anymore. It slows me down. But are you running or will you choose to run the latest drive genius with their malware stuff? Well, no, I generally don't run Drive Pulse because it's ridiculous. It wants to yell at me. No, I should I should and I will qualify for a lot of things. Well, you know, the thing is when I install free space on it, it doesn't like it they have and I've talked to them about this. No, I agree with you there. Their free space calculation is out of control because it wants me to have on my SSD. It wants me to have like 40 gigs free. It's like, guys, the way an SSD works, it's not going to get less efficient at 30 gigs free than it is at 40. You know, yeah. And they're like, no, we have a thing. I have a whole thing. If I'd known we were going to talk about this, I would have read. How could you maybe possibly address this? Like maybe put something in the preferences saying, don't here's the low watermark that I want you to. Yeah, it won't let you set your own low watermark. That's right. Yeah. So it's what, 10 percent or whatever the they have their own thing. Yeah, it's crazy or somewhere. I'm just not even going to get into it. Yeah. All right. Well, that wasn't quick. It was fun. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying that in a bad way. I'm just acknowledging the goal is not to be quick. It's for quick tips that you it usually is. But again, it's like ever wherever we go. Uh, Jay writes us with with a quick tip. Says I was listening to episode six seventy nine when I heard a couple of recurring questions that I might be able to answer with one submission to cool stuff found. First, the question of a notes app that will sync locally. And second, Pilot Pete Circus Pony's notebook dilemma, because it doesn't exist. He says, I love Devon think, but it's not for everyone. I can't remember this ever coming up on the show before. Another solution is notebooks, which you will find at notebooks app.com. Not only is it a handsome app with some unique features, but among syncing options is Wi-Fi sharing. And if you read the FAQs, you will find detailed instructions for migration from Circus Pony's notebook. So there you go. Thanks, Jay. That's great. Awesome stuff. All right. Well, you know, we had actually this question came in a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to give it some time to to ferment to ferment John. But listener Mark wrote in and and said, my confusion over people's enthusiasm for Plex remains unanswered. Some background, though, we're in a semi rural town in Queensland. So our internet is pretty ordinary using the remote access of Plex for me, he says, is not possible. So without that on the table, why Plex? I have an Apple TV for with a lot of compute grunt. So why would I need to find another compute resource to transcode my videos? Plex's client server solution, of course, requires it. The client on your Apple TV doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting. It's all left up to the server, which if you're running, say, a disk station might actually be slower than your Apple TV. Says, for folks who do not need the remote access Plex element, I would recommend infuse. This is a native Apple TV app and uses the Apple TV to do all of the transcoding. It has all the expected metadata capabilities and is run flawlessly for us for months. The free version does not support all of the video formats, IE MKV, but the premium version or the pro version, they call it, is well priced. It is. It's I think you can pay six bucks a year for it or maybe it's more than that, but it or $15 flat rate. And then you own it, depending on which way you want to buy it from the app store. So this sort of opened up some thought process for me, because one of the problems I have, and it doesn't matter whether it's Plex or or video station, if I'm watching a movie that I'm streaming from a box over there that's transcoding it for me. And I need to like rewind or fast forward or scrub around in it. Sometimes that works flawlessly. And sometimes it stops the movie dead in its tracks because, you know, you're asking this box over there to start transcoding this section. Oh, no, no, stop. Transcode this section. Oh, no, stop. Right. And then that gets wonky because you've got this server that's sort of disconnected from the client. With infuse, it's all happening locally. You just point infuse at your local library that's like file shared. It's got a SMB client in it, and then it goes through and it indexes all the metadata for your movies. So for the last couple of weeks, most of the time that we watch movies at home, anything from our private collection, we watch we've watched with infuse and it has been great. It's got a really nice interface. It's got, you know, it's got album art and all the metadata and everything. You don't get all the trailers and additional, you know, behind the scenes commentary and all that stuff that Plex tends to deliver you. Infuse doesn't do any of that. It's just about the movies that you have. But it works really well and it's a really smooth thing. I feel like I tried it a number of years ago and it was like, OK, but not. Not ready for primetime. Well, it's definitely ready for primetime now. So I wanted to I wanted to share that from from Mark. I have another thing to share on that, French on, but I'll let you I'll throw to you any questions, thoughts? Well, the thought I had. So we're talking about previews and just the viewing experience. The one thing I noticed in addition to, you know, my handbrake fail, which I fixed is that when it's it's scanning a title, a lot of times it'll say scanning previews. And I think what it's doing there is it's trying. It's putting additional information in the rip. Well, that's not that's not previews. Like, that's not trailers and such, right? No, I understand that. Yeah. No preview. When I get it's a preview in the sense that if you jump to a different part of the movie, it's going to show you a thumbnail at the very least. Oh, yeah. Yes. There's some of that that can be baked into the movie. You know, I got to be honest, though, I have completely stopped. Converting movies at all. I rip, like, you know, with generally with make M.K.V. for Blu-rays and it makes an M.K.V. file because that's what make M.K.V. does. And then that's it. I just put the M.K.V. in the Vobs and all this stuff from the subtitles and whatever in a folder for the movie and I it works great because I get. Well, because I'm not I'm not losing any quality. I'm keeping, you know, full quality on my library. Storage is cheap and and then there you go. It's just right there. Good to go. And infuse or Plex or whatever I want to use can transcode it on the fly. But it gets even more interesting. You know, John. Whoa. Well, hit me. I'd heard a lot about this company called Play On dot TV. And I started playing with it. No pun intended. It's a weird thing. You can, through this service. Get an undrammed video files of your favorite Netflix episodes, Hulu, HBO Now, HBO Go, all those things that generally you don't get to do that with. And what you do is you tell it, OK, this is what I want to get from my HBO account. Go. And it'll say, all right, we're going to like it literally says this in the app, we're going to go and have a computer watch that video and save what it sees. And then it's going to put that in a file for you that that will give you a link to download. Kind of sounds like a DVR. It's kind of like a DVR. Yeah. A virtual DVR. Exactly. All right, it's well, it's no different than like, you know, Xfiddy's X1 cloud DVR, right? It's the same sort of concept implemented differently, for sure. But but it works. And then you buy credits, you get your first credit for free just for signing up, but then you buy credits. And I think they're like, you know, 30 cents or something for a credit to get it to go and go do a job for you. It seems I don't know. Like I am I'm assuming they've sorted out whatever licensing issues they would need to. That's what you think. No, that's what I choose to think. John, there's a difference in the same vein. While we're talking about video playback, Leslie wrote us and and started me down a different path, John. And it's not necessarily one that's been easy. But my son, you should probably only choose one path. Yes. If you're on a discovery journey, then I encourage multiple paths. OK, well, this was a discovery journey. My life is a discovery journey, John. You know that. For all of us, for all of us, yeah. Or it should be. Leslie wrote, do either of you have the new Tevo Vox remote? You have to if you do, you have to update your Tevo service from Tevo Central, which is the user interface that Tevo's had basically forever to the new Tevo experience, which is the the name of this completely rethought user experience that Tevo now has. And Leslie finished by saying the changes are jarring. And now it takes more clicks to do just about everything. So I did. I, you know, I figured ahead of CES. I'm going to meet with the Tevo folks there. I should have a working knowledge of Tevo experience. Sure, we've covered enough on this show. You know, it's certainly a recurring topic and it has been for 12 years. So, yeah, so I did it. I don't have one of their Vox remotes. I've experienced that and and I can see where their Vox remotes would possibly make this better by simply skipping you over many of the more tedious aspects and elements of the new UX. But Leslie's right. I've been using it for about two weeks now and I'm used to it. I'm over the change resistance, but I'm not comfortable yet. It's it's clunky, the new UX. I think it almost requires voice as opposed to, you know, voice would enhance it. It seems kind of weird, a lot of extra clicks. But it's where we will all be with our Tevo soon. So it's some kind of if I have anything to say about it because they made a very minor change to their UI. On my bolt, Dave, and that they moved something from one place to another. And it's like, why did you do that? Yeah, it was like where to find, you know, my to-do list or something. But but they reshuffled the UI for no as far as I can tell, beneficial reason to me because. It may be sad because I'm like, well, wait, this used to be here. What happened? Why did you move it? And there was no explanation. If that bothered, if that bothered you, I have to tell you then I'm going to jump. Yeah, I'm going to lose. You're going to lose containment when when you change to this other thing. But I'm just I'm just warning as a friend, I'm telling you. No, I understand. Be ready. I understand. But just then making. Don't ever make a UI change without warning people, especially with a product that is all about Tevo, dude. I mean, two, dude, I mean, Tevo, their their reason for success is because their UI was so accessible to so many people. I mean, even my, you know, non-tech parents and my sister get Tevo. So when you introduce a change without warning people, it's it's traumatic. This is going to rock their world. But like, I mean, try it. I mean, I can handle it, but it's like you cannot go back. Well, that I don't like. I mean, it's like, oh, no, wait, I take that back. I take that back. You can go back. But in order to do it, you have to wipe out your entire thing and lose all your recordings, which, you know, recordings. I mean, I store typically five versions of whatever show I watch. Sure. And I hardly ever watch them. It's just kind of a safety net in case I need to look back like, oh, that was that thing in that episode. But I could probably handle that. Yeah. So there you go. Or back it up on an external source, which, you know, is kind of craziness. But. Yeah. Well, yeah, they and they like that stuff isn't quite in the new UI. You can't send videos back to it yet. It's not a permanent omission. It's just, you know, right. Yeah. And add one thing here, which just I thought I mentioned because it's infirmary right now. A lot of things you can't pull off the Tevo. So I'm running right now. Right. But that's what plan is for, man. Planned is I don't want to take a I don't want to deviate. Well, no, I'm I already have the thing is so I'm I'm running C Tevo right now, which I think is probably one of the better clients for the Mac. Yeah, we're talking about the software that'll let you take the things that your Tevo has recorded and pull them off so that you could use them on like your, you know, whatever, your Mac or wherever you want. Yeah. Of course, the thing is or not because several recordings with the HT content or marked as copyrighted or copy protected. Right. And at least C Tevo honors that. It's like, well, yeah, this is on your Tevo, but I'm not going to let you download it because it has this flag set. And I'm like, oh, all right. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, if you're in that boat, I highly recommend like I used we used to do the whole C Tevo thing and in all that that was very short lived because once we got the Tevo bolt and I think your Romeo will do this, too. It'll you can just have. But I got the ball. I got the ball. Oh, that's right. The ball plus. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yours is is is newer than ours. But you can just stream directly to your iPad or your iPhone right from your Tevo. You can even stream live TV. It doesn't matter where you are. So that like that obviated the need for C Tevo for us because it's just like, OK, great. You can just do whatever we want. It's cool. Well, to me, a lot of times if I miss something, the thing is I found more often than not, if it's a, you know, a big show. Yeah, you can stream it on the web for you. Anyways, yes, a lot of times if I miss something and this still makes me shake my fist, but if my Tevo for whatever reason misses something like my cable network is down, which has happened. Sure. I stream it online and I send it to my Apple TV and I get an HD and everything's good, though. I have to watch commercials, but, you know, that's life. That's life. Yeah, exactly. That's what all the people say. Hey, you know what all the people also say, John? Well, I don't know if all the people say this, but what I say is our first sponsor for this episode is Otherworld Computing at MacSales.com or now OWCDigital.com. Seems like the same. I mean, it's they all go basically the same place. So it seems like they're transitioning to that. I thought digital. They've been digital for a long time. Yeah, well, and they've been one of my favorite companies for a long time. And the good news is they don't have to pay me to say that, though I am happy to say it. They they are the place that I will go first if I need to buy an external whatever for my Mac. Like if there's something that Apple doesn't make or even sometimes if Apple makes it, but, you know, somebody else could make it and make it better. Any attachment for my Mac? OWCD is the first place that I go to look for like solving whatever that need is, because they just sort of that's what that's where their heads are. Is how can they make from a hardware standpoint? How can they make your Mac experience better? Kind of they're kind of like the perfect match for us. And I don't say that, like, I think they do great stuff. But like here we are trying to make your Macs better from sort of a software standpoint and sort of a conceptual standpoint is what we do here. Well, they provide the hardware to make that happen. So it is a perfect fit. They have two things that I want to talk about quickly here. The first is their USB-C travel dock. If you've got a USB-C Mac, here's this. It's kind of like a little square, almost puck-sized thing plugs in USB-C. It's got a USB three gen one port on one side. Sorry, USB 3.1 gen one port on one side. It's got another one of those on the other side. HDMI SD card reader and then another USB-C type USB-C auxiliary port where you can deliver power. Right. So there you go. It's cool. The other thing is their ORA Pro 10 SSDs for all of those Macs where the SSDs are on a board inside it. They've got kits to do it. Everything now is designed for and, of course, compatible with high Sierra, taking full advantage of APFS and all of those features. You got to check it out. Go to otherworldcomputingowcdigital.com, macsales.com, either one, take you there. Our thanks to otherworldcomputing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, we've got all kinds of questions. I don't know which direction we're going to go in this. But let's start with Mark's question and Mark. Oh, I got we've had so many marks in here. It's crazy, crazy. It's the show of all marks. Uh, writes, I'm having an issue with my fiance's iPhone. And I'm hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. For some reason, when she gets a text message or an I message, the notification disappears from the lock screen. It only seems to happen for messages. Other notifications still show up and stick around. When she gets a message, it shows up initially, but then goes away after some amount of time. I've checked the relevant notification settings and they appear correct and they match the settings on my iPhone. The issue has persisted across a new phone. However, it was restored from a backup of the old phone. So here's the thing that makes messages different from most other apps that deliver you notifications. Messages, notifications are what I call smart in that once you've read that message, even if you've read it on another device, the notification goes away. If it's not an unread message, it doesn't live in your note in your notification center. So the question is, is there another device on which she or someone if we're going to wear a tinfoil hats is reading those messages? If she has an Apple watch, that could do it. If she has an iPad or a Mac where she's reading those messages, that could do it. Potentially, her Mac could do it without her there. If she had messages open on that particular thread and the Mac were awake, it might get itself in a scenario where that could be assumed that it was read and then it disappears. Any thoughts on this, John? I mean, I've seen similar and I'm wondering if some of this, Dave, is related to your iCloud account. Yeah, well, I mean, certainly messages is is absolutely a part of well, it's probably your Apple ID on my various devices. Yeah, right. I will get messages through the message. I mean, you know, I got some from you today, you know, we're saying, you know, do this for the show, do that, you know, check this out. And I'm like, yeah, cool. But I'm trying to remember. Now, I don't think I'm going to offer it, but the thing is, the nature of that has never bothered me. But the thing is, I've never noticed that the alerts have not appeared on my other right iCloud enabled devices. So that that's actually kind of. So me, the process here is that if you acknowledge this on one device, then it wipes it because it thinks it's doing something good for you. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, yeah. For the most part, I've noticed when I get alerts or messages, you know, especially when they come from messages, like, you know, you sent me a couple today, they appeared on all of my devices because I selected that in. Well, of course, you can select that in iCloud. You know, it's buried somewhere. But the thing is, if you're everybody's logged into iCloud, you can have your your messages propagate among all the devices. Oh, that's what they do good. Yeah, maybe bad. Yeah. Yeah, it could be this other thing. Warren in the chat room at mackeygub.com slash stream says, if you visit on your iOS devices, notif there's settings, notifications, messages. There is a temporary or persistent option where if you have it set to persistent once a message comes in into notification center at the top, it stays there. It won't go away until you actively dismiss it, whereas temporary it shows up and then after a short period of time, it it fades away. But it's still there if you swipe down into notification center either way, at least it should be if it's remaining unread. So. All right. Well, if anybody has any thoughts, let us know feedback at mackeygub.com. So there are some nuances to the whole messaging thing, Dave. But I just want to make sure that I heard what you said. And that was feedback. At mackeygub.com, it is feedback at mackeygub.com, unless you want to find us on Twitter and Peter actually has a question about Twitter because things have been changing over there. And Peter says Twitter now allows 280 characters per tweet. But the share menu of Mac OS only allows 140. Is there any way to update that? So, yeah, I've noticed that there is a way to update that. And now I'm going to be a little bit snarky, but only if you're an Apple engineer, I think. No, shake your fist, man, because they deserve this. Well, so Twitter is like I think they deserve what you're going to say. But I'm sorry. Go. Well, if you think of a of Mac OS as yet another Twitter client, which it is, right, it's just another piece of software that can interface with Twitter without you, you know, going to Twitter.com on on the website. Of course, you can do that, too. But the share menu is just another Twitter client. And every Twitter client needs to be updated to support 280 characters. They've updated their iOS apps. Twitter has. Twitter has not updated their Mac OS app. Their native Mac OS app is still stuck at 140 characters. Apple has not yet updated Sierra or high Sierra. The Twitter client components of those to shame for shame. Well, I mean, it's only been a couple of weeks, right? Well, no, seriously, I mean, I would not expect Apple to prioritize that in an OS update the way I mean, the cycle at which OS updates happen at Apple is, you know, things are cemented in and then they're QA and then they're sent out. And, sir, we could sit and argue that in theory lately, their QA process has been a little, you know, less robust. But but, you know, like this would not be something that if I were the project manager of Mac OS, where I'd be saying, oh, we must get that in there. I think they will eventually. I mean, but I can't say for sure, obviously. But I think they will eventually. But I think it'll probably be, you know, January, February before that that change is rolled out there. Now, whether or not Twitter is ever going to update their own Mac OS app to support this is sort of the big, you know, that's the. Well, I guess I was going to say it's a million dollar question, but it's not. It's just a twenty dollar question, right? Because I could buy Twitter if it for twenty bucks on the Mac and get that feature. Is that right? I did. Is that what it is? Is it twenty bucks for Twitter if it on the Mac? Nineteen ninety nine. Yeah, OK. Save a penny there. So you get that penny there. But, you know, Dave is someone who has done software and someone who, you know, I still consider myself a software engineer. Yeah. This is just a poor design because the thing is if you change the length of a message within a protocol, the client, the protocol between the client and the server should be able to adapt to that. You shouldn't have to come out with a new version. So I I'm not getting why some things don't work. I mean, did they hard code in the Twitter client on Mac 140 characters? Maybe they've hard coded. I don't know. Well, they've hard coded that into every Twitter client everywhere because because they have to warn you when you get to that limit. Right. I mean, the whole size of the UI. Yeah, I get it. No. But do you see where I'm going here is that you can make that kind of dynamic and part of the protocol is like, well, but it's that's the thing is it's not part of the protocol. It was it was always 140 characters. And so Twitter was never like when you authenticate with Twitter, it doesn't say and, hey, our character limit for today is 140. Like that's not part of the handshake. What I'm saying is it should be transparent. I think it is. I should say what's the biggest size you can take. And it's like, here, here it is. And the client's like, OK, cool. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that was never built into the API. Right. Because it was 140 characters. So I mean, yeah. Yeah, I this this couldn't have been written to be dynamic given by any app developer because Twitter's API doesn't expose that. OK, I'll accept that. It's a fault of the API. But, you know, the thing is, I mean, you see what I'm saying, you can pull it off easily if it's there in the API. But but I mean, you you'd be asking Twitter to. Predict the, you know, the future 10 years down the road, saying, are we ever going to change this? Are we ever going to change that? Are we ever going to change this? I'd have to pull back on that. It's like TCP IP. It's like, all right, how many pieces of data do you have? I have this much. OK, send it. Sure. An IPv6 was just automatic, huh? I mean, like you there's certain givens that you just have to be able to to have everyone assume. Personally, no, I get it. Personally, I don't think it should have ever been an issue if their original design intent was to have a flexible message size. But apparently that was not one of their that was never a design. No, their design intent was exactly the opposite. It was fixed message size. We want to be SMS like we want to get into an SMS size. So we're going to hard code it. Right. Hard coded. Yeah. Anyway, it was not a good decision. Anyway, Twitter, if it for Mac OS will support that. And when there you go, I alluded to this earlier, John. Joe writes in and asks, he says. I'm battling a high Sierra install, having some issues with causing system pauses not really hangs, though occasionally it will get to the spinning rainbow. He says, opening Activity Monitor will occasionally show that BDL Damon is using a lot of CPU. And I notice frequently software update D is as well, at least briefly. Interestingly, often background windows, Activity Monitor, for instance, will continue to have screen changes, but windows are frozen. And sometimes the mouse freezes as well with the spinning rainbow. The pause is anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds. And the frequency is about every five to 15 minutes. And he goes on to talk about a few other things. It says the CPU use seems to grind to zero rather than being tied up. But yet I still can't do anything with the system. So this is an interesting thing. And we've all experienced things like this, some of us more frequently than others. Every one of these is going to be potentially unique. In his case, BDL Damon or Damon is a piece of Bit Defenders antivirus for the Mac. Antivirus software by its nature gets in your way. It's scanning everything that's happening. If you've got some app that's doing a big index somewhere, maybe Dropbox even, like those two things can sort of, you know, create a perfect storm together because Dropbox is indexing and as Dropbox is reading stuff, Bit Defenders in there reading right along with it, the same files, making sure everything's OK and it can it can sort of swirl up and then it can cause problems like that. I don't run antivirus software on my Macs for this very reason. And so we were talking about before, but, you know, there are plenty of proof of concept pieces of malware out there. So, you know, you got to pick your your place on that risk continuum. But but my advice, if you want that to go away, is to turn off Bit Defender and, you know, live with that. I do have more to add to this a completely different direction, in fact, John, but I'll throw it to you first. My only reflection is that so we did. You may recall, Dave, we did look at a Bit Defender product recently, or I did. Oh, yeah. Their box product, right, which included the Bit Defender software. And I noted as well that it seemed to suck down the suck down the processor. The good news, which we will report the results when it happens, is that they introduce a new version of both their hardware and software, which will hopefully alleviate these problems, which I pointed out to them and not so subtle terms. I'm like, dude, it's sucking my processor. So we'll see if they can improve. It sounds like they are on the road to improving the performance of their daemon, which I noticed and and both their box. So stay tuned. Yeah, it really, I didn't want to make this about Bit Defender. I mean, the the. No, it's a general. But that's it. It's just a. Yeah. And the way Joe went about this was right. When your system slows down, if you can launch activity monitor, see what's going on. If that's not giving you any indication, launch console, maybe see what's going on there. I am. In general, my 2011 MacBook Air has been performing actually very, very well with high Sierra, much better than it ever did with with Sierra. But there are times when it sort of gets itself tied in a knot. There are two processes, spin dump and tailspin D. These are Apple processes that monitor your system. If an app tells one of them to take a sample of what's going on, they certainly will. But otherwise, they sort of sit there and aren't triggered unless one app starts using a lot of CPU and then it fires up these processes to take a sample of that so that, you know, there's some. History of what happened when and when this app sort of took over. The problem is that spin dump and tailspin D. Use quite a bit of CPU on their own to do this. So if you've got an app that's been using a lot of CPU correctly or incorrectly and then spin dump decides, hey, that app's been using the CPU pretty heavily for a minute, maybe a minute and a half. I'm going to fire up a process and I'm going to sample the heck out of that thing. Suddenly, you now have three processes competing for your system resources. You've got the one and then you've got spin dump and tailspin D. These are two things that fire up from Apple. So I set about figuring out and I've looked at the logs that these things spit out and they're, you know, generally worthless for me. They just tell me, yeah, this one process got really gung-ho. It's like, well, yeah, I know. And then you've gotten its way to tell me that this process was gung-ho. Didn't want that. So I did some digging, John. And I found, you could do this manually, but I found a script on GitHub that basically what it does is it goes into both system library launch agents and system library launch demons, launch demons, whatever you want, and renames P list files in there after it unloads them. So it turns them off and then it renames them so that they can't come back. I presume an OS update would would sort of, you know, require you to run all this again. I'll put a link to these scripts in the show notes, but I got to warn you these scripts, if used by default, will probably turn off things that you really want to have on. They're sort of built to turn off all of Apple's background stuff. And you might want, say, screen sharing on or maybe you want photo analysis, D to run, all these things, it's going to try and turn them off because they've just sort of put them in there by default. But so I went through and I I sort of stripped these things out except for com.apple.spindumpd.plist or com. And then com.apple.talespindy. I guess it's not Spindump D, it's just Spindump and then Talespindy. And I had to disable system integrity protection for this script to run because you're modifying system files. And that's what system integrity protection is there to to prevent. So you would, you know, disable SIP, which you have to do in recovery mode. And then you boot into recovery mode, you launch the terminal and you type CSR you till space, disable, and then it turns it off. And then you go run this, you got to reboot back in and you go run this script, then you come back around and and you can turn system integrity protection back on once you've disabled the stuff. But now when I wake up my MacBook Air, it just wakes up and there's not like there's processes that fire off and do their thing. But Spindump and Talespin aren't trying to like log every one of them. It used to take 10 minutes for Spindump and Talespin to finish sometimes after I would wake up my Mac. And that's now a thing of the past for me. So. So I put a link. I'll put a link in the show notes for for this. I put it in our chat room, too, but beware. Beware. But I think it's a good thing. I don't need those things running. I don't think. What do you think, John? What I think is in general is you should have some tool, either activity monitor or my favorite Dave, as I said, menus. Yeah. So when your system is slowing down, you can identify. Where the heck is it happening? Because a lot of times it's not entirely obvious. Well, that's that's how I got here, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, it could be your disc. It could be your ram. It could be your it could be one of several things. But these tools will help you identify it because. I still got to say when. Especially from, you know, wherever the request comes from. When I hear the statement, my system is slow. I my blood starts to boil because the thing is you got to quantify that. Right. Right. And most of our listeners do that in that they're like, well, you know, it happens here and there like this. But if you can get a tool to measure. The phenomenon that helps us and it helps you and it helps everybody and it makes the world a better place, right? Yeah. Cool. Don had an interesting while we're on, you know, kind of doing the movie episode here. Don said random M4V and JPEG files on two spinning hard drives attack attached to my iMac via type one Thunderbolt connections have become unreadable. The disks are readable. Just some of these files are not. It says, unfortunately, this corruption is spread to all of my available backups, time machine, back plays and crash plan. As I said, this is affected only some files. For example, half of the M4V files in a folder containing a season of a television program are corrupted while the others are totally fine. I've run disc utility and disk warrior and drive genius. Nothing has helped. Fortunately, I have the original media, the Blu-rays and the DVDs for all my corrupt M4Vs, but and and good news, none of the corrupt JPEGs were important. My first question is whether either you know anything that might repair these unreadable files. My second is whether either of you could hazard a guess about the cause. He says, finally, I know that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. I thought my back plays crash plan and time machine backups would have prevented my being caught. Alas, this wasn't the case. The earliest available versions of these files on the three backups are unreadable as well. This is interesting, right? Because certainly bit rot can happen. If you've got a drive that's slowly going bad, you may not, especially with like movies and pictures, things that you're not accessing all the time. You may not know that you've got any data issues or any physical issues with the drive whatsoever, because. Right. Well, I want to help identify the term that you use bit rot. So bit rot is let's talk about this here. So you have storage and you write data to it and you read data from it. And your assumption is that the data that you write and you later read is the same. I think bit rot is a term that we. I.T. veterans use to say that something in the data has changed state without you making that happen and that it could because and I'm totally serious here, cosmic rays, magnetic forces, electrical forces, or just the drives themselves, things change state on media. And you may do nothing to cause this. So the idea, I guess, the I'm trying to project the thought here is that, number one, the fact that something is degrading or changing state and you don't know about it is disturbing. And what can you do about it? Well, the interesting part here, though, is that the backups were made. I mean, usually when you've got, you know, data degradation, aka bit rot, right, you've got a scenario where the file is at least partially unreadable, right? I mean, but backup software has to read individual files. It doesn't have to, but that's how those three pieces of backup software work. They all read individual files and then make copies of them. So how did the damaged files make it into the backups? Like that's the part to me that, like if they're unreadable now, how did they get unreadable into the backups? Well, I guess that was kind of what I was going for, is that the thing is, if the contents of a file become inconsistent with the parameters of that type of file, who's going to warn you about that? And my thought, and you know, we may be going on in a relevant tangent, though I think not. I think it's a relevant one, but you know, things like RAID and, you know, various technologies that are used to verify the integrity of the data on your hard drive could have detected this. So at some point in time, I'm sure with these files, when the rot or the change in the format of the data occurred, somebody could have said, or fixed the problem. Do you see where I'm going here? Right. Right. Yes, I just- Because that didn't happen, but the thing is, even now, I mean, we discussed this, Time Machine does have a checksum for files. It stores a checksum and you can do a verification. As of late, I forgot, I think it was one or two versions go over, Time Machine would do this. So even that should have alerted you to the fact that something has changed. If you actively tried to find this problem, but I'm still just trying to swirl around the problem of how do you detect when a file has degraded? Now you could do it, and I've seen some products, Dave, we haven't used them much. I've certainly never used them, where they can actually do a checksum on all the files on your hard drive. And if anything changes, they'll say, hey, you know, something's wrong here, but that's not typical practice, at least for the current version of macOS. And I don't think most operating systems, right? Right, right. Yeah, it's weird. So how do you know? To me, the big question, and we'll throw it out to the, you know what I affectionately call the peanut gallery, everybody who's listening, is how do you tell when your files have started to degrade or lose their integrity? And that's a big problem for all of us, right? Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. And, you know, it's why a lot of RAID units, and I use, you know, and a lot of NAS units, but RAID units too, will do data scrubbing or tell you to do data scrubbing on the drives, where it basically goes through- My Synology, every month, and I appreciate the fact that they do this as, you know, we need to do this sort of thing, because now, I don't know about you, Dave, I've never had mine come up with an inconsistency or maybe it fixes it and doesn't tell you about it, but at least Synology encourages you to do this operation to make sure the data is consistent. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Drobo's do it automatically. They don't even tell you that they're doing it. It just happens. But every NAS, QNAP, Synology, Drobo, they all do this thing where they read through the drive and make sure it's gonna be, the data is readable because they know that they are, they're not cold storage devices, but a lot of the data that you put there, you just leave and you're not routinely reading. So that's what this data scrubbing is, is like, no, you know what? Let's routinely read it just to make sure we don't have a bigger problem developing. And it's smart, so yeah, very interesting. All right, now we did have, but I just wanna mention, so in the chat room here, which, did we talk about the chat room, Dave? We did. At macigap.com slash stream, but some people actually mention it. Actually, I'll throw my tin hat in the ring here. Memory may get corrupted, in which case you read a file, memory gets corrupted, and then you write it out, and you write out bogus data. If that wouldn't corrupt, that wouldn't do it. No, because it, like that, you're not rewriting the file on the source disk. It, like the file got corrupted there, and then, I saw that comment in the chat room, but it doesn't make sense, right? Because you're not, like that would mean that the data on the backup is different from the data on the source drive, but it sounds like in this case, they're both the same. It's gotten the damaged data. It's just weird that a backup, like none of these backup packages caught the fact that they were having trouble reading this data. That's where it gets kinda wonky to me. Yeah, though, I mean, I get the memory argument to a certain extent, sorry for having Brian made this, but you know, what if you read data and you don't have ECC memory? So ECC is error correction code, I think. And I think typically Mac systems do not use the ECC feature of RAM, they just write and read. Yeah, that's just, again, it's just, I mean, we're talking about BitRot, ECC memory, I don't think it fits into this conversation. I think it fits into a potential source of corruption, but yeah, no, I'm kinda with you. I mean, I just, like, unless you're reading from the disk and writing back to it, I don't see how the type of RAM that you have could cause this. Okay, I guess the key thing is, what is the source of the corruption, I guess, is the mystery that we are all dealing with. And it's like, it could be bad RAM, it could be a bad hard drive, well, yeah, it's a bad hard drive. I don't think, I don't wanna send people on wild goose chases, I don't think it's bad RAM. I am certain, in fact, that it's a bad hard drive. The question is how did it get from the bad hard drive to the backups? And that's what we don't know. I mean, that's what BitRod is, right? Is the data's going bad on the storage. So, yeah. Hey, Warren had, well, he had an interesting question, again, over on our Facebook group, at geekyab.com slash Facebook. We were talking about mesh networks and Wi-Fi and all of that. And Warren commented, he said, let me know when one of these mesh networks can match my Fios gigabit speeds, which is, of course, the 1000 megabits give or take. And I believe with Fios, he gets it not only on the downstream, but back on the upstream. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. But, you know, but what was- I weep. What he's looking for is, and I have no trouble getting gigabit speeds out of most of these things that I test. But when I say that, I mean that I have no trouble on ethernet getting gigabit speeds across from the things on my LAN, on my local network, to my WAN, where you're not gonna get gigabit speeds is with Wi-Fi. And I know that there are routers out there. In fact, Warren even posted a picture of one, the Nettgear Nighthawk X6S, the R8000P router, says it's a four gigabit Wi-Fi router. So let's talk about how router speeds are marketed. Router speeds are marketed as the speed of the maximum theoretical speed of each radio inside your router added together. So that means if, like in the case of this router, you have a tri-band router, you have one 2.4 gigahertz band and two five gigahertz bands, three different radios in there for this. The 2.4 gigahertz band, I guess, is a five by five radio. I don't quite understand that. I've never seen that before, but that would be 750 megabits per second. And then each of the five gigahertz radios because of the number of streams they have are each 600, sorry, 1,625. So you add 1625 plus 1625 plus 750, and there you go, there's four gigabits. But here's the thing, there are no client devices that are going to connect to all three radios simultaneously and bridge a connection across them. And your router is really not set up to accept a client like that, but that's okay because as I said, those clients don't exist, certainly not in consumer applications. So we're limited really by the speed of our client devices. And almost every device you get from Apple is either a one by one or more commonly a two by two Wi-Fi device. And what that means is the number of streams that can go in each direction. So a two by two device has two streams for sending and two for receiving. Two streams on one radio. Two streams of 802.11ac, which is the fast standard that we have on five gigahertz now. Each of those streams can theoretically go 433 megabits per second. So add them together, you get 866, and then guess what, divide it by two to get the realistic maximum, not the theoretical maximum, and you get somewhere about 400 megabits per second if you're close to the router and don't have any interference. That's the fastest that your clients can do. I believe the iMacs, and I know the new MacBook Pros have three by three radios. So 433 times three is 1300, cut that in half, and you're gonna get probably about 600 megabits per second out of those things, maybe seven. Again, in perfect scenario, you're still not gonna hit gigabit speeds, but again, it's all up to your clients. Your iPhone will never do gigabit Wi-Fi because it literally doesn't have enough radio in it to do that. And that's where things get a little confusing sometimes. So yes, most of the mesh products out there are built for gigabit speeds with Ethernet. No, they're not built for gigabit speeds with Wi-Fi because neither are your client devices. So there you go. Did I get that right, John? As far as I can tell, I just look forward to the future. But yeah, I think in general, your statement that Wi-Fi speeds will probably never approach wired speeds is correct because there's so many variables. Right. I think someday we will see Wi-Fi speeds eclipse what most people are able to do for wired speeds. I doubt it. I think in the home, I mean in many cases, we're already there, right? Because a lot of people can't send gigabit Ethernet throughout their homes. Well, to me though, see the problem is that with enough power and enough frequency, you can do anything. The thing is, is the power and the frequency required to get gigabit speeds from wireless devices worth the threat to your wellbeing and health and life? Well, there's that whole Wi-Max thing, right? Isn't that the one that goes like, no, no, no, that that that's getting, isn't that? Oh no, there was, it's not Wi-Max, it's the other one. I can't remember. Ethernet 11 AD? A, no, is it AD? Is that what I'm thinking of? AD is purportedly close to gigabit Wi-Fi. And I think it's on a weird band like some, I forget, it's some weird frequency that I'm like, what are you doing there? It's the 60 gigahertz spectrum, I think. Yeah, 60 gigs, yeah. And I'm like, what? But I think you go there. I think it'll do multi gigabit is what it's built to do. Well, I guess it could, it doesn't kill you first, but we're gonna learn about that at CES, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Yeah, we already saw it last year with Brian. I mean, we already saw, I mean, I was with the TP-Link guys and they were like, yeah, here's our next-gen product. Then yeah, it's got the crazy frequency and crazy throughput and I'm like, hey, cool. Yeah, yeah. The only thing is higher frequencies mean that in general, unless you jack the power up, your distance is gonna be limited, right? So that's just my worry. Oh no. Yeah. Are we gonna fry our brains in order to get higher bandwidth on our toys? Yeah, absolutely. It's worth it. No, we all think it's worth it. Yeah. All right. Where are we at? Let's see. Able, again, also from Facebook, we had some great stuff on Facebook this week. Let's see. Able bought a new switch, a TP-Link switch, actually, and it was one of those smart switches. And he said he had all kinds of problems when he introduced it into his network. He was getting packet loss. It caused his work VPN to drop. And he said he didn't do any configuration. He assumed the defaults were okay and he asked if anybody had any trouble. He dug into it a little more deeply and realized that the switch was giving itself an IP address that was in use by another device, I think, Able's router on his network. He said the documentation of the switch said that it was set to 192.168.1.1. Turns out the switch was set to 192.168.0.1. And that was the same address that his router had chosen for itself whenever he set that up. And therefore the two devices were trying to claim all the same packets and that's not a good thing. That's not how things work well. So it's just a reminder to anybody that goes from using dumb switches to smart switches or anybody that has smart switches that these things need an IP address on the network too. That's generally how they're configured and addressed. And so just remember, so thanks for that, Able. Sorry you had to go through it, but thank you for sharing so that the rest of us can remember this when we get there. That's good stuff. Yes, Mr. Braun. Well, I found an interesting because I would think some device on the network like your router would warn you when another device tries to claim the same IP address. And actually even further... Wait, wait, wait, slow down. I'm gonna ask you this question. How? Yes. How would your router warn you of this? I mean, your Mac can tell you. Like if another device is, you know, using or trying to use the same IP address as your Mac, your Mac will actually throw up an error message and say the device that this Mac address is trying to use this IP address. But I mean, if you don't have a display on your router... No, excellent point. And if your router is set up so it has your email address, it can send you alerts and stuff like that, depending on the smart router. It couldn't send you an alert if it's something's trying to use its IP address. Can't talk on the network. Unless it goes to the internet, which is probably connected to. But no. I see what you're saying. Oh yeah, the router does have the other... Right, right, right. It could try and do it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's good. But it's... No, it's a good point is that, again, I would think that most operating systems and routers and other pieces of equipment, if they see somebody else trying to claim their address, will try to cry for help. Now, it may not always get to you. Right. Which I think is your point, because you don't have a channel. Right, there's no... For that sort of thing. There's no console. But... You know, again, like Mac OS, if you try to throw something with the same IP on a network that somebody else already has, it's gonna tell you, it's like, dude, somebody else already has this and here's their Mac address and it tries to help you diagnose the problem. But... No, it's a good point. Because I have one of these smart switches and I guess the thing you keep in mind is that a lot of smart switches, in addition to things like our pal, Ero Dave, they need an IP address on the network. Right. I mean, I see that. When I run Fing or something like that, I'll see or even their own utility, it'll be like, oh, well, here's one of your satellites and here's another of your satellites and here's their IP address. I'm like, that's cool. Yeah? Yeah, for sure. All right. We've got some tips to go through that I wanna burn through pretty quickly, just because, well, I think they're good tips and... Set the burn. Yeah, that's good. Let's see, where are we here? I gotta get the right ones up. So, John noted, he said in 687... Where am I here? Oh, yeah. In Mac Keycap 687, you were talking about installing a hard drive in an older MacBook Pro. When I replaced drives in MacBook Pros and iMacs that don't have the stock SSDs, I always have to reset the PRAM on the machine before it starts acting normally. He said the SATA issue might be, in this case, related to that, thought it was worth mentioning. You're totally right. Resetting the PRAM and resetting NVRAM, there's a reason that they are in everyone's toolbox because it makes a difference. But he says, I think it was mentioned in the chat room, but two things about caching in High Sierra. One is that you can get all the old advanced options in the caching server, including computer-to-computer caching. If you're in system preferences, sharing content caching, preference pane, hold down the option key and the options button that you can click turns into advanced options. So you can really tweak that caching server. So thanks, John. That's a good one. I like it. On Facebook, we heard from Zef, and Zef was asking about the differences between the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 10. And we were talking about two things in there, and it's a conversate. If you're on the fence between the two, John, at the end of the last episode, we were talking about this, and I was trying to convince you to get the 10 if you were going to bother to get the eight. And the home button is something that the absence of the home button becomes a very automatic thing. And honestly, I don't even miss it anymore. But one thing that I completely forget about is the screen. I'm used to it. I look at this phone, you know, many times a day. I don't I don't think about the fact that this is an OLED screen. And when I show anything on my phone, it could be an email, but certainly a picture or something to anybody in my family. The first comment they make is, man, that's green. Holy cow, like every single time it becomes the conversation as opposed to look at this thing. You know, so I just wanted to make sure we we wrap that up. OK, I'm going to challenge you because I've seen talk of this here and there, but there's a talk of burning on that screen. Is there a burn in on OLEDs? OK. I mean, I'm not seeing any burn in on this, but OK. No, I've seen articles. I don't think we've written one. Yeah, where we may have and I just missed it. But no, I saw talk of burn in, which is a phenomenon which you should be familiar with with your plasma screens. Yep, where some screens of the same images displayed too many times, it kind of takes hold. And then it ruins everything. So but you haven't seen that, obviously. No, but you're right. With an OLED screen, it could be. I mean, you're right. It the technology is potentially subject to that after, you know, certain amount of time. We'll put it. We'll put a link in the show notes today. That's that's that's a good one, man. But OLED, as far as I know, is the superior. At the moment, the burn in technology. Yeah, at the moment. Yeah. You want to you want to take us to Chris quickly, John? I mean, we're at the minute. We're at the hour 20 mark. We've got two more tips that I want to share. So if we can, we can do these quickly, if we can do them quickly. I think we can go if I can. Well, you know, I can condense what Chris said. OK, so we had. Yeah, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try to condense it and not expand it. But. Anyways, Chris wrote in so Chris does a Mac service and he's supported and he's over in Germany. Hello. My family. That's your people, man. But they're my people. Well, you're all my people. You're my people. Well, there's my people. I think everybody's my people, unless you're a jerk, in which case, you're not my people. But here's what he said, which was interesting. So we had a question for someone saying, well, I'm trying to put it in. I think the gist of it was I'm trying to put an SSD into an older Mac, a 2009 Mac, 2009 Mac book, which had a. I think SATA one or SATA two interface. And when they put in. This newer drive, newer technology, when they tried to install the OS, it came up with a what was the term Dave? I'm trying to find the. Oh, yeah, it was that crazy error message we talked about in the last show. Yeah, some probing. But I think what the OS was doing was saying, you know, I'm going to test the throughput of. Data with this new thing that I see. And if it doesn't work out, I'm going to put up this stupid error message that means nothing to anybody because it was something like, you know, inconsistent. What was it? I'm sorry, but it was like it was some stupid error message that wouldn't tell you that the problem is that the capabilities of the thing you're trying to talk to exceed the capabilities of the hardware that you have. And then it was basically, I think that just Dave, so to boil it down. The problem is older Macs would have SATA one and maybe SATA two. And we were given examples of this and the thing is to boil it down, the problem is that number one, some of the older Macs would allow you to move the firmware to go from SATA one to SATA two. The problem is. The wiring and here is the thing, Dave, kind of like cabling when we're talking about networks. The thing is if the wiring in the Mac is not capable of doing the throughput, it's not going to work and it's going to fail. And you're going to get this error message. And I think that was the gist of this discussion is that if you have a SATA one and here was the thing that amazed me, Dave, and I never even thought of this. If the cable that connects your computer to the drive is not sufficient, you're going to get errors. I had never even thought of this, that if you tried to put a SATA two drive into a SATA one machine, it would fail because the cable wasn't capable. But when you think about it, it makes sense because you have this network. So you have, you know, Cat 4, Cat 5, Cat 6, Cat, whatever. If the cable that connects your physical network or your ethernet network isn't capable, it's going to fail. I never even thought of the possibility that a SATA cable connecting your computer to the drive would not be capable. But that's the deal. So sometimes with older Macs, you may have to get a newer SATA cable. In order for a newer drive to work properly. All right, that's amazing. And in 687, David, we talked about syncing photos in multiple libraries and all of that. And he said, because of my recent experience with iCloud Photo Library and sync, I got a bit behind the curtain. And and he said. Like the caller, I have over 140 gigs of media and my wife has 50 and my daughter has 75 using iCloud Sync, assumes, as John mentioned, that if you exceed the allotted space just by a bigger phone or machine or iCloud storage, my concern here is our media creation pace has far overcome my wallet. This is where he says DS photo from Synology or Synology's moments, Google's photos are Amazon's approach of the storage service versus a sync service really should be able to service really shine. Says for the caller, just leaving the media in a single library and switching to Google photos backup would entirely solve his or her problem. No additional local accounts, no iCloud accounts, no multiple libraries and Google photos would automatically sort by year versus the manual method of multiple libraries. You're right, Google photos does that. And if you let them recompress your photos, you get two benefits. Number one, you don't pay for storage. Number two, they can go through and analyze your pictures and do all of the, you know, find me pictures of birds or find me pictures of cars and it'll do it. But it does require you to let Google recompress all your pictures. So theoretically, you might lose some quality there. In the tests I've done, everything looks really good. So I haven't seen like any noticeable impact, but there you go. So, yeah, you're right. Google photos is is an alternative there. And if you run the app on your iPhone regularly enough or let it run with background tasks, then it will keep your Google photo library updated as as often as it can. And and one last thing, this really kind of blew me away because I had no idea about this. But David says, I think it's the same David. He says, I've been experimenting with some home automation components and I settled on a wink to hub. I purchased a few door sensors to give it a go and found something interesting. When I paired the sensors after they were 23 feet away, the hub wouldn't recognize it. It seemed odd because it's such a short distance. After some hair pulling with the sensor company, their only advice was to move the hub closer, but that made no sense. Support being no help. He says, I dove into figuring out how it works and came to an interesting conclusion. Z wave, which is what this is based on, is a mesh network. So distributing devices throughout the house means that each sensor meshes with another in a similar way to wireless mesh devices, though not using Wi-Fi. Says, knowing this detail solved my 23 foot problem. He said he was able to put devices throughout the house. And as long as there was always one in the middle, it could move things around. And I I had completely missed the fact that Z wave and and a lot of those, you know, home control devices are mesh. So there you go. Who knew? I mean, I guess a lot of people knew just I never knew. It's crazy. I knew I saw him at the now it was talking to him. C.S. Yeah, yeah, Z wave. There's a few Z things. Yeah, there's still this mesh. Yeah, of protocols for IOT things to talk to other IOT things. And it's still a mess, right? Yeah. That's why he's like was mentioned. You need one of these hubs, you need a hub and they they have conflicting standards and all of that stuff. Hey, I want to take it all together. I want to take a minute and thank all of our Mackie Keb premium subscribers that contributed this week. Actually meant to do this earlier in the show. And we got on such a roll that here we are on the biannual plan for 25 bucks every six months. We have Guy D. Felix B. Andrew R. And then Anders E. Who's on it 35 every six months and Chuck P. Who's on it 50 every six months. Thank you to all of you. You rock on the monthly ten dollar plan. We have Paul M. JC, Ari L. Bob L. Michael P. Santiago M. John D. Stephen A. John V. Jeff P. And Gary B. Thank you to all of you as well. And also to Stephen L. Who sent in a one time ten dollar contribution. You rock, too. You all rock. Thank you so much. It means a lot. It really does. It helps in a lot of ways. That's that's all we have for today. We told you how to email us. You premium folks can email us at premium at MacGeekEb.com if you want. We told you how to find us on Facebook and there you go. I do want to say one thing, though, John, and I'll I'll say it to you as well as to everybody to you and and to a lot of you. I say Merry Christmas and I hope because I think this is in fact, I know this is the last episode we're doing before Christmas. I know a lot of you are celebrating Hanukkah now. Or we're or whatever you celebrate. Yeah, there you go. Hey, it's a holiday season and I don't. Believe there's anything wrong with saying that because there's lots of holidays. Hey, everybody have a good time. There you go. That's that's my that's my theory. I'd say everybody have a good time all the time. Either we're family, friends and try to avoid the severe weather that we often see in the Northeast. But even the rest of the country. Yeah, it's crazy out there. It's crazy going on. It's crazy. All right, folks, we will we will see you next time. I want to thank cash fly at C A C H E F L Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, our sponsors, which O W C we heard about earlier. Smile at smile software dot com. The bare bones, folks at bare bones dot com. A couple of new sponsors coming up too. I hope you have a good week. Whatever it is you're doing, whatever it is you celebrate, have fun. But there is one thing I do want to make sure. It's three simple words. They're important, though, while you're out there having fun. Make sure that you don't get caught.