 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gabb, episode 723 for Monday, August 20th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gabb, the show that takes your questions, tips, cool stuff found, mixes them all together into a potpourri of learning and entertainment for your listening pleasure. Where the goal is that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every week we get together and we do get easy for me to say we do get together every week. Sponsors for this episode include masterclass where you can learn all sorts of things and get a deal on unlimited access at masterclass.com slash MGG crossover from Code Weavers at codeweavers.com slash MGG and Game Time. We're at usegametime.com slash MGG. You save 15 bucks off your first purchase of last minute tickets. We're going to talk all about all of that in a moment here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Triple Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Brown? Good stuff. I'm doing good, man. But my NAS environment was in a state of chaos over the last week. Dave, it was terrible. Talk to talk to me about this. This is we're going to talk to you. And actually it was happy ending. So one thing is my Drobo. So I still have the Drobo FS. It's still it's still chugging. Wow. And it's got some drives in there. Well, one of the drives in the oldest drive in there is 11 years old. It's an old Hitachi one gig. But anyways, this thing is. So let's put it this way. Not only does the FS own owe you nothing. The drives also owe you nothing. You've gotten more than their serviceable lifetime. I actually did a card here. So the drives in there are dated 2013, 2011, 2011, 27, which is that one gig Hitachi drive in 2014, which I just swapped out. Yeah. So anyway, so at least this Drobo, when a drive is about to die, you'll get an email from the unit saying, yeah, something's up and I fixed it. And then it keeps saying that like again and again. And the thing is what I found to prompt it to finally say a drive is dead is the cycle power on it or restart it. And sure enough, when I did that, one of the drives showed up as a red light, which basically means I don't like this drive and take it out and put something else in here. So I'm like, oh, what am I going to do? You know, because I was doing to drive redundancy. But the thing is, so I pulled the drive. It was a two and a half terabyte. OK. I think WD drive. Anyways, not. Yeah. But, you know, so I pulled it and then I'm like, all right, well, let me put another drive in there. So let me pull one of the drives from my Synology because it has multiple this redundancy. So I pulled out one of the somewhere redundant drives, so it put it in degraded mode. But the thing is, is I can get drives like not quite as quickly as snapping my fingers. But it's usually when I order from Amazon. Yeah. And the thing is, so I ordered ahead of time. So I was like, so the the Synology so I took the drive from the Synology, put it in the Drobo. It added it to the array to give me the space that I needed. And then the Synology was integrated mode for like a day or two until the driver arrived and then I put it in and then everything's great. And I got more space. So it was just a very smooth process because, you know, I had enough drives on hand to handle. To do the juggling. Yeah. And this is one of the benefits. You know, we just did our deep dive on NASA about a month ago. And this is one of the benefits of having one or more as you have, John, of these devices sort of just available on your network is not only do they let you take lots of storage or lots of drives that you have and aggregate them together into one big blob of storage that you can just barf things at. But as but they are built to be fault tolerant and you can configure them not to be, of course. But but in general, they're going to be at least one disc fault tolerant, which means if a disk dies, you don't lose any data. And the nice part about that is not only does it help you when a disk dies, but it also allows you to just keep growing this blob of storage by either adding drives to the array or if the array, you know, if the enclosure gets full, you can take one out and put a bigger one in and sort of grow things that way without having to move your data around. Like it takes care of the moving of your data. And you know, in all the talk that we've done about NASA and all the features and all of that stuff, I realized as you were saying this, John, we've never really sort of shine the what what seems to be perhaps the most obviously light, right, which is that benefit of you just have this blob of storage that grows with you. And at least on the Synology side, if you were to get a newer Synology enclosure, perhaps something that had, you know, if you wanted, if you didn't have hardware transcoding for video or you wanted something with more drive phase or whatever, you know, you find reason to upgrade. If you take your drives out of one Synology enclosure and put them in a new one in exactly the same order, your array follows you to that, too, right? And it will expand with you. So, you know, like the array that I've had, I think, has been through three different disk stations since I created it, which is it's just great to have this blob of of storage. And so anyway, there you go. Yeah. So it kind of tickled me. So some people may shake their fists at me saying, how could you take a redundant drive from one array and put it into another? And it's like, well, because I can. Yeah. Now, I mean, there's I realized that array was at risk for a day or two, and that of one of the other two drives and it went bad, then, yes, I would have been in. Well, I also do a run and backup of that to another thing. So no, it would have been terrible. This is one of those do as I say, not as John does scenarios. Right. Well, not only because you had two arrays at risk simultaneously, but also the dry like arrays beat the crap out of these hard drives. It's it's what they do. It's what they're built to do. So you are putting a not gently used drive into, in this case, your Drobo, right, because you took it out of your Synology, which had been beating on it for who knows how long. And now you're going to let your Drobo beat on it for until presumably until it, you know, sees its last last last gasp of air or whatever it is. So, you know, there's an argument there to say, well, you know, you're living on borrowed time. But but, you know, as long as you're doing it eyes wide open, it's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah. And also in the Synology, I put more RAM in it just because I can. Yeah. Well, and that's another thing. It's it's totally worth that RAM is especially for those devices is relatively cheap these days. And my guess you went from what one gig to four gigs of RAM. And what did that stop you? So the stock and it's interesting with Synology and I suspect other NAS devices. But so the processor in mine, which is a 713 plus. It came with one gig, but it was socketed. And the thing is, if you look at the specs for the for that chip, it's like, well, oh, yeah, by the way, I can understand four gigs if you give it to me. And it's like, oh, well, gee, let me buy one of those. And I bought one for like 30 bucks. King's. OK, so 30 bucks to quadruple the RAM in your in your disk station, which A lets you run more apps, gives you the freedom to run more apps with all in RAM at the same time. And I've also found it to increase the disk station's ability to transfer data. So but this is not a deep dive episode. So so. No, it's just my life. We're going to move on. We'll move on to my life. But at least this this has to do with my MacBook Air. But I am not alone as I found. So I have noticed, John, you know, I've got this 2011 MacBook Air, which really I know it sounds crazy, but it it it maybe it doesn't sound crazy. It still runs great most of the time. But sometimes I'll wake it up and it will be like just so terribly slow that I just can't deal. And so I have to reboot. I mean, like like CPU just pegged to the max and never giving up. Like, you know, a lot of times, you know, you wake up and drop. I've heard it once or twice when you've been here. It's simulated a wind tunnel. It's totally, totally nothing to do with that, though. Because that happens all like the fan runs a lot because I use the CPU. But this is where it wakes up and it's just like almost ground to a halt. Right. And it's like, you know, and finally, when I can like get enough control over it to reboot it when I reboot, everything's totally fine. The fans still run, you know, when the CPU heats up, but but like I get full access to my CPU. And that's sort of the thought that hit me this week is it's like, wait a minute. I feel like I'm not getting full access to my CPU. So I set about investigating this and I use I step menus, right? To keep an eye on my on my computer in general. And there are lots of things that you can monitor with I step menus. And one of them is your clock speed. Now, most of our computers these days run CPUs that that will vary their clock speed, depending on what they're doing. Right. Even your iMac, you know, a desktop machine will do this, but certainly a laptop will and your phone does as well. And it does this so that it uses less power when it doesn't need to use more. So my I think I think officially the CPU in that that MacBook Air is one point seven gigahertz, but it can burst up to like two point six or maybe even a little more than that or something. And so I thought, well, let's let's monitor this. Let's see what's going on. And I figured it out. There are times when that machine would be stuck at eight hundred megahertz and would never go above it. And I realized I think I realized what's causing it. Yeah, the processor speed would show I step menus would report just to be clear. It would say eight hundred megahertz. Yes. Not gigahertz, which eight hundred mega most of us most of us are used to seeing at least something in the gigahertz range. Sure. That's very unusual point, eight gigahertz. And I step menus takes advantage of something called Intel power gadget to to get this information. So I'll put a link to Intel power gadget because you can run that separately and see this too, right? I step menus just will grab it if you have that IPG installed and and surface it, right? So OK, so I did some testing and I realized that when my machine gets below five percent battery, it automatically throttles itself down to eight hundred megahertz to eke out any lasting, you know, CPU or any lasting power without over drawing from the battery, right? And but if if it's if that happens and I grab the power cord and I plug it in, then it's free and it goes right back up and it'll, you know, be varying between whatever, you know, one point five and two point whatever, depending on what it's doing. But I think what would sometimes happen is if I sometimes would put my computer to sleep at five percent, put it in its, you know, I have a little case or whatever in the living room and put it on charge. And for whatever reason, it would never even though it would charge itself to one hundred percent, I could wake it up and it would still be stuck at this eight hundred megahertz until I rebooted. So now I just need to make sure if it does throttle down to eight hundred, I put it on power first and then close, you know, put it to sleep, close it or whatever. And and and then it and then it and then it's been fine. But this has been driving me crazy for years to be perfectly honest. And I'm I'm stoked that I just now figured it out. So yeah. Yeah. So it's a bug in the firmware, I guess. Yeah, maybe. Power management or yeah. Yeah, exactly. Maybe something along those lines. But but the thing is your MacBook Pro will likely do the same thing. I did some once I realized eight hundred was the number. It was like, OK, now I have something I can Google, right? And the next time I'm low on battery, I'll I'll see what the reports at us. But yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense, you know, with the controversy over them doing the same thing with the iPhone and then everybody started shaking their fist at them saying, well, how dare you? Right. You know, degrade the performance of my, you know, my shiny toy because the battery is low and it's like, well, dude, I mean, otherwise, it wouldn't work. Do you want it to work or not? I mean, you know, you tell me. Right. Right. No, exactly. Yeah. So it was just interesting to figure this out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully it helps one of you. So there you go. That's my that's my thoughts on this. I want to talk about our first sponsor, John, which is crossover from Code Weavers. 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A for sponsoring the episode, but and B for making crossover, especially crossover Mac 17, which is awesome. Thanks. All right. Moving on, John, let's go to Ian because he's got some battery and heat management tips for us, too. So Ian says he has three tips. He says John mentioned that his phone overheated in a car mount. He said I had the same problem, but then I changed to a magnetic mount which fits into the air vent. And this is not only much easier to use, but the phone is cooled by the air conditioning when it blows out of the vent. I've actually I've done this before with with those air vent mounts and they it does. It works and I don't know that you need a magnetic mount. His just happens to be magnetic. But but, you know, any even the pressure mounts or whatever, just one that kind of sits in the air vents. And I've used these air vent air vent mounts with, you know, plus size iPhones and have not had any negative consequences of like, you know, bending air vents or anything like that. I don't like them because the thing I like about the window mount is like the screen is at the same place that I'm looking while I'm driving, whereas my air vent isn't. So it could be. I get that. I do. But also the screen is now blocking your view through the windshield. So like, you know, could be argued either way, right? Yeah, I'm still uncomfortable looking not in front of me. Yeah. So most of the peripheral vision, you can get it. It's just. Yeah, most cars, their GPS is not on a heads up display. It's it's on a. Yeah, I know it's usually below the air vent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The in-car ones they've had. No, I've seen that. Yeah, I get it. But all right. Number two, he says, at home, I have a charging dock for my phone on the nightstand. But when I'm away, they're in a hotel or someone's home. I had to search around the bed for a power outlet at least once. Oh, and at least once I forgot to retrieve the charger before leaving the hotel and folks, we've talked about this. I actually had the same solution as Ian about two years ago, but it's been a while since we talked about it. So Ian says, now I always use a power bank to charge the phone overnight by the bed and then I recharge the power bank in a more accessible outlet during the day while I'm out. So he travels with an extra power bank and, you know, just a battery, one of those battery power banks, the external ones, uses that by the bed, get one with two ports on it so that you can charge your watch and your phone simultaneously next to the bed. You don't have to worry about, like, draping cables over the crazy thing. And if you're going away for a night, like, I don't even bother to bring my normal, like, you know, I have one of those anchored, you know, 10 outlet, whatever, 10 USB outlet things to charge. I don't even bring that with me if I'm going away overnight. I just bring a 20,000 milliamp hour battery pack with me and I just use that to charge my devices and I'm good. It makes life way easier. So that's a good tip. Any thoughts on that before I share his third one? Another tip is go through your freaking batteries. I just did this, Dave. So, you know, we're media, so we get, like, all sorts of handouts. And the thing is, I have a little pile. We may have seen it last time you were here of relatively portable battery devices to charge my iOS stuff. And I went through all of them, like, a week ago and, like, three of them are duds. Sure. You know, I charge them, you know, they were dead. So a lot of them were dead. And I'm like, okay, let me fully charge them. Charge them, the light, you know, was green or, you know, not bad. And then, you know, I went back to it and it's like, oh, yeah, it's red again. I'm like, all right, yeah, you're junk. So here's the thing about batteries, right? If you let a lithium ion battery essentially die or go all the way down to zero and you don't... Which I think all of these are some form of lithium ion. Sure. Right. Current technology. Right. And you don't charge it up right away. It will... And when I say right away, I mean, within a few days, maybe a week, right? But if you leave it for much longer than that, chances are that's the end of that battery, right? So this is why they recommend on the quote-unquote, on the bench, if you're just going to leave a battery for a long period of time. Having it at 100 won't kill it, but it will tend to reduce its maximum capacity. Whereas leaving it at about 60% is what they recommend for a battery that's going to go into cold storage. Like, and that's where they charge them if they're going to, you know, like when a company ships, you know, a thousand batteries to Amazon or whatever to sit in the warehouse until you buy them, that's 60% is the magic number. And I think I learned that if you leave it at zero, it'll probably never see the light of day again. That's the end of it. That's right. Yep. That's exactly right. I think they call it deep discharge or something like that. But anyways, yeah, the battery has died. It cannot be recovered. So, but no, so I cleaned it out, you know, our town, you know, like many, you know, does a battery recycling. So that's where they're grown. Yeah. And that's actually worth being aware of whatever your town does for all your old batteries. Because like, AA batteries and stuff, usually they recommend you just throw them into your normal trash, right? But anything lithium ion, they usually rechargeables or lead acid. And actually our town, actually, we have coming up, it's a hazardous waste day, which is like, what fun, right? Yeah, no, it's great. It's great. Number three for me. And he says, if I know that I'll be using the phone a lot, for example, using maps while hiking or walking around town, setting low power mode really makes a difference for me to battery life. He says, I also added this switch to control center. So it's easier to find. Definitely add battery, low battery, whatever. Low power mode to control center to make life easier that. And you can do that in settings. I believe it's just settings, control center. Yeah. And you can just customize controls and add it there. Yeah, I actually have that in my shortcut screen because it's something you don't think about. And the thing is, do you ever have you ever been sorry that you're in low power mode? And I don't think I ever have been. It's like, well, nothing didn't happen that I wanted to happen. Yeah. The thing I notice is that it does not check mail automatically in the background. Right. Right. So there are times when I mean, sorry is sort of, you asked, have I ever felt sorry? No. But I have noticed like I launch mail and it's like, oh, right. And I do sort of rely on, I have mail check. I think it's, I don't know, once every 30 minutes or something on my phone. Maybe it's once an hour. But I, especially if I'm out and about during the day and not necessarily checking mail, I do have my mail set to notify me for VIPs. Right. So I kind of rely on that, especially again, if it's a day where I'm not, you know, thinking about checking email just to see, oh, is there anyone that's emailed me that's important that I might want to look at? And so low power mode keeps me from seeing that. So there you go. Yeah. But I don't know that I've ever been sorry about it. That's fair. Let's see. Oh, you know, we've been talking a lot about mail certificates here and we had an exchange with listener Brother Jay about them. And no, and a tip. The changing of the certificates just occurred for both you and I and many people if you listened to our episode a number years ago, because we did it in August and certificates expire, which is annoying. Well, unless you throw somebody money, but still. And so we changed our certs and it reminded me of this tip that I think I've shared before, but we use S-MIME certificates and we'll put a link in the show notes to an article about how to create your own S-MIME certificate and install it in both Mac OS mail and iOS mail. Jeff Butts did a bang up job putting all that together for us not that long ago. But there is a tip that I will add. By default, when you create these things, they are put into your normal main system key chain. It's either login or, you know, it's under your username or whatever it might be depending on how long it's been since you've nuked and paved your Mac, right? But you have the one main key chain and that's where these things go and it goes into certificates. Well, I, a long time ago, decided I wanted to be a little more aware of my mail certificates and, you know, your login key chain certificates, it just gets crazy, right? There's just tons and tons of them. So I created a new key chain. You just go into key chain access on your Mac, go to file new key chain and I created one called mail certificates. And then I dragged all of my mail certificates from my login key chain to this mail key chain and it's great because I can see them all, I can see when they're going to expire. It cleans up the view because the only thing I have in there are mail certificates, nothing else gets put in there, it's only the stuff that I put in there. And the other thing that I can do, John, is I can set how frequently I want that key chain to lock. For me, on my machines, I don't have my login key chain lock unless I log out, right? Or maybe if I put it to sleep but then it unlocks when I unlock my Mac. I like to have my login key chain just unlocked, which I think is default behavior for, for most of us. But for mail, I don't know, I kind of like the idea that if a message is signed by me, then it's signed by me. And also, if somebody happens to sit at my computer, they couldn't see any messages that were encrypted and sent to me. And so to do that, I set my mail certificate key chain to, I go to edit, change settings for mail certificates in key chain access. And you can set how frequently you want it to lock. And so for me, I have it lock automatically after five minutes of not using that key chain. Which is awesome. If I'm doing a lot of email, it's no problem. It's great. But if I stop doing email for more than five minutes, boom, the key chain locks and everything's good. So there's your. Yep. I do the exact same thing because if I get a prompt saying, oh, I want your password for your key chain because there's some secure stuff going, then I'm like, oh, well, this may be important. It may not be. It may just be BS, but no. But but it catches my attention, which I do like. So I do the same thing that you do. The thing is apples. My most recent certificate update experience was very unpleasant because it well, it kind of matched the ones I had in the past, but key chain access is broken. I think in the, you know, you get your cert, you generate the private key, the public key. And even if you separate it out, it's it's not quite smart enough to put it together in a fashion that is useful. Right. Yeah. Well, what I do is when so the process, we can go through this. It's fine. The process is you visit a website and again, Jeff's article will take you through this. You visit a website, you request the certificate, then you wait to get an email from them and you click a link in the email to download the certificate. But really, when you request it, the first half of the certificate is a saved in your key chain, right? Because there's two parts of the key. There's the private part and the public part and the private part never leaves your computer. So your computer generates this private key and saves it locally in your key chain, in your main key chain, not your mail key chain. And then when you go through the process and download the key, it's really downloading just the public part of the key. I always add that to the login key chain. And that way, it marries the two together. And from there, I can then drag that key from certificates into my mail certificates key chain. And it's way easier to see because it's hard to tell just the way key chain access displays things. It's hard to tell which private key goes with which email address. But it knows. And so when you pull in the public key, it marries them together and then you can drag them around and it's totally fine. So there you go. Okay. The reason I mentioned it is because you may run into a situation where so you renew your certificates and everything's great. And then all of a sudden you're like, well, I want to export it. Right. Typically in the pkcs12 file or p12 file, which key chain access will do, but it won't if it can't find the private key. So sometimes you have to manually. Right. Right. Kind of give it a little hint there, which is the only fish shake at a key chain. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's not smart enough it's like, well, I know where you came from and I know that you guys are kind of related to each other. So let me group you, but it doesn't. So. Right. Well, it does if you leave them alone at first. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you don't try to be smarter than the key. If you don't try to outsmart yourself. Uh-oh. I'm hearing, whoa, we'll be right back. All right. We're back. Sorry. I don't think it made it to the recording that way. I think it was just to my ears. So no one has any idea what I'm talking about. Great. It was funky. Yes. That's right. I do have a cool stuff found to add, John. It is back to school time or in the case with my daughter, it is off to school for the first time time. This week, she is heading off to her freshman year, which is creating all sorts of excitement and emotions. What, like college? Like home. Yeah. Fresh. Oh boy. I know it's crazy. Yeah. I'm going to miss her. But the. She's not gone. What's that? She's not gone. She'll be back. She'll be back. But I'm going to miss her. It's like, you know, we're used to having, we're used to being essentially, you know, other than special occasions or whatever or trips, we see each other every day. You know, and now that's just like the norm changes. It's normal for the norm to change. But it doesn't, like we said earlier, you know, changes. It's it's constant, but it is not fun for us humans. So there you go. But anchor has most dorm rooms have like, you know, two outlets in them and that ain't enough. So anchors got this thing called the Powerport Strip 12, man. You got to take a look at this thing. I'll put a link in our chat room and say hello to everybody at MackieGab.com slash stream. And and this thing's awesome. It's got 12 AC outlets on it organized so that you've got room for the ones that need wall warts. And then it like those six of those are along the long edge. And then there's room in the middle for another six outlets right next to each other sort of in power strip fashion. And then at the bottom of this thing, there are three USB charging ports with, of course, it's anchor, right? So they all do high speed charging with power IQ. And the whole thing, of course, is, you know, surge protector and all that stuff. So it's 35 bucks from anchor. We'll put a link, of course, in the show notes because not only does it look cool, but I've tested this thing. It's awesome. So you got to check it out. Good. And one last tip from listener Donna, who had an issue in her car where she she drives a Ford and this is important this is a little bit of a PSA, which is interesting. Not a PSI but PSA where her PSA for the PSI. It's a PSA for the PSI. That's right. Because she was getting this thing where her tire pressure monitoring system, which of course is mandated in all vehicles for what the last 10 years or something is was giving her a fault and saying either it couldn't read all the tires or it couldn't read, you know, some of the tires, not that they were low, but that the system itself was having a fault. And it turns out that this happens when you use the wrong and it turns out to be inexpensive. No surprise. Charger for, you know, in your DC, your 12 volt DC port, we used to call them cigarette lighter ports, but since cars don't come with those anymore, I don't know that that term applies. But, you know, the little car charger ports that are in your car, the round ones, using a cheapo iPhone or USB, you know, charger in those ports will on Fords. And it seems like Fords alone potentially cause it to report that the tire pressure monitoring system, it doesn't, as far as we know, it doesn't break anything. This is, it's a temporary thing and it is solved by not using that charger. And she said she bought some, you know, some better chargers or whatever, not L cheapo brand and they're totally fine. Yeah. So as John in the chat room is saying, RF interference, and that certainly is, is I think what's, what's causing this. So we will put a link in the show notes to both some more details about this, as well as the charger that, that Donna has, has shifted to. But thanks for the heads up. That's crazy. Yeah. I know. It's nuts. I'm noticing general, I actually had one, like weather station temperature thing that I had. Yep. When the voltage on the battery in the sensor is low, weird, weird things happen. Now the thing is most devices have, like this one actually has a thing saying, well, dude, the batteries low, you should probably replace it. Otherwise it's going to tell you crazy stuff, which is what it did. Yeah. Yeah. So always check the level of your batteries in your remote sensors, because yeah, once it gets below a certain voltage, they just have a mind of their own. That they do, my friend. Yeah. It's crazy. Craziness. Craziness. All right. My house. I want to talk about our, our second sponsor, John, which is masterclass. So imagine learning new recipes from Gordon Ramsay. Can you imagine that? You can. You can learn at this. It's freaking amazing. So he doesn't yell at me. Well, you want to talk about yelling. You could learn freaking acting from Samuel L. Jackson. Now, I think he might yell at you. You can learn comedy from Steve Martin. You can learn chess from Gary Kasparov. Right. You can learn jazz from a Herbie Hancock. This is pretty amazing stuff. Singing from Christina Aguilera. Pick your hobby. They have found the name brand experts. And not only have they found them, they have created these courses. Right. And they're all available at masterclass. 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Our thanks to masterclass for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's see. We are moving on. Oh, Paul has a great question. Let's go to Paul here. Good stuff. Paul writes. He says, I've been traveling internationally and decided I would use Wi-Fi as my primary contact method with Wi-Fi calling. And it works great. My issue came when I found an open Wi-Fi. Some are just open. I then engaged a VPN. He says, some, you know, the restaurant or whatever gave us the password. And that worked great. But how about those login screens on the open Wi-FIs that where I have to go and accept their terms? He says, my wife's iPhone had little issue. Mine kept running into not loading the login screen even if I went to neverssl.com or 1.1.1 or something to spur the page to launch. He said I went into the Wi-Fi to forget it. And I noticed that the auto login button showed up on this particular network, but not others. So I turned it off and instantly the login screen popped right up. I guess I'm asking, has anyone else done this to make sure they can get in? Or am I just part of the people just going in to check to see this? He says, I probably should reset network settings but I'm a bit cautious to do it while traveling internationally. So yeah, I've run into this before too where the phone thinks it knows how to log in to this bonus page that comes up, the gateway page, if you will. And sometimes the phone can learn how to do that properly and then do it. But if you're having trouble turning off that auto login thing in there and it's just in the settings, you go into Wi-Fi, pick the network, hit the little i and you'll see not every network has it. There'll be auto join now as of well a year ago with iOS 11 and then auto login and you can turn either or both of those off. They're separate toggles. So turning auto login off can help fix this for sure. The thing that I've noticed, so there are stores where I expect so we have stop and shop and hold foods here. And they have free Wi-Fi and the thing is I expect it to work but it doesn't. Here's how I make it work in that I go to the settings, Wi-Fi, I see the access point and if you click on the little i, the little info window, more often than not, I found in my case, Dave. So I think what you're saying, what you're driving at is that sometimes the auto login thing is broken and that it doesn't work right in that I found at least in two different stores, whatever portal they're using. I have to click on the little info thing in order for it to prompt me saying, oh yeah, enter a password or do something so then I can log in. So I think it's a dance between these portals and Apple's implementation of auto login because I found that sometimes I have to second guess them. And Paul's right in his note he mentioned never SSL. That can be another thing. In fact, I find that more often than not the solution on my Mac when I'm at a hotel or a coffee shop or whatever. And I can't get that bonus page to come up. Going to never SSL.com almost always fixes that for me. Because what happens is the phone tries to go, when you join a Wi-Fi network, it actually tries to go to one of Apple's pages. And if it gets there, it says great, you've got internet access, I'll stay out of it. If it doesn't get there, then it displays whatever page it was redirected to, presuming that that's the login page. The problem is, and that's a fine path, that works great. The problem is sometimes whatever page your Mac is trying to go to is, it might see internet access and immediately say, oh, I want to check email and do this and do this. And all these things are secure connections. And so it's trying to redirect these and it doesn't work because security certificate doesn't match. And it just shuts it all down. Never SSL is a website that, as you might guess, never uses SSL. So there's no security on it. You go there and then that will redirect successfully to whatever the login page is. There you go. That's the key. And one other thing he mentioned, resetting network settings, I wouldn't be so hesitant to do that. In fact, we have four of us in the house and so there's four active iPhones. In the last two weeks, three of the four of us, me included, have had some problems where resetting network settings fixed it. My wife and daughter yesterday both had a problem where they couldn't really, they were on LTE but couldn't do anything. And my daughter was like, oh yeah, I can't check email when I'm on LTE only on Wi-Fi. Like, what? Yeah, and she's like, no, remember we saw this before and we did. And resetting network settings. So you go into settings, general on your phone, and then all the way at the bottom is reset. And reset network settings is one of those options. Do that. It, I think it blows away your VPNs. And it also, at least until you charge and then it gets to sync with iCloud Keychain, it will blow away all your Wi-Fi passwords too. So you may have to rejoin at least one Wi-Fi network and then if you use iCloud Keychain, the rest usually auto-populate. But it may or may not blow away your VPNs. But VPNs and Wi-Fi passwords are the things that might be impacted by this. But that reset can be a huge, huge help. So don't be afraid to do that. I've done it while traveling. I've done it, you know, we were at an amusement park. We, we had kind of a family day yesterday at one of the local amusement parks here at Canobie Lake. And you know, we reset their wife, their network settings while we were, I don't know, like in line for a ride or something. And it totally solved the problem. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. You didn't like hack them, did you? Oh, well, I don't know you. I just reset. Yeah, it was all good. I didn't do anything wrong. But I mean, you know, Paul's not, Paul's also not wrong. Like anytime you do one of these things, if there's some underlying problem, doing this could result in bricked phone, right? You know, anything could. But I've never had that happen. I haven't heard of that happening with people. I've been generally speaking this reset network settings tends to work pretty well. So yeah, good stuff. All right. I think it's time to go to Yanis, right? Yeah. All right. Yanis writes, I thought you might have an answer to this. So here goes with the iPad lightning to SD card camera reader, combined with a lightning to USB C adapter work in a 2015 MacBook that only has a USB C port. He says, I'm asking for a friend a friend. So she buys only the adapter and not the whole other dongle. So looking to read an SD card on a 2015 MacBook and getting SD to USB C. And if you already have one or even both of these things would plugging them and work together. I did some research on this and on the surface, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work. The lightning to USB C adapter says that it works for syncing. So that means data will pass across it, right? So it should work. I haven't tested it because I don't have these three things to combine. But you know, I like stuff like that. That's fun. I think it'll work. What do you think, John? My assumption was just that, yeah, it has, you buy a simple adapter. Yeah. You don't have to jump through too many hoops. No, not too many. If you want to send in your question to us, feedback at MackieCab.com is how you get to us. No, no, no, no. No. Did I get it wrong? Well, you almost got it right, except feedback at MackieCab.com. I see what you're saying there, man. But I'm pretty sure it's feedback at MackieCab.com. Yes. Sorry. Yeah. OK. Yeah. You know, I want to talk about our third sponsor today, which is Game Time. So you folks know I love going to concerts and stuff like that, right? And I have always prided myself on being on the cutting edge of the right way to buy tickets. Because it's important to know how to get tickets for the events that you want to see. That I've realized lately, a lot of people have figured out how to like use a ticket master and all this other stuff. And you know, and so a lot of times, though, the right tickets are available at the last minute. Because think about it, right? Expiring inventory. If the event is tonight, man, if somebody's got a ticket that they have for sale, I'm guessing that they are incentivized to sell. And Game Time at usegamtime.com slash MGG is the top destination for last minute tickets for the live events. And if you go to there and then use code MGG, you get 15 bucks off your first purchase, right? And unlike Ticketmaster and Stubhub, you know, which are sort of overwhelming with all these choices, the Game Time app only shows you the best values and makes buying tickets really, really fast. And it shows you like a photo of the view from your seat, right? They've got these high-res photos in there so you can see what it's going to look like and, you know, where the stage is going to be or, you know, if you're going to a sporting event, like, you know, where you are in relation to the field and all that stuff. And Game Time's got you covered. They'll guarantee you receive your tickets in time for the event and that they'll be valid for entry. And I was, we went to see Brad Paisley right after Game Time had signed on board. And so we already had our tickets because I didn't know about Game Time at the time. And I went while we were in the parking lot, you know, we got there early. We ate our sandwiches or whatever. And before we went in, I pulled up the Game Time app. And this is just a couple hours to show time, maybe an hour to show time, whatever. And I could have gotten better seats than I had for less money than I paid right there in the Game Time app. Obviously, I didn't do that because I didn't want to spend more money. But, you know, like there it is right there. And so now Game Time is right there on my phone and I'm going to use it. So you can use it too. Use Game Time dot com slash MGG for 15 bucks off your first purchase. Use promo code MGG. Again, that's use Game Time dot com U S E G A M E T I M E dot com slash MGG. And then use promo code MGG. That'll get you off the 15 bucks off your first purchase. Our thanks to Game Time for existing and for sponsoring this episode. All right. Ron, shall we go to Ron and talk about heat? Yeah. It's getting hot in here. So hot. All right. Ron writes, I just purchased a he says I have a new 2018 15 inch MacBook Pro. So nice. He says I just purchased a dock with two standard USB ports and an SD card reader. It has he has the Satechi dock and he says it had good reviews and works well. But it gets very warm. Do you believe this is normal behavior? He says it makes me uncomfortable leaving it plugged in. Says I also purchased a convex type C power adapter. He says it takes an old power brick with the type two MagSafe adapter and adapts it to type C. That's handy. So that's cool stuff found right there. He says it seems rated properly, but it also gets warm, both the brick and the adapter. He says I use it for travel, but I'm nervous about leaving it plugged in. Any experience with these types of things? So, yeah. And he's got another question that we might get to too. As far as the heat on these, I mean, I think it makes sense at some level. You know, I've got some older Thunderbolt 1 and Thunderbolt 2 portable like breakout boxes, either little docks or a USB 3 and gig ethernet thing. And those get warm too. I mean, there's power passing across them. So I don't mean to invoke a pun, but I wouldn't sweat it. I mean, depending on how hot it is. I mean, if we're talking about something that you're worried about it like burning your skin or, you know, melting the couch or something, well, that doesn't sound normal. But otherwise, I don't know. What do you think, John? You're a, you're a, you know. The thing is, things should be designed according to certain standards. One of them being it shouldn't generate enough heat for it to burn a human, burn human flesh. All right. Yeah. I think that's in most design specs, you know, let's not get to that level. Don't burn humans. And we remember the good old days or the bad old days. They, when some Mac, I don't know if they call them laptops or portables, but would get dangerously close or sometimes beyond the temperature at which your flesh may not be happy. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. That, that, that was bad. Yeah. And even I've, I've bought some questionable, I'll admit it, products, you know, they were cheap. Sure. Yeah. It's tempting. Yeah, it's tempting. Magazine adapters. Right. And the thing is, Dave, when I look at them, so, so I have infrared measurement tools, and some of these things I look at them and the temperature of these things running in, I suppose, neural operation are way above the temperature of Apple products. I'm like, you know, 20, 30, 40 degrees, but it's not bursting into flames at burning my house down. Yeah. So, you know, you got to, you got to weigh the risk. Am I comfortable with something running at, you know, 200 degrees, you know, against my carpet, powering my computer? If you are, then good for you. Right? Yeah, I guess. I guess. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta find a link to this, this power adapter thing because this looks cool. But anyway, we'll find that. Yeah, yeah. So, I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the magic answer is, John. I mean, to me, the general rule is, look, if you hold it and it causes pain, that's probably not good. That's probably a threshold that you don't want to reach. Yeah. Right. Right, right, right, right. Because a little beyond that is it's going to burn your house down. I don't know. I don't know that that's just. Yeah, right, right. What kind of amateur take here? I'm not a, you know, you know, thermal engineer, but if it's too hot for me to hold, that's bad. Yeah, that's right. I did, I found, sorry, I was, I was distracted here, John, because I really wanted to find this thing. And I found it. It's, it's, it's now the links in the show notes, of course, because that's how we do it. Yeah. This is cool. It's for 22 bucks. You can go MagSafe. It says MagSafe 1 or MagSafe 2. Maybe it comes with the converter tip thing. Yeah, I think it does. That's pretty cool. And so if you've got, you know, a bunch of old MagSafe chargers that you've sort of littered around your house so that wherever you are, your laptop, like your house, John, you've got them, you know, strategically placed. I wouldn't say littered in your house, but, you know, we all have. Three, three strategically placed. So now you just cart around this little $22 thing. No, no, no. And, and that like allows you to adapt to like, I think certainly right now. Well, really a year ago, but for 22 bucks, this is something worth throwing in your, you know, bag if you're traveling or whatever, because that way, if you run into Apple folks, you know, you might, you have a greater chance of being able to charge. Anyway, cool. Thanks for that, Ron. You know what, Ron, you had another question. So let me, let me see if I can pull that up for you while we're at it. Where am I here? It's like, it's like I'm lost, John. He says, my MacBook Pro is a second machine. So I reinstalled completely from scratch. The App Store, iCloud, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud and Dropbox made it easy. I reset my preferences and will add others as I need them. Mail has both my Comcast, iMap and DotMac mobile me accounts. Or I, why did I say mobile me? Well, because that's newer than DotMac, I guess. But it really, it's iCloud. He says, as you can see, the Comcast account has, he sent us a screenshot. And he says the Comcast account has a tilde next to it in the mailbox list, suggesting that it is offline. But when I checked with the connection doctor and preferences, it says all is well. Also, mail is able to be sent and received normally using the account. Do you have any ideas about why this is? So yeah, those, those tildes. So the screenshot he sent, it's worth describing because this can be confusing. In mail, when you, when you have multiple accounts, you'll have the ability to either collapse or expand your mailboxes like inbox, sent, trash, drafts. And you can see the, if they're collapsed, you get one inbox. And if you open it up, you see inboxes individually for each one. And this can be handy if you want to, you know, have everything displayed as one, or if you like to see them separately, just twist it open. But his, they were collapsed. So the tilde is just over the inbox in its entirety. It's in, if you have this problem in mail, it's worth expanding that. And then you'll see which mailbox or mailboxes are having the problem. Let's assume that he had done this and in fact it's his Comcast account. Uh, that's fine. Click on that little tilde. It will give you some level of an error message that may be helpful or it may not. But sometimes the fix is as simple as going in mail to the mailbox menu and choose the option, take all accounts online. That often solves this problem for me when I see this. Either clicking on the little tilde itself to see what the error message really is or going and just choosing, you know, mailbox, take all accounts online can really help. So there you go. Run. Hopefully that, uh, hopefully that helps. I don't know. Got any thoughts, John? I haven't had to do that often, but when I have it, yeah. It solves it. Right. Mail gets confused. It's like, uh, or it's just like the last time I checked. So yeah, whenever you see that little triangle. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um, all right. Andrew's got this. I don't know what to do about this, John. I like his question. Yeah. So Andrew writes, he says, uh, as a professional photographer who uses a number of cameras and an iPhone seven plus, it would be nice to be able to sort my photos by the exit date in an Apple finder window. However, the date modified and date created are not correct or at least not tied to the date. The picture was taken when I export my photos to my external drive for archiving. If this is the case, I wonder if Mojave has this option now. Um, but if not, can I use some alternative finder to achieve this? Um, so yeah, this is, this is interesting, right? And he's got a tip that sort of solves this problem too that we'll get to. But, um, I, I was looking, so really what he wants to do is sort in the finder or in some analog to the finder by date taken, which is there in the XF data, right? And you can even see it if you do. So you're telling me the finder will reveal EXIF data, which is the embedded geeky stuff that everybody wants, including time and date. So it's there. It doesn't reveal all of it necessarily, but it certainly reveals that part of it. Yeah. Um, but you, it won't sort by it because it's not available there, right? He was thinking, okay, you know, can I go to the view, show view options and get date taken in that list? And maybe I haven't tested out Mojave. I haven't checked this on Mojave yet. But, um, yeah, it's possible, but probably not likely, right? That it's, they're going to bother to add that to the columns. But that is, that's a tip in its own, right? In, in the finder, if you go to view, show view options, um, that will be individualized to the folder that you are currently in in the finder. So whatever change you make here is only for that folder, unless you make the change and then click use as default at, at which point, yeah, then it will use it as the defaults for everything. But you can set these per folder. So you can have some folders, calculate all sizes and some not and, you know, do whatever you want. Unfortunately, date taken is not in that list. I found a, uh, a post in the, the pathfinder support, uh, group, you know, pathfinder being one of the several finder alternatives. And someone was asking about this, but I never saw it. I didn't see a response there. I don't use pathfinder currently. So, um, but, but that, you know, pathfinder would be one of the places to, to look for this. There's, you know, there's a few others. Do you use, you don't use any finder alternatives to you, John? Uh, not anymore. No. What did you use to use? Love to dig around. Okay. All right. Okay. No, it's been a while. No, I mean, the current finder is, uh, it's pretty good. But, you know, for this sort of problem, I, uh, using a photo suite that can get to the EXIF date, I think is probably your best long-term. Well, but, but his, his issue- It'd be nice and finder. I, I agree. It'd be nice and finder, but- He can sort this way and photo, like photos sorts this way, right? Date taken is how photos does this. That's not the problem. It's now that you've exported these, is there a way to, you know, to, is there something that will manage them just as raw files, right? Not as, as, you know, photos as you were. But yeah, no, no, no, the, the, the photos Apple, most photos will do it. So there's, there's others. I'm trying to think total finder is the other one, um, that comes to mind from binary age and, um- I like them for a while until they, yeah, until Apple added. Yeah. Their system integrity protection. All right, thanks. Yeah, right. Well, that too. It's like, yeah, stay away. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Oh, and I did promise Andrew's tip to, to solve this. He says, uh, you can rename each file based on the exif date taken in a better finder rename, which is a great little app that if you, um, if you've never used it, go check it out. This is, you know, yet another cool stuff found kind of thing. Um, he says, uh, if you do that, he says, I recommend using the Y Y Y Y M M D D. So year month date format so that a photo taken today would be two zero one eight zero eight two zero, right? August 20th, 2018. But the nice part about that is, is you're going in order of, uh, least to most significant, and then you'll be able to sort things in a, in a very logical way. Things from 2017 will be 2017. Whereas if you do, you know, month day year, you'll have every photo taken in August, regardless of year first, you know, January 1st, and then et cetera, et cetera. So, um, yeah. And he says, uh, um, he said, uh, it's important to include the original file names and some cameras can take up to 20 seconds per each photo. So he says, make sure you include the original file name in the, in the, you know, in the, the formula that you create in a better finder rename. That's a pretty cool app. Have you used that one before, John? They have a whole suite of amazing apps that do things just a little better than Apple. So, yes. Yes. Yes. A better finder, something. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That really what, what they need is a better finder. Yeah. There you go. Yep. Well, we can make one product, but yeah. Yeah. Just a better finder. It's like, yeah, Apple, stop it. Here it is. Here it is. There you go. All right. Uh, moving on to Greg. Greg asks if I can find Greg. Thankfully, Evernote has been behaving for the last few weeks, which we like. He says, I was helping someone with his UPS battery backup connected via USB to his MacBook Pro 2014. It says, in the past, I could see the UPS settings in Energy Saver, which I still can see. But for some reason it is only showing settings for the display to shut off on the UPS tab. He said I called the manufacturer APC and he says they don't have any software for high Sierra, any suggestions. So yeah, this is interesting. If you go in, if you have a UPS connected to your Mac via USB cable, which I highly recommend, if you're going to buy, well, first of all, I highly recommend using a UPS. Secondly, I highly recommend connecting it via USB to your Mac because what can happen is that way your Mac knows that it is being run from battery power and then it will allow you to set whether you want the computer to sleep or even shut down, depending on where, you know, how much power the UPS has and all that stuff. But I have found that different, not just different operating systems or different versions of macOS, but different computers have different options here. So on the computer that I'm on right now, I have, I can set computer sleep and display sleep separate for UPS and then I can also set shutdown options. So I can say, you know, shut it down when there's, you know, five minutes left or when the battery is below a certain percentage or, you know, whatever I want. And it works. But I have also seen, like my iMac in the office, I don't think I have an option to set computer sleep even normally, like forget about the UPS. You're right. The thing is, there article about this lies, Dave, and then for my machine it says, well, you get this option and you get this option when you're an energy saver. And it's like, no, I don't, it doesn't show me what they say they show me. So that's all I'm going to say. Well, and it depends on your computer, right? Because like I said, the one that I'm on, so I'm on a 2011 iMac here in the studio. And I get on both the power tab and the UPS tab. I can set computer sleep at two minutes or hours or never and the same with display sleep. On my iMac in the office, which I've connected to remotely now, the only thing I can set is display sleep. I do not get the option to set computer sleep. The only, the only option I get is prevent the computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off. So I can, I can tell it not to sleep, but I can't control when it chooses to sleep. No, and this is, you know, with things like power nap and that sort of thing. This kind of makes sense that, you know, setting a fixed time for when the computer sleeps, like sleep is a, what defines sleep, right? So I think, I think that, that the fact that, that newer Macs have changed the definition of what computer sleep means, that it's best not to, to worry our pretty little hearts with it. I think John is the, right. But what happens if I look at PM set, right on, on that computer? So no, no, no, PM set from the terminal. So I have my display set to sleep after 15 minutes in energy saver. And looking at PM set. So if you open the terminal and type PM set space dash G, I can see that my system sleep is also set to 15 minutes. So you can control this. It's just not there in the UI. But right now it says that sleep is prevented by com.bombic.cc helper, which makes sense because it's after 6 30 PM, which means my computer is backing itself up while I'm busy podcasting up here. So there you go. So you can use PM set. All right. That would work. You all right? Everything good? Yep. Okay. All right. Okay. Good. Let's see. Oh, you know, we were talking about reset network settings earlier this episode, and Roger actually has something to share right along those lines. He says, uh, my iPhone had odd password related issues. He says, today I got a prompt saying that some features might not work until I updated iCloud settings and prompted me to sign into iCloud. After doing so, I was prompted to add a passcode, which no, this wasn't spam. These were alerts on his phone. Okay. Yeah. It says, after doing so, I was prompted to add a passcode, which the phone already had, which was functioning. At this point, I opted to contact Apple. It says, after reviewing the pattern of issues, the agent asked me the name of the app that had crashed and which I had deleted. So he had an app on the phone that had crashed that predicated all of this. And he says, I couldn't remember. So we went to the purchase listing to look for it, and this app was not listed. The assumption at this point is that the app in question was pulled from the app store, possibly for not updating its security related code. So the working assumption is that the app crashed somehow and corrupted my key chain and or other password related caches. He said, the Apple agent had me reset the phone via settings, general reset all settings. It took two attempts to get the reset to actually do its job. So this is different from reset network settings. This is reset all settings. And he says, the agent said, if it doesn't take several minutes, it didn't really reset. This method takes out all of your customization settings, but does not delete content data. Ever since doing that, everything seems to be fine, except for the endless list of tweaks that I'm still updating. So this is short of nuking and paving. If you get to the point like Roger was, where his phone was doing all this crazy stuff, and he, you know, it was, well, wipe it clean or try this reset all settings while wiping it clean, you know, also deletes all your app data. This does not do that. It just deletes all or it sets to default all of your settings. So you've got to kind of reset everything in there, but you get to keep all your app data. So that's another another thing in settings and settings general reset that's worth considering. This one requires a little more consideration than reset network settings. But but still better than, you know, better than having to completely nuke and pave. So thank you for sharing that, Roger. That's pretty good stuff. Yeah. Good, John. Have you ever done any of these resets? Not recently, which is good. I guess. Yeah, that is good. Right. Right. Okay, let's see. How much time do we have left? We've got we've got some time. All right, Kevin, Kevin asks, he says, I remember you saying not too long ago that you upgraded your whole business operation on FileMaker. That's true. We've been using FileMaker internally here at the Mac Observer and Backbeat Media for almost 20 years. And I've used it for other things prior to that. And really, we do everything. Our campaign management and invoicing and our writer payments and all of that stuff is managed with FileMaker. It's awesome. It says I've never gotten into FileMaker, but I am about to give it the free trial. All right. So I'm about to give the free trial the world. One of my IT clients is a local nonprofit garden and park association. I don't do any database work for them currently. They have the QuickBooks of Nonprofit Donor Management to handle all of their fundraising. The org may have hundreds, if not thousands of volunteers come through their door on a yearly basis. The manager of volunteers has asked me to recommend a database slash CRM slash HR-ish solution that can manage all of the basic contact info, but also have files attached to each contract like or contact, sorry, like volunteer agreements and any other things. He says, we will be doing this in Windows or on the web. Would FileMaker, he says, in addition to using it on the Mac, we would want to be able to access it from Windows or even on the web. Would FileMaker work? Will it be easy to learn or would you recommend something else? So yeah, I really think FileMaker would be perfect for this. With an eye spot about FileMakers, you can completely customize things. In fact, you can start totally from scratch and build whatever you want on your own mostly visually, right? I mean, that's sort of the point of FileMaker is you get this really powerful database engine that can do all kinds of stuff and you get to design visually in it. You can also do scripting and you may want to get to that point, depending on how you want to get data in and out of this. But you don't need to and FileMaker, especially depending on how you host it, can easily be accessible from the web. In fact, all of our writers at TMO now access FileMaker from the web to store all of our contacts and whenever we have interaction with PR reps or whatever, we do all that. It's all doable on the web, so you don't even have to buy FileMaker client software. You can just do it right there or you can buy FileMaker client software, of course. In terms of starting, like I said, you can start from scratch, but they have tons and tons of templates. What you're describing is a fairly common thing with some tweaks and that's where FileMaker is truly powerful, right? You would start with maybe just a normal contacts database and then say, okay, I want to add a field to this that stores attachments and then you could have, you could either create a field that would store multiple attachments and you could put in whatever you want or you could have a field for volunteer agreement and a field for insurance form or whatever and just put all that stuff in and then you could search the database by, do we have any people that have checked in in the last three weeks for whom we do not have a current volunteer agreement and you could pull that report up and do all that kind of stuff and that's where FileMaker gets really powerful because you're able to do, you're able to build this database that's custom to what you want and then do your own custom searches on it without ever having to learn MySQL or any other database language, which is, I mean, as someone who has learned some of those database languages, it's awesome because it makes it really easy and it's all super visual. Have you ever, other than what you interact with here at TMO, have you ever messed with FileMaker, John? Not really, though I have done quite a bit of database work, including SQL work and all I would say is that FileMaker is a fine product that's been out for many years. You can do your SQL stuff, I guess, if you want to. If you want to build something from scratch, then maybe look at, but as you mentioned, recently, MySQL. MySQL is an open source database that follows a standard called Structured Query Language, which is what SQL is. If you want to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and put together a database, otherwise, a product- The problem with doing that is you then also need to learn a way to create the visual, like the user interface for it, MySQL is just the database engine, so you would also need to learn PHP and HTML to tie, because PHP becomes your engine, or at least your business logic. MySQL is your database, and then you'd need to learn HTML to be the front end. It's daunting to set that up. We do it all the time. We use lots of stuff. That's how MacCobserver.com runs, but in terms of what he's talking about, that would be a huge monumental undertaking. I mean, I've built things like that, some templated and some out of whole cloth, but for what he's describing, I would never use MySQL, because FileMaker's right there, and you can just, within an hour, you've got it, and it's good to go, whereas if you were going to use LAMP, which is Linux Apache MySQL and PHP, or MAMP, if you want to use Mac OS Apache MySQL and PHP, I mean, you're talking days, at the very least, to get something basic up and running. I would go FileMaker. Yeah. I mean, for something like that, for a CRM kind of thing, you don't want to build it your own. On your own. I don't think so. It can be fun, but it's not necessarily good. John, a security question. Oh, I think did we lose John? He says he hears nothing. Fun! Let's see if we can get him back. All right, we're back. I think we've got Mr. Braun. You hear again with us, John? Yes, sir. Good, because I have a question that I think maybe you might be able to help with here. Listener Brian writes, he says, I hope you can help point me in the right direction. I have a late 2011 MacBook Pro, my first and thus far only Mac, as announced at WWDC. My computer has just fallen off the list. So Hi Sierra is the last OS that he'll be able to run. He says, I can't seem to find anywhere. How long until updates stop coming for my computer? I would like to be prepared for when updates stop. He's talking about security updates. So my question, how long do I have to scrape together enough money to buy a new MacBook before Apple stops updating 10.13? John? Three. Three is the magic numbers. Three operating system versions, which these days translate into years. Is that right? I would venture to guess that's a accurate assessment. Okay. So no, three. Three is the answer. Do you agree? No, I definitely agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Apple typically will release security updates for three versions of the OS until they stop releasing them. Then you're not necessarily at risk, though you may be if you're running a Mac with such an old OS. Because who's going to bother writing an exploit for a really old version of Mac OS? Somebody who knows, right? Yeah, sure. Sure. I think Apple's semi-public position has been, yeah, if you're within the last three updates, you're pretty good. Yeah. So I'm currently running some machines where El Capitan is the most recent officially supported El Capitan being 10.11. So 11. Yeah. So that and that still gets updates, right? There was a security update in July for El Cap and it runs Safari 11, which is also great. But that's about to end, I think. I think once Mojave comes out, I think El Cap is, is, you know, end of life in terms of that. So that's the point at which it's like, well, it might be time to move on. So if so, I have a few machines I need to replace, but, you know, and, you know, the question is how much does it matter? It depends on what you're doing with these machines. If you're, you know, browsing the web, especially if you're browsing, you know, questionable sites or whatever. Well, maybe you want to stay, you know, right on board. But if you're just doing, you know, stuff at home and maybe it doesn't matter. I don't know. What do you think, John? I think for the most part, as long as you, you put your filter on, your human filter or, oh yeah, well, the, you know, the spam filter, human spam filter. No, I didn't win a million bucks. No, I didn't win the lottery. No, I'm not going to get sued by the IRS, all right? Right, right. Once you, once you get that under your belt, then you can handle those threats. Cool. Yeah, I agree. And I think you're good, right? Yeah, I think so. I think so. But still, like, you know, I mean, my, I will say this, you know, the machines that will only run a Capitan for me are 10 and 11 years old right now. So that's a, I mean, and they still run fine. Like, I think, did I prep this Mac Keekab on one of, it's possible. I, maybe, no, I didn't prep. Oh, no, I didn't prep this one on one of those. But I think the last episode I did, like, they're totally functional machines. That's the beauty of, of computers these days. They, you know, their serviceable life is, is really long. But a 10 year old machine doesn't really owe me anything. You know, if it died tomorrow, I mean, I'd be, I'd be upset because I'd just paid for a semester of college and I really don't want to have to buy another computer. But, you know, I can't really be upset that this machine. I hope you got the student discount. Well, the student discount on, on paying for a semester of college. That's actually, that'd be really funny. I don't, I don't, like, that would be funny to ask for a student discount on a semester of college. I don't think they would give me one. But, I don't know. Is it a state school? Yeah. Yeah. We get an in-state discount. Yes. But there's no student discount. That would be, I mean, that's, I'd like that. That's good. All right. Good stuff. There's been talk. There's been talk. There's always talk. There's always talk. It's how it goes. Hey, you want this? Do I want what? Well, you know, education. Yeah. Yeah. College. I think she does. Yeah. I think we've had a lot of talk about that. Yeah. Whether she really wants to, you know, do that. Yeah. That's the answer. Well, the only way to find out is to throw a lot of money at the problem. Wait, what? I disagree. I disagree. I think that if you're a premium member, you can throw money at a problem and get an answer faster than you would if you would not. I would know you got into my premium member. Yeah. Right. Praying money in. Right. And you can learn about MackeyCab premium at mackeycab.com slash premium, which you get to use the premium at mackeycab.com email address. You get the warm fuzzy feeling that comes along with supporting your two favorite geeks, one of whom is now paying for college. And you help, you know, keep the lights on and all that stuff. And like I said, we prioritize your questions when they come in over the general questions. Although the not so secret secret is that we answer everything every week when possible. And I really believe that for the last however many years we've been doing the premium thing, every question has been answered, I think an average of 50 weeks out of every year. So that's pretty darn good. And if that's not worth supporting, I don't know what is, but there you go. Right. Right. Let's see. I want to thank the folks, the good folks at Cash Flies, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to direct you to our MackeyCab forums. I swear John Braun is going to join these forums and check them every day. In fact, I guarantee it that he'll be checking them every day this week and he will have some answers for you. It's at MackeyCab.com slash forums. Oh, it's great. Yeah. You got to join. Wow. I appreciate the vigor. It's vigorous, isn't it? Yeah. Do you agree with the vigor? I don't know. It sounds kind of risky. I don't think it's risky. No, it's good. The forums are nice. It's way less risky than Facebook, man. That's why we created them. Not only is it less risky than Facebook, it's better formatted for what we do here. You can upvote answers. It's freaking awesome. Custom. It's totally custom, except it's not. Right. Yeah. I mean, we're using WP-40 as the back-end engine, but we've tweaked it. Yeah, WP-F-O-R-O is the engine we use, but we've tweaked the heck out of it. And just this week, we added a ton of new features, including inline image viewing. So when you add screenshots and all that, either to your question or to your answers or both, they appear inline for everybody that's viewing the forums to see it really. I mean, that alone made a huge difference. Can I do a picture of my cat? Well, you can. There's two problems with that. Number one, you don't have a cat. Can I do? Well, how about Puck? Puck's a good boy. Yeah, Puck's a good cat. I'll put a picture of Puck in the, we have one thread where we've been testing the pictures, so I'll take a picture of Puck and I'll put it in there. So there's that. And then the other problem is most of the time a cat picture isn't going to be relevant, but if so many of you want to publish your cat pictures, John can create a sub-forum just for cat pictures. How's that sound? Or maybe just a sub-thread might be the right place. But we could do that because it's ours. And then they stay compartmentalized there, which is another benefit over Facebook's Wild West disaster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Man, it's cool. All right. I want to thank all of our sponsors. Of course, we have masterclass at masterclass.com.mgg. Use gametime.com.mgg. Of course, codeweavers.com.mgg. Smilesoftware.com. That's the one that's different. Otherworldcomputingit.maxsales.com. And check them out, man. Ring.com.mgg. It's good stuff. Really good stuff. Don't forget about the folks at Bear Bones at Bear Bones.com. All right, John, it's the moment you've been waiting for. It's all on you. It's all on you. What do you have? What do you have to say? I've got something special for this that I don't know what people are going to think. I got nothing, man. You got nothing? No, I got something. I got everything. I'm going to tell you what it is. It's three words, and the three words are don't get caught.