 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, episode 771 from Monday, July 22nd, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show where we take all your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, pretty much anything that you find or we find throughout the week. We distill it, we dissect it, we try to answer it. The goal being that every single one of us, us included, and you too, that's learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include a new sponsor, mintmobile.com slash MGG. You want to go there. We'll tell you why in a minute, but trust me, you want to go there. And lino.com slash MGG, you want to go there too. Again, we'll tell you why in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brawn. How are you, Mr. John F. Brawn? Fantastic. That's good. You know, I really look forward to the way I have. We all have our routines, right? We're humans. We're creatures of habit. I'm more of a habit habitual creature than most, I think. I don't know, maybe whatever. I have my habits. When we do the show, we get together, we sort of talk through things, and then we go and get like tea or whatever. And you can you can be part of all this at mackiekeb.com slash stream, if you want to be part of of all that. And we play a little song or whatever while we're going and getting our drinks. And I make tea for myself 99 percent of the time, which I did today. But I don't take a sip of the tea until the theme music is playing. And I like, especially today, but most days, I always look forward to that first sip of tea the way it like, you know, it's warm. It hits your throat. It sort of just changes everything. I've really become accustomed to that. Speaking of my throat. I am those issues I talked about whatever a month or two ago. I think, John, they were caused by me having my moved my podcasting microphone from being on my left for however many years we've been doing this to to being on my right that Bell's palsy that I had whatever, not quite as many years ago weakened the right side of my throat. And I think talking aiming to my right while I talk was causing more strain on my larynx than than I should be putting on it. I moved it back to the left. Everything's good. I'm happier. I can sing again like it's all good. So anyway, I just I don't know that here we are. Do you have anything to share before we go to Andrew or should we just should we have Andrew save us here dive right in diving in Andrew says I have a quick question as the T two chip becomes more embedded into Apple's devices. Do I need to be concerned about time machine backups for devices? In other words, if I start a new time machine backup using an external drive and keep secure boot full security checked in the startup security utility which you can get to by going into recovery mode and external boot disallow will I get caught if the laptop drive dies or if the computer has some other hardware issue? The answer is yes, you will. You cannot boot your Mac from anything other than the internal drive if you leave it at the defaults and don't go into recovery mode startup security utility and change this just to be clear. Just I know I'm 99% sure Andrew the person asking asking the question knows this, but just for everybody's benefit. You can't boot from a time machine backup anyway. You'd have to have a clone or a USB stick, for example. There is the recovery volume on your startup disk. So even if something happens to your main installation, as long as the hardware is OK, you should be able to boot from the recovery volume, which is still internal and still allowed by default. And then you could restore and use your time machine and all of that stuff. But yeah, if something happens to the hardware or if you simply want to boot from your clone, you can't unless you go into startup security utility and allow booting from external media, which is one of the options in the external boot section. So yeah, it is worth thinking about. I have on my laptop, my MacBook Air, I went in and and changed that to allow booting from pretty much anything. And I mean, I grok the security concerns. I know why Apple has these options, but it's a great thing to be aware of. And that's kind of why I want to start the show with it. Just to just remind everybody that, you know, you want to know about this before you need to know about it. So thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Well, it'll be good to know once I get a machine with the T2 chip. Right, right. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing is as we all sort of migrate up into these machines eventually, that's that's exactly what it's what it's good for. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. While we're on the subject of backups, Bob has a question related to the last episode. He says we had answered Bob's question about time machine backups and and all that in the last show. And he says it got me to thinking about whether I want or need backups or just copies slash clones of my computer's drive. My understanding is that backups such as what Time Machine does give the ability to not only have a copy of the most recent state of the computer, but the ability to go back in time to get earlier versions of files that may have been modified or corrupted. As I have yet to need to go back in time to retrieve a previous version of a document or file, I think I would be fine with just a copy or clone of the hard drive to protect against catastrophic loss. Have you already discussed this or have a tutorial? Any thoughts? Would I need to have a couple of recurring clones spread out over a week or a month? So it's a good question. But the sort of the umbrella answer is you need to do whatever you are comfortable doing, right? Backups, clones, whatever it is. What we want to do is make sure you are making that decision eyes wide open. Right now, I'll throw out an example here that might change your approach to your backup strategy. It certainly changed mine. Several years ago, I went to prepare for a presentation for an Apple user group that I was going to speak for. I may have been, I think I was doing a presentation for them that I had done for someone else or at least wanted to use something from a prior presentation. So I have a whole folder that I just keep all my presentations in and I couldn't find it. It wasn't there. I know where it's supposed to be. It wasn't there. I looked in my time machine backups, but they had been reset like, I don't know, three months before something because time machine and nope, not there. Somehow I must have accidentally deleted this folder from my Mac and just hadn't realized it because I hadn't done any presentations in whatever period of time that was. My clone certainly wouldn't have had that data. It's possible my time machine backup would have had that data, but my clone certainly didn't. Then I remembered about eight or 10 months before that I'd gotten a new Mac and had immediately repurposed the prior one. I think in fact it was this machine that I had gotten down in the office and I had, you know, rolled the old one up here for the studio just like I did this time. And because I was immediately repurposing the Mac. I did what I always do and I made a disk image clone of the Mac that I was repurposing so that I had, you know, essentially cold storage of whatever data was was going to be on that or was previously on that Mac. Just in case I didn't migrate something or didn't copy something, you know, whatever. I just it gave me peace of mind to go and format that drive and get it ready for, you know, for its next home. I looked and thankfully in that disk image there was my presentations folder from, you know, eight months prior, I think I lost some edits or something. But, you know, I had every presentation I've ever done in this folder. So now I don't wait for when I get a new machine to do these cold storage archives. I do them once a year and and then I just save them on my disk station or NAS, you know, any sort of whatever, you know, storage you've got there and and now I know I have, you know, all this historical data going back because you that that's the thing is you haven't yet needed it, Bob, but you might like I'm pretty diligent about things. But somehow I, you know, had that folder selected when I selected something else and hit delete and moved on with my day and, you know, dude to do that's the end of that. So yeah, I don't know that I would I certainly don't recommend just having a clone. But even if you feel comfortable with it now, you don't get to change your mind about the past in the future. So yeah, I don't know thoughts on this, Mr. Braun. You don't get to change your mind about the past in the future, right? I think that might be the topic of the subject of the episode. Oh, you may. I don't know. All I know is you should probably. Everyone should deploy multiple backup strategies. Yeah. So my case, I do a clone on a regular basis. I do time machine and I also use various cloud services to backup things as well. Yeah, right, right. That in case something local happens. Yep. Yep. It's smart, man. Smart. Yeah, because I had same as you one time. I yeah, I don't know what I don't know what happened, but there was a case where yeah, documents kind of like you disappeared. And I'm like, what happened to those? Yeah. Yeah. I mean clearly was certainly in my case. I'm certain it was user error and most of the time that's what it is. It's you know, or as we like to say an error between the chair and the keyboard. But you know, operator, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, good. So hopefully some perspective for you for all of you on that. Rich has a question. He says when I am in Safari on my MacBook Pro running Mojave when hovering the cursor over a clickable link, the cursor intermittently flickers and I can't click the link. If I hit the escape key, the cursor returns to the hand and the link is clickable. This has been going on for quite some time, dating back at least two versions of Mac OS. I sought help at the Genius Bar. They seemed to know what the problem was and supposedly fixed it, but soon thereafter. The problem was back again. Any thoughts or suggestions before I nuke and pave, which I really don't want to do. So I'm actually curious what the Genius Bar thinks they did or did because that's that's interesting. My first inclination in a scenario like this, especially if it's only happening in Safari would be well in general boot in safe mode. See if that solves it. Right. Also boot into a separate test user account. You've created one of those, right? If not, stop what you're doing. Go create a test user, give it admin privileges and a password. Don't forget the password. That way you've got a test user if you can't ever log into your account. This is a helpful thing. But you know, boot into safe mode, boot into your test user, see if it happens there. That'll tell you is it system wide? Is it some, you know, third party thing that's loading when you're in regular mode, but not safe mode, etc. But check other browsers, right? Does it also happen in Chrome and Firefox? If so, okay, it's not a Safari specific thing. If it is a Safari specific thing, maybe a Safari extension is at play. That could be it. Go to Safari preferences extension, see what you've got there in the chat room Kiwi Graham at mackeygibb.com slash stream as we mentioned, suggested perhaps this is malware trying to hijack links. You might see that in your extensions in Safari. I've certainly seen it there. You might also see it in system preferences profiles, which will only be there if you have a profile installed. So if you don't see it, don't worry about it, but check that and then of course, you know, if if all else fails to run malware bites and see what, see what that says too, because that's that's a great way to get rid of stuff. It seems like the malware vendors, vendors, the malware authors, probably a better way to say it. Although malware is a business. So maybe they are malware vendors. They have like malware bites has been able to keep up with what they're doing. It seems I have not heard of anyone saying I've got malware bites didn't fix it. But maybe now I will feedback at mackeygibb.com. Did you say feedback at mackeygibb.com? I did. I said feedback at mackeygibb.com. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, good stuff. Any any more thoughts on that, John? No, I'm with you. I've had that happen on occasion. It wasn't malware. It was just Safari. Oh, every once in a great while, I'll have, you know, something I try to do in Safari and it fails. And I'm like, okay, well, and so my my routine is, okay, let's try it in Firefox and then let's try it in Chrome. Yeah. But typically, whenever I have issue with, you know, something like click on not working, it almost always solves the problem by going to Firefox. But like many, my everyday browser is Safari. Right, right, right. Yeah. The Safari is still my everyday browser, too. It it seems to be the most efficient browser on macOS, which is no great surprise. Happens to be written, you know, by the people that also make macOS or at least the same company. So yeah, especially on my laptop, I find battery life with Safari is is better than the other sort of two major browsers that I might use. So yeah. All right. Good. Yeah. And I we sort of said this, but for clarity, Brian Monroe shares, see if it is a system thing or a local user thing. And that's where having that test user account is really helpful to determine whether is this a system wide problem or something specific to your user account and that can just aid in guiding your troubleshooting. So yeah, thank you, Brian. Great stuff. I want to take a minute and I'm really stoked. In fact, to talk about our first sponsor, which is Mint Mobile at Mint Mobile dot com slash MGG. Look, if you're still using one of the big wireless providers here in 2019, have you asked yourself what you're paying for? They have to pay for retail stores, right? They have hidden fees and you might be taking they might be taking advantage of you because they know that you'll just pay. This is what Mint Mobile is here for. Mint Mobile provides the same premium network coverage that you're used to. John and I have tested this. It's actually faster than our big wireless providers, at least in the places we've tested at a fraction of the cost because they don't have stores, right? Everything is online and you buy plans in bulk. Mint Mobile makes it super easy to cut your wireless bill down to just 15 bucks a month. There's no unlimited on Mint Mobile and there's a reason for that because you're probably not using all of the data that you're paying. You're not using unlimited data. You can buy different data plans from them and if you use more, you can actually buy and and top up, you know, just for the month or whatever, but you'll still get some data like it doesn't cut you off. It just slows you down. So when you run out of 4g LTE, you get dropped down to slower speeds, but you still get some data so you can still function. They are really into Apple, iPhone, iOS. All your network settings are auto updated when you put their SIM in. They support voice over LTE. All this APN settings like all that stuff happens visual voicemail. It works. Hot spot is built in at no extra charge. It's super easy. You can bring your own phone number. You can get a new one from them. They sell iPhones too. A lot of them use iPhones. I talked with the guys like the head of the whole thing there. You know, they are they are Apple people like us. Many of them just use iPhones. You got to check this out. So go to mint mobile dot com slash M G G. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get it shipped to your door for free mint mobile dot com slash M G G. One more time. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. Mint mobile dot com slash M G G. Our thanks to Mint mobile for sponsoring this episode. And good day, John. And good day, Dave. This is Andrew in Australia. Dave over the last week or two, I've heard you both on the Mac beat gap and also on Mac break weekly talk about the zoom server software issue. And how Apple has run silent updates. I think on two occasions to remove this software from our machines. There's one bit of the story that's missing for me and I thought you might be able to do an explainer for us on it. And that is how to silent updates work. My only experience has been when Apple has done a software update or there's a security update. It says it tells me that the software update is there. I hit download and then my machine restarts and then I live happily ever after, which is great. But these things as the name implies has happened have happened silently. And I'm just intrigued as to two things. One is why did my machine not restart? And two, why did I not see any software in my trash? Yeah. So look, I think that would be of interest to many listeners and I'm interested in myself and I thought you are the man to explain us to it. So we don't get caught. See you guys. Have a good week. Bye for now. Thanks. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was had the pleasure of doing. I think it was episode 670, but whatever this week's the Tuesday, the 16th episode of Leo reports, Mac break weekly. I was on there with them and and this was one of the things we talked about. It was it was actually a blast. Of course it was, you know. Yeah. So these hidden updates, John, these silent updates you mentioned last week and I mentioned this on Leo's show too for people that were listening software update or system preferences, software update advanced. There's a checkbox there that says install system data files and security updates. If you uncheck this, I'm pretty sure that would stop these automatic zoom updates from from coming. I'm not certain John Gruber checked with someone at Apple and seems to be pretty certain that this would do that, but you want to make sure unless you have a good reason not to do software updates or security updates, you want to make sure that's checked. Now how they work. Well, not every update requires your Mac to reboot. Right. If for example, let's say we're going to delete and disable this web server engine. That can all happen. You can do it manually and you don't need to reboot your Mac to do it. That's how these types of updates happen. Patches to the OS that aren't part of the boot process don't require a reboot to be applied. So that, I mean, and they don't necessarily, I mean, they might be putting, they might be removing things in this case. Maybe they are removing the actual engine that's running the web server. But, you know, Unix is happy to let you delete something without, you know, just moving it to the trash can. In fact, when you move something to the trash can on your Mac, it has not been deleted, right? Unix doesn't delete it, just moving it to a different folder that's then treated a little bit differently by the OS. But in these cases, if it's a security update, you don't want it sitting in your trash can and so Apple just deletes it. If, in fact, that's what the update does. So really better to think about, as I'm talking this through, these, you know, security updates, this ProtectX database, whatever it is, think of these more as system scripts that can run. Like Apple says, okay, this particular thing needs to be done on all Macs. We need to shut down this web engine or this, you know, web server, and then we need to delete that file. And we also need to delete the thing that's going to try to restart it at login and fail because it's no longer there. So they write the little script and then they, to do that, instead of giving you a set of instructions, they write the script so that your system can do it automatically, they push that script out, your Mac downloads it because you have this box checked and then your Mac runs the script in the background. So that, think of it that way and maybe that's, maybe that helps to frame it. What do you think, my friend? I agree. Okay. Now there are a number of, yeah, as you pointed out there, you know, number one, have that checkbox checked, but yes, there are multiple things that Apple deploys to get rid of nastiness. X protect is one of them, right? Right. Yeah, protect, X protect. That's I called it protect X. Yeah, X protect is the right word. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I was actually, you know, I was poking around. I was trying to find, I recall at one point there was a, I thought I had a utility that would list all of the various things that X protect on your system would protect against. There is a file and if you search, you can, you can find it. There is a file. There's a P list file that actually you can open up and then look at all that, but I thought that Onyx had, I'm misremembering here, but yeah, if anybody knows, let me know. I'd love to see a list of the X protect stuff without having to open the P list file, but I don't know. Yeah, that program. Let me do that. I'm finding an article at ostandaly.com or OS X daily, however you like to to call it and there is you can, there's a defaults read command that looks at system library core services X protect bundle contents resources X protect meta dot P list and you can pull the version out of that on my this particular Mojave running Mac when I run that I get two one zero three for anybody playing along at home. So if that's, if that's helpful for anyone. So yep. I don't know. All right. Yep. Okay. Barb has a question. We'll have some answers and maybe you folks will have some answers and then maybe in the future we'll actually have even more answers. So Barb asks, I've had a ring doorbell since the fall of 2016. It was awesome until one day in 2018 and then it was junk on that day. It started only showing the backs of people as they turned around and left. So we never saw their faces before that day. I could see the people walking up and leaving when working with their support. They told me it was my network after lots of checks. I know that it is not my network. Nothing in my house has changed. I live in South Carolina. The same thing happened to a friend in Texas and another friend in Florida. All of us have different kinds of networks. So my question is, do you know of any way to make the doorbell video on ring work properly? If not, can you recommend a replacement video doorbell that is activated by motion or just a video camera in general that is activated by motion? So I don't know that I have a solution for this. It's weird that you're having it with multiple things. But it sounds like maybe, you know, ring has pushed out several updates to their their software over time and has in some of those dramatically changed the at least the interface and I think the functionality of how the doorbell looks and sees what's going on. My guess is if you contacted ring support, you've already been through all this. But for anybody that has a ring doorbell, if you kind of set it up and forgot about it, which is very easy to do because it just sort of works, it's worth every six months going and launching the app and sort of going into the the sensitivity settings for the the doorbell or the camera or whatever it is because I went in once and it was like, whoa, this has changed dramatically. You can you have so much more control than you used to have or it's different controls. So that might be it. Another way to test it is to just launch the app and say view live and see how long it takes for your doorbell to start streaming video direct to your phone. And you know, I found that it usually takes about two or three seconds to set up that that stream. That is not how long it takes your doorbell to start recording. By the way, it's just in order to get the stream happening. You actually talk to ring servers and then it sets up a direct stream from the doorbell to your phone. But it's a little weird. So so that's part of but that that two to three seconds is normal. And I would say if you can start seeing video in that two to three second range, then there's nothing wrong with your network ring. Your doorbell is able to talk over the network. It's able to stream. It's all of that stuff. So maybe something with their sensitivity changed and it's just no longer working for you and your friends, which which sucks. And you should report this to ring because you shouldn't just have to buy a new doorbell. All of that said some options. There's the nest doorbells. There's simply safe. There's that company wise. I talked about their bulbs last week, which are now available. You can go buy them for the same price I paid twenty nine ninety nine for a four pack and then you pay for shipping. So it works out to be about nine bucks a bulb is what I paid. They don't have one yet. But when they do guarantee it'll be priced really aggressively because that's their that's their M.O. And then we'll put a link. I found some some articles, you know, from like Wirecutter and stuff reviewing smart doorbells and John, there's one you're about to start testing from you fee the people that make the RoboVac that I use, which is an anchor brand. So I'm curious to. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that once you get it. Are you still? Yeah, I look forward to because yeah, I've had I've had issues with the ring as well, being a bit too sensitive. So you have the opposite issue of Barb. Yeah. Yeah. And as you pointed out, you know, all of these guys are constantly updating their algorithms and, you know, it's a hard problem to figure out, you know, what am I seeing? Yeah. Well, as anybody listening to the show can and my right hand writing John's level can attest, you're pretty close to the street. We can, you know, we can hear cars going by. You must have a window open or something, which is fine. No, it keeps me on my toes writing your level when I hear that. But and your issue is that it's telling you there's someone at your door when a car is just driving by and this new one from you fee says it's got human detection in it. So and I think their example is they show a dog coming up to your door and it doesn't, you know, if you turn on humans only then it doesn't do anything if it's a dog. So maybe that's your answer in your scenario. So yeah. Yeah, there you go. Anything else? Am I good? Yeah. Anymore on this top? I'll have to look through my files because I remember there was one that I saw at CES that tried to solve the problem by having two cameras. So it would have one that was looking straight ahead and one looking down. And and I think their claim I'll have to dig around and find that vendor. But that was solving the problem of what you just pointed out is all right, if the down facing camera sees something but the up camera doesn't then they're like, oh, okay, must be a cat or a dog or some other critter. And I shouldn't tell you about that unless you want to know about it. Right. Yeah, unless unless you want to know about it what the weird part is that rings floodlights use have like human detection. They've got person detection in them. You know what? Weiss doesn't have a doorbell but they have a camera that you could use. So go. Let's let's not forget about that. I'll put that in the list. That might be your answer because I think you can get those for really like, you know, it's wise. So they've got the wise cam and the wise cam pan and how much is the wise cam? Twenty bucks for the wise cam and this thing like it's like a little robot. It it I don't know. I yeah, here we go. I got to get one of them. I actually found I actually found the product here. It's coming back to me Maximus. Okay. They claim they are the first dual camera video doorbell and I believe them. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. That's cool. That's cool. Huh. Maximus doorbell. Huh. All right. I'll put that in the show notes too. That's pretty cool, man. Dual cam video doorbell. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to buy those wise bulbs, go do them from from wise.com. W Y Z E dot com. I'll put those in the show notes too because now they're actually on sale. When I mentioned them last week, I had gotten them as part of their their, I mean it was a public thing, but it was their pre-order or whatever, but you can buy one for eight bucks or four for 30. So there you go. That's they're pretty awesome. I'm pretty stoked with them. So yeah. Hey, all right, John, I have some, some news and a tech problem that we need you and I need to solve. So the news is that you know, I was I was suffering terribly from FOMO because Max stock is coming up and I couldn't go because I had committed to this theater show. We were doing a production of the show called the head wig in the angry inch this summer and and it's one that I know and have done with this cast. It would have been really difficult for them to sub the drummer part out and I had committed to do it. So it's like crap. It's the same weekend is one of the weekends of head wig is the same weekend as Max stock. And it was also supposed to be, you know, like these two weekends and then we've got a break and then there's two more weekends in August these first two weekends were canceled because people got sick because there were other shows happening that burn these people out. And as soon as I like the email went out at 2 a.m. One day earlier this week and by I walk for whatever reason that day I woke up at five. I saw the email and I booked flights to Max stock. So I will be there, which is awesome. A smartly I had booked a hotel and had not yet canceled it. I don't know why I hadn't canceled it. I think FOMO, you know, I was the fear of missing out. So so I will be there. And then I started talking with, you know, Mike, who organizes Max stock and Barry, who organizes sort of all of the after parties Max stock. Max stock really sort of happened because years ago, the first one because Barry wanted to do this, this cookout at his house. And and then he and and Mike real Mike Potter realized that well, wait a minute, you know, we're gonna have all these people in town. We should have a conference for them during the day. And so Mike took the job of organizing what now we know as Max stock. So it's like, well, if I'm going to be there, you know me, if I'm going to be at a show, I like to justify the expense by doing something speaking, you know, something that's a, you know, a public sort of thing. I mean, I don't get me wrong selfishly. I would actually just love to go and and you know, just be an attendee and hang with all of you. They're going to be there and all that stuff. But but, you know, you gotta we do a thing here. So we got to do a thing there and we went back and forth on some options and actually had some great options. I mean, all of his speaker schedule, of course, is full because the things and we can have, of course it is. But we started thinking about, well, what about a live Mackie cap? And so Saturday evening, Barry is having a thing at the main hotel, which is the Hampton Inn. And there's going to be like games and stuff and food and, you know, that sort of thing. So at the beginning of the evening, John and I will be recording Mackie cap. I think in one of the conference rooms there at the hotel, I don't think they have a P.A. for us though, John. So we need to Barry wasn't all that concerned about us just projecting. And I think we'll be okay. But I started thinking through, okay, you know, what can we do? How can we do this? What, you know, what's going to work? And so, we have a mobile recording setup, right? You know, we can do it all in software. We plug two USB microphones into, I mean, we'll plug them into my MacBook, but we could plug them into any MacBook mind just happens to have the rest of the software that we need to record the show. So we will plug them into mine and we can record the show. That's easy. We've done that many times. We're, you know, fairly confident that that will work. The question is, I started thinking, okay, well, how do we make it so that the people in the room can actually hear us? I mean, we'll project and we'll talk like we normally do, John, but wouldn't it be great to give them something, even if it's just a small room, even if we're all, we might all just be sitting at sort of a round table, which would be cool because I want to do a stump the geek thing so that people can ask questions. So I, I think I have a second microphone that I can bring so we can have three mics and one of them can be a mic for people to ask questions and we'll do a shorter Mackie cab. I don't think it's going to be our, you know, 90 minute thing. I think I'm aiming for like a 45 minute show. So next next week show 7, 7, 2, if you see that it's short, that's normal. You didn't get a short file. So John, well, first thoughts about all of this and he, any tweaks to the, the vision here before we start talking about some of the particulars. I'm with you so far. Okay, cool. Um, and you have a microphone you can bring, right? Your USB mic, so it will be good. And actually, I mean, it's Mac stock. So if we need a mic, my guess is someone like Guy Searle would have a mic from the my Mac show and we could probably borrow that for the, for the listener mic, you know, some USB mic. So now that we've got all that sorted out, the question is, okay, could we give them a little something and I started thinking, well, wait a minute, I always travel with like a JBL flip or something so that I can listen to music in my hotel room. Those have, I don't want to mess with Bluetooth because there's weird delays and stuff, although that might actually be okay. But those speakers also have headphone in like mini eight input. So why couldn't I bring a mini eight cable and perhaps even bring like a 20 foot extension on a mini eight cable so that we can have the speaker a little further away from us and perhaps closer to the people that actually want to hear out of it. So we don't have to turn it up as much and we get less bleed through and less echo and all of that. I mean, it's going to be a little echo-y anyway because, you know, we're not in our normal scenario. But but I'm thinking of, you know, we can, we can use a little speaker to give just a little bit of extra amplification. I think that might work, man. What do you think? Because we have a, I have a three way normally when we plug in, I have a three way splitter for for our headphones, but we only ever use two of the three jacks on that. So could you use the third one to go to the speaker? What do you think? Am I crazy? You're the audio guy. I know, but you know, like you grok the big picture. Yes. Yeah. You think it's going to work? That's really my question is like, yes, sanity check. Okay. So we need to make sure I'm going to make a packing list here because I need to make sure I bring the speaker. So speaker. I need those speakers are weird because they have a mini eight jack just like my Mac does. So I need a dual male mini, you know, headphone to headphone, dual male jack. Okay. And then I need the extension cable. And I need to make sure I bring the three way splitter and don't just use a two way. And and then I need an extra microphone. Maybe times two. If I can fit an extra microphone in, I hate checking a bag, but you know, this might I might have to take the sacrifice. So now yeah, good. All right. I think we can make this work, John. I think so. I'll have to I'll have to enlist you to what we need to we'll need to jointly set up because we'll have to I think we like this thing starts at like 630 and I I want to plan to like start recording you know, relatively on the early side. I want to sort of record on the first side because we're going to be hungry and we're going to want to eat. So let's get the show done and then we can go eat, you know, all that stuff. So yeah. Yeah. Does this seem like a workable plan? I'm ready. Okay. Well, that's good. I'm glad one of us is I have a very tight turnaround because I'm driving back from Montreal Thursday and then I think my flight leaves Boston at 9 a.m. Friday. So I need to like get home unpack, repack, don't forget anything and jet off to Mac stock. So I'm squeezing this in but I think it should work out. I hope I hope all right. Anything else about Mac stock? You want to share share? Now I'm just looking around and I don't see my mic. I think it may still be in my suitcase. I yeah, I have said that's why I think I have an extra one because I keep one in my suitcase, but I think I have a second one that I used to like ship out to like when we had guests on the small business show or whatever. We used to ship them a mic. We don't really need to do that anymore. But I think I've got, you know, a second second mic. So yeah, make make sure you have your mic and make sure you have headphones. I mean, if you didn't have headphones, it wouldn't be the end of the world. But make sure you have them. You can always take them off if if they're not the thing about headphones and podcasting and why I find them valuable, even if we're not playing like audio comments or anything, which we probably won't be playing for that particular episode is having headphones in reminds us to to like affect the proper mic technique and be up on the mic instead of, you know, just drifting away and getting distracted. Oh yeah, that's right. You got to come back when you hear yourself going away like you naturally just get back on the mic. So and that's especially important when we are in a room that has, you know, more noise in it from like humans and those sorts of things. Cool. All right. I'm feeling good about this. I think we can I think we can make it happen, man. Okay. I want to talk about Linode, our second sponsor here for today at Linode.com slash MGG. That's L I N O D E dot com slash MGG. Some of you might call it Linode. That's fine. There's a whole you could it doesn't matter, but it, you know, it's because they're Linux servers. So there you go. That's where the name I assume that's where the name comes from. So Linode L I N O D E dot com slash MGG is where you go to start setting up your Linode server. And the cool part is you can get a server that's like five bucks a month or you can get a server that's got like a dedicated CPU and distributed and you can like go nuts. 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Twenty bucks added to your account. Guess what? Nanode five bucks a month. That's four months worth of a nanode on the house just because you're a listener. lino.com slash mgg promo code mgg twenty nineteen our thanks to lino for sponsoring this episode. We have some tips to go through John and some cool stuff found including finally one from pepcom that is now available that that you've been checking out. So so I'm excited about this segment here. This is good. But we'll start with a quick tip from Scott because this is actually so smart. He says I don't know if you had discussed this before but I discovered something cool. This is the epitome of a quick tip. Have you ever wanted to print a web page but it's so full of visual elements including ads that the print formatting is just all screwed up and you just can't print the information you want. Well Apple has a built in answer for you in safari if the page is capable of being displayed in reader mode the reader button will appear on the left side of the URL bar it's just like three little lines and that's just how it works. Click the reader button and then print your page in reader mode because reader mode strips out all that stuff and just makes it easy to read and you can print what you see in reader mode just by doing you know command P or file print or however you want to do it safari will render the page as it appears in reader mode call up the print dialogue and you're good to go and of course as an added bonus he says instead of printing the page you can save it as a PDF or do whatever else is in your PDF menu like saving it to Evernote if you're an Evernote person etc. It's all right there. Scott says this is one way to not get caught and I appreciate it Scott I never really thought about this before this is a great great tip. So pretty cool huh John. Yeah I've every now and then I've yeah I'm going to have to try that because I've had cases where I try to print something and what I see in the print preview is not what I want. Well there is a way that you can set and we've done this honestly don't know if we have it in the current iteration of Mac observer dot com but I think we do that you can set a separate style sheet for print mode so when someone goes to print your web page you can choose what elements are there or not there and and some websites employ that better than others so that may be why at times you go to print and somebody has some weird style sheet that actually strips out the things you wanted to print or if you want to print what a web page actually looks like as a web page that can be really difficult sometimes you got to do like screenshots in order to actually get it because the print stuff goes through the print style sheet and you know gets changed so yeah yeah it's pretty cool pretty cool alright ready for the next tip John alright Jed says I figured this was a combination of a former tip and discussion and Eero simply being awesome although what he's about to share it is not limited to Eero you could do this with any router and I love this idea he says I'm moving and due to the annoyances of life and timing not always working as expected although we moved out two and a half weeks ago we have yet to be able to move in to our new place yep it happens he says so my family of four has been relying on the kindness of friends and we've been staying at different friends houses while they're away on their summer vacation or in Airbnb's etc they all provide us with their Wi-Fi password but he says the problem is as we get to a new place we have to all enter the Wi-Fi passwords on our devices and sure iClouds will sync them and move them around but it's just kind of a pain more so he says when you're actually living there and like living life as opposed to vacationing somewhere where you know your schedule is not your typical daily schedule and he says so what I'm doing instead is I just take my main base hero and plug it into their cable modem bring your own router plug it in now every device you own knows how to connect to that Wi-Fi because it's your Wi-Fi just in a different location just like it'll be when he moves into his new house it's it's one of these brilliantly simple things that just makes so much sense I could even see bringing it with you on vacation if you've got a family of four and you each have two or three devices and you don't want to mess with it you just go and you plug in your thing and you're good to go I told my family about this last night and I all looked at me I'm like don't worry I'm not going to bring a router with us we're going to Montreal for a few days before max stock as I said for a little little family time away and we're doing an Airbnb there and and I'm like now I won't bring it now now that I've said this I will regret not bringing a router with me for some reason but but anyway there you go he says the nice part is everyone's Wi-Fi is just like it was at home no need to distribute the password four to eight times and have someone make a typo and all of that stuff he says the other extra nice tip in the same bag I put my Apple TV better than figuring out someone's cable or Netflix or whatever he says I just plug it in and let the kids veg out on Netflix or whatever they want because it too knows how to connect to the Wi-Fi and we're already logged into all of our services so bring your router you know and it's nice if it's something like the euro which is pretty compact but bring your router bring your Apple TV and saves you a headache I can see that totally saving time I I do that dance every time you get to an Airbnb it's like okay I got to get everything on the Wi-Fi and all that stuff if you just plug it in that probably takes less time than doing the dance on all your individual devices so great advice Jed hopefully that that turns the light bulb on for someone other than just me I can't imagine it won't so pretty good huh John you want to tell us about your cool stuff found Mr. Braun yeah I used to do yeah I used to uh that's why I got an airport Express was to do exactly what you were talking about right when you had ethernet in hotel rooms yeah yeah yeah that makes sense yeah cool so here's a cool stuff that we we saw a pepcom and I think it's pretty cool my charge has a new product here it's the my charge solar charger powerful 8000 and what is the 8000 well it has 8000 milliamp hours of juice which should be able to charge most of your devices once and maybe even twice but here's the fun part so as two USB ports so you can charge two things at once but also as a micro USB so you can charge it but then here's the fun part and you know so there was a solar charger and the thing is it also you can you can take the unit and dock it I guess with with a group of solar panels that they provide as well and also kind of acts as a as a case a case for the battery yeah yeah now what's interesting about this and we've been waiting to the fact there's another thing from my charge that we're just waiting for it to become available to tell you about it because we don't want to tell you about something you can't go and buy the one that that we're linking to here is actually not I'm realizing now it's still not the one that we saw at PEPCOM because I believe the one we got from PEPCOM has two notable differences same form factor it's got the battery it's got the fold-out solar panels it's got two USB ports on it I'm pretty sure the one we got at PEPCOM PEPCOM is a 10,000 mAh power bank not an 8,000 but I could be wrong about that what I'm certain I'm right about is that it also has a cheek oil in it so you can charge chi right on top of the thing and that doesn't seem to be happening right doesn't yours have a cheek oil or am I confusing things terribly I do not believe so now the other coil yeah I don't think it does oh I'm pretty sure mine does because I've charged with it and not with a cable so I think there's a new version of this coming with a cheek oil on it and if I'm wrong well I'll tell you next week but I'm I'm pretty sure I'm not wrong about this do you have yours right there I can get it like how long would it take you to go get it probably about 30 seconds hold on I will talk about another cool stuff found and we will circle back to this okay all right go so Jay this is real-time folks Jay shares a cool stuff found with us he says as you were talking about back to my Mac replacements and remote access software in a recent episode I thought of two pieces of software immediately first jump desktop is what I have used since log me in raised their prices to remote access my Mac and Windows boxes I like the interface I like its features it does have support for multiple monitors to so if you have multiple monitors on your Mac you can use those it is a paid app he says I think it's like 29 bucks in the Mac app store and 15 in the iOS app store and they have a client for Windows that is free the other app that I have not used but I have heard others rave about is screens from a Dovia yeah we've mentioned screens here many times similarly he says it is paid 29 for the Mac 19 for iOS screens is the one I used and it's just so smooth he says both apps support RDP and VNC so they can remote into any machine that supports either protocol protocol locally but both have a helper app for easing remote access that only works for Mac OS or Windows thanks Jay we'll put links to both jump desktop and screens in the show notes because because that's quite I don't know that I'd ever heard about jump desktop before but but there we go so there you go alright John back to back to the my charge here tell us if you put your phone on it and you have to like you know power the battery on because the battery is not on all the time but does your phone start charging no really mm-hmm man I would have sworn mine did that mine is way too far away for me to go and get real time during the show here so I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to follow up on that but we'll put a link in the show notes to the to this solar oh and it's got an LED flashlight in it too it does yeah yeah and you can also set it to do SOS if if you're in distress right that's kind of right interesting yeah yeah great great for like a camping trip or whatever I mean it's kind of got all those elements hey man are you sure it doesn't have a cheek oil I feel like I charge my phone on it and it's not it's not charging it and it's on right like you can see the battery read out at the top okay maybe I'm just crazy maybe uh maybe Dave's crazy that's what I'll put as the subject to this chapter so there you go okay one last tip while we're while we're on there thanks for going and getting that that's great uh Neil has has a tip for all of us keyboard maestro users and he says I'm a big keyboard maestro user and while I do not tend to download other people's macros because I kind of like to build my own others might download macros more often than me but I do it occasionally surging searching I think he typed this with with Siri searching the keyboard maestro forms recently I came across a posting by Peter Lewis the keyboard maestro author that I thought merited sharing it turns out that there is a potential risk when you import macros if the macro is installed in its activated state it could run automatically before you have had a chance to review it for example if a macro has a trigger to run every second it will run virtually immediately after you've installed it this provides a window for a potentially malicious individual to cause damage to your system I would hope that those sharing keyboard maestro macros would not do this and I've never heard of it happening but it seems like good and courteous practice to always distribute macros for download in the inactive state so the end user can deliberately activate it after review but in the real world there's potential bad actors Peter has provided a safety mechanism if you hold down command option shift control when importing a keyboard maestro macro again command option shift control when importing the macro they will be imported in the disabled state regardless of what they were saved as so you can review and decide whether or not to activate I didn't know about this before and have kept a note on it for reference and wanted to share so there you go thank you so much for that Neil that's that's great advice I like you I I am a trusting individual most of the time but but you know that could bite you for sure because keyboard might you've already given keyboard maestro access kind of to your system so you're now that's a that's a it's a pretty strong attack vector right there I wonder if perhaps you know the default behavior of keyboard maestro should be to import macros in the disabled state regardless or ask you if you're importing a macro hey this is enabled you want it that way or should it be disabled it wouldn't surprise me if Peter Lewis adds something like that in an update especially after hearing this conversation so there you go alright Mr. Braun what do we what do we have I've got some some questions about nas we've got some more tips we've got all kinds of good stuff shall we shall we jump to let's jump to to Ari's question about nas shall we do that John yeah sure sure okay Ari writes after having set up and worked with Synology for several years now I'm starting to encounter occasionally use cases where some of the weird quirks of using a Synology distation offset the benefits making it less of a magic bullet scenario than than it can be for some folks says in the case of one particular client he says he's having a bunch of weird issues with his DS 418 J including that it's indexing very slowly and being very cumbersome to search with spotlight and he says perhaps this is because he's got a J series with a in a lower and CPU or maybe he needs more RAM in order to get those indexes happening properly because Synology will your distation will do its own indexing and then it will expose that index to the finder to be searched with spotlight which is pretty cool but it has to be beefy enough to index whatever you throw at it and if you have lots of files it may not be able to keep up we see it on our max right that that spotlight indexer wants to run all the time for some reason so there you go he says he has problems with SMB butchering his file and folder names he has inevitable issues with time machine backing up as a network drive weird errors connecting to the shares from the finder over the network and huge problems he said music I think producer or something huge problems saving files and instruments from logic and other music software forcing him to split his logic files and other miscellaneous issues he says he's not really use it's he's the only one using it and he's not really using any of the nasi functions like a distributed media library or Synology Drive to sync files you know remotely and locally like all of those cool things that you can certainly do with a disk station says this guy isn't doing he's just using it as a place to store his files and we've been slowly turning the conversation towards setting him up with a direct attached solution something like raid or a JBod solution at JBod being John do you know the you know what JBod is just a bunch of discs that's exactly it yep and in letting software do raid if we want because of that he says I've been looking at the OWC Thunder Bay for which is an enclosure only solution and then migrating the data from his nas over to that using his existing drives any sense well he's got a couple of questions is there a way to do the migration smoothly if he wants to use the same drives and can you give a sense of how much management and configuration the software raid will require he says I'm hoping that we can sort of you know get it set up and have headaches eliminated so yeah I I tend to agree if you're just going to use something in a single user scenario where you're not going to you know you're just storing files and you're not looking to you know utilize any of the network functions of a network attached storage device then a direct attached storage device is better there are a couple of ways to go with this Drobo sort of pioneered the whole easy to use direct attached storage approach with you know their their original Drobo and now they have several different direct attached options they they handle the management of it though in that you just put the discs in and it appears as a volume and that's great because it makes it really easy to use but it is sort of a black box in that sense I mean it's a black box in a literal sense but also figuratively you don't get to control I mean you get to tweak you can create different volumes and you do get that sort of control but you know you don't get to pick what what CPU you're using it's just whatever Drobo put in the box that's what you're getting and the benefits of soft raid software raid I should say soft raid is a piece of software that does raid and is sold by OWC because Tim standing the guy who developed soft raid now works at OWC software raid is actually better than hardware raid in a lot of scenarios and the reason is and it took me I had to have a conversation with Larry O'Connor over at OWC to finally see the light on this but you know the CP with with a raid scenario things get really slow when you have to do like a rebuild of the raid and and John's got people driving by and I didn't catch that in time sorry you know it because the CPU is doing a lot of work in terms of that and your Mac doesn't know when the raid is doing one of these rebuilds so you know things aren't quite managed the right way but your Mac CPU is going to be way faster than any CPU you're going to get in a especially in a consumer grade raid and all of this stuff is built into Mac OS including drivers to mount a volume that's managed with soft raid so if you've got a soft raid volume that you've chosen to use this third party raid piece of software which you could get from OWC and you would get with your your I think you get it with the Thunder Bay or some version of it you could take that and plug it into another Mac and it would mount like you don't need to worry about oh it doesn't have the drivers or anything it does they're built into Mac OS you know they've made sure that so but you know disc utilities raid is functional it's not quite as full featured or as efficient as soft raid but it's very functional and simple to and of course it works on every Mac as well once you create it so getting one of these J-Bod things you know where you can just put your discs in and then you choose how to manage them can be a really powerful thing and and I you know it took me until I guess probably sometime in the last year that I finally saw the light on why this makes so much sense but it makes so much sense especially for somebody like you're talking about unfortunately taking the drives from your Synology and just putting them in this I I it would be a shock to me if it would mount I don't think they will I think we would have heard about that I think you're going to need to copy the data to somewhere else put the discs in and then you know copy the data back you might be able to get away with shrinking your Synology down if if he's not using all of the space that's on those and if you know if he's got four drives in his Synology and he could fit the data on two of them then maybe you you know you break the raid in the Synology you put two of those discs in the in the J-Bod you copy the data over and then you can move the other discs over after the fact it's probably not workable you probably need to put them somewhere else but you know think about that option so it is a software raid is if you're doing direct attached I would strongly consider yeah doing some flavor of software raid either Mac OS is built in or or software raid so what do you think Mr. Braun I'm with you on the Drobo thing wait I still think it's a good solution for some people and when I've seen them at a recent shows that I've been to especially the Thunderbolt ones man they're smoking yeah yeah okay so you have had like relatively recent experience with a direct attached Drobo I have not it like they're new ones I have not tested and I felt like the company was kind of I mean they were rudderless for a while they brought in Mahir Shah as their new CEO but about a year maybe two years ago and I know he was really working to kind of get them on track he had we actually interviewed him on our small business show I'll put a link in the show notes but you know he was working to get them on track he he understood sort of the challenges that they had faced but I haven't really heard a whole lot from them since then so I don't know where they are on that track which is why which is why I sort of was you know hesitant to to be too bullish on them but but if you've seen him it like did you see him at your photo shows or whatever is that right that's yeah that's the last time I saw him yeah yeah and they were you know running you know they were showing it they were running I think it was a black magic speed test sure if I recall correctly they were getting like in the thousands of megabytes per second I think oh they should be yeah I mean they should be yeah I would I would think so I mean it yeah if you've got Thunderbolt going and you've got multiple drives and we can do that in our in our MacBooks now so we should be able to get that and more right so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know the Synology may be too much for some people well yeah it's the I mean it's the wrong tool for that particular job yeah for sure for sure yep cool alright a couple of geek challenges the first thing I want to do or the next thing I want to do is thank all of our premium supporters if you go to mackeycap.com premium you can learn all about this but essentially this is a program for those of you that can and would like to support us directly certainly not mandatory but it definitely helps and we very much appreciate all the support that we get this way so contributions from folks on our biannual plan at 25 every six months are George from Surrey Kurt from Princeton black boy from Long Island City James from Mississippi Graham from Devon Robert from Oklahoma City and Mark from Connecticut who lives about five minutes from where I used to live there I happened to notice as I saw the the details of the payment and all that stuff come through so thank you to all of you for that and on our monthly $10 plan Mike from Kansas Bob from La Pesh Dave from Socrates Timothy from Tennessee Jeff from Connecticut Frank from Tunbridge Jim from San Jose John from Pennsylvania Santiago from Florida John from North Carolina Barry from overhead although we get to see him next weekend at Max Talk Tony from Middleborough and Ken from Honolulu thank you to all of you as well so thanks so much it really it's it means a lot and helps a lot so very good all right a couple of geek challenges John the first comes from listener Neil who says listening to the discussion of purchasing large capacity drives instead of keeping around a bunch of older low capacity drives reminded me that I probably have a dozen one terabyte hard drive sitting around all unused I was wondering about your thoughts on how best to recycle or dispose of them I hate to just send them to electronics recycling but I haven't spun them up in years maybe they don't even work anymore and I wonder if you know of any service or organization that finds a way to repurpose these drives do any of the manufacturers have a recycling program some do it seems just a shame to toss them he says but they've been sitting in a box unused for long enough that I know I'm not going to use them yeah I it would I would I love the idea of you know an organization that would repurpose them I don't know of any and that's why I put it up as a geek challenge so if anybody knows send it to us we already said the email just actually if you're a premium listener premium at mackeygab.com but otherwise I think because it's in the in the interest of a good cause John I'm going to break the rules feedback at mackeygab.com so I'd love to hear about that any thoughts do you know of any any things for this John I I mean heck they may still be good you know well that's it yeah why we would want to get yourself an array yeah but I mean how big would the array need to be for it to be I mean you know Neil has they they have outlived their their usefulness to Neil right he needs more storage than I mean he would have to pay for like if you buy a you know what we're going to spend a few hundred bucks on a a j-bot and you're going to get three terabytes out of it you know if you put four drives in or something it's like well okay like there's a there's a cost benefit scenario there or it's like well that same few hundred dollars into a j-bot with larger dis actually gets you storage that you're going to be able to use he's not going to use these so the question is can someone right and and what could what could they do with them yeah I agree with you if you can still use them great but that's he's past that point right so yeah I would I would love to know if there's some you know place you know like that like the MIT flea market or whatever like where where people come and and actually like take these things and use them like you know other classrooms that could use these things probably not but maybe actually probably so there's got to be somebody out there hopefully somebody knows of a couple places we can we can recommend and show you've never heard of any of these things John now okay there he is all right those school hmm maybe a school right like I mean it you know if there's somebody's doing some projects where they need storage or fast you know like okay cool or somewhere that's you know needs drives to take apart to learn how to service a hard drive when you know problems when things go sideways I don't know yeah Mike has a question that I think is a bit of a geek challenge for us he says my Google foo is failing me in search of a video editing application or applications that would let me start working on an iPad pro and then when back in my studio move to the Mac right now he says we do roughs in Luma fusion on an iPad and then Final Cut Pro back in the office what a pain as always your wisdom is appreciated I mean iMovie comes to mind right because you can iCloud those files and they're openable in both places and all of that but I think he's looking for something a little more pro professional then iMovie you know lets you do so I don't know the answer here and that's why it's on the geek challenge list maybe someone does do you know of anything is anything come to mind as we're hashing through it here John for iOS well yeah for something you know cross platform essentially right like you could start on iOS start doing a little bit of edits and then you know let it like move the project over to your Mac and and continue along that path and preserve what you've done on iOS yeah it didn't nothing came to mind for me either so all right um we will never have enough time to get through everything that's just how it goes the show has gotten long enough over the years you know I mentioned before that we're gonna do a 45 minute show at Mac stocker at least that's that's the goal that's where Mac was when it started you know so and nothing official ever changed it just stretched so uh Dan in the last episode we were talking about disk space discrepancies and snapshots perhaps being the the cause and sure enough um Mike from Bombic software who writes carbon copy cloner gave some guidance on that and he said for sure I'm I'm pretty sure that's what it is and as it turns out Scott uh who had the problem confirmed yep it was snapshots so great you you find those in carbon copy cloner you actually click on the volume time machine doesn't let you see your snapshots that it's created there's no interface but carbon copy cloner will let you see its snapshots or time and time machines I should say um the open carbon copy cloner in the lower left is where you would click to to look at that and uh and you will see them and you can remove them from there so it's not perhaps not as obvious in the interface as as uh Scott was hoping initially but he'd certainly found it and so thank you to everybody for that Dan uh Dan shared he says I have used the TMU till command and found all the snapshots that way from the terminal as well so that's another way to do it but uh but you know he also confirmed that you know time machine and carbon copy cloner use APFS snapshots and it's configurable in carbon copy cloner you can actually set some of those options in there it really is as far as I found carbon copy cloner is the best interface to manage APFS snapshots that exists and it will show you how much space is being taken up it you have to give it a minute when you when you launch it there's a volumes option or section or boot volume there it will show you the list of snapshots and then shortly thereafter that list will be populated with sizes and you get to decide what you can delete them right from here you can restore right from here and right from here you can turn on carbon copy cloner's snapshot creation and retention um policy and then you can set how often you want it to recycle them out and and you can even have it do it based on the amount of free space you have which is awesome so this is very cool snapshots are pretty awesome because they happen very very quickly and they allow you to you know just freeze a a point in time which is great so thank you to everybody that that wrote in on that including Mike Bombeck from you know the author of carbon copy cloner great stuff I love it we love that we have lots of listeners that can teach us lots of things it is good bill has a question though John about snapshots and he says I ran disc utilities first aid function on my iMac and one of the things it points out is snapshot is invalid should I be concerned by that he says I've seen this on my Mac book pro of course sometimes it's different I've actually seen this a lot too and I when I first saw a snapshot is invalid like it'll say snapshot is invalid and then it'll say you know volume cleared successfully like everything's good it's like wait you just told me my snapshots invalid as I understand it this is an okay error to see I don't quite understand why that's an okay error to see John but but just seeing if you see other errors with it there might be more to it of course but just seeing snapshot is invalid is not necessarily a problem in and of itself have you have you you've I feel like we've talked about this before John but if you've seen this before there was that thing with one drive where you would also get reports of snapshots not being good remember mm-hmm I do I do remember yeah yeah yeah yeah well all right so there you go um I'm trying I'm looking through our tips here to see what Andrew has a great tip from that related to when I was talking in the last show about keeping a paper list or creating a paper list of all the apps that I had installed on this machine before effectively I knew can paved it and he says what I do from time to time is to a screenshot of my applications folder and then I store it in ever note so I have a record of everything I have installed he says sometimes of course it takes a few pages of screenshots to get the whole list also clean my Mac has a list of installed apps it breaks them up into two categories from the app store and from elsewhere says that's really handy to so thank you for that Andrew that's those are good I forgot about clean my Mac's list of apps that's pretty good I like that it's good thoughts on any of that Mr. Ron I'll give you another one K system information oh soft so Apple's a system info which you can get to if you go to about this Mac and then you click on system report or just run the system information app there's a software applications category and here's the fun part is if you want to save or what you can do you save your system report and then come back to it later oh yeah there's another one yeah yeah yeah that's good good stuff man cool I think we have time for two more because this first one's quick Ben reminds us or corrects us in fact in 770 last episode we were talking about Google photos and getting your data out of it and one of the options we discussed was there well was not is a checkbox and Google's interface where you could have your Google photos put as a folder on your Google drive and that went away back in May unfortunately so that's not an option anymore sadly so thanks for that Ben thanks for the heads up on that and sorry for the wild goose chase for anybody that tried to figure out where that was because it's not anymore if you had done this previously but the folder will not auto update nor will it auto import so it is a frozen in time folder and that time has passed so just so you know and lastly from Scott Scott says interesting info for our troubleshooting toolboxes he says when I upgraded to a 2018 MacBook Pro from a 14 2014 MacBook Pro I had to replace all of my of course USB and Firewire hubs I bought a USB C hub from Amazon and it had multi it was actually a Thunderbolt 3 dongle that had you know USB 8 and 1 kind of thing with HDMI and USB 3 ports and an SD Reader and even power delivery 100 watt power delivery for his for his MacBook so it could do all the things well and good at first but then I kept having issues connecting to any Wi-Fi I thought the issues were the Wi-Fi and my parents house where I was visiting at the time but when I got back to my place lo and behold the problem persisted so via troubleshooting I discovered that this off-brand USB C hub was putting out enough electromagnetic interference to screw up the Wi-Fi so I stopped using that hub and picked up an Apple HDMI adapter the primary purpose of this hub was for an external monitor problem solved yeah I think this is certainly USB you know or anything electronic can cause issues with electromagnetic interference I think this one is more of a beware you get you get what you pay for you know cheap and worth it is often true when it comes to some of these knockoff or off right I don't want to say knockoff but off-brand you know electronics that we buy on Amazon because I run several USB C hubs and Thunderbolt three hubs and dongles and stuff here and have never had a problem with Wi-Fi with them but you know I'm running the ones from OWC and Caldigit and Satechi and like the companies that that you know have to be well responsible for what they make because they want you to buy something in the future from them so I they test for these things and it's one of the reasons we really like OWC and and these other companies too right because they test for these things so you know buyer beware and all that stuff I'm I'm John and I are you know always interested in you know saving money if you can get the same thing for less by all means but sometimes it ain't the same anything yeah well that's a easy place to to skimp on you know shielding and things like that or whoever made it especially if that you know it's not FCC certified because I think a lot of things you you have to go through some process to make sure that it doesn't you know destroy all communications in the neighborhood right right yeah good point good point so alright folks sweet well so the next episode will be recorded live from Mac stock I will because why not also try to stream it to the to the live stream I assuming the hotel Wi-Fi works then that will work and if it doesn't then it won't work but we will attempt so it'll be Saturday evening for those of you that want to tune in from other parts beyond feel free Saturday I think it's let's figure sometime around 630 7 p.m. Central daylight time Chicago time for those of you if you want to there you go uh John I think it's I like I'm having trouble even saying the words but certainly for us we are proving that us be is better than firewire for our audio needs and it just doesn't feel right to even say those words except the proofs in the pudding and we've ever since mid last episode when I switched from firewire to usb because things went flaky again things have been uh smoother than they've been in in I'll say years in fact so it's crazy I yeah I'll take it dominate us for the podcast awards at podcast awards dot com I think that exists throughout July it's certainly was still good as of this morning but that's in the past for all of you right now but yeah please we would love to have your nominations and sign up for our weekly newsletter we would love to be able to send you our show notes right to your email box with all the great links and stuff that we've mentioned and everything so that you don't have to come and search it out we'll just deliver it to you but you got you do have to come and search it out in order to get it sent to you because it be creepy if we just sent it to you out of the blue also we don't necessarily know your email address and that would make it even creepier so MacGeekeGab.com is where you go to sign up for for that uh thanks to cash fly of course for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to our sponsors our new sponsor MintMobile.com slash MGG go there sign up you're gonna love it you do get a seven day free trial so you know and of course linode at linode.com slash MGG smile software.com slash podcasts other world computing at MacSales.com barebones software at barebones.com Eero at Eero.com slash MGG thanks to all of them thanks to all of you thanks for all your questions thanks for hanging out in the chat room thanks for listening that's really it thank you in advance for telling your friend about this show really seriously we would love that John are you still here Mr. Braun? Yes okay I have a secret message for you oh it this will only make sense if you played records backwards in the in the 70s and 80s do you need that one more time it's a secret message so I can only play it twice oh yeah oh