 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 882 for Monday, July 26th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take all of those things, we mash them together into an agenda, and we loosely follow the agenda because the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing with their USB-C travel doc, and BBEdit with their new BBEdit 14. We will talk more about each of those things shortly here for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairville, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Braun. And we'll thank Kurt Lee for creating that intro. I think he wrote that for us like 10 years ago, but I keep it in the files and like to break it out every now and then. So nicely done, Mr. Lee. Let's get to some quick tips, shall we, John? Indeed. All right. Gene brings us the first one, and we will read it in a fist shake take style. The hidden in the photos app is a robust map view for geotagged photos. When viewing a single photo, you can scroll the photo up to reveal a map showing the photo's location on a fairly detailed scale map. Of course, the scroll bar is on the right, is hidden until you scroll, giving no indication that there is something there. And this even happens if you have always show scroll bars turned on in the general system preference pane. I don't know why that's the case, John. Maybe it's so that the photo can sort of live on the screen when it's in full window mode. I don't know. You can't seem to find, you can't seem to get to this fine map view going through the info panel and the places view is completely useless for locating an individual photo. I've been trying to get a good map view from the info panel for quite some time now. One more example of Apple hiding good things. Yeah. This is cool. This is there. And it's not just a map view. If there are people in the photo, the icons for the people will show up there. And then you can go to the people. If you go to the map view, it'll show, as he said, where the photo was taken on the map. And you can click on that and see more photos that were taken in the same location. So that's a pretty cool little, I had no idea. And I have the always show scroll bars turned on. So that's a second little quick tip. If you go to system preferences and then go to general, and I'm going there now just to make sure it's there. But yeah, it's there's a show scroll bars automatically when scrolling or always. And I am very much an always person. I like to see scroll bars. I like to know that they're there. And this sort of throws you off if you don't know. So that's what I got. Anything on that? Should we move on? Mr. Braun. I'm going to try it out. OK, cool. Yeah, it's cool. It really like it's I love finding these little hidden things. It's great. All right, Bob brings us. This was interesting. He found a support article called if your Mac battery won't charge. And in that article, it talks about resetting the SMC, something we talk about all the time and something we talk about doing only on Intel Macs. Well, here's what Apple says reset the SMC, which controls how your Mac manages power. If you have a Mac with Apple Silicon, just restart your computer or other Mac computers see this other support article about how to reset the SMC. So this tells me that whatever the analog is to SMC, which might just be SMC and Apple Silicon is reset on every restart of the computer, which is interesting. It's good to know that a restart does more than just a restart, which is which it should. Like there's we have seen very little negative impact of resetting the SMC on Intel Mac. So it makes sense that why not just, you know, reset whatever that is there. So nice. Nice. Fine, Bob. That's it. I love these little hidden gems is good. More, you've got one from another Bob, I think. Right? Yeah, from Bob. I guess this is a follow up from your Apple watch. You can do something like this. Hey, S lady, remind me when I get home, mumble, mumble, mumble. You will get a reminder when you get back home. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, as long as you have your home address set, which it tries to really into it. So yeah, that's pretty good. I like it. It's good. One last quick tip we have from listener Craig here, John, who reminds us he says simply by accident, I stumbled onto a nice quick feature in the Mac OS dock. There is a separator bar between those items permanently in the dock and those items which have just been recently used. And then there's another separator bar between those and the trash can. If you fix your cursor on either of these separator bars and right click, you will get a dock system preferences menu. This is especially helpful when using a dual monitor setup as the dock can shift from one display to the other. Now, using this technique, rather than having to use multiple clicks through system preferences, I can reposition the dock directly with only one click or maybe two. Very cool, Pensacola Craig. I like it. Yep, it's it is one of those handy little things. And it's again, not obvious. The beauty, the epitome, in fact, of the quick tip. So it's good. Thoughts on that before we move on to cool stuff found, Mr. Braun, moving on, moving on. We will let we will let Todd take it away. I think. Hey, John, Dave and sometimes pilot piece. ADD Todd out of Utah here. Currents release of Mac Geek gap. Steer mouse was recommended. Went ahead and did a little bit of quick research. Got a golden oldie that may do the job better and or cheaper. And the guys been doing it for roughly according to the info as I skimmed through the pages. Since before OS 10, you USB overdrive. Like all the other replacement drivers, they don't touch Apple specific drivers, Apple mouse, Apple keyboard, Apple, Apple touchpad. But hey, he's been doing it for a long time. He's up to big sir. He may even go ahead and step into the M one level, whatever. OS is going to be running from there. Yeah, OS 11. Sorry, brain debt, brain fart, even anyway. I haven't been caught. You don't get caught either. Bye bye. Thank you, Todd. I appreciate it. Very good stuff. Yeah, I forgot about USB overdrive. That's he's right. That's a golden oldie, but he's also right. That it has been updated, I think, within even the last few weeks with another big sir related update. So very cool. Thanks, man. That's the idea behind cool stuff found. You want to take us to listener, John? John, yeah, cool. All right. John has another one for people that want to get a PDF of a whole web page. This is something that he does pretty often at work. He used to use a Chrome extension called awesome screenshot. But I now found that a Chrome extension go full page is far superior. It was a scrolling of the page to stitch together a full screenshot of a web page. You can then simply click the download PDF. If you upgrade to their premium version, you can also edit, annotate, share and do other things. But I found the basic good enough for me. Only issue for sites like our main site, which has frozen elements is they will appear multiple times in the screenshot in a way around that really cool. We'll link to that. Cool. I got, well, on that topic, I finally got the answer I've been looking for, John. And and that was it came from many of you. I'll read Jeff's email, but but it came from, I think, Scott and and Steve as well. And maybe even Sean, there were many S's involved, but but I will read Jeff's email who says, in Mac in Mac, you get 882 and prior, you discuss difficulties in printing web pages from Safari. I have found that in Mac OS Big Sur, I am able to get excellent renderings of dynamic or static web pages by selecting Export to PDF from Safari's file menu and simply saving the file to my drive. The export will include the entire length of the active web page, not just the part that's visible on the screen. And it's totally right. It makes it not really conducive to printing, of course, because you probably don't have a printer that prints to paper that's that long, but or it'll be very narrow if it if it shrinks it down to fit on one page. But yes, this is exactly what I was looking for is a way to get a PDF of a single web page. And it was right there in Safari's file menu the whole time. So thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it. And thank you, everybody who sent that in. That's it's nice to nice to put a cap on that one, John. You got some cool stuff found, man. Yeah, so I saw mumblings in my Twitter feed about something called the Apple MagSafe Battery Pack. And I'm like, oh, that sounds neat. Let me get one. So went to the Apple site. I used Apple Pay, which is fun. And I put it on my Apple card. Of course. And it came a few days later. So what is it? It's a battery pack, but it connects using the MagSafe protocol to your. To your iPhone 12. Interesting. Yeah, and you can't use it with a third party case, I would assume. Right. Oh, yes, it works with my case. Really? Yeah, I got one of the spec clear cases. So, yeah, it goes through the case. So. All right, so there are two things. So one, you charge it with lightning. And it didn't come fully charged. OK. I think it's about 1,400 milliamp hours, so it's not quite a full charge. And the phone knows this. So it's interesting when I hooked it up to the phone and alert came up saying iPhone can charge to approximately 90 percent. Oh, OK, well, that's that's a nice nice. Let me know that. And then because, you know, Apple makes the whole thing. So check this out. So and you get two status indicators. One, when you hook it up is the the progress that your phone has made. And then it also shows the battery level of the battery pack. That's cool. Can you see that? Yeah, I see it there. Those people watching video can see it. Yeah, for sure, in Control Center on your iPhone, I see it. Yep. OK, so it just adds one just like it would add your Apple watches, battery and I think there's other things that you can have added there. So OK, so it just adds it to Control Center on your iPhone. Very cool, man. And I just noticed something. See, my phone is flashing. Yes, I think that's I think that must be infrared. Huh? Yeah, it would have to be. Yeah, if your phone is flashing in the camera on your computer, then that would be, yeah, I guess that you're right. OK, infrared, right? So the the Brio can see the Logitech Brio sees infrared. Yeah, maybe that's or is it what would be infrared? Is this the FaceTime? Does the Face ID camera believe? Yes, OK, I'm pretty sure it does. Yeah, OK, cool. All right. So there's two modes. So you can either slap it on the back of your phone and let it charge. But if the other thing you can do is you can charge it while it's charging your phone. And that actually. From what I read, it actually will provide a little more power if it's being powered itself. So. Oh, I see. It can pass some of that through. You mean while it's still OK, huh? That's cool. Very cool, man. How much was it? I mean, 99 bucks is probably a little expensive for the capacity that this has. But yeah. Yeah, yeah, I agreed. But, you know, it's Apple and convenient and, you know, certified and all that good stuff. So, yeah, yeah. Brian Monroe in the chat room confirmed that the Face ID camera uses an IR flood illuminator to do part of to facilitate its job. So, yeah, cool. Fun. I like it. It's good. Uh, next cool stuff found, right? You want to bring us to Gary? Oh, us? Hold on, Gary. Where is he? There he is. All right. He saw something that was posted on Twitter by Senator Feinstein. And it's a site that gives you some tips to avoid ransomware. So it's cisa.gov, consumer, something, something, something, I guess. So the government wants to give you tips to not get ransomware. That's good. That's the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Gary also shared with us another thing that he was asking about called the Mobile Verification Toolkit, which is available on GitHub. So the source is open and visible and vettable. And the idea is that it is, as their description goes, a collection of utilities to simplify and automate the process of gathering forensic traces helpful to identify a potential compromise of both Android and iOS devices. So this is to see if you have spyware installed on your phone. The way it works with iOS, as I can tell, is that you have to do a local backup to your phone, and then it inspects that backup to see if there's anything nefarious in there. So, yeah, I would say that this is trustable in terms of it's not going to do anything to your phone unless you have it manipulate the backup and then restore that backup to your phone. But yeah, I would, that's an interesting thing. Sure, seems fun. Yeah. Cool. Kansas Dave, John says that you can also charge AirPods with your MagSafe battery pack, which makes sense because it's just a MagSafe charger. It's a G charger, right? So, yeah, interesting. Cool. Fun, fun thoughts on on that mobile verification tool kit there, John? I've got to check it out. I know it's a, yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing. Okay, let's see. Jim has a cool stuff found for us. We've talked about similar things over the years, but I don't think this one has ever come up. He says, I am fortunate enough to be retired and be able to spend the winters in Florida. We also usually take a five to six week long drive vacation in the summer, both of which caused us to be away from our primary residence for about six months of the year. During such periods, I leave my internet service online, primarily for the security camera system, but also such things as like water, temperature and CO sensors to let us know if there is a problem while we are away. I have my provider's gateway in bridge mode connected to my Synology router. And while I have fairly good internet service, there are occasional glitches and outages which occur. In the past, my experience has been sometimes those glitches self-correct on one or both of my boxes and sometimes a reboot of one or both is necessary. Said reboot from afar is my problem. I can't use a resettable outlet because, of course, there is no reset ability if I don't have Wi-Fi in my house, chicken and egg, but I came across this. It's called Keep Connect. And I found it to be an excellent way to solve my issues. After a loss of Wi-Fi signal, this device continues to reboot your router, or in my case both, my gateway and my router in the proper order, no less, until connection is re-established all without intervention from me. It's a pretty cool little thing. Yeah, it's, we've seen these before. They essentially do the same thing. You connect it to your Wi-Fi network. It checks for an internet signal occasionally. If it doesn't see Wi-Fi, it cycles power on the outlet and then waits and tries again a little bit later. It's $50. That seems to be about twice the price that I remember these types of things being when we talked about it in the past, John. But, you know, if that's what they cost these days, that's what they cost. So very cool. And I like this idea. If you're traveling a lot, I can see that's being super handy. Yeah. Yeah. I also highly recommend, in general, but also very specifically for routers, putting them on a battery backup system, a UPS type of system, A, that keeps power flickers from causing issues with your devices. And because oftentimes the connection itself will remain just fine when there's a power flicker because your service provider uses battery backups. So if you have the ability to put those, your internal devices, devices inside your house on battery backup, you will see a lot less of these types of issues. Doesn't mean, though, that it wouldn't also be good to have this in the line, too. Good. Good. What's next here? Oh, Donna. John, Donna's got something, well, for all of us, but maybe also for you. She found, from the RetroMaccast podcast, throwboy.com has some blankets that are macOS themed. And I was thinking if you're going to avoid putting blinds or something more typical behind you, you could get one of these throw blankets with a macOS logo or an old, there's a 1984 throw blanket that has the, like a Mac Plus on it. They've got one with a Game Boy on it. They've got old cassette tapes, VHS tapes. It's pretty cool. So thank you for sending that along. They're about 50 bucks a piece, give or take. And 47, I guess. Oh, exactly the same. Yeah, man. I know that I think you might like the 1984 one. Anyway, I share. Thank you, Donna. Actually, it was Donna who shares. I just read. We're just the stewards of this content. And pass it along. You want to take us to Bob? Yes. Bob says Dave was having issues with Evernote using the new interface. Were you? No, I think it was you. It was having problems with Evernote's new interface. It doesn't matter. So a suggestion is to use Joplin, Joplin app.org. I was able to transfer my notes from Evernote to Joplin. And the thing that was most interesting to me was I can use my Synology for the backing store. I got a myname.synology.me, DDNS, and pointed Joplin to the storage area on my Synology. I did port forward through my ERO to get access to the Synology drive. I have access from all my Macs on my iPhone. For sharing between us, you might need to set up a Joplin account on Synology or maybe your advanced Synology app. You might need to set up some other tricks. I never heard of it. I never heard of that either. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it supports AppleScript, which is our issue, right? Because Evernote did support AppleScript and does in our current, in the version we currently use, but not in the current version. They changed the foundational code. So I'm not entirely sure what to do for our note sharing. Our current workflow works really well, but being able to AppleScript from typing a reply to one of your e-mails and having that automatically populate everywhere that it needs to populate, including putting it in the right Evernote notebook is, well, it's pretty spectacular for us. It makes things very efficient. I'm not sure what to do. If anybody finds a note taking app that supports AppleScript, let us know. Feedback at macgeekapp.com. Did you say feedback at macgeekapp.com? I did. And feedback at macgeekapp.com is easy for you to say, evidently, and not so much for me. But feedback at macgeekapp.com is also where you can send in your questions, tips, and cool stuff found. So, you know, there you go. Where are we on time here? Let's see. Sure. We've been kicking this one down, this particular can down the road. We can get a little bit geeky here. Jesse shares a little bit of a geeky cool stuff found and says, over the years, I've learned just enough AppleScript and terminal commands to get my Mac to do what I want. But I've always had a problem getting my Mac to do what I wanted when I wanted. I used to use Automator to create calendar alarms, but they were temperamental and unreliable. I'm sure I injured a few scalp follicles due to my hair pulling in frustration. I tried out the app's power manager and keyboard maestro. I was able to use them to create and schedule macros, and they certainly are wonderful. But then I got caught by the do-it-yourself bug. I decided, so this is a good kind of getting caught, I decided to see if I could use the Mac's built-in capabilities to achieve what I wanted. When I learned about launch agents, I felt like Hermione Granger discovering a powerful spellbook. Launch agents often get mentioned in the context of looking for agents installed by third parties, or even those that are malicious software, in order to remove them. However, they are simply a way that macOS allows talking to LaunchD, the powerful demon that runs its system startup and loads and runs services on demand. I decided to create my own launch agents. It turned out to be very doable for a mere mortal. I now have written 10 such launch agents to run various Apple scripts on my Mac at the times I find most useful. You can also schedule shell scripts or Automator workflows if those are your things. Why bother? First, to go beyond the limits of the Mac GUI. And second, for the fun of it, I have agents that sleep my Mac at different times on different days. Oh, that's interesting. Orchestrate which AirPlay speakers should play what, when, and how loud. Mount and run my time machine backups on my chosen schedule. Export archives of my calendars and contacts weekly. Oh, this is getting interesting. Randomize my screensaver daily and more. I finally feel like my powers of automation on the Mac have caught up to what I can do with shortcuts on iOS. Now I feel like Hermione having just mastered the big spell book. There are plenty of articles on the net and Jesse, she gives us a few of them. So we will put those on, we will put those in the show notes. But yeah, this is very cool. So these articles talk about truly creating your own from scratch out of whole cloth. And this is an app called Lingon that we have talked about many times on the show that lets you see the launch agents that are there, you can delete them, you can disable them, you can edit them, and yes, you can create new ones. So Lingon might be another tool for people like Jesse who want to do this kind of thing. But, you know, there you go. So very cool. Thank you for sharing that, Jesse. I know I said it was a little geeky. It was not difficult to build. And with some of the articles that you gave us, I think people can get rolling. So yeah, you're right. This is, huh, this is interesting. I'll have to think about the automations that I do and whether I want to move some of those to my own handcrafted launch agents. So this is cool. In the chat room Kiwi Graham is saying launch control might be another app to do some of this. So I will put that in the show and then we will check it out and you can check it out. Yeah, it's from SomaZone. So that wouldn't surprise me that they would have an app like that. I feel like we've talked about it before. The launch D GUI. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, and is that Lingon is not free. I don't know if launch control is free or not. Not sure. I think it might be. Yeah, I'm downloading it now. It only downloads for free. Download is trial versions. Test them. Okay, shop. Let's see. Personal licenses. Boy. Launch control. 18 bucks. So there you go. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks Kiwi Graham. Fun stuff. I like it. You want to take us to listener John with the cool stuff found? Yes. John says I was doing some research for my new car at Tesla, which I found another tip. And I found two really cool things. One, I decided to repurpose a Samsung T7 SSD to use for my security and dash cameras in the Tesla instead of a USB stick for greater storage. And also better speed. While researching, I found out that Samsung has a free magician software that will let you address their SSDs. And you can even control the over provisioning, which is pretty cool. But if you look at the camera, then there are a lot of rights and rewrites. So I got a one terabyte and actually added like 200 gigabytes to the over provisioning to protect the drive. And then number two, an app for Tesla owners that is totally awesome stats. It not only adds a whole bunch of statistics you can look at, but you can also do more controlling than you can with the stock Tesla app. But it is awesome. Yeah, I think it's like 50 bucks. But that's yeah, I can I can see where that would be worth spending the money on. If you had a Tesla and you wanted to dig in a little bit more, 50 bucks is probably short money for that. So yeah, cool. All right. I got one more cool stuff found. Then we'll talk about our sponsors. We finally get to talk about the new BB edit and then and then we'll share some more of your tips and questions and keep on rocking here. The the next cool stuff found that I have is Synology just launched C2 password and their free plan is available. So C2 is Synology's hosting arm, right? They up until now C2 has basically been used for sort of raw storage backups and things like that. It's also used for their hybrid cloud that rolled out with DSM 7. Now C2 password is their password manager. It is it's probably not full featured enough for us Mac users or Apple users yet. But the free plan is I signed up for it. They allow you to store 10,000 items in the vault. They will import via a CSV file so you could export your one password stuff or your last pass stuff or whatever you have. It has a password generator. It's got the one time password authenticator built into it. You can transfer you can get your one time passwords via email if you want and you can let's see and they have mobile apps sort of not yet for us and also the extension I think only works in chromium browsers so like Chrome and Edge right now not Safari. So it's but you know Synology has been great about you know apps for iPhone users and so I'm expecting if that's not already out. I'm expecting it will come soon. I'm looking as we're talking here John to see if there is C2 password app in the App Store yet and there is not but I expect that we will see one soon. So keep your eyes peeled. I wouldn't recommend switching to it yet unless all of the things I mentioned sound like they are perfect fits for you but I'm excited to see that out there Any thoughts on that Mr. Braun? No. Alright well then I'm good with cool stuff found if you're good and I'm ready to go on to our sponsors if you are. Okay First up today is Barebones and I am very excited that we get to talk about BB Edit 14. It's true put out another version. It's amazing. A lot is the same. I mean like their generous eval mode 30 days of full functional app that you get to try it out fresh eval period for all customers if you used an old version you get the full 30 days with 14 that's cool and then there's discounted upgrade pricing depending on which previous version you have but after the 30 days it remains functional in free mode which gives you a lot a lot. One of the cool things that I love about BB Edit 14 I have often probably more often than I care to admit used BB Edit to write notes for myself this is something evidently lots of people do and what you wind up with is a list of you know about 400 untitled documents because that's what happens when you add a note well no longer BB Edit has a notes feature and when you start typing a note it titles it much like Apple Notes with the first line of the note so that you can actually go and find things really smart for them to do this it'll allow me to have my code separate from the little snippets of information that I capture while I'm in there doing things with my code and other things like that very cool stuff it's super smooth there's so much more that they've put in there that I can't wait to tell you about for now just go check it out Barebones.com BB Edit 14 thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode next up is Otherworld Computing with their OWC USB-C Travel Dock I have used lots of different travel docks over the past couple of years now that we're fully immersed in USB-C land I was teaching that class at UNH last semester I was using an off-brand different travel dock it wouldn't work with like the camera that they have they have this owl 3D camera thing and then I had to plug in my HDMI so that I could you know display on the screens and all that stuff no bueno didn't work that's because not all USB ports are created equal I got the OWC USB-C Travel Dock plugged it in camera works on all three ports I didn't have to do any guesswork when you're teaching a class for the first time and I don't mean that particular class for the first time like literally I am not a teacher so there's a lot of stress that went through my head each time that I got into that classroom it was super nice to know that I had no stress from my USB-C Travel Dock truly to be able to get there plug in and know that okay the technology is working now all I got to do is teach easier said than done but at least the tech worked OWC's USB-C Travel Dock made that happen for me it can make it happen for you go check it out it's online there at maxsales.com of course we've got a link in the show notes and our thanks to OWC for sponsoring this episode alright John we have we have an interesting little tidbit from listener Todd so Todd's tidbits my wife and I traveled from US to Italy and returned last week I put an air tag in each of our checked bags we were able to track them through our multiple legs from the US to our destination in Italy after a great time in Italy we started our 3 leg return flights home all went well until our final leg JFK to IAD the flight was cancelled one and a half hours prior to departure late on a Saturday evening with bad storms up and down the east coast we stopped crashing at a family member's house in Long Island and catching a flight the next day out of LaGuardia our checked bags remained at JFK no worries the find my abs showed them at terminal 4 at JFK the entire time Monday they were flown to IAD then a courier who picked them up presumably with an iPhone because we could track their progress to our home the entire time good real world results with air tags I like it that's great yeah I've in the past with the tiles in my luggage and with our upcoming travels I will definitely be using air tags for the same purpose that's that's great Todd I like it I like it fun did you did you see the I forget what youtuber it was sent air tags in the mail I think they were in like France maybe anyway France or Germany or something sent air tags in the mail to a few places one was like North Korea and it didn't make it or maybe it did but you can't track air tags in North Korea because the functionality is disabled there and then the other two were sent one to Elon Musk and one to Tim Cook the one to Elon Musk went into like the last its last known location was a like a recycling factory or something so it was destroyed the one sent to Tim Cook was actually sent back the office of the president at Apple or the office of the CEO I guess and with a letter from one of the Tim Cook's assistants saying thanks for sending this what a cool thing here's your air tag back and yada yada yada very cool check the box so I don't know fun it's cool what's amazing to me and shouldn't be amazing is that with tile people had to have the tile app on their phone in order to track these things whereas now people just need the latest build of iOS and it sort of does it as long as the phone is new enough and there's enough of a there's critical mass there's way more than critical mass out there to just track air tags no matter where they are which that's the amazing part to me which is cool so it's fun thing I did like about tile is that you could use your tile to find your phone can't you do that with an air tag no I guess not there's no button on the air tag to do that that's right I tried pressing it right well get yourself an Apple watch then you can find your phone with your watch it is fun alright thank you for sharing that Todd good little it's good not only is it interesting it's actually good it has a question John here it writes I have some old defunct email accounts that are listed in Apple Mail that I have not used for years however I am finding it very difficult to delete them every time I delete one it comes back being synced via iCloud do you have any ideas um yeah so when you go to remove one of these accounts it says do you want to remove this account blah blah blah from all your computers using iCloud Keychain removing it from all computers will remove it from this Mac and then it will list other devices that it's going to remove it from and you can click cancel or remove from all and it will go away and then it will come back you'll get this new accounts added notification and back they are I have seen this exact same thing and the way I've solved it is by deleting it and then going to one of the other Macs if it comes back and deleting it from there one of the Macs is deciding to act as the master and so going around to all of the computers that have that synced to it has been the way I've been able to do it I'm sure there's other ways and if you know of them feedback at mackeykev.com but that's how I have solved that problem in the past it's persistence it's a little bit of brute forcing have you seen this before John no interesting would you solve it a different way when I've had I'm wondering if there is stuff left in the keychain I'm sure it is it's iCloud keychain that's doing this okay maybe pop it into the keychain yeah I don't know that you would see it in keychain access I don't think they're listed there let me pull this up no I don't think so let's see what would I call my mail accounts let me look so if I go into system preferences internet accounts I have one okay that is called bbm imap alt and no there is nothing in my well let's see bbm imap oh no to be able to do this stuff no it's not there it's not in my iCloud it's not listed in keychain access it is syncing via iCloud keychain but it's not manipulatable in the keychain access app no it would be nice if it were yeah yeah good call I like that line of thinking though that's good yeah I do see application password entries I just searched for one of my emails it did come up so for the password will be there for sure but this is the account that lives in system preferences internet accounts and it's you can tie it to mail and contacts and calendars and notes and you know whatever else the account officially supports but yeah yeah I think keychain access isn't where they live or where they're visible I think the only place in the GUI that you can see them is in internet accounts but so yeah hopefully removing it from the other devices will work I suppose what you could do is remove it and then log out of iCloud remove it from another machine and log out of iCloud and remove it from another until there's none left and then log just one machine back in let it do it syncing if it comes back again well now you know there's only one place that it's being stored so remove it from that hopefully that will kind of become the master that's the trick there alright you want to you want to take us to Bob Bob got a quick one here Bob says sometimes when attempting to connect to hotel or public hot spots you need to tickle the login page you can often use one of the following URLs to wake up the login page either neverssl.com or captive.apple.com yes that's and the key about both of the URLs that John just mentioned there is using HTTP not HTTPS because the issue most of the time is that the captive portal pages work by doing a DNS redirect in a hotel and of course if it tries to show you if you try to load let's say Microsoft.com HTTPSMicrosoft.com and what's delivered to you is a site that doesn't have a certificate that matches Microsoft.com your Mac is just going to stop dead in its tracks it's not going to do anything and that's a problem so going to load a site that you know will never use SSL is the key and that's what HTTP colon slash slash never SSL does apple's captive portal at captive.apple.com the same thing so yeah no that's I've used that many times that's good advice yeah and just a tip from me regarding this is I would have that problem sometimes on iOS settings Wi-Fi the SSID of the access point there's a auto join okay choice which you can turn on and turn off so for those so for those access points if you're going to use them again you may want to say auto join interesting yeah even with auto join I've found sometimes I still get the captive portal page but you're right iOS is smart about remembering that for a lot of them that's a good point yeah yeah yeah cool we put links to both of those things in there but never SSL is an easy one to remember and yeah it's good is good it is good alright John not you well you because we're going to talk about a question from listener John I love this question he asks I've got three Samsung 500 gig T5 external SSDs I'm using a Mac mini 2018 with a one terabyte internal SSD running Big Sur is it possible or even practical somehow to combine these external drives to make a larger 1 terabyte or 1.5 terabyte SSD for backups or data storage rather than buying another single large SSD and is being portable versus internal in this setup an issue so no all of the above is totally fine and believe it or not Mac OS will do it for you if you go into disk utility go to the file menu you will see raid assistant when that comes up it will ask you to choose from one of three options striped, mirrored or concatenated which is a J-Bod for what you're doing it sounds like you probably want to do a J-Bod which is a just a bunch of disks so it can put them all together and you get the full storage of whatever you put in there there's no fault tolerance because it's not really raid but you get all the storage pulled together as one volume now the issue would be if one of those drives dies then that's the end of that maybe you'll have to see so make sure to keep it back up but otherwise yeah that that'll do it which is pretty cool have you ever done this John no okay I thought for some reason I thought you did it with like a bunch of USB sticks once or something um I've suggested that one yeah I never pursued it but the thing is you know I have hundreds of these USB sticks we get them press kits on them usually I was thinking if I could get a USB hub with enough plugs that you could put all those drives in there and then make one big disk but I never pursued it and it probably wouldn't be that fast oh it'd be terribly slow but like for the SSDs if you have enough USB 3 ports that would work I let my rage take care of that right that's the thing yeah of course of course but having a direct attached drive for like photos can't be stored on a NASA so they have to be stored on a direct attached drive so if you want them external then putting them on one of these J-Bod things make sure that all the disks stay there and then back it up somewhere like to your NASA or something like that alright you want to take us to listener John with some car play fun yes John has some car play hacks so as I mentioned above I got a Tesla I used to have a Volvo XC 60 just fair warning I've drunk with Kool-Aid put the clerical collar on me and call me an evangelist I love my Tesla but I'll promote any electric vehicle that is recently made okay two car play hacks the first is if you have a wired car play in your car and you are jonesen for that sweet sweet wireless car play most cars can use a small device out of China that will plug into the car play USB port in the car and turned into a wireless car play without any real intervention on the user's part except maybe a little firmer upgrade now and then there are a bunch of knockoffs but I found one that one to be the original car link it yeah now car link car link would be the one for for that yeah let's see you must check your car in their compatibility list most work my Volvo did but my wife Subaru did not and it's not on the list the uber geek car play hack when you don't have car play okay so I love my Tesla I also love my Apple devices and my car play I still want the MGG app to have a car play icon fish shake okay fish shake received so I did a whole bunch of geek search see what I did there and came up with the following way to add car play to any car that doesn't have it I got myself a reefer 8 inch Amazon Fire HD tablet for 45 bucks yeah an Android tablet to serve Apple car play isn't that rich you can use a lot of different Android platforms but it has to be fairly recent and use a USB is the charge interface because that supports on the go cables I then got a J5 create USB C media adapter like the Apple one but cheaper that has a USB a and a USB C for power it also has an HDMI but that is unused then you need to connect your brain of a car link adapter but a different one than the above solution it is for non car play Android head units then you need some kind of mount for the tablet and there's a mount if your car doesn't have USB C power ports then you only need to have a 12 volt USB C power adapter for your car to the list are mostly above you download the Android app on the fire tablet you are rolled to download it in the car link adapter box on the documentation in very tiny print then you plug the car link into the media adapter connecting USB C power as well and then plug the media adapter into the tablet run the AutoCAD app on the tablet and then once it recognizes everything you can Bluetooth pair it to your iPhone which will do the car play handshake and then switch to Wi-Fi boom you know a wireless car play as a side note the latest software update did something really cool when in the advanced settings of the app you can set the audio channel to Bluetooth what that will do is leave your phone paired by a Bluetooth car for audio input output as you have probably had until now and the controls are all paired into the car play that means you don't have to figure out an audio connection from the tablet to your car stereo speakers and mics wow what a hack that's great I will ask John or maybe you can reply to John and ask him to publish that in the forums because he's got some pictures and everything and that would be great and we can link to that here wow yeah very cool what a great thing though to have car play in uh I love that using an Android screen for that what a smart move yeah yeah yeah yeah you folks need to see these pictures so we'll see if John will post these in the forums for us very very cool stuff alright we've got you know I'm thinking we don't need to go super long today John and I want to talk about there's a few more that I think we can do that would be good Jed had an interesting question he says um I'm approaching a new project and I have a problem that I always always struggle with wondering if you have any ideas or maybe the hive mind has some he says I'll be working on a six month project where I get over a hundred video clips that I may or may not use I'm editing a TV show and we're getting a lot of archival footage they do not come in all at once and keeping them organized time intensive and prone to the worst kind of error a.k.a human and this is where the problem goes beyond me looking for a simple solution but just for me but maybe more useful for a wider circle of people is there a way to drop everything into one folder and have that folder be watched by the Mac and then whenever a new file is added just to have that file name added to a text document or even better a Google Sheet in the past I've taken huge contents of folders selected them all and copied them and then pasted them using page and paste and match style to create a file list but then I copy them into the Google Sheets and organize them I can put where they came from and maybe some other information and when new files come in I need to do this manually which isn't the end of the world but it does feel a whole lot like the kind of automation a computer can do okay so whenever I hear I want to watch a folder immediately my mind jumps to Hazel from Noodlesoft because that's what Hazel does is it watches folders and and so that's I think going to be the key here I use Hazel to actually to do something very similar to what Jed's doing here when we get your audio comments in we want to put those into Evernote like we were talking about earlier in the show but that's tedious right so what I have is a specific folder that actually not only is shared amongst all my computers but it's also shared to John's computers and whenever any of us save a file into that Hazel watches that folder and when it sees something new it springs into action and in my case runs an Apple script but it only runs on one of my Mac so it's not trying to fire off all at the same time and then that puts a copy of the file into Evernote moves the original to the trash it could rename it it could do a lot the kinds of things so that would be I think Hazel is going to be your thing here because Hazel can do all kinds of different things to a file again including running not just Apple script but Automator, Shell scripts and even Java scripts on these so you've got a lot and then also you know it can move and rename and copy and do all sorts of things that are baked features that are baked into Hazel but I think Hazel is going to be your key for watched folders is sort of the path to automation when that's involved so that would be that would be my answer I don't know if you have a different thought on that John yeah it's pretty cool did you even know that that happened I think you've done it once or twice and just had it magically appear in Evernote I don't know that you and I have ever talked about that so yeah so that's what that's there for there's a folder called like MGG audio comments or something that's synced in our MGG shared folder so yeah you want to share waltz follow up oh yeah so we were talking about document management software and I babbled something about Fujitsu make something but I didn't follow up so I'm going to follow up it's called scan snap home it's the successor to scan snap manager and then scan snap manager broke with an OS upgrade so they came and they came up with something new so it's free it'll do you know do searchable PDFs which is nice so I guess they licensed something cool so yeah blinks in the show notes click on that and see if you want to try out their their software yeah yeah for sure cool fun stuff I like it I like it I like it all right we have a question from Andrew who asks I have a consulting client with a 2015 iMac who I helped wipe her original two terabyte apple fusion drive with the max number of scrubs but now she wants to sell it so can you go over the best way for her to install an OS and which one I think Catalina makes sense but does she just need to create a username and password using her name what's the right way to do this and can she also go to network preferences and delete any of her SSIDs from her wifi networks so the way I like to do it is far simpler than the questions you're asking because you're right worrying about putting SSIDs in and removing those and username and password and what do you use and you know do you got to worry about iCloud Drive and all that stuff what I would do the first thing I do is deauthorize from Apple Music or if the machine is old enough iTunes so that you don't run into that problem down the road because once you format the drive you can't do that anymore other than doing it widespread and that can be kind of a pain in the neck so once I've done that I boot into recovery mode I wipe the drive and install the latest OS that will install on it that's where I always start with these things if I'm repurposing a machine to give to a family member or to sell or whatever whatever the latest OS is that's what I put on it and then when it reboots and gets to the part where the OS is fully installed and it's asking you those questions where if you leave it on that screen long enough it starts speaking to you in many different languages turn off the computer and ship it because that way the person who gets it has that fresh out of the box experience you don't have to give them a username and password you don't have to worry that there is a username and password on there because it's not yours is not part of this you've just wiped the drive you've installed a fresh OS they get to start and walk in from scratch they can use migration assistant they are the ones setting up the very first user account and it's all clean and pristine and that's how I do it and it's worked well for me over the years so obviously if somebody has a better or different suggestion feedback at macicab.com but that's how I do it what do you do John in that scenario um I can't find his note here it doesn't matter the notes gone I read it from another thing just answer we've talked enough I've been prepping a new iMac um we're prepping prepping a mac for sale right you've had a mac and now you're letting it go to someone else oh what I would do is do what Apple says oh okay um yeah let me let me find the uh the article show notes later what is what's generally Apple's yeah here we go what to do before you sell giveaway or trade in your mac great so they got a support article create a backup sign out of iTunes sign out of iCloud etc etc so um yeah that's what I do okay I'll link to this little do they um I put the link in the show notes for you do does Apple in that say sign out of iCloud sign out of iMessage reset the NVRAM erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS after macOS installation is complete the mac restarts to a setup assistant that asks you to choose a country or region to leave the mac in a mac in an out-of-the-box state don't continue instead press command Q to shut down the mac ah so there's the part that I didn't know command Q at that I've just turned it off at that point but evidently command Q will let it shut down nicely which is even better when the new owner is on the mac setup assistant guides them through the setup process perfect perfect perfect that's great cool uh all right listener Rick asked um sort of the opposite question my friend has a 2014 27 inch iMac that is annoyingly slow uh with 24 gigs of memory my suggestion for getting extra life from it uh was at least until the 27 inch the larger uh silicon iMac is available is to either replace the internal hard drive with an ssd or just use an external ssd is the startup disk but I don't know if the thunderbolt is fast enough to be worthwhile your recommendations would be appreciated so yeah that that 27 inch that is the og retina iMac right that's the first of the retina iMacs and is what I had in my office up until that new m1 mini arrived that I traded that domain for a couple months ago and quite honestly I got it with an ssd out of the gate and with that ssd in there it did fine like it was doing fine even up until you know a couple of months ago so I would definitely say that putting an ssd as its boot drive is the answer I would not rip it open and do that unless you have some reason to want to have an ssd inside it in the future it's an iMac it's not portable uh having an external drive that you boot from is no problem with that mac so I would just go with an external ssd and then when you when it's time to move to whatever the next mac is you can take that ssd with you and you know migration assistant from it to the internal drive of the new mac and then use that ssd for whatever you want maybe it's that's your external storage for your um you know for your photos library or whatever um and that way you could get a smaller internal drive for your next iMac and you've got this external drive to do your storage with so that's that's what I would do I don't know what would you do John I'm with you okay yeah cool um what um now that that machine has uh USB 3 I would assume oh yeah it's thunderbolt 2 and thunderbolt 2 okay which is what 20 20 it's yeah it's 20 gigabit thunderbolt that's right yes okay yeah not either of those should yeah should be snappy enough exactly yeah no it that machine runs super fast it's it's great uh you know make sure it's got enough ram in it but it sounds like it already does so yeah it's good all right you got anything else you want to do John or is it time to uh to maybe give our listeners back some of the time that we've we've borrowed from them over the years um let's let's get the uh let's get the hook let's get the hook the hook's on it's good thanks for listening folks we will uh we will head back to the mail bag and uh and see you there we've actually got lots of stuff still to talk about gosh I have we have a whole section of cool stuff found that we've that we've not gotten to yet so there's lots of things to do uh for those of you that watch the and listen live and if you don't you can at uh at live.matgeekab.com and you can subscribe to the calendar at matgeekab.com slash calendar we're doing two shows next week Friday morning and Friday morning normally we're on Friday mornings eastern time we're also doing Thursday morning so if if either of those works for you and you want to join us live.matgeekab.com is where you go and again matgeekab.com slash calendar that's the same calendar that John and I use so it is guaranteed to be correct because if it's on there we're here and if it's not on there we're not going to be here so that's what I got you got anywhere else to send them John before we move on here oh yeah I just went here youtube.com slash matgeekab.com podcast I think that's right that's correct yeah yeah we were or I was asked to watch the video watch the video and a few things bothered me are you are you you want to talk about those things or are you just working on them fixing them no no it was just I changed a few things on my video setup cool cool well you look good and sound good today although at some point we'll see there's all kinds of things to do there's always tweaks to be made alright yeah that's what I got alright folks thanks for hanging out with us thanks for checking out all our sponsors of course the two sponsors from this episode barebones.com and maxsales.com you can check out BB edit 14 and the OWC USBC travel doc respectively of course you can check out all the other sponsors if you go to matgeekab.com slash sponsors and that's what we got make sure you go check those out all the deals are live there for you matgeekab.com slash sponsors thanks for hanging out with us folks I mean it seems only fitting to let this happen