 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 772, Mac Stock Edition, from Monday, July 29th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you not only send in your cool stuff found, your tips, and your questions, but today, because as John said, we're here at Mac Stock Expo after hours. We've got an extra microphone for you to actually speak your questions live. So we'll play a little bit of Stump the Geek today. Sponsors for this episode include Other World Computing, who is also a sponsor of Mac Stock Expo. So that's cool. And I fix it at ifixit.com.mgg. We'll tell you why you want to go and visit them shortly. But here in McHenry, Illinois, if I'm not mistaken, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, right next to him, in the same place. This is John F. Braun. Don't forget to stay up on your mic, Mr. John F. Braun. Thanks. So yeah, here we are. There are all kinds of things. I want you folks to be thinking about your questions. We have a microphone with a cable that will get you here. We have some of your questions and those from people in parts beyond. To answer the show will probably be a little shorter than a normal Mac Geek Gap, because that's how it will be given our time constraints this evening. But John, should we start with some tips from the listeners and kind of get people warmed up? Absolutely. Sound like a plan? All right, cool. So the first thing, and actually, I want to remind everybody in the room to just mute your phones. Does anybody not mute their phones all the time? Is that like a thing? No, no, no, like you. OK, that's cool. Kelly doesn't mute her phone. But she's a podcaster. She knows. So that's fine. All right, let's go to Aaron with a tip that is a good reminder for all of us. Aaron says, for some time now, I've had issues with my 2010 Mac Pro. And in recent months, my 2011 MacBook Pro running slow when the machines are up for any length of time and both have SSDs and plenty of RAM. After a reboot, they will run fine for a while and then back to running slowly. I finally narrowed it down to the free RAM, slowly going from around 4 gigs to about 400 megs as the inactive RAM is increasing. I came across the terminal command sudo purge, sudo space purge. That clears out almost all of the inactive RAM and restores the machine to working order. It takes about 20 seconds or so on my machines for the command to run. So yeah, you can force RAM to purge. I would say only do this if your machine is slow enough that you would reboot it otherwise, because you're purging out all of the stuff that macOS thinks it might need again and might actually make your machine faster if it were in RAM and didn't have to load it from disk. So I would say only do this if your machine is running slowly, but if it is, that could save you a reboot. And perhaps I had done that earlier. We might have started this episode 15 minutes sooner because my Mac wouldn't have decided to install an update because now's a great time for that right before an episode, no less. Yeah, the machine has a mind of its own. You're telling me. One thing occurs to me, though, here. So he said he went from having 4 gigabytes of free RAM, but he also said that he has plenty of RAM. I'm wondering what the definition of plenty of RAM in this case is. It sounds like they may have eight. Yeah, eight, which I think is plenty for most people these days. I know in this room we all disagree with that. No, no, no, it's true. And when I bought this air, my previous air had 4 gigs. And that was the thing that finally made it unusable to me. So with this, I hedged my bets and I went with 16 gigs of RAM. But for most people and for most of us, for most of what we do, eight gigs is actually enough these days. It really is. With SSDs and everything, eight gigs is enough. All I know is I have, in my trusty, mid-2012, I have 16. Right, right. And same. I'm just suggesting having more RAM couldn't hurt, so. Yeah, but he can't put more in. Well, actually in his 2011 MacBook Pro, can you, right? You can in that one, yeah. My 2012 I did. Yeah, up to 16. The other thing I would suggest that there are some indicators within the Mac that can show you if things are going a skew. One is something called memory pressure, Dave. Yeah. And the other would be your swap space. And actually, so those two things. So if you see those, even though it's an SSD, if those things are growing, then you may have either an app that's just bad, memory leak, or something like that. And the final thing is, yeah, I said that with the RAM. So see if there's any app just hogging a lot of RAM. Yeah, for sure. Don't forget to stay up on the mic. OK. I can help. Yeah. Can you help, Allison? OK. Let's go to Roger here, another one of those tips that's good for all of us. We were talking in the last episode about a woman that was having trouble with her Ring video doorbell being heard. And I've been able to connect to the network. I've actually gotten now two pieces of advice about this, one from Allison Sheridan, who suggested that a mesh network, or if you have one, getting your mesh points closer to where those doorbells are. Remember, you've got potentially a Faraday cage of a screen between your mesh point and the doorbell, which is outside, so maybe getting it closer than you think you might need it. There's stuff in your walls who knows what your insulation is made of. Probably not metal, but you never know. So that can help. And you said, Allison, you said you had someone that it did help with, right? It was you. Perfect. OK. Well, that's great. Allison says it used to work when she added a mesh piece, and then it got better. We do have a microphone up here, and we will employ that shortly. So Roger shares. He says, a fiber optic line got cut in my area of South Carolina a few weeks ago, which knocked out service for 12 hours. It affected Comcast, AT&T, and several other vendors. So it was a big outage. He said, when it was restored, I got my usual fast download and upload speeds within day. But I noticed over the following weeks, there seemed to be a latency issue of five to 10 seconds between the time I would tell an app to access the internet and when it would start doing. Once it appeared, the speed was fast. I restarted my cable modem several times via Xfinity's iPhone app, but the problem remained. In fact, it seemed to spread to my Philips Hue hub. Resetting the hub and my plume Wi-Fi mesh devices did not fix the problem. Finally, I unplugged the cable modem from the wall, unplugged all of my plume mesh points, unplugged the Philips Hue hub, waited a couple of minutes. Then I plugged the modem back in. A minute later, I plugged in all my plume devices one at a time, and then finally, once they were back up and running my Philips hub, all of my problems have disappeared. He says, I recognize that Barb's problems started last year long before this particular line cut. He says, however, sometimes just restarting your network from the ground up can be a really helpful thing. So, and that is good advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kelly, you are raising your hand. Do you want to talk into the microphone so that the listeners on the... Well, if you want to talk, sure. I will let you turn on the switch on the microphone because Kelly Guemant is a professional. I love that you think that. But we pay you, I mean, it's like, to know it. It is true. Nobody tell him. By definition, yeah. Okay, it says on, so I'm hoping it works. What I find is that I'm in what I think Comcast believes to be a sketchy area. And so, and the reason I say that is because they spent like six months with the actual cable that serves my entire neighborhood, dangling from a tree and then down across the sidewalk. Yeah, so that's a thing. And what I find is that I regularly have to call Comcast in order to get them to send the reset signal. And the greatest thing about that in this case, because I never will ever say this, is that it's now automated. You can call them and say like, you know, cable service, you know, internet service, technical support, I just want you to reset my modem. And then the automated attendant will send the signal. And then usually for me, that has cleared stuff up. When I've had something weird happening, like if I unplug the cable modem and wait and plug it back in and that doesn't help, then I call and get them to send the reset. And that seems to fix it. Cool, thank you. I find their app rage inducing most of the time so I've forsaken it. So Tim here in the room suggested their app can do it. And that's actually what listener Roger was saying he tried and with limited success. But it's possible the app was doing just fine resetting his cable modem, but resetting perhaps his plume devices and getting the new DNS entries or whatever, like all of the stuff, it makes a difference. Sure, yeah, sweet, thanks. Cool, thanks everybody. Yeah, that's good. One thing to suggest is on most Doxus modems, if you go to 192.168.100.1, I think it is, yes. That's the status page for the cable modem itself. I've seen in the past with mine. So first they allow it, not all ISPs will allow it, but cable vision does. But it'll show you both levels, which voltage levels and signal levels and all that, which you may have to do some searching to find, but it will also, at least mine, shows when they're exceptional conditions, like the world disappeared, or a message equivalent to that saying I just don't see anything anymore or I got reset. So you may want to check that just to see if it is a problem with the modem or the line. I mean, where I live, we've got squirrels galore and squirrels are some bizarre reason. Like to chew on cable, they also like to chew on the line on my gas grill I found the other day when I tried to cook something. There was a big hole chewed in the cable. So it could be a physical or media problem. Yeah, cool. All right, what is next here? How, I guess I'm the one that knows that. Will has some advice for us here in terms of reminding us about iCloud. Will says, he actually sent in a question and then answered it, which is awesome because it means we get to share with you and Will did all the prep work, so thank you, Will. He said he was having a strange issue where he could not remove VIPs from mail. He joined a new company and the VIPs from his old company just started showing up in mail about two days after he set up a new machine for himself. So this was not a machine that had come from the old company, this was a new machine, but iCloud was a common denominator. He tried removing them and they would remove and come right back and then he went into iCloud.com and was able to remove them there and they stayed removed. This is a good reminder for all of us that iCloud.com is a place you can go to actually talk as close as you'll get to the server as opposed to trying to change something on a client and having another client push the change back at you. So iCloud.com, it seems like functionality in terms of especially that kind of stuff on iCloud.com has gotten way better in the last, what, 18 months or something. So yeah, any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? I'm looking and not seeing it immediately, but I'll check it out later. I think it was in his contacts. He was either in contacts or directly in mail in iCloud where that is. Okay, there's nothing in contact, so okay. Yeah, of all. All right, you know what? I'm gonna take, do we have some people in the room that wanna play Stump the Geek and ask some questions? Okay, but there's Allison. I think you were the very first person to ever play Stump the Geek at like a Macworld Explore or something. So it's fitting, yeah, not surprising either. I'm gonna take a minute and talk about our first sponsor which is OWC, and then we will have Allison come up. So yeah, as I mentioned at the head of the show, OWC is not only a sponsor of this episode, but they are also a sponsor of Mac stock in and of itself. And that's serendipitous. It's awesome. Yeah. OWC, we had the opportunity to tour OWC yesterday. And we say it on the show all the time that it is the first place we go to go and if we need anything to expand our Macs and any of that stuff, and that is true. That's not just because they're sponsors. In fact, they're sponsors because that's true. We got to see their factory and I've always known OWC was obsessed with customer service, but seeing, or not their factory, but their warehouse, talking with them in their warehouse and having them walk us through various different things. And we were all asking different questions and kind of bringing them in 1,000 different directions. The answer to every question started with, well, we do it this way because it's best for the customer. And that, again, not a surprise, but very impressive. I'm a customer service maniac. I know that it's the way to keep people happy and that's good for business as OWC has proven. But everything starts with, it's good for the customer. Then they talk about what's economically beneficial to them and those sorts of things, of course, but it all starts and ends with what works for the customer. Their new Envoy Pro EX with USB-C, it's an NVMe M.2 SSD with speeds up to 980 megabytes per second, Thunderbolt 3 compatibility and backed by OWC's three-year warranty. And these people know their stuff because they test it like crazy. It's amazing how much they all know. Everybody in that company knows about all of their products and it's super impressive. So when it's time for you to add something to your computer, like one of these new Envoy Pro EX SSDs, go to maxsales.com. And you can be just like John and me and I think everybody else in this room. And get the right stuff for yourself. So our thanks to OWC for sponsoring this episode and also serendipitously this conference. All right, Allison, you're up. I would love to have you run the mic around, but it is, we are on a short cable here because of... Right, that's it. Kelly knows not to get between Allison and a microphone. All right, so it's time for Stump the Geek. What do you got, Allison? I got something perfect. So you just asked us, did we all put our phones on Do Not Disturb? Yeah, or at least mute. Yeah. Mute, whatever. So today is a perfect example. This happens to me all the time. I have my watch. I go into Do Not Disturb. I go into my Mac on Do Not Disturb. I go on my phone, my iPad. I said, everything to do not disturb. And then I mute everything that can be muted and everything still makes noise. Like in particular, telegram seems to just be allowed to do whatever the heck it wants. It's allowed to make noise, whatever. But today I was in Twitter. I mean, I showed Steve. I showed him my iPad. I said, look, it is muted. Look at this and watch. And I hit send and it went, Yeah. It's all the way muted. Is telegram... This was Twitter. So telegram sends messages just like, it's just not obeying the rules by anybody on any device. Right. And so this was on Twitter on your phone? This was Twitter on an iPad today. On an iPad, on iOS. I was in Do Not Disturb and I had it muted. Did you have the volume all the way down? Volume all the way down. Okay, so it wasn't just muted with, I guess that's the only way. You press it all the way down and then it goes to mute. But I went and double-checked. There's like a little line through the speaker. My stuff just, maybe it's because I keep talking. It thinks it can keep talking. It's almost like you deserve this. But it punishes everybody else. I don't know the magic answer to that, John. Do you have any thoughts about that? I have noticed some apps think they're allowed to break the rules and that I've had the same situation where I almost always have my phone off. Yeah. You see the little red and it'll buzz. And yes, I just verified the volume's all the way down. So, I mean, do you notice that it's just specific apps, Allison? Yeah, she doesn't have a mic. So she says not always. Yeah, I just don't know if it's a system. I don't know if that's another thing, but today it was Twitter. Yeah, I just get the sense that it's an app thing more than a system level thing. Yeah, that's a good question. Why is the system letting it do it? Yeah, it should not. If the volume's down, like I could see do not disturb and, you know, being bypassed if you're actively using it. It's not like it's asleep and waking up. You're doing something and but it should not make sound. And I've seen, I've had that happen too where I'm on do not disturb and all of a sudden I get a calendar notification. And I'm like, I thought, you know, I'm driving. What's that? We have somebody that wants to follow up on Allison. Yeah, come on up. Yeah. What's your name? Where are you from? All that good stuff. Michael from DC. Nice. Get up on it. And for instance, oh, sorry. There you go. I thought you meant the topic, not the mic. No, we don't need to stay close to the topic at all here. Anyway, so for instance, no offense. I'm chatting with my cousin on iMessages and I'm hearing the clickity clack and I got the volume down and I've got the thing on do not disturb. But, and there's other apps other than Twitter and instant messages and whatnot that I do hear or get alarms. So I don't think it's just one app or two apps. I think there is a system issue because I always worry, especially when I go to court because I'm a lawyer and you know, last thing I need. Yeah, that's the last thing you need. Yeah. Huh, interesting. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's not just you. Are you on data as Allison? No. Interesting. It could indeed be a random bug but that's how software works. It doesn't sound like... It doesn't sound like a random bug. This sounds like intentional behavior or, you know, but yeah, yeah, but we have Mike. Yeah. Gentlemen, nice to see you. Yeah, there's somebody ringing. Oh, perfect. I just want to point out that that was Kirshen. Wait, what? It's the volume setting of you. Well, good boy. Can I say something quickly? You have to say it into the microphone, Kirshen. It's coming round. I just discovered this and I was testing it out and I tripped on somebody's wire. All right, Kirshen Sia. Yeah, y'all know me. I muted the, as Dave can attest, I have muted the audio and yet the ringer volume is non-zero. Right. That could be it. Oh, right. Yeah, that's right. Check your ringer volume. Oh, that's interesting. That's right, because there's all sorts of different volume settings in... Well, no, but... Kirshen, we take back your earlier shunning. That was an intentional demonstration. I mean, like when I run ways, I'll be on mute and I have to adjust the volume so I can hear ways because I'm kind of giving ways permission to say things. Right, right. And that was, that's exactly on topic for what I was going to ask about. So, John, thank you for that excellent segue. Oh, welcome, Mike. So I think everybody can wait till we finish the podcast to test the volume thing. Please. So I had a different volume issue. I was in my car. I was listening to music being played from my phone over Bluetooth in my car. And I was driving into the teeth of the thunderstorms that hit the East Coast a couple of weeks ago, a week or so ago, and a flash flood alert was delivered to my phone. And what happened was that it treated that flash flood alert as an incoming call that I could not refuse to accept and blasted the brrrrr brrrrr at the, at full music volume in my car, causing me to soil myself. So I'm wondering what... 14 years of Mackie Gabham took this long to get to the comments about that. So thanks, Mike. Mike, was it a rabbit? I'm glad I could, what? Was it a rabbit? It was not a rabbit. But I was glad, I'm glad I could be here for this historic moment. But I'm wondering if there's anything other than actually turning the emergency alerts off that you can do to affect the, the notification, the volume that coming through Bluetooth as opposed to coming through the device speaker. Or the volume. It might not be, especially with the alerts. So yeah, with those emergency alerts. Back with the sequel we have Allison Sheridan. And I'm actually delivering a message from Lydia, who just showed me what she does in school. She goes into settings, sounds and haptics, ringer and alerts. There's a change with buttons slider that when you turn that on, that's when the volume button up and down actually turns that sound off. Lydia! Lydia does it! Thanks, Lydia. Cool, thanks, Lydia. That's awesome. All right. Do we have another question? You have a follow-up. Let's stick with it, sure. One last follow-up. So I know how the Uber and Lyft driver apps work. But in terms of how the actual alert sounds go, and this is where that whole volume thing comes in, Uber's app, when it sends a request through, does it as a ring. So if you adjust your ringtone volume, it'll adjust that sound. But Lyft's app treats it as if it's music, a media volume. So you could have your ringer down and Uber's app won't make sound, but Lyft's app will. And vice versa, if your media volume is down for Lyft, then Uber's will make sound, which is really bad for drivers that have their car plugged into their Bluetooth because they'll be able to hear Uber because it's ringing through the phone, like a regular ringtone. But it doesn't work for Lyft because now it's going through the Bluetooth of the car, which if you're listening to the radio, you're not hearing that ring. Yeah, so it depends on how the app is set to make noise. To very similar apps that operate completely differently. Yeah, yep. And Allison, do you have key clicks turned on on your phone or off in settings, sound and haptics, on a haptic, on? I wonder if turning off key clicks would also turn off the other in-app sounds. It's a shot in the dark. Yeah, big time, yeah. Cool, anybody else or? We can answer a listener question. Like a pre, yeah, you know what I mean. Not from someone here, right? We're good? Okay, Lauren asks a question that is near and dear to our hearts here, John, and so we will answer it. She says, I was wondering if you could give me some advice about routers. My parents recently cut the cord and upgraded their internet service to 200 symmetrical. That means 200 both up and down. The router that Frontier Fios provided is not working well for the house and the technician confirmed that this was as expected. My parents' home, she says, is a 3,200 square foot home with two stories. The room where we're having the most issues is their bedroom and the office, both of which are on the first floor toward the front of the house and the router is on the landing in the middle of the house. They would like to spend no more than 250 US dollars on a router or mesh system. The main thing they're looking for is something that will deliver consistent coverage and speeds. She said, we've been looking and found a couple of Netgear Nighthawk routers, the X6S family and she's curious if these will work. So those Netgear routers are actually fine. I'm not convinced that a standalone router, it's hard to know without being in the house and actually testing it, but oftentimes a standalone router isn't gonna do it. Sometimes it will, but if you're having these kinds of problems with the frontier router, it's not gonna get that much better. You might get better speeds, but if the coverage just isn't there, adding another router often won't do it. So I would, especially without being able to be there when people write in or people call me and ask for advice where I can't be hands-on. I'm almost always gonna lean towards a mesh, but here's the nice part. TP-Lynx Deco is a very capable mesh. It's really, it's one of our favorites. It's certainly one of my favorites. And you can get a three pack. So a router with ethernet ports and then I forget what they call them, but it's like Eros Beacons that plug into the walls. You get two of the little beacon things and one router that has ethernet and can do its thing for 149 bucks on Amazon. For 179, you can have three units that all have ethernet ports. And these things work really, really well. I've set them up for relatives and they're not the geekiest of devices, but they have all the features you need. And TP-Lynx is very committed to making these things work better and better as they find different issues. They are in this. So it's hard not to recommend them. I say this every time we talk about mesh. I like Eero kind of at the top of the list along with Plume Super Pods, but you're spending 400 bucks, 300 bucks, 400 bucks for a system and you'll get that value out of it. But if you don't need that value out of it, the TP-Lynx Deco is gonna cover your home and get you your wifi. So yeah, yes, Mr. Braun. Just looking at the benchmarks or the coverage that some of the vendors advertise. So one, those two neckiers, I've looked it up and they advertise the coverage as a big house. So I don't know if anyone, I don't know if you, I consider 3,200 square feet to be kind of a big house since mine is 1,200 square feet. But even Eero, just to give you a data point here, Eero claims that one of their units will cover 1,500 square feet. And these other guys, it's very hard to get numbers from them. As Dave pointed out, the conditions, I mean, this coverage is under ideal conditions, but if you got metal, liquids, concrete, but whatever. So I would just say that a single router being able to cover 3,200 square feet houses is highly unlikely. So a mesh. Yeah, yeah. Like you said, it depends if you've got, if there's air conditioning ducts in the way or refrigerators in the way or whatever that doesn't, that's gonna block signal. That's how radio works for better and for worse. But also the, I don't know if you mentioned, but the Synology has a similar one. It's like, well, hey, if you want a top of the line router, the Synology is very nice. And then they have the mesh extension option. So here's the thing. I'm a big fan of what Synology does and their router is awesome. And their mesh router is awesome as a router. Synology mesh is one of the newer meshes on the market and is still what I would call immature. It works well in very default setups, but it's not quite there yet. They need another firmware update or two and then they'll be reliable in most places. I mean, again, it's reliable if you set it up exactly as you're supposed to. But as soon as you start making tweaks to it or you wanna do something where one is like ethernetted and the other is not, there's some weird things with where the satellites will connect to and they fix these things internally, but they need to roll them out. So six months from now, I might have a different opinion on this, but right now, if you need mesh for your house, again, without being there and able to really test it, I would not recommend the Synology Mesh yet. So there you go. But I run one of their routers at home and then I use whatever mesh system I'm using in like bridge mode as the mesh and I mean, it's a little bit crazy, but it works. Kirsten's coming back. I'm saving her from other wires. Thank you. Thank you. My add-on to that is we've been using an RB from Netgear and that's pretty old and it works for us. So it might be more than one option other than that. So... Orby's another one of those that I have, I cannot recommend for most people. It works very well in default setup. As soon as you start doing anything different with it, it falls apart. They're firmware, they're constantly having trouble with it. It doesn't seem to be getting better. Again, if you're using it in that default config, if it works for you, it works for you and there's nothing like that's great. It also is the one that has the longest range for its satellites. So if you have an outbuilding or a garage or something where you need to get that mesh coverage to it, Orby is probably the right answer, but be aware that as soon as you start doing some stuff that's sort of off the beaten path, it may or may not perform well for you. Funny you should mention that, Dave, we had an issue with our ring cameras and our Orby. Had to do some strangeness of a double net just to get that to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Express can an old airport express just to get our rings to work. Interesting. All right. Any questions? Yeah, we've got one. Yeah, absolutely. So there's one other alternative to add to this solution. Okay. Two caveats with it. It requires probably a little bit of enterprise networking experience and it's more pricey than anything you mentioned, but this is the lines of stuff that's made by Ubiquiti. Absolutely. So I have their enterprise router on my fiber. I use their wifi solutions around both indoors and outdoors. It's solid as hell, but it costs twice as much as all the stuff, because it's not consumer gear, but if you have any kind of network chops at all, it beats all this other stuff hands down. It, yeah, the Ubiquiti, especially the Unify stuff is, is you can run it from a console on your Mac, you can run it from your phone. It, yeah. What's the right way to say this? They know that there are, that there is a segment of users that are, you know, home users that want that functionality, but don't necessarily want to buy the piecemeal. You don't currently, you buy a separate router, a separate switch, a separate controller, and a separate wireless access point. They know that people would like to have that all in one. And so pay attention to what's happening with Ubiquiti along those lines because they've got some stuff cooking along. So yeah, it, yeah, yeah, it's, no, the Unify stuff is fantastic. As long as you don't mind being an active participant in your network management. You're an enterprise network guy. You're an enterprise network guy. No, that you want it, you want that. Yeah, no, there's nothing wrong with it, but it is the kind of thing where you will be going in and tweaking things. If that's fun for you, and that's like, you know, then you're my people. That's okay. I'm guessing this room is your people. Right, yeah, yes, exactly. Just a guess. Just a guess. But for example, for Lauren's parents, unless Lauren wants to be the one managing it, I would not even come close to recommending Unify for them because they would hate it like very quickly. So yeah, even though it works really well. And possibly Lauren. Yeah, and she definitely doesn't want that. That's right. So yeah. All right. Any other questions in the room or John? You want to take us to Mike Mace. I will take us to Mike Mace. Perfect. Oh boy. That's okay. How embarrassing. Okay. He writes, my wife and I just returned from vacation. She took her photos on her iPhone. I took my photos online. How can I merge the two roles and preserve their interleaved order? I tried shared albums, but you can't mess with the sort order. It's the order they were added in to the album. And that's, it's the order that they were added to the album. And that's it. Okay. That's a question, I guess. Yes. And I'm going to try to answer it. So the thing is, I started this. I'm not a photos expert by any means. And we do have some photographers in the room here. So if you guys know how to do this with photos, but I tried. So I actually, we actually did exchange some photos earlier. Some of us are at events here. And then we used AirDrop to get them in here. And when I got AirDrop photos, they appeared in my role in the order they were added. So I'm like, huh, can I change that? So try to do it through the photos view. Nope. Try to do three album view on the iPhone. Nope. Then I'm like, well, let me try this. Cause you know, sometimes things work differently on iOS and Mac OS. I don't know if you've noticed that, but so I tried photos on my Mac. Now I also have iCloud photo library. And I think that this is, that this could be a solution here. I actually had an album on my Mac. And so I went to it and I tried to change the order. I was able to drag the pictures into a different order. So one suggestion could be that you create albums out of those photos. And then I guess you would merge them and then you could change the order. I guess what I'm saying is the only way I found to change the order of photos is from within an album on photos on Mac OS. And I've had that in shared albums too, where you know, when someone, if you're sharing an album and like when we go on vacation, we share an album and we all just, you know, barf our photos into it. And they, yeah, in the album itself, they don't, they order by ad date. But you could look at your resulting photo library in date order, just not in the album there, just not in the camera roll. Yeah. Yes, I got a question. I've got a 2015 iMac with a Fusion Drive. What on God's name can I do to increase the lag time or decrease the lag time that I'm getting from using the Fusion Drive? The lag time from the operating system. Yeah. Yeah, and what OS are you running on that? Current up to date. Yeah, current up to date. Well, Stephen Hackett's here cracking them open like you should have brought it with you. Yeah. I'd love to, but it's on a lease. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At least, so we can't, we can't jigger it that much. I mean, what you need to do is boot not from a Fusion Drive. You may be able to, you know, fragmentation is still an issue-ish on Fusion Drives. You could try, you know, cloning everything off of it, wipe it, start the Fusion Drive fresh and put it back on. I'm not convinced that's gonna solve the problem for you though. I think, especially if it's on a lease, you obviously don't wanna rip it open, but you can connect an external SSD to it. So you could get an SSD and boot from the external and then just store your data. It's 2015, which means I have a Thunderbolt 2, not 3. So, but then the question becomes if I'm gonna be booting from a Thunderbolt 2 connection, is that connection significant to the point that's gonna be just as slow? No, Thunderbolt 2, I mean, really USB 3 is gonna be fast enough to do this and you can easily fit USB, right, because USB 3 is five gigabits per second, Thunderbolt 2 is 10, right? And then Thunderbolt 3 is 20. Double channel is 20, correct, thank you, thank you. Yeah, okay. But then what's the direct connection? What's the direct connection? No, no, no, what's the speed for the direct connection from the hard drive that's internal? Internal bus versus this external situation? I think on that, I don't think that machine's NVMe, so I think it's just SATA and so it's either three or six gigabits per second, but we're talking about the maximum speed of the bus and your drive is slower than that, like without question. The footnote, I would give that, thanks for calling on me, Dave. I just jumped in, you know better. The footnote I would give is that if it's acting erratically enough that it's seriously affecting you because it's like system software, is that since it's a lease, you may wanna take it in and have like smart status checked because maybe the fusion piece is failing and that's just sort of dragging the platter portion down with it, started to get all technical, but yes, Allison? Nope. You can't do it from there. Wait, we all need to be able to... How long since a clean install? Two and a half years. Two and a half years, yeah. And it's always been that slow. It's always been that speed. Yeah, and finally. I would be inclined to go through the steps of verifying the validity of the fusion piece with that because it sounds to me like what my computer started doing before it melted down completely and needed a new SSD, so that's why that's the first thing that comes to my mind. Mr. Braun. Or no. No, finally, just exciting update from Kershin. She just taught me something here. You can do this. What we were talking about. Wait, okay, hang on, are we finished with that one? Are we done with the fusion drive? Right, I think it's, yeah. And I can get into as much detail with you on that later as you want because I went through a great many things to make it reality, so if you need to, let me know. And anytime I wanna know how Kershin showed John up. The answer on this side here is also, you know how we all love caches and how they screw everything up, so I don't know if you've given Onyx a run, but there's, especially, okay. Okay, yeah, he says weekly, yeah, no. Anyways, I would boot from, yeah, boot from an SSD. That's, yeah, that's the way to solve this problem. Yeah, yeah. All right, John, your update. To rewind, so I was doing it wrong. So photos on iPhone in an album, you can move them around. What I did is I think I executed a force touch, which just makes the picture bigger if you lightly touch a picture in an album and then move it in, it moved it. So I just learned something, thank you, Kershin. So I have to have a lighter touch with my iPhone, supposedly, allegedly. Mr. Dave Ginsburg, do you have a question? I do. Awesome. I wanted to ask a question about backup. We talked about this today during my conference and I figured why not, what's great, great opportunity to bring it up again. Sure. Backing up your notes using something other than iCloud. I mean, and you had brought us to my attention and I think as a previous listener, that there is kind of a way to do it. There is kind of a way to do it. So yeah, Dave, you gave a great talk about notes and various other things today and mentioned that there was no great way, really no way to backup your notes data. And that is largely true. But like with everything, there's always a way, the data is stored somewhere. If you are syncing to iCloud, that is going to be, probably Apple's official way of backing up your notes or Time Machine, right? Because Time Machine can slurp them back that there is a notes interface for Time Machine if my memory is correct on that. Just like you can in the finder, you can launch Time Machine with notes open and I think you can pull notes back. So there is that. But if you look on your computer and I used, it's one of my favorite tricks, if I don't know where an app stores data, I launch the app, then I launch activity monitor and I go into the open files and ports section for that particular app and I look and I start kind of seeing what files it has open and this one has in your home folder, library, group containers, group.com.apple.notes is full of all kinds of data. There is a SQLite database in there. There are three files when you are looking for a SQLite database. There is the whatever the file is.sqlite, whatever the file is.shm, which is shared memory and whatever the file is.wal, which is the right ahead log. I believe, is that correct? Okay, cool. And so that is, that's the data. I don't know what would happen if you took that data, a copy of that data and shoved it onto a Mac that was already syncing with iCloud. It probably wouldn't go very well for you. It probably wouldn't act all that predictably. So I would, if you need to restore your notes data, that's where it is. Turn off iCloud syncing for notes, move that stuff in, maybe even turn off your Wi-Fi because you don't know what's gonna happen. But that's where the data is. So in a pinch, that's where you can go in. I would be curious to see, just like you said, I put it on, just copy all these file locations, maybe throw it on an external drive and then copy it onto another Mac and see if it'll, when you open up notes, once you restore it, if it's there. Yeah, try it with a test user account, right? That's not logged into iCloud in any way, shape, or form. That would be another good way of sort of compartmentalizing your risk. So, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, of course, thank you. And I got a bonus tip. Yeah. Unfortunately, so the good news is that there is a way to restore data that's stored in iCloud, notes being one of them. Unfortunately, the feature that I'm looking at here does not have notes in there, but the things you can restore, so if you go to iCloud settings, advanced, you have the ability to restore files, contacts, calendars, and reminders, and bookmarks. Cool. So that's not something that I, so maybe you should ask them to add notes. There you go. Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully someone's listening. I want to take a second. I know we have another question coming up, which is great. I want to take a second, maybe a little longer than a second, and talk about our second sponsor, which is iFixit, another one of our favorite companies that we've used for years and are happy to work with. iFixit is on a mission to make it easier for you to fix your electronics, and especially your Macs. And listeners to this show know that this is a topic near and dear to all of our hearts. They've got over 50,000 free repair guides and a huge selection of parts and tools. They are a one-stop shop for your do-it-yourself repairs, and you'll find everything you need there to fix or upgrade your Mac by yourself. You may not know this. Actually, the people in this room probably do know this, but some of the listeners at home may not. You can replace the battery in your MacBook Pro, even the Retina models, including the MacBook Air. iFixit makes it easy, but they're all-in-one fixed kits, and they have a deal. Go to iFixit.com slash MGG and use code MGGFIX. That is only good for the next couple of weeks here. MGGFIX gets you 10 bucks off your $50 fix. So again, iFixit.com slash MGG code MGGFIX saves you 10 bucks off your $50 fix, or thanks to iFixit for sponsoring this episode. Kelly, do you have someone up for us next? I do, I have Susan who has a question. Awesome, that's all we got. Thank you, Susan. I have two Macs and I have some mobile devices also. I would like to sync the contacts on the Macs without affecting the contacts on the mobiles. How can I do that? So, okay, so that's a good question. You can use iCloud to sync the contacts amongst any devices that are logged into iCloud. So, if you don't want your contacts to sync on your mobile devices, go in on your iPhone or iPad, go to settings and then hit your name, because that's how that works, go to iCloud. And in there, you can granularly choose what parts of your data gets synced to iCloud and don't, and contacts is an option there. So you just turn it off on your phone and then your phone will not sync your contacts. What's also cool is if, for example, you wanted to have your phone logged into one iCloud account but say share a contacts database, I know a lot of folks that do this, amongst multiple people, you can log your phone into a second iCloud account for syncing data. So you could turn off contact syncing on one iCloud account, turn it on on another one and share. You've got to be careful, you're now opening a can of worms and if you don't think about how it's all working, you will wind up with a potential mess. As always, backup first and often and save them, but yeah, it all works. Contacts is, contacts has an easy backup option. If you go into contacts on your Mac and go to, I believe it's the file menu and go to export, you can export a contacts archive, which is the easiest way to restore from if you wind up munging your contacts database. So you can get it from Time Machine, you can get it from digging in and finding the database files, but if you make one of these ahead of time, the restore process is so much simpler. So there you go. We have another question or something? No, it's not a question, I just wanted to follow up on that. Do you want the mobile devices to sync with each other separately from the Macs? Oh, well then we're back. Okay. We have another question from Steven. Just an answer. Okay, great. Whoever had the notes issue, I use a program called I-Mazing from Plum Amazing and it'll back up your notes and you can retrieve them from that. Oh, there you go. It just shows up. It just shows up in a side car. Yeah, all right. I-Mazing will be granular about that. That's great. Yeah, cool. Thank you. That's great. I didn't mean to ask if I-Mazing handled notes. Yeah, yeah, of course it does. I mean, why wouldn't it? Well, if you have an iPhone question, I-Mazing tends to be the answer. Tends to be the answer, that's true. Yeah, yep. Any other questions in the room? I have a cool, yeah. Yeah, come on up. Yeah, come on, Brian. I will talk about a cool stuff found while Brian walks up here. I can't really show it to you in the room because I'm relying on it at the moment. But it is the new 12 South Stego USB-C hub. For 99 bucks, this thing is awesome. It's got a-my favorite part about it is that it has a travel cable that fits inside it. So you don't have this hub with a don- like a cable dangling around in your bag that you're worried about bending or breaking or whatever, fits inside it. It's got three USB-A ports. Wait, no, four? No, and then a USB-C port? I can't touch it because I- like, hang on. HDMI, microSD, and regular SD, and ethernet. So, and you can charge through it, too. So it's, for 99 bucks, it's like, I love that this stuff exists. I don't know about all of you, but I am like so happy to live in Dongle World now. Because it's so much- like, I can get the flexibility that I want. Right? Dongle World? We love Dongle World. Yeah, you get the- you're not stuck with the ports that Apple decided to put on your computer. You get to pick the ports that you want for any given purpose. Like, I knew I was gonna be podcasting, so I needed something with lots of USB ports. But if I was just traveling, I wanted something more lightweight. I can do that. It's like, it's fricking awesome. So, we love Dongle World. So, I know, it's weird, but there you go. Brian, as a question- Brian, save us from Dongle World. Well, it's kind of my walk of shame, too, to be honest. I'm gonna take you back to Fusion Drives right now. So, I installed a two-terabyte SSD in my Mac Mini, and I took out the one-terabyte Fusion Drive. And it was fine, so I was using it as a backup drive. So, I decided, well, I'm gonna reformat it. I reformatted it, and Disk Utility let me reformat it into APFS format after that it only sees the SSD. It does not see the spinning disk, and I am unable, after many attempts, to try and get it to recognize the spinning disk and revert back to the old file system. Is there anything that you know of, or should I just get rid of this Fusion Drive and just move on? Because I've got the most ridiculously small backup drive now, because it only sees the SSD on a 2013 Fusion Drive. Right, which is probably like a 32-gig Fusion Drive or something, a 32-gig SSD or something like that, right? It's small, because it's a one-terabyte Fusion Drive, and I think it's got like 128. 128, okay, okay. So, who's answering the question? Thank you. 2013 is 128. After that, they took it down to a 32. Okay, I knew they took it down to a 32 at some point. So, like, Disk Utility should be able to do this. Like, it's built for it. Have you tried completely removing it and then reformatting and creating your Fusion Drive as HFS Plus? Yeah, I try to do it, now it's an external, because obviously I've removed it. See, the problem is I replaced it with the SSD, so it's seeing as an external, so when I take it in via, you know, in this particular case, USB, it was working fine before under the old file system. Like a ding-dong, I decided to, you know, basically, okay, I'm gonna put it to the new file system. So, I don't have the steps off the top of my head, but there are instructions online for creating your own Fusion Drive, right, with an SSD and a rotational drive, which you could do with like a 2011 iMac that had the Fusion Drive configuration without it actually being a Fusion Drive. And so, there are steps, you go to the terminal, you use Core Storage to do this. That's what I would try for what, even though yours started life as a native Fusion Drive, you messed with things. So, it's no longer a native Fusion Drive. And I think accepting that and walking the path of, I have these two things that I wanna marry together, Apple's not, doesn't support this configuration, how do I do it? I think you'll actually find your answer in, I don't have the steps off the top of my head, and somebody said... So, the comment is it may not be APFS compatible because of its age. So, if you're gonna ask questions, come up, because we gotta... So, I made this exact same mistake. Great, okay. All right? Thank you, Jay. I went through a lot of this. So, the two steps I took is, A, I took the drive to a Linux box and zapped it to zero. Okay, so now we have a completely blank, both halves are zero. Mojave does not reliably support FU. In fact, I think it's even considered not supported for Fusion Drives in Mojave. For APFS. For APFS. Okay. And I brought it back to the Mac. I used the terminal commands through the many different tutorials on there to create an HFS plus Fusion Drive, and it works fine in USB. It's, I tried standing in my head, facing east, holding my tongue right to get the thing to place. Did you wave the chicken? As he's figured out, that don't work. And so, since I also have numerous Linux boxes in my lab, I just use Linux to blast it back to empty and then start it over and got a working HFS plus. HFS plus, yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so there you go, Brian, great question. Thank you, Brian, for saving us from Dongletown and moving us straight to here be dragons. Yeah. The thing I would wonder though is, if you have to go through this kind of gyration for the Fusion Drive, whether or not it is in fact worth forsaking as a backup drive for the dark magic that is APFS. So you might be happier with something else instead and doing something else with this drive, would be my guess. I know a guy. Yeah, there you go, yeah. Might wanna talk to OWC, that's right. Who would be happy to sell you something that would do this for you, Brian? Yes, yes, yes. All right, any other questions in the room? We've got time for a couple more things here, and this is fun. And Kelly, I can't thank you enough for really being the host of this episode. It's great. So what's your name? My name is Bill Jorasi. All right, Bill. So I use Apple's voice memo, and when I copy stuff off, I then try and delete all the files and I manually delete all the bloody files and then they all come back. Isn't that fun, though? Which I call stupid, actually. No, no, they don't want you to lose any of your data. Yeah, well, that's one of the things I don't like about iCloud. I can't say this is the authority. I can't designate what the really real is. That's correct. That's what this is about. Well, you sort of can, but it takes a lot of hard work. You have to remove, you have to make a backup of things, you have to take one device offline, remove everything, remove that data specifically from all your other devices and just keep doing it until it finally pushes that to the cloud and then bring the other device back and, again, in theory, hope that it doesn't decide to push the change down and instead pushes the change up. But you're right. There is no button that you get to push that says take this as master. So it's as bad as I thought. It is as bad as you thought. Yeah, the first thing you do is you make backups and iMazing is a great way to make backups of voice memos and also restore voice memos. So you can, yeah, yeah. So yes, there you go. The second thing I would say is I've had to help people with some pretty in-depth iCloud troubleshooting and literally the best way to do that was take every single device offline, wait 20 minutes, turn on one device, wait 20 minutes, rinse, repeat and usually that will give everything enough propagation. So sign everything out, nuke everything and then wait 20 minutes for the last device to send all that up and then turn everything off and then go back and a device at a time. This is an afternoon and possibly some adult beverages while you wait for these things to happen because at least then, like by the time you get to the end, you care a lot less that this is taking you 20 minutes at a time. Everyone wins. This is right. You build yourself by the hour for this. This is absolutely a job for someone by the hour, yes. That's right, yeah. All right, we are, thank you for everything, everyone. I have one last cool stuff found I want to share because I don't want to wait a week to tell everybody about this and then we will wrap things up and perhaps have some adult beverages of our own. Bruce shared with us that he said in episode 771 which was the most recent episode up until now, Andrew asked a question about how silent updates work in Mac OS and we talked about how you can use the terminal to see the X protect version and he says there's now a much easier way. Silent night with a silent K, there you go. Silent night is a new Mac app from Howard Oakley from the Eclectic Light Company that fills this gap. You run the app, it shows you, well, the model of your computer, the version of X protect, gatekeeper, MRT, TCC, Kext, whether or not File Vault, SIP and X protect are enabled and you can tell it to check for an update and go and pull those updates down if you don't have the latest versions of all of these things. So it's a great way to just go and check things. I will tell you something because I learned a valuable lesson earlier today. I ran Silent Night prepping for the show and it said that my X protect database is at 2103 and the latest is 2104. Would you like to, I clicked the download update button. Of course you did, you were recording later. Right, this is the problem. I downloaded the update, which also downloaded the 10.14.5 update that I had or 10.14.6 update that I had been avoiding while I was traveling all week and I was gonna do next week. And then for whatever reason, I needed to reboot my Mac before we recorded the show because USB wasn't working and 20 minutes went by while I got to watch my Mac update to 10.14.6. So do as I say, not as I do. But use this app to know that you are up to date and all of that good stuff. That's all we have. Okay, there's one last hand in the air. So yeah. That's all I got. It would be great if whoever made that app could put in a button that says, tell Apple to shut up and try to remind me to do updates I don't want to do. Well, sure, good luck with that. I'll let you send that into feedback, sir. That sounds great. Yeah. All right. But yes, I would pay Eclectic Lite with a healthy amount of money for that. Yeah, it's great. Where was that Dave? Silent Night at Eclectic Lite Company. What other thing I said? Begins with F. F. You said feedback. Feedback, I did. Feedback at mackeycab.com is the email address that you can write into if you're not gonna be in the same room as us while we're recording and you have a question. And we're only gonna say it once because you don't want to hear me say feedback at mackeycab.com again. Easy for you to say feedback at mackeycab.com. That's where you send in all your stuff. Seriously, this has been a blast. Thank you so much to everybody here in the room for hanging out with us and doing all this fun stuff. We'll see if we brought the band with us to Chicago here. It looks like we did, which is awesome. Call us, right? Because we'd like to hear from you. 224-888-Geek, which John is? Four, three, three, five. That it is. I wanna thank all of our sponsors, of course. I fix it at iFixit.com slash MGG with MGG fix to get you that 10 bucks off. OWC, Otherworld Computing at macsales.com. Of course, ero at ero.com slash MGG. Barebones Software at barebones.com. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Thanks to all of you for listening here in the room with us for everybody at home. You guys rock. All right, so there's one more thing that we have to do together. And there's three words that make up this one more thing. And we're gonna try and do it all together in the room on three. Are we ready? Okay. So we wanna give everybody at home some advice, right? Good. I think we all know what's gonna happen. One, two, three. Don't get caught.