 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek app, episode 674 for Sunday, September 10th, 2017. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek app, the show where you send in all kinds of things, including, but not limited to, questions, tips, cool stuff found. The goal being every single one of us, you, me, him, her, yep, all of us, you too. At least four new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include, a long time sponsor, Bear Bones at BearBones.com. A returning sponsor in Casper, or at Casper.com slash MGG. You can get 50 bucks off of my favorite mattress. And a new one, BarkBox, where you visit BarkBox.com slash MGG. And you'll get something that I'll tell you about a little later. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here, in hurricane free, fearful Connecticut. For the moment, I hope. Yeah, that's wrong. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. I hope everybody and all our friends in Houston are kind of, you know, pulling their lives back together and all our friends in Florida are preparing and dealing with the worst right now. It's crazy. Hope everybody's all right. If you need anything from the Mackie Keb family, you let us know, we got you covered. Shall we go to Bill here, John? Just kick it right off, don't you think? Kick it. We're going to kick it right off. So listener Bill posted, he said, my cousin's 2009 iMac running Sierra started having a login issue. She's in Detroit, and I administrate it from 600 miles away in St. Louisville, a team viewer, when she powers it on, it boots to the correct background screen with the correct login names and icons. Things look normal. However, she cannot move the mouse pointer to select a user account and open a password field as the screen freezes. When you highlight and select using the arrows on the keyboard and press enter, nothing happens. The name darkens as selected, but entered does nothing. She called her local Apple store in Detroit and they got her macOS utility screen, but I don't know what they had her do. Apple told her it could be the mouse and recommended she buy a new one because it seemed to be freezing on the login screen when you cannot click a user account. She may get a new one at Best Buy, but I don't know if that'll help. Also, when booting into safe mode, the same behavior happens. Unfortunately, she can't log in and launch TeamViewer, so I can't help her. What do you think? To me, this one seems like a USB issue. It could be as simple as a bad mouse, but it could also be a bad keyboard or something else on the USB bus, right? I mean, we're talking about things that are plugged in USB not working. So I would limit it down to just having a mouse plugged in, like not even a keyboard, just the mouse, nothing else USB tested that way. And then, you know, isolate just the keyboard without a mouse and go through that process. Isolating without it without a mouse will make things a little odd because it's going to the Mac OS really needs you to have a mouse, but you'll at least get a feel for whether the keyboard now functions without the mouse. It's possible that the mouse button is held down all the time. I mean, not that you're holding it down, but, you know, that the like the system or there's something wrong with the mouse where the button is reporting as being held down all the time. That's kind of what would happen. The things you described, Bill, are the sort of things that would happen if the mouse button were down all the time. What do you think, John? At first, I was confused because I wasn't sure what was where this was happening. So we have two machines here. One that is used to remotely administer and then the machine in question seems to have USB problems. Right. Yeah. I mean, the remotely administered can't isn't a part of this at this point because they can't even get to the, yeah, yeah. Um, what I would do, you know, I'm sure if someone looked here. So if you do go to about this Mac, yeah, system report, you got the USB section, I would have looked on that and see what the computer saw. And I would have suspected that they can't because they can. Right. That's that's the problem. So you got to troubleshoot this without asking for anything of the system. Yeah. But, um, I would, you know, swap out the mouse, swap out the keyboard. Huh. Yeah. I mean, there is system diagnostics, but that would have the same problem is that you need something to navigate it. To navigate it. Right. Well, but, but, um, one thing to do in, and, uh, Furby's in our chat room at macgeekup.com slash stream is suggesting. Boot from an external drive, because that will rule out whether or not it's, you know, system software versus hardware. And hopefully if it's hardware, it's just, you know, replace the mouse or something, then you're good to go. So, because it could be something on the, on the motherboard, although as Furby said, a faulty USB bus might likely cause a failure at, at power on test at that, I don't know. I've never, um, I haven't experienced that recently enough. I did have that with a past machine where the USB bus started to fail. Not to see it in the console. It was like, yep, it's connecting yet, but disconnecting, connecting disconnecting. Yeah. Or, um, you know, if you could log in, uh, something like hardware growler, we'll show you that as well. It's going to show us something jumping around. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, hopefully a new mouse does it, Bill. That's the, that's our goal for you and, and, uh, on your friend, sister. I can't remember what you said. Anyway, uh, moving on, we have some cool stuff found today. So we will, uh, start here with Andy. He says, uh, I know you've been discussing ways to move email accounts. And moreover, the transferring of data says in my role as a freelance web designer and developer, I often recommended, especially for the smaller email account to my clients that they should just drag and drop all their emails and folders from the IMAP server to a folder on their computer so that they have a local copy that's not impacted by the external server. Uh, he says, then when a new email account has been set up or moved, you can simply drag all that stuff back. It works. It just takes a long time to move all the emails in quite often. If the clients are impatient, they would lose a few emails in the process. He says, I know you've discussed a few ideas in G suite, but more recently with a client that had 20 plus email accounts, all of which had mailboxes that were around five gigs in size, the drag drop method was not going to work. Well, I found a magic solution. There is a tool called IMAP sync. And it's at imapsync.lamoral.info. He says, it's a great geeky tool, but better still, these guys have put a free online version up, and this is super easy to use, works quickly, seamlessly. And I have tested it on accounts with up to 10 gigs of mailboxes. So I looked at this. And actually it's, it's, it's good to continue one last thing. He says, you just need the IMAP host name, email account and password of the source and the destination. You plug those in, you hit the sync button and it takes care of the rest. So the drawback to that is you are giving someone else the keys to your email account. Now you might trust these folks at lamoral.info and then it's fine. Or you might not. And then it's not fine. You kind of have to make that decision for yourself. I looked at it a little bit, but they seem legit. Obviously, listener Andy has used it and thus far hasn't, you know, run into any nefarious purposes. It's not like they're Equifax or anything. Yeah, but if you don't like that idea, there also is a downloadable version of this at the same website. So you could essentially take this and roll your own. And then, and then, you know, you don't have to worry about trusting others with those particular keys. So trust. No. Trust, no one. Yes, ex files. That is an ex files reference. Yeah, they were right. Oh, no. I mean, it's trust. Yeah. Well, that's a, you know, that's a. It's sort of a corollary to to our favorite motto. So, you know, it's good. It's good. Of course, the other thing you can do, which I think accomplishes the same thing. Yeah, you know, I've never done a drag and drop of a mailbox. What I have done, so talked about that. You can't you can only drag and drop messages from server to server. Oh, OK. So you highlight a whole bunch of messages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, because what you can do is if you go to the mailbox menu in Apple Mail, you can say export mailbox. Right, right. And that's that's free. That is free. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's something we might do. But that's a that's indeed. Yes, it's I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah, handy stuff. All right. Kurt wrote in with not one, not two, but three, nope, four. Great. Terminal. Websites that will help feed your terminal addiction. First up, he says is explain shell. If you're unsure about what a single line shell or terminal command does, copy and paste it into explain shell and it will parse the command and and show you what the a cool he says it'll actually show you a cool graphically enhanced display where the line connect connects every command line option to the relevant paragraph in the in the man file so you can really kind of get a feel for what. You know what it works out to be, which I think is cool. So that's at explain shell dot com. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes, of course. And then the second resource is spell check dot net. As you might guess, the site helps you check and make bullet proof that your shell scripts, the way it works is that the site presents a window into which you can paste or type a shell script and it dynamically critiques your script in an output window. It appears to do all kinds of error checking, for example, if you're creating for a loop structure in your script or typing it into the input box on the fly, it will complain about a missing done line and things like that. So sort of on the fly debugger at spell check dot net. This is handy stuff and it's pretty cool. I've never heard of any of these, John. The third he says is man dash K dot org. And as its title suggests, it is a Unix man page utility site. The dash K switch of the Unix man command makes it emulate the apropos command. So when you type in a term into the search box, it will perform an apropos search and show you a list of man page results. So apropos means it will find related commands. I believe is what that will do. So very, very cool. And then finally, as it has been mentioned before, command line foo.com is a great resource for finding useful shell scripts. So there you go. Great stuff. If you if you want to, you know, feed your your terminal geek. There you go. He says, this is Kurt who wrote this in and he said, I wouldn't mind if you mentioned that the open ZFS port of the fantastic ZFS file system exists at open ZFS on OS X dot org. So we will mention that. In fact, I think we just did. So if you want to run a ZFS on your on your Mac, you can very, very cool stuff, very cool stuff. Thanks for that, Kurt. Anything to add to that, John? Uh, for fun, you know, you can do Dave, you can go to the terminal. And of course, you can type man to get a man page. Sure. But you can also type man man to get some man on man action. There's a man page for the man command. That's awesome. Because I'm looking here. I was curious, um, well, we'll leave this as an exercise for the listener. Sure. There is a way to ask where are the man pages with the man command? I can't see it right now because that could be handy too. Yeah, for sure. They're buried deep in the OS somewhere. But, um, cool. Yeah, I like it. And I'm scratching my head. I'll see if I can find it. But I remember having a utility at one point that was basically a realization of the manual pages. It was like a little database, but these appeared to do pretty much the same thing. Hopefully somebody can correct me if I got opera po wrong. I remember using it a ton, like, you know, 100 years ago. And now I feel like I haven't used that command in a long time. And so I think I'm forgetting what, uh, what it does. So hopefully somebody can correct me while we're doing this. Uh, moving on to listener Dave number one, I think there's at least two listener Dave's being represented here, but listener Dave number one, it says with Amazon Drive taking away their unlimited option for uploading files. I wanted to use Dropbox with my paid one terabyte account to store my photos. The problem is my year's worth of photos are on my Drobo. This is an issue because even if you use a program like MacDrop any, the files will be removed from Dropbox once the Drobo is disconnected from my MacBook. That makes sense solution. I already have arc ARQ from haystack software, which I know you guys dig, we do, and it allows me to send the photos from my Drobo to Dropbox, and it doesn't delete the files when the Drobo is disconnected. Talk about cool stuff found. I never quite thought about using arc this way. Man, this is, I like that. That's pretty good, Dave. Nice stuff, man. Thanks for thanks for sending that along. How you have you changed your your tune on any of these cloud backups, John? I think ARQ would be a good one for you to use because you've got so many of these cloud services and you could use that to sort of direct things to the places that you want them to go. That's the beauty of ARQ and, you know, yeah. No, there is something I'll have to look at it. I think I sent you a link to it as well. We did, we did get a vendor recommending a tool that could be used to access your various cloud services and encrypt the contents. I haven't tried it yet, so we'll save that for a future. Cool stuff found because there are a few utilities that consolidate, that can consolidate all your cloud services and do other nice things for you rather than living in their own little worlds. Right, right, right, right. All right, and on to the second Dave here, who says, a quick one, but, boy, a powerful one. Outside of groceries, I am fairly sure I buy more through Amazon than I do driving to a store. Beyond the convenience, I love knowing the quality of products I'm receiving or above average. Though Amazon has reviews, they're sadly not always legit. Enter fakespot.com. It uses algorithms to review the reviews and it's the real deal. I never buy anything on Amazon without first throwing the Amazon URL into fakespot. I can't say enough good things about it. And that's Dave from Houston. So, yeah, yeah, I know. It's pretty good, man. And I tested this a little bit. It totally works. Yeah. I mean, sometimes fake reviews are pretty obvious. Sure. A couple of words and. Yeah, yeah. One thing I've noticed as of late is that in a lot of Amazon reviews now, they'll put a tag, something like Verified Buyer, in that they actually are saying, yes, this person actually purchased this product from us. So, right, right. That introduces a certain level of trust. They could still be pulling your leg. Of course. Yeah, yeah, it's right. I mean, it's it's probably well worth it for a vendor to go buy their own product through Amazon so that they can have a verified review there. I mean, I would, I would do that. I mean, unless it's strictly, you know, or explicitly prohibited, it seems like a good idea. Yeah, watch for that fake spot. It's fake spot everywhere. It's that's right. Got to look. Got to look. All right. Uh, going to Bob still in cool stuff found here. Bob says regarding backups, he said, if you and Pete were to trust each other and he's referring to the fact that Pete and I currently use crash plan pilot Pete, this is currently used crash plan at each other's homes. We have Drobos that we've left there and we just beam data back and forth to each other. So if you and Pete trust each other and you can live without the data being encrypted, you could use carbon copy cloner's ability to back up to a remote Mac via the internet, the remote Mac must have system preferences sharing remote login turned on, which is SSH support. And as I said, he says you need to trust the other person as you're going to have, you're going to have to need access to an admin account on the remote system via SSH. So it's mutual trust in advance. It is helpful if on the remote Mac, you create a directory where you want the carbon copy cloner backup to be stored before doing the setup work. Um, and yeah, this, I mean, this could work. It's, it's not nearly as automatic as what we all have currently with the crash plan, but that part is going away. No matter how much money you pay them, you cannot back up to your friend's house anymore after what October of 2018. So, you know, I, I don't know. It's not that I don't trust Pete. It's that I don't trust, um, what happens when somebody breaks into Pete's house? You know, so there you go. And nor should he trust what happens when somebody breaks into mine. So, yeah, I like it though. There's, there's, I like that we're swimming through these ideas. So it's good. We'll get there. We'll get there. And, uh, two more cool stuffs found here, John. Zach is the next one. And Zach, I will find, maybe I won't find. Maybe we only have one more. Did I not put Zach in here? Oh, I saw him. Uh, I'm not seeing it, brother. It ain't there. Oh, look, I know what he's talking about. I can, I can, maybe in the main, maybe I just didn't move it in. Yeah, there it is. Okay. There it is. So, uh, Zach found this little thing, which is actually, I think a cool stuff found reprise in that we mentioned it years ago. And it's a thing from blue, blue lounge called the Jimmy USB port extension. And it's called the Jimmy presumably because it is shaped like a J and it's built for your iMac where the USB ports are all on the back and you might want to plug something in from the front. And so what the Jimmy does is it plugs into one of your USB ports. You can pick which one. And then in its J shape, it comes around the back of your iMac. And it's like, it's a little, it's sort of a rubbery thing, uh, where sort of the bottom of it fits exactly. It's flush with the bottom of your iMac. And, and it's got like a little nub on it. So you can sort of clip it in there. Uh, and that way you've got a USB port accessible easily from the front. You're not fishing around the back. And more importantly, you're not scratching the back of your iMac with USB cables as you're trying to figure out where the stupid thing plugs in. So, uh, for 15 bucks, he found it. I'm not sure you'd probably find it on Amazon too. We'll put a link, uh, in the show. But yeah, I've got one of these on my iMac down in the office. It's great. It's the only way to go, I think. You know, that always irked me about most computers, Dave. Yeah, including several Apple ones is why do you put all the ports on the back? Like, it's true. Like, remember the, I mean, I'm looking around right now with all my devices here. And the only thing, the only thing, thank goodness, that has a USB port on the front is my sonology, believe it or not. Oh, it's like, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a great idea. They have some on the back too. Of course. Yeah. I think they have different purposes. But I remember that when they came up with the first, you know, the tower Macs, it's like, hey, why don't we put this port that everybody uses on the front so they don't have to fish around. Right, right, right. Yeah, man. Yes, yes. And finally, I mean, finally in that we're wrapping up cool stuff out. Finally, a. Thing from from lawyer Jeff actually called the tech restarter. This is for years. Our home office internet connection was plagued by slowdowns and brief outages that could only be cured by rebooting the router, even after upgrading it. A year ago, I installed this small timer device called the tech restarter that has a setting where I can just reboot the router and modem every night. At 4 a.m. problem solved. We no longer have internal internet issues. Says I would have preferred to have a weekly reboot, but I've been unable to find a cheap timer that can easily execute this schedule on all the time, except off for four minutes once a week. For now, this tech retarder restarter solution works. It is made for just this one purpose to reboot daily. You program what time it offers two plugs, both activated in parallel. That's pretty cool. I don't know that I like the idea of restarting the router that often. I don't even like the idea of restarting it once a week, although it seems like Jeff has to has to do that regardless. But there are there are funky things that can happen to your network when your router doesn't actually get to actively manage it and know what it did. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm overthinking it. I'm sure I'm overthinking it. It's what I do. But but if you're in a scenario where rebooting the router actually makes a difference, then this is the right answer. So there you go. Yeah, it sounds like kind of a hack, though. Well, of course, it's a hack. But, um, yeah, but that's the point. Yeah, if you feel the need for rebooting things all the time, just a little tip for people if you don't know that this is here, it's kind of buried. But on most Macs, if you go to energy saver and then go to schedule, you can schedule a time for your Mac to. Restart itself. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if you're into that sort of thing, of course, then you'd have to change the way it logs in. Otherwise, it's going to sit at the login screen. Right. Right. I actually have all of my Mac, not all of my Macs. I have the one here in the studio and the one in the office set to start up at eight a.m. every day. And I rarely power them down. And the reason that I have them set to start, I don't have shut down scheduled, but I have. Power ups scheduled. And that's if the power were to go out here and come back on and my Mac chose not to restart. Well, when the next eight a.m. comes around, it is going to attempt that restart as long as it's got juice. And then that way, if I'm traveling, I'm, you know, at worst, I'm without access to these computers for, you know, 24 hours. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a nice place to. Look, another one that may be useful is start up automatically after a power failure, which is normally the Mac doesn't unless you check that box. Yeah, yeah. It's there. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Good stuff. Yes, it's good. It is good. All right. Let's see. You know what I want to do, Mr. Braun, if I may is we have we have over the years, you and I have had many tech related healthy competitions. And you may not be aware of this. In fact, I'm almost certain you're not. And I have I have gone to great lengths not to post about this on social media or anything like that. I realize I did I did make one error, but I don't think you saw it. So we have a healthy competition happening as we speak. And and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But the first thing that I want to do is is tell everybody about our sponsors for today. Does that work for you? Sure. All right. So we got three sponsors for you today. One existing sponsor, long term, one brand new sponsor and one returning sponsor. And that's who I'm going to start with. Our first sponsor today is Casper, where at Casper dot com slash MGG with coupon code MGG, you get 50 bucks off of the best mattress that I've ever slept on. And I've slept on a few of these. 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They added that to BB edit because they know that that's what people that use apps want. Like when you quit an app, if you have to restart your computer, you want it to come back exactly the same way that you you had it when when you had to quit, right? I mean, sir, you can close all the windows if you want, but a lot of times you don't. And what's cool is this is true with BB edit, not just for documents you have open locally, but BB edit allows you to open documents on a remote server either over FTP or SFTP or, you know, I mean, just however you want to do it. And it'll open remote documents when you relaunch to. But it's smart, actually, it asks you. So if you happen to, you know, launch BB edit when you're on an airplane and it says, hey, you want me to open all these remote documents? You can say, whoa, no, but if you want to do it, you can. Right. And it just works. That's the beauty of BB edit. It's so simple. 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And like I said, you tell them the size and some of these preferences and what your dog likes and all that stuff. And then this box arrives and it's got some like treats in it for the dog to eat. It's got chewables and it's just fun. And you're actually the instructions when you open it up, say, OK, you've opened the main box. Now go get your dog first. And now sit on the floor and now reopen everything with your dog right here. And it actually is. We did that with Callie here. She enjoyed the toys. The box every month is themed a little bit differently. So the one that we got was New York theme, like New York City theme. So it had all kinds of stuff in there about New York, including like a chew toy that was a Chinese food takeout box that had little like fortune cookies inside it. That all obviously were were just chewable toys for the dog. And they had like little squeak toys and things like that. Really, really cool stuff. All the edibles are made in the USA or Canada. And 100 percent of their products, of course, are tested on their own animals. Free shipping on any bark box within the continental US. Very, very cool, fun stuff. And like I said, you can sign up for a subscription when you sign up to a six or 12 month plan. You get a free box added to that plan. If you use our special URL, barkbox.com slash M G G. I know you're going to want to sign up for your dog. It's awesome. And again, barkbox.com slash M G G will get you that free month when added to your to your new subscription. Our thanks to Barkbox for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, it's time. So a couple of weeks ago. And in fact, it might have been more than a couple of weeks ago. But. You mentioned that you got a faster upstream, right? At your house. And. Correct. That's not good. Because you previously, I think, had five megabits up and and I had 10 here. And I think with your five, you actually got about six. And with my 10, I get about 12. And and and then just magically, you got upgraded to to like thirty five or something, right? Well, my original was thirty five down five up, right? Right. And per your prodding or encouragement, I call optimum or cable vision or whatever they have like three different names. Right. That's crazy. Right. And I was like, yeah, you know what I'm paying? That's not that great. Sure. And they were like, well, no, you're paying you're paying the right amount for the service that you have. And I'm like, yeah, but it's not that great. And then we heard this story. So I don't mean to cut you off, but I do. You know, I'm going to let you finish first. But so right. So you you bumped up and what are you at now? So they bumped me up to one hundred down thirty five up. That's right. And then a couple of months ago, they said, hey, because we love you so much and to distract you from the fact that we're going to charge you for your cable modem now, we're going to give you two hundred. But that expires in December. So technically, OK, I have one hundred. My package is defined as one hundred down thirty five megabits up. So OK, so I was I was on Comcast two hundred down and ten up, which really gets me about two fifty down and twelve up. But, you know, I started thinking, well, this isn't good. John's got a faster upstream than me. And also with all this talk about backups and everything and me having to sort of redo all my backups and needing way more bandwidth or needing to send lots of data up again. I started thinking, man, what's up, Comcast? You know, we've been they were good for a while at increasing my speed, sort of just, you know, marching down the road every year to things would get faster. And that's still true of the downstream. That sort of keeps keeps getting bumped up. But the upstream sort of marched up to ten and stopped. So I went online and I I texted with them, you know, because that's the best way to get Comcast support. I have had like no issues with Comcast support as long as I can text with them on their little chat system. So I did that and I said, hey, what can you do for me? And they said, well, we've got this plan that'll get you thirty five up. And I said, that sounds great. I mean, it's still I would like, you know, like five hundred up or something. But hey, thirty five, that's triple what I have today. And I said, great, let's let I said, well, what's the what's the cost delta? They said it's a $17 a month difference, like perfect. No problem. Definitely totally worth it. So so I said, OK, let's do it. And they said, well, we just looked because they can see, you know, what I'm connected with your modem isn't compatible. So I was using a motor or a modem and and it only had 16 channels down and eight up or four up or whatever. And they're like, you know, for this new plan, you need, you know, you need more downstream bandwidth because they're like and I said, well, what's the bandwidth downstream? They said, oh, it's our gigabit plant. So it's it's a gigabit down and and, you know, a thousand megabytes down, thirty five up. And I said, oh, OK, well, I have another modem here. You know, I've got a modem with like 24 channels down there. Like, yeah, that's still not that's still not going to be enough. We can send you a modem like, whoa, hold your horses. Like, I don't want to get into modem rental again. Wait, gigabit down. That's what right. And so I said, wait a minute. Are you telling me that I need a Docsis 3.1 modem? And they said, yeah, I said, oh, all right, hold the phone. You know, I'll call you back in two days. So I I went and and looked and are the advice that we get. And this is what I love about this show. You know, the advice that we gave you what eight months ago, but don't buy a Docsis 3.1 modem yet. They're too expensive. It's not worth it. That is no longer the case because there are at least four Docsis 3.1 modems approved by Comcast. Two of them from Netgear, one standalone and one sort of baked into a high end router and then one from Motorola, which is made by Zoom Technologies. But it's the Motorola thing and then one from Ares. So I have had the opportunity to test two of these thus far. I'll start testing the Ares one tomorrow. But this podcast, this Skype call is going over the the Motorola version of the modem. And it's very interesting what I have found. And I'll leave the reviews of the modems themselves out of it until I've had time to actually test all of them. And then I can sort of give you all a comparison. But some interesting things. So installing the Docsis 3.1. And these are all like the one I'm running today. The Netgear one that I was running, the Netgear CM 1000. You can get that on Amazon for 172 bucks. I previously or I'm currently using the Motorola MB 8600, which you can get for 159 bucks on Amazon. So these things are out there. And, you know, like then they work and they're not exorbitantly priced because they are ready for consumers. So, so, you know, I went through the process and Comcast lets you do your activation online. You know, so you just plug in a computer into the modem, you log into your account, it assigns it to your account and then boom, you know, provisions it and you're up and running. And sure enough, I get. So the best part, John, is it's not really a thousand down and 35 up. The numbers are far more significant than that. It's 1.21 gigabits down, right, like like 1.21 gigawatts. And the upstream that's actually provisioned into the modem is 42 megabits per second. So these are very important geek numbers that they have assigned here. And sure enough, it works, right? I mean, it, you know, you like that. Really, you got those numbers. Yeah, right now. So back to the future and the chikers guide to the galaxy. I know, amazing. It's great. You can if you're a Comcast customer, you can look on DSL reports. We'll put a link in the show notes. They have an article that shows you like, what are the provisioned speeds of my modem? Because it's, you know, that's that's what you actually want to know. So we'll put that in there. So so what's the competition here? Well, it's more bandwidth. Yeah, that my upstream is now, you know, at least as fast, if not faster than yours. And and then my downstream is, you know, I mean, I'm at a gigabit, John. So, yeah, yeah. But here's the interesting part. So, you know, I set the thing up and I start doing my tests. And the first thing I do is a speed test. But whenever I do a speed test, I also open another terminal window and I start a ping test going so I can see what buffer bloat happens in the modem and how it deals with it and all that stuff. And so I did my my test and downstream, you know, there's no buffer bloat because that's generally handled pretty well by the cable modem head end. Upstream is where you'll see the ping time increase as the, you know, as the packet or as the buffer fills up on the cable modem. Nope, not with this modem, not with either of the two that I've tested. Like, OK, what? I tested it five times. No change in ping times would have whatsoever was like, you know, whatever, 10 milliseconds to to www.apple.com. I just that's usually what I ping. So I started doing some research. Cable labs in the Docsis 3.1 spec mandates that you use a new queuing methodology to make. Buffer bloat go away in the modem. So, like, in theory, you wouldn't have to worry about setting QOS on your router for that stuff. You might want to do other things with QOS, but it takes away a huge thing. And it's it's there. It's called Docsis Pi, P.I.E. That's the queuing method that they're using now for Docsis 3.1. And that is mandated for Docsis 3.1. Here's the question that I have and I don't have an answer for this yet. I've asked both both Netgear and the folks that make the motorola modems and and they have just not gotten back to me yet. I've asked if like these modems, so Docsis 3.0 and Docsis 3.1 are two completely different signaling methodologies, like the modem just and they all support both so that they're backwards compatible. In fact, while my downstream is happening over a Docsis 3.1 OFDM channel, my upstream is still the same three bonded what appear to be Docsis 3, like non OFDM channels. So my question is this. If you just plug this modem into a connection that was provisioned only for my previous speeds like Docsis 3.0 speeds, would it still do the new queuing and buffer bloat protection? And I think the answer might be yes. So that alone might be the reason to upgrade your modem now to get the better tech. And then when, you know, when it's time to go to to Docsis 3.0, when you go to Docsis 3. So. So there you go. It's pretty cool, John. I know, I know I'm I'm sticking with the one that I just bought for a while, because I think it's the best choice for the plans that yeah, right now, the most that they offer, I think is 440. Right, which I think fits within the Docsis 3.0 definition. So our my ISP does not yet offer a gigabit or 3.1 type plan. Right. So you're saying the modulation is different, the modulation, you know, the modulation scheme for 3.1 is is entirely different. It uses. So it's not QAM. It's OFDM. That's correct. OFDM. OK, so that's all right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I know. But it's this it's this queuing that really kind of blew me away. I mean, we've always said you need QOS on your router because cable modems are awful at managing this, which was true and is true for most cable modems. But but cable labs to their credit said, no, you don't get to get away with this anymore. You've got to fix it in the modem and they did. I know it's pretty good. So yeah, I like it. But they, yeah, they had a rush. So I had some local friends that also have optimum and they were like, hey, the modem that you said to get, they say it's out of stock. And I'm like, well. And the weird thing is they had two different sites you could go to to get the exact same modem. Yep. One of them said out of stock. And the other one said, yep. It's very weird. Yeah, it's the TM 1602. It's $99. And I think it's well worth it. And I think that's the best price you're going to get for it. And it does 16 16 down for up. It's cool for me. Yeah. So just just to be clear, folks, that is not a doxus 3.1 modem. No, there's just one. John has a three point. Oh, right. Internet and voice modem. Oh, right. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't seen any voice 3.1 modems yet, but I'm sure they're there. It might just not be available for. I currently do not do their voice service. I still have a I still have this thing called POTS. Yeah, plain old telephones, telephone system. I saw the copper landline. Yeah. And yeah, just just to just to close the loop on that, the Eris SB 8200, which is their standalone doxus, three point one modem, like not one with a router baked in is one eighty nine at Amazon. So they're out there and they're not. It's not the four hundred dollar extravaganza that it was a year ago when there was like one that wasn't really available. So I like it. Well, it's good. So are you saying so was this. Service tier advertised on on their webpage or yeah, to someone or was it hidden away? Like, I mean, is this no, it's there. They just didn't know. No, it's it's consumer grade, you know. Yeah, they and it's it's there. It's just not it's it's just wasn't advertised. Like they never told me, hey, you want to go to gigabit? You know, we have it available in our area and it could be that it's just, you know, because it's brand new, so I don't know. It's good, though. I mean, it's not rolled out in every area or at least it wasn't. Maybe it is now, but but it's not rolled out everywhere yet. And so that's I mean, I knew it was available, but, you know, I didn't think it was available in my area. Turns out I was wrong. So it's pretty good, pretty good. And so I'm I'm now still faster than you, right? Yeah, here they offer, I think it's still part of this. They do offer something called light path here, which is fiber. And that you can definitely get. Yes, even speed. Well, and you'd get way faster upstream with fiber. Well, I think for the most part, when they deploy fiber, it's symmetrical and that the up and down are typically the same. I don't know why that's not the case with cable, whether it's technical or I've I've never seen a cable service, especially the higher speeds have symmetric up and down. And I don't know why that is. Yeah, maybe somebody could explain it to me. Yeah, yeah. Well, why it's different? I mean, it's because the way the whole cable infrastructure is built. It it's built. Well, I mean, part of it is the number channel. So part of it is that if you're, you know, like my modem, you know, it has 60 down and four up. So obviously the up is limited because there's only so much pipe there. Right, right. Or I guess optic when you're doing optical, that's not really a problem because it's not RF. It's it's it's light and lightest magic. Cool stuff. All right. Well, I'll have to. Yeah, all cable vision every now and then and say, hey, well, that's the trick is and, you know, when they said it was only 17 bucks a month, OK, like, am I agreeing to a new contract? What's the catch? Because that's not I expected. I expected this gigabit service to be, you know, insane. What is it a month? I don't know because it's baked into our pricing. But it, you know, we've got a package deal with them. So I think it's somewhere in the I want to say like 50 to $60 range. Oh, OK. That's yeah. I think mine is fifty four ninety five. Yeah, yeah. I think that's all it is. But then it was higher and then they apply, you know, promotion. And then, you know, you got to do them once the promotion runs. That's right, exactly. So I can't tell you what the actual price is and they don't advertise it on their on their website. Nice. So what are you going to do with all this new found bandwidth? Well, I'm going to upload podcasts faster. Ah, great. I honestly, I have not found the new downstream bandwidth to matter like one iota. It's it's it's totally irrelevant. I mean, going 250 down was plenty. Like way more than enough. I mean, I downloaded something from Apple the other day and I saw it come in at like 60 megabytes a second or something. It was like, oh, yeah, that's nice. That's fast. But OK, you know, so it was it was here a couple of minutes before it would have been right. I mean, media, you know, like I look at the every now and then I'll look at the bandwidth and like, you know, I so I have Netflix. Yeah. HD. And I think that consumes, you know, a few megabits per second. Right. You're nowhere near. And what I've seen also is that a lot of times when you're downloading from somebody, they're going to cap their bandwidth on the server. So even though you may be able to download it, you know, hundreds of megabits a second, they're going to be like, uh, uh, uh, uh, no. Right. That's the thing. And that's what I'm seeing is, you know, I'm seeing things top out. But I also it was weird when I swapped in the new modem yesterday, I noticed that my bandwidth like with the with the first modem, which was the netgear one. But the problem that I had was not the fault of either of the modems. They both work fine. The first one, like instantly I was getting, you know, whatever these speeds like speed test and stuff can't get to gigabit. Like it's just never going to get there. But I can, you know, I'll see you somewhere between four and six hundred or whatever. It's like, OK, cool. And I was fine. Interested. If you could send me a screenshot of the the Doxus status page. I'd be interested to see what yours shows versus mine. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It shows all the Doxus three channels connected. And then it shows one OFDM channel connected. That's it. Oh, OK. Yeah. I think each modem can bond two OFDM channels in each direction. Like that's what it would be capable of doing. But Comcast only sinks the one on the downstream. But yeah, so, you know, I did the test. It was fine. I ran that for a couple of days and it was like, all right, let me put the motor roll in place. And so I did that and everything seemed fine. But then I sort of dug in a little deeper. And when I was connected directly, you know, with my computer to the modem right after activation, I was getting, you know, speed tests would show me like six hundred megabits like, whoa, all right. And which was a little faster than I was getting previously with the neck. I don't know why, but it could have been it was just the right time a day for me to hit speed test and get some real bandwidth out of them. But but then once I plugged it into my router, my speeds topped out at like two or two fifty. Like this is weird. It wasn't like this with the same, literally the same router, you know, a day ago on the other modem. So I rebooted the modem, didn't change it. I rebooted the router, totally fixed it. So I don't know what that was about, but, you know, sometimes like lawyer Jeff says, sometimes you need to reboot your router. So there you go. We have some tips from previous shows. I think it's time to to move on past this geekiness. Don't you think, John? Never, never, never. It's true. All right. Listener Bill has a tip from show six seventy two. He says, I think you missed one very important key limitation in the migration to crash plans, small business plan. And that is the five terabyte limit. He says, I believe listener Stephen had said he had seven. He says, I'm well over five as well with a limited upstream bandwidth. It took several years to get all my data upgraded. So needless to say, I'm not happy. What Bill is talking about is that when you are a crash plan home customer, if you are a crash plan home customer, you can choose to migrate or not to crash plan for small business. Crash plan for small business eventually will cost you double what the home versions cost. But like we said, back in show six seventy two for a lot of us, especially people with gobs and gobs of data, that's still the least expensive by triple, right? I mean, it's like a cost a third of what the next least expensive thing is. So crash plan, if you've got a lot of data to save, even though you're going to wind up paying double what you paid him previously, it's still going to be way cheaper than what you pay somebody else. But you do have to migrate your account from crash plan for home to crash plan for small business. And when you do that, there is a data migration that happens. Except if you have more than five terabytes of data, you have to start over. And I checked with the CEO crash plan about this and it's true. He said what he's seeing a lot of people do is remove data from crash plan to get just below the five terabyte limit, migrate over and then just upload the delta so that you're not having to start from total scratch. A painful process to have to go through and a painful pill to swallow for sure. But. You know, there you go. And I based on the conversation I had with the people at crash plan, it doesn't seem like they can change this easily. So I don't I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily want to lead anyone on and say, oh, but wait six months. And then, you know, I like I didn't get the feeling that that was in the cards at all. I could be entirely wrong about it. But I think they would have said something along those lines if if they were even thinking about doing that. So so there you go. Thank you for that, Bill. Good stuff. Yeah, good. Moving on. Juergen brings us to thoughts about life after crash plan. And and he says. The news about this crash plan thing hit me hard. He said, sure, they will fulfill the time I've paid for. But I not only made backs of backups in case I lose data, I was also willing to pay a premium price. So I would get historical versions of my files before I move on to the next company that might close their doors in the future. I was thinking about alternatives. Most of the available solutions limit storage and or the number of machines. Since I have at least four computers, I would like to back up. Paying for each one now gets expensive. There's a reason crash plan closed down this home version of their of their product. I don't think it was profitable for them because the same model doesn't appear to be profitable for anyone else. Says, I have a family license, though, for carbon copy cloner. And I run that on all my machines. What I now need is some storage in the cloud. My plan, create an image size limited and then let carbon copy cloner do the job of backing up with historicizing the files. When the size limit of the image is reached, the carbon copy cloner can automatically start deleting old files. What do you think of my plan? If I get enough iCloud Drive space, do I have to be careful so that the images in the cloud are not synced back to my computer? So, yeah, it should work using iCloud Drive. I'm not sure how iCloud Drive will deal with a big Mondo disk image like that. And like you said, it'll be synced down to every Mac that you have. There's no selective sync available there in that way. So that could wind up being a huge band with hog all by itself. But it's an interesting solution, right, finding some cloud service that you can just send your stuff up to. Again, I come back to ARQ, which I mentioned earlier, because that's sort of built to do this in a way that carbon copy cloner is not. Not that you couldn't do it, but this is like what ARQ is built to do and was built for exactly this reason so that you're not tied to the software that comes with your. Cloud service that it's, you know, it's service agnostic in a sense. I mean, there's there's certain services it supports and certain ones that it doesn't. But mostly it supports everything that it can, including just, you know, random, not random, but generic FTP and SFTP and, you know, webdav servers. So roll your own, do whatever you want, find your data and boom off you go. So that's that's my thoughts. I don't know anything you got to got to say on that, John. We have another another thought from Rob about sort of along the same lines. I'm not surprised that free doesn't make companies money and they kind of decide. Yeah, right. We've seen it happen time and time again. I saw it with some of the sync services and right services. Now we're seeing it with these unlimited is unlimited. Really isn't. Yeah, really. Right, right. Well, yeah, business model. And and that's somebody infinite amount of something for fixed price. All right, yeah. Right. It just it doesn't. The economics just don't work. They don't generally. I mean, unless the fixed price is exorbitant out of the gate, right, you know, like, yeah. The the issue and and I've heard a lot of people perhaps unaware. And I know we sort of alluded to it earlier in the show. But Amazon Prime Cloud offered or Amazon Prime offered Amazon Drive unlimited to people for 70 bucks a month or 60 bucks or 70 bucks. 70 bucks a month, they probably still do it 70 bucks a year, 60 bucks a year or something like that. That is gone, at least here in the US. I've had some European listeners write in and say that they can still get it for 70 euros. Um, I I I thought they had discontinued that everywhere. So be very careful before you commit to to that. Because that would that, you know, six months ago, that was the magic, right? Like a whole suite. We get Amazon for 70 bucks. Great sold. I bought in and then it was like, yeah, no, we're going to turn that off. Thanks for your thanks for your money, though. So so Amazon, you can pay 60 bucks for one terabyte, and then it's basically 60 bucks a terabyte. So, you know, for that seven terabytes, you're paying 420 bucks a year or whatever, which, you know, 35 bucks a month. That's about what we're finding everywhere. So that seems to be what the pricing is. One last one about this. And then we have some other tips and things to share as listener Rob, yet another crash plan solution posted to Facebook. It says I was an offsite crash plan user, but had to stop due to bandwidth caps. I kept using the crash plan app to back up to a local server. Now I'm going to need a new solution for my local backups to my unraid NAS server. I need an easy start it and forget it service, maybe with a reminder once a week on how it's doing like crash plan has slash had. For this, I feel like carbon copy cloner is your best bet. That's what I use for all of my local backups. The nice part is that it's not creating anything unique to carbon copy cloner like that. You don't need carbon copy cloner to extract your data out. You can choose to back up to a disk image on your NAS or really whatever you want. I mean, but it's just using things that are sort of native to Mac OS and that's a beautiful thing. You can even just have it back up the files to a directory on your NAS. Like you don't even have to put it in a container. Just like take these files and clone them over there. So I would use carbon copy cloner for that. John. Yes. Yes. How are you doing? Good. Don't all right. How are you? I am all right. I'm in the middle of recording a show. Maybe we do this later. Any thoughts on that one? Now I've avoided the whole this whole nightmare. Well, you need like as a friend. You say I need a cloud backup. I do. And I have select cloud backup. I know. Indicated to you in the past. So you can keep reminding me and I'll keep ignoring it. OK, good. That sounds great. That's going to be good. Though I do find the CCC remote compelling. I'll have to I had really not explored that all my carbon copy cloner backups are local direct attached drives. So being able to do it over a network I think is neat. I just took a peek at it. And it's like, yeah, which machine over port 22. So I guess it does a secure tunnel. You're right. That's what we're saying before as he uses SSH. But man, that's like the problem is like we were saying before it. You know, you're not encrypting the stored data. It's not encrypted at rest. That's which is fine for me for local backups, although I have my like my Synology drives are encrypted anyway. But storing data over there that's not encrypted. I'm not into that. Yeah, because all my backups so my time machine backups are encrypted and my CCC are using my those drives are using a file vault. So right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's a tip to everybody is encrypt your backups. I think so. Yeah, big time. But this does prompt me to explore that piece of software that someone they are you know, it's something else. It's something that lets you use your existing cloud services but choose to encrypt the contents or provide an additional level. I think most of them already do. Right. Right. Using either your key or their key or maybe both. Sure. Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Jumping around but still with tips from listeners. Listener Bill and he's correct about this. He says, here's the downside to using Eros. If the Internet goes out, the whole network is likely to go with it. He says, I've had the Internet go down twice since I installed the Euro. His cable modem goes out or whatever. He says, in the first instance, all of my network went down with it. No local streaming, no printers, no file transfer. Even though the problem was outside my house, I still could not do anything with my Wi-Fi. In the second instance, he said the land continued to work. But according to a message from Eros support, apparently I was just lucky and indeed Eros support told him, and this is true. The Eros will typically maintain the land connection when the Internet connection drops, provided that the Eros are not rebooted. However, Eros do have a self repair function that automatically will attempt to reestablish a connection to the Internet. And if the ISP service is still down when the Eros tries to do this, the land will be lost. But we have had a lot of requests for persistent land. And I'll be sure to pass along your interest. Yeah, this is this is not good. And I have. I did not experience this when I tested Euro initially. Now it might have been that this was not the case with it. Or it might have been that I just got lucky and or their their their checks were less frequent or something. But in the last couple of weeks, I've been running Euro here at the house. And I definitely experienced this, especially as I'm going through and, you know, yanking cable modems and that sort of thing. I have seen Wi-Fi just go down. It won't let you connect if the WAN connection is down. And I agree. There's no reason for that, that the land should maintain itself regardless of whether or not it can get out to the Internet. That's my feeling. So hopefully they will prioritize persistent land. I can't imagine that that's technically difficult. But I mean, I don't know the inner workings. I could be entirely wrong about that. No other router seems to have that problem. So thank you for alerting us to that, Bill. That's an important distinction. Hopefully they'll get it fixed. Ken listened to us last week, John, and Ken reminds us. He says, for remote access to get into your Mac from your iPad or your iPhone, use parallels access. It works great and it's 20 bucks a year. I always, always forget about parallels access for remote access. And it's fantastic. It works well. It basically changes the interface of your Mac to be more iPad friendly when you're on your iPad. Not obviously when you're on your Mac, but that remote connection is a little more fluid, in fact, a lot more fluid on the iPad. It's probably the best remote access for that, not for helping people or whatever, because that's different. But but for just doing things on your own Mac remotely, parallels access is awesome. So thanks for that, Ken. Good stuff. Have you used parallels access, John? I remember they showed it to us and I think I got a. Yeah, really didn't have a it's a it's a very clever product. Yeah, yeah, doing the remote thing. But it not something I really had a lot of use for. So yeah, yeah. I'm still rocking parallels for my virtual machine. OK, and that's my current product that I like to use for running windows. Sure, we're always shown on Mac OS. So last show, we were talking about that. And listener Michael said, how do you make it work to use screen sharing within messages? Because we talked about that as an option too, especially for helping someone out. And it's actually very straightforward, although it's sort of hidden. It's not the most obvious thing in messages. Highlight someone who is an I message you. So go to the message of someone that's an I message user. So blue bubbles, not green bubbles. And then go to the buddies menu at the top of the screen and either choose invite to share my screen, which will invite them to share your screen. Hey, looks like my my audio wanted to cut out. Is that was that just me? Hang on. All right, I'm back. Well, that was interesting. The output on my firewire interface. It stopped my my external firewire interface, which is like 10 years old or more. So it's possible that, you know, things are flaky in there. And it's done this once before it's stopped taking data from the computer and outputting it to its to its output. So thankfully, I have another interface here that I could switch my headphones over to. So we're still using firewire interface for mixing and everything else. I just can't hear what I'm sending back to it for monitoring. Anyway, start this again. Start this again. So in the buddies menu of messages, you choose invite to share my screen to invite somebody to share your screen or there's another option. Ask to share my screen and it'll ask them for the same. And that should that should do it. Yeah, that's how that works. It's pretty it's pretty good. Used to be much stranger, but now it's it's pretty good. And again, another question from 673 last week. Listener Paul, sorry. Listener Todd asks. You discussed moving an I photos library and iTunes library from one external disk to another. Sounded like it'd be fine to simply copy the top of a folder of each across via the finder or carbon copy clone or whatever. But I assume the path to the library must be maintained precisely or the app won't find the content. Is that true? Does the new drive need the same name as the old one? And is it not possible to change folder paths or names at all? What if on the new drive, I want to reorganize the file slightly and perhaps put things in a sub folder? Yeah, you're you're on a great track here, Todd, and it shows that you're paying attention because we should have talked about this as a follow up to to that advice. Once it's moved and you can, you can put it anywhere you want. Once it's moved, you need to let the software individually, photos or iTunes know where the new library location is with photos. The simplest way is to just launch photos with the option key down and then choose it'll let you choose a library. Choose to open that library, but you're not done. That's just the open library. Now you need to tell it that that's also the system library. So once you're in photos, go to photos, preferences general and then choose the little button that says use as system library and it'll make the active library, the system library, which then makes things like either photo stream or iCloud photo library. Just, you know, it blesses it for those and shifts everything to that. And then that's it for photos. You're good with iTunes launch iTunes normally, then immediately go to iTunes, preferences, advanced and set the iTunes media folder location to the new folder, to the new location of the folder, the one that you moved. This will, this is where iTunes actually does something very well that it didn't used to do all that well, but I've had good experience with it. All your mappings will still be to the old drive. Like if you were to go and highlight a song and, you know, command in command I or get info and look at the path, it will say this is on the old drive because that's where your library thinks it is. It when you change it in the in the preferences, it only changes the new songs. But if you go to play one of those old songs, iTunes will realize that it's not like that it can't even find the old location. And so it will check the relative location in the currently defined iTunes library media folder. And if it's there, it'll change it and it'll change everything. It's really smart about that. And I have not had it screw me up. So, so, yeah, you can reorganize things and it's all good. Pretty good, right, John? Huh. Yeah. So it's not just because I tried the same trick with iTunes. If you hold down the option key and say you want to create a library or you want to. That's what you're saying. No, no, no, no, no. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that for photos with iTunes. You should not be storing your library file anywhere other than your home folder. I'm talking about the media file location to very different things. And so you'll change the media file. What did I call it? It's the I don't have iTunes. I do have it open the iTunes media folder location is the only thing that's changing. And that's the only thing you should change your library folder. There's it's very small or your library files. They're very small and they should always live in home music, iTunes or whatever that that folder is like the default location. All you're changing is where your media files are, which is the big Mondo thing. With photos, you're doing exactly what you know what I said. Option key and do all that. But but with iTunes, there's really no good reason. I mean, you might have a good reason, but in in general, there's no good reason to relocate that library file. So just bear that in mind. OK, yeah. All right. I just noticed that the behavior is similar when you hold down option with a lot of correct software. Is that it says, hey, yeah, you want to find something? Of course, the other clever thing. So if you hold down option and command, Dave, yeah, with photos, yeah, it will say, hey, you want to fix things. And with iTunes, I had not known this. I was like, wow, what happens with iTunes if you hold down option and command? It'll come up and say, I've disabled. I'm booting in what I'm going to call safe mode. I was just how around what is iTunes safe mode? That's great. I mean, I'm booting it right now. It says iTunes is running in safe mode. Visual plugins you have installed have been temporarily disabled. That's all it says. I wonder if that's all it does. That might be the only thing. Yeah, I mean, I have not used iTunes visual plugins in ages. I wonder if it does some other program into from interference, interference caused by plugins or scripts not manufactured by Apple. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's basically, you know, disabling third party plugins to iTunes. Yeah, yeah, safe mode for iTunes. OK, so yeah, OK. And then with photos that carries over from their other photo software and that. Option and command gives you ways to repair things if things seem if you're not getting thumbnails or, you know, other weird stuff. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Huh, huh, huh. Interesting, interesting. Hey, we've got a couple of questions left. And we've got two about iCloud syncing or iCloud issues. So let's we can stretch this one out a little bit, John. Let's let's take Ian's question. Shall we? Surely. Surely. Ian, I got you. Ian writes, I finally decided it was time to upgrade my iCloud storage to the 200 gig plan and enable iCloud photo library and iCloud drive document and desktop syncing just to have another backup. I don't want to get caught. I enabled both features in the computer, left the computer running overnight to start the upload. Five megs was going to take a while. Five, assuming five gigs is going to take a while. Yeah, next morning, iCloud drive was showing 111 K uploaded out of 651 megs. And photos was showing 500 ish pictures uploaded out of 20,000. I left it on all day that day in the following night. And the next day I checked again, no change. I tried pausing and resuming the iPhoto upload or the photos upload, sorry. And it seemed to start running again. But an hour later, stuck breaking out the Google foo. I was able to come cobble together an Apple script that would open photos, preferences, pause the upload, wait five seconds, resume the upload, wait 30 minutes, wash, rinse, repeat. The script should be attached. Oh, yeah, you sent it along. We could we can share this if if you folks want. Leaving this running for another three and a half days in my library was finally all uploaded to iCloud and I could sync back down to my iPhone. Yay. However, I'm still stuck with the document and desktop syncing any ideas how to give it a good kick in the backside and get the upload running. So this is fascinating. I've seen this happen where it throttles itself on a daily basis, but obviously what Ian's reporting is not just daily throttling. This is like it getting stuck. I know it's trying not to get in the way, trying not to get in the way of your other network operations. So I wonder if maybe there's some packet loss happening on his network that's causing it to say, whoa, I need to just stop. Again, ping www.apple.com is a good way to check and see your packet loss. In fact, I think I put up an article about two weeks ago explaining this. So I'll put that URL on the show notes. But I can't think of anything else. I mean, it would be worth looking in the console to see if the console is reporting why this stuff is stopping. Do you have any thoughts on this, John? You betcha. Oh, good, sweet. Well, for iCloud problems, especially related to things that are syncing with the cloud. Yeah. Sadly, Dave, I found sometimes the solution is to go to the iCloud system preference and say sign out and then sign back in. Oh, I bet you're right. Sometimes that, I mean, I've certainly found it. So we've discussed this if you change your password. Right. It's not smart enough to link sync messages and I think a log out and logging back in would do that or maybe not. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I've had problems. I remember you and I had a problem for a while with messages, because what it does is it creates an encryption key and for some stupid reason, it just wasn't getting it. And I think you said, well, have you tried logging out and logging back in again? And I'm like, no, let's try that. And that seems, so sometimes things, especially if you recently made a change to your environment, I think sometimes it may not grok it and it sounds like in this case maybe it didn't or it could have been a network issue. It could have been a problem with the iCloud server. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet you're right. That totally makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It can get kind of scary though, because you get some scary warnings when you log out of iCloud. Like in some cases it'll imply that you'll lose everything. Right, right. But you really don't. Or it says, you know, you want me to get rid of all local copies and it's like, well, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, right. Right, right. Yeah, when you sign out and sign back in iCloud, be careful because some of the dialogues could be misinterpreted. Make sure you answer the dialogues in the right way or you could potentially lose some data. Yeah, yeah. All right, so one more iCloud related problem and then we promise we'll let you go. Listener Paul writes, I have a new top of the line iMac and I've been loving it, but I have noticed one problem. I can receive mail on my iCloud account, but not send it. I get a dialogue that says, cannot send message using the server iCloud. The sender address was rejected by the server and it's an iCloud address. It's not like he's trying to send from another address or anything. And the server response was, authentication required prior to essentially negotiating a mail connection. Selecting a different, or it then says select a different outgoing server from the list, et cetera. It says mail was configured from iCloud. I just plugged it in and it built the account there and it works fine on all my other devices. I'm at a loss on how to fix it. So your sign in sign out might actually solve this one too, but it's obvious that what's happening is iCloud mail or iCloud is not able to negotiate with mail. So the first thing I would do is I would go into mail and edit the SMTP server list. And actually you should have a button to do that right on that warning screen, but you can also go into accounts and find it there and plug in your username and password manually there. I have heard, a lot of times this will just work, but I have heard of people with two factor authentication enabled that have gone and created single use, not single use, but this application passwords for sending mail because really when you set up mail, and I know this is crazy, but it's true with IMAP and POP even, but you are setting up one account for receiving mail and one account for sending mail. Now it might be the same credentials, but mail sees it as two completely separate accounts. It's using IMAP or POP for the receiving and SMTP for the sending. Generally, the Mac is good at sort of populating all these things in the right places, but it's possible when you went through setup, something got a little foobar and maybe it just didn't plug your password in on the sending side, so it can't negotiate the connection. Check that. You might find that your username and password just isn't there or the authentication's not set, so you just plug that in and that should do it. That's my story, John. You got a story to tell on this one? I think I had this happen recently. Yeah, for some reason I deleted and re-added some of my IMAP accounts, and I remember it came up once and all I had to do was say try with selected server. Oh yeah, there you go. And then I think it prompted me for the password. So the first time around it didn't populate it, which is weird because it should. Right, right. And the other thing, there's another path to get to this screen is that if you are in mail and you click on accounts and then you click on the account, you go to server settings, outgoing mail account, and that'll list all your outgoing mail accounts and then it'll also list, have edit SMTP server lists just like this dialogue. Yeah, yeah. That's another way to get to it. You may have to fiddle with that as you said. Right, right. All right, before we go, I do want to list and thank this week's contributors for our MGG Premium accounts. I don't know what to call it. Our MGG Premium subscribers. This week we had renewals from Robert P. Terry O. Pierre T. Paul H. Joe B. Matt C. James H. Brian D. Mark R. Michael B. Abdullah B. Doug L. Chanin K. Martin T. David B. Barry F. James F. And one time contribution from Brian D. Thank you all so much, you rock. It's, I say it all the time, but it's, you know, it's a huge part of why we're able to do what we're able to do here every week for you. So it means a ton to us. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also, thank you to cash fly. C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. But what about getting things from you to us? John, how would they do that? Hmm. I know. Oh, good. One way, Dave, is you could send an email. You have email. I hope you do. Yeah, hopefully your email can send. That's right. Yeah, you may have to, you may have to set it up right. Right. Feedback at MackieGab.com. Wait, wait, wait. You said feedback at MackieGab.com? I'm pretty sure I said feedback at MackieGab.com. What about if you want to call us? Do you know the number for that, John? It's 224-888-GEEK. Do you know what the numbers for GEEK are? Which is 4-3-3-5. Yeah, that's right. I still have the old number, remember? But it's right there in our thing at the bottom of our agenda so that we don't screw it up. Yeah, yeah. But you always read it, so I just kind of ignore that. Well, that's a lot of things you say. There are a lot of things I say. Yes, that's true. I want to thank our sponsors for this week and actually in general, our sponsors, our ongoing sponsors. So as I mentioned during the show, Casper at Casper.com slash MGG, where you get 50 bucks off a mattress using coupon code MGG. Barebones from BB Edit Software at barebones.com. And you can get a free month of BarkBox with your subscription when you subscribe to a plan at BarkBox.com slash MGG. It's always good, John. I also want to thank Smile Software or Smile at SmileSoftware.com and Otherworld Computing at MaxSales.com. You can find us on Twitter. He's John F. Braun. I'm Dave Hamilton. The show's Mac, GEEK, Mac Observer, Pilot P. We'll figure out a schedule to get him to come back. What do you got, John? Anything? I got nothing. Oh, I got one thing. What's that? A little piece of advice. Just one? Which should apply in all facets of your life. Computing and otherwise. Especially if a hurricane is coming. And that is, don't get caught. Made on a Mac. Be careful out there, folks.