 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 721 for Monday, August 6th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together. We create a nice little salad of all these tasty little tips and tricks and sometimes the tangents. And that's the dressing, right? Just to add a little bit of flavor. When we do that, John, you're laughing at me. We do that so that each and every one of us can learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include TextExpander at TextExpander.com slash podcast to get 20% off your first year's subscription, CodeWeavers crossover. We're at CodeWeavers.com slash MGG. You get a two week trial and you save a bunch of money. And Eero. We're at Eero.com. Use coupon code MGG for free overnight shipping in the USA and Canada, the mesh network that John and I use. We'll talk more about all of that shortly. But here, right now in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brunn. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Brunn? I was going to have a talk with you about the mometers, Dave. Okay. We still will. All right. The mometers it is. Topic number one. Well, number one, it's hot. So, yeah. And we can all hear, we all know that it's hot. And here's how I'm going to clue you folks into this. No, no. See how John sounds all flanged and a little weird today? That's because his air conditioner's on. Now, I'm going to ask you to turn this thing off and then back on John so that the listeners can fully experience why they're enjoying this minor flanging of you as opposed to hearing this. Go ahead, John. Wait. So you want me to hit the... Turn off the noise cancellation. Nice. Yeah. Okay. And it is now... There it is. So we're saving you from that. That's nice, isn't it? Turn it back on and we'll deal with the flanging here. So the thermometer and, of course, the thermostat are involved in that decision as well as our ears here. So we'd like to have a low noise podcast and we suffer through a little bit of flanging because of it. So two things I learned. Number one. Flanging. So many in the chat room. Mackeykeb.com. Stream is asking what flanging is. Flanging is kind of that. Yeah, exactly. What John just did that, wow, wow. And it's kind of doing that to the sound. It's an audio processing nuance. Yeah. What did you say? It's an artifact of this particular process. But sometimes, like you'll hear, you go, in fact, go back and listen to a lot of 80s music where you hear that clean guitar that's got a flange on it a lot to give it not quite the wah sound, but it's similar to what a wah pedal would do. Anyway, that's for our GigGab Working Musicians podcast, which we record at a different time. But you can check it out at giggabpodcast.com. All right, John, thermometers. So anyways, so number one, for the last week I had a minor illness. I think they call it the stomach flu. And the reason I determined this was because I bought myself a dandy little digital thermometer and dude, they're so cold these days. I never had one because I rarely get feverish. I really have a fever. But so I got one of those, but that's not too important, but it's a neat little Gizmo. Sure. Let me know about my health. But the second thing, so Dave, so I was a, I went to a family gathering over the weekend over in the gypsy. So, you know, hopped in the car and it was a hot and sunny out. And so, you know, I'm chugging along and using ways to make my way since I'm not over in the gypsy too often. And all of a sudden I got this alert on my phone over a temperature, or I just saw a big red thermometer. And for those that have never experienced this, this little joy, if your iPhone gets too hot, it'll shut off and warn you about it and say, I'm too hot. I don't feel it's safe for me to operate. So cool me off and then try again. Right. And I would say, at least in my case, what is work, Dave? So I think what caused it is that, so I have a dark interior of the car, though I think all car interiors get hot with the sun. But because I have a dark interior, the sun was, was, you know, shining on the dashboard and then it was reflecting up onto the phone and he got the phone, which was in a case. And I think that was what solved my problem. So the thing is, I was your phone charging at the time that this happened. That too. And that's actually a good point. How was it charging? Was it charging via cable or via? Cheek oil. Okay. So cheek oil is going to add a ton of heat to the equation, right? Your phone will, will heat up a lot more when charging via cheat than it will charging just with a, you know, with a lightning cable. So a good point. Yeah. So the mount that I have is a cheap charging one. So I could have disabled charging because it was it had enough charge. Right. And here's another trick. I know we've talked about it, but while we're at it. If you had simply plugged a lightning cable into the bottom of your phone, it still would have charged and therefore still would have generated some amount of heat, but when the lightning cable was plugged in, the phone stops accepting charge from Chee. And so you would have been able to save the heat from that. Just FYI. Okay. Cool. What worked in my case is, well, it was in a case. Right. And so I took it out of the mount. I pulled it out of the case. I let it sit for a while. And then I put it back in caseless once it had cooled down and then it was fine for the rest of the trip. So between Dave and I, just a couple of tips here. So number one, I agree with you. So charging of any form induces heat or causes heat and has to go somewhere. And it's probably going to go in the phone or it's in the phone. And she is the worst by, I mean, by far and well, it's inductive. Yeah. The nature of the technology. The more distance you have between phone and Chee coil, the more heat, at least from what I found generates, and of course, having a case on adds some distance there. And so there's some, some power loss and power loss isn't actually lost. It's just lost to heat. And so there you go. You know, now that I think about it, yeah, I'd never had this problem when I was lightning charging it, even when it was in a case. Yeah. So a good observation, my friend. Very welcome. Yeah. Cool. Shall we move on? Absolutely, yes. I'm going to talk about our first sponsor here, John. We, it's been a while since we've done this early on in the show. And our first sponsor today is crossover from Code Weavers. Man, you know you like to run Windows software. You know sometimes, right? We have to. And you know you hate to run Windows. But what you love to run is crossover from Code Weavers. Because crossover lets you run Windows software without having to run Windows. Yeah. Right. You don't have to manage a Windows install. You don't have to buy a Windows license. You don't have to worry about Windows malware and viruses sitting in the background running all the time because Windows ain't running all the time. That's how this works. So if you want to run stuff like, you know, Microsoft Office 2016 or Quicken 2017 or countless games and really other apps. I mean, it like, it supports a ton of apps. It's crazy. So you got to check it out. Go to code weavers.com slash MGG. That'll get you two things. The first thing it gets you 14 day free trial, 100% free. You get to check this out. You get to see how it works specifically with your apps and your environment. All good to go. And then when you're ready to buy that same link crossover. Sorry, code weavers.com slash MGG saves you 35% off of your first year's subscription to crossover max. So you got to check it out. Code weavers.com slash MGG are thanks to code weavers for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Now it's time. Let's let's go to Jay here. This is a yet another interesting one and a helpful one. Jay writes. Oh, where's the thing? See this is I might have heard this wrong and know you didn't. You heard it correctly. But a couple of episodes ago, Dave mentioned the inability to save an email and Apple Mail on iOS as a PDF. Regardless, it makes for a good tip using the print function in iOS mail. So you pull up the message, you hit the little reply button at the bottom, but really you get a bunch of options. You get reply or depending on the message reply all and forward and print. So you use print there. Then when the print preview comes up because that's what will happen, you'll see like the page or pages at the bottom right there. If you 3D touch into that, so push and then push hard. Or if you don't have 3D touch on your phone, you do a reverse pinch gesture, right? So zoom out, right? Pinch out and that will bring you to a screen that basically shows you the preview of the print job, but it has rendered it as a PDF here. And you get a share icon in the upper right corner. This is the key because with that icon, you can share the PDF. You can text it to somebody. You can email it and as in my case, you can even send it to a workflow. And workflow is awesome for all kinds of things. We use it to generate the PDFs that John and I share an Evernote and we need to like put them on the agenda and all the stuff. So I have a workflow. I've got an automator or an Apple script on the Mac that lets me do it. And now I have an automator action on the phone that lets me do it. So that's tip number one from Jay. Thank you very much for that. And now three more. In Mac Geekup 709, you were discussing methods for secure file transfer. I use Drop Share with Backblaze B2 on the back end and Jay has written up. So we will link to that, which is a pretty cool thing. Let's see, John. He says the real tip is the free 10 gigs of storage that you can get with Backblaze B2 and how cheap it is to buy more. But Drop Share is a great alternative to Dropler or Cloud App and it allows you to choose your own storage engine, which is pretty cool. I like it. And he says while we're on transfers, there's a neat little command line tool that's right in the Mac Geekup wheelhouse called transfer.sh. It will let you send files from the terminal. You can even encrypt files with PGP or Keybase, scan for malware, and even send an email with attachment via an alias. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And then lastly, John, for you. Yeah, Jay says after your adventures, John, in user agent switching on macOS, it reminded me that iCab Mobile can do the same thing on iOS where it can be genuinely useful for getting some sites to behave. Unfortunately, these tools are becoming necessary again as Chrome is doing a good job of imitating the bad old days. So we will put a link to iCab Mobile in there too. Sweet. Thanks so much. That's great, Jay. Good stuff. Thoughts on that, John? I'm going to sneak in a follow-up here because our friend Allison Sheridan of the NoCelicast podcast wrote in a tip, but not to Mac Geekup. She wrote it to our other email. But she mentioned a great reason why you may want to change the user agent, Dave. And I had not quite maybe subconsciously realized this. You know where I'm going with this? Well, even if you don't, I'm just going to steam ahead. If you go to Instagram, if you go to it with Safari on macOS, you're going to notice there's one option missing, Dave. You can't add a photo from the macOS interface, web interface. Isn't that dumb? But you can with iOS. Oh, no. Well, you can. I suppose when I'm on iOS, I run the Instagram client, which obviously lets you add photos from that. But no, I think what you said is correct as well. But here's the trick that she mentioned, is that if you change the user agent, when you're running on Safari on macOS and change it to iOS, all of a sudden the icon to add a photo appears on the screen. And if you click on it, it brings up a file browsing dialogue. So it's actually kind of standardized. So I guess when you click on the plus, if it even appears, it says, okay, well, open up a... Yeah, go get a file. Yeah. Bring up a file dialogue. Yeah. I just don't know why they hide that under macOS. Huh. Fascinating. Thanks for that, Ted Bowson. Yeah, good stuff. Cool. All right. Next up, we will go to James, who has cool stuff found. Now that we are in cool stuff found land, and James says... Here we are. I'll get there. Why is Evernote being so slow today? Came across this and thought you, and perhaps a number of listeners would be interested. It is called Pocket Ethernet or Pock Ethernet. P-O-C-K-E-T-H-E-R-N-E-T dot com is the link and they actually sent along sort of a how-to video. But what it is, it is an Ethernet network cable analyzer and network or cable tester and network analyzer that fits into your pocket and connects to your smartphone. Right? So you can plug this thing in. It's 167 pounds. If you live outside of the EU and 199... Sorry. No, it's not pounds. It's euros. I don't know why I said pounds. I can see it right in front of me. 167 euros outside of the EU and 199, including VAT there. But it lets you check the Ethernet link, find cable faults, check power over Ethernet voltage, check your VLANs, your DHCP results and much, much more. So that's a pretty cool thing if you ask me, John. And I don't know that you did, but I'm going to... I qualified it anyway. No, I looked at it. I was trying to figure does it let you look at data though? It's a good question. It lets you... It does a lot of stuff. DHCP stuff. You might be able to see some data passing across it. Yeah. I mean, it says network analyzer, which to me is kind of a vague term. I mean, technically, you typically call something that lets you look at traffic, a protocol analyzer. Right? But it does say, like looking down it, it says you can view the content of CDP and LLDP messages to identify network ports more easily. If the switch port supports it, you can instantly view the connected chassis and port ID as well as the native VLAN. So I think it can see traffic. I'm not sure if it... Oh, here we go. No, no. It's broad traffic, but... No, I see it says view traffic samples. So it may not be a full-time... It may not be something you want to use, full-time data. But it looks like it does let you capture data. Okay, I see it there now. No, it's just... It does a ton of stuff. It was hard for me to tell at first looking at this. That's pretty good. I like it. But for a phone? Yeah, that's a... Right. And being able to... Yeah, exactly. Super handy because you plug it in, you sync it to your phone, you can see it. That's good stuff. Thank you. Thank you, James. Very cool. All right. Man, Evernote is just not happy with me today. I don't know what's going on, John, but it is... This is fun. This is fun. I think I'm going to have to force quit Evernote in order to process the show. I know. Not cool. Not cool at all. All right, so we force quit it. Let's see what happens when we come back. We'll see if it wants to behave here. So can I archive that one? Are you going to kill me here and I got to do this on my phone? Well... Well... Well, we do have a cool stuff found from Ev if I can ever get there. Huh. This is fascinating. Just like cranking the CPU. Good old Evernote. 100%. Even after I quit? How's yours? My mind's just... Everything's fine. I mean, I had to figure out the other day where, you know, it wasn't updating documents. Awesome. That was great. Cool. All right, well, I'm going to launch Evernote on my phone here because we have a podcast to do. And evidently, my Mac doesn't want to behave. So there we go. I will... Here we are. Evernote. How are we sorted here? Uh-huh. Let's see if I can find this and then we'll figure out how to sort things in Evernote on the phone because I think it's sorted. There we are. So, a cool stuff found from Ev. And Ev says, I know a lot of power users listen to Mac eCab and they like a nice and snappy machine. So I thought I would pass this along. I'm about to try it. It is an SSD adapter from StarTech and he says it has OS independent RAID in it. Allows you to put in two SSDs. He says I'm going to RAID zero the two together. My friend of mine did the same thing on his 2015 i7 iMac and said it was a significant boost from his single SSD. Well, that's very interesting. Yeah, makes sense. It's a housing that you put two SSDs in and it sort of stacks them together. It looks like from what I can see looking at the specs on this thing. It looks like a three and a half inch enclosure when it's all done. So it takes the two SSDs, you stack them and it's in, you know, an enclosure like a three and a half inch drive. It supports, as he said, it's got hardware RAID so you can do RAID zero or RAID one. But it also supports JBOD which is just a bunch of disks. Just a bunch of disks. I don't know why I couldn't think of that. Just a bunch of disks. And so then you could let your computer do software RAID which arguably might be a better path to go down. But because that way it's supported by every OS you're going to try. At least every version of Mac OS that you're going to try. But yeah, pretty good. 60 bucks. That's not bad. I like it. Cool. You going to get one, John? I don't think I am, but it's pretty good. I'm wondering because I have been considered. The thing is I do have a lot of two and a half inch drives. And I'm trying to figure what to do with them. They do have some, I think Drogo and Synology. I think they all have some units that take two and a half inch drives. But yeah, last I checked almost all of their things are three and a half inch or whatever reason. So, right? Cool. And then finally another cool stuff found that I have to hunt and find here because, you know, that's just how it's how it's going today. I love it. Mark. Mark's cool stuff found is it's a travel charger. In fact, it's called the M U travel charger at the M U dot co dot UK says there seem to be a lot of questions on charging devices while traveling the globe. Take a look at this little device. It could be a game changer and this is interesting. It it flattens out. It's a little it's a little charger and it's got prongs for outlets that that sort of fold out of it. And that's a pretty cool little thing. They've got international versions and UK only versions and all of that, but it's a flat little device folds right up, sits there and connects. It's got two USB ports on it. I think maybe more. Maybe it's got three pretty cool little thing. What do you think, John? Good stuff. You're traveling and you want to charge your stuff. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah, this really isn't fun having to dig around on my phone here, you know, to do the show. If I'd known I was going to have to do that, I would have grabbed my iPad, but nonetheless, we will we will endure we will move on and at some point I'll get us to where I don't even have to vamp for time and talk about it anymore. But listener Bob says we were talking about the the beach ball and I guess two episodes ago show 719 where we said that, you know, when it floats over an app, it's when the you know, the app is no longer responsive. And so the system says, hey, I'm waiting for it and shows you that by by spinning the beach ball and Bob says my understanding of what triggers the beach ball is that the app that the mouse pointer is hovering over, not necessarily the active app, but the app that the mouse pointer is hovering over is not removing entries from what's called the event queue. If you move the pointer to another app, then the beach ball will often disappear, assuming that app is responsive. Since your mouse and keyboard actions all generate events for apps, the event queue is an easy structure that Mac OS can look at and decide that the app is being responsive or if it is neglecting its duties to accept input. Now as to why an app is not processing events, this can be a lot of things, but that's interesting. And that makes a lot of sense. I buy that. That's good stuff. So yeah, fascinating. Huh, John? Kind of though. It's always why aren't you servicing? Why aren't you dealing? Why are you doing your job? Why aren't you doing your job is the question? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So the app is stuck somehow and just doesn't know how to process. It doesn't know how to process. That's right. Yeah. Cool. All right. And then one last tip from listener Harvey back in show seven twenty. He says you were talking about shaking your iPad to undo a just deleted mail. Says I found a really cool way to shake your iPad without shaking it, thus not potentially risking dropping it. If you go to settings general accessibility and scroll down and turn on assistive touch, you get a lot of features at the push of a pseudo button and it doesn't require you to swipe up or down sideways, shake, etc. Turning on assistive touch puts a translucent button on your screen. This button can be moved anywhere around the edge of the screen. I move mine frequently. He says when it gets in the way of something and I need that I need to touch beneath it. That's the only annoyance. He says you can control its opacity so that it can easily be read through tapping. It makes it visible and in about five seconds it goes translucent again. He says I keep the opacity set between 20 and 30 percent. Tap it once and a square menu pops up on your screen that gives you the choices of notifications, device, control center, home, Siri and custom. Tapping on control center is the equivalent of swiping up with four fingers, etc, etc. This is an interesting thing because you can you can trigger undo from here and trigger a lot of other things accessibility. It is another one of those reminders. Accessibility is a great. Place to go to get access to some of these really interesting features that you might not otherwise, you know, notice even on on iOS. So I highly recommend it. What do you think there, John? I think what you and I reflected on with this Dave is that some of us had to use this feature in the past, especially with misbehaving iPhones whose home button. Yeah, stopped working. I don't know if it was my four or my five, but there was a generation of iPhones where after extended use, the home button just wouldn't button, right? And it's like now what because it's kind of core to the operation of the for most people core to the operation. But one of the tricks was you can get a virtual home button by using. I think it's assistive touch, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we did that with Lisa's. I think I mentioned, I don't know, several months ago, but she ran her phone through the washing machine, her iPhone 7 and that rendered the home button less useful for a short period of time. Well, water resistant. It's no, well, it could even be argued that it's waterproof, but it's only waterproof to what, like three meters or one meter rather, right? And and so even though the washing machine, of course, isn't deeper than that, it's it's all about pressure. And so when you're tumbling something around in the washing machine and it's like forcing water at it invariably, you're going to hit greater pressure than than the, you know, one meter that you're going to have just from, you know, standing water, essentially. So I think that's why it got in there. So there you go. But yeah, it worked for her for a while. In fact, then even when her home button started working, she left the assistive touch button up on the screen for quite a while. But there you go. Yeah. Okay. Alex in the chat room has an interesting thing. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. He says, there's a tangent on the spinning beach ball events Q question or note. He says, I wonder if fs monitor at fs monitor dot com, a file system monitor could begin to prove that theory. I don't know that it is an events monitor, but I imagine events might relate to this. So we'll put a thing for fs monitor. That's nice little bonus there. I like it. Well, they're events. They're just file system events instead of event event. Well, they're events. They're not input events. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Interesting. I want to talk about our second sponsor that worked for you, John. Absolutely. All right. Cool. Our next sponsor for this episode is Eero. We're at Eero dot com. You yes, you can get free overnight shipping in the U.S. or Canada by using coupon code MGG and that will get you this Wi-Fi mesh system that both John and I use and quite happily use at our homes. This is the one that's really been around the longest. They are now on their second generation of hardware. The second generation does two things. It adds a third radio to the Eero base units, which we call the Gen 2 Eero. And then also it adds a completely new piece of hardware called the Eero beacon, which is super cool because this is a unit that you can just plug into an outlet and it hangs right on the wall. So it's out. It's you don't have to worry about finding space on a table for it. You don't have messy cords and it means that you can kind of pop these things strategically through the house. So if you ever wanted to put an Eero in the hallway to start expanding coverage, maybe for the bedrooms that are around it. Boom. The Eero beacon is it night actually use one of those downstairs in our playroom to kind of get the playroom and the and it's another playroom, but we call it Grand Ed's room for reasons that aren't relevant. But anyway, my dad lived with us for a while and so that's where that was. But and so this beacon is very cool because it sits right there. You got to check this out. You know, the single router model just doesn't cut it for many homes nowadays and Eero is the place to go to resolve this search go Eero dot com and then make sure that you use promo code MGG so you add overnight shipping and you got to be in the U.S. or Canada to take advantage of this add overnight shipping then add promo code MGG and that'll make the shipping price free. You are good to go. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Where are we here? Moving on to so Jim has a great troubleshooting story for us. He says after a recent trip I changed my Apple ID password. I usually do this says as a precaution if I have spent any significant time traveling and using Wi-Fi and cellular service outside the country, even though I use a VPN when I made the change on my iPhone I started getting an error message that said that my ID and password could not be verified due to a server error. I was on cellular service. So I found this odd. I decided to do it through Wi-Fi and I got immediate verification. I saw my iCloud data and was off and running. I turned cell service back on turned Wi-Fi off and an alert popped up asking that I re enter my Apple ID password. I did and got the server error message again. I couldn't figure out why it worked on Wi-Fi but not on cellular. So I made a wrong decision to reset network settings and try again. Same result success on Wi-Fi error on cellular. I was about to go through a total reset when I decided to review my settings one more time. This time I noticed I went through all the settings I could think of and found the problem right away for some reason cellular data was turned off in my settings. So I don't remember doing it but somehow it happened. I turned the switch to make cellular data available for the settings app and bingo. I was able to verify by Apple ID. So for me a lesson learned he says start with the basics and to Apple a minor fish shake for having a message that said server error when in fact the problem was that cellular data was off and needed to be re-enabled. That's pretty interesting and even realize that you could turn off cellular data for the settings app. Right. So we're talking about in on the iPhone in settings. So this is a very meta thing right go to settings go to cellular and then sure enough the settings app is listed as an option there for something you can turn on or turn off. And evidently the settings app is what one of the things anyway that needs to authenticate with your iCloud and when it can't it tries and goes over the network and then we'll throw an error. That's fascinating. Fascinating. There you are. Yeah. Very interesting. Very very interesting. Cool. All right. Well, hello. Hey John. How you doing? Okay. I went away and came back. So I didn't know that. Oh, well welcome back. I put in the room there. Okay. I don't know what I was talking. I can't read and talk at the same time but I would have caught it eventually. Welcome back. Nice to see regarding Jim. Yes. Yeah. I thought commentary on that. Yeah. Was it well to catch you up then Jim's problem was that in settings cellular as you scroll through the list of apps that can or cannot have access to cellular data, he somehow had turned off cellular data access for the settings app itself. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. It took me a couple reads to get that right. It was like, oh, he turned off cellular data in settings. It's like, no, he turned off settings cellular data in settings or it was off. We assume he turned it off because that's okay. All right. You and I earlier were having a tangential conversation. Well, I think it's a relevant discussion. But how do you really know when cellular data is off? So before this is a great place to go. But before we head down that path, maybe we should do that another show because it gets it's a it's a it's an onion or a rabbit hole or whatever. Yeah. And it's it's separate from this, right? Because he his cellular data was turned on. Yeah. No, it was it was just an app specific thing. Yeah. The unintentional setting. Right. Right. It wasn't system wide. It was just for that specific app. It's fascinating. Yeah. All right. Two comments about the new MacBook Pro. So we I'll put that on the list for for next week's show. That's a good one to dive into John. Ron has one and then John has another. But when it comes to the new MacBooks Pro Ron says just commenting on the recent discussion about buying a new MacBook Pro versus fixing the old says I have a mid 2012 MacBook Pro. It has served me well, but I use Lightroom and Photoshop frequently and the computer has struggled mightily. 16 gigs of RAM is OK, but I regularly max out the cores and the battery just drains on this 2012 Lightroom and Photoshop were slow. I tried all kinds of things to speed them up with no luck. I finally went with a 2.6 gigahertz i7 with 16 gigs of RAM and I've been blown away by the speed everything flies. The keyboard seems fine. He says I've even learned to appreciate the touch bar as it puts some commands at my fingertips. I'm even thinking of going to a second monitor and a big external hard drive when my iMac, which seems to be holding up despite its age, finally goes really great computer. So yeah, it's it's important to remember it. You know, it really is easy for many of us, most of us in fact to survive with these older machines, right? You know, we've got SSDs in them now, which which makes the, you know, the booting and launching apps faster. Most older machines have are able to have plenty of RAM in them to do what they need to do. But, you know, the speed of that CPU, especially when we can remove these other obstacles like the SSD can be an obstacle. You remove that, you remove any RAM obstacles and then really it's left to is the SSD fast and sorry, is the CPU fast enough to do what you need to do and will faster CPU help. And in Ron's case, the answer is a resounding yes. So it's worth remembering as we look at our older machines and say, yeah, it's still good enough. It is good enough. But what's the value of better? So it's good stuff. Thank you for it. Thank you for the the the thoughts on that, Ron. Is this the one that had that? I seem to recall a recent temperature based controversy with a recent Macbook machine. I don't know if this is one of them, but right. Well, there was right. Yes, you're right. There were issues that the new 2018 Macbook pros were having an issue with throttling the CPU in a in an erratic way when the the core temperature hit a certain number and it was it sounds like and then Apple released a firmware update that completely resolved it. But it sounds like what that was was somebody just programmed the the power management or thermal management chip incorrectly. It and so it was just doing strange things when it would hit a certain temperature was like spiking all over the place and it evidently doesn't need to be doing that. So yes, the firmware update fix that. Yeah. Okay, some people were like, well, why use this new fancy processor if you can't keep up? Yeah. So that's that's fair, right? Yeah. Okay. All right. So it was it was a temperature managed power management. Yeah. Issue and the firmware update fixed it. Okay. That's right. Yep. There is an interesting caveat or or PSA perhaps and I'll put a link. Listener John, thankfully, porthos John in the chat room and in the forums posted this in our forums and I will put a link to this in the Mac eCAP forums because we're not going to go through all of the details here. But he he got a new MacBook Pro and when he got the machine he was going to migrate everything from his current MacBook Pro also running high Sierra. So the new one he gets running high Sierra old one runs high Sierra. He wanted to migrate everything from the old ones to the new one. So he made a full backup to an external SSD full backup of the old one to an external SSD. But his new Mac wouldn't boot from that and so he couldn't clone it to the internal drive and this this in in retrospect as things often are is a good sign. If it won't boot from it externally it's probably not going to boot from it when you clone it internally either. So he says he put the new machine in target disk mode and use carbon copy cloner to send over the whole thing. And then as as I've said his new machine wouldn't boot from this old version of high Sierra. And so it would he tried all kinds of things. He tried to boot from a USB installer. You know he made a USB stick of the current high Sierra installer wouldn't boot from the stick. There's a new secure boot option in in high Sierra that requires you to boot into recovery and set security options. He tried that. He went through all kinds of things. He actually found that installing and this is the sort of the key here installing the current Mojave beta solved what didn't solve it but it sort of got him down the path of because that worked. And so that was interesting. And evidently it has something to do with this t2 processor in the 2018 MacBook Pro and the firmware can get corrupted and result in the inability to install high Sierra. I also wonder if something along the lines of you know he's running 10.13.6 it may have even said that he was running 10.13.6 on the new Mac but I really wonder if there is a special build of high Sierra that's coming with these and that 10.13.7 will include that for everyone and then make you know all the existing builds or the all the existing installations of high Sierra boot the newer Macs too. It certainly seems like that and the dev betas of Mojave already had it in there because we've seen that before we're a new Mac will come out and and even though it says it's got the same version of of whatever version of Mac OS is out it's not it's a you know it's a version plus and it's got whatever the magic is that it needs to boot from that. So anyway the takeaway is do not image to these new 2018 MacBook Pros with the current version of high Sierra which is as we're saying this 10.13.6 that may well change with 10.13.7 in fact I'd be shocked if it didn't but but your mileage will vary and as John learned the hard way and the long way if your machine doing what he did was really smart tried to boot from the clone and then was going to clone use you know having booted from the clone then the the internal drive is unencumbered and he could have cloned it back to that not booting from the clone is a good sign that it may not boot from that installation regardless of where it is so crazy crazy crazy scary yeah yeah yeah yeah well good PSA so thanks for going through all that John thanks for chronicling it for all of us we'll put a link like I said cool Leo all right John we got one more tip left before we can jump to some questions how's that sound for you sure now with that cool listener Jeff says I bought an Apple Watch about nine months ago mainly for health and fitness tracking and it's been great about a week ago I noticed that my Apple Watch was showing the red icon at the top of the display indicating that the watch was disconnected from my iPhone an iPhone 6S sure enough in the settings app on my phone it showed that my Bluetooth had disconnected I toggled my iPhone Bluetooth off and on and it connected fine couple hours later same thing so I toggled iPhone Bluetooth and boom it reconnected when it disconnected again several hours later I power cycled my iPhone and the watch but it continued to lose Bluetooth connectivity every few hours a bit of web searching turned up some suggestions that unpairing and repairing the watch would probably fix the problem so I went ahead and did that this process takes a while as it appears to do a full backup and then restores it unfortunately this didn't fix the problem remembering my troubleshooting training from my years of being a support engineer I asked myself the question I should have right at the start did I do or change anything right around the time this issue showed up that could possibly have a bearing on the problem in this case as it often is the answer was yes earlier during the day that this problem first occurred I had installed a Bluetooth audio receiver dongle into an old stereo system in my garage workshop so I unplugged the new dongle and voila problem solved it's now been three days since my watch last disconnected so it seems that somehow the Bluetooth dongle was interfering with the watch connection to my iPhone since I have quite a few Bluetooth devices kicking around the house and never seen anything like this before so that's very interesting great troubleshooting process and we love that that's sort of what made the story endeared it to us and and has put it in the show here because we love the troubleshooting process and getting it right because that really often is the thing that separates us from being totally crazily insane and taking one step at a time and really kind of doing the detective work but I wonder if the proximity of the dongle was the issue or was the dongle is paired to the phone like if he had unpaired the dongle from the phone with that have fixed I don't know you know what do you think John I think as we discuss that a prior episode that Bluetooth is just the hot mess is is the problem well yeah clearly yes of course of course no yes somebody something paired with something else or interfered with something else yes but but no but I mean it's it's almost the first rule is when you try to solve the problem first determine what what if anything has changed now sometimes you may not know what has changed right but in this case of course he did because it was self induced not saying that's a bad thing but it's just how it goes yeah I did a thing and right yeah but it's so hard to I mean in this case it's certainly you know retroactively looking at it it seems obvious it's like oh you started having Bluetooth problems but sometimes it's not that obvious right even in retrospect it's like oh yeah I changed the thing yeah and like he said and actually you know I worked with IT groups and helped us people for a number of years and one of the first questions they would ask somebody that would call up is have you changed anything yeah it's hard to remember well no well have you added any soft oh well but some of that stuff is so routine like you know a software update to an app like an auto update happens when you reboot your machine right you know you let it go a week or whatever and you reboot and it's like oh yeah okay and you just let it happen right really no memory of it because it's you get like three of them every time you reboot it's like okay cool I couldn't tell you what the three things were that updated the last time I booted my Mac was it you know and then like something like Dropbox right Dropbox updates itself in the background you don't know you have no idea that's just how it is go yeah okay cool so things can change without you know you can even allow changes without knowing that you did that's great that's where it gets interesting yeah yeah cool all right yeah all right moving on to Tony Tony's got a good question got an email from Tony this morning says I can't find a CAD file from August 1st that I have the PDF of I think I changed the name of the file when making the PDF is there a way to see what vector works files I was working on that day so this is interesting he first asked is there a way in time machine to do this but and it's good that he has a time machine backup but I did time machine immediately seemed like the the wrong answer you know if you don't know what you're looking for in time machine that can be interesting however the finder just normal finder I think is the thing to use here and if you go in the finder you go to the file menu and choose find you get a few new options at the top of your finder window right and you can search for files by something other than or in addition to the file name and so what it on my machine what it defaults to and I think this is on everybody's but you get a couple of menus you search and then it chooses let's you choose this Mac or shared files or whatever folder you happen to be in and then you get a couple of drop downs and the first one is to pick what you're looking for and I choose kind there and then in the next drop down you get to see a list of the file types that it wants to offer you but the bottom of that list is other and what's cool is if you type other you can just type in the text that you want to look for in the kind of the file so since his was a vector works file I said type in vector with a capital V because vector works starts with capital V and I couldn't remember if vector works had a capital W I think it does but let's not even worry about it let's just search for files where the kind is vector so it'll find vector works documents and maybe it'll find others and you could then also say only find files that you know we're modified as recently is you know whatever August 1st whatever it is and and of course he wrote me back instantly and said that did it I was able to find it so don't forget about the finders advanced find features these are helpful helpful things and it even took me a minute like when his email came in I started heading down the you know he said time machine so it's like oh let me no no no like wrong rats nest different rats nest is better to solve this and the finder really is it so there you go yes John very close by in that same dialogue Dave so if you go to the kind of course you can go kind any and as you said you can choose other yep but if you click on kind you'll also see an other other right yep you with me I'm totally with you know I'm glad you're going down the tug on this string let's go yeah yeah yeah I'm going to talk in the string because I think it's relevant because if we go to other on that list there's like I'll estimate like 200 things there and based on what I see in that list Dave I think some things get placed there by app by specific applications yep so there could be a choice in that list saying a vector works file because I'm looking here and I'm sure I'm really bizarre stuff like does this file have an alpha channel well if you even know what an alpha channel is yeah yeah yeah but there's so many specific things in here application specific or file specific that you may be able to find one in this list is specific to the type of file that you're searching for and I'll leave it at that because I mean yeah I mean there's just so much stuff in here it's it's no that's a that's a great a great little tidbit to share because it really there's so much to this and it's worth you know when you're not having a problem right it's worth going through that that other list in that first drop down there because you might see something that like you said John triggers you know just take a look at the list and you just check the box to add it to the main list and then you can use it but there's so many things there that you know you might say oh I had no idea I could search based on that criteria it's like yeah man there you go off off to the races so yeah all yeah all anything more on this John nope nope okay before we move on to Greg I want to talk about our third sponsor for the day if that's okay by you my friend okay okay our next sponsor is text expander from the lovely folks at smile we're at text expander dot com slash podcast you get 20% off your first year there now text expander holy cow this is one of those apps that will save your bacon it will save you so much time and can really save you embarrassment and let me explain whatever you're doing running a business even just running a household but certainly running a business there's lots of things that you're going to email to people over and over again right you might customize it here there you might put somebody's name in you might tweak something but you're starting from the same spot and what do you do you go find the last time you emailed this text to somebody right and and you copy it you paste it and I think all the formatting is weird I got to fix that let me change this and hopefully you don't screw anything up and hopefully you're not just trying to type these things over and over again from memory you know things like email addresses website addresses directions reference requests proposals right I just had a sales guy leave the company and so it's like we got a cover for him while we work to replace him and man if it weren't for text expander snippets for somebody that you know comes in and says I'm interested it's like yeah here you go you know here's all this information we don't have to type it out we don't have to check it for accuracy we know it's right because not only do we have it on one computer but because text expander for teams allows you to you can sync it to all of the computers not just that you have but that exist in your entire organization so you got to check this out go to text expander.com slash podcast use one of the tools that I couldn't possibly live without and I've been using for a decade plus I think certainly feels like life has been good that long but there you go so check it out text expander.com slash podcast our thanks our sincere thanks to the folks that smile for sponsoring this episode. All right John why don't you take us to Greg. Greg has one that I thought be a slam dunk but it's not it never is it should be so Greg says how do I find the size of an iOS video I recently attempted to screen record a webinar on my iPad pro that went for 30 minutes. Okay fair I have a 256 gigabyte iPad pro but I don't know the impact of this recording on my space. That's a fair question. Well seems to be pretty simple Dave I mean you know where where do your videos appear to be they appear like you know all the all the other media in the photos app so you just go to the photos app you bring up the video. And then you click you get info wait and then you click on the get info icon that's not there exactly because that would be my expectation is like whoa whoa whoa right so reasonable expectation but for whatever reason on iOS Apple just doesn't think you need to know this so how can you get this information so I offer a potpourri. Yeah how do you get this information John well there's a number of ways you can get this information Dave cool so but you can either do it with getting an app or not doing an app so you know I wanted to take the challenge here and how can you do it how can you do it with without spending any coin natively yeah okay it's kind of round about but if you recall Dave they just added a new files ability to the term to iOS and one of the things you can find in the files app is the size of something right okay so what you could do and I did because I took a video though I already have some so you take a video you click on the share icon which is little square with the up arrow and then say save to files you can then choose a location you may want to probably choose on my iPhone but you could choose anywhere really right destination or something like that and once saved you run files and then you click on the file and it shows you the size how do you like that well I don't like it and and here's why well I don't like it because it takes up storage but yeah but but it does it like those videos are saved on the phone in HEVC format right h.265 sometimes the sharing of a photo or a file strips some things or reconverts it sometimes I I don't know that this happened in this particular instance but I've seen it where like when you if you send a photo to somebody via messages they don't get the full-size photo right if you airdrop it to them they do so I I'm not convinced that this is telling you this is allowing you to see what the size is of the thing that you have saved there but I don't know that that's letting you see the size of the original I don't think they're one in the same necessarily it might okay but it's it's it's fair to think that it might not be too so okay their point warning yeah yeah then I looked around because other people had this question I surfed around here and it seems there's a popular app that's free called photo investigator okay so you download this thing called photo investigator the nice thing about photo investigator in addition to being able to let you surf your media library and look at the size of things is that it also appears as an option in the share area as well okay so that's kind of neat so it puts a little plug in there so so if you bring up a video say share photo investigator is going to be one of the options and bring it up and it shows you the size of the video on your device so that will that should quell your concern yep yep as far as third-party apps there's another one that as far as I know is free called snap seed which I believe Google absorbed at some point that's right yep and I have that so then I started going through my apps the thing I kind of like the files thing because it doesn't require an app but right right that's that's and I thought it was kind of clever but maybe maybe too clever for my own good oh maybe it's hard to there's no way to confirm right that's the problem you know you know well there is I mean like I didn't go through and verify that the file size was the same with between saving it and viewing it with the third-party app and then the fourth party app that or second party if you have a Mac there's a thing called image capture you know what you could do Dave you can hook up your iOS device to your Mac you can run image capture it will identify your iOS device as a data source and it'll show you the size of all your pictures and videos give you a big list of all the videos and stuff and and along with it there's a column that says here's how big it is so if you happen to have a Mac in addition to your iOS device that that would be the best way to do it yeah yeah I like this but why why why I don't know it just seems such a simple thing to put into the UI of the of the photos out yep I wonder if I'm I think I amazing will show you the same thing but you know you need a Mac for that too brother I'm amazing and it it seems to take a very long time to process the data on the device it was like it was really go it was like you know building thumbnails or something like that I think I eventually got to that point but I didn't mention it because it seemed to take a long time to get the data that you needed whereas it was pretty much instant with image capture yeah right right not blaming them I mean they're you know they're they got to do it their own way yeah right yeah I think what they do is they build a thumbnail that they require building a thumbnail index before they show you all of the data that I wasn't I didn't have time for that I mean you know but you get an answer here that's right yeah we got to move on to the next question speaking of I guess we got to move on to the next question don't we listener Carl sends in his his question here and seems ever notes behaving and I shouldn't really say that without knocking on wood he says I have an interesting problem I have a nifty brand micro SD adapter with a 13 inch MacBook Air early 2014 running high Sierra the adapter houses a Samsung 128 Evo XCI micro SD card it is formatted as a Mac OS extended journal so HFS plus disk over the years I've been able to copy files and deleted files as you normally would I basically was storing less used files and apps since the MacBook's SSD is a bit small to keep things simple I had three folders on it one was for games one was photos one was for other stuff and I would occasionally dump files in the root directory to no problem about a year ago I copied a bunch of files I needed to make sure I had them with me on a trip I created a new directory and dump the files into it they appeared to copy fine but a few hours later gone the newly created directory and files gone I thought it was weird but being on the road I got too busy to troubleshoot and I had been using a trustee usb external drive in the meantime anyway fast forward to the present I figured I would reformat the drive and see if that eliminated my issue but it won't format I get an error message saying the drive is in use if I boot off another drive or remove the drive and try to format another computer disc utility goes through the process and says the drive is formatted but nothing changes those same three directories are still there the same old formatting option all the files everything is fine I can read but I can't write the card inserted into a completely different Mac I trash the files that were there I just move them to the trash and empty the trash then about an hour later they're back so I've never seen anything like this is my drive haunted so as I'm reading this email I'm thinking man this is bizarre I wonder what's happening and then I got to the end and it hit me I think this is a hundred percent normal John I it's just that we haven't started seeing this routinely yet if we remember back to our discussions when we first started talking about solid state drives solid state drives and flash memory in that sense have limited right cycles and we know that when a drive gets to a certain point you won't be able to write to it anymore but you can read from it just fine that's what we kept saying this is like eight years ago or whatever well show enough seems like that's what started happening to his tribe I mean he's you know unless there's something about the disk that he has physically locked it and can or not physically but you know it's somewhere in the hardware of the drive like there's sometimes there's ways like an SD card you can you know slide the little thing and it won't it'll lock the disk and certainly if it has one of these unlock it and things will be fine again but but barring that I think this is just normal wear and tear you know and it's how an SSD goes that you're you're hissing John so I'm not really sure okay now it you know I thought about that though but I actually looked up the card in question here so it's a micro SD card right yeah I mean it is an SSD in a sense I mean it's but I actually looked up the specs for this drive okay no so I'm with you initially in my disappointment is that I looked up the specs here directly from Samsung and they didn't have one figure that I would expect that the vendor of any memory card or any sort of media would offer and that's a some call it maximum right cycle some call it mean time between failure what area call it mostly right cycles and they didn't really have a reliable that they didn't list like how many times you can write to this thing the other thing is that they claim that this device I believe has a 10 year limited warranty which I don't know it's 10 years old or if it's not maybe there's an option here but I'm looking here yeah and the thing is if your cards failed well hey it's got a 10 year warranty so you know yeah for a new one that's right yeah but I'm with you and the other thing is yes like you said I have found that certain enclosures or adapters have that little read-only switch that you may accidentally slide sometimes not realizing it way to do that of course yeah I guess you don't look at the finder and see if it's listed as read-only right yeah no this one doesn't look to have that but again you know it's it's totally worth checking for that yeah yeah this one doesn't seem to have one fascinating and I think we're going to start running into this more and more with you know drives that we've had a long time right you know these I mean this will happen at some point it's the way it's it's one of the ways that these things I'll say gracefully fail right is okay we're done writing the scary part is that it appears as though it took these rights and then you know when it flushed its caches and all of that stuff nope it didn't you know so that's the scary part as you think you're saving data to it and then it turns out no you weren't so yeah fascinating I love it I love you know I don't love it I'm sorry that Carl's going through this but you know it's interesting yeah yeah yeah hey before you take us to Jim I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium contributors that contributed this week please in if you want to learn more about Mackie gap premium it's Mackie gap comm slash premium is the place to go our premium listeners are those of you that are interested and able in contributing directly as I always say you all contribute in your own ways and and it's I mean that's what makes our Mackie gap family work the way that it does and and as well as it does but for those of you that are interested and able to contribute financially directly you're also a huge part of how this all works and continues for us here so I want to make sure to thank you and this week can contributions on the biannual plan of 25 every six months include newly to us Peter P. Gary W. David H. Robert F. and Carl B. Thanks to all of you you rock and on the monthly $10 plan Nick S. Robert D. Beth B. Ward J. Greg S. Olga P. Bob P. Michael L. Jason A. Stephen A. Chris F. Paul M. Mike C. and Mark R. So thank you so much to all of you. Thanks to everybody for doing what you do. It's it's awesome to be able to do this every week. So really thank you. All right, John, you're going to take us to Jim. We got some fish shake ammo here, Dave. Okay, all right, just get ready, man. Watch out for the strap. No, I'm stretching. I'm getting ready. So Jim, that's a great question and about the smack when I click on storage and then manage watch. I'm sorry. So it's yeah, get info. All right, then there's a storage tab and then manage dot dot dot. So let's all go there first. But once you go there, Dave on the left pane on the bottom, there's something called system. Now he says it used to say five gigabytes. Now it never populates and just constantly spins. I've tried many form suggestions. Thoughts on a fix. Yeah. My thoughts on a fix is ignore it. Don't use it because it's bogus. And I'm standing behind our fists are shaking already. Hey, I'm just back for man illness here, man. I got all this energy. I got to do something right. Yeah. But I'll tell you honestly, my experience with Dave is that it is bogus. So in the course of my investigation here, though, I've actually looked into this before and came to the same conclusion. I just ran it on when I ran away MacBook Pro when he presented the question. I brought up the same dialogue and I saw a figure of 334 gigabytes. I'm like, all right. Then a few moments later, it said 192. Okay. And then a few moments later, Dave, it said 159. How can I trust you? The other thing to Dave is that if you look in all the items in this dialogue, there's applications, documents, iBooks. It all gives you some level of detail as to what is in what constitutes that category. The system category you can't click on because it's grayed out. So what does it even mean? And I'm being totally serious. I have no idea what system means. That could be what's in your system directory. I don't know. So please Apple, you know, in the next Rev here, I mean, either, you know, expand this or just get rid of it because it's confusing. So two suggestions though. I'm assuming that you're trying to save space. Now you may be trying to understand how your system works, but I'm going to give a couple of suggestions. So one is that if you're looking as to what is taking out space, including what's in your system directories, which is often where lots of things that you don't know about could be hidden. I'd use something like our friend Omni Disweeper. All right. Yeah, for sure. At least that's one of my suggestions and that will show you clutter in your system, potential clutter in your system directory. Like at one point, I remember I had like all these old, you know, iOS backups and all sorts of stuff. It was just there was huge, there was huge amounts of data that were not immediately visible to me that once I ran Omni Disweeper or, you know, and there are other tools to do this as well. And I will point out, and I'll link to the article, but we've got sort of the canonical article on how to do this at TMO. Running Omni Disweeper is great, but it can only see what it is privileged to see, which means that any files that aren't accessible or visible to your user account are not visible or accessible to Omni Disweeper because you're simply running it as an app. So we have a little terminal command that you can run that will run it as a root user. It uses the sudo command from the terminal. And that's how I always run Omni Disweeper. In fact, I just did it on my machine downstairs and realized I had, you know, 18 gigs worth of some back plays crap that they say means I need to uninstall and reinstall back plays and start my backup from scratch. So ask me how happy I am about that. But I'm happy to have deleted this 18 gigs worth of crap that was on my drive and, you know, and I found a bunch of other stuff too. Like I tweeted a thing out yesterday from our Makikeb account after I ran Omni Disweeper. I noticed this. So I run Homebrew. I ran brew cleanup on my machine in the office which goes through and deletes like all the installers for previous versions of things. Every time you do brew upgrade, it, you know, it adds, it downloads the newest one and installs it. Well, it doesn't delete the old ones unless you do brew cleanup. And I can see why it's, you know, it doesn't want to do anything that hasn't been told to do. Eight gigs, eight gigs. So that was a lot of storage. So anyway, yes, Omni Disweeper. Good stuff. So after you. Oh, okay. So you saw a big blob of data that you didn't think was really. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Well, you know, that's the nice part about Omni Disque Sweepers. It shows you where everything is and it's super. It's great. I love it. And the nice part is if you go like in my case, you know, I did brew cleanup and I wanted to update just that one section that one directory of Omni Disque Sweepers that it would see it and I didn't have to start from scratch, but I got to see sort of, you know, where my disc was in the moment. You just highlight the directory and go to, you know, command you or go to the file menu and choose update and just highlights, you know, just rescans that one sub folder or whatever, which is great. So anyway. Okay. And the second thing that I noticed, David, I noticed an additional item in this sidebar called system junk. It's like, well, I don't remember seeing that there before. Well, you know, why that's there? It's there because our friends at Mac Paw must have written a plug-in for CleanMyMac 3. Got it. Because when I clicked on that, it then showed me a report from CleanMyMac saying, hey, yeah, I found all this junk here. And by the way, if you run CleanMyMac, it'll actually tell you what constitutes the megabytes of potential junk that it finds that you can then get rid of. So just hats off to them for doing a nice integration and giving you the deets because sometimes you need the deets, Dave. Sometimes you need the deets. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean it, you know, you got to balance it with being obsessive about this stuff. But my computer was getting down to, you know, several gigabytes free on my 512 SSD or my 500 SSD. It was like, oh, yeah, okay. It's time. Like what happened? Oh, really? Yeah. An Omni distripper kind of lets you see the story of what happened. Now I'm up to like 70 gigs free this and no functional change in the way that I work. It's just old cash files and you know, things like, like I said, this homebrew thing and the some downloads that I still need to go through, you know, people will send me. I've got it's and you know who you are. But I've got folks out there that they know what bands I like and they constantly sending sending me downloads and stuff that I have to process through and sometimes I process them and forget to delete the file or whatever. I don't mean to say that I don't want these things. This is awesome. It keeps me listening to lots of music. So it's great. But but you know, just like all that stuff. It's just how it goes. Yeah, cool. That's what I got on that. Yep. Cool. Hey, on this topic, we had a question from listener Daniel. Oh, cool. Oh, it seems like it's time to for for Evernote to spin and do nothing again. I love that makes me. I got it came to life finally. It oh, it did. It had for a while and then and now it's something wrong with the event queue. I don't ever know what I think. Dude, I don't know. I don't know. It's something. What? Why is this not like what it's going on? How come I can't am I? Are you the money? Are you actually paying the money for this? Yeah. Oh, I'm definitely paying the money. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's awesome. Get on the horna. I bet I need to dump the Evernote cash file. Like it wouldn't surprise me if that's the if that's the issue. Right. Like, you know, that kind of stuff. Do they have like a purge cash file option in their references somewhere? Uh, probably around while you actually do. Yeah. No, it's OK. I have Daniel's question in front of me finally after vamping here. So Daniel asks said someone wants someone once told me that the surest way to kill on SSD was to run it at or above 90 percent full. Do you agree with this? I know it's not good due to performance hits when it's this full, but can it indeed kill it? Um, so, you know, and then he asks as a follow up, do you know of any small app that can run in the background and monitor the free space on a drive and most importantly, display that info in an easily viewable manner. So I step menus is the answer to that second fall of the second thing because you can choose to put it right there in your menu bar and and see how full your drive is and all that good stuff. So that's one of them. There's others, but certainly that would do it. I've never heard that a full SSD will kill it, but it certainly makes sense that an SSD might suffer some performance issues if it's close to full. You know, an SSD takes an additional cycle to wipe a cell before writing to it. So usually when you write to a cell on an SSD, it's one that's already been wiped previously during downtime. And this is what we refer to as like garbage collection or trim, right? That's what an SSD is doing is, right? It's doing that in its downtime so that when you need to write, it just has a place to write. So if you're changing a file, let's say even you're editing a, you know, a pages document, right? You make some changes and you hit command S. It's not saving that back to the same place that it was. It's saving it to a new place because that's faster and then it's marking the old places ready for garbage collection. And then later, the drive will go through or the system will go through and let the drive do its cleanup and all that stuff. So if you're very close to full, then there might be some scenarios where if even a simple operation like saving a small pages document would require an extra jump because the system might say I don't have enough room or even if I do, I'm going to save it there. But then immediately, I have to hold off and go clean up that old one so that we have it free because holy crap, we're really close to, you know, emergency levels here. So, so yeah, in that sense, that might kill it because it's going to cause, you know, extra wear and tear on those cells. And as we just talked about, once cells have been written to a certain number of times, they stop being able to be written to again. So I guess, yeah, the fuller drive is, yeah, I can see, I mean, to use the term kill is a little, that might be overkill, but it's not wrong. You know, you want to, you want to have some space free or not, right? I mean, here's the thing. You could buy a two terabyte SSD today, right? Let's say you have 800 gigs of data. Okay. You could buy a two terabyte SSD today or you could buy a one terabyte SSD. One would be, you know, far more than half full. It would be 80% full. The other one would be 40% full. So, which is better for the, from an SSD standpoint, you know, if we take this at face value, what we've been talking about here, yeah, okay, the two terabyte one will see less wear and tear with that 800 gigs of data, so it might last longer. But what's the cost difference between a two terabyte and a one terabyte today versus buying a one terabyte today and then in whatever five years when that drive starts to fail, you buy another one terabyte drive, it's going to be way less expensive. So, well, you know, I don't know. It's one way to look at it. What do you think, John? So with the rotational drive, I would say definitely because with the rotational drive, well, at least in the case of performance because rotational drives have a head and the thing is the less space you have, the less places you have to put the new data and so the head's going to be flying around all over the place. With an SSD, I'm with you in that there are mechanisms to try to prevent burnout, shall we say, and that when you're writing to a what we'll call a sector on an SSD, you're not really, even though you may appear to be writing to the same place, you're really not because it's doing, I believe it's called ware leveling is that the physical cell that you're writing to isn't the same. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, right, right. It's just like I said, yeah, you're you're writing to a different spot when you hit save in that pages document. It's going somewhere else. Right. But I think what you were saying was that you may not have enough un trimmed or trimmed blocks in that yet you may approach a point where it hasn't been able to do enough garbage collection or trim work and it gets it gets stopped up. So it's a it's not necessarily a killing issue, but yeah, it could be a potential performance bottleneck if it gets too too full. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. So I'm with you on that. So that's why you run a want to run a tool like I made a sweeper or something else to make sure you got as much as much free space as possible. Cool. Well, while you were doing that, while you were speaking there, John, I was listening to you, but I was also updating Evernote in the background from seven dot two dot three to seven point three. I would never do this during an episode normally, but you know, given we've seen, I figured it couldn't hurt. The worst thing that would happen is it would leave me unable to see my data in Evernote. You know, really? Like the rest of the episode. I'm on seven three, seven point three. Oh, I'm only on seven to three. See what I'm saying? There you go. Okay. And it did do a database upgrade. So we'll see, but listener John has a question and I am able to read it. It says he says lately I've been on a kick with some old school ring tones, one of which AOL is iconic. You've got mail. It's now my tone for new mail on my iPhone and iPad pro, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to set a new slash custom tone for new mail on my Mac. I'm using a 2016 Mac book pro running TICER 10.13.6. So yes, here's the trick folks. Make the sound, right? And I think any type of sound file that your Mac can play in the finder, you know, with like quick look or whatever quick look being when you highlight a file and hit space bar if it plays the sound there, I think any of those will work. But put that in your home folder in in the library folder which if you can't see it go to the go menu and choose library and if it doesn't appear there hold down the option key and choose library but I think it appears there for everybody now go into home library and then sounds drop that in there then go into mail and and choose the sound and you should see any of this that like there'll be the default system sounds that are kind of built in at the top and then there'll be a little separator and below that will be anything custom that's sitting in that folder and that should let you do it for you which is handy I think don't you, John? I'll be honest to it isn't it? Well, just slightly I don't know. I mean, you look everything seems obvious when you know the answer right? I mean, so now that we know you can get a home library and sounds like oh, that's a smart place to put a, you know for that user account sort of a you know non application specific group of sounds that we can choose from makes perfect sense once you know yeah but it's not intuitive correct I agree with that wholeheartedly yes Brother Jay saying he wants to change the messages and FaceTime sounds to a custom sound but that has never been possible ah you know I don't know will those appear there too? What do you think, John? I don't know. He messages forever. No, there's no message received sound. Let's see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Play sound effects. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think those I think the sounds that are there will appear in that menu. Brother Jay let me yeah, we might as well with the heck, John. We can we can do this here. It's only you know it's fun to have a little experiment. So I will download a sound and we shall see what happens here, John. So I will save this in home library sounds because we like to do things in real time. So I grabbed a sound file that I have. I will I will play everyone the sound file once I once I get there. Come on, save it. There you go. Some messages shows ring tones and alert tones which I guess is the standard suite of tones. Okay. So let's see. Message received sound shows ring tones and alert tones. No, I am not seeing this sound that I put in there. Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad because that would be that would be interesting. This was the sound that I that I had. Let's have a party. I love you. From Chattie Kathy, right? Wouldn't that be a nice little message to sound? But no, doesn't seem like it wants to show up there. So not an option. Not an option. You know, both apps show ring tones and alert tones which must be stored somewhere. So if you can figure how to get something in first to find them, right? Right. Let me see if my Chattie Kathy sound in there appears in mail just to make sure. Yeah, sure enough. It certainly appears in mail now that I put it in that folder. So yeah. So some apps can only see sounds from certain sources, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the very least here, at least FaceTime and messages seem to be looking in the same two places. But not in the sounds folder. Yeah, exactly. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I see again, there's a ring tones category and an alert tones category. Where do those live? Yeah. You'll have to investigate that. Yeah. This is interesting. All right. No, no Chattie Kathy there. Gosh, that's too bad. All right. I need to turn that off because I definitely don't want Chattie Kathy alerting me to my mail arriving. There you go. So yes, though, I'd love to play Chattie Kathy to people who tend to be talking too much on their phones when in my presence and I don't think they should be. I think I'm going to get that. Can you send me that please? Let's have a party. I love you. That's good stuff, right? You know, it's interesting. All right. Well, speaking of sounds, John, I think it's time. We've had a chatty. Yes. Speaking of chatty people that need to be told when to stop. I think I think that we played ourselves the chatty Kathy sound as perhaps a hint. Fun stuff. I am stoked that you all could join us today. This is a good one. And thanks to everybody who sent in questions, whether we read them or not on the show. Thanks for sending them in. Thanks, of course, to all of our premium subscribers. If you want to send in your own question, please. There's two places and actually I'm totally OK to be putting them in either one of these. So there's the email address which we're going to do and we've got a little bit and so we're going to do that and it's going to take a little time but it's feedback at Mackie Keb.com. And like he said, it's feedback at Mackie Keb.com. Feedback at Mackie Keb.com is where you can email us and that's option number one and it's totally OK. Option number two because you have a choice is posting the question in our Mackie Keb forums and Mackie Keb.com slash forums. That's where you can go. You post it right there. We'll see it, but so will everyone. So obviously if it's something private then send that to us for email. But if it's something where you are OK with it being public and would like to get the benefit of the community Mackie Keb.com slash forums is the place to go. Let's see. What do we have here? Oh, yes, of course. I'd like to thank cash fly at cash fly dot com for providing all the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you. Let's see. Of course, we want to thank all the sponsors in our podcast marketplace. We have smile of course at text expander.com slash podcast. As we mentioned, Iro we're coupon code MGG saves you on overnight shipping crossover at code weverse dot com slash MGG other world computing at max sales dot com ring at ring dot com slash MGG and the folks at Fairbones software fairbones dot com and makers of BB edit one password dot com slash geek gab as well. John, do you have anything to say before we head off on our adventures for the week and then, of course, return next week. Do I have anything to say? I have three things to say, Dave, as you probably know. And those are don't get caught. Let's have a party. I love you.