 The Mac Observers Mac Geekab Episode 807 for Monday, March 23rd, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geekab, the episode that is of the show. Look at me. I'm all tongue tied today. The show where you send in your tips, your cool stuff found, your questions. We answer your questions. We try to share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. We share our cool stuff found. The goal is every single time we get together, each and every one of us learns at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include two sponsors you've heard from us about before. And one new one. The new one is mailroot.net slash mgg, simplysafe.com slash macgeekab and expressvpn.com slash mgg. We'll talk more about those URLs and why you will have visited them shortly. But for now, as you might have guessed, 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? As well as can be expected. There you go. Yeah. I'm glad we get to do this. Like this is, this is, I am always glad we get to do this. I know I say that all the time and it's always true, but, but I'm especially glad we get to continue doing this. So this is, it's good. That's good. Let's, let's start with a quick tip, shall we, John? For those of us that are spending a little more time with our Apple TVs. Todd says, my non geeky son showed me an awesome tip when using the remote app with your Apple TVs, the iPhone's remote app. He says, I can use the iPhone's volume buttons to change the volume. I had no idea. I'd been using the TV remote and the iPhone remote app like a caveman. So thank you. That's a great one, Todd. Todd actually, Todd sent in a lot of great stuff this week. So Todd will be featured throughout the episode. But that's excellent. So very, very good. Very good. Are you using that app, John? Am I? It's part of the remote app. Yeah, it's sort of integrated with iOS 13. So yeah, cool. Yeah, I was doing some stuff actually with the Apple TV might as well share. This is kind of a quick tip. Sure. So one thing the Apple TV, you know, knows about your iOS devices and when there's a need to type something in, like, you get a notification or you should say, hey, you want to use the keyboard on this thing to type that stuff in. Because it's kind of a pin and neck. Oh, yeah. Otherwise. Yeah. For sure. But yeah, you know, with what's going on here, someone asked me about, oh, what are some good shows to binge? And I'm like, oh, well, you know, here's, here's one fringe. And so I searched for it and it came up in IMDB, which is Internet Movie Database. And they let you stream stuff for free. I was like, oh, that's cool. So you know, I was watching it on my computer and I'm like, oh, you know what? I want to stream it to the Apple TV because, you know, the screen's better there. But when I tried, I got a HDCP error and I'm like, how do they know I'm doing this? So HDCP is the HDMI copy protection protocol, right, which is done only over HDMI so you can't, so AirPlay does not contain it, right? Right. Yeah. But there is a way you can watch free IMDB stuff. So I didn't know this, but apparently Amazon had acquired them a while ago. Here's how you can watch the IMDB stuff, which is not immediately obvious. Get the Prime Video app on the Apple TV. Oh, nice tip. And then if you search for the show within the Prime Video app, it will find IMDB stuff. And it did. Interesting. All right. Hey, that's a good little quick tip. Thanks, man. Good. Fun. We will put that in the show notes. In fact, it's already there. Cool. Todd, I'd said, was going to make several appearances today. And his second appearance has to do with one of my favorite services. Probably not one you're using today, but Tripit has made Tripit Pro free for essentially six months. It either ends six months from when you join or September 30th. But for anybody that does have to fly right now knowing about cancellations and changes and having something like Tripit Pro, keeping abreast of all of that, that's huge. I mean, it's huge all the time, but especially right now. So kudos to Todd for finding that and kudos to Tripit for making Tripit Pro free for anybody for six months. That's awesome. So thank you. Good stuff. Good stuff. Going back to Episode 805 for a little while here. Listener Derek helps us understand managing the family shared calendar because we were talking about someone. Someone had written in and said, Hey, you know, I'm sharing my iCloud family with more than just my nuclear family, which is fine. Like I was saying, I do that with my parents and he's whoever wrote in. I can't remember what it was. I said they wanted to there's that family calendar that just gets auto created. And we were talking about ways to deal with having a calendar that maybe wasn't shared with everyone in the family. Well, it turns out that family calendar is also controllable just like any other calendar. By default, it opens up to everybody in the family, but you can go into the calendar app. And then on the bottom click on calendars, then select the info like the eye and parentheses icon thing on the family calendar under iCloud. And there you will see everyone on the calendar and you can just remove people that you don't want to have access to that calendar. So thank you, Derek. That's great. I had no idea. I feel like I certainly worked around that in a different way. So thank you. It's always good to know the right way to do things. So thanks, Derek. Good stuff. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to Robert, from 86. Yeah, that's good. If you're going to do a family thing, but maybe it's for like one member of the family and you want it to be a surprise is. Well, no, you're not controlling individual events. You're controlling access to the entire calendar. No, I understand. Okay. All right. I just wanted to make sure. Yeah. So but yes, you know, so I'm thinking of scenario would be if you had a family calendar. And again, if you're scheduling an event, you may want to exclude them temporarily so they don't know that it's coming up. Right. Right. Right. Right. Cool. All right. Moving on to Robert. He said we were talking in last week's episode about connecting LTE, getting your home internet over LTE, which suddenly becomes a little bit more interesting and perhaps necessary for some of us as a backup. Robert wrote in and we gave some advice. He said for connecting a router to cellular, he said, in addition to the sonology stuff that you mentioned, two options I have considered TP link makes the TLMR 3020 a small travel router for around $25 that has a USB port for connecting an external USB 3G or 4G modem. So it becomes a self contained Wi-Fi router with a cellular uplink. Netgear, he says, has a product that no one ever talks about. The Netgear LB 2120, basically it is a box that acts like a cable modem, but has a slot for a bring your own SIM card, GSM only. What looks nice is it has two ethernet ports, one to connect downstream to your existing router. So just like your cable modem would connect downstream to your router, it provides a broadband connection via the cellular SIM. But the router thinks just a regular cable modem is plugged in. So that's cool. The second ethernet port, he says, can optionally be connected upstream to your existing cable modem. So the Netgear thing becomes a failover connection, totally transparent to the existing router. So you put this in between your cable modem and your router. And if the Netgear notices that it can't get a connection to the internet from your cable modem, it can be the failover connection for your network so that you lose nothing. This is pretty cool. So I might have to test one of these out, John. I've got some ideas for this, but thank you for sending that in, Robert. That's cool stuff and we will put that. It really should have been cool stuff found, flagged as a thing, but I will. I'll call it cool stuff found because, you know, it is. So thank you. Thoughts on that, John, before we circle back to 805 and Todd? No, they're cool to check them out. Yeah, I know. All right. And then, as I said, back in 805, we were talking about CarPlay and Todd and setting the default app for CarPlay or dealing with the fact that when in some cars, when you plug it in, plug your phone in, CarPlay just starts streaming some song all the time. And Todd says he solved this a little bit differently. Todd says, mine was that when I hooked, my problem was that when I hooked my iPhone to my car, it would automatically play ABC by the Jackson 5. Fun tune, but this got old pretty quickly. Off and on, I have tried to find elegant solutions for this problem, even tried to make a shortcut, like you guys discussed, but no love. Mackie Cub 805 got me looking again. My situation, I have no Apple Music subscription, just old school MP3s, et cetera, in iTunes or music. It turns out the music app was playing the first song listed alphabetically, ABC. So he says, I took a hammer to the problem. I Googled for a blank MP3 and I ended up downloading this 480 minute track that is called the 480 minute blank track things by Simon. He says, I loaded the MP3 into the music app. I renamed it AAA and synced my iPhone. Now I have peace and quiet in the car until I decide what it is I want to listen to. That's awesome. Thank you, Todd. Good stuff. I told you Todd had good stuff this week. So we'll put a link to the 480 minute blank track out there. So that's a pretty good solution, huh, John? Nice little hack. It's clever, yeah. Yeah. Yep. All right. Let's see. And then J.P., we've got a tip from J.P. who says, he was having an issue where his Mac wouldn't shut down. I think we talked a little bit about this on the show. We've certainly been going back and forth via email that J.P. has sent into us. You could send it into Premium. Or if you could send it into feedback at MackieCab.com, unless you're a premium subscriber like J.P. And then Premium at MackieCab.com is where you can send it into. But, John, but J.P. had this problem where his machine just wouldn't sleep or shut down or it wouldn't wake up properly. He was having all these issues. And he says, at my wit's end, I decided to clone the data from my external drives in my Thunder Bay box to new hard disks. He says, I completed a three terabyte transfer to a new drive and have installed a new drive in the box. I took the old drive out and noticed that the date on it was from 2013. Holy moly, he says. And so I dropped it into a drive dock and proceeded to use Disk Utility to run First Aid and then Erase before tossing. And when I tried to repair using First Aid, it took three fails before it went through the process. Then when I attempted to erase it in the Disk Utility app reported it could not dismount the drive in order to erase it. He says it took a few tries but then allowed me to erase. He says he tested this with a couple of his other drives. These drives were old and failing, but not failing to the point where he was having like interactivity issues. And once he replaced these two old drives, his shutdown problems went away. So I think it was that they were old, maybe having some retries on right. It was taking too long to dismount them and so whatever was happening in the shutdown or sleep process was just failing. So if you're having weird symptoms or even if you're not, think about the age of your drives because they will fail at some point. It's just a matter of when and it is good to be proactive on replacing those drives at times. And of course, JP found that out the hard way after tearing his hair out. I don't know if he actually tore his hair up, but you know, there you go. Thoughts on that, John? Yep. Another thing he could have done. So I agree that, well, I don't know. The date is not necessarily a thing that's going to make a drive fail its age. Though, like you said, they will fail. But he could have used, we talked about this way back. I've found that 776, using a tool like I think DriveDX is probably one of the better ones that I've used so far. That'll look at various smart parameters and say, uh-oh. You know, this is not good. It'll actually, you know, tell you, hey, you know, this drive is garbage. You should get rid of it. It gives you like a percentage confidence that it's good or not good. We're not good. Yeah, right. Cool. All right. Well. All right. Any more on that? Or are we good on that one? We're good. We're good. I want to, if it's okay with you, Mr. Braun, I would like to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor for the day. Please do. All right. Our first sponsor today is a new sponsor, but one that many of you have already helped us test, and that is mailroot at mailroot.net slash mg. Mailroot is there to help us stop email threats. And like I said, we're testing it. We have it running on the mackeygab.com domain. It's there to stop spam, viruses, phishing, malware, and even downtime. The first thing that mailroot does is it processes every bit of email that comes in. It does it super quickly, but all our email goes through this and they run it against all kinds of different checks to make sure that there is no malware, viruses, phishing stuff. And then, of course, it compares it against many different databases to decide whether or not it thinks it's spam. The cool part is I get to control all of this. I can go in and set exactly what it's doing, where the line for spam is. I can whitelist some of you. It makes it super easy and gives us far more control than we'd ever have with just our normal email process. So it means that we actually get to see if your mail got bounced. And even that, like when it gets bounced because it's spam or even if, for some reason, there's a message that's blocked by some blacklist that we want to let through, we can go look at our searchable mail logs and control everything. So if we say, oh, no, no, that's a good message, it'll send it through even though it was on a blacklist or it was classified as spam for some reason, very, very controllable. And if you have any questions, their support staff is all U.S.-based. They have no setup fees, no additional support charges. So you've got to check this out. There's more to learn. We will be talking about them again for sure. Go to mailrootmailrute.net, m-g-g for your free 30-day trial and our thanks to MailRoot for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Apple gave more love to the MacBook Air this week and I couldn't be happier. I mean, this is what, three updates to the MacBook Air in basically a year and that's after, you know, many, many, many years of essentially ignoring it. So this week's updates are, well, they're good and they're bad. They're good. Don't get me wrong. Like, as an air lover, I'm stoked. I mean, I have a little bit of FOMO now because obviously I, you know, I feel like I'm missing out on all these new features. But you can now get a, you can now customize the processor. It used to be that you could get whatever processor you wanted in the air as long as it was the one that Apple put in there. But now that's not the case. You can order one of three processors in the air. There is a, actually, let me pull this together because it gets a little weird and I'm still trying to figure out which one, which processors it is, John, in the new air. But you can get an i3 as the base model and a dual core i3 quad core i5 or a quad core i7 now in the air. And I've, I'll put a link in the show notes. I've narrowed it down to two versions of the i3 and two versions of the i7. I know which i5 it is, but the good news is every one of these has hyperthreading in it, which means that you get two threads per core. So on the, on the dual core i3 you can actually get four threads and then on the i5 and the i7 you get eight threads because they're quad core. But it does sort of blur the lines again between the air and the sort of lower end MacBook Pro. In fact, I would say that this is, this doesn't have a touch bar. It has the touch ID sensor, right? But I would say that this, especially the i5 or certainly the i7 one is better than the low end MacBook Pro. A, because of all the things I just mentioned and B, because it has the magic keyboard that your 16 inch MacBook Pro has. So no longer does the air have the butterfly keyboard. So I feel like Apple kind of buried the lead on that one when they, when they put the press release out. I mean, it's in there, but it's not like right at the top of the list. But, but I'm pretty stoked about this. Apple's sending me one to check out. So we'll, we'll have some, I don't know which one they're sending me yet, but we'll have some experiential stuff to talk about. And when the geek bench numbers come in, that's what I'm really looking forward to, to see where it falls on the spectrum. But that's pretty cool, huh, John? Not bad. Yeah. Still like the pro, but yeah, new stuff's better. And they also did a new, kind of a minor tweak to the mini. As soon as I saw that they introduced new mini, I was like, oh man, I just got one. What are you doing this for? Yeah, they lowered, they lowered the price on the air and, and they lowered the price on the mini, right? And, and did like some little bumps to it. I think they basically give you way more RAM and it's faster RAM. I think that it starts at 256 gig. Is that right? 256 gigs of storage, not RAM, but yes. Oh, storage. Yeah, but yes, you're right. The RAM in it is faster. You can go up to 64 now. I think in that, if I'm not, if my memory is not mistaken, you can go up to 64 gigs now and you're, I'm just looking at the specs while we're reading here, but you're right. The minimum storage capacity of the mini as well as the new air is now 256 gigs. So no more 128 gig on the, on the mini or the air, which I think it's great. Yeah. Same CPU options as before, a little bit less money. But yeah, yeah, I know it's good to see these machines like really getting some attention. I think the mini probably deserves a little bit of like the fact that the CPU in it is still the same after whatever 15 months now that feels a little bit old. But the thing is like that, that CPU that I seven that's in there, the one that you got, that's a great CPU. It runs hot though. So I wonder if that's what Apple's working on is some option to actually increase the capacity of the CPU without increasing heat in there and so anyway, which is what I think they're doing in the MacBook Air. That's why I'm having trouble narrowing down which processor it is because like Apple says that the, like the i3 is a 1.1 gigahertz dual core that turbo boosts up to 3.2. And if I look, I can't find an i3 that does exactly that. I can find one. Oh yeah, I can. Oh, I can find the two that do that. It's the i7 on the other side. Let me pull this up. This sort of gets weird and I'll put this chart in the show notes so that you folks can see it. But the i7 is 1.2 gigahertz turbo boost to 3.8. There is one i7 that starts at 1 gigahertz, not 1.1, right? We said 1.1. Oh, 1.2. Yeah, this is the thing. So I couldn't find one that starts at 1.2 and goes and tops out at 3.8. So we got, well, actually we got one that starts at 1.2 and goes up to 4.5. And we've got one that starts at 1 and goes up to 3.8. So I can't tell if they've chipped up the base frequency of the slightly slower one or if they've limited the top frequency of the fast, a potentially faster one in order to maximize heat. But these, these are in my chart. You can spend a lot of time looking at this chart that I put together. I mean, it's just at Intel site. I just check the ones that, that I think it might be. So pretty good, right, John? Indeed. Yeah. I'm stoked to see that like another laptop with the magic keyboard, especially the one that, you know, that for most people, I think these days I would recommend the air. But, you know, just for a general use machine for, if you want to do pro stuff, I mean, with a quad-core i7, like the air definitely spills into that category. But, but, you know, I mean, of course, at the top end is like that 16 inch, which is amazing. That's awesome. I'm, I'm waiting to see if later this year there's like a 13 inch version of, of essentially what you have, John, because that starts to get interesting to me. 16 is a little too big for me. But, but yeah, we'll see. It's fun to have toys, like new toys to talk about. This is exciting. Yeah. And I'm going to give you another, another tip here. Okay. So I wanted to open up the, I wanted to see what was inside of, you know, my new MacBook Pro. At first I thought they were pentalobe screws, but it turns out, I think it's just a regular T5. And there are one, two, three, four, five, six screws on this. So I'm like, okay, you know, let's, let's unscrew it. And so I took all the screws out and then pulled up on the cover and nothing happened. And I was like, hmm. Well, you know, if something doesn't, doesn't budge, you should force it and then it will. No, no, no. No. So I searched around and I found an article, I think the best one here. And you see, I'm already putting a link here. But I found an article said we damaged our 16 inch MacBook Pro. So you don't have to. So the thing is, it's not just letting people know if you get a recent MacBook. And I guess it's probably been this way for a few years now. They have all sorts of clips in there, I guess, to hold the cover, you know, sturdy. Yeah, don't don't just pull up on it. You have to go about it in a very specific way. Otherwise you're going to, you're going to bend it. That's good. That's good. All right. Well, we'll, we'll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes so that people can read up on that. Cool. John, I have a little fun geek challenge. I got a note this week from a listener that was having trouble launching an app, right? And they're like, and anytime I get one of these. And plus, he said, you know, how do I launch this app on Catalina, which I will give you folks a hint. We're going to, we're going to share this geek challenge and we're going to, we're not going to share the answer with you. We're going to let you folks play for a week. And then next week we'll talk about the answer. He said Catalina and always, you know, the information that you get from the customer and I'm speaking and like consultants speak here can often be so misleading. So of course the first thing I try, I download this app. It was the head rush pedal board firmware updater version 2.1.1 for the Mac. I'll put a link in the show notes to the Twitter thread that we have going on this so you can definitely find the same thing and download it and, you know, experience it the same way. My first thought was, oh, it's, it's not signed. So I need to right click on it and do it. So I right click on it. The app still won't launch. I mean, it just like nothing. I go crap. What is it? And I dug in and dug in and it took me a little while. It wasn't nothing. It gave, it gives an error. It does. That's true. Yeah. But it wouldn't launch. Right. Yes. It wasn't nothing. It wouldn't launch. Yeah. Correct. And I think we'll leave it there. I don't want to, I want to let you folks enjoy the journey that John and I each went on to, to get there. So we'll just leave it at that. We'll put a link in the show notes for it. You can play with it. We'll put it in the live stream. We're actually doing two live streams today. Well, same show live streamed to our normal channel at, at what, what is now live.macgeekab.com. And, and then today we're also experimenting with live streaming to our Facebook page at macgeekab.com slash Facebook. And it seems to be working. So maybe somebody in the live stream will get it before the end. That's fine. We will talk about it next week. I promise. No problem. So good. I thought it was a 32 bit thing at first. That's one of my thoughts. As soon as it was Catalina, I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe they haven't upgraded it to be a 64 bit app, but that wasn't it either. Yeah. Red herrings all over the place with this one, which is sort of what makes it fun when you, when you kind of figure it out. It does take getting geeky to figure this out, which is why I'm calling it a geek challenge. So there you go. I was, um, well, before we all sort of had to hunker down, um, which we're in New Hampshire. We're still basically doing by choice, but most people are doing it, which is good. Um, and, and even then after, because I can go in the street and see my neighbor's Wi-Fi, I was helping my neighbor diagnose a Wi-Fi issue. He had, um, he had called Comcast and they checked everything and they said it's fine. But his Wi-Fi was like cutting in and out, but it was mostly like it was out enough that it was unreliable. So I was like, okay. He's like, you know, I think it, I think it's my airport extreme base station, you know, or his time capsule. And so I'm like, okay, well, so I brought him a new router. You know, I have extra routers here. This may not come as a surprise to you folks. And I brought him, so I brought him a router. I set it up with his exact same Wi-Fi network name and, uh, and we still had the same problem. I'm like, okay. Or we set it up actually and it worked, which is sort of the problem. And then like the next day or even later that night, he texted me and he's like, problem. And then we sort of go into, you know, semi-lockdown. And so I, I went into the street and, uh, connected to his network and looked and his cable modem, you know, your, your numbers for your cable modem on your downstream. So you can, you can check all of these, uh, at usually, I have yet to find a operable cable modem where this is not the case. If you go to 192.168.100.1 in your browser, that gets you to your cable modems diagnostics page. You might have to log in most of the time. If there is a password, the username is either admin or user. And the password is either pass or password. So, you know, there you go. Uh, but people can only get to this if they're connected to your network. So it's not really an issue and there's not a whole lot people can change. Even, even you, you can just sort of see things, but there's generally not a lot of stuff that you can change. Unless your cable modem is also your router, in which case there is. And it might be worth having a different password. I digress. So you can look at your upstream and downstream power levels. Downstream, uh, should be, it's measured in, uh, DBMV, I believe. And downstream should be, it's best if it's less than 50, but it's sort of workable if it's less than 55. Um, upstream should be, sorry, I'm going, I'm saying the wrong things aren't I, John? Correct me on this. I'm pretty sure because yeah, I thought to, yeah, when we discuss this downstream, I think is negative seven to positive seven and zero is optimal, right? Correct. But you can go to negative 15 and positive 15. You're right. But downstream should be as close to zero as possible. No, we're, no, I had it right. I had it right upstream. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know, you had it right. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking at mine now. Finally, we'll get this right. You're right. Yeah. Downstream should be as close to zero as possible. It's measured in DBMV. So make sure that's what you're looking at when you look at your downstream lists. So DBMV and it should be close as close to zero as possible. Mine here in the same neighborhood as my neighbor sits at, uh, about three or four. His were in the negative 20s, 30s and even 50s. Some of his connections wouldn't even lock. It was so bad. Like the fact that he was getting a connection ever was shocking to me. And his upstream was fine. His upstream is kind of where mine is, you know, hovering right about 50. And that's also measured in DBMV. So he called Comcast and they then looked again when he told them this specific thing. And then they sent a truck out and said they fixed it. And again, I went into the street and, you know, self-isolating but checking the network and good to go. Right? It was totally, you know, his numbers are basically where mine are now. They said that there was some problem, you know, at the street or whatever. And so the moral to this story is if you're having a problem, troubleshoot as much as you can on your own without driving yourself crazy. But don't necessarily trust that when your ISP says all is good on our end, that they are necessarily looking. They might just be saying, can I see the cable modem from here, which clearly is what was happening. Because if they had looked at these numbers, they would have been shocked. I mean, as soon as I saw them, I took a screenshot and texted John. I'm like, dude, I've never seen anything like this before. Like in fact. What I like is that in the, in the modulation column, there were some that I think said unknown. Unknown? Yeah. Not a really good modulation scheme. I find that's not as effective as like QAM 256 or, you know, the ATDMA or OFDM or anything like that. Yeah. Unknown is not my favorite one. So yeah. So don't necessarily believe your ISP. Check your numbers on your own. It's very, very easy to do. It's far easier to do than what I explained here. Again, just visit 192.168.100.1. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. I know it'll be weird that you can click on a link on our website that links to your cable modem, but it's just because it's the same IP address for all of us. So there you go. And then you check your numbers. And I'm glad I did that analysis too. My upstream, which we were having a problem with before and you encouraged me to call a tech. It was like, yep, it's our problem. These values have not changed for months. They're like rock solid. Oh, that's right. Yeah. They haven't deviated at all where before they were all over the place. Like, yeah, they were spiking up to like 54 or something. I'm like, that's not right. No, that's not. Yeah, that's not good. But yeah, 54, 55 starts getting problematic. Yeah, that's right. They do. I have seen some things. My upstream here used to be same house, same wires used to be 35, 36. Like it was definitely less than 40 when we moved in. And now it's closer to 50. And I thought, OK, did something happen to the wires? Did something happen here? And I think something in the infrastructure has changed because I was doing a bunch of reading about that this week, John. And people were saying, oh, yeah, you don't want it less than 40. If it's less than 40, you might be in a scenario where you lose connection. Like there's not enough signal being pushed out from your upstream. So I thought that was interesting that for whatever reason, the thinking in these were posed from the last few years had changed. And they're like, no, you kind of want it to be in those 45 to 50 range. So there you go. All right. That's all in the show notes. It's good. Everybody's happy. Where are we here? You know what I want to do, John? We've got we've got a while we're on this subject. We have a great question from Willie all about Internet and perhaps even a bit of a conspiracy here. But first, John, if it's OK with you, I want to talk about our next two sponsors. Fantastic. All right. Look, with home security, there's two ways that you can kind of get there, right? The first is the traditional way where you've got to have somebody come out to your house and install it. Or there's the other way. Simply save our next sponsor here because simply save is everything you need in a home security system and you can set it up yourself. Anyone can do it. I did it. It's no more complex than like plugging in a router and getting things configured. The app walks you through it. It takes like 30 minutes, maybe an hour tops. Once you've got like the cameras placed and this, that and the other thing, and there's no trade-offs to your safety because you'll have an army of highly trained security experts ready to dispatch police to your home at a moment's notice 24-7 and it's only 50 cents a day with no contracts. So if you decide that you don't need the monitoring service, you still have all the stuff and you can see the cameras and all of that, you get to cancel because there's no contracts, right? It's why the Verge calls simply save the best home security system because you get comprehensive protection for your entire home. Outdoor cameras, doorbells, those are the things that see outside and then you've got entry, motion and glass break sensors to guard inside. You barely notice it's there, but what's truly remarkable is you can, you know, set it up all by yourself, like I said. So listen, go get yours. Go to simplysafe.com slash MacGeekGab today and you'll get free shipping and a 60-day risk-free trial. You've got nothing to lose. Go now and be sure you go to simply save. S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E.com slash MacGeekGab. That's simplysafe.com slash MacGeekGab. Thanks to SimplySafe for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so look, now that so many of us are stuck at home, it's only a matter of time until we run out of stuff to watch on Netflix. And we all know how ExpressVPN, our next sponsor, protects our privacy and security online, right? But here's something that you might not know. You can also use ExpressVPN to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. So you can virtually visit them and watch movies that would be available to you while you were there. So, you know, like for example, you can watch, I used ExpressVPN to binge some Rick and Morty episodes, which is only available if I connect to the France one or the Paris one, right? It's so simple to do. You just fire up ExpressVPN, change your location to France, refresh Netflix, and boom, there we go. Because ExpressVPN hides our IP addresses and lets us control where we want sites to think we're located. So we can choose from almost 100 different countries. And so all kinds of options open up, right? Very, very cool. I mentioned Netflix, but it's not just Netflix. ExpressVPN sort of does this and works with any streaming service, Hulu, BBC's iPlayer, YouTube, you name it, right? Look, there are hundreds of VPNs out there. We've tested many of them. I don't want to say we've tested all of them. We started testing ExpressVPN when they came on board as a sponsor. That's how we found out about them, just like you are here. But we've kept using them because, for me and for John, it's the simplest one we've found and it just works. You install it on any of your devices, one click, up and running automatically connects. It sort of traverses the network that you're on, figures out the best way out to create that secure tunnel, and then it creates it. So you've got to go check this out. Visit our special link right now at expressvpn.com.mgg, where you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. So you get to support the show, you get to watch what you want, and you get to protect yourself while you're doing it with ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com.mgg. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring the show in this episode. All right, John, I promised a conspiracy talk. Now, as you know, I emotionally support all conspiracies. I cheer them on. I can't intellectually support them all, but Willys actually might have something to it. He says, I have this issue that I've been having for six months, and I wonder if you might be able to shed some light on my internet connection conspiracy theory. The issue is using my wired ethernet or wireless connection makes no difference. The requested web page doesn't matter, but some seem more likely to load than others or to not load than others. I've tried changing my DNS servers, I've tried clearing my DNS cache, and I've tried running onyx. I've had the AT&T technician here three times with no solution. What happens is the page progress bar will go about halfway and stop. Sometimes it will eventually respond with, Safari can't find the server. More often, it just grinds away, never displaying. I originally had an airport extreme but bought a new router, Nighthawk R7000 from Netgear, then exchanged it under warranty as the issue persisted with all three of them. The AT&T tech replaced the original Motorola modem with a Netgear ADSL 2 Plus modem. Same problem, no improvement. He says, I have the same issue on my iPad Pro on Wi-Fi and DSL, but changing to my cellular connection on the iPad will allow the page to load right up, same with my iPhone. As I live in a rural area, I can't get decent broadband, having to rely on 6 megabit down and 512K up to DSL. Although it was bad before November, it worked. Now has come my conspiracy theory part. I believe AT&T is trying to push people off their DSL service because the technician told me they're encouraging people to use their fixed wireless, which has a 250 gig monthly cap. I watch a lot of Netflix, et cetera, and I'm afraid the limitation may affect my viewing. Visions of HughesNet nightmares, right now. He says, I have a static IP address with no cap on my usage. Then one day, he says, I installed ExpressVPN. Voila, no problems. I have never had a web page not load with the VPN. Sometimes a little slow, but very much like it was before the problem. Here's my thought. Since I've asked around and found that others have this issue, I thought, what if AT&T, who has everybody's IP address, is trying to move people off DSL because they no longer want to support it? If I understand correctly, the VPN would blow a hole in their IP tracking. I wonder if you have any ideas to bust my idea because I'm not a conspiracy theory person. Well, this is interesting. As I said, I love a good conspiracy theory. Let's evaluate, John, what we know. What we know is that on the VPN, this works great. Off the VPN, there are often problems getting a DNS lookup to happen. The first step in troubleshooting is isolation testing. Willie's got that one down. This is a great way to isolation test, so kudos Willie for that. Now, let's think about what's different here when the VPN is on versus the VPN is off. The VPN tunnels everything, but it doesn't hide your IP address from your internet service provider. They still see that you have that same IP address. They just see that you're connected to your VPN server and nothing else. They can't see what you're doing across that tunnel, but they can see that it's you and you've got a tunnel. So that's good to know. I mean, if they were blocking things, maybe they'd be blocking this, but if it's just a DNS thing that they're blocking or hijacking, so this adds some perspective. It doesn't necessarily dispute the theory, but it adds some perspective. If AT&T were getting in the way, they would have to do it at this very deep level because they're clearly not stopping your VPN traffic. So what else is there? There's DNS lookups and there's web traffic, at least involved in this test. That's basically it. So is AT&T blocking web traffic? Well, you could isolate that too, right? You could do a manual DNS lookup while you're on your VPN and then put that entry in your Etsy hosts file. This is a little geeky, but there is a file at slash etc slash hosts and if you put the IP address and then the space or a tab and then either one and then the domain or the name, it will use that instead of going to a DNS server. So it would bypass DNS, right? So you could do that and then you could disable the VPN and try it both ways. That might answer the question, but it's a little geeky. The alternative question is to go the other side of this and say, is AT&T blocking or hijacking DNS? And by hijacking, I mean, are they taking any DNS queries that they see and forcing them to be routed through their servers? And this one, thankfully, is way easier to test because especially on a Mac, because Firefox on the desktop now enables encrypted DNS by default. So that would be my next test and you can test, you can check to make sure if you launch Firefox, go to settings, go all the way down. We've got an article about this, but scroll all the way down to network and then, or Firefox preferences, all the way down to network and then there's a button that says more settings or something, click that. When you're in there, you'll see if you have encrypted DNS and which server it's on, I choose Cloudflare for mine. This will completely bypass your Mac's DNS settings. It will send DNS queries securely. So another essentially an encrypted tunnel, okay? But the rest of your traffic is happening locally, normally, I don't want to say locally, normally. So this would be the way to test it. Go get Firefox, check that out and if your issue is a DNS issue and you ensure that you have Firefox's encrypted DNS enabled, then you'll know. So thoughts on that, John? One other thing I would try. Excuse me, so yeah, I think it's DNS related. There is something, unfortunately, the GUI version doesn't seem to work anymore, but there's something called name bench. I'd be very interested to see what comes up if they try to run name bench. Oh yeah. So you'd have to use a package manager to get it, but it's in mine. You do have to use a package manager to get name bench now? I thought you could do it. They broke something a while ago where it doesn't display the results properly. It stuffs it in a HTML file and it used to redirect to it and display it and then somebody broke something. Okay. Or at least that's been my experience. Maybe they fixed it. I heard they were going to be working on like a 2.0, but I don't think that's out. Interesting. Yeah. It'd be great to see what it thinks is the best DNS server or just looking at its results. I mean, if they're doing some sort of weird DNS diversion or something like that. Yeah, right. This tool would probably notice that. Huh. Huh. Yeah, that's true. You're right. It should. It would be worth checking. I'm with you on that. I'm totally with you on that. All right. Let's go to Todd. I told you Todd has lots for us today. Todd will ask us. He says my Apple TV to Samsung TV via HDMI and an ARC HDMI cable from Samsung to. Okay. So his setup is sorry. Should have parsed this a little better. His setup is that he has an Apple TV plugged into his Samsung TV via HDMI. And then he has an HDMI cable running the ARC, the return signal from his. Excuse me from his. It's tea time, John. There we go. He has an HDMI cable running from his Samsung TV to his Sonos Beam running the ARC, the audio return and then CEC, which I think is control channel or something. I forget what it is. His Samsung's internal, his TV's internal speakers are disabled. Okay. So Apple TV feeds the TV, TV feeds the Sonos Beam. Got it. Okay. How he asks is the iPhone able to adjust the volume of the beam. He says he's used, he's of course shared the tip that we opened the show with. And he says he's using the, you know, remote app to do all that. But how is the iPhone changing the volume of the Sonos Beam when he does it inside the remote app? He says, is it that Apple is sending the signal via HDMI, which makes its way through the TV and back down to the beam? Or is there some CEC feature? And yeah, absolutely. It's CEC that's doing this. CEC has a few commands that it can send. It's not overly complex, but it's got enough. You can switch inputs with CEC. You can change channels with CEC and as Todd has found out and proven, you can change the volume with CEC. So that's pretty cool. And it's meant, it's built to work for exactly the setup that you've got there, Todd. That's exactly the reason they put this together for you is that. So yeah, pretty good, right, John? Yes. Yes. All right. Thoughts on that before we move on, John? Yeah, I'll have to review my setup and see if I can get more control. Okay. No, it's for setting volume and stuff like that, but I think like five remote. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. Yeah, we, you know, we're still Logitech Harmony remote people here. And I'm not convinced that there's a better solution than that right now. I mean, for Todd's sort of very straightforward setup, yes, but in general, if you've got a lot of devices, I don't know. I think the Harmony remotes are still the way to go, but it's worth trying to see if HDMI can solve it for you. If you're set up fairly simple, then probably. If not, then Harmony remote. And the Harmony remote's awesome now because it can link with your smart home stuff. So I can tell the A-Lady to, you know, if I tell the A-Lady turn on Apple TV, it doesn't just turn on Apple TV. It turns on the event called Apple TV in our Harmony remote, which turns on all the right stuff. I can even then of course have it, you know, dim the lights and, you know, whatever, change the hue and this, that and the other thing. So, yeah. Yeah, the Harmony remote's pretty good. I like them. And there is an iOS app. So if your remote batteries happen to die because, you know, it doesn't have to be charged every day by any stretch. So you can launch the remote on your phone and then still, you know, control your stuff, which is good too. Lots of different options. Any more thoughts on that before we move on? Yeah, I got to... The TV remote can control your other things, but it's kind of hit and miss sometimes. I think they're like, okay, we'll press this button. Yeah. Does your TV go on and off? Or now try this code. Now try this code. It's very tedious to... To program. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the way it goes, right? Because it needs to... Every manufacturer has like four or five different or maybe 25 different ways that they program remotes. And so you just got to kind of go through the list and find which one you're... Or you can program it directly. But things like Harmony, they have all this stuff in their database. So if you tell them the exact model number, oftentimes it's like, okay, I got you. I know exactly what you need. So yeah. Pretty good. All right. Okay. Yeah. Let's go to Scott, shall we, John? Okay. This is probably a geek challenge. So Scott says, as I'm sure many of your listeners are experiencing similar issues, I'm hoping you will have some answers. I have two daughters, one in second grade and one in pre-K. And my wife and I suddenly became homeschoolers. We have an iMac running Catalina and the new Screen Time app that replaced parental controls seems to be lacking some of the features I recall having and would like. Essentially, I'm trying to limit my daughter's ability to do anything other than sign into their Google Classroom using Safari and maybe play around in Swift Playgrounds for a few minutes. I recall having settings to limit contacts in mail and the ability to remove settings from system preferences. Now, I don't see anywhere close to the amount of control that used to be in there. Please tell me there's a way. So I'm not sure. I'll admit that I haven't spent a lot of time in parental controls. So my pre-Catalina knowledge definitely has a hole in it here. And I haven't spent a lot of time in the new Screen Time for this purpose either. So I'm skating the surface here. But it looks like the content and privacy section could accomplish some of what you want here, Scott. Specifically, the web content allowed websites only section. Because it seems potentially possible to use app limits and always allowed so those are two sections to set ridiculously low limits for all apps and then exclude or always allow those that you want. It might even be simpler actually to use downtime like enable downtime or, you know, make downtime the thing that's happening most of the time and then set those things that you want as allowed exceptions. But it does seem limited and I bet there's some third-party stuff that would work here too. So if anybody has any ideas please let us know. I know I said the address once before but I'll say it again. Feedback at MackieCab.com Did I hear you right that you say feedback at MackieCab.com? I did. Yeah, that's right. So that's what I got. Yeah. Any thoughts on that, John? Nope. You haven't messed with any parental control stuff or anything like that. I presume but I don't. No, I'm the only one here. Right. I was sure if you'd helped out any family or anything like that. All right. Yeah. Well, you want to take us to JP, John? Yeah, we got another from JP. They think we're super-leading to the problem before we're drying dives. Dying drives. Anyways, fellas, do these speeds look right to you? He has a Thunder Bay T3 box plugged directly into a 5K iMac. And here's the drive I got. It's an SEA ST8000 NM0055 which in English is a 8TB Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch drive. SATA3 6 gigabits per second. 7200RBM hard drive. So and it's the iron wolf as far as I can tell. So here's the thing. He listed the question here is what sort of throughput should you expect to see here? Now you may think, well, I should see, it's a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. So I should see Thunderbolt speeds. No, no, no. Thunderbolt is way faster than any Thunderbolt will operate at. How about the SATA thing they said, you know, 6 gigabits per second. Should I expect that sort of speed? Well, no, not really. Either. Here's where you got to look. So the model number led me to the led me to the Seagate site. You know, enough of the code matched up there. And here's what you want to look for. So you want to get the data sheet for that drive. And then what you want to look for. I just had this up. Man, not here it is. Okay. So I got the data sheet for the drive and the number that you want to look for to see what throughput you want is going to be something with wording like maximum sustained transfer rate or transfer rate is what you want to look for. And surprise this drive Dave guess what the transfer rate at maximum transfer rate is. What's that? It's 210 megabytes per second. Well, that's pretty close to what he's got going. And he was getting yeah, he was getting like 200 or you know, 195. So that's how you determine throughput of the drive. Sometimes you got to dig. Makes sense to get it. Yeah. And then I think we had a further communication and he did a follow up and the thing is if he does want to get better throughput you could do striping I think it is Oh, with multiple drives if he's got them in that J-Bod unit. Yes. Right. That's right. Yep. Yeah. So choosing striping may give you like kind of like two lanes. Absolutely. Yeah. Well that's like what my I mean our disk stations do that because the drives that I have in there are very similar to these but because I've got you know, four or five of them. I can get easily get well more than my gigabit ethernet will let me send. So that's all I need is like, you know, there you go. So or, you know, SSD is right because then speed is way up. Yeah. And the other thing I thought of is I do not know if this has a cache in it. Like some of the synologies that I have and you have Okay. If you want more speed which two doesn't I don't know if this unit has a has a cache. Do you know probably not. I mean if it's if it's a J-Bod how could it right how would it know what to cache it's just sort of a dumb box. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Cool. Now I got one for you. So the thing is I was like, hmm I wonder if I could benchmark my my NAS drives and the numbers I was getting weren't that great. I was trying to use this speed test black magic to speed test and using my NAS as the drive to test and I was getting speeds that were not that great. Now I wouldn't expect them to be as fast as a direct connect drive but I don't know. Huh. I was getting like five megabytes a second or something which to me seems kind of slow. Wait which drive were you connecting? The Synology. So I was trying to use black magic to speed test on a NAS and maybe that's not what you should do. That's interesting. Yeah. Huh. And what kind of were you getting? Like five megabytes a second or something like that. That's really slow. That's interesting. Actually maybe I should let it run longer because I think the thing is it does increasingly larger files. So maybe I was just getting like the beginning and I was just like, this is terrible. Right. Maybe I should let it run a little longer and that if it starts sending larger files. I think that's how it operates. I think it starts with smaller files and then it does larger files for testing. Right. You can set it to use a five gigabyte file which is its default with black magic. You can set it down as low as one but yeah it's between one and five gigabyte files and it writes it and then it reads it and then it writes it and then it reads it. I'll have to test that with I'm not going to do it right now. My computer is doing a lot. It's streaming video and like it's you know it's doing okay but you know it's like there you go. So alright and for those of you that are listening back on the Facebook stream to this my apologies my audio was echoing for a little bit actually for a long time up until right about I don't know five minutes ago I realized that the software that I'm using I'm using OBS is the software that I'm using to stream this. I'll put a link. I had given it our you know feed of our luscious audio here it also was streaming the mic inside my iMac so anytime I spoke it was getting you were getting both so I'm sorry about that that's not the audio experience we like to give you so anyway but you can check that out I think we'll do this again next week too so we'll see how it goes maybe we can stream to a couple of different places at once there's some places to do that so it doesn't just have to be Facebook but anyway we'll get there it's fun and really easy I mean I set this up it took me less than an hour John fired up OBS I'd used OBS before so it wasn't like the first time I'd seen the interface but I built some simple scripts and things like that and not scripts scenes sorry that I can cut back and forth and it works really well it's easy and when I'm not screwing it up with an extra microphone in the mix so yeah yeah Paul Frans in the chat room asks there's a way to remove the mic from the camera that I'm streaming from I don't think I thought I had removed my IMAX mic from from OBS it doesn't seem like I can the only thing that I was able I had hidden it which was the problem I wasn't seeing it in the interface so I unhid it and and just set the set the volume slider all the way to zero and hit the mute button so doubly doubly certain that's all I did so you probably have to exactly Paul so that's how I think that's how we got to do it thanks for asking the question Paul okay let's go on while we're we'll detour back to we'll resume from our detour back to Phil and some stuff about SSD performance Phil says I hope everybody's staying safe and sane yes thank you very much so far so good here I have a question for the experts I have a late 2013 13 inch with 8 gigs of RAM and the original SSD that came with the machine I recently came across a new one on Amazon that is the let's see Samsung 970 EVO SSD 500 Gigabyte it's an M.2 NVMe SSD he said I would need an adapter to make it work which is fine but the question is has SSD technology advanced where I would see an improvement in my speed tests or like a lot of machines is it not the speed of the drive but the speed of the bus that limits me so John I started doing some math and I got it wrong and I'm hoping maybe you can help me on this so no you didn't get it wrong okay but interesting alright I'll tell you why well one I have an article that talks about how to do some of these conversions okay yeah let me tell you what the conversions were right and and you can walk me through this so the late 2013 MacBook Pro which is the one that he has has as it's listed has a 5.0 GT per second PCIe interface and it is times two okay so it also his if it's the early one it's got a 6 gigabit per second SATA interface but he's got the late one so it's a 5.0 GT per second PCIe X2 and what I think that means is that it has two lanes of PCIe 2.0 which goes at 5.0 GT per second and this is where things got weird for me but maybe I did the math you're saying I did the math right I did some math that converts 5 GT per second down to 4 gigabits per second because it's an 8 to 1 ratio because of the way that works so you go from 5 to 4 and so 8 gigabits if my understanding and my math is right would equal 1000 megabits megabytes per second so that's the speed of the bus and now how fast is the current drive versus how fast is the new one the thing was he sent back the reports he did the upgrade his old drive was doing like 750 his new one he's getting like 1500 megabytes per second so this is where I presume that my math was wrong and I converted from GT per second and I don't even know what GT is or at least I can't remember off the top of my head Gigatransactions I think Gigatransactions so this is like raw speed and then we go and then we take some why does it go why do we go from 10 to 8 is it because there's some overhead in the transaction or something look at the article that I found depending on the PCI encoding there's going to be some overhead okay that makes sense alright so why is he getting 1500 megabytes per second on this bus then because so he mentioned that he needs an adapter I looked at the screen so he sent us screenshots from the old installation and the new installation and I guess you missed this when you were looking at them Dave if you did look at them the Samsung has X4 but his oh so the other one was X2 so it's a wider it's the same 5 giga Gigatransactions got it but it has four lanes instead of two it's not the Mac that's limited to four lanes or two lanes it's the drive that's in there is limited to two lanes is that right because clearly if you put a four lane drive in it's talking to more than two lanes unless our math is wrong and I think that's what that adapter is doing is it's giving you more lanes magic alright we will put a link to this drive that he found in the show notes too so thank you for that great I was like how could this be how can they be different I don't know why the Apple Drive didn't use four lanes and this one does so my only guess is that this adapter is somehow giving you more lanes right interesting okay that makes more sense I'll buy that thank you look at this the world is there for the observant and in this scenario I started heading down the math path and I never zoomed back out glad you did thank you John awesome where are we on time oh we still got some time here wow that's great we'll go to Brian how's that sound John alright okay Brian says I don't know if you've run across this but I have an issue with accessing my hard drives I have all my settings to keep drives slash system awake however after a period of time when I go to access to drive the finder beach balls and I have to wait for the drive like it's waking up or spinning up however this happens even when accessing SSDs this even happens on the desktop say grabbing a file and trying to move to trash the file will freeze beach ball and after five to seven seconds I can complete the operation so this is interesting to me I think maybe there is one drive that is going to sleep and causing the system anytime you try to copy things or whatever it might be this is you know Dave theory here trying to see everything and if there's a drive that's asleep it's got to wake it up in order for you know it to see oh can I is there enough space over there can I put it over there and all that stuff and that's holding you down so we've been talking about this app called amphetamine which let keeps your mac awake right we talked about it last week in the show I happened to notice when I was digging through the prefs for it last week that it has a drive alive feature that might be worth trying where you put the drive into this you know you check the box next to the drive and you say keep it awake all the time keep it alive all the time this might be the answer I would do it with all of your drives and then if you want you can start like alright deselect this one see does the problem come back and isolation test but the first thing I would do is throw every drive at it and see if it actually solves the problem so you're not driving yourself crazy for no reason and amphetamines free so we'll put that in the show notes of course so hopefully I don't know unless you have any other thoughts John he didn't mention this I have run into this in the past now I don't know what type of external drive it is but some external drives have like an administration interface and I'm wondering if that may be interesting may be set in the enclosure right right yeah yeah I mean the Synology has that feature it will you know spin everybody down after a while right right oh I see what you're saying if the enclosure itself is forcing this to happen yeah yeah yeah yeah or it's something in the firmware you know check to make sure the firmware for the enclosure or the drive is is the latest well and that's where this drive alive feature can be really helpful or some like it I haven't used the amphetamine one but my guess is that it's doing more than just sending the you should stay awake command or avoiding sending the sleep command usually what these do is they and again I'm extrapolating out I don't know that amphetamine does this but I know what I've done in the past when I've had a drive that's been pesky and simply won't stop falling asleep like you said if it's the enclosure that's putting it to sleep and taking its own decisions well if you go and read from the drive you know say the same file over and over again on a recurring interval it will not let the drive go to sleep so maybe that's what this drive alive thing would do and if that were the case then it would it would get there so pretty good mm-hmm all right good good cool cool uh you know circling back John in the chat room says the related to our PCIE and how many lanes and all of that he says the bus just transfers the data lanes is at the chipset which is at the head closest to the drive so yeah it it could I think you're right John John Braun I think you're right that that it's in either the driver that adapter or some combination too that that does that that's pretty good and you know so anyway I know we're jumping all over the place today it's fun it's because it's the uh you know the great internet blocking conspiracy episodes so we gotta kind of we gotta keep everybody on their toes all right uh let's go we have we have a couple of questions that get a little bit geeky and uh and so they're both about max that won't boot so let's start with scout and let's see how long we we spend in here uh scout writes I just got a uh he said well the problem I'm going to describe I'm curious if you think it's a disk problem or a system problem he says I just got a brand new 13 inch retina macbook pro 2.7 gigahertz uh early a brand used sorry not brand new brand used uh early 2015 13 inch macbook pro 8 gigs ram 256 giga ssd he says I upgraded from sierra to catalina no problem installed my apps and we used it for several days then last night he says I installed the wacom driver 6.3 .38-3 uh so we could use the graphics tablet but it would not reboot into the os after that it starts it shows the login screen but it stalls when the loading bar is almost full so that's not the login screen that's the decompression screen if like there's two screens that you'll get when you turn on a laptop that has file vault 2 on uh or any mac one is the the where you have to enter your password to decompress the drive so that it can actually boot and then once you type your password at the login screen which you can skip uh but if you have the login screen uh once you type your password there's no more progress bar it it just goes to the um you know to your desktop and starts kind of building that so i'm thinking that we're not that's not the the act the account login screen that's the decompression login screen he says uh he sees the same issue in trying to boot with safe mode booted into recovery mode though uh and tried disc utility no problem with the macintosh hard drive but macintosh hard drive data remember catalina splits them into two shows uh an error that says directory valence check directory old zero children for does not match director direct account zero uh disc utility further states that there was an error trying to repair and suggests using fsck instead i tried fsck and it states that it's okay but i'm not sure i properly properly ran it it's difficult to find the correct documentation he says originally i suspected a problem with the new kernel or system extensions added by walkham uh since the timing of the installation and subsequent problem uh was immediate so i tried running text cache to rebuild all of that he says i reviewed system library extensions and library extensions to see if the new walkham files have the correct file ownership and while i saw no problems there i was also surprised to see no walkham files there which i thought was weird he says i also tried the old mac tool belt pram and smc resets and he tried a remote verbose mode boot and the boot process seems to run into trouble with a line marked alf old data sw fs and then it gets into some volume key bag stuff and then complains um that the drive is not readable so i'm not clear if this is a system problem catalyzed by installing the walkham tablet or if it's a disk problem and it just so happens that this reboot is the problem so um i think based on what i'm seen and he sent us some screenshots and that sort of thing john i'm thinking that the walkham timing is a little bit coincidental and it's a red herring but of course it's impossible to be certain of that um i have some theories assuming that's a red herring what do you think about this john which which way are you leaning on it i don't know yet okay well i'll share my theories and maybe i'll spur some thoughts here um so you know it when you have an error and he sent a screenshot that said run disk utility on the entire apfs container um disk utility out of the gate won't show you everything you have to go in disk utility have to go to the view menu and choose show all devices and then highlight the ssd at the top of the hierarchy of your boot drive not just the the individual volumes there and run first aid from there that may give you more of a big picture and it might also be able to repair this remember apfs is new and so not all the repair utilities exist in the ways that we would want them to yet but it you know just first aid is certainly written by people that are that wrote apfs so there you go um try that and and and i think it would be important to get that to run uh clean all the way through uh and and perhaps run it on each level there on each of the partitions but then also on the top one and get that to run through once it runs clean obviously try booting if it still doesn't work uh then i would try an over the top reinstall of mac os which which um scout in a follow-up note called a repave so we call the nukin pave right which is where you wipe it out and then pave it but this is a repaving over the top so i like this the repave uh and see what the story is after you do that right it might just do it um to to do the the you know the maintenance reinstall the repave uh obviously it would be best if you had a backup before doing any of the things that we're mentioning here because if your if your file system is tied in not fixing it can sometimes result in not seeing files that were there before uh if you can't get a backup well you know this is the scenario you're in so hopefully hopefully you've already got one if not try and make one before making a lot of changes so that that's those are my thoughts on that what do you any any further thoughts actually i have yeah now they think about it recently i thought i had a need to uh boot in the safe mode okay um the thing is they don't uh with the latest os they don't put an explicit indicator that you're in safe mode on the screen so how do you know if you're in safe mode now and i'll tell you how or at least the only way i found system information software there's a list of parameters and one is boot mode as far as i know that's the only place now you can tell that you're in safe mode it doesn't show up in the menu bar anymore um not on my machine oh that's no bueno it used to yeah red letters used to say safe mode and it's like oh okay right because yeah that cleans up you know it cleans up some caches and then other other things like that so huh just thought i'd throw that in the ring yeah other than that yeah i'm with you is uh you know a repave or you know of course you have a backup so restore from a backup right right right okay all right well let's see uh the kiwi gram says uh safe mode should still show in red on the login screen so if you have the log oh and i think safe mode forces the login screen to come up right so yeah there you go all right uh along the same lines jesse has a question about an iMac that won't boot at least not fully jesse says my 2014 27 inch iMac on mojave was unresponsive when i came home from work tonight and required a hard power down uh when i restarted it it would get about halfway through the boot process bar and then immediately restart and say it restarted because of a problem and then repeat i tried to boot to my clone but that only got about 75 percent uh through the boot process and then it restarted i tried to boot it to recovery and that got a little further than half but not quite to 75 percent like the clone and then restarted again tried to boot safe mode and that got the farthest but still failed and restarted i'm beginning to think there's something pretty wrong since i can't even pull up the recovery partition i was kind of looking into getting another mac anyway so maybe this was the incident i needed to make that happen i was hoping to get a 27 inch uh with an ssd or mac mini with an ssd but it'll take two weeks to get it here and i'm not sure i want to wait that long is it worth it i don't do a lot of power hungry stuff anymore and i mainly use it just to uh do more basic duties now like watching videos and host a plex server but it'd be worth it to wait for the ssd i have a mac book to get me by but i'd like to get my plex server back online sooner than two weeks okay thoughts on the restarting problem and is an ssd worth it to wait to have it ordered i will answer the second question first because my answer for it is shorter than my explanation yes it is absolutely worth it i would not buy a mac without an ssd in today's world catalina or apfs in general totally built for ssd's not built for rotational drives even fusion drives start to get a little wonky we just talked about that thing last week where if you're using iCloud drive on a fusion drive it can be really impactful in a negative way to your performance so i definitely the two weeks that you have to wait for the ssd totally worth it in the long run i think okay thoughts on do you have anything to chime in on that that answer there john no okay do you do you do you want to are you abstaining from a vote on this or do you have do you just agree or what is it i'm gonna i'm gonna ask oh no well looking at my last purchases i would say i agree i don't i don't like to presume or anything so i just figured i'd ask you if you yeah okay alright so as forgetting that 2014 to boot it should it is possible though that you have a bad stick of ram that is the thing that comes to mind when everything fails trying to come up with that because if you've got bad ram and the system you know tries to write something to that memory address boom so apples diagnostics might be a good place to go and i think that's i always forget john i always have to look it up i know it has to do with the d key do you have to also hold down commander is it just d at boot that does it i'm looking up the knowledge based it's just d now you are right yeah absolutely absolutely okay uh so we'll put a link to that apple diagnostics in the show notes here but um but you can do that or short of that you can just start taking sticks of ram out too um and that may wind up being i mean if apples diagnostics confirms that it's ram that's a nice thing to know before you start pulling sticks of ram out but even if apples diagnostics doesn't tell you that it's ram well you're probably going to start pulling sticks of ram out anyway although being able to run the diagnostics after each one and have it give you a clean bill of health would be um would be helpful so i don't know there you go i know uh the folks at and i'm i'm trying to desperately remember the name for it here the folks at micro mat who make tech tool all or tech tool pro also make a um a ram testing utility and i'm atomic atomic thank you john yeah so but i don't think you can run atomic here because you can't get your mac to boot so i think you've got to use apples diagnostic uh to get yourself there so but atomic would be the other the other thing or just in general for memory testing um there you go so we'll put a link to all of those things in the uh in the show notes because it's what we do yeah yeah i ran the diagnostics the other day apparently they um upgraded the uh they upgraded the uh uh interface remember how it used to be like this cheesy you know like 80s looking yeah yeah interface now it comes up with you know kind of a plain old screen saying yep i'm you know checking things out and yep everything's okay that's good that's good i don't know if that's a catalina thing or what yeah i'll have to check it out i haven't run diagnostics in a long time did you oh well you're running them on two relatively new machines i'll run them on my i thought they were in the firmware so i think like it would surprise me if this i'm on which is the 2014 had the you know new diagnostics but my 2019 should down in the office so yeah yeah uh yeah okay cool anything more to add on any of this john no okay well i think we've got to uh i think it's it's time we've spent our time for this week we don't want to overdo it you know we want to save some for next week not that not that we've never had a problem in the past getting questions in and your questions have been pouring in uh as of late so it's awesome keep it up please please please keep it up and uh and go review us we would love that go to mackeygab.com slash reviews that's the closest i can get you to uh being able to review us and the you know in the apple podcast directory there but it makes such a huge difference even just one review like the frequency of them having i know we've got lots it's and that's great i don't mean to be dismissive of that but one new one even just one new one every week makes a huge difference and i know we can do more than one new one every week so uh if it's been if it's been more than a year since you've reviewed the show go back and edit your review to kind of you know refresh it and that actually that helps too that's like a new review so so you can do that mackeygab.com we would we would love to have you review the show means means the world to us so and then we'll read your reviews here on the uh on the on the air so to speak so there you go any more thoughts on any of this john before we uh anything to say before we uh say goodbye no okay all right well i want to thank all of you for listening and all of you for everything all of our premium supporters for uh for supporting us at mackeygab.com premium all of you for listening that that's like the first thing on the list sending in the questions tips keeping the show you know that's what keeps the show vital and interesting tell a friend review the show that's that's our ask for this week and uh and stay safe and you know all that good stuff thanks to our sponsors of course simplysafe.com slash mackeygab expressvpn.com slash mgg uh and our new one mail root at m a i l r o u t e dot net slash m g g fun fun stuff we'll figure it all out whatever it is we got going on we'll figure it out it's what we do john i got us into this mess this week do you get us out what uh what do you have to say do you have like three things that maybe you could share i do have three things for you dave and the three things are don't get made