 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, episode 701 for Monday, March 19th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together. Oh, you know it. We make that salad. We throw in some extra croutons. We fill in with tasty dressing. The idea is it's good for you. It tastes good. It's happy. You're healthy. And each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Roboform or roboform.com. Coupon code MGG saves you 10 bucks off your Roboform Everywhere subscription. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And Jamf now. Jamf. J-A-M-F dot com slash MGG gets you your first three devices free for life. They're great mobile device management system. We'll talk about that in a minute, too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, back in Durham, New Hampshire safely. Thankfully, I might add. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here still in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Brown. How you doing, Mr. John F. Brown? I'm hanging in there. Good. Good, good. Good, good. Just getting ready for the last, last hurrah. Which what's the last hurrah? What are you talking about? Oh, we're getting another storm. Yeah, but it's not supposed to be as big as as they said it was originally, right? I don't think. Yeah. And actually, the others were pretty wimpy at least for me. Oh, dude, they weren't wimpy here. We had 14 inches before I left and then 26 inches while I was gone in Texas, my family had to contend with. Yeah, we had like two. Oh, really? Really? No kidding. That last one last week. Wow. Wow. That's crazy. All right. Well, you want to why don't you kick this one off since you weren't buried in snow this week? I mean, I wasn't buried in snow either. I was down in Austin. It was 88 degrees. Not Austin. Yeah. No, it was beautiful. Anyways. Yeah. Gary writes and says, Hey, Mackie, Gab, crew, do you know if an app or a way to set my computer to restart itself weekly? I try to follow the recommendation mentioned on several shows that it's a good idea to restart your Mac weekly. I try to make it a habit to do so every Sunday, but depending on how early I have to be in at work the day, sometimes it gets done later in the day or my next day or, you know. Yeah. It'd be nice if I could have it done 1 a.m. on Sunday. And then he mentioned something interesting. I use IMAZING to do this weekly reboot of my iDevices, but I don't see anything in the system preferences on the Mac. Thank you. And don't get caught. Really? So first of all, I had no idea that IMAZING could schedule a weekly reboot of my iOS devices. That's very interesting. I have seen that if you bring up the detail, yeah, if you're running it, I have seen that it can do a restart and a shutdown. I've seen that. I just didn't realize I could. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, there you go. I've got something to say about that later, but I've derailed you enough. Sorry. Oh, good. No. Oh, no, no. So, and Gary, you got so close. Oh, he's so close because he mentions that, yes, you can schedule a sleep. And the magic answer here, there is an answer, is that it's in the exact same place, but it's not obvious. So if you go into system preferences, energy savers schedule dot dot dot dot dot means that there's going to be multiple things that confuse you in the next dialogue. You see two choices here, start or wake and then sleep. But sleep is a pull down menu. And if you click on it, it also has restart and shutdown. And then you can also choose the frequency and the time that that happens. So he could choose Sunday at 2 a.m. like he wants. And I would say that, you know, I've been thinking of doing something similar. The thing is actually my Mac mini, which seems to like to wake up all the time. I actually schedule it to go to sleep at midnight. Oh, yeah. Just take hold because sometimes I'll walk on the room and it's like awake. And I'm like, why are you awake? Yeah, what are you doing happening? Yeah, my my Mac in the office is the same way. So sometimes not all the time, certainly not even half the time. But yeah, sometimes it's just I get in and it's like, how are you doing? Wait, what? Well, what have you been doing up all night? So yeah. Interesting, interesting, interesting. And then the next one we have here, Dave. Well, I'm actually going to pause for a second. Your sound got a little warbly. So we're going to pause and see briefly if we can't fix this. Hang on one second. All right, we're back. Take us to the next one, John, if you would, please. Back on track. So let's see. Our next one is from Steve. And this question is on an iOS device, does moving mail from the inbox to the junk mail folder mark that mail as spam? Question mark. If not, is there a way to mark mail as junk on an iOS device? I know how to do it on a Mac, but I find myself not using my Macs much these days. Interesting. And the answer is, Dave, at least with iCloud. And this is because Apple says so. Yep. Doing that in fact does qualify as actually reporting junk mail. And they have a little diddy called identify and filter junk mail and iCloud. And in that section, they say one of the ways you can do this is by moving into the junk folder. So it's different UI wise, I think, annoyingly so between Mac and iOS. But yes, it'll do that. And as far as I know, Dave, Gmail does that too. If you if you move things, it makes it smarter. But my experience the last time I used Yahoo! Mail was that it just didn't get it. Huh. At the very least, you would think dragging something that's from weird address or has a certain subject would kind of flag it as. I assume that's part of what they do. Yeah. Yeah, I would. Yeah, Gmail definitely does that. But it can be a little weird. I had Gmail flagging all of my mail from FedEx spam, which was annoying because, you know, I like to get my my my notifications from FedEx, you know. And I in order to fix that, I went in and I would I would move them in mail. And then I went into the web interface. It was like, no, not spam, not spam, not spam. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. And finally, I had to set up a rule in Gmail that said any messages from, you know, I think it was this address or to this or whatever it was. It was like, do not ever mark as spam. And then it was like, oh, OK, gosh, I didn't I didn't know you felt that way. You know, it was fine. So yes. Yes. Yes. So there you go. Yeah. Good stuff. Cool. We good. Right. Right. All right. Let's moving right along here. We will go from Steve to Chuck. Chuck actually, I think this is a geek challenge. I don't know that there's an answer for it yet, but there should be. Chuck says, I've started taking a lot of video and using it on Facebook. Is there an easy way to edit the video on an iPad to add subtitles? What I really want is a service where I can pay a small fee and they just add the subtitles. Does anything like this exist? What a great question. I don't know what the answer is to this because I I mean, you can you know, you can do it manually, but but not easily. Like, I don't know of any easily easy way to do it manually. And especially for posting videos on Facebook and YouTube, like if you're doing like a how to or something, having subtitles is huge because a lot of times people can't listen to sound and having subtitles there can really kind of, you know, bring people in with with the sound off automatically. I don't want any thoughts on that, John. I mean, I did a search and I came up with 10 free useful subtitle maker tools, but it looks kind of shifty to me. Shifty. Any any of them for iOS? No, it's mostly Windows stuff. No, I just I just typed in subtitle creation and and getting things that claim to do this in some fashion. But I mean, none of the high end video editing tools do that. I mean, it's well, none of the high end. Well, I don't know what I don't know what we qualify as high end pricey maybe. But well, you know, Brian Monroe just pointed to a Google support page, a YouTube support page that says you can use automatic captioning. YouTube can use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos. If automatic captions are available, they'll automatically be published on the video if you if you turn that on. So that's actually pretty cool. So that's what I was thinking of, though I was having problems expressing it is yeah, something could automate this doing a speech recognition. Yeah, that's cool. I'll put any I'll put a link to that in the show notes, because that would be YouTube automatic captioning. Cool. Yeah, I was wondering if any of the video editors had a, you know, something that could do that for you and apply it since the video is in the tool, we'll want to apply the subtitles to the movie. Right, right. All right. All right, cool. Yeah, as Brian Monroe says in the chat room at mackeykev.com slash stream, use the power of the Borg. So I like that that works. Yeah. Yeah, the assimilation things really not personal. No, they just want to improve the quality of life for all beings for all beings from one of them. Yeah, that's what they're all about. That's all they mean. That's right. Just like us. Just like us. That's what we did. That's correct. Wait, we're the Borg? I didn't know. We're the good Borg. All right. Let's see. Oh, Nathan had a good little tip. He said, recently I got caught, as did Dan in the Mackey Kev Facebook group at mackeykev.com slash Facebook and Bill in episode 699, our symptoms all overlap, though not perfectly, where the finder gets wonky in various ways that make you less functional on your Mac. I believe the other symptoms are caused by the finder not seeing files, which are in fact, still on your internal SSD relaunching the finder helped us, but only temporarily until the problems recur. What we have, what we three have in common is that we're running Drive Genius 5, which means Drive Pulse is running 24-7 from the menu bar. My working theory is that the current version of Drive Pulse doesn't get along with High Sierra and or APFS, and they booger each other up technical terminology at some point when Drive Pulse is running in the background. Both Dan and I have gotten back to happier functioning on our Macs just from temporarily not running Drive Pulse for a full week now. I've started a support case with the Drive Genius ProSoft folks, and they're not admitting to anything yet, but it's worth a shot for Bill or anyone else to try. It sure beats doing a nuke and pave of macOS, reinstalling everything, and then possibly experiencing the same headaches again. Thanks for sharing this, Nathan. That's very interesting, and I would assume if it is Drive Genius, it certainly seems like it is. I would assume that it's an APFS-related thing. This is a new file system, so we've got to expect this kind of stuff. Hopefully- Yep, and while you were gone, Dave, they actually released an update. Drive Genius 5. And one of the items in the update dialogue, I can't find the release notes online, and I can't bring up the dialogue again. But yeah, one thing suggested that they were more intelligently handling some Drive corruption errors like the ones I ran into, so I don't think it was just me. So I think they just realized, if we see this error, it's really not an error. I haven't had it come up already. But yeah, they're constantly improving it, which is a plus as they learn more. As they learn more, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this came in on Saturday, this email from Nathan's, but who knows? Maybe that will fix it. There you go. Cool. While we're on the tips bandwagon here, why don't we go to Patrick. Patrick says, in episode 697, John F. Braun relayed his story of purchasing a new iPhone. Here's my cool stuff found. My wife and I wanted to upgrade our iPhone 6s to iPhone 8s, we're with AT&T, so we went to the store because of their buy one get one free promotion, only to find that we couldn't do this because we were not adding a line, so we left. But later, we went to an AT&T authorized reseller. The salesperson was fantastic and told us if we were willing to cancel one phone line and add another, we could get the buy one get one free promotion. Now, it's not easy to change your phone number, but my wife said she would do it. So we each got our iPhone 8 256 gigs, but we'll only be paying for one of them. If you're in this situation, just go to one of the authorized resellers instead of the company stores. So that's interesting. I wonder if you could have added a third line and then transferred the number from line two to line three and then canceled line two and kept your phone number throughout this little thing. I don't know if they would have let you do that, but it's a thought. There's always a way to- I had the same thing. The guy was like, well, we have a deal when I was upgrading my phone. He's like, well, we have a deal where you can get two phones if you get unlimited. It's like, yeah, I only need one. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barry says in the chat room, he says, I asked. I tried to do that. You definitely lose a number. Yes, yes, yes. All right. Where are we here? Oh, yeah. David has potentially a tip for us. All right. And David writes, I'll find it. It's the right one. Oh, per a recent episode, he said, Dave mentioned about Apple deprecating AFP, Apple File Protocol, and one should start using SMB, server messaging block, I think. Is that right, John? Yeah. Okay, cool. He said, I recently had two incidents where using SMB would, for some reason, lose the mount point. It would just unmount with no explanation or message, which then caused all software to fail and things like that. He says, I use carbon copy cloner and Plex. And when the share goes away, that's bad. He said, switching to AFP solved the problem, whereas you can reproduce the issue connecting with SMB nearly every time. It seems to me that Apple's implementation of SMB has problems under load over an extended period of time, like when carbon copy cloner is doing a NAS back up or Plex is doing a re-scan. I figured this out while working with some engineers from carbon copy cloner who couldn't pinpoint it either and have no explanation why AFP would work and SMB would not. My suggestion is if you have switched to SMB and begin to see odd issues or failures, switch back to AFP and try again. Huh. All right. There you go. I've never, I don't know that I've had any issues like that, John. Have you? Sometimes with my Drobo. Okay. If I try to connect with SMB, in which case I see the name of the volume in all lower case, and then I say connect, a lot of times I'll connect them. It'll be like, oh, I can't find the thing that, you know, I just connected to and it's like, huh. And also I find some, you know, some things like I think some of the extended attributes you don't see like the colors and stuff like that, if you connect with SMB versus AFP. Right. I think it's just the implementation on the Drobo here. For a lot of times it works fine, but every now and then it glitches and then sure to inject and then try again and then it works. Right. Try again and it works. Yeah, exactly. Yep. All right. Brian Monroe says, yeah, that'll work as long as AFP is still supported. But who knows, sometime it might go away. That's what happens to deprecated stuff. All right, John, I want to take a minute and talk about our sponsors, if that works for you. Is that cool? Very cool. We'll form.com. You know, I screw this up every time, John. And we're going to try this again. I'm going to get it right. Are we good? Are we good, John? Yes. All right. Our first sponsor for today is Roboform, where at roboform.com, you can go and download Roboform, this awesome password manager today. And of course, it's like a lot of things these days. You can use it on one machine for free. 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Not like for a limited time, unless, you know, forever's limited time and then I got nothing. Four free forever, three devices, you can manage your Apple devices remotely, or you can manage somebody else's Apple devices remotely. Of course, they have to give you permission, but this is great if you run a business and you need to set things up, you can configure like Wi-Fi settings and email settings, you can even remotely wipe a device if, you know, heaven forbid, you have to, right? And it works on your Macs, it works on your iPads, it works on your iPhones, you can do this, I mean, it's free for three devices, so you can do it for your family if you want, or you can do it for your business, or you can do it for both. And it doesn't just have to be the family that lives in your house because this is remote, so you can do it for people all over the world as long as they have access to the internet, very, very, very cool stuff. You got to check this out, like you should start using this for your family right away because you get three devices for free forever. So just do it, go visit jamf.com slash mgg and then after those three devices, it's just two bucks per device per month, that's it. Check it out, jamf.com slash mgg our thanks to jamf now for sponsoring this episode. And Dave. Yes. Amazingly, we didn't plan this at all, it's just a strange coincidence here, but the upcoming question may involve something like jamf. We didn't plan this, it just happened, man. That's actually true, I mean we, I noticed it after we built the agenda, but there you go, yeah. So Adrian writes, I'm the IT guy from my large family of seven. We all have iPads and other iOS devices. Is there any software you would recommend something like jamf now that would allow me to manage these devices? Do things like run updates, manage parental controls, etc. And the answer is yes. So one, I know this Dave because I'm working on a... Yeah, you're doing a deep dive on that stuff. A little ditty on how to use a iOS 2 or a macOS profile manager to do some of this stuff and it's pretty darn cool. But my answer to him includes that and some other things. So what do we mean when we talk about managing devices and really it is the creation of something called a configuration profile and actually Apple has a spec on this and it's basically your way of telling a device to observe certain behavior restrictions, network settings, all that great stuff. The first thing that does it Dave and it's absolutely free is Apple Configurator 2. Okay, right. That creates these files and you know, that doesn't really provide much in the management aspect and that you can configure them, but you know, if you're talking lots of options and people, it can get to be a chore. Sure. And you do it by a USB cable and it's only for iOS devices. Okay. The next thing now is something like macOS server because it has something called profile manager and it deploys something that we're going to call mobile device management. Okay. And that's what Jamf and other things are as well. And that has a component where instead of plugging in devices individually, it configures them using security and certificates and also it does that over a network, whether it be Wi-Fi or wired, even if it's on the internet. So that's the cool part too. And macOS server does that. But as pointed out, there are several other products and I would say a good strategy, which worked for me Dave, is, you know, I typed Apple and MDM Mobile Device Management into Google and it came up with Jamf and it came up with macOS server and it came up with the report that listed like 10 of them and stuff. So, cool. There's a lot of options. Yeah, yeah. But like, I think it's like Komodo even offers it, which is like, well, why not? They do certificates, which is kind of a part of this whole device management equation. So, really? Komodo has a mobile device management thing? Who knew? Look at that. dm.komodo.com. There you go. I mean, we get our certs from them. Yeah, but and this will work on iOS devices too. Well, I mean, the files are the same between iOS and Mac. So, actually, Mac can support profiles as well though. Right. But Komodo doesn't support the Mac. Komodo is Windows, iOS and Android. But I mean, but it's iOS. I mean, I had no idea. That's okay, because I did get a hit. It's like, yeah, we can do some of this for you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So they piggyback something off other, you know, cert infrastructure. So you've been digging into this a little bit. I don't want to derail us if there's more to say about the question here. But I'm curious, what have you dug into here? Like, I want to learn. Well, part of it is, you know, the whole certificate infrastructure. And at least if you do it yourself with Mac OS, you can do a self-signed. And the thing is, it takes care of it. So you don't get warnings and, you know, freak out and stuff like that. But then it's really about, you know, what do you want to deploy? Like the thing that I like doing just because it has such a sudden impact is one of the things you can do is put many restrictions on a device. Sure. One thing I said is, well, disable the camera. And it's like, okay. And so, you know, communicates over the internal or internet. And all of a sudden your camera goes away. And it's like, oh, that's kind of cool. Huh. But practical controls, network setting. You did that with Mac OS servers profile manager? Yes. Isn't that cool? And then it just, and that's it, right? It just turns off the camera. So you set it up. There's a part of the control panel that shows the progress of the task. And sometimes it gets stuck. Especially with the push. Yeah, everything had to kind of get in place. It's like the first time I tried it, it's like waiting, waiting. It's like, oh, interesting. Well, there's some magic happening. I mean, push notifications actually seem to be. Oh, yeah. All of this goes through Apple's push servers. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And they don't work all the time because we, well, they, I mean, right, there's sometimes a delay. I've seen that when we send out, like, you know, for those of you that don't know, we have a Mac Geekab iOS app. And of course, you can listen to the show in the Mac Geekab iOS app, but you can also get notifications from us, like when a new show is starting, but also when the live stream starting. And yes, you can listen to the live stream and even participate in the chat inside the app. The apps for you should, you should go get it if you're, you know, use an iOS device works on iPhone and iPad. But, you know, those push notifications, we've used various different, I'll call them front end services, because the back end is always Apple's push notification server for that. And we just feed it to it in some way. We could even write our own front end for that. It doesn't matter. But once you feed it to Apple server, it's like, okay, now, like, wait, well, we've got it from here. So that's it. Yeah. Huh. That's pretty cool, man. But describing what you can do, I mean, a lot of it is stuff that's already in the system preferences. It just makes it real easy, especially. Yeah, of course. You know, so you would probably guess everybody in the household is going to connect to the same, you know, Wi-Fi server and have the same password. Well, you can distribute a, you know, little configuration that sets that up, or even prioritize things. Then you can do restrictions. So I think that the two parts of it are really restrictions for whatever reason, whether it be to keep your kids out of trouble, or, you know, you're a top secret, black ops, you know, whatever you're doing there that we don't want to know about. Right. Especially, again, turning off the camera is just to be brilliant. There's no way to get to the camera if you say turn off the camera. It's just... Right. Right. Well, I mean, you could camera app and it's like, nope. And I'm like, well, yeah. You could remove the profile from your phone there. And the thing is I'm looking into that because the thing is they claim to have the ability to password protect the ability to do that. Of course. But I found that doesn't work. Oh, really? Because I was able to delete it. And it's like, well, I applied a password to this one. Why didn't you ask for it? Yeah. Right. Huh. It looks like they have the hooks in there, but it doesn't work. And the thing is my understanding though, is that if you do it with the, is that you can password protect the files if you use the configuration, Apple Configurator will let you password protect the profiles. Okay. Okay. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, I thought of that too. Yeah. And the thing is you, I mean, yeah, you could say it's a crummy model because, you know, the owner of the device can delete the profiles. Yeah. No, I think those passwords work. I mean, obviously, I know you you ran into an issue with it, but like that is a thing. I've done it with like with Jamf. I think I was pretty sure it was with Jamf where like, once I locked it in, like you can't move it. And that's sort of the point. Like if it's a company owned device, you don't want an employee to be able to necessarily, you know, like just strip that and go rogue and do whatever they want with their with their iPhone. So yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. Dave Ginsburg is saying he used Jamf now to remove the camera from the phone. Oh, that's pretty cool stuff, man. All right. Cool. Well, I'm you're putting together an article for us at TMO about that. Is that right? Yes, maybe more than one. Oh, the first one is how do I how do I set up and then it's like, all right, now what do we do? Yeah, it gets their ways ways to get yourself into trouble, which I took. They got it. Well, that's always how it is. That's like that's perfect. Cool. Hey, when we started the show, you were talking about scheduled restarts of your Mac and you happen to mention scheduled restarts of an iPhone. As I mentioned, there is a little tale of woe that Dennis had. And he said, I have where are we here? Oh, yeah, I have a 2017 iMac with a 27 inch 5k display running high Sierra. He says he talks through his network and all that none of which mattered as we found out. He says, I have iMazing backing up my iPhone and iPad and my wife's iPhone and iPad at five to six a.m. in the morning each day. I keep seeing iMazing indicating that it crashed every couple of days. I shared this with the iMazing team and they said they couldn't reproduce it. I dug into it further and was monitoring LSOF, which you can do from the terminal, for iMazing and noticed that there was an increasing set of sockets in a close weight state. My theory is that it keeps increasing that until the app crashes. I've also shared this with iMazing. And he said they had me check to see if I was using any firewalls or anything like that. And then he wrote back. He said, the problem is not identified, but it's solved. iMazing said it may be due to not having multicast enabled on my network. He's like, but I'm not sure that's it. He says, after looking at the data I collected from LSOF for iMazing on the iMac, I noticed the open sockets that were in close weight and increasing were only for one of the three devices being backed up. I tried to watch the console of the iPad with iMazing because that was the one being affected. But just like a Mac, if you aren't sure what is normal, you'll get lost in the details. So being relatively confident that it was that iPad, I did a reset by holding down the power and home button until the iPad restarted. I then restarted iMazing and started monitoring again. And now the open sockets for iMazing seem to be relatively constant like I was seeing on my laptop. So if any of your listeners are having iMazing crash restart, if left running for more than a few days, this could be the cause and the solution. So very interesting that really the answer was restart your iPad. And it's interesting because we do talk about how I certainly restart my Mac every week. I don't have it scheduled yet, although I do kind of like this idea, John. But I always notice that if I'm having wonky problems with my Mac, invariably, I'll look at the uptime in iStat menus or whatever and it'll say, oh yeah, it's been running eight days, nine days, 10 days. It's like, oh yeah, okay. And then I restart and everything's like a hunky dory again. And it seems to be that seven day mark really for me. And I've got 32 gigs of RAM on that machine, like it's not running out of RAM or anything like that. It's just, you know, things have been running for a while and it gets wonky and you got to start from scratch. So that restart and with an SSD, those go pretty quickly, really helps solve it. But we don't do this for our iPhones or at least I don't think to do it for my iPhone. The only time I restart my phone is either if it has a problem or if I get a software update that forces a restart. So I'm starting to think that I want to do a weekly reboot of my iPhone just like I do on my Mac. I mean, it's the same operating system at the core, right? I mean, it's, you know, BSD. Well, kind of, but you know, it's like kind of thrown in the towel. Because the thing is, you know, iOS is a subset. I mean, it's not a desktop operating system. And it's just no, no, no, no. But I mean, at the core, my expectation is that something like that, you know, it's not an embedded device, though I would expect that from those, but things that are relatively less complex than a desktop PC, I would expect to not require that maybe as often. I'll settle on that. I'll settle on that. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I mean, you're running all the, like, or I'm running a lot of third party apps on my phone. And yes, there's sandbox, whereas on the Mac, you know, many things are not sandboxed. So, but even still, it's like, it's that whole memory management thing where it's like, eventually, well, I definitely had to start from scratch. I've definitely had to wish some apps away because they got stuck. It's just like, totally not responsive. And then I, you know, double tap and it's like, oh, well, okay, everybody else is happy. So away with you. Away. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've got a couple of things to go through here. The first one I'm going to say, though, is I'm becoming, especially after traveling and at South by Southwest this week, I am becoming less and less enamored with face ID because it's slow compared to touch ID, where it just happens right away that there are a lot of times where I feel like I'm waiting for face ID. And certainly, if I'm trying to do something where I don't necessarily want to hold my phone up to do things with it, it's kind of a pain in the neck. Like typing in the password is often what has to happen. So there's work that needs to be done on face ID here. I'm not sure what the deal is, but there you go. That's what I'm thinking about face ID. It's adapting. I don't know. It's not adapting in the right direction. A lot of parameters there, especially you're in an unusual environment, not a South by Southwest per se, but lighting. Right. Well, that's what it is. Especially stage lighting and all that stuff I can imagine would be. Well, just like with a normal camera, it's like a lot of them can't deal. It can't deal? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was infrared, so should that light really affect? Well, but heat. I had a lot of times where if I had my glasses on, face ID wouldn't work, which I know it. These are just like acrylic framed glasses, but I don't know what it was screwing it up, but I'd take them off and everything would be fine. They polarized? They are. No, these weren't even sunglasses. No, I was having problems with just regular, you know, I wear glasses for some distance stuff, especially when I'm seeing a band like I'd, you know, I like to see everything and so I wear glasses. Anyway, I don't know. While we're talking about South by Southwest, I want to throw a couple things out there. I did get to see both at Apple's eddy cue speak toward the beginning of the week and then the day before that I got to see Elon Musk speak, which was interesting. He said I always thought he was terrible on stage watching his streaming videos of them doing product announcements or whatever, but he was he was really good. It was just a fireside chat. He was really personable and affable and very well spoken. And you know, he said like he said, I know we all know he's a smart dude, or at least I know he's a smart dude. What I didn't know is how much engineering he still winds up doing. He said when he started SpaceX or at one point they needed to hire a chief engineer, but they couldn't afford a good one and he didn't want to pay for a bad one. And so he became the chief engineer. Like that's pretty impressive. Like he literally just willed himself into being a rocket scientist. That's pretty good, you know. And he said, even now, like 80 to 90 percent of his time at SpaceX is still spent on engineering. Like somebody else runs the business. That's pretty impressive, right, man? Not bad. I mean, it looks like he has a basic education, but hey, I know. Well, motivation and intelligence, I would I would assume. Yeah. Yeah, you got to have you got to have the building blocks and some dumb luck sometimes. And totally dumb luck. Yeah. Yeah. At least I've looked at my life and some things are dumb luck. Some things are totally dumb luck. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yes. To ask the question in the chat room. Yeah. Musk is getting better at public speaking. I think it like I need to see his next product announcement to see like if that part of it has gotten better, but it's good. And then I saw I saw a queue at South by Southwest as well. He what's he do? He's I forget what his title is at Apple, but you know, C-suite at Apple. He was he was in charge of iTunes for a long time. And and now he's actually still senior vice president of internet software internet. So OK, yeah, yeah. And he you know, again, I've seen him on stage doing product announcements many, many times. And you know, he's fine. He's sort of like you're, you know, he's kind of like like Schiller in the sense that he's your kind of funny uncle up there and doing his thing and, you know, kind of kind of a goofball and that's OK. But but obviously, you know, a very astute guy and a good negotiator with with all the deals that he's pulled together. But it was he was interviewed by Dylan Byers, I want to say, maybe I've got the first name wrong at CNN. And it was a weird interview. It wasn't all that great because the guy kept asking Eddie to divulge secrets about, you know, Apple's future products. And the first time he asked him, Eddie said, you know, it's interesting, I'm going to be at Apple this year. Oh, Mark, 30 years. He said, I'd like to work another 20 there. We've got some great things going on. So because I want to work another 20, I'm not going to tell you about any secrets that we have. You know, and that was funny. But beyond that, I don't know. It just it didn't really go anywhere. It was kind of a weird, weird interview. But I don't know. It was fine. It was good to see at EQ, cool that they, you know, they can pull that kind of those kind of heavy weights in for a show like that, which is good. Any questions about any of that before? I thought his shirt was kind of subdued. Oh, yeah, sometimes his shirt's a little crazy. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I will say this, South by Southwest is also, I mean, it's it's what do they call it? The South by Southwest Conference and festivals. And, you know, there's the music festival that goes on. You can listen to today's GigGab at giggabpodcast.com, where I talked all about how the music festival works. It's also a film festival. And a lot of times those things will kind of mix together so that we music films or tech films or the set and the other thing. I did see a movie and the frustrating part about what I'm about to do here and tell you about this movie is that you can't see it yet because it was a film festival. So it was there to hopefully get exposure and and like funding and then, you know, maybe it'll come out. And I think this one will come out. It's a film called Science Fair. It's a documentary about the International Science Fair. And it chronicles the story of like five or six different like people in groups that that, you know, create something high school students that create something and go on to the International Science Fair documentary. One of the best movies I've ever seen. I cried, I laughed, I cheered. This movie is fantastic. It's like I can't wait to see it again. It won South by Southwest does audience awards for all their films. And I happened to see this one on the last day, which meant that the awards had already been announced. They do awards in every category and, you know, things like that so that they can highlight lots of different films. This was the one that won like the overall best audience award film of the week. I think I, you know, because they had shown it a couple of times before and people were able to vote. Truly amazing. Like absolutely stellar film. Highly recommended it. It I learned so many things about the National Science Fair that I had no idea about. Just I mean, I suppose or the International Science Fair, I should say, I suppose I knew that it existed. That's pretty much where my knowledge ended about this thing. And it's really amazing what some of these high schoolers are able to pull together. It's really like highly recommended. And I think they wouldn't say where they like by the end of the week, you know, it had gotten a lot of buzz. And so somebody asked, you know, where can we see it again? They said, well, we don't have anything to announce yet. But then they basically described like it's going to be on Netflix or something like that. Maybe Amazon Prime, they said it'll be somewhere that everybody that wants to see it could see it, which is good. So science fair. There you go. Really, really great movie. So that's what I got about that. I have a tale of woe and I learned something, John. At just one thing. No, I learned a lot of things. It's my tale of woe isn't finished. So my tale of woe. Remember the last episode I mentioned to you that we dropped off my son's iPhone 7 at the Apple Store, the iPhone 7 that my son's using. It's actually my old one because it update. Well, yeah, it had that firmware problem, right? Or motherboard problem where it couldn't update the firmware, right? And Apple said, oh, yeah, it's covered. No problem. You'll have it back in three to five days. I still don't have this phone back, by the way. And we recorded that episode before I left. So it's been, I think today is day 11 since we. Yeah. So, you know, middle of the week, my son's texting me. He's like, have you heard anything about the phone? It's like, oh, yeah, kiddo. What? Okay. So I checked in with Apple. They're like, oh, yeah, it's processing. Okay, fine. The next day I check in. Yeah, it's still like, what's going on here? And it took a while. It actually was until, wasn't until Saturday. So we had dropped the phone off Thursday. This was a week later Saturday that I finally had some time. I was like in my hotel room in the early evening packing up my stuff because I was flying out Sunday and I had some time to spend on chat with them. And I had done this chat thing a couple of times, but I finally dug into it with them and I got a little bit, I don't know if I was irate, but I got pushy. That's for sure. And just said, what's going on? Like, where the heck is this phone? What's the story? And they kept saying like, even when I checked with them earlier in the week, they're like, oh, there's a serial number problem, but we'll fix it. Like, what's the problem? Well, it turns out that when the tech at the store had logged the repair, he totally fat fingered the serial number. Like, they told me the first letter and the last four digits were the same as the phone that appeared at the depot, the repair depot, but nothing else in the middle was even close. So I don't know what the guy did, but everybody that looked at it knew that, oh, yeah, he just screwed it up. And then on Wednesday, so this was six days after the repair happened or after it was dropped off. On Wednesday, the store was emailed by the depot, because as it turns out, when a repair originates, and this is the lesson for all of us here, when a repair originates at the store, the store is the owner of that repair, even if it's shipped off and it's never going to come back to the store, like in this case, it's going to be shipped off to the depot, and then the depot is going to send it to me when they fix it just at my house. But the store is the owner of that. And so the depot emailed them saying, look, you guys screwed this up, I need you to just go in and acknowledge that this is, you know, this should be a different serial number, just hit the OK button, whatever it is, and then the depot could do it. The store didn't check their email. Still on Saturday, the store hadn't replied to this email that was sent to them by the depot on Wednesday. And so Apple was apologetic about this, needless to say, thankfully. And they got customer relations involved. Now, for those of you that don't know, Apple's Customer Relations Department, it's the name that they have for the thing that other companies call like Office of the President, right? It's the Customer Service Ninja Department, the people that have a lot of authority to just fix really bad problems. And you and I have dealt with customer relations over the years. I think three or four times on this show in the past 13 years, you and I have talked about, like, I know for me, Customer Relations replaced and upgraded in the process to computers for me because there were major problems with them. And I think you had that with an eye book at one point, right? And discussion is usually explaining what's happening and then say, dude. Dude. Yeah, exactly. Right. They're like reasonable people that become your advocates as long as the situation warrants it, you know. And so I got in touch with Customer Relations. In fact, they insisted that I talked to Customer Relations. I was getting frustrated. I'm like, you guys know what the problem is. Why do I need to be involved in fixing this? Like, why am I the one that has to beat down these doors? Why can't you guys fix your own internal problems? Then finally, Customer Relations said, we will be those people. We'll take care of it. You don't have to waste any more time on this, sir. But that was only 24 hours ago and it's being fixed. Like they finally got in touch with the store. They made the store check their email and all that stuff. But the interesting part is all my prior interactions with Customer Relations were such that the Customer Relations rep was like had universal authority at Apple. They could just do whatever they wanted and get it done. And they said that that's still the case unless the repair is the problem, which of course, in this case, it is, unless it starts at the store. In which case the store has full authority and all Customer Relations can do is call the store and, you know, appeal to them and say, look, you've got to fix this. And then they can get it done, which is what happened. And I think my phone will ship out today. I hope that, you know, that's what we're waiting to hear back from. But this whole thing about the store being like the linchpin or the, you know, the wall, the speed bump is really interesting. So my, the lesson that I've learned from this is if you have a repair that you know needs to be sent out, don't start with the store. Now, that's like very easy to say in retrospect, but because sometimes you just don't know. But remember, we talked last time about the Apple support app on iOS and how like they were able to diagnose the phone. We have a different phone with the battery issue. They were able to do all that diagnosis inside the app. And then we're just going to ship it into them. Of course, we're waiting for this other one to come back because we're using that one as the spare. But you know, so I would say if you have a problem, I would start with chat support. Now, I will be starting with chat support first from now on, because that way it stays inside the Apple care system and is a and doesn't involve the store. Like the stores are all corporate owned, but it seems like each store has their own. I mean, they have their own responsibilities. They've got their own bottom line and they have their own authority for this stuff that comes into them. And if they are being, you know, these stores are there. I mean, they're built to deal with people walking in every day, every moment of every day. And so this kind of institutional memory at the store when something's lingered for like 10 days or once it leaves, they stop thinking about it. And as we saw, at least this particular store didn't check their email. It's fascinating though, huh? And again, Brian Monroe in the chat room for the win, he said, I would say also make sure you log all the serial numbers of all of your devices somewhere. And I swear I had done that, but I did not have at least not traveling with me this week. And frankly, I don't know where it would be here if I didn't have it with me because all my notes are electronic. I did not have a serial number of that iPhone 7 with me. And they asked me that once. So like, do you know the serial number of this? Because that might help. I'm not sure if it would have helped or not. It seems like the store could have like held up the whole works again anyway. But Brian's right. Take a screenshot of that page and your iOS settings and save it away from somewhere. So it's fascinating though, huh, John? This is how the support system kind of works now. I had no idea. I suppose. You suppose. Yeah, it's usually work for me. Oh, same. I mean, right. This is definitely one of those things where I mean, it was an honest mistake that then cascaded into some, I don't want to say they're not honest mistakes, but some negligence in terms of, of, you know, them not checking their email and addressing this for days and days. But like, it's interesting. Very interesting. Another place. Oh, no, you can't. Oh, darn. Oh, well. So no, I was just kind of distracted for a moment here. And I was like, you know, I thought you could get the serial numbers of all your devices logged into iCloud, but I just looked here and it links out the beginning. So I thought that the image place to account for that. Yeah, going to each device. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, Brian Monroe says, if you had a screenshot of that serial number page, you could forward that to Apple and they would have a better starting point. I believe that. I believe that would have would have helped things for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating stuff. So anyway, hopefully, and, you know, as always, customer relations has been stellar to deal with. I've never had a bad experience with them and that includes this one. They were apologetic and fast acting and, you know, took the reins and took responsibility and it's great. So like all good. They said, we realized this didn't start in an Apple tastic way, but I think it's going to end in an Apple tastic way. They actually did. They did say Apple tastic. Oh, God. I don't. I think that was sort of just that that particular reps wave of, you know, making funny me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just engaging. It was good. It was good. Yeah. All right. All right. While we're here, I want to make sure we thank all of our premium subscribers that contributed over the last week and a couple of days here because without you, without you and without our advertisers, you know, it just doesn't work. And so this, this part's about you. I want to thank we had one time contributions. We had a $5 contribution, contribution. Easy for me to say from Harvey S and a $50 contribution from Rob A. Thank you both. And then on the monthly $10 plan, we had Scott F, John G, Barry F, James C, Joe S, Paul M, Ari L, Michael P, Bob L, Jeff P, John V, Stephen A, John D, Santiago M, Gary B, and Ken from Kailua. Thank you all very much. So and then on the biannual $25 every six month plan, we have Stephanie E, Eolake S, Joe S, David T, Dominico B, Mike F, Erica R, Graham M, Mike Z, Rick S, Craig R, and William P. Thanks to all of you and for anybody that that's interested, of course, go to mackekeb.com.com. That's a good place to go. So very, very cool stuff that all of you contribute towards making happen here. So you rock. Thank you. All right, John, you want to take us to Chuck? Oh, do you have something to say about the premium stuff? Oh, no, just thank you. Thank you squared. Thank you squared. There you go. Thank you squared. I like that. That's good. All right. That'll be the end. I won't say. All right. So Chuck writes, last week, while in the US, I received the software update notice for high Sierra 10.13.3. However, I completed the update on February 26 in Japan. Right. Is it possible that this update is a glitch brought on by time zone changes or Apple's update server confusion? The details appear identical. If I run the update, will it recognize that my high Sierra is already up to date? And I've seen this before, Dave. So you see one update and the wording of it, including not only the name of it, but the text is identical and you're like, well, they appear to be the same. My experience, Dave, is that, as he suggested, I think it's server confusion. Well, but I also have seen and I know at least one time in the past, Dave, there was an update that they glitched in a major fashion. And they pushed it out of the one. They just left the wording the same because it's like, yeah, we screwed up and just download this again. Okay. Just go get it. Yeah. So it could be either one. An interesting thing you may want to check out in the future and that this digs into the innards of the OS. So it gives you more detail. So if you go to the Apple menu about this Mac overview, you see where it shows the version of the OS, Dave? Well, if you click on that, it'll give you an extra secret code that only we know about. It's the build number, right? In my case, I just clicked on it. It's one seven D as in Dave. Dave. I know that guy. Dave's not here. One zero two. So that's like a subversion number. So you can have 10.13.3, but you can have different build numbers. Oh, interesting. So you want to keep track of that because that should not be the same between them. So they could have both been 10.13.3, Dave, but I'm almost certain that or in the past when I've seen this happen, the build number would tell you that, yeah, something is subtly different. Yeah. And also, the serial number of your computer appears here. So when we were saying, when I was talking in the last segment about the support request and having your serial numbers on file, shooting a screenshot of that screen would not be a bad thing to have around. So there you go. It used to be that they hid the serial number on the screen and you need to hit that version number again and then you'd get it. But now it's just displayed right there because there's no reason to hide it. I remember we had to go through hoops to yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there was no reason for that silliness. Yeah, guys. Yeah, let's go to David. This is an interesting one. David writes, he said, oh, let me find where we are here. Right. There we go. I seem to have hit a wall after some very painful calls with Verizon and the conclusion that it is something within my network. I started down a path to figure out why, after a period of time, nothing can get to the internet. No websites, no pings, nothing. I can move around my intranet just fine and even connect to the web admin page of the router. All looks rosy and fine except nothing works outside the land of the web. I've tried running network scans to see if I have some sort of rogue loop going on. Doesn't seem like it. I made sure all my devices are up to date on patches. And as a last resort, I just started unplugging stuff until either the network came back or I identified the culprit device. This has resulted in yet another path where I get about five devices unplugged without rebooting anything and the network magically stabilizes. So then I started focusing on those five devices and came up empty. I then plugged them back in and bam, down it went. So I unplugged five other devices and sure enough, it comes back to life. The point here is it doesn't seem to have anything to do with any single device, but the collective number of devices. In theory, Verizon Quantum Router supports up to 255 IP devices and more on various subnets, but clearly I'm nowhere near that limit. I don't have anything crazy going on like multiple rooms doing HD streaming, gaming, or long batch processes across the network or to the cloud. Though I do cloud backups at night, this all occurs during the day. I currently have 20 wired devices, not all on at the same time, through a managed 24-port switch and an 8-port power over Ethernet device on a separate 8-port switch and then another 15 wireless devices from wireless sticks to iPhones to iPads, etc. He says, my gut is telling me that I'm overloading the CPU on the router itself in some way, or maybe RAM or something else, but I have no way to confirm or test this given that it's a Verizon Quantum Router. He says, I purchased versus rent and I have no visibility into the hardware. Verizon has looked at my router and even sent me a replacement, and from the router perspective, all seems happy and good. I'm at a total loss here, he says. Any thoughts? So this is an interesting one, John. It's certainly possible to hit the CPU wall in a router, but I don't think that's what's happening here. But I have seen it where, I don't know this router in particular, but in general, routers often have Ethernet switches built into them. A lot of times you'll get maybe a 4-port Ethernet switch for your LAN on the router, and then there's another port, however many you have, there's an extra port that connects to your internet or whatever. I'm not sure if that's happening. But at the backplane should always support at least the assumption that everybody's talking at the same time on that switch, if you will. Correct. But I have seen it, most of the time, that even though there's four ports that look separate from the fifth port, they're all on the same switch, and it just VLANs that switch so that one of them is the port to the LAN and the other is the four local ports. And I've seen it where when I have a network loop before it craters my local network, it will stop my router from talking to the internet. So I've seen that, but I've had a loop going on. Now it's possible that David's got a loop going on too, because maybe it's two of the devices and it just happened to be one in the batch of first five and one in the batch of the second five. But I don't know, it feels like he's been troubleshooting this well, and would have at least identified one device that was the problem as opposed to, well, I take five off and then magically it works. But I will say this, if the network does have a loop, and obviously we're just kind of, or I'm just speculating here, if the network does have a loop, that loop won't necessarily yield any ugly symptoms the moment the device that's looping is plugged back in, it takes a few minutes for the traffic to build up in the loop to where it craters it down. That's all, that's what I have to say. You got any thoughts about this? I'm going to assume here, the one thing I was going to toss out, but it doesn't sound like this is currently possible. So the Verizon thing is the router and it's connected to a switch and the wireless is being done through that. My thought is ditch that thing as the router, put it in bridge mode and get another router, but I don't know if there's an inherent issue with this thing, it just doesn't do something right, and eliminating that would be another data point. It would be another data point. Yeah, it could be a problem with the 24 port switch that he has. You reset everything. Yeah, a lot of times when I have those kinds of problems, I power cycle my switches and then the world just magically gets better. Seriously. No, I'm with you. I've had that too. Or you have a self-inflicted wound. I still remember where I had two devices, one my laser printer, which I rarely use, but I gave another device on my network the same IP address and when I turned them on, things got weird and power cycling the switch helped. Yeah. Eliminate the confusion because there's two things with the same address. What are you doing? Right. Yeah, switches, there's that whole MAC address table that switches have that relates IP addresses to MAC addresses and does all that magic. And sometimes the whole idea of a switch is to intelligently not send traffic to devices that don't need it so that it's more efficient. You're not like hubs in the old days. Yeah, it's directed. It's directed. Right. Hubs would just be, they were dumb. They would just barf data at all data at every port. Whereas... Yeah, I remember the graph, the little utilization graph. You got more collisions. The little graph would slowly go up to 100 and then... You were done. Yeah. You get this. Yeah, but switches are really smart. Well, maybe not really smart, but somewhat smart, where they only send the data between the devices that need it. And so they can get confused. Again, I don't know. I don't know. But they can... Switches can also be smart. Like your smart switch, you've had it tell you when you had a loop or some problem, right? Or it would tell you if you... It has advanced settings, which can look for stupid things happening. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Like some device all of a sudden starts barfing things onto the network. It's like, okay, well, that's this type of problem. So let's stop that. Let's just stop that. Yeah, exactly. I like your idea about replacing that. Yeah, man. Solving these kinds of network issues is a major headache. Again, because especially with loops, they don't appear the moment you plug things back in. And sometimes unplugging them and plugging them back in solves the problem because of exactly this. When you unplug something from a switch, well, then it forgets what it knew about it. And when it comes back on, it reconfigures. So yeah. And you can get a new toy to play with. Sounds like probably doesn't... If this thing's doing it for the number of devices he has that I think a non-mesh. Hey, get a mesh. Yeah, get something new. Come on. Does he... Oh, no, that's right. He didn't have mesh. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Well, speaking of mesh, Bob writes, he said, how difficult is it to integrate the Eero mesh system with an AT&T U-verse residential gateway? Is this advisable? If I do add an Eero system, there are only four Ethernet ports on the AT&T residential gateway, and all of these are currently used. So how do I connect the Eero? Do I need an Ethernet switch to add more ports? Does the Eero have an Ethernet port to connect to my disk station? He's got a disk station, a transporter, an AT&T DVR, and then a second connection for a remote DVR. So the answer is, yeah, it's going to work together fine. And in fact, Eero has a page about using this with AT&T U-verse. But let's not look at it directly as an Eero U-verse thing. Let's look at it as U-verse with any kind of mesh. The important thing to remember is that, in this case, the Eero or any mesh, and the U-verse are routers. And by default, we'll be configured to do all the routing. And what that means is if you simply plug your Eero into your U-verse as it stands, it'll work. But you'll be in a scenario where both the U-verse and the Eero are handing out IP addresses and trying to route traffic. And that can wind up in a double NAT or even a parallel NAT scenario where you've got things, it becomes a management headache. The best thing to do is to have only one device acting as a router and then have the other one in bridge mode. And with the AT&T U-verse stuff, you can certainly put the Eero in bridge mode. You can put the AT&T U-verse device, it's not quite bridge mode, but it's a pass-all traffic to that device mode, which is pretty close to bridge mode. And again, Eero's got a website that, you know, an FAQ entry that explains all this stuff. So that's where I would go with it. But I would try it with the U-verse in bridge mode if you want the Eero to do all your routing. If you like all the routing that the U-verse does, then by all means, put the Eero in bridge mode. That's kind of what I'm doing right now here is I've got the Synology Router doing the routing, and then the Eero's in bridge mode doing all my Wi-Fi. And the world is happy. It's fine. So it really just depends on how you want to configure it, but put one of them in bridge mode and the other one can be your router and then you're in good shape. As far as Ethernet, if you choose to have the AT&T U-verse thing as your router, then kind of what you have now is fine. You'll need to remove one of your Ethernet devices from the U-verse to plug the Eero in, but then the Eero has two Ethernet ports. So you could plug another one in and just have it essentially do a pass-through. As long as the Eero's in bridge mode, that'll work fine. If the Eero is not going to be in bridge mode, if the Eero is going to be your router, then you can have nothing plugged in to the AT&T U-verse modem except for the one Eero. And then you'd have to plug the Eero into an Ethernet switch that everything else is plugged into. You kind of have to have it all behind whatever the router is, otherwise it can't route. Right? Am I right on that? There can be only one. Well, there should be only one. Kind of. Yeah. No, I know. I've never used one of these gateways. Right. As long as they've kind of been able you to do that. Yeah, it's the kind of thing. Brian in the chat room, man, dude, you are like rocking it today. He says you have to be careful about that as the U-verse will not let the TV stuff work in bridge mode. So you got to make sure you coordinate with AT&T to get things working the right way. You might not... It might not work the way you want it to work. Because, you know, that's how it goes. AT&T. Yeah. Yeah. That's really what it is. Where are we on time here? We're getting close to the wall here. Is there anything else we want to do today, John? I'm not sure if there's... Maybe we should do Rob real quick here. Harvey's kind of mysterious. We need more. We need more information. Okay, so we'll skip Harvey and we'll see if Rob can... Well, I want you to try some stuff because I tried some stuff and it was inconclusive, which is like... All right. ...when that happens, you know? I do hate that one when that happens. All right, well, we'll talk about Harvey and we'll get something prepared for Harvey for next week, even though none of you know what Harvey's up to. Rob says... What does he have? He has an issue. He's got a MacBook that will start to boot and he's tried it in verbose mode. He's tried it in safe mode. He's tried it in recovery mode, most telling, and they all get to the same point where before they finish booting, he gets a blank gray screen. Most telling is that the verbose mode tests get past verbose mode. It comes up, continues to boot, which is only a little bit left in the boot process, and then the same thing, gray screen. He said... It started a few weeks ago where it's a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. It started running some serious processes in the background, which was evidenced by iStatMenu showing all four cores of the CPU maxed out. He said before he got a chance to dig any further, he woke one morning to the machine powered down. So here's the thing. Certainly, extra processes running in the background can max out your CPU. The other thing that can max out your CPU is when your system is trying to save itself from overheating. It will artificially report that the CPU is in use by some other process. It's usually kernel task, but it's not in use. It's just not letting other apps use the CPU in order to keep it from overheating. So I'm wondering if, in fact, what you saw was not the CPU in use by other processes, but the CPU in use by kernel task because maybe the fan is not running, and maybe it's overheating. So that's kind of my thought. He said he did do the Apple hardware test, and that worked. And it declared that all was well. And he said he also booted into single user mode and got the terminal prompt. But again, that all kind of makes sense with a fan or even just a CPU issue. So in my thought, I don't know, John, an external fan on this, put an external fan on this thing and try and boot it and see what happens. It seems like it gets far enough into the boot process, but then booting, especially with an SSD, booting uses a lot of CPU because it's the only thing it's waiting for. So it's running full CPU for a long time and then just freezes. That's my theory. I'd be curious what happens if you try to boot from a backup. Oh, same thing. I didn't see that. Yeah, he said, but also recovery mode, right, is a separate boot too. It's not the same operating system. Right, but okay, did he say he tried to boot from a backup? He definitely tried to boot from recovery mode. I'm pretty sure. Yes, no, I understand that, but... Oh, he said he tried to boot from a clone. Yeah. Oh, darn. Because my guess would be that the drive is shut. There's something wrong with the drive and you should resort from a backup. Interesting. Yeah, no, he said he tried to boot from his clone and also his install key, his thumb drive. Yeah, so... And that's hardware. Mm-hmm. Well, but that's the... Okay, so there you go. I got to the same point, it's hardware and then the alarm went off in my head because my own saying is when it's hard, when it seems like hardware, but it's really software, it's the SMC. So I think he should try an SMC reset and then maybe a PRim reset. Yeah, they've done magic. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So hopefully an SMC reset solves this. That's, I mean, if there's going to be a magic fix, like you said, this is where the magic happens. It doesn't fix my problem, though. What's your problem? I have the one with my mini where it doesn't wake up, it goes to sleep. And then when I turn it on, it's like sleep wake failure. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, what do you mean? That's not even the name of the thing. Yeah, but, but this is the same computer that sometimes is awake when you, when you come in, right? Yeah, I see it. I don't know. It's interesting, man. It's interesting. Poltergeist. It's poltergeist. Yeah, that's exactly what it is, John. Yeah. It's poltergeist, man. No, it's not. Is it the Borg? Is it the good Borg? There were some good Borg. Q and the rest, yeah. All right. Yeah, they weren't all bad. Most of them. Q wasn't Borg. Was he? No, he wasn't. No, okay. All right. I thought you just said Q. Oh, no, no. Q was Q. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but not like Q. Because there's Q and then there's Q. Right. Isn't that weird? They would call each other Q and it's like, well, wait, whatever. They understood. It's beyond our understanding. The humans are not capable of dimensional understanding that. Yeah. All right. There's one thing I do want people to understand, Dave, though, and that's where you could write us, Dave. And where's that? That is feedback at MackieGab.com. Oh, you said feedback at MackieGab.com, didn't you? Yeah, after all this time, I thought you forgot, so I thought I'd say it again. It's feedback at MackieGab.com. Or premium at MackieGab.com. For those of you that are premium supporters, very good stuff. You can call us, anybody can call us, 224-888-Geek, which charm is? Four, three, three, five. And you can find us on Facebook. Go to MackieGab.com slash Facebook. I have a bunch of stuff there to go through. I got through, I think I got through all the questions that came in today while I was gone, but I have not gotten through Facebook. I mean, I say, I mean, I got through the ones that you had done quite a few, Mr. Braun. And then I got home and cleaned up the rest, so. That's what we have. See us there. I want to, let's see, what do we have? I want to thank Cashfly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth. I want to thank all our sponsors. Of course, Roboform at Roboform.com. Coupon code MGG saves you 10 bucks. I want to thank Jamf at J-A-M-F.com slash MGG. I want to thank Ring. Go check out Ring at Ring.com slash MGG. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com. Barebonessoftware at barebones.com. What else, John? You know, I was in Austin this week. Things were crazy down there. With some of the stuff going on. And I was able to get out just fine. But everybody else that's in Austin, those of you I know and those of you I don't know, I hope that you don't get caught. I mean that.