 The Mac Observers, Matt Geekab, episode 656. No, wait, I got that wrong. Episode, I got it backwards. 656 for Sunday, May 7th, 2017. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Matt Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We share it all. We answer it all. The goal is that every single one of us, every single last person listening to this show, the person doing this show, that person over there, us, you, all of us. We're gonna learn at least four new things between now and when we stop recording a little bit later, that's the goal. Sponsors for this episode include Smile at smilesoftware.com slash geek with PDF pen nine and BitBucket from Atlassian with their for the code promotion. You can get a free Git repository at bitbucket.com slash for the code. We will talk all about both of those in a moment here, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in pollen laden, Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. Yeah, man. It's pollen laden, New England today is what it is. You and I are basically neighbors in that today. When trees attack. When trees attack. Yeah, man. God, it's like poison outside. Fun stuff though. It's a, I actually, when I lived in Austin, I really missed the change of season down there. We basically had like a week of spring and a week of fall and then it was either summer or not summer. And so I do like the change of season. Just some of the effects of it, you know, in Texas, they don't really have because one time I took a fall picture and one of my online friends in Texas said, what are those? I'm like, well, those are the trees leaves changing. Wow, that's that's interesting. Yeah, no, you that's why people come to New England in the fall for leaf peeping season. So they just drive around and look at the leaves in Texas. Do they just fall off the trees? No, they just can change. They don't change. It doesn't. Yeah, it's just it doesn't. That's not what happens there. I mean, they change sometimes, but not at all like the splendor that we get here. It's yeah. Yeah. Anyway, hey, some quick tips. Let's let's do some of these and get into this. Gary says, I just wanted to give a quick tip for those who like to have Siri talk in an accent from another country such as UK English like me, if you ask Siri when a holiday note when a holiday is if that holiday is celebrated on a different day in said country, it will give that country's date for the holiday. For example, if you ask Siri what day Mother's Day is and you have it set to UK English, it will say Mother's Day is March 11th, 2018. If you had a Russian accent, if available and asked for Christmas, it would likely say that Christmas is January 7th, 2018. Good call, Gary. That's right. So many of the holidays between US and UK are the same, but not all of them. So yeah, be aware of that. If you choose to use a foreign accent for Siri, I like that tip and good stuff. Moving on to Chris. Chris says I recently heard you talking about one of the caveats of resetting network settings on your phone is that you then have to reconfigure all your VPNs. I feel your pain on that issue of having trouble getting my iPhone to remember my work's Wi-Fi network. I knew that I should reset the network settings since I'm the only one having the problem. I also knew that, unfortunately, it would remove all of my VPN settings. And I have six of them because of my consultation side business. And all of them are L2TP with a password and a pre-shared key. And all of those are randomly generated strings. Very painful to have to reconfigure them. But he says, I remember hearing the esteemed Mr. John F. Braun mention the Apple configurator and its ability to create profiles. I knew that profiles could contain VPN configuration. So tonight I gave it a go and it worked perfectly. I was able to create a profile and configurator to that contains all of my VPN settings. I reset my network settings and then air dropped the profile to my phone bingo. All my VPN configurations are installed automatically. That is pretty cool, man. I like it. It's good stuff. Did you ever install one to prevent you from joining that cursed? No, I didn't the Logan Wi-Fi network. No, I think I finally got that. I purged that from my from my devices. But but I did as soon as he is soon as I read Chris's note. I thought what a great idea. So I built one for the L2TP VPN that I have here at my house and then also the one that I have at my dad's house. So it's now that's sitting in my in my cloud station drive and I can get to it from from anywhere. So yeah, it's good stuff. I like it. It's fun. All right. And it works really, really well. It it there's something it's worth it's totally worth playing with Apple Configurator 2, especially since it's free, right? It is free. It's got to be. Yeah. Moving on to John. John writes. He he said, you know, we were talking a lot about mounting shares and keeping them auto mounted and all of that stuff. And he sends us a link to a blog post on G R A P I I dot com. I don't even know how to pronounce that, but it's a blog post all about keeping network drives mounted on Mac OS using auto FS, which the beauty is it's built in to Mac OS. So you don't need any third party software to do it. And of course, that means it's free. The downside is you have to configure 100 percent of it from the terminal. But but this article does a stellar stellar. Spleller. It's either a splendid or a stellar job. So it must be a stellar job of of of, you know, explaining all of this. So we will put a link to all of that in the show notes because because that's what we do. Thoughts on that, John? I never really thought of that. Yeah, it's pretty good. Bit of a whirl. Yeah, yeah, it kind of sounds like launch D but for your file system. Right, right. Yeah, you're you're editing. Yeah, it's the auto FS stuff. Yeah, and it doesn't look when you look at it on the surface. It looks a little a little fishy, but not fishy. It looks a little convoluted, but it's really not all that convoluted. It's pretty straightforward. So and if you go through this, you will by the end of it, you will have a an even better understanding of just sort of how things work underneath all of OS Mac OS 10 Mac OS 10 for a while. I finally ended up finding this file, this configuration file that they have because and I still see these in here. I noticed this one day when I was running hardware growler, which among other things will show if you're mounting or unmounting disk images, which is actually the one useful thing about it is that there are I don't think they do it anymore, but there are some things that kind of sneakily update themselves without telling you. Sure. Hardware growler. I would see it be like, oh, yeah, you know, Chrome is updating itself. If you didn't have that, you wouldn't know. But then the other thing I noticed is that I see these slash net and slash home directories and I was always wondering who's doing that. And the thing is it's this file is is doing that. I'm not sure if you need those anymore. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, but it bugged me because I'm like somebody is mounting these these volumes and I have to find out who. So good stuff. Yeah, pretty good. And then last in our quick tips here, Chuck says almost too minor to mention. He says, but I found this and categorized it in the usefulness department. He says it's good to pay attention to the dots that appear on the screens of various iPhone apps. He says, I've been using the digital stopwatch screen of the iPhone's clock app for years. It's large font readout is easy to see from a distance, but I never noticed until today that there is a second screen that is a combination of analog and digital, which is also very useful and even a bit nostalgic. And this screen looks a lot like the analog stopwatch available on the Apple Watch. He said the functionality of some apps is perhaps a bit too subtle at times. And he's right between the reset and start buttons on the stopwatch on your iPhone. You'll see two dots and the left one is lit up and the right one is not. And if you swipe the screen to the left, you will get the screen that's on the right, which is the digital stopwatch. So Chuck's advice, follow the dots because that's. Hey, you might find something you didn't know was there. Pretty good. Follow the dots, John. Works for Pac-Man. It does work for Pac-Man. That's right. Stay away from the ghosts. I ain't afraid of no ghosts. All right. Onto cool stuff found. One thing, though, if you want to if you want to make sure you stay away from ghosts is you want to stay awake. And sometimes your Mac doesn't want to stay awake. And that's that's where Amphetamine comes in. Amphetamine is a graphical interface interface interface for the terminal command called Caffeine, which is built into your Mac. And Caffeine will keep your Mac awake. And Amphetamine gives you a really nice interface for this that that has some configuration options and and all of that stuff. And it's available in the Mac app store. So we will put a link to that in the show notes. Very, very cool thing. Did you check this out? Did you download Amphetamine, John? I played with caffeine at one point. Yeah. But so here's the here's the beauty of Amphetamine. Caffeine and I sorry, not caffeine, caffeine eight. I use regularly if I'm ripping movies because a lot of times my machine, especially if I'm logged in remotely, will then go to sleep as soon as I log out and leave it to its own devices to convert these movies. So I use caffeinate from the terminal all the time. One cool thing or actually several cool things about Amphetamine is that even though it uses caffeinate to do the keeping awake of the Mac, it's got all sets of all sorts of schedules and triggers, options to send notifications, all of that stuff. So it kind of enhances the whole experience and it's free. So pretty good stuff. No, yes. Now, why wouldn't? I mean, the thing is, as people probably know, but you can set the sleep in energy saver. You can set when the computer sleeps. Why would just setting computer sleep to never not be? Well, you might. My issue with that is I forget and I leave it on that. And then it's that way for weeks until I notice. I'm like, hey, it hasn't gone to sleep. Oh, crap. So that's why I like to use caffeinate to just do it for a short period of time. And then and then it and then, you know, that's it. So, yeah, it's pretty good stuff. I like it. Yeah. So that's why. And that's really the only reason. Yeah. OK, in the Department of Desk Connect replacements, because that has now gone away, Steve offers another one, another contender called InstaShare at instaShare app.com. And this is a mobile and desktop suite of applications iOS, Mac, Android, Windows. And you can beam stuff around to your devices very, very easily. Basically, whatever you want. So pretty cool stuff. So we'll put that in the cool stuff bound list for today, too. It's tough, John. Yeah. I like sharing. Sharing is good. Sharing is good. Yeah. All right. And then and then Charles brings us some network geekiness and in cool stuff found. He says, you mentioned Ping Plotter and show 651, but really didn't give it the attention it deserves. He says, I used this app years ago on the PC and was excited when they finally rewrote and released it last year for the Mac. What Ping Plotter does is a trace route to the destination IP address that you choose, then it pings every hop along that path. I usually change the default interval to every one second. He says, I think the default is every one and a half. It also continually does a trace route so that if the path through the late layer three network changes, it notifies you. You also get the historical information about latency packet loss and jitter in an excellent, excellent graphical format, which you can adjust and scroll through in the range. This is a great tool tool for troubleshooting where and when a network problem happens as the network is always blamed first, especially if the problem is at random times. So this is one of those things where if you the idea would be to keep it running over a long period of time. And then when you notice a problem has happened, you can look at this and say, hey, wait a minute, you know, my route to that host changed. Why? And and you might be able to kind of dig in a little deeper. So thank you for that, Charles. He says you also had mentioned about scanning a network to see what hosts are alive. As you mentioned, yes, you can do a broadcast ping pinging the broadcast IPv4 address, which is typically the dot 255 address and see who responds. Not all device manufacturers write that into their network stack, though, so it doesn't always work. What I have used for years is a piece of software called angry IP scanner. It can be configured for a number of different types of pings, including TCP and UDP, to determine if a system is alive. It can also do some scans of the host ports to see if a host is really alive and just not responding to pings. Hope this helps. Thank you very much, Charles. Very, very good stuff, man. I like this angry IP scanner. Have you have you used that before? Um, I think I have it kicking around somewhere. I typically use I like thing. Oh, yeah. OK, now what's it from the same the same crew? Not sure. No, I think thing is a different different group of people that make it all together, but I will. I will put thing in the in the show notes. You use thing on your iPhone or on your Mac or both? I don't think it's on the Mac. I think it's just on the phone. Oh, is that right? I could have sworn thing was on the Mac, but I could easily. No, I have angry IP scanner on the Mac. OK, here if I angry. Yeah, there we go. Angry IP scanner. All right. Well, that's how it goes. Yeah, I haven't needed to use it for a while. And then thing they're coming out with some sort of intrusion detection network monitoring thing box. I think the thing box. Yeah, yeah, we saw that at CES, didn't we? I don't know if I saw it. Did I? I do. You saw it. I spoke to them quite a bit about it. Yeah. OK. Well, I think it was a work in progress. I don't know if it's a released product. I don't think it's out yet. No, that's right. Yeah, so. And I'm seeing somebody in the chat room at actually someone that's helping us craft our show notes here says that, yes, thing for Mac exists as well. So we've got a link for all of that in the show notes. Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to take a random guess and say that that was Brian Monroe from our chat room at MacGearb.com slash stream. But I can't tell. So thank you to whomever it was. You are awesome. All right. And then the last entry in cool stuff found John comes from listener William and listener William says, I haven't used the ear buddies, which you mentioned in the last show, but are currently unavailable on Amazon. But I can vouch for something else called ear hooks from a company called Spidgen as by S P I G E N and ear hooks is within S. He says they slip on to AirPods quite easily and include cutouts for all of the sensors. So tapping for Siri or play pause works flawlessly. Really a superior design. He says, I may be weird, but I actually only need the left one. My right one never slips out of my ear. So he gave us a link for those as well. Very, very cool stuff. I like I like it when all of this just comes together. And, you know, that's how we do it. Right. Any thoughts on that, John? Like the A team. I love them when a plan comes together. Like the A team. Are you, are you BA? I'm not Mr. T. No. I don't know who I, who I'd be. Okay. Well, I think, I think we obviously need to just stop the show and figure that out right now. Don't we? No, we should just keep moving along. Okay. But yeah, those little hooks, I like the idea of those little hooks. I got to try them on ear pods because those have always fallen out of my ears. But I am, I am very much an in ear fully sealed type of person when it comes to using in ear stuff. And I guess that's no surprise having been a musician for years and using that stuff on stage. But even when we podcast here, I really like having something totally seal me off from the world and I don't like something pressing on the outside of my head for that long. So, so I always have used in ears. And actually right now I'm using J.H. Audio, which was founded by Jerry Harvey from that's the J.H. and J.H. Audio, but he was the original founder of Ultimate Ears. Years ago, I've got a set of the J.H. Audio Lailas, which are their reference monitor quality in ears. And they are stellar for podcasting with because they really give me a flat response and I know what you folks are hearing and all that good stuff. So I like it. It's good. I'll put a link to those in the show notes if anybody cares and anybody wants to look it up. All right. John, shall we, shall we go on my friend? Where are we? Where are we? You know what I want to do? I want to take a minute and talk about our two sponsors. Does that work for you my friend? Of course. Oh, awesome. You rock. Our first sponsor is Smile and PDFPEN9 is what we're talking about this month here. PDFPEN9 just came out in April and you can find all about it at smilesoftware.com slash geek. The new PDFPEN9 really, well PDFPEN in general is again one of those tools I just can't live without and Smile has a habit of creating and releasing tools just like this. PDFPEN allows you, allows me to manipulate PDFs in ways that just aren't possible with the free stuff built into Mac OS. I can, not only can I do things like moving pages around but I can find and highlight all instances of a word or phrase. I can add or remove OCR text layers. I can create links to other PDF files. I can export a PDF in grayscale and also to JPEG PNG, one bit TIFF. If you really want to like crunch down a PDF this is what PDFPEN and especially PDFPEN9 can do for you. I can use forms which do calculations. Really, really cool stuff. PDFPEN9 adds the ability or enhances the ability to do table of contents editing with links to all of your other pages and adds OCR for Chinese, Japanese and Korean which is pretty darn cool. And then it can still do all of what I'll call the simple stuff, adding your signature to a PDF, converting a Word document into a PDF. All of these things that you just find yourself needing to do and having PDFPEN on your Mac or on your iPhone at all times just at the ready makes life way easier. I can't recommend it enough. So check it out. Go to smilesoftware.com slash geek. Check out PDFPEN9 and our thanks to Smile for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is Bitbucket at bitbucket.org slash for the code. That's F-O-R-T-H-E-C-O-D-E. Bitbucket is the get solution for storing all of your code changes. This is the way to do it if you're working on any sort of code. Whether or not you're even working with others. I know people say you don't need a code repository if you're working on your own. Hogwash, for me, the biggest enemy to me when I'm coding is me six months ago, right? Because I don't remember what I did or why I did it or even when I did it. And sometimes even just that temporal reference of seeing when did I make this change? Oh, I made it back then. Right, this is what was going on. Then I can look at my calendar, pull all that stuff together. But of course, Bitbucket allows you to do a lot more than that. You can leave notes in the repository along with the changes that you commit so that you don't even have to check your calendar. You can just see why these changes were made and what was going on because you get to leave yourself notes. And then of course, if you are working in a group which most of us wind up doing at some point or another, well, now you can see everybody's notes and everyone can see yours. Bitbucket gives teams of all sizes free private repositories with state of the art features like they're fantastic pull request algorithm, built in continuous delivery, and this is where it gets awesome, integrations with all of your favorite tools like Docker, AWS, Azure, all of those things are there. Including of course, because also made by Atlassian is JIRA. So you can track all your bugs and issues and feature requests in JIRA and link them to Bitbucket. So go ahead, check it out, bitbucket.org slash for the code F-O-R-T-H-E-C-O-D-E to start your free account today. Our thanks to Bitbucket for sponsoring this episode. All right, moving right along, where shall we go here? You wanna go to, let's go to Andrew, shall we? Andrew's good stuff, right, Mr. Maryland? Yes. Okay, so Andrew asks, he says, with the recent influx of Mac malware, there are numerous apps to aid you in combating malware, and other virus type of threats. Is there such a thing as having too many apps running which do similar tasks, e.g. Bitdefender, ClamAV, Maxcan, McAfee and malware bytes? Number two, do you folks have a preferred combination of these to assist in protecting your machine from threats? Now with that being asked, he says, I realized that the best advice is to be a vigilant computer slash mobile device user as that goes a lot further than any application to help you, as they say. An answer prevention is worth a pound of cure today. That ratio may be a little off though, he says. Well, Andrew, I recently started using malware bytes on my machines and actually have had it find some fairly low risk threats, but it finds them nonetheless. And then someone in our MacGeekab group on Facebook, so if you go to macgeekab.com slash Facebook, you can come to our support group there, where somebody actually posted a keyboard in Maestro Macro that will go and run malware bytes for you in the background, you know, in order to do all that, so automatically. What do you use, John? I use that, and then something that I notice is every now and then Drive Genius looking me a little notification saying, hey, yeah, I upgraded my malware database. There you go. So either one of those, but typically, I'll run a, and I got bit one time too. I was downloading, it was some sort of media handler, and it was kind of sketchy, and once I installed it, I realized I made a horrible mistake and I ran out of malware bytes, and it's like, yep. You got some malware, let's clean that up before you dum-dum. Mm-hmm, yeah. That's good, that's good. Yeah, malware bytes seems to be the best one, I think. You know, so. I don't know. I'm looking to see if anybody in the chat room says otherwise, but I don't think so. I think it's malware bytes and malware bytes and malware bytes. I mean, between that and, you know, Apple's underneath the covers, X Protect I think is what they call that. That's of course another tool that's silently, you know. Well, if you try to mount something that is bad, it'll just refuse. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I had that happen too, one of those bogus flash installers. Yep. Yeah, it's funny, when you go to certain sites that they seem to really want you to install, to update your flash, it's like, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, I know that they're pulling my leg because I uninstalled flash on my desktop machines. Right, right. On both my machines here. At first, I thought Jeff, our own Jeff Gamut, was a raving lunatic saying that, you know, you should remove flash, but he finally convinced me. Yeah, you know, I leave it installed because there are things for which I still need it occasionally. But as I have mentioned on this show, and I think as Brian Chaffin wrote up for us at TMO, what I do is I go into, in Safari, I go to security plug-in settings, and then for flash, I set, at the bottom of that screen, it says, when visiting other websites, set that to off, not ask, because if it is set to ask or on, your browser will announce to those websites that it has flash installed. So if you set it to ask, what'll happen is the website will just kind of pause and ask, your browser will be asking you if you want to run flash. If you set it to off, your browser does not advertise that you have flash installed. So if a website has, say, an HTML5 workaround for you not having, excuse me, not having flash, then that just kicks in and you don't even know that they would have used flash if you had it. That way, websites just act like they would for you, John, without having flash installed at all, because it's as though you don't have it. The only websites that see that I have flash are the ones that, above that in the window, I have chosen and selected on. And that works really well for me. So I highly recommend that if you ever run into anything where you need to run flash, just makes life a little easier. So that's my advice. That's all I got. It's summertime, John, or it will be soon, and that's when these allergies will be over, our heads will be a little clearer, and maybe, just maybe, we'll start taking some travel. Fred asks a bunch of questions about summer travel. So I will read his questions, and then we will talk through them. He says, number one, what is the best way to save pictures, just in case Customs wants to keep my iPhone or it gets stolen? I have about four gigs of storage on iCloud and access to Amazon Prime. I would wanna back up the photos during the trip. I was thinking about setting up a flash drive for the iPhone. When I could get access to Wi-Fi, then I could back up the photos to the cloud. My long range plan would be setting up a Synology Cloud at home. And I'm gonna read through his questions and then we'll come back. He says, I understand that I may need to purchase a SIM card to use my iPhone in the UK, buying one at the airport is the best way to go if I wanna make any calls back to the US or is buying one at the airport the best way to go? He asks, let's see, number three, I will go to the Apple Store and purchase the World Travel Kit. The iPhone 7 Plus is very new and I wanna protect my newest member in the family. Talk a little bit about that. He says, what about battery packs? Do you have any recommendations? He says, my flight from the US to the UK is about nine hours. And he says, I would like to take my iPad but with Homeland Security may block iPads in the cabins of planes this summer returning from Europe so I may be traveling without it. All right. So the best, let's go, let's do these in reverse here because the pictures one might take the longest in terms of discussion. So in terms of your iPad, I would actually bring both your iPhone and iPad. My family, there are two members of my family recently flew to and from China. And on the way to China, they were allowed to use tablets in the cabin but not phones. Phones couldn't even be in airplane mode. They had to be off and stowed away so you could not use your phone at all but you could use a tablet. And of course my son texted me from his iPad and said, I don't get it because my iPad has a 3G or a 4G chip in it. So what's the difference? Like yeah, don't tell them that kiddo. So I would bring both, especially for a long flight and I would prepare both of them with whatever movies or whatever you want. This is gonna be a moving target for a while which devices are allowed use in the cabin especially on international flights. So just be prepared for anything would be my advice. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on? Nope, okay. In terms of the world travel kit, if all you're bringing with you is Macs and or iOS devices, you can probably save a ton of money. I went, when we went to Europe last year and I did the same thing for Lisa and Lucas when they went to China recently. I just went to ricksteves.com, R-I-C-K-S-T-E-V-E-S and bought adapters. Your power bricks for lack of a better term for your Mac and your iPhone will support all the voltages available throughout the world. So you don't need a power converter. You just need an adapter so you can take what you have and plug it into their plugs. At ricksteves, those adapters were all literally $1. So I bought, when we went to Europe, so we were in the UK and then the rest of Europe. So I had to buy two sets of adapters, but that was eight bucks to buy one for each of the four of us and then we have our power bricks or whatever and everything worked fine. So you don't need converters. You don't need anything overly special. Your power brick from your iPhone will protect your iPhone seven. That is what it is built to do. You just need to get it plugged into the plug. And actually in China, they found most of the time US plugs were accepted because China and Australia use the same thing just as long as it's not a polarized plug, they were fine in China. So it's interesting stuff. Thoughts on that, my friend? I haven't had to do that for a while, but yeah, I got the world adapter kit. You did, huh? Last needed to, yeah, and I remember they actually had a recall. It was like seven years later, they were like, oh yeah, by the way, there was a defect in that kit you purchased from us like ages ago and they actually swapped out a couple because there was the potential for them to burst into flames or something. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, I just don't think you need to spend that kind of money. I don't think it's gonna do anything for you. So, all right, moving up the chain here. In terms of purchasing a SIM card, our experience has been that it's really difficult to purchase a SIM card for another country from the US if you don't live in that other country. So if you live in the US and more specifically your credit card has a US-based billing address, then you are going to have a really hard time buying a SIM card and or buying even top-ups type service, months worth of data or whatever, before you go. That's, we did it. Several Mac Key Cab listeners, Mike in particular, helped out a ton in terms of getting a SIM card before we went to Europe. Then we had to go through this process of adding data to them. That was, I was able to get data on two of the four of them that we got and then even that path got shut off because it was kind of a shady path because this company was selling us data that probably shouldn't have been. And finally, it was like, you know, let's just deal with it when we get to the airport. The data we bought for the other two SIM cards was cheaper and more data that, you know, than what we were able to buy remotely here in the US. It's just go, get off the plane, go through immigration, go through customs. And before you get in an Uber or whatever or a cab or whatever, you're going to get to where you're going. Just go and buy a SIM and some data right there in the airport. That's going to be your best bet. So there you go. That's my advice. Oh, and if you are going to use Uber, you have to reconfigure Uber after you put your new SIM in because Uber's got to confirm the new phone number that you have. When you swap out SIMs in a foreign country, you get a new phone number. So bear that in mind. Just because otherwise you might have a problem. And then of course the trick is remember to do that when you get back and don't lose your SIM. When you take that SIM out of your iPhone, have a spot in your travel case or something that you put it because you're not going to think about it for two weeks and you're going to have like, or however long you're there and you're going to have these grandiose experiences every day and then suddenly, you know, whatever a week, two weeks later, you're back on the airplane. You're like, where did I put that SIM for my iPhone? And you know, those aren't large things so they get lost pretty easily. So think about that ahead of time, put it in one spot and then it'll be there when you're going back. Okay, so that's the SIM card thing. All right, so this photos thing, John, this is where I really want to dig in with you. How to back up pictures remotely. So he doesn't want to bring up, it sounds like he doesn't want to bring a Mac with him and I totally get that. So how does he back up pictures from his iPhone to something he has with him when he can't necessarily get things backed up to the cloud? That's the question I pose to you. What do you think? I'll tell you what I think. There are a number of devices that'll handle this for you, Dave. Sweet. Probably my favorite and it actually prompts you for this but there's the I expand case for the iPhone. And what is this is a SanDisk product. But basically it's a case, has a lightning connector. When you plug your phone in, they have little pieces of software you can run. Okay. And it'll say, hey, you want me to back up your photos and when it's done, it'll actually prompt you and I think you can turn this off if you want to say, hey, you want me to scrub those off of your phone while I'm at it. So if you want to make sure that they're not on your phone and they're on this memory case, that's one way to do it. They actually have several products that, yeah, I mean, if we look at, that's the one that comes to mind here. Also that has a, the I expand memory case actually has a battery option as well, which is kind of slick. So it does a number of things for you. I really like it. Cool. And that's just, they call that the I expand mobile flash drive. Is that right? No, it's the I expand. Yeah, let's find out. I think it's the I expand memory case. Okay. All right. Kind of find it on there. And they have a few others here too. Yeah, they have several memory products here. So they have the I expand flash drive for iPhone and iPad. That's another one. The sizes go up, I think up to 256 gigs. So yeah, you'll pay for it. What else do we have here? Connect wireless stick. That's another nice one. So I think that'll lead, that'll let you beam them. I think you can beam them to them. You can certainly download them. So several things from them, from Sandus that I would recommend for backing up your photos. Yeah, I like it. Cool. Some of my thoughts on this include the meme. It's a charging cable, actually, that has storage, it's got some flash storage right in the cable and it has a companion app and it's built to back up your photos and things like that, contacts, calendar, messages, music, photos and videos. And we talked about this on the show once before but I will put a link to it in the show notes because it could be your charging cable and your backup device the whole time that you are gone. So I will put that there because we like cool stuff like that. Previous cool stuff found contender. And then kind of to solve two of the problems is something like the Seagate Wireless Plus which is its own little hard drive and hotspot all in one. You could think of it as sort of a very purpose-built network storage drive in that you can store all your movies on this. So I was thinking about from your, when you can't decide whether you're bringing your iPhone or your iPad and which one to put movies on and what they're gonna let you use on the plane, you could just put the app to stream movies from this device. Now you are running Wi-Fi on a plane and I'm gonna leave it up to you to decide whether or not that's okay. But it hasn't brought down any planes I've been on. So let's just put that out there. And you can get it in one terabyte or two terabyte sizes but not only can you stream from it, you can back up to it. So this thing could be an interesting little device and I'll put a link in the show notes for you. And of course you can stream more than one device at a stream two more than one device at a time. So even if you're traveling with your family, you could use this wireless plus to stream to several things at once. And they've got several related products. There's the Seagate Wireless Plus and then there is the, what do they call it? It's, I guess they just call it the Seagate Wireless which does sort of the same thing. It's called wireless mobile storage. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too for you. It sounds similar to the one of the Sandis thing. One of the Sandis thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. But yeah, there's options. And when we went to Europe, I brought one of these Seagate Wireless mobile storage devices with me. And it worked, it was fine. We didn't really need it because we were all able to back up both to iCloud and to our Synology Cloud that we have because we always had decent wifi in the apartments that we rented. But obviously we didn't know that going in. So like you, we had a backup plan. So it's good, it's good traveling with a geek, right? We're having geeks assist you when you travel. All right, John, you're gonna regale us with some information about iOS email? I think so. Now you'll notice that in our notebook I must have had a slip here, but I have the email in front of me here, Dave. Okay. So I'm gonna see if you have any thoughts on this. I certainly have a thought. So Sandy writes, I'm having an issue sending email with my iPad and iPhone occasionally. When I find an article online that I like to save, I send it using email to myself. I use the above email address to send from and send it to another Gmail address that I have. Nine times out of 10, when I do this, the emails get put in the outbox with an exclamation mark. Tapping the exclamation mark gives the following error. The connection to the outgoing server smtp.gmail.com failed. Additional outgoing mail servers can be configured in settings mail contacts calendars. I've tried deleting Gmail and adding back the two email addresses, which work for a short time and then the same problem. Also yesterday, I tried to send an email from the above address to someone with an aol.com email address and I got this error. The connection to the outgoing server smtp.com has gotten that failed. Additional outgoing mail servers, blah, blah, blah. Same thing. Each time this happens, I'm not on my home Wi-Fi network. In the case of the iPhone, I was using cellular data and it had a strong connection. My iPad doesn't have cellular. Any idea why this happens? I think I know why this happens, Dave. At least I hope this is why it happens. Um, you may see inconsistent behavior depending on what network you're on when you try to send mail, right? So smtp is the mechanism that you use to send mail. When I've had this problem in the past, Dave, it's typically because I'm not providing the smtp server with a username and password. I'm not authenticating myself. I can't imagine there's any smtp servers that don't require username and password regardless of where you're connecting from now, though. I don't think it exists. Probably not. I mean, unless you run one yourself. Well, in some cases, if the smtp server thinks that you're on the same network, it may not require authentication. So I think that's why this may work at times and not others. So my suggestion would be to dig into your settings on your machine and make sure that... Yeah, but she's using Gmail, which always requires... Right. Authentication. So I'm thinking that data may not be there. You may have to refresh it. And where you go is you go, then you have to dig kind of deep in the mail on iOS. So it's settings, mail, accounts, then you choose the account, and then there should be an smtp setting. And then once you click on that, it'll show you the parameters that are being used to send to that smtp server. Just make sure, because I actually looked on one of my... And then you'll also, typically when you go there, you'll also get a list. Or when you get this error, you'll also get a list of alternative smtp servers that you can use. So you may want to set up for that. Do you get that list on your iPhone? I don't think you do. I did. No, I know I saw it. Did you? When I was digging in, I saw a list and it's like, okay, well here's the primary. And by the way, here's all these other ones that I know about. You want to maybe use these. So that's the other thing is you, whether it's mail on macOS or iOS, typically when things don't work out, it says, okay, this isn't working. Try panning. How about you choose another one? No. And depending on the OS, you do this in different places. But that's a... Yeah, I'm with you that it sounds like she just needs to go and I would remove the SMTP servers that are there and just re-add them. That, I mean, that would be my advice. Yeah. I mean, let me just dig in here. All right, so I'm going here. So for example, on my iOS device here for SMTP, yep, okay, it shows the whole kit and the bootle here. Well, okay, so let's tell them how we got there. So we go to settings, mail, accounts, and then pick one of your accounts. And click one of the accounts and then there should be outgoing mail server SMTP. Nope. So you gotta pick the accounts, right? So let me get them there from the beginning because you keep skipping a step. So settings, mail, accounts, pick one of your accounts, then click on account, and then there you get to click on outgoing mail server SMTP and then you get to this list that John's talking about. Yes. Yes. And when I click on that, so for example, on my Yahoo account, it shows SMTP mail yahoo.com. Sure. That makes sense. If I then click on that entry, then I get another screen and it says, oh, well, here's the primary server. And if I want to, if I click on that again, it'll then show, okay, well, you know, here's the name of it, username, password. Now that's kind of weird because it's actually show. Oh, no, okay. That's weird. So password, it says optional, but then two lines down, it says, oh, and by the way, you're using password authentication. That's a very confusing dialogue here. You can also set SSL and the server port 587, which I guess is a secure outgoing mail port. But then you also get a list and it says other SMTP servers and by default, so these are from all the other accounts that you have defined. And by default, they're all off and I have a huge list here. Yeah, right. So you may want to, for the accounts where you have issues, maybe choose, activate one of these backup servers and make sure the credentials are correct. Yeah, one piece of warning I will give you with activating backup servers is that generally nowadays, you are only allowed to send email from an address that that server knows about. So for example, if you're sending from, you know, or whatever, my email at gmail.com and for whatever reason, gmail won't send that mail. If you try to send that through Comcast or Yahoo, it may bounce that email saying, whoa, whoa, that's not coming from my Yahoo address or my Comcast address, so I'm not gonna send it or, and I haven't tested this, which is why I say or, it might change your from address to be from say Yahoo or Comcast so that it can send that email out. Just be aware or do some testing to know what these things are gonna do so that you're not accidentally sending, say a work email from your Yahoo account without being aware of the fact that that's happening. Just, you know, cause you gotta be aware of that. And then, and I'm trying to find the URL for this, but in the chat room at makiqab.com slash stream, Brian Monroe suggests, especially with gmail, that sometimes your credentials will be bounced if gmail in their infinite wisdom decides you need to reset your capture or re-authenticate or re-prove that you are a human and there is a URL to do that. And we will put a link in the show notes. Basically go to accounts.google.com slash display unlock capture, C-A-P-T-C-H-A, but we'll put that in the show notes so that you can see the instructions so that you can do that. It's been a while since I've experienced that, thankfully, but there was a period of time, I think, where I was going through that quite a bit. So, yet more fun, right, Mr. Braun? Yeah, that's how you define fun. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, that's what I got. Yeah, I like the capture angle. I didn't realize that some email services- I think it's just gmail, which is why I didn't really think about it for Sandra, because she's also having problems with Comcast Mail. So I think your idea about just wipe them fresh and bring them back in is good. But we shall see. Maybe we had something similar happen. I think it was... Yeah, I think you and I both had this when we were supporting our parents is... If you change your password, sometimes it doesn't propagate to all the different things that use it. I remember this. Yeah, all of a sudden... Yeah, I think the password, there was a password change for the main password to log into Yahoo, and it didn't update it in the key chain. It's like... I think you had that problem too. All of a sudden, my mom's like, I can't send any email, I get this error. And I'm like, okay, so I wrote it in, and I'm like, oh, well, it's prompting you for the password. Right, right. It's like, well, I never did that before. It's like, well, it's prompting because the password changed. And yeah, I think you and I both reflected that, well, that's kind of lame. I mean, if you change your password for your Yahoo or Google or whatever, why doesn't it change it in the key chain? Because it's going to have to provide it at some point, right? At some point, yeah. That's right, yeah. Or in iOS as well. So that whole activity doesn't seem to be well synchronized with a lot of services. Yeah, yeah. All right, you want to take us to to the next one about iOS email here, John. Oh, boy, we're just it's iOS email party here. Yeah, let me get this here. OK, who are we talking here? Well, it's listener David, but you didn't put his name in the in the agenda. So it's just all right. But I did say the whole thing here. Yeah, OK. I don't know if I really have an answer, but at least I confirm the behavior here. Sure. So I'm not sure he's writing to here, but he says gentlemen. Not sure if you covered this before, but it's been eternally frustrating for me. When I flag a message in iOS, I can't see it in the flagged mailbox on the phone. This is driving me nuts because I flag messages all the time on Mac OS. Yeah, I can't view them on my phone. If I search for flagged, it kind of sort of works, but I don't get them all and search has always been sketchy for me slow and doesn't always show all the results when I know the mail is there. However, regardless of where I flag an email, it does show up on Mac OS mail out properly in the flagged folder. I've tried re-indexing the mailboxes and other cleanup type tasks and nothing works and I can't believe this is expected behavior. Then again, I'm beginning to suspect this is yet another item that isn't synced as part of iCloud. I think this is expected behavior, Dave. Yeah, it may not be desired. My response was as follows. In that my experience and I don't really do much on iOS with flagged stuff, but I decided to try it and see how, you know, how it performs between Mac OS and iOS. Sure. So for example, currently on Mac OS, I have 25 emails flagged. Okay. So the first thing I did is I went into, so if you go out to mail on iOS, you will see a screen. Let me bring up that screen. Yeah. And you go to your mailboxes and you say edit, you'll then see that you can bring up a flagged mailbox. It's normally unchecked. Okay, so we're on the mailboxes list in iOS. So one up from your inbox, if that's where you were, right? Now you're on your mailboxes list and you can add a flagged mailbox. I'm with you here. Okay, yep. So I did that and then I looked in it and it says, oh yeah, you got four. I'm like, what? Because I don't have four. I have way more, Dave. So that didn't work. So I think that behavior is wrong. Okay. And here's the other thing I tried though. And I think he was suggesting, this was being suggested as well. Well, let me go to my mailboxes and let's do a search. And how do you do that? Well, you can click on all mailboxes. Yeah. And say search. And then it gives you suggestions for things to search for, Dave. And one of them is flagged messages. This is getting even more confusing. So there's not only, so like, is that the same flagged messages that what I just did? And I don't think it is because when I search for flagged messages, Dave, I got actually more than 25, including some that were, I think, cached from the past. There were some old CES emails that when we were going to CES, I actually flagged them. And it still shows them as being flagged on my iPhone when I search for flag, but they're not flagged anymore on my Mac OS. So what am I trying to say, Dave? What I'm trying to say here is that so searching for flagged messages, I think is going to bring you the most results, but it still doesn't seem to synchronize well between, I'm not seeing the same things. And I... I'm going to add two words to everything you just said for you. Because I'm not, flagged messages sink perfectly for me and I do it in Gmail, right? They sink perfectly for me back and forth between Mac OS, iOS and of course my mail server because that's what's storing that data and searching for them also works flawlessly. Yeah, I'm not doubting that you're having a problem. I'm just saying we need to significantly limit the scope of what you're describing here because it is not for everyone it is for you. And for our listener. And for listener David. No, that's totally true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. So... But I guess my question for both you and David and anyone else having this problem is how many email accounts do you have on your Mac versus on your iPhone versus in these other places? Because when you start doing a search and you say all mailboxes as opposed to current mailbox, it is looking at everything it can see. Now your iPhone can't see messages that are in the on my Mac folder on your Mac, right? So it's possible that if you've got some flagged stuff that's because it's stored locally. Yeah, and I know you know this. I just wanted to kind of say it out loud so that we all understand what it is the scope of what our iPhones can see versus what our Macs can see. And sometimes that's the same if you're not storing any messages locally if they're all on your IMAP server then in theory it can see them all but it may not see them all initially when you start doing a search your iPhone first looks for all the mail that's on it that it has cached. And then it also opens up that search to your mail server by connecting to it over the internet assuming it can get a decent connection and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. So it, and this works. And I just flagged a message in my inbox and it appeared flagged on my Mac and my Mac isn't even running Sierra it's running a Kapitan because I use a Tascam USB device and Tascam won't update the drivers and I will shake my fist at them but that's sort of an aside but I did a nice little shake here. And so, you know, it just works flawlessly for me and I'm sure if I go on my Mac and I unflagged this message it will eventually appear unflagged. There it is, boom. I just watched it unflag itself on my phone. So. I mean, the only suggestion I have and it sounds like this was tried on one end because he says I've tried re-indexing the mailboxes. Not sure if that was re-indexing on the Mac or well, there really isn't a re-indexing choice on iOS. Right. The way you re-index is you delete it and you add it back again. Actually, that's not the way you re-index. It seems like it should be if you delete your mailbox and then mail account, which is, you know, everything and then re-add it. Any errors that existed in the cache for that mailbox will still be there. Oh. Sucks. How do you fix that? I thought you talked about that. Yeah, the only way to fix it is to back up your iPhone, wipe it and restore because the caches are not stored as part of that backup. The other way to fix it, if possible, is to change the name of the mail server you connect to. So for example, if I'm connecting to imap.gmail.com and my username is Dave, which it's not, but let's just say for example, it's Dave at imap.gmail.com. That's what they, no, it doesn't matter what I've named the mail account. It could just be Dave's Gmail or whatever. It doesn't matter that the name I apply to it is not what the cache is based on. The cache is based on Dave at imap.gmail.com. But with Gmail, you can connect using a different set of addresses. So if you change, or if I were to change my email instead of being Dave at imap.gmail.com, if I change my incoming mail server to imap.googlemail.com, that actually connects to the same place at Google but because the name is different, the cache is different as well. So that is a workaround for quickly bypassing the cache on your iPhone. And I don't know how long that cache sticks around. It seems to last kind of, you know, FFE forever. But, you know, yeah. It sucks. So one thing to try may be to do a backup and restore? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That wouldn't be a bad idea, actually. Yeah. I mean, you're going to wind up with some problems if you do that. But, I mean, you know, it's... I hate when the solution is turn it off then on again. Well, and that's sort of my issue with troubleshooting on iOS is, you know, we know... For example, right here, we know exactly what the problem is. And if it was on our Macs, what we would do is we would dig in, we would go to home, library, mail, and then we would just delete the folder that matches David imap.gmail.com, right? We know that that's where the problem is. We just take it, we throw it away and we're done. But we can't do that on iOS. And that's... Like, Apple can't even do that. At least not at the genius bar support level. So, that's where it gets really frustrating for me is we know what the solution is, but we're not allowed to touch it. And because we're not allowed to touch it, we have to use these, you know, very, you know, shotgun style approaches that have so many other impacts that we probably can't even guess, but we can't go in with a, you know, the surgical knife and scalpel and do it. So, that's my rant for today. But it's... I think it's a good one. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah, man. Okay, well, that's how we do it. All right, John. You want to take us to Rick? Rick has a great one. All right. Which took an unexpected twist and turn. So Rick says, Hi, guys. My daughter's hard drive on her MacBook crashed a while back. I'm pretty impressed that she replaced it herself. Now, she's having a problem. She has an external hard drive where she keeps her iTunes library. When she tries to access it, she gets this message. The iTunes library.itl file is locked on a locked disk where you do not have right permissions for this file. She tried to use the terminal to change the permissions. Once again, I'm impressed that she got this far. But it tells her this, chmod, unable to change file mode on slash volume slash Toshiba space EXT read only file system. Any idea what she could try? So first, it brought a tear to my eye that as I think any father is that your kid can change the hard drive themselves. That's good. Oh, yeah. Brought a tear to my eye. I still am quite proud that my daughter was not only able but interested and eager to help me swap out all those drives when we did the great SSD experiment a couple of years ago. And now she's like, totally comfortable. She's like, yeah, let's just rip it apart. Let's just do it. And she even, she put a virus on her computer not that long ago. Nice. And then, you know, told me about it because she wanted to download some movie that wasn't even available for purchase. Like her father, she's like, I'll find it somewhere. Well, like she couldn't buy it. It wasn't even an option. And she's like, yeah, I think I put a virus on my computer. I'm like, oh, what'd you do? And she did one of those flash installers like, you know, like you talked about. Like, all right. Yeah. And I think I was doing something similar. I was looking for something. Actually, it was something that my Tivo screwed up by old Tivo to record properly because I'm like, no, well, you know, I should be able to find this, you know, S, whatever, E, whatever of the show. And yeah, everybody was getting in my face saying, hey, you better update your flashbacker. It was like, no, no, no, no. All right. Good stuff. I'm still here. Of course, I'm still here. All right. So I'm going to, I would suggest the path or the terminal. And if you highlight a drive, Dave, an external drive and you do a get info on it from the finder, you're going to see a whole bunch of interesting information. And towards the bottom, you're going to see the various permissions, the users and the permissions that they have. But you're also going to see a little checkbox saying ignore ownership on this volume. Sometimes it's useful to do that. So I'm like, hmm, maybe I want to give that a try. Well, that also ignore access control lists on that volume, ACLs. Not sure. OK. But I thought it was worth a try. It totally is. And I think it does ignore ACLs when you do that. ACLs are sometimes called extended attributes or extended permissions and can really get in your way when you're having what appears to be a permissions problem with a drive and you go and set everything like you know you're supposed to and it still won't let you do it. A lot of times it's these extended attributes getting in your way, the immutable flag or something a little more hidden and you've got to get rid of those things. So we'll get there. We'll help you. But I'll let you go. All right. Yeah. So suggesting that she go to the finder window, which gives you all the information in one place, kind of led us down the right path because he said he asked her about that and she tried that and apparently didn't solve the problem. But then here's the from left field. He then found out that, oh, by the way, that drive is formatted as NTFS. Oh, oh, yeah, that's a different problem. So I was given. Yes. So that's a different problem. Now, NTFS for those that are not in the know, but NTFS is a Windows formatting scheme. And the thing is, last I checked, Dave, is that the Mac can see NTFS volumes, but they're read only. They that is correct. Is what we were experiencing here exactly. So there are a number of ways you could deal with this. So one, there are third party products. A lot of them got to throw down some coin, but I did find an open source one from tuxera.com. And then you see that I have the link there. OK. Tuxera.com has something called open source NTFS 3G. You may want to try that. And who are the other guys that make all the NTFS? Hey, I had it. It was on the tip of my tongue and now I've lost it. Paragon. Paragon also makes it. Do I don't think they have a free option? No. But there's from what I hear, theirs is quite a bit faster than this NTFS 3G. But still. Yeah. So if you're doing a lot of not now, for this purpose, I think performance is not going to be an issue. Yeah, that's right. Yep. Yeah. And I think they have a pay one. Yeah. So either a Paragon or tuxera or two companies that make NTFS products. Here's another way to solve the problem. Ditch the NTFS and maybe maybe reformat the drive. Of course, you know, save the content somewhere else. First, how about we formatting it as either fat or ex fat, depending on the size of the drive. So fat is another way you can format a Windows volume. And last I checked, Mac can read and write from that. No problem. That's true. You could fix this problem even just with your Mac, as long as you have another drive somewhere, because your Mac can read NTFS. So you could just read all this NTFS content off, you know, even with carbon copy cloner to another drive, and you're good to go. Yeah, the thing is a lot of. Yeah, so that's what I would do. Though, if you want to fiddle with the NTFS driver, that's that's fine. But I think a better solution would be to just, you know, ditch the NTFS. Unless you have a good reason for maintaining an NTFS volume, which if you're just storing your iTunes on it, then I don't think that's a good enough reason to use NTFS. Right, right. So and what was the final thing here is that the yeah. So it's interesting is that there are two versions of fat. So fat is for drives that are less than 30, 32 gigs. And there's something called EX fat, which I guess is expanded. Fat fat being file allocation table. And that's for drives that are greater than 32 gigabytes. That's just a little copy out there. Oh, OK. And last I checked, I believe this utility will give you the option to format either. Or I guess what's most appropriate for the drive that you're trying to format, right? Um, yeah, it will. That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Won't yet give you the ability to format as Apple file system, but, you know, we're getting there. All right. Yeah. So if I look here right now, so I'm in this utility on this machine, I'm not going to format my backup drive, but I'm clicking on my karmic copy, cloner backup, and it says, oh, you want to erase it? And then on the format list, it says Mac OS extended. Several versions of Mac OS extended. And then it lists ex fat and MS-DOS fat. Yep. It's two other options. So you can do it all with the Mac. And I've been looking here for something that will modify extended attributes. And I can't really find anything. There used to be an app, Cletus in the chat room helped us find called extra ex-t-t-r-a, but it doesn't seem like it's been updated in about five years. So you may have to do this from the command line. It's not so bad because really, you just need one command and we'll put a link in the show notes, how to just wipe out all the extended attributes and sort of reset them. But that's that's where we're at. I thought I could have sworn there was a there was a GUI that was kept up to date, but I don't think so. So anyway, it's the the dash C option. So it's x-a-t-t-r-space-c and that will wipe out and then the file name and that will wipe out all the extended attributes for that one. But I'll I'll put a link in the show notes for that. So that took an unexpected turn, but useful info for anybody that has to deal with NTFS formatted stuff. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. NTFS changes all those rules. Right. Right. Yeah, it's good stuff. Cool. All right. Where are we here? Let's I don't know. What do you want to go to, John? Pick one of our last four and that's what we will do. I'm kind of feeling like like Jeff might be the one. Yeah, that that can get squirrely. So why don't let's go. All right. Jeff asks what seems to be a simple question. Maybe it isn't a simple answer. He says my older MacBook MacBook Pro is getting a bit bloated and has been freezing intermittently. And I was thinking of wiping it clean and starting from scratch. My problem is that I have a number of applications that have turned to subscription models and don't make the prior versions easy to get. Is there a way to copy over selected applications and their supporting files? I was going to use migration assistant, but it looks like it might carry over more than I want. So it might. But migration assistant might still be the easiest answer. And you can you can kind of you can manage the cruft a little bit there. But you could always just clone the drive so that you have a backup and then try first, just if you want, just move over what's in the applications folder for each app that you want, just manually in the finder, just go into the applications folder on your old drive on the clone, copy it over. My advice at this point would be copied over, eject the clone so that it's not able to pull anything else from that drive and you're truly running from the new one and then run the app for a lot of apps. This is going to work just fine. However, for some, it might not. And for those that don't, my first piece of advice would be to look in the home again, back on the old drive, look in the home folder in library and in application support there. So home library application support. See what you might be able to find that appears related to this app that you have just tried to run and copy that over to the same location on the new drive. Then again, eject the clone and and try again. I would think with with both of those methods, you're probably going to get 95 percent of the stuff to work just fine. But I'm curious to your thoughts, John. Yeah, I was scratching my head over where the only other place you may want to look to bring over some data. And I've had to do this in the past for a while. But preferences, things like activation keys or other things may be stored in the preferences folder. And that gets kind of interesting because there are multiple layers there. So you'll see if you look in the preferences, typically library preferences, right? Home library preferences, but also root library preferences. Yeah, I've seen them in both places. Yeah. Yeah. There may be some important data, again, like an activation key or something like that stored in the preferences folder. Yep. And if you look at the preferences folder, you'll see, I mean, if you sort alphabetically, most preferences, they're kind of announced who they belong to. I mean, I'll see com.adobe dot whatever and com.apple. And, you know, whoever the vendor is. There is a by host folder where sometimes things get put in there instead, and I'm not quite sure what actually looks. Oh, yeah, that's true. Almost. Actually, it looks to be almost exclusively Apple stuff. So I do have another place, John, I always forget about this. And it's been long enough that I shouldn't. But I'm glad I remembered before we stopped recording home library containers. Remember, any apps that are sandboxed don't store their preferences in the normal places. They store them in the normal places inside their own container. So if you go to home library containers, you'll see containers labeled by app in sort of the reverse domain order. So for mail, it would be com.apple.mail. For Pixelmater, it's com.pixelmaterteam.pixelmater or whatever. Dig into there, look in the data folder there. Then you'll see something that looks like your home folder. Look at the ones in here that are not aliases that don't have the little arrow on the folder. Usually that's just library. Sometimes it's library and documents. The ones with aliases do point back to your normal, you know, desktop folder, movies, music pictures, whatever that is, dig in library, application support. And you might find something in there. So that's how the sandboxes are built. It's actually good. I highly recommend everybody go and do exactly the path we just discussed so that you can sort of see what how these sandboxes are built and understand that the sandbox sometimes points back with shortcuts slash aliases to the root folders on your drive. And then sometimes just has stuff that's only accessible in its sandbox. It's a little convoluted, but it's worth digging in here when you're not in a pressure situation. And you can just start to sort of grok with what Apple is doing here. So that's my advice. And if you want to get even more convoluted. So I've had to do this in the past. So this is I don't know if I call it cheating. No, it's it's it's clever. If you want to find out all the places that an app puts things, maybe you should use an app cleaner. Oh, that's interesting. My favorite, of course, being. App cleaner. Hi. So that's the best free option. There are a number of vendors that make app cleaners, but at least app cleaner. Let's see who who's that from here? That's true. That'll show you. So app cleaner. What happens is that if you drag an application on top of app cleaner. And typically what I do is I put an alias to it on my desktop. If you drag an application on top of it, it would be like, OK, I see what you want to get rid of this. And I think you can automate the behavior, too. But it's like you can have it prompt you and say, all right. All right, here's the app. And then here's all the other places that I think it puts stuff. Yeah, don't delete it. Just note that list. Look where it has. And sometimes it. Yeah, that's good thinking, man. And the author is pretty clever about digging and finding all the the pieces where they're scattered about, right, including the folders that we talked about, but sometimes some unexpected folders and some caches and var directory sometimes. And I'm like, why is it putting stuff there? Well, OK. But any of the app cleaners were you can kind of do some detective work with them to see where they think all the all the pieces are. I like it, man. That's good stuff. Pretty cool, man. That's fine. Good show. Hey, before we go, though, I want to make sure we send a shout out and a thanks to all of our premium subscribers that you can learn about premium. Mackie Kev dot com slash premium. But I also want to extend our specific thanks to those of you that either joined or renewed or contributed in some way this past week as we have been doing. So starting with our by annual and actually several of you had asked if we had the option for you to set your own price for a one time donation. 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