 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab episode 775 for Monday, August 19th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take all of that stuff, we mix it together into a nice little thing. Today, we've got topics like we'll talk about, I think persistence is a key for this episode. It's a finicky friend sometimes will help with some of the specifics digging into apps on Apple Watch, persistently, Safari tabs, time zones and more, because that's what we do. Sponsors for this episode include Mint Mobile at mintmobile.com slash MGG. We'll talk more about that in a minute. For now, here back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How are you today, Mr. John F. Brown? I'm doing great. I was a little concerned here, because about 15 minutes ago, we had a torrential downpour and severe thunderstorms. And then I look out the window a few minutes later, and it's all gone and nice and sunny. That's good. Yeah, that is good. I would have hated to lose the juice or have the thunder and lightning very, very frightening interfere with our recording. Yeah, I had, it was about an hour and a half before we recorded that we had that blow through here. So yeah, it's great. It's, you know, it's storm time here in New England. No, not all that different from where I was last week in Orlando with the crazy storms. In fact, just before we recorded last week's episode, I drove back from Kennedy Space Center to the hotel in a massive torrential thunderstorm crazy thing. But you know, it's all good. Let's just get right to it. Shall we? I think we've got lots of stuff to go through. I mean, I got a whole list here. Ralph will start with the persistence. He says, has a tip, a friend had an interesting issue with Safari on his Mac mini running the latest OS. When he activated Safari, it would immediately and without intervention sequentially load tens of tabs closing and restarting Safari, problem persisted, delete all the tabs, quit relaunch, problem persisted, reboot the Mac, problem persisted, delete all history, problem solved. He says, I'm not sure what caused this glitch, or if my solution of deleting all history is best practice, but it certainly got the job done. That's probably the path I would have taken to. I'm not sure I'm not sure when I would have thought to delete all history, but which is why I wanted to share this because that did not obviously come to mind as a way to get rid of all the tabs. But yet there it is. So that's a weird one, man, which is why we share these things here so that we have them in our arsenals. Any thoughts on this, Mr. Braun? No, I know. It's weird, right? Oh, and it's bizarre. But hey, you know, I mean, keep throwing things at the wall. Some something will stick. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. Yeah. All right, let's go to let's go to Keith here. Keith says a very simple tip for the Apple Watch that makes it a lot easier to use. Push the digital crown in to bring up the application grid. Force touch on the grid and select list view. Now when you push the crown, your apps are presented in a nice alphabetical list that you can scroll through. Not that awful, unnavigable grid. This is one of those things that Lisa learned. My wife, Lisa, learned when she did her on boarding call with her new Apple Watch. I'll put a link in the show notes to to the article that she wrote about it. Those on boarding calls with Apple can be handy because you get quick tips just like this one. And I agree with Keith, unless you really spend time to lay out your grid, it can be unnavigable. And as you add apps to the watch, it it will happen again and again. The list view can often be a very, very good thing. So I like these tips. I like this is why we do what we do. It's good. Yeah. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? And currently Apple Watch list. So I don't have much to say about that. There you go. Well, you're not iPhone list and I have a tip to share. My son is at summer camp this this year. He was there for five weeks. He's actually in his fifth week now. But this year for the first time, he's had occasional access to his cell phone. As a camper, it is a technology free camp. But as leaders, they have access to their cell phones and they actually have to have code words to talk about things that are contraband to the to the campers like, you know, phones and food and things like that, which makes sense. The issue is that service at his camp isn't stellar. And so occasionally, I message isn't going to work, but it can default back to SMS, which is fine for getting text back and forth. Except that I've been I messaging him and him me with our iCloud email addresses. Now, this is really handy if you are somewhere where you only have data service like Wi-Fi and not your phone service. But in the scenario that we've been dealing with while he's at camp, we wanted to go back to using our phone numbers for each other. Prior to, I think I was certainly I was 12. I think maybe even I was 11. But it was it was either. I know it was I think it was 12 and Mojave that coalesced all of the multiple chats that you might have had with one person. For example, with my son, previously, I think I had two or three chats going. One was between our phone numbers. One was between, you know, one set of email iCloud addresses. Another was between another combination of these things. That got confusing. So with iOS 12, they coalesced all this stuff and it all pulls into one chat. But previously, if I wanted to text him at his phone number, I could do that by finding that chat where we had our phone numbers going. No longer is that the case, it will default to whatever the most recent thing is. And near as I can tell on the iPhone, there is no way to change this persistently. I have I was able to get it to change by like moving things around in the settings. But yeah, see, even the fire department wants to hear about this one. It's really important. Yeah. But I could but it would revert back. But on your Mac, if you open messages and you go to a message thread that you have with, you know, someone. Click on their name in the top of the thread. And you will see the address or number that you are communicating with. And you can choose a different one to use. And if you do that, you can change. But that only changes you to them, not them to you. And I thought, OK, so I fixed this. And I was like, great. But how do I get my son to do that when all he has at campus is phone? And of course, it hit me. Wait, if all he has at campus is phone, then what I have here at the house is his computer. And because, you know, the way we do things in our house, I know the password to his computer. So I was able to open up his computer. I sent some messages back and forth just to test, but I was able to get that to happen. So, yeah, launch iMessages or launch messages rather. Sorry, on the Mac, click the, you know, the person you want to chat with, of course, get to get the chat open. And then in the two field at the top, you get to pick which address you're sending to. I could not make my phone do this. But if one of you knows how to make your phone do this. But of course, this setting is inherited by your phone because iMessages are synced, right? But but I couldn't make this change on my phone. At least I couldn't figure it out. If you know how feedback at MacEatGab.com, we'd love to hear about it. Did you say feedback at MacEatGab.com? I did. I said feedback at MacEatGab.com. Yeah. So yeah, you can change the destination persistently of an iMessage conversation. Pretty good, huh? Yeah, because when I bring up a conversation with you and Mac OS, I see like three phone numbers and four email addresses. Which one are we using? You don't have to say it out loud, but are we using an email to communicate or are we using? Yes, we are using email. OK. At least the thread I'm looking at, but it also shows. OK, so here's here's the interesting thing. I am texting you at your phone number and you are texting me back at a different number at an email address. And that's fine. Like the two are mutually exclusive. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. But the nice part is now with my son, if a message doesn't go through, I can tap on it and say, try again or send as SMS. Previously, it was send as email. And it was like, I don't want to send it as email because then that means he needs to check his email to get the message and he may not see it because that's weird and all that stuff. So yeah, good stuff. All right. We have a few tips actually from last week's show to related to our discussion about iPhones that that were rebooting. I mentioned that while at Kennedy Space Center on Monday, so this will be Monday the 12th, my phone spontaneously rebooted and got stuck in the reboot mode. And I had to do the secret key command, which we'll talk about in a second to to get it out of that. Will, who happens to live near me here and is he runs. It's Will Lenhart. I think I can say his last name because he runs Lenhart systems and and he is they are a fantastic group around here for solving all of your computing needs. Will wrote, he says, my wife and I were in New York City with two other couples last weekend on Sunday and Monday. So the 11th and 12th, five of us found that our iPhones were either rebooting or frozen, trying to reboot. This happened a couple of times over the weekend. We chalked it up to heat or something. We were all taking photos and keeping the phones in our pockets. When I heard you had similar problems in Florida on the same day, it made me think. I wonder if there was a security update that Apple was pushing out that caused phones to misbehave a little bit. And indeed, on Twitter, I heard from a couple more of you that went through similar things on the same day. So something happened last week, which was interesting. He says they mine was a 10R. He says there's were a mix of 10R, 8 and 6S. So thanks for that, Will. Good stuff. Crazy. Yours did not do that, John. Your eight, your eight, well, to your knowledge, yours didn't do that. But maybe it did while you weren't looking and it succeeded and all was well. Correct. And if it was heat, you would know it because I've gotten this on both the iPhone and my iPod touch. You get a special, yeah, I'm too hot message and it has to cool off before it'll do anything. It was certainly hot in Florida, but this was at the beginning of the day and my phone had not had a chance to overheat, at least not from environmental factors. So yeah. Yeah. In both cases, this was hot because it was in a car and there was lots of sun and it was hot. That's the only time I've ever seen the heat warning is when in a vehicle. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Related to that, Mike writes, he says, I was just listening to Episode 774, he says you were talking about not being able to remember the key sequence to force reboot an iPhone 10. And he says, I remember the force reboot by remembering the phrase, you don't panic, which translates into UDP, which is also a type of packet for those of you geeks out there that like TCP and UDP packets. No, this is how we're going to remember this. Like we need as much help as we can. UDP up, down, power, hold the last one in. You're good to go. So thanks for that, Mike. That's good. And that will change your or force, reboot your phone if it's in that stuck mode, which is great. UDP, of course, being Unix datagram protocol. No, it's not exclusive to Unix. I don't get it. Well, but Mac is Unix kind of. Yeah, not kind of very much. So it is the, well, I was going to say, it's the most popular Unix distribution on the planet. But I think iOS might actually beat it. So there you go. Yeah, I think it's a, well, they had next step. And I think it's BSD-ish if you had to give it a flavor, right? Well, BSD is a flavor of Unix. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's open BSD if I'm not mistaken, if that's like the closest thing we get to it. So anyway, yeah. Allison Sheridan from Podfeet, Nozila Cast, et cetera, et cetera. You wrote in in response to our question in last week's episode about what widgets she was going to miss. And she talks about missing Terry's time scroller because what this lets you do is set a bunch of different time zones and you can label them as like, say people so that you can see what time it is for that person now, but also in the future. So you can scroll around and you see, OK, what time is it? For, you know, somebody in Russia when it's 10 30 p.m. here, chances are it's 10 30 a.m. for them, or at least that's where all my Russian people wind up is 12 hours off for me. But that's a really handy thing. She says there is a utility called Cal zones that does this. But she doesn't like the interface and was hoping, perhaps, someone might find another option. But but Cal zones for now is is the solution to that. So thanks, Allison. Good stuff. Any thoughts on that? I haven't had a good calzone in a while. I'm trying to think of where I had one. But I did have one recently. So I don't know. I can't remember where. But that's OK. Yeah. All right. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway. OK, hey, I got a note today, John, that actually I got some I'm getting I ordered something. But I was invited to order something that might be of interest to you. And that is Amazon's new Echo Auto. It's twenty five bucks available exclusively by invitation from Amazon. You can sign up and request an invitation, which I did. I don't know. A few weeks months ago, I can't remember. But it's a you add Alexa. Sorry. You add the A lady to your car. And it's got eight microphones with all the far field voice in it. You can connect to your car either with Bluetooth or with an aux cable. So lots of options. And from an aux cable, you could even go to like one of those FM things, if if necessary, right? And and you get all your stuff. It supports Apple music as well as Amazon music and Spotify and Sirius and tune in and I heart and all of that good stuff. And of course, you can ask it for directions and it will launch things like, you know, ways and Google Maps and even Apple Maps. It's not compatible with CarPlayer Android Auto because those things sort of do this differently, of course. But but there you go. So you can take Alexa on the road. This is the second of these things that I will have had the opportunity to test. The first was the Rov. Alexa thing. And I'm trying to remember what they call it. The Rov of Viva by Anchor. And it's it's an a lady enabled device that plugs into your PowerPoint, we used to call it the cigarette lighter port, but I don't even think they have those anymore. So I will put a link to that in the show notes, too. I think that's about the same price, 26 bucks or something. So so we'll talk about, you know, how it works and how they compare in a future episode. But with CarPlay in my main vehicle, I certainly would would I'll test it there, but probably move it to one of our other vehicles that doesn't have CarPlay because that's where the benefits of those things go. So I will we will put links to all of these things in the show notes. But the Rov Viva by Anchor has worked quite well for me. And I even have that in my same car with CarPlay. Because one thing that one of the many things I think that a lady does better than S lady from Apple is research. So if I have a question about, you know, some thing that I would want to look up with Siri, it's like I can't show you the results of a web search while you're driving or some something to that effect, which is super frustrating. It's like I didn't ask you to show it to me. I asked you via voice. I expect an answer via voice. A lady is far closer to being a voice only assistant than Siri ever has been or probably will be. But and I think Google Assistant is even better. But but there you go. So it is kind of handy to have that in the car, especially for long drives when you have those thoughts like, you know, like, why is the sky blue? You can ask that question and get an answer. So, yeah, there you go. It's good, right? I like the Rov stuff. Yeah, I think I told you, I got one of their gizmos, which does. A little bit of everything. It's amazing for the price. What's it called? And what is it? Well, I call it the Rov. I believe they call it the Rov charger. OK. And it and my car does have a cigarette lighter port because it actually came with one of those cigarette lighters, which is in a drawer somewhere because I don't. Two cigarettes in the car. But yeah, so it's a dual port charger. One of them is a smart. I think the other one is a regular. But it will also remember where you parked your car. So combined with the app on the phone, which is kind of neat, it has a battery health monitor, which to me is just like they're like throwing all these features in there. And of course, I can stream my music from my device to an FM station that you tune the device to. So is this the Rov smart charge F2 Bluetooth? I think it's the F2 or the F4. I forgot. I know they have a couple of models. OK, well, I'll put a link to one of them in there. But it looks like the F2 is the newer one. There's an F0 and an F2 near as I can tell. It looks like I have the F2. OK, great. Yeah. And it also will handle phone calls. Right. That makes sense. As well. I think it has a. Yeah, it has a little phone button on it, too. It like does like five different things. And was like, that's awesome. Twenty bucks or something. Yeah. Yeah. 2674. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So hats off to them that it's awesome. The only weird thing that happened is sometimes, Dave, if I'm on my phone and I get too close to my car, I got to figure out what I didn't set up right. Is that my phone will switch over? Oh, yeah. If your car is on, that that happens with everybody's car. Welcome to the world of Bluetooth vehicles. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the phone is like, oh, I see you. I better send audio there. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, it's awesome when I'm on like a business call or something in my office and, you know, one of the kids has, you know, my car out and then comes back and parks it in the garage, which is right next to my office. The call just cuts right over to my car, even though I'm not in it. But someone else's. So, you know, I'm. Yeah. If anybody knows, we already told you how to get in touch with us. Is there a way to fix that? Is there a way to prioritize what the phone picks for sending audio to? Nope. Not that we've found. I mean, we've talked about this on the show. If somebody if somebody knows the answer, that would be great. But we this is a question that we've we've asked and discussed several times here. And the answer thus far has. OK. Yeah, because I mean, to solve the problem is I bring up the whatever a swipe up on the whatever you call the screen. And there's an audio icon. And then I have to re choose phone instead of. Bluetooth streaming thing in my car. Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, it's pain in the neck. Other than that, it's awesome. Yeah. But then. All right. So so I'm so I'm in a boat with a lot of other people. You're in the same boat as everybody else that has an iPhone and a Bluetooth car. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Hey, we have Wesson to go to. We've got some questions, in fact. And and I think, John, you have Wesson prepared. So we'll let you take Wesson. But first, I want to talk about our first sponsor, which is Mint Mobile. Man, you know, I mentioned it actually last week that while I was in Orlando for podcast movement, how well Mint Mobile worked and how much it saved my bacon when when I needed to do that little troubleshooting and had all that data service right on Kennedy Space Center. So even NASA can use Mint Mobile. This is pretty good. But here's the deal, right? Why? Because Mint Mobile is built to save you money. 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OK, I did an informal test of the speed. Yes, they sent me a kit and sent you a kit. Yes. I'm with Verizon and all I can say is that doing a data test. I got in the single megabits per second with Verizon with Mint. I got double digits and way into the double digits, too. If memory serves, you were in like the thirties or forties there. So yeah, it's pretty good. So I because I always heard people shaking their fist at certain providers and that, you know, their coverage or their speed wasn't that great. But in my case, it's like I was shocked. Yep. It's good, man. So so they get a thumbs up on speed for me. Cool. Yeah, same. Oh, no, it's way faster than what I was using previously. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You want to take us to Wesson? All right. Wesson says, guys, I back up my Mac Pro to two time machine drives, which are directly connected. One of the drives has begun to become unmounted after it goes through a time machine cycle. Time machine will then use its trick of using the boot drive as a holding area until I notice the drive is unmounted and mounted again. My second time machine drive does not exhibit this behavior. Is this a symptom of a problem with the drive? What else could be causing this to happen? It's becoming a nuisance. Here's what I got to say. OK. Now, since it's directly connected, we can rule out a network issue because as we've discussed, time machine over the network can get wonky. That's a nice way of saying it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to break it down into having to solve the problem by replacing things until you find the problem. And to me, the items that could be an issue could be with the port that you have the drive or the hub that you have the drive plugged into. I'm going to assume it's USB, though it could be something else. Sure. Yeah. So it could be one of the ports. And actually, I've noticed as I've laid on my 2012 machine, one of the ports does seem to be very persnickety. And the other one is fine. So I lean towards one port. So it could be a port. If you're plugging in directly, maybe you do want to get a hub and see if that solves the problem. Could be the cable. We've seen problems with cables. Cables can get wonky or the connections. Or it could be if they're external drives, it could be the enclosure or wherever you get the drive from. I've had that happen to me as well, or it's just the enclosure. So I try to switch all of those out. That being said, what he said also is it could be the sign of a failing drive. Is it just says, I give up, you know? Yeah. But here's some tools that you can use to further diagnose the issue. The thing is, Time Machine knows a lot about why it does what it does. The thing is, it's not very expressive and it doesn't necessarily share the information with the user. That's putting it kindly. Why is it that we have to add that caveat or that asterisk to every comment about Time Machine? Like what? Now, you may ask yourself, what tools could I use to find out what Time Machine is doing under the covers? And I'm going to recommend two. Fortunately, they're in the same place, Dave. So one is called consolation, which is a general purpose console tool. But it does have a special Time Machine selector, if you will. You can just see Time Machine messages for a certain period of time. And the other one is called the Time Machine mechanic, which also gives you way more information that you're going to get from the official Time Machine interface. And these are both from our friends at the Eclectic Light Company. And the link that we will provide in these show notes has both of them on the same page. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, man. Howard Oakley over there at Eclectic Light. What would we do without him? I mean, I like to think that someone would be making these types of tools, but the reality is, yeah, good stuff. Yeah, that's I mean, I think you covered it. Cable, you know, drive ports on one side or the other. That's that's it. You know, it because it's only happening with one drive and not both. Resetting the SMC is probably not going to solve anything. But it is a free and easy thing to try. And sometimes when it's hardware, but not hardware, the resetting the SMC can do it. So I would try that before, you know, before driving yourself crazy, replacing expensive hardware. Yeah, because one of the things resetting the SMC does is that it does address and they say this in the article, which I'm sure you've already put in the notes their day. But the SMC does have something, which is the system management controller does control many power issues. Right. So there could be a power glitch that you're having, which is why the drive is doing wonky things. So resetting the SMC could solve this. That's true. Yeah. If it's a power thing, then adding like a powered hub as as for your earlier recommendation might. Yeah, might do it. Yeah, yeah. Coolio. All right. Or as others maybe in his family might say, artist Leon Ivy, Jr. Right. Because that's Coolio's name. Thanks to Jeff for alerting us to that. All right. While we're on the subject of Time Machine, Matt wrote in and was applied to an episode a few weeks ago where someone was having issues with Time Machine not connecting well over the network. And there were a number of options being thrown around like clones. He says, I've also had issues using Time Machine with my Synology NAS over Wi-Fi. A few months ago, I bought ARQ at ARQ. We like to call it and set it up to connect to my NAS via SFTP to run backups every three hours. After a few months, I can now go back and find versions of files much like I could with Time Machine, but without the errors or corrupt backups that have to be thrown away. He says, I also have unlimited Google Drive through work. So I set ARQ up to connect there and do another backup once a day to have a offsite backup. You might say, but Google can spy on all your super secret files. ARQ lets you encrypt locally. So even if Google tries to look at my files, they would never be able to see anything that makes sense to them. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner daily. So I have no reason to use Time Machine to restore my whole computer. ARQ is a great option and is quite reasonably priced with its lifetime license. So this is brilliant. We've talked about ARQ many times on this show. It's from Haystack Software. They have ARQ was started to be the backup software you would buy and then bring your own destination. They now have their own cloud that you can use as well. But the original functionality hasn't changed. You can still use it with your own destination. I have always thought of it as cloud backup. You know, pick your own cloud, pick whatever you've got out there. Never once until we got Matt's email did it dawn on me that you could do this with a local destination. But what he described using SFTP with ARQ to back up to his NAS. Brilliant. Way better than doing this with Time Machine, because SFTP is a client server protocol. So you are talking to a server that's prepared to receive a file. And if the file doesn't come through correctly, it doesn't get corrupted. It just retries it the next time it can, unlike Time Machine, where you're mounting a drive remotely and all kinds of things can fall apart. So I'm going to redo what I'm doing, especially on my laptop, where Time Machine backups just corrupt all the time. And I'm going to try it all with ARQ because that sounds like a way better option. So thank you for this, Matt. Great. Brilliant. Just, you know, this is what I love about this show is there's these things that are obvious to a subset of us. And it might be only obvious to one of us or it might be obvious to all but one of us or somewhere in between. And we get to share these things and turn on these light bulbs for each other and make our computing lives better. So this is why we love what we get to do here. So yeah, it's good. And the thing I like about what Matt mentioned and you mentioned as well, Dave, is keep in mind when you make a backup, a backup, if some evil person runs away. So you may be in. So number one, you should enable FileBalt on your Macs to encrypt the contents of your drive. Certainly. I saw I think the reason I'm going to put an asterisk on that, but we'll come back to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Well, I do. Yeah, I think most people should. And I'd love to hear your caveat once I'm done here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get there. You also may want to keep in the back of your mind here that you. You want to encrypt your backups as well and pretty much any. Solution, including Time Machine, will give you the option to encrypt the backup. So my Time Machine backups are encrypted by carbon copy cloner backups are encrypted. Yeah, that's all I'm going to say is that if there's an option to encrypt the backup data, whether it's local or in the cloud somewhere. Do it. Otherwise, the evil people that want to steal your data can get it and then then then you're in trouble because I think most of us store rather sensitive information on our computers. It's true and and on portable machines, especially newer portable machines, Brian and Rowan, the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream is reminding us that there were some issues with older errors and and file vault. But for new Macs and certainly laptops, I'm 100 percent with you. I don't know that I've turned on file vault on any of my desktop machines. And the reason is, well, if somebody gets into my house and is sitting at my computer, I have bigger problems than like that. There's there's more going on now, right? Then like losing my laptop or having somebody steal my laptop, you know, whatever, at a conference or at a coffee shop. Like that's a realistic thing that could happen. Somebody makes it into my house and given where we live here and stuff, you know, burglaries of that kind are very rare. If somebody makes it into my house, I have a major problem. Now, it could be argued that I don't want to compound that major problem by also giving them access to my data. But when it comes to troubleshooting, encryption can get in your way. And so on my laptops, I find it worth it. You know, that that particular, you know, risk is is worth the the cost, right? But on my desktops where they're not moving and I mean, I keep passwords on everything and everything is is, you know, maybe maybe maybe I'm maybe I need to rethink this as we're talking about it. You know, is there really a reason with clones and all that stuff to worry about this? Maybe not anymore. But it used. OK. Yeah. So that's my thought process. But but now that I'm saying it, maybe I knew I need to rethink it. OK, I. Number one, you're in New Hampshire, so you probably have like guard moose or bears or something, right? Well, we have guard bears. Yeah. And yeah, that's right in our neighborhood and guard guard fishercats. And I think there was a cougar in our neighborhood recently. Oh, we got coyotes, too. Yeah, we have those as well. Yeah, those. OK. So anyway, so we have various guard animals on our properties, people. So don't don't mess with us. But that's right. But I'm curious as to the comment both you made and Brian made is is the reason you don't support File Vault on older MacBook Air's is because they have rather wimpy processors. Well, there was before I'm trying to think we're we're looking at like I think it was 2014 that all the chips in MacBook Air's had built in encryption, right? But prior to that, it was only in the I7s. So if you had an I5 in your MacBook Air, all your File Vault, File Vault stuff was happening in software, not in hardware. So it could sell things down, right? I mean, there was, yeah, there were performance issues with it. Now, all the tests that I've seen, it's actually faster to be running an encrypted Mac than a not encrypted Mac by, you know, half a percentage point. But but generally speaking, encryption makes your drive more efficient because of at least reads from your drive more efficient. So. But and if the processor has the OK, which I also do, yeah, even because I recall the older MacBook Air's had like 1.4 gigahertz processors or something like that. I'm sure they bumped it up a notch. Well, it's the hardware encryption. Once the processor has the speed of the CPU sort of becomes irrelevant for for this for this type of thing. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe I should do it on my desktop Macs. I haven't because it's just one more layer, you know, I mean, as I always say, security is a continuum, right? And you get to pick at one end so secure, like ultimate security where you can't even get in. And then the other end is no security such that everyone can get in. And we sort of pick our spots along that continuum. I don't think any of us are at either end, certainly not at the end where we can't get into our own stuff. But, you know, I think about it like a house. I could brick up all my walls and it would make it really difficult for people to get in, but it also make it really difficult for me to get out or me to get in if I was outside after I bricked them up. But I could also like not have walls at all. And that would be way more convenient. And I could just waltz in and out of my house. But then it's more like a, you know, a tent with a with a it's like a tarp. But right that I live on earth that I don't want to live on. But at least nobody's going to blow your house down. Well, maybe a hurricane. But well, if I just have the tarp, man, it wouldn't take much. So, you know, so I think it's, you know, where along that line do you want to have windows so you can see in and out and let air in and out? Yeah. OK, well, that's a security hole right there. You know, do you want to have a door? Yeah, I do. Because I, you know, I find that easier to get in and out than the window. OK, well, that's yet another security hole. Right. Like, you know, the but you you pick and choose and find a spot where you're comfortable with the balance. And then you just live with it. So, yeah. Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this. You want to take us to Roger? Yeah, I think I know where we're going. Because we're going to Roger. So Roger has one that's going to bring us into the bowels. Of Mac OS. OK. I think that we love that. No, it does. What we do. OK, so strap in this could get geeky. Roger says, I did not knowingly make any changes to my settings, but I've noticed in the past several days that when I'm using Safari and try to send a page link to someone using the mail option under the share menu, something has changed in my share menu. Instead of launching Apple's mail program, Google Chrome now launches and goes straight to my Google Mail page to send the page link. I've never seen that. I've attached the screenshot that shows the Google Chrome icon now shows up when I click in the share menu and I'm presented with the various share options. I did not knowingly make this change and cannot figure out how to change it back to Apple Mail. Any thoughts on this? So one specifically he's talking about. So if you go into system preferences, extensions, share menu, it's going to show you lots of things that may or may not appear in your share menu, depending on what you're doing. Right. So I dug into this a bit. So there's two facets to this problem, believe it or not. Mac OS, along with other operating systems, uses a variety of ways to decide what program should be launched based on what you click on. And that's good and bad. So the first thing. So the first thing is I did some digging here and I found this dandy article, Dave, and I'm not going to read it to you. But to use it for reference as to one method one could use to choose what you use for sending an email. The title of the article is called How to set Gmail as your browser's default email client for mail to links. OK, keep that in mind. Mail to links is one way of telling something. How does what program to use for mail, but it's not the only way. OK. So that was one suggestion is read that article. It'll show you how to configure Chrome again. That's it gets pretty detailed. But maybe you could use this article and reverse the process. So secondly, I saw the screenshot that he showed. And yep, sure enough, it showed the Chrome icon next to the mail icon and the share option and extensions. And I'm like, well, that's really wacky. Wow, I wonder if I could make my system do that. And Dave, I was able to do that. OK. So how do you do this? It's not entirely obvious, but here's how you can make this happen. So in mail, so if you run the mail program and you go to preferences, general, there's a setting default email reader. And it's normally set to mail. What I did, Dave, was I'm like, I'm going to trick you. So what I did is I changed the program. For mail. To Google Chrome. And all of a sudden, when I looked at the the configuration screen, sure enough, the Google Chrome icon was next to the system, preferences, extensions, share, menu, mail. So maybe that was change somehow. The thing is that we've discussed. You can get the random bit flip. You may not have done this knowingly or unknowingly. It could have just happened. Things happen. Sure. So look in that place, too. But then here's a program and it still works, Dave, as far as I can tell. And I hope it works. I didn't get a warning when I tried to run it here. But Dave, there's an app called or actually it's a what do we call it here? A pref pane called RC default apps. And this will let you look into the bowels of the OS that I warned you about. This will show you all of the ways that you can map file types and URLs and URIs and then everything to what application should handle it. So in this case, it has two settings. And as far as I can tell, they are directly applicable to the things I just mentioned. One is an internet mail setting, which is the same thing as setting within mail. And then they also have a thing URLs mail to setting, which is the first option that I mentioned there. Yeah. So that's it. And actually, I think you got back to me and he told me that it was the default mail client within the mail. It just changed. And again, I don't know if Chrome changed it or someone else changed it. But. All right. So I have I have some thoughts here. Go. I love that 14 plus years later, you're still mentioning RC default app. I think that could be arguably works. Right. But it arguably was the it was certainly first mentioned on this show very early on. It might have been the very first cool stuff found, right? Even though we probably didn't call it that back then. But the most recent version is over 10 years old from 2007, right? They say that it's 64 bit. It probably will work, therefore, with Catalina. But they like it's it's it's it's dead, right? Like there's no active development happening on RC default app. But if it works, it works, right? There is something that Apple hasn't changed yet. Yeah. Hope not. And maybe that's where you're going. Is that Apple hasn't changed these various mechanisms that are used to decide what app to associate with whatever? Correct. But there is an app called Choosy. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes at choosx.com. We've talked about it before. I think one of you folks mentioned it as a cool stuff found somewhat recently, where you really can pick what URLs are going to open and you can set rules like if the you could set one that's like the web address is mail to and, you know, open Chrome, right? Great. But you can also say, you know, I want links that I click in mail to open in this browser and links that I click in Evernote to open in that browser. Like you can get crazy with it, which is awesome. And it's 10 bucks, right? So OK, it gives you more of finer grain control than RC default app. Super fine grain control. Yeah, exactly. So there's that. Now, whichever app you use, opening Chrome, that's fine. But, you know, Chrome is a browser. You you might have you might already have it open and you might have tabs open to a million different things. Wouldn't it be nice? Cue the Beach Boys to have. Sorry, now I have that song playing. We think like, yeah, I yeah, the song was going in my head. Oh, man, it's like one of the best songs ever written to anyway. Wouldn't it be nice to have it launch a web browser that is customized and only will launch Gmail? And you could do that, too. There are two apps that come to mind. I use an app called Fluid at fluid app dot com. And what fluid and they actually both of the things I'm going to mention to do the same thing. Fluid, it's five bucks, but you might be able to use the free version and you essentially build apps with it that launch specific web pages. And the nice part about this is you just launch the app and you're good to go. So I have one for Facebook and that's how I use Facebook. It's just right there. And I even sync these apps with my sync service of choice, which for me is Synology Drive, but you could sync them with Dropbox. So you build the app once you have it on all your machines. I say build the app. I mean, you just configure it and it saves. But it saves a file like that is an application. You just double click it and you can treat it like an app. So it can be the destination of either RCD default app or choosy. And so, boom, you click a mail link, you have your fluid app that's built to launch Gmail. It's logged into your Gmail account. It's not going to have tabs open from other things. Boom, you're good to go. Fluid has changed my life. It's fantastic. Really, really makes life super easy. There's another one that does something very, very similar called Unite. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. The reason I mentioned Unite is if you're a SetApp user, SetApp contains Unite. It does not contain fluid. So if you're already a SetApp user, you might well have have Unite already available on your Mac. Unite's 10 bucks if you're not part of SetApp, but you can, you know, download it and all that good stuff. So there you go. Those are my those are my additions to this. So yeah, have you messed with Fluid or Unite, John? Any of these like, no, dude, dude. For those of us that are like 80 D a little bit, you know, or a lot bit having like for this guy, you know, having his email open, not just in Chrome, but in an app that is only his email that, you know, keeps the focus where it needs to be. There's no other tabs open to get in the way. If your email gets wonky, you can just quit it. No problem. You know, all good. So yeah, good stuff. And Facebook is great for that, because it takes over the browser. It's slow. It's ram hungry. I use Marco Arman's quitter to to quit lots of things. But but I can you can quit that. It's like having it close a tab for you. But, you know, it's it's right there. So anyway, there you go. So that's that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Sweet. Yep. All right. Let's see where we at here. It is time to talk to Eric. Eric, this is fascinating, John. So Eric. Was we were going back and forth on some things. He says, I thought I should run disk utilities first aid on a disk that was not looking so good. And and he noticed that smart. Was not running. And I think this came from a show we did back in July or something. He says, I looked in disk utility and smart status is listed as not supported for my internal SSD, which came with my iMac. Smart, of course, being a way that the drive system monitoring and report. It's a way that your drive can report any problems it notices. It's flawed. We've talked about it for a decade plus here. If it reports a problem, you probably have a problem. If it doesn't, if it doesn't report a problem, you might still have a problem. I wouldn't say it's flawed. Oh, I would. There's two parts. Well, there's two parts to it. There's the high level status where it's a thumbs up or thumbs down. I will agree that that is flawed. Yes, then within the smart specification is a boatload of very specific parameters regarding your drive. And that I don't think is flawed. The thing is, you need a utility beyond this utility to look at those like my favorite is Drive DX, where it's going to say, hey, you know, these all these numbers here, these smart numbers. It looks like your drive is failing. So I'm going to kind of disagree with you on that. OK, and the part of it is flawed, but part of it is very useful. Yeah, can be very useful. On my 2014 IMAQ, which is the one that is now in the studio, the OG Retina IMAQ, when I launched this utility and I click on the disk. So that's the top level of the hierarchy. If you're seeing the hierarchy, it says smart status verified. But on my 2019 IMAQ disc utility, click on the disk. It says the same thing that he is seeing smart status, not supported. So it seems. Yeah. So it seems like Apple is not not supporting smart anymore, which is odd. I mean, I don't know. Well, it sounds like just what? No, that's weird. Why would it? Now, the other weird thing about this, so I looked on. My MacBook Pro. And my MacBook Pro, the crucial or micron crucial same thing, I guess, right? SSD says smart status verified. I'm like, great. Then I went to my Mac mini Dave and I'm looking for that status and I don't see it. Why did I not see it? Because this is kind of an annoying part about this utility. It has two views. It has a show only volumes view. If you go to the view menu and that has a show all devices, you have to go to that view in order to then click on the drive. And in this case, both my machines say smart status verified. Now, I'm not sure if it's because they both have the exact same one terabyte crucial SSD. Or I don't know if this is something that I mean, do you think it's something with the Apple SSD that it's just like, I don't want to talk to you about this? I mean, maybe it's because it's on the the NVMe. Yeah. Yeah. OK, it's both mine are on the SATA. So so I answered this question while we were at Mac stock. I actually used remote access to VPN into my network and all that stuff. I am going to launch this utility right now via remote access, but only to downstairs and see, does it still say that? Yeah, it still says it's smart status, not supported on my one terabyte SSD in the in the brand new retina iMac or, you know, 2019 iMac. Yeah, it's crazy. So did they just so did they remove smart from the drive? Does the drive just not work that? Because I mean, that's pretty much a standard. I know I should try running Drive DX on it. I'd forgotten about Drive DX, but it's pretty much every drive I have, whether it be rotational or SSD reports smart, even if it's in a NAS. I mean, you know, even the Synology has a, you know, oh, sure. Yeah, the entry thing where you can say, hey, tell me all the smart stuff. And it's like, OK, here you go. Yep. Well, but if you does it show it for your on your current Mac that you're using, if you look at your external drives, does it say smart status supported or verified or not supported? Let me look at. Oh, that's good. Hold on. OK, brainstorm here. Wait, I think I know what's going on. OK, so I'm looking at the external. So I have a one terabyte SSD. Yeah. On my Mac mini to back up the one terabyte SSD within it. And it says smart status not supported. Right. Now, that's on you. But I think it's on US because it's on USB and not SATA. I think that's why that's the case. And I don't think I added this. There's something you can add to your system. Am I am I getting this right? I think Drive D normally has a thing that you can add like an extension or something like that that will allow smart to be used with external non-supported drives. Yeah. Normally, yeah, I think normally external drives, whether they be USB or FireWire or Thunderbolt or whatever, do not support reporting smart status. So right, right. But yeah, pretty interesting. So anyway, there you go. Just fascinating. I was surprised that it, you know, it was. So maybe you got to add that. Maybe you got to add that extension. Trying to remember the name of it. I think it's a it's an open source thing that Drive DX includes as a courtesy. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, maybe you're right. And I wonder will it work as it been rebuilt to work with Catalina, right, because, you know, extensions do not work out of the gate with Catalina. So all right. Well, we will we will move on here. Adam Adrian. Sorry, why did I say Adam? Adrian writes, he says, I manage the iPhones and iPads for my entire family. Everyone either has an iPhone or iPad or both. That makes seven to ten devices. Would you recommend something like Jamf now to help me manage these rather than having to update each one independently? And I think, yeah, I think it would make life a lot easier. Jamf isn't a current sponsor of Mackie Keb, but I when the question came in, I checked to make sure that Jamf.com slash MGG still works and it does. So you can set up your account and get your three free devices and all that stuff. We'll put a link in the show notes. But but yeah, I I I know lots of people that use Jamf to manage their, you know, if you're the tech support for your friends and maybe even family or family and maybe even friends, that Jamf is super easy to use. And, you know, it's cheap. It's like two bucks a month or something to to, you know, to add more than those three devices. So you get you get three slots free and you can use them however you want. And then after that, you know, yeah, there you go. So yeah, I would I would recommend it. That's that's a good thing. Makes life easier, especially when you're remote. So any thoughts on that, John? Not on that, but to rewind a bit, yeah, it's. OS dash X dash sat that dash smart dash driver is the name of it. It's an open source product. All right, I will dig up the linker. OK, we'll see if Google can find it. Google found it. So there you go. Good. Hopefully that gets updated. I think the last time it was written was for Yosemite or something. Right. Mm hmm. So yeah, there you go. All right. Yeah, because that gives you more on your external stuff. So yeah, all right, good. More is good. Well, sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Going to Louis. Louis writes, he says, thanks so much for mentioning the Ikea branded Sonos speakers. He says, I would have never thought I'd buy speakers at Ikea, but I bought the Sonos non-lamp version, which I believe they call the Ikea symphonic desks desktop speaker bookshelf speaker bookshelf. That's the one. And it's great. You know, and it's 99 bucks. It's like I never thought you'd get a Sonos speaker for 99 bucks. Yeah, killer. And and so he asks. I at home, I have three older Sonos speakers that are connected to my network via a bridge. My question is, do I still need the Sonos bridge if I have one airplay to Sonos speaker, which is my new Ikea one amongst my old non airplay Sonos speakers. So here's the thing. If you're using Sonos net, which is sort of the original way of managing your Sonos devices, where they create their own wireless mesh. One of your Sonos devices needs to be connected to ethernet so that the Sonos mesh can bridge with your network. It can be one of your speakers. But if you're one of your speakers isn't in a convenient spot to ethernet into your router or, you know, somewhere else, then you can use the Sonos bridge or the Sonos boost, which is sort of the new version of the bridge to be that bridge between ethernet and the Sonos net network. And as an aside, Sonos was, I think, the first company to create a consumer wireless mesh, which is cool. That said, Sonos does allow you to use a direct to Wi-Fi connection now. So your speakers can just connect to your existing Wi-Fi. I do not recommend this. In theory, it should work better because, you know, your Wi-Fi probably has, you know, better range than the radios in the Sonos system. And so you don't have to rely on your Sonos speakers to see each other. If you've got, like, say, mesh Wi-Fi, it should work great. It does not. It's awful. If you try to run more than, like, two Sonos speakers connected to your Wi-Fi, especially if you have a mesh system like any of them, Euro or TP-Lynx Deco or Orbi or, you know, Vellop or whatever, it doesn't matter. It doesn't work. I have been working with Sonos and sort of pestering them to find out why this is the case for a very long time. They confirm that it is the case, but I haven't been able to get, like, a technical answer that explains why you would think it would all just work. But it doesn't. It's you get weird wonkiness. So I would stick with SonosNet. And if you already have the bridge, I would live with the bridge because it's going to your life is way easier because of that. Or just plug a speaker in Ethernet and let it do its thing. But yeah, Sonos on Wi-Fi, it's a great way to get set up, especially when you got your first Sonos speaker and it doesn't matter. But as soon as you have multiples, especially if they're, you know, connected to different mesh points around your house, you will almost certainly start running into problems. Just plug one into Ethernet or get one of these bridges or boosts. They're relatively cheap and you're good to go. So that's that's my that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. We got any thoughts on that, John? No, but speaking of network speakers, yes. Actually, now here it is right here. Shall I kind of ease us in? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take us to Ken. Sure. All right. So Ken has something that he has a couple of questions here. But. He says he has two small questions. First, I have a few older airport express units here. The a one zero eight eight model. I was thinking of disabling the Wi-Fi on them. By the way, they are not used now. They have been in a drawer for a few years and using them as air tunes. Like you could also see air play, right? It's kind of interchangeable clients. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Can you think of any security issues I might have? I can't see if they will be an issue as the Wi-Fi is off. They're on my cable network and behind a firewall and won't be accessing the Internet. But maybe I have missed something. Should I answer that one or read this? Yeah, no, no, no. Take that one. And then we'll go to the second one. Sure. OK, so. All right. I have a pretty similar setup in that I have a newer airport express, the third generation. Now, you may ask yourself, not only how do I work this, but what is it a one zero eight eight? And I'll tell you how I figured that out is you run Mac tracker and you search for a one zero eight eight. That's the first generation airport express. Like the one that plugged into the wall, which was kind of cool. I had one at one point. I think you did too. So anyways, I'm using it in a similar fashion, Dave, is that it's just sitting next to my. It's just acts acting as what I'm going to call a airplay relay. That makes sense. Yeah, because you have it just you have it sitting somewhere in your house. It's connected wirelessly to your network and you have what we would call an aux cable plugged between it and your speakers. So I don't think it's even it's not even really connected to my network, Dave. You don't have it. You don't have it connected wirelessly to your. Well, no, what I do is I have it advertised. So let me continue here with my reply. So I use it in a similar fashion, but I have my setup as wireless instead of wired. And I don't have. And I think this addresses a security question. I do not have it set up with an airplay password. When you set up airplay, you can say, OK, before you let somebody connect to it, ask for a password, right? So in theory, Dave, with my setup here, someone could stroll along and find my airplay thing, which doesn't have a password and play to my speakers. Since he's choosing wired, I think that that's a more secure option because someone would have to be on his wired network and able to get to this. So what I'll say is that, you know, if you're in the airport utility, you'll see these options here. So but I think you're good with that. But no, in my case, Dave, I just have the airport express set up. It's not connected to any network, but it just is is beaconing, if you will. It's saying, hey, I'm I'm an airport thing. And the thing is if I run or airplay and if I run. Oh, it's got to be connected. It's got to be connected to your your like your Euro network. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but it's just locally connected in that sense. It's no different than him plugging it in ethernet, right? It's only connected to your to your Euro network. Yeah. All right, hold on. Let me look here. Yeah, look here. A station name, Internet. OK, I think. Yeah. OK. No, we got it here. OK, in wireless. No, you're correct. Yeah, it's got to be. So in the wireless tab here, it's connected to it's connected to to my Euro. OK, my mistake. Sorry. No, that's good. But still, I mean, but in either case, if it's on the network, whether it's wired or wireless, then your your other devices will will that understand what airplay is, we'll see it and you can choose it as an option, like in iTunes or in system preferences and stuff like that. Yeah. OK. So I think he's good. That's a that's a great way because that's all I use it for. It doesn't provide any any internet access. And that's probably a good thing, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think I think so. No, so I'm mistaken. So somebody would have to be able to be on my network. So yeah. So you, which have access to my network because you have my passwords and stuff, you can see it. But all right. So my mistake. So somebody just randomly wandering by my house could not see this. No, no. And that's a good thing. Yeah, I have to be on my network. Correct. Now, maybe if I set up a guest network, maybe they could see it, but maybe I wouldn't recommend. So I'll put an asterisk out there on guest networks. I would not do them without a password. I would always do a guest network with a password. Yeah. So. But if you set up a guest network, I'm not sure that the people on your guest network could see that device because typically guest networks just give you a, you know, a tunnel pipe to the internet per device and don't let you see other local devices. So yeah. Right. Because that's on my main network. Correct. Yeah. OK. Correct. All right. Thank you for fixing that. Yeah, of course. OK, the other question is that he's running an older 2012 Mac mini from from an external SSD. I know this is possible, but are there any pitfalls I might encounter? I was trying not to pull it apart to install an internal one as it has Thunderbolt. Two, I think. And I was going to use the internal 750 gigabyte hard disk drive, I guess, rotational as a temporary data dump drive. I had one of those as well. So I had a Mac mini 2012, Dave. You know, it's funny, my observation. So I had a 2012. Now I have a 2014 and now they have the latest. And getting at the SSD, oddly enough, seems to have gotten easier with the progression in the years. And I just don't agree with that. So yeah, the 2012 was a. It took patience and discipline. The 2014 was a lot easier. And then I saw at Mac stock, some guy was working on a 2018 or 20. No, 2018, right? Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that's even easier. So it's not so bad. And I think that's kind of a middle of the road option. But I was looking at the options for that machine, again, with our Pal Mac tracker. So on that machine, it does have USB three, which is five gigabits per second. It does have an internal SATA three, which is six gigabits per second. And it has Thunderbolt one, which is 10 gigabits per second. OK, the 2014 does have Thunderbolt two, but he has Thunderbolt one, but still that's 10. So that's the fastest port on that machine. So yeah, but you're not going to find a single drive SSD that's going to beat the slowest of those. So it doesn't matter what you use. OK, now I'm just going to shortcut us there. Right. I mean, it like I would go USB three. It's way cheaper than paying if you go with Thunderbolt. You are now paying the Thunderbolt tax for a Thunderbolt interface on that drive. Right. And there's no reason you're not going to get any benefit if it's a single drive thing. If you're looking at a multi drive, you know, J-Bod, raid, whatever, sure. But if it's single drive that you want to boot from, ain't nothing going to beat that five gigabits per second. And you can save a bunch of money, just get a USB three drive. I wouldn't rip the thing out of there. I would just boot from the external and you're done. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. I'm with you. Does anybody even make a Thunderbolt one enclosure? Oh, I have one sitting in front of me, believe it or not. From Buffalo, I don't know if they still make it, but that's what I'm using on this machine. Although if I'm looking at it, it has USB three and Thunderbolt one, I think I'm using USB three on it. It doesn't matter. It's it's too slow to matter. So yeah. OK. Yeah. So. So I guess we're in agreement. I think USB three in this case is good enough to get you going. USB three for a for a boot drive with an SSD. You're going to love it. And you're going to love not having to crack your machine open to put one inside. So I think. Yeah. Yeah. It's I'm glad to see that Apple has made it easier to get. I mean, it's almost like in the earlier Mac minis, they made it like intentionally a pain in the ass to pull out the SSD. It was like you could almost do it, but you had to like do this and that and that. Your fingers would lead. 20 steps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your fingers would definitely bleed and you might break something. But, you know, there you go. Well, that was the thing. It's like, you know, it looks like I can just slide it out. Oh, there's just a little resistance. And it's like, yeah, as you said, do I possibly destroy the drive trying to slide it out without doing all these additional steps? Yeah, without right. Yeah, holding your your mouth just right and doing the chicken dance and all that. Well, it was basically getting it so you could slide out the motherboard and oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was the whole disaster with that thing is that you had to get to a point where you could. And yeah, there were multiple screws and, you know, you had to get I used a nice dish at one point. And then, you know, I fix it has a nice little pad so you can keep track of the screws. Watch out, folks, whenever you work on most Apple things. Keep track of those screws. You probably are. You don't want to have extra parts left over. Well, you don't want to have a different number of parts that you took out when you go back in. Wait, I thought that meant I made it more efficient. Like, I did better than Apple's engineers. I thought that was the whole point. And oh, it's not. No, like, why do we have screws left over? No, because you're better than them. That's why you made it work with less. It's lighter now. It's got to be better. It's faster. It's good. Yeah, I'll put a link to that. I fix it magnetic project mat. That is one of the best little inventions I've ever used for one of those types of projects. Yeah, it's good. In addition to their toolkit, because especially. Oh, was it the 2012 or the 20? No, I think it was the 2014. Yes, the other thing, folks, if you if you're going to dive into a Mac mini, Apple loves putting proprietary screws in the Mac mini. I think it was a security torques in the 2012. And I think the 2014 had a similar thing where it's like, I remember I got it and I'm like, I want to add an SSD. And, you know, I got my toolkit, which was a lesser lower end version of the I fixed toolkit. And I'm like, it doesn't have a bit for this screw. What the heck? Yep. I even went to Home Depot and I'm like, do you guys have this? And they're like, no, not that small. No, they they did have security torques, but not that small. I think it was like a T6 security torques. That's crazy. So it's crazy. All right. All right. But I think he's he'll he'll be good to go there, Ken. Yeah. All right. We have we have a little bit of time left. Andrew wrote in, he says, I have some thoughts and comments and questions about a frightening topic. He says, I noticed a Reddit thread about a Mac that was damaged by plugging in a hard drive. It turns out that the USBC cable was purchased from a large office supply store in Australia. It was a Western digital hard drive. The cable was purchased from this office works place. So not some generic two dollar Amazon cable, but it was the cable's fault that the Mac's USB C port was damaged. So my first question is, how do we choose cables that have a good chance of not causing this issue? And my second question is, oh, he has a question about the flight worthy batteries, right? Because they there were there was an issue with some of those 15 inch MacBook Pros that are now banned by the FAA because they have batteries that are not, you know, stable enough to trust in flight. And and if you can get them replaced, right? And once a new battery is installed, then you can bring that on the plane. So his question for that is, how do you prove that the battery was replaced and is flight worthy? So about cables, right? Well, I'll answer the second question. First, I would keep the receipt in the bag for the new battery, just in case somebody asks, I haven't seen any airlines looking at specific models of computers and saying yes or no. But just keep a copy of the receipt in your bag or keep it in your favorites album on, you know, take a picture of it, keep it in your favorites album on your phone so you can pull it up easy and show people. That's a handy way to keep stuff around. By the way, I'd use it all the time for things. So yeah. So there you go. Now, about just OK, I'm going to say is right, I would say you and I are pretty much experts on MacBooks and other things like that. What possible criteria? How would a TSA person not saying that they don't know what they're doing? But I would just think setting up the criteria for them to determine. Yeah. The revision of the machine and the revision of the battery, because I'm looking right now, like on my MacBook Pro, I actually replaced my battery and it's not up to the TSA, right? It's up to the airline because it's the FAA saying that, right? It like you can bring your exploding Samsung Galaxy, whatever, you know, through TSA, you just can't board a plane with it, right? Two different things. TSA is not filtering for that. So it's up to the airline to filter for that. OK, so the gate, they're going to say you have to prove to me that you have your Mac has either had the battery replaced or it's outside of the range. Correct. Correct. OK, because I have 20. I mean, I have when you're on the plane, like nobody's checking at the gate. I can only use the Samsung phones as the as the experience test here because I've experienced that where literally every time I got on a plane for about a six month period, they said, if you have the Galaxy Note 8 or whatever it was that was exploding, you need to turn that into us. And so it was opt in, you know, and it was just that it was part of every pre-flight announcement. OK, and I remember that, too. So yeah, all right. So it was like a violent. So you could, in theory, yep, either be not paying attention or forget that you have in a battery that's going to explode. Yeah, I mean, the likelihood that, you know, your laptop battery, oh, no, I could, I guess. OK. Yeah, I'm just thinking that just says the whole it's the honor system. Right. So but you should get it replaced. If you have one of those and we'll put a link to the article there. As far as the USBC cables, I think then this is a hard thing, right? You know, here we are. We, you know, everybody pushed on Apple to to adopt non-proprietary standards. And then of course they did, right? They were the ones that led the charge with USBA and now we're on USBC and it's a good thing and all that stuff. But the reality is you can buy cables from anyone. And if you buy a crappy, I mean, John, you talked about that a couple of years ago on the show where you bought a USB charger from your car and it blew up your what your phone and your iPad. I think it, you know, these. Oh, yeah, these things happen. It's how it goes. I mean, I wonder if it has something to do. Was it not qualified for power delivery, which is a special mode of USB? Possibly. But it wasn't doing power delivery. It was plugging in a hard drive. That's not power delivery. That's five volts or less, generally. So. All right. Yeah. No, it was just be a defective cable. Like in my case, it was a component that blew up in a charger and then it would blow up the things that I plugged into it. That's right. They didn't have protection built into them. Correct. Correct. Yep. So, yeah, you could, you know, get a known good cable, plug it into a known good hub and then use the hub as sort of the, the, you know, the intermediary. But as we've discussed, there are no, you know, eight port USB C hubs out there. And I don't know that there ever will be because that's kind of a weird thing where, you know, does does every port have power? And if so, how much power can you expect out of each port? And how much power are you going to run into this thing? So, yeah, I don't know the answer for this. I think it's just part of the deal. And and it's unfortunate, but it is part of the deal. You buy from a trusted source. Don't buy off brand USB C cables, especially to your point, John, if you're going to use them for power delivery, I would, I would be very careful as to what you're using there. Yeah. Yeah. That's got the juice. I mean, that's in like the tens of watts, which, yeah, that's that can cook things. Yeah. I mean, it could be the machine. You know, and I think, yeah, in the letter, there were, there were stories of, you know, in some cases, Apple kind of admitted, oh, maybe it was a problem with the with your machine or the motherboards. Sure. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. But it's just how it goes. It's just how it goes. I think, John, I think we're I think we're at the end here. I think it's how it goes. I mean, you know, all the things and even bad things must come to an end. Well, you know, and that's actually good advice to remember. I always say to people, no, because, you know, I lead a but we both do, you know, we lead pretty charmed lives here. And I always tell people, look, the bad stuff's going to get in, right? So when the good stuff shows up, let that in too. You might as well, because the bad stuff's going to get in anyway. So enjoy the good stuff when it shows up. And to your point, all of them will end. So, you know, don't count on the good stuff or the bad stuff being a permanent thing and you're in good shape. I will say I will share Alan five sixty sevens comment about our last question. He says anchor makes great cables. They're a good value and they're good quality. And I would agree with that. I would I have trusted every anchor cable and charger that I've bought or gotten, they do send us some stuff for, you know, for review and all that stuff. But I've had great luck with all of it. So, yeah, yep. Yeah, I got a bunch of the Ventev devices, including a USBC charger that supports power delivery. And well, I had to buy the Apple cable, but they will do that. And yeah, that that's the fastest way, by the way, to charge most devices. Most lightning devices, you mean? Right, right. Yes, is using a USBC to lightning cable versus Qi and other things like that. I confirmed it. I mean, power delivery guarantees. I think the last I saw is that it should charge something to 50 percent within 30 minutes. And I think I timed it and it did. It's like, wow, it's pretty awesome. Pretty good. Yeah, pumping the juice through there. So you want to make sure you you got a certified cable and a certified charger. I will put a link anchor makes and it sucks. I lost mine. I don't know what I did with it, John, but anchor makes a USBC to lightning cable. And it's 16 bucks at Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. So, wow, because those were hard to get for a while. I know, I know. I'm bummed I lost mine, but I got to get another one. So I'll put a link in the show notes that'll remind me to order one. All right. Well, it is time. That's how that's how this particular cookie crumbles. It's good. It's good. What do we have? We shared the email addresses. Premium at MacGeekUp.com. What are you saying, John? Oh, yeah, no, I got to buy some. I don't think I have any cookies. OK, yeah, yeah, premium at MacGeekUp.com. That's money for cookies. That's really what that turns into. No, wait, what? Premium at MacGeekUp.com. That's the email address that you premium listeners get to use. We answer those first, then we answer everything else. We really do try to answer everything, but we prioritize those of you that prioritize us and it's all good. If you want to learn more about MacGeekUp premium, well, the URL is MacGeekUp.com slash premium. I think that's all we got. Go to MacGeekUp.com slash reviews. Leave us an iTunes review if you haven't done that. If it's been years, you can go and update your review. Really makes things. It helps Apple because they see some activity there and that's a good thing. And then that that's good for us and, you know, all that. So there you go. Yeah. And if you want to get up close and personal, but not too personal, there is the Twitters. I am John Efron. He's Dave Hamilton. The podcast is MacGeekUp, the publication is Mac Observer. And yeah, that guy flying around somewhere is Pilot Pete. They're all on the Twitters. We have a MacGeekUp Instagram channel where we post all our album art and other things related to the show. So yeah, go follow us there. I'll put I'll put a link to the MacGeekUp. I bet you it's instagram.com slash MacGeekUp, right? I think you're right. I think you're right. I'm surprised somebody didn't hijack that. I know. Otherwise, we'd have to send our sick the lawyers on them. Yeah. Is that trademark? Is this trademarked? I don't have MacGeekUp trademarked. We could, but yeah, I don't know. Is it maybe it's worth it. It's like 250 bucks and a little bit of headache and all that stuff. I've trademarked other things. Yeah, you know what? We'll do that. We'll get that rolling. If anybody has any thoughts about that, let us know. But but yeah, all right. That's that's it. I want to thank, well, in addition to all of you, I want to thank our sponsors, of course, MintMobile.com slash MGG are ongoing sponsors like ExpressVPN.com slash MGGExperien.com slash MGGIro.com slash MGGSmileSoftware.com slash Podcast All the World Computing at MacSales.com Barebones software at Barebones.com. It's good. We're happy to be here. Happen to be able to keep doing this. Go to lino.com slash MGG, too. I I've been traveling a lot. I think next week's show might be a day late because I think I have to travel to New York for a secret event. But I know. I don't know if I can talk about who the event is. I think I can. But I'd need to check the NDA and I'm not going to do that right now. But you'll probably figure it out. Anyway, we're all together here. And so with that, I think we all have something to say, right?