 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, Episode 715 for Monday, June 25th, 2018. These folks and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, mixes it all together into a nice potpourri of deliciously scented learning for your pleasure. Sponsors for this episode include other world computing at MacSales.com. We'll talk more about them in a moment. Crossover from CodeWeavers, where you can get a 35% discount and a 14-day free trial at CodeWeavers.com slash MGG and a new sponsor, OnePassword for Mac. Actually, OnePassword for everything is the sponsor. OnePassword.com slash Geek Gap. It's a little different. I'm sorry for that. But it's worth it because you get three months for free. We'll talk more about that too here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Freeville, Connecticut, John F. Brown. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Brown? I'm doing great. But some of my drives are not happy, man. Oh, I knew it was going to happen. So are these this is interesting to me. I'm stumbling a little because I'm trying to think of which gear to put the brain in this morning. But what are these were these drives that that are failing? Were they purchased all at the same time or put into service all at the same time? No. OK. No, this was. So I got four drives in my original Synology, two in the expansion bay and two in the unit itself. And the two that are in the primary unit I got. And then later I got an additional larger drive. And it was actually a W.D. refurb. But one thing you could do with the Synology is set. The number of bad blocks at which point it tells you you have bad blocks on the drive. And right. Right. A week ago, it said, hey, you got one blot, bad block and disconnection event, which I guess is it renegotiates or fixes it. That says, yeah, everything's OK. Right. Well, that happened. And I'm like, all right. Well, you know, one bad block, nothing to panic about. But then I got the alert again. And this time it said, yeah, by the way, you got 44 bad blocks on this drive. And I'm like, OK, time to get no one. Yeah, that's right. So the drives are interesting, right? Because we're talking rotational drives. They once they develop and start developing bad blocks, that process does not end. It may it may happen slowly. And but you might see where it goes from. And I think you saw this with your driver. We were talking earlier this week when we were on the train down and back to PEPCOM. But I think what you saw was your drive go from one bad block to zero. And and that happens because your drive actually has some extra blocks that are unused, reserved blocks. And when it detects a bad block, it remaps things and stops using the block that's bad. Now, obviously, you know, you've got some, you know, it's like cancer for hard drives, like it and and and there is no chemotherapy, right? So it's just, you know, once it starts growing and these are how these things go, right? It's unlike cancer. It's it's something that happens just as part of the wear and tear of a drive. So you need to, you know, you just once once this starts, that is the warning sign. And that's one of the nice things about rotational drives is that they they tend to fail with warning, not always. Don't rely on that. But generally speaking, they, you know, you tend to get some warning signs that it's that the drive's going going south and you can do what you're doing. Right. It's like, oh, time to order a new one. You know, you take it offline, you put the new one in and it's good to go. But with SSDs, of course, our experience has been no warning whatsoever. The drive just goes offline. And as far as the computer's concerned, it has been removed. It's not there. No drive sensed, which is, you know, anyway, right? Yeah. So as soon as that happened, one thing you can do with the Synology, I basically said, well, let's take that drive out of the they now call it a storage pool. And I'm like, yeah, let's deactivate that drive. So basically, remove it from the array. And then it's now saying, well, now I'm in degraded mode. You know, I still work, you know, but I didn't want, you know, that drive to complicate matters because, you know, data is starting to lose things. Yeah, right. Right. Right. So I'm sure it recovered everything because, you know, I'm set up, you know, with redundancy using their hybrid. But I have another drive of the same capacity on the way. OK. So it should rebuild it or repair it, I guess. Yeah. Is it? Oh, so you have not told it to repair the array. You're still in degraded mode. Is that right? Yes. OK, so you don't have any redundancy anymore, right? You're you're using your one disk of redundancy and then you'll put. So at this point, if another drive died, you would lose data. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So right now, if I look at, you know, it says, yeah, well, you have a Synology Hybrid RAID with one drive protection. Right. Right. And so you are you are rolling those dice much like I was with a dead battery in my UPS last week. But and that's still how it is, by the way, folks. I I did order a new battery, though. So that's good. That's good. Yeah. I mean, I'm not really rolling the dice because I'm doing a full backup of that and as to my other Synology, which you can do with their backup software. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. It's you using Synology's hyper backup for that, John. Yes. Cool. Yeah. So I back up the contents of one or the other. So that's my second level of redundancy, if you will. So I'm not too worried. Smart man. Smart man. That's good. I do want to get that drive. And then actually, I was surprised. So I so I decided to get one of the Iron Wolf Seagate Iron Wolf drives, which have special features on the Synology and a four terabyte. It was only like one hundred and twenty bucks or something. That's awesome. That's great. Really? Wow. Yeah. And then they have two levels so you can get just the Iron Wolf, which has extra features or you can get Iron Wolf and then get data protection or like data recovery service. Oh, that's right. Which was a tens of dollars more. Did you get that? No. OK. All right. No. No, I think that's more for enterprise, you know, where you need the drive like saved critical data. I'm looking on Amazon here, you're right. Even it just came up with the 10 terabyte, you know, and then you can drive around and on the site and find different sizes. But even the 10 terabytes, 314 bucks and the 12 is 408. Like that's really not bad. Wow. All right. I'll put a I'll put a link to the four terabyte, the one that you got. But, you know, everybody everybody knows you can you can just drive around and then find the find them all. So wow, that's pretty good, man. Yeah. So the four terabyte, like you said, is one nineteen ninety five with the data recovery, it is one seventy four ninety nine. So, you know, you're adding I mean, it's a war. You're buying essentially a warranty for their service, right? So. Yeah. Four terabytes. Yeah. And another but I was going to get. And actually, this is being mentioned in our in our chat room here at McGeek, MacGeekGab.com slash stream. But another good choice for NAS is Western Digital has what they call a red drive, which is, I guess, specifically designed for. Twenty four seven use inside of a NAS. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another good choice. But I didn't get that one. Maybe I'll get that for my next one. Yeah. Well, it's fun to play with those iron wolf drives. I've got a couple of those in my in my in one of my synologies here. I mean, it's interesting. It's, you know, for the home user, maybe overkill, but I don't know, right? You know, well, it gives you additional data on a synology, right? I mean, they have some API or something where you can get additional statistics or reporting up. I don't know. Yeah. But it also like the Synology, it's really what iron wolf does with the Synology is it takes what we all would have expected smart to do for our hard drives and actually does it like that. The NAS and the driver able to communicate about the drive's health. It even checks like, you know, rotational anomalies and things like that. I mean, it's crazy what it does, but but, you know, it works. And here's the interesting thing at the four terabyte price, even at the 10 terabyte price, the Western Digital red drives, at least from Amazon, are more than the Seagate iron wolves. So there you go. Oh, go figure, right? OK, hey, you know, we set up our new forums at Mackiekeb.com slash forums and things are moving well. You folks are signing up and having some fun and playing and actually getting some questions answered. So I wanted to go through some of those, if that's OK with you, my my my esteemed colleague and friend here. That work? Oh, of course. Sweet. So let's start with one from Mark on the subject of Synology. He said, I tried setting up my new Synology as a time machine backup. There are two one terabyte drives in two of the four bays, so plenty of room. Problem is the space that I have a lot of fills up. And when it is time for it to run a backup again, time machine says that it cannot because the disk is full. It's not taking off the oldest data to make room as happens in my airport. Attached time machine disk. Does anyone know how to fix this behavior? So this is interesting. It should write the destination of a time machine backup should not, at least in my experience, hasn't changed its behavior in terms of the where it rotates out the old to make room for the new. But there are times when there is simply too much new data to rotate out old stuff. I've seen that before and and when that happens, you either need to manually go in and clear things out, which you can do. You can go into the time machine interface and start deleting things from from the backups. But yeah, so like that can happen. But and you or you might just need to start your time machine backup over. I find that I have to do that about once a year with my time machine backups. They just get to the point where they're tied in knots. And it's like, all right, yeah, I just had to do that myself. Yeah. So so one thing to mention here is that there is in the time machine interface, if you click on options, there's a checkbox. Notify after old backups are deleted. I think that I don't know if that's checked by default. But if it's not, you may want to check it. Just maybe that will give it a nudge in the right direction. Or it could be that it's trashed. I just had this where my MacBook Pro backup, which is like two years old, is going back like 2016 got stuck in the state where it says preparing backup and never finished preparing for the backup. So I'm like, OK, bye. Yeah, bye. Like a new one. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was just it was just in a state where it never it never got passed that point. I even tried to restore from a backup an earlier version of the time machine file and that didn't fix it either. So I don't know. But yeah, I'm with you. It's I think a good thing to recreate that because it will avenge. Well, I don't know why it should. I mean, I'm actually surprised that it lasted two years. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. One one thing with Synology and Time Machine while we're here and and Mark may have done this. He wasn't we didn't really talk about it yet. But is setting up Time Machine quotas or setting up quotas for your Time Machine backups. Time Machine is as most of us know. And if you don't, well, that's why you're here. You there's one of the five things that you're going to learn. I will fill up all the available space that it sees. So Synology has a way of limiting the space that any given user sees with quotas. So even if you have like a, you know, in this case, he's got a one terabyte volume, right? You know, he could say, well, I only want Time Machine to have 300 gigs of space available to it. So what I'm going to do is you set up a user that's only used for that Time Machine backup. And that user only gets 300 gigs of data, even though it's on a one terabyte volume. It don't that user can only see 300 gigs. Time Machine will only see 300. And when it hits that 300 limit, it'll roll around. So it's possible that what's going on with Mark here is that he's actually hitting not just the storage limits of what his Time Machine user can see. But if the Time Machine user has no quota, he might be hitting the storage limits of the actual volume on the Synology and that could be causing trouble, too. So I've got I've got links in the forum post there that that that we've linked to from the from the show notes for for all of those. All right, we have we have another forum post to go to, John. This one from listener David and listener David writes if I can, if the web will cooperate. He says, I've been using Antigo virus barrier to protect my iMac for the last several years. It has served me well, but I think there are better options. I've been doing some research and the two that have bubbled up to the top of my list are Sophos Home Premium and Bitdefender Total Security 2018. I was wondering what other people are using and why they like it. And of course, this led to a healthy discussion in the forums about how folks are using but if folks are using virus protection and how my advice and and, you know, most people don't buy an alarm for their house until after they've been broken into the first time, right? So let's bear that in mind and and accept that we're all humans here. That said, I've never gotten any viruses or malware on my Mac, but I do run malware bites. I run the free version. It does not run in real time. I don't think threat concerns are high enough to warrant running an engine in the background in real time all the time. So I don't feel the need to pay for an engine that I'm not going to use. But I do use malware bites in the free mode. And once a week, I scan my drives with it and I actually built a little keyboard maestro trigger so that, you know, every week it comes in and I did screen scripting so that it knows where to go and click and start the thing. And even if the keyboard maestro macro fails, it's at least launched malware bites and I see it like, oh, yeah, I got to run it. And so I run it once a week. It has yet to find anything, but but that's what I do. So what do you do? Not much of anything. OK, everyone's in a great while. If I think I've been bamboozled, like one time I was looking for a media player and managed to find one that slipped past me. And I thought was legit, but was not an installed some malware. So fired up malware bites. It found it, it got rid of it and everything's good. Every now and then I run clam, clam AV just to see what's on my system. And that'll find some interesting things, mostly an email, like weird scripting or redirections or stuff like that. But I just do that more out of curiosity, but that those are pretty much the two that I run, but not really on a regular basis. And are you running clam X AV? Is that? Well, yeah, that's the OK. I just want to make sure we put the right one in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the the Apple variation. Yeah. And maybe is a multi platform. Right. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And Kyron in the chat room says he uses Max scan once a week, which is from the secure Mac dot com. So I'll put links for all three of those in the show notes. And that way, that way everything's covered. Good. Yeah. And what else? Latest drive genius also has malware detection, right? It's true. That's right. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. I think I actually I think at one point I actually had malware bites installed, but then because it's kind of redundant because I think they use the same engine. I de-install that. Hmm. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Like I said, I just run it in manual mode. And then there you go. So cool. I think the biggest threat most people have is not so much viruses and malware and stuff like that, but it's getting fished, getting fooled by of course, someone to give up your sensitive information or credit cards or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And and I've got this last one from the forums in here as a quick tip, but it wasn't intended that way. But in typical Mac e-gab fashion, sometimes we learn things sort of along the ride here in in the forums. Alison Sheridan, pod feet as she is known in the forums says on all of my devices, do not disturb isn't being respected. I have a scheduled DND from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and yet in the middle of the night, two thirty nine a.m. to be exact, my Mac lit up and bombed when the messages app received a message. Yesterday, I was trying to record that video of my iPhone. So I turned on DND and I kept getting telegram messages. This is really aggravating. Anyone else having this problem. And so there are some troubleshooting things that that folks have gone through with her there, including, you know, turn it off and turn it back on, which oftentimes will fix things like this. I'm not sure if it has for her, but the thing that I learned, the quick tip, I had no idea that Mac OS had a scheduled do not disturb setting. And and as I was reading her question, I thought, wait, you can't do that. You can, it turns out, go to system preferences, notifications, do not disturb, which is at the very top of the list. And there it is to not do turn on, do not disturb. And you can check a box that says, you know, from one time to another or when the display is sleeping or when mirrored to TVs and projectors, the latter two are on by default, as I understand it. The first one is not, of course, you've got to turn that on. So pretty cool. I always love little quick tips. You know how that you know how I am with that, John. Nice. Yeah, that's pretty good. Pretty good. All right. You know what, let's let's take a minute and talk about a few of our sponsors here. How's that sound, John? Fantastic. Awesome. Our first sponsor for this episode is a new sponsor for Mac Geekab. It is one password at the number one password P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D dot com. And if you visit one password dot com slash geek gap, I know it's not our normal MGG thing. So you just have to remember or just go to the show notes and you can click it there. You get three months of one password seven for free. So one password is a password manager, right? It allows you to store and save your passwords. It allows you to create unique passwords. It allows you to store secure notes. It allows you to store your credit cards. It allows you to store your driver's license. I actually keep a picture of my passport in there, too. Great, great stuff. And what one password adds that really makes it intriguing and perhaps worth for those of you that maybe one password is the one that I use and always have. 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They have the answers for you now, including all the MacBook Pros with Retina displays. So check it out, Other World Computing at MacSales.com. And our thanks to them for being a sponsor of this episode as well. All right, John, you want to take us to Rob? I'm going to take us to Rob and Rob writes in and says, I have an odd problem since I upgraded my work iMac to MacOS 10.3 10.13. Hi, Sierra. The iMac is a late 2013 3.2 gigahertz quad-core i5 with 32 gigabytes of RAM and the one terabyte Fusion drive. It has a 1920 by 1080 pixel Dell monitor attached. I use an Apple Extended Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad. The issue, when I activate the screensaver using the hot corner I have set up top left, the iMac does not respond to the keyboard or trackpad while the screensaver is active. Once the monitor goes to sleep, it responds as expected to keyboard when I want to wake it up. Likewise, if the screensaver activates automatically, I have it set to kick in after 10 minutes, the computer refuses to respond to keyboard and trackpad until the monitor goes to sleep. However, if I bypass the screensaver using the new in 10.13 lock screen command with keyboard shortcut control command Q, it responds to the keyboard is expected when I want to unlock this behavior under screensaver seems to be specific to this machine. A colleague's machine also on 10.13 has expected behavior. Thoughts? Yeah, I got some thoughts. Cool. I haven't seen this. Well, I don't really use screensaver that much, but I just put the screen to sleep. But anyways, so maybe you don't want to use a screensaver. I don't know. But the only thing to think of that I have seen in the past is that you could have a corrupt screensaver module. Right. Yeah, right. Oh, right. Because that is a little piece of software, if you will, right, that your Mac is invoking when it hits this condition of deciding to run the screensaver, either time based or mouse movement based or whatever. Yeah. And it's a little, you know, it's a little program and it displays pretty graphics. So it has to be doing some computation. Yeah. And you can actually see some of the pieces here, but then this is what makes me then started me going down a rabbit hole here. So you can you can find some of the pieces, you know, if you look for screensavers on your system, there's a slash system slash library slash screensavers. It's also in slash library, also in slash library and also in home folder slash library. You'll see components of it. Then here's the other thing, which leads me to a suggestion, is that I also found so if I typed in the name of some of the screensavers that you see in the system preference, some of the pieces were buried deep within the operating system, like within this private framework. So what I think, well, one thing you could do is choose a different screensaver. Maybe just the one you have selected is corrupt. Yeah, that would at least be a good test. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is that one of the damaged pieces could be in the operating system, as I found. So, you know, go into either get your I think the best way would be to reinstall the OS, probably doing it through recovery. So you get the latest version, right? Yeah. And hopefully that over overwrite the faulty screensaver file or system component. And that's what I got to say about that. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have anything more to add to that. That's that. That's where I would go with it. Yeah. Right. Because it well, and at the very least, like you said, switching from one to another would be the a good test. Right. So at least you know. OK, yeah, it's definitely that screensaver not screensavers in general. So yeah. Yeah. Cool. I was just looking, you know, I so I upgraded my Mac in the studio here to High Sierra earlier this week, John. Finally, High Sierra is the last OS that will run on this machine, but I'm always, you know, three, six plus months behind on major version upgrades here in the studio because I need to make sure the drivers are going to exist for any of the audio hardware we use. And also I just want the machine to be reliable because we need to rely on it to do this real time, you know, operation of producing a podcast every week. Actually, several times a week with, you know, small business show and gig gap that I also do. So but I finally decided, you know, I was talking with someone as often happens. I give myself advice when talking with other people and somebody was saying, oh, do you think it's OK to upgrade to High Sierra? And I say, oh, yeah, I see no reason why you would, you know, hold back at this point. It's, you know, it's mature enough. You're on Sierra already. It's like, I think you I think you're OK. Of course, I walked away from that conversation thinking I should take my own advice. So I did. But what I did, John, and this will get back to screensavers, but I'll talk through the process here briefly. I call I clone with carbon copy cloner every day and that is automatically scheduled, right, to happen. I think on this machine, it happens at like two thirty a.m. or something because the studio is generally empty then. Maybe it's four a.m., I don't know. And so I did one last clone manually and then I turned I changed the schedule and it's not set to clone again until tomorrow morning. And the reason is I wanted to make sure I could get through a MacGygab recording without any trouble before I blew away my clone of Sierra. Because right now, if worse comes to you know, if we started to record the show today and it was like, whoa, OK, big problems, I could just easily reboot to the the external drive that has the clone on it and boom, we're recording from Sierra. I could, you know, I could move it back and we're in good shape. I don't think that's going to need to happen, given where we are in this episode. And if you folks are hearing this episode, then that means success. But, you know, that's what I did. And and actually, I did the whole thing using screens from Adobe. I didn't want to have to sit here in the studio to babysit an iMac that was going through a operating system upgrade. So I did it from my iPad from the house using screens, which is a remote desktop type client that that's actually really, really good. So I'll put a I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. But but yeah, yeah, that's that's what I did there, John. And so far, so good, I hope. But where it comes back, do you have any questions or comments about my upgrade process? No, no, good strategy. Yeah, don't wipe out the old one quite yet. Right. But I also didn't want to forget because I've done it in the past where I've just disabled the clone and then realized three months later, holy crap, I haven't been cloning that machine, right? Because I turned it off and thought I would just remember to turn it back on when I felt it was safe. With this, I gave myself a deadline. Now, obviously, if even if things were a little flaky today or turn out to be a little flaky, I could kick that can down the road and schedule it instead of starting tomorrow morning. I could schedule it for, say, Thursday morning, right? Whatever. But by setting the future date as the first date of the schedule anew, that way, you know, if things were working fine and I don't think about it and I almost didn't think about it here. In fact, until you mentioned screensaver, I didn't even think about, oh, yeah, we're on high Sierra. But you know, having that schedule set was good to go. But the reason. And maybe we have a problem because John tells me he can't hear me anymore, but this happened before and it was his issue. So hang on. Let me see if I can bring John back. All right, John's back. So this is the second time this has happened with Discord today. As Michael King in the in the showroom said, maybe you do want to kick the can down the road with the with the clone. I don't in this case, at least all of my troubleshooting and my gut says that this is an issue happening on your end, John, not not here only because I don't have to make any changes. All you do is quit and relaunch Discord, which is the app we use to to communicate over the Internet. And and then you get my audio back. And I haven't done anything here, like, you know, hands off, throttle and stick kind of thing. So I think it's something with your end and Discord is is finicky with changes to audio devices. So I'm I'm wondering two things that I don't obviously I don't think you're making changes to your audio device intentionally while recording, right? I mean, my only audio devices, my my Yamaha right mixer over USB. That's that's it. So is your machine doing so USB is is very sensitive to system interrupts? Is your machine doing something like a backup or anything like that where there's high disk usage or, you know, some background process that that might be impacting your, you know, the connection to your USB device? Because if it if it drops off and comes back a split second later, Discord might be hypersensitive to that, whereas other apps might not be. I mean, Piazza was running alongside it. But you don't have like time machine trying to back out back or anything. I run all that stuff at like three in the morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, yeah. And what was the last time you rebooted that Mac? Gee, how could you tell? Well, I'll tell you one way to tell. Going to the terminal and type uptime and it says four days. Well, OK, rebooted four days ago. Yeah, all right. Huh, I don't know. There isn't this is a new version of Discord that, you know, that came out on the 21st, so certainly new for us here for Mac so maybe that's part of it. All right, but where I was going with all of this is the. High Sierra screensavers on my iMac in the office. I am able to see the basically the same screensavers that I have on my Apple TV, like all of the cool drone flyovers of cities or whatever. And I can't find those here and I can't remember if I added those manually or if I thought they were just there in High Sierra, but I don't see them as an option here. Do you remember how that works, John? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. So you haven't you haven't got a look now. So that that's it could be a geek challenge. I'm I'm sure I can go get the answer by looking down on my iMac, but I'm not going to do that right now because I'm here with all of you. So but but it is I love having those screensavers on my iMac. You know, I'll come back into the office or whatever. And it's like, you know, you get those beautiful drone flyovers, especially on like a retina 20 inch screen or whatever. Michael King in the chat room is saying I have to go out and get them, which must be what I did. So cool. All right. We will we will get a link for where to go and do that because it is sort of a beautiful thing to get. So all right. Let's talk to Rick. Rick. Rick writes, I have a Drobo DDR3 that has been giving me trouble for a while. I use it for a non bootable carbon copy cloner backup of my MacBook Pros SSD and as a time machine backup. Every few weeks, I cannot mount the main Drobo drive. I never have never seemed to have a problem with the time machine partition. Most of the time when this happens, either disc utility or disk warrior will fix it. But sometimes nothing works. I have erased and reformatted the Drobo a few times. But the problem keeps reoccurring. I normally have the Drobo plugged into an O W C Thunderbolt dock, which I then plug into my MacBook Pro. However, I think I have also had the same issue when plugging in directly. So I don't think it's the dock. Any ideas as to how to tell what's happening. I don't know if something is wrong with the Drobo, my Mac, or possibly it is at time for a clean install of high Sierra. I can't remember how many versions of Mac OS it's been since I did a clean install. Any suggestions would be appreciated before I give up. So, you know, generally, and I will emphasize the word generally, any issues with direct attached, you know, raid type drives like a Drobo are treated just like you would any other direct attached disc. And of course, that's exactly what what Rick's been doing here, right? He's, you know, he's he's using disc utilities, using disc warrior like the things that would use you would use for an internal drive or an external drive, right? These all of these raid type things, generally speaking, just appear as discs or perhaps multiple partitions or multiple volumes on a single disc to Mac OS. But obviously, something still amiss. The fact that this is happening routinely is, you know, sort of the head scratcher. So the way I'm looking at it is there's either some part of your daily workflow that kills the file system structure of that particular volume or there's something wrong with the way that volume is formatted itself. So you could try reformatting the volume. I know you've said that you've erased it. I'm not sure if that just means you're kind of erasing it in place or if you're actually doing a remove the partition and read the partition. You can do some level of that with disc utility and then you can do more of that with Drobo dashboard. My advice at this point would be to do Drobo dashboard. In fact, the only reason to use disc utility would be to see if you if you really care about knowing exactly where the problem lies, right? But because if it doesn't work with disc utility, then you're going to use Drobo dashboard anyway. So I would just jump to that. You're going to have to, you know, either way, you're wiping out the contents of that. So you either need to back it up or, you know, or lose it. But but that's that's what I would do here is is use Drobo dashboard to remove and recreate that volume. And and then let's see what's happening, right? You know, and I guess the other thing to ask, although I think you would have included this in in your question, but I never like to assume if you're getting those messages from the system that says, hey, this drive disconnected improperly, you should be careful about that. It doesn't quite say it that way. But but that's the that's the message you get. If you're getting those, then, you know, check the cable or whatever. But, you know, the fact that time machine, your time machine partition is doing just fine indicates to me that that part of things is probably OK. So that's that's where I've got on this. John, what about you? The one thing I check out so you mentioned the Drobo dashboard. Excuse me. And there is a tool section and. There's a software update section. Manually check for an update. Every once in a great while, they'll have a firmware update. There may be a firmware update. And I found that Drobo, like many other programs, isn't necessarily very proactive in looking for updates. It takes something manually intervention may be required. So give that a whirl to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not bad. Now, I see they have I haven't I don't know if I've ever done this. I mean, there's a scary looking button here. I'm actually floating over it says Drobo reset. Which I'm going to assume is like, I'm not sure. I don't want to press it because I hover over it and it's red. Yeah, that might that might be bad. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking that would. Reformat the whole thing. I don't know. Right. Read up on that. Right. Right. Yeah, I think at some level it would. I don't I don't want to say for sure that it wouldn't happen with the first click. I think you get a warning where you have to type in the word or race or something. OK, no, here we go. Yeah, that's exactly what it does. So I'm I'm looking at the help and it says, click this option to reset the drives and the selected Drobo device to factory standards. This erases all data on the drives. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so there you go. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah, so I like it's hard to say. But it sure seems like I. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. My yeah, I don't know. My gut, my gut doesn't have a leaning on this one, whether it's, you know, users slash workflow error or, you know, functional error between the system and the Drobo or with the Drobo itself. It's hard to say. But while we're on the subject of drives and external media and all of that stuff, I think it's time for for us to to spend a little time with APFS. Does that does that work for you, John? Yeah, sure. OK, cool. And we might as well make use of of the audio file that we have. So so, you know, here we go. Of course, I've got all the sound muted. I do this every week, don't I? Because I, you know, I move the slider down the fader down for the the recorded audio so that at the end of the episode, I can fade in the band. Right. But but of course, that doesn't work when you want to do something like this. It's time for a deep time. I'll get better with it, folks. Trust me on that. We will start with Michael. And with Michael here, he asks, I've decided to finally upgrade by Max to High Sierra. Hey, welcome to the club. Since I want to be ready to go to Mojave when it's released, I'm wondering what to do with my many, many external drives. Once I've upgraded, do you recommend upgrading those to APFS as well or is it wiser to keep those with HFS plus? So here's the thing for your external drives, for your internal drive, if the system offers to upgrade it or just does upgrade it, like that. Generally, OK, you still want clones of anything, especially boot drives, but, you know, back and backups of everything. But for your external drives, I wouldn't go out of your way to change their formats to APFS just yet, at least not as a general rule. That said, if you have a drive, an external drive, where you use multiple partitions, then it might be worth considering APFS because APFS doesn't force you to waste storage when you're partitioning a drive in the in the old paradigm, the HFS plus paradigm, but really the paradigm that we've lived with with any file system. We've really used widespread anyway on the Mac. If you had a one terabyte drive and you decided, OK, I want to dedicate 500 gigs to my time machine, or let's say 500 gigs to my clone and 500 gigs to general storage, that would be it. Your general storage, even if you didn't put anything out there, your general storage would be using 500 gigs of space, meaning that there was only 500 gigs of space available for your clone. However, with APFS, that's not quite how it works with APFS, an entire blob of storage. And I should say that with partitions, the space on the drive is actually allocated to each of those partitions. It is not only a logical distinction, but it is a physical distinction too, right? So this space is dedicated to that partition. The other space is dedicated to the second partition. With APFS, that's not how it works. APFS says, OK, give me a blob of storage. Great. OK, here's the whole drive. Great. That's the blob. Now, how would you like me to address this, right? And you can say, OK, cool. Well, I want two partitions, and I want one of them. You know, I want my time machine or my clone to max out at 500 gigs or whatever, like top it off at that. And then I want this other one, and you can top it off here or maybe not top it off. And now APFS will allow you to see all of that storage kind of all at once with limits, similar to what you would do in Drobo dashboard for the Drobo, right? That's how that's been for a while. And now you can do that with APFS. So if you've got something where you've got partitions, it can be interesting, especially if you've got one for, say, your clone and then one just for your general backups or general usage. You know, you're not limited by the choices you make out of the gate. You could down the road say, you know, my clone's really only using 400 gigs. So why don't I cap that off there and make a little bit of a difference? And make a little more space available for my other data? And that you can just do that on the fly, non-destructively. It's really no fanfare because all you're doing is changing a logical separator to say, okay, yeah, that's how much storage that, you know, partition or volume uses. It's not really a partition anymore. That's how much that volume uses and everything else. So that's why you might want to consider this for an external drive. But do so carefully because APFS is young and we don't have enough experience with it. So expect that you may need to rely on your backups of whatever you've put on that volume at some point. And so just bear that in mind. That's my feeling on it, John. What do you think? If it even broke, don't fix it. Pretty much. Unless you want to explore, like you were suggesting the features of APFS. Right. I mean, me, I decided to reformat my external backup drives for my carbon copy cloner as APFS, just because I wanted to experience the pain. And they were working fine for a while. I was getting those false positives for a while about there being problems, but that went away. So I think they've made some sort of update. Good. Good. Yeah. You know, and you don't have to reformat as APFS. You can use Disk Utility to convert HFS plus to APFS. But if you want to do these partitioned volume things, you're better. I think you're better off starting from scratch because converted volumes, especially multi-volume converted drives aren't quite laid out the way they would be if you started them from scratch, at least based on what I've seen. That may have changed, right? The converter. Does it still allow you? I thought it wouldn't normally allow you to convert a rotational drive to APFS, but it would let you do that with an SSD. Is that still true? Maybe it was just in the early days. I don't think so. Yeah, let me look here. No, I have an external rotational drive on this machine. I just updated this machine, as I said, from Sierra to High Sierra. And in Disk Utility in the Edit menu, I can choose Convert to APFS. But again, this is a drive with, well, it's a drive with two partitions. So I would be converting each partition separately to APFS. That's not really what I'd want to do. So best scenario would be to offload all this stuff and then format the drive from scratch so that it sees the entire blob of data as APFS. Yeah. Cool. All right. Going on to listener Matt, who says, I installed a fresh copy of macOS 10.13.4 on a two terabyte SSD with file vault encryption and APFS case sensitive file system. I then tried to install Adobe Creative Cloud and it will not let me do so because my file system is case sensitive. Is there any other way than a full reinstall of OS 10 to change this? And this is one of those scenarios where the answer is no. Once you have set your volume to be either case sensitive or not case sensitive, the default being not, once you've set your volume that way, the only way to change it that I found is to reformat the volume. You don't need to repartition or relay out things, but you do need to reformat the volume and choose not case sensitive. So, there you go. That's true with both APFS and HFS+. I would stay away from a case sensitive file system unless you have a very specific need for it. There are problems like this. Creative Cloud is sort of a common one, but it's not the only one where the way the software is written is assuming or expecting a non-case sensitive file system. What do you think, John? I'm with you. I've never found a compelling reason to do case sensitive. And as we've observed, some software for a stupid reason won't work with case sensitive. I don't know why that is. I don't either. Yeah, right. But obviously, some decision was made deep in the code base at some point where somebody said, well, just assume it's case insensitive, of course, it's just always a bad idea. Assume something that we can't control. But it will warn you. Creative Cloud will say, no, I won't install. I expect non-case sensitivity and you have it. So at least you don't have to encounter the wonky data loss problems or whatever might happen. It just says no. No, we're not going to run. Cool. Great. You want to take us to Brent, John? Oh, boy. Yeah, this is a good one. So Brent has a 2013 iMac with a three terabyte Fusion Drive. During a recent carbon copy cloner backup, I received the following errors. And the error was along the lines of the file or folder is sitting on a bad sector of your hard disk and is unrecoverable. That's the gist of the error. There were like five files that I identified. So based on that, should I be concerned that the rotational hard drive in my iMac is failing? There doesn't seem to be any issues when using the system. And I'm still able to access the picture files above. OK, some of the error files. All right, so that's kind of weird that carbon copy cloner reported an error. But when he read the file again, it was fine. It appeared to be fine. Second question, can I safely delete the .dist file? Well, one of the files I had an error was in slash private slash far slash blah, blah, blah. .dist. As far as I can tell, the .dist file is something from, I think it's like a receipt or an installer script or something. OK. So I do not, I actually tried to get to that part of the system and it wouldn't let me in. I tried to dig into my private var. It's a big long path. Sure. And it's a, no, it's like I won't let you in that directory even if I did a pseudo. Right. Wow. So I don't know if there's a way to get that stuff back. Maybe disable system integrity protection to get there. Yeah, but I don't think they're critical again. I think it's like an installer script. So kind of, if it's not there, you know, you go to the app store and redownload the app and then you're good. Right, right. And he says, well, I did get a warning from Drive Genius. Five, I did a repair check and it did not turn up anything wrong. All right. So this is interesting. So my thoughts as follows. So I'm also a CCC user. I've never seen that specific errors. I did have, as we mentioned in the past, I'll move along here, but it could have been, I actually did have one of my programs indicate there was a problem and I thought the disk was bad. It was actually a flaky cable or connector. So it couldn't be that, even though it's in an internal drive, you know, it could be a connection issue. Sure. Maybe. I mean, it's an older machine. These things have been known to happen. Yeah, the disk file, I'll just skip over that, but I think you may want to run. I mean, it sounds like it's failing, kind of like I had my situation there. You may want to run a different utility to do a bit more analysis rather than I can't read this because it could have been a one-off event that, you know, this just happened, and it's not going to happen again. Or may keep happening. And I suggested maybe something like DriveDX. DriveDX is not, well, a smart reporter is one, DriveDX is another. A smart reporter is kind of basic. DriveDX does what I'll call a bit more predictive or intelligent analysis, and that if it sees certain parameters getting to a certain point, it'll say, yeah, you know, I think something's wrong here. And then, yeah, he actually ran it, so he actually got DriveDX. And what did it say? Ah, yes, here we go. So here's the error that it reported on his drive that it thought was not really good, and it's something called reported uncorrectable errors. And that basically means that there's some problems, low-level problems on your drive. Is that it tried to read it? So this is confirming what he saw in CCC, but it's giving a bit more detail. And if you hover over this DriveDX, you know, they're like wizards it up with all these values. I mean, and that value means your drive's starting to fail. So I'm not sure which one it is, but I would get it serviced. I mean, it's probably, as we mentioned, it's probably the rotational portion, right? Yeah, I would think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, DriveDX, yeah. I always forget about that tool, but that's good, that's good. When I'm suspicious of a drive, it helps you dig deeper. So we said he's going to make an appointment with the Genius Bar, and I think bringing this additional information along with the CCC error and the Drive Genius error will help them probably conclude that the drive's on its way out. Yep. Which is kind of sad because what did he say? It was a 2013 machine? Five years old, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I would expect a rotational drive to last more than five years. Maybe not. How old's the drive that's dying for you right now in that sonology? I bought it about two years ago. Okay, well, there you go. But then it was a certified refurb, so it may have already had some mileage on it. Right, right, right. All right, let's... One last one in our little deep dive here, our mini deep dive, if you will, for APFS from Robin, who says, now that APFS is maturing and soon supporting Fusion and rotational drives as well in macOS Mojave, I've noticed that you are both starting to recommend it as a first-class citizen. He says, I have one consideration to still choose for HFS Plus, and it goes like this. Recently, I've been contacted to review disk recovery software for the Mac. I did ask the developers if APFS was already supported, which they confirmed, but with a side note stating, it doesn't work as well as with HFS Plus. You feel it coming, I guess, when you're getting in problems with a disk and you don't have proper backups or redundancy, it seems that formatting HFS Plus is still to be preferred for its recoverability. And that's not surprising, right? Well, two things, right? With all the history that we have with HFS Plus, we know more about it, right? We know how to dig into it better. We know how to fix those things or find those things. With APFS, we don't have that history. It may not ever be possible to do data recovery from an APFS volume or may not ever be possible to do it as well as we currently can with HFS Plus. Or, you know, as we learn more, it may turn out to be even more recoverable. But at the moment, yeah, all those utilities that we use for those disaster scenarios have far more history with HFS Plus than they do APFS. So if it's something where you feel like you might need that, then most certainly, you know, forego any of the new features or benefits of APFS and stick with HFS Plus. But even in that scenario, whether you're running APFS or HFS Plus, I would still say have backups. But if it's truly mission-critical data and you feel like you might get in a scenario where you need to use data recovery, even that's not guaranteed with HFS Plus. It's just they know more about HFS Plus. So there you go. Thanks, Robin. That's a worthy point to consider. And a nice way to kind of wrap this up with a tempering of our excitement for APFS, just a reminder. Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah. Anything on that, John, before we move out of this deep dive and perhaps go to some other questions? Nope. Okay. I want to take a minute and thank our premium subscribers, premium contributors for this week. And I want to thank all of our premium subscribers. Macgeekab.com. premium is where you can go to learn all about that. And premium subscribers get a couple of benefits. One, of course, and the whole reason we created the program was because you asked for this one, that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when supporting your two favorite geeks. And John and I really, really appreciate that. In addition to that, you get access to the premium at macgeekab.com email address. And now in the forums, you get a little badge that says you're a premium subscriber right there on the forums. 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You just, it's, it's, you know, we have one account for everything that happens under the macobserver umbrella and the macgeekab forums are part of the macobserver site. So you're just good to go. You've got everything right there. So go check it out. Speaking of email, we had a little email issue this week, John. I got to your house on Friday morning. We had a little bit of time. We were going to prep the show together. So we started digging into the email boxes and just verbally communicating about, okay, I'm going to get this one. I'll get this one. And you said, yeah, all right. I replied to, I forget who it was, maybe Joe or Jim or something. And I'm like, I've not seen it. You know, because we make sure we copy back our email addresses so that we see each other's answers and we have the history. I'm not seeing it. Not seeing it. And then I realized I don't have any email in those boxes since Monday. And it's Friday. This is bad. And I knew immediately what the problem was. I knew I have one, I have a couple of Gmail accounts that I use, one sort of for my main email, all the stuff that comes directly to me. And then I have another Gmail account that I funnel everything else into, which includes all our Mackie Kev stuff, as well as all of the press releases that come into Mac Observer. And every few years I need to go in and archive off all those old press releases from years past so that it doesn't fill up my 15 gig space limit on Gmail. Well, that's what happened on Monday. I got no notification that this happened. Didn't seem like anybody was getting bounce messages that this happened. And yet, of course, it happened. Awesome. And of course I realized this when I wasn't at home. So I sent John down the task of continuing to answer your questions while I dug into this problem. And so what I had to do was I VPN in from my laptop to the house. John, I don't know if you realize I did this. And then remote access my using I just use the, you know, screen sharing because once you're VPNed in you can do that. I screen shared to my iMac here in the office because that's the machine that I archive all the local stuff to and started doing that archiving and moving things off and freeing up space on Gmail. In fact, there's a weird way once you kind of move things off of Gmail, they don't leave. You have to delete them. And I've actually got a series of search commands really one in particular. I'll put it in the show notes, the code for it that goes and finds old messages that aren't in my inbox. They aren't in my sent box and aren't in my archive. And then I can put those in trash and delete it. And I freed up the space. And then what you, what I haven't told you yet, John, is that over, you know, the next day or so, all of those messages came into my inbox. So I think it was within that five day delivery period that mail seems to seems to have on the internet like, yeah, okay, it failed, but I'll I'll keep trying. You know, and and so they all came in. And so we were able to get to your email and obviously we answered all your questions this week and all that stuff. But it was an interesting little tour this week, John. Yeah, what if a nice if you got an alert? I really don't think I did. I mean, it's possible that I did and missed it, but I'm pretty attentive to my email. You know, so I don't know. I don't know. But it was not it was not a fun it was not a fun little excursion. So anyway, it's panic inducing that it really was you're not getting email. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It was like, oh, man, this is bad. This is bad. But thankfully we caught it. Or, you know, within whatever that period of time was so that the mail just got delivered once I freed up space. And so now I'm down to about eight gigs used and I'll be good for so two things I dealt with it. And then I put a note on my calendar that I will that recurs annually to remind me next June to go and do this again and that way I'll never hit the well, I say I'll never hit the limit, but, you know, I'll have to knock on the there's no wood here by here. This is not good, John. I got to lean over and knock on some wood. All right, now we're good. Okay. Cool. Let's go to Phil, shall we go to Phil? Oh, Phil, Phil, Phil. Where are you, Phil? Actually, I think there might be two questions from the same Phil. Phil says, my wife and I are heading to Paris in the fall. He says, I know you've covered some topics about traveling abroad, but I have a question or two. He says, he wants to know what to use for charging all of his devices. And he says we both have T-Mobile and have free data and texting, just no call ability. But if we are on Wi-Fi, it would a FaceTime audio call get around that. My thought is that since we have free data and use my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, I can have my wife connect and then her iPhone SE would also be on Wi-Fi. And a third question, the Airbnb has Wi-Fi. He says, but I have Tunnel Bear on my iPhone. Would you recommend using it on both of our phones? So three questions. The first about charging, he found so you can find power converters that do two functions. Number one, they fit the outlets in where he's going in Europe. But you can find them that will fit the outlets wherever you go. And then convert the power that they have over there from 220 down to 110 or 240 down to 120, whichever way you want to cut it. Which is more accurate, John? What do we have here? 110 or 120? Flows between them, doesn't it? I believe 120 is the official figure at 120. Okay. Volt 60 hertz. Yeah. All right. There you go. But the reality is you might not need that second part because if you look, especially for all of your Apple devices, including just the little, you know, wall plug chargers for your, you know, your iPhone they will all take variable voltage. You should absolutely check everything that you're going to plug in. But my guess is that you will find other than hairdryers which you just don't bring with you either don't use one or use one that you get over there. But, you know, other than that and like curling irons and things like that, you know, that use heating coils everything else especially that you're going to use for your electronics most likely has a variable voltage power supply that will just take any voltage you throw at it. With that you simply need a way to plug it into their plugs which are different than what we have here. So, what I found when we traveled to Europe a couple of years ago and I think is still the best deal going is that Rick Steves who is a travel blogger etc. also sells all kinds of great things for traveling and one of those things is a European power adapters they also sell UK ones because it's different but they sell them for a dollar a piece and really that's all you need. So, I bought I think I bought four of them for general Europe and then four for the UK because we were in both places and, you know, I think it cost me less than 15 bucks including shipping and all of that from Rick Steves and that way each member of the family had one wherever we were and that turned out to be far more than enough because my wife and I really didn't need to, you know, we shared a bedroom and so, you know, I used a single charger that we could all plug into and plug all our devices into and it was totally fun. So, that's that's the way I would go with that part of it. Yeah. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to the other stuff? No, I just looked at even this knockoff adapter I have, a non-Apple one even it has and it says, yeah, I can take between 100 and 240 volts and 50 to 60 Hertz. Right, it's just happy with whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's pretty common with at least with Apple stuff, it's like why not just make it handle the types of electricity and then you just need the adapter. Yep, exactly. Exactly. And these adapters from Rick Steve's are inexpensive. I loaned them to a friend who went to Ireland last year and, you know, he's like, oh yeah, we're just fine because it because all it's doing is changing the shape or the size or the orientation of the outlet. So, it's really just, you know, just you could do it on your own if you wanted to, you know, get some prongs and stick it in the outlet and connect the wires up. But I am not recommending that you understand because you risk, you know, electrocuting yourself and it's it hurts more over there than it does here in the U.S. So, so that's step one. As far as FaceTime audio, if you have free data, you don't need to be on Wi-Fi to use FaceTime audio. You could use FaceTime audio across your data connection and that should work fine. I've done that many times and it should work. Just be very cautious when doing that that you are not making a regular audio call that you are actually making a FaceTime audio call because otherwise you'll wind up using your travel abroad minutes and those as you stated are not included in your T-Mobile plan. So, there you go. That's that's my thoughts on that. And I think that's a great idea for communicating with people. Any thoughts on that before we move on to the VPN portion of this, John? Yeah, any VoIP type thing. Yeah. Type thing is a yeah, you called me the other day and I was kind of surprised to see it wasn't from your phone. It was FaceTime audio. It's like, yeah, sure. Why not? Yeah, I was sitting in my computer and I'm like, I don't want to, you know, I've got a setup at my computer with a microphone and it works great and why not? So, I just do it that way. Yeah, it works well. I will say this you although actually, so he's on T-Mobile which means he gets free data and texting in lots of countries and France is one of them. So, anyone texting your phone number like friends or family in the US text your phone number. You will get that if you're in the UK when we went a couple years ago and this would still be true if we went today because we're still on AT&T AT&T does not have free service in these other countries. I don't think Verizon does either but I might be wrong about that. So, we chose AT&T does have the, you know, $10 a day per line make your life easier and just bring your data and voice plan with you to Europe option. But if you're going for a couple of weeks you know that's 140 bucks a person times however many people you're bringing it starts to get really expensive, right? So, with that we chose then and like I said would still choose now to get off the plane and in the airport just buy, you know, a bunch of sims and load them up and for like 20 bucks you can get enough data to use the whole time you're there. Changing sims changes your phone number. You're taking out the sim which attaches to your U.S. phone number save it somewhere don't lose it you will want it again two weeks later trust me but, you know and then you're putting in this new sim that has a different phone number which means anyone texting your old phone number or you're existing now it's not old it's just your U.S. phone number will not get through to you while you're there and that can, you know that can create some issues so we started making sure we were using iMessage based on email addresses so that at least iMessage people could get to us and we could get to them beforehand but, you know, while we're there but we started doing that a couple of months before we left so that any existing message trails that were going were based on email address with iMessage not phone number with iMessage because as soon as you remove that sim and add a new sim your phone number is no longer actively attached to your iMessage account in the way that you would want it to be it'll come back when you put the sim back in it's all fine but while you're there you have a new phone number and similarly you don't want to be initiating chats from that phone number you want to do it from your email address again so that those chats don't die when you come back so think about that and you can make those settings changes right there on your phone if you go to settings messages, i am 99% certain and then go to send and receive it'll show all the addresses that you have associated with it one of them will be your phone number one of them would be your iMessage Apple ID and then any others you've added at the bottom it says start new conversations from pick something other than your phone number here and that will help indicate this so so there you go that's that now as for VPNs my friend so here's my thoughts and i've had this conversation a lot with people in fact i was at a user group meeting the other night speaking and somebody said oh yeah but you know i just make sure that i definitely use a VPN if i'm going to access my bank right and i stopped and i thought you know this is really interesting your bank is the place where you would need the VPN the least and here's here's why i say that you might yell at me and and if you do great you know let us know feedback at matkeekab.com that's where we want to hear about anybody that you know has any questions comments or you know disagreements right feedback at matkeekab.com feedback at matkeekab.com right so the connection the only thing a VPN will do to help you security wise and privacy wise when you're connecting to your bank is it will obscure the fact that you are connecting to your bank right what the only thing that's sent in the clear when you connect to your bank is the lookup of where you want to connect to so you know www.bankofamerica.com and then the fact that you have a connection to www.bankofamerica.com beyond that because your connection to the bank is secure and mandated to be secure on the bank's end everything end to end is encrypted device your device to their server so it really doesn't matter whether you're on a VPN or not in terms of in terms of that you've got a secure connection to your bank and you're good to go that you know that to me is that's why I say you know connecting to your bank and that sort of thing is the least concerning with a VPN where you do want to be concerned is anything that's connecting in the clear which is less and less and less these days right you know some email providers you might still be connecting in the clear but by and large no they're all end to end you know secure SSL or TLS or whatever many websites are HTTPS everywhere right so like if you visit Mac Observer even just to read an article you have a secure connection there we did that a couple years ago and it's just the way it is the whole site and of course frankly that makes our lives way easier because then we don't have to worry well if you're logging in there for the forums but that but you're a premium subscriber well that you know that account is then tied to your payment data that should also be secure so it's just like okay make the whole thing secure it's just easier that way and it and everything supports it it you don't even think about it so right there and you can get secure certs from Let's Encrypt if you're a webmaster and you want to do that stuff it's a little outside the scope of this question but so you know using a VPN it's not a bad thing it certainly protects you it adds another layer of protection but I wouldn't especially in an Airbnb I wouldn't freak out about it so that's my feeling on this John what what do you think am I am I completely misleading all of our great listeners here no no I agree with you you know when I'm out and about my ISP does offer a secure Wi-Fi that has a certificate and all that stuff and I think yours does that as well yeah yeah Xfinity does too yep but um but even if I'm out and about and you know I'm connecting to free Wi-Fi like at the grocery store the library stuff I don't I'm not too concerned because as you pointed out almost everybody is encrypting end-to-end with SSL or TLS I guess more correctly and I mean I tried this a while ago I actually you know went to my library and bought my brought my machine and got a packet sniffer and monitor the traffic yeah there there was hardly anything of interest that wasn't encrypted right right right there was something yeah I mean there were some unencrypted stuff but it was like printer name broadcasts and like you know things just advertising their presence but I I didn't see any data where you know it'd be like wow you know I'm gonna I'm gonna you know score big yeah right yeah you know compromise the system you know I got the the credit card number or the username and password because that's all well protected as far as I know yeah as you pointed out you could get somebody that you know whatever app you're using is a poor implementation but you would think of the very least Apple would kind of notice that like hey guys you're not communicating securely I would assume that they scan at least for that right they require although they've I don't know that they've enforced this yet but they do require that all communication from your app back to your own servers is done with HTTPS and then when they announced that there was sort of a big issue for podcasters is like well wait a minute you know even for my audio downloads those have to be HTTPS because not everybody hosts somewhere that that's possible and so they were like oh we didn't think about that so but but in general yeah yeah communication from apps you know has to be that way but but again even before Apple in long before Apple introduced that requirement banks have had that requirement right and you know like we said most email already does and all that stuff so yeah man it's uh that's how it goes so I think you're okay you know you could find someone that's very cleverly spoofing a lot of things to get your banking data but it would take a lot of work I'm not sure it's certainly possible but they'd have to spoof certificates and confirmations and all of that I mean it would be a very robust scenario where where and it wouldn't just be somebody sniffing on the network it would be the person running the network so I don't think I don't think you need to worry I don't think so but if you do email us at the address as we said or call us and our phone number is 224-888 geek which John is 4-3-3-5 sweet and please do visit our forums matgeekup.com slash forums that we would love to see you over there so it's good stuff our thanks to of course cash fly CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you it took me a lot of years to get comfortable saying those words in the right way together I just noticed anyway thanks to them thanks to you for listening thanks to all of our premium subscribers and obviously we take a break in every show and thank our premium subscribers but I want to thank everyone we wouldn't be doing this show without you not only you simply listening but you engaging you asking questions you participating in the forums your questions your tips your comments your cool stuff found to us anything so this is a community that John and I are just the stewards of our community but we're all doing it together so it's a great thing we get to do together here and that is not lost on us every week that we get to do it so thank you and of course thanking all the folks in this marketplace of course onepassword.com geekgab codeweavers.com otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com smile at smilesoftware.com barebonessoftware barebones.com and ring at ring.com slash mgg linkedin.com slash mgg as well alright man what do you think John do you have any advice for for our friends here I think if you're out and about no matter where you are you better be using SSL, TLS or VPN otherwise there's a high chance that you will get caught