 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 728, birthday boy edition. And it's not my birthday. For Monday, September 24th, 2018. And welcome to The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all of your tips, our tips, your questions, our questions, hopefully our answers, sometimes your answers, and some cool stuff found. And we mix it all together, with the goal being that every single one of us learns at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include IMAZING at IMAZING.com slash MGG, LinkedInJobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG, and Jamf now at Jamf, J-A-M-F dot com slash MGG. We'll talk more about those in a few moments. Here, yes, the birthday boy in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. Celebrating his unbirthday. This is Jonathan Brown. A very merry unbirthday to you, my friend. To me. To you. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So another 365 and a quarter days are on your chart now. On my chart, right? I, as I, as always, I woke up this morning. I stood in front of the mirror with my driver's license and I looked and made sure, OK, yep, that's me. I know my name and as it turns out, today was my birthday is my birthday. So there you go. But you do that every morning, right? Everybody does that. You check to make sure you know your name and whether or not it's your birthday every day. You look in the mirror. No, it's just me. It almost sounds like my Groundhog Day or. Well, every day, the start of either a very good or a very bad sci-fi movie. Yeah, it could could very well be. That's true. Yeah. Where am I today? Where and where am I? That's right. And I know all of these things. And we got them out of the way in the intro of the show. So yeah, all right. I guess it can't hurt to just get your bearings at least once a day. I know, exactly. Yeah, it's a nice place, right? Beginner's mind, as it were. Yeah, I'll say thank you to everyone in the chat room at MackieCab.com slash stream for all the birthday wishes there, too. Thank you, everyone. That's that's great. Today, as perhaps a birthday gift that all of us get to share in Apple released Mac OS Mojave and I figured it would be a good thing for us to just talk through some of the things that we've noticed as and as things go on. Of course, we're happy to take your Mojave questions at feedback at MackieCab.com as always, right? That's what we do here. So it's all good. And he said feedback at MackieCab.com. I appreciate you reiterating my feedback at MackieCab.com, John. That's a good thing. So the first feature, it's certainly not the most exciting one. It's one that I turned on and turned off three times now in Mojave since installing it. And I should say this is the first release in a while where I have not lived on a beta of it on at least one of my machines for an extended period. I've only had it on for 24 hours, which is actually a really good thing. In a sense, it's it's necessitated by the fact that I only have one machine. My MacBook Air will not run Mojave my because it's a 2011. My iMac in the office, of course, will. So I put it on yesterday. I put the developer preview on, which is not quite the release that that we all got today, but it was close enough. And and it's it's always good to not get to this point and have already learned to take advantage of or dismiss all of the new things that are in Mojave. So I started making a list and obviously the first one is dark mode, right? That's that's one everybody talks about. It it is a system wide setting that changes not just your menu bar dark as you could do in in previous versions of the OS, which I highly recommend. By the way, I think it looks great and it's nice to have the the menu just sort of fade into the background of the bezel and have your windows pop. But now everything, including text on things like your email, will now be light text on dark background. And I I'm having too much trouble adapting to it. I think because well, I mean, it's new, right? But also it and it's not mandatory. In fact, it's not on by default, or at least it wasn't for me. I had to go turn it on in in system preferences, general appearance. But it, you know, you like Safari Windows when a website specifies that it's a white background as most do with black text. And that's what you get. So you have this huge, you know, white ish background thing going on in this sea of otherwise very, very dark windows. And it's just the contrast to that's a little jarring for me. So so I I have I have I have not gone to dark mode full time. I and I don't think I will. I had a conversation with gamut, Jeff gamut today. And and he said, yeah, that's not surprising. He says you haven't lived in Photoshop for years where dark mode has become the the default. And honestly, I think if I could get my email app not to go dark mode, then I would use dark mode everywhere. But having dark mode and mail is not OK for me. I just don't like it. So and maybe there is a way maybe that I haven't found. So because as I'm looking at my screen here, John, on the studio machine. Audio hijack is basically dark mode. And I'm on I'm not on Mojave on this machine. I'm still on high Sierra. Farago, which does all of the audio files that we play is dark mode discord, which we use for the audio for our connection between us dark mode. Everything else light mode. But but yeah, we're so anyway. Yeah, what are your thoughts on dark mode and or the the next thing on your list about Mojave, John? Excuse me. So I just lost you when I restarted. Oh, welcome back. OK, cool. But you just finished dark mode. So great timing. I did. Yeah, we never would have known if you hadn't said anything. So any any thoughts on on dark? Well, you told us that you were gone and came back. But I I enabled it on my test machine. I installed an external drive and it's like, yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah, OK. It's different. Yeah. I'd like to talk about something a bit more functional. Yeah, go. Yes. And I'm going to group these all under so we may not I mean, we may not tackle all of them. But I'm going to talk about that. So Mojave has made several finder enhancements, which I think are great. OK. And I think the one that caught my attention the most because it just prevents people from being slobs. Not that you can help it. I mean, hey, you know, the desktop's there just throw everything on it. You just see my office here, Dave's office. I mean, it doesn't doesn't ask her. Right. But stacks or groups, depending on where you activate it, is a really nifty feature. So. Basically, what you do is right click as with many things on documents on your desktop. And it'll say, hey, you want to make this part of a stack or you want to enable stacks, I think, is what it says. And it's like, OK, yeah, I don't even think it's interesting. I wrote this up for us to write as a tip. Right. I anyway, but I did not put it in our notes here, which is interesting. So, yeah, you don't have to click on a document. Even you can just right click anywhere on the desktop, you know, in the in the finder there and it and just choose enable stacks. That's it. And then it will it will kind of collate all of your like typed files together and then it creates an other file as well. Yeah. So and we've all seen this, especially support people, is that, you know, not that it's right or wrong. I mean, it's allowed, but a lot of people just put everything on their desktop. This just helps bring order out of chaos because it groups them all together. What I did notice as well, Dave, is when I drag some documents that were on the desktop into a folder and right click, it said, hey, you want to use this thing called groups. And that changes the view in the finder a bit. And I'm going to make that dovetail on item number two and then we'll move on because there's a couple other finder ones. But the other one, Dave, is they have something now called gallery view. So I think we can group these together. So you've had list view, icon view, a few other views. They introduce a new gallery view. And I would say it's it shows the document on one side. And then it shows all of the metadata on the other. And I think even when they showed this, it's really handy if you're a photographer. So on one side, it shows a picture. And then on the other side, it shows all of the EXIF data, which for a lot of photographers is important. So it's nice that this view versus highlighting something and saying, get info. This is pretty much what this is doing. It's putting them side by side. So I think that's kind of interesting as well. That's a good way to think about it. I like that it basically includes the get info. For other things, it depends. And depending on the type of documents you work on, PDFs as well, you can get a lot of data that's not obvious about a PDF. It depends on the type of documents you work with. So that's a view some people may like. So that's just another icon in the bar in your finder window. One you haven't seen before. Click on that. I noticed, so I use things like text expander and keyboard maestro and several other apps that need to be able to manipulate my user interface. Text expander, it watches what I'm typing and then changes that if I type a snippet, as you probably know. Keyboard maestro does all sorts of things. The one I use it for most frequently is its clipboard stack, where it remembers everything that I've copied so I can then go back and not just paste in the thing that I copied most recently, but also one, maybe three or four or 10 old. The first time I used either of these, it says, hey, you need to go and allow this. So I did. It said go to system preferences, security and privacy, privacy, and that's where it brings you. And it says you have to check the box for whatever app keyboard maestro text expander, whichever one happens to be the one that you need to. For me, all of these were checked and going in there didn't do anything. So I had to uncheck them and recheck them. And in the case of text expander, I believe I had to quit the app after that and then relaunch the app. So there was something a little bit wonky, at least with the way my system up. And mine, I'm definitely an upgraded from High Sierra to Mojave. So if you wind up with an app like that that seems to think it's going to function fine and is not, go into system preferences, security and privacy, privacy, and turn it off and turn it back on. And I just went in and turned them all off and back on, it just went down the list. And then I rebooted my Mac because that way everything restarted, right? There's no app that was still running. And since then, it's been fine. So after I had to do two or three of these, it was like, okay, I've had enough. Let me just do this once and we're good to go. So there you go. Yep. What's up? What's next on your list, John? Well, I think we'll do some more finder stuff. Okay. And it's another kind of double hitter. So one, hey, Dave, there's a new screen capture tool, huh? I had that on my list too. Command shift five. Oh, sorry, I beat you to it. That's okay. But I thought I'd lump it in here. Yeah, that's not just the finder. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's good. So now if you hit command shift five, so actually this has features of a love. Oops, I did it on this machine and it brought up Snaps Pro because that's what I have for. Let's go to the other machine. Yeah. But yeah, so it brings up a square, a selection square, and then you hover over, you can capture entire screen, capture selected window, selected portion, record entire screen, record selected portion, then there's some more options and you can say record. And look at all those options. Well, so the options are actually pretty cool, right? I took a picture of them because there was no way I could find to do a screen, a screenshot of the screenshot window, right? Right? So I took a picture with my phone. But just to not, just to highlight something you mentioned, in addition to doing the selection window or full screen with command shift five, now you can do a video of a window or a selection, which is new in Mojave. There was no video built into the screen capture functionality. You could get quick time to do it, but now it's there. And then this list of options that you mentioned, John, you can choose your save to location right there. I want to point out though, this is command shift five, not command control shift five, because you don't need that anymore. Because from this option, you can choose to save to the clipboard, which is pretty cool. You can also choose to have it pick the screenshot after a five second timer or a 10 second timer, so that you can get things the way you want them. And maybe you couldn't before with command shift four or whatever. So and you can have it choose the mouse pointer. I mean, you don't need Snapse Pro anymore, John, I would say. In fact, I would say this functionality bests what you've got with Snapse Pro. And Snapse Pro is essentially the end of life anyway, so I wouldn't want to roll out. Yeah, they upgraded it for the last OS. Hey, you know, it's it's a last that a good a long time, but yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would agree with you. But they go beyond that, Dave, and that they do something else. So once you take the screen snapshot, yeah, it appears in the corner of your screen and kind of like iOS. Isn't it weird how they're merging? You get a preview and if you click on it, you can do some. I'll call this Markdown Markup Markup. Sorry. Yeah, yep. I'll call it Markup. If you choose so, and this is something that you're if you use iOS, this is the behavior on iOS already. I had no idea. I brought up the window, but I didn't I didn't take a screenshot. So if you click on it, you get some very basic markup. You know, you can add some text. You can rotate it, you know, not a lot of stuff, but basic editing things because the assumption is that you're taking a screenshot for future reference, either an article or right or whatever. So sometimes you may not get it right. I find it super handy. There are many times where I want to take a screenshot and like draw a circle around something and say, hey, this right. And previously I would have to use an app called Skitch, which if you're still on, you know, not on Mojave, Skitch is still a great app to use. I think Evernote acquired it. But but yeah, so now I don't even I didn't even realize that. See, this is why I wanted to have this conversation because I know there are lots of people listening that have already learned their five things. I feel like I've already learned my five. So this is good. Speaking of which, I want to take a minute, Mr. Braun, if that's okay, and talk about our first sponsor for today. Does that that work for you, my friend? Absolutely. It does. Okay, good. I had it right in front of me and now it's gone. So, you know, there we go. Aha, I found it. Cool. Our first sponsor today is LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network. 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Just because you weren't looking for a job doesn't mean you aren't open to hearing about one. And if you are looking for people, this is where you want to go. Here's the thing. You go, hurry to LinkedIn.com slash MGG and get $50 off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get $50 off your first job post. One more time. LinkedIn.com slash MGG terms and conditions apply. But I will tell you, you may well find your candidate in that first $50 spend. Obviously, there's no guarantees. You know how life goes. That's why terms and conditions apply. But I have used this and I have found people and it really works out. So check it out. LinkedIn.com slash MGG. All right. Next tip that I have is the continuity camera, right? So Apple, as you said, they're merging things or at least blending things. And continuity has been their name for sort of merging the world of iOS and macOS for a while. So the things you do on one are just naturally there on the other. And you can now go into pages or mail or really any of Apple's apps that support this. And I think third-party apps will be able to as well. And choose import from. And you choose your iPhone or iPad in that list. Then you can take a picture or a video with your phone and slurp that right in to the app without having to jump through the hoops of, have you ever tried to do this, right? Where you want to take a picture with your phone and paste it into a mail document on your Mac. Well, good luck, right? I wind up texting these things to myself. That's the easiest way. Because waiting for iCloud Photo Library to sync it all around sometimes takes too long. I'm impatient. Now, I don't even have to do that. Boom, right there. All good. So that's a continuity camera. That's one of my favorite things, John. Yeah, I like it. Because I remember last year for a CES, there were some, I had to write an article and there were some pictures that I took with my iPhone instead of my other camera. Sure. And I had to either hook up a cable or whatever, but now it just drop it in your document. It's just good to go. Yeah, I know. It's great. I know I'm bummed that I don't have this on my laptop. It further supports my desire to replace my Air. Despite the fact that CPU-wise, for the things I do with it, my Air is totally fine. But it's 2011. I mean, it's fine. It doesn't owe me anything. I'm okay. And now, I want to talk about some things you're going to find in your system preferences. Yeah, I like those. Those are my favorite. New things. So in iCloud, you're going to see some new items. You're going to see news, stocks, and home. Huh? Yeah, it's basically now, because I also did this, because I actually noticed this. So I got an iPod touch and it's not a full member of my environment that I only have iCloud on. But it made me realize once I enabled just that and not my other email accounts and stuff like that, how much comes over with iCloud. It's true. Well, new stocks and home now come over. And they're now on macOS, not just iOS. So that's kind of neat. And then also in the system preferences, it's a minor point, but we noticed that, especially if you're in the beta, there's an always software update system preference where you can tweak how software update behaves rather than kind of baking it into the App Store. Wasn't that there before? No, I think that was there before. I swear it was there before. I don't believe there was an explicit app store. Oh, was it just in App Store on the old one? I think I'm looking. Yeah, that's what I just said, right? Yeah, yeah, it was. Oh, there wasn't an explicit. When you said App Store, I was thinking the actual Mac App Store app, not... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand what you said now. Got it. Got it. Yep. There's a separate prefane and then... So they just broke it out, which kind of makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. So I have a system preference thing to point out, and I swear I'm going to find it here. I know. I put it in the thing. I left it somewhere. Ah, yes. A new entry in system preferences. If you go, system preferences, John. Dock. Show recent applications in Dock is a new option. It's a sixth option at the bottom of all the little checkboxes in the Dock system preference pane. And what this got turned on for me by default when I upgraded. And between the active applications, or the fixed applications, I should say, a new Dock. And the documents section where the trash can also is, now appears a new section with the three recently launched apps right there, whether they are running or not. Right? So you get the... And you'll see it. Like it was like, okay, what is this and how do I control it? And that's where I found this new entry. System preferences, Dock. Show recent applications in Dock is new. So yeah, yeah, pretty good. Did you find now you're looking at that, John? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yep. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I like it. And you mentioned the Mac App Store in passing. The Mac App Store is way different now. Laid out very differently. Seems to work okay. Like I haven't spent a lot of time fishing around for apps in there, but it seems to take some cues from iOS, which is no great surprise. Thoughts? Anything? I'll check it out. I never really... I never really spent a lot of time in the App Store. I usually know what I'm looking for. Right. Are you going to search for something? And so, I mean when I peruse, I mean when I visit again and see if the experience is different. Let's see if it's different. Yeah. So, John in the chat room, and I'm trying to reconcile exactly what he's telling me. We've kind of had a conversation going on. So, if you go into system preferences, security and privacy, privacy, which is where I mentioned that accessibility thing was previously. They're kind of one of my first tips about Mojave and turning apps on and off. There is now a new option called Full Disk Access. And it says, allow the apps below to access data like mail, messages, Safari, home, time machine backups, and certain administrative settings for all users on this Mac. And what was interesting is we were chatting pre-show and he said, in the terminal, he could not get to his mobile sync folder, which is where essentially your iCloud Drive. And I'm in the studio here not running Mojave. So, I thought, well, let me SSH in from my computer up here down to the one in the office and see if I can get to that folder. And sure enough, I can. But SSHD is listed as an app that has access to my Full Disk here. So, that must be the reason I was able to see it and he was not. So, things like your backup software, if you're backing up things in your iCloud Drive, would potentially need access to this. If they're backing up your mail and stuff like that, you're going to need to give them access here. And they'll probably ask for it. It's one of those things that would seem like that. The terminal will not ask for it. We've proven that. So, thank you for that, John, in the chat room. That's good. So, yeah, I'll put that in the show notes, too. It's crazy. I love this. I love finding the new things because it helps us all kind of know where we are. You got anything else? I've got a couple of safari things that are not just Mojave, but do you have anything else Mojave for today, John? I'm sure we'll have more quick tips in future episodes, too. Not the major. No, I think that's all right. Cool. I'm sure there'll be more. I have no doubt. All right, the next thing I have then, this is in Mojave, but it's also Safari 12, is that, and you can install Safari 12 on High Sierra and Sierra. I was not able to install it on El Capitan. I don't think, right? Or was I? Anyway, if you can install Safari 12, if you go to Safari, Preferences, Tabs, there's a new option there. Check the box, Show Website Icons in Tabs. And now you get to see the beautiful favorite icons that I created just last week for macobserver.com. We had a previous one that I also created that really didn't look all that great when shown in a tab or anywhere else for that matter, and having them in tabs made me realize, you know what, I need to go spend 20 minutes on this. So I did and created some very, very nice ones that matter to everyone. So there you go. So there's a new one for us, and you can see them and turn them on there. Anything thoughts about that, John, before I go to my last one that I have here? No, we got that last time. Yeah, I haven't really noticed anything, which I guess is good that I'm on Safari 12. And, you know, Safari 12 has the new Safari Intelligent Tracking Protection on, and John Martellaro last week found a great write-up from Security Week about how all this works. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. We've talked a little bit about it here on the show, but it is a good thing. And I will say this, I'm not sure exactly where I have the question. I thought I had it queued up for the show, but maybe not. Someone had asked us, I don't want Safari 12. They had installed it on High Sierra, and they said, you know, how do I get rid of it? I have some websites that don't work with it, you know, so don't want it. And the answer is not easily, you know, Safari is not just an app. It's WebKit framework is at the core of the operating system. It displays things in all kinds of places. Like your mail is displayed by WebKit, it's just lots and lots of things. Chrome even uses WebKit all the way. I think it uses its own baked-in, like isolated, you know, sandbox version. But suffice to say, it's used all over the place. You know, if you use an app like Slack, that's just doing web views, right? And it's leveraging WebKit all the time. There's a lot of iOS apps that do. The reality is when you install Safari 12, it goes deep into the OS and replaces WebKit with Safari 12's WebKit. And so the only way to get rid of it, like, it's not just a needle in the haystack. It's many, many, many needles in the haystack. What you'd rather... Go ahead. Removing Safari risks you removing WebKit as well. If the tool is doing its job and things you don't want to remove WebKit. Because as you said, it's the core of so many other things. But I don't think you can just throw away Safari and... And go back. No. And install the OS and just drag it. Even though it appears as an app in your applications folder, it's not that simple. It's not that simple. That's right. But you might be able to go... Now that we're thinking about this, I have not tried this. So, you know, this is just me speculating. There is... If you go to WebKit.org, that is where you can download all the nightly builds of WebKit and test out what they call Safari Technology Preview. But this is a browser called WebKit. And there is a WebKit build archives. And it looks like you can go back... You might be able to go back and get a previous... Like there's some from January of this year. So, you might be able to go back and get a version of WebKit that is a self-contained browser and run that to access the sites that don't work in Safari 12. Essentially, you'd get, you know, the Safari 11 build of WebKit here. So, I will put the WebKit archives page in the show notes. And maybe that will get you there. No promises. But I try it. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I thought there used to be... No, that time has passed. I thought there used to be standalone Safari installers from Apple. But yeah, I think that time has passed. I think it's through the App Store, right? Right. It's through the App Store. But even if there were a Safari installer, like I think that it's not... Again, it's not just the app that it would install. It would muck libraries and frameworks. Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. All right. So remember back in the day. I do. But I want to talk about our next sponsor, if that's okay, John. Can I do that? Okay. Okay, sweet. I want to talk about iMazing. iMazing is, well, it's our next sponsor just for clarity. But it is the app that takes over where iTunes leaves us all hanging. And before I go into this, I want to tell you, you can visit iMazing.com slash MGG to save 30% on all licenses to this really killer iPhone and iPad management utility. It backs up. But it does lots of great things. They just added this new quick transfer feature. What you do is you drag and drop any file or even a folder of files onto iMazing. And iMazing will show you a list of compatible apps on that specific iOS device that it can then take these files and pump them into, right? I mean, these guys, and again, this is just one of many, many features that they've added here and continue to add. It really, it's quite something. And we have, John, you know, we sometimes share tales of woe and that's fine. But what I have is from listener Jed, I have an iMazing tale of joy. And what Jed says is my wife's or a friend, sorry, a friend's 20 something year old daughter just came back from Europe. She said everybody was using Google phones. I want a Google phone. She was due for a switch and she switched from her iPhone. Three weeks later, she hates her Google phone. Doesn't work well and so on. Manages to convince a Verizon employee to switch her back, which is great. Here's the great part, the amazing part. Her iPhone backup on her computer would not restore. It said it was a defective backup. Jed thinks she downloaded some janky third party apps to convert her data to her new Google phone, et cetera, and they damaged the backup in the process. After lecturing her about making a copy before messing with a backup, Jed says, I introduced her to iMazing. It repaired the backup and saved the day. He says he never would have known about it, about iMazing without us. And that is the kind of story I love to share, which is why I let this ad read go on a little bit longer because it includes some tips right in there. That's what we like to do. So check it out. Visit iMazing.com slash MGG to save 30% on all licenses. Again, iMazing.com slash MGG are thanks to iMazing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you're up. I was going to say, remember back in the day when everybody yelled at Microsoft and they said, well, the browser is a part of the operating system? I do. I think back, you know, we all thought they were just being a bunch of wise guys, but they may have actually had a point. They might have been on to something. That is true. Remember? They said they couldn't decouple it. You know, remember the whole thing? The lawsuit and everything. If we could, we'd remove it, but we can't. Yeah, but okay, you're right. And that is a fair point and a valid point. However, the way Apple has done this now, yes. WebKit is at the core of the operating system. WebKit is used for all sorts of apps that want to leverage web views. It's really Apple's way. It's no different than Apple's framework for drawing a button on the screen, right? You don't have to draw a button. You tell the OS to draw a button, and then the nice part is no matter what it is. WebKit is a, last I checked, open source type of rendering library, right? But you can use a different browser. Like, yes, you can't remove Safari, but you can set, you know, well, I was going to say Netscape, but I can't set Netscape to be meant to fault browser because I can't run Netscape anymore because it really doesn't exist. But it morphed and now Firefox is something I can run and Chrome is something I can run. And I can happily run any of those as my default thing. So, yeah. So there you go. Yeah, I'm saying what Microsoft was saying wasn't entirely untrue. It's just their engine was their internal rendering library or IE or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, for sure. And they call it back then. Right. Yeah, whatever they called it. Yeah, whatever they called it back then. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, fascinating stuff. All right, we've got a bunch of quick tips. John and I went to, we got together this week. So if it seems like we're even more in sync than usual, that's probably why we spent, you know, whatever, 24 hours straight together or something like that. And lots of things came up. One of them is about iOS 12. And we talked about this in person, John, but we did not talk about it with our listeners. And that is that if you are using a password management utility separate from iCloud Keychain, like if you're using LastPass or OnePassword, iOS 12 has a fantastic way now of allowing those to participate in sharing their passwords directly inside Safari and also directly inside any apps, right? And this is the part that's freaking awesome, if you ask me, because being able to have your OnePassword library or your LastPass library right inside when an app asks for your password is awesome. So go to Settings on your iPhone, go to Passwords and Accounts, and go to Autofill Passwords. And you will see, if you have one of these apps out there, Dashlane, I think also does this, you will see you can turn on Autofill Passwords and then you can choose Allow Autofilling from, and for me, I've got iCloud Keychain and OnePassword on here. So I can choose either or both or neither and turn off Autofill Passwords entirely. So if you don't want to participate in iCloud Keychain, you can turn that off now and run your OnePassword or LastPassword over. So anyway, I just wanted to share that because it's a good thing, right? It's a good quick tip. And it was not on by default for me, right? I knew it existed and I had to go and dig and find it. So I will put the link to that in the show notes as always. But yeah, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Right. So we were at PEPCOM, which is one of these press events. We've talked about it several times where there's lots of vendors. I think there were 75 vendors or something there showing off all their stuff that's coming out or already out for the kind of holiday season. And New Egg was there, John. And New Egg had some gimmies. And one of them, you know, they handed me like a, actually they handed you a pen. By the way, that erasable pen made my son so happy. So thank you for that. An erasable pen. How's that possible? I know. But they handed me a couple of things. One of which they were like, here's a 3000 milliamp hour battery. Okay, fine. You know, it's always handy to have an extra battery. But, and I thought, and it was in a case so I couldn't really see the battery. It was like, whatever. I'm like, yeah, okay, great. So I threw it in my bag and went on my day when I got home. Again, I pulled it out and like, I had another battery and I opened it up. I'm like, wait a minute. This is interesting. And it's a thin little battery, really thin, 3000 milliamp hour battery. It's called, and it's, here's the kicker. They don't sell this, right? This was just something they bought as a chochkey to give away. But I'm going to tell you about the chochkey because it's really, it's a cool thing. And I think you can buy one-offs if you want, right at handstands.promo.com is where I found this. So they call it the Griptite Power 3000. And it's got that sticky, what is it called? It's not a sticky pad technology, right? Which allows this thing, like you just touch it to your phone. I even have a spec case on my phone. I just put one of these new sparkly spec cases on my phone, which has like the little grippers on it. I figured the sticky pad wouldn't stick to that because it's just the little grippers stuck to it. No problem whatsoever. You put this little sticky pad on. It's got both a micro USB or and a lightning connector coming off of it. So you pick which side to plug in. You plug it into your phone. Your battery pack is now stuck to your phone. And it comes with this cool little case that you can leave right there on your phone and turn it over and protect the sticky pad when you're not using it. So it was one of the coolest things I've ever gotten. I thought I was going to be sending you all to Newegg to buy one, but no, doesn't seem like it. You can hopefully buy them from handstands.promo.com. Or maybe somewhere else. Maybe somebody else will find a place. So anyway, what do you think, John? Yeah? Yeah, I already used it. Charged something. So it has lightning and USB, micro USB, mini micro, whatever. Micro, I believe. And then there was the, we'll mention who makes it, the cable. So they were also giving charging cables that were also dual standard, but they had animated LEDs in the cable. So you could watch the electrons moving from your battery to your... Not really. No, not really. That is kind of cool. All right, I don't know. We got all kinds of stuff here. I will jump us to Everett here, John. And Everett has a cool stuff found for us. He says, in case you ever wanted to know what it is that Apple uses to get the dust off the inside of the glass iMac screens when they put them back together. So we're talking about the iMacs where you have to put the suction cups on, you pull the screen off and do whatever work you have to do inside. Then you have this glass and the screen, and you need to clean the screen of dust and clean the glass of dust and put the glass back on without any dust hitting either. Tell me about how fun this is on a 27 inch iMac. I know, I know, first world problems complaining about a 27 inch iMac, but it's a pain in the neck. I've done it before, but what Apple uses is a silicone roller. And Everett found the one. It's called the vinyl buddy used to clean old vinyl or new vinyl records, whatever you want. And you don't have to spray anything or anything. You just run the roller back and forth. It grabs all the dust. You put the thing back on, you're done. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So thanks, Everett. Good stuff. John. All right, Dave, you know what? Yeah. So when you were coming down, you sent me a Waze notification. So Waze lets you hear your route with people. Yeah. Well, all I can say is that Waze implementation sucks. Sorry guys for navigating traffic. You're awesome. But this doesn't cut the mustard versus, I'll say glimpse is still my favorite service. Oh, for sharing your travel. Well, the thing is, I got the notification and so I run Waze and it's like, okay, it started showing me your route. And then I'm like, okay, well, I got to quit the app and do some other stuff. And so I started again. And it's like, well, where's the thing I just told you about? Right. It's like, huh? And I'm like, yeah. And the notification was gone too. It disappeared from my notification center. Of course. So I couldn't revive the session. So that kind of sucked. But good news. The thing is, you and I, Dave, but I'm like, yeah, I'll just use find my friends. Right. We share our location and find my friends. Yeah. Yeah. So find my friends is a feature within the Apple Echo Sphere, which if you want to share your location and you have a GPS or even not a GPS device, it'll snitch on you and tell your friends that you've allowed to where you are. And I'm like, well, where is he? And then you marveled at the way that I implemented this, Dave. So normally you started up on your iPhone. Right. But then you came to my house and you were like, dude, you're running this like in Safari. How are you doing that? I'm like, well, I went to iCloud.com and logged in and then it's there. I guess you were just surprised that they extended find my friends to a web interface, which actually is kind of cool. Yeah. You just had it up in your browser. I'm like, wait a minute. How'd you get that in your browser? And of course it's right there at iCloud.com. But this is why we do these quick tips, right? Because there's things that are there that we don't always see. So while we're here, I will share the other ways. Like you said, there's the find my friends app on iOS that you can use. If you're in, you can go into messages on either the Mac or iOS and get info about your friend and see their location there. This is super handy if you have a group like we have our family group. If I want to know where everybody in the family is, I just go and boom, it just shows me everybody on the same map, which is super handy. Or my favorite way to do this on the Mac is to go to the notification center. So the upper right hand corner. And in the today view, you can add a find my friends widget. If it's not already there, go down to the bottom, click on edit. Or if you have new widgets to look at, then instead of saying edit at the bottom, it'll say x new, giving you the number x, how many new there are to look at. But just click on that. And you can add in, you know, your find my friends widget and sort it and do whatever you want. So yeah, it's all pretty good. It's pretty good. I like find my friends. What else you got, John? You got another cool stuff found for us? You hear me? I do hear you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there's weird stuff happening with this cord here. I had to quit and start again. But another thing I found while we were traveling, Dave, I'm like, oh, check this out. So this was an app that my buddy Kenny showed me called Wallaby. But they sent me an alert saying, yeah, we're quitting this app. So you got to get the other app of the people that bought us. And the name of it isn't that sexy. It's called the points guy app. And it's like, who's the points guy? Well, this is for talking about points with your credit or debit card. It's basically a master list of all your credit cards. Now, why would you want to give an app a master list of all your credit cards? So when you're out and about, it can tell you how to get the best discount. Because I don't know about you, but nearly every card that I have offers some either a flat rate rebate in cash, usually, or a statement credit, or some other thing. And there's different percentages, though. The cards that get you your airline points or your hotel points or whatever. And it's always different, right? Depending on what type of merchant you're at. Yeah, some do it every three months. They have different ones. Some it's straight categories. But sometimes, especially if you're not like me, I think I have a credit card. Between my credit and debit cards, actually, I think I got 12. So you're like, dude, what's wrong with you? And it's like, well, I'd like different rewards. Or some people just like collecting them. But sometimes it can be hard to keep track of, well, this app keeps track of it all. So you tell it which cards you have and then it uses your location. It's like, dude, you're at a restaurant. Well, this is a Discover 5% back on restaurants. So use your Discover card if you want the most cash back. And it's like, wow. So it spies on you. And then you can also link it with your cards itself. And then it can look at your transactions. Now, how would you want this level of detail? Well, it can tell you, well, hey, dummy, you use this card here and you should have used the other card. So you didn't get all the credit you could. I like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't get those right when I've seen that. But it does let you see your transactions, which may be useful as well for various purposes. So if you want all the money back, check this app out. It's really cool. Yeah, I obsess over earning travel points and stuff. So this is, I'm shocked I'd never heard about this app. That's great, man. Good stuff. We have a tip from listener Andrew here. He says, according to Apple, the only versions of iTunes that are compatible with being able to upgrade to iOS 12 is iTunes 10.9 for Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, and this is as of two days ago, he says Apple has not released iTunes 10.9 for the Mac. As of yet, the workaround is to apply a patch to iTunes 10.8.0.150, but some versions of iTunes 10.8.0.150 are also not compatible with this patch. The fix is to delete iTunes from your Mac and download and then install a fresh copy of iTunes 10.8.0.150 from Apple's website. Now he says when I click on the update button in software, update a window pops up with an icon of an iPhone 10, Andrew says, and states that I need to download and install a patch. iTunes cannot be running to apply the patch and no indications are given when the patch is completed and the iTunes version stays the same. After restarting iTunes, the update button now works correctly and starts the update process for all my iOS devices so I can install iOS 12 via iTunes. And that's instead of doing it in the over-the-air software update. So yeah, everything all right there, John? You're growing in a moment. Now we're good. Okay, all right. So yeah, thank you, Andrew. That's crazy. I mean, it's good, but it's crazy that we don't have that option. Hopefully iTunes 10.9 will solve this. I have seen this though. It's not just an iTunes 10.8.0.150 issue. I've seen it where I keep on top of my updates. I run iTunes all the time. I'm playing music with it almost all the time at my desk. And suddenly I will realize that I am three updates behind on iTunes. And I have to go to the website and download the iTunes installer and reinstall iTunes on top of itself to get it to update. So yeah, it happens all the time. And I'm not, evidently, I'm not alone. So yeah. Yeah, I'll admit I don't use it too often, but usually software, the App Store usually gets it right, but I don't always, I guess. Are you sure? I mean, you would have no way of knowing is the problem. You know what I mean? So you say I have no way of knowing if I'm running the latest iTunes. Correct. That's sort of the problem. So you know what? I'm going to run iTunes on this machine. What version should I have? I think 10.8.0.150. I think I'm looking on this computer. Give me 12.8. 12.8. Did he, did he say 10 throughout the thing or did I just say that? Yeah, 12.8.0.150. That's the latest. So I will, I will put a link to the download. 12.8.0.150. Yep. Looks like I'm good. Yep. Yep. Now, of course, the question is, which version of 10.8.0.150 do you have? And fun. All right. Listener Paul. So two tips. There's different ones. Oh man. That's what he just said in his tip, man. It's crazy. It's crazy. Listener Paul, we're talking about all kinds of things and I'm trying to think of the right way to enter this process here. Oh, he says piecing together four minutes of your podcast over many years. He says you used to have audible as a sponsor. That's true. And Dave years ago complained that his wife and him had to offset reading Ready Player One on Kindle, I believe, because it would sync current places across devices. Also true. That's because my wife and I both have our devices logged into my Amazon account so that she can read so we can share the library. And he says, I assume that's because Dave was using the same account. Yep. But he says, if you set it up on an Amazon household, now your family can have their books. You can have your books. And since you log in with different accounts, the current location only syncs across yours. Since my wife and I had just gotten new iPhones, we had to go back in and allow the new devices to see the other's content because it's on a device by device basis, which is true. And there's a link about this that we'll put in there. But yeah, I had set up an Amazon account years ago, but I never thought to have Lisa start using her account for books until this very moment. So thank you for sharing that advice. It's good advice to set up the Amazon household. You know, it's interesting. I mean, Apple has their family plan, household stuff. Amazon obviously has theirs. Google also has theirs. Each of them does different things. So it's easy to get stuck in the mindset of like, oh, everybody's going to do it like Apple does and there's no real benefit or there is the benefit. But it's worth, you know, everybody's kind of got their own little, little, little shtick there. So go check it out. And while we're at it, listeners, Scott, back in episode 725, we were talking about, you know, buying refurb max and, you know, just different ways of getting inexpensive tech equipment. Scott says, if you ever want to try and find used computer equipment, try the liquidation market. The liquidation market are estate sales, personal and commercial downsizing and complete liquidations. Many of these liquidations are sold by online auction. You go online, you bid, and then you pick up your winnings at the end. He says, you can find a company that just closed but has good computer equipment, including communications gear and even desk chairs and furnishings for your office, cheap. He says, I just bought two HP Leaser printers from a leasing company, plus two additional toner cartridges for each printer for $10 total. He says, of course, there's no support or warranties, obviously. He says, but if you can deal with that, find your local online downsizing auctions and bid. He says, two places to look are estate sales.net and estate sales.org. I think they are two different sites. So there you go. But thanks, Scott. I, you know, I never, it's interesting. We talk about, we've talked about this on our small business show before, but never thought about it for just, you know, personal use, right? To just go find whatever you need to find. So thanks, man. Yeah, good stuff. I am going to take a moment and do our third sponsor, John. And today our next sponsor is Jamf now at jamf.com slash MGG. That's where you go to get your first three devices free for life. Jamf now makes it easy to set up and manage and protect your Apple devices. It's easy to keep track of your own Mac or iPad or iPhone because you've got them. But what about other people's devices? What about your clients? What about your family members? What about your employees? As your business grows, as your family grows, as, you know, as things expand, chances are, if you're listening to this show, you might be the one that gets tasked with taking care of managing all these devices. And wouldn't it be easier if you didn't have to touch the device every time you wanted to help somebody make a change on it? That's what Jamf now does. You can check your inventory, see what devices are there. You can distribute things like Wi-Fi and email settings. You can deploy apps remotely. You can protect data. You can even lock or wipe a device from anywhere. No IT experience needed. So, Mac Key Cab listeners, here's your deal. Start securing your business and your devices today by setting up your first three for free forever. That's right. Up to three devices on your account at any time are always free. Eight more start at just $2 a month per device. So, go create your free account today right now at jamf.com, J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G. That's J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G. Our thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. You know, in episode 727, we talked about dual sims. And a couple of listeners had some things to share about this, John. Erin, I will share first. He says, you talk about their dual SIM card trays. He says, I can see how this can be convenient for people to use both a business and personal SIM card in a single phone, like you mentioned. He said, I would caution people to be aware of their company's policies over bring your own devices before doing this. Putting a company or government own SIM card in a personal phone may give the company implied or perhaps even direct consent to track and or search your entire phone, not just your business stuff. He says, I work for the government and just logging on to work email from my iPhone or my personal Mac or PC gives my agency such powers over my devices. It says so right on the login page, but most people don't read the tiny fine print. This is the main reason I never use my personal devices to check my work email. Just putting it out there. I don't want you to get caught. So thank you, Erin. Good stuff. You know, it could be Dave. What's that? It could be no such agency. I have no idea where Erin works. And you know what? I don't want to know. You know what it stands for, right? I do. Yes. No such agency. Yes. That's what they used to say. That's what they used to say. Okay. Uh, someday I will tell you about my run-in with the NSA, but not today. That's right. It was at a WWDC, believe it or not. Anyway, it's a good story. Oh yeah, they hang there, black hat. Oh yeah. Oh, they have to, you know. Oh, it was more than that. They're in security or black thereof. Yeah, it was very interesting. They were definitely following the group that I was with and wanted to have a conversation. Anyway, I will happily tell you that story over, you know, beers or dinner, whatever, any of you sometime, but I won't tell it on the podcast. Not over the internet. Correct. Yep. And I don't know anything that would make it any interesting, but it was an interesting story nonetheless. Yeah. Hi guys. Right. Hey. Ciao. So, on the dual sim thing, Eric points out, he says, you talked about how this feature will be great for users that have personal and work devices, but there is one potentially big issue. The Apple dual sim support page states, to use two different carriers, your iPhone must be unlocked. Okay, no problem. Otherwise, both plans must be from the same carrier. Understood. We even mentioned that last week. Here's the part we didn't mention. If a CDMA carrier provides your first sim, your second sim will not support CDMA. And then it says contact your carrier for more information. And that's because CDMA, which is what Verizon uses, and also therefore Xfinity Mobile, because Xfinity Mobile uses Verizon's network, CDMA is really kind of hacked into phones these days, right? It's not, it doesn't really use a sim. It sort of does, but in a sort of, you know, back into it way. Whereas GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile, all in and many, many others throughout Europe and everywhere, they, the sim actually does the communicating with the network and handles 100% of that. Your CDMA phone is identified to the network by, I believe it's IMEI or serial number, for lack of a better term. And therefore you can't have your phone on the CDMA network twice because there's no way to differentiate it. So if you are, for example, if you wanted to have a work number and a home number and you use Verizon at work and at home, no go. It's not going to happen on the same phone, just because there's no way to, it's just a, it's a functional limitation of CDMA is all that is. So just FYI, thank you so much for sharing that. Appreciate it. Huh? But wait, doesn't my phone do both? Your phone, right, your phone does both. So you could have, if you're a Verizon customer, which I know you are, then you could get an iPhone XS, XS Max or XR and install your Verizon thing and then also go get a SIM either a data and voice SIM or a data only SIM from a second carrier. You could use the eSIM really is the way to do it. And you'd be fine. But as long as that second carrier is not Verizon or is also not a CDMA carrier. Like Sprint. Is Sprint still CDMA? Is that right? I thought they were one of them. They were. It's kind of like Verizon, they do both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. And Boost, which I think is a spinoff of them. All right. So CDMA complicates things, all right. Yes, yes. I don't even know what I'm using. You know, that's the weird thing. I don't know if I'm using GSM or CDMA. You're a Verizon customer, right? Right. But my phone is capable of both. So I'm using CDMA when I'm in this country, but if I'm like traveling or something, I'm using GSM. Is that if you're roaming on GSM, then you're roaming on GSM. Yeah. Yeah. How would I know? Yeah. I'll read upon it. Yeah. Yep. There you go. All right. Let's see. NCS-UPE in the chat room is saying that LTE isn't CDMA, right. But the way your phone knows that it's on the Verizon network is still effectively CDMA. I'm pretty sure about that. I don't think that, I don't think there's a distinction there. So yeah, NCS-UPE in the chat room, mackeykip.com, South Stream says this will only be an issue while 3G is supported. Okay. Fair. Oh, all right. Fair. So if I'm on 4G or LTE, then... No, I don't... Again, that's not what he's saying. It is Verizon still uses CDMA and doesn't really use SIMS, as I understand it. So yes, I think at the moment, because you're on Verizon, you can't have two numbers on Verizon. That's what I understand about this. If we're wrong, though, let us know. Feedback at mackeykip.com. I know we said that three times. You already said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Brian... Our good friend and knower of many things, Brian Monroe, actually just pointed us to an article. Yeah, that's the one we mentioned in the... That's the one we just read from. Yeah. Okay, he just... He just put the link there. He also put it in our show notes, which thank you for that. Hey, James, last episode, we talked about cruft and James says, you frequently do this, but I do not remember you saying what cruft is and why it is so bad. I understand that things get left behind when apps are deleted, but except on very rare occasions due to these... Do these fragments cause problems? A lot of this cruft is left behind because Apple's or the app's uninstaller doesn't remove everything. But most of what's left behind is not referenced again by updated versions of an app, and for the most part consumes very little disk space. Recovering this space was more critical when disk drives were smaller and more expensive. He says, I feel that frequently talking about cruft puts unwanted fear into less technical users' minds, especially those switching from Windows. It may lead some to think that Macs have an inordinate amount of cruft while not understanding that cruft is a problem on all computers and perhaps not that big of a one. I understand that as a technician we want things pristine, but for most computers that's not possible, nor is it worth the time or effort it would take to get to that pristine state. There are current tools, clean my Mac, aptly, etc., etc., to help keep cruft down. He says, I feel that you should get a higher focus than spending so much time on how to do clean installs. You make some good points, James. I appreciate you sending that. Yeah. Don't sweat it, man. He's right. Yeah. Yeah. By and large, no reason to sweat it. So yeah, you're freaking people out, man. Cut to stop it. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. But he's right. He's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's something we obsess over and probably shouldn't. We love to obsess over it. Yeah. For sure. I mean, there's that one file that's like, you know, five bytes and it's like from ages ago. Why is it still there? Right. Yeah. Those kinds of things just don't matter all that much. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where are we on time here? Okay. We have a few things to talk about. We've sort of avoided this. We've had some router things. So let's talk. Todd has a cool stuff found related to routers. He says, I want to mention the Comcast slash Xfinity, Xfi pods, XFI is the name. He says, I have Xfi, the internet service from Comcast. And he says, I've been using, yes, renting their XB6 gateway, which is a modem, router and Wi-Fi combo box since January. He says, and I've been very pleased with it. It reaches nearly, nearly all of my house. However, it does not reach out in the backyard at all. So I wanted to add mesh Wi-Fi. He says, I know of Eero and Orbi and a few others. But by far the cheapest option for me, he says was Xfi pods at just $120 for three pods. And with a 30-day return policy, I decided to try them out. After a few weeks, I can say they're working great for me. In the backyard, my Wi-Fi speed is around 40 megabits, which is fine when walking around inside or outside the house. Handoff has been seamless. And I can see in the Xfi app, which access point my phone is currently connected to, or I can see a list of devices connected to each. Setup was fairly easy. If you have Comcast slash Xfinity internet and want a cheap inexpensive, I'll call it inexpensive, I wouldn't call it a cheap mesh and I'll explain why. Give it a try. It's basically the same hardware as Plume, but licensed by and well integrated to the Xfinity Wi-Fi. And it's true. It's the Plume first gen pods, not the super pods, but the first gen pods. And as you might remember, I've been blown away by how well those Plume super pods work. And their app is killer, really, really well done and interestingly priced with their annual subscription service and all that stuff. They are quickly becoming, if not my favorite, and possibly my favorite, but certainly one of my favorite. They are already one of my favorite. Top two, top three kind of thing. And there are times and scenarios where they are most definitely the top one of my mesh recommendations. They've really done a nice job with what they're doing there. So, thank you, Todd, for sharing that. That's great stuff, man. Cool. While we're talking about meshing options, listener Lonnie writes in and says, I just thought I would pass along my experience. I have a Synology router, which I was mostly happy with, except on a far room on my second floor. So, I added a ubiquity UAPACMUS UnifyMesh access point for around 89 bucks. He said, which happened to be the cheapest access point I found in their offerings at that moment. This access point connects via Ethernet through the included power over Ethernet injector. I did have to download the Unify controller software to set it up and give it the same SSID, but then I was good to go. He says, you don't have to run the controller software continuously. It's just for setup. He says, I put the ubiquity access point by a window on the second floor and gave myself the added benefit of Wi-Fi reaching out into the backyard as well. Yet Unify is an interesting company. They make the Amplify consumer focused mesh, and that I've also been very impressed with. They're the ones that have been doing mesh Wi-Fi for a long time. Most of their initial experience was with wired mesh, wired back all like he describes here, but obviously with Amplify and some of their ubiquity Unify products, which are more of the pro-sumer or even pro-level, they are probably the right option for the very geekiest of us users here. So I feel like maybe there's something we should be checking out too. And I've talked to them about this. Obviously I've been in touch with them because of the Amplify stuff. So yeah, it's good. Cool. So thank you, Lonnie. Good stuff. Any thoughts on that before we move on to one? Actually, I'm going to do DOM and then we'll talk about all of this. I don't know if it's DOM or Dominic. I'm sorry, it's Dominic. Sorry. Dominic says, if you have another solution to this same issue, if you have an old airport express lying around or can pick one up on eBay where they generally go for $50 or less, is to use the utility to set the device to join a wireless network and provide it with the credentials to connect to your home Wi-Fi. Once this is done, you can connect an Ethernet cable to the airport express and have a wired device's traffic backhauled over the Wi-Fi. It says, I tried this with a second generation 802.11n version where both Ethernet ports provide this extension. And though it probably works with older models too. He says, I dug my airport express out of the back of a drawer and put it back into service as an AirPlay 2 interface for my stereo, courtesy of the recent unexpected firmware update which added this functionality. He says, it's great. Now I can watch music videos using Apple TV and have it lip synced sound coming out of my big old speakers. So very cool, Dominic. Thank you for that reminder that airport express can do wireless mesh as well. It can also do wired mesh. You can just have it broadcast an SSID. You know, I'll call this all quasi mesh, right? Because you're managing it from multiple interfaces and there's no... With the X-Fi, there's smarts for sure. But adding one brand of access point to extend another brand mesh or another brand's router is not... They create some mesh, but it's not... You don't get the facilitated handoff and things like that between them all because it's not all managed from one place. But it works really well in a lot of places. So thoughts about this now that I've plowed through all that, John. It's not a real mesh, but it's good enough. For many scenarios, it's plenty good enough. Yeah, exactly. Not with you. I don't know if I'd allow such a thing. Oh, no, actually, I have that in my house. Yeah, right. I love kind of quasi mesh for a long time. Well, I'm doing the AirPlay thing. I don't use it as a... No, so actually, I'm not. No, all my meshiness is a hero. Okay. And you just have your airport joining via Ethernet or it just joins as a Wi-Fi client? It's Wi-Fi and it's AirPlay only. It does. It does not have internet. Right, right, right. I see. But the only purpose in life is to let me blast things out of the speakers attached to it. That's cool. Hey, there you go. That's good. It does that great. Yeah, yeah. All right. So Scott, no, Simon, sorry, writes. He says, I have a question which may not have an answer. When I arrive at work, my laptop connects to our free Wi-Fi hotspot for customers, which is slow. I would much rather it connect to my iPhone and tether as I have plenty of 4G data and it's up to 60 megabits per second. At the moment, it connects to the Wi-Fi at the office and then I have to switch and the phone only shows up after five seconds or so. But as I use my MacBook Pro, Touch Bar 13, sporadically throughout the day, I have to do this many times. So is there a way of automating this so that my Mac auto connects only to my phone when I'm at work or when my Mac connects to the O2 free Wi-Fi, it disconnects from that and reconnects to my phone here at the house. So you could tell your Mac not to connect. You could remove your work Wi-Fi from the list in System Preferences Network Wi-Fi advanced and there is the list. But you can also tell it, you don't have to remove it from the list to do this and I'm confirming that this is hopefully... I know the answer. Yeah, it's and this is not just a Mojave thing. You can do this in High Sierra as well. If you go into System Preferences Network Wi-Fi, you can choose the network that like say, choose your work network and then uncheck the box that says automatically join this network so that your device, your MacBook, doesn't automatically join it. Won't forget the credentials. It will remember it, but it won't join it unless you tell it to. And maybe that's the trick for getting it to auto join your phone's network. But I haven't tested this. Have you, John? Do you have the answer? I remember many episodes ago we solved pretty much the same problem. So the thing is, according to Apple's rules and they have these published somewhere, maybe you can find it, but I know we had it in an older episode, a prior episode. Hotspots are actually supposed to get preference as far as the thing that you should join first, but Apple ignores this. So yeah, we went through this and I think the answer was... Well, another answer is you could generate a profile, maybe using Champ for somebody else and make the Wi-Fi. I remember this is how I solved the problem. I created a profile where I deselected auto join for the Wi-Fi network and that way it kind of convinced it. Yeah, you really should do what you said you do anyways, but now that I'm telling you to explicitly ignore this Wi-Fi thing, connect to this hotspot, please, please. I don't think you need to do that with a profile. It's kind of a hack. What you said solves the same problem unchecking that auto join. Just uncheck the box. Yeah, I don't think this was originally in High Sierra. I mean, I could be wrong and I could have missed it, but I don't think this automatically join this network checkbox was an option up until maybe the most recent High Sierra update because Brian Monroe in the chat room was waving the flag saying, dude, no, no, no, it's only a Mojave thing. No, no, no. I'm looking at it right here. I'm on a High Sierra machine. And he's finding the same thing. So I mean, it's possible we simply missed it in all of High Sierra, but more likely that it was just added in. And I've had the two where sometimes I get home and my home Wi-Fi is at the top of my list because it's home. Yeah, of course. But the one that my ISP offers is usually number two or number three on my list. And sometimes, even though I'm in the house, it's still on my ISP because sometimes I'll notice my network doing just really weird. It's like, wow, that's really, really slow. And it's like, not that their service is slow, but it's slower than what I have in the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So every now and then, it's just... Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm trying to think if there is questions here. We have, yeah, what are we doing on time? We'll do one more. All right, this is Andrew. And this, I think, is a good one here to end with. He says, comrades, can you give me insight into what my Mac gets up to when I am not looking? Specifically, he says, I do a carbon copy cloner backup each day at 2 a.m., and it backs up lots of gigs each day. And I don't actually do all that much on my Mac. He says, I can understand a few files, of course, mail and caching, web pages, things from my phones, iPad and Mac, might cache a gig or something. He said, but I'm averaging eight gigs a day. So what is it doing? Who is it talking with? The reason for me asking is that I have solar power and a battery on the house, and I'm watching my energy consumption. All of this backing up to my time capsule, an external drive that runs carbon copy cloner each day at 2 a.m., and to the web consumes energy. I also noticed that when I run clean my Mac, it routinely finds a minimum of two gigs of cruft every day, if I were to run it every day. He says, is there two gigs of stuff on a Mac that it just manufactures by itself? So I took a look at carbon copy cloner, and I couldn't find, maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't find a per file log of everything that it decided to back up. But I feel like I'm missing something. But just in case I'm, okay, well, I'll share my workaround, but then you're just gonna, you're gonna give a better answer. My workaround was turn on safety net and have a look in safety net, right? Because if it's replacing files in the backup, it's gonna show those in safety net and boom, you're good to go. So what did I miss? Well, you may have missed. So I was like, you know what? Does carbon copy cloner make log files? If it does, maybe it would have this level of detail. Okay. So you may ask yourself, where can I find carbon copy cloner's log files? Yeah. Where can I find carbon copy cloner's log files? Yeah, well, I'll paste it in our chat room and we'll paste it in the show notes. Sure. But there are log files, in addition, in that article, which is title work and I find CCC's log files, there's another support article which I think may help as much or more. And the name of that article that links from this article is called using the CCC command line tool to start, stop and monitor CCC backup tasks. I wonder if you do that. It'll tell you what it's doing. Well, I agree with you. I will say this. I didn't explicitly look in the log files to see if it does list a file by file. I have that answer. I have that answer. And because it's right in that first thing that you link to, there is a question in bold that says, where can I find a list of every file that carbon copy cloner has copied? And it says, CCC does not retain that information for each backup task. If you're concerned that CCC is copying too many or too few files, please contact us for assistance. But I think using the safety net would be the workaround here. At least it would give you an idea of what files are being replaced every day. And that might help point you in the right direction. And finally, I'll give another piece of advice. When you're running carbon copy cloner and you bring up the UI, it shows you a running total of the amount of data that it's backed up. And it also shows you where in the directory structure you are. No, I admit this is not the most exciting thing to spend your time doing. But if you're in front of your computer, keep an eye on that. Notice when the number goes up and see where on your computer it is. Yeah. It could be a cache file. As to the question, should I be generating two gigs of something a day? Well, he's generating eight. He's generating eight. Okay, eight, sure. That's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah, but maybe not. I don't know what he's running. Right, same. Yeah. I mean, something that could be that big, I think, would typically be, and it shouldn't be backing that, but like VM files or memory-related swappy things. Well, or if he has... Or it could be some app that's just really excited about telling the world everything it's doing. I don't know. It could also be if he's running VMware or like Fusion or Parallels, or VirtualBox, right, that... What are the things, I'm going to ask this question, because I think we're coming, we're circling the answer here, but the thing is, what are the things that you exclude from your time machine backup? And the things that I exclude, Dave, are my photos library, because anytime anything that it changes, it results in a huge time machine backup, or my Parallels VMs, which I thought it was smart enough to only recognize the segments generally changed. That's true, yeah. But no, it's like, hey, I'm backing up 40 gigs and I'm like, up, it got another VM file. Yeah, let's turn that off. Or photos. For a while it seemed to be smart about it, and then I started doing a lot of movies and stuff like that and sharing them and all that, and all of a sudden it was like, yep, tens of gigs. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Crazy, crazy, crazy. But you know, I bet if you run, you know, the old trick with the OmniDisk Sweeper or some other utility, what are the big files on your system? It may be one of those. And yeah, a VM, a photo library, some sort of library. Yeah. You know? Yeah, I would safety net it. That way you're not guessing. And then you can see what it is. Thank you so much, folks. This has been a blast as always. We told you how to email us. You can call us 224-888-Geek, which John Geek is. None of your business. Four, four, three, three, five. That is correct. I want to thank CacheFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. That's at CacheFly.com. And I want to direct you all to our MacGeekEb forums at MacGeekEb.com slash forums. Great discussion, great resource. Really, really, like we've got the organization down in the way that we all want. And you can participate in that. It's really great. So please, please check it out. MacGeekEb.com slash forums. And of course, a big thank you to our sponsors. Obviously Jamf at Jamf, or Jamf now, I should say at Jamf.com slash MGG. IMAZING.com slash MGG. LinkedIn.com slash MGG. Also, Smilessoftware.com slash podcast. Otherworldcomputing at MacSales.com, barebones.com, and ring.com slash MGG. It's stuck. John, any, uh, any last wishes for me here before I head off? Oh, no, I have to wrap up this, this day. Well, I'll give it what's before and, you know, I'll give it once again here. But it's a great thing, Dave, that you check your license every day to make sure you know how old you are. Because the thing is, Dave, you could be out and about. You could get pulled over. But if you seek mercy from someone, it's best to do it on your birthday because then you probably won't get caught. Maiden.