 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 784 for Tuesday, October 15th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff down, we mash them all together, and the goal is that every single one of us, including us, you know, your hosts, learns at least five new things every week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include two existing sponsors and one new one, lino.com slash mgg, barebones.com, even though they've got something new, they are an existing sponsor and a new one, ancestry.com slash mgg. We will talk about all of those URLs in a little more depth shortly here. But for now, here in Los Angeles, California, I'm Dave Hamilton. What? Oh. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. Yeah. Here I am in LA. Well, technically Sherman Oaks at the at the moment, but, you know, close enough to LA that anybody not in LA would probably just call it LA. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say that you and I are probably almost as far as part as two people could be in the continental United States. I feel like this is the furthest apart we've been when recording a show. I know I've been in like Vegas recording a show, but I don't know that I've ever been quite this far away. So or that you have been. Yeah. Yeah. But oddly today, we started having, well, not oddly, we started having some connection issues when we synced up. The odd part is that it seems like it's from your end, not mine, which makes no sense, but that's how the universe seems to work. So we will go with it. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, it's it's been a little nuts. I'm speaking at Mac Tech later this week on Thursday. If you are in the LA area or wish to come to the LA area, I know that tickets are still available. I will put a link to we've got a we've got a thing that'll save you like 200 bucks, I think, on a registration. So I'll put that promo link in the or the discount link, I should call it in the show notes. And then last week, I spoke actually at Google, believe it or not. And yeah. And because it was a publishers event at Google is actually really good. And then because I had to be in, you know, San Francisco Thursday and Friday and then here, you know, this week, I decided not to spend two days on an airplane flying back and forth to the East Coast to only have like one day at home. So instead, I flew my family out and we spent the weekend in LA touring some colleges and doing some other fun stuff, including a tour of JPL with longtime Mac Geek Hub listener and contributor, Michael Johnston, who who works there now. And he gave us a tour yesterday of NASA JPL, which was pretty fricking awesome. I got to see the Mars rover. What is he, like a rocket scientist or something? Yeah, that's exactly what he is. No, I know. Yeah, it's pretty cool. He got his degree in physics or something. Yeah. Yeah. He's, you know, they do a lot of robotics there. That's JPL is sort of a misnomer today. It's not so much about jet propulsion anymore there, even though that that is how it started. But now most of what they're doing there is robotics. But yeah, they've got the Mars rover. We we had a sort of a weak glimpse at it because it's in the space simulator right now, which is where they can set temperature, atmosphere and vacuum to their liking to test all kinds of different things before before they send stuff up. So it's pretty cool here. I got to see aerogel, John. I never in my life. I barely knew about aerogel, but it's a new band. Yeah, right. No, it's this stuff that is. It's it's ninety nine point two percent air. But but it's gel and they they designed it, I think, to capture like dust particles. But obviously it's really lightweight. You can all it's weird looking at it. You can it's almost not there. It looks like a haze that is that has formed to it. It's bizarre. And I guess it has no shear strength. So if you like, you know, try and like tear it apart and just like basically crumble, but it's got like push and pull strength so you can it can it can hold things. But it can act as an insulator, actually. And of course, very lightweight, which is good for, you know, for space. But yeah, it was crazy, man. Like so crazy to be able to go see all that stuff. But anyway, we toured some colleges and then the family left on a red eye last night and I had some meetings with like ad agencies and stuff today. And now we're doing the show before I get kicked out of my hotel room. So there we go. It's good, right? If you want to do cool stuff and you need a server to do it on, I'm going to tell you about our first sponsor, which is Linode, John, because you can build it on Linode really like this is what they do. They have like this crazy cloud infrastructure there that not only is super powerful, it's super affordable and super easy to use. In fact, it's exactly as difficult to use as you want it to be or exactly as complex, I should say, as you want it to be. So if you want to do rocket science stuff, you can. But you do not need to be a rocket scientist or even a server admin to start up a server at Linode because they have their cloud portal now, which makes it super easy. Sure, you can go to the command line if you want, but you don't have to. You can just use their web interface to not only sign up for a server, but to tell it what you want installed, like you want WordPress, you want to, you know, set up a VPN, really anything. And they've got like tons of these things and you just pick what you want. And your servers start at just five bucks a month for their nano. You pay for what you use. But if you were to leave a nano, which is their smallest server up for an entire month, you'd just pay five bucks. And it's all SSD based. So you're getting fast disk access, even on the lowest priced server there. And you get a twenty dollar credit just because you listen to me tell you this. Go to Linode.com slash MGG use promo code MGG to zero one nine. And that is where you're going to get your 20 bucks. Our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to Ronald, please? I'm going to take us to Ron. Yeah, we've got some quick tips to go through or could be Ronald. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So Ron writes in and says, John and Dave, during installation of Catalina on my twenty nineteen iMac, the process went almost to the end. But setting up lasted for over 30 minutes. This thing. Yeah. I check Google and others have had that issue. One brave soul restarted and it booted normally. I then tried it and everything worked. I thought this could be reassuring to those who experienced this problem on my MacBook Pro downloading times out consistently. Ron, I'm going to tell you a thanks for the tip, but sadly, this behavior is not isolated to Catalina in that I had pretty much the same thing happen with the last Mojave supplemental update. The system would show some progress bars would give me some time estimates. But then I left the room and when I came back, my Mac mini was on and the power light was solid and both my screens were asleep. And, you know, I hit the keyboard and I hit the mouse and nothing. So I mean, the only thing you do in that case really is hold down the power button, which on pretty much any computer, if you hold down the power button for about five seconds, it will shut the machine down. And then you can hit it again and it will start the machine up. Fortunately, that worked in my case. And then once it started up, it resumed it. It's like, oh, OK, yeah, you know, 10 minutes left for applying the update. So the bad news is that the installers often get stuck. I've had it happen. I think you've had it happen, Dave. But the good news is that it seems to bookmark where it was. And then if you restart, it just continues on its merry way. A lot of times if you let it hang, it will make it through. Now, in your case, with the screens being off, you know, non responsive, probably not going to work. But I mean, I could have remote it in and yeah, seen what was going on. But it was like, in that case, I was like, OK, this yeah, it's just that's best to just best to move on over. Yeah. But I have found I think it was back in like the Sierra days that we realized that there was a very long lag introduced to the upgrade process. If you had some stuff or some significant amount of stuff installed via it to the command line via like a package manager, like brew or homebrew or something like that. I think that mucks with what like it's got to move all that stuff over and it's not efficient about dealing with that. And I think that's potentially for some of us the reason for those lags. But but, you know, John and Ron, you're both right. Like either wait it out or, you know, force a reboot. Generally speaking, the worst thing that I've seen and I'm sure others have seen worse, where it's catastrophic and it can't come back and you've got to go to a backup. So make sure you have a backup. But the worst that I've seen is that you restart it and it comes back up in the previous OS with, you know, no indication that there might have been an attempt at installing something new. And then you just start over. So there you go. Cool, Leo. All right. Thanks. Are we good on that one, John? I think so. I will remember that tip because I have not yet upgraded either of my systems to Catalina. But I'm in the final stages of creating all of the backups, including Time Machine and a clone. So if things go south, I can get back to a known state. I am using Catalina today to record this show. And it's super handy because I can use Sidecar with my iPad and get more screens in my hotel room, which when I've got everything up to record the show is actually kind of nice. And so far, so good. Like, if you're hearing this, it means it probably worked. Or we used one of our various backup recordings and you didn't know. But that either way, it's good. All right, Peter, quick tip. He says this may be a little obvious to some, but it took me a couple of tries before I realized I was overthinking it. I was very excited about the new desktop features, including it in Safari for iPad OS. I do a lot of work that involves downloading comma separated value CSV files or text files and manipulating them in spreadsheets. This has always made me hesitate to leave my laptop behind when traveling, just in case I was called upon to do that sort of thing. But when I heard about being able to run Google Sheets in Safari coupled with an actual download manager, I was optimistic. My first couple of attempts were disappointing because every time I tried to open a Google Sheet from Google Drives app, it insisted upon opening the Sheets app, which frankly just doesn't cut it for me with what I need to do. I found that I could get the link to the sheet from within Drive and paste that into Safari. But that was a huge pain, especially if I wanted to make a new sheet. So I thought, what if I just delete the Sheets app from my iPad? Then it won't have any choice but to open in Safari. Wrong. He says, if I tapped on a sheet in Drive or created a new one, it opened a viewer within the Drive app and tried to get me to redownload the Sheets app or jump through the aforementioned hoops. Finally, I realized the actual answer. Ditch all of the apps. Go to drive.google.com in Safari, just like I do on my Mac and work from there. All perfect success. So thank you for that tip. I may be deleting the Google Sheets and Drive Google Drive app from my iPad for exactly this reason. Good stuff, man. This is good. I like this. I like it. Sometimes you got to outsmart it, John, or it outsmarts you. But you've got to make sure you don't outsmart yourself. That's the trick, right? How would you even do that? I out. I have made a lifetime of outsmarting myself. I really have, you know, like, I mean, I guess I guess we call it overthinking things. Maybe that's that's the nice way we say it. But it's, you know, how many times have I thought to myself? Oh, man, I outsmarted myself on this one. Happens. It happens. You want to take us to Mark? Mark's got a quickie. Mark writes and says, remove languages on your Mac. If you don't want or need, save me over 300 megabytes of wasted space. And the app is called Monolingual, and it's on GitHub. So I would assume it's open source and a freebie. And that's cool. I think it's similar to... So there's a program that I think both you and I like. It's, you can get it through Setup. But CleanMyMac 10 does something similar is that it has a cleanup system junk category. And I think it's doing something similar is that... An app developer can choose to include resources for languages other than English. Now, we're in America here. And we're all assuming that, well, you know, everything should just be in American English. Well, no, come on, there's the rest of the world there. And so apps can have resources embedded with them that represent things in other languages. And that's cool if you're not in America and don't speak American English. It makes me a bit nervous. I'm with you on this. Utilities that kind of... It makes me a bit nervous because what it's doing, as far as I can tell, it's it's digging into an app and yanking things out of there. And I'm wondering if that's gonna set off an alarm some day is that, you know, I mean, especially if the app is signed and stuff, I mean, or I guess the app signing thing doesn't consider removing languages as a violation. As far as I can tell, because otherwise we hear people screaming about it. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, I didn't even think about that. My concern with this is I'm always worried, like, when do I need to do it again? Like, do I have to run this once a week because with every app update or every, you know, or certainly after like a point OS update or something like that, is it gonna reinsert all this stuff? How, and is 300 megs worth this particular headache? I guess is really the question. Cause like you, I'm a little, it has worked. I've done it. It's worked for me. Obviously it works for Mark and many, many others out there. But I just always wonder like, is it really worth it to mess with like, I don't know? I would say the only situation is it's worth it is that if you have Mac with a puny little SSD and every megabyte literally counts. I guess that's true. Like, 256. If you're on a 128, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. Right, then 300 megs. I mean, it's something to, you have a one terabyte SSD that's not then I wouldn't bother, but if you have a small SSD, drive, then yeah, hey, you know, as Dave said, make sure you make a backup beforehand. We need to make a backup of your internet connection, John. You're turning into a Cylon over there. I don't know what it is. I'm seeing like tons of packet loss from you. Yeah. I mean, you were intelligible. Like I don't think anybody lost the message there. So I think we're okay, but I would like it if that went away. I think it has gone away. And now, yeah, it's very cyclical. I don't know if my ISP is having a, yeah. I mean, I see the bar in a Discord, it's like three green bars and then all of a sudden it goes red and then, you know, you suggested that I run a ping in the background and I've noticed for the most part, I'm getting like 20 millisecond pings to Apple.com, which I think is pretty good. But every now and then, it either drops one and then the ping doesn't come back or I see it go up into like the hundreds. So we'll roll the dice. It's the dropping that makes me, it's bizarre. And yeah, you're dropping them to no matter. The weird part is you are not dropping them to specific locations. Like we've tested various different points around the country at least and they all seem to drop simultaneously. Did you were also testing your pings on your laptop as well? Did that also lose them at the same time that your desktop didn't? It didn't lose them, but I saw recently, so there were two pings. One was 334 and one was 570 and then it went back to the 20, 1920, 21 millisecond. Okay, so it's seeing, so the thing isn't isolated to just one computer at your house, it's the entire house and perhaps beyond. So you tried rebooting your cable modem and that didn't work. I did that. I may restart my switch after we're done here. I don't wanna do that now. No, that might be bad. I mean, if it gets really bad, we might have you. Actually, well, your switch could be it. It could also be your, oh, it could be your switch. That's true. Are you doing like a big data transfer to your new Synology or something? Not that I'm aware of. Okay. All right, we will keep moving. We will go to, but oh, I will say, we mentioned that you're doing a ping test. The ping that I usually do in the background and that you're doing is just a ping www.apple.com. You open the terminal, you type literally ping space www.apple.com, hit enter, and it will just once per second, it sends a little beacon out to Apple's web server, which then returns back to you. It tells you how long it took for that to happen. That's the measurement in milliseconds. And then if one doesn't come back, it also tells you that and that's packet loss versus latency, which is the amount of time that it takes to come around. And you know, there is no wrong number for the latency. I mean, John, you were saying 20 milliseconds. That's, I mean, that's a really good number, but a hundred milliseconds isn't necessarily a bad number. It's more about the consistency. What is your, what does your connection look like when it's normal and when it's not normal and when you're experiencing other problems? And that that's, and if you're losing packets, especially from Apple's server, which never seems to lose them on its own, it would be something else causing that, you know, between you and them, that's the way we do it. One of our favorite troubleshooting tips here. I mean, it could, I don't know. I mean, it could be there's, I don't know. I mean, typically most audio streaming apps use UDP as the protocol, right? Because UDP, which is Unix Datacram, Unix Datacram protocol, there we go. I got that out of my system. Ha ha ha. User Datagram protocol. That's what Wikipedia says, no? I think they're wrong. Okay, that could be. But anyways, UDP, so that there's two protocols, there's two ways you can send packets using TCPIP. There's UDP and there's TCP. UDP is like kind of high performing, but it doesn't offer things like guaranteeing that stuff was sent, but it's much, much more efficient. And especially with audio and stuff, you can probably, or video streaming, I think also uses UDP. You can probably afford to lose a few packets and not notice that anything's terribly wrong. Right. But when you, oh yes, you're doing the notes here. Of course, there's another protocol. ICMP is what Ping does, that's another. Yep. We're digging a bit too deep here, I guess. Well, no. Hey, look them up. We put them in the show notes here. Yeah. You can read up on them. But if you're losing packets with one, if you're losing packets with one, you would be losing them with others in a scenario like this, which is why it's sort of relevant. I'm thinking TCP may be a bit more aggressive about trying to guarantee that the traffic is delivered, which is kind of the point I was making. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it won't get there in order. And that's the issue. Whereas UDP, it's just streaming it out so that because if I get your voice in the wrong order, that's actually not valuable, right? Whereas if I get my email data in the wrong order and then it's reassembled on this end, that's fine. I'm pretty sure UDP also doesn't guarantee order of delivery. That's what I'm saying. TCP. To kind of reassemble it. Well, UDP just delivers the packet when it arrives and if it doesn't make it, it just discards it. So that you're not getting that weird out-of-order thing. As I understood it. Right. And so I got a UDP joke for you. You ready for this? A UDP packet walks into a bar. Nobody pays attention to him. So he left. Not a very good joke. It's funny, though. It's funny. I mean, you know, it's a keep joke. What do you want? But look at the name of the show, folks. It's MacGeekup. In fact, go to macgeekup.com and sign up for our email newsletter so that you get the show notes and all of the links we just talked about delivered straight to your inbox every single week. That's good stuff. All right. We do have a lot to get through though. Bill has a, so we're failing at our stated mission of QuickTips because we're taking too long with them. Bill says, in regards to the last episode, the new column layout in mail in Catalina. He says, I don't have the same problem that you describe in the podcast. He says, like you, I have stuck with the classic view in mail prior to Catalina. In addition to having the column layout selected in the view menu by default after the upgrade, I then manually, and this is the Quick Tip, I manually selected show date and time from the view menu. This gives me both the date and the time for each message. And I can see both on my screen and both on my, on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro at all times. Nothing is being crowded out so that I can't see them, even if I dramatically shrink the width of the window to something I'd never really use, such as like four inches. Have you selected show date and time, Dave? Well, I have now, Bill, and thank you for this because that's super valuable. I had no idea that was there. And this is, that's the beauty of Quick Tips. So that does make it better. I mean, it's still one Mondo column, but it, so you can't adjust the widths, but that show date and time option is not selected by default if you come over from Mojave in classic mode. So highly recommend that if you are or were a classic mode user, when you get to Catalina, go to the view menu in mail and choose show date and time. Very, very handy. Thank you, Bill. You rock. Last Quick Tip here, John, you wanna tell us what Paul has to say? I'm amazed at what Paul has to say. So Paul says, no matter how much I turned up the volume on the Apple TV, the sound was way too low on my AirPods. I found this nifty utility on the Apple TV that fixed the problem. If you go to the settings and then video and audio, scroll down to calibration and you will then see wireless audio sync. When you click on that, it will give you the instructions to follow to do the wireless audio sync. This quick wireless audio sync calibration fixed all my audio issues on my AirPods. Paul, thanks, Paul. That's great. No, it's a good tip. I mean, I'm not an AirPod user at the moment, but you would, I would think, Dave, you're the audio guy more than me. You would think that the Apple TV would be able to figure out that it isn't given enough oomph to whatever it's talking to or the AirPods. It just seems weird to me that you would get into this situation where you couldn't get enough volume. I agree with you. I've never run into this. So perhaps it's not a common thing, but it is nice to know that there's a path to solve it that doesn't involve, you know, just wipe it and refresh, you know, which is good. Yep, what I do like is that he did point out. So we found, like in the past, we found that there was like this home screen reconstitution thing in the Apple TV, but there's also some other good things, Dave. So I've been in that section for different reasons. So they also have a zoom and overscan section, as well as a color bar section in the calibration section to make sure you get your video right, because especially if you're getting a high end, like I have now, and I think you have, Dave, 4K, UHD, you know, SuperGWIS TV, you may have to do something special in order to get the best quality out of it. So one choice that they have is check HDMI connection, which I thought was kind of interesting because in theory, what it does is checks your HDMI cable to make sure it has enough bandwidth to do fancy pants, 4K and UHD video, and it tests that in the video section. I almost thought there wasn't much of a difference. I mean, I have HDMI cables that I bought years ago from Monoprice and the Apple TV said, yep, they're good, you're 4K, go for it. The other setting I remember from video, Dave, is chroma, which I think is like a color map or something, and the thing is that also I think is dependent upon the type of TV you have, and you can set your chroma to I think 422 or 442, 442 being better, but it may not work. Really? So we're getting into video, which yeah, but there's a chroma setting on the Apple TV, and I think there was also one on the UHD DVD drive that I got or Blu-ray drive that I got as well, so whatever video device you have, hey, dive in and look at some of these settings, you may be able to get a better picture than what the default is, so. That's pretty cool. I had no idea about, I mean, Did you find an article on that? Oh my gosh. I put a knowledge-based article in about that screen. I don't know that it goes all that deep into it, but it's a place to start, so yeah. Pretty cool. All right, let's see. You have another quick tip actually from Aaron. Yeah, we're just, we're full of quick tips here. Yeah. I mean, we're a half hour into the show, so I don't know if they were all that quick, but they're tips and they're valuable, so that's good. So Aaron writes in and says, here's a nice little quick tip. I love Apple's refurb store, but if someone is set on brand new and is military or a veteran, Apple has a little-known military slash veteran store. The link for the store is at the bottom of the Apple website under shop for veterans and military. Once your military status is verified, you get a nice little discount on Apple products, even on the new iPhone 11 Pro slash Max. The fish shake is that you cannot use that discount price of the iPhone with the iPhone upgrade program. Apple support could not explain why, but did confirm I could not use the discount with iPhone upgrade program. Hopefully it'll change this for iPhone 12. Yeah, well, the iPhone upgrade program is through, yeah, I don't know why the price would matter. I wonder if like the employee prices work with the iPhone upgrade program. I bet they don't, right? But who knows, I don't know how that, yeah. Yeah, but that is good, that's good. Yeah, I saw that there, and they list some of the other stores. So they have a government store, an education store, I think a business store. Back in the day when I was doing the corporate thing, they had an employee purchase program, and there's also, so if you know somebody that works at Apple, and Dave and I probably do, and you're on good terms with them, Apple employees can extend a friends and family discount, which is like 10 or 15%. So they have a limited number of things that they can use that for every year. So don't overly pester your Apple employee friends, but yes, they can, that's true. That's true, yeah. I think I don't know what the number is. I think it's somewhere between five and 10 times a year that they can extend that to friends and family. So if you know somebody that works at Apple, be extra nice to them, so they'll give you a discount. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's, actually, I want to take a minute here and talk about Ancestry, which is our next sponsor here. Very cool stuff. We've been able to start submitting to them. We haven't gotten our results back yet, but this is, it's really cool because I have, obviously, two sides of my family. I've got my mother and my father. My mother's side, my uncle over there has done so much genealogy research and it's really cool, like the stuff that he has learned over decades and decades about like getting into all this stuff and it makes me kind of, or it has made me sort of, you know, feel like, wow, we have all this information on one side. We don't have a lot of information on the other. Well, Ancestry and their Ancestry DNA product really can help and so I've submitted to Ancestry DNA to get more information and, you know, I'm excited about this because it can give you so much more information than just the places that you're from. It can trace your ancestors' journeys over time and it find out, you know, how and why your family moved from place to place because they've combined the DNA results with over 100 million family trees and billions of records to give that insight, right? Into your genealogy and your origins. Like I said, I'm really excited to find out what they can tell me about my family and especially on my dad's side but also perhaps to confirm some of the stuff that my uncle has found on that side and, you know, perhaps check some boxes that we didn't know about, really, really cool stuff and, you know, we're Apple users, privacy is a super important thing to us and I was really happy to see how seriously Ancestry takes privacy here. It's awesome. I'm so glad, Dave, because that was the first thing I asked you when you asked me, John, do you want a kit? And I'm like, dude, I don't want to hand up my DNA to just anybody. Right. No. Do they have a policy? They do and you can delete your data at any time. They take it super seriously and I'm so happy to see that. So it's super easy to get started and you get a discount. So you go to ancestry.com slash mgg today and that gives you 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. That's Ancestry DNA. Sorry, it's your Ancestry DNA kit. The URL is ancestry.com slash mgg for 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. I'll say it one more time. Ancestry.com slash mgg are thanks to Ancestry for sponsoring this episode and we'll have more to come on that as, you know, we get our results and things like that. Well, I can't wait actually because I'm first generation American. Right. My family before me, as you can probably assume from the name Braun, is German. So I'd be very interested how farther tendrils can reach out as far as those sort of records. Cool. I do. Your family's more... How many generations have you had? I want to tell me, but... Yeah. You've had more generations than I have in this country, right? Correct. That's right. Yeah, but we'll get the data. We'll talk about it. So our thanks to Ancestry. Again, it's ancestry.com slash mgg to get 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. And our thanks to Ancestry for sponsoring this episode. All right. Cool. Fun. Another fun thing, John. I noticed a product or actually just a feature now called Linksys Aware. This is something that is on the tri-band Linksys vellop mesh units. And it's been added via software. And it can essentially now become a motion sensor in your home using the Wi-Fi radios, which is really kind of cool. It doesn't require any additional hardware other than having a tri-band vellop, you know, Linksys vellop thing in your home. And you can personalize it so that it won't like tell you if your pets are moving around in your home and you can adjust the sensitivity levels and all that stuff. Very, very cool stuff. I guess it's using the it can see. No, no, Linksys vellop is is 2.4. It's got one 2.4 and two five gigahertz radios in the tri-band units. But my guess is they, you know, they can see each other, right? And they know the signal strength that they see to and from each unit, right? So if that changes because, say, there is interference moving between them, that is motion. And so, you know, that something has moved of a certain size, density, et cetera. So I haven't tried this out yet. I noticed it just before I started my trip. So I do have a vellop set at home. I don't generally use it, to be honest. They're honestly, I wasn't sure if Linksys was really paying attention to the vellop line. It seemed like maybe they had sort of kind of moved past it. But I guess not, which is good news. So I'm curious, I'm eager to check this out. Pretty cool, but at least the idea is pretty cool. So, right? Fun. Crazy, right? Yeah, I'll have to think around here. But the thing is, I did see at the last couple of CES various companies that would use RF beacons to as you. Yeah, as I guess these guys are doing also to detect when there were people or pets or something in the way. And it would assume that it's probably a person or again, a pet or something like that. Something, right? Yeah. My guess is they're doing some sort of machine or have done some sort of machine learning to just, you know, get pattern after pattern after pattern and then lump them all together. So, yeah, pretty cool, pretty cool. All right, John, you want to tell us about car play? Or at least shared listener, John's cool stuff found with car play here? Yeah, once I stop getting distracted here and bring up get away from that. And oh, that's from John. Awesome. All right. Here we go. OK. John writes, here's a good one. I usually send screenshots to people when I'm texting. And today, while I was sending a screenshot to my wife, my phone was plugged into the car and car play. And I had the Waze app up on the screen. So when I sent the screenshot of the iPhone screen, it not only took a screenshot of the iPhone screen, it also took a screenshot of the car play Waze screen. I never knew it did that. It does. I have mixed feelings about this. Number one, I don't have a car play. I mean, I have advanced technology in my car that can let me play my music and stuff, but I don't have car play. Right. But the only thing that appeared in my mind here is. We should probably make people aware of this because you may not want to send your car play screenshots to someone. Unintentionally, right? Sure. Like any screenshot. Because to me, it doesn't sound like it doesn't sound like Apple makes it clear that if you do a screenshot and car play is engaged, that you're going to be sending multiple screenshots to someone. No, it totally does. I mean, you're right. Out of out of the gate, when you think about it, it's not clear. But when you do it and make that screenshot, you actually see thumbnails for two different screenshots. I mean, it's it's so there. So could you swipe away the other one if you wanted to? There are two separate images in your camera roll or or in your message, or, you know, however you're using it. Yeah. And but it is pretty cool to be able to get screenshots of, you know, your car play stuff. I remember the first time I was like in traffic in Boston. It was the first time I'd seen my my phone, say, five G E, right? Because where we are in New Hampshire, we don't get the five G E thing on AT&T. I mean, it's all sort of, you know, who it's not real five G. Don't get excited. But I was like, yeah, you know, there it is. So I just reached down and did the screenshot thing on my phone and kept driving. I didn't look at my phone. I just know how to do the, you know, the screenshot gesture. And so I just reached down and did it. And when I got home to show my son, I was like, hey, you know, the five G E is like, wait a minute, there's the screenshot of, you know, right next to it in my camera roll was like, wait, there's a screenshot of actual car play, which is cool. So if you've got, especially if you need it for support reasons, for an app developer or or there's something on your car play screen that you want to share with somebody, you can. It just takes the shot. So it takes two pictures every time what you what what the phone screen shows and what the car play screen is showing. So yeah, it's pretty cool. I know. I'm curious if there's a way to disable that. I don't think you'd want to iOS. I mean, oh, OK, I mean, you could dismiss it as you just dismiss it and I'm with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but you're right. I mean, it is adding extra pictures to your camera roll, but you can just toss them if you don't want to. So. Yeah. All right. We talked about shortcuts in the last episode and triggers. And by the way, the trigger that I realized I could make during the episode seems to be working flawlessly where it launches an app when it connects to the certain Bluetooth device. It's great. So I'm very happy that we did last week's episode for a variety of reasons, that being pretty much at the top of the list. But we have an audio comment from JP and I'm going to see if technology will let me play it for you all now. Right. There we are. Hey, John and Dave, JP on the road, listening to the latest MGG podcast. The little shortcuts stuff you were talking about is fascinating. And I've been thinking about doing the exact same thing that Dave, you apparently are doing whenever you leave your house or return to your house, you can set your phone to turn off Wi-Fi because I've been just telling Siri to do it because when I'm out in the world, I turn Wi-Fi off because it really confuses the cell service and it tries to connect to things. And it ends up just getting in the way with my Internet connection. I'm going to try that on the shortcut. The app. But my question is this. I have two homes. I have one in California and one in New England. Do I have to set up a separate shortcut for each home? Airquote that I designate. Or do I have to have one and every time I go from one to the other, just change it? How granular is that? Cut me off. You cut yourself off, which is even better, because I'm not sure what I would have done here if you like decided that that was a good time to let us know your bank pin code or something. I would have had to edit the show. So thanks, JP. But yes, you are absolutely right. I think the easiest way to solve this is to just create essentially four different personal automation triggers, you know, one that is when you leave your home in California here, one when you arrive back and then mirrors of those, one when you leave your home in New England, one when you arrive back. But I'm not doing this with Geo triggers. I could be. There's nothing that would stop me and that's a great one. But because I use CarPlay, I am using it that when my car connects to CarPlay, which also can be a trigger in personal automation, when my car connects to CarPlay, it turns off Wi-Fi. And when my car disconnects from CarPlay, it turns on Wi-Fi. But what that means is I am doing things a little differently than what you want. I am OK having Wi-Fi on while I'm out and about. I just don't have it on while I'm driving because it would, like we said last week, it starts to get really wonky. Sometimes you stop the light and it's like, oh, do you want to connect to this network? It's like, no. And then it's like, oh, I can't get directions because the Wi-Fi I grabbed is terrible. It's like, right, I didn't want you to grab Wi-Fi from the corner of the street here. So that's how I'm doing it. But you certainly can do it with a geofence trigger. And I see no reason why that wouldn't work. I mean, of course, it's technology, so there's probably a slew of reasons why it wouldn't work at times. But yeah, yeah, I like it. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, John, you want to you want to take us to Tom there, my friend? Oh, where's Tom? Where is he? He's next. Right after JP lost. Ah, there we go. OK, yep. No, we're here. OK, no, we're just skipping stuff. Real time editing, I guess. Always. All right. So, yeah, I've got to pay attention, I guess. Right. OK. So which I'm really good at. Right, Dave? I'm sorry. What was that, John? So Tom has a good one here. And I think you may have something to add a little later, Dave. But Tom says I have a late 2012 27 inch iMac with a fusion drive and I'm considering swapping the one terabyte spindle drive for a one terabyte SSD. That sounds like a good move. Yeah, I realized that I could also replace the blade drive. In this case, the blade drive is, I think, the PCIe SSD portion of the of the fusion drive. Right, Dave? I think that's right. Yeah, call it a blade drive, because I guess it has some sort of wacky adapter, which is a pain in the neck. But right, right. So I was thinking I could also replace the the SSD portion of the fusion drive, but that involves gutting the whole unit to get at the blade drive on the back of the motherboard. So I figure and I go the easy route and just replace the main drive since it's now seven years old and tempting fate. My question is this, do you think I should recreate a fusion drive once I install the SSD or simply leave them as two devices? I'm wondering about the wisdom of tying the new SSD to another drive, which is now seven years old and has probably gone through quite a few of its right cycles. What do you think? I'm going to tell you what I think. I'm going to give you some guidance into what path you should take. The first thing is so I fix it. We're we'll post these, hopefully, in the show notes here. But so I fix it has two guides for replacing both the hard drive and the blade drive on the iMac Intel 27 inch. It's also called the EMC 2546. And they got two guides. So the one guide. So on both of them, as you know, we've talked about I fix them before. We love these guys. They show the difficulty for both of these being difficult and looking at some of the videos and the screenshots. I would agree is that you got to get a special cutter and you got to be really careful and you don't want to rip the cables out and stuff like that. But the steps involved to get to the blade drive is 58 steps versus 43 steps for the hard disk drive. So I would say you'd be fine breaking up the band or breaking up the pair of Dave. Since the SSD tends to be puny in most fusion drive configurations, right? Right. I don't know what this I was I was searching in. I was trying to find out the size, the actual size of the SSD, and I couldn't find it through any of the tools that I normally use. I don't know if it's 256 or 512, but it's almost certainly smaller than the rotational hard drive. So. Oh, it can be really small in some of those, too. Like like 128 or or even less. Yeah. Yeah. It used to be bigger, but then they got then they got smaller. So, yeah. Now, what you can do. So here's a nice thing. So there's this thing we've talked about in past called smart, which is a system monitoring and reporting technology or something like that. But anyways, it's not only an indicator of when a drive fails and it almost never tells you that a drive is going to fail. But it also there's a whole bunch of parameters stored within the drive. And fortunately, SSDs should, or at least both that I have, Dave, have a parameter called two or two life percent lifetime remaining. In the case of one of the machines that I was on, Dave, it was three, which means, OK, you know, you got 93 percent, you know, so through ware leveling and all of this stuff here. So basically, the drive kind of estimates how many right cycle, as far as I can tell what this is saying is, OK, this is how many right cycles have occurred. And, you know, take this number and do what you will with it. The SSD I got in the machine that I checked in on Dave, I got around 2014. And this is my daily driver and if it's at 93 percent. So after five years, I've lost 7 percent. Depending on the SSD that you have and how much activity it has seen, you may be OK. I would still lean towards not fusioning it. The other headscratcher I had, Dave, is can you fusion two SSDs? And apparently, the answer is yes. Yeah, you could. I don't know why you would do that because a fusion drive rate. It's like you you stitch them together so they appear as one drive. But yeah, if you'd want to do that with a puny Apple SSD and a larger one. So I see what you're saying. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't do that because fusion is built to have one spindle and one SSD and it's moving data around between the two of them. Like actively, it's not just it's not like raid where where you could just, you know, stripe them together and make one large volume. It it does that. But it's also actively moving data between them based on what you're doing and where it thinks, you know, the the faster date, the faster drive access of the one SSD of the pair would be better. So I don't know that fusioning two SSDs would make sense. And honestly, I would not do fusion. I would not create a fusion drive. Even if he were replacing the spindle with the spindle and the SSD with an SSD, I would just say, you know, get an SSD that's big enough to boot from. And two fifty six is probably it. Although that the for aftermarket stuff, the difference between two fifty six and five twelve these days or two fifty and five hundred is pretty negligible, especially if you're willing to go through, you know, forty three steps to to put that in there. I would I would say, you know, just just, you know, keep them separate. I also would skip the forty three or fifty eight steps. And I would just use a USB based SSD to boot from and forget about it. It might be way easier. Um, you know, I didn't know I could bring it up in Mac Tracker. I mean, does that vintage machine have USB three? Oh, it's a twenty twelve. You're right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you could get this. I have Thunderbolt because you could Thunderbolt to USB three. Yes, I think it has Thunderbolt one, the ten gigabit flavor. Yeah, just more than enough. Yeah. So rather because I looked at this and popping that thing open looks to be a real chore. Yes, I agree that this was one that had the glue and you needed like a cutter or like a pizza, you know, it looked like a pizza cutter. Yeah. No, it's not easy to get. It's not easy to get into this this vintage of Mac. They don't make it easy for you to replace the hard drive. No, but it says that in Mac Tracker on this twenty seven inch late twenty twelve I Mac, right? There it is. Has, you're right, two Thunderbolt one ports. So up to ten gigabits per second. And it says it has four USB ports that each go up to five gigabits per second. So that's USB three. Oh, USB three. So I would just do USB three and then then be done with it. Like there's no reason to start digging that machine apart then drive yourself crazy, unless you want to. That can be fun. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, I could see the comfort of having the internal drive be the one that you deal with rather than external. Because then now you got these two drives kind of hanging around doing nothing. I mean, I suppose you could just, you know, disable them somehow. Yeah. Well, I have that with my twenty eleven I Mac, the one that used to be in the studio, it has one drive that's dead inside it. And that it is a pain in the neck because it there are times because the drive is completely dead. There are there's like a lag of it doing things. So if I if I want to take that drive out, it would actually make the experience of the machine better. But but I have not done that yet. I will some point, you know, maybe maybe when my kids are home over Christmas break, we'll just like, you know, make a family event of taking it apart. All right. So what I'd say is, you know, get the SSD. Yeah, maybe try it. So I think for your suggestion, try it in an external enclosure via USB three or Thunderbolt and see if the performance meets your needs. If not, then, you know, go to the next level and rip the thing open and replace the internal rotational drive with the SSD. And I guess you need an adapter, right? Yeah, you probably would. Yeah, yeah. Check those I fix it links. They'll they'll set you up with those. Oh, yeah. All right. Harry writes in, he says, in a couple of weeks, I'm traveling to Italy for two weeks. I am undecided what my best option is for cell service on my iPhone. I need to find a way that my family can get a hold of me if needed, but not anyone else, especially not work, since I don't want to get caught while on vacation. At the same time, I need to be able to phone home if I need to. Obviously, I'd rather not carry two phones and I don't want to lose access to all my stuff that lives on my current iPhone. Initially, my thought had been to use something like gig sky or true phone for that primary data plan and then use Google Voice or Skype or something, some similar voice service with a US telephone number. That actually works. He says that sounded great until I realized that even if I had great data service, my cell service would still be active in Italy and AT&T would charge me enough that it would be outrageously expensive, even using their international plan for two weeks. The phone call to AT&T wasn't very helpful, except that I learned that according to customer service, even if I routed all incoming calls to my voicemail, I would incur an international roaming charge with each one since this is handled on the phone and not server side. That is a very good point. If you forward your phone to your voicemail automatically, it still routes through wherever your phone was when it rang, unless you're in airplane mode or have your data turned off some other way. In which case, then no, your cell service, I don't want to say your data, but your cell service turned off some other way, then no, it won't work. And it will route server side. So it will default to server side. It is possible server side, but it does not happen that way if your phone is live somewhere else in the world. So he says, other thoughts or other other options I thought about were number one, buying a local SIM card from an Italian cell carrier and just use the data for VoIP about 30 bucks with a small allocation of data. Not ideal, but doable. Get a Google Fi SIM knowing that not all of their features are supported on iPhones as they are still in beta beta, not withstanding. This is promising because I but I need to be able to make calls back to the US if necessary and can't find anything about calls from Italy back to the US being included in their free calls and text plan. And if not, what the cost would be number three, by a cheap throwaway prepaid phone in Italy, you can live like a spy. That'd be awesome. This would work, but all of the plans seem to have microscopic data. And then I would have to figure out what to do with the phone when I'm finished. Number four, just take the SIM card out of the phone and provided it would still connect to an eSIM data carrier without it. Live with the frequent error messages about no SIM being installed. So, yeah, number four would work. I'm not even sure that you would get error messages if you were connected to an eSIM plan. I think it might be OK. I haven't tried that, but I think that might work. Taking the SIM out, though, is definite or taking your AT&T SIM out is definitely something I would recommend so that you are not getting those, you know, charges for all the various things we already discussed. Second to that, or perhaps option number five, would be get a T-Mobile SIM card here in the US before you leave. Get a month long plan from them. They they have unlimited calling pretty much in, you know, it's like 130 countries or something, you get to use your calling and your data there. So that might be an option that might actually cost you more, though, than buying a local SIM once you land in Italy. It is nearly impossible, in my experience, to buy a SIM in a country that you are not physically standing in. When we went to Europe, we did. In fact, we had several Mackie Kebbl listeners that sort of helped us get some SIMs from a UK carrier ahead of time. But it was a real pain in the neck, even with all of their help. Because once I got the SIM, I couldn't register to it because I wasn't in the UK. I didn't have a UK address on my credit card. I didn't like it was a massive sort of I had to use some shady third party company that was doing it. And then they stopped after I did two of the four of them. It was it was it was a mess. The good news is you can get off an airplane and and like grab a SIM or something like that and you're good to go. So I think those are the options. I feel like there should be an eSIM option that gets you not just data, but also calling. And maybe Truphone is that I know gig sky is not that gig sky is data only. But Truphone might be your option there. But yeah, yeah. So so I hopefully that helps. But the simplest option I think is get off the plane and buy it, you know, buy a SIM there and take your AT&C SIM out. Don't lose it. Don't lose it because you're going to want it when you come home. But but otherwise, there you go. Hopefully that helps. Any thoughts on that, John? I know you probably haven't put a lot of thought into this. But no, I mean, the last time when I traveled to Europe, I actually had to do a wacky forwarding thing right to a phone that I temporarily because it was CDMA and that wasn't really big in Europe. So but they were able they rented me a phone which I could forward my US phone to the one that they rented to me and people could reach me. Sure. Sure. Yeah, it was pretty pricey right now because. Well, but now that's that's not really a problem anymore because you're not on CDMA anymore, right? Because you're like well moved to LTE kind of. But I have well, I have GSM and CDMA. Right, right. That's you're not limited to CDMA with Verizon anymore. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. And they actually offer. Plans where, yeah, they base it that if if you use the phone, then we're going to charge you X dollars per day. Right. If you're in Europe and use your phone. Yeah. So, no, I have yet to experience that the joy of finding a alternative voice or data plan. Yes. When traveling. Yeah, it's it, you know, I guess that I feel like I'm missing something with the ESIM thing. And I probably as I'm driving to my next destination after we record this here, it'll be like, oh, right. So but maybe one of you will write in feedback at MacGicab.com would be the place to tell us what we missed because we'd love to to know what we missed so we can share it. Despite this temperamental connection, Dave, I think I heard you say feedback at MacGicab.com. And despite the temperamental connection, you are correct that I said feedback at MacGicab.com. You know what I'm also excited about, John, is BibiEdit13 is out. And I am so stoked about this. And they're one of our sponsors this week, too. But if you haven't checked out BibiEdit13, you want to do this, right? Because if you're like me and you know the value of using regular expressions or as some of us like to call it, grep. But you haven't memorized the entirety of the grep command set so that it can actually be valuable to you and you're like me and you just avoid it and do it like in more difficult but easier to comprehend ways. BibiEdit13 is like as I said to them when they were telling us about this, John. They could package up their grep regular expression features that they've added to this and sell it as a separate product. So you could think about BibiEdit as your grep cheat sheet, your pattern playground, which is really cool to be able to like have a text document up and start typing in, you know, your regular expression and have it highlight right there on the screen. No longer do you have to go and find some janky JavaScript website that does this badly. You just use BibiEdit. So you could just buy this and then you get this awesome text editor thrown in for free, right? It's amazing what they've done here. As as Rich Siegel said, it's educational for new users, supportive for existing ones. But most importantly, for someone like me, it gets me across the gap. I've been using it since it came out and it's freaking amazing. So you've got to go check this out. Go to barebones.com. You can download a free copy of BibiEdit and all of the features are free for 30 days, including the new pattern playground. And then after 30 days, if you want to keep using all of the features, it's forty nine ninety nine for a new license or twenty nine ninety nine for an upgrade from any twelve dot X thirty nine ninety nine from anything eleven dot X and earlier. It's amazing, but go get it. Go download your free copy. It's also in the Mac App Store for three ninety nine monthly or forty bucks a year. Go, go, go, go, go, go. You can be like us and you can be just as excited as me because I think you probably will be once you realize that this is the thing that's going to not only teach you the right way to use regular expressions, but it'll be your support like four months down the road. When you're like, great, how does that work again? You just put it in. It's like, all right, that's how it works. It's got the little cheat sheets and the thing. It's amazing. So you got to check this out. Go to barebones.com. Download your free copy today. Thirty day trial of all the features and then many features are just free beyond that, too. So our thanks to Bear Bones for creating BibiEdit 13 and for sponsoring this episode. You want to take us to Kurt, please, Mr. Braun? We're going to have to roll up our sleeves here, my friend. This one looks pretty deep. So our friend Kurt says, I recently upgraded from my old 2011 MacBook Pro to one of the refurb twenty seventeen MacBook Air laptop. Apple has been selling. I've been pretty happy with it. Generally speaking, with the traditional USB three ports, MagSafe connector, upgradeable storage and reliable keyboard. However, I've noticed a couple of times it will lose 30 percent of its charge overnight as if it wasn't truly going to sleep when I close the lid. You can see it in the 12 hour history of the energy panel of activity monitor. Battery charge goes down steadily for what looks like three hours. And then the standby mode is triggered and it levels off. I wish I could say it was consistent. But other times I put it to sleep and when I wake it up in the morning, the charge has gone down three or four percent, which seems fairly normal. I tried to do an SMC reset, which I thought fixed it. But last night it was back. So I did the reset again today. We'll see what it looks like in the morning. I guess my real question is, should I be concerned since this was a refurb unit? I've still got a couple of days until my return window closes and I just don't know whether to conclude I got a lemon. Even if it is a lemon, in some sense, it seems like I could just use the PM set terminal command to force it into a true hibernation mode with Ram off any time I put it to sleep. And maybe I'll end up doing that anyways because I bought this low spec unit with the express purpose of upgrading the storage with an NVMe card. And I've heard that the aftermarket NVMe sticks generally need the hibernation mode sleep so that they don't use as much battery. Maybe you could just say a few words about what sleep mode really is like on these newish laptops. For instance, I noticed that in energy saver pain of system preferences, there is a slider for when the display goes to sleep, but no longer a slider for when the laptop goes to sleep. What's up with that? Yeah, I'm wondering too. And hopefully you can help me, Dave, but I'm. All right, so losing 30 percent of your battery overnight doesn't sound right at all. I call that no bueno trick. So yeah, yeah, that there's something that it almost certainly is not sleeping. Or there's something seriously wrong with the power system. But I don't think so because he said in a some see kind of sort of fixed it. Maybe I do like the trick of reviewing the energy usage and activity monitor to determine that something is amiss. Because when I looked at mine, Dave, I put my MacBook Pro to sleep overnight and my battery graph, which pretty was pretty much flat during those those hours. So so I agree with the observation that losing three to four percent is normal, but not in the tens of percent. Right. A few ways to address this. An SFC reset is, of course, dandy, but I'm wondering if a PRAM and VRAM reset wouldn't hurt either. And I may be wrong in this, Dave, but I thought that. So then he also mentions the PM set command, which is power management settings from the terminal. I thought some of those were stored in PRAM, though I could be mistaken, maybe one point. I think, yeah, yeah, you're not. Yeah, you're not making that up, whether it's still the case or not. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it still is. I think you're right that PRAM is the place or NVRAM, I guess is what we call it now, but it's the same thing. Yeah, I think that's where that's stored. It would have to be. Yeah. Yeah. Now, also I did some digging and I found a dandy article on how to view and modify a P list file, which looks to store the energy saver stuff. So maybe it's stored in multiple places, Dave, but we'll link to this article, but it's called setting energy saver preferences on Mac OS Mojave slash High Sierra. And and looking at this article, basically, if you go to library, preferences, com.apple.powermanagement.p list, that's where all this stuff lives. And the article goes into excruciating detail about all the contents. You may want to whack that too. Maybe that's corrupt. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can actually edit that file. So I actually was able to see me ask yourself, not only how do I work this, but how do I get there? And you could just, I mean, simply you could go in the terminal and just say cd library slash preferences. And you'll see this file and you can just remove it if you want to. And maybe that'll set things right. I like it. You could use BB edit to edit that file too. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, by default, I think Xcode, if you have Xcode installed, will be your P list editor. But BB edit is also very capable of editing it, letting you view and edit those files. So maybe whacking that or we're checking it out. It may put you in a better state, but I kind of like the suggestions. So what was suggested here is putting the machine into what I'm going to call the semi-secret hybrid eight mode 25, because the thing is you cannot, you can only set this mode from the terminal using the PMSET command. And if you go into the terminal and you type man space PMSET, it's going to give you excruciating details. The difference of this mode from others is as he pointed out, it will hibernate in that it will write your contents to the hard drive or it'll save memory to your hard drive and then it's going to turn the RAM off. And then when the machine wakes up, it's like, hey, well, I got to repopulate the RAM. So I'm going to load all the stuff that's on disk and put it back in RAM. As they say in the article, you do this at the expense of time to sleep and wake. Right. But you save power. The thing is I looked at least on my machine, Dave. My machine using I-stat menus shows that the 1.5 volt DDR memory uses about 0.3 to 0.5 at most amps. So that's about 0.75 watts at most and that's kind of a drop in the bucket as far as the total power consumption. So I don't think you're going to see a lot of difference by invoking this mode. You can if you want, but I don't think it's going to solve your problem. I think your problem is that the machine is, in fact, not sleeping. I have seen this. I'm looking, he's got a 2011, it's a 2011 MacBook Pro, right? But no, it's his new 2017 Air that's doing this. Okay. Yes. So my old 2011 Air, my wife uses it around the house but it did this for her and it did it for me and there was a wipe and clean install and everything in between those. And I did several of those when it was under my care as well. I will maybe once every couple of weeks, maybe a little more frequently than that, I will reach into the, I have like an old laptop bag that sits like in the living room next to the couch where we put our laptops to charge. And it happens several times a month where that machine will be like blazing hot to the touch overnight because it's not really putting itself to sleep on charge. And I've also found even if it's not on charge, it's not hot, but the battery is just like dead. Like it doesn't necessarily go to sleep the right way all the time. Most of the time, yes, but not all the time. And I have not found an answer for this. It's, you know, I've done the SMC, I've tried, but I have not tried this to forcing it to hibernate because, you know, it seems like it would take extra time and I'm impatient. But maybe that's the answer. And so I did, I put that command, the PM set hibernate mode 25 command. I put the way to invoke that in the show notes so you can go find that. But then there's that article that John referenced from Nick Cummins, I guess, that sort of goes into the excruciating detail. So that might be it. That might actually solve the problem. Yeah, the thing is now that you mentioned this, I'm glad we had this talk, but I remember back when I actually, I remember one time with one of my past MacBook Pros, one time I remember pulling it out of my computer bag and it was blazing hot. And I think the reason was there's a setting in Bluetooth which says, wake the machine if you see something nearby that looks Bluetooth-y and the machine turned on and then it was like in a bag and it's like, oh my gosh, I can't breathe. And it was like going crazy. It was getting hot and it was blowing the fans but it was like in a bag. So it was like, you know, it wasn't really helping much. So I'm wondering if there's a nearby Bluetooth or other wireless peripheral that's preventing the machine from sleeping. So that's still there in Catalina. If anybody wants to experiment with it. Sure, it's so that a Bluetooth keyboard can wake your computer or Bluetooth mouse, but maybe, yeah. So going to system preferences, Bluetooth and then in the lower right corner is advanced and in that list is there are several check boxes and one of them is allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer. So yeah, I may go do that on that laptop when I get home. I mean, why not? It's worth an experiment. Yeah, it shouldn't, it shouldn't, but that's sort of the point of all this stuff, right? Yeah. The other thing is that if you go in the terminal and you type pmset slash or space dash G, it's gonna list a whole bunch of just fascinating information about power management settings, including there's gonna be a line titled sleep. And if there are any processes that are preventing your system from sleeping, it's gonna list them. Yeah. That's another place to look. Cool. The last thing that I kind of scratched my head over, Dave, and I don't know why this is the case. If you know, let me know, but why isn't there a time limit on the, on my MacBook Pro 2012 running right now in Mojave, so shortly, Catalina. I have an explicit sleep timer in Energy Saver, not for the, only the display, but the machine itself, but it sounds like, and I found some screenshots online, that's not the case with the Air? Oh, and I don't think it's like, it's not the case with the MacBook Pro either. I forgot that I have a MacBook Pro in front of me, not a MacBook Air. So the newer machines just don't have that setting anymore? That's correct. Nope. You have the ability to turn the display off after X number of minutes, either on, and separate settings for battery versus power adapter. But in terms of the computer going to sleep, no, you don't get to control that anymore. You can control the display. So the only way you can do that is to either go to the Apple menu and then say sleep, which is what I do in a lot of machines anyways, but all right, so they kind of remove the feature where the machine will sleep but not be closed, I guess. Yes, exactly. Yeah, well, I think the, no, because I think this, think about this from the standpoint of a non-geek, right? If once the display is off, and I'm trying to like think like Apple here, which if I could do this all the time, I think I'd be a lot wealthier, but I'll try and folk this. Like think about the confusion between, well, if I'm setting the machine to sleep, what's the difference? Like if the screen's off, isn't the machine off? Like I can see Apple getting a lot of support calls about that, right? Like, well, wait, what's the difference here? You know, why would there not be, who cares? So I think that's why it's like, once the display's off, then Apple says, well, it's fair game, whenever we're ready, we'll go ahead and sleep that machine. That's gonna be fine. I use, and I use it because it's part of set app, but I use a piece of software called Lungo, L-U-N-G-O, which I think has something to do with coffee, but I'm not a coffee drinker. And it allows me to tell my Mac to stay awake as long as I want, and they've got some, it can be indefinitely or they've got some pre-programmed, like 10 minutes or eight hours or whatever. And one of the preference options with it is to either allow or not allow the display to sleep, even though the Mac is staying awake in the background. And I use this regularly, like I have it on here while we're podcasting, just in case I certainly don't want things going to sleep on me while we're recording the show, not that I think they would, but I also don't want the display going to sleep, so I use it for that, which is kind of nice because if I forget about it, I set a timer for like four hours and if I forget about it, the four hours is the worst, after that it's free to kind of return to form. You don't, I think Lungo is paid software. There are free alternatives to this, including a command line option that is installed on every Mac, it's part of the core Mac OS suite of command line tools called Caffeinate. And if you type the word Caffeinate at the terminal and hit enter, it will just keep your Mac awake all the time. And then you can use different options. You can do dash T and then set the amount of time in seconds that the Mac will stay awake. So you can do some second math, but quick math is 3,600 seconds is one hour. So there you go, that you can now do your math from there. But yeah, so that might be happy. And then there's other options if you do Man Caffeinate, but I used to use Caffeinate all the time and then I realized I had Lungo as part of SetApp and it's like, well, it sits in my menu bar, that's really handy. And I can see whether it's on or not, so that it's a nice little visual indicator. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Fun, I think we have time. Are we good with this one? Yeah, great. I think we are. It's sad when your battery goes down and you don't know why. And you don't know why. Yeah, it's frustrating. We've thrown out enough options to help you figure out what is going on. So two quick ones, I think. First, Bruce asks a very good question that we've really been trying hard to get the answer on. We talked in a pre-Catalina release episode about the fact that there's these 32-bit apps and you might want to save, you know, a version of your Mac in bootable form with Mojave on it, just in case you come across, you know, oh, crap, I need that 32-bit thing to do X, Y, or Z, how do you do that? Well, we discussed saying what we said was go ahead and make a disk image of that and then use your favorite virtualization software to boot that disk image. Wouldn't it be nice if things worked out that way? As it turns out, you can't really boot a disk image with your favorite virtualization software. You can't even boot a disk image with your worst hated virtualization software. I don't know which yours is, folks, but it doesn't matter because it means none of them will do this. We've talked with the folks at Parallels and VMware and there is a way to do this, but it's not as simple as just boot. So what you can do is take that disk image. If you took our advice a couple of weeks ago and you made the disk image, you didn't waste any time, that's still step one. Step two is launch your favorite virtualization software and install a clean Mojave installation. It's the only way to get where we wanna go. Then once you've got it up and it boots and it says, do you wanna run Migration Assistant? You say, yes, I do. And then you let Migration Assistant slurp in all the stuff from your disk image into this new Mojave installation. In theory, that will get everything over. It's not the most elegant way of getting there, but it does ensure that this new bootable virtualized thing is set up in a way that makes it very happy in a virtualized environment. But then you can slurp in all your data and your apps and your settings and all that stuff. And you should have a very, very close analog to what it was that used to boot your Mac and it's still Mojave and you're still good to go. So that's how that's gonna work, but I really hope somebody can figure out how to just boot from a disk image. You know what, Synology figured it out. Like when they do a clone of your, well, if they do a, like if you do a hyper backup of your, or a backup of your hypervisor thing, it actually boots it all by itself to make sure it works and then saves a video of it booting it so that you can see, yep, everything works, but that's not how things work here. Thank you for asking, Bruce, Bruce. Yeah, so good. So feature request. So we thought that you could just import the disk image and it would be just like, oh yeah, I know what OS you're running but apparently they're technical or legal. I don't think there's legal reasons. I think it's a technical, I think they've, honestly, I don't think they'd thought about it until we asked them about it, but maybe now they'll think more about it and maybe we'll get there. So, you know, it's happened before. We've been the inspiration for many apps and features. But with the recent gyrations with Catalina, especially I don't blame them that they didn't decide to tackle this problem with this particular upgrade cycle. This is Mojave. No, I understand. It's a general virtualization problem. The thing is, I think it's more important for people now because we're bringing up the point that, hey, you're gonna upgrade and banish all your 32-bit apps or they're not gonna work anymore so there's a really good reason that you should make a virtualized environment. Right, right. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it creates the need for a lot more people than it previously did. Speaking along the same lines about finding another way to do things, Lisa wrote in and says, I've been using Smile's PDF Pen Scan Plus for years to create PDF images from receipts and other documents. I've been using it too. She says, now that Smile is letting this app die, dude, you have a recommendation for a substitute. I know, I'm sad. This is the thing that you've probably heard me talk about where I need to scan a book of music for a theater show or something and I just do it quick with my iPhone, it's great. Well, you can't anymore. I mean, you can, but they're not gonna keep updating this app. So other apps that can do this, Scanner Pro from Riedel is one, Genius Scan is another. So those are, I've used Scanner Pro. It's been a long time since I've used Genius Scan. So I can't really speak to that one, but I've definitely used Scanner Pro and that has worked well for me. Genius Scan, we'll put a link to. And then Apple even has a, you know, they have those stories in the App Store. They have a story about scanning. So I'll put the story about scanning in the show notes so that you can, you know, if you don't wanna use Scanner Pro or Genius Scan, you can read about other apps too. So there we go. I think, John, I think that's gonna get us there, my friend. I think I got the band even. All the way to LA. The first LA gig. With the show that never ends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, all right. Well, where are we here? We gotta find everything. Wow, so they're in LA. So do they get, what are they part of? What group are they at, never mind. All right, maybe they'll get a gig tonight at the whiskey or something. That'd be fun, right? Yeah. Yeah, but who's the group that makes sure that bands get compensated when things are... When music is played? Asp... Well, there's three of them. There's ASCAP, there's BMI, and there's CSAC. And it just depends on which you're registered with. ASCAP, I've heard of, okay. Yeah, this particular song is registered with BMI. And I know that because I was in the band when we wrote it, so there you go. Right, so these are groups where you license, where you offer to license your music to people that wanna play it, is that correct? Yeah, you register, yeah. When you write a song, you register it or when you record a song, you register it with one of these three groups. And then they are your rights management agency for that. And so when someone plays that on the radio or in a bar or for public consumption somewhere, they are supposed to tell that group. We played this song for public consumption in front of an audience of X size and we played it four times or whatever it is. And then they say, okay, cool. Well, you owe 14 cents or whatever. And you send the 14 cents to ASCAP, BMI or CSAC. And then they take 14, 100ths of a penny and send that off to the artist. No, I think they give the artist a little bit better cut than that. Now, can you without getting specifically political, but I've heard one or more cases where certain politicians have played certain songs at their events and the artists were not pleased with that. Can you refuse to have your music? Can you tell someone, I don't want you to play my song as part of your event because I believe I'm then endorsing you? Sure. So technically, I don't think you can. You certainly can make a big stink about it and the politician- Right, and we've seen that. Yes, exactly, right. But no, if I wanted to go out and cover a song, like record a version of whatever, it doesn't matter, like some Britney Spears song or whatever. If I wanted to record my own version of Hit Me Baby one more time, because it's already been released, I can do that. Now, it's better if before I release my version of it, I've gone and gotten permission sort of the wrong term, but it's close enough. Getting that permission makes life a little bit easier in terms of managing the royalties because Britney Spears or whoever wrote that song or whoever owns the mechanicals on it needs to get paid because they wrote it. I also get paid for sales of my version of it, but not because I wrote it, but because I played on it and recorded it or whatever. But there are companies out there that will go and get that permission before you release it or pay that relationship is sort of a better way to say it because it's often easier. It's a very weird sort of thing, but it's founded in, on paper, it's all good and then it gets weird. But yeah, no one can really stop you as long as you're playing by the rules and paying what you need to pay for the use of these things and all that stuff. All right, that's what I thought. So the artist can make a stink. No, I've seen it. We've both seen this thing where they're like, Oh, you see it all the time. Well, I don't want you to play my song at your event because I don't agree with your view on whatever. And it's like, well, yeah, that's great. They may be able to have a say in that because that's not, that there's an implied endorsement there, right? Like if I go and record my own cover of, you know, hit me, baby, one more time and I release it on my record and I say, this is, you know, Dave Hamilton's, you know, hits from the 90s or whatever. They're Dave's versions of hits from the 90s. Like that's fine. Like no one thinks that Brittany said, Oh, Dave would be great to cover this. I would love to have Dave cover this. All right, you know, it's just like, I just went out, but she could. But until she does, no one would assume. I'll give her a buzz. I'll call her up and ask her a tweet. Yeah, but no one would assume that she, she endorsed that right now when it's, when there's a use that might imply that, for example, a political candidate using it, you know, to, to rally the masses and all that stuff. That, that might be a different scenario. So it's, it's, I don't know that it's quite as cut and dry in that, in that scenario, but anyway, I do have to, I'm gonna get kicked out of my hotel room here in like 30 minutes. So, so I should, we should wrap this show up. Thank you for answering my question, because no, it's just, it's kind of topical. We've had fascinating conversations as in like the, the out, the outro show. We had the one about, oh, Ian on, on Twitter replied to our conversation last week about break a leg and he offered a new one that I didn't know about. And although my daughter did, I mentioned it dinner the other night. She's like, oh yeah. But he said, he always thought, or he had always heard that it was break a leg because that meant you got to be in the cast. See that? I like it. This is good. So I have another idea for things to share in the outro of the show that kind of keep us all thinking. I'm not going to do it today because I'm out of time, but I have a riddle that I am going to share next week and then we will see who answers it or how the responses come in. You and I can talk about it a little bit too. And I think that having a riddle every few weeks or something, it doesn't need to be one every week, but start thinking about your own riddles. And I have mine. So I have one that we will start with, but folks, everybody, you too, John, start thinking about your own riddles to sort of send out to the masses and we'll see how it goes. It could be fun. But with that, we really do need to get out of here. They're going to throw me out of this room very, very soon and that's not good. So I want to say thank you to everybody who has listened. Thank you to you, John, for managing your schedules such that we could actually make this work. Thanks to the hotel here for not throwing me out too, too soon. Thanks to our sponsors, lino.com slash mgg, ancestry.com slash mgg, barebones.com. Other sponsors that weren't in this episode, that are in other episodes, like smilesoftware.com slash podcast, other world computing at maxsales.com, ifixit.com slash mgg, ero.com slash mgg. And let's all cheer for Dave because, you know, it sounds like he got real, real close. But I think this time with this hotel room, as far as I can tell, he didn't get caught. Made.