 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 743 for Monday, January 7th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all the things that you send into us, your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take some cool stuff found and tips that we find of our own. We try to answer your questions. We try to answer our questions with the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include OpsGenie at OpsGenie.com, ExpressVPN at ExpressVPN.com slash MGG, TextExpander at TextExpander.com slash Podcast and Captera at Captera.com slash MGG. We'll talk more in detail about all of those in a moment here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, very close to Dave Hamilton, this is in Las Vegas, Nevada, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Well, you know, the travel thing actually wasn't too bad. That's good. I'm not going to say I'm good with Delta, and I think you did JetBlue. And we made it from our various Northeast locations to Las Vegas. Yeah. And it's a, I don't know. I have my reservations about Vegas, my friend. OK. OK. As far as cities to do trade shows in, I'm not a big fan of Vegas. I much rather prefer the little ditties that you and I do in Manhattan or like Backworld Expo, San Francisco. So I'm sorry, but I still like Vegas. See, that's interesting. I think it has a draw in that there's entertainment. There's there's all sorts of things going on with Vegas. Yeah. See, I think Las Vegas is the best city for a trade show because. Really? Yeah. Because New York's a pain in the neck. You can't get everybody in like close proximity to each other. But you know, and I'm talking like a large trade show, right? And and like the Javits, there's nothing near it. So you've got to always travel to it. The and San Francisco is ridiculously expensive, right? For to put on a conference and to stay and all of that. Like, I don't San Francisco was a good location, though, because you could stay right in there. I do I do like San Jose for for WWDC. Obviously, that's that wouldn't work for a show this size. But for show this size, Vegas is great, right? Because you've got enough hotel rooms. It's easy to get around here now with Uber and Lyft. I don't know. I'll give you that. Yeah, I think I like it. I mean, for CES, I would say, and then we'll you will hear our coverage, but CES is it's too much for any one person to handle. And that Dave, I got through my 500 emails from people telling me about all the great things that we're going to tell me about it. 500 in just the last week, you mean? Yeah, something like that. But anyways, the thing is, everybody, if you're on the CES press list. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Well, and that's that's why John and I are here, right? Because it it our goal is not to cover the entirety of CES. That would be nobody can do that. It well, it would also be not all that interesting because there's just so much that happens here. So we come and bring our perspective and filter it down and try and kind of cut through the noise. So we'll be doing that this week. There there actually isn't anything yet to cover. But so we have what essentially it's it's interesting. I was thinking about this. We do a while we're here in Vegas. We do a normal show where we answer questions that have come in all week. And then when we get back from Vegas, when we're in our homes in our normal environment, that's where we usually do the show that's about CES. But I was thinking, John, there's no reason we can't do a second podcast this week. It doesn't have to be like a full 90 minutes. Nobody says we can't like do maybe a 20 or 30 minute show midweek if we want from CES about CES after we've been to something. So watch your feeds, folks, because you never know it might happen. For now, let's do this, right? So let's go to obviously we're here in the hotel room. Things will sound a little different, but you've already figured that out. So let's go to Jason and and share a series of quick tips from him. He says, Happy New Year. I recently set up a new machine for myself from scratch, not restoring from backup. And what was amazed at how slow the OS felt working in the finder, I realized why and wanted to share with you what I had previously done to make things very snappy. He went to a site that is a favorite of us here and should be a favorite of yours or it could be defaults dash right dot com, which has all kinds of great little tips for Mac OS. And he in a specific URL, he went to for speed up Mac OS high Sierra. A lot of these things still apply in Mojave. And he says it has a host of commands you can run to turn off or speed up various actions in the finder and other apps. The ones I like best are turning off the delay when showing and hiding the dock. The delay when opening new windows and with quick look. He says running these commands makes my Mac feel 10 times faster, even though I know it's not really and I just wanted to share. So we will put that link in the show notes for all of you. And yeah, thank you, Jason. Cool stuff. There's some there's some great things there, John. Did you check out this? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the thing I notice is a lot of them have to do with built in. Protections in the OS to make things seem like they're happening at a different rate than they are. Sure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that's fine. And maybe if you have an older machine, which Dave does not. And he'll tell us about this later, I'm sure. But a lot of older machines do a lot of what we'll call eye candy in that they they show thing and and a lot of these tips address that. And it's like, let's turn off looking pretty. And just remember to stay on the mic, my friend. Yep. Yep. Now again, we're we're both on ice buckets here. Yeah, that's right. We'll post a picture of our of our podcasting set up here. We took our ice buckets and turned them over to made them into Mike's. That is the best strategy for these mics here, which have a yeah, rather lacking stand, but it's a good general purpose mic. Oh, yeah. Yeah. As far as I can tell. All right, cool. So we will move on to Randall here and Randall says, if you run older Apple software, you may sometimes be confronted with having to provide a security code after, say, providing your Apple ID and password for its two factor authentication. But if you're running older Apple software, there is no obvious place to enter it. So this is running something that needs to log into your iCloud account. You've got two factor authentication enabled and this whatever it is, whichever piece of Apple software it is, does not have a place to to authenticate that. I says, this happened to me today when I gave the little used airport extreme at our beach house, a firmware update and an update to my Apple ID password via the airport utility. I entered the password, hit enter, got an error message, and then a code came into my cell phone, my security device. But where to put it? Here's the magic re entered. He says, I re entered the password this time followed by the security code at the very end of my password. So if your Apple ID is, you know, you at me dot com and your password is password one. Well, then you would type password one for your password followed by whatever the six digit code that just got sent to your Apple ID is, and you're good to go at a light chain. So thanks for figuring that out, Rand. That's a good one. That's a good hack. It's a good hack. Yeah, I know, it's crazy. Very, very good. Very good. Let's see, we have a couple of cool stuffs found. But I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is Ops Genie at Ops Genie.com. I saw a sign in the airport today, John, that encapsulates what Ops Genie does. Ninety nine point ninety nine percent uptime doesn't happen by accident. You need to be on top of your stuff. And that's where Ops Genie comes in, because incidents are inevitable. You just have to respond quickly. How do you do that? Well, the first step is in knowing that you're having an incident and we humans can't work 24 seven. It's just not how we are. We need to sleep. We need to do other things. So there's going to be other people that need to be notified, even if you are the first in command there. If you're not available, that's what Ops Genie does. Right. It empowers your dev and Ops teams to plan for service disruptions by following through a series of a cascade, if you will, of who's available when who should be notified when if I'm sleeping, someone else should be notified. 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Never miss a critical alert again with Ops Genie from Atlassian and our thanks to Ops Genie and Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Couple of cool stuff's found here. The first comes from listener David and and then two come from me and I'll explain why, but but first listener David sends in, he says, I haven't heard this one on the show, but I've been playing around with it for weeks as an alternative to both Stringify and if. So these are these automation services and it's called WebCore and it's spelled, well, it's spelled like you'd like you'd think W E B C O R E. But it is W E B capital C O capital R capital E. And we'll put a link to the whole WebCore thing. This is there's an iOS app, but it's also, of course, a service because that's how these things work. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Pretty cool, John. I like it because I looked at it and the thing is being a coder or a software developer, I looked at the screenshots in this. Yeah, in this app and it was like, if something, something, then something, something, which is typical. If you're not a programmer, don't be afraid, right? But it looks like you can do you can get really you're not stuck with what can be managed in a graphical interface. You can actually write a path. So, yeah. I guess what I'm saying is that I looked at this and the thing is as a programmer, even if I wasn't, you can look at this and understand what they're trying to do and the language that they're using, which is English. Right. You know, I suppose they. Yeah, some derivative thereof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it makes sense. They're like, you know, if this happens, then do this. And for most of us, that's kind of life, right? That's how it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, worth checking out. Thank you for thank you for sending that in, David. Cool stuff. That's why we call it Cool Stuff Found. So, John, I've been using this this new MacBook Air that I got. Actually, this is the first show that we're recording from it. And and it's pretty. It is pretty. Well, you you seem to have applied a coding to it. Well, it's not a coding. It's just a plastic cover. Oh, OK. It's just a shield around a mental protective channel. Yeah, protective. It's a plastic shield. Yeah, I don't. I'll put a link in the show notes to whatever this plastic shield is. I don't off the top of my head. I don't remember what it is, but it was like 20 bucks on Amazon. I'm just putting a note here. No, I like it. For my viewpoint, it's an apple with headphones on it because. Oh, no, no, no. So you're confused by several things because no, no, no. So it's a normal MacBook Air. Then I have a sticker that Bob Levitis gave me years ago that I moved from my old air to my new one, your Bob, yep, that has that has a little headphone thing that it puts around the Apple logo. And then on top of all that, I have this plastic shield to protect the MacBook Air. So yeah, there you go. All right, so I'll put a link in the show notes. It was like 20 bucks on Amazon. But the next cool stuff found is on this air I mentioned I've been kind of going back and forth with dark mode, which seems to work really well for me. On a on my laptop, I do not like it on my desktop on the larger screen, but I really like it most of the time on the laptop. There are a few apps that I don't like it with my calendar for one. Busy Cal does not to me look like I just can't function with it that way. So I switched back and forth and I found a little app to let me do that called Night Owl that is at night owl dot cram sir dot X, Y, Z, of course, a link will be in the show notes and and it just puts a little thing in the menu bar to toggle between light and dark and you can schedule it with this. You can also set a hot key so that you can do it right from the keyboard. So night owl and it's a donation where, which is great. So good stuff. Go check it out. You still don't use dark mode, right, John? Tried it. Not a fan. Yeah, but hey, that's just me. Right. No, that's the beauty of it. Right. Exactly. Coolio. All right. So this next one is a cool stuff found, but it it it comes in the form of a question. So it's like the Jeopardy version of a cool stuff found. And it comes from listener Ian who asked, oh, I will find this here. I want to make sure I get this right. He says this past weekend, I had to reset a home kit device and some automation timers and rules were missing steps. The problem is I can't remember all of the steps that I had set up because home data is synced via iCloud. I was hoping to find the data location and possibly retrieve it from a time machine backup. He says, I've looked in mobile documents. It didn't show anything I've looked in containers. I found a folder called apple.com.apple.home, but I couldn't really figure out anything. Do you know of a way to back up and restore the home kit configuration? So the answer is yes. And it comes in the form of a cool stuff found because there really doesn't seem to be a way to if there is a way to do this, let us know. Feedback at MackieGab.com. Dave, did you say feedback at MackieGab.com? Feedback at MackieGab.com. That's right. Yeah. I did find a third party app called controller. It's on the app store and it will back up and restore your home kit configuration. The app is free. The backup restore functionality is part of their pro in-app purchase, which is only 6.99. So unfortunately, though, I don't think this is going to solve your problem in because you would need to have done this before so that you had this backup to use. I don't I don't think you actually have a backup of your home of your previous home configuration. But again, if if we're wrong on that, which of course we could be and maybe it would be good if we were, let us know. So there you go. Thoughts on that, my friend? It's an interesting. So before or actually after I got on my flight, Dave, I then got my smartphone to set my thermostats on my home because I'm not home, so they shouldn't be heating the house. And the thing is before I had smart thermostats, well, I had programmable ones, right, but not smart ones. But now that I have smart ones, which are baked into the Wink ecosystem, I actually did this shortly before I left is that I turned off all my timers saying, sure, is it lower? Raise it. And I said, you know what? Keep it at this temperature for this zone, keep it at this. And the thing is, I can now monitor it. Of course. The coolest thing about the smart thermostats versus the programmable ones. Right. So. Right. The thing is, for those that don't know, I did have a frozen pipe event many years ago, in part due to the fact that maybe the heat was not on at the level. It should have been so if for no other reason, all I can tell you folks is frozen pipes and burst pipes are not fun. Frozen pipes and burst pipes are not fun. No, you have to deal with insurance companies and blah, blah, blah, and water all over the place. But anyways, a smart thermostat that knows these things is is a good thing. Yeah, I agree. And I'm very happy. So cool stuff found slash quick tip here. I went earlier today, actually, and did a carbon copy cloner backup or started one on Lisa's new Mac mini, which like my MacBook Air has the T2 chip in it, right? And carbon copy cloner said, yeah, OK, cool, you can do this. But just know that your Mac will not boot from an external drive. It is configured not to boot from an external drive from the factory. Security. OK, but they said you can fix this. And the way you fix this is you go to I'm going to find it here. Oh, yeah, you go into recovery mode, right? So reboot command are then from recovery mode, go to the utilities menu. And there's a new option there called startup security utility. And in there you have two things to configure secure boot and external boot. So external boot has two options. You can either allow external devices to boot it or disallow. By default, disallow is set. I set this to allow because I want to be able to recover from a clone. Secure Boots interesting. Fulls, there's three options. No security, which lets you put any operating system you want on this machine. Medium security, which allows any version of a signed operating system from Apple or trusted by Apple. OK, and then full security, which requires your current OS or a signed operating system that Apple trusts and it's confirmed you have to have an internet connection at installation in order for this to work. It, by default, is set to this full security. So it needs to be an Apple signed operating system and you need to have an internet connection before you can install. Again, I chose to turn that completely off. I get why Apple's doing this. You can make your own choices about it. But I have it. I had no idea this was there until car and thankfully carbon copyclawner told me. So it was like, OK, great, I know what to do. It's no problem. It's easy. It's all right there. But just bear that in mind. If you've got a Mac with a T2 chip, which would be something with the Touch ID sensor or the new Mac mini has it, then you you want to be aware of this. So is this a facet of what they call SIP or System Integrity Protection? No, this is far beyond SIP. System Integrity Protection is Mac OS protecting it Mac OS. The T2 chip is your Mac protecting it the entirety of the Mac. It's what it converts or it encrypts your SSD if you have one, right? And it does not store the keys on the SSD. It stores them on the T2 chip. So your SSD is completely worthless. Even if you know the password, it's worthless without the computer that encrypted it. So, yeah, no, this is this is a hardware thing. And the T2 chip does some other stuff too. I hear that it does some it participates in audio and video encoding and decoding. As well, yeah. So, but yes, no, this is totally hardware far beyond SIP. Now, do you have one in your sexy new? Yeah, that's what I'm saying is the new MacBook Air has has the T2 chip in it too. Yeah. Yeah. OK, I'm not sure what to think about the new the new hotness here. Wait till you see the screen. You'll blow the thing. I will you sent me a screenshot of your SSD speeds. Yeah, I've never seen a SSD speed being four digits. So that's I know it's crazy. Yeah, yeah, I read. I think the read speeds were like a thousand. Yeah, read speeds were a thousand. Write speeds were four or five hundred or something. Eight eight eight eight eight. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was smoking. Yeah. Yeah, this thing's fast and that Mac mini is even faster, which is great. In fact, I think that Mac mini is. Faster than every Mac available CPU wise, every Mac available, except for the fastest iMac Pro. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Put a GPU on that thing and then you know, you're good to go. I'm going to take a minute and talk about our next sponsor, which is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is frankly the easiest VPN that I've ever used. They make this super simple. They have apps for your iOS devices, apps for your Android devices, apps for your Mac. And it literally with one click, the VPN is configured. It's good to go and it's super smart. So. Most VPNs, you know, have you ever stopped to think, does it block IPv6 traffic? Like, could something get by it? ExpressVPN knows this. They block IPv6 from happening. They make sure that your traffic goes where you want it to go. And here's a cool part about ExpressVPN. On the Mac, John, you can actually set it to only use the VPN on certain apps, but not others, and you can configure it the way you want. So if you only want your web browser to go through the VPN or if you only want your web browser not to go through, it works, right? 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Again, visit ExpressVPN.com slash MGG to learn more. Our sincere thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's I go. We have a follow up from Andrew from Show 742, John. That it warms my heart. Well, it warms your heart. It warms his time capsule. Yeah, so we were we were talking in the last episode about a guy with an overheating time capsule and he says, I had the same. He says, I purchased an older tower type airport extreme on eBay and cosmetically it was fine. He says, however, when I turned it on, the fan on the bottom went nuts, ran at a very high speed, made a loud noise and the light was blinking. I had never seen this before. He says, I thought it was possessed. Google Foo revealed that the airport extreme was overheating because the bottom was clogged with dust. So I got a can of compressed air and sprayed it into the openings on the bottom of the machine that fixed it. It blew out all the dust. There was no more noise. The fan came on silently and from time to time came on silently from time to time and the light turned green all good. So compressed air might have solved this problem for the other listener. And I believe we speculated that that may be a solution. Yes, when we talked about this problem. It's true. Yeah. I mean, a finger rag at Apple for designing things where you could allow all this dust. So a couple of things. So number one, always check your events or exhaust or whatever you want to call it, Dave, for dust. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And maybe you get some compressed air. But and another thing I'll mention is in certain environments, number one, if you smoke, don't smoke where your computer is because, you know, the thing is the smoke gets on the chips and it insulates them and they heat up and this is what happens. So you want to pay attention to the vents and the thermal. I don't know how to put it exactly. The thermal exhaust. Well, thermal exhaust. But yeah, just the vents, clear the vents. Yeah, get the compressed air. Yeah, yeah. But it's but no, it was good to hear that we were not the only ones that heard about this heating problem. Yeah, that Apple observed it, which hats off to them. Yeah, a product that they actually said, hey, you know, the hard drive or whatever, you know, this is heating up. It's heating up. Yeah, exactly. Watch the heat. Yeah, watch the heat. All right. Let's see. We have we've got some questions to go through here, John. Listener David writes in and says and asks. He says, upon the migration to High Sierra, I think the system made my email account an actual Gmail account. He says the problem is that I want to where am I getting this? He said, OK, anyway, he I'm just going to cut to the chase here. Sorry, David, for mangling your email. I'm doing this on a it's a larger screen than I've had on the road in the past, but smaller than it. Anyway, David has a Gmail account. He has gone in and assigned multiple from addresses to it in Gmail. He used to just add those in mail as additional from addresses. But sometime around High Sierra. Apple changed the way it dealt with that and it forced even an email account that you put in as an I map account. It basically forced it to be a Gmail account and it treats it a little bit differently. And he can no longer find the place to go and add these multiple from addresses to his account. So he sets up his Gmail account. But like me, you know, I run all my stuff through a Google Apps account that's at one domain, but I have other email addresses come to it. Some of my Mac Observer stuff, some of my Backbeat Media stuff. And I want to be able to send messages from this. So the first thing you do is you go into Gmail and you add them there. But mail doesn't automatically sink all these down. But you can do it. You can put them in there by going into mail on your Mac, go into preferences, go into accounts, choose the account and then click on the email address that's there and edit the list and just put in all the addresses that you want. Now, if you haven't already put these in it at Gmail, you will not be able to send from them. You have to go and authenticate them on Gmail. But once you've done it there, then you mirror it here. And you're good to go, which is pretty cool. Do you do that with your you don't use Gmail as your main filter or you do? Um, I was looking through this and actually I find it interesting, Dave, and that it would seem that between iOS and Mac OS, you can. But as you pointed out that the path to get there is twisted. And that if you go to one setting in Mac OS or iOS, it's not, you don't get an option to add email addresses to the primary account. And I think that's the problem. But they're there and you can put them there. Now, on iOS, there you you can still set up a Gmail account as not a Gmail account, but just as a like a generic IMAP account. That's the only way to get iOS to do this with iOS mail. You cannot add addresses to an account that iOS sees as Gmail. So you just have to configure it as as an IMAP account, you use imap.gmail.com as your server. And then from there, it'll it'll it'll work. And then you can and you can then go and and edit all of the email addresses in that account. So, yeah, gets a little nuts, but it's super handy. I find life is much easier having one IMAP account that I check and just having everything funnel into that makes life easier on the road. And it's a little more efficient, I think, in terms of checking mail and managing mail to each our own. All right, let's let's see. Oh, so again, back to kind of getting this new this new machine configured. I, you know, I had actually I had cloned it, right? Or not cloned it. I had done migration assistant from a clone of my old air because I was like, great, I just want to get it up and running all good. So it did that and I launched mail for the first time. It said I have to create the indexes and all that. And it took whatever an hour to go through and do all that. Great, no problem. I was doing some searching of mail the other day. And I realized I wasn't getting results before December 1st on this machine. And I knew that I had messages. And so I looked through like I went in, like are these messages somehow not sink down, like what's happening? Nope, the messages are there. Search will not find them. Crap. OK. So I thought, well, before I go on the road, I need to be able to search my mail like that. This isn't I could do other. I could do it other ways. I could go online because I use Gmail, right? I could search it there, but I wanted to be able to search it on my Mac. And I qualify because I know sometimes in the search field, you can do like from color, you can do all sorts of fancy things, which actually I don't have an article and maybe we'll find one. Yeah, that's true. You're right. Yeah, you can. This is not what it was. This was that the index was munched. Oh, and so I ran Onyx. You would never find it because the index didn't have the data. And I told it to delete the mail index and also my spotlight index. And then I rebooted the machine through Onyx. Yeah. Yeah. And that did it. Yeah, really? Yeah. I mean, it took a long time because when I launched mail after the reboot, of course, it said, I have to go through and reindex all your mail. And it took like whatever an hour. And you know, but once it was finished, it was good to go. So, yeah. But it was just, you know, it's just one of those things that things get weird, just how it goes. Cashes, caches, indexes. I mean, these are the things that make your Mac seem faster. Right. So, you know, well, they should. They should. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Indexes or indices? Throw down the gauntlet. Yeah, I mean, I've seen both used, right? Like, I don't I don't think is it is it indexes or indices? I don't know. I think it's say indices. Yeah, but like, but both words are correct. Last I checked, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I like indices. It makes you sound like more of a pompous. Yeah, it's that makes you sound more pompous. That's true. That's true. Yeah, I like to sound pompous sometimes. All right, let's go to Ed. This is what you get for. So, John and I woke up in eastern time today and we're a mess. Yeah, we're recording this at 11. It's 11 p.m. ish Pacific time, so you can do the math. I slept a little on the plane. You slept a little in the hotel room. I think we're we're good. Anyway, I slept on plane two. Oh, good. Oh, see. Yeah, we're fine. Delta. I like Delta. Good. They're good. All right. So, listener Ed has a question here. He says, I recently bought a one terabyte SSD from OWC for my early 2013 MacBook Pro to replace the 500 gig SSD that it came with. I want to do a clean install. My stumbling block is reinstalling my apps. My question is there an easy way to identify apps I didn't purchase in the App Store? I know that apps from the App Store will be automatically downloaded. But what about those from elsewhere, such as things like Keyboard Maestro and OmniFocus? It seems cumbersome to print out a list of my App Store apps and then cross match them with all of my applications in my applications folder. Surely there's an easier way. I'm not sure there is an easier way, John. Sure there is. OK, this is why John F. Braun right here, ladies and gentlemen. Well, one thing I would do, Dave, is so if you go to your Apple menu, which we all love the Apple menu and I'm going to be spinning disco boy, I may have to upgrade my computer, Dave. Yes. I mean, it's a stately 2012 MacBook Pro, which still I'm happy with. But anyways, so if you go to your Apple menu about this Mac system report, you're going to see a category a little ways down on the list here called software. And then under that is going to be applications. My humble recommendation is that you take that list and you look at it because the thing that that list shows you, Dave, is not only if an app is from Apple, but it will also show it'll it'll say identify developer, which means it's a developer that has spent the money to get a signing certificate. And I assume the authorization to be in the App Store. So you may want to look at this list just to rock what exactly you have in your machine that's considered an application and whether you should keep it or not. Look at that. But but you can sort this obtained from field too, sir. And actually I'm now seeing I haven't seen in the past before, but Dave, actually some things I see here say obtained from Mac App Store. Yeah, this is perfect. Actually, my first run through on this, I did not see that. I saw a known right means that the developer didn't do their homework. Sure. It also shows the 64 bit status, which, yeah, for those that are paying attention, future versions of Mac OS may not support non 64 bit apps. That is so true. So for anybody that is paying attention. Oh, yeah. Yeah, cool. Check it out. Software applications. Nice catch, man. That's great. Oh, awesome. There's there's a lot of good stuff in this system information. I mean, sometimes it takes a while. Like when I ran it, it took a minute or so. Oh, yeah. This but it's it's good for you. Yeah, it's good. Cool. All right. Let's see. Moving on to listener Michael. I will find him here as I bounce back and forth between all our stuff. Michael asks, he says, I have a large database slash set of spreadsheets in numbers. I like to change the name when I update it to reflect the updated date. It is saved in desktop dash iCloud. When I tried to rename it to the current date and save it to my one terabyte SSD, my internal drive, I got a permissions error saying that I don't have permission to save it there. I don't want this in the cloud. I want it physically on my drive. Where does my file actually live? Is it on my drive but backed up to the cloud? Is it only in the cloud? Why can't I move it to my internal SSD or does it already live there? And who is wheel? That's a good question. Yeah, so let's let's go through some of this stuff. So any sense a screenshot of this, which shows that this file is actually it was just a screenshot of his of his drive. So well, wheel to answer in reverse. If you look if you've ever looked at the permissions for an item, either a disk or a file or a folder, how do we do that? In the finder, highlight the item and go to the file menu and choose Get Info. Good question. You might see wheel listed there. Wheel is a group of permissions that includes all of the system administrator accounts. I don't I know I looked up years ago why they called this group Wheel in the in the Unix, do you remember why they call it Wheel? We have a local band called Murray the Wheel, but I don't think that's due to him. But I don't think it's him. It's a good local band. But I've also seen Dave. I'm just looking right now at a file that I just randomly opened and it has a group called Staff. Yeah, another one that it's kind of mysterious. So I guess my answer to you is I have no idea. OK, choose Wheel. Other than Wheel is kind of, you know, I mean, it's a round and it's fun. And I don't know. Yeah. If anybody knows. Yeah, let us know Apple insiders. Somebody had to come up with this. Well, I think no, Wheel is a Unix thing. It's not unique to Apple, but but I still don't know. But somebody out there will know. Somebody allows and we'll we'll report back. So to answer your question, the these files are the best way to think of them is that they are actually stored in the iCloud, but your Mac probably keeps a local cache of that file on hand. Depending on how you have things set, if you have it set to optimize storage or keep all your local files, that would that that's sort of going to define how iCloud syncing works and how iCloud Drive works. But if you have something that you do not want synced to iCloud, but you have documents and data or documents and desktop syncing turned on. I have a plan for you go into your home folder and create a new folder there. Maybe call it on my Mac only right to stick with Apple's paradigms. And then you can save things in that folder and they will not be synced to iCloud because your entire home folder isn't synced, just your documents folder and your desktop folder and some other things, of course. But but that's what I would do is just make a new folder. It's yours. You know what the system didn't create it. And you can put things in there and you know that they're not going to be synced to iCloud because iCloud didn't create that folder. Does that make sense? Good. That worked, John. Good as any. Cool. Cool. Very good. I found a wheel thing. It's it's it's based in the yeah. Based in what? Old computer lore. OK. Back to like about I found a reference to an article and they said it referred to the 10x operating system, which is like. Oh, OK. The heck is that? I honestly, I've never even heard of it. Oh, oh, interesting, interesting, interesting. Cool. I think it was talking about the big wheel. I mean, we all know about the big wheel, right? I drove one when I was a kid. What? A big wheel. I drove a big wheel when I was a kid. I love that pedal pedal operation version. Yeah, that thing rocked. Yeah, I don't think this is that's not what they meant. What they're talking about. No, I think they're talking about the big wheel. All right. The big like the big cheese. Yeah, OK. All right. Going to let's see. Where are we here? Where are we? Where are we? Let's go. You know what? Yeah, let's go to Brian. It's good. Brian asks, he says, some time ago, I wrote to you about beach balls freezing, etc, occurring on my late 2012 27 inch iMac with a one terabyte fusion drive based on some of your responses to recent collars. I suspect my iMac's hard drive might be failing. I have a one terabyte SSD in a USB 3.1 enclosure, which I've used to test my apps in newer Mac OS versions. It's currently running a six month old clone of my iMac hard drive on high Sierra, I would like to use the SSD external to replace my fusion drive by cloning my iMac's existing Sierra installation to it. The question is, number one, do I first use disc utility to erase the SSD using up some of its read-write cycles and then do the clone or do I number two use carbon copy cloner to clone my Sierra installation over the top of high Sierra installation? Number two seems like there are a lot of opportunities for errors. Number one would allow me to get rid of the high Sierra recovery partition. But are there other ways of doing this? So I would go with option one. It's way cleaner and and you don't want to clone to something only to inherit some weird issues. I mean, I think carbon copy cloner would take care of erasing all the things that shouldn't be there. But honestly, I think that's going to impact you more from a right cycle standpoint than just wiping the drive and cloning out to it. Because wiping the drive doesn't really do anything in terms of right cycles. Just basically says, yeah, that the data is irrelevant. Right. You reuse it. OK, good. And then, yes, you're going to like rewrite everything to it. But you're going to rewrite most everything anyway. And at least this way, you're not going through and deleting stuff. And like, I think this is way cleaner. Just nuke it and go. I don't think that's going to be a problem for you. That that's my thought, Brian. John, do you have any thoughts for Brian here? Hmm. No, I think that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think he's got a good wipe it fresh, wipe it fresh. Yeah, that's and then and but he could he could take a well, but he's going to clone out to it so he doesn't even need to worry about, you know, what apps to install or anything like that. It's good. All right, I want to take a minute and talk about our third sponsor, which is Kaptara. We've talked about them before. Kaptara is the leading free online resource to help you find the best software for your business, right? It's great. You go to Kaptara.com slash MGG and they have over seven hundred thousand reviews of products from real software users. You can discover everything you need to make an informed decision. You know, it's do you remember 1989, John, the year the worldwide web was invented? You know, we've come a long way in those 30 years, right? I remember this, right? So why does it feel like a lot of the software we use is stuck in the past? It's because we need to find new stuff. That's why you listen to this show to find new stuff. Well, Kaptara is the way some of we find some of the new stuff that we use here because it's fast, it's easy, it's great. There's more than seven hundred specific categories there again at Kaptara.com slash MGG, everything from project management, email marketing, yoga, studio management, right? Like they really have all kinds of stuff there and we use it too. So you've got to check this out. Visit Kaptara.com slash MGG for free. It doesn't cost you anything and they have all kinds of stuff there. So visit Kaptara.com slash MGG for free today to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for your business. Kaptara.com slash MGG. That's Kaptara C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash MGG. Just go visit today. You're going to be blown away and our thanks to Kaptara for sponsoring this episode. All right, moving on to Dave, not me, different Dave. We'll go to listener Dave here and listener Dave asks. He says, oh, the woes. I cannot get a wired external keyboard to play nice with a 2018 iPad Pro. I eliminated every variable I can think of by trying a replacement iPad Pro. Well, a USB C travel doc from OWC, a Satetschi USB C mobile hub pro meant for the new iPad I have, Apple's USB C with charge through adapter, Apple's wired magic keyboard, Mac Alley's ultra slim keyboard, no matter the combination, the same thing happens a hundred percent of the time. When the iPad goes into standby mode, aka black screen, after I walk away, I unlock the iPad only to find that Wi-Fi doesn't work. Huh? Yes, that's right. A wired keyboard kills the Wi-Fi on my iPad. I have to unplug the hub. The keyboard is connected to plug it back in and the Wi-Fi works again. What the heck variables? I eliminated hubs as I tried many keyboards. Ditto iPad, yep. And even in iOS, when I received my new iPad weeks after buying the original, when it came out, I had to do an iCloud restore, so that was a fresh OS. Oh, and when I had those original Bluetooth issues on the first iPad, the Apple Genius had me do an iTunes restore. What else could the variable be? What causes a hub and or wired keyboard combo to make Wi-Fi turn off? So I don't know that we're going to have an answer, but I have some thoughts about this, John, because like. I do as well. Like, I don't think it's I don't think it's randomly turning off the Wi-Fi. I think it's. Like, it's possible to use ethernet, right, with an iPad. And you could have a USB-C to ethernet adapter. I have one in my bag. It would plug into an iPad. So is it possible that when an iPad Pro sees a USB device like this, it's getting confused incorrectly. But nonetheless, getting confused and thinking that it's got ethernet and so it can turn off Wi-Fi and just go with ethernet. Like, even though there's not ethernet on these hubs, that's the, I don't know, or is it saying, yeah. What do you think, John? What I think is when somebody says that something happens 100% of the time. That's a good data point because that's good troubleshooting. The thing is, if you've gotten to the point where you've tried all these things and Dave has the other Dave, not me. Right. I knew what you meant. It could be that the piece of hardware that you have is defective or it could be a bug in the OS. Well, but he's he's ruled out the hardware. Two different iPads. And in that case, it could be a bug in a subtle bug in the OS. It's using, I don't know if I call it exotic hardware additions, but maybe they just don't know how to deal with keyboards or a certain device. Or it could be a bug in the device itself. I don't know. Right. Right. Well, yeah, Wi-Fi turns off when the machine goes to sleep. It's just not turning it back on. That's weird. It could be again. Yeah, I'm almost leaning towards it being a bug in the OS and that definitely. Oh, well, should I turn this thing back on that I turned off? Yeah, I don't think so. And it's like, well, no, really, you should. Yeah, yeah, I know you should come back on. It's just weird that unplugging USB then makes Wi-Fi like there's something in there that's saying, oh, no, we're going to use external. But there's a kind of well, the USB. I mean, the USB device or sorry, the Wi-Fi device is a USB device almost certainly. Right. That's how it is on a Mac, right? You know, it's oh, no, actually, it's not that way on a Mac, is it? Has been. It has been. But I don't think it is now. No, it's not. Is it on the it's not on my on my Mac? It's just a Wi-Fi device. Why would USB be getting in the way of that? No, I'm with you that it's a software thing because the way I look at stuff, I mean, look, when something's intermittent, that's when it's hardware, right? And when it's, you know, it like this is software that is causing this to happen every time. It's not bad hardware. It's bad software. Now, it might be bad software embedded in the hardware, right? But this is not just hardware gone bad, right? For listeners, part of the troubleshooting process is do this, do that, do that other thing or take steps one, two and three. Right. If you get the same outcome, that's good. Exactly. If you get not the same outcome like you try something and all of a sudden the problem that you observe doesn't surface itself. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that occurs to me is that I, you know, some people chuckle at this, but I've seen this actually in some accounts that I followed. They're like a cosmic bit flip may have caused the problem. And you may laugh hilariously at my saying this. But the thing is bits within your computer will change and may cause wreak havoc. And there's nothing you can do about it. Mr. John F. Braun, ladies and gentlemen. I'm telling you, man, I will get articles backing up my claim here. Because the thing is, there are situations, my friend. I'm telling you, as a computer scientist. Cosmic bit flip. Yes, you can have. But that's not this like Dave's problem is not a cosmic flip. No, I don't believe it improperly tested software. Yeah. Yes. In this case, I think it's a software bug, but you could have. I'll find it. No, I've had people refer to this. The thing is, you can have cosmic rays impact the energy within your computing device and flip a bit. That is. Yeah, I know. I know you're not wrong. And even though you have the error correction. Yeah. If you don't choose to use it, then you're right. And then I mean, just imagine the chaos if a bit flipped and you didn't know it. Yeah, fair. Yeah, imagine the chaos. 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TextExpander.com slash podcast and our thanks to Smile and the folks who make TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. All right, Kevin has a stellar question here, my friend, and I will find it and I will even drop a time stamp because that's what we do. Kevin asks, just some time ago, I ripped my DVD collection to my NAS using a piece of software called Rip It. The resulting disc images are in video TS folders and play perfectly with Apple's DVD player or with VLC. I recently installed Plex, however, and would like to set it up to make it easy for my non-geek family members to browse our movie collection. However, Plex does not support video TS folders. What's the best way to convert these movies to a folder that Plex does use? So really, the the answer I think is Handbrake here. Handbrake is is truly built to do this. It you can point it at a DVD sort of. But even easier is to point it at this video TS folder. And then from there, it will convert it to whatever you want. While you're at it, take a look at the presets in Handbrake for H.265 conversions, try that because it's going to convert way smaller than the H.264 ones and see if it works with the devices that you and your family are going to use. If so, then I would just standardize on H.265 these days because it'll save you a ton of space. As long as it works with the devices you have to use. Thoughts on any of this, John? I'm no, I'm good. OK. Good. Now, I haven't yet delved into the H.265 world. I'm wondering how that will work with my Tivo. Should I be concerned? Do you play movies from your Tivo? Where do you use your Apple TV? No, actually, mostly I do my Apple TV from from the Synology. Yeah, right. Using their products. So I don't know if it. I don't know if I've actually tried with 265, so I probably should. Yeah, try it out. I know I know the newer Tivo's support support, you know, whatever they call H.E.V.C. or H.265. Oh, OK. There are multiple names for the same thing. Yeah, Apple calls it H.E.V.C. Or H.E.E. Yeah, H.E.V.C. is what they call it. It's H.265 is what that is. And I think I think Netflix uses that too now because it's way more efficient, right, you know, to send. And I'm pretty sure the Tivo Bolt supports that. So the newer Tivo's too. Yeah. All right. What else do we have here, John? Yeah, you know, we have enough Synology users here. Let's let's do this one last one last one from Louis here. And Louis writes, where are you, Louis? I got you. Louis writes, he says, I'm having a strange problem with Synology Drive. And I'm wondering if you can help me. I've set up Drive on Synology to sync folders with my Mac. So for those of you that have Synology that don't use it or don't have Synology Drive is it used to be called Cloud Station. They're effectively the same thing, at least in terms of the way this question is is bringing us. And it's the piece of software on your Synology that lets you set up your own Dropbox, right? So you put Drive on your Mac, you put Drive on your Synology. And you and you can your Mac like my Mac right now, I just saw it syncing with Synology Drive back in my office, right? It works across firewalls and routers and all of that stuff. And it just lets you host your own, you know, your own repository. So it's like having your own Dropbox. OK, he says, so I've set up Drive on my Synology to sync folders on my iMac and, of course, it also syncs on my laptop and my iPhone. Everything is working as expected between my iMac, my laptop and my Synology, but not on my iPhone or iPad. Using the Drive app, I can connect to my Drive folder on the Synology. But the problem is that I can't see all my files. Certain folders sync other ones. I get the syncing wheel for a moment, then it says no items. Sometimes I try again and I get the files, but certain folders just won't sync at all. I've tried several things and I'm actually not going to go through any of them. Well, because there's there's a better way is what it is. So there is the Synology Drive app for iOS and it has some handy things. But if you've got a lot of data out there and you just want to browse through what you have, a better way to do it is to use an app called DS file. It's also in the app store. It's also available for free. And this will let you browse the folders on your Synology in a much more, I think, streamlined way than the Drive app does. I keep both on my devices and I sort of flip flop back and forth between them. But for what Louis trying to do here, the Drive app is frankly not the one I would use. It's the wrong one. So use the DS file app and I think that'll get you there. You've used both of these, right, John? I actually haven't delved into Drive. So but I do use the file app. Yeah. Yeah. DS file, the Synology apps on iOS are for the most part work the way I want them. Yeah. Yeah. I think they work great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good stuff. All right. Well, you know, it's late, John. I think especially with the idea that we have about potentially doing another episode, even just a short one this week. I think we're going to wrap it up here. I brought the band. I did. I know. Well, you know, they traveled. They travel relatively cheaply, so we can we can make it work with them. We are here at CES and we couldn't do what we do here at CES with it. Well, without money to be perfectly frank, because it it costs money to travel and all of the crazy stuff. And we have some sponsors for our CES coverage. Text expander is was a sponsor of this episode in particular, but is also a sponsor of our CES coverage. And this is site-wide. So all the coverage you see at Mac Observer and all the stuff that John and I are doing from here, all sponsored by these folks. So text expander, Carbon Copy Cloner, which we also happen to mention in the episode, not not intentionally. But this is how it goes. And also not intentionally mentioned in the episode, but OWC. So text expander, Carbon Copy Cloner and OWC at MaxSales.com are our three sponsors for our CES coverage. Thank you. Yes. Thank you to all of them for sure. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to thanks to you for, you know, sending in your questions and your tips and all of that stuff. It's it's fantastic. We are we're so lucky to send them. Oh, I think we already did that. Yeah. If you're a premium listener, though, you can send them to premium at MacGeekGab.com and come visit the forums. Visit the forums at MacGeekGab.com forums. We we would love to see you there. So that's what I have. I want to thank Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank our sponsors. Of course, ExpressVPN.com slash MGG, OpsGenie.com. Smile, of course, with Text Expander at TextExpander.com slash podcast, Capterra.com slash MGG. Those are the sponsors of the episode. Then, of course, we have Bear Bones at BearBones.com. Eero at Eero.com slash MGG. Ring at Ring.com slash MGG. Man's getting busy out there, John. I got one more for you, Dave. OK. Which none of the sponsors brought up here. But I think it's a very important point, Dave, especially being in Vegas. And that is that when we are here, we won't get caught.