 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek App Episode 804 for Monday, March 2nd, 2020. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek App today. As every show, or most every show, we will take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, mash them all up together, string them into an agenda, add in some stuff of our own with the goal of everyone, the goal being that everyone learns at least five new things today and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ExpressVPN.com slash MGG, Mac Weldon with promo code MGG, and TextExpander.com slash podcast. We'll talk about all of those in a little more detail shortly. But for now, here, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, still in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Yeah, man. How are you doing? Good? Yeah, I'm toys everywhere, man. Toys everywhere. Yeah, that's right. I'm talking out lately. Well, that's what we geek out here. It's what we do. All right, well, we'll talk. You've got some new toys to talk about, which we'll get to in a little bit here. First, let's start with some quick tips. Ben comes through. He says, a client discovered during our session today that you can right click a column in the Finder window. You right click the little resize bar in the Finder window to reveal three options, right size this column, right size all columns individually, right size all columns equally. So this is in column view in the Finder, just in case that's not clear. So if you're in the Finder, you go to view and choose as columns. And he explains the first option is the equivalent of like Zoom window, but for a specific column. So right size means it changes the size of the column to fit whatever the longest thing is, as long as that's not way too long. And he says so it's like Zoom control for a specific column, making it as wide as the longest file name in the list. When multiple columns are visible, the second option, right size all columns individually, resizes all of them to be as wide as their individual longest name. And then the last one, right size all columns equally takes the longest name of one and makes everybody that, which is pretty cool. He says, and even better, my client's Mac is running Sierra. So I guess this feature has been around for a while, but I confirmed it does also work in Catalina. So yes, it's been around and it has endured. So thank you, Ben. That's pretty good. I like that one. I don't live in column mode usually. I live in a list mode, which has columns, but is different than column mode. What do you think about all that, John? Yes. Right. Andrew shares a quick tip. He says talking about system preferences he says, this one's, this is one of my favorite tips. He says launch system preferences. Once it's launched, tap the tab key once and then just start typing in the preference pane and boom, it jumps out. So here's, here's what he means by this. You launch system preferences, hit tab, and then if say you want to launch the network preference pane, you hit N, that'll bring you to the network preference pane and then space bar will bring that pane forward. So if you're like me and use, say, you know, spotlight to launch your apps, right? So if I want to launch system preferences, I'll do command space bar. I'll start typing system preferences enter. Great. My hands are still on the keyboard. Now I hit the tab key. I hit N and boom, I can launch the network thing. I believe though that you have to have, and I forget where this is. Maybe somebody in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream can help me. I think you have to have that, that, that full access mode. And I believe it's an accessibility maybe keyboard. Someone is going to get me there. I know, I know, maybe not. Okay. But I think you have to have that enabled. We'll circle back to what that is. What's even cooler is you can navigate around there with the arrow keys if you like as well. So pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff. Thank you for sharing that, Andrew. Man, I wish and in the chat room, speaking of Petter Hall says, you can also spotlight directly to a system preference pane. Look at this. So if I type network, look at that. No, now that brought me to the wrong place. Okay, that's not it. Maybe if I go to notifications, you know what? I might have those turned off. Let me look in my system preferences spotlight. No, I've got preference paints there. I don't know why spotlight doesn't want to bring me there. So there you go. Dan C in the chat room says, go into keyboard, go to shortcuts, and turn on the use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls. That is what is necessary for this, I believe. Right? So there you go. Great. Yeah. Yeah, very cool. Thank you, Andrew. This came up actually in a Facebook thread somewhere. A friend of mine had posted that his phone was no longer ringing, and I've seen this problem before, but I had not seen his solution for it. The problem that I had, where I'd seen it was, it didn't matter what you did, it didn't want to ring for calls, and you had to back up restore the phone in order to fix that. Thankfully, there might be another solution. And for him, that was go to, on your phone, go to settings, go to phone, and make sure that silence unknown callers is not toggled. For him, it had somehow become turned on. Probably he turned it on, but you never know how these things go. And there you go. So pretty good. Thoughts on that, John? I wish I could silence some people. You can. You can silence individual people. No, I mean like the person themselves. Oh, like a filter. Oh, that would be interesting. Is there an app for that? I don't know. I don't think phones, I think you'd have to do like sorcery or something. Yeah, I think so. I like it though. I like the idea. Hey, you have a quick tip, reprise to share from Joe. Yes, Joe has a good one here. So Joe says, someone should write a book with all the system keyboard shortcuts per OS revision. One I just discovered today trying to install a software security component was the ability to see hidden files, which are usually preceded with a period, if you go in the terminal, and you do LS-A. But that makes things invisible. But in the finder, if you want to unenviable things, command shift period. Correct. Yeah. And as he says, yes, it saves a trip to the terminal. And my reply was as follows. Now the thing is, Dave, somebody actually does have a list of keyboard shortcuts, and this was not in the list. So shame on them, but Apple has a sport article called Mac keyboard shortcuts. Oh, nice. Okay. Cool. So you may want to check that out, but I don't know how up to date or thorough it is, because again, I couldn't find this one. I was going to say, when we've talked about this, this one has been in place for several years, at least. I know it was probably two years ago that we first discovered it. And when we talked about it, folks said, yeah, we've known about that for a while. As a reminder, and just to crystallize it, command shift period will toggle the finder's display of hidden files on or off. And it is a universal setting. I don't believe it is a per-window setting in the finder. So once you've turned it on, it is there until you turn it off. Yeah. But again, it's just command shift period, toggles it on and off. But yeah, it's been there for a while and is not documented anywhere by Apple near, as we can tell. Right. And then if you want to know keyboard shortcuts, we mentioned this a little while ago, but why not mention it again? Because it's relevant. There's something called cheat sheet, which if you hold down, I think if you run it, and then you hold down the command key and wait for a couple of seconds, you'll get a screen full of all the keyboard shortcuts relevant to the app that you're in. So, but this wasn't listed either. Yeah, I know. It's one of those that's super handy, but probably only four geeks, right? So, I don't know. Well, there's a reason things are hidden, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And while we're talking about keyboard shortcuts, I would be remiss if I didn't re-recommend Mouseless, which we talked about I think only four or five episodes ago, but it's a great little app that gamifies the way of learning keyboard shortcuts for all of your favorite apps and of course, the system as well. So, go check that out. It's good stuff. Great stuff, in fact. John, you've got one more from Brother Jay. This is a big one. Oh, for some of us it is. Everything okay? I set you up. Yeah, here it is. Okay. No, I got it. All right. So, Brother Jay tells us finally after years and after asking you about it, the startup chime is back on my machine running version 10.15.4 public beta. Yeah, the color on this makes it hard to read. He's Tinkertool system, which was updated. Let's get right to it. Yeah, let me read it. He says, I used Tinkertool system, which was updated to version 685 a few days ago, but notable inclusion now is that you can enable the classic startup chime. He says, I updated, tested, and confirmed. It works perfectly. My post-2017 machine chimes once again on startup. I assume he says that it adds a boot argument in the envy room, but I must obtain verification prior to providing affirmation. Very, very cool. And yes, it does, right? Do you test this on yours, John? Is that right? Yes, I tested it on my MacBook Pro and tested it on another machine that we're going to talk about soon, and it works on both. Great. Okay. And did you, how did you turn it on? Did you use Tinkertool? I just went into the terminal. Okay. So he did not mention the terminal command here, but there is one. Oh, actually, he did. He mentioned it in a future note. It is sudo space envy ram startup mute equals percent zero zero. And you know that we've already got that for you in the show notes. So yeah, there you go. Thanks, Brother Jay. Very cool. So you can do that. While he says that it is available in 1015 for public beta one, you're not running any of the public betas. You were able to do this with your release Catalina Mac just by typing in that envy ram command. Correct. Okay. Great. That's awesome. Cool. Yeah. Because, because yeah, as he pointed out, or I pointed out, it's kind of important to have that sometimes so you know where in the boot process you are. Yes. Right. Yeah. Fair. Like if you want to activate certain things on startup, you have, you've got to hit the keys like immediately after the chime in a lot of cases. And if there is no chime, then how do you, you know, and I realize that now with the new machines that I have here, Dave, they don't make any noise. Huh. You know, I mean, before my Mac book would, you know, make the little DVD happy sound. Yeah. No. That's right. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah. And all these new machines, there's no noise. Yeah. It's crazy. Kind of disconcerting. I kind of like to have indicators on the, on the old Mac book, like the battery level and stuff like that. It was just nice or the pulsing light to let you know that it's, it's alive. Well, yeah. So, okay. So you bring this up and I have a very important question for you, John. And that is what's different about Mexican power? And I'm not talking about their government or anything like that. I'm talking about power because I was in Mexico over the weekend. Okay. Because our power is 120 volts, 60 cycles last checked. Okay. Okay. So, you know, I've got my MacBook Air that I travel with that worked fine in Mexico. Lisa has been using my older 2011 MacBook Air and it works great for the things that she needs to do with it. It's awesome. So she was like, yeah, you know, we're going to be away, we're going to be away during the week a little bit. She does actually quite a bit of work with us here at Backbeat Media. And so she's like, I'll bring that laptop with me so I can do some air checks and like keep ahead of things. So we're not coming home and just buried. Like, great. Sounds good. So we get there and our machine won't start up. Okay. Won't wake up, won't start up. Fine. Maybe the battery's dead. It's all the machine. This happens on this machine from time to time. So I pull out the charger and I'll point out that this is a charger from Apple that I used for, you know, the better part of the last decade, traveling all over the world, mind you, I even used it in Europe, plugged it in, plugged it into her MacBook Air. The green light came on on the charger, but it never turned orange. It's like, this is weird. Okay. Fine. Went through all the, you know, reset the SMC, reset everything, hold down the right keys, do all this stuff. Nothing that we did in Mexico brought this machine to life, John. And then we got home. Yup. That's weird though, because from what I recall, Apple's adapters and power supplies can handle a variety of voltages. That's correct. And frequencies. Yeah. I don't, and I'm not convinced that there was any problem with it. I mean, it, you know, it powered up. It was green. Everything looked good. We get home. I pull it out of her bag. I plug that charger in. I plug it into her MacBook Air. It turns orange. The machine powers up and it has 97% battery. Huh. Uh-huh. Yep. I believe this will forever remain a mystery. But you know, since you brought it up, I figured I'd ask the question. It just seemed strange to me that this just didn't work. And like, you know, her, um, there was a little bit of water that had leaked out of like her water bottle from her backpack or whatever in the bottom, like the back, I should say, the bottom of the, you know, her backpack was on its side on the plane. Like there was a little bit on the way down. And so I thought, Oh, maybe, you know, she cooked the thing, right? Then fine. Okay. It's 2011. Like, you know, not that big of a loss. No problem. But when we got home, it just worked just fine. I tried many times over many days doing different things in Mexico. I would like leave it unplugged for several days, try it, plug it in, leave it plugged in for a couple of days. Like nothing that I did would wake this thing up. And then I get home and I plug it in and it just fires right up. It was in a weird state. Like I was seeing some interesting things like as part of the boot process. So clearly all of my machinations of resetting the SMC and all that while we were in Mexico worked like they, they, it, it, they meant something to it, but it would not power up until we were back safe and sound in New Hampshire. I don't understand why. I know. Did I try different outlets? I did try different outlets. MGMG in the chat room asked that question. Then yes, I did. I, I, yeah, I went all over the, the room and everything else that we had worked, including my, you know, various chargers from, from my MacBook Air, albeit different, right? Because one's power delivery over USB-C and, and the older one is MagSafe. But yeah, moral, moral, it must have been something. Maybe, maybe they were cycling at an odd, I mean, I didn't bring a power conditioner with me. So perhaps that would have made a difference. I mean, I found something online that says their voltage is 127, but to me, that should be close enough. Yeah. Yeah, you would think. I mean, it worked with, you know, whatever it is in Europe, 240, I think, in some places. So yeah, it's weird. But anyway, the machine's not dead. And it sort of forced us to have more of a vacation than we planned, which was not a bad thing. So, you know, it all worked out. So anyway, there we go. John, I would love to hear about your new toys that you have gotten. But, but first, I would like to talk about our first two sponsors, if that's okay. Fantastic. All right. Our first sponsor today is a favorite sponsor of ours, a favorite sponsor of mine. And that is Mack Weldon, where at Mack Weldon.com, you can use promo code MGG to get 20% off your first order of some of the most comfortable clothing I have ever worn in my life. I never quite realized the difference between buying quality clothes versus, you know, regular clothes until I started with Mack Weldon. Holy cow. Like they're socks. Awesome. I love them. I went and I went nuts and bought a ton of socks. Now they're the only socks I wear and it makes such a difference. The same is true of their t-shirts. I don't know what they do to these things. They are so comfortable. They last, I've been wearing Mack Weldon stuff for almost four years now, since when they originally came on as a sponsor. Everybody in my house likes this stuff. Their sweatpants are fantastic too. And of course they make underwear, which I know I've talked about on the show before too, but sweatshirts, you know, hoodie kind of things. Like I said, sweatpants, they want you to be comfortable. So if you don't like your first pair of underwear that you get from them, you can keep it and they will still refund you. No questions asked because it performs well. This is good quality clothing and it makes a big difference. So like I said, visit Mack Weldon.com and use promo code MGG for 20% off your first order. You can get clothes like I'm wearing here. I use this stuff. I mean, I use it all the time. I travel when I don't travel, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't matter. I'm wearing, at the moment, I didn't even realize this. I'm wearing a Mack Weldon t-shirt as well as, of course, as I mentioned, Mack Weldon socks. So you got to check this out. Mack Weldon.com promo code MGG 20% off your first order. Our thanks to Mack Weldon for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is TextExpander, of course, at TextExpander.com slash podcast. That's where you can go to get 20% off your first year's subscription and you can be efficient like me. I'm crazy about efficiency, but I'm also a real nitpicker. Ask anybody that works for me. Just listen to this show. I'm a nitpicker, right? I don't like things to be inaccurate, but I also like to get things done quickly. These two things generally don't go well together and welcome to my struggle. Well, welcome to my solution too. 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Now you'll know when you get emails from us. Well, you can join us and do this too because TextExpander lets you do all of this. Like I said, you can customize things so you can have it prompt you and ask you for answers to customize your replies. Check it out. TextExpander.com slash podcast gets you 20% off your first year. Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. All right, Dave. All right, John. This is the year of the upgrade for me. It is for you. I know. Last year, well, yeah. I mean, it wasn't a calendar year for me, but between December and June-ish was my upgrade time when I got my new air and my new iMac, the 2019 iMac in the office and then the new Mac mini for Lisa. What did you get, John? So if you remember a couple of weeks ago, you know, we were having some audio issues because all of a sudden I had something chew up on my processor and my audio got choppy. And I'm like, you know what? And other things were just kind of pokey because I had a 2014, I think it was the i3 2.3 gigahertz 2 core, I think it was. So anyways, it's time to upgrade. So, you know, I did refurb tracker and my criteria is I wanted 16 gigs of RAM, one terabyte SSD, which is the same that I have in my MacBook Pro. So I upped that a little bit from the other machine, but I wanted to get and I'll get emails from them, but I didn't get quite the match I wanted. Like they had one that had an i3 or an i5 and I'm like, I want the i7 if I'm going to get this thing. And finally, I got an email saying, yep, here it is. And I'm like, okay, you know, put it on my Apple card, get the 3% back. I just shipped off my old machine for for credit. Well, on a Apple card. So a gift card. But then and then the machine's great. It, you know, actually, I was all worried, you know, about the whole USB-C thing. You have been worried about that. Yes. As it turns out, it wasn't really a big deal because this has an ethernet port. So and so that worked. It has two USB-A shaped USB 3 ports and I have a USB hub and was able to plug my things into that. And I think the only thing is that I had an adapter for my secondary screen. Oh, it has HDMI. So I was able to plug that in. So I was up and running immediately. I used Apple's. I purchased their Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. And that's how I sucked the data off my old machine, because that's the fastest connection you can get between those two. Right. That's true. Yeah. Well, oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, you could have just done ethernet between the two and saved yourself the cable. Oh, right. Yeah, just yeah, because it would see it if it's on the network. Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, I think you can just plug an ethernet cable between the two Macs and do it that way, too. I think they'll ad hoc right up and do that. Okay. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. But anyway, so all the data's over. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I temporarily had. So my secondary screen is DVI and not HDMI. Okay. But one of the adapters that I got, one of those anchor adapters, I used that temporarily, and then I just picked up and it just arrived yesterday. I got a USB-C to HDMI. So I'm using that instead. Oh, I'm sorry. DVI adapter. So, but I learned a lot about cables, Dave. Okay. So one thing that I got, which is a really nice enclosure, Oriko, 2.5-inch drive, external hard drive enclosure, SATA3 to USB type-C for hard drive. Tool-free supports UASP. So it's a nice enclosure, and it was like 15 bucks or something. And it comes with the USB-C to USB-A cable. And I'm like, oh, okay, you know, so, you know, pop my drive in there. And then I would connect that to one of these adapters with the USB-A connector. And it's like, oh, yeah, you're going to get 5 gigabits first. It's too slow. I want more. So I'm like, what if I did a USB-C to USB-C connection between this thing and my machine? Okay. So you cut out for a little bit there. So it's possible your audio problems aren't solved, but it's probably just something else. You said that 5 gigabits was too slow. Yeah, I'm being funny. Oh, I see. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. I'm like, I want more. Got it. And it's like, can I get more? And the answer is you got to dig a bit. So quickly, I'm going to tell you what I learned about cables. So I don't want to bury the lead here. This Oriko Type-C hard drive enclosure is, it's got a Type-C port on it. It supports up to 10 gigabit per second. Oh, no. Yes. Yes. 10 gigabit per second USB. And it only cost you how much? 15 bucks. That's the lead I didn't want to bury there. That's awesome. So we will put that. Actually, I will put a link to the Amazon thing in the show notes because that's better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But then I'm like, I wonder if I can get more speed between the two. So I was looking around for, so I did have a USB-C to USB-C cable, Dave. It's the one that comes with the MacBook Pro Charger. Well, yeah. Yes, it can carry data. It can, but only like USB-2 speeds or something. Correct. So I tried that and the drive showed up, but I'm like, oh, this is even worse. So one thing I learned is that different cables support different versions of USB, which to me is kind of silly. So then I'm like, well, you know, let me go to my local staples and see if they have one. And I found one that looked like it would support everything. It's, let me see. Who is this here? Scoshi? Scoshi. Yes. So Scoshi had a cable and they had it on the wall. The strike line USB-C. And it said, yep, I support USB-3, USB-3.1, and I'm high power. I'm like, oh, well that's good. Because some cables won't carry the maximum amount of power. And I went on one that did. The thing is it was 40 bucks. Okay. And I'm like, you guys do price match, right? And they're like, yeah. And so I showed them on my phone, the webpage at Amazon, where they were selling it for $17. So they're like, okay, here you go. That's great. And that cable does great. And when I hook up the drive with that cable, it reports the connection speed of 10 gigahertz per second. And then I also wanted to see the charging performance, because they said, you know, power delivery two or something like that. And it will charge at the maximum 95 watts if you wanted to. Sure. Sure. Some cables do not. Like I found, I think I bought, I got an Amazon basics USB to USB. And that would only carry 60 watts and the USB to speeds. I'm like, huh, huh. So then while I was shopping, it was an interesting thing. It I've been doing some testing with various things. And it like most of the USB A to USB C cables that I just happened to have laying around for whatever reason are what I would call, you know, basically charge only cables in that they do. And of course, charging that way, they're not going to charge too fast. But most of the ones that I have only support USB to so 480 megabits per second or whatever. Yes. And that's no bueno. And Apple's is Apple's USB C to C cable, as we just said, is also in that boat. It's USB to only. So yeah, it's really, it's interesting that that, you know, you got to find cables that say I've found the ones that that say super speed, look for speeds, look for a cable that says it'll do five gigabits per second or 10 gigabits per second. That's what you're looking for on a USB on a USB cable in order to get that, you know, USB three speeds. For sure. So just be aware of that. Thunderbolt cables will also work if you're doing C to C. A Thunderbolt cable will pass USB C at whatever the fastest speed is available there because it's Thunderbolt and can do more. So yeah, so many cables, they look the same. And they are not at all. It's it's, you know, they are all very different potentially. So yeah, just be aware of that, folks. It's good. So the other thing that I picked up, and you know, this is, you know, Amazon loves doing this is when I was, you know, buying one thing, they're like, Oh, you know, people that bought this also bought this. And I'm like, Hey, you know, I could use one of these. It's a USB C to two and a half inch SATA adapter cable. Oh, kind of like the newer thing. So it's like a hard drive enclosure without the enclosure. Correct. It's just a cable, you know, for quick and dirty. If you want to hook up a drive quick and dirty from a StarTech.com. Okay. And that was $37.99. Okay. But yeah, and it connects the drive at 10 gigs. Cool. That's great. I think that's, I think that's all the toys and learning that I have here. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was actually looking this morning, I was doing some, some testing and with it, I'll talk about in a minute and realize this. So I actually just bought, I found some anchor cables there on, on Amazon that for $10.99, it's USB A to C, it does five gigabits per second. So everything's good. It's, it's what I need. And I need a few more of these just around, you know, to have one in the travel bag, to have one here, because nothing is more of a drag than being somewhere and grabbing a cable and plugging in your USB drive only to realize, Hey, you've slowed me down to USB to enjoy the weight, you know, so. Another cool thing that, that we found that sort of led to the, the testing, the revised testing that I'm going to talk about here is that anchor has a new hub. They call it, you know, I would, I would classify it as a dock for MacBooks. And it's one of these hubs that fits right against the side of the MacBook. It plugs into two of your ports, the two of the USB C ports. But this one's interesting. There's lots of these. We don't talk about every single thing we see because it would, you would, it would be noisy and you wouldn't know why we were talking about it. Well, this one's different because it's, it plugs into the two ports on one side. It's built to plug in on the left side, though, I suppose if you had a MacBook Pro that had ports on the right, you probably could fit it. It would just feel a little upside down, but it has HDMI to USB A, a USB C, and then two SD card, a mini SD and a regular SD card, right? So that's great. And it's awesome. But what it also has is a Thunderbolt port. Yes, one of the USB C ports is a Thunderbolt port on this. Now, it does not mean that this dock is Thunderbolt. In fact, this dock is not Thunderbolt. This dock is a USB dock and it connects to everything that way. But it does have this effectively pass through Thunderbolt port. You can charge through that, which is good for those of us that have machines with only two ports, but you can also connect it to your Thunderbolt devices at full speed with an asterisk. And this asterisk, to my knowledge, is not anchor's fault. Because we've seen this, I think we mentioned, John, but we didn't dig too deeply. Well, at CES, I started showing you, I think it was the C8 rugged SSD Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drive, and I wanted to show you how fast it was, right? But I had my USB hub plugged into my MacBook, that's fine. I plugged in this drive, it's a Thunderbolt drive NVMe, it's going to do like, you know, 2000 megabytes a second on the reads, and we run it, and it's at like, you know, low hundreds. I'm like, what? I know this thing. And I look in system preferences, and it says it's connected as a USB device, not as a Thunderbolt device. So we unplugged everything. And then I plugged this drive back in, and it mounted as a Thunderbolt drive. I've done more testing on this, John. In fact, I spent a lot of time yesterday testing, not just on my MacBook Air, but on my son's MacBook Air to confirm that I didn't have some weird problem with mine. I also reset the SMC on mine before doing any of these tests. The net of it is, this is true with at least the MacBook Air though, as I'm hearing sort of anecdotally from others, this is also true with other Apple laptops. The first device that is plugged in will negotiate a Thunderbolt connection if, in fact, there is Thunderbolt to be negotiated. After that, everything will negotiate USB unless there is power being applied. So this is only if your MacBook is running on battery power, internal battery, its own battery power, the first device you plug in can negotiate Thunderbolt. Once a device is plugged in, it doesn't matter whether it's a Thunderbolt device, a USB device. Once a device is plugged in, the next device that you plug in will only negotiate USB. And if that device can do both, like that Seagate Drive can, great, no problem, you're all good. If it can't do both, like say the Plugable SSD that I've been testing, then it won't mount. And what's interesting is I had, so I had both of those, I was using both of those SSDs because they're both Thunderbolt capable. If I plugged in the Plugable one first, which only does Thunderbolt, fine, great. I plug in the Seagate and it negotiates USB. Okay, now I unplug them both. I plug in the Seagate first, it negotiates Thunderbolt, I plug in the Plugable, nothing happens, the light comes on, but it won't negotiate anything because it can't negotiate USB and the system is not advertising as Thunderbolt. As soon as I ejected and unplugged the Seagate Drive, the Plugable Drive mounted, it was like, ah, okay, now I can negotiate Thunderbolt. It's fascinating. And I'm assuming Apple is doing this potentially because of power draw, maybe Thunderbolt draws more power, but I mean, I feel like my little USB dock that I use when I travel that has a couple of USB A ports, like if I plug that in and have nothing else plugged into it, I feel like there's probably enough juice left to negotiate a Thunderbolt connection. So why is it not letting that happen? Because if I do it in the right order, I can have multiple things connected and one of them can be Thunderbolt, but I'd have to do it in the right order if I'm running on battery power. If I have power from the wall, it's good. That's lame. Well, it's weird. I'm wondering if it's either a bug or a feature in whatever USB-C chip they're using or maybe something in their driver that, I mean, it could be a bug or it could be intentional that they're, like you said. We just don't know the reason that they're, because my expectation would be, well, you should negotiate the fastest speed possible. Right. Right. Well, and at the very least, there should be some alert to the user that this is happening. Because if I plug in my, like you and I did, I mean, if it weren't for me wanting to show off to you how fast this thing was, I would still be under the impression right now that every time I plugged that Thunderbolt device in, it negotiated a fast Thunderbolt speed. There would be no, like I'm not constantly testing the speed of my drives. I plug them in. I expect them to run as fast as they possibly can, no matter what. Not, well, not if you're holding your mouth just right and if the stars haven't aligned. So that's the part that really kind of gets me is, is that there's no alert to the user whatsoever. And there's lots of these, you know, for, in this example, there's lots of these SSDs that will negotiate Thunderbolt or USB speeds. And, and so, you know, you like, it will mount. The pluggable drive wouldn't mount. At least there's that, right? But that's not as flexible as I would like. I would like a drive that I can also mount on a non Thunderbolt machine. Like that's pretty cool that they use the chipset for that. So yeah, it's one of those things. I put a forum post up about this folks and have linked to it in the show notes. So if you want to either follow up on this or have anything to add, please go there. But hopefully there'll be some discussion there. And we can get some stuff. I talked to Larry at Otherworld Computing briefly about this. He and I shared some emails last night and he says they have confirmed it. They're aware of it. He offered me a job in their testing department, which is flattering. And, and, and he said they believe they have, they have some ideas about a workaround. So, so I guess we all get to stay tuned on that front. So pretty interesting though. Pretty interesting. Yeah, I wonder if you could get answers on Apple's developer site. Assuming it's a software thing and not a hardware thing. Right. Right. That's yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm curious if it does happen on a machine like yours. I know you don't have any Thunderbolt devices to test this with yet. But I'm curious, we'll fix that by the way. I'm curious. Well, I kind of do. Right. You do. Well, you do and you don't. You don't have a Thunderbolt cable. Right. So correct. Yeah. But I could put either of my machines in the target this mode. But yes, I need the right cable. You need the right cable. Yeah. But I'm curious if, if in fact it happens on machines other than the air, which it sounds like it does. And if it does, is it system wide or is it per side? Because I know on some of those laptops, there are multiple Thunderbolt buses at one per, you know, for each of the two ports on either side of the machine. So, you know, is it that one side now is in USB only mode, but the other side is fine? Or is it system wide? It's like I said, it seems intentional. But I am going to report this via Apple's bug reporter and see what they say. Well, you know, I'm not, I don't have my hopes up or anything, John, but we'll see what they say. Right. You know, it's good. Hey, we have, we've got some great questions to get to. And I want to, I want to do this. The first thing that I want to do is I want to talk about our second sponsor. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Yes. All right. Listen, when you use the bathroom in public, you close the door behind you, right? Because you don't want some random passers-by looking in on you. So why would you let people look in on you when you go online in public? This is arguably more important. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like going to the bathroom in public and not closing the door. And this is why I use ExpressVPN. I've been traveling a ton. You folks know that. I was using ExpressVPN everywhere I was in LA, in Mexico. It worked great everywhere. It doesn't slow me down in any noticeable way whatsoever. It's super fast. And it means that I can connect to wherever I need to connect to without worrying about whatever is happening with whomever is managing the network. That's important to me. ExpressVPN puts a stop to all that tracking and all that craziness that the provider of the network can do because it creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that your online activity can't be seen by anyone. And it works on all my devices, right? ExpressVPN works on my iPhone, my laptop, and there's even some routers that can support ExpressVPN. In fact, lots of routers can support ExpressVPN. It's pretty good. That way anybody that shares your Wi-Fi at home can be protected too. And it's super easy. It's literally one button. You just launch the app, you hit one button and it figures out your network and connects and you're done. So if you're like me and you believe that your online activity is your business, secure yourself by visiting expressvpn.com-mgg today using our exclusive link, ex-p-r-e-s-s-vp-n.com-m-g-g. You can get an extra three months for free. So that's expressvpn.com-m-g-g and our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's go to Jim. Jim has, this question seems to come up in different ways all the time. Jim asks, he says, I'm trying to be an amateur reasonable and trusted geek of choice for a good friend. We like to call that rat gock here, reasonable and trusted geek of choice. He says, and I've hit a brick wall. It's our goal, by the way, John and I, when I say our, to be your rat gocks. That's what we do here. Anyway, back to Jim. He says, for his friend, he and his wife have a family share set up and their music is not being shared across all devices for both of them. I'm sure there are multiple problems involved, but one seems to be that the non-primary account has different sign-ins for both iCloud and iTunes. Is there a way to change the iTunes password slash account to be the same as the iCloud password or account for this family member? And yes, there is. In fact, Apple even offers some assistance and guidance in this regard. And so we'll put a link to that for Jim's question here in the show notes. But all you do is go in Catalina anyway that gets a little bit different in previous versions since in Catalina there is a family sharing preference pane. Prior to Catalina, you would go into iCloud and get to it there. But once you're there, it's all pretty straightforward. You go into the user, so you go to family sharing whichever way you get there, and then click on the details dot, but next to whichever user you want to edit. This could be your account. Actually, it has to be your account, I think. Even if you're a sub-user, you have to do it this way. You click the, and once you're in there, it'll show you your purchases and music account and your iCloud account at the top of the screen. So for me, my two are the same. For my wife, because she was the one that, before we had family sharing, managed the secondary iCloud account that we used for purchases that we all could share without getting things too muddled up, she still has two separate accounts. She's got her main iCloud account and then one that she uses for purchases and music. Once you're in there, you can hit the change dot, dot, dot. So you go into family sharing, click details next to your user account, which needs to be the one that you want to change, and then click the change button, and you can change it there. So hopefully that helps. I hope. I hope I'm answering the question that you're having. It sounds like, in fact, as you said, it sounds like you're having multiple issues, but hopefully that one will get you there, Jim. So thoughts on that, John? Share with my family. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yes, of course. I haven't really explored that feature of. Have you looked into whether or not that would be a more economical thing? Like, I mean, I share with with my with obviously my wife and my two kids, like our household family, of course, but you can have up to six people on your family share. And so I have my dad and his wife on our family share as well. And the benefit of that is we all get to share that pooled two terabytes of of iCloud storage that I have, and we all get included in the family subscription to Apple Music. So there are some benefits to leveraging that full six if you can. So I don't know what what you yeah. So think about that with your parents. It might be it might be worthwhile. To be quite honest, we've done that with our cell phone plans and things like that. It's like, all right, let's roll it all together and, you know, make it a little more economical. If you got big pool of data to share on your cell plan or, you know, something like that, you can do all it's possible to do all kinds of different things. So yeah, I throw it out there, you know, because it's what we do. Good. All right. Well, we're on the subject of iCloud. You want to take us to David? Yeah, David has kind of a related question here. So David says morning, gents. How did you know it was morning? I know. I've got most. I've got most of my photos on a Mac mini attached to an external hard drive for backup. I would like to find some way to back up my photos externally. I have 200 gigs of iCloud, but it seems more like a sharing service than a genuine backup. Any suggestions for cost and time efficient solution? Don't really need to interact with them. Just keep them safe. I'd say you're really close, assuming that you use photos to manage your photos. So I'm making that assumption here. So what you do is you go to photos, photos, preferences, iCloud. And I learned something. It's now called iCloud photos. It used to be called iCloud photo library. So the subtle name change there. And if you activate that, I mean, he has the 200 gig plan. So assuming that your photo library is smaller than that, which in my case, this is exactly what I do. And my photo library is about 140 gigs. So you've acknowledged what he's already doing. But we haven't yet answered his question, which is he in his opinion, he's not comfortable just trusting iCloud photos or iCloud photo library as a backup. He wants another way to back up his photos, somewhere local to an external drive. And so there's two ways, there's two things you need to do to go about this. The first is, you can do this either in system preferences, iCloud or system preferences, Apple ID, or you can do it right in photos. But when you go to photos, make, actually, maybe you can't do it in system preferences anymore. Man, they move these things around. You have to do it in photos. I don't want to launch photos on this Mac because I'm afraid of what it might do. But if you go into photos, and maybe John, you can, if you happen to have photos open or someone in the chat room can help me, if you go to photos, preferences, iCloud, there is an option to download all photos to this Mac, right? So in order to do a local backup, you need to have all of your photos locally. So you've got to check download all photos to this Mac. That's step number one. Now you have your photos in two places, right? It's on iCloud, and it's on your Mac. From there, you can use Time Machine to back that up. You could use Carbon Copy Cloner to back that up. You could use SuperDuper to back that up, right? I mean, you can do all kinds of things to back up that local version of your photos library. And now you're, you know, you're in, I would think you're in pretty good shape. So that's that's my thought. And I also put a little Diddy in here. I just wanted to play around with this. You could even write a little automator script. Absolutely. And say, you know, take this file or this folder and put it over there. And it's a it's pretty easy to do. It's a nice, you know, visual development environment there. Yeah. Yeah, that would work. So yeah, you and you could I'm trying to remember how it's stored. Oh, so Brian Monroe point in the chat room points out that it's it's photos, preferences, iCloud. And you want to choose the option that says download originals to this Mac. So that that would that would do it. So so that's that'll get you there. And then and I'm trying to remember how they store this stuff. It changed in Catalina. But if we go into the photos library and show package contents, right? So right find your photos library, wherever you have it stored, it's by default in home photos, but it could be on an external drive if you've changed it. Right click on that photos library and choose show package contents. And then in there is a folder called originals. If all you want to do is back up the actual pictures, originals is is the place to go. And this is what I've done so that I can back up just my photos and not all the thumbnails and all the other things and the database and all that I want to back it up to my disk station so that it can also process these photos sort of on its own. Now the trick is it's very difficult to get a backup app to look inside your photos library. Because it's a package, even though it's a folder, your Mac really treats it as a package. So what you do is this, you get in there, you find that originals folder, you go to the highlight it, then go to the file menu and choose, oh, it won't let me make alias. So I have to do the cheat. Start dragging the folder and then hold down command and option. And you can make an alias wherever you want, but it has to be somewhere else. So command and option, you could put an alias on your desktop. Now, but or you could put an alias just in the top level folder where your photos library is. Now you have an alias to that originals folder inside of your photos library. And that way, you can back that up because you point your backup software at that alias and it will go to the actual folder. So there's the trick. But you got it. It's tough to make an alias because you can't write inside there because it's packaged in the weird way. So it doesn't the make alias options not live, but you can trick it or you can use the shortcut by using command option and drag that will make an alias it won't move or copy. So that's what you're looking for. Look at that tons of extra little tips just being thrown around willy nilly, John. We're hitting those five no problem. Right. Good. Okay. Anything more on that one before we move on? No, I think we explored nearly all options. We explored the space. That's right. Okay. We'll get the cowbell out in a minute. All right. Listener John writes, he says, I'm hoping you can help me with what has become a long term issue with, you guessed it, iCloud. He says around Halloween 2019, I migrated from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a 2019 with the migration assistant. Everything seemed to work fine, but I noticed some sync issues with some apps I use on my iPhone, namely an app called iThoughts. I tried signing out and signing into the iCloud account, but it didn't fix it. Since I knew Apple support was available for my new laptop, I called. They ran some kind of server side diagnostics and noticed some issue that they wouldn't articulate. And my case got escalated to the most senior level. The first thing they asked me to do was send them console logs and their upload tool kept failing. Finally, after a few weeks, I was able to get everything to them. Anyway, they've had it since basically the end of the year and have given me no news, no news, much less a solution. Meanwhile, he says I tested the iCloud sync issue between my laptop and iPad. And it seems the laptop can see files in the cloud, but new files created on the laptop do not go to the cloud. Folders, however, will. Files added to those folders are still not visible from the files app on the iPad. Once we tried, one thing we tried was to set up another user account with the same iCloud, same problem. One of the numerous senior tech support staff, but not yet engineering, suggested there might be a P list that needs resetting. But it seems there's a server side issue and I'm sick of waiting, hearing nothing from them. The individual I'm in contact with is friendly, but has no information. Do you have any ideas? So I do. It seems like this is an issue with your iCloud account on Apple side, but and you've you've sort of confirmed this in the negative by trying another user account with the same iCloud ID. But I don't know if you've tried a different MacBook Pro. And so it might be, they might be right about it being a P list locally here. The way to test that, though, is to create another user account with a different iCloud ID, right? So now and perhaps even that same test user account, sign it out of your iCloud ID, sign it into a new one and try some syncing. See what happens. You don't need to sync your iCloud your iPad to it or do you maybe you do to see files now. I never remember what they but they actually want to show us on iCloud.com. But I think you can see your files on iCloud.com now. I'm waiting for it to to come up here. But you might have to sign your iPad or iOS device into it if you can't see them at iCloud.com. But but I think you can. I think you can go to iCloud Drive there. So which which I'm pulling up. So it seems like that's okay. But so sign your Mac with a different account into a different iCloud account. So a different user account on your Mac, different iCloud account, see if syncing between your Mac and the cloud works with not just folders, but also files. And that might help you answer whether it's a problem with your specific iCloud account or your specific Mac. The other way to test this, of course, would be to get a different Mac, sign it in, see how it does with the syncing or even an external drive on your Mac with a fresh install of say Catalina might do that to like, you know, some way of separating your current boot disk from this process because that could very well be the issue. So I don't know. That's what I got. That's what I got in mind. What do you think, John? I'm with you start from yet new account creation could help isolate this. That's all it is, right? It's just isolating and troubleshooting that way. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I was poking around is I'm like, I wonder if there's a sync services preference that you could whack, but it looks like they got rid of that. And even when they did have it, they warned you not to touch it because you'd screw everything up. So. Right. But hang on. I'm thinking about something here. Okay. So Apple doesn't have these tools, but Eclectic Light, aka Howard Oakley, might very well have these tools. And he has because he's the one that makes like Time Machine Mechanic or now called T2M2 and tons of other things that we talk about here all the time. Well, one of those tons of things is an app called Cirrus that takes control of iCloud, investigates and diagnosis its problems. And also an app called Bailiff that will, it's menu bar control over iCloud. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes to Cirrus and Bailiff here and see if maybe one of those might just do this. So I don't know. It might. It even if they don't, I'm not convinced that they would actually solve the problem, but they might highlight where the problem is by showing you perhaps the right error messages. So there you go. All right. Look at that. The icon's a little cloud. And Cirrus, I get it now. Okay. There it is. That's clever. It is clever. I know. I know. What else is clever is all of our premium listeners who contribute directly to the show and help us, you know, kind of we've got that whole stack of what it takes to move everything forward here. And our premium listeners are certainly a part of that. And like I said, that's everybody that can and wants to contribute directly. It's certainly not mandatory, as you know, but it is very much appreciated. And I want to take a minute and thank all of them for this week. We had a one-time $100 donation from Carsten in Madison. So thank you for that. And we just did these a couple of days ago. So there's not as many left as there were last time, which means we're caught up on the monthly $10 plan. We'd like to thank Matthew from Forked River, David from Mount Prospect, and Steven from Plainfield. So thanks to all of you. And on the biannual defaults to $25 every six-month plan, Jurgen from Wielderstadt, Matthias from Reineck at $30, Russell from Jefferson, William J. Wesson G., Mark from Centennial, Alan from Montgomery, Stuart M., Michael from Spencer, John from Henrico, Michael from Britzel, Kershin S., Fernando from Cincinnati, Martin B., or Martin B., sorry, Peter from Peterborough, and Jonathan C., thanks to all of you for all of your contributions, you rock. And if you want to learn about that, matgeekab.com slash premium is the place to go. All right, let's see. Yeah, we'll get into some of the geeky stuff here, because that's what we do. We like that. Chris brings us an interesting little question. Chris says, which is better? Has Siri Shortcuts replaced AppleScript? Is there still a use for AppleScript? The reason I ask is I purchased the book AppleScript 123 years ago with the intention of reading it and learning it. I came across it due to a move and wondered if I should still bother. So good question. Right now, Siri Shortcuts is only available on iOS and iPadOS. And AppleScript and Automator are only available on macOS. Now, it would not surprise me if we see Shortcuts make its way to macOS in some fashion, you know, with the next release or whatever that is. But we're not there yet. So the two live separately. Even if we had Shortcuts on macOS, like to be fair, I don't know what Shortcuts on it macOS would look like. I can only know what it could look like. But if it mirrored effectively the functionality of what we see on iOS, I would still use AppleScript, Automator and Keyboard Maestro to do a lot of my automation on the Mac. Keyboard Maestro is, you know, like that's the core of all of it because it's just able to trigger so many things. But a lot of things that I trigger are either AppleScript or Automator actions, right? So like there's a lot there. The way we process and publish the show, AppleScript and Automator are huge parts of that. We really rely on it. And if I were to reinvent those solutions today, I would do it exactly the same way. Like, I have not found something better on the Mac yet. So yeah, I think AppleScript is worth learning. As you said earlier in the show, John, Automator is certainly worth using. And I don't mean, I do mean to distinguish learning from using, but only because as you use Automator, you learn it. It's like you said, it's a very graphical drag and drop environment. So there's not a whole lot of pre-learning that you need to do before you can start. You just sort of start and drag things in and figure out what you've got. And if there's an action for something, you can, you know, include it. So yeah, I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. Of course, the other, you know, I was fiddling with this the other day. Back when I was doing software engineering, my answer to any programming problem was write it and see. Though I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah, I think scripting language is a better approach. Probably, yeah. Yeah, there's kind of a steep learning curve, learning the Apple way of doing things. But you know, I just downloaded, here's another thing you may want to try. And I just started getting into this Swift Playground. Cool. I'm curious to hear what happens with you messing around with Swift Playground. I remember when they were talking about it, but I, you know, and I've looked at some, some Swift code, but this is supposed to teach you how to do it in a fun way. So I'll have to dive into that. So check out Swift Playgrounds. Yeah, I took a day long class on Swift a few years ago. It was one of those pre-Mac Tech classes and Mac Tech conference classes just to distinguish the two. And I liked Swift. You know, I mean, it's a curly brace language like, you know, like C or PHP or any of those. But it's, it's, it's, it's clearly written by people that were frustrated with how inefficient things can be in C, an objective C specifically. So yeah, it's, no, I think you'll like Swift. It's, it's, it's great. I hated objective C, man, all the brackets. Yeah. And you could potentially, and I remember this, this is what disgusted me about it, is you were able to provide, like, arguments to API. And when you ran, it would, it would crash. That's cool. But you, you really wasn't, because, you know, yeah, the thing is, if you compile something into compile successfully, when you run it, it shouldn't, well, no, I guess, you know, you want flexibility? Sure. But, you know, you can crash. I mean, it's the difference between driving a car and a train, right? You can't really steer the train off the tracks. But, well, I guess you can. But, you know, oh yeah, we've had that happen around here there. That's true. Yeah. They're trying to deploy, I don't know, something called positive train control, which basically makes the train detect when it's going too fast and slows you down. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that you steer it off the tracks. It's that you, you run it off the tracks. So yeah. All right. Let's see. Karsten asks a question. He says, my main Mac is a 13 inch fully stocked MacBook Pro from 2015 and all as well. I upgraded from a mid 2011 MacBook Pro. The old 2011 MacBook is also fully decked out, i7, 16 gigs, SSD. The old MacBook works 100% and is still an awesome piece of hardware. But it cannot run the latest Mac OS. It's a shame to have a fully functional MacBook and not take advantage of the latest OS. I understand it has to do with newer technologies like Swift UI or something like that. But what to do? I see that DOSDude1.com has a patcher program that one can use, which promises it can make this old Mac run the latest OS. But is that an OK option? I prefer to run the latest OS versions for security reasons. As an alternative, I guess, could be to install the latest supported Mac OS via internet recovery and then install parallels or VMware and run Catalina in a virtual machine. But that will only work until parallels or VMware drops support for whatever OS my Mac can run. It's tough to see a great piece of hardware getting old and still works. One alternate thought could also be to make it a Windows 10 laptop and make the laptop useful that way since resale value is not all that great. Any advice? Yeah, well, you could also make it a Linux machine too, right? We talked about that. We've done that here. But you're totally right that this is an interesting solution. I haven't messed with the DOSDude1 stuff much, but when I have, and it's been a little while, it worked kind of. You need to accept that you're running an unsupported configuration, right? And starting with Mojave, all that project catalyst stuff is in there that allows iOS apps to be more easily compiled and ported over because it leverages Apple's GPU technology called Metal. And so you need to be running a Metal-capable Mac in order to run Mojave or later. So your Mac is not Metal-capable. So there will be things that don't work, that crash, I would assume. If you tried to run, I think it's the Stocks app or the podcast. Actually, I don't know if podcast is project catalyst that might have been written from the ground up. I can't remember. But anyway, any project catalyst apps like, say, Tripit, right? I can't imagine that that would end well trying to run that on a machine that's running Catalina, but does not have a Metal-capable GPU. I just don't even know what that would look like. So it's maybe worth trying. Back up your Mac first. I mean, the worst thing that happens is it's too flaky and you just wipe it out. So I don't know. What do you think? What do you think, John? Yeah, I think a VM is this way to go. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of like that idea. It's certainly safer. Yeah. And he's got enough RAM. I mean, I think that's good. Or like we said, run Linux on there. That can be fun. Yeah, some. All right. While we're in this realm, let's do one more super geeky one here with Tim, who says, your conversation in one of your December episodes got me thinking more about how I could use a smart plug in my studio. I was wondering if there might be a way to set a smart plug to turn on the lights and display in my recording booth whenever I launch, say, Logic, or maybe even just when a track is armed for recording. If that works, I could install the infamous red light out in the house that would turn on only when, say, Logic is open or a track is armed so that a family member can know when recording is being done and things need to be quieter. I started looking into if, but I didn't see a way for an open application to be the trigger on my Mac. Hopefully you guys know another option. So yeah, I like this. If it's great for sort of the things to link with your online services, right? So if your light is controllable, you know, if it's a hue bulb or a TP link bulb or something like that, that has cloud integration, then if this is a great thing to have as part of your solution, because it can sort of be that glue that ties your smart home stuff together, the trick is you need to trigger it. And there's no ifdap to sit on your Mac and watch what's happening. But there is an app to sit on your Mac and watch what's happening. I mentioned it when we were talking about AppleScript and Automator, and that's Keyboard Maestro. So Keyboard Maestro can definitely know when an app is launched. Like I was able to create a trigger that says, you know, when Logic Pro 10, I guess we're supposed to call it Logic Pro X, because that's the digital workstation I use, but you could do the same thing for, you know, Pro Tools or whatever. Logic Pro 10 activates, then do something. And I believe you can have ifd trigger via a URL, right? So you have a URL that kind of sends a payload to ifd and says, go do this action. And then on the if side, you would say turn on the red light or as I called my script, Roxanne. So you've got this script, Roxanne, when you run your Logic Pro, it would have two parts. One would be with Keyboard Maestro and it notices when the app has launched and then it calls this URL and then you'd have the second part of the Roxanne script to turn on the red light on your ifd account and have it read from that URL and then off it goes. So I think that that would be doable. I don't know. What do you think, John? Have you done any of this, like, you know, scripting stuff? Maybe is there something, have you messed with, like, Webcore for your smart things yet? Right, because all of those could be tied together. Okay. No, but I know there's, yeah, that's the Samsung environment, right? No, I haven't really messed with that. And yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah, you couldn't do it with ift. Only, not only ift. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But ift could be part of it. I mean, if it would definitely be the right thing to do there, just you got to have something that knows what your max up to. And I think, I mean, to me, Keyboard Maestro is, I don't know what else I would use. I hope it never goes away, man. Like, that would be a shame. I don't know. Any other ideas? Good. Good. Good. All right. Let's see. Where are we looking here? You want to take us to John, John? Yeah. Yeah, I think this one's pretty straightforward. So John writes and says, I'm going to Germany for three weeks living with family there. They have a 2019 21.5 inch iMac. I have a 2017 21.5 inch iMac. If I clone my system to an external drive and bring it with me, can I plug it in and boot from his machine provided he has external boot enabled? I don't see why not. Though I'll offer one caution. I learned this when I last went to Europe, Paris specifically. And I went into an Apple store, an Apple franchise over there. And I was like, oh, look, a French Mac. This is neat. And so I started typing on the keyboard. And what was appearing, because I touch type, what was appearing on the screen, Dave, was not what my brain was saying. I'm like, what's going on here? Am I having like a stroke or something? But here's here's the thing. European keyboards aren't QWERTY. They're QWERTY. Okay. The layout is subtly different. So I think what you're going to have to do is, so when you do boot from your drive, I think you're going to have to go to where is it? System preferences, language and region. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, language and region. So you want to set that to let it know that you're in Germany, I would think. And then also system preferences, keyboard input sources, you may have to change that to their keyboard. Huh. So this is what I love about doing the show is, you know, two of us, and I'm sure if there were five of us, we would then if this would be true for five, but two of us can read a question and see it completely differently. My question or my thought when he, when I read this from him was he was asking is, you know, can I plug it in and boot? And, you know, will that Mac boot the drive that boots my Mac? And the answer is it might not. It depends on your operating system. You know, we're talking about a 2017 inch or a 2017 inch Mac would be pretty big. A 2017 iMac could run, you know, it came with 10.12.something, right, when it was brand new. And the 2019 Mac will not run 10.12. In fact, the 2019 Mac needs to be running at least 10.14.4. So make sure, good point, right? Make sure that drive has 10.14.4 on it that clone. Now, if you're running Catalina, obviously, all good, no worries, both machines will run that and you're fine. But that's the trick here with, you know, older Macs, especially, you know, like in a previous question, we're talking about somebody who's got, you know, a 2011 Mac and a 2019 Mac. Those Macs cannot run the same operating. There is no Venn diagram that allows them to boot what the other can run. So you could make clones all day long. But if that's your outlet, if, you know, if those two are your only machines, your clones aren't going to do you any good in the moment. I mean, they might do you good restoring files, but in terms of booting, no, they can't. And even restoring files, you know, APFS now, okay, like how's that going to do? What's your 2011 Mac going to do when it sees an APFS drive? Probably not be very happy about it. So even getting files off of it starts to become a chore. So yeah, think about think about the minimum operating system. And as always, Mac tracker is a great resource here. I know we mentioned it all the time, but it's an app that I have on both my Macs and my my phones. And to be able to look this exact kind of information up very, very quickly. So you got to check it out. I don't know. Any other thoughts on that one, John, before we go before we move on? No. Okay, cool. I like it. We've got barely, well, we've got two quick tips from previous episodes to share. And then, and then we're out of here. Because, you know, our time is coming to a close from Nick. He says, talking about in a previous episode, Wilco wanted to have his user account on an external drive, and he wanted that drive to be encrypted. And so the question was, how do you decrypt that drive? When the way it gets decrypted is by the password that's in your login keychain that now is on that drive, there's a chicken and egg syndrome. And Nick points out, he says, the short version of my solution, he should create a separate admin account on his system drive that can decrypt the external drive. He uses that account to log in at reboots and mount the external drive and unlock it. Then log out of that account, log in with your regular user account, you're good to go because the home folder is there. I like that solution. That's really simple, really straightforward. If you want to do this, man, that's the easiest way to do it without doing something that's like completely haywire and potentially not supported on a future OS upgrade or might get wiped out or something like that, this is guaranteed to work. Have a second user account and have its home folder on your local boot drive so that it can unlock that external. I like that. What do you think, John? Yeah, that's a consideration for me now because I have T2-enabled systems. So I actually had to go into the load of utility and loosen up the loosen things up a bit so I could boot from an external drive. Explain to people what you mean by that. That's a really important thing for anybody that's buying a new Mac that's got a T2 chip in it. I don't have it in front of me right now. But there is a utility you can run that could set the varying levels of security and the default is that the machine will only boot from the internal drive. You need to run this utility. I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's in, you have to boot into recovery mode. That's the only way to run this utility. It's not, it is on your Mac, but it's not in you. Okay, no, right here. Okay, yeah, now you then have an article. Yeah, startup security utility is what it's called. So yeah, if you get a new Mac, check that stuff out. Yeah. Again, I changed it slightly because I didn't want to boot from only the internal drive. Well, that's the thing. By default, there's two sets of settings that this startup security utility will let you change. And one is whether or not you allow booting from external media. So in the case of a clone, if you don't, before you have a problem, if you haven't changed this setting, your Mac will not boot from an external drive, no matter what. And that's by default with the T2 chip. And then the other thing is what OS your Mac can boot. There's three levels of security where it will actually check to see if your OS is signed by Apple and, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah, craziness. Craziness, craziness. All right, yeah, I don't, I don't like that. That's the default. I mean, I get why they've done it, but they need to tell people. So they don't. So we do. One last little tip from episode 801 where Rob says I was listening and heard the segment regarding the iOS volume control annoyance that you and your listeners have found. You may have already had this tip come in as I'm a little behind. However, in, if you go on iOS into settings, sound and haptics, there is a switch underneath the slider for ringer and alerts that says change with buttons. I've found that if this switch is off, then you can alter the volume of a video or other media that might be using the volume buttons on the side of the phone at any time. It's not just when the video is playing. This means you can prepare your volume appropriately before you play the media, depending on where you are, avoiding those disapproving looks from people. All this means is that you need to get a ringer and alerts volume. You need to set a ringer and alerts volume separately in settings using the slider. This is then unaffected by the buttons on the phone, except a mute switch. This still mutes the ringer as expected. Thank you, Rob. That's very, very helpful, my friend. Good stuff. I know it's crazy having to manage all this stuff, but, you know, we'll get there. That's good. That's good. Well, John, I think that's going to bring us there. We went a little long today. Well, not too long. 124, so I guess that's not a little long. I thought we were going a little long. My house is full of students doing the M3 MathWorks math modeling challenge, where they have 14 hours to solve a math problem from when they get started. So they started early, early this morning, and my son and his friends are digging into whatever this problem is. They have to put together, they have to solve the problem or offer a solution in a 20-page or less report that all needs to be submitted within 14 hours of them getting access to the question. So I think that's pretty cool. I like this stuff. It's good. Yeah. Divide by zero. Divide by zero. Yeah, don't do that. That's bad. That'll hurt. That'll hurt. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's it. Why is everybody still here? No, no, no. We appreciate you being here. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for sending in all of your questions and tips and all of that stuff. Where do you send them? You send them to feedback at macigab.com, of course, because that's the right place to send them, don't you think, John? Did I hear you right? Did you say feedback at macigab.com? In fact, I said feedback at macigab.com. That's easy for us to say, easier for you to type, and we'd love to get your questions, your tips. If you're a premium listener, premium at macigab.com, put you at the top of the queue. We still try to answer everybody's questions. I'm a little behind after being away this week. John answered a bunch. I answered a bunch, but there's still a couple that are left in the queue. But we'll get there. We don't like the queue to be empty. So we try to get to everything, but the premium stuff we do prioritize because it's a little something we can do as a gesture of appreciation. Yeah, it's good. Thanks for listening. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to them. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, expressvpn.com slash mgg, macweldinmack, w-e-l-d-o-n.com with promo code mgg, and of course, textexpanded.com slash podcast. If you want to learn about all of our sponsors, you don't have to remember, you can do two things. You can go to macigab.com slash sponsors. That will get you to the sponsors. And you can just go to macigab.com and sign up for the newsletter, which will get the show notes, which include the sponsor links sent to you every week. So a couple of different ways. Or you can just visit macigab.com. Why am I having trouble saying that? You think after 15 years, John, it would be a little easier to say, but evidently not. Thanks to all of our sponsors, in addition to those that we mentioned that are in the podcast marketplace, ero.com slash mgg. We'll talk about them next week, not maybe as a sponsor, I don't know, but as their new thing. Klume also has a new thing to talk about. So lots of mesh stuff to talk about next week. Barebones.com, MaxSales.com, Lino.com slash mgg, all through the Backbeat Media podcast network. John, it has been a blast. I made it through all of going to and from Mexico. I even got the red light at Mexican Customs, but all worked out well. And you know, so follow my actions and my advice and don't get caught.