 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Hub, episode 735 for Monday, November 12, Veterans Day, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Hub, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and our cool stuff found, and our tips, and sometimes even our questions. We mix it all together, and then we dig in, and we enjoy the delicious meal of learning, educating, entertaining, and just plain knowledge, so that we can each learn at least five new things every time we get together, so that we can solve our own problems when they come up. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs at linkedin.com.mgg, Eero Plus at ero.com.mgg, OpsGenie now from Atlassian at opsgenie.com, and Jamf now at jamf.com.mgg. We will talk all about all of those shortly here, here, back here. Ah, nice to be home here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Brun? I haven't spent too much time in Windows, man. It happens. It happens sometimes. I feel your pain. I told you I moved Lucas, the machine that he was using from Windows to Ubuntu, partially because of that. Yeah. Well, actually, things worked out here. So two things. So one, you might have read, I got these in new inexpensive one terabyte SSDs. It turns out, I think what was happening on my Mac Mini was a power problem because the SSD was exhibiting weird behavior as well. So I think I just unplugged all my USB devices, plugged them all back in, and all of a sudden they all started working right again. Cool. Well, the reason I mentioned being in and, you know, I was running Windows being in parallels, Sandisk has a cool little program called SSD dashboard. Here's the bad news though. It only runs under Windows. Ah. But, so I, you know, ran a VM in parallels, downloaded it and ran it and it's like, oh, I can't find a Sandisk SSD. I'm like, well, it's weird. I mean, it's right there. You know, when you're in a VM, typically you see your mounted volumes. I had to actually explicitly go to the USB menu and say, yeah, by the way, can you mount this drive in Windows? And all of a sudden mounted it and the utility shows you the firmware and, you know, we'll do like benchmarks and stuff like that. So that's kind of neat. That's a handy use for something like parallels. I, that's, that's one of those things or it's like, yeah, don't be afraid of this. Just go ahead. You're good to go. Oh, good thinking, man. I like it. The second thing that I had to do within the Windows environment as well because the utility is only available for Windows is I want to play around with virtualization on the Synology. Unfortunately, the files on the Mac are in a PVM format, which as far as I know is proprietary to parallels. And I want to export it or I want to import it into their VM environment, but it doesn't understand that type of file, but it understands other types of containers. And VMware makes a utility that will export out to that format from within the virtualization environment. So I think I found a sneaky way to push my, push my VM. Cool. Into there because now it's converted to another file type that it does understand. Sure. Yeah. Sure. I'll import this. Oh, that's great. Cool. So further updates as events warrant. All right. Cool. Yeah. Keep us posted. Like I said last week, I'm very curious to learn how that works for you. Speaking of learning, boy, do you, you learned a pant load of things. Dude. So, yeah. You know what? Let's just, we'll jump to it. I was at Mac tech this week. I spoke at Mac tech this week and you know, here's the thing. I was hesitant to speak at this conference for, in retrospect, what's a stupid reason, but I think it'll, it'll make sense whenever I travel to speak somewhere, especially like user groups and stuff or conferences that I, you know, that I sort of believe in and Mac tech certainly fits into that realm. I, I don't need to profit from that, but I also like to be cash flow neutral, right? So that my travel expenses don't wind up costing me just to go and speak for a group of nice people and Mac tech does not cover travel expenses. So I was hesitant to do it and, but they, but they do cover, they don't cover hotel and airfare, but Mac tech is like camp. Really it's like a cruise is the right way that that's the best analogy I can do. You have a chair and you have a ticket and of course they, as a speaker, I got a, you know, a complimentary ticket and they cover all of your meals and entertainment for the entire time you're there. I mean, I think they fed us five times a day, you know, or something. And then in the evening, they have activities and all that. You don't have to participate in everything, of course, you're not forced to do anything, but you are welcome to and, and so that's why it sort of, in my mind, I equate it to a cruise because there's food provided, a schedule provided. You don't really have to think, you just do all the things they tell you to do and you'll have a great time. And of course I did have a great time and I also, you know, as I was doing my cogitating on, on whether or not to do this, and I'm very, very glad I did, by the way, I neglected to remind myself that in addition to being there as a speaker, I am there as a learner too. And I truly got to learn so much from so many smart people. And that's the best part about Mac Tech is it's safe to assume that everyone there is smarter than you, at least about something, if not, if not everything, like there are just brilliant, brilliant people there. So I highly recommend Mac Tech. And in fact, there was an alarming, not alarming, a pleasantly surprising percentage of attendees that were Mac Geekab listeners, like so much higher than I expected. And so that was also very cool, getting to see some of you who are already new and meet several, many, many, many, actually new listeners, not new listeners, new face-to-face friends who are also listeners. So yeah, so I almost certainly will be going back to Mac Tech next year. I've already put it on my calendar. And I'm going to try and see if we can work out some kind of maybe special deal for Mac Geekab listeners for that. So stay tuned on that. But really a great show and a great conference. There's a part of it that is solely for enterprise folks. And that's fine. And there are many of you here that are in that realm. But there's also a great path that you can take through Mac Tech if you are a non-enterprise consultant or something where you're just helping smaller businesses or even individuals in their homes. Like you can get so much out of Mac Tech for that. And so I want to share some things that we learned or that I learned while there. So now I have to move the agenda around because you jumped me into this. But it's a good jump to make, my friend. So the first was that in no particular order is that I saw a session by none other than Tim Standing about APFS. Tim is the guy who wrote soft trade. He now works for OWC because OWC acquired soft trade. And Tim knows a crap ton about APFS. And he gave an entire session on it. And I told Neil Tickton, who's the guy who created and organizes and runs Mac Tech, that if he put my session up against Tim Standing's APFS session, that I would be unable to attend my own session because I would be attending Tim. So thankfully he put Tim's at a time when it conflicted with no one, which was very smart. And so I got to attend Tim's without having to make anybody else upset. Because I went there to speak, of course, about mesh Wi-Fi because that made a lot of sense this year and people people actually seem to really love it, which was great. But Tim talked about APFS. He confirmed a lot of the things that we already knew that APFS has some great features, but is slower than HFS plus and likely will remain that way forever. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, he still recommends it. He likes it, drives are fast enough that we can sort of get past that now. And so he's very bullish on APFS, but not blinded by it. And one thing is very interesting about APFS that I wanted to share that I learned. So if you have the secure enclave on your Mac, which many all newer Macs do, but that that T2 chip and all of that stuff, here's the way it works. If you so the way drive encryption works is that the key for the drive, the drive isn't encrypted with the password that you give it. The password is generated by the computer and stored on the drive and then encrypted with your password. So that's how you can have multiple users able to decrypt the same drive, right? Because the drive doesn't have to be encrypted with the same password. Everybody doesn't have to share the password. You just have to have access to decrypting your copy of the password, which is great. And it also means that if you want to change your password for the drive, you don't need to decrypt the entire drive and re-encrypt the entire drive. So FileBalt2 is very, very smart in that way. And this is true about both APFS and HFS Plus. That's just how it works. So great. But there is a risk to this because it means that when the drive is mounted, the encryption key is being held in RAM. It has to be in order for your Mac to be able to read and write from the drive. It's got to have the encryption key somewhere, so it holds it in RAM. And it's possible on your Mac for some piece of malware, theoretically, anyway, to access that key in RAM. And now it has the key to your drive, right? That's bad, right, John? I would think so. OK. So Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has said, aha, we can solve this problem by storing the encryption key in the secure enclave on that T2 chip. That way, it's never stored in user accessible RAM. And in fact, it's only ever stored right there. So good news, right? Now you're good to go. And as he's saying this, I start thinking, and I actually talked with him after the session and confirmed all of this, but it hit me. It was like, wait a minute, if you take the SSD, which is really just a bunch of chips in most of those machines. But if you took that out and put it in another Mac, you could not read it because the secure enclave is over there in the original Mac. If the Mac, you know, if the motherboard dies, you cannot read your disk. That's it. It is encrypted and the key is not accessible because the key isn't stored anywhere on the drive, even in encrypted form, or at least not in a way that you would be able to get to. It is gibberish. And of course, this also means that the easy way to it that it is good to use encryption on SSDs because all you have to do to wipe a drive is write zeros out to the encryption key. And you're done because as long as you don't have the key, the drive is gibberish. Doesn't matter. You don't need to erase everything and burn up sectors or burn up right cycles and all that stuff. But but sure enough, if you've got an SSD that's encrypted with a file vault to as you should and you are on a Mac with a T2 chip, which is the according to Apple right now, the iMac Pro and then basically the Mac mini MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from 2018. They all have that chip. You can check this in system profiler. You go to system information. Call it now, I guess. And in the sidebar of that, there's a section for either controller or I bridge and it will say Apple T2 chip. If you have one, if you have one, then it's even more important to run backups because if anything happens to your computer, you cannot read the drive even if the drive itself is fine. Interesting, huh, Mr. Brown? Hmm. Mm hmm. So that's one of the things I learned at Mac Tech. Any questions on that? I have a bunch of cool stuff found that I that I will go through for us. But but yeah, anything else before I go there? No, no, that's a I have to read up that T2 chip. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty fascinating the way it works. All right. So some cool stuff found from other sessions at Mac Tech. The the first is a piece of software from ObjectiveSea.com called Knock Knock. This I now have this running on all my Macs. It's great. It's goal and there was a lot of discussion so much so that that I think it's accurate that Macs are actually more susceptible to malware now than Windows 10 is. What that sink in for a second, right? So you should be doing something to protect against malware. I run malware bytes and I have it scan my Macs every week. I wrote a keyboard maestro script to do that, right? Knock Knock, I now have installed on all my Macs. And what it does is you you run this utility and it goes through and it looks in all the places that anything persistently installed on your Mac would exist. And by persistently installed, what that means is things that can launch by themselves after you reboot. And so it looks at kernel extensions and launch items and library inserts and all that and it also, if you let it, compares those against a known malware database too. So you can run this thing and it'll say, Hey, look, I found 75 things, which is fine. None of them are in this database. But go ahead and look at them anyway, because you might have something running. You don't want running. Very, very handy utility. So definitely cool stuff found at Mac tech. Very cool. Any thoughts on that one, John, before I move on? I like it. It kind of reminds me it's it's looking at a lot of the same things that Lingon it Lingon plus it in that sense. Yes, exactly. Yep. So Lingon let you and persist and I could also be defined as startup items or launch statements or that's where that stuff all all has to go in one of those. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. Sloth is the next one that I found out about John. And what this does is it takes, you know, when you go into activity, you may not know this, folks, but I know you know, John, when you go into activity monitor, you can dig into any given process and see open files and ports. And we've talked about that as a troubleshooting step so that you can see what files are open from any given process or what it's trying to do. And maybe that might help you decide which P list to blow away or with something right or what it's doing. So Sloth takes that information and organizes it in a much easier to manage way when you're troubleshooting. It just lists every app and you can filter on it and have it say, oh, only show me the regular files that it has open or only show me directories or only show me devices or only show me IP sockets. So I want to see network activity or any mix and match of all of those. And you get to see it for all processes at once and you can kill a process or you can show a file in the finder like you can highlight on one of these things and hit show and finder really, really cool. So again, mandatory in the troubleshooting arsenal, which I love so much so. Pretty good, huh, John? Brings it all together. It brings it exactly. Yep. Another one that, interestingly enough, was mentioned by Alex in our chat room here at Mackie Keb dot com slash stream as well. And we sort of mentioned it on the show a couple of weeks ago is lock rattler from the eclectic light company. This will show you all kinds of things, including whether your Mac has the T2 chip in it, but it'll also show you if system integrity protection is enabled, it will show you if your X protect database, the one that OS 10 or Mac OS uses to check for malware on its own. It'll check to see what version of that you have and whether it's up to date and all of this stuff. So it's very, very cool. Again, just a great utility to have and probably one to run. You know, I would say once a quarter on your Mac, at least, if not, if not a little more frequently than that. We don't like to obsess over these things, but, you know, there you go. So pretty good, huh, man? I have three quick tips, two of which I learned at Mac tech and one I stumbled onto this morning. So but anything about lock rattler before I go? No, we've, yeah, he makes some of the good stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, his entirety of his downloads were included in the last cool stuff found segment, I think. So yeah, I learned something, more things, John, at Mac tech. Somebody, you know, it's the best is when you're watching a session and someone does something that is automatic to them and you go, oh, holy crap, that's amazing. That's a quick tip, right? It's that moment. And that's why we encourage you to share all those at feedback at MacGeekab.com, because we like to have all those quick tips. And it's easy to overlook because we think they're okay. Yeah, there's another place you could email. That's feedback at MacGeekab.com. And lastly, of course, feedback at MacGeekab.com. But the one thing that I learned, actually one of the two that came across that way is we've talked a lot about and we've shared commands for using defaults right to write things to settings files, which really just write things to P list files. But defaults read also works. And here's the interesting part. You can see the contents of a P list organized quite nicely. In the terminal, if you type defaults, space, read, space, filename dot P list, boom, it just shows it to you right there. It's a pretty obvious thing when you stop to think about it. But I don't, I had never stopped to think about it. So it was an aha moment for me and I was happy to have it. So pretty good, Mr. Braun. Yeah, I see that there. If on the man page. Yeah, I don't think I've ever used it to do that. I know, exactly. No, it's just one of those like, oh, duh. I think I just loaded it into an editor, but this is probably a bit quick. It's a little bit quicker. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is just a text file, right? Well, no, or a structured text file. It is structured. I always, from a Unix standpoint, I think of P list files as binary files. That might be incorrect, but certainly if you just try to cat out a P list file, most of them will be gibberish when you cat them out. So, so, yeah. So you have to open them in something, but like BB edit will open them, you know, or this just defaults read and boom, pointed at a file and you're good to go. And then lastly, you know, we've we talked about launch services and all of that. There is a command again that we've talked about in the past called launch CTL. L-A-U-N-C-H CTL that talks and gives us a list or that allows us to manipulate whether a service is on or off. But there is also another command in there. In fact, there's lots of them. And this one is launch CTL space list, which lists all information about all of the launch services that you have running. Probably this command is used by knock knock to help enumerate all of that stuff. So, so there you go. You know, very, very it just cool things, I think. Don't you, Mr. Braun? Sure. OK, good. Hey, I do want to take a minute and talk about our first two sponsors for today. If that's OK by you, my friend. Fantastic. All right. Our first sponsor today is Ops Genie by Atlassian. We all know about downtime. Here's a great example. Last week, we made some changes to the way our ad server worked and then, you know, I tested it, things looked fine, went to sleep. Woke up Monday morning to a series of emails and texts and various other chat method messages indicating that we had had a problem overnight. But you know what I also woke up to? A solved problem. Do you want to know why? Because even though I am the main point of contact for this stuff. Everyone that was backup points of contact were able to be contacted and step in and easily. 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So LinkedIn.com slash MGG terms and conditions apply of course. Our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, I promised I had one more tip and that was hit command T in your favorite apps. I did that accidentally. I've been having problems with keystrokes this morning as listeners in the live show know and we'll we'll leave it at that. But I hit the wrong keyboard shortcut in Evernote. I hit command T. Guess what it did? It opened up a new tab. And now I realize I can have tabs in Evernote. So, you know, there you go. Yeah, yeah, super handy. Yeah, of course, I. Yes, you can do that in your browser. You can do it in the terminal, right? Have you ever done that? Works totally fine. It's great to have multiple tabs in the terminal. You can do it in Evernote, too. I've got them up right now. In fact, what I have in Evernote, John, is. A note from Bill, because Bill writes to tell us yesterday, Apple released updates to the iWorks applications while earlier this week, he says they updated fine on both my iOS devices and my iMac. However, I couldn't get the updates to appear in the updates tab of the Mac App Store on my MacBook Pro. Multiple times, I tried closing and reopening the App Store, logging out of and back into my account in the App Store and rebooting my laptop all to no avail. I tried searching for the app in the App Store to see if that would prompt an update button, but it only said open. Clicking on open did, of course, just that, just without the update. I found nothing to help searching online. In an act of desperation, I started rummaging around in the App Store and finally found something that worked while the blank update tab was staring me in the face. I clicked on store, reload page in the menu bar. And sure enough, all of the updates then appeared in the update tab. I passed this along in case any others encounter a similar problem. While I suppose I could have deleted the apps and redownloaded them from the App Store. This, of course, was much easier. Thanks for that, Bill. Very, very cool, man. That's good. Good stuff. Don't you think? Yeah, why not? Why not just pull down on it like you do on iOS? Oh, because that's why I, but when, yeah, when I was reading this question, it's actually where I looked. I'm like, you know, is there a way to do that? You know, because that's the gesture you use on iOS. Right. Right. Then I right clicked because sometimes that reveals little secrets. But yeah, he found it up there. He did. Yeah. Well, Bill also found something else that that we will share. He said I listened with interest to Mac Geek App 734's discussion about altering Dark Mode's appearance in Mojave. Although I'm not a fan of the looks of mail in Dark Mode, to me, the worst was always Apple Maps. Seeing Dark Maps made them almost useless. The mail discussion prompted me to look in Maps, and I found a way to turn the Maps display back into something useful. Under the View menu is the option to use Dark Map, which was turned on by default after I selected Dark Mode. Simply turning Dark Map off returned the map to its former self. Much, much better. So very, very cool. Thank you for that, Bill. Good stuff. I love these kinds of things, man. That's cool. You found one, right? Somebody tweeted at you, Mr. Braun. Shazum. Yes. I know about him. Tweeted me. Where did he tweet me? We might as well do an image in these. Sure. So I am John F. Braun. He is Dave Hamilton. There's Pilot Pete. There's Mac Observer. And Mac Geek App. All of those are on Twitter, if you want to Twitter with us. But he tweeted with me and said for your cool stuff found section, which is where we're at now, Dark Mode extension for Firefox is something that he recommends. As noted before, webpages are jarring in Dark Mode. This extension fixed that for me. Do note there are two classes of themes. I found the second class slowdown scrolling too much. Another note, it even works with their mobile browser on Android. I wonder if they will do that for their iOS. Oh, I guess it wouldn't because we can't add extensions to mobile Firefox on on iOS, right? So. Apparently not. Yeah. Is there a mobile Firefox? Of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I guess I never found a reason to to get mobile Firefox. I find it handy to have a second browser. I actually have both Chrome and Firefox installed on my iOS devices. It's not it's not overly rare that I find myself using them for various reasons. Yeah. Sometimes it's nice just to have a different browser with its own sandbox and, you know, everything else. Oh, no, I actually do that on on my Macs. I have those three, the same three browsers. Yeah, just like you were found a reason to maybe I will. But yeah, as you point out, sometimes some pages just don't render right. Correct. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. One more comment from Bill, because Bill's awesome. And also it's a correction while we're going back to show 734. He said you said that the new MacBook Air has the touch bar similar to the MacBook Pro. He says, however, that's not true. The air only has touch ID, not the touch bar. And he's totally right. So thank you for sending that in Bill. It's interesting. You know, I have I have yet to own a laptop that has either. And I talked to a lot of people at Mac Tech this week that that have have the touch bar. Nobody has the MacBook Air with touch ID yet. But, you know, some do now, I guess, but they didn't at the show. And of all the people that had Macs with the touch bar, it was touch ID that was the reason they loved it. They said, for the most part, like whatever, some folks had very specific use cases where the bar itself was handy. But for the most part, everybody was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the touch ID is great. They're like, you never have to type your password for one password for logging in. It's great that they're like, it's way more useful than you ever would think. So it's a very interesting point that there you go. Of course, in order to have that, it has to have that aforementioned two chip and yada, yada, yada. There we are. So pretty interesting. How Mr. Braun, yeah, well, it's nice to have parody among all your devices as far as how you can get into them. Well, but there is no parody. I mean, it with iOS devices now and in the future, it is face ID only. Oh, I know. Yeah, much to my disappointment, but that's why I'm in no rush. Yeah, that's why I'm not in any rush to get off of my eight. It does exactly what I need right now. Yep. Yep. My wife passed on taking the iPhone 10 hand me down for me. So that went to my daughter while I'm busy using the 10 hour because she saw me cursing at face ID all the time. She's like, I don't want that in my life. And now she says, you know, anytime she sees my daughter or whatever, and she says, oh, yeah, it's so funny watching her, you know, curse at her phone. Like, yeah, I hear you. It's not the most convenient thing. I'll be perfectly honest. The touch, the touch ID sensor was better. It's obvious that that's irrelevant. We are moving forward and and so be. Well, no, well, I don't see it as moving forward, though. I think I'm going to start a petition. Oh, good idea. I'll be for touch ID. Bring it back. Sure. That'll work because that'll work. Yeah, cool. That sounds great, man. Yeah, tilting it windmills. But fun, you know, we talked about in the last episode 734, we talked about somebody that wanted to be logged into two accounts at once so that they could have their Mac mini. I believe it was Mac mini, sinking down iCloud photo libraries for two different users. I think it was, you know, a wife and her husband that both wanted to do this. So OK, great. Or a woman and her husband, I guess it's appropriate to say way. I don't know. Anyway, you understood what I meant. And anyway. Rob wrote in, we had two creative ideas for this. So Rob wrote in, he said, something that occurred to me to solve this problem, because it's very difficult to have two users. In fact, it's impossible with Mac OS by default to have you two users log in at startup. You can have one log in, but not two. He says something that occurred to me was virtualizations. He said, you can set applications to launch on log in. VMware Fusion allows you to boot a selected virtual machine automatically on application launch. Parallels let you do this too in its own way. He says, this may be available on other virtualization packages. He says, I couldn't find anything in virtual box, though. He said, but if you put those things together, you set up his photos. You know, one user's photos on the Mac mini is normal. Great. You log that user in automatically. Then you create a Mac OS virtual machine. And this is one of those things to remember, folks, that virtual machines can be used to run on your Mac anyway, and in parallels in VMware. And I think virtual box too, I don't know that I've tried it. But I'm pretty sure that you can run, of course, Windows and Linux and other operating systems, but you can also run other copies of Mac OS. I think going back to, I think Sierra was the... No, no, you can go further back than that. Snow Leopard was the last one you could not virtualize. So I think you have somebody in forward. You can virtualize. And that's really handy to be able to run older versions of OSes. Also handy to do exactly this. So you could have Mojave virtualized in, you know, parallels or VMware, have that auto launch, have that one log in to the other user's account. Now you've got, boom, you know, one person has their stuff downloading to the Mac, the other person has them downloading to the Mac inside the virtualized container, and boom, you are good to go. So a very creative solution, Rob, and also a good reminder, as I said, for all of us, that virtualization on your Mac need not be operating systems other than Mac OS. It can be, but it can also be Mac OS on your Mac. There is something about the licensing of Mac OS that requires it run on Apple hardware only. So I don't think you're going to easily be able to run Mac OS virtualized on something like your Synology that you're testing, John. But maybe there's a way. I was asking them that. We'll see. I because I mean, there's virtualization products that are multi-platform, of course, you know, like VMware, they make one on Mac and one on PC. So. So I think there may be a way, depending on the format of the container to run that. I'll let you know. First thing I want to do is get my is somehow get my parallels environments running. Sure. Virtualization. Sure. You're your non Mac OS parallels environments. Yes. Got it. Cool. Which are we? Yeah, I'm still running. Yeah. So I still so I run. So I still run XP, just just for kicks. No, that's fine. But you but I'm just pointing out that I don't want to equate parallels to only being able to run Windows or Linux. Parallels can also run Mac OS virtualized on your Mac. Yeah. So. So. Cool. Very, very good. Very good. OK. And then another way to solve this is offered by listener Neil. And he said. I'm going to guess that some sort of background process needs to be running for photos to sync for these surface services. And that's that's correct. He says assuming that's the case and that the process can be identified, which I believe it can. I think it's photo assets D and maybe also photo library D. He says it might suffice to have that process running under the required user, even if that user is not logged in, especially if that process does not require any access to the GUI. And I think that's correct. He says, if this is the case, it may be feasible to create a task for launch D to run this process on boot for each user that needs to have photo syncing taking place. And so that would be to use CG or another way would be to use CG session. CG session is a command that allows control of the user session so you can switch to a different user ID and then run a process. So if you could figure out what this process launch looks like, it might be possible. It would take some experimenting. He said he doesn't run iCloud photo library or even photo stream. So he cannot test this, but very, very handy and interesting. I mean, this is actually a scenario I run into a lot with people where they, you know, they use their laptops as their sort of daily drivers. And but they also happen to have like a Mac mini in the house. And if, you know, most of the time, your laptops, you know, you have to buy an SSD. You can't rely on having external storage connected to it all the time. So you probably don't have enough storage on your MacBook Pro or your MacBook or your MacBook Air to run to save local copies of all your photos. So you want to save them all in the Mac mini, but you don't want to have to think about it. And that's the scenario that we're in here. You can hang an external drive off it, point both photos, libraries at it and boom, you're good to go. So I like both of these solutions. I got to play with this one from from Neil. And if anybody else has any thoughts on it, please do share. Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. Any thoughts on that, Mr. John F. Braun? I'm just one user. You're just one. You are. Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still still. No, I know. Yeah, yeah. Let's go through. Let's go through a couple other tips here while we're at it. We're in tips mode this morning today. Whatever time of day it is for you is what it is for us. Listener Dave sends in a tip. He said, for years, I used a Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad instead of Apple's smart keyboard. I did this for one reason only. I love TextExpander over Apple's text replacement options and settings. Why does this matter? I could not figure out how TextExpander's soft keyboard, their on-screen keyboard could come up when the smart keyboard was in use. This was necessary because TextExpander has those cool snippet options, which is another quick tip where you could push a button on the TextExpander soft keyboard. This allows you to get the snippets typed without even needing to type the shortcut. He says, so I needed to have a he says, with a Bluetooth keyboard. I could access the smart keyboard. Why? Because Bluetooth keyboards let you press one button to bring up soft keyboards, not apples. He says, I researched and Googled and read articles over and over to try to find a way to bring up the soft keyboard with the smart keyboard attached. No joy, but I was wrong. He says, sometimes I love being wrong. You can do this. The odd, what the heck does that mean? Down pointing arrow on the screen in the lower right hand corner is the secret key. It's there when you're typing text, push and hold it. Don't tap it and the Harry Potter magic begins. The soft keyboard comes up. I sure wish this was more obvious. He says, for TextExpander fans like me using an iPad as their main driver, this will delight and trance and intrigue. I almost fainted when it worked. He says, good thing I didn't or I wouldn't have finished the TextExpander snippet. I wanted to type. Thank you, Dave C. From Houston, Connecticut native. Excellent, excellent stuff. Yes, very good. Very, very good. So cool. I like it. Pretty good. Pretty good. And and another tip, John, from listener Craig about the eSim and iOS 12.1. He was having a problem where we talked about this, actually. I don't know if we talked about it in a show, if it was post-show or something where the did we talk about this in the show, John? I can't remember. Where he was having an issue and could not connect to a he had a previously or he has had a 10 and a half inch iPad Pro and prior to iOS 12.1, he was able. It's a Verizon iPad Pro and he was able to use the internal eSim to add extra services. When iOS 12.1 was released, it stopped that option for him. And presumably because iOS 12.1 opens up the eSim on the phones, it sort of broke this functionality. He found a workaround. You have to take the Verizon Sim out and then put it back in and then you can use both, but only for a limited period of time. This has been reported to Apple and other people are reporting it too. So if you are a Verizon iPad user and are having problems using a secondary data provider that the workaround is take the Verizon Sim out and put it back in, that opens up the options and settings and hopefully an update to iOS 12.1 will solve this problem. So pretty good. You don't run a Verizon iPad, right? Your iPad is the T-Mobile 200 megs free deal like mine, John. Is that right? Yeah, but actually it hasn't been working. I have to go to their shop. I think the Sim is bad. It says T-Mobile in the menu and it shows bars, but if I turn off Wi-Fi, it can't access the internet. It's weird. So I think there's something wrong with the Sim. I called them on some like, here's the phone number for it and all that. And they're like, yeah, looks like it. I'll go to their store. Interesting. But you are correct. Yeah, I only have one device on Verizon, which is my iPhone. Got it. Got it. All right. And then Graham in the forums reminds us that you can manually configure iCloud Mail. They have Apple has instructions for Windows users. And of course, those can also be used on the Mac. So it was an answer in the forums to someone who's having trouble getting iCloud Mail, iCloud to send mail for them. And Graham accurately pointed out. He's like, you know, you don't just have to inherit the auto-configured outbound mail server. You can configure your own either for use or testing or both, but handy stuff. So again, our forums at mackeekub.com slash forums are great places to be. We would love to see you there. Any more thoughts before we get on to the questions, John? Because we have some questions. Nope. OK, you know, actually the next thing that I want to do, Mr. Braun, if I may, is to talk about our second batch of sponsors. Does that work for you? You may. All right. Our next sponsor is Eero. We're at Eero.com slash MGG. You can get what is currently my favorite mesh Wi-Fi solution. Those of you that were at Mac Tech this past week heard me talk about mesh Wi-Fi. And what did I say during that session? The same thing. Eero is my current favorite. Why? Because first of all, they are the most mature mesh Wi-Fi solution. They've been solving this problem for a long time. They understand it. They're on to their second generation of hardware, which includes some tri-band units that are twice as fast as their predecessors. And they have Eero Plus. Eero Plus is a service that can come with Eero if you visit the right link, which is Eero.com slash MGG. We'll talk about that in a second. It provides you a simple, reliable security solution that defends all your home's devices against a growing number of threats, such as malware, spyware, phishing attacks, et cetera. 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Visit Eero.com slash MGG and at checkout, enter promo code MGG and you get $100 off the Eero base unit and two Beacons and one year of Eero Plus. You're gonna love it just like we do. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is Jamf Now. I mentioned I was at Mac Tech last week. I couldn't possibly have talked more about Jamf there. More people were talking about it there. It is a super simple solution to use to keep track of all of the Apple devices that you need to keep track of. Be they your own, be they your employees, be they your clients, your family members, all of it. The way it works is Jamf sets it up with Apple's mobile device manager profiles and lets you manage and protect your Apple devices from wherever you are. You can check your inventory, you can distribute Wi-Fi and email settings, you can deploy apps, you can enforce pass codes, you can protect company data, you can even remote lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere. Jamf Now helps you manage your devices so you can focus on your business. Instead, no IT experience required. And here's a cool part. MacKicab listeners can start securing their business today by managing their first three devices for free. Add more, starting at just two bucks a month per device. Go create your free account right now at jamf.com slash mgg. That's J-A-M-F dot com slash mgg. Start managing all your devices even if you just have a kid away at college or something super handy. But once you start using it, then you'll find, whoa, hey, I could use this for my business. I can use this for anything. Check it out. J-A-M-F dot com slash mgg are thanks to Jamf now for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you wanna take us to a question from Cindy from Indy? Yeah, this is, let's see where we go with this one here. Hi guys. Can I install a printer that doesn't exist on site? I'm trying to create a PDF from InDesign in printer spreads. InDesign has a print booklet option and then you can save to a ProSkip file and then use distiller to convert to PDF. But InDesign asked me to use a printer profile and I'm going to choose from printers. I have, which are cheap inkjet and laser printers. I need to be able to choose a high quality digital printer. Can I do this? Add a printer to choose an InDesign even though I don't have one. That's a good question. And I remember having to do this a while back. Of course, the obvious solution is to hook up one of those but I see this as remote work and it doesn't make sense to do that. And we'll decline that incoming phone call. All right. Yes, I think there's a way to do it because I was able to, on one of my machines, Dave, to add a printer and right now I got an HP LaserJet 500 color MFP in my list of printers. How did I do this? Yes. And I'll tell you how. So, go to System Preferences, Printers and Scanners. And you're going to see your local printers probably. There's a little plus sign in the lower left-hand corner of that window. Click on that. Now, first I'm going to offer you a bonus tip. So what you should see is your local printers. If you right-click on that window, Dave, you're going to get Customize Toolbar, all right? Okay. And the thing that's not in that toolbar that I think everyone should add, just because is advanced. So what you do is when you get the Customize Toolbar, take the little gear advanced and drag it into the toolbar. Right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Okay. All right, so here's a little tip on how to customize toolbars because it's pretty much the same thing when a program gives you the option to do this. Right. So now you've got the Advanced button there. You may need this. I'm going to take one path and then maybe I'll take another path. So you're going to see a list of your printers here. Click on any one of them because it doesn't really matter. Then you're going to get a thing that says name and it's probably going to be the name of the printer. Change it to something else just so you can find it later. I'm going to call it Ghost Printer. Okay. All right, fine. Now there's a location that it may have grabbed. And then here's the key, Dave. So normally what it does is it does Auto Detect to pick the driver that it thinks is the best and that'll probably appear in that list for that printer. Here's what you want to do. In the use menu, click on it and there's going to be a select software option. Huh. If you click on that, guess what? You get a list of all the drivers that you've ever installed or have been pre-installed. So Mac OS typically comes with a lot already for the popular brands, Canon and HP and Epson and stuff like that. Sure. Actually, back up. Before you do any of this, find the driver for the printer, the high quality digital printer that you want and install it so it'll appear in this list. But once it appears in this list, Dave, click on it. You know, I'll say, okay, here. So I just said I had a brother, something or other here. Click on add. I don't know say setting up printer. It may say, you may get some warnings, but continue. And then it'll... At that point, yeah. Yeah, and then at that point, it's going to add the printer. Like I said here, so I have on my one machine here, a ghost printer and it says kind, HP Lages yet. What I'm assuming happening here is that that printer is using the driver for that printer so that if you output something, so if you then try to print something, choose that printer and choose that printer and then say send to PDF or send to PostScript. Sure. So that's one of the options in that menu. It's going to be designed for the printer whose driver you have selected. Does that sound reasonable? It does. Yeah. I haven't been able to try this because I don't happen to have a high quality digital printer or type set or anything around here. Right, right, right. But I think that's one way to... Now the other thing is that you can also... So I mentioned the advanced thing. So also if you add a printer and you click on that advanced tab, that gives you some other options on setting up a printer and depending on the type of printers you have. So it'll sit there for a while so it's searching for printers. But then you're going to get some additional options for adding a type of printer. And I think it has like LPR and some other things. And again, you can make up some of this stuff here. It may say, like I did one where I set up, I think it was an IPP printer, which is a protocol for talking to printers. Sure. It may ask for like an IP address here. So here it says IPP colon slash slash and I typed in some IP address. And at some point it said, hey, I can't find a printer here. And it's like, yeah, whatever. The key is, so here's the takeaway. When you're setting up the printer, go to select software after you've installed the driver for that printer. And it should show up there and once you create the printer that you've named. Distinctly, I'm hoping this works. Please, please let us know. Yeah, that's pretty good, man. I like that. That's good. Cool. Cindy from Indie. Very good. We had a question from Dave, which I love when questions sort of inform us in ways that show us where lights can be shined to help sort of enhance the knowledge base of the collective here. And Dave is on that. He says, because I like to run my own router, I typically turn off the wifi in my cable modem and also run the cable modem in bridge mode. I don't recall you guys talking about running cable modems in bridge mode, at least not in the past couple of years. Says I've been using bridge mode for many years, through many changes of equipment and the intent. It was to avoid multiple NAT scenarios. It says, but I wonder if I'm doing something that is no longer necessary since you guys never mentioned it. So here's the thing. First of all, what you're doing is absolutely the right thing to do. It is absolutely necessary if you want to avoid the whole double NAT thing and double wifi thing and all of that. Really, truly smart. You're doing exactly the right thing where I want to shine the light is on what device you're actually using because what you have, at least based on what I'm interpreting here, Dave, is what's called a residential gateway by a lot of ISPs. A residential gateway is three devices in one. Before I tell you what those three devices are, I want to talk about your routers for a second because your routers are actually these days, two devices in one. A router that has wifi in it, which almost all routers do these days, is actually a router and a wifi access point in the same box, right? So you have the ability to do the routing, then you have the ability to do wifi, but you could buy devices that are separate and do those things, okay? So your router is really a two in one device, anything we call a router these days because it also has a wifi access point in it, most of them do. Now let's back that up and apply that logic to Dave's scenario and his residential gateway. What is it doing? Well, it connects to his cable line coming in, it does routing and it also has wifi capabilities. So that means it is a router, it is a wifi access point and it is also a cable modem. It is three devices in one for that. And sometimes even four devices in one if it's also doing your telephone service, right? So now let's think about Dave's question. Cable modems are always in bridge mode, most of the time, because they don't do any routing and you can get a standalone cable modem that all it does is passes through the data that it gets from the cable signal. But most of what we wind up getting when we get a modem from our ISPs are these residential gateways that has the cable modem, the router and the wifi access point all in one. And in those scenarios, what Dave wants to do is he wants to dump it all the way back down to a cable modem turning off the other two devices inside it, it's turning off the wifi, turning off the router. That's what Dave's doing and it's very smart to do that if you then, for example, want to run like Eero or something. And so you would turn off that part of your cable, your residential gateway, you'd make it just a cable modem and do that. If you're paying 10 bucks a month though to your cable company for this privilege, you might be better off just buying a straight up cable modem and that way, you know, you're getting the functionality you want, et cetera, et cetera. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Uh-oh. Yes. All right, I wasn't sure. Sometimes. Well, so my personal situation, so I have what some would call a telephony cable modem. Sure. Two of the pieces that you mentioned. So there's the ether, there's the F connector, I guess. There's the cable coming into it and what's coming out is ethernet and an RJ11 for the phone service. For the phone. Sure. So that's my scenario. On the other hand, the last time, so my parents, they're with Xfinity and they started yelling at them saying, well, you have a DOCSIS2 modem and you should really get something new and they eventually did and theirs is all in one. They have everything in it. Yep. They have the wifi, they have the routing as you pointed out and the telephony in. Yeah, so they've got the four in one essentially in that sense. Yep. Yeah, and I think we decided at some point. So they did have an airport but at some point I decided, well, you know what? It actually doesn't look too bad. I mean, it has, you know, it's 802 AC and all that. Yeah. You know, I mentioned that I gave my wifi talk at Mac tech and one of the things I always say when I talk about this is if your cable modem from your, whatever device you get, if your router that you get from your cable company works for you, then it's okay to keep that, right? Just like your parents did it. It gives you a single point of management. You can call your cable company and they will help you manage that. But the one piece of advice I have in that scenario is if you're paying 10 bucks a month for this, which is generally what they charge, so $120 a year, you should and you are able to call them up pretty regularly at least once a year and ask them what new device you can get because you're not actually paying for that particular modem. You are paying for lease of a modem slash router slash gateway from them and you might as well have the best of whatever they offer because you're paying 120 bucks a year for that privilege. So make sure you are always up to date but other than that, if you're okay with the cost benefit, you know, ratio and it works for you and there's no headaches, stick with it. No problem. With me at some point when I had a change in service I think they gave me a higher tier of download or something. All of a sudden I started seeing this charge on my bill. They were charging me 4.95 a month or 9.95 a month for modem rental and I'm like, you know, in the decade plus that I've been with you, you never charged me for it. It's always built in. They're like, well, yeah, now we're charging you. And it's like, okay. Yep. Bye-bye. But what they did is offer an option. So they actually have a co-branded. So it's actually an Ares cable modem and it says optimum on it. I wonder if you could use that. They developed it specifically for them. It's an Ares, you know. Yeah, I don't. My guess is they didn't develop it specifically for anyone. They just put their label on it. Oh no, it's like a TM822. I mean, if you look at the info page, it's like I'm an Ares, TM, whatever. Model, whatever. And it's, you know. But that's what I'm saying is my guess is it wasn't developed specifically for your broadband provider. Yeah, they just decided. Slap their label on it. Yep. Yep. Cool. All right, Chuck has a question. He says, are you and the MacGeek app team okay with Mojave for a 2012 MacBook Air? He says, I'm happy with High Sierra. So I've been ignoring slash postponing the daily reminders to upgrade to Mojave. If I decide to stay with High Sierra for a while longer, is there a way to get the app store to stop the daily reminders? You know, so certainly, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's a good policy because the corollary to that is if it ain't broke, fix it till it is. And you know, so you got to choose your path. So that always applies. But in general, based on what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, talking with other consultants, you know, I think you're gonna be okay to upgrade that machine to Mojave. If you're happy with High Sierra on a machine, Mojave is gonna run at least as well. If not, perhaps even better is sort of the general consensus. And at MacTeX, actually this conversation came up quite a bit, or maybe not quite a bit, but it came up once and we were all kind of nodding our heads saying, yeah, this is the first time in a while that at this stage of the game, you know, two months, less than two months, six weeks after release, like we're all okay, kind of, you know, advising people to head down this path if you want to. If there's no specific reason to, then don't feel like you have to, but yeah, I would give it a thumbs up. How do you feel about that, John? Not sure. Okay, are you running Mojave on all of your machines? Now that I think about it, not that we're good. Okay. Yeah, I would say, yeah, it's, actually, I wouldn't necessarily, I'm trying to think back what I did recently again to my parents, you know, my family, my IT. And actually, last I was there, they were like four OS's behind. I mean, they got their iMac, you know, quite a while ago. And I think I finally decided to upgrade them, not to Mojave, but to two or three after that because it was, well, actually, the App Store was bugging them. So I would say, if you're within two or three and you don't feel a need, all right, you know, stick with it. Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say right away, you know, I'm still nervous about installing something as soon as it comes out, you know, let them work the bugs out first. Sure. And it looks like they have to some extent. Yeah, that's kind of the thing is it, you know, it's a pretty, it came out as a pretty stable thing. Both Mojave and iOS 12, you know, Apple's updates this year were focused more on, you know, making sure things were okay under the hood as opposed to adding lots of new features. They did, of course, with Mojave, add the whole, you know, Marzipan thing, which lets you recompile iOS apps relatively easily, relatively easily for macOS and take advantage of some of those libraries. Right, right. You went away and then I went away, now I'm back. You're back. I didn't hear you for a while and I was babbling. So I figured if I didn't hear you, so I gave some of my thoughts there. Okay, well, we missed them. We missed, well, actually we got quite a bit of them and I agree with you. Yeah, yeah, it's there, it's good to go. So, cool. All right, so yeah, I would say that was a little disjointed, but thumbs up to Mojave. If you wanna do it, yeah, I think you're okay. Obviously shoot a backup first. Clone is my advice. And here's another piece of advice. When you are gonna clone and do that backup, certainly clone to another disk if you want, but if you have some sort of large long-term storage like a NAS or even just a big drive that you sort of dump things onto, create a disk image clone of your Mac. I recommend doing this once a year anyway. There have been times, and I'm speaking from personal experience, where you can get into a scenario where you deleted a file, so it doesn't get backed up anymore because you've deleted it. And then your backups sort of cycle out of their rotation and you look back and you're like, hey, six months ago I had this file, where is it? I once deleted my entire presentations folder, like gone. The every presentation I've ever given was just gone because they're all stored in one folder. I'm sure I must have deleted it from somewhere. I don't know why or when, but I started looking back through time machine backups, no, and then I remembered, oh, I've got that old, my old machine. I have a clone of that drive that I saved off before I formatted it, and I dug into that and sure enough, there it was. So if you have the room storing a disk image of your clones or of your drives before you either decommission them or once a year before you do a major OS upgrade or whatever, it might just save you down the road it's nice to have sort of a frozen in time snapshot, if you will, so. So there's my extra advice on that one. Moving on to Gary, Gary asks, he says, I started a new job this week and they wanted me to upload a photo for my badge. If I use my iPhone, of course, there is the take a photo option which will bring up the camera interface, but what's the best way to access my photos on my Mac? For some reason, I can't seem to find the folder that photos keeps all my photos. I have iCloud Photo Library, so when I open the photos app, I can see the photos I wanna use, but when I click the choose file button, I can't find the folder with them in it. The only workaround I found was to go into the photos app and drag a copy of the photo I want to use to a folder like the desktop. Is there a way to streamline this for future uses? So yeah, you could dig into the photos library and if you have the local copy of that photo, which iCloud Photo Library may or may not keep, you could dig in by right clicking on your iCloud or on your photos library. It's a package, so you then choose show package contents, then you can see some of the options there and or some of the contents there. Look in the masters folder. That's where you would find this stuff if it's there, but frankly, I think you're better off doing it the way you've already done it and here's why. Photos are now generally stored as HEIF files, right? That's that new high efficiency image format. That's what HEIF stands for. And when you export them, it converts them to JPEG, which makes them far more compatible. Lots of things are now compatible with HEIF, but not everything. And it wouldn't surprise me if some badge creation engine that's used by some company's intranet might not have been updated to support HEIF in the last year or whatever. So dragging it out, you're converting it to JPEG, you're getting the full copy of the file, whether or not iCloud Photo Library had downloaded that particular one for you. It takes care of all that and then you can save it out and you're good to go. I have things like my headshots and other photos that I use regularly. I do two things with them. Number one, I mark them as favorites or I put them in an album so that I can easily find them when I'm navigating on my phone, like you said. But I also take those few things and just save them off to a folder. I know it means I have two copies of them potentially locally, but it makes life way easier when I'm in a scenario exactly like you described. So that's what I do. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Yes, because now I think I understand the question he was asking. I think what he's asking, when prompted on his Mac for the location of the photo file, he's not seeing that. Correct. I think what he has to do, so I just started jumping around here and I think I have an answer, Dave. Okay. So I went into, because I'm like, I'm almost certain this option used to be here before. The thing is he needs an interface to photos so he can pick his files, right? Fair. I think there is one. All right, so I'm in Safari right now. Okay. And let's say open file, all right? Bring up a generic file open dialogue. All right, well, you're gonna see your sidebar and you're gonna see probably the last folder you've been to or something like that. Then I just saw this, Dave. So if you scroll down on the left, the bar all the way at the bottom, hey, look, there's a media category and look what's under it, photos. That's your interface into your photos library. Not bad. I like it. Yeah, sure. I'm like, you know, because I think Apple has always provided like a shortcut to get into your photo library of whatever, you know, iPhoto, Aputure, whatever. Sure. And that's where this is. So it's not immediately obvious. I mean, they put it all the way at the bottom there. But now I'm looking at it. Now it's churning, it seems to be, but then now, okay, my photo stream just popped up. Yeah, so they let you choose by moments, collections, years, places, albums. All right, there's your interface. You just gotta scroll down. Cool, cool. Yeah, that'll work. If it works, yeah, pretty good. That would be the right way to try that. I wonder if that would also do the auto export translation to JPEG. You know what I mean? Like how much of a translation layer is that going through, right? Because it's gonna give you access to your iCloud photo library. So presumably you would be able to choose a photo that you don't actually have on your Mac, right? That you just have the thumbnail and it would then pull it down and do all that work. Will it also translate it to JPEG for the, you know, in that interface? I'm not gonna test it right now, but that would be an interesting thing to test. I'll test it. Yeah, so yeah, pretty good. All right, Gary, a different Gary, in the forums writes, he says Apple Photos Export only has one option for naming destination folders, and that is location comma date, where the date is spelled out. Location comma November 4th, 2018. Is there a utility that will read the date from the folder name and convert it to, you know, four-digit year, two-digit month, two-digit date? Of course, there are plenty of file renaming utilities with date naming functions, but I haven't found one that will read the date in actual folder names and convert it. And so I believe we have an answer to this from Jeff Lambert, 670, sorry, in the forums, and that is to use a better Finder Rename 10 to do this. And I believe that's correct, but if that's not the right answer, or you know a different answer, we've got a link to this post in the forums right here in the show notes, which the show notes are always just in the episodes, which you can get to from macgeekgab.com. Go there, you can click on this, get to the forums and answer the question yourself, which is awesome. We love all the participation that's happening in the forums, it's great. All right, I think we have time for one more, John. So we will go to Jeff, we will wrap up this photos section. He says, this is a follow-up to an exchange we had for a couple of weeks ago. He says, you guys had talked about using power photos for merging photos libraries, fantastic. He said, you'd also suggested carbon copy cloner for a backup of that new library, again, fantastic. Says, however, I may have failed to mention that I have time machine turned on and there is a full backup of my Mac hard drive that's also going to my Synology. So he's using carbon copy cloner to point this to clone his photos library to his Synology and then also using time machine there. He says, am I correct in thinking that using carbon copy cloner to also backup my photo library to my disk station is redundant and so taking up space on my NAS. He says, I guess I thought carbon copy cloner would be using off-site cloud storage. So keeping with three to one recommendations for backing up time machine files to cloud or backing up the Mac directly to the cloud, I pay for iCloud, I pay for Dropbox. He says, and I have my Synology. I would also like to be able to backup my partner's Mac so I don't hear him whining if and when it fails. He says, sorry, this is a common question. Well, no, it's a great question. Yeah, if you're happy with your time machine backup to your Synology, then you don't need to also use carbon copy cloner to backup a subset of that data AKA your photos library to the same destination for sure. As for backing up to the cloud, there are many options. There are three that I'm gonna recommend here. They are probably an order of awareness is the way I'm gonna put that. Backblaze works really well. Acronis true image is one I've tried this year and also works very well. It's got some additional stuff in it too. And very recently, and I'm really excited about this, Arc ARQ from Haystack software launched their own cloud service. So for years, Arc has been this standalone piece of backup software that you can buy and then point it at a cloud of your choice and that is still available. However, to make life easier for you if you don't wanna have to manage buying your own cloud storage, Arc now has Arc cloud. And I was looking at the pricing the other day at Mac tech now that it is announced and it is I believe six bucks a month. I hope I have that right. For one terabyte of storage, you can buy more than one terabyte and you can use that one terabyte for as many Macs as you wish. So if you have a couple hundred gigs on a few Macs, guess what? You can put it all into that one terabyte of storage. It's not limited per device. So I would check out any of those three. The Arc one is new. I've been using it. I've been having great success with it and it's been working well. So there you go. So there's three for you. Do you have, what do you use for cloud backup, Mr. Braun? Or we talked about this recently. Yeah. Well, currently I cloud. Okay. Okay. You know, in some of the various sync services Dropbox OneDrive. Sure. And I selectively print. So I think almost all my stuff is in multiple places, which I think is one of the recommendations here. Sure. Personally, so on my Mac book, I do not back up large files because I don't like looking in the menu bar and it's like, yeah, backing up 50 gigs over wireless. And it's like, no, no, no, no. I don't want you to do that. So I exclude my parallels VMs, which are multi gigabytes and the directory where my photos library is. Okay. And so you're okay just not backing those up or you back them up differently? Oh, no, I back those up with carbon copy clothes. So I'll back those up to a physical, a local physical drive. Gotcha. Gotcha. So between it being in iCloud and it being on that, I choose not to put it in Time Machine. Sure. Because those files are typically huge. Makes sense. Okay, so you've got, and you are okay not backing those up to the cloud, right? Well, the library is getting backed up by default. No, no, no, yeah, your parallels things, sorry, yeah. Yes, I'm okay with just having those on a local backup. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, and really that's what it is, is being, as we like to say, eyes wide open about it, right? We're, okay, here's what's being backed up. Here's what's not being backed up. Here's what's only being backed up in this way, but not that way. And having a scenario where when your computer, you know, if you assume that your computer is just completely and utterly destroyed or stolen or lost or otherwise unusable by you, can you recover? Like that's the scenario you need to paint. And if you can do that, and you can do that in an amount of time that is acceptable to you, and that's gonna be different for everyone. Some of us, like me, I need clones of everything because I need to be able to get back up and running somehow on some other device quickly. Then that's why I also do clones in addition to a time machine, in addition to a cloud backup. But if you could wait two weeks to get back up and running, okay, well, then maybe only storing things, you know, you want, maybe you don't need a clone, right? Maybe you need a local time machine and, you know, a cloud backup or something. But there you go. I do all three because, you know, we preach it here every week. We should, you know, but there you go. Anyway. All right, any more thoughts on that, John, before we move on our way for the day here? Preach it, brother. Preach, yeah, there we go. It's time. It's time. It's been fun though. I like that. I have some, my earlier keystroke fumblings leave me with some extra editing work to do. I chopped up the show into, I believe at least three distinct pieces, but normally we record just the one because that's all you need. So that'll make life a little bit fun. So you got your digital tape ready. I have my digital splicer ready. Yes, exactly. Digital splicer. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to all of our premium subscribers. We talked about how to contact us, but what we didn't mention was that if you are a MacGicab premium subscriber, you can email us at premium at MacGicab.com and we do prioritize those. In fact, I wanna say, I'm gonna pat myself on the back here. We did a great job this week, even though I was traveling, keeping up with all of your questions. I created a routine in my day and it worked out great. We were able to keep on top of it all and it was good. And John, you were answering questions. It was great. Had a good flow going. So thank you to everyone for contributing and asking questions and tips and all that good stuff. You know where to find us on the forums. We talked about that several times in the episode. I do wanna thank the folks at CashFly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I wanna thank all of our sponsors. Of course, as we mentioned in the episode, Ops Genie from Atlassian. Eero from Eero and Eero Plus, of course. We had Jamf at jamf.com slash M-G-G and LinkedIn Jobs, LinkedIn.com slash M-G-G. Of course, in our podcast marketplace, we have sponsors like Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com, Barebones Software at barebones.com, Ring.com slash M-G-G. All really good stuff, really excited. We're having a good time, having a good time all the time. I have two things to say, Mr. Braun. It's Veterans Day. So, to all of our listeners who are veterans and have loved ones who are veterans, never forget and thank you for your service. And to everyone because it's, you know, how we do things here, I'd like to share a very important thing and that is don't get caught.