 The Mac Geek Gab, $6.97 for the 19th of February, 2018. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab here, where we get together to share your questions, to share your tips, to share your cool stuff found, answer your questions, the goal being every single one of us leaves having learned at least five new things each and every time you get together, we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Jamf Now, we're at jamf.com. You can get your first three devices free for life and also Roboform, where using coupon code MGG, you can save 10 bucks off your Roboform subscription here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in formerly chilly, but now warming up, Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. And here, another part of Durham, New Hampshire, is that guy that opened the show, Pilate Pete. How you doing, Pilate Pete? Thanks for having me, guys, yeah. I'm glad you made it, man. Yeah, glad to be with you. This is fun. Cool. I almost like coming here. And just so everybody knows, okay, I told Dave today I was coming over and good to do, good to go, and he says, yeah, I moved the studio around a little bit, but I'll get you all set up. And I got over here and everything was set up. The cans were here. The mic stands all set up and no microphone. I think he was trying to tell me something. I think so. Yeah, by the way, that's like now, shut up. So here we are. No, thanks for having me out. I'll have fun coming in and spending this time with you guys. Cool. Well, thanks for flying in, Pete. There you go. Let's jump to, well, we've got a bunch of tips. So let's just go right in and do some quick tips here and see how we do. We'll start with Patrick. He says, on Mac OS 10.13 high, high Sierra, when deleting messages, click the X and it asks you repeatedly if you want to delete a message. Click the X while holding down option and it doesn't ask you much faster. I like that tip. I don't I don't wind up deleting messages often, but I've seen people do it. And so I know this is a thing that people do. And holding down the option key skips that confirmation dialogue. That's nice. Cool. And that's not rare, right? Or that's not unique to just messages. The option key can get confirmation dialogues and a lot of things. Yeah. And you know, and I'm a huge keyboard user as opposed to mouse clicks and all that kind of obviously speeds things up. The one that drives me nuts about message is if if you click the X and the dialogue comes up and you hit enter, the default is canceled. Correct. It's not yes. The default is non-destructive, Pete. That's a good thing, though, right? It is, but so many times it is the default is there. You just want to hit enter and move along, but not this time. So that's cool. Thank you. Appreciate that one, Patrick. Anything on that, John? I thought there was a similar one in the finder. If you try to empty the trash, normally many dialogues option empty trash will will force the emptying of the trash. If there's something in it that's locked, it will attempt to blow it away even though it's locked. Yeah. And you don't get a dialogue. Once you listen, as you said, I just tried it. Don't get a dialogue. There you go. Yeah. Cool. Hey, so I don't know if this was intentional, Pete, or if it was just the way you kind of read the script for today. But when you introduced the show, you said Mac Geek Gap. You said the Mac Geek Gap, actually, as opposed to the Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gap. Now, we're not changing anything about the the branding of the show. But as listener Barry noted, and we posted on Twitter this week, we did change the way the title of our show appears in our RSS feed, which impacts how it appears in every podcatcher out there. Because the title used to say, and for 13, almost 13 years, said the Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gap enhanced, right? If you're in iTunes because you get the AAC version. We dropped the Mac Observer's from that. See, Dave, I'm psychotic. I knew you were going to do that. And that's how. Yeah. Well, the reason we did it is we had several people saying, gosh, you know, I'm having a really hard time getting my voice assistant to play your podcast. Because they think of this and understand. I mean, correctly, you think of this show as, you know, Mac Geek Gap. So you would say, you know, hey, a lady or hey, s lady play Mac Geek Gap. And it would say I can't. And so instead, you'd have to say, hey, a lady play the Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gap, which is not how you would think about it. And so I'd been thinking about changing the name on this for probably five years because it's just really long. So that was enough tip the scales. We did it. Barry said, I read your tweet about the name change. And just on a whim, asked a lady play Mac Geek Gap podcast to my surprise. The reply was getting the latest episode of Mac Geek Gap from tune in radio. I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't realize this function. That's pretty cool. I didn't actually had no idea that you could do that with Alexa. I've had who you said it, you know, you can say it occasionally. I feel like and I should do this, too, that every podcaster should have all of those devices in the studio in which they podcast actively listening. Here you go. And that would curb any desire to say that word accidentally. Or you could do this. Hey, Alexa, go rate Mac Geek Gap five stars now. Hey, I think it worked. I think it worked. There you go. So, Dave, what they really should do with we being kind of technical geeks and you being a audio geek, shouldn't they? And I thought we talked about this, but. Couldn't you put like a non hero, some sort of tag within the audio? So the one was and I thought we Amazon does that with their commercials. I know that. So when they say the name, it doesn't go to the listening. So there's some way to do it. I just don't know what it is. Yeah, I actually tried it. Somebody on Reddit years ago, not that long ago, maybe last year, had figured out that what they do is notch out a big chunk of the mid range frequencies, kind of like the low mids. They drop them by like 20 dB. And when the devices, the the A lady devices or or A word devices hear it with that notched out, they know not to respond. We tried that on the show. The problem is we're doing all kinds of multiband compression and everything to to make it so that no matter where you play this, the audio is punchy and present and can be like overroad noise without being too loud. And so the EQ is way different between what I set here and what you even hear on the live stream at MacGeekUp.com slash stream, let alone what you get, which goes through another level of processing before it actually goes out on the podcast feed. So it didn't work for us, but but I have no reason to believe it wouldn't if we turned off all our other filters. So there you go. So there you go. Yeah, cool. The other problem is you got so many times said throughout the show, you know, you're trying to go through and tag it each time would drive you drive you crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. All right. A quick tip that I stumbled on this week, I like to sign and when possible, encrypt my emails with Apple's mail app. And so not only do I use the sort of built-in support for SMIME certificates, I also use the the freely available, at least currently freely available, GPG tools, which allows me to have PGP as part of my signatures. And on my, I'm going to have to ask you to make your typing quieter. I can hear it coming through our ears. Really? Wow. Well, because your mic is not aimed away from you. Yeah. But where was I here? So after I, sorry about that beat. No worries. When I installed GPG tools on one of my machines, I realized that it was defaulting to signing messages with that, not defaulting to SMIME, which is what I wanted. But I had one Mac that was defaulting to SMIME and one that was defaulting to GPG tools. And so I searched and I realized that there's a terminal command that you can type to tell your computer which one really you're telling the GPG tools plug-in which one to default to. And it GPG, GPG mail to be specific. Right. We're going to go down this rat hole. The plug-in. There's a mail plug-in. Yep. But yes. It's part of GPG tools. And it's just a defaults right command that I'm not going to say it here. I'll link to it in the show notes. But you're changing the default security method from number one to number two, and then it works exactly as I wanted. So I just wanted to share that that's possible. If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it. If it does, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about and you'll be saying, oh, thank goodness. So there you go. And all along those lines, John, you found something. Well, we ran into another thing. So we were having an exchange, email exchange with our friend Kenny. Kenny Lee, and he's in chat room. Hi, Kenny. But so if you do get a GPG message, here's what you and I noticed, Dave, and we had to take some action here. So when you receive an encrypted or signed message, Apple Mail will indicate that using whatever plug-in. The thing is what you and I were noticing, Dave, is that we were getting email from Kenny. And at least I noticed when I double clicked on the signature icon of Mail, it said, well, this signature is not to be trusted. And it's like, well, that's not right. I mean, I trust Kenny. Here's why that was happening, though, Dave. Very quickly. So normally, with the whole certificate dance that you do, the thing is something has to be signed in order for it to be trusted. Hopefully that's enough of a condensation of the concept, Dave. Yeah. The thing is with S-MIME, the certificates are signed by a CA who issues the certificate and they're in your key chain. The thing is PGP has a different model and that you have to do that operation manually. The thing is if you don't sign the certificate of someone who emails you, it'll come up with this warning and they admit that it's not a very good error message. The thing is you have to sign their key to say that you trust it in order to say somebody trusts it. The thing is with S-MIME, it happens because their certificate, their public certificate is in your key chain, but that PGP is a different model. Well, that's right. You're making your own key so it could be from anyone. I get it. Yeah. OK. So somebody has to have said they trust it. That makes sense. The thing is and they admit the error message is bad because it's just saying nobody signed this. It's not saying that the signature or crypto is wrong because you see the message. It's just warning you something's not. You may want to kick it up a notch. In the early days of PGP, I remember people used to have key signing parties where you'd all get together and sign each other's keys after meeting one another and trusting that the person that you met that's showing you their key is in fact that person. And then then you'd start to quickly build up, you know, a significant amount of trust in your keys. And that was kind of a thing that doesn't seem to happen. And the other thing is Kenny and I actually went through this. The other aspect of this for people that use PGP or GBG or both or neither. No, both. Sometimes the keys in your GPG key chain maybe stale. And that was another thing. So what I had to do was both sign Kenny's key and also update. And we both had to do that. So I think the other aspect of this day we should talk about is that sometimes keys expire. And then when they expire, that's another thing that causes this error to come up. Yeah, you've got to keep your keys fresh. The nice thing with PGP keys is you can just assuming you have the private key that goes along with it, you can just change your expiration date at will, which is great. Right. Do you have a good location for a tutorial for getting your keys set up? Because I had mine set up years ago. It was working great. I was doing it with you guys. And then my key expired and I tried to mess with it. And then I ran out of time. And yeah, go to gpgtools.isit.com. I want to say that it is. Org. I think it's Org. You're right. Yeah. Dot com is the wrong place to go. Yeah, gpgtools.org. Thank you. Yep. Just go there and download GPG suite for the Mac and that's what you want. OK. That will that will take care of that. All the certificates. Yeah, cool. All right. Yeah, because it'll let you create your own and then it'll put it in the thing and you can choose to publish it to the MIT key server. Right. Actually, one of many key servers. Right. Right. Yeah. So, cool. From Kevin in show 695, we answered a question from James about using a Thunderbolt SSD as the main drive for an iMac. Kevin says, as a directly related issue in late January, I did a computer upgrade that your listeners might be interested in. He said a family member had a has a 27 inch 2011 iMac. He had done a nuke and pave on it for them in 2013. In the year since they kept upgrading to the newest Mac OS all the way up to Sierra, says I noticed during the Christmas holidays that it was getting long in the tooth. The two terabyte rotational internal drive was continuously banging away under constant siege by Sierra. He says, I watched the install a new hard drive video on OWC's website and decided that's not for me. He says, but the 2011 iMac was the last iMac to not have USB 3. I have one right in front of me. Yes, that is true. He says, but it did have and does have Thunderbolt one. He says, so I searched around and found a Thunderbolt G Mobile one terabyte external drive from G Technologies. He says, let me put a Samsung 850 Evo SSD in it. And then he says, after installing new RAM and cleaning the iMac, he says, we got some Velcro command strips and attached the G drive to the back of the iMac stand. So it is totally out of sight and out of danger of accidentally being unplugged. And it plugged it into the new Thunderbolt one port. And now that's the boot drive and no one is the wiser. And everybody's happier, of course, because now they're running on an SSD. So taking apart an iMac is not for you and you want to upgrade that way. Kevin points out just how simple that can be. So thanks, man. That's a good one. I like it. Good, John. Moving on. Is that a three inch drive in those iMacs? Inside the iMac? No, it's a full size drive. It's only three inch as opposed to the two and a half. Yeah, it's a full size. Full size, internal, full size, internal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, John, it's good. You just need the juice. You need the juice. That's it. If we found we heard about another APFS bug this week. APFS created if you create a disk image formatted APFS, then there is a bug in high Sierra that may or may not have been fixed with the update that came out earlier today that can cause data loss on those disk images. So when you're making a disk image, format it HFS plus and you'll be fine. You can create a disk image of any format you want on any drive you want. That's sort of the beauty and the point of disk images. So just don't make them APFS and don't format them that way. And I really think that this, you know, keeps coming back to the the advice that I'll give. And John, you may disagree with me. But my advice is only use APFS on SSDs. Like don't get creative. Don't try it on spindles. We've seen problems. Don't try it with disk images. We've seen problems. Don't try it with fusion drives. Who knows what would happen, right? APFS is a very young file system. And it's been fairly reliable on SSDs. Of course, we are hearing, though, of some problems of data loss there, too. Not not anything systemic. But if a problem happens, the repair utilities are not robust yet because they just haven't had enough experience. So it's like make sure everything's backed up is really the lesson there. Because if if the file system gets corrupted for whatever reason, which is going to happen on any drive, the repair utilities are not nearly as robust as they are for HFS Plus. So there you go. Yes. And a follow up quickly. Yes. So I had an interaction with ProSoft. I told you I was going to write them about these errors and stuff like that. And admittedly, I wrote an email to their support and I was being a jerk because I'm like, why doesn't your utility work? And then I thought about it and you you coached me and you were like, dude, it's not their fault. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. So I wrote back and I said, sorry, I was being a jerk. And, you know, here's some additional information that I got from running FSEK underscore APFS, which gives a little more detail when it claims that an APFS drive is faulty, that the error was IO error, which is like, yeah, that's really useful. It doesn't work. Right. But then it wrote back an unexpected result. Yeah. And the thing is then that they wrote back saying, well, sorry, it didn't sound like we were trying to do anything about the problem. The thing is, we're as frustrated as you are. And like you said, David, it's relatively new. So but yeah, so their advice is don't do that. Don't use APFS with the rotational drive. It's just their advice right now. Yeah. They still identify that, and then, you know, I had it, I reformatted and it came up against saying, well, you know, I'm something's wrong with this backup. So that's all I'll say, they're very cool about it. They're just like, just don't do that because it's new. So I think our advice all around is APFS is not ready for rotational drives at this point. Or anything that's not an SSD. Correct. Yeah. I think that's that's the safest advice I can give right now. And frankly, the advice that I'm following here, especially after what you went through on behalf of sort of taking one for the team there. So cool. All right, let's we'll try something a little bit geeky here because I always like to get things right, even when we get things wrong. So we talked about memory interleaving in a recent show and we got it wrong. Bob wrote in such a great explanation of why memory interleaving might make things faster for you that I wanted to read it. Bob says, memory interleaving does not increase the data bus with current memory technology. Memory reads are destructive. Reading a memory cell drains the capacitive charge to sense if a one or zero was stored. After figuring out what used to be stored in the memory address, the DIM needs to put the original value back. So you have one memory cycle to read the value and a second memory cycle to restore the original value. Until the read-write cycle completes, the DIM is not available for a new read. By interleaving, if the CPU is requesting data in sequence, the next read can be sent to the interleave DIM, which is not doing anything at the moment and can immediately satisfy the read request. Actually, he says it, but while you've got one DIM sort of recovering from the read, instead of the CPU having to wait, it can go and read the next bit of data from the other interleave DIM. And by going back and forth like this, things can be much more efficient. Double, in fact, if it were that simple. He says, of course, since RAM stands for random access memory, not all access is sequential. So RAM access is not, on average, twice as fast. Although the CPU and the CPU caches are way faster than your DIMs. So even if all memory access was sequential, the CPU would still be spending a lot of time waiting. So there you go. That makes perfect sense. Thank you so much, Bob, which is now why there's like a number thrown out that says it's about 15% faster. And I think that's just the real world tests that kind of sift out from how this works. So thanks, Bob. Very cool. I love this kind of stuff. And that kind of proves quantum physics exists, right? Merrily observing something changes it? You know, that's actually really interesting. Isn't there something about a cat involved with that? No. Yeah, that was a shorting. A shorting of a cat was killed by an outcome freezer. Yeah, that's right. That's what we do here. Proving quantum physics exists. That's what we're going after here. Pete, that was just saying. I can't like, I like it. I like it. Do we just play the outro music now? And that's the end of it? You know, like we're done. Yeah, we're done. Yeah, Mike, please don't drop that. OK, that's an expensive mic. Yeah, you didn't want me to have it in the first place now I know why. Yeah, that's what Mike is. Pete is on a Hile PR 20. Oh, that's low end. Dulsit and smooth. Yeah, it actually works really well for Pete's voice. And you're on the PR 40. I'm on a 40, yeah. But you know, the 40, the problem is you've got to roll off lots of low end. Otherwise, it gets a little boomy. But it's not a nice big diaphragm on it, which is a nice life easy. We'll discuss what I'm doing here in a moment. All right, so John, you got some new toys, though. Yes, I did. So you know, I don't know if it was just that I got my Apple dividend, or just because I want to stimulate the economy. Sure. So Dave, I dropped. I decided, you know, I got to get this iPhone 7 upgraded to something new. Something new. Sure. So as you recall, I dropped it. So the screen was cracked. It was in a non-visible portion. So it was perfectly functional. But Verizon is kind of picky in that they're like, well, if the screen's cracked, they have three conditions if you want to trade it in a phone. One, no cracks on the screen. Number two, the battery isn't a piece of garbage. And I forget there was like a third one. But anyways, the screen was cracked. So I'm like, you know what, let me go. So I set up an appointment with the Genius Bar at the Trouble Wall and said, you know, I want a same day replacement of my screen. But the current price for that is $149. And I'm like, well, I got to pay this if I want to trade my phone in an upgrade. And they were totally cool about it. I think it took them about an hour, 15 minutes instead of an hour, but they did it within an hour in real time. And, you know, I got to hang out at the mall and have some sushi and all that stuff. Sure, yeah. But then as I was walking around the mall, I'm like, oh, look, there's a Verizon store here. It's not my local one. And I'm like, so I walk in there and I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm getting my phone fixed. And I'm like, do you happen to have an iPhone 8 256 gig space gray in stock? And they're like, yeah, hold on. And they're like, yes, we do. And I'm like, I might as well do it all here. So you paid to get your phone repaired. And then you walked across the hall and traded it in to get it. Or downstairs and traded it in and then upgraded. So Verizon allows you to, if you're at least a year into your contract, to upgrade and then basically resume. Depending on which payment plan you're on, like there are some that you have to wait longer than a year, but yes. The one that I'm on is as long as you're at least a year into your plan for the current phone, you can upgrade to the newer phone. And they'll accept the trade in and then start a new plan. And everything works swimmingly. It was a, no, they're awesome. Didn't have to switch the SIM or anything like that. It just migrated from one phone to the other. And they're like, yep, thanks for the old phone. And here's your new phone. And I got to say, the thing is, Dave, at first I was like, should I upgrade? I mean, the thing is the eight, you know, I've only had it for a couple of days, but the thing is it's, it's not a mind blowing upgrade experience, but it's better in subtle ways. The reason I think I went with it is, is number one, I'm still kind of wary of the face ID. And number two, the size of this phone is the same as the seven. So all my cases and accessories hope work. Sure. Yeah, it really is kind of like the seven s, right? Like you said, you get a, you get a incremental update of some things. You get a wireless charging capability, even though that there's no wireless charger included with the, with the phone. You could certainly do that. But yeah, otherwise it's just a little faster, better camera. Did you, well, did you go eight or eight plus? No, so I got the eight, but I did get, so my old, my seven was 128 gigs. And this one, I think the choices are 64 and 256. So I'm like, well, that is, we'll get to 256. Yeah, it's so far is so much nicer. Yes. Yeah, especially since I went to iCloud Photo Library, in which case, you know, I want that extra space. So I'm very happy with the experience. Bryzen is awesome, allowing you to, you know, give them more money. Right. But then Dave, over the weekend, I'm like, you know, I want to check out the chi, right? Even though it's spelled QI, it's pronounced chi. I'm like, well, now I got the wireless charging. Totally. So I ordered on Saturday, Dave. So I looked around and Wirecutter had a Samsung charger. And Amazon also has it as like a best choice. And it's in our show notes here, 15 bucks. It doesn't do the fast charge, but it works fine with the iPhone 8. It was just awesome. Just put it down. Well, the iPhones won't do fast charge, right? They will do. We have to wait until their pad comes out, because this pad does have fast charge, but it only is fast charge with Samsung phones. Yeah, the iPhone's fast charge is going to be faster, obviously, than the standard, but not quite as fast as what actual chi fast charging is. It's Apple morphing a standard for their own benefits. The thing is, I tried this charger. So I got it today because USPS delivers holidays, which today is a federal holiday, but they deliver, which is awesome. So I got it within two days and it's 15 bucks. You know, it charges. I think I measured in the course of 15 minutes and increased the charge by 10%. So not as fast as USB, but still, it's convenient. And I got two of them, one for upstairs, one for downstairs. And when you come over next, Dave. Oh, I can just lay my phone on the pad. Huh? What's really nice is how many cases it will charge through as well, too. Some cases won't, obviously, but. Yeah, as long as you don't have a big Hong Kong metal in there. Yeah. Well, the thing is that's why the back of the 8 is glass and not aluminum. Be careful with that glass back. Well, like I put, you know, the thing is that I had the Otterbox. And yet you managed to break the screen anyway. The Otterbox modular. No, I have I had the Otterbox modular case, which allows you to plug in peripherals and stuff like that. The universe, I think, right? Otterbox universe. I think that's the name of it. Yeah. I'll look it up. But the problem is, is that the to accommodate plugging in peripherals, the underside is unprotected. And guess where I dropped it when I fumbled it in a parking lot, which on the underside, now what I have on it now is a spec case, which a lot of their cases, they actually advertise. So right now I have the clear one. They also have colored ones. I like the clear one because you can see the phone. But I put that one on because they actually advertise a certain level of resistance. Yeah, now the spec stuff is very drop proof. Yeah, we'll make sure to put that in the in the show notes, too. Oh, that case. Yeah, OK, we've done it before. Yeah, yeah. Is that the Presidio clear or whatever it is? Yes. OK, yeah. All right, I'll take care of it then. All right, and then you have one more, right? Well, I don't know if I should. I don't know if I want to mention it. OK, well, then we'll skip it. Well, I could. OK. I was hoping that you'd hear it, but I can't decide for you. So yeah, have you have you ever heard of the Shure 55SH series two dynamic microphone, otherwise known as the Elvis microphone? Thank you very much. The Shure, which one? Say it again. 55SH, yeah. Well, I'll send you a link here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've talked about it before. It's the one that that looks like it has a very classic look on the stand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And so that's the third toy that I bought. And I'm talking on it right now. OK, that makes I thought something had changed dramatically in my audio set up here. OK, because it like I wasn't getting the same type. Like I was getting weird like articulation noises out of your mouth that I've never heard before. Yeah, OK. I thought I thought it was my ears on these meds or maybe the change in the setup of the studio here, having Pete's mic open that couldn't figure out what it was. It was kind of driving me crazy. So OK, yeah. So that's it. I like it. If you want to mess with me like that. Dave, you should just go. But I just like it because it's a cool look. It's a cool looking mic. And I've just been seeing it more and more in music videos that I've been watching. And I'm like, and that's a cool looking mic. So we'll discuss. I just like it because it looks cool. But yeah, are you talking directly into it? No, I'm doing like you recommend like with the PR for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not screaming right into it. It's on the side here. So I don't get the. Yeah, I'm just getting like right. If there's a lot less of that, like I said, that boominess that I need to sort of tune out of the PR 40 is is not there. But there's a weird like like maybe six kilohertz thing that's very, very boosted on that mic. So that's what and that's what we're hearing. In fact, people in the chat room are saying, yeah, I'm noticing something with John's mouth. So there you go. So there you go. The lips are moving. Yeah, yeah. Not really a broadcast microphone, right? And it may not be. So we'll we'll work with it. But again, it's it's fine. Like I'd like to look of it. Yeah, yeah, they do mention that this mic has a care. Yeah, they do mention that the shore boost somewhere. And yeah, it does have a different audio profile. Every every does. Yeah. Yeah. So where did you get? I mean, did you just decide to buy this off the off the cuff? I think I saw it. I saw it in a, you know, I've seen enough of it in the videos. And I'm like, let me go online and find out what it is. You know, like, well, it's the Shure 55 and they have a few variations. They actually have one that is like has a. Blue foam instead of red instead of black. And I'm like, that that looks kind of weird, cool. No, and then I went to Amazon and Amazon has it. And I think it actually let me see. I think it was actually directly from Amazon. All right, well, there you go. I was eligible and yeah, I'll post a cool link likewise. But but it's a pretty looking like you got it. I think it's really cool that you went out and got yourself a mic. We just got to tune it out. So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, just tell me when you do those things. It makes makes my life easier. Don't feel bad, John. And you get a mic at all this morning with this piece. Oh, sorry. Sorry, let me put my dead horse bat away. Yeah, yeah. I do want to thank all of our premium listeners that contributed this week because without you, we couldn't do these things like buy new microphones and and all of that. So really, it makes a huge difference this week on the biannual $25 every six month plan. We have Elliot G. We have Kevin S. We have Harry M. We have Michael P. We have David R. We have Tom Tom M. We have James E. We have Paul J. Drew T. Daniel P. William J. And Gray J. Thank you all so, so very much, really appreciate it. And on the monthly ten dollar plan, we have Michael P. Bob L. Jeffrey P. Gary B. John V. Stephen A. John D. Santiago M. And Ken from Kailua. Thanks so much to all of you as well. Really, really means a lot and really helps us do what we do here. So thank you so much. Let's get into some questions, shall we? Yeah, good. Indeed. OK, going to Larry here, Larry asks a quick question. Is there any reason to keep my mobile applications folder on my Mac anymore? It's taking up 14 gigs and there seems to be no need for it anymore. My feeling is, yeah, I think you can dump it. The only reason you'd want to keep it is if there's an app in there that you've saved from your phone or downloaded from from the store over over the years that's not available anymore in the app store. Then you can use that to restore the app to your Mac. But there's two like other than that, there's really no reason when you set up your phone again, you're going to restore from iCloud and it's going to download everything from the store, which is what you want anyway, because the apps on your Mac probably aren't the most updated versions or at least you don't know if they are because iTunes doesn't do that automatically in an easy way. Right. And how many times have you had to delete apps recently with the newest version of iOS because they don't work anymore? They don't work anymore. That's the thing is these old apps that aren't available in the store, they're not going to be likely not going to be compatible with. They don't even work anyway. They don't work anyway. Yeah. So yeah, I'd say get your 14 gigs back, man. No question. So, John, do you feel differently about that? Oh, no. And actually, I would say with my recent upgrade, actually the iCloud backup. So the thing is I was with the guy in the store and he's like, OK, well, you know, we're going to restore your iCloud backup, which, of course, you should always do before you upgrade your phone. And I did that. And the thing is they have in-store Wi-Fi. So it was actually pretty quick. But the thing is at some point, once it got to the point where it's, you know, you see the little waiting, waiting, waiting, I'm like, OK, well, I'm going to shut the phone down and finish this at home, which worked perfectly. I was actually amazed because my past iCloud backup phone upgrade experience was less than pleasant. This one was totally 100 percent work fine. All my apps were stored perfectly. Cool. Yeah, great. Yeah, I have seen it where sometimes the apps will kind of stop or it'll seem like they've stopped waiting. Usually just kind of makes you realize all it was like updating some other app that it wasn't on the screen and it looked like it had stopped. But tapping on an app will usually we'll we'll kind of kickstart that one into gear. So yeah. And I did that, too. And then I'm like, you know, it looks like it. Yeah. So that kind of gives it a nudge. But if you just let it if you just wait, I mean, it took. Maybe an hour. Yeah. Yeah. And I have. Cool. All right. Let's see where this one goes. I may regret this. But Tracy wrote in and and she said. Let me find her original message here. She said I've been using a Synology DS 214 play for three or four years now. Two days ago, I received an alert via email from my disk station, letting me know that an IP had been blocked due to multiple login attempts. When I did a Google search on the IP, I was surprised to find a Russian address. I would guess that this was some random attack and probably nothing to worry about. However, I'm wondering what now is there anything I should be looking for to see if anyone has actually gained access other than approved users? What security precautions should I take that I may not have automatically been enabled when I did my setup? So this one is a good one because if your Synology or if your disk station detects, I think when you turn on auto block, which is in control panel security account, you can say more than five failed attempts within five minutes and it blocks that IP address from trying again for 24 hours. You can have it, you can actually turn off the expiration on that. I choose to leave mine on and I leave it at one day. So, you know, hackers have at it, you get five tries a day. I do that just in case I'm traveling and I fat finger that thing and can't log in. I don't want to be out. Who left my cap locks on? Right. Yeah, exactly. I don't want to be out for, you know, for the entirety of my trip or whatever it is. I mean, yeah, I could find another IP to log in from or whatever, but it's just, you know, I'm good this way. But you can decide how you're good. And that's that's how you do that. Other than that, the only thing sort of in a general sense that I would do is perhaps disabling the admin user on your disk station or making it so that the admin user can only log in locally. So that would be the only thing because the the the user name of admin, A-D-M-I-N is common to all disk stations. So if somebody realizes they're hacking at a disk station, guessing the username is easy if they're just guessing admin. So turning that off should, you know, then they have to guess both the username and the password. And that just makes it way more difficult. So that other than that, I think you're OK. Where was the so control panel security control panel security account? And then. And then it's right there at the top. Auto block. Yeah. Oh, I have mine enabled. Yeah, I think it's enabled by default. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm not a Russian target at this point. Right. Right. Right. Well, that's good. I'm glad to hear that you're not a Russian target that you know of. Maybe they're only trying four times a day because they don't want you to be hip to them. Ah, yes. All right. Moving on to a question from Brother Jay. Brother Jay asks, he says, recently I decided to grant access to select privilege persons content on my Plex server. However, I did not anticipate the seemingly impossible obstacle of a double NAT scenario that is out of my control. Everything on my setup allows packets to be sent and received. My setup is relatively simple. Coax cable from the wall to a cable modem, Ethernet from the cable modem to his primary ERO node and his primary ERO node to a secondary and tertiary ERO nodes via Wi-Fi. The Ethernet cable used is the nice dirty cable packaged in the ERO box. I also, he says, use private internet access. The sole commercial VPN I would recommend. This is the culprit. My Plex server is fully and readily accessible outside the local area network after private internet access application is exited via the menu status extra where the apps controls reside. I know it is accessible because the Plex control panel reports. So upon activation of the retry button, this is reverted after private internet access is re-enabled. I think it's obvious what the issue is. The VPN presents a double NAT scenario. So I'm going to kind of stop right there. So, yeah, when you're running connected to a VPN, either individually from your computer, like Brother J is describing here, or if your entire network is connected to a VPN, inbound traffic must also go through the VPN. And I've never been able to make it work where I can actually have inbound requests to a server work when I have a VPN connected, which makes sense that the security of the VPN is built to do just that. So the solution is put your Plex server on a machine that is not behind the VPN and put your other machines either individually like you have with this one, you know, by installing the client, you can put your other machines on a VPN or you can, you know, perhaps set up another proxy server that has a VPN and use that as your gateway for the other machines that starts getting a little bit nutso. But you can and it's totally doable. But you can't have the VPN running on a server machine or at least not on the server process. It would, in theory, be possible to say, connect Plex to the Wi-Fi circuit and not the Ethernet circuit and then maybe bind Plex to one interface while you bind all the rest of your internet traffic to another. I mean, you know, these things are doable, but you're it's it's a crazy scenario to create. But but that's that's what's going to happen here. So if you are running any servers or services at your house and you decide to connect to an outbound VPN, then your inbound services won't work. And that's just by nature of the fact that your router is now going to put your devices are going to be set to not answer from those things. Does that make sense, John? Kind of. I was mulling this one over in that if you ran your own VPN server versus a third party with that. Well, you're talking about across this. So I'm talking where I think you're we're talking about two different types of VPNs. You're talking about an inbound VPN server. And what Brother Jay is talking about is an outbound VPN server. So he doesn't want his ISP to see his traffic so he connects to a VPN and and that's where the problem is. So that's fine. OK, I was I was lost for that entire thing until you just said that. Perfect. I'm glad and I'm glad we got that's why I was trying to figure out why the you know, but I see now two different ways to double that. Yeah, OK, OK. Yep. It seems to me you could leave your well, then you're someone else. I was going to say you leave your Plex server wide open. And if you VPN in and get the data, your ISP can't see it anyway. Correct. But if like you and I share Plex servers with each other, right, yours is at your house, it mines at my house. We rely on the other person's Plex server to be accessible directly from the internet. Right. So we port forward from our routers or Plex does it for us to the Plex server. But as soon as that server is now connected to a VPN, all that other traffic is ignored. You've got to go find the endpoint and the VPN is just not going to let you do that. Yeah, you're not going to port you're not going to port forward from your VPN to your house. Right. That's what would need to happen. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. So see the light. Yeah. And where that gets really frustrating is like, say with the Synology router that I have, right, it can do VPN on the outbound for your entire connection, which is cool. The Eros can do that, too, with the Ero Plus service. My Synology router can also be a VPN server, but it cannot do both simultaneously because if all traffic outbound is going through an outbound VPN, you cannot have an inbound VPN. It's just it's just how it works. Yeah. Yeah. All right. A question from last episode where we were talking about 2.4 versus five gigahertz. Paul says in episode 696, listener Bob wondered whether mesh would solve his network speed issue. And Mr. Braun observed that his Mac was on his 2.4 gigahertz network while he whilst he was on the throne. I've recently observed this behavior, although not whilst on my throne with my late 2013 MacBook Pro running high Sierra. I have two access points, a base station downstairs and the satellite upstairs on both an Orbi RBK 50 and a Zeisel multi X mesh. When connected to the base station, my MacBook Pro will drop to the 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi when I move upstairs, rather than switch to the five gigahertz Wi-Fi on the much closer satellite. My Microsoft Surface Book switches to the five gigahertz signal of the satellite in the same location. We can rule out the throne in this and the mesh system, which leaves me to suspect something is awry with the configuration of my MacBook Pro or Apple's implementation of Wi-Fi. I know you guys are router royalty, so any help would be much appreciated. So royalty on the throne, right? Yeah, I think it might have to do with how each of these devices, you know, your MacBook versus the Surface are defining best, right? And we probably should have dug into this more last week. So I'm glad you asked this question. I fear we might have left people with the not necessarily accurate conclusion that five gigahertz is always better than 2.4. That's not true. It's generally up to each device to decide which radio is best. And it might be able to negotiate a faster or more reliable connection over 2.4. And it seems like the perhaps your Mac is geared to do that, at least based on, you know, this anecdotal evidence that we have here. There are some routers that will participate in this decision process. We call this band steering where the router knows how many other clients are connected to either the 2.4 or actually both radio. And it might say, hey, you know what? That client's not that far away. Let's try that on the five gigahertz and it'll actually push it over there so that it can free up some space on the 2.4 or whatever that is. But but there are quality metrics when you're connected to Wi-Fi. You can look if you hold down the option key when you hit the Wi-Fi menu in your menu bar, you can see the MCS index. That number indicates essentially the quality of the connection. How how fast it's able to go. And and, you know, so if your five gigahertz is it's saying MCS of like one or two and your 2.4 gigahertz is up at like 12. Maybe that's why it's going to choose 2.4 and getting you more reliable, effectively faster connection than then you might get over five. So and it can be due to interference or, you know, whatever. So I think we got that. But what do you think, John or Pete? No, you did because I was going to mention the MCS index. And also if you do the same thing that Dave said, and you get that, you know, extended menu, it also shows the transmit rate that it's negotiated. Like right now I see on my MacBook Pro, it says 300 megabits per second, right, which probably makes sense because it's an 802N and it's right next to the Euro. So that's the maximum rate I'm going to get. But yeah, it's the logic that they use to pick. So higher frequency is better, but you got to mix it with signal strength and things like that. And they try to do the best they can to decide, well, you know, is this a time I should maybe change that. Right. Right. And I'll see that sometimes with the Dubuque tools or something else. It's like, well, you know, I made a decision to change the frequency or the bandwidth because, well, I think that's the right thing to do. Yeah, sometimes it's not right. Yeah, it just decides that's right. If you really want to control it, the only way to do that is to have your networks with different names. So, you know, 2.4 and 5. The problem with that is then you have to. Yeah, because of the way the Mac and actually all Apple products do it. Well, it's just the management disaster. Right. Also, right. Right. It is. Yeah, yeah. And with some mesh product products like Eero, you can't change the network names. Like they are always the same and that is how it shall be. No, no, no, the with the Linksys Vellop. And I think even with the Orbi, I can't remember off the top of my head. There's too many user interfaces that I've seen. But with some of them, you can do that. And with the Amplify, you can do it from ubiquity for sure. But but generally, but the Eero, no. And there's a couple others to it might be the Orbi is also no on that. So, hey, I want to I want to talk about our two sponsors. Is that cool, John? Outstanding. Sweet. Our first sponsor is Roboform. With Roboform, you never need to remember or type your passwords again. Roboform saves all your logins for really easy access, all secure. We all know we can't use the same password everywhere, right, folks? We know that. I know you know it. I know and I know you're nodding, but some of you are nodding and wincing because you know that you do it. I used to do it, too. You need to have different passwords everywhere. And the only way that's feasible is if something is managing your passwords for you, because otherwise, you're just going to use very formulaic stuff that's built for the human mind to remember, which also means it's built for the human mind to guess Roboform takes care of all this for you. It generates stronger, randomized passwords, saves them automatically. You can log into websites with a single click and you can securely share logins, including emergency address, which allows you to create a trusted emergency contact to have access to your data in case something happens to you and you can't give them that at the time. Filling in online forms is simple, really, really great stuff. They've really done a stellar job with this and blown away with how well this works. One thing I really like is you can set domains equivalents in there where you go in and you say, hey, you know, www.apple.com, I want to have the same logins here that I would at developer.apple.com. And you can like put all that stuff together so that domains that that and you could even have it like, for example, you know, we used to have iPod Observer, right, which ran on the same content management system as Mac Observer. Well, I used to have to have two entries in my, you know, password manager for that. Well, now I don't because I could set the two together. Really cool stuff, the way this works. So you got to check it out. Roboform is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome OS and Linux with support for all the major browsers, including Microsoft Edge. Go check it out. Visit Roboform.com, download it today. And when you're ready to buy Roboform everywhere so that you can sync your passwords with all your devices, code MGG saves you 10 bucks. Let's go to Roboform.com, R-O-B-O-F-O-R-M.com. Download it today. It's free. Download, use it on one machine. No problem. As soon as you want to go past that, that's when you get Roboform everywhere. Code MGG saves you 10 bucks. Our thanks to Roboform for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor is Jamf. As I mentioned, it's actually Jamf Now is the name of the product. But if you go to Jamf.com slash MGG, you get Jamf management of your first three devices for free for life forever. More devices than three, it's two bucks per month per device. But the first three are always free, no matter what. You could have 10, you're only paying for seven. That's just how it goes. So what does Jamf do? Well, you know, it's pretty easy to keep track of your own Mac, your own iPad, your own iPhone, right? You listen to this show, you understand how to tweak things on it and how to do things, and that's great. And you become the one that other people ask for help. That's where it gets interesting, because helping somebody remotely can be a little frustrating, especially when that person maybe doesn't understand what you're trying to tell them and does some extra things that can be extra frustrating. Jamf lets you control these things remotely, very, very cool. And you can do it from any device. So you can do things like changing email settings on somebody else's iPhone. Now, they need to have given you access to this at first. But you could set this up with anybody that you support. It could be family members, it could be your clients, it could be your customers, it could be your employees, all of that stuff. So check it out. You can change email settings. Like I said, you can configure Wi-Fi. You can install applications. You can protect sensitive data. You can even remote wipe a device from anywhere. Really, really cool stuff. So go check it out jamf.com. J-A-M-F.com slash M-G-G gets you your first three devices for free forever. I really should say it gets you three devices for free forever because if you remove one, you can add another one. And it's still free because it's just in the first three, you know? And then after after you have three, then you pay for what's more. But it's only two bucks a month per device. So check it out on our thanks to Jamf at jamf.com slash M-G-G for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's where are we here? Yes, let's go to James. See if we can get James's question answered. James says, oh, wow, this PDF. Oh, no, it's not that much of a mess. It's kind of a mess. I bought a new Apple Watch and part of the reason I purchased it was that I could unlock my new iMac with it, since we don't have touch ID on the computer. I envision perhaps not only unlocking the computer, but eventually working with a password manager to unlock websites all through the watch. Well, it's been quite a disappointment. Both the watch and the iMac are running all the latest software. I've been online and on the phone with Apple support, including an upper level advisor, and still the problem exists. I've been able and I have been able to get the watch to work for short periods of time, but inevitably when I go back to the system preferences, security and privacy and look at the box to allow my Apple Watch to unlock my Mac, the box is no longer checked and I go through the following rigmarole. For a short time, I'm able to get the watch to unlock the computer, but not long. Once again, when I go back to system preferences, the box is unchecked again. I wonder if there's a corrupted preference file or something that might help with the problem. So, yeah, I think so. I would assume that this preference file is getting overwritten as long as no one else is remote managing your Mac, which would potentially allow them to change this preference. You want to make sure that's not the case. The first thing I try is rebooting into safe mode. That clears out a lot of stuff. Just the process of booting into safe mode and getting up and running in that clears out a lot of things. Failing that, I try Onyx through its automated maintenance section and its cleanup, you know. And if that doesn't help, John got an idea. Not really. OK. Yeah, I'm not seeing anywhere. It's under accessibility because I'm not seeing my watch in here, but I know I've set my watch up to unlock the Mac. And every time I get here, it's in it's in security and privacy and system preferences. And I'm on the privacy tab. And it's right on the general tab was on the general. It would be the fourth option on the general tab. Apple, your allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac. Yeah, not every Mac supports this. I think you have to be later than 2014 to support 2014 or later to support this if memory serves. Yeah, it seems like a corrupt preference file. Yeah, you know, you have to delete all your preference files. That's my advice. Yeah, I tried. I tried turning this. You know, my is always to to pull up a search of recently updated files and then go and check this box and make, you know, see what file floats to the top. Nothing floated to the top for me. So it might be a hidden preference. Yeah, somebody out there knows. Yes, somebody out there knows. So if if if that doesn't do it, we'll make it a challenge. You guys can write in and tell us feedback at MacGeekab.com. Because there's another. I don't know if I quite heard you might know I heard you because my headphones are still the same. OK, that's good. Though if I change them, I wouldn't tell you either. No, I wouldn't need to know. But I think you said feedback at MacGeekab. That's not what I heard. I heard feedback at MacGeekab.com. Yeah, they have feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's the right one. Yeah, that's it. That's it. You can't do that. You broke the rule. No, we're changing the rules, John. You change your microphone. I'm changing the rules. You said it four times. I know. There's actually a dude before you're at it. If you can't solve that watch one, there's another iOS app called Mac ID. That's correct. Somebody in the chat room was saying that. Oh, there you go. OK, I didn't even see that. Yeah, and that's cool. So when your phone gets near your Mac, it will unlock it for you. So I've done that before. I haven't used it. I do have that on my phone, but I haven't used it in ages. Yeah. Yeah, it's brother Jay says Mac ID is now known as Unlocks, U-N-L-O-X. Yeah, so we'll put a we'll put a link to that. And the I still have an app called Mac ID. Let's see what happens when I start. So do I still on my phone? Yeah. All right. That's why you don't want to delete your mobile applications folder then. Can you get that back in here? You want the latest versions of these things. Thank you, brother Jay. That's awesome. Yeah, all right. Moving on to listener Tim's question here. Tim writes, I know I'll have it. I had it in front of me. I use and love Little Snitch 4 recently, says I noticed a new behavior for Apple software update processes. While I know that Apple uses CDNs, content delivery networks like Akamai, it looks like Apple is using a server with my ISP for distribution. Have you heard of that? For instance, Little Snitch tells me that software update D connects to Apple servers such as SWDist.Apple.com and SWscan.Apple.com and store download D connects to Apple servers such as P9-buyitunes.com and other things. So the odd thing is that now when my Mac updates software on my home network, I see the download related processes pass off from an Apple server to an IPv4 address that does not resolve to any domain. But who is reveals that the IP address is leased from my ISP as an enterprise client. I definitely don't see this address come up when I'm updating software well on my employer's network. Since these are system processes, I assume the pass off is legitimate, but it makes me wonder any thoughts. So this is interesting. It's clearly domain hijacking of some sort, but I think it's the good kind. Yeah, it's not a bad thing. No. Well, it could be a bad thing. I don't think it is. I think, well, there's one of two things that's happening here, right? And I think it's the first, but I'll say the second anyway. I think it's that Apple and your provider have teamed up to cache these updates so that it saves general internet bandwidth, right? We do this already with the content cache on Mac OS High Sierra, right? Where you can have a machine on your local network cache updates and that way things just kind of move around and it's great. There's no reason to think that your ISP wouldn't also be able to do that and wouldn't also want to do that because it saves outbound bandwidth and just keeps all the traffic local to their network. All they have to do is get one person to download, say, Mac OS 10.13.3 and then everybody can get it from the local cache. So that would make sense. It could be that your provider is sort of doing this on their own and I suppose that's possible, but I'm guessing that they teamed up with Apple to do it, but you know. The only reason I would, the thing is if they were using a CDN, like we talked about this, you know, we did this ping tip and the thing is if you ping Apple, it'll actually say, and you know, we did this and that, it'll come up and say, you know, blah, blah, you know, CDN, whatever.net instead of apple.com. So in this case, because it's coming up as an IP address, I'm thinking that they're, they don't want to heavily advertise it, but it just means, it leads them to believe that they rolled their own solution. Well, yeah. So just because he can't do a reverse lookup on an IP address doesn't mean that a forward lookup wouldn't work. They are not one in the same, right? So you can create forward lookups with no matching reverse. So usually you don't, but it is certainly possible to do that. So yeah, I mean, maybe they're running, who knows, maybe they've got a Mac there running content caching server. I mean, I would worry about that. They could. If you want to do this on your own, go to system preferences, sharing, content caching, then hold down the option key and click on advanced options dot, dot, dot. And you can see that there are some interesting options for clients that allow the scope of things to be expanded. So you could like just use caching server and, you know, put it on a big honkin Mac and hope for the best, I guess. But actually, if you have several of them, several machines on a network with content caching enabled, it will, I think it'll load balance between them too. So maybe they don't have to team up with Apple, but I think that's what's going on here. The other thing to check is make sure that you are using your ISPs, DNS servers in your router or on your Mac, just to make sure that somebody else isn't like injecting things in there, but I think you're okay. So, I think you're all right. Yeah. Oh, good. Actually, a good site to go to. So who is, is a nice tool. There's a site that I think will go beyond that because I think who is, typically, if you're running from the command line, I think is US only. But maybe this is a dated tip that I'm giving here, but if you go to RN, A-R-I-N, which is American Registry of Internet Numbers, dot net, when I found a mysterious IP address, I would punch it into these guys and if it's not in the US, they'll tell you that. So maybe who is, does that too, but. Yeah, there you go. But I tossed that in there. Cool. All right, yeah, yeah. We'll put both of them in the show notes. Never hurts. It never hurts. You want to take us to Andrew, John, or should we go straight to the geek challenges? I think Andrew's good. Go. I think he has some good general tips here. So here's what Andrew says. Help! Guys, I've been pursuing this one for a few weeks, now with no resolution at site and I turned to the Mackie Gap Society for assistance. I have a mid-2011 My iMac in the 27 inch and a 2.7 gigahertz variety running El Capitan, 10 to 11, not six, with 12 gigs of RAM and a one-terabyte SSD. I want to see if I can cut some of this out here. The rig has been chunking along just swimmingly since new and I've had very few software hardware hiccups since purchase. Recently, however, my iMac's file association ability has gone off the rails. Otherwise, there have been no new updates or apps that have coincided with this new bug and no virus infected emails or shady websites that might cause difficulties. I'm well aware of how to change file associations so that double clicking on any data file will open the application I prefer to use with that data file. For example, double clicking on a JPEG will cause preview app to open. I have changed that to open Pixelmator in the past but currently prefer the default preview. A few weeks ago, double clicking on the JPEG file inexplicably caused Adobe Illustrator installer to start instead of preview. I wrote it off as a random glitch and corrected the file association for JPEGs but this kept repeating regardless of how many times I corrected the file association. So I rebuilt the entire launch services database via the following command line. And yeah, you can do that. I'll do something else. I cleaned up the issue for a little while but then the problem returned. In fact, it started to affect other file types and applications. Clicking on a word file opens something other than word. Opening an MP3 opens something other than iTunes. I'm now running the above command line utility daily to correct the launch services. Obviously, I'm not getting to the core problem. I think we can get stopped there. You think? By the way, you sound fantastic now. I'm really liking this mic for you. About 10 minutes ago, I tweaked the mid-range BQ just to stop it from highlighting that extra little bit of articulation from you. And I'm really liking this. So let us know what you think, folks. You already know how to find it. Yeah, there you go. So I answered the question. Sorry, I didn't mean it to worry. Thank you. I'm glad I made a simulated risk here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I read all the proof. They were saying this mic for voice work and I've heard people use this mic and I'm like, wow, it sounds really good. And this is voice work in a sense, right? I mean, I haven't seen. Yeah, it's definitely. At least not currently, but I may in the future. But all right, so the thing is, Andrew, yeah, Andrew's got a problem and this may be kind of a geek challenge, Dave. But the thing is, I would say that the steps that he took make total sense since corruption of the launch services database is often the cause of various woes. One of the most famous, which I'm sure we've all seen at some point is when you right click on something and go to a contextual menu and say open with, you see multiple entries for the same app. That means that what we know as launch services is messed up. Well, how do you fix that? One of the ways is, of course, to use our Pal Onyx, which sounds like he has or maybe has not, but if you want to, try it. So it has, when you go to the automation and then rebuilding tab, not only is there the launch services database, but there's a few others that I would suggest, Dave. So one is called DYLD's shared cache, which is dynamic loader cache, XPC cache, core-duet database. One of these must be getting messed up. So using Onyx to clear them out or other means is fine. Hats off to using the terminal to rebuild one of these databases. But another Dave, as you mentioned, is Safeboot. We'll say it before, we'll say it again, but that clears out, I think these same caches, but it does some other work. Finally, Dave, what I will recommend and I verify that it does work. So there is this app that will, if you want to know all the ways you can associate a file extension or the embedded information in a file or whatever, RcDefault app is the app that will show you all of these mappings because there are a number of ways that Mac OS tries to figure out what app to launch. It's not just the extension, it's not just the embedded information. It could be, there's like three or four things it uses. And it's usually pretty good, but sometimes it gets screwed up. So I would say that RcDefault app will show you the low level mappings for several scenarios. And maybe you can use it to detect who is doing this. The thing that I'm scratching my head over guys is, is it an, is the OS screwing up or is it some mysterious app saying, oh yeah, by the way, change these mappings? Yeah, right, knock it off, change them. And this terrible thing is happening. I've personally never had this happen in that, you know, all my apps are mapped or I want them to. So this could be another challenge, Dave. Well, what causes that, you know, what is causing, I mean, have you ever run into this? No, no, it's always worked, but I mean, I think, I think you're right. Like, where else are you gonna go? It's RcDefault app. Or like you said, use Onyx to rebuild the shared cache, the DYLD stuff, yeah. I mean, if it keeps happening, I mean, I think it's a stretch, but, you know, I don't know if it's file system corruption. It just sounds too specific that it's suggesting an app that's kind of the same, but not really, it's putting an app that can also handle that type of file in place of it. And I'm like, well, why are you doing that? I don't know. I wonder if an updater is doing, I wonder if a software updater is maybe saying, oh yeah, change the mappings, by the way. Just a shot in the dark. Yeah, yeah, it could be, right? It could be. All right, while we're here, we've got some geek challenges. Pete, you started asking us a question and I knew I wouldn't know the answer to it. I'm not convinced there is an answer. I just went down a rat hole before the show began, but. Right, I said, please stop and let's do it during the show. Okay, yeah. So here's the thing. As much as I can enjoy Fall Out Boy and Panic at the Disco, we start doing the Blackfield brides and that kind of stuff. It's a little too much for Pete to listen to. You sounded pretty hip over there, right? Yeah, a little too much to listen to all of my 15-year-old daughter's music on the way to school in the morning. So frequently I will put my Plututh air pod in and listen to CNBC or something like that on the way to school. And then she hops out of the car and if I go to put on the FM radio or something like that, I don't know, call me. Call me weird. Sometimes I want to multitask and listen to two things at the same time. So I'll listen to the radio and then I'll go back to listening to CNBC and I want the same thing to play. The problem is. Remember, folks, he is a trained pilot. He's used to listening to lots of things, lots of sensory input, while controlling things. And I have the Honda with driving assist. So I can take my hands off the wheel and watch myself die in slow motion. I've read the docs. That's not what it's for. That's right, don't do that. That's right. Off-label use. So the long and the short of it is, however, the Bluetooth, once my daughter disconnects, the Bluetooth in my car takes over the Bluetooth connection to my telephone and I can no longer listen to it in my earpiece, which drives me nuts. I just want to leave it in my earpiece and maybe even turn the radio down. And it's not having any of it. I think the answer may be to reorder the Bluetooth connection. This morning I told it to forget the connection and then I put it on again and now that connection's at the bottom, but my daughter hasn't been in and out of the car since. So I don't know if that's an answer or not, or if there is an answer. You know, is it because there's more power coming from that Bluetooth connection in the car? The hands-free link, is that going to take priority over my Bluetooth headset that's in my ear? Anybody know anyone, Bueller? Yeah, this is definitely a geek challenge. I've fought with this before. We get email from you folks fairly regularly where somebody says, yeah, like my car takes over with this priority, but not that priority or the opposite. I can never get my AirPods to be the first thing on the list on my phone and I have to manually choose it. I can go in and manually choose it and it takes it right back within a couple of seconds. And I'm like, this is killing me. And I have a feeling now that I've done that, I probably have to go in now and take all my family's phones out of my car and re-add them, they'll still get in the car and take priority over me and you. Well, yeah, some cars I know have the ability to set like a priority level, like I don't know that I've ever seen it with music, but I've definitely seen it with phone where you can set telephone and alternate telephone so that two are connected simultaneously. Interesting. Yeah. Honda doesn't have that option that I've seen. Yeah, right. But yeah, it's, you know, I've always wondered if it's kind of like Wi-Fi where, and I could be totally wrong on this, folks. So like, this is not advice. This is just the crazed musings of a, you know, mildly hopped up on flexural geek. You know, I've wondered if I go and remove everything from the Bluetooth settings on my phone and then repair all the things, is the order in which I add them relevant to the priority that the phone allows them to have? And if so, which way does it go? Just, you know, is it first in top of the list or first in bottom of the list? I, you know, I haven't gone, sorry, I haven't gone through the pain of removing all my Bluetooth devices and re-adding them. Usually when I get a new phone, as I'm sure you have now, John, you know, as you encounter each new Bluetooth device, you're just like, oh yeah, I gotta pair that again. And so it's some random order. I don't actually, because I do very little. The thing that surprises me is that, and I heard you going down the right path. So I'm like, can you prioritize this in the Bluetooth system preference on macOS? And the answer seems to be no. And then I tried, I see the devices listed and I'm like, well, you know, can I, you know, change the order? And it's like, nope. Yeah, that makes me sad. Yeah, yeah, I don't, right. There's no obvious way to do it. So whether iOS will let you do it or not, doesn't seem to. Yeah. Oh, you know, something just came to mind here. Thing you may want to try there, Pete. Okay. Don't let my daughter listen to that music? Please say yes. I wouldn't go in that direction. Darn it, okay. All right, so I've got to let her listen. You got to let your children define their own path, right? Yeah. Some of that's pretty good. But don't make her listen to that rock and roll I think would be better instead of this garbage that she's listening to. No, I'm sorry. But this goes actually pretty good. But I'm wondering if you could create, all right, so I'm actually going to be doing, so you're going to see something for me about Mac OS server and device management shortly. But I'm thinking, Pete, I wonder if there's a way to use Apple Configurator 2 to kind of tweak the Bluetooth behavior because it can certainly tweak the Wi-Fi behavior of your iOS device. So I'm wondering if you may want to see if there's something in it. I mean, the tool's free, so. Yeah. But if there's a way to maybe get it because you are able to use it to prioritize your Wi-Fi as we've discussed in the past. So I'm wondering if it will allow that additional capability with Bluetooth, maybe not, but. All right, I got two more geek challenges that I want to throw out here so that we can get the hive mind thinking. The next one is from listener David. He says, is there any way to clear the suggested locations or recent locations in the calendar on Mac OS? Somehow long ago, a letter someone wrote me got into my recent locations list and it messes with my ability to find locations easily. Sorry. Right over there, Pete. Is it really, it is really long and comes up with just about every location I type in. And it's awful looking at this PDF this guy sent. I mean, it's like a five page letter that comes. Any word in the English language he types in. It finds that letter. It is in this, right. And so it becomes the thing. Man. He says, there is no obvious way to do this in the graphical interface, but I'm hoping someone knows where a cache file is so that I can delete this and start the list over. Yeah. I don't know where that cache file is. I don't use calendar enough to, I use busy cal instead of calendars. So I like don't even, I don't even have a test case to test here. So anyway, there you go. John, if you don't know the answer, we're leaving at a geek challenge, but you know, I'm open. Oh yeah. Okay. Then it's a geek challenge. The last one for this week is from JT who has a very simple question that I don't know the answer to. He says, a possible geek challenge prior to macOS High Sierra, a script was able to be run that put all apps into a nice neat OCD alphabetical list in Launchpad. And you would do defaults, right, com.apple.doc reset Launchpad bool true and then kill all doc. And he says, if you run the same script in High Sierra, it will reset the default Mac apps on page one, but a clue of an order appears for my third party apps. Short of moving them in the order that my OCD brain needs, I'm not sure with APFS this is possible. I've included a link to a website that explains some of these changes. I'm not convinced that's APFS's fault, but I suppose it could be, I mean, anything could be, but yeah, it's just Launchpad. Yeah, I think something changed there and something changed with the defaults. So there you go. I throw all those out there and we'll see what happens. But that's all I got for this one. So it's time to bring the band in, John. I think anyway, I think it's time. Yeah, if you're throwing out, Dave, I'm throwing it back. Okay. Catch. Yeah, I caught it. I put it right back on the agenda. That's right. No. All right, folks. Well, we told you how to find us. What we didn't tell you is if you are a premium subscriber, how you can find us. And that is by emailing premium at mackeykev.com. We prioritize all the stuff that comes into that address because you folks help us do what we do. But, the goal every week, in addition to learning five things, our goal is to get through all of your questions. And so that is that is what we do. And I think last week we did it. Most weeks we do. It's just like when there's travel or, you know, other interruptions that things just kind of get, you know, just off the list. What's that? It's cray cray. Yeah. Visit us on Facebook. Go to facebook.com. And if you have any questions, go to facebook.com. Actually, it's easier. Go to mackeykev.com slash Facebook. That'll bring you right there. It's much, much simpler to go that way. I want to make sure we thank Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, I want to thank all of our sponsors because without them, you know, they are part of the mix there, too. Obviously, in the show we had Roboform, where MGG saves you 10 bucks. We had Smile Software last week. We're at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. You can learn about all the cool things that they do. We have Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. We have Barebones Software at barebones.com. And then, of course, this week also Jamf, jamf.com slash MGG gets you those first three devices for free. That's going to be how it goes, I think anyway. Hey, Pete. Huh? Huh? Hey, how you doing over there? Yeah, I'm good. I'm here. Good. Durham, New Hampshire treating you well today? So far so good. A little chilly, but warming up nicely. Yeah, that's right. Don't slip on the ice, by the way. That's like the first piece of advice I want to give. Do you have another piece of advice you want to give? I do. I do whatever else you do. Don't get caught.