 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 872 for Monday, May 24th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We share your cool stuff found in your tips. We share some cool stuff found in tips of our own. And we answer your questions. We do our level best to answer your questions. We at the very least share your questions so that the community can help answer your questions. The goal is that each and every one of us, when we get together, we learn five new things every single time. Sponsors for this episode include Headspace.com slash MGG Amazon Pharmacy at Amazon.com slash MGG RX Clever MacSales.com with other world computing and Scosh Industries were code MGG 20 gets you 20% off through June 6th. So you got to check that out too. We'll talk more in-depth about each of those in a little bit here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How goes Fairfield, Connecticut with John F. Braun today? It is just beautiful out. That's good. That's good. Cool. Yeah, it's we're having some nice weather. And in fact, I think my gig on Saturday, we're recording this Friday, which is a little early for us, but that's okay. But it was supposed to be rained out. And right now it's looking like probably not going to be rained out. So John's got a problem. They're coming to get you, man. Don't get caught. I told you fire engine. Hopefully not to your house. Nope. Hopefully one did stop at the house next to me though. Once that's not good. Yeah, it was it was more an ambulance call. Oh, well, I hope everything was okay. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, sometimes things aren't you want to you want to take us to get into it. Good. All right. So here's a really quick one. So Alex wrote in, well, first he told a little story, but then he condensed it. So I'm going to just condense it. They are quick tips after all. Yes. Yeah, this is quick. Command delete. Well, if you highlight something in the finder do command delete, it goes into trash. But what if you put it in there by mistake? Well, first off, if you put it in the trash, it doesn't empty it immediately. Thank but that's right. Yeah, but then command delete. If it's in the trash, we'll return an item to its original location and I have done this in the past. Oh, so it's a undo trash, undo trash with the same keyboard shortcut that you would use to put it in the trash. That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, cool. I like it. Nice. All right. And then so yeah, I discovered a way to extend the precise location with an air tag. So, so I wrote what I reported to you was accurate in the past that it seems to go about 100 feet, but I was only getting about 30 feet for precise location. It's like, okay. Here's a way to get more. So where I had the air tag before was in the center console. So you're talking about an air tag in your car? Correct. Okay. All right. That makes sense. That's a place that would that that would be a natural place to put it in the glove box or the center console or something. Sure. Yeah. Um, here's the problem with that though is that there's still stuff in the way now, even though my car is mostly plastic, there's still some metal and there's also some liquids and for the frequencies that we're talking about here, um, that's that dams into the signal or blocks the signal. I was like, you know what? I took my air tag and you know where I put it, Dave? I put it on my rear view mirror. So now it's brilliant. So now there's and a little adhesive. Right. Of course. Of course. Yeah. That makes sense. Right. Um, here's the thing now. There's nothing in the way except there's still some metal in the way, but much less than it being buried in the center of the car. Um, here's what happened is that I got precise location up to not 30, not 40, not 50, not 60, but 70 feet. Whoa. And I think you saw, I posted a picture of it. I was like, wow, that's a big improvement. Here's another tip. If there's nothing, if you are between your phone and the air tag, that's also going to shorten the precise range. Why? You may ask because you're a big bag of mostly water. Well, you're an ugly bag of mostly water. If we're, if we're going by Star Trek. So lingo, that's right. That's, yeah, that's what they call this. Yeah. Um, so if you have nothing between your phone and the air tag, then you can get up to 70 feet from what I've seen. So I like it. Huh. That's great. Oh, great thinking. I like that. What kind of adhesive did you use? Just like, like, um, it's double-sided tape that I also use for some other purposes. Okay. So nothing super sticky. I mean, I guess they're lightweight. So double-sided tape is enough. That's great. Yeah. I think it's scotch. I think it's scotch, but scotch makes it 3M makes it. So I like it. Cool. All right. Thanks, man. Good one. You got more quick tips for us. I think we do. So we got one from Darius, um, uh, talking about accessibility triple click under accessibility touch back tap double or triple back tap on the Apple logo and magic will happen. You can assign a plethora of options to run the system accessibility or even iOS shortcuts. Um, and he's correct. And actually I had, um, a funny thing happened the other day. So, uh, I was noticing that my phone when I was playing one of my games is that my phone would go to control center, uh, simulate random and I'm like, is it a bug in iOS? Is it a bug in the, I'm like, oh, I remember I did a triple tap shortcut to get to control center. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that. I had one set to do screenshots with either a double or a triple tap John. And it was like, they will misfire. So don't, you know, make sure that whatever the action that you put in for one of these is not something that like sends a message to someone else without confirmation or anything like that. Like they, it will misfire, uh, because it, it's not actually sensing that you're tapping on the back of it. It's just sensing that the phone is being tapped. I think it's, it's that you don't have to tap on the front of the screen, but tapping on anywhere on the phone can cause these to trigger. So yeah, yeah, it's cool. Well, I would think it's using the accelerometer to detect this. I think you're right. That would make the most sense. That's right. Yeah. Cause there's not actually a tap sensor on the back of the phone or something. Right. Right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Fun. All right. And then Matt, Matt has a, a quick one here and there's going to be some additional information elsewhere about how to do this. But he says, hi guys, since you talk about homebrew fairly regularly, I thought I wish her this trip. I have found that many commercial applications, I think he means open source. No, not necessarily. The ones he's talking about here aren't necessarily open source. I think you can put a package into homebrew. Right. Doesn't have to be open source. It just has to be available for free. All right, but he says here, he found that many commercial applications such as coconut battery, source tree, VLC, Vivaldi, VS, Codium, draw IO can be installed by a homebrew. I like this option because then I can update them all using homebrews update function and not get bugged to update every time I reboot or launch something. And then he has a script here, which we'll have to post. Yeah, we'll post it in the forum. So he created an auto-updater script for homebrew so that he doesn't have to type brew update to, you know, to regularly. One thing I will say about homebrew because his script goes, it's a very complex script, complete script. It's not complex. And it will have him post it in the forums or we'll post it in the forum so you can see it. But essentially what it does is it runs brew upgrade, then brew upgrade cask, then brew cleanup, and then brew doctor. Those are all fine to run and the one that's potentially a duplicate is brew cleanup. If you run brew upgrade and it's been more than 30 days since brew has done a cleanup, it will automatically do a cleanup for you now. And that's that's as of the last 18 months or so. Like it's not brand new, but it's new enough that if you didn't if you didn't know it when you started with homebrew, you might not have it in your kind of in your in your mindset. But but yeah, that's great. That's that's yeah, good stuff. Yeah, I always forget that I can install things that aren't command line utilities. Maybe that's the right way to say this. It is possible to install some GUI utilities if the developers make them available that way with homebrew. I liked it. That's good. Cool. Fun stuff. Good little quick tips. I like quick tips. I like cool stuff found to Randall has one for us. And Randall says. I'm not sure if you have mentioned this service before. It's called play on dot TV. It is a virtual DVR recording service and it it records to what they call the play on cloud. So he says it can save you lots of money building up your video library. We'll leave it to y'all as to whether or not this is copacetic in your jurisdiction. But Randall continues with the steps to use this. He says you watch a show on a streaming service like Netflix Amazon Video HBO Max the CW Disney Plus etc. You tell their iPhone app you want it recorded the virtual DVRs use your login info to record the show in either 780 or 1080p and you get a link when their recording is ready to download as an MP4. You pay by buying recording tokens or about 10 or 20 cents each purchased ahead of time. He says right now 260 credits are 30 bucks. He says I find this a ton easier than ripping content and there are no legal or DM DRM issues. Perhaps that's true in Randall's jurisdiction. Just make sure that's true in yours. He says you can even record and keep downloads of rentals gets more questionable or you can have them store your downloads for a monthly fee. You can watch on any device and even watch on your iPhone subtitles and audio descriptions are captured if they are enabled when you first watched. So a cool service again check into whether it's cool for you but but I like this the time shifting idea is good. The being able to play anywhere is good. It's one of the things I love about Plex. So anything that that adds to that is good cool. You got one for us John Todd has one for us here. This is a site that is built personally by Paul Bowden who's Paul Bowden principal program manager office for Mac. Crazy details like Microsoft Mac team slack usernames. He was on his Zoom presentation and shared the site. Which is at Mac admins dot software. That's kind of neat. I didn't know that software was a valid a completer. Evidently. Yeah. He started the site to assist himself in his job. A lot of useful info on the main page and in the header links. Very cool. If you use Microsoft Office on the Mac. Yeah. Did you dig into this? This looks pretty cool man. Mm hmm. Yeah. Not deeply. But yeah I gave up on Office for Mac long ago. We even though we got a review copies. I'm okay with Apple stuff. Tell you the truth. Yeah. Oh for sure. Yeah. The pages numbers all that stuff. Yeah. This resource is killer. Like if you're using office in your and especially if you're in charge of troubleshooting office having all of these things that your fingertips is huge. So I will say that like you I stopped using office now I still because I I still like work I often have to deal with people that are using office on their end and using Apple's tools with that is absolutely a disaster. You wow you got a big truck going by using Apple's tools with that is absolutely a disaster because Apple's tools don't natively read and write office documents. They they will translate them and convert them to pages or numbers or whatever and then translate them back out to office and things get lost in that translation especially if you're just passing a document back and forth doing quick edit. So you definitely want something that can read and write office documents as a native thing but I for years have used Libre office for that it's open source and works really well and just you know it is an open office a version of open office for the Mac and it's to me it's the best one that exists now since I started teaching at at the University of New Hampshire this year they they of course have a site license for Microsoft Office so I have that again but on my and I put it on my laptop just so if I'm dealing with things with students I've actually got office but but but on my on my iMac right now Mac mini down in in my office I'd still use Libre office it's it's great you know it's good stuff all right speaking of Microsoft John the the good folks at Microsoft have recently made the personal features of Microsoft Teams available for free which is pretty cool and it's mainly so that you've got all the stuff that teams can do for people at work you can now do at home for your own little you know meetings and fans and friends and family stuff and all that stuff so that's all those personal features in Microsoft Teams are available for free and we've got a link in the show notes that talks about what these are and and how it all works so that's pretty cool we have some stuff to talk about with backups John in fact we've got quite a bit of stuff to talk about with backups including a cool stuff found that I'm sort of saving because it's pretty cool the next thing that I want to do though is talk about our sponsors if that works for you Mr. Braun no problem all right look if we've learned anything in the last year it's a little bit of self-care is a good thing and to that end wouldn't it be great if there were a pocket-sized guide that helped you sleep focus act or even be better well there is and if you have 10 minutes headspace can change your life our sponsor headspace here is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in this super easy to use app I've been using headspace for years on and off I'm not perfect with it meditation is a practice not a perfect right so I practice and I try and lately I've been back into it and headspace makes it super easy to maintain that practice if you need help falling asleep like I said they've got some wind down sessions that members swear by they've got stuff that you can do with your kids if you've got kids headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits like 600,000 five star reviews 60 million downloads you deserve to feel happier and headspace is meditation made simple go to headspace dot com slash mg g that's headspace dot com slash mg g for a free one month trial with access to headspace is full library of meditations for every situation it's the best deal offered right now so head to headspace dot com slash mg today and our thanks to headspace for sponsoring this episode next up is other world computing you know that John and I we love other world computing and it's the place that we go to buy accessories that we need for our Apple devices and now with those new iPad pros they're starting to arrive and OWC's got all kinds of stuff that can help you with your iPad Pro because these things have all kinds of expandability options is expandability the right word maybe it's expansion I don't know whatever the word is OWC has it they've got the OWC Thunderbolt dock starting at just 169 they've got the Thunderbolt hub starting at just 149 they've got the USBC travel doc which is available now starting at just 6499 all of this of course at maxsales.com you want to add some storage to your iPad Pro well they've got the on boy pro FX goes from 240 gig to two ton two terabytes those start at 199 over max sales they've got the mercury elite pro dock that starts at 279 this is the place to go to get whatever you need to expand your new iPad Pro go check it out visit maxsales.com like we do and our thanks to max sales other world computing for sponsoring this episode. All right John we had a question from Corey and Corey says well Corey says a lot of great things Corey is the one who makes our Mac Kekebap so when emails come in from Corey we answer Corey says so thank you Corey can you guys do a segment on Mac on the show about off site backups I used back plays in the past but I stopped a while back once they changed their pricing scheme to be per machine I don't really have someone with a Synology around here that I can cross backup to so ideally I'd want to service or scheme that I can install on each of my computers and back them up separately like back plays used to be or still is if I pay per computer this is in addition to my normal onsite backups I want to have offsite as an emergency yeah totally understood and you're right things are well there's lots of the good news is there are lots of options and John you and I have found quite a few of them there is back plays so I will throw that out there it's 60 bucks a year let's you back up one Mac and because this is something that not all of them let you do it locally attached direct attached we should say external drives are able to be included in your backups then there's carbonite home for $72 so we'll start with back plays and we'll compare against it carbonite home 72 bucks a year external drives though are an add-on option I drive person so those two have unlimited storage as far as I can tell John will correct me if I'm wrong because I think he's got more details than me and then there's I drive personal at $69 a year with a five terabyte limit external drives are included and I drive personal adds real-time sync for like file collaboration so dropbox style thing that lives within your five terabyte limit the last one that I will mention is arc ARQ from haystack software and I think this is one that should not be overlooked they have two programs or two paths one is what they've been doing for a long time and it's called arc ARQ you bring your own storage you buy their app for 50 bucks one time purchase 49 99 really and then you can sync your backups to pretty much anything you can sync it to Amazon Drive Amazon Web Services back blazes be to storage Google one drive if you have an SFTP server you can back up to that it's it's you know truly open source backups for storage reference be to from back plays is five dollars per month per terabyte you don't have to pay the full five dollars if you don't have a full terabyte it's all pro rated that's just a way of thinking about it then arc recently in the last couple of years introduced arc premium which is 60 bucks a year it includes a terabyte of storage and you can add more storage for 59 cents a month for every hundred gigabytes of again pro rated I'm just doing the math for you so you don't have to calculate per gigabyte so 60 cents a month for every hundred gigabytes on top of your one terabyte and five computers are included so for somebody like Corey of the things I've talked about I think arc premium might be your answer but John you know a lot more about this than me or you found a lot more about this than I did yes so I found a really good summary and everything that Dave mentioned is in it from our pals at I more and also our pals at Apple so here's the first one I'm going to throw out Dave drive sure there are some hooks within it that are nice so it can it can put your desktop and documents folder up there in the cloud so that's kind of neat and I'll kind of say that I cloud photo libraries is part of that as well sure so I have the 200 gig plan which is I think three bucks a month so it's not too expensive I don't think I would store everything on iCloud drive right nor would it be easy to do that right like that's part of the issue with this although would arc let us do that off to look I got a look at arc I don't know that arc will let us sync to iCloud drive because it's weird they don't really have an API right the only way to do it is to put things in your documents folder or your desktop folder right so or the the iCloud drive folder minutes that you could you could do that but it starts to get a little weird because it's more syncing than backup in in that sense yeah right okay all right one in the article that caught my eye because I had not heard of it before and they say it's kind of unique and I think it is msp360 formerly cloudberry is a unique cloud backup solution because you control where your backup goes you can use Amazon S3 Glacier Microsoft Azure Google Cloud OpenStack Rackspace HP Cloud Backblaze v2 and more okay so that's similar to arc right where you're just you're picking where you're backing up all right right cool let's interesting then they had a couple others Mac backup guru okay that's one another one that yeah you know you and I never I don't know if I ever got around to this I've seen them at some shows a cronus true image yep I've used them a little bit I don't know I think the only reason that a cronus did not stick for me is because the way I do my backups is I backup my computers locally to my Synology and then I let my Synology backup to the Synology C2 cloud so it like it's all just sort of happening for me there so it but I think which is why I that's what I use right so that's why I don't use back plays anymore it's it's why I don't use a cronus true image although I thought about when I was traveling a lot I thought about putting it on my laptop so that I had something backing that up but then I actually thought about what do I need to backup for my laptop everything that's on here is synced to it anyway right my documents are synced to it my you know my email my bookmarks like all the things that I use would be there if I set up a brand new laptop anyway so that's the other thing to think about is you know for me right I've got you know there's three computers I use there's this one in the studio there's the one down in the office and then there's my laptop I really only need to backup one of them I do clone the studio like clone the studio in the office computer so that I have a bootable clone but that's even sort of becoming a legacy thing we'll use the word legacy and I'll explain why in a minute but but it's worth kind of taking that zoom out and thinking what do you actually need to back up here my laptop I don't back up I do I let it back up to time machine because why not but I'm not sure I'd ever actually use that it's just more of a safety net I guess I don't know what do you what do you do John or do you have more sorry is there other more to mention well now I'm good yeah so now I'll let me go into some of the other things that I do so one Dave involves Synology and there's two pieces of software so one is that they have Synology Drive which basically I have it set up so everything in my documents folder maybe did I select other folders I may have but anyways you can select what files are pushed from your Mac to your Synology in their fault and that's a sync right so you can have it that's like a Dropbox style thing so if you have multiple Macs you can have that folder sync to all of them but right but it is on your Synology you're right yeah and then here's another thing that you can do so Synology also has something called Hyper Backup and there's a number of options you can back up to another Synology you can back up so they break down the categories here a file server like our sync or webdab is another one and then they have several cloud services like Dropbox Google Drive with High Drive JD Cloud I think these are Japanese and Synology's in Japan Microsoft Rackspace S3 SFR NAS backup so they list them all here that's another way that you can take your content so there's two steps so one is you know what I want to my Mac put on the Synology and then what on the Synology do I want to put to one of my cloud services yep and I like I said I just use Synology C2 cloud it it's it integrates exactly with Hyper Backup that's the that's the utility on Synology I used to do it but but yeah yeah and they do have and I think they do have now I don't know if it's released yet but I think you can try it out but they introduced recently at their last event they introduced this thing they call Synology Hybrid Cloud which is where you can define a volume but it exists on both your Synology and their C2 cloud service yeah I think that's coming in Synology DSM 7 if if my understanding of it is correct and yeah it right it it will keep a limited amount of that data local on your on your drive and it can you can have it manage it sort of by itself or you can give it hints about no keep copies of this stuff local but the other stuff can just stay in the cloud so yeah it's good we have one last note here yes sir because on the list here what if you want to protect your stuff stored in the cloud there's something called box crypto and that seems to be its purpose in life so yes I you know I've had this I think we've mentioned box crypto before but if we haven't it's been on the cool stuff found list and should have been mentioned in the past yeah go ahead and tell people what it is well you go to their page and they pretty much explain it encryption for one drive dropbox Google Drive and many more so yeah it encrypts your data and uses Dropbox Google Drive as John mentioned as the storage for it but you can't like you can't go to Dropbox's web page and see the data you just see the encrypted blob that lives up there but that's I mean that's pretty good like if you yeah let's see N10 encryption they do 2FA yeah all sorts of good stuff so we have one addition from the chat room Paul Frans at live.mackicab.com mentions tar snap which I've never heard of before but it is online backups for the truly paranoid tar snap is secure efficient online backup service it has encryption their source code is available so you don't need to trust us they say you can check it yourself they have deduplication so that you're reducing your bandwidth and storage requirements and it's 25 cents per gigabyte per month for storage that's not cheap right because if we're looking at our hundred gigabyte thing like 25 cents times 100 gigs that's 25 bucks right if my yep my math is correct yeah so that starts to get expensive 25 cents they say 250 pico dollars who talks about money in pico dollars John I like this that's the best part about this is pico dollars so I'm gonna start I'm gonna start trying to talk in pico dollars I think that's gonna be it's gonna be a disaster alright this is good if you folks have any thoughts on this please tell us feedback at Mackie cub dot com obviously we did not get everything here and we may not have even thought about the right use case for you with one of the things we did get to so tell us how you're using it we would love to keep this conversation going please absolutely did you say feedback at Mackie cub dot com Dave I said feedback at Mackie cub dot com you heard me it's true I promise that I had another cool stuff found to share and I do and that is well two things from our friends at Bombic software with carbon copy cloner the first is that carbon copy cloner will now do bootable backups of system volumes on M1 max so that's good we knew that was coming you know but it's nice to see that it's there the second cool thing from our friends at Bombic software is carbon copy cloner six which is now out and it adds it keeps doing what carbon copy cloner has always done adds to some of those things they've they've increased your ability to schedule things they big time increased the utility of snapshots and how you use them and they've always been sort of the best snapshot application but best way to manage your snapshots and it gets even better they have increased their smart updates and they've added something called quick updates which I will read their thing it says are you interested in lightning quick backups with no exhaustive scanning for changes required how about those nas backups that took hours would you believe us if we said they could take as little as a few minutes well they say that it can so that is going to be huge because I as we just said I backup stuff to my nas all the time so that my nas can back it up to the cloud carbon copy cloner six says it's going to make that easier for me I just installed it this morning so I haven't actually run any backups with it so but they've got they've increased the speed they've added a way to pause backups that's really nice like if you're especially if you're backing up a spindle drive so that good and then they've got you know they've added to some notifications the one thing that I did notice right away when I launched it is that you can do task grouping now so if you've had a bunch of different tasks and carbon copy cloner and you're always like me wondering wait which one of these is the one that I actually run all the time and which is the one that I I don't want to delete that I rarely use you can put all of those into like folders essentially I mean they're they're not really folders but they look like folders you twist them open you get my you get what it might my drift here so yeah I'm stoked about carbon copy cloner six good stuff well one thing that I wanted to say though John is that carbon copy cloner six will do bootable backups but they call them legacy bootable backups in the app so the idea of a bootable backup is really becoming a thing of the past apple obviously did not make it easy to do this on the m1 max they did not make it easy to do this in big sir on any max our friends that make backup software like the folks at bombic and like the folks at that makes super duper have obviously figured it out and that's great but the idea of bootable backups is becoming a legacy thing which is I'm not sure how I feel about this we might have to have Mike back Mike Bombic back on to talk to us about why why or why we shouldn't feel okay about this but but they do call them legacy bootable because my my I put it on my m1 mini down in the office this morning and you know I made sure my backup tasks were all still there because that's important and as I hovered over it said because I hadn't converted my my boot my backup on my m1 boot drive I had not made that bootable it's just doing a data backup and it said you can convert this to a legacy bootable backup I think that's interesting terminology so we have to unpack that a little bit John but you know fun good stuff so backups we got more to talk about with backups John should we should we share some tips about time machine that came in after we talked about this in the last episode sure cool all right well this is finishing up a question that we answered before so you can map a time machine drive via IP address and I have had occasions where that's more reliable and using the local network name and told John how to do this he had an important question though how do I find out the IP address of my time machine here's how you find out you should have airport utility which will see your time capsules or time machines you go in there and there's an internet tab and you have two choices DHCP or static so that's where you're gonna find that that makes sense and probably set it to yeah I was gonna say probably best to set it to be static either either right there or in your even better I think is in your router with a DHCP reservation so yeah yeah interesting interesting cool all right we got another comment in relation to that John listener Rob brought something up he says I listened to episode 871 heard you talking about mounting a time machine share using IP address he says I learned a trick several years ago and this actually sort of relates to our off-site backups conversation John and it remains valid today says if you wish to do so you can mount a time capsule share over the internet using AFP obviously you would want to encrypt your backups and use a strong password to authenticate to the time capsule itself but it works shockingly well the convention for doing so would be the same as for SMB which is not routable over TCP IP so that's good for us to remember it has to be AFP I said I did this originally so I could still get backups of my MacBook Pro when I'm outside of my home network the process is the same from the finder you select go then you do connect to server and you say AFP colon slash slash IP address of your of your you know your your time capsule now you would also for most of us you would also have to go into your router at home and point port 548 which is the AFP port to your time capsule so that your home IP address actually can get you know you she can get to that from the outside world again I will you know I will reiterate what Rob said you are now exposing your time capsule via AFP to the outside world it's an unencrypted protocol so be very aware of what you're doing how you're doing it eyes wide open folks probably not the best solution for us all but certainly a workable solution and we like to share workable solutions because we'd like to know everything eyes wide open so I mean we'd like to know everything we couldn't possibly know everything we like to be aware of everything so that when when it comes up in six months you have that thing in the back of your head and you're like I heard about this on the show let me see if I can remember yeah the only I would the thing I would be concerned about with this is that we are now taking something that is known to be imperfect aka network backups of a time machine and making and adding another layer of the internet to it so generally the reason for corruption in network time machine backups is that your network connection got fritzed out during that's a technical term got fritzed out during your backup and corrupted the you know left the backup in a state that was nonoptimal and aka corrupted adding the internet to that I would think would kind of make that worse so you know that's that's sort of my that would be my my big concern on that but but you know it's doable so thank you Rob I don't know would you do this John would you backup time machine over the internet no okay yeah I don't think I would either I think I'd use one of the other options that we talked about in our thing all right we have lots more questions to get to including a question of my own and then another answer of my own I ran into some tech problems this week I want to share I also want to share our next two sponsors if that works for you Mr. Braun okay all right look if you're like me you love Amazon Prime because it is super fast to get stuff to my door I just ordered a microphone this morning they're telling me it's going to arrive tomorrow I live here in like rural New Hampshire it's pretty amazing that Amazon's able to do that and now you can do the same thing with Amazon pharmacy because Amazon pharmacy saves you time it easily works with your doctor 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for sponsoring this episode. All right John I had a weird issue last week so we recorded the show on Sunday and then I had band practice shortly thereafter now this was our first band practice in 14 months with everybody here because you know COVID and all that stuff when it was awesome it was great to get everybody back and so the guys came everybody's sort of you know getting themselves situated here in the studio and I have the mixer that we use is on the Wi-Fi network it's actually my iMac is our mixer it's logic and everybody's experimenting with in-ear monitors now and so they all had their their phones and iPads out not not only to control their mixes but also to you know get to we use a Dropbox where we store all our files and you know things like that like song sheets and you know chords and lyrics and things like that and the guys we're getting rolling and then suddenly they're like it says no internet connection Dave I'm like what and I'm like which Wi-Fi network are you on and they're like oh we're on the Dave the nerd Wi-Fi network I'm like yep that's the right one I'm looking on my phone no problem like the internet's fine blazing fast you know consolidated fiber rock in the fiber life they weren't rock in the fiber life no internet connection and it was multiple devices that this is happening to and I'm like okay I'm like I don't know and they're like I'm just going to use my like data connection it's fine like great you know just get rolling so as we're playing like the next song and I'm stop I you know stop actively thinking about how to solve this problem you know my brain gets to work in the background which is often the most valuable time for my particular brain talk about like headspace man that's a good use of meditation is letting your brain solve problems without you thinking about them and and that was it it hit me I'm like wait a minute I wonder if I don't have enough IP addresses to give to them and so I after we finished playing the song I went over to the computer and I fired up you know Mike when it logged into my router and I looked at the IP range you know that like the DHCP allocation it was like that looks like about a hundred addresses that's give that have been given out I can't see really any holes here and so I increased it to a 150 and since then I've actually gone in and and increased it far more I now have instead of using a subnet mask of 255 255 255.0 it's 255 255 254.0 so I get I get really an extra 250 addresses to use so I'm up to you know I don't know I think I've got 400 addresses in my DHCP pool now and that was it that was the problem so add all the you know the the Wi-Fi bulbs and all the different IOT devices and all those things that I added over the last year when the guys weren't coming to the house and that's what it took so 100 devices is probably not enough for your DHCP pool these days now were they getting a 169 IP address? probably I didn't even look I just you know I saw their devices were saying no internet connection it's like okay yeah but problem I mean probably they were either getting no IP address or you know it was being self-assigned eventually so yeah probably so okay and just so people know that that's if DHCP fails you got a self-assigned or you the IP stack will assign an IP address to you of a 169 dot something something something that's usually yeah though you can I mean if you get that as an IP address you could connect to it if you're on the same if you also have a 169 IP address yes two devices with 169 IP addresses can generally see each other it's 169 dot 254 I think is is what auto assign self-assigned I should say so yeah yeah it's interesting so yeah so go check that out on your router and and like I said I you know every router is different but if your router will let you do you know a we don't call them class they aren't classes anymore used to be that you had a class C and then you could move to a class B or whatever classes are out the windows so I think I move to from a slash 20 well let me look this up because I'm going to get this terminology wrong John and I don't want to because you know we'd like to get terminology right here so DHCP is that did I save the notes that way Dave ran out of DHCP address yeah so I am now a slash 23 I was a slash 24 on my IP range and now I am a slash 23 which gives me a maximum of 510 addresses I think I have my my range of my DHCP server set to serve out about 400 of those at the moment but but yeah and it it works like it works totally fine so I have you know my my range here at the at the house is 192.168.42 dot X because you know 42 that also allows me to not if I VPN into your network because I'm helping you troubleshoot your network is probably the most people out there is you know 192.168.1 so by not being on dot one it doesn't confuse things I can still access my stuff and your stuff at the same time so I use 42 and now because I use a slash 23 instead of a slash 24 I go up instead of dot 42 dot 255 is the top range it might I am now the top of my range is dot 43 dot 255 so we've expanded beyond and it works like it's you know it's amazing this network stuff yeah I use a 172 just to be different that's no being different is good and is yours is yours what what subnet mass do you use are you three 255 255 255 yeah okay all right so you could also move to a dot 254 on the last one and give and then you have to go into your DHCP server and tell it to assign them out but you know yeah so yeah Wayne Dixon it mentioned in the in the chat room that that there are still classes of IP addresses I you are correct that there are definitions of classes but they have been deprecated as as I am told they are no longer used if you if we had and we're not but if we had network purists here there would not we would not be allowed to say class C anymore we just talk about it and CID our notation which is the slash 23 slash 24 et cetera so but if somebody says class C you know what they mean it's okay John I mentioned I had another problem so I'm just going to bring it up my battery on my iPhone 12 mini has been tanking when it's doing nothing now I have noticed that this only happens when I'm at home if I am somewhere else even somewhere else on a Wi-Fi network the rate of decline of my battery is far flatter than it is here at home and I'm trying to figure out why that is so it could be that you know I'm thinking home so do I have some sort of geofence did I let some app do a geofence do I have a shortcut with a geofence here at home so I turned off in my phone I went into you know privacy yeah wherever it is in the settings privacy location services and I went to system services and I turned off both location for both home kit and for location based alerts but I only did this last night and so it's hard to say because I was actually out at the theater last night which is really nice to go see some you know stuff but yeah see I think that was it so far I am proving that that was it because I did it before I left for the theater things were nice and flat while I was at the theater and then things have been nice and flat so while we've been doing the show here this morning so I think something about location and I this is like very early for me to declare victory here by the way but it certainly seems like something about either location based alerts or home kit so I got to turn one of those back on at a time and see which one but I think there's something there I'm hoping I'm hoping I found it because it's I it's felt like a needle in haystack here I don't know it's weird man like it's like I leaving my phone on my desk doing nothing with it all day the battery would not last if I was at home but if I was at your house would be fine I mean I think I don't know so I mean the other thing you may want to tweak so yeah if you go into location services you can set on a per app basis yes when an app is running in the background so yes and I have I've managed that but it's like that hasn't helped but you're right looking at which apps are allowed to use location services all all the time versus when they're in the foreground versus all that stuff and I yeah I guess I sort of fast forwarded I did all that and it didn't seem to help the worst part is that the battery if you go into you know settings battery you can obviously see the graphs which were shocking to me and you can also see activity but the activity stuff it lies man like it doesn't tell the whole story like there's nothing in there about something is using your battery that we're not telling you about so anyway hopefully hopefully that's it but if you've run into anything like this and you've found a solution it just seemed really weird that it was at home and that's why I started thinking okay Geofencing it could also be my cell signal at home is weak and isn't reporting as weak I mean I get two or three bars here at the house so like even inside the house so like that shouldn't be a problem but that just got me thinking hold on I'm going to find it settings cellular cellular data options Dave okay voice and data yes so there are two settings if you're on 5G one is always do 5G and then they have a setting called 5G auto which will which says 5G auto uses 5G only when it will not significantly reduce battery life yep I tried I had it on 5G auto I mean this is great advice but no no I think I'm glad you shared this because for anybody else out there having problems this is good to know yep I I had it on 5G auto for a couple of days I switched it to LTE and for this problem it made zero difference which is which is actually good to know because that means that 5G auto isn't like is doing what it's supposed to do so yeah yeah yep I'm hoping this is it weird man but it could you know I like another thing it could be but I don't think it is for me is that cell service at the house here is weak and so it you know because if your cell services weak or non-existent your phone will be over zealously trying to find a signal and that can cause battery problems to so alright let's go to Joe Joe has for us and I hope I can find Joe I found him he says Dave and John a few months ago my customer unknowingly responded to a phishing email and within minutes the person she was speaking with over the phone connected to her computer without asking her permission of course when she realized she was being scammed she ended the conversation and subsequently took precautions against identity theft and bank account credit card abuse then a few weeks ago she told me that a website unexpectedly came up on her screen and she could not control the cursor the cursor would move but not where she wanted to put it there was a warning on the screen that turning off the computer would have dire consequences so this is a symptom that indicates that yeah some malicious scammer still has control of your computer at this point all is working properly she did turn her Mac off and upon reboot all was well a few days later I paid her a visit and found no evidence of malware on her machine he says at this point all is working properly but I am concerned that either of the above events could recur I'm thinking that it would be advantageous to change the IP address of her Comcast gateway is it possible to do that Comcast told me the only way to get a different IP address would be to replace the gateway do you agree with Comcast is changing that IP address a good way to stop these events from happening again so I want to answer your Comcast question but I don't think that's the solution here generally speaking it's something running on that computer that is allowing these people in it will go and open a port on the router and essentially invite people that are coming to that port to go to the computer and I think this is why rebooting that computer dealt with this especially if there's no lingering malware running on the machine and you know we'll have to trust the tools that you're in to confirm that but but generally I'm sure what happened here is that your client you know got this phishing email clicked a link that in her I think you said she yeah in her browser you know open told ran some applet or something that open to port for remote access right I mean this is all doable anyone anyone that's been on a Google Meet call which you attend via your browser and then said yeah I want to let somebody else control my screen like that's a thing and it's awesome but it also means that it can be done when you don't necessarily want it especially if you've already given permission to the browser to do things like that so so yeah the the the trick would be making sure that it truly was just a web app that was running and allowing this and not something else that was running and allowing this I would change the passwords on the computer of all user accounts that would be something to do I'm looking in the chat room here yeah Kiwi Graham is is chiming in at live.mackeygov.com says that remote desktop software would show up won't show up in malware scans necessarily that's true because some remote desktop software is acceptable so making sure that that there isn't any of that running on the computer Wayne Dixon offers a conservative approach wipe the machine and start over and not restore from a backup but copy the data over that would be the you know certainly a way to go but I don't think changing I don't think it's the IP address is the magic answer here because if there is remote desktop or remote access software running on the computer it will simply go once it has a new IP address it will go out and and report that to whomever it was asked to what do you think John Oh I had something a while ago where yeah a window popped up on my screen saying oh my gosh your max infected you know click on this or I think it was called this number no it was called this number and then when I called them they were like okay can you go to I think it was log me in or something they're like yeah can you go to type this in and go here and I'm like oh okay yeah right and the thing is that what they were trying to do was install malware on my machine by my giving them remote access the thing is I was trying with them so I actually gave them remote access but when they got to the point where they could install software I basically ended the session and of course you should make better choices in life because you're going to get caught and they were like yeah try it and I'm like okay sure yeah so I reported because they were using a 1-800 number so I reported it to the FTC federal trade trade commission sure likes to go after people to do this unfortunately it's super easy to spoof caller ID so that it probably wasn't their number but yeah as far as changing the IP address if you want to change your IP address again I don't think that's what's going to help here but it's a good question you know knowing what it is that changes your IP address actually just had something hit me that I will share after I after I answer with a cable modem your IP address is tied to the hardware address sometimes called the Mac address of whatever device is the router so if you have a Comcast gateway that is a combination cable modem and router and Wi-Fi access point right if you have your own and you can't change the hardware address of that device so they're right that you would have to get a new one or pull it offline long enough such that Comcast's DHCP servers forgot the address they had assigned to you and then hope that you get a new one and that may be 24 to 72 hours so like probably not what you're going to do because you don't want to be offline for 24 to 72 hours so getting a new gateway would be the easy way if you have your own router often times routers will have a feature called Mac address cloning and it's so that if you move from an old router to the new router you don't have to change your IP address you clone the Mac hardware address from the old router to the new one and then Comcast's DHCP servers or anybody else's don't know that you have changed devices and you get the same address and all as well so you could use Mac address cloning to force a change of the Mac address I don't entirely recommend just picking Mac addresses at random because they are supposed to be mainly unique I don't like using the word unique with any qualifier because something is either unique or is not there's there's no very unique but it is a binary sort of descriptor but anyway Mac addresses are supposed to be unique and probably best not to start mucking around with that unless you know of one that of an old device you throw away that you can use and so in that regard it's not a bad idea to save Mac addresses of old routers you throw away but that would be the way to do it so you know yeah that's why I'm not thrilled with the you know privacy feature in iOS that comes up with a random Mac address right I mean it's kind of clever but then on the other hand what what if the how do they know they're not selecting well I suppose I don't know I mean what if you have two devices on your network with the same Mac address adults you'll get a your your device will get a warning that oh right right and so it I'm presuming that apple has accounted for this and would for and would would say oh wait okay I just picked this I'm going to pick a new you know and so that that's generally how that works yeah yeah John I had a thought about my I ran out of DHCP addresses and the timing of this I think this problem has been going on longer than just when the boys and fling showed up to rehearse I have been having now that I think about it I've been having weird issues with a few devices on my network for the last few months so I think I've been running up against this limit for a while one thing that changed is I moved from Comcast with a cable modem connection to consolidated with a fiber connection and I love it but there is one feature that Comcast offers that consolidated does not and that is IPv6 if I had been running IPv6 on my network those guys would have been able to connect to the internet at least sort of like as long as they were connecting to IPv6 destinations and I think like Dropbox is an IPv6 destination that I think they would have been able to get online and I don't think their devices would have yelled at them about that so I think not running IPv6 may have been part of the formula to highlight that I had an IPv4 DHCP constraint happening on my network so I just wanted to share that as the realization sort of came here so all right you want to I don't know any thoughts on that before I move again okay cool and and here's another realization I came to Dave so I fixed a problem thanks to our pal Dan um so Dan wrote in hold on here there we are um yeah my stuff's coming up in Everdote now isn't that great and that's yes I'm very happy about this I put the legacy I don't know what's wrong with their current client though well they keep having these caching issues we don't have enough time left in the show to talk about what's wrong with Evernote's current client okay what we will talk about is um so Dan says haven't been able to attend the live show recently do to work but I've heard John mentioned scheduling a restart leaves the Mac in an off-state is File Vault turned on if File Vault is turned on and a password is not entered on Reboot after a short period of time the Mac will turn off and you know I think that's exactly what was happening Dave so I'm like hmm let me try this so first both my Macs are T2 Macs um right the thing is turning on File Vault on a T2 Mac is different than how you did it in the past um and pretty much what I decided to do was you know what I'm going to turn off File Vault and you may be like that's crazy you know your data won't be protected well it actually is yeah um and we got an article from our pal Glenn Fleishman called how File Vault in the T2 security chip work together in New Air Macs uh so once and and that was the key and then setting or system preferences users and group login options um what you can do is automatically log in a specific user isn't that handy right were you not doing that prior is that right no I was not got it okay it was prompting me for the File Vault password uh got it got it so here's what I did and and so if you go to users and group login options there's actually a little question mark which is help um and it specifically says oh by the way you get oh but here's the thing is like when I tried to select automatic login it was great out and it said off and I'm like well no I want to automatically log in and it's like no no no no you got to turn off File Vault and they warn you of this in the help article so here's what I did um so I turned it off all right hold on let's see so what else do all right so turned it off um and then where did I go oh and that was it and then yeah I think that's restart and it restarted the thing is is system preferences now you may say well your machine is not protected against the evildoers well it kind of is if you go to system preferences security and privacy general require password immediately after sleep or screen saver so so if my machine restarts um after a few minutes it's going to lock the screen and then you got to type in my password in order right so there is some protection now somebody managed to be in my house immediately after the restart where I automatically log in then yes there's a chance they could read well no they could just turn your computer off and turn it back on right right and then they can get in the way and you're totally right about all of that the way I feel about that is if someone is in my house I have bigger problems right than them getting into like they're gonna get they've they've made it inside my house we I like like wow there's an issue here so yeah yeah yeah but you're right that auto login there is a security hole there that's true that's a fair point yeah yeah and that's why it's an option so but yeah interesting about the t2 or the file vault keeping you from from rebooting I mean of course that was one of my issues and it's this is actually why I don't use file vault on any of my desktop Macs because if I'm remote and I'm having a problem and I need to force a computer to restart if I'm not there to type in the password there is a way I know there's something I can do with the terminal to like prepopulate the password but you have right the right incantation you can bypass the password request yet like in beds it in the yeah no Kiwi grams got it there in the chat room so remote restart and bypass file block check that the Mac is capable of this FDE setup supports auth restart so that would be the command to run in the terminal and we'll put these commands in the show notes but if I it is true on my computer okay so that's step one great and then you authorize the bypass with sudo FDE setup auth restart okay and then you say delay minutes minus one but then you have to do it at the next restart right like you have to do right or is that will it Kiwi gram hopefully you're listening here will doing this make it happen 100% of the time or only the next time that's the question here and we'll we'll put this in the show notes too that will allow next restart okay thank you Kiwi gram so this this isn't this you have to think about this every single time otherwise it won't work but yeah okay I like it this is good this is good good good good yep and then you got to restart immediately okay yeah yeah yeah cool thank you for this we'll we'll clean this up and make it nice nice in the show notes okay uh that's um that's going to do it for today this has been fun I like this this went nowhere that I thought it would go I mean it sort of did we talked about offsite backups which I wanted to get to obviously uh great question and hopefully valuable to all of us but um but then we then we went nuts so this was like you know um this was geek therapy here we needed help with our own stuff John so I like it I like it fun fun fun right thanks for thanks for hanging out with us thanks for all your help everybody you can see how engaging things can be with the live chat room live dot mackeycup.com please if you if you are available when we record join us there because you can see how much fun it can be we do our best to keep it all sort of on point and relevant and hopefully we did that today you can learn when we are going to be live in the chat room by subscribing to our calendar at macgeek gab dot com slash calendar that is literally the same calendar that John and I use for our scheduling so if it's in there we're going to be here and hopefully we don't put some personal events in that calendar and invite you all to those too but but it's happened it's happened there was one like not so public apple briefing or something that I put in there for a day once and was like oh oh but thankfully work we're all in the family here at macgeek and so the trust we extend to you is is is large and we and we know we get it in return it's awesome we love what we love what we're able to do here together all right what else we got Mr. Braun anything else to talk about here anything that's about it all right you want to tell them where to find us com slash mackeek gap that's the place to go yeah it is relatively new that's true well we've had it for a while but we're actually doing something with it that's what's new yes yeah it's kind of weird score like through my Instagram feed when I see me it's like huh yeah yeah it is it's good though like that's that's sort of the point the idea is um the idea is we're trying to not just increase engagement but you know expose mackeek gap to a a bigger audience and so you can help with that folks if you see those things on Instagram Twitter Facebook wherever you see stuff that we're posting we're posting lots of little things we've actually hired somebody we've got Sadie on board and she is chopping up our segments and putting them out that's why all of that's happening if you see those share them with a friend like that's the best way to grow this audience is to to show people what we do here on the show and that's why we're chopping things up so please yeah share with that like that truly that's our ask for this week please share all right that's what I got thank you for listening everybody thanks for checking out our sponsors of course we had headspace.com slash mgg max sales dot com amazon.com slash m g g r x scosh that's scosh s c o s c h e dot com code mgg g and you can visit mcgup.com slash sponsors to learn about all our other active sponsor deals even if they're not active sponsors a lot of sponsors don't cancel like their coupon codes and so we check those about once a month to make sure they're valid but go mcgup.com slash sponsors well Dave I got us in so I might as well get us out asymmetrical life I know but are symmetrical yeah it's like bookended I like that idea that's good yeah but my advice to you Dave and to everyone listening and everyone watching is these three important words and that's don't get caught made up