 The Mac Observers' Mac Keekab Episode 746 for Monday, January 28th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Keekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We answer your questions. We share your tips. We share cool stuff found from all of us. It's like car talk for Apple users where the goal is each and every one of us learns at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include Kaptera at Kaptera.com slash MGG, Otherworld Computing at MacSales.com, and a new sponsor that I'm going to wait to tell you about a little bit later here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Just easing back into the usual thing after all the sensory overload and excitement of CES. I think we're all well down from that. All right, good. Not you, though. I still have all kinds of stuff from CES that we haven't talked about yet. Some of which we'll talk about today and some of which actually will be coming in future episodes. So it's good. CES is awesome for that. So many cool things that we get to see. I want to start with some quick tips today, though. And the first comes from Abimanyu, who, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, who says, I have a quick tip for the Apple TV. When you're watching something on the Apple TV, if you tap, not press tap the track pad of the Siri remote one time, it shows you the time remaining, you know, in a little bar across the bottom of the screen. You know, the point at which you're at, it shows you the time remaining and then at the rightmost end of the seek bar and then at the current point, it shows you, you know, where you are on the time elapsed and all that thing. What's cool is that if you tap the track pad a second time right after the first tap, so a double tap, if you will, the current position of the scrub pointer will now change to show you the current local time. And the rightmost end of the seek bar will change to show you the exact local time when the video would end if you keep playing it. It says, I find this really cool and extremely useful when I have to let someone know the exact time I'd be free without having to do any kind of time calculations in my head. Note that this only works while the video is playing and that it won't work if you have the video paused. Also, it only works for the native video player interface on the Apple TV, for example, and it won't work in a custom playback interface like what the YouTube app has. And I hope this helps. Of course this helps. This is one of those cool things, man. Really nice find. Great little quick tip. So thank you for that. So cool. Had no idea. Use the Apple TV all the time. Never noticed it. Because, you know, you probably wouldn't stumble on it otherwise. That's what quick tips are all about. It's good, right? Though some do, as we say, it's a happy accident. It's a happy accident. I don't have one of those. So I guess for us people with older models, I guess the way to get that number is to hit the pause, as he pointed out. Well, but you just, you don't get that number, right? I, I, yeah. Yeah, you have to do the math, unfortunately. I mean, nothing. A lot of videos, if you pause while it's on the Apple TV, you'll get. You should get a scrub bar. So I think you missed what he said. If you tap, you get the scrub bar that shows you the current elapsed time and the total time. If you double tap, the scrub bar changes to show you the current actual local time, like for you in Eastern time. Got it. And then the end shows you when in Eastern time it would end, which is the cool part. Yeah. Yeah, I see. Yeah, I know. You don't have to do the time math. That's good. Another quick tip that came up actually in a TMO staff meeting this week, and it was Kelly Goumont brought it up, but John Martellaro wrote it up, is a quick tip to remind us all about quick look. And this is like the the epitome of why we created quick tips in the first place. Anyone who uses quick look knows to use it all the time. And anybody who doesn't, when you see someone use it, it's like magic. So the idea is quick look is built into the finder and other file dialogues throughout Mac OS, and you can highlight a file and just hit the spacebar. And if it's a file of a type that the finder can interpret or display, it will show it to you. Or if it's a media file, it will actually even play it for you. So if you need to, if you want to see what a picture looks like, boom, you just hit spacebar and it shows it to you. You don't have to open an app, nothing. Same with a pages document. I think word documents even work this way. It's worth trying with just about anything and is a super handy feature and really can speed your your travels through the finder and through your file dialogues. Pretty cool, right? I assume you use quick look all the time, right, John? When I need to. When you yes, of course, when you need to, yeah. And now you may ask yourself, are there ways to extend the things that quick look can understand? And the answer is yes. And where do you want to look for that sort of thing, Dave? You probably want to look in your library folder and then within that folder is a quick look folder. And within that, you're going to see, may see some files that have a QL generator at the end of them. So for example, I see Dropbox and pacifist as two apps here then installed something there. So quick look can be extended. And if you'd like to know how yours has been extended. Or just tell me where this is again. It's in your library folder in your home folder or the main one in the system? I think either one could like a lot of things. It could either be your system library, but if you go, I mean, just just for kicks, go to your any library folder and look for a quick. Yeah, I see. I've got the Dropbox one and a set up one on this machine. Yeah. Oh, cool. Cool. Just sort of toss that in there. If you want to understand what else is being quick looked. I found a website called quick look plugins dot com. I don't know how up to date this is, but it shows plugins for various different types of files, including one that I found for SRT files, which are subtitles, and that would be a handy thing to be able to look at. Yeah, process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll put I'll put the link to that there. But yeah, that's pretty good. I don't think because Apple's as we've seen, Dave, Apple has developed more stores for different things. Like, for example, now there's kind of a Safari extension store. I don't think there's a quick look store that isn't endorsed by Apple. So good find. Yeah, cool. Huh. I I don't know that I knew that that would not. It might be. Yeah, there might be. I don't want to launch the app store while I'm podcasting here because, you know, well, no, just funky. You've got a separate machine. So yeah, well, Apple's usually pretty good about. So if I go to Apple dot com slash quick look. Yeah. All right. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, cool. Well, that's good. I didn't I don't think I knew that you could extend that with third party stuff. See, this is why we do this show. If I knew it, I forgot it. So there you go. All right. Moving on. We've got more tips, more cool stuff found. But let's let's take a question here from listener Bill, who says, I am trying to remotely help my sister with an iPhone battery problem in the fall of 2017. So about a year ago, I gave her my then two year old iPhone six S when I bought an iPhone eight early last year. She took advantage of the low cost Apple battery replacement program and got a new battery installed. She recently contacted me and said that her phone battery was performing so poorly that she can literally watch the battery percentage indicator count down so far. We've tried rebooting the phone and then upgrading to iOS 12 dot one dot three, no improvement. And he showed some screenshots of this and it says her 88 percent, it says that her maximum capacity is 88 percent, which is fine. And he says, and then the second one shows 10 day battery usage. And he says, what strikes me as odd is that the thing that's using the most battery is 28 percent of it is used by home and lock screen. He says, by comparison on his phone, home and lock screen usage is only four percent. He says, is this indicative of some system level problem in my sister's phone and would a restore be the best option at this point? Or do you have other ideas? So it's an interesting issue. And I think I think you may wind up doing a restore on this, which you have to do with a computer if you really, truly want to wipe out the operating system and reinstall iOS there. If you just want to wipe out settings, you can do that in settings general reset, erase all content and settings. But that doesn't replace the OS that said, I think this issue might come back because what you're seeing where you when you see home and lock screen there, there's a lot of things that fall under home and lock screen on iOS, but the one that is generally most responsible for battery usage is notifications. And it's almost like they should include notifications in this just to give you sort of a hint as to what's going on. Anytime your phone has to wake up, i.e. for a notification, that's using the battery. And all of that is attributed. It falls under the umbrella of home and lock screen. So if you're someone that uses the smart notifications or the enhanced notifications, I guess we call them to reply to text messages and do all sorts of things without actually say launching launching messages or whatever app it is, that could be the reason that most of your battery is being consumed there. But you also said that she's seeing her battery fall precipitously like in front of her very eyes. That may mean that there's some other background process that's not being reported here, which is something we've seen that perhaps the settings reset would would fix. So that's that that's the information I have. And maybe that helps you or someone else understand what what you're seeing in that scenario. What do you think, John? Yeah, I was looking at my phone here and I got a home and lock screen at 13 percent. Now, I think in my case, it's probably a combination of what you mentioned, which is notifications, but also if you have your phone, which I don't know how many people do or don't. But I have my phone set to wake on motion. OK, pick it up. Yeah. And that's also going to the lock screen. So I don't know how often you do that. I would say probably in all likelihood, if you have notifications on, that would happen a lot more than you picking up and putting your phone down, unless you're really, you know, Jonesen for some notification. Sure. Well, you know, they do trigger our dopamine receptors. So, you know, that there's there's some truth in in the term. Jonesing for notifications. I mean, sometimes I'm like, is anything going on? Well, if I pick up my phone, it'll tell me if there is. Now, you can keep your phone from waking the screen when you get a notification by putting it face down. That in I believe the six s is receptive to that trigger as well so that when your phone is faced down, it it'll still buzz or sound depending on my mind. I almost never have my phone sound on just because I don't want to annoy people around me, even when I'm home. Sure. But whatever you have it set to, it will still do with the face down, but it won't light the screen until you until you lift it up. And I think the six s does that, too. So yeah, so there you go. Yeah, it's tough. Hopefully that helps, Bill. But it might you might need that erase all content and settings that that may well be a thing for for her on this one. All right. Yeah. I mean, the other thing, though, is that I'm trying to remember the article that I read the other day, but it was basically saying, hey, you know, if you install an update to iOS, you may notice that your battery is going to be draining because we're reindexing all sorts of things. I don't know if they ever explicitly say that when you install it. But that's sometimes the case under iOS is that it's doing a lot of work because they just added some new features or they have to recatalog it or whatever. Yeah, I'm saying I totally. Yeah, anything can run in the background. And it the app I've seen apps run in the background that do not show up if you look at the app switchert. So that that doesn't necessarily keep things from running. It depends on what provisions the app has, because some apps can just launch themselves without you actually seeing them. So yeah. Yeah, of all. All right. Moving on, let's go to Paul here, who asks. He says, I'm making a carbon copy cloner backup of my 2013 15 inch MacBook Pro running Sierra. Will I be able to boot my 2009 24 inch iMac from that? And will I still be able to boot my MacBook from it after booting my iMac from it? These are good questions. And anybody that's been using a Mac for, say, more than about 10 years might remember a day when there were different versions of the OS that would you would you would not. That's the right way to say this. When Mac OS was installed on your machine, it would get a machine specific version of of that of that version of Mac OS that wouldn't necessarily be able to boot other Macs. Nowadays, based on my experience anyway, every Mac OS install is what I would call fat in that it has everything to boot every Mac that that version of Mac OS is able to boot. So as long as your 2009 iMac can run that same version of Mac OS, which in this case, it is a yes, then, yeah, that disk, that drive should boot that machine, no problem. But it wouldn't hurt to test it now before you're in a scenario where you actually need to rely on it. And yeah, once it boots that machine, it doesn't change anything fundamentally about that drive. You'd still be able to boot your your 2013 Mac Pro with that, too. The only scenario that that would be a problem is if, say, you upgrade to Mojave, which I think your 2013 MacBook Pro can run, but your 2009 iMac cannot. And in that scenario, then no, Mojave would not boot on your 2009 iMac because Mojave won't boot on a 2009 iMac. If that makes sense. What do you think, John? I did quite a bit of background researchy type stuff on this. And let me tell you what I found. Oh, my goodness. All right. So first, let me highlight this thing. So one, I found an article here and it's titled How to Install Mac OSICR on Older Mac. You've got it ready. OK. And it goes into detail. So one, well, actually, I'm going to step back a bit here. So how do you know what operating systems your Mac can handle? Well, I looked. So I want to provide one data point here, Dave, to follow up on what you said. Our friend Mac Tracker is a wonderful database of all sorts of trivia and lore about Macs here. But one thing that it shows is that for that particular Mac, which I believe he indicated was the iMac 24 inch early 2009. If you click on the software tab, it's going to say, well, here's the OS it came with, which was 10.5.6. And it's like Maximum OS 10.11.6. I would use Mac Tracker as a guide for how difficult it's going to be for you to install an OS that's outside of the Maximum OS and indicated here, which I believe is information from Apple saying, well, we really don't support running an OS beyond. In this case, 11.6 on this 2009 machine. Does that mean it won't work? I don't think so. What I think it means is that you won't be able to download the installer in that machine because it's going to be like, well, no, this machine is too old, but kind of the end run that we're taking here. 2009 Mac won't. Oh, that's right. That 2009 Mac Mac might not run Sierra. Right. And I'll go into a bit of detail. But well, but I want to take the information here in context. So this is the information that is coming from Mac Tracker, which I assume comes from Apple, even though Apple doesn't necessarily officially support it, there may be ways to get around this. Now one, which I think is kind of a clever end run is you make a clone and you boot a clone drive. So even though you can't run the installer for the OS you want to put on there on the machine itself, you should be able. And I've done this and you've done this, Dave, is that as you pointed out, it's pretty much portable in that you get an install almost. Now, when I'm talking about, hang on, if this machine won't run anything past 10, 11, I don't think it's going to boot from that clone. What I'm saying is, even though this data is in Mac Tracker, I don't know if I think it may still work. And I don't think so. Well, and then I found an article here talking about how to install High Sierra on older Macs, including pre 2009. And the claim in this article from Macworld is that you can do so. You may need a hack. Oh, with a hack. Yeah, there was that hack that existed from Dostud or whatever. Right. Yes, exactly. And that's the article that I found and then Dostud. So somebody wrote a hack. OK, yeah, but but but but whoa, that you need to put that. You need to build Mac OS Sierra with that Dostud hack in order for it to boot on a 2009 Mac, right? It won't just it won't just like if you build it on a clone. No, if that OS is not built. So I misspoke, I thought this would run Sierra. This machine, this 2009 machine, but it will not not without a hack. And that like lots of people have used those Dostud hacks. And we'll put a link to that, certainly in the show notes, how to, you know, how to use it and where to get it. But but just having that clone. So no, the answer I have to retract. So you don't believe that booting off of the clone with high Sierra on that machine would work? No. OK. I don't think so. All right. I don't know because I don't have enough. You actually have a wider array of hardware than I do. Yeah, I don't have anything here where I can even test this theory. Though, you know, I poked around and found people that said, yeah, it may work on older Macs. Now, the thing that they do bring up is that some older Macs will not run high Sierra because although what you said is correct and that you pretty much have a universal install, they point out that on some older machines, something like the Wi-Fi chipset is so old that high Sierra does not include a driver for it. This is probably like, you know, 2.n or B or that or just a Broadcom product that just was deprecated or something. Sure. So they do purge from what I can tell, they do purge drivers for certain classes of things like Broadcom Wi-Fi controllers. So you're not going to get every driver for everything. Right. They're going to. I mean, they just have to do that. I mean, they can't support like a 2.n or B chipsets. It's like, well, dude, why? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm saying, but yeah, that article goes into some detail about what you can expect when trying to run or install the new RS and the older hardware. Yeah, it won't. Right. The Dostudestuff is is meant to make it run. But but just getting it installed, like you said, on a clone or something is not enough. You have to then take the Dostudestuff and patch whatever install it is in order to get it to run because it doesn't have the drivers for that particular hardware. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'll put a link in the show notes to Dostudestuff. It's Dostudewedone.com and they do have one for Mojave as well. So if you want to run Mojave on an unsupported Mac, you can head down that path to most reports I've heard are that this is not stable. So, you know, caveat emptor. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I saw mentions as well. They were like, OK, and another restriction is that some versions of Mac OS, if they don't see a certain breed of Intel processor like beyond a certain revision or code name, they're going to be like, no, don't get it. Nice catch. I should I should have checked Mac Tracker before answering this question because it would have told me, no, no, this is one of those El Capitan is the end machines. So I'm here for you, man. Yeah. No, it's good. And the listeners as well. Yeah. No, thank you. That's great. All right. Can we take a minute, John, and talk about our our first sponsor? Absolutely. All right. I'd like to thank Hair Club for being a sponsor of Mac Geekab today. I know what you're thinking. What does Hair Club have to do with Mac Geekab? We ask this question to because we want to have sponsors that fit for you. 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All right, and it's time now to talk to Christopher. We've got some cool stuff found to handle, my friend. Christopher says in response to Mackiekeb744 and the discussion on apps to aid in removing files associated with deleted apps. I wanted to give a shout out to my favorite app for this task, AppTrap. He says, while it's not updated often, it doesn't seem to need it. It's one task is handled perfectly. It sits in waiting as a preference pane watching what files are installed along with an application outside of the app's own container. When you trash an app, it asks if you want to delete the associated files that it's kept track of. Since I've been using it for years with no issues. And the best part is I don't have to think about it at all. The one thing to watch out for when updating an app and the old version is trashed, it will ask to delete the files, which you probably don't want to do. Luckily, he says there's a warning right in the dialogue about it. Well, thanks for that, Christopher. Very good stuff. I like that. So that's different than the other ones that seem to just kind of go based on their own databases. AppTrap seems to like just watch what's going on. I like that. That's pretty good. Right? Good, Mr. Braun. I think so. For some bizarre reason, I search for AppTrap on this machine and have an email from 2011 where someone was talking about it. And I said, oh, yeah, I use it. Oh, I don't anymore. So why is that? Why is that? Yeah. Huh. Yeah, I thought it sounded familiar for. Yeah, that's that's interesting. Huh. Cool. Well, thanks, Christopher. It's always good. Cool stuff found. Revisited. We like it. It's good. Uh, I have found something cool, John. The folks at anchor have partnered with a company called Yufi EUFY, which makes something called the RoboVac and now makes what's the the model of the RoboVac is the RoboVac 30C that works with your iPhone. And, uh, and it's 240 bucks, which is much lower than it was a week ago when I put it on our list here. So check that out. That's a good thing. Uh, and it, you can, uh, it's a, you know, it's a circular just little vacuum thing that will intelligently go and vacuum your house. So we have our set, you can trigger it with your phone. You can trigger it with a remote that comes with it. You can trigger it with Amazon's A-Lady, right? And, uh, and just tell it to go. And there's all kinds of different modes. You can actually remote control it. If you, if you really want to like drive it around like a remote controlled car, you can tell it to just focus on one area, or you can just tell it to go in auto mode, which means it'll just basically get the entire floor. I have this thing set to go at 3 a.m. every day, John. I wake up and my house is vacuumed every single morning and that is blissful, man. It's a pretty cool little thing and it works. It's, uh, it's smart the way it does things. And what, what really amazed me is I had it, uh, you know, uh, like across the house and it's got this little charging base and the charging base was not in the room that it was in and I told it, you know, with the app on the phone, I said, go home and it made like a B line back to the charging base and evidently it uses infrared at some level to line up with the charging base. But man, it was like magic the way that it just like, it didn't have to hunt around for how to get there. It just knew. It's really really crazy GPS. Oh, GPS inside a house would be a disaster. No, it's not using GPS. No, no, no, no, no, or why? Yeah, you wonder. No, I get it. Um, they must just, it just remembers. I'm sorry. Infrared is magical because you can't see it, but other things can. Correct. Now you may ask yourself, how can I see infrared? And some digital cameras, not the iPhone, though, I think it used to, but many digital cameras, the, uh, optical sensor in them sees infrared and you can tell if this is true for the one that you have, take some of your remote controls and hold them up to your digital camera. If you see a pulsing light, you're seeing infrared. That makes sense. My current point and shoot camera does that. So I would encourage you when, when it's doing its thing is aim one of your digital cameras, uh, or point and shoot or whatever you got, but anything except an iPhone, because it doesn't look like it works anymore. Sure. And you'll see the infrared, you'll see the pulsing lights and I believe it kind of cool. But that's a smart way to find out where something is. So yeah. Yeah. In the cool part with infrared, but it doesn't bother you because it's infrared. Correct. And the cool thing with infrared is it will reflect off of glass, right? You can try that with your remote control at home, right? Aim it away from your TV. And again, this is assuming your remote control is infrared. A lot of remotes these days are like wifi or you know, whatever. So just like, if you have a harmony remote, the new harmony one, it, you know, that'll work from different rooms. But yeah, do it in the summer. I'm like having a blast because yeah, I love bouncing my remote from my AC off of the walls and doors and everything because light kind of does that. Yeah, right. Because light kind of does that. Exactly. Yeah. No, this Robovac thing is really cool. It's our first foray into that world. And it really is like one of the smart home things that has leveled things up in our house. Like it, everybody in the house loves to instead of a instead of an iRobot product. That's interesting because they're like this thing. Yeah. Well, the iRobot stuff is super expensive. Super is like you'll pay double the price for that that you will for the, for these things. And this thing just works great. We've had a couple. I mean, again, I'm doing this every single night at 3 a.m. The other night I was awake at 3 a.m. I'd gotten home from a gig and couldn't sleep or whatever. And I'm sitting in the living room on my laptop, just chilling out. And all of a sudden I hear beep, you know, and it's like that's this thing firing up and it's like the heck's going on. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And occasionally we've woken up, you know, and it's said, oh, you know, the rollers are stuck or whatever. And it's because we left like a dog toy or whatever on the floor and it slurped it up underneath it, you know, like a little stuffed thing or something. But but by and large, it's been, you know, it's totally fine. It's great. And but what are the pets think about it? Are they terrified or they're curious. OK. About it. Yeah. They they basically have learned to that it's part of the deal and they just leave it alone. But again, it's happening at 3 a.m. When the everything everybody in the house is kind of asleep and not there. Well, except the cats that are tearing around at 3 a.m. Cats generally don't the cats sleep about 22 hours a day, John. They're like people use the word nocturnal, but they're just they just sleep is what I think it was our friend Allison, the post of the video at 3 a.m. And it's like, what are the cats doing? And it was just a video of cats just tearing around and our camera was picking it up. And it's like, what are they even doing? Yeah. Yeah, that'll happen sometimes. But but most yeah, most of the time the cats are just asleep. They don't think better to do. It's stupid. All right. Let's see, moving on. Oh, yeah, I saw this on Facebook. In fact, our old friend Steve, who ran Comlink years and years ago, posted this cool little device. It's called the OB 200 OBI two zero zero and it's 48 bucks today on Amazon. It is a one port VoIP phone adapter. So the idea is you plug this thing into your you know, via ethernet, you plug it into your router or whatever. And then it's got a phone port out of it. And here's the cool thing is that you can connect it to your Google voice number. So with this thing, you can make your landline in your house, quote unquote, landline answer when someone calls your Google voice number and you're not your Google voice number you can get for free. And this thing you pay 48 bucks for once and you're done. They it supports all sorts of other services, too. But Google voice is one of them. And that's a pretty cool thing about this. So I share because I thought that was a pretty good little find. He says he's been using it for years, which is which is great. Yeah. So pretty good, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Options are the better. The more. Yeah, exactly. Doubling back to Oh, no, to your your comment about the iPhone not supporting I.R. PJ in our chat room at mackeekab.com slash Stream says the selfie cam. So the the front facing camera on the iPhone 10. Well, I'm not sure what iPhone he has, but he says the selfie camera gets a little I.R. The back cam gets none. And Michael King also in the chat room confirms that at least on the iPhone 10, the front camera works. But my guess is a lot of these front cameras will work on on your on your iPhone. So check that out. That might that might be the answer to finding infrared. Good. iPhone 10 S for PJ. So everything OK over there? I'm here in all kinds of banging and microfonics. And are we all good? Mr. Braun. All right, I'm bringing us back in. John can hear us now. It's all good. Life is life is a highway. We're going to ride it all night long. Let's see. They're right. OK, there you go. Sorry. No, I just. Changed to the selfie cam. And yes, as a matter of fact, I can see my AC remote control blinking its LED. Nice. Cool. Hey, thanks, guys. Yeah, I thought the iPhone was a lost cause there. Now that's weird. So I guess they're just using different sensors for. Well, obviously they're using different sensors for the front and back. Right. Right. Why would they use one that picks up IR for one camera and not the other? Who knows? Well, my guess is they both would pick it up and maybe the front camera is tuned to show it for some reason, you know, like the software for the camera is tuned to show it. Oh, I mean, yeah. Different glass PJ says front facing camera. Oh, maybe it's maybe it's filtering. I could be could very well be could be for the quality of the type OK, that kind of makes sense. Yeah, it does. Good catch. So it could be it could be IR filtering a glass there. OK, but you can still use it to see the magic. You can still use it to see the magic. That's right. Yeah. All right, the magic with your with your phone once we're done. I've once I'm done. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to mess with my phone afterwards, but you guys keep doing what you're doing. It's all good. Everything's there. Hey, speaking of messing with phones, I not only like to mess with iPhones. I also like to mess with Android phones. And the reason is I like to keep up to date on, you know, what's happening on Android and how that experience is and all that stuff. So I actually have two things to talk about here. Number one is one of my favorite brands to mess with is a company. They're the phones from a company called Doogee. Or I think that's how we're supposed to pronounce it. D O O G E E. These folks make killer phones with great big batteries in them and usually with their own cases that keep them like super protected. And the prices on these are awesome, like super, super inexpensive. There I was I'm going to I'm going to talk about the S 70, which was their phone that came out a few months ago in terms of some testing that I just did. And this phone's awesome. It was, you know, a few hundred bucks or whatever. Six and five point nine nine inch screen, right? Octa core eight core two point five gigahertz processor. Like this thing blows away the iPhone on specs. It takes better pictures than the iPhone. And it's just a few hundred bucks, like a fifty five hundred milliamp hour battery. So that's, you know, it's a monster and it's great, right? Wireless charging, all that good stuff. Well, now they're doing a Kickstarter for the next one, which is the S 90. And I think two ninety nine gets you. Yep, they still have slots left. You pledge two ninety nine and you get an S 90 out of them. And so now that's a six point two inch display. An eight core processor again. Ten watt fast wireless charging. I mean, this is an Android phone, so you have to bear, you know, like, but these are good phones. I've used them. I've used them when I've traveled and stuff. It's so I really like these doujee phones. And that that S 70 blew me away when I when I started playing with it. I mean, I have mentioned it here on the show a few times and on TDO as well. It's it's my the S 70 is my current go to Android phone when I need to look at all there. Oh, look at them. They have all these little add-on modules. Oh, I'll see. Yeah, night vision, camera, power, walkie, oh, my God, game. What? Yeah, you can get right. There's a gamepad for the S 70 that you can that you can put on it and it makes playing games great because you're not imposing on the screen. And yeah, it works out really, really well. Yeah. I got a real night vision camera. Look at that. That's right. See. So so in theory, you should be able to take a GSM sim from whoever correct. You sign up with and just pop it in here and you're good. All right. That's correct. And it's yeah, they've got multi like it'll take different size sims and all that stuff. You know, because because sometimes that's what you want, you know, it's pretty good. Yeah. Anybody that offers bring your own device, which I think pretty much all the major carriers do to some extent, right? Correct. Correct. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So with that, I wanted to mention this because I just recently it was just before the turn of the year I started really, I just my son and I had a day to ourselves. My wife and my daughter were away traveling or whatever. And my son 17 now is like, oh, we should go test drive cars. Because I'm like, at some point in the next year, I need to get a new car. Well, I wasn't really thinking that testing that going to car dealerships the week before New Year's Eve was a time where they might really want to make some deals. And I really didn't want to buy a new car. There was no reason to. I could, you know, buy a car that's maybe a couple of years old and be great. Well, I wound up getting a deal on a Subaru Outback 2018 that basically let me drive it off the lot with no depreciation because it was a new car, but it was the end of the year and they wanted to get rid of it, etc, etc. So that's what I'm driving out. And one of my things that I wanted in a in a new car was carplay. So yes, Lucas and I had a very successful experience going out and test driving cars worked out that we actually took one of them home. But carplay has been fantastic. I've used it in rental cars in the past. We've talked about it a little bit here on this show. But but I've learned some things about carplay. And one thing that I've learned, one tip that I've learned is you'll probably still want a Bluetooth your phone to your car just in case you're in the car and you haven't plugged in or whatever. And you get a call or a text you wanted to appear, you know, on the screen and be able to use the microphones in the car and all that stuff. Well, here's the thing. Carplay, the phone and I've found this true in any car that I've tested. So I don't think it has to do with the car. I think it has to do more with the phone. But the the phone will not connect to carplay if it has an active Bluetooth connection at least with that car where it's sending lots and lots of data. It will wait until that connection finishes and then it'll do the carplay thing. So I was finding in my car that sometimes on short drives, carplay would never connect, right? Even though I plugged it in, it would the phone would never fire up the carplay interface because remember, carplay is just an extension of your phone screen. Your phone's doing all the work. The car is just showing you the data. It's like the car becomes your iPhone screen, right? Only certain apps can appear in all that stuff. Really? Uh huh. OK. Yeah, that's just how it was like some sort of embedded software on the. So it's actually doing a. OK, interesting. Yeah, architecture. I mean, it is embedded software in the car to allow it to do the carplay thing. But that's about it. So some smart. So they have to license it. And I think there's been some controversy over that, right? So that's why I didn't want to get another BMW because BMW wants to charge people to use carplay. And I was like, no, screw that. Done with paying that tax. Well, because they so they think because we have to pay up a license that then we should charge our customers. And it's like, no. Yeah, well, they can. They are just not going to be one of their customers. Well, sure, they can. But you may not have a lot of people really excited about exactly. So anyway, we've been really happy. We had another Subaru we were really happy with. And so that's why we wanted to put this. But what I found was was this issue where carplay was inconsistently firing up. And sometimes it would take a few minutes. Sometimes it would never fire up. And I started thinking, you know, I have a lot of contacts in my phone, like a lot of contacts because I sink them all, you know, from my Mac. And we've talked about this, right? You know, I have a lot. And it's caused some problems that have led to some great little solutions in the show. And I thought, you know, I wonder if the delay here in keeping carplay from firing up is my phone sinking all my contacts to my car because if you go in to Bluetooth you know, on your iPhone settings Bluetooth and then hit the little eye, you know, the info circle next to your car, you will see a few options. Most of the time there's a slider for show notifications so that you can have your car display your notifications. And then there's also a slider for sync contacts. Below sync contacts, once you turn it on, you get to see your groups. Which groups do you want to sync to your car? And of course, I had by default all contacts enabled. I thought, well, wait a minute, I don't need to sync all my contacts. If ninety nine percent of the time I'm going to be working with carplay anyway, it gives me the option to sync just my favorites and recents. Like, you know what, that's enough. So I unchecked all contacts. The entirety of my carplay in, you know, initiation problems immediately went away. Since then, 100 percent of the time I plug it in and within about three seconds, it's good to go. So the syncing the syncing of the contacts was keeping the phone from wanting to fire up carplay. Funny enough, it seems like we've had this conversation before, Dave. It's almost like Apple is doing inappropriate syncing of data. Well, it's not inappropriate. Is this photos? Well, no, but you know what I was saying, it sounds like they're trying to sync the entirety of your database rather than just maybe doing like a spot look up when you need it. Do you see what I'm saying? Well, yeah, but it has to because when a Bluetooth, the Bluetooth protocol, the way that it works is it just sends the phone number across to the car. It says here's a call coming in from this number. That's it. That's all that it sends. So if the car doesn't already know how to look up and associate that phone number with a name, you won't get that name on the screen via Bluetooth with carplay. Again, it's just your iPhone screen in the car, so it can just display. It doesn't have to sync. It's all right there on your phone. But this is why you'd want to sync your contacts with your car. Just that if you have a lot of them, you have a lot of them. And that's OK. How life goes. You see what I'm saying is that this may be another case where apples syncing strategy may not necessarily be the best. I don't know that I can blame Apple for this. This isn't. This has nothing to do with carplay other than that the Bluetooth activity kept the phone from firing up carplay because I dealt with this in my in my other cars, too, where it would take forever for, say, music to start playing over Bluetooth because it had to wait until this sync of all these contacts was done. And of course, the sync was happening every time the car fired up fresh. Cars are weird these days, right? Like for four hours or so after you turn it off, they most of the newer ones generally tend to maintain some level of memory. So if you just get out of your car, quick at the grocery straight, you get back in. It doesn't have to do the resync. But if you leave it overnight, it does. So there you go. Oh, not me, man. No, I I I unplugged my battery every night just to, you know, if there's any. Do you really from your car? Monitoring devices that, you know, I can. That's insane. No kidding. OK. I like it. I respect it, but it's kind of insane. People have used it as some people have said that doing that will will calm certain problems on older vehicles. Right. The battery. Well, from what? Yeah, like, oh, it says check engine. Well, just disconnect the battery and then that goes away. It's like, well, there you go. I don't know if that's such a good idea. Check engine is probably telling you there's something wrong. Now you can either ignore it or I actually did this one time. I put tape over the light because it was annoying. But I eventually had the problem fixed. So I've had the opportunity now to mess with CarPlay, which I really like, especially, you know, now that with iOS 12 apps like Waze and others can really be first class citizens in CarPlay, which is awesome. And Siri tends to work really well with with CarPlay and all of that. So it so you can get so you can get Waze on your car's display versus having to do it on your phone. Correct. Is that what I'm hearing? Correct. Outstanding. That's cool. That's and that's new as of iOS 12. They allow third party mapping apps to be used with with CarPlay. So Google Maps, Waze both work as well as, of course, Apple Maps, obviously. I've also because of these, this douji S 70 phone that I've been experimenting with, been able to check out Android Auto. Folks, if you have not been able to check out Android Auto, don't waste your time. It CarPlay blows it away. Apple really does win this battle, at least at this point. Android Auto is very, very limited in I mean, CarPlay is limited in what it can do, too. But the experience of it is pretty smooth. Android Auto has been a mess and it's just very limited, like super limited in what can happen and how and the interface is very clunky. You can't get to things very easily. It's it's like over compartmentalizes stuff in a way that you can't really customize. So I've been I've been very happy with CarPlay and then not at all happy with Android Auto. So so I share that. So if you haven't tested Android Auto, you don't have to worry about what you're missing. And I promise I'll report back if that ever changes, at least from my perspective. So that's that's what I have there. Thoughts on that, John? So to sum it up, though, so I haven't done a lot of CarPlay. I mean, I didn't have a very positive experience a couple years ago at one of the, I think, CEA events in Manhattan where I forget I don't know if it was for it or somebody else. I don't want to point the finger. But they were like, hey, our car is CarPlay. And I'm like, oh, that sounds great. You know, let's check it out. And it was just like failing on the show, which is normal for demonstrating things on a show. Of course. What's supposed to happen? It's supposed to not work when you're showing it to tech journalists, because then they can make bad things about you. But no, and it just didn't work that great. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not impressed. But that was a number of years ago. So it sounds like they've refined it. But I guess to to describe, I mean, when I look at their page here, I mean, it just it's a offloading of certain phone features to your car's display. That's it. It's like think of it as extended display from your iPhone for certain things. Yes. And AV, of course, your audio. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's right. That's right. OK. And I see that they show, you know, so you can do phone music, but you can't do everything. You can only certain things that they agree that are safe things to do while you're driving. Yeah. What's what's frustrating is that, for example, an app like Glimpse would make perfect sense to have a CarPlay enabled version, right, that that could do that. And they have not they have not done that yet. Right. Glimpse being a service that Dave and I often use, which will I deleted. I'm not going to use it anymore. Not until they have CarPlay. That's stupid. Oh, yeah. Because it's unsafe to have that thing running otherwise. But yeah. And for example, like Messenger, you know, messages on iOS, right? And and WhatsApp, both work great with CarPlay, right? It'll read my messages. I kind of disagree with it unless the car is not moving. Why would you even allow messages or does it not allow that while the car is moving? Oh, no, it's awesome. It reads my messages. No, I don't see them. I hear them. It reads me my messages. It lets me respond via voice, tells me if there's new ones, it's fantastic. OK, but it lets you do it safely and that it like will it let you enter? Do you see what I'm going with this? It's like, does it is it going to let you text somebody while you're driving and it's like? Yes, but using voice commands only. OK, not not touch. OK, no. So if I tap the messages app, it says, who do you want a message? And I could say John Braun. It's like and then it would ask me, what do you want to say to John Braun? And then I tell it and then it reads it back to me and it says, do you want to send the message? And I say, yes, my hands never leave the wheel. My eyes never leave the road. OK, I'm just getting the thing that terrified you a number of years when you were driving with me where you're like, dude, you're like, you know, interacting with ways like while you're driving a car. Oh, yeah, no, that's a disaster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, CarPlay does it right. And the and like the WhatsApp also works for messages. Facebook Messenger, no CarPlay functionality. It's like, come on, guys. So there's things that need to get there, but, you know, hopefully they will. It's CarPlay is awesome. It really changes things. And the Android thing is in its infancy as far as that's probably a fair assessment. Yeah, OK, yeah. It may get better, right? There's I mean, it's just software. So, you know, the sky is essentially the limit, but yeah. Hey, I want to I want to talk about our second sponsors that work for you. Fantastic. All right. I'd like to thank Captera for being a sponsor this episode today. Do you remember 1989 when the World Wide Web was invented? You know, we've come a long way in 30 years. So why does it feel like sometimes the software that we use every day at work is stuck in the past? 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And you can find the right tools to make 2019 the year for your business. Again, it's all free. Captera dot com slash MGG. Captera, that's C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash MGG. Just go, it's free. And you can support the show while doing it. Captera dot com slash MGG or thanks to Captera for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you know, we had a question from Ed that talks about, well, using Bluetooth in the car. So it seemed like now's a good time to answer that question. Ed writes, I'm trying to figure out how to achieve a certain Bluetooth behavior in my car. My car doesn't have its own Bluetooth capability except for making phone calls. No music can be played through Bluetooth in my car, but I have an aux jack input where I could connect a Bluetooth receiver. The behavior I want is the behavior I find when I use my daughter's car. She has a Toyota RAV4 and I've paired my phone with her car stereo. Every time I get in the car and turn on the engine, the podcast that I've been listening to just starts playing. I don't have to pair my phone again with their system or even press play to continue listening. The podcast app is open but not the active app and it works even when my phone is locked. He says, I use downcast as my podcatcher of choice. He says, I want to buy a Bluetooth receiver to put in my car that has the same behavior, but I don't know what characteristics to be looking for in the receiver to make this happen. Can you explain what I need to specify in a Bluetooth receiver to get this? So this is a really good question. Near as I can tell, I actually did a lot of research on this, probably more than I should have. That's when I was up at like 3 a.m. messing with the vacuum, sprung to life. Digging into Ed's question here. But near as I can tell, autoplay is controlled by the car for the receiver, but not the iPhone. And I'm fairly certain of this for a few reasons. Number one, lots of articles that I read at 3 a.m. while the vacuum was going. But number two, in my car, I have an option with Bluetooth to enable or disable autoplay. And that's a setting in the Subaru settings, on my iPhone. So I'm pretty sure that's gonna be the case universally. I checked on Amazon and looked at a bunch of different Bluetooth receivers and none of them said one way or another whether they supported autoplay. So I can't recommend a specific one. It might take a little trial and error. It might take some asking of manufacturers, but I couldn't find anything that said, oh yeah, and we either do or don't do autoplay. Some people don't like this functionality as you might imagine, right? It's personal preference. So I think you're heading down the right path, but just dig in. Maybe Amazon lets you ask questions of other buyers. And most of the time, people will answer those within about 12 hours, sometimes a little more. But maybe that's a good question to ask on some of these there on Amazon. So that would be, that's how, you know, there you go. That's how it works. Thoughts on this, John? Not really in the Bluetooth audio world, but I like the question. The only thing I would suggest is sometimes when you're trying to solve a problem like this, especially with older hardware, whether it be your car or your Bluetooth or your phone or whatever is an analog solution, like maybe an on-off switch, maybe a way to compliment. Well, he doesn't want an on-off switch. He just wants to get in his car and have it start playing. No, I get it. What I'm saying is that for people that may not want always to always hear the last song that they played, you get yourself an analog switch. But how would you, I need to, now I need to ask, because I'm not understanding. So if I have, take carplay out of the equation, right? I have my iPhone, it's paired with my car. I get in my car and it starts playing music. What analog on-off switch? What are we, like, how would an analog switch prevent this? I will be speaking of, in the case of taking a Bluetooth to auxiliary in device. If you don't want it to do the autoplay thing, you get a little cutoff switch for it. Do you see what I'm going with this? I do, but then your phone, but your phone will still be playing it, right? Yes, I, I, and so it might mark that episode as played, even though you haven't heard it. So that could be, and then it might play the next episode. I'm just being devil's advocate. Yeah, no, I get it. I'm just offering a different perspective on solving a problem from a totally digital or computer standpoint, is that the analog may sometimes do it for you. Yeah, yeah, I would be, again, I would be careful. I love, I mean, I like this back and forth that we have, yeah, it's good. Is that you don't want to circumvent the features of the system in place and that, oh, well, did I play that or not? Well, I did, but I couldn't hear it. No, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, it's good. I like digging in like this. Yeah, yeah, I use, when I'm on stage, I use, and this might actually be handy because I've seen some of these Bluetooth things over drive cars radio. When I'm on stage, you know, playing music. Yeah, when I'm on stage playing music, I use in-ear monitors, right, so that I can hear what I need to hear without it having to be too loud and, you know, also protecting my hearing from everything else that's happening on stage. And what I do is those have just a normal, they're a normal headphone connector and I have a normal headphone connector that plugs into the mixer and all that stuff. In between that, though, I put a little $4 attenuator so that, and I tie that attenuator to my belt loop and I use it so that I can have an easy, quick way to like just reach down right on my body and control the level. And I usually turn the level on the board up to higher than I'd want so that I have some headroom and I can go up or down. I'm thinking that one of those little in-line attenuators might well be the answer if you're having an overdrive issue where you just turn it down and then it's keeping that level of signal, you know, from happening and you don't get the distortion anymore. So, there you go. You know, when you think about it, Dave, it's all about the levels. It's all about the levels. No matter what you're talking about in life. I mean, line level versus mic level, right? Yeah. I mean, how much confusion does that cost for people? It's like... About 40 dB. Yeah. I think that's the difference, right? Between line level and low level? You're the audio pro, not me, but I know there are different levels and if you plug the wrong thing in the wrong hole. I think it's 40 dB. I don't know, I can't remember now. But it's two different peak-to-peak voltages that are used for different types of equipment and the problem is you can plug one into the other and if you do, you probably won't blow anything up, but it's gonna sound terrible. It's gonna be bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, a lot of things have a switch that lets you pad the signal to go up or down from mic level to line level. I think it's 40 dB. I don't know. I can't remember. It's just, it's a lot is what it is and you don't wanna confuse the two. That's for darn sure. Let's see. Where are we on time here? You know what I wanna do, Mr. Braun? I wanna... I wanna, let's talk about Andrew here. Let's do that quick. Andrew says, I have a new 2018 Mac Mini and discovered the following. Number one, it will not run anything older than Mac OS 10.13.x. And he says boo to that. Well, I'll list these things and we'll talk about them. That's an interesting point for earlier conversation. We're gonna list them and then talk about them. Yeah. Number two, you have to turn off security in order to access the internal SSD via target disk mode. And number three, he says this is more a question than a discovery in target disk mode connected to a 2017 MacBook Pro 13 inch. The Mac Mini will show up as an external hard drive, but if I try to install Mojave onto it, there's a notice that on the drive, when I select the destination, it says I cannot install Mojave onto the drive because it's in target disk mode. What's up with this and is there a way around this and how do I remove all the system restrictions so I can proceed with workflows that I've been using with my Macs for years? Okay, so to your point, John, yes, this is very interesting. And I agree with you, but it makes sense, right? The Mac OS, this machine was built and released in 2018. An OS that existed prior to its release probably won't have all the drivers that are needed to boot that machine. Makes total sense why 10.13 is- Or especially they got this fancy pants T2 chip, right? Well, that's not... I don't think that's the reason that you need Mojave to boot it, but I think the T2 chip is the reason for numbers two and three here. Okay. Yeah, yeah. But no, I don't, like, if the T2 chip is responsible for some part of it not booting it, it's not the only reason, right? Because we've seen this. Generally, most Macs cannot be started up from an operating system that predates that Mac. Even, right? I mean, we've seen this over the years. Even if we're at 10.11.1 and a new Mac comes out, it'll be like, okay, here's a special build of 10.11.2 that knows how to boot that Mac. And then future public builds will also do it. But yeah, I think that's pretty common, I think. I think, I think, right? Or have you bought Macs and previous OSes can boot them? I don't think so. I think it's, I've always experienced it that you buy a Mac and like an OS that existed before it doesn't boot it. I have to dig back into the midst of time. Yeah. I don't know, honestly. I mean, right now my machines are pretty close. I got a 2012 and a 2014 and they're both able to run the latest OS. So I don't really have a good frame of reference. Well, let's look at Mac Tracker, right? I mean, you know, the original OS on that machine we were talking about before, the 2009 iMac is 10.5.6. I don't think 10.5.5 would boot that machine. Like that, that, I mean, I don't know about that one specifically, but my experience with every other Mac has been that. That it's like, oh, no, no, no, no. You need like, this is the minimum. Now, this and everything forward will have the drivers for that. But it sounds like what they're doing is they're taking probably in part because of the T2 chip, but maybe because they're like coming up with a new layer of architecture. Yeah. I'm trying to think about to call it here. Well, I mean, it could be. You know what? This OS, yeah, is that we're only gonna run 10.13. whatever. Yeah. So later. Yeah. That's right. All right. So in terms of the T2 chip, though, these other two things definitely are impacted by it. In order to access the Mac via target disk mode, by default, you cannot do that. And you have to boot in, we talked about this at the show we did from CES, John, the startup security utility. And you get to this by holding down command R and booting into recovery mode. And then once you're in recovery mode and you see the utilities window, go to the utilities menu and choose startup security utility. And from there, then you have these options. You can, this is where you could always set your firmware password stuff, but now on the T2 Equip Macs, the T2 being this security chip that's in there that holds the keys for your hard drive encryption and all of that, you have secure boot and external boot. And if secure boot is all the way on, I don't think with full security, I don't think you can see this thing in target disk mode. I think you have to go down to no security and then you also need to allow external booting in order to do that. That seems to make sense with this T2 chip because otherwise the Mac, I mean, it's built to keep people from messing with your Mac. So, and maybe actually, maybe secure boot's not the thing you have to turn off. I think it might just be external boot. You have to allow the external booting in order for target disk mode to work. So, and go ahead. I couldn't find it. You couldn't find what? The utility, the special utility. Your Mac wouldn't need it, right? I know. Oh, okay. All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll put a link in the show. Do I need to upgrade by 2014 though? Yes. Question. Do you think so? Really? Sure. I'll put it in my book for this year. Yeah, there you go. Really? I mean, it did pretty much. Yeah. Does it do what you want? Yeah. Does it feel slow? There's some entertainment titles that I cannot run because of the Wimpy graphics. So, maybe the answers, yes. Yeah. There you go. I'll wait to see him in the refurb store. Are they in there? Yeah, that's smart. Which in the refurb store, the Mac Mini? Well, 2018. No, not yet. I haven't seen him. It'll probably be another, that came out end of November-ish. So, you're probably looking at February-March before they appear in the refurb store if history is an indicator. Now, in terms of not being able to install Mojave from target disk mode, again, I think this has to do with the T2 chip. I think, and this is truly a guess, but it would make sense, I think you have to install Mojave from that machine booting the installer so that it can coordinate the OS install with the T2 chip there so that the OS can unlock the drive when it needs to and get things booted. My guess is that's why. Because remember, if you take the hardware of that disk, you know, the SSD out of any of these machines that run with a T2 chip, you cannot see the data on that. Like there's literally no way to see the data on that, because you don't have the keys. The keys are not stored on the drive, they're stored in that chip. So I think that's why Mac OS has to be installed that way. That would be my guess. That would be my guess. While you ponder on that, John, how do you feel about me doing one more sponsor spot here? I'll ponder it and then let you know what I was pondering. All right, I'd like to thank Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com for sponsoring this episode. You know, OWC is the place that John and I have gone. We still go for years. We've gone there to get stuff when we need to expand our Macs, right? These people understand the technology that we all use every day because they use it every day. And then they engineer solutions that will actually work for the things that we need them to do. And of course, if they don't work, they totally stand behind it, but it happens so rarely that it's not really a concern. So you got to check this out, right? Things like the new Envoy Pro EX from OWC, up to 2,800 megabytes per second of rugged portable SSD performance, right? That's the perfect portable powerhouse for demanding environments. And I challenge you to say that 10 times fast. Also, go to OWC, turn your iPad Pro into a workstation with their new OWC USB-C travel dock, right? You can use this to connect the display, access images from an SD card, even charge the device all through a dock that fits in your pocket. That's the OWC USB-C travel dock at maxsales.com. And you know, that also works for your MacBook Air 2018, right, with a USB-C port, for your MacBook with a USB-C port, your MacBook Pro with a USB-C port. You got Thunderbolt 3, cool. Get the OWC Mercury Helios FX, right? Connect that to any Thunderbolt 3 equipped Mac or PC for smoother frame rates, elevated gaming performance, an overall performance boost. You take that new Mac Mini 2018, you add one of these with a killer graphics card in there and boom, you've got like, you know, your own little kind of Mac Pro thing going on there. And you can move it from computer to computer to enhance performance whenever it's needed most. Again, check out maxsales.com for more information on all this stuff and really for anything. It's where John and I go when we need to expand our computers and you can go there too. Maxsales.com, our thanks to Maxsales and Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. Any thoughts, my friend? No. Okay, all right. You were pondering, you know, for the last couple of minutes while I was doing this, so I just, you know, wasn't sure. Okay, Paul, Paul Friends in the forums was asking a very good question. He says, with IPv6, you're no longer using NET. He says, will this reveal your internal address and is this safe? So Paul's right. With IPv4, there aren't enough IP addresses to go around and assign individual, real IPv4 addresses to all of our devices. So years ago, router manufacturers started employing this thing called network address translation, or as Paul called it, NAT, that takes one public address and shares it amongst lots of internal IP addresses. That's where we get our 192.168 or our 10.0 or whatever internal range you choose to use. This is how that all works. And so that provides a level of natural firewalling because someone cannot attack your device like your Mac specifically because your Mac doesn't have its own address that's accessible from the internet. It has to go through your router because of the way that network address translation works. With IPv6, that changes every device, not just every computer, every device, your phones, your cameras, whatever. If their IPv6 is capable, if your provider is IPv6 compatible and if your router has IPv6 enabled, every device is gonna get its own externally accessible IPv6 address. This means that your router has to be much smarter in terms of its firewall. Thankfully, most of them are. It used to be that Macs would have their own IPv6 address that they would generate based on the network they were on plus their Mac address, like the hardware address of the network adapter. And they would never reveal that. Instead, a temporary IPv6 address would be generated, I think every hour or something that it would use for outbound connections. That seems to have changed. That doesn't happen anymore. I think it changed in Sierra at some point along the way. So the Mac only has one IPv6 address, but it's hashed in a way that it doesn't reveal your Mac address so people can't know what type of device you're on. But they can know the one true address that your computer is accessible at. So that is exposed. You wanna make sure you're running a router that's got firmware that's up to date. Again, most router manufacturers are pretty good about this. The default firewalls that are in place for IPv6 are all pretty solid. In fact, some might argue they are overprotective, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's much better to have to go in and open up a port than just have everything open all the time. So I think you're pretty safe, but it is worth being fully aware that yes, with IPv6 enabled, your devices now can just speak on the internet. There's no network translation layer happening anymore. Well, it's still happening with your normal IPv4 address, but with any IPv6 stuff, it's not. And if you've enabled IPv6, I guarantee you've connected to websites directly. I know Facebook and Apple and several others run IPv6 as the priority. So if you can do it, they will do it, and you're just operating at that level, no translation whatsoever. It's all just direct. So yeah, it's a good question. Thoughts on this, John? I still see the notifications using hard regeraller where it says, hey, I got a new IPv6 address and not as often as I used to. Really? How often do you see those? Usually when, you know, when I fire up the laptop in the morning or something, I'll see, or just when I'm using the computer every now and then. I don't know who's doing it. Is it my ISP? Is it the ERO? Oh, it could be your router reassigning something or your ISP. Well, do you have a switch? Do you have real IPv6 though, John? Or no? Are you tunneling? Okay. Well, hold on. Let's look here. And how do we know that? How could we possibly know if we have IPv6, Dave? I go to ipv6-test.com. Yeah, I'm going to tell you where I'm going to go. And it's not there, not because I want to disagree with you, that's always fun. It's fun. It's good for sport. Yes. But basically I'm looking at the DOCSIS status page on my cable modem and you may ask yourself, how do I get to this page? And it's at 192. So you run your favorite browser and you go to 192.168.100.1 and it's going to give you all sorts of fascinating statistics. Like I have 24 downstream channels. Isn't that cool? And four upstream. But then on one of the pages here, I think is it event log or CM state? But there's one page here. All right. Basically it says, all right, attempts to get a IPv4 address, five. Attempts to get a v6, none. So there are certain pages on the status page for this modem, which have the word IPv6. And whenever they say that, the number next to it is zero. So I'm going to conclude that I cannot. I'm not convinced that's telling you whether or not your provider would support it for your connection because it's possible. If I were to, if I were to go along with that, then I would tell you that my provider doesn't support IPv4 because my cable modem does not connect via IPv4. It only connects via IPv6 to contrast. So I think that tells you how your cable modem is getting its address. I don't think that necessarily indicates whether your router or devices past it can use IPv6. I could be wrong about this, but I didn't think that was the way to do it. I mean, I think the way I've tested it is, you know, you look up your, well, you look up your ISP, figure out what people say they've used and turn on that type of IPv6 in your router. And it might be that there's a few different ways of connecting to IPv6. One is DHCPv6. Oh, I did that, yes. I did a tunnel at one point, but I don't anymore. So. Okay. Yeah, you can tunnel. I went to, what is my IP? And it says your public IPv4 is this. So what is my IP? Doesn't realize that I'm on, doesn't think I'm on IPv6. Well. As far as I can see. But if you, even if your provider supported IPv6, if you didn't turn it on in your router, what is my IP.com would also say the same thing, right? It's cause it's, you're not going to get an IPv6 address unless you turn it on. The thing is I'm almost certain if I look at my, so what am I running? You may ask John and I'm running Arrow and I'm pretty sure I turned it on in Arrow, but I'll look again. Yup. So we run the Arrow app and network settings and I'm almost certain IPv6 is, at least the Arrow app thinks it's on. So I'm not disabling it from my router. So I don't think the. No, I don't think you, I don't think your ISP supports it. That's right. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I believe you. I don't believe the regular Arrow of the tunnel thing. It was easier on other devices. The, for whatever reason, the Arrow doesn't seem to make IPv6 tunneling easy. Or at least. I don't think it does it. I don't, I don't think that's an option. Cause my last router was the, yeah, what, what did I have the, you had a TP link. Yeah. Yeah, but it actually had a thing where it's like, hey, you want to do a tunnel? So it looks like you got IP, or we'll make you have IPv6. And it's like, yeah, sure. But Arrow doesn't do that at this point. Right. And then, fine. I'm okay. Yup. I mean, for a while we were talking about how IPv6 is like, you better use this or it's like the end of the world. I don't know if it's the end of the world, but it's something that if you can run it, you should run it. I would agree with that. Yeah. It helps the internet move forward at the very least. And may, may give you faster, quicker connections, lower latency connections, maybe. Well, your router's not having to do any routing. Right? It's just passing. It's not having to do any translation. It will still be doing routing, but it won't have to do any translation. So that's another layer you get to take out of the mix. So maybe it's faster. Right. I mean, I still like the kind of dynamic remote IP like secure connection thing, Magigie. That's cool. Say that again. Well, the thing is where you can give this IPv6 address to somebody and then kind of, they can kind of, we fiddled with this a while back, but I haven't really used it since then. I don't know what reason to, but it's like, you know, I don't know if I'd call it a virtual VPN or virtual remote access. I don't know. It's not virtual. I mean, it is remote access. Like that's the beauty of it is you don't need. Right. You just connect. You're good. Right. And that's the risk. It's such an incredibly huge, complex number that nobody's ever going to guess it. So it's like, all right. And you keep changing it. That's right. Well, it doesn't keep changing, though. It used to. Now it doesn't. OK. Yeah. And that's what we're talking about. Yeah. Because I used to say, well, or does it just not change it as often? I don't think it changes it ever unless, unless your internet provider changes your IPv6 prefix, in which case, then, yes, it does change. But otherwise, no, it's a static thing because I use IPv6 locally here amongst my devices and it works great. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. All right. Let's see. Where are we here? Do we have? Oh, yes. This was a question that came up a couple of times, John. You answered Bill's email about it, and then there was also a post in the forums about it, too. Yes, yes. And Bill, it was, we had talked in the last show about how some drives are APFS formatted because they were migrated from HFS Plus and some were APFS formatted from scratch. And how do you tell the difference? That's basically the question that came in in various different ways. So do you want to take us through how you answered it for Bill, John? Sure. Hold on. Cool. Let me pull up here. Kind of dealing with like three things at once here. You know how that goes. Maybe we'll finish doing the show, then you can deal with the other stuff. Yes, we'll do that. Sounds good. Sounds good. We're almost finished here, John. So, you know, it's. No, no, we're in the home stretch here. Yeah, that's the idea. Where is, where is he? There he is. All right. So good question from a bill. Dave and John, during the discussion about. Well, you don't have to answer. You don't have to read his question. We've already set it up just to answer the like just answer. How do you tell if the drive is APFS APFS from scratch or APFS from HFS Plus? And my reply was the message on how you can tell volume was APFS APFSified comes up when you run disk first aid. And the thing is, we didn't mention that. We had the screenshots during the question. Right. The thing is, during disk first aid, if you run that on a partition, and as far as I can tell, you should probably highlight the lowest level device that you can to get the most information. See where I'm going with this? Yeah, although in my experience, it doesn't matter. You can just highlight the volume and it'll tell you. But yeah, I like the idea. Yes. Right. Yep. Right, because you may get less information if you go to a higher level device. Right, right. What happens is you're going to see in disk first aid, when you run on the partition, it's going to have a line that says the volume, blah, blah, blah, was formatted by probably something called HFS underscore convert, and then it gives you a version number here. It's 748.1.46. It's like 748, really. And last modified by APFS underscore K-E-X-T. And then there's another line after that, which I get them as well. But the thing is, Dave, HFS underscore convert is the thing that did this. So I would say that it was a converted volume versus a freshly formatted volume. Now, I don't have the text of what happens if it's freshly formatted, it'll say the volume was formatted by new FS underscore APFS. So it's really obvious which way this went. You have to, yeah, you've got to let the whole disk utility thing run. But yeah, then it'll be in there. Yeah, yeah. That's the. What does bother me is that then he had a little follow up saying, all right, so the thing is, you can also in disk utility highlight a volume and then click on, there's going to be a little circle with an I in it, which means in almost every world, info. And it's like, give me more info. And it's like, OK, let's do that. The hot thing, Dave, that I noticed that he noticed and I noticed, and I don't know if you noticed or not right now, is that if you get the info, it says, oh, by the way, this disk isn't bootable. And sure enough, when I went through my MacBook Pro, which has a bootable, last I checked, like five minutes ago, APFS formatted volume, it also said that it wasn't. So I don't know if it's a bug in this utility or they got a flag set wrong or just explains. So I'm not running Mojave on the podcasting machine, but I am seeing the same thing. I am seeing info for my boot drive that says it's not bootable. That's right. Yeah. And yet you booted from it recently. Yeah, but here's the interesting thing. If you look at the true structure of the disk, right, and go to if you go to the view menu and go to show all devices, you'll see that there's a container above the disk itself. And is that container bootable? No. OK. So that's not is the disk itself bootable? No. So OK. So nothing's there. Nothing's bootable, according to this, which is, of course, wrong. But there's different layers of APFS things. And I don't even think even if you go in discutility to the view menu and say show all devices, I don't think you're seeing everything. And it's possible that the thing that's actually booting your Mac is not one of these things that's appearing here. In that, it might be that this get info thing is actually telling you something accurate. It's just misleading. That's all. I think. I don't know. It's weird. It's Apple. We don't always get to see everything. And APFS, even if you format from scratch as APFS, it's still a little hidden. So that's what I got. Anything else, my friend? I think I lost him. I don't know. He's going to come back. But in the meantime, I'm going to get us out of here. And John will join us again, I think, at some point. He has this problem with Discord where it just stops letting him hear anything. Nobody else I do Discord with has this problem. But John definitely does. Oh, that was exciting. See, I told you, I told you he'd be back. Feedback at mackeekab.com is where you can send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, anything like that. Hopefully John heard me. I think I heard you, Dave, and that before my Discord just violently crashed. But I'm back. You said feedback at mackeekab.com. I did indeed say feedback at mackeekab.com. That's where you can send all that stuff in, unless you are a premium supporter, in which case premium at mackeekab.com is the address that you get to use. Everyone can use the phone number 224-888-GEEK, which, John, is 4-3-3-5. And you can find us on the forums. We mentioned them a couple times during the show. It's at mackeekab.com slash forums. Lots of activity happening there. Someday, John F. Braun's even going to join us there today. I did once again. I will. I promise. There we are. Good. It really is a good place to hang. We like to hang there. Yeah. I want to thank all of our sponsors, of course. And first, I want to thank Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you, the sponsors, of course, in this episode, as we mentioned, hairclub at hairclub.com slash MGG capterra at capterra.com slash MGG. Otherworld computing at macsales.com. Of course, the good folks at Smile. Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Barebones software at barebones.com. Iroh at Iroh.com. It's all good. It's all good. Have a fantastic week, folks. Thanks for everything. Seriously, thanks for everything. Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling your friends about the show. That helps a ton. John, I know you had a couple of issues in the middle of this episode where you might have detached and come back. I hope that your week goes smoothly and that you don't get caught.