 The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gap, episode 695 for Sunday, February 4th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gap, the show into which you send your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found in order for us to answer your questions. Share your tips, share your cool stuff found with the goal being that each and every one of us is going to join in the process of learning at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Casper. We're at Casper.com slash MGG. You can save 50 bucks off of select mattresses with code MGG. We'll talk more about that in a minute and smilesoftware.com slash podcast from the great folks at Smile. We'll be talking about PDF pen and I've got some tips actually for how you can do some things for your year and like, you know, sending your paperwork to your accountant and that sort of thing. So we'll talk more about that in a minute too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, John F. Brown, how are you doing today, Mr. John F. Brown? Good. Good. Good. I think I inherited or I caught over the airwaves here that you're you're at least something related to your sickness. I had like a cold this week. I'm pretty much over it actually other than like the little lingerie stuff that that likes to linger. But you know, it's all good. It's all good. All right. Yeah. Well, we've got to be at your best for the big game. I thought the podcast was our big game. Oh, well, that's the other big game. That's this morning's big game. Okay. Another game this afternoon. That's right. Go Pat's. Yeah. The results will be will be no passable of one. Yeah. Well, that's that's the idea. That's my prediction. Yeah. That's I think it's a safe prediction, but but it, you know, that's sort of the point is, you know, on any given Sunday, that's how it all works. But on this given Sunday, we are given the opportunity to answer some of your questions and we are going to do that. So let's go to Bob because I actually learned something in answering Bob's question. By the way, folks, that's not rare. That's one of the things I love most about doing this show is that you send in questions. I don't know the answer. We don't know the answer. We do a little research and it's like, hey, everybody wins. So this is definitely one of my five things. Bob writes, he says, I am the sound man at our church and I record our services to a USB drive. The mixer is an Allen and Heath GLD 80 for anyone curious. It says, I either process the audio with my iPad, a wave file to the ferret app to trim and split the worship from the message. Then final touch to normalize, compress, limit and convert to AAC. I then email the files to several people and use mail drop since even the AACs are often, you know, close to 100 megs in size, sometimes even over. This in a while. I use my MacBook Pro and then I use Audacity to do with the above, but I still, of course, use MailDrop. It all works great. My wife, one of the musicians is one of the recipients of the attachment. She wants to move the file she receives via MailDrop to a Dropbox folder on her iOS, using iOS on her iPhone usually. She says, he says, I can't seem to figure this out since I think it would work, but it doesn't. I downloaded the file and I then long press and use share and select Dropbox. But what is saved into Dropbox is a PDF of the screen, kind of like a screenshot. I tried a few other ways to do this, but to no avail. I thought the files app would help, but that doesn't help either. I'll try a few more ideas, but this doesn't seem like it should be all that complicated. Am I missing something? And the answer is yes. Yes. Yeah. Right. We learned, as far as Dropbox, that has absolutely been my experience too. It's 100% consistent with that. You go to save things that can save pictures, and if it's not a picture, it makes it one or it makes it a PDF, which effectively, you know, picture, and at least these purposes. But and there's a reason for that actually, you know, iOS is weird. When you send data from one app to another, it actually sends it like via a URL. It's really kind of crazy, and it like, it like bakes all the data into one big string and packs it around. It's not entirely efficient, but that's why Apple fixed this for us with the files app. And I'm curious how you tried this with the files app because I did it exactly the same. I did exactly the same thing. I created an audio file because, you know, I can do that here and sent it to myself and then opened up the email on my iPhone, went and chose, I chose to save it with the files app. I chose Dropbox as the destination. I chose save and then there you go. Yeah, you choose save to files. You do the sharing thing just like you talked about, choose save to files and then from within there, you choose Dropbox. Now you need to first configure files to expose Dropbox and show that, but I was able to do it. Then I saved it on my iPhone, I went to my Mac and, you know, it synced the file down from Dropbox and sure enough, there was the audio file and I was able to play it and everything worked great. I mean, it worked swimmingly well. It's ridiculously well and this is sort of the beauty of that files app is it gives you, it's kind of like the Finder, especially with your cloud services. You just save things and magically they just work. I didn't even have to launch Dropbox. It like triggered the sync up to Dropbox just by saving it via the files app. There was none of this weird background activity not happening or anything. So I assume that would have been your answer to John or did you have yet another way of attacking this particular problem? No, that's what I would have done though. I'll admit the way to get there may not be entirely obvious because even now I'm looking in the files app and depending on, it may not be clear to you that you can add Dropbox and actually it's kind of hidden. Like even now I'm looking at, you know, when you first open the files app and then you, you know, gives you a view, you actually have to go to locations or there's little locations choice in the upper left hand corner. But even if you go to that Dave, I'm looking right now and it doesn't show Dropbox in my locations. But if you hit, drive in a few others, but if I hit edit, then it's like, ah, okay, well, here's, here's some other places you can send your stuff. So, right. Oh, yeah, that's interesting. Right, right. The first one I tried this, I'm like, well, where's Dropbox? I don't know why they don't list it maybe just to the conserved screen real estate. Well, you can, I mean, that's sort of the point of that edit screen. So what we're talking about is if you launch the files app and make sure you are at the main screen. So if you've used files to say, look at your iCloud drive or anything like that, it's possible that when you launch it, you will just be in, it will bring you to wherever you were last. So that's where John said, go to the upper left and click locations. That just, that would be necessary if you're already one level deep. But once you're at the top in the upper right hand corner is edit and you can choose which locations appear in that list. So if say there's something that you just don't use, maybe you don't use Dropbox. Or like for me, I have transporter on here, given everything that's happened. I don't really store new things on my transporter. So I've turned that off in files. It just doesn't appear. But I did realize that Synology Drive wasn't appearing here because I guess I haven't launched files since that app came out. So I added it. And I also added documents by Riedl because I just reinstalled that because transmits going away and I need a new, I need a new FTP client. So I'm using documents by Riedl. So pretty cool. I like the files app more and more. Like it's, it's this, this sort of extensible thing on iOS that just seems to magically work. And I like that. Good. Yeah, John. Very good. All right, sweet. Let's, let's let Todd take us to the next one. Hi, Geek Gabbers, ADD Todd here. So with the call handle like that, be aware if I start losing track of what I'm saying. Say anyway, I'm trying to do some regular clean up on my MacBook. Older MacBook, but still supports the current high Sierra. I believe it is the latest version of OS 10. Naturally, of course, I'm using Onyx to go ahead in its automated automated mode to do 90% of the clearing. But if you go to the partition manager and you select your working partition and look at it through the info there, it will say generally so much purgeable space being used. Here's my question. How do I purge it? I can't find anything that will actually go through and clear that out and reset the caches to say, OK, we've gone from 16 gig, 32 gig, maybe more down to two gig or one gig or less. We're going to, we're going to go ahead and start filling it up again. It's always gone, just gone ahead and said so much purgeable but untouchable. Please tell me how to do that. Thank you for your time. I haven't been caught. I'm hoping you're not caught. Thank you very much, Todd. Yeah. So do you do you want to, we were talking about this a little bit pre-show, John. Do you want to talk about what purgeable space is or do you want me to take this? Go. I think I know what it is, but. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, it can be a lot of different things, right? But but one of the main things I think that that at least as I understand it, that appears in purgeable space is your local time machine backups. But but also other things appear there and you can. Like it's not meant for us to purge it. The OS will purge it if and when it needs to use that space. And I've never seen it not purge that stuff, which is a good thing. But but that that's what I understand it to be. I don't I don't think it's caches and that kind of stuff. But maybe I'm I mean, there's a little ditty. They did on six colors where. Jason kind of digs into this a little bit. Oh, good. OK. And it is, yeah, it's a. So I think that the answer is it's not meant for you to touch. Right. OK. The OS manages it. The thing that I found interesting is that the the way that you see it is. Is there's two ways you can? Well, there's a lot of ways you can look at your drive here. What what kind of surprised me is that when I went to get info and storage, your machine will sit there and churn and then show you the classifications of things. And yeah, we were doing this before the show. And I'm like, well, it's not showing that I have purgeable. And you're like, well, look at to get info. And I'm like, huh, that's weird. So yeah, he talks about, you know, it's like fonts. It's things that the OS, in its opinion, if it needs to wipe it out, it will because it knows that it can download it again. So OK. All right. That's an interesting way of thinking of it. And that's actually what somebody in the chat. It was Kiwi Graham, of course, in the chat room at kikab.com slash stream. Hello, everyone. It said purgeable really means redownloadable. That's interesting. OK, I guess. And that makes sense, right? So thinking of it kind of like a browser cache. Huh. All right. Well, there you go. There you see. I learned something new. I like it. So this is not time machine backups. Is that right? As far as I know, no, it's OK. I don't think that's it. That's a different class of storage. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. All right, which I don't think. Yeah, I don't think I have that enabled. I don't think I have local snapshots. Generally only on a laptop. Mm hmm. Right. So. Yeah, who knows? OK. All right. Well, good. I like it. We're solving all kinds of problems, John. That's good. Listener Doug, man, I love it when I learn this kind of stuff. Taught me about something completely unintentionally. We were talking about, I don't know, some other thing. And he said, oh, here, by the way, here's a quick tip. He said, one good thing I did learn from this crazy exercise I went through was that from Sierra Onward, it is much easier to show and hide hidden files and folders in the finder. Just hit or hold down command and shift and hit period. And the invisible items will magically appear. Hit the same key combination, command shift, period. Again, and they will disappear, it just toggles them on and off. He says, you probably already knew this, but it was new to me. No, I did not know this. And when I mentioned it in our Mac Observer staff meeting, no one else knew it either. So we went ahead and shared it as a quick tip this week over on Mac Observer 2. But really handy, and it toggles it finder-wide. So it's not just the one window that you're in. And the way I remember it now, I mean, it's new to me. But in Unix, files that start with a period are hidden. And so that's sort of the mental hook that I use to patch this into the thinking process. Is, oh, period files, hidden files, great. Command shift period, show me them or don't show me them. And that can be a really handy thing because sometimes you need to open a folder or dig in and find a file that the operating system is hiding in the finder. And previously, I would always either have to go to the terminal. And here's another tip for you. But if you navigate someone with the terminal and then type open space dot, which is the local folder, open will open whatever in whatever app on your Mac is built to open it. So when you say open this folder, open space dot, it will pop wherever you are on the terminal. That will now appear on a finder window, which can be really handy, too. But that's the only way I used to do it. You could also, if you knew the exact path, which I guess if you're going to do it in the terminal, you'd kind of do, you would go to go in the finder, go to the Go menu, and choose Go to Folder. And then you can type it in there. And I believe Go to Folder, just like the terminal, or most things in the terminal does, will support tab completion. So here's yet another tip. This is super packed right here. If you go do that thing in the finder, go to the Go menu, choose Go to Folder, and then type slash say slash v to go to the volumes folder, and then hit tab. Well, actually, it'll bring you to var, because it shows you a dropdown, just like you might get, depending on your shell in the terminal. You can choose slash volumes. And then I choose DS, and it shows me my 3DS volumes, general movie music. So you can use tab completion here to not have to type the exact name of things. So that's the other way you stew up. But now, to be able to navigate through the finder, and just quickly toggle that on and off. The one thing that irks me about this, John, is this is available in the finder. Command Shift period works. It does not show me, like there's no menu item being triggered by this. Most of the times, your command keys are just shortcuts to things that you could access in the menu. This doesn't exist in any of the finder's menus, and yet, obviously, it works. Sierra and later, Sierra and later. Crazy, huh? I don't blame them. You don't blame them for what? I don't blame them for kind of making this obscure. Oh, that's actually a good point. Yeah, sure. Well, the thing is, is that I activated this, and I'm looking on one machine here and I'm seeing directories that I never knew existed. And then I'm like, wow, you know, I wonder what's in those. Should I? No. Well, there's that. Yeah. Yeah, there's one here. Dot HFS plus private directory data. Question mark. And even as a question mark, I'm like, what's in there? Should I look? You should look, but not now and certainly don't delete all the things in there. Now, no, that would be bad. But just not while we're recording, you know. OK, so that was a good one. And then while we're on some handy little quick tips, we do have one from listener Chris back in show 691. We were talking about what to do if I'd cloud iCloud addresses or contacts wouldn't properly sync. And he said, I'd like to add one more thing, the nuclear option. Now, what he's about to describe is not what I assumed the nuclear option would be. I assumed it was like, you know, format your drive and start over. And perhaps that's like the nuclear squared option because that certainly is always an option. But here we go with Chris's. He says, I was told this on two separate occasions when I called Apple for iCloud support on behalf of clients who were having issues with their addresses. They were using one iCloud account for address sync with many max, very many max in one case. And some machines just would not pick up recent changes. In both cases, the first level support person on the phone walked me through a bunch of steps, pretty much what you guys described on the show. When that failed, they put me on hold to talk to a specialist. They then told me to do something else. I didn't get a full explanation, but here's what I deduced from our conversation. In some cases, address book sync through iCloud can get stuck because there are one or more rogue address records that mess everything up. These are the evil address records of death, E-A-R-O-D. Maybe we brought them with us when we migrated from Clarus Organizer. What you want to do after trying all the other steps, such as logging out of iCloud and logging back in, making backups, of course, is find one iOS device that has all or at least most of your address records. Apparently, max can become tainted and iCloud itself can become tainted, but iOS is pure. Then when you have found that one pure iOS device, log it out of iCloud and retain the address records on the device. You'll get an option. What he's talking about here is when you log out of iCloud, it'll say, do you want to delete all the things you've synced down or do you want to keep them? In this case, you want to choose keep them. It says then delete all address records from all other devices and from the iCloud website and burn them with a fire. Make sure there is not a single address lingering anywhere. Do whatever is necessary. Log devices out, then in, then out, then in again, whatever it takes. When all the other devices are clean and have no address records left and then the iCloud website also shows a completely empty address book. Then and only then log the one pure iOS device back into iCloud and merge its addresses with the cloud. Its clean and pure addresses will be uploaded to iCloud and the evil address records of death will be banished forever. Or at least until the next time this happens. He says, this has worked for me multiple times when nothing else would. Thank you, Chris. That's super handy. I mean, I think I know the title of this show already, but, you know, that's the evil address records of death. Yeah, I think so. I mean, like, it's just doesn't get any better than that. So but thank you, Chris. That's super handy. You know, it's it this feels like one of those things that if you had to do it, you know, 15 times, you'd probably figure this out maybe by time eight, you know, and then it might take time 12 or 13 to like really codify it like you have here, Chris. But this is great. So thank you. You saved us a bunch of time. This is good. Good, good, good. Any thoughts on that before we move onward? So I think it's an interesting variation on the old that you try turning it off off and on again. Well, but it, you know, it's that like I like the sort of meta lesson here, which is if you're having trouble with something sinking, the first thing to remember is that the cloud is also a participant in this, right? So, you know, logging your devices out and then in and hoping that that'll fix it. If the cloud has bad data or something, it's going to keep re-injecting that into the process here and potentially, you know, keeping the problem around. So wiping it out and then like Chris said, going to the iCloud website and wiping it out from there and really, you know, whatever you can do if there's like mail, right, but is also this cloud sink thing with IMAP. And sometimes you have to go to the website of the cloud mail provider and manage something there to get it right. And then let that change propagate back down. So, yeah, I wonder if I'm going to start having to go down this path because I had something recently where there was an event that I put on my calendar on my Mac and I looked at my phone and I'm like, well, where is it? And it wasn't there. Like that's kind of weird. So I raised it from the Mac calendar and then created the event on my iOS calendar and it propagated to the Mac calendar. That was kind of weird. I don't know why it didn't work in one direction, but the but it did work in the other direction. Yeah, that's not good. I are you certain because I've done this before where I put something on my Mac calendar, you know, I'm in it in kind of in the flow of doing things, maybe going through email and it's like, oh, yeah, let me add that event. OK, let me go to the next email and I put it on the wrong calendar. So, I mean, was it one that's not syncing with your iOS device possibly or or did you confirm? No, it was the, you know, it was the home calendar. Yeah, right. OK. Yeah, the main one, the green one. Yes. Well, it's I mean, it's green for for you. My number for everybody. Yeah. Hell, yeah. All right. Interesting, interesting, interesting. All right. Well. Well, all right, let's keep let's keep trucking here. If I can find, you know, I really do. I need to bring that other monitor up. It would be really nice to have two monitors up here to do the podcast with. I just decided, John, I'm rocking the monitors. You should, too. Well, I rock two monitors down in the office. But then, you know, Monoprice sent me that other one to review and then they said they didn't go back and it was like, oh, OK. Well, I mean, I just bought this one from you, you know, three months ago. So now what do I do with it? It's going to require moving things around here in the studio. But but I think it'll be worth it to to have the second screen. I just need to decide which side of me I want the second screen on. I want on the left or the right. I don't know. I don't know. Got to figure it out. Ergonomics, John, it's an important part of my life. Let's go to are we here? You know what? Yeah, let's go to Giles. I like Giles. This is a good one. Giles writes. He said, having surpassed my 200 gig iCloud storage limit, I decided to take the plunge and set up family sharing with a two terabyte account. At least my wife no longer has to pay anything now. During the process, I discovered you can set young children up with their own Apple IDs. So I did this for my daughter. She's just starting to use an old digital camera and needs a home for her crazy toddler photos. And she's going to inherit an old iPad mini of mine to watch her kids and TV shows on. I plan on setting her up with a named user account on the home Mac mini so that she can use her own iCloud photo library with her new Apple ID and see just her photos on the iPad. So far so good, I think. When it comes to TV shows, they all currently reside in my iTunes, but the files themselves held on an external hard drive plugged into the Mac mini. He says it's all stuff we own and have ripped, so DRM is not an issue. If she has her own user account on the Mac mini, then she'll have her own iTunes installation. And this is what I'd like to use to sync content to her iPad via USB. Says not syncing with my iTunes. The big question is, can I point her iTunes at the same media files on the external hard drive that my iTunes uses? Would it cause any device permissions or Apple ID issues? And how would I do this? Practically, do I have to drag and drop individual files from the external drive into her iTunes? Or is there an easier way I could do it using playlists? Thanks for any advice. Yeah, so this is a good question. And I like your setup so far, right? Everything you've done works. Regarding those TV shows, yes. In general, you can have her iTunes. Use the same media files that yours does, especially since it's on, you know, on this external drive that all user accounts can access and all of that good stuff. So you don't have to worry about it mucking with permissions or anything like that. But, you know, if she deletes the media file, which iTunes can do, then obviously that media file is gone and you can't see it anymore. And vice versa, if you delete something, then it's gone and she can't see it. Other than that, though, it should be fine. The first thing you want to do is in iTunes, go to preferences advanced and uncheck the copy files into iTunes media folder when adding to library box, right? Because it sounds like you've probably already done that on yours unless your entire media folder is on this external drive, in which case maybe you haven't. But on hers, certainly do this. And then what you would do is add the TV shows to her iTunes. Now, you could do that a couple of different ways. Number one would be go to the finder and dig into this media folder. This is like log into her user account on the Mac, go to the finder, dig into the media folder, find inside iTunes media, there'll be a folder called TV. If you want her to see all the TV shows, just grab that folder, drag it onto iTunes. Again, make sure you uncheck that copy files to iTunes first because you don't want it making a copy of these. Just drag it in and it'll just like index them and see them and add them to her library, but still pointing at those same files. Or you can go to file open inside iTunes. I don't want to launch iTunes on this machine while I'm here because it does weird things with audio and we're already having some weird things happening today. I think we have packet loss from you, John. I think that's what the issue is. But that would also work. It's just used file, I think it's file add to library. I say file open because it's command O in iTunes, but I think the menu item is named add to library. And then you do the same thing and it would just kind of slurp it and index it. If you add new things though, she won't automatically get those. You'd have to re-add that folder and you can just re-add the whole folder. It'll index and not make duplicates or anything like that. The iTunes is pretty good about it. But then she can sync them and it's like they're in her library. Playlists, you could share a playlist with her. Well, no, you can't share a video playlist. Can you in iTunes? Well, it doesn't matter. If you could, she can't sync the content from a shared playlist to one of her devices. So you'd still need to do it this way. So there you go. That's my thought. Mr. Braun? I'm with you. Okay. Well, I don't do family sharing. So I'm- Well, this isn't family sharing. I mean, it's not Apple's definition of family sharing. Yeah, obviously it is sharing with his family. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's just sharing amongst other users, locally, local sharing. Yeah. Crazy. About the packet, I think you're right, because I'm actually looking at my inbound screen and it shows that I've lost one packet from you. Okay. I don't know what your stats show. Yeah, normally, like when we get to the end of a show, which is usually like a close to three-hour session by the time we do pre-show, post-show, and then the show in the middle, I usually have less than 20 packets lost from you. Today I have, at the moment, 2700 and counting. Yeah, yeah. Are you doing a backup maybe? No. All right, let's do a little network troubleshooting here, and we can do this right in the show, or at least we'll start it right in the show. When I experienced things like this, the first thing I do, and I actually started doing this, how long is 380 seconds? I started doing this six and a half minutes ago, is I open up a terminal window and I type ping space www.apple.com, and I hit enter. And for those of you that don't know what ping does, so I'm asking you to do this, John, so that we can get some data going here. I already started it. You already did. You knew where I was gonna go. Yeah, exactly. We've known each other a long time. What this does, ping sends a request out and waits for something to come back and confirms that it either came back or it didn't. This is, you know, and it does it once a second until you hit control C to stop it. And so the handy part here is you get to see, are you losing any packets, both inbound and outbound? You don't really know which way you're losing them, but you can see if packets are being lost because things won't come back. And you also get to see what the time for a packet to do a round trip is. And that can also be helpful because you can get a baseline and see if things increase or decrease. So I have not lost a single packet in the last seven minutes. And my, well, my turnaround time is anywhere between seven and 11 milliseconds. So how are you looking? On the order of less than 20 milliseconds and they've all been successful. No packet loss. Huh. The interesting thing is that when I said, ping dot dot dot apple dot com. Yeah. Well, it's not really apple dot com. It's like, oh, well, yeah, you really want me to ping e6858.dsc9.acamaiedge.net. Yeah. So I blame Akamai. I think they're losing the packets. Wait, you are losing packets? No. Oh. No, I'm saying that Akamai's probably dropping them. I don't know. Well, but you're not, but like ping isn't reporting any packets lost to Akamai. Okay, but we are getting packets lost from you to the server we're using with Discord. That's not good. But you're not seeing any significant packet loss coming from me on Discord, huh? Oh, yeah. All right, so we are gonna pause the show here. I'm gonna, we're gonna try something else. Hang on one second. All right, we're back. We may have gotten somewhere. We're either way, you know, the show must go on as a, as it, as it always does. You're still with us, right, John? You're still together here? Okay, cool. All right, let's go on to listener John and see what happens. So listener John says, I was wondering what your opinions are regarding iPhone security when used with a SIM card. By default, SIM lock is off. This is simple. It relies on the iPhone passcode or touch ID. However, if the phone is lost or stolen, the SIM card can simply be removed from that iPhone and put in another device. And then that device can get the two-factor codes from Apple. However, if the SIM lock is turned on to protect against this, it effectively prevents find my phone from working as the iPhone cannot connect to the cellular network until SIM lock code has been entered. I know you say there is a continuum between security and convenience. However, in this case, it seems that you either get SIM security or you get the ability to track a lost or stolen phone, but not both. Is there a way around this? And he says, yes, I know. You get both until the phone is turned off or runs out of charge. That's an interesting question. I hadn't really played with SIM lock on any of my production devices. So I never really kind of, you know, grok this until your email and then I did. This is one of those scenarios that highlights the reason security pros are quick to point out that Apple's is not two-factor authentication, but rather two-step authentication, largely because it can all be done on the same device. Right, when you're logging into something, it'll say, hey, a browser needs access. And on the very same Mac, you know, it pops up and says, type in this code. Like, yeah, okay. Like that's cool. But like if you're on my Mac already, maybe this is not the right device to show me the code. It's certainly convenient, but it's, you know, that's two-step authentication. I think, right, John? In my mind, that's how that's differentiated. Did you agree? Yeah, well, we talked about that before when I was talking about that token, you know, there's multi-factor and then there's multi-step. I mean, it's always, I mean, most people consider the more steps or the more factors, the better. Right. But yeah, I never, you know, I've never really enabled this. I've never had a concern that my SIM would disappear and somebody would, you know, go crazy because when you should be able, so say you, you know, somehow your SIM is scoffed. Right. You should be able to just call your, you know, call up your phone company and say, well, you know, somebody stole it. Can you like disable something? I don't know if it's the serial number of the SIM or what? Right. It's one of those, one of those incredibly long numbers in general. Yep. Yep. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's interesting. And, you know, we got the same sort of, you know, shifting this conversation from the SIM lock thing to the two-factor authentication versus two-step authentication. We got the same comments when I suggested that instead of using, say, Google Authenticator on your iPhone for those, you know, second steps for the auto-generating codes that cycle every 30 seconds or whatever. And it's super handy. Instead of using Google Authenticator or any, you know, device-based authenticator app, you can actually have one password do that. You capture the QR code in one password. It stores the formula. And then that formula is shared amongst all your devices. So you don't have to pick up your phone to do a, to type one of those, you know, two-factor things on your Mac. But now it's no longer two-factor because it's all happening on the same device. Then people were right to point out. They're like, hey, you know, you're like, giving people advice that's good for convenience but not so good for security. Because if they can get into that one password vault on any device, boom, they're good to go. So it's like, yeah, I'll buy that. All right. Hey, I think it's time to talk about our first, our first couple of sponsors. How's that work for you, John? Awesome. Awesome. Well, let me find the notes here. Of course. And I, oh, you know, so this is my problem. I use these things and I have things in the wrong spot, John, and then, you know, and then things aren't right. I don't know how to do this. How am I supposed to do this, John? Are you ready for me to talk about the sponsors, John? Absolutely. All right. Our first sponsor today is Casper. Casper makes, well, the most comfortable mattress I've ever slept on. We have one at home. I've slept on it, of course, and I love it. And I've even slept on them in Airbnb's. In fact, I was in an Airbnb in San Francisco and like two nights in, I was like, man, I'm sleeping really well here. I never sleep this well when I travel. I checked. I'm like, it's gotta be, right? Sure enough. There's the Casper logo. Okay. Now it makes sense. 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And you can be sure of your purchase with Casper's 100 night risk-free sleep-on-it trial because they offer free shipping and free returns in the US and Canada. Use our special deal. Visit casper.com slash MGG and then use promo code MGG at checkout to get 50 bucks towards select mattresses. Now some terms and conditions apply, of course, but casper.com slash MGG using promo code MGG at checkout gets you 50 bucks towards select mattresses. Check it out. Our thanks to Casper for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor for today is our friends at Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. I mean, they're all our friends there, not just the people at the slash podcast URL, everybody there, but that's the URL you go to this month. We're talking about PDF pen. This is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs and going truly paperless. You know, it's a new year. You can go paperless. It's a good time to go paperless. We're only a month in here. It's great at organizing documents. You can split PDFs. You can combine PDFs. You're gonna need to be sending some forms to your accountants and your lawyers or whoever it is that handles your taxes for you. I use PDF pen every year. I scan all my stuff in. I pull in all of the important things into PDFs. And then of course I wind up with a bunch of PDFs. Well, I don't want my accountant getting confused and losing or missing or overlooking something. So what I do every year is I take all these things but I don't wanna send them multiples. I wanna send them one. So I pull them all in to PDF pen and then I reorganize things. I can use markup in there to highlight specific things. I can redact account numbers. So if I need to include some statements from stuff but there's just no reason for my accountant to have the account numbers, well, let's hide it from the PDF. That way, even though I trust my accountant, you know, if the PDF winds up in the wrong hands, my account number is clean and safe. So check it out. Visit smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Check out PDF pen or thanks to the folks at Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's go to Chuck here and talk about High Sierra, shall we? Because I think, is it time? Is it time to levy some judgment? Is it long enough to share our opinions? Of course it is. Sure, sure. Chuck says, what are you hearing from the MGG community about the stability of High Sierra? I've had more issues with my MacBook Air getting weird and unresponsive or just plain freezing than at any time in my history with Apple and Mac computers. And that dates from the 1980s. He says I defaulted to High Sierra when Sierra became unresponsive and disc utility via the recovery partition didn't correct the issue. I had to use the recovery partition and disc utility to get it working again. So I did High Sierra. Most recently, my Mac stopped cooperating and the keyboard wouldn't respond after booting from a recovery partition. So even that option wouldn't work. I ended up having to reinstall High Sierra using the internet option, which I didn't even know existed option command R, which is of course recovery boot. Yep. I got my MacBook Air functional again. Says anyway, my frustration grows and this isn't the stable varieties of OS that I have been using for decades. So it sounds, I mean, Chuck's having a lot of problems. I would, I don't wanna point to hardware here based on the things he said, but that's, Chuck's not, I think your problems are isolated to you. I haven't seen or heard about these kinds of things from the wide variety of people. In fact, I would say, and of course I need to preface this by saying that I am sitting in front of a Sierra computer. I still haven't trusted High Sierra enough to migrate this computer to it, but that might have more to do with this computer and the fact that I really need to take that dead drive out of here, yes, still. But my production machine in the office is High Sierra, it works great. My laptop, which is my old 2011 Air, works phenomenally well on High Sierra. And I think compared to Sierra, the general gist seems to be, yeah, High Sierra is better or at worst the same, but definitely not worse, but of course I might be missing something. What do you think, John? I've been happy with it. The only thing that I noticed from time to time, so I have it both on my MacBook Pro 2012 and my Mac Mini 2014 running on an SSD. Both machines have a one terabyte SSD and I'm okay with it. The only thing is that every now and then Safari will do something weird, but that's not. Sure, that's Safari. That's the only pause that I've had sometimes is that sometimes Safari gets unresponsive and then whatever it's doing, it finishes and then it resumes, so you go from the spinning beach ball of eternal weight to, yeah, than that. I mean, the things we did notice is that I think they had some rough spots with the installer early on. Sure, sure. The installer left things behind, or at least that was my observation. Yep, yep. Yeah, but yeah, once it's up and running and in now, the installer problems seem to have been remedied, so even getting it up and running, I would say is gonna be fairly predictable. Again, any isolated stuff can certainly be an issue, but yeah, I give the High Sierra a thumbs up, so I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade to it, but I also wouldn't necessarily, like if somebody's on Sierra and not having any problems, I wouldn't necessarily be compelled to even mention the upgrade to High Sierra. I was helping a client the other day and I noticed both of their Macs were on Sierra. This is the first time I've said anything about it. It just wasn't, it's like, yeah, you know what, things are cool, let's, we can let it hang for a little bit, right? Would you, am I missing something there? Would you disagree with that? Should I, should we be telling people, I'll get yourself to High Sierra? Don't wait. Yes, no? I'm trying to think of a compelling, I don't know if there's any must have features in High Sierra versus Sierra, it's just. It keeps you on the edge. I mean, as their incremental, we'll call this an incremental from Sierra to High Sierra, I think it was more fixing the plumbing rather than. And paving some of the path for the future, right? More stuff, 64 bit like that kind of thing. So yeah, yeah. Well, Todd has a question along those same lines. He says, I always wait at least a couple of minor versions before upgrading my Mac to a new OS to let the bug shake out, so I'm still on Sierra. He says, but I'm thinking now of upgrading to High Sierra because that's currently the only way to protect against the meltdown chip bug, at least until Apple provides a security update for Sierra. Now this email came in a couple of weeks ago. I think that update has now exists, right? But he says, I'm reluctant to upgrade though because I've been reading that High Sierra has brought lots of new problems more than just the usual OS upgrades. Of course, maybe that's my impression because people who have the problems are more vocal. So I'm curious about your take. Has High Sierra been rougher upgrade than usual? Well, yeah, we talked about that. The upgrade path was initially much rougher than usual. Yeah. And would you suggest waiting for 10.13.3 on High Sierra? I think whenever you decide to go, just go. And again, do you suggest upgrading High Sierra? You know, two High Sierra. So Brian Monroe in the chat room says, you should be telling people to go to High Sierra now. And I don't necessarily, I mean, I think the time is okay to move people that don't necessarily want or feel the need to be on the cutting edge. I wouldn't call High Sierra the bleeding edge by any stretch at this point, although in the early days I guess it was. But yeah, I mean, I would say I wouldn't have any qualms about upgrading someone to High Sierra or even about telling someone to upgrade to High Sierra on their own. But I guess to clarify the point I was making before, you know, do I need to like stop the presses and say, whoa, before we do any troubleshooting or any of this, we need to get you to High Sierra. You know, and I need to do that as billable time. Like, no, I don't think so. You know, I think, I think like, yes, it's great to get people there, but I don't think it's an emergency item. But maybe I'm missing something. You can let us know. Feedback at Mackie Keb.com. Right, John. Do you say feedback at Mackie Keb.com? I did say feedback at Mackie Keb.com, John. And, you know, you can also call us at 206-66. Oh, no, it's not. No, no, you can call us at 224-888-geek. And John Geek is? 4-3-3-5. So again, that's 224-888-4335. And, you know, we got a voicemail to that number from Daniel this week who was asking, hey, I was just hoping to, Daniel is a premium listener. He said, you know, I was hoping that maybe one of you would answer the phone when I called. And that, I mean, that's great. Then he said, you know, my question probably requires a little more detail than I want to leave on voicemail. So I'll shoot you an email. And that was great. But we know we don't answer that phone. That is a voicemail only line. I'll be perfectly honest with you. My phone number is not hard to find. My cell phone is published on the internet and that's intentional. I found in my life and especially with business, but just in general, answering the phone when it rings has brought me far more opportunities than not answering the phone when it rings. So if one of you wants to call me, find my number, feel free, it's on my website, davidnerd.com, is probably the easiest way to find it. But it's everywhere. Like it's just not a big deal. That said, the time that we generally can spend with Mackie Keb questions is, you know, we sort of compartmentalize that to email and your phone calls coming in that way. And obviously the time we spend actually recording and doing the show for you. If we spent time on the phone with every person that had a question, we wouldn't be able to do this show. I don't think, you know, but if you feel like you need to talk to us, give us a call. I do have, you know, as I mentioned in a previous episode, I do have my consulting business sort of, you know, up and running again. I mean, it never really went away. I just never really talked about it. But, you know, I'm not gonna start billing you from, you know, second number one or minute number one. But if we get into something that's like, oh, this is gonna take time. Okay, well, let's schedule some time where I have time for you. You have time and we'll do that its own way. And John, you can do whatever you want. Cause that's, you know, I don't want to talk. A better way to say this is, I don't want to speak for you, John. So if you don't want people digging up your number and calling you, that's fine too. At one point I hadn't unlisted that number and it's like, why am I bothering? Right. I actually recently made a change in that, you know, I switched my phone over to my ISP. Oh, right. That's right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now I have caller ID. Now I can see the name of the people that hang up on my machine. Yeah, exactly. Well, so, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes I just see the, the area that's being called from. Yeah. Sometimes the name of the company or person comes up. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Who knows. So you need after all these years to get a, you know, upgrade my phone. Well, when you choose not to upgrade for a while, then, you know, you get what you do get, you know, kind of in relate to circle this discussion back around what you do get is a very mature, stable, well-supported platform to use. So that's not a bad thing. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I wanted to get back to the OS question here. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, 10.13.3 does address, as far as I can see in the notes for the update, they do claim to have addressed the meltdown release. They see here, kernel. So one of the fixes they made was to the kernel and they said an application may be able to read kernel memory, meltdown. Yes. That's the issue that they addressed. Yeah. Well, and to circle that you're right, the 10.13.3 does it, but also so does Sierra's 10.12.6. So, and El Capitan's 10.11.6. So those both work to mitigate meltdown inspector as well. So that maybe that alleviates the compelling nature of the meltdown thing. So we'll put it. One thing you may be sure to activate, and I think it's on by default, but just in case it isn't, if you go to the app store and then go to the preferences, there is a box that I think you want checked. So one is automatically checked for updates, but then there's a submenu, if you will, and it says install system data files and security updates. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you want that enabled. I'm looking here and it says install macOS updates, install apt updates, and those are unchecked, which I think means that it's not gonna automatically happen is that I have to grant permission. Right, but for the meltdown update, that would not have happened automatically for you because that's a full, oh, it's not just a background security update. It's a, that's a full, you know, full fledged point update. So, yep. All right. All right. And you know, Michael King in sort of in relation to that, one of the concerns was that because of the, and you can rewind back to the episode we recorded at CES to talk where we talked about kind of how meltdown impacts your machine and how patching for meltdown could impact the performance of your machine. Michael King in the chat room saying on one of his Macs running 10.13.3 has slowed it down, but not that bad, but certainly noticeably, obviously take that, you know, as anecdotal evidence, it's one computer. We haven't heard a rash of reports of this, at least not here, but it, you know, there you go. So. All right. You know, while we're at it, we talked about contact information. The one thing I didn't mention was that premium subscribers can email us at premium at macgeekab.com. And if you want to learn about being a premium subscriber, of course, you can visit macgeekab.com slash premium. Premium is a program that we put together basically at your request years ago for, as a way for you to support us directly if, if you are both interested, willing and able to do so. So that that's both with three things. And so there you go. This week, we had several contributions come in as we always do. Thank you on the biannual $25 per every six months plan. Jim K, Elizabeth B, David H, Robert F and Dave C. Thank you very much. We also had a one time $25 donation from Joe F. Thank you. And then on the monthly plan of 10 bucks a month, we had Dave, yeah, Dave C. Thank you very much. A different Dave C than the Dave C in the biannual. Greg S, Olga P, Chris F, Petter H, Jim E, Ward J, Jason A, Bob P, Michael L and the B-man. So thanks so much to all of you. You rock. I really, really appreciate it. We both do. Here in this case, I will speak on behalf of you, John. So very cool. Thank you so much. Really means a lot. All right, let's share some tips here, John. Let's jump to these tips I think and then we'll come back. Back in show 694, we were talking about discount apps and coupon apps and price tracking and price saving apps. And Dave says, you forgot one, which I knew I was forgetting one because it's the one I use and I couldn't think of the name in the moment. He says, it's called Honey at joinhoney.com. I've used Honey with great success. So much so that when buying something, I'll be told by Honey a coupon code was automatically entered for me. And it really can help. It like totally automates that process. It's really well done when those folks deserve all the success that they get. So thanks, Dave, for suggesting Honey. That's key. Thank you for that. Do you have anything to add to those, John, before we move on to the other tips from recent shows or about recent shows? I do have another, I'll find it. There's a wire cutter related deal and I want to make sure I get the handle right. So give me a sec there. I'll read a couple of these others and then we can circle back or if we don't get there, we'll include it in the future. Tannell writes in and says, I have one small note about your vector graphics discussion back in Mac Keycap 694. Well, it is true that Pixelmator has vector graphics mode in it. The files are exported as raster graphics and all the benefits of vector graphics are immediately lost on export. He said, I have tried Inkscape and I hate it on a Mac. It's not a native app and it requires X11, but he says it needs serious tinkering before getting it to work and it looks ugly. I have colleagues who are Linux users and totally love it, but as a Mac user, I hate it. Honestly, he says, I do not think there is a good free option for Mac users out there. I personally use VectR, V-E-C-T-R which can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store. The app only saves files as SVG and I also use a free SVG converter for making a PDF since latex, L-A-T-E-X, the industry standard for document creation amongst the physics and math folks only recognizes either EPS or PDF files for vector graphics. Why I had so much trouble getting through that, I don't know, but thank you. So if anybody has a good recommendation for vector graphics, please, please share it. We would definitely appreciate it, but we'll put a link to Inkscape out there again just so it's there. Regarding this, and this will be the last thought, at least for now in this cycle about the whole DRM removal from movies got impossible or at least more difficult with High Sierra. We started talking about Note Burner, then we talked about M4 V-Gear, then we talked about how M4 V-Gear was the same as Note Burner and now here we are with Bill with what I think is the final answer. He says, run it in Windows via VMware or Parallels. He says, you don't have to, here's the advantages. Number one, you don't have to downgrade your Mac OS or run off an external drive. Number two, the Windows version of M4 V-Gear converts video 10 times faster than the old Mac version, even on your Mac, right? So huge benefit there. Number three, you can keep a clean empty install of iTunes and Windows to make life easier. If I run M4 V-Gear on my Mac, I have to download video, convert it, restart iTunes, yada, yada. He says, this is the only thing I use Windows for these days so I have a keyboard maestro macro that opens Windows and runs M4 V-Gear to get me started. As I said, it's really, really fast. Works way better than it ever did on the Mac. Bill, you rock, thank you for that. That's great, I think that's the answer. At least for a while, right? Yeah, if you gotta run Windows, you gotta run Windows. Yeah, yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. Like, that's the beauty of parallels in VMWare as they make that stuff really easy. I wonder if you could run it on VirtualBox. I don't know, I haven't tried it, but that would even save you some money there because VirtualBox is free, as we, I think, right? VirtualBox is still free, right, John? Last night check, I think it's Oracle. Yep. Pick that up at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty basic. I don't think it's, you know, the others of VMWare and parallels have all sorts of optimizations. So you can do like gaming and other things that, you know, full speed. I don't know, for VirtualBox necessarily has that, but then you get what you pay for. Right, exactly, yeah. And then, lastly, in the tips department for this week, we have James, which, you know, just not quite, I need that extra screen. It's going to happen. It's sitting on my couch. I mean, it should be put to use. It's driving me crazy. Anyway, James says, in episode 693, Gary asked about upgrading his 2015 iMac with an SSD, but he didn't want to crack it open himself. And that led to the discussion. He says, a possible alternative for Gary's might be to purchase an external Thunderbolt SSD drive. That way, he would not have to open his iMac. And this is something he could easily do himself. And he links to a thing at robinmonks.com for speeding up your Mac with an external SSD. That's true, you know, in that same episode we talked about the relative benefits of using Thunderbolt versus USB 3 for external drives. And, you know, with a rotational drive, it's like, well, generally not worth paying the Thunderbolt tax, but with an SSD might well be worth paying the Thunderbolt tax if you get an SSD that's fast enough. And then, you know, there's basically no difference in terms of access to the bus and all that stuff between an internal or an external drive. So I kind of like that idea. And when you get a new Mac, super easy, unplug the drive. Done. Good to go. So it's kind of cool. What do you think, John? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. I'm not there yet, but I will be. Right. As far as Thunderbolt. Right. I'm not Thunderbolting right now. I like it when you folks send us these tips or ideas or thoughts or just your, you know, it's really it's your perspective, right? Because we can we can try and be as I don't open mind. It's the wrong word. I think we're all pretty open minded. But, you know, you kind of get you think about a solution and then suddenly all other possible solutions tend to kind of fade away. And and so you might not like I didn't even consider that. That's like that's a great idea. Come kind of coming from outside the box. It's good. Speaking of outside the box. Kiwi Graham in the chat room asks a good question. Rewinding back one notch to the to the M4 vGear and Windows thing, would it run under wine? Wine is not an emulator. That's actually what wine stands for. W-I-N-E because you don't need to buy a copy of Windows to use wine. In this case, I don't think it would work under wine because you need both M4 vGear and iTunes running simultaneously. I think that's certainly how it works on the Mac. I think that's how it works on Windows. And so without Windows running, I don't know if wine would make it happen. But but wine is an interesting thing. And it and for certain apps and very certain apps, it can really be a great, great thing. And I think you can install it. You can install it in a lot of different ways, Homebrew and other ways, too. So I will might we'll put a link to wine in the show notes. All right, John, let's we'll leave it. We have some cool stuff found. We'll leave that for next week, or at least we'll leave that for later. It's not quite time to wrap up, but we do have some other questions here. So let's let's go back now, John, to in our agenda. No one knows we're going back, except you and me. We'll go to Don, who asks the icons of several of the external hard drives that I leave connected to my late 2015 27 inch iMac have begun randomly to disappear. The drives remain connected because disc utility can see them. And when I run repair on the drives using disc utility, the icons reappear where they formerly were on the desktop. Is there a corrupted P Lister preference file that controls this that I can blow away to fix the problem? And he says, by the way, the problem has only occurred since I updated to 10.13.3. Is that a coincidence? Well, it might be a coincidence. But I have intermittently experienced things like this on my Mac for years, both the desktop and finder sidebar icons are inconsistent at best for me. And I've just gotten in the habit of creating finder sidebar shortcuts or desktop aliases to the drives or even the folders within the drives that I want to access. And then everything's kind of consistent and works great. But yeah, I've been seeing all of high Sierra has actually been kind of weird for me with, especially with the finder sidebar, like my boot drive appears there after a couple of days, it'll it'll have like six or eight entries there on many of my machines, not just one. Yeah, so yeah, I don't have a magic answer for this. I mean, we can throw this out as a geek challenge. I would love if somebody has thought. I mean, do you have any thoughts on this, John? Have you have you seen anything like this? The thought that I have is there is a place you can go to see if this is set up properly, the assumption being that you want to see your hard disks and external disks and servers and other things on your desktop. Sure. And that's if you go to finder preferences. General, there's a list that I just outlined there. And there's a little checkbox next to each one. Just make sure it didn't, you know, undo itself on its own or maybe toggle what, you know, toggle one of those and maybe share a behavioral get more consistent. Yeah. Yeah. The toggle trick. I like that. Huh. I should try that. And I think that, and I think that, well, that's certainly I think changes a P list file should be able to, I don't know if it's finder dot P list. Yeah. Which one is that? Um, I'm in Sierra here. So show these items on the desktop. Let me uncheck it and I'll check it again. I don't think interesting. My recently modified files list is not showing up with that. That's not good. It must be hidden in a place that I can't even get to see from there. Not good, John, but yeah, that's how it works. No, I think that's it. I'm looking here. And so, uh, my most recently updated preference file, where is that you may ask? And it's in users, my user directory library preferences. The file is com.apple.finder.plist. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Same is correct there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just remember sometimes preferences aren't stored there if they're stored in a sandbox. In this case, they are stored there, but you could also look and drive yourself crazy. Looking in home library containers and then find the container for the app that you're talking about, um, and, you know, dig into that. So in this case, it would be looking for a container that doesn't exist. com.apple.finder is sort of how you would, you know, start to think about that. But, um, but that doesn't exist. Finder doesn't live in a sandbox. I think that would be kind of a mess, actually, if it did. But anyway, any more on that, John, before we move on? No. Okay. Cool. Um, Brett had a question and, and I think this might be kind of the, at least the last part of this kind of discussion on the changes coming to macOS server server. Uh, Brett says. Any, just linked to the, the article that we talked about last week where Apple has indicated that macOS server won't be supporting a lot of, um, features that it has in the past, one of them being the DNS server. And he says that's kind of a bummer as I have this setup running on my own internal house DNS. Uh, it looks like I'll have to migrate. So, um, maybe, but two things are, are true about this. Number one, Apple has said that they will start removing this from the GUI in macOS server. Uh, if you don't have it enabled and then at some point it will just be removed from the GUI. GUI being graphical interface, uh, graphical user interface. But the thing is mac, that's all macOS server is, is the graphical interface to lots and lots of Unix services that exist under the hood and always exist. Like when you install macOS server, I don't think that it installs any additional actual services. I think they're all there. It just gives you a user interface on top of that to configure them so that you don't have to use the command line, but you could use the command line. And in fact, there are times, even when you're using the user interface, that you want to do something that can't be quite tweaked right there. Well, you just go to the command line, you tweak a conf file or whatever. It's not P list files because these are mac apps. They're Unix app, but you know, you go and tweak a conf configuration file or something and restart the service and boom, you're up and running. So you could just keep using your DNS even once the user interface goes away by managing it from the command line or using maybe another management tool. And I honestly haven't dug in to see what exists, but opportunity now knocks, right? Because macOS will always be a great server operating system because it's Unix. So perhaps someone will write a very nice GUI to manage your DNS server that's built in to macOS for you. Perhaps someone already has. I just don't know about it, right? So that like it's worth bearing in mind that the ability to do this isn't going away. It's just Apple is going to stop being the ones that provide you with the graphical interface to configure and control it. Is that a is that the right way to say this, John? Or do I totally get it wrong? Oh, I followed it. Okay, good. Do you have anything to add to that, John? Hmm. All right. Do you know what I mean? Do you know of any other GUI tools? If anybody does, you know, send them to us because we'd love to know some. It's good stuff. Anything else on that one before we move on? Yeah, I was looking here. You can. I there's actually a I found an article that talks about setting up your own outside of what's already on the Mac. Right. DNS server off the mess with this before I offer it as good advice or not. Sure, sure. So Kiwi Graham, again, in the chat room asks a very relevant question, how well will the underlying Unix be kept up to date by Apple? So that's a good question. And there's I have two answers. Number one, I actually think Apple will probably keep that Unix fairly well up to date because Apple's pretty focused on security, like really focused on security. So they don't want it to like even from a PR standpoint, they don't want it to get around that, you know, Macs have insecure web servers or insecure DNS servers or whatever, but you don't necessarily have to rely on that either because the Mac is a Unix. You can manage your own Unix packages separate from whatever the OS brings in and using something like homebrew. But, you know, you can you can do all of that stuff. And I'm pretty sure that bind exists in homebrew. I'm going to run your favorite utility, John Cakebrew, to to look at this for me because I forget how to list packages and I guess it would be brew list and pipe that out to to grab bind maybe. But let's see. No, it's not there. Oh, is there is there any DNS server? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's yeah. So it looks like there are DNS server. You could run DNS mask, actually, which I that's the one that I found. Well, that's a forwarder, though. So, huh, but bind. Oh, no, bind is there. Oh, it's just not installed. Right. That's the problem. I ran brew list. I don't have bind installed. But bind would be, you know, the an actual DNS server. And and that, you know, that will always be kept up to date by, you know, the homebrew folks very obsessively, I think. So there you go. That's that's the key. But DNS mask might or might not do what you need. But, you know, probably what you're talking about is bind. So no cakebrew. I don't want to update now doing a podcast. We had a question from David that sort of relates to what we were talking about from Bill earlier and and David asks. I've heard you can run Windows programs on a Mac, but you have to run it inside another. Could you please tell me how to do this and what programs you recommend? So, yes, you know, we talked about sort of one of these ways, which is using virtualization software. And we'll come back around to that because that allows you to run Windows alongside of the things on your Mac. But you can also run Apple's own boot camp, which really turns your Mac into a Windows machine. Mac OS doesn't run it, boots Windows natively. That's not inside a container. It's not virtualized. It's not doing any emulation or anything. It is literally running your Mac as a Windows machine, but you can't run Mac OS at the same time. So you get to pick which, whether you want the convenience or the purity of that. That said, I know a lot of people. We don't do the benchmarks here anymore, frankly, actually, because Jim Tannis, who would do them for us, started his own site, TechReview and at TechReview.com. He does obsessively the benchmarks for. Parallels versus VMware for the most part, but sometimes includes other things like virtual box in there. And there are times when. Like graphics performance is better inside a virtualized container than it is in boot camp. Right, which is kind of crazy. But I don't know. So what are your thoughts on that in terms of the best way to do it, John? Um, I mean, start with virtual box, maybe. Yeah, see if it does what you need. Like I mentioned, you know, it's kind of basic. Like I found, you know, support for, you know, like at one point I was using it to do some USB debugging and it's USB, non standard USB device support was kind of wonky. Yeah, it was much better with the and my current is parallels. This is what I'm currently running. OK, because they're nice people and they give us licenses. They all give us licenses. Let's be fair about that, though. No, no, no, I don't want to misrepresent like like both parallels and VMware happily provide us with licenses. And we both have licenses to the current versions on either. Um, so, uh, and but I like for my purposes, I don't like and I do very little. I honestly don't find a difference between virtual box parallels or VMware. But oh boy, they're going to shake their fist at you. Well, that's OK. The difference. Well, of course, no, of course there's a difference. But in terms of like what I use and the frequency in which I use it, you know, it I honestly couldn't tell you which one I used most recently. But but I'm doing very lightweight stuff. I do find, though, and I think it is VMware Fusion that deals with the Microsoft virtual machines very, very well. So if you go to developer dot Microsoft dot com, we'll put a link in the show notes. It's a it's a much longer link than that. But out there, Microsoft lets you download 90 day trials or test versions of virtual machines for for you to use. And it's really for browser testing, right? So that you can really test your websites and your shopping carts and your web engines or whatever you're doing on any different many different versions of a browser. It goes from IE eight on Windows seven all the way up to Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, right, which is great. And if you're only doing something that that doesn't require like a lot of persistent configuration or, you know, persistent local Windows storage, this is a great way to get things going because you don't have to go and buy a copy of Windows. But you do have to sort of start from scratch every 90 days, which may or may not be a big issue, depending on, you know, how you're doing stuff and and it saves you from that. VMware Fusion, for me, has made it very easy to use and integrate these these developer engines. So, you know, that that and that generally is is enough for me because I don't I just don't have a use of I don't have a daily use case where I need to run this constantly. It's just like, oh, yeah, OK. And and so there you go. Yeah. That's that. That's that I've never used bootcamp, though. No, me neither. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see, free copies of Windows to virtualize. How about we call it that in the show notes and put it right there? I'll put it in the chat room, too, for everybody. So all right, cool. And well, you want to you want to tell us we've got one cool stuff found that really is sort of a follow up from show 693. John, we were talking about creating QR codes for Wi-Fi networks or whatever. And while you were building the show notes for that episode, you found and included something there that we really didn't talk about in the show. So I wanted to to know we didn't know I said, I said, I'm almost certain that there's somebody out there. And I thought it was either. But but I was like, you know, one of one of the tools that we really like, they have a lab where they have additional software. Right. And I promised to find it and tell you about it. And I did put it in the show notes. But now we're going to tell you again, but it's called Smart Join. And it's from our buddy, Alph. What? I Stumbler Alph, what? Yes, of I Stumbler fame. But this is a little tool that he put together and get it from the app store. Last night, I checked it was free. And what does it do? Well, it does something that I thought was pretty cool. And it was actually kind of timely because I was at an event last night, one of our good friends had a had a bash and he wanted to he wanted to set up Wi-Fi for people because believe it or not, Dave, my Verizon at his place, it came up as 3G. I didn't get LTE. It's like, you know, we're really in the sticks here. But his Wi-Fi was quick. But yeah, Smart Join basically generates a QR code, which now that iOS 11 supports that, you scan it and it basically lets you logs you into a Wi-Fi network. It's pretty cool. Then I found it somewhere. Then I found it somewhere else. So I just decided because he was like, well, how do I set up a guest network? And I'm like, well, you go here and there. Well, wait, wait, before you do that, I just want to point out, yes, you can download Smart Join from the app store and generate QR codes with the iOS app. But you can also just go to smartjoin.us and generate it right on the web. So you don't even have to download an app or if you're doing it on your Mac or whatever. You can generate that QR code without downloading an app at all. So there you go. So now with that, take a look at that. So I was also, you know, so at first he said, oh, well, I have an Orbi, but he misspoke or I misunderstood. He actually has an Eero. And I was like, oh, well, let me. And he said, yeah, I was able to set it up in the Eero. And I'm like, oh, well, let me look at that. So I'm running the Eero app. And if you go to guest access, check this out. It says, oh, you want to set up a guest network? And by the way, here's a QR code that people can either scan or you can use the standard sharing mechanism within iOS to send it to somebody else. Isn't that cool? I never knew that was there. I don't think I've ever, I haven't looked in the guest access section of their app for a while. Yeah, I had no idea that was there, but it wasn't there originally. I mean, I do remember when I first tested it, I turned on guest access and there was no QR code there. But yeah, that's pretty cool. I like it. It's good stuff, man. So thank you for finding that. I think it's super handy. Like keep encouraging, especially these theaters where I work, where they have Wi-Fi throughout the theater because usually they're in cement buildings or whatever that are awful for cell service. And you'll find somewhere on the wall, like on the way to the dressing rooms or something, somebody will have put up a sticky with the Wi-Fi password or something. It's like, oh dude, we got to just print, we got to print the QR code and just put it on the wall, let people do it that way. Or do both. There's no problem. But the way it works, it's just a URL. And if you play around at smartjoin.us, you'll see it's a Wi-Fi colon slash slash URL is how that works. So I just did one where it was, you know, Test and Dave were my, the network name and password or whatever. And it just puts it right there. I will warn you about this though. If you do this at smartjoin.us, it is sending it in a URL in the clear. So like the URL includes my name and password. I mean, I didn't put in my real name and password in order to then generate, because the server is generating the QR code, not my browser, I presume. So it's possible that Alf could go through his web logs and see your Wi-Fi password. Alf is like the most trustworthy guy. He's on the list of most trustworthy people I've ever met. So I'm not worried about it, but I just wanted to make sure I really knew. I don't know how the app works. My guess is the app does it all local and so you don't, there's no sharing or anything like that. There you go. And people could also look through your browser history and see that, that, right? I mean, you know, there are security holes to doing it with a get request versus a push request, which doesn't show it in the URL. So there you go. My guess is Alf will listen to this and probably find a way to fix it because he's a smart dude. But he's a very trustworthy smart dude. So there you go. What else do we have, John? We talked about how to contact us. Oh, you can visit us on Facebook at mackeykeb.com slash Facebook. We'd love to see you there. Great discussions happening, all kinds of things. And we really do, you know, anything, including we had some great comments this week, you know, like tweaks and, you know, I'll call them criticisms, but it's never, like I never take criticism as negative. In fact, most of the time when somebody sends in a piece of, you know, email or whatever saying, oh, you know, here's this part about the show I don't like. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes I read that and it's like, oh, you just crystallized a thought it's like been percolating in me for three months that I haven't been able to like, you know, put my, you know, put words to or put a full concept to. And so it really, it's often it's like, oh, great, thanks for saying that. We can fix that. No problem, you know, or whatever it is. No, not always. I mean, you know, we can't please everybody. We know that, but we, you know, we work to put on the show that we'd want to hear. So there you go. You got anything else to say, John, before we let this one ride? Go team. Go team. There you go. I want to say go team. Go ahead. No, we're gonna have to, we have to do prep for the big event. Yeah, I guess so. I actually have a remote consulting session with a Mackie Geb premium listener later this afternoon. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I really have been enjoying the consulting thing. I mean, it, you know, like I said, I need to be concerned about committing too much of my time to it. But actually, I had a story I was supposed to tell, I'm not supposed to, that I wanted to tell this week about something that I did actually with an onsite somebody in my neighborhood here. But, but I'll save that for next week because it's interesting and you're probably gonna yell at me because for something that I did, but I think it was the right thing. You know, there you go. But go team cash fly at cashfly.com. Those are the folks that provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Go team Mackie Geb sponsors. Of course, Casper at Casper.com slash MGG. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Other world computing at maxsales.com, bare bones software at barebones.com, Roboform and roboform.com slash MGG. Go team Mackie Geb listeners, all of you, every one of you. And, you know, I have one last thing to say for the entire team, John. And that is, when you're out there, be careful, have fun, and don't get caught. Made out of Mackie Geb.