 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek App, episode 693 for Monday, January 22nd, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek App, the show where you send in your questions, tips and cool stuff found. And the goal is for every single one of us to learn at least five new things. That's right, five new things. As we answer your questions, we share your tips and your cool stuff found and really just pull it all together together. Because that's what it is, being part of the Mac Geek App family, speaking of the Mac Geek App family, a member of the Mac Geek App family, sponsoring this episode is Other World Computing at macsales.com. We've got a bunch of new products that we're going to talk about shortly. Here, in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, feeling much better, but still a bit under the weather, in Fairville, Connecticut, John F. Brown. How are you doing today, John F. Brown? Well, again, I've got the post-CES crud, I guess, as we fondly call it. But I'm making it, I'm not too disoriented, though I traveled into the past. Yes, you did, but that's okay. No one knows. Well, now they do. Well, that's right, that's right. Let's get down to it. We have a bunch of cool stuff found to go through today. The first one I want to talk about is from listener Bruce. And Bruce says, Wi-Fi signal is an app. It's from adriengranados.com. He says, a cool thing that I found as a possible alternative for people who don't want to go the full debuki route, this $5 app store app will give you a bunch of great info about your Wi-Fi connection in the menu bar, including when your Mac changes base stations and it shows your signal quality visually, as well as through numeric stats. So yeah, it's called Wi-Fi signal, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes like we do, because that's how we do it here. So it looks pretty cool. It's actually very simple and elegant. Yeah, very cool stuff. Thanks. Thanks for that, Bruce. Have you checked that one out, John? I went to the page and it looks like something we another program that someone suggested that we talked about recently, but it's again, something that is kind of like a Geiger counter for your Wi-Fi, right? Yeah, exactly. We run around and you're like, you know, am I getting a good signal? Right, right. Barring, you know, holding down, is it option on the airport menu? Which shows you a lot of interesting stuff. These tools are certainly a great addition. Right, right. Cool. All right. And then second on the list of cool stuff found this week is kind of a cool thing that listener Joe found. He says, I noted an upgrade became available for SuperDuper and looking at the release notes, he said version 3.1 now allows copying and restoring from user selected previous snapshots. He said, one of the main things that I thought I was going to get by upgrading to APFS, he says, I'm not sure that's been available feature so far and would seem like it would make the eventual obviation of time machine perhaps a little more viable. So yeah, he says, and it's also nice that is that for bootable APFS volumes, it's copied from a snapshot. And it sounds like SuperDuper is even making a snapshot first and then copying from it to further secure a successful copy. So very cool to see the shirt pocket Dave Nainian over there kind of going and going deep with this APFS stuff. It's interesting because for years, I was a SuperDuper user and then there was some issue years ago with, I forget if it was El Capitan or something where it wouldn't trigger backups automatically. So I was like, well, I got to have automatic backups. So I switched to carbon copy cloner and I've been there for a while and literally the email I got before Joe is somebody was asking me, which do you prefer? And I said, you know, I really don't have a preference. I know like there was this one thing years ago, but I know SuperDuper had fixed that since it wasn't still an issue. And I said, so I just tend to kind of stick with something until it doesn't work anymore. I said, but you know, the new shiny sometimes attracts me anyway. And then literally the next email I get is this. And it's like, oh, maybe it's time to head back into SuperDuper land. So yeah, anyway, there you go. Thanks, Joe. Well, I guess in the past, our observation has been that the support for the recovery partition has always been more advanced than carbon copy cloner, right? Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I don't. Yeah, that's right. Yep. We're checking into. So yeah, very cool. The other thing I'll mention, Dave, here, very timely, because it just happened to me twice today. But regarding APFS. Yep. So I had two machines. So I think I told you in the last episode that I reformatted my external rotational drives as APFS for my carbon copy cloner backup. Yeah. Well, today on both machines, Drive Pulse, which is ProSoft's drive genius, kind of background watching what's happening. Utility said, oh my gosh, there's a critical error on your backup drive and you better like panic and like reformat it or like do something. And I'm like, OK. And the thing is I ran the formal utility and it even said that it's like, well, you should probably run drive genius and figure out what's wrong. And I did and it did a check and it said, yeah, everything's great. So I think I may have come across a bug. I had at least one person to my Twitter stream say that they ran it to the same thing where they got an alert from Drive Pulse. But when they ran the extended utility, it said everything's great. So well, you should I'm going to get a horn to them and just say, I think there may be a bug. Yeah, let me know how that goes. I've been having trouble getting in touch with those guys since the summer, really, which is too bad. Because I mean, I really like the work that they're doing. It's just, oh, yeah. Well, we saw them. Well, we saw them fairly recently at a PEPCOM last year. A couple of years ago. Well, one of their. Yeah. We haven't seen them at PEPCOM for a long time. We used to see. We saw Gordon Bell at PEPCOM with Anarchis. But he but that but he doesn't work at ProSoft anymore. So. Right. Right. Yeah. So. Yeah. So yeah, let me know how that goes. Yeah. Hopefully it's just a bug and you don't have like some, you know, catastrophic error. Seeing as how. Doing running another version of the utility says there's nothing wrong, makes me believe that, yeah, it is a hiccup. But who knows? Yeah, I'll let you know. And if anybody else is running into this and uses Drive Genius and Drive Pulse, let us know. Cool. You know, I wanted to talk about something that I not only got to see at CES, but that I got I've gotten to experience since since then. I've been a big, big fan of putting tempered glass screen protectors on my iPhones, right, because I used to put the plastic ones on. And then when the tempered glass came out, it was like, oh, great. Finally, I can like feel glass when I touch my phone and I like that. But I also like to have the screen protected because, you know, like things happen and and having that tempered glass on there has has really saved not only me, but, you know, other family members. Well, I ran into the folks from Q Maddox, Q M A D I X at CES and they have what they call their invisible first defense liquid glass screen protector. It's it's just a I mean, just I say it's it's a thing, a film, a a chemical that they wipe onto your iPhone or you wipe onto your iPhone. They did it for me at their booth, but you could do it too. It's just I mean, really, you clean the screen and then you just wipe this stuff on both front and back with the with the iPhone 10. And then it seals it in and makes your screen nine, you know, whatever it is, the level nine H, the sapphire level of hardness. It's nanotechnology. They say that creates an invisible protective coating. My screen has never felt as good as it does right now. And and it's it's really cool. And it comes with a guarantee to protect you. I think for the iPhone 10, I think they give you a $250 guarantee if you if your screen breaks while you have this on there. So, you know, that's not so bad. Yeah, they put it on a towelette that you just sort of, you know, wipe onto your screen and then let it cure and you're good to go. That's it. It's pretty cool. So I had to share it. That's why, you know, it's cool, cool stuff found, right? So there you go. Yeah, one has to wonder why Apple themselves doesn't introduce such technology, but then they'd eliminate a whole market of people that are trying to help you from destroying your iPhone. Well, but it's I mean, it's also I mean, they use Gorilla Glass. I mean, people acknowledge that even though if you talk to them, they will say, well, we can't comment on that. It's like, dude, everybody knows they're using your hands glass. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So I will have this on my phone for quite some time. So I'll let you know how how it goes. Jason on Twitter, who is always a star when it comes to cool finding cool stuff found, he's got quite a few. We'll do two of them now. And I think we've got two more to do before all is said and done here. But the first one that he found is called D seat dot me. And what this is built to do is to clean up your online presence. You know, you go and create like all those accounts at other websites or, you know, whatever, and you forget that they they're even out there. Well, what this does is it goes and finds all the accounts assigned to whatever email address you go and tell it to find. And then and then it assists you with with, you know, just closing all these, you know, kind of random accounts that you've got out there. So D seat dot me. Thank you for for sending that into us, Jason. Very, very cool. Jason Hooper on Twitter, actually, is who it is. So pretty good. How does it how does it? No, well, it probably goes and looks in there. On their probably your key chain or something, right? No, no, no, it goes in like pings them. No, it doesn't look at your key chain. The assumption is you don't have. So it like surfs the Internet says, you know, yeah, John at whatever, or David, whatever, all right, I know. That's a kind of invasive. Yeah, well, that's sort of the point, right? Is if these accounts can be found that way, maybe if you don't need them, shut them down. There you go. Yeah, I'm just hoping they don't annoy people too much with all these attempts banging on the doors. That's right. Well, better than than me, right? So better than better to have them do it on on my behalf. And then Jason Hiptus to this thing from Matthew Palmer.net called Rocket. Anybody that's used Slack knows that Slack has one. Slack is a messaging app that you can use for, frankly, anything. You can set up a free account, but you can also pay to get extra features. But it's a great messaging app for organizations. It really groups of any kind. I've come very close to setting up a Slack channel just for a Slack, whatever it is, workspace for my family, because it lets you kind of organize things and it's really, really cool. Their emoji picker there is great because you start typing on the keyboard, you hit colon, and then you start typing like the name that might describe the emoji that you want, and it starts showing you things. Well, Rocket adds that Slack type emoji picker to everything on your Mac. And it works great. So, you know, there it is. Cool stuff. That's all that's all I got for you. It makes it makes it way easier to find emoji by like subject as a you know, title, as opposed to just having to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. If you if you want to do it the hard way, what is it? Control command option space? No. Oh, no, no, no. I forget. I always forget. Is it control shift option command space? I forget. No, there's some other thing. Anyway, we will we will. There you go. Just get rocket. It's easier for you. And that's at Matthew Palmer.net. All right, John, you want to tell us about about the thing you found? Yes. So I got this at a, you know, being a security conscious type of guy here and I'm trying to pace the link here. I'll take care of the link to talk about it. OK, so I got you be key. What is a you be key? Well, everybody knows about multi factor authentication. Or if you don't, here's the deal. You can have authentication when you try to access a resource, whether it be your computer or whatever. Username of password is typical, but that's one factor. Most people acknowledge that in order to have really good security, you should have two or three factors. And it's what you know, which is a password, what you have, which could be a hardware token or what you are, which is biometrics. So this introduces biometrics being your your fingerprint or your face or your or something like that. So most people say that that's the best that you have three factors, but it's sometimes a pain in the neck. So having two factors is better than one factor. So you be key is a hardware key, a USB hardware key. Um, and it pretty much integrates with everything. I, you know, I found the link to their services. So right now I've integrated it with my last pass. So if I want to access my last pass fault, in addition to entering my master password, which with a lot of password managers, if somebody knows that you lose because then they have access to your vault, I need to now put this USB key into my computer and then press, you know, it's a has a little button, press that button. It generates a security key. Last pass says, okay, I, I, I trust that, you know, you're the device that registered with me and there you go. So it's pretty cool. And it integrates with a boat load. And this is the thing where, you know, I was trying to paste that link into, um, it's all set. The thing is the number of services that support it. Google, Facebook, Windows, Mac, Salesforce. Oh, I also set it up to log into my Mac. So the thing is, if I want to log into my Mac, um, it'll also say, hey, well, you know, give me the YubiKey in addition to your, uh, admin password, drop bucks, semantic. I mean, you see the screen here. I mean, dude, it's like everybody supports this because they're all standard spaced. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, um, and they're not terribly expensive. I looked in their, uh, uh, you know, typically under a hundred bucks. Okay. Huh. Uh, and they have enterprise plans and all that. So if you want a little extra security on your personal or your business machine, I think it's neat. It was, it was very seamless getting it to work. Um, yeah. So thanks. Yeah. I think Scott, Scott in the chat room says, uh, you know, to kind of boil it down. He said the YubiKey is essentially a secure keyboard in that it, that's how it registers itself with your Mac. Right. It's an HID. Yeah. It actually, when you plug it in, it says, oh, you're a keyboard. Aren't you? And you kind of get a, you know, get past that. Sure. But yeah, I think it, um, it looks like a keyboard to the operating system and inputs a super long, you know, password. Uh, looking like somebody typed it on a keyboard, I guess, devices doing it. So a key, a keylogger could still grab that data because of the way the YubiKey has to work. Uh, I think their implementation makes it so that even if you capture it once, I think a lot of security solutions will do a, if you capture, if you capture some data with a lot of security scenarios, um, and you try to replay it. So, so I, and I looked in their documentation, I said they, they guard against replay attacks. Okay. Oh, okay. So it is, yeah, yeah, okay. Got it. So what you're suggesting makes sense and that, yeah, if you caught it once, well, you know, just replay it. But the thing is they, they guard against that. Got it. And it's crypto magic. As Barry Kay in the chat room at mackeykeb.com slash stream asks, what happens if you lose it? You know, I was looking on their site and I think the thing is, so especially if you're in a business, I would think that you'd be able to archive the, um, you know, I guess the private key. Okay. As it were, so, so if you're in a, yeah, I mean, most of these, you know, and the same, you know, RSA offered these secure ID things for the longest time and the same sort of thing. I think if you lose it, as long as the, the person that runs the system has created a backup or recovery key. If you were right, which we've seen with, you know, a lot of crypto solutions. So yeah, if, if something breaks, you have a way of getting, getting to your data. So, right. Oh, what I could see there, um, you know, they kind of accommodate that if you, if you put the effort in. So that's pretty cool, man. Ah, I like it. Yeah. I've just heard of them and, you know, we mentioned them. I think I'd look back, but in episode 422, I think we, we talked about it and somebody told us about it and I just never got around to looking at it. Yeah. I looked in our, in our system in, in our file maker database. I didn't see it in there. Mackeykeb. But I believe, I mean, I believe you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just didn't see it in the file maker. Mackeykeb 444. Huh. Diagnostic mode can be fun. Okay. I believe you. And we talked about it, apparently. So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Cool. Uh, all right. Yeah. You know, um, what, what 444, we might as well put a link to that in the show notes, right? And it looks like in 652, we also talked about it a little bit. Really? Oh, yeah. That's what Google says. I believe you. All right. Hey, uh, when I was looking at that thing, Rocket, that I just talked about, um, I also noticed that Matthew Palmer .net, because he makes other apps that he makes an app called vanilla. And vanilla is kind of like bartender, but it does it in its own way. And what, what it does is it allows you to hide, uh, your menu bar icons that you don't want to see all the time, which can be really handy. You know, we all have all of these things that we're running in the background constantly, and they each have a menu bar icon. And each of those menu bar icons is really, really valuable at the moment you need them to be valuable. And in every other moment, they just clutter up your menu bar. So, uh, so bartender and now this, uh, vanilla from Matthew Palmer, uh, work to clean those up. There's a free version of vanilla and then, uh, vanilla pro for four bucks that you can upgrade to. So I put a link to that in the show notes too, so that, uh, we don't miss out on any cool stuff. I always like it when somebody, you know, tells me about it, or I find an app from a developer and it's like, Hey, that looks cool. What else have you built? And sure enough, there's, you know, something, sometimes there's something good floating around out there. We will go back to Jason though, because he had some, some more cool things. I think I've actually got several more that we didn't even include, but this is from, uh, chirpake.com, c-h-e-r-p-a-k-e.com remote for Mac. Uh, what it does is it, they are iOS apps that let you remote control your Mac. It's also a Mac app too, but, uh, but there's remote control that lets you, uh, really like control things on your Mac, uh, volume, keyboard, trackpad, different system actions, controlling airplay, that kind of thing. Then there's remote drive for Mac that lets you upload or download files, stream files from your Mac, browse files, that kind of thing. And then there's remote pad for Mac, which lets you use your iPad as a numeric keypad. Uh, wirelessly, obviously for your Mac. So you get like that extra little thing, right there, arrows and, you know, all those things that you get on a numeric keypad that you wouldn't get on the kind of shorter keyboard that you might have on your Mac. So again, thank you, Jason. Good stuff. And lastly, from our friend, Jason, is, uh, an article that I download blog published, I guess about a week ago, showing you how to allow your guests to connect to your Wi-Fi network with a QR code. And they've got a great little thing. You visit QIFI.org, you type in your network name and password. They say, and looking at the, the JavaScript, it seems correct that they aren't saving any of this data. It's all happening inside your browser. And, uh, and then it makes you a QR code and you can, uh, you can just scan the, the bar code and it'll, you know, jump and log people into your Wi-Fi network, just both good and bad. I mean, if somebody gets a hold of the bar code that you don't want to have the bar code, well, that's bad. But otherwise, very, very handy. Pretty good, huh, John? It escapes me, but I'm, I'm almost positive that one of the makers of fine Wi-Fi software that we know made something similar that made a QR code that would let you log into a Wi-Fi network, but I can't find it now. I don't know if it was Stumbler or Dabuki or someone. I'll, if I can find it, I'll, you know, link to it. But I know I've seen other people do this and it's actually pretty cool. Cool. Cool. Now that we can read QR codes. Now that we can, it's so, it's so nice. Did you see that in, in, I think it was, it was either the most recent X-Files episode or the one just prior to that, where they had a QR code on the screen for the, it was from the guys that, that used to write the lone gunman, right? And, and so they, there was a QR code on the screen. So of course, naturally I paused the, you know, the show and you scanned it, you nerd. Of course I scanned it. And where did it go? It's so interestingly, I'm looking to see if I can find it. Yeah. So it, it resolved to the MagicBulletNewsletter.net. Oh, I remember saying, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that didn't, like that website doesn't answer. There's nothing at that server. But if you do a who is on the MagicBulletNewsletter.net, you see that it's owned by the Fox Corporation, of course. Sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'll put a link to the MagicBullet, but you won't get there. Yeah, I'm the, I don't know. Well, you're obviously watching it as I am. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how to feel about the new, new season here. Oh, I'm loving it. Oh, it's great. I couldn't, I couldn't be happier about it. It's fun to watch. Good stuff. Yeah, it just strikes me as well. It I don't know. Now, I guess I do. I mean, the thing is, yeah, the storyline, you know, they bring in the bad guys is kind of, you know, making peace with the good guys and they're and then they have the standoffs. Like the last episode was like a, you know, individual, like, you know, solving a mysterious case and all that. But we'll leave it at that. I don't want to ruin it for anybody that hasn't watched. And Scully doesn't age. No, of course, she doesn't age. That's right. It's like what? Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. In the chat room before we started recording, James hipped us to a piece of software called M4Vgear.com, which answers the question we asked in 692, which is how what app is out there that can strip DRM from iTunes movies so that you can stream them with your Plex server or whatever. And he says that M4Vgear.com software still works with High Sierra. So there you go. Thank you so much for that, James. That's a handy little thing to know about good stuff. Yeah. And then also in the category of things that that don't exist anymore, at least not really, if you go to apple.com slash download slash dashboard slash radio underscore podcast slash Mac geek gab dot html. There is a link to a Mac geek gab dashboard widget. Don't know when this was created or by whom I never saw it before in my life. But but evidently, it was there for quite some time. It the screenshot is from Friday, July 9th, 2010 and shows a Mac geek up 273. So there you go. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's thanks to lawyer, Jeff. So thanks to lawyer, Jeff. Again, a year from now, I want to be saying judge, Jeff, which is just saying. Well, I know you could make. Kind of dashboard widgets from I haven't tried in ages, but I know there's a way, I think, to highlight part of a web page in Safari and then create a dashboard widget saying, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if that may have been what this was. Yeah. Yeah. It's not downloadable anymore. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But it's there on Apple's website. So I don't know how Jeff found it, but you know, there you go. Hey, all right. I do how there's all kinds of things to do here, John. But I think the next thing that I want to do is talk about our sponsor, which is Otherworld Computing. How's that sound for you, John? Outstanding. Cool. You know, I got to meet with OWC while I was at CES and when we learned about all kinds of things. They are really focused on all of this Thunderbolt stuff. And, you know, they as always, OWC understands the products that they're building. And it's really fascinating to hear everybody at OWC all the way up to, you know, Larry O'Connor, who's the founder of the company and the CEO. Dude, I couldn't believe that I got to that. I finally met him faith to faith to CES. And he is such we know of each other. But it was first time we talked to face to face. Dude, he is such a geek. Oh, my gosh. Exactly. Right. Which is a good thing if you're running a company like OWC that makes all these awesome products. Yeah, he knows all the details of every one of their products just as much as the people that are, you know, supporting them every day and selling them. It's really fascinating. So yeah, we were talking Thunderbolt versus Firewire US. I mean, it was just amazing the knowledge that, you know, him and the rest of their staff has. It truly is. It really is. So they've got the Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3, which is a bus powered mobile drive, high speed, rugged, ultra portable. They've got it maxing out at speeds up to 2600 megabytes a second on the read and 1600 on the right. Truly like screaming fast. The Thunderblade V4, which is the fastest external drive on the market today, completely silent. This thing, it's really elegant the way that it looks. It has no fans in it. It's an SSD, so it has no moving parts. It is built. It kind of looks like a big heat sink. But when I say it that way, I know it makes it sound like it's not attractive. It actually is very sort of it's this industrial elegance. I really kind of like it. That one's got read speeds 2800 megabytes a second, writes 2450 smoke and fast. You can go from one terabyte to eight terabytes. And then there are Thunderbolt 3 dual display adapters, which allow you to connect two DisplayPort 4K displays at 60 Hertz or one 5K display at 60 Hertz. Very, very cool stuff. And they understand how to talk USB-C Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort in the right directions at the same time. They know what they're doing. It's very, very cool stuff. And then there's the Thunderbay 4, which is their J-Bod, really. It's the bunch of disks that can then be formatted with a magic piece of software called Soft Raid. And that's something we're going to dig into with Larry on this show because he like you need to learn about Soft Raid. I used to think that hardware raid was better than software raid. And I was wrong. Software raid way better than hardware raid. And very, very cool stuff. So we'll dig into that with Larry in a little bit. But you got to go check out otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com and our sincere thanks to them for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's see, where are we? Let's go to let's go speaking of upgrades and all of this stuff. Rolling up our sleeves here. Going to roll up the sleeves. Yeah, let's go to Gary here. And Gary asks, he says, I have a late 2015 iMac with a one terabyte mechanical hard drive with AppleCare and it will expire at the end of this year. I was wondering if I wanted to upgrade that drive to an SSD to take advantage of APFS and high Sierra and upcoming versions of Mac OS. I've watched videos on YouTube on how to upgrade the hard drive in an iMac and it involves stuff that's way beyond my comfort zone. Would Apple do it if I took it to an Apple store? And if so, how much would they charge since it's obviously not a warranty issue? Should I wait for the AppleCare to expire and then take it to them, Best Buy or another computer repair place? I know the people at OWC have upgrade kits. But again, I'm not ready to disassemble disassemble my iMac on my own. Yeah, so this is a good question. I am honestly not sure if the Genius Bar would do this for you. I suppose, I mean, they certainly could. But it seems outside of the realm of things that they would generally do. That said, there's still a way to get things done in an Apple certified sense without bringing it to Apple. And that's your local, possibly likely, AASP, authorized Apple service provider. You can go to getsupport.apple.com to find one near you if you don't know of them. But they are authorized Apple repair facilities that can do things in addition to authorized Apple repairs. But they can warranty their work. It's also important to remember that Apple is pretty reasonable when it comes to your warranty. Because it doesn't necessarily void Apple care, right? If you if you go in there and replace the drive and come out and don't break anything else on the way in or out and you have a problem with something unrelated to that drive, like, you know, the motherboard or the graphics chip goes, that's still going to be warranty replaceable. If in Apple's reasonable opinion, they can can say, yeah, look, even though you went in and out, you didn't break this. This isn't your fault. No problem. Obviously, if the drive that you put in there fails, they're not going to warranty that because that's not their drive to warranty, right? But they will warranty other things as long as, again, there's no obvious evidence of you causing that problem by you cracking your machine open and going in. At least that's been my experience. It's certainly worth calling Apple about you, but that that that's been my experience over and over again. So so you could do this on your own, but also an ASP would would be probably the best place to take it, perhaps even better than the genius bar to be perfectly frank, because they're going to they're going to be able to go a little deeper with you than the genius bar can. So that's that's my thought, John. My thought is that I did a bit of surfing here and I found some references to people saying that within Apple's warranty, there is a clause saying that their warranty does not apply to machines where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and unauthorized service or unauthorized modifications have been made. So that's correct. That may be in text somewhere. But as you said, I would say for the older class of machine like my aging machines here where user. But you're out of warranty anyway. It doesn't matter. Right. What I'm saying is that for the machines where it's it's relatively simple to replace the hard drive or the battery of the memory, they're not going to yell at you. But I would think for some of the more restricted machines. No, that's not that's what I'm saying is is my personal experience as well as that from listeners is that even with the newer class of machines, machines were harder to replace that they they're reasonable. They're reasonable about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you know, if it's obvious that, you know, the fact that you went in there is directly related to whatever else is broken. Yeah, they're going to say, look, you know, but otherwise they're they're pretty good and they're even better if you have Apple care on it. Right. They like Apple care is Apple gives you like this. You get better treatment, especially when things are sort of edge and corner cases when you have Apple care on a machine as opposed to just within the first year warranty or whatever that is. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Hopefully that helps, Gary. I remember going to one of my local Apple stores is when I was having issues with my iPhone 7 and I remember the guy. So it was just within the one year boundary. Or I think it was a little past it, but they were nice to me and she said, well, why don't you get Apple Apple care plus? And I'm like, well, why do you make products that break after a year? And then he kind of stopped. Yeah, they usually stops them from being nicer. Yeah. Oh, no, they were they they already helped me. Oh, I see. You know, he just made a random comment and you know, I was just being kind of a wise guy. It's snarky. Yeah. No, they're there. No, they were they were. They they did what I needed. I was in warranty and they fixed me up. That's great. That's good. Yeah. No, they're they're pretty reasonable about it. All right. Along the same lines, Bernard asks, I have a 2012 iMac with a three terabyte fusion drive that I want to upgrade to an SSD. Can you help me figure out what the proper procedure is? Number one, buy an SSD, connect it externally, clone the existing drive to it and boot from it. Once this works, I want to replace the inner drive. And then I go to step two. So before you go to step two, I yes, I absolutely agree with step one. Make sure the SSD works, make sure your machine boots from it, make sure everything is hunky dory with that drive before you go through the process of taking the screen off and digging into your iMac and replacing things. So, yeah, like I I fully support that path. That's what I would do. Do you have any thoughts on that before we jump to the next part, John? So this is all right. So I'm looking at all right. So this is the machine of the past. So so this is probably a SATA. Two SATA drives. OK, probably two SATA drives. I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. OK, and of course, Mac Tracker is where I'm looking now to see that. But yeah, in the case where they're both SATA drives, then, yeah, I would say. Taking that approach gets more complex when they start when you start with the PCIe and all that wackiness, right? Well, it depends on where you get your replacement drive from, because a lot of times it'll come with a case that you can, you know, take the internal drive and move it out. So yeah, but yes, it does get trickier with PCIe. You're right. Well, I know because, yeah, but because especially the newer Mac minis of which I have one has. A PCIe and a SATA port. OK, makes upgrading kind of complicated, especially in this case, you know, sure, had one with both. Well, not not too complicated. I mean, if you if you replace the two drives that make up the fusion drive with a single external SSD and then to pop that in there, then you're good. So. Well, I mean, you can replace it with you don't have to do both. And that actually gets into the second part of his question. He says, here's where I need your help. Do I just replace the spindle drive with the SSD and leave the old SSD that was part of the fusion drive in place? Or do I remove the old SSD? This requires more work. Yes. Or do I break the fusion drive and use the old SSD as a second drive and, you know, to see one or to see I if I break it? Do I do this before I replace the spindle drive or after? So the answer is yes to the last thing. You only want to replace the spindle drive. You want to leave the SSD in there, assuming there's no problem with it. And yes, I would highly recommend breaking the fusion drive before you do the actual replacement. The path that I would go is step one, back up your fusion drive to something and and squirrel that away. Because if all, you know, all heck breaks loose, you want to have something. So that's step one. Step two, set up your new SSD that you're going to boot from. All of that externally, assuming, you know, based on what you said, John, that it's not the, you know, a big headache to do that. Get it booting externally, get things happy, even to the point where you're ejecting your internal drive and just booting and running off of this external SSD software wise ejecting, not, you know, like ejecting it out the back of the computer or something. Right. And then I would once you're ready to kind of commit to that. At that point, I would break the fusion drive up so that you're so that you don't have to deal with any of that headache after you do your your deal. You break the fusion drive, then put the new one in. Good to go. And happy days are here again. My friend couldn't resist. Yeah, that'll work. That'll work. I like it. It's good stuff. I got to admit, I've never done a fusion drive machine. And I probably never will just because, you know, maybe it's just a rational, but I just don't trust their pseudo proprietary marrying of a SSD in a rotational drive, but works for lots of people. I think the thing is I totally agree with you, except that in the whatever years, I mean, the fusion drive came out in 2012, right? Because I have a 2011 iMac in front of me that doesn't have it. It has the hardware for it. It's got the spindle drive that I need to replace because it died and an SSD that still works fine. But they were never factory married together as a fusion drive and really haven't been married together as a fusion drive ever. But so it's been, you know, almost six or six years, right, since whenever that iMac came out. And we have had, I mean, maybe two people write in about like total fusion drive corruption disasters. Otherwise, it's been. Yeah, it's been great. But, you know, here's the thing, like if you rely on an SSD for your storage, we've had way more people write in with utter corruption disasters on an SSD because when those die, pages die, like it's over. There's no bake it in the oven, whack it on the side, start it up one last time. Like that disappears from existence. It's great. That's it. So we're sortationals. I would say most of them fail gracefully. Like my job now is yelling at me because one of the drives in it now, like I think I told you the last one that I pulled out, rotational drive was 10 years old. So it was about it was time to go. Yeah. But it's doing it again. It's saying, I got to rebuild your data. OK, everything's great. I'm like, OK, somebody in there is failing. It's not going to tell me which one quite yet. But I know it's happening. Right. Right. Yeah, as we've seen, maybe it's different now with the current technology. And I've seen some really awesome deals. Dude, I just saw a deal today. It was like a one terabyte sand disk for like 250. Oh my gosh. For an SSD, I assume. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. But you know, maybe I'll grab one of those and put it inside the SIMAC when I take when I take out the spindle drive. Huh. Huh. Yeah. It's a... Well, here's the tip here. thrifter.com. I don't know if you follow them on Twitter. No. It's a deal site. But they listed that today, the whole sand disk. And they actually, also when I went to them, they... My TP-Link 24 port switch, they also... See, I believe it's thrifter. Cool. I'll put a link in the show notes. That's great, man. All right. Yeah, they get these spot deals and you've got to move quick. But anyways, you better move more quickly. Right. We'll move. Yeah. What's next? Move quickly. Otherwise, I get dragged into the next thing. But this has been great. Ian asks, he says, at work I have an iMac 5, 1 cheese grater style with two SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration. I was recently trying to upgrade to high Sierra, but the installer kept saying that the drive wasn't supported. A bit of Google Foo seemed to find that others were experiencing the same problem with RAID volumes. However, I've now heard that the new iMac Pro has two SSDs in a RAID configuration. And this must come with high Sierra installed and the ability to recover a RAID volume. Any ideas how I can get the installer to run correctly or should I clone to a non-RAID volume, upgrade and then clone back? That's interesting. So my guess is it's the APFS conversion that's part of the installer that just is choking on however you've configured that RAID. Cause certainly APFS will run on a RAID volume, but I don't know. My thoughts would be to upgrade without converting to APFS and just maybe bypass that for now. What are you thinking? Yeah, that's an interesting thing, Dave, because you may ask yourself, not only how do I work this, but how can you bypass macOS high Sierra's APFS conversion? And we have an article that was written a little while ago telling you how to do that from the terminal. Don't be afraid. Right. Yeah, you've got to do some, you download the installer and then you run the installer with a, I guess with a switch that's dash dash convert to APFS. No. No. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing, which, you know, I just reminded myself of this, I haven't tried this. And if anybody has, let us know. But if you go to, and I think that, yeah, the part of utility that was being talked about is if you go to disutility in the file menu, there's something called the RAID assistant. Yeah. And I just ran it today and it says, well, you can do striped RAID zero, mirrored or what we talked about for JVOD, which is just a bunch of disks. But apparently, so what it sounds like is that when this is attempted, it comes up and says no. No. No. That's right. No. That's too bad. And you're speaking of RAID. I mean, we were talking about soft RAID and stuff, but I haven't, I may want to experiment with using Apple's, you know, now that they revealed it because they, they hid it for a while. It was like, well, we're not going to let you do RAID. And it's like, dude, you can. Well, they took it out of Sierra, right? They put it in, then they took it out, and now it's back again. I don't think they took it out, but they hid it. It is that you had to either do a magic incantation in the terminal to do RAID. And so Apple has their software RAID, which is when we... Well, is based on soft RAID. In fact, based on soft RAID so much. Oh, it is. Yeah. Really? That if you create a soft RAID volume and then bring that volume to a vanilla Mac, it can mount it because the things, the drivers in Mac OS have what they need to mount soft RAID volumes, which is pretty impressive. Yeah. So either there's a standard or they talk to each other or something. I think Tim wrote Apple's stuff before he went off on his own and wrote soft RAID. I think that's how it works. To be perfectly honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, this is, yeah, like I said, we got to talk to Larry. He's like, he's the man about this stuff. Also, people that deserve some kudos here are our premium subscribers that contributed this week. And I want to say thank you to all of you. The first one is Ken M. With a $50 one-time contribution. Thank you so much, man. And then on the monthly $10 plan this week, we had Jeff P. Gary B. John V. Steven A. John D. Santiago M. Ken from Kailua. Clive S. Everett. T. And David G. Thank you so much. You all rock. It really means a lot. And then on the biannual. And yes, that is the right word to use. I've had so I've had several emails recently, about people that say that biannual means once every two years and that semi-annual means twice a year. Well, actually, semi-annual does mean twice a year and biannual also means twice a year. Biannual, B-I-E-N-N-U-A-I-E-L, I guess. B-I-N-N-V-I-E. Yeah, biannual means every other year. I know, I know it's the English language. OK, it's messed up. But by means to, no matter who you talk to, correct? Correct. But by means to have something. But then then there's the frequency aspect that you're talking about, which gets kind of squirrely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, B-I-E-N-N-I-A-L. Yeah, biannual means once every two years. Correcting or corrected or maybe even both. I think we're correcting on this one. That said, the people that fall under the category this week of making their biannual contributions of 25 bucks are George D, Cindy K, Racer G, Tony C, Michael E, Brett P, and Mark S. Thanks to all of you. And I really even appreciate hearing from those of you that want to correct our grammar, because if we're getting something wrong with grammar, I want to be the first one to know. Because I am a grammar. I'm a real jerk about grammar sometimes, actually. So so I want to make sure we get it right. So I appreciate all of you looking out for us. It's great. All right. Let's go to Alistair, shall we? Alistair, Alistair. Oh, now I got to find where we are here. Quick question, he says, but I've found a setting on my iPhone 10. And I'm not exactly sure what it does. It is the lock camera option in settings. Camera, what does it mean when it says, do not automatically switch between cameras while recording video? Why would it be switching between the lenses automatically? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of turning this feature on? So there's some interesting stuff on the Internet, John, and some of it's wrong. The most popular, I'd never even knew this option was there. So the most popular search result came from Tom's Hardware, which says that that option keeps you from switching between the front and rear facing cameras of the phone. So I endeavored to test that. Well, regardless of how the switch is set, you can't switch between the front and rear cameras while recording a video on the iOS camera app. So that ain't it. And then I started thinking, well, you know, the iPhone 10, just like the eight plus and seven plus before that, has two cameras on the rear facing camera, a wide angle lens and then a zoomed lens. And indeed, that is what this switch affects. If you're zooming while you're recording video, the camera will naturally, with this option off, will naturally switch between the two lenses while you're doing that in order to give you the best picture at whatever zoom rate you choose. If it's higher than 2.0X, it's going to use the zoom camera. If it's lower, it's going to be using, I believe, the wide angle lens and doing digital zoom. Because the the other lens and police, somebody has always correct us if we're wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the zoom lens is a 2X fixed. So it's got digital zoom to get you in and out of there. But if you're if you're filming things very close up, the. The spacing between those cameras can be kind of funky when you switch. You got to have a really sharp eye to catch that, though. I tried to catch it, and I don't think I ever caught it. And I was filming like my keyboard from inches away. But still, there might be a scenario where you don't want to switch that camera. So that's what that does, is it will just leave it at whatever camera you start with. That's the one that it's going to be on, no matter what, as you zoom in and out. So there you go. Pretty interesting, huh? Right, John? I like this. It's got an iPhone 10. I don't I don't got one. I'm pretty sure I would love to know if that option is on the 8 plus and 7 plus. I would assume that it is. But obviously it might not. I don't see it on the yeah, well, I got a 7. So yeah, you don't have two cameras. Right, right, right. All right, Laura has I'm sorry. Go ahead. Are we good? No, someday. Something I mean, yeah. Well, I do have two cameras. One's my iPhone, one's my my Nikon. Yes, exactly. All right, Laura writes. Interesting question. She's going to ask this about Tivo. But but it really goes as we always try to do it. Sort of the answer will go beyond that. But but I'll I'll I'll share her question as she wrote it. She says, I have a Tivo conundrum and I need a tie tiebreaker for my two favorite geeks. I have a Tivo Premier XL in my living room and can download shows to my computer through C Tivo. But I'm trying to find a way to download shows when I am not near my home network. I was looking at purchasing a Tivo stream from a third party. When I called Tivo customer support, the person said that I would be able to connect the stream to my router with an ethernet cable and it would work. Even though my Tivo is in a different room from my router and connects to my home network with a wireless and adapter. A video on YouTube from another stream user seems to confirm this. However, both the person selling the stream and a different Tivo community member posted that the stream requires a wired ethernet connection between my DVR and the home network. So I have two votes for yes and two votes for no. Hence the tiebreaker. Have either of you used a Tivo stream before any wisdom you can impart? So yeah, so I have never used a Tivo stream. I I made the jump to using a bolt with Tivo minis and it takes care of the streaming right inside the bolt. And that's been great. Tivo really and they started with the premiere in the stream and then they just kind of enhance the functionality as things grew. But the way I understand it, the premiere with stream setup is similar to the way the bolt with the minis are, at least in terms of how you have to connect things. And if so, that means that as long as you can get both devices on your network in any way, they'll sync and stream with each other. I don't think Tivo has put in any blocks in the software of the premiere to prevent this if it knows it's on a Wi-Fi connection. But it's possible that they could. And even though Tivo tells you that they haven't, it's possible that these people in the forums are right. Those Tivo community members are pretty good. So now we need to talk about how to Wi-Fi without Wi-fying, right? Because it let's assume that your Tivo has to think that it's connected to Ethernet. OK, so you could get a USB to Wi-Fi. Sorry, you probably have. You would replace the USB to Wi-Fi adapter on your Tivo with some sort of Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridge. Because at that point, your Tivo wouldn't know that it's connected to anything other than Ethernet. It has no idea how the Ethernet cable connects to the other end, right? It just knows, yeah, I'm plugged into Ethernet, golden. So there's a few of them out there. And I'll put links in the show notes to them. There's one from TP-Link and one from IO Gear. They're both in that like $40 range. They're 802.11n adapters in their Ethernet to Wi-Fi. They act as a Wi-Fi client. So you would connect this adapter to your router. And then once you've got that all set, it's got an Ethernet port. You just plug that into one end of an Ethernet cable, the other into your Tivo. And now your Tivo thinks it's on Ethernet, even though it's Wi-Fi. And you could do this with other devices, too. Like if you had an Apple TV and, you know, maybe an Xbox or whatever, you could plug those all into a switch and then also plug that switch. Right into this Ethernet to Wi-Fi thing. Well, there and adapter is an Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridge. It's kind of like a little baby access point. I think hers is the USB. I had it and I got rid of it. No, that it was a it plugged into the Ethernet port. Oh, OK. Tivo series three. But it was basically a baby Wi-Fi access point. Oh, baby Wi-Fi, not access point, but client. Client. Yeah, OK. Oh, so it's exactly what they're describing. They're an adapter did that. So if you went to the Tivo with this adapter, it would say, oh, you're connected by Ethernet. Right. Oh, because it was using the Ethernet port. Whereas in reality, it was using end to your router. Right. Right. OK. All right. So this may this problem may already be solved this way. While we're here, because it thinks it's on Ethernet and not why. It doesn't think it's on wireless. Whereas the USB adapter, as far as I know, it would say, oh, yeah, I'm on wireless in which case some things wouldn't work because typically that was slower. Sure. Sure. Right. OK. All right. Well, then that's great. If that's the case, then then then you're already set. But for people that need to do this, there's these two adapters. We'll put the link in the show notes. And then, you know, chances are your TV, which is near your TVO is near a coax connection. And maybe your router is also near a coax connection because you've got a cable modem there. So you could use Mocha to be your Ethernet bridge between those two locations and get plenty of speed. If for whatever reason Mocha wouldn't work, you could also go with Powerline. Powerline isn't all that fast compared to, you know, Mocha and even Wi-Fi these days. But it's definitely going to be faster than your 802.11 N connection. So those are those are sort of your options and you really can create an Ethernet bridge using things other than Ethernet in the middle of it. And there you go. So yeah, sweet. I actually did some Tivo action when I when we were at CES. So number one, our hotel, the Mirage and MGM property, I believe, had free Wi-Fi. So that's great. And it wasn't free. Trust me, I paid the bill. The Wi-Fi wasn't free. Oh, I'm sorry. It was part of the resort fee or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's no such thing. Yeah, nothing. Well, some things are free. I'll tell you about them later. OK. But but I remember I ran either my iPhone or my iPad and I was able to run my Tivo app. And I think he warned me about this. The thing is I was able, even without doing a VPN, to get to my Tivo network. And it let me stream the stuff that was on it, because the Wi-Fi was like probably not quite up to snuff for streaming. It was it was kind of unpleasant. Depended on which day you tried when we first got there. You know, gazillion people weren't on. Yeah, it was great. Like I was getting like I got like 40 megabits in both directions when we first got there. And then I think Tuesday night, I was trying to do something like the day right before the show floor opened and I couldn't even get, you know, 300 K per second down. Upstream was still awesome. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think actually if I used my my phone as a hot spot, I probably would have been able to get throughput. Oh, yeah, that's right. Deserving. But but I was I was pretty impressed. But again, I think you warned me that you want to marry your Tivo app to your network before you are remote. So that it knows how to reach it in the future. Otherwise, it'll say like your dude, you're not on your local. Yeah, you have to do that initial pairing when you're on the same local network. And I think that's got something to do with, you know, Tivo's relationships with the RMS. Yeah, service providers and content providers. That's right. Yeah. All right. Let's talk to David here. I'm not sure if we have a magic answer for him, but we'll get there. He says, I have a friend who purchased a new MacBook Pro with the U.S. PC port, and he's stating that he can only get mirrored displays to work with two monitors, not extended desktop. I can't test it, but there are articles on the web stating both sides. So I'm not sure what to believe. You know, I so there's a couple of reasons that you wouldn't be able to do anything other than mirrored. The first is that if the Mac doesn't have enough VRAM to support its own display plus the extended display, because it needs to be able to see it all, I don't think there's a new MacBook Pro that wouldn't have enough VRAM to support an external 4K display. But I mean, that's the pro, dude. Right. Right. Exactly. But I like that is possible. I have seen it before, but I don't think that's what your buddy's running into on this. I try shot. We got shows mirror displays as an option. No, that's not the screenshot we got. That's the screenshot I sent him. That's OK. No, no, no. Continue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would try booting into safe mode and trying this again, but it's also possible that your friends not finding the option to unmirror the displays. By default, when it sees a new display, all of my Macs go into mirrored mode first. And it seems like I have to set them every time I bring my MacBook somewhere to display or present or whatever, I plug it in and it's mirrored. So I always have to make sure like I quit my email and stuff before because I know it's going to just like, you know, barf this onto a big screen that everybody's going to be able to see. And then people shame me for my messy desktop, I'm sure. But it's a silent shaming, so that's OK. Where you find this is if you go to system preferences, displays, and then the arrangement tab. Now, the arrangement tab will only appear if your Mac sees two monitors and it will only appear on what it considers to be the main monitor. So you might have to look on both to see this. It might be thinking your external display is the main one. Although I guess if it's in mirrored mode, it would be showing the same thing on both. So maybe that's not such a concern now that I know that I think this through. So it should be on both, actually, if it's mirrored. But on the arrangement tab at the bottom of that screen, there is a checkbox mirror displays and that will be checked, uncheck it. And then you should be able to drag the displays around. And I myself have had trouble finding this. I don't know why I said myself. It's an overused word incorrectly, and I just used it incorrectly, especially after we talked about use grammar. Maybe I didn't read it incorrectly. I just don't like to use it. I it was a plan as I didn't need to say it. I have had that problem where I forget. It's like, where is that stupid thing? And you got to dig and dig in. Oh, yeah, it's there. That's right. Uncheck the box and then, boom, everything opens up. So so there you go. That's, you know, there you go, uncheck it. And it's it's a different checkbox. There's two of them. There's one that this one says mirror displays and then below it, it says show mirroring options in the menu bar when available. You can also check that to make your life easier so that you get it in the menu bar as opposed to having to dig here. But but there you go. Yeah, good. Right. I'm still waiting to grok this USB-C stuff. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward, I think. Well, I got nothing to use. Actually, no, I'm sorry. I lied at CES. One of the vendors gave me the most amazing adapter, dude. It has four connectors. USB-A, lightning, USB-C and micro USB. Oh, it's so cool. Oh, this is like a so USB-A on one end of it and then all of these others on the other. Yes. No, no, they're all combined. So you plug in, I think, any two that you want and it communicates. Whoa. So it's a USB to lightning. It's a USB-A to USB-C and it's a USB-A to micro USB. But is it also a USB-C to lightning if you want it to be? Uh, I don't know yet because I don't have any USB-C stuff. Well, can you tell us like where we can go get one of these things? Uh, I. It doesn't even have a vendor on it. It was just a. Oh, it's just to give me a charge key or whatever. Somebody at CES that was showing other cool stuff was like, hey, you want one of these? And I'm like, yeah, I think I want more than one. Yeah, like a big box. I got well, I actually got one for you. Oh, nice. Next time you're here. Sweet. Well, anytime I get cool toys, we'll dig into it together and see if we can find like a model number or something to share the next time I'm down there. Yeah. All right. It just seemed the most amazingly useful, you know, something we all need. Adapt-O thing because yeah, it's like, well, I need to talk between this and this. Four way Adapt-O thing. I like it. That's good. Yeah, that could be the episode name. I think it is. Yeah. Four way Adapt-O thing. What is next on the list? Neil asks a question. I'm not sure I know the answer to this one, but we'll see if we can get there. Neil says, I wonder if you guys have any ideas. I have one system running High Sierra, everything else still Sierra. A High Sierra system is a recently purchased Black Friday Mac mini that I am using as a server. I therefore have not installed my usual complement of software on it, just the software I need for the server functions. The App Store app, however, is telling me that I have a number of updates available to install, all for apps that I have not actually installed on the server. And checking the applications folder confirms that these apps are not installed on this system. Looking at the Purchased Apps tab also shows the update for a large number of previously purchased apps that have not been installed, rather than installed. It seems that the App Store does not know what apps have actually been installed on this system. Any ideas on what might be causing this and or how to fix it. So this is weird. My first thought is, was this a used machine? Because it seems like something's not right here. And maybe during the refurbishment process, something wasn't cleaned out of the OS. It's worth looking through a couple of files. The first is if you go into your home folder, go to Library, which you might have to do by holding Option on the Go menu in the Finder. Application Support, App Store, UpdateJournal.plist. That kind of has a lot of history about what's going on with the App Store. And it's got the, I've actually got a page here that I'll put in the show notes with some great instructions for editing that stack exchange or article that really digs into it and talks about it. So I think though, at some level, the App Store still uses the receipts model to track what software it should match for updates. I'm not, you know, I've upgraded my machine enough that I can't say for sure that the High Sierra's App Store is still doing this or not. But it's certainly worth checking in the receipts folders. And there's three of them that you're gonna look in. The first is Library Receipts. So again, Home Library's receipts is one of them, but System Level Library Receipts. So all the way up to the top, the root of your hard drive, Library Receipts may list some things that the App Store might be looking at. Also, root of your hard drive, System Library Receipts might be the issue. And then lastly, and this is what I love about the chat room, KiwiGram says, the App Store definitely checks attached drives. So even though you're not finding it in your applications folder on your boot drive, if you've got a drive attached and it sees these apps out there, it may well be offering to upgrade them over there. So that might be part of this too. So there you go. That's, those are my thoughts on this, John. Well, mine plus Gramps, and Gramps might actually be the best yet, but you got anything? I'll roll with that. Anything to add to it? No, that's not really, I really have not had any, the last time I had App Store chaos, I actually had to dig into the deepest parts of the system and get rid of everything because it just somehow the things that it thought that I had and the things that it thought should be updated were like very out of sync. Okay. And I forget where you have to go to do that. I think it was like in containers, something, you know, something very deep in there. I think there was a Stack Exchange article, I think that actually talked about this. It's like, look, if your App Store is totally wrecked, then delete all this stuff and then it should be okay. That's actually in the Stack Exchange article that I'll link to here is. Oh, great. Yeah, there's, I'm linking to a post in there, but right below that is another, like another comment on that same thread that talks about exactly what you just said. So it's right there. Yep. Yep. Okay. Right. All right, good. Maybe we might be checking boxes here on these things that I thought were geek challenges. Let's see what Mark's geek challenge finds for us. Now I'm really curious. We've got the A team on here today in the chat room. So this is good. Knock these down. I know. Come up and knock them down. It's good. Trying to, this is Mark saying, trying to make a very long and frustrating story short. My Drobo had a meltdown and when a hard drive failed, it failed to do what it was supposed to do. So I thought I had lost a whole bunch of files. Drobo's recommendation was to run Disk Warrior, which appeared to find all the missing files. But what it did was create new folders called missing folder one, two, three, et cetera, with files in them. With this, I ended up with duplicate files in many places. The problem is some are corrupt. The only way I can tell is by trying to open them in Photoshop. They are all JPEG TIF or PSD files and getting an error saying the file cannot be opened because it is damaged is the only way I'm able to find out whether the files are good or bad. This is tedious. Is there a program I can point at a folder and it will tell me which files are corrupt slash damaged? We are talking thousands of files. The icon previews all look good. So even running a program like system duplicate finder shows the duplicates as the same file size, same date, et cetera. The only way to know, as I said, is to try and open it in Photoshop. Obviously, this could take a long, long time and I would like to organize my drive again. All right, the only thing that I can think of on this, John, is a slightly, I mean, it seems like as far as the operating system is concerned, these files are not damaged. So it's really to your apps, like will an app open these files or not? And to me, the way to check them is, I mean, it's gonna have to be a manual process because it's almost like you need a human to look at this unless I'm missing something. So I'm thinking quick look might be the answer because at the very least with quick look, you can highlight the first, organize your files in a list in the finder, highlight the first one, hit the space bar. That will quick look that file up or not if it's damaged. And then you can use the arrow keys at that point because quick look follows your focus. So as you're moving down the list with the arrow keys, it's gonna quick look at every file below that or whatever file you're on, the quick look preview is just gonna update immediately and you'll know. And then you can use command delete to delete the ones that don't show you anything. I mean, it's worth doing some sanity checks on that versus what Photoshop shows for you. But that might be the best way to do it, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. No, so I'm just looking at this one command here. Oh, it still exists, okay. So sadly, the time to examine your files or do something that prevents them from being damaged has passed, right? Right, right, right. No, we have this blob of files and some of them are good and some of them aren't. Right, all I can suggest, so one thing, so there are, so I did a search and there are utilities. So oddly enough, a file is a blob of data. And the thing is you can perform certain operations on it in order to make sure that it's happy. And one is generating what's called a checksum or something worth fiscated. And it's basically something that rips through the file, comes up with a magic number saying this is a number that represents the contents of this file. And the thing is if it changes, then you know the file is damaged. There are utilities on the Mac that will do this. Actually, I just found this on OS 10 daily. They actually have, believe it or not, there's actually the ability built into OS 10. And I just verified this called SHASUM, where you can take a file and say generate a SHA, secure hash algorithm, which is a way of doing this. And then you can accomplish this, but the thing is you have to do it beforehand. Now I'm trying to find the utility, but there are also our utilities that will rip through your entire file system and it'll take a while. And then generate a checksum or hash for each file. And then you can do it later and if they don't match, well, the other thing is that time machine, as of late Dave, so I think a couple of versions ago, time machine actually includes a checksum for all the files that it backs up here. And if you wanna find out, the thing is you can run a verification. I think it's only command line only. You can say, okay, verify that all the files on my time machine backup have the same checksum when they were backed up. And it will tell you any files that do not match. So that's another suggestion and all. All right, I have some ideas because you gave me an idea, but first I'll share, I'll share Graham's idea. Graham suggests using some sort of batch photo processor since all of these are pictures. What if you run, like graphic converter has a great batch mode where you can configure it to do all kinds of crazy things and then point it at a folder and it'll do it. If the photos are damaged, it won't do it, right? So that would be one way to... Yeah, from what I recall, graphic converter is very smart. It tries its best if it sees a damaged graphic file to figure it out and then it'll give up and say, well, what do you think it is? But a lot of times it'll make the right guess, which is awesome. So that might be a way, even if you just have it copy the photos from one folder to another, do something non-destructive, maybe renaming them with the photo name plus the date and the time or something, at least then it would be, or maybe adding something to the EXIF data or something non-destructive in terms of the picture. At that point then, you'd wind up with the destination folder full of pictures that are not damaged versus the pictures that were and couldn't have their data modified, aren't gonna be there. So that, I actually really like that idea. The other thing that I thought of when you started talking about terminal commands, John, it jogged my memory, I remembered a command named file and it's really simple. If you go to the terminal and type file, right, file space, the file name, it will tell you what it thinks that file is. And then you can also, on a directory, do file space star, which is everything in this directory. And I just did that on a random directory and it listed two things that are other directories. Yep, one that's a zip file, it says zip archive data, at least version 2.02 extract. And then there's a couple of JPEGs and it says JPEG image data, JPEG standard 1.0.1, aspect ratio, density, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it shows me the size of the JPEG. And there's three of them. One's 41 by 53, one's 173 by 225, one's 552 by 720. And if you're listening to this and you know what kind of folder I am in where I got this kind of data, you win the prize. So we'll just leave it at that. I won't share what it is until next week's show. Yeah, I don't know, it's fun, right? Yeah, it's, anyway. So, there you go, that's the way I think. Yeah. I also gotta say, if you know what it is, folks, you can email us, right? Feedback at MackieGab.com. No, no, no, no, no. Well, first I had something to say. Oh, go ahead. Another thing I have to say is feedback at MackieGab.com. What else did you have to say? Well, also doing frequent multiple backups will prevent your terrible things happening. It's true. That's what we say. I hate to use Mark as the example here, but there is a phrase that we geeks like to throw around which is fault tolerance is not a backup. While Drobo and even Synology, any kind of, well, not any kind, but RAID that has fault tolerance in it means that it can survive the death of a drive or sometimes two drives depending on how it's set up. What it does not mean is that it will protect you against other types of errors, either user errors or like in this case where the entire RAID just sort of crumbled and cratered. It's worth backing up everything and it sucks. That you're in that scenario. So the thing is what I'm doing now, Dave, so I think I told you that I moved to getting a larger iCloud drive and iCloud photo library. But I decided not to back up the entire huge Wampan 100 megabyte file. 100 gigabyte. Or 100 gigabyte, I'm sorry, to my time machine, but I will back it up to my local drive. Sure. So I don't want it to chew the bandwidth because it's 100 gigs, man. It's a lot of data. Yeah, but your time machine is local. It's not like you're chewing up. Well, one of mine is and one of mine's remote, but still. So one of my time machines is wired and one is wireless, but still it's like, do I really need to back up my iCloud photo library multiple times? And to me, the answer is no. No, I would have at least one local copy of it. Like two local copies, the one that you work from and then another. And then you've got the one in the cloud. And I think between that you're pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the first time I did a time machine backup after I enabled it, one of my machines was like, yeah, I'm backing up 100 gigs. And I'm like, yeah, you're not. Yeah, you get to scale. No, we're really exclude that. I think, I can't remember how I have time machine backed up, but where you gotta be careful is if you have multiple Macs and you've got time machine backing up every one of your Macs and you're syncing your iCloud photo library down to multiple Macs. Well, you certainly don't need to back it up from every single one of those. In fact, what I do with multiple Macs, maybe you're already doing this, John, is on one of my Macs, I tell it download originals. So I want all of them locally here. But then on all of my other Macs, I just say optimize local storage because I don't need, like you said, local copies of my entire library on every Mac. So you can kind of fuss with that too so that say on your laptop, you've only got the optimized version and then maybe on your Mac mini where you've got more storage, you can have the whole thing. Oh yeah, well, my phone actually yelled at me because it was like, I don't have enough space to do this. Do you want it to optimize? Then I'm like, yeah, fine. The thing is, the size of the screen on the iPhone, you know, optimized looks fine to me, so I'm all right. No, that's not what optimized means. Just for clarity, what optimized means it's taking up less storage on the device versus the full image size? Yes, but I'm going to get more granular there. It will, when you go to view the image, it will download the entire image. But if you're not going to view the image, it will download the thumbnails. So you can see all the thumbnails, but when you go to mess with an image, it pulls the full thing down. And the reason it does that is because you might want to do some edits locally. And when you do those edits, you want to be doing them on the full-size image so that then the copy that's saved back to your library is based on the full-size image. Well, hey, you know what, Dave? I just learned a new thing because I just enabled iCloud photo library and I'm like, oh, this seems like fun. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I've been really impressed with iCloud photo library. It's pretty good. But it is time. Yeah, I had to throw down two bucks a month to get the extra storage. Yeah, it's more expensive than you'd pay everybody else for storage, but it's really convenient, so. It's not that bad because, yeah, it was like, all right, my photo library's 100-something gigs and should I get the 200-gig plan? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Hey, you know, before we were talking about it, but I'm not sure either one of us got it right. It's feedback at macgeekab.com. Unless you're a premium subscriber, as we discussed, and you visit macgeekab.com slash premium, then you can use premium at macgeekab.com and we do prioritize looking at that box. We always make sure to look there first because you're the ones that help us, but we do answer our goal every week and most weeks. Like, I would say 50 out of the 52 weeks a year, we hit it or we answer everybody's questions, at least via email. There you go. You can call us, though, if you wanna leave a voicemail, 224-888-GEEK, which John is? Four, three, three, five. That's right. And then you can find us on Facebook. And I am way behind on answering questions on Facebook, so I endeavor to do that tomorrow morning, but it may not happen until tomorrow night. Go to macgeekab.com slash Facebook. It's a great group of people, just because I'm not in there answering questions over the last week or so, doesn't mean your question isn't gonna get answered. In fact, I know that I'll go in there and see better answers than I would have thought of flourishing on all of the discussions. It's really fantastic. Because it's a community and we're one big, happy family and I feel like a group hug is maybe coming in. That's what that Facebook group has become. It's the big group hug. It really is, yeah. Hey, all right, so I wanna thank Cashfly 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 podcast marketplace with Otherworld Computing, as we mentioned earlier in the show. Smile at smilesoftware.com, Barebone Software at barebones.com and a couple others coming soon. Roboform, they have roboform.com. Very, very cool stuff. I think so. Hopefully you found a link to that Nido four-way adapt-o thing, John, because there you go. Hey, you made it through the show, John, with even with the remnants of your head cold and perhaps some other stuff going on, but do you have any comments now that you've made it through to the end? Do you have any comments for anybody else? Well, even though I, it makes me sad, Dave, because even though I made it through to the end, I'm sorry to say that one thing happened during this whole experience and the thing is I got caught. Made up.