 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, episode 785 for Monday, October 21st. Happy birthday, Matt and Chris, 2019! It's folks and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show where you send in all kinds of stuff. Questions, tips, cool stuff found, you know, all those things that either are on our minds to learn or things that we have learned. And we share them with each other with the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every week as a result of having to gotten together here. Sponsors for this episode include Native at nativedeodorant.com. We'll talk about that in a minute with a coupon code MGG. And linode.com slash MGG, which we'll also talk about in a minute with coupon or promo code MGG2019 here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. Yeah, so we have all kinds of stuff to go through today, John, right? Because both Mac OS Catalina and iOS 13 have been out for a couple of weeks. So we've got some questions and tips about that. Plus, I learned some cool things while at Mac Tech last week. And then we've got some other, you know, cool stuff found and quick tips and all that stuff too. Yeah, I learned one thing. Go. About running a smart home. You may have seen me tweet about this. So, you know, I got those smart thermostats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The wave thermostats. Yeah. So I was downstairs and, you know, looked up and display on one of them was blank. And I'm like, oh, that's not good. Because I actually put a notification in the smart things environment saying, OK, if the battery level gets below a certain level, then, you know, send me a notification. And it didn't. Oh, OK. Don't use the batteries that come with things, especially if they're not like a name brand, which they weren't. And so, you know, I mean, it came with four AA batteries. I'm like, I'll put those in there. One of them was leaking and apparently broke the power circuit. Got it. Yeah, that's not good. But the environment just was a simple replacement of the battery enough to. Yes, to solve. OK, so it didn't damage the device. No, but there was enough leakage in one of the batteries to to provide no power. Yeah, I guess it was like. So I put some of I got tons of these as you probably do a nickel metal hydride recharge Yeah, took a little cheap batteries out and we're good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have. So I'm really stoked that a lot of the smart home stuff. I just got a D link water sensor that I haven't tested it yet. So we'll obviously kind of re-circle on that. But it uses double AA batteries, which I'm really stoked about because you can get those, you know, very easily rechargeable. I think that was the any loop was from from was that Samsung? I can't remember even who did it. It was Sanyo, I think, and then Panasonic. Sanyo, that's it. But now you can get the Amazon basics ones. And I like that's all we've been using. And those have been great. And like, you know, you can get, I don't know, like eight of them for less than 20 bucks. And as long as you get a way to charge them up, which you can also get that, you know, at Amazon, obviously, they, you know, kind of good at that thing. I got some of those. I also got a Duracell makes. Yeah, right. Lots of people make them for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I'm stoked about it. I like it. It's good. All right. All right. Speaking of Mac tech at one of the sessions there, I learned about a utility called detect X, which is and well, there's two versions of it. There's detect X and then detect X Swift for anything running 10.11 or later. It was rewritten in Swift, but it's essentially like an anti malware keylogger adware scanner that that I did not know about. So I share because I figured, you know, maybe you didn't know about it. So the links in the show notes. I also learned. So we have lots of different ways that you can send us things, questions, tips, cool stuff found. Of course, there's the email address feedback at mackegab.com that you all know about, right? I think you said feedback at mackegab.com. That's correct. Feedback at mackegab.com. Right. And then you can tweet us at mackegab where you can even message us on Facebook or, you know, whatever. One other way is to show us in person and Brandon was we were at at Mac tech. We visited the, I think it was the aquarium of the Americas really cool facility, like amazing facility. And Brandon was running around with this app called spark camera, which is a video stitching app. So you just take like little snippets of video here and there. You would take like a second here or second there or whatever or a couple of seconds and then it like takes care of stitching it all together so that you have like this nice little video of the event, which I really wish that I had had earlier in the week for like, you know, grabbing of video snippets of my family had come out to LA. I had a couple of days off and we wound up going to universal studios and did some fun things. And it would have been kind of cool to use that app. So spark camera at spark camera.com. And of course it's in the iOS, you know, app store because that's the only way to really get those things. Thank you for that, Brandon. Good stuff. Fun. Fun hanging out too. Yeah. Go ahead, Mr. Brown. Now in theory, you could also, I remember someone had a question that if I think you can use QuickTime Player to paste videos together, though I don't think it's very efficient. No. And this was all just done on device, right? And you could use iMovie to do this too, but but this is iMovie. Yeah. But this is like, you know, all in one app and it just does it for you. And you can add music in the background. And yeah. Yeah. I know. I really, I got to try it out at my next like thing. So and then Andy in response to the discussion we were having about keeping our Macs awake intentionally in the last episode, I mentioned a couple of apps. I used one called Lungo because it's part of set app. We also talked about the terminal command, and Andy wrote in and says, I use a free little app called caffeine. It puts a coffee cup icon in the menu bar. You toggle it by clicking when the cup is full. The Mac stays awake. Empty. It can sleep and you can set it for varying amounts of time. So it sounds like exactly what I'm using Lungo for except it's available for free. So I put a link to that in the show notes too, which is great. We love free. It's good. I mean, app developers should be, you know, like, you know, if they want to charge for their app, then obviously we should pay them for it. But if they don't and they're okay with it, then free is great. Any, anything to add there, John, before we blast through our quick tips here? I got my caffeine right here. Same cup. I know I'm having caffeine today, which is the first time in a long time. Yeah. T form, right? T form. Actually, yeah, I'm having, I think I've mentioned this T before, but it's morning thunder from celestial seasonings. So it's, it's got some black tea in it, which has caffeine, but I think it also has, like, matean from Yerba mate or something. Anyway, you know, so I'll put a link to that in the show notes in case anybody cares, because, you know, we can. All right. Listener Adam has a quick tip. He says in the new iOS and iPad OS, Maps app, you can zoom in and out easily by doing the following. Double tap, but on the second tap, do not lift your finger from the screen, rather slide it up and down to zoom in and out. This is a feature that Google Maps has had for years. I find it super helpful when trying to zoom in and out on the iPhone one-handedly. Well, thanks for that, Adam. That's cool. I like it. Pretty good, huh, Mr. Braun? Nice. Cool. Anything to add to that, or should we just blast through these into the next one? No, I somehow thought you were always able to do that. Maybe. You know, I mean, it's not rare that we stumble on something that is new to us, but maybe I've never done that before, but maybe it's not new. I don't know. I don't know. Listener David recently was trying out multiple Ultra HD and HD music streaming services and found something that came up that I hadn't really thought about before. The default Mac settings for sound. There is an app called Audio MIDI Setup where you can tweak the output settings and also the input settings to truly get the full effect of your sound. The default, for him anyway, was considerably lower than what these services portray they can deliver. Once I made recommended changes, I could definitely hear the differences in speaker output. So yeah, Audio MIDI Setup is, as the name implies, there to configure both your audio devices and any MIDI devices you have. And when you launch it, you click on any given audio device and it will show you, generally there's two tabs, one for input, one for output, and depending on the capabilities of the device, it may have other things too. But what he's talking about there is setting the format to something that matches the streaming or the quality of the streaming service that you're using. So if, for example, you were set to, I don't know, 16-bit or 42, 48K, or if you were set to 22K instead of 44.1 or 48K, then you might not be getting the full data path of that audio and therefore might not be hearing it in the quality that it was intended or that you desire. I have found, I launch Audio MIDI Setup generally at least once a week, right before recording this show, to make sure that nothing has changed there because I have found my system to be more reliable during our podcasting sessions if all the devices that I'm using are set to the same format. So I have standardized on 48K, 24-bit for all of my stuff here, and that seems to work. And part of that is by choice, but part of it is also dictated by the limitations of some of the devices that I have. I can't do 16-bit on some of them. So it's like, all right, if this is forcing me to 24, then I'm just going to do 24 on everything and I'm in good shape. A little bit crazy, but, you know, it's good to know these apps exist even if you never need to use them. Right, that's the point of this show is, in my mind, is not to have all of us remember everything that we discussed, but, you know, it lodges in our brains that there's something that's possible. That is the key, I think, to successful happy computing life, so that six months from now, when you have some weird issue with audio, you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Look, it's in the Applications Utilities folder. That's another little hint for you, right? I'm pretty sure that's where the audio MIDI setup is. But, yeah, there you go. It is in the Applications Utilities folder. Okay, now I'm going to quit it on this machine so I don't accidentally make a change while we're recording. That would be very bad. I get very nervous opening that particular app because it could change a lot of things that cause a lot of headache. Good? I'm good. One last little quick tip from listener James, who says, when I wanted to merge multiple MP3 files into a single file, I found a surprisingly easy solution. I wanted certain songs to always play together as an album side, but I had separate MP3 files for each song. So I wanted to combine them into one file. I'm not a musician, and I don't have a lot of audio editing software lying around. You can probably do this with GarageBand, but there's probably a bit of a learning curve. Instead, I found out that you can simply concatenate the files in the Mac terminal using the Unix cat command from the shell. He sent us a link to a little article that explains this, but he's right. The way the MP3 containers are built, they can actually just have repeats of their data. All the cat command does is take multiple inputs, in this case, multiple files, and save them out to one output. You can do it. It's most commonly used with text files if you've got a bunch of things that you just want to string together into one. But obviously, you can use it for audio files so long as the format is such that it can be played back that way. And MP3 files, it just so happens, can be played back as one big stream of data. Wow. It's almost like it concatenates them. Well, that's exactly it. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Cool stuff. I had forgotten that you could do that with MP3 files. And his example is a good one. I'm trying to think... Well, I mean, there's other ways of playing an album side together, but that is one that will work in any playback engine. And I guess that's good. Yeah? Good? Good? Okay, cool. We have a bunch of Catalina questions and tips because we said we did and because you sent them in and because we found them. But first, I want to tell you about our first sponsor and why I smell so good in such a healthy way. NativeDeodorant.com, coupon code MGG saves you 20% there. 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It's like there's so many smart people there, and there's no, like everybody's together. That's what I really love about it, is like you're never the smartest person in the room, and no one is, like there's no class system or any separation of, like even speakers, I mean, speakers and attendees are all the same. And in fact, while giving my sessions there over the years, I've learned things about the very topic that I am speaking upon. Like there's always somebody in the audience that knows something you don't know, it's just outstanding. And everybody's, I mean, it's just an environment of learning. It's so great. Anyway, you got to go. We will, we will again have a promo code and for next year I will make sure that we get it early enough that you can actually take advantage of it. I heard from a lot of you that said, oh, you know, you said you were going to have a promo code and then one didn't materialize. I needed to make my plans and I went and did it. And, you know, so we will, we will fix that for next year. But anyway, going to Jeff here, he says, after installing the Catalina update, a folder with 300 gig of data just disappeared. I had a folder in the root of my Mac called shared folders. Within it, I had folders such as server, Jeff, server, daughter, server, family, et cetera. I share each folder with users that should access each. I use the same naming scheme with my clients as I found that it makes things clearer when folders on the server that you're accessing over a network have the word server in it. Okay, fair. It says anyway, my entire shared folders folder disappeared or so I thought with some Google foo, I discovered that this was expected behavior when upgrading to Catalina. I was told by a both level one and level two AppleCare phone tech that any non-Apple created folder in the root of your drive will upon update to Catalina be moved to users shared relocated items. And then in this case, move to security slash your folder name. This is true, he says, and it's exactly where I found it. So take a look if you've upgraded to Catalina and users shared relocated items and just dig through there and make sure it will move some things in there that you don't care about and that's fine. But it might move something that you do. And so you want to check that out. He says they also told me that the root directory of any boot drive in Catalina is no longer writable by any user. And this is to protect from mischief and malware. This however, he says, at least in his case, is untrue. When figuring out where my shared folders went, I started a time machine restore of that very folder. Time machine restored that folder and all of its contents dutifully back where I had it under Mojave directly in the root folder. When time machine finished its restore, all of my files and folders were there and everything was readable and writable. He says this overly aggressive behavior is to use one of your terms not at all coolio to me. All right, so you are right that you can put files and folders there because you did. But so is Apple. So first of all, thank you for the tip of looking in that user's shared relocated items. That might be a really valuable thing to some folks listening and certainly is to me. So thank you. But Catalina actually runs two volumes. We've talked about this on the show before but now we're starting to learn more about the implications and at Mac Tech from Tim Standing who is like he was the author of software or is the author of software and now is the VP of software at other world computing. I learned a little more. So Catalina has two volumes. One is a read only system volume that contains Mac OS and is what boots your Mac. And then there is a writable data volume. However, it doesn't look this way on Catalina unless you really start to dig into the guts of how the drives are formatted and laid out. When you're using your Mac, it appears to be the same way that it always has been, which is one drive that has your one volume, I should say that has your, you know, that boots your system and has Mac OS and then also it has all your data. But those are actually two separate things and there are two separate things so that the system volume can be read only. However, in order to have the system volume read only and your user volume writable, Apple invented a new thing and they call it firm links. Firm links allow you, so we have had SIM links and aliases which are similar but not exactly the same in the past and we've also had hard links which are used for time machine. So SIM links allow you to point to a file on the same drive but you can't, I guess, no, no, no. Can you point to a file in a different drive with a SIM link? Yes. I think so. Why couldn't you? It's just another folder. Yeah, I think you can actually. But they don't allow you to point to folders. Firm links allow you to point to folders and link these separate volumes together so that users see just one hybrid volume and this is how Mac OS is getting away with this while keeping the system volume really which is just, you know, from our viewpoint a series of folders read only. And so when you go and write something to your Mac you are most definitely writing it to the data volume. You cannot write to the system volume. And what I learned about at Mac Tech was very interesting. Tim Standing was talking about extensions, right, which need to be installed in the system volume and certain types of third-party extensions are still allowed there. They won't be forever like that is being deprecated but for now they still can be. And the way it works, John, is this. The extensions when you agree, you know, Mac OS says this extension is trying to be installed do you want to allow it? You say yes. It puts it on your user volume in a staging folder. And then when you restart your Mac it goes through, launch D is the master process of everything, it goes through and shuts down everything else like it does and right before it actually reboots your Mac it makes sure no other processes are running so it's only launch D that's running and then it runs a script. And what that script does, John, is it remounts the system volume as writable for this brief moment in time when no other processes are running. It remounts the system volume as writable, copies over any of the extensions from the staging folder to the actual folder unmounts the volume and reboots. So there is this brief moment of time where your system volume is mounted read write but no other processes are running at that point and it's just before it gets unmounted and rebooted and of course when you reboot it mounts as read only and never changes until the last little moment again before you reboot the next time. That's pretty cool, huh? Yes. I know it took me a while to process this too. Like I've had a few days so yeah I'm still not quite right on it all but you know at least yeah this is yeah. So go ahead, sorry. No, no, we know a quick tip is coming up explaining the impact of this so I'll wait till we get to that because I had to run into that as well. All right. Yeah, let's see so and I think we had a question about from Bill about the relocated items folder. I looked in my relocated items folder and found a one gig swap file there that macOS and its infinite wisdom decided it needed to keep. Listener Bill wrote in and said that he has found some you know other things in there too but I feel like Listener Jeff is the only one we've heard from that has actually found valuable user data in there but it makes sense because he put that valuable user data at the root of his hard drive which Catalina is attempting to stop us from doing. So anyway, just take a look in that folder and then you're good and delete the thing like you know I mean I found it on my laptop this week that you know I was going through the questions that night I was like oh I wonder what's in mine and it was like wait a minute what the heck why do I have a one gig swap file here who needs this so I happily deleted it. All right. Let's see let's go to Jeff I think this is the quick tip you were talking about John. Yes, Jeff says so I updated to Catalina and I used carbon copy cloner to do daily slash weekly backups for certain folders my jobs all started to fail due to the split. Yes, there is nowhere in the finder to view this but when you open carbon copy cloner it asks to change the source to use Macintosh hard drive dash data so if anyone runs carbon copy cloner jobs they will fail until you go in and accept the changes due to the multi volume split well that's a good little quick tip I need to go do that on my machine downstairs that I upgraded last night have you found this to be true for you John? Oh yeah I get a yeah I was getting emails so I have my carbon copy cloner jobs email me or when they fail and yeah I was getting and it said you know CCC backup failed and I'm like great now what yeah now what right yeah and as soon as I started it up it's like oh yeah by the way Apple changed something so you gotta you gotta be permission to change this other thing that makes sense yeah yeah right yeah yeah that makes sense cool all right um listener Kevin I might need this downstairs too listener Kevin says just a quick tale of woe but with a happy ending after upgrading to Catalina says I use an OWC USB-C dock that has an Ethernet port on it it stopped working when I upgraded I reached out to OWC support and their recommendation was to roll back to Mojave since they have not yet completed their Catalina testing I shook my fist in the air and then found a better solution Plugable had a post with exactly what I needed they have a driver in beta for Catalina that works great not only with their dock but with other world computing's dock and so we've got a link that we'll put in the show notes to the USB-C driver that is Catalina compatible for this Ethernet port and in theory everything should be good thank you for that Kevin for a while I had to use the Ethernet port on one of my docks but yeah if you're using it on a MacBook or something that doesn't have its own Ethernet port then that's your Ethernet port so thanks for finding this the Plugable folks are cool they make a cool like that Plugable I think they call it the dock we've talked about it on the show it was a cool stuff found I can't remember the name of it I'm looking it up here but it's like this block that has all kinds of ports on it it's a really it's a good little USB-C thing and if their website came up quickly enough I would tell you what it is yeah it's called the cube the Plugable USB-C cube so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too because I've used that on my laptop for a while and it works really well so good yes John bad good very good very good very very good let's see can I put that there yeah there we go alright let's see that's Kevin moving on to oh yeah I had a problem the other day God this sucked I'm running Catalina on my laptop which I have been for you know since basically it came out actually since the day before it came out but I have upgraded to the latest and I was at Mac Tech one morning the Wi-Fi was a little wonky because they had V-land it wrong but they fixed that so but I was having an issue that I didn't realize it was going on all day where I told mail on my laptop to file you know I would like read a message reply to it that all worked the reply would go out and then I would take the message and archive it to my archive folder or somewhere else even to the trash and well it looked fine on my laptop screen when I looked on my phone or my iPad all those messages were still in my inbox it's like crap so I looked and in mail if you go to the window menu you can look at the activity browser and it said moving messages one of you know at that point it was like 108 and as I went throughout the day and archived more mail it went up to you know one of 142 or something like that and it was like crap and I looked in the web interface and obviously the messages also there had not shown any archiving so I upgraded there was the supplemental update to Catalina or whatever so I did that hoping that that would like kick it into gear obviously that caused a reboot which I had tried before anyway and neither of those things did it so I had to accept that I was going to lose my my archive operations and everything was actually still in the inbox and the next thing that I tried now remember I'm traveling I'm on a hotel Wi-Fi it was actually pretty good where we were especially in the rooms but you know it's hotel Wi-Fi it ain't home and so I went and deleted I went into the mail sorry I went into the home library mail v7 folder because it's v7 in Catalina and then in the mail data folder there I deleted all I think it was three different I want to say it was four I'm looking at a Mojave machine here because I haven't upgraded the studio yet but all the files that started with Envelope index I quit mail first I deleted those and then I relaunched mail now when you do that mail has to go through and it says re-importing messages but really what it's doing is re-indexing messages and I did that actually before we went to the aquarium that night so my Mac was happily sitting there in my hotel room churning along doing all this stuff I used Lungo or caffeinate or something to make sure my Mac stayed awake during this operation because you know I didn't want it to go to sleep after ten minutes and by the time I got back everything was there of course it was all back in my inbox but most importantly the moving messages item had finally stopped appearing in my activity window so I was able to then I tested it obviously with just a few messages moved them to archive and that reflected in the web interface right away and you know all that stuff so problem was solved by removing and letting it rebuild the envelope index I think I don't think this was a Catalina problem per se I think it was mail got stuck because it was on wonky wifi and trying to move things and couldn't move things but I wanted to share it anyway regardless of where you might see this problem that was the solution so I didn't have to delete my mail account I just had to delete the envelope index from in there so I share any thoughts on that mr. barn yeah I remember doing mass but that's a good tip I remember doing mass moves of mail within mail app sometimes don't go very well yeah well that's true yeah this wasn't mass moving although it turns out it was right I mean it was the first move was just stuck and therefore it wouldn't it never timed out on it was the problem it should have timed like I feel like this is a bug in mail but I don't think it's a new bug you know I feel like it if mail mail shouldn't allow itself to be stuck in that mode for nine hours you know it should after ten minutes like say hey I can't move this message so I'm putting it back you know that would be you know but you know yeah one thing that I found when I did have a need to move lots of messages between mail boxes is break it up into little smaller problems yeah right well this was I mean I was moving them one at a time it was just my normal triaging of mail yeah it was just stuck but you're right when I've done when I've done you know big moves or whatever I move if there's 10,000 messages I might move a thousand at a time or something so that if it fails I'm not stuck with you know 10,000 go back and redo yeah yeah but I'm with you I mean it should at some point time out and say I'm not making any progress here yeah yeah cool all right um let's go to oh yeah so a different listener Jeff wrote in and was asking with the new Mac podcast app of course iTunes is no longer an app in Catalina we have three different apps for if you count the finder music podcasts and TV to manage those various different types of media and he says I'm trying to find out what folder my downloaded podcasts are being saved to I will often convert them to mp3s and upload to Apple music he says for me that plays better on Apple Watch we do have an mp3 feed for Mac GeekGab by the way if you go to MacGeekGab.com it's right there so you can subscribe to that and get the show on mp3 if you prefer we will be moving everything to mp3 now that iTunes is being deprecated because iTunes is the only place that will not show you mp3 chapters which is why we've kept that AAC feed for so long but now that the podcast app will exist and will show you mp3 chapters we'll be moving everything over but that will probably be a couple of months just to give everybody a little time to get to Catalina yes I realize there's some of you that can't get to Catalina there are other podcast apps that you can use if you want chapters on your Mac chapters on your iPhone work in the podcast app either way anyway he was wondering where they were so I launched Activity Monitor I did not know where they were either I launched Activity Monitor downloaded a podcast and started playing it and then looked in Activity Monitor I double clicked on the podcast app I looked at what's the open files and ports right when you go into the app and I looked through it and found where it was playing my podcast from and that was in home library group containers and then some serial number groups.com.apple.podcasts library and then cash so it is saving them to your home folder buried in the library you can probably find it from there if you look for a folder that contains groups.com.apple.podcast inside that it's in a folder called library and a folder called cash so there you go there you go fun Mr. Braun I think so okay here's another little tidbit hmm so if you go in the terminal now you get a dandy little message here saying the default interactive shell is now ZSH that's right yes yes yeah instead of bash B-A-S-H we're using ZSH and that's the second change I believe in the history of macOS if I'm not mistaken I think T-shell T-C-S-H was the default shell originally and then it changed to bash somewhere in the 10.4 time frame I'm pulling this all out of my head so I'm no doubt getting something wrong and then now with Catalina we've moved from bash to Z-shell I run fish shell F-I-S-H which I install with homebrew I like its auto-completion much better but maybe I need to try Z-shell but I will put a link to fish shell in the show notes it's my favorite for now yeah the reason I was going in terminal I was wondering if the file thing you mentioned I think you could also use L-S-O-F though that may be a bit overwhelming because it shows you everything yeah yeah yeah explain how that works well it's a terminal command L-S-O-F check L-S-O-F and it just blasts out all the open files and ports or just the files that is list of open files you could search you could pipe that through something like grep which would let you filter but easier to just do L-S-O-F and then after it barfs out its output just use find command F in the terminal to look for the name of your app and then you could begin to find what's there yeah I feel like Activity Monitor is probably easier just because it does that filtering for you but yeah cool you can use C-H-S-H that is true yes just to whip some terminal foo on you guys yeah you don't have to use these you could use any shell you want correct yeah that's right I guess fish shell for a while which works great I use it everywhere like I said it's auto-completion killer but I haven't used Z shell in a while so I should probably try that okay let's see Chris one last one for Catalina while we're here Chris says I came up on a recent show whether or not it's a good idea to enable external volume booting on Macs with T2 security chips Chris says in my opinion I think it's fine because if you're worried about your data then you'll have File Vault enabled and if File Vault enabled and if you have that enabled even when someone boots your Mac to an external drive they still can't get at your data this is why whenever I install a Mac or set up a Mac with a T2 chip I go into recovery mode and turn on external volume booting. So I am totally with you. Like, and this conversation came up a lot at Mac Tech last week, because if you don't go in and turn on external booting, you're like troubleshooting a T2 equipped Mac becomes a very limited process. If the recovery volume is still okay, then you're fine. But otherwise, you're not fine. You know, you've got to bring it in in order to do anything with it. I did learn something again, harkening back to Tim Standing's talk on Wednesday. He noted, and I intellectually, I suppose I knew this, but I couldn't quite put together why when I enabled File Vault on that new, you know, the MacBook Pro that I was testing from Apple, which is a T2 Mac, just like my MacBook Air is, you just turn on File Vault and it's on instantly. Like, that's weird. Doesn't it have to go through the whole encryption process? Well, here's why it does not. All T2 connected drives are encrypted, regardless of whether File Vault is turned on. The drive is encrypted by in the key is stored on the T2 chip. So if you were to yank the drive out of that Mac, regardless of whether you turn File Vault on or not, you could not read that drive somewhere else. It needs to be paired with that same T2 chip because that's where the key is. When you turn on File Vault, it just encrypts that key with your own key. So it's not re-encrypting the drive. The drive's already encrypted. It's just protecting that key that would decrypt the drive for anyone so that it only decrypts it for you. And File Vault now, by default, will store your key in iCloud so that you don't have to save it. But you don't have to do that. You can say, no, I don't want Apple to back up my key. I want to be the only one that has access to it. And then you can do whatever you want with your key. Just make sure what you want to do is save it somewhere. So there you go. Good stuff? Yeah, I had a vein. Here's another thing I ran. It's a carbon copy clone. Go ahead. I think you're having a packet loss again. Yes. Yeah. Open up your ping to Apple thing. And actually, I've got a quick tip about that while you're setting that up. Listener Todd sent us a tip in related to last episode. He says, is there a difference between... So last week when John was having these packet loss issues, we talked about having him open up a terminal and then type ping space www.apple.com and just look to make sure or to confirm that packets were indeed being lost, which of course they were. And I'm assuming you're probably going to see the same thing now. So in response to that, Todd asks, he says, is there a difference between using terminal and typing ping or using the network utility app to ping www.apple.com? He says, seems network utility might be easier for some folks because it doesn't require using the terminal. He says, of course, finding it is not always easy. Well, that's true. And you're totally right. Yeah. Network utility would do this. It does the same thing. It's just a nice graphic interface for ping and other tools. But you're right. It's not stored anywhere. It's not stored anywhere. It's easy to find. You have to use spotlight to find it. Where is it stored? I'm looking here. It is... Ableities? No, it's not in applications, utilities. It's in system, at least on a Mojave machine. This is not a Catalina machine, but it's in system library core services applications and then network utility. That's also where the screen sharing app is. The DVD player app, archive utility, raid utility, things like that. So, are you seeing packet loss, my friend? Yes. Yep. All right. So, you got some kind of connection problem there. When was the last time you rebooted your router, your Euro? I did... Euro? I haven't rebooted that. I mean, I rebooted my switch. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I should reconnect to see what happened. All right. Let me put this where it needs to be and I will pause the show here. All right. We're back. We've actually done about 20 minutes of troubleshooting here. So, we will share. So, let's see, John. You rebooted your router and you rebooted your cable modem to no real avail, correct? Still some packet loss. Yes. All right. And then you went to our favorite thing, the DOCSIS diagnostics page, for lack of a better term, which for all of us is actually the same IP address, which is 192.168.100.1. And we started looking at the power levels of your upstream and downstream channels. And your downstream power levels should be... The range I've always heard is that your downstream power levels should be zero. But anything between negative 15 and positive 15 is what I've understood to be within spec. And you're at like three or four. Is that right on those? Yes. Okay, great. Upstream power levels should be, as I've always understood, 45 or less. And yours are maxed at 50.050, correct? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, your cable modem is... What that tells us is that your cable modem is trying really hard to maintain its upstream connection with your service provider and is succeeding, I mean, quite frankly, it's succeeding most of the time because we've still got you here. But it's not succeeding all of the time. And so, you've either got a bad cable modem, a bad coax cable, a bad splitter, or there's some problem beyond you with your ISP. So, this is a... If you have a replacement cable modem, like a spare laying around, that would be one way to troubleshoot it. And failing that, you've got to call them. Or maybe I'll just order another one. Well, I would call them before you do that because they will... I mean, you want to... Like at this point, unless you had one, that would be one way to test. But even that's kind of a pain because you've got to reprovision and all of that stuff. It's definitely better to get their tech support involved so that they can tell you what they're seeing from their end and at least have them provide you some... You only get to see half the information right now. And so, they'll probably want to send somebody out. And so, getting that clock ticking faster would be good because you've got... I mean, it's... This problem's been going... It's not just new today, right? It's been going on since Tuesday or something or before. But, you know, so... Could be a couple of weeks. As Prime and Roland, our chatroom at mackeykev.com slash stream says, you may need a truck roll to resolve this issue. Truck roll? I like it. It's good. You were saying something, though. Do you remember where we were going with this with... We were talking about file vaults and external access and you had something to add, but we couldn't hear what it was. Yeah, it was something with carbon copy cloner. Another thing is that it enforces... When I ran a job, it was like, oh, yeah, by the way, I'm not going to write to an encrypted APFS volume. And I'm like, okay. So... Oh, it's destination can't be an encrypted APFS volume? Yes. It warned about that on the previous OS, but now it's like, no, no, no. Can't do that. Interesting. I wonder why that is. Huh. Yeah, I think the documentation explained it. I'm sure it does. Yeah. I want to get Mike Bombik on the show here. There's a lot to talk about. And that dude's a master at this APFS stuff. So we'll see if we can get him on in the next couple of weeks here and then dig in a little bit. That'd be fun to have him. All right. If you don't want to host everything yourself, our next sponsor, Linode, is where you want to go. Because these folks know how to run servers, and they know how to set up servers, and they know how to make them run quickly. And the trick to making a server run quickly in today's world is using SSD storage, because so much in terms of bottlenecks happens with reads and writes to the disc. So as long as you can get rotational discs out of the mix and run SSDs, life is going to be way better. We just moved to an SSD server from a rotational server, and it's freaking amazing how much faster and how much more responsive everything is. It's not really a surprise. We all went through this on our Macs somewhere in the last decade at various levels, moving from rotational drives to SSDs. You want the same for your servers. And the cool part is every single server at Linode uses native SSD storage, even their Nanode, which just starts at five bucks a month. So you've got to check this out. If you like the terminal, you can use the terminal, but you don't have to, because they've got their new Cloud Manager that allows you to just set things up right in a web interface and never have to use the terminal to connect to your server. You can just configure what you want to do there, and you're good to go. So you've got to check this out. Go to linode.com.mgg, use promo code MGG2019, that gets you a $20 credit to get started so you can fire up one of these Nanode servers, use it for four months on the house because of that $20 credit for being a listener here. So it's MGG2019 is the promo code, linode.com.mgg. All of this is in our show notes, of course, so go check it out. And our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. John, I want to follow up a few episodes ago. We talked about how Gazelle wasn't really the best place for us to sell off our old equipment anymore. And we discussed a lot of options. Well, I've tested several of the ones that came up, and I've got some answers here. So the first thing that I did, I had a few phones that needed to go. In fact, I had one phone that was an iPhone 6S Plus that I had sent in to Gazelle like a year ago. They said they were going to pay me $140 for it or something. And so of course, or maybe it's 160, I don't remember. I sent it in, they go through their evaluation of it and it came back and they were like, oh, this has a scratch on it. It's worth $15. I was like, first of all, that seems a little low. And secondly, when I sent it to you, it didn't have any scratches on it. So I don't know what you're seeing, but forget it, send it back to me. So they did, they sent it back to me, which is what they were supposed to do. That's fine. There were no scratches on it, at least none that would have mattered to me as a user of this device. So I kept it around. And then when it came time, we bought two iPhones this time around because it was time. And we sent that in to the Apple Trade-In program. And they said that they would give us a hundred, I think $120 for it, whatever they said it was. So we're like, all right, well, let's see what happens. We sent it in, we got the $120, no questions. So Apple's Trade-In program, at least in our limited tests here, worked great. There were two others that we discussed, one called Swappa and one called Declutter, SWAPPA and DECLUTTR. Swappa is a sent, so I had an iPhone 7, a Jet Black 128 gig iPhone 7 unlocked that I wanted to part with in one of these two ways to test. Typically, I would just go to eBay and sell these types of things. And I've had great luck selling on eBay in the past. It's super easy and really, really has been a great experience. But I wanted to try these other things in the sake of research for the show. So I went to Swappa and I realized that Swappa is an online marketplace, just like eBay. They're not buying the phone from me. They are just creating, they just have a marketplace like eBay. I thought, well, that's kind of weird. Why would they do this? But it's just for phones. So maybe there's a better thing. So I went through their little process and first, in order to get pricing, I went to Declutter because Declutter is kind of like Gazelle, right? Where they just buy it from you. So I went to Declutter, I told them what I had and they said, great, we will give you $155 for that iPhone 7 128 gig Jet Black. Great. Okay. So now I know the price and that's locked in for 30 days when you go to Declutter, just like it was with Gazelle in the past or whatever. So I go, okay, cool. So I have a little time to play here. So I went to Swappa. I listed the phone. I think I looked at what well that was fun. I don't know if you heard that drop. Are you still there, John? Okay, good. I don't know what happened just then, but I think we're okay. So I went to Declutter and it seems like we're riddled with technical issues today. But I went to Declutter and got the price and then went to Swappa and I think people, Swappa advised me to price it at like $210 or something, which kind of makes sense. Declutter's got to buy it at a discount so that they have some margin to make some money. Fine, no problem. So I listed it at like 210. They said list it for seven days, which seemed really long. I never would have done a seven-day auction on eBay. I would have done like three days. But anyway, fine, took their advice, went through the whole thing. So there wasn't much activity initially, which I didn't expect because I expect all the activity to come at the end of the time frame of the auction. But it was fine. I figured I'd go with the flow. And questions started coming in with like 48 hours left, like what's the battery cycle count on this device? And some things that were realistic for people to ask. And then I kept getting these offers where it was like, I'll give you, would you take $200 for it instead of $210 or $194 instead of $200? These things just kept coming in. I knew what my bottom number was. I knew it was $155 because that's what Declutter was going to give me. So I'm like, yeah, okay, that's fine. I kept saying yes. And finally, one came in with maybe 12 hours left in the auction and somebody said, would you take, I think it was $194 or something. I replied yes. But this had been going on for several days where there were just a lot of looky-loos that were sort of kicking the tires, but no one taking any action. And there were only like 25 views on this thing too. Swaple wasn't really getting, I didn't feel like it was getting out in front of people, but fine. And I posted something in the comments because these were all public offers that were just in the comments. And I posted something saying, okay, look, I will sell it for $190, but I'm not going to extend the auction beyond the end of the seven days. I just wanted people to know that if it didn't sell, I wasn't going to be in a position to put it back up for less. If it ends and it doesn't sell, I'm going to sell it on Declutter, which is what I said. I said, really, I'm doing this for research for our podcast. And the people at Swappa swooped in and they deleted my comment but publicly replied to it and said, please keep your comments on topic. They basically give me a little slap on the wrist or whatever, which I thought was fine, except their comment back to me was public, but they deleted my comment to which they were replying. So it was this very weird thing where if you were reading the comment thread, you would see this slap on the wrist, but you wouldn't see why the wrist was being slapped, which was sort of weird. And so I reported their comment as being off topic because at that point it was, there was no relevance for it. It did not sell there. No great surprise. I won't be using Swappa again. I had known that before they decided to slap me on the wrist. I think they were justified in deleting my comment because I think I mentioned one of their competitors and that's, I get that, but they should have sent me the feedback privately, not publicly, those sort of weird, because it sort of derailed the conversation about the device on their comments. But it told me who they were as a company and that's all I needed to know. So I sent the phone in to declutter. It took a couple of days to get there. It took them a few more days to evaluate it and without any hassle or anything else, $155 showed up in my PayPal account, all good. And so declutter is my new favorite. I will be trying them again when I have more phones to shell to sell. And there they go. So that's what I'm, that was, that's my, there's my story. I'm sticking to it, John. Declutter seems to be the right one or Apple's trade in thing. Like Apple's trade in thing was super easy. So I would, I would do that too. You've done, you did, you mentioned that you did your Verizon thing, right? The last time you did this, I think? Last, so yeah, so I have a Verizon company store. Right. And yeah, for my last, I actually bought the phone from them. Right. Right. They get an allocation of it because, you know, they work with Apple on that. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I think the last one, they gave me like 200 bucks or something. That's cool. Okay. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. So knock down the, the, yeah. So knock down the price to like, I think 800 bucks and then, you know, to your, to your term, which I'm almost, I think I got three payments left. That's good. Cool. And it's all mine. Maybe I'll trade, maybe I'll upgrade to one 11. I don't know. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I've been very happy with the, with the 11 Pro. The, and Lisa has been super happy with the 11 as well. The cameras on both of them are stellar. The battery life is amazing, really. It's, it's, it's quite something what they've done here. I'm impressed with what Apple's doing. I like the direction they're going with it. So, all right. Where are we here? Oh, it feels like we've been doing this forever because we had a big 20 minute break in the middle where we tried to troubleshoot your, your cable modem. But we do have a bunch of iOS 13 stuff to get to. So let's do that. Michelle has a tip for us. Michelle says, let me get back to Michelle. She says, for those who have found themselves and gotten caught with the iOS 13 reminders sync fiasco and to encapsulate that reminders changes its database structure with iOS 13 and Catalina. And so if you have non iOS 13 and Catalina devices, they won't be able to sync reminders with these new ones. So she says, if you've gotten caught by upgrading your reminders and didn't want to or find it to be an issue, I have a workaround. Number one, use another iCloud account. Don't have one? Create one. Number two, recreate your reminders on the new account. I know that's a pain if you have a lot or a lot of vitamins in each list. You might want to log into your primary Apple iCloud account on the web, then copy and paste them to a text file log out, log into your newly created account and paste them back. Add the newly created account to iCloud on all of your iOS devices. How? Go to settings, passwords and accounts, tap add account and tap the reminder setting to green once you've enabled it. Now, regardless if you have iPhone, iPad, Mac, MacBook, regardless if you're running Mojave, High Sierra, iOS 12 or 13, you'll have all your reminders synced. No web interface needed. No waiting for any Apple changes or fix. I don't think they're going to fix this. You are good to go. Thank you, Michelle. That's a great one. I didn't realize that creating a new iCloud account would use the old style of reminders instead of the new style of reminders. That's the key to this. I don't know how long that will be the case, but Michelle says she ended her message with a signature that says Michelle who got caught but found a hole in the net. Clearly, this worked for her and hopefully it will work for any of you that find yourselves in the same predicament. I guess it will be this way for a little while because there are still iOS 12 and Mojave machines out there that can't use the new reminders sync format. We will kind of keep our finger on the pulse of that, but that's a pretty good workaround. Thank you, Michelle. Good stuff. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on? No. All right. Patrick says, I jumped on the iOS 13 public beta probably in early August. Things went okay, although sometimes my watch battery would last 12 hours, sometimes 30. Towards the end of the beta cycle, my iPhone, an iPhone 10 to 56 gig, was having internet connectivity issues. The connectivity problem manifested in many ways. For example, Siri would not connect on the first attempt. Safari wouldn't load a web page until the refresh was pressed two or three times. Carat weather would produce a 1003 error, etc. In an attempt to fix this, I deleted the beta profile, upgraded to release of iOS and left the beta program that didn't help. Last Friday, I backed up my iPhone with iTunes, iCloud and iMazing, then went into settings general and reset the entire phone. I then restored the system and data via iCloud. That didn't help either. Last night, I went to the Genius bar and we reset wiped the phone again, only through iTunes, not doing it on the phone because the genius said it worked better through iTunes. While still in the store, things seem better with good internet connectivity. So I thought things were solved. I went home and restored from iTunes with the backup I had just made, and the problem is back. Any thoughts on how to fix this? So to me, this sounds like a DNS issue, a networking issue of some sort. I'm curious, and we don't have this information, so just sort of have to talk theoretically here, which is what we do. I'd be curious if this happens only on Wi-Fi or only on LTE, or is it truly happening with both? Because I'm wondering, it sounds like it was working in the Apple Store, but not working at home. Is there something with your home router's DNS? That whole thing about not being able to connect the first time for anything sounds like a DNS or an IP tables issue in so much as the way the phone is managing its network stack, right? So I'd be curious about a couple of things. The first is go into settings, Wi-Fi, go to your Wi-Fi network that you're on at home and hit the I button there, the little I circle, and take a look at the bottom of that screen and see what it says for configured DNS. If it's set to manual, change it to automatic. If it's set to automatic, change it to manual and put in cloud flares, which I think is the 1.1.1.1.1, see if that works differently. If it does, then you know you have a problem with however the DNS was set the other way. That would be one thing to check. The other thing is it might not be DNS, it might just be the way the network stack is. So another thing to do, and I have had this solve all manner of problems with iPhones and iOS over the years, go into on your phones or your iPad settings general, go all the way down to the second from the bottom, which is reset, and inside reset, choose reset network settings. This sort of wipes out all of that stuff that builds the routing and firewall tables and all that stuff and resets it back to normal. You will lose your VPN configurations and you will at least temporarily lose your Wi-Fi settings. But iCloud Keychain Sync, if you have that enabled, will bring down your Wi-Fi passwords and all that again, but just reconnect to your Wi-Fi type in your password and see how things go. I would guess that reset network settings, if there's no specific DNS that you have set or you don't have some DNS problem, I think reset network settings will solve this problem for you. I hope that's my plan. So what do you think about this, John? Do you have to restore? Oh, sure. Yeah, if the rest don't work, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty severe thing, but yeah. Yeah. A DFU restored device firmware update is like a super restore in that it replaces more stuff than a regular restore. Of course now, I'm looking at a little article here. The problem is in Catalina, I'm going to have to figure out how to do this because there's no more iTunes, right? Yeah. I think actually I found an article. Yeah, actually I found an article here. How to use the Finder in macOS Catalina to sync and restore iPhone? Oh, that's nice. Yeah, the Finder does it. I think you'd probably do the DFU restore the same way because it requires doing some machinations on the phone itself, right, to get it into that DFU mode then you just plug it in and do a restore. Right. You got to hold down certain buttons for a certain length of time and I don't remember. I'll put up my head what they are. I'll put a link to some of that stuff in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. And Brian Monroe in the chat room confirms this for us. He says he did a DFU restore from the Finder in Catalina the other night. So it's good to go. So thank you. That's great. Nice. So Brian was trying to solve another problem. Yeah. An iPhone problem too or an iPad problem. Yeah. Yeah, I fix it has a great article about how to get into DFU mode on various different iPhone models. So there you go. Cool. Oh, oh, Alan. Okay. I guess Apple Configurator 2 could also do that for you. It's a free piece of software from Apple that does all sorts of wonderful things. Right. Yeah. I think that's what you're saying there, Alan, right? Okay. Cool. I'll put a link to that there in the show notes too. That's great. Cool. Yeah. It's a nice little tool and it lets you fiddle with a lot of the settings on your devices. Cool. Cool. Cool. Okay. Let's see. Let's go to, we're good here, right? Yeah. We're good. Cool. Let's go to Jeff. Yet another Jeff. I think that's three different Jeffs in one episode. So Jeff asks, he says, I recently got curious about the space my iCloud drive was taking up. So I opened a Finder window and browsed to my user library mobile documents folder. This is the iCloud drive folder and gives a very sanitized view of the contents. So I opened the same folder with Pathfinder. I was amazed at all the old junk in there, mostly related to iPhone apps I once used and then subsequently deleted years ago. I attempted to delete some of the old unused folders, but they've reappeared again a couple of seconds later, presumably because iCloud drive is reinstating them with sync. I presume these folders are regarded as private to the iOS app that created them and therefore hidden from normal view. The question is, how do you get rid of them if you have deleted them and no longer use the app? I logged into my Apple ID webpage, but the iCloud drive on that webpage shows the same sanitized view as on the Mac. So no luck there. Yeah, that's an interesting question. You know, we've dealt with this in the past. It's been a little while. I'd be curious. Maybe we'll throw this up as a geek challenge, but I'll share kind of what we've done here in the past to get rid of these. Generally speaking, it requires logging everything out of iCloud except one Mac and then go onto that Mac and delete the folder. And if it comes back, delete it again. We've also found that deleting the, logging that Mac out of iCloud, deleting the folder, logging back in, you're trying to flip the switch enough times that the server believes what you have chosen to do. And having only one device logged into iCloud, at least in the past, has been a part of how I've done that, to clean out all that old craft. Yeah, you'll see, you know, like, I think it's like tilde com dot apple dot whatever. You can also, you don't have to use Pathfinder to get there. If you don't have it, you can, you can use the terminal if you want. There's, you know, there's other ways to get to that folder, but it's, you know, it's that mobile documents folder. Oh yeah. Yeah, I got a pile of, yeah, I'm looking right now. So in the terminal, it would be your home directory library mobile documents. Yep. And yeah, I got, looks like I got at least a hundred items there. My advice is to be like MC Hammer and don't touch this. Well, if you know, I don't know if they're, go ahead. I'll just say, I'm looking at a lot of the stuff here and, and actually, one is that I think they're just directories. I don't think there's any content. I look through some of the, some of the folders because you can actually go in there and there was nothing in them. It was just like, I think as, as you were kind of saying, it's, it's like a placeholder. Well, you didn't say that. I said that because I see like here, I mean, I'm looking here and I see like, you know, iCloud comm, Synology, DS chat, DS cloud, DS drive, DS file, and but I don't think there's any content in them. So let's see, do you dash SH? Oh, I'm in the wrong place here. I'm looking to see what the, what these look like. So yeah, if you, if from the terminal, I'll put a, I'll type this in there in the show notes too. But do shows you how much space is used by whatever you point at it. So I use D U space dash SH to, I forget exactly what S does human, H gives it in human readable form. And then I do star, but I'll put this in the, in the show notes. And so from the library, home library, mobile documents folder, I just typed D U S H star. And you're right that a lot of these are zero byte folders, but not all of them. It, you know, and like I have, there's an app I used to use. I guess I still have it installed called capo, you know, and that's got 104 K of data. Cloud docs has 983 megs of data. PDF pen has 1.2 megs of data. So like if things are storing stuff in iCloud, this is where it will be shoebox, you know, has 5.6 megs. That's an Apple thing. So they, they may be empty. They may not, but I don't know. No, I'm with you. That's a good suggestion because yeah, I'm looking at most of mine are empty, but some have some content like one has 12 K, you know, in consequential in my humble opinion. But, but not all of them are in consequential, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think the largest one I got here is 4.2 gigs. But that's calm till the Apple till the cloud docs. Right. That's your iCloud documents folder. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. That's the largest one I have. All the others are either zero byte or, you know, a couple of K at most. But I, but I don't, I don't think there's a, I don't, I don't agree with the don't touch this, but I actually, I will qualify that. If you, if you look at a folder name in here and you don't know what it is, don't touch it, right? But if, you know, for example, like I've got, you know, three folders from, let's say iCloud till the com till the Euro smarts something. It's like, oh yeah, I probably tested some app from Euro smarts over the years. Like, I don't use that anymore. So I, you know, I wouldn't mind getting rid of those folders. But to your point though, is it worth it? Like, yes, there's all these folders out here. They don't contain anything. Is it worth going through whatever machinations we just described or more to delete these zero byte folders? Probably not. So MC Hammer might actually be the right advice. So maybe I do agree with you. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to bother to try and delete these. Maybe that's the right. Yeah. I just had someone who I used to provide back support to and the reason I gave that advice is that this person, I think you know who I'm talking about, I'm not going to say exactly who, but would root around in his system folder and try to fix things. Yeah. It turns out he would usually break things and then call me and it's like, why were you in the system folder again? Well, I thought I could. No, no, no, no. But that's how we learn. I mean, right? Like, that's how we get here. So I, you know, have a backup. And as I always say, whenever I'm like giving talks about this or whatever, I always say Google is your friend, you know, which is another way of saying if you don't know what something is, find out before you make a change. You know, don't just make changes willy-nilly, like at least have a guess as to what that could be. But, but I don't, I wouldn't say don't do it. I'd say just, you know, make a backup first. And, you know, like, you know, like this is how we learn. It's, you know, it's how we became geeks, right? So yeah, fun. Fix it till it's broken. That's right. If it ain't broke, fix it till it is. Yeah, man, for sure. Let's see. I have a quick tip to share with iOS 13 that I have not tried, but I have heard about at, uh, at Mac tech. And that is that when your iPhone needs you to put in your Apple ID password, you can double tap on, I think it's the Apple Watch button to put this in. I overheard this as a conversation at Mac tech. So, and I don't have a watch that can run the latest watch OS, so I cannot test this. But, but that's like a really interesting thing to me because, you know, typing in your password can kind of be a pain in the neck. So I need to, I need to learn more about this. So if somebody knows, please send that in. That would be, that would be good. And the other thing that I heard about at Mac tech, John, which might cause a lot of problems for people that we've given advice to over the years, is that Catalina will only install on your, on an internal drive. You can boot it from an external. I have not tested this theory yet, by the way, but it will only install on an internal drive. Now, that was not my experience during the betas. I ran Catalina only on an external SSD that I plugged in, you know, via USB-C or something on my, on my MacBook Air. But, but because it's doing firmware updates as part of the OS installer now, it needs something to do with the internal drive. So I'm curious, you know, I know we've got a bunch of folks out there that are using, like, you know, if their iMac or something came with an internal spindle drive, they didn't want to go through the 48 steps to rip the iMac apart, you're using, you're booting from an external SSD. How is that working for you? So please let us know that too. This is, this is, you know, an issue. So there you go. Yes. Um, all right. Where are we here? Oh, let's talk about some of this personal automation stuff, because we've, we've mentioned this in the last episode. And I mentioned how, you know, I was using CarPlay to trigger it turning my Wi-Fi on and off so that I wasn't, you know, accidentally picking up Wi-Fi while I was in the car or whatever. We talked about using that with geofence triggers. And many of you wrote in and said you set these up. And sure enough, when you enter your geofence range or connect to a Bluetooth device or whatever that particular trigger was, you see a notification on your phone, but it does not run the automation unless you tap the notification and say run. I have not experienced this, but all of you that have are correct, at least according to Apple's documentation. But last night, again, I tried this. I set up my geofence to turn Wi-Fi back on. I turned Wi-Fi off while I was out. I got home. I saw the notification come up. I did not choose to run it. And I watched as my iPhone connected to Wi-Fi. So it's possible I'm missing something of, you know, because one test case, my son seemed to think he was seeing the same thing. But listener Bartek dug into Apple's documentation and found the answer, which says the following automations cannot be run automatically. And they are arrive, before I leave, Bluetooth, leave, time of day, and Wi-Fi. So all of these things have one sort of meta property in common. And that is they are not happening as a result of something you have manually done to your iPhone, as opposed to something like CarPlay, where I am taking, at least wired CarPlay, where I'm taking a USB cable or lightning cable and plugging it into the bottom of my phone like this is a thing I've done. And in my CarPlay actions, I get the option to automatically run automatically. Whereas on my Bluetooth action or my geofence action, I do not get the option in the personal automation to run automatically. So I feel like I'm missing something on my Bluetooth or geofenced ones, but my son runs a time of day one that he built and he's not having any issue with that either. And his time of day one, John, this is brilliant. The kid thinks so smart. It's amazing. His school has a three-day schedule. So they have, I don't know, I think it's like blue day, white day and black day or something. I don't know. But it's let's call them days one, two, and three. And they rotate one, two, three. And he has classes that start at different times. He's a senior in high school. He's got some open ends and things like that. And so he needs to set his alarm differently each morning for school. But it can't be on Friday set at its a certain time. On Thursday set at a certain time because this thing is rotating. So he thought about using a personal automation to turn on the correct alarm the night before for the next day. But automations doesn't have any persistent storage. And what he was thinking is essentially he needs a database, right? He needs a database to store what was yesterday's day type. And now if I know yesterday's, I can then calculate what tomorrow's is because if it's one or two, it's the next number up. And if it's three, it's one, right? And he used Evernote as his persistent storage database inside his automation. And so first of all, I thought that was brilliant. So I wanted to share. But he says his automation is running every day. Well, he only has his automation run Sunday through Thursday nights because of course, you know, Friday and Monday, or if Friday and Saturday, he doesn't have school the next day. This will of course fail when he has like a Monday holiday or something, but he can account for that. But his automation is running based on a time of day thing, which goes counter to what Apple's advice says. So I am not entirely sure what's going on here, but I wanted to share that idea of using Evernote as your, you know, as your back end database for the, for automations. I thought that was pretty good. Pretty smart. It's a nice little. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember back in the day before databases were big, big deal. A text file is a wonderful database. Yeah. Well, it's not wonderful, but it is functional. Yes. Yeah. So he's doing kind of the same thing as I never knew. That's exactly what it is. He has a note with one value in it, and he deletes the value before he writes the new one so that there's no issue. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's, he's, he only started really only started programming like in the last year, but I've, I've, his brain has always worked this way. So I've always thought I didn't want to overpressure him, right? Because, you know, if you overpressure your kids, they tend to resist. But, but he took a MATLAB course last semester at the university here and then it was like, you know, the light bulb went off. I was like, yeah, I know, kiddo. So it's good. It's good. All right. I think that we, I mean, like, there we are. I think it's time to, to bring in a band, my friend. There is one more thing I wanted to do. If that's, I want to make sure we say thank you to all of our premium contributors whose contributions came in in the last week and a half here, because we didn't do this in the last show. So mackeycup.com premium is where you would go to do all this. And premium is there for those of you that can and wish to support us directly. You don't have to listening to the show, contributing your questions, visiting our sponsors websites, whether or not you buy, but just, you know, our job is to generate your interest there and get you to learn a little more. Beyond that, it's between you and them. All of those things are truly help us. This is sort of a holistic thing. And you folks that choose to contribute directly are a very important part of that whole. So we have three ways to contribute. You can do a one time contribution, which for which Apple Pay works on the web, which is great. Or you can do recurring contributions monthly and by annually. So we had three one time contributions come in, Barbara from Hanahan at $30, William from Hillsborough at 25, and Patrick from Milton at 100. So thanks to you three. And then on the monthly $10 plan, we have recent contributions from Scott from Portland, Abdullah from Reisterstown, Peter from Auburn, Bob from Working Smarter for Macusers, Jay from Long Valley, Joe from El Dorado, Chris from Charlie Wood, Ari from Kensington, Michael from Mission Hills, Philip from Tucson, Bob from La Pesh, Timothy from Hendersonville, Dave from Socrates, Jeffrey from West Haven, Jim from San Jose, John from Sinking Spring, Santiago from Palm City, Frank from Tunbridge, John from Wake Forest, Tony from Middleborough, Ken from Honolulu, Barry from Up Up and Away, Michael from Robbins rounds out the monthly $10 contributions. And then we have our biannual contributions, which by default are 25. James from Dublin, Colby from Otis, Robin from Andover, Mark from Hayward, Donald from Jamaica Plain, George from Natick, Andy from Durham, Edward from Manhattan Beach at $50, Willie from Seminary, Jed from Jersey City, Scott from Fort Benning, Steve from Santa Fe, Laura from Spokane Valley, Scott from North Little Rock, Andrew from Homdale and Clyde from Hamilton. All on the biannual plan every six months. So thanks to all of you, you all rock. All right, John, my only request of all of you, if you haven't done so in the last, let's say six months, go to mackeykeb.com slash reviews. And that will allow you to go and leave a review for us on Apple podcasts. We would love to get your reviews there. If you wrote one a long time ago, you can update it. That actually helps in exactly the same way to have that update up to date review. It shows Apple that you folks are still interested in the show, which I know you are. But it's nice. It helps us get higher in the rankings. And that brings more listeners in, which means better, you know, a better hive mind for all of us to benefit from and all that. So that's what we do. All right. I think that's what we got here. It's time to go. We've been at this forever today, even though the show's only its normal length. You got anything to add, John, before we move on for the day? Nope. All right. Well, thanks for listening, folks. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, native deodorant.com with coupon code MGG linode.com slash MGG with promo code MGG two zero one nine in the podcast marketplace. Of course, smile software.com slash podcast other world computing at Mac sales.com bare bones software bare bones.com ero.com slash MGG and more. Thanks so much. We will see you. Well, I don't know when we'll see you, but we'll chat next week. John, before we leave, assuming your connection is still good. Do you know it's it's fantastic now at the moment. That's great. But you know, that could fall apart at any minute. And that makes me sad because I don't like getting caught.