 The Mac Observers MacGeekGab Episode 703 for Monday, April 2nd, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers MacGeekGab. We are the show that takes your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all that stuff. We mix it together. We organize it. We study it. We try to bring you answers to your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. The goal in all of that is for each and every one of us to learn at least, yes, five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Smile, where at TextExpander.com slash podcast, you can get 20% off of TextExpander, your subscription there for the first year. And then also Ring, where at Ring.com slash MGG, you can get up to 150 bucks off of their Ring of Security kits for your homes. And we'll talk more about both of those things later here in Durham, New Hampshire, surrounded by a Ring of Security kit, no less. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, surrounded with a bit of security and snow, which is now going away. It's snowing April. Are you kidding me? It's April. Yeah. This is John F. Run. Yeah, man. We got some snow this morning throughout New England. You got more than us, I think. So yeah, it was another let down. Yeah. But I mean, we were shaking their fists at the superintendent of our school system because apparently it was it was kind of treacherous in the morning to a school. Those guys have such a tough tough job trying to figure out whether or not to cancel school. I mean, it's easy when it when they're supposed to be two feet of snow, like no problem. But when it's like a little bit and you never know, like those guys, they they they're always going to be criticized for their decision, whichever way they they make it. It's it's it's never good. But speaking of criticizing decisions, let's go to Gary here and start the show. Gary said I just updated all of my devices to the latest software versions and and he says, including Mac OS high Sierra 10 dot 13 dot four. Before the Mac OS update, I would go to log into my bank or other websites that I have to provide a username and password and the fields would turn yellow and Safari would automatically populate them with the information. Now I have to actually click on the username or password field. Then I see the choices appear. And then when I click one, that's when it populates it. Otherwise, the updates have done vast improvements to the performance and stability of my devices. But finger wag at Apple for this Mac OS update. So there you go. Yeah, that's that's not an accident, by the way. That's listed right there in the Safari update notes. And it would happen not just in 10 dot 13 dot four, but also the Safari update for say, you know, Sierra and I think probably even El Capitan. And it says helps protect privacy by only auto filling usernames and passwords after selecting them from the auto fill list in a web form field. So I I I have experienced the frustration for this on both sides. I very much used to like the way it auto filled things. I would say 95 percent of the time. But sometimes I'll go to a web form and Safari will decide that two of the fields there are supposed to be my username and password, and it starts just auto filling them in, even though I'm trying to fill out the form. So I never thought about that as a security breach, but but it totally is because I could accidentally send my password in to somewhere. I also find it like if I have to go in and edit one of the like you folks that one of your accounts in our content management system, like in the back of WordPress, I'll go to your page and it'll put my username and password in and try and like overwrite your account. I mean, I don't hit update. I go in, I turn off the auto fill thing and then I can go back and edit your account and it's fine. But so at least that makes this part go away. But like I always used to like it when it was just auto fill and I didn't have to choose from the drop down. I think I'll probably wind up using one password a whole lot more. Because that's faster to hit command backslash as opposed to, you know, having to go and like with my mouse choose the drop down. So yeah, it's fine. Like I run, I run one password and iCloud key chain in parallel so that I can have, I can have, you know, my password sync to my iOS devices too. So it's fine. Yeah. Likewise, except I use. That's right. You use the last pass. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. Well, I did like in this update, which is long overdue. I think is that they also, so another bullet item here of what they did is displays a warning in the Safari smart search field when interacting with password or credit card forms on an unencrypted web page. So I think what happens, and I think I saw a screenshot is that it comes up like in red in the address bar saying, dude, this page is unencrypted and like you shouldn't submit anything to an unencrypted page. Right. There's nothing you care about. So yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Other than that, I didn't, I didn't really notice much. Oh, the other thing here I saw, this is kind of cool. Not that I have one or you have one. I don't think you do, but add support for external graphics processors. Well, that's right. The eGPUs now on Thunderbolt 3 Max are supported. That's kind of a big deal for both AR and especially just for video games. You know, people that want to play those games that require crazy graphics cards now, you can. I mean, I think it would still be cheaper in the end to buy a Windows box. But, but, you know, like, well, it's just the reality of it. But, but it is doable on the Mac now. And that's like, that's more expansion than we've had on the Mac in a very long time. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. And we had the iOS update, too. Yeah. Well, before we jump to iOS, I just want to say the one more thing in Safari is that it adds a keyboard shortcut of command nine that lets you to quickly jump to the right most open tab, which can be really handy if you're jumping around between tabs. So, so bear that in mind. Command nine and Safari jumps you to the tab of the the the current window all the way on the right. So there you go. It's good stuff. That that I think is kind of handy. Personally, what, what about the iOS updates caught your fancy, John? Well, the only thing that caught my fancy. Well, one, it broke at least one of my apps and that when I launch it, it stays up for about a second and then it goes back to the home screen. It's like, nice. I wrote to people to make it. It's our it's our local state lottery. OK, OK, and I verify, you know, I had my iPad. I did an update and it worked fine. And then my iPhone, which I updated it, it crashed. So I actually wrote that actually got back to me quickly because. That sounds like it sounds like a poorly written app. But I wouldn't necessarily blame that. I mean, it's probably them. When was the last time the app was updated? Right, that that's the last thing I think it's that. Yeah, I look in the so you can get that in the release notes. Or if you go to the app store and I think it's it's about a year, nine months to a year. So I'm but surprised it still runs like I'm surprised they had made it 64 bit and all of that stuff. But, you know, like like that, that's the kind of thing that would get in the way there. So yeah, I think the most exciting feature, though, in the iOS update is that now they have a they say it's in beta, but you can now get a measure of your battery health, which in the past you had to do with these as we've discussed kind of wonky utilities that kind of break every time Apple changes something. Right. So now they're putting that ability in there. So now, you know, if you say battery health, like, you know, I'm looking at my phone, which is, you know, practically new. And it's like, yep, 100 percent. You're good, man. That's good. But apparently now what they'll do is that when your battery does degrade, you will have control over the throttling behavior that before you really didn't. Right, right, right. Yeah, well, and I think there were some AR kit stuff, which I actually hadn't used, but that was the one thing that jumped out of me is, you know, they're just improving. Yeah, they're just exposing more of things that are important to people. Yeah, you know, it's my battery, you know, it's my battery dying or dead or defective or whatever. Yeah, right, right. I'd be curious what your logs say for that for that app that dies when you launch it. Have you looked yet? I'll dig in. But the thing is, so when I wrote back to the person who I don't think was technical, but, you know, and I said, well, you know, I'm a developer. And as far as I know, if you set up things right, then you should be getting a lot of crash reports now. Right, but you can see those on your device. I'd just be curious what the, you know, what the what thread it was that crashed and what the thread was doing. Those are usually pretty helpful. You can see them if you go in on your iPhone to it's in settings privacy, I believe, from getting this right. Analytics down at the bottom. Yeah, there we go. And then you go to analytics data and then you'll just look and you'll probably have a lot of stuff out here, especially if you haven't plugged your iPhone in via USB in a while. But you can find where it like the name of the app appears. And that usually will point you in the right direction. So you can start to see that stuff or you can sync it up with your Mac and see it in console and that sort of thing. So, yeah, which is super handy. And that's what here we go. What can we boy? That's what you can see a whole bunch of entries here. CT dash lottery. There is a ton. Well, you'll have one for every time it crashed. That's right. Yep. Yeah. And you can take a look either look at them there. Like Kiwi Graham said in the chat room at MacGeekyeb.com slash stream, he says, you know, console on the Mac can also see iOS logs of plugged in devices. So yeah, yeah, here we go. Exception type exe underscore bad underscore access, kernel invalid address. OK, well, that's useless. Whatever. Yeah, well, it's probably helpful for them. Yeah, cool. We had actually quite a lot of great stuff happened in our Facebook group over the last week or so. MacGeekyeb.com slash Facebook. And yes, we are actually pretty close on creating our own self-hosted place for your questions and answers. That's going to be a formatted a little better than Facebook and also isn't Facebook. I know there's a lot of you that don't I have Facebook accounts or don't like to use Facebook. So that so it serves that purpose too. I wish I could say we started doing this because of the Facebook privacy stuff. But no, it's just the timing happens to be pretty good. Anyway, Alex on Facebook pointed to the Apple support article that teaches us or shows us how to create bootable installers for Mac OS, and it's done in the terminal using the create install media command, which is, I mean, it as somebody in the comments pointed out, Discmaker X at Discmaker or Discmaker 10 at DiscmakerX.com makes this process even easier. But I just think it's great that Apple is not only acknowledging that we need installers that are on USB sticks, but is essentially officially supporting their creation, which is pretty good. And they show you how to do it from High Sierra all the way back to Mavericks, which is pretty good. So so we'll link to that, of course, in the show notes. Good stuff. Thank you, Alex, for sharing that. Any thoughts on that, John, before moving on to the next one? No, it's a no, I'm glad Apple, you know, rather than using a, I wouldn't say a hack, but it's that Apple officially supports the creation of that, because why not? Because why not? Yeah, I think Discmaker 10 actually uses the same method to do it. I don't know, but I just would assume. I mean, why wouldn't they, right? But but they let you do it without having to go to the terminal and they sort of, you know, hold your hand through the process, which isn't a bad thing. So so there you go. And did I pull up the wrong one? Oh, yeah, Rob on Facebook asked a question. Rob asked he was came over from Windows and he said, there's a particular behavior that I've never gotten used to with Mac OS. He says, I'll tend to switch between applications using Command Tab on both platforms. If I've minimized my documents to the dock before switching away from the app, when I return, I have to either pull the document from the dock or use the window dropdown from the banner. Is there a key combination? He asks that allows switching between live documents or even a way of opening documents from the dock once an application is selected. And Gary was very quick to answer correctly that Command back tick, which on Apple's keyboards and most keyboards is the key just above tab. So it's it looks like the almost like an apostrophe kind of leaning down to its left. Command back tick will cycle through the windows of the current app. And if one of them is in the dock and you select it, it will pull it out. So you can command tab to your app and then basically just move your hand a little bit and boom, you're there. Command back ticking through all of those those great little windows. So perfect little solution, Gary. Thank you for sharing that stuff. Yeah, good stuff, John. Nice. Cool. Where are we here? Oh, in the cool stuff found department, Ev the nerd writes in with with something that are called light dims, L-I-G-H-T-D-I-M-S. We've talked a lot at different times about the bright lights bothering us on things like chargers with our chargers next to our beds or that mono priced box that I have on my TV to switch between all the HDMI signals or whatever the light is just piercing. And so you and I, of course, John always jump to use electrical tape because that's what we have. But there's this product called light dims that it's just a pack of varying sizes and shapes, basically circular or rectangular of LED covers and they come in two different flavors. No, not flavors, because we're not going to taste them. Has a two different capacities. Thank you. Right. So one is the dimmable one or the dimming one, which dims the light down to like 50. You know, it reduces 50 to 80 percent of the light. And then they have a blackout strength that completely blacks out the light. So if you just don't want to see it, then you can get that too. And it's like, you know, somewhere between six and 10 bucks for a sheet of these things, depending on how many you want to buy. And and that sort of thing. So pretty cool. Well, put a link in the show notes. So thanks to Ev the Nerd for for sharing that. I like it. Cool. I don't know about you, Ben, but Blue Ellie, blindingly bright blue LEDs, I think, is just a curse on any sort of consumer electronic. You know, I agree. I can handle red. I can handle because they're colors that I'm used to. But the blue just just. I think the blue was put on when I I bought a pair or actually about three of them, like probably 12 years ago, these Mackey SRM 350s, they're they're PA speakers, right? And they sound great. They look great. I'm still using them today, right? They've lasted forever. But I remember when I got them there, their power light is blue LED. And I remember how amazed every musician that I put one of these in front of on stage was because they're like, wow, these look expensive. Like that blue, I think I think there was there was some market research done that blue LED looks like it conveys quality for some reason. So anyway, that's that's where I think that's where that comes from. And I actually still really like them on the on the Mackeys, because from across the stage, I can see if that lights on. And that's pretty that's pretty nice. And, you know, I've got a cow digit, like an old Thunderbolt one dock, I think here right up on on this iMac, and it's got a blue LED on it. And I have to say it looks nicer than like all the things that I have that have green and red ones. So I think the blue is like, I think it's a psychological choice. Although when it's right next to my bed, it makes me want to, like, you know, shoot somebody. So there you go. That's, I don't know, there you go. OK. Listener Barry writes in and pointed out something with a picture that I am certain I've seen many times, perhaps all of you have to. And perhaps like me, you never really noticed it. But he was updating his iPads and he has two of them. I guess one for him and maybe one for somebody else in his house, or maybe he's just got two and one of them is a white bezeled iPad. And the other is a black bezeled iPad, as they are, depending on their, their, their back case color. And the iPad that is white bezeled has a white background with a black Apple logo during the update. And the one that is black bezeled has a black background with a white Apple logo during the update. And that just makes it look smooth on that screen. I've never noticed it before. And I think that's the intention. It just, there you go. So. Oh, yeah. Thanks for the snapshot, because I don't think I've ever gotten a white. Yeah. See, I have both. I mean, I've got iPads, the ones I've had. I think we're all all space gray or black or whatever you want to call it. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, it's pretty amazing that, you know, just that the attention to detail that that Apple provides for all of us is is quite something and I'm appreciative of it. So, you know, you know what else I'm appreciative of? John is is our two sponsors for today. Can I can I take a minute and talk about them? I appreciate your appreciation. So go. All right. Our first sponsor for this episode is Ring, where at ring.com slash MGG, you can save up to one hundred and fifty bucks on what they call a ring of security kit. They sent us a bunch of videos. So ring is this company, they started making video doorbells. Both John and I have them. It's the coolest thing because not only can you interact with someone that's at your door, like when they ring the bell, you get a notification on your phone and you can see them because the doorbell has a camera in it and they can talk to you and you they can hear you. They can't see you because there's no screen on it. But that's good, right? You see them, you can talk with them. Whether you're home or on the other side of the planet, it doesn't matter. It all happens, you know, as long as your phone's on the Internet. Boom, you get this notification. But you can also get notifications when someone is at your door, even if they don't ring the buzzer and you can sort of set the scope of, you know, how far out it senses motion and all that stuff. They like I said, they sent us a bunch of videos. And I'd love to play the audio from this one, but I don't think it would work. But without seeing the video, too. But it's this woman that comes up onto this doorstep and starts to grab a package, right? And, you know, the owner of the house gets a notification, pops it open on his phone and says, hey, drop that package. The woman drops the package, jumps in her car and takes off. It might have even been able to see the license plate because it's a 1080p camera, I think, in there. It's pretty nuts. The quality is great. You can kind of zoom around and move around really, really cool stuff. The Ring Video Doorbell lets you see and speak to anyone, including intruders on your smartphone from anywhere. And then you can even share video clips to your neighbors using the Ring app. On top of that, the doorbell isn't the only thing they make. They make spotlight cams and floodlight cams. I've now got two of these floodlight cams at my house. These things are so cool. Just got another one. I've got one coming off the like above the garage and one on the back porch. And of course, it lights up when it's dark out and there's motion. But it also alerts me to the motion and then I can go back in even later on and see what that motion was. It's kind of cool in the morning. You know, I can see like I saw it looked like a platypus crossing my driveway. I'm pretty sure it was a beaver because, you know, I live in New Hampshire. But I like to think that this thing called a platypus. So go to ring dot com slash MGG. That's where you're going to get up to one hundred and fifty bucks off on a ring of security kit. Really cool stuff. Our thanks to ring for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor for this episode is Smile with TextExpander. We're at TextExpander dot com slash podcast. You can get 20 percent off your first year subscription. TextExpander is one of those things I couldn't live without. I certainly couldn't run my businesses without. It's pretty amazing. 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So I can I can use like comma MGGN from MGG notification. And it pulls up this text, but it pulls up a form that I've told it to make and walks me through like, oh, OK, well, here's the text. But you want to put something in here. And so I put the timestamp in and it's like, all right, great. You put the timestamp in. Now you had this other spot set for something else. I paste the URL in or whatever. Or if I know I'm going to have the URL on my clipboard, I can have it automatically slip in the contents of the clipboard. Like when I want to make our Amazon affiliate links, I just copy the product code and I type comma MGG AMMA and boom, it makes the whole thing by baking what was on my clipboard into this affiliate link makes life super, super simple. You've got to check it out. Go to TextExpander.com slash podcast. You get 20 percent off your first year of this fantastic product that, like I said, I certainly couldn't and wouldn't want to live or work without. Our thanks to the folks at Smile and TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, we we heard, Dave, you are my first ring customer. I have to say it was pretty darn cool because my esteemed colleague and his wife came down in my hood and they were the first people that rang my doorbell except me. That's right. But you had caught your mailman on there just putting stuff in just because it caught your motion, right? Oh, the motion detection. Yeah. So so I think that's what most people catch or people trying to steal your mail or pay. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool tech. Yeah, for sure. It's like motion alert. And I'm like, oh, what is it? And it's like, oh, it's the mailman. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I've been very impressed, like I said, last episode, too. It's just been been blown me away. In fact, we have a bunch of comments from previous episodes. And and so I will jump to know I'll jump to Louise, which is just about all this smart home stuff. Actually, I think this came in to our TMO Daily Observation show earlier this week. I was on there and we Jeff Gamut and I talked about smart home stuff. So the question came in there, but it's totally relevant. He asked, I was just listening. Actually, yeah, he said to the TDO for March 29th, and he says, and you read my mind, I am in the process of trying to figure out how to configure my front porch lights in an automation scenario. There are two lights on my porch. The only lights in my entire house that I have the desire to automate. So I'm thinking because they're on the same switch that a WiIMO switch makes more sense than smart bulbs and a hub. You might be right about that. And basically, I told the same story that I did here on Mackie Gep about how I got the Phillips lights and everything. So you folks are all caught up. It says I have a ring stick up cam. Ideally, I would like the lights to come on at dusk and turn off at dawn. The lights shine into one of my bedrooms so I can foresee that they might be turned off from time to time. I would like the light to come on automatically when motion is detected by the ring camera if the light is not already on. And of course, turn off after five to ten minutes. I had thought I would use if to configure this. But what you said on the podcast about if versus Stringify has me thinking, should I be using Stringify or HomeKit instead? Says I do have an ecobee thermostat. But besides that and the ring camera, I don't have any other needs for home automation. And it seems like HomeKit configuration would be a real hassle. Any advice? Yeah. So, right. Ring isn't currently supported by HomeKit. They say it's coming. But so HomeKit, if you want to link with ring, not so much right now. But otherwise, HomeKit could do this. And we talked about that last week, how HomeKit will do some of that stuff. But but really Stringify is is probably going to be your your answer. It's and I and I like the idea of the WiIMO switch versus buying smart bulbs, except that Stringify doesn't support WiIMO yet. Like if they just haven't built that integration. But if does and if has an integration for Stringify. So you could have it so that when your ring camera, you know, detects motion and it's dark out, right? Then you could have Stringify trigger an if action and then have an if action that triggers your WiIMO switch that you're going to get to turn on your lights. And then you can have it wait five minutes because Stringify is good at that, if it is not and or 10 minutes or however long you want to wait and then have it send another command to if to tell it to turn off those lights. So totally doable. You just got to wire a few of these things together and of course rely on everything working. But it but like totally doable. And, you know, I you say that you don't have any other needs for home automation. You're you're opening up Pandora's box here. I like there's I find it hard to believe that any of us geeks could get something like that set up and then not say, well, you know, I mean, the whole reason I got those smart bulbs is because I got the the ring camera and it was like, wait a minute. Now I have something that can detect motion. I can do things with that if I string it all together. And, you know, you heard the story last week. So there you go. So I don't know. Like I feel like it's it's like everything else that happens to us geeks. Right. You know, once once you get a taste for it, there's there's no more novice, right? Like, oh, I'm just going to do a little bit with this. Yeah, right. But that's a good thing, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's it's still kind of especially for, you know, your average bear, it's still kind of a complex landscape. There are so many options. You can get this hub or that hub or did it personally? The A word is my home automation hub, at least currently. Yeah, but that's not probably will be really a hub. Though, I mean, that you can't do any or ecosystem, I'll say, is that the devices I can control, most of them are through the A word. Right. But but here's the thing. The A word is simply a and we're talking about the A lady from from Amazon. Yeah, that is solely a command driven, demand driven thing, right? So you're not going to have your lights turn on. You're not going to use that to make it so that your lights will will your lights turning or your motion at your front door is turning on lights in your in your bedroom, right? No, that's just not how that works. Give me that. Yeah. So in terms of like, to me, the there's the control, there's voice control, and that is awesome at voice control. But automation like that's it's really it doesn't do much. If any of that home kit does do the automation part of it. But you have to have devices that are home kit compatible and there aren't like most devices aren't right now. But you but if you were starting out fresh and didn't own anything, you could certainly build up a home kit only system. But you're going to wind up hitting the wall of frustration with that because, you know, home kit, well, it's just it's Apple. It's the normal Apple wall of frustration. They build you the paths that they have tested and that work really well. And then that's it. There's a wall and and thou shalt not vault or dig under the wall. It's just how it is. But their paths are OK. Like as long as you want to do relatively predictable stuff, it's right there. But as soon as you want to get into like Stringify and things like that, like that's to me where the real automation comes in is is things like if and Stringify and home kit, right? Where you're saying if if a trigger does one thing now do another or at this time of day, I want that to happen if it's raining. And like that. So the lady doesn't do any of that. So yeah, no, I agree. And yeah. And at least for me, at my current smart home state, most of that automation is built into the app itself. Correct. Or my Nest Cam or all that is all the abilities are there. It's like, OK, well, you know, if you see motion, do this or that do this. Right. It's when you want to start linking things from unrelated vendors together that that you need some kind of glue. And like I said, I mean, I said it last week and I've done 10 times more with Stringify now than I did last week. And then it's just it works so well. So OK, so I'm going to guess. So, for example, ring. Yeah. So you could probably tell it. And I don't know if you've tried this, but you could say, OK, if you detect somebody with the ring doorbell, turn the lights on. That's exactly what I have. Yes, I've already done it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's and that's right. That's what I described last week, right? Where it but it only turns on for five minutes and then it turns off. But it only happens if it's dark out, right? Like like I've got all these parameters and that's the cool part about Stringify. You would love Stringify. Yeah, yeah, I will say this to all of you. If it is super easy to comprehend when you when you step in the door the first time, like you go to if then you, you know, wire up your stuff or whatever. You log into the various accounts and then it just it's it's really straightforward. But that comes at the cost of limited functions. The first time you use Stringify, it says walks you. It said it offers to walk you through creating several dummy flows. That's what they call their their their actions or whatever it's flows. And I made the stupid geek mistake of saying, oh, I don't want to create your dummy flows. I want to create my real ones. And I had no freaking idea what I was doing. And it took me probably 10 times as long as it should have. And in the end, what I did was I went back and I created their flows and learned how to interact with their, you know, visual language. And now that I understand it, you know, it's like anything else. Once you know what to do, it's super easy. And then you can start getting really creative. Like, oh, I wonder, can I wire this to there too? And then the answer is often, yeah, it works great. So so just follow the direct. Like my advice to you is just follow the directions the first time in to get to get a sense of sort of some of the advanced things of how it how it works together. So there you go. Speaking of last episode, we talked to listener John and and he had an issue where his drive nearly doubled in size. He had the he had 1.3 terabytes on his drive before he wiped it and restored from his clone. And after restoring, it had 2.9 terabytes. So it was more than double he found out what it was. And he wanted me to share that with you all. He said I had my hard drive wiped. Then I used migration assistant to bring over the carbon copycloner backup. But in carbon copycloner, I have safety net turned on. And when you do a migration, it brings back the disk image of your latest backup plus the safety net file, which he says in his case was 1.7 terabytes. So he deleted the safety net folder and everything's back to normal. Then he says whatever normal actually means. So so there you go. Just be aware if you're restoring a carbon copycloner clone and you're just like barfing it back onto your drive from another drive, which is how it works generally, then you might bring that that clone, that safety net with you. So yeah, which is the stuff that's been deleted. It's the safety net is the thank you for that, John. Yes, the safety net is the stuff that's been just let people know. Yeah, no, that's right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, that's a good. Yeah. So you should probably exclude that if you're restoring from a backup. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be a good idea. I thought carbon copycloner did maybe it doesn't do by default. I don't know. Well, I don't think he he didn't use carbon copycloner to do the restore. That that was the issue. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because I'm pretty sure if you use them to restore, it's going to by default exclude that because it's like you don't really need it. Yeah, I think I would assume that's right. Yeah. Yeah. OK, now we have one listener. I just want to add something here in the in the arena of mysterious to space issues. Yeah, one listener actually wrote in and I noted what they wrote into us, but they said, here's another whoops. You you talk, I'll edit the show notes on this one. I got I got it. Yeah. All right. Well, anyways, here's another potential. OK, you got the link. I told you, I had me. So, but yeah, another reason that you may have discrepancies in the amount of space that you see on your drive reported by the finder versus how much is actually being taken up. And someone mentioned this to me is local snapshots will do this. And Apple even and we will link to an article that tells you this explicitly is that the space taken up by local snapshots is not reported in the finder. Oh, because it's purgeable, if necessary, or it's eventually going to be and that's their excuse. Now, personally, I'd say, dude, if it's taken up this space, you report it. Yeah. But their choice is not to report it. But but in their defense, they say, but if the space, but if if we get into a low space situation, then we're going to start purging the local backups. But I still honestly think that, you know, what they report is what they should report. They should report how much space is taken up no matter what takes it up. Yeah, I don't disagree with you. Yeah, we had actually, well, you know, here's something interesting. I'm going to play this audio comment from listener Michael here. Hey, John and Dave, this is Michael calling in reference in the latest episode to the person who when they had done a restore from a clone, it turned out they had like an extra terabyte of data on the disc. You know, something that I don't know if this is I can't really worry, but I've noticed like if I've been running like Onyx or some cleaning utilities a lot of times, and I know that a sizable amount of, you know, kind of cruft and cetera that was taking up space on the drive has been removed. When the machine reboots, it actually shows that I have less space available initially. And then over time, it'll then reflect kind of what I have done in terms of removing all of that stuff that was that was on the hard drive so and I've never noticed that in pre I'm running high Sierra and I've never noticed that before on other past versions of the OS. So I don't know if it's if it's like calculating things in its head, so to speak, once you and I don't know how much time elapsed from the time he, you know, did the restore from the clone and reached out to you guys. So that is something that I have noticed. It takes a while for the drive to reflect kind of data removal, so to speak, that's taking up space in the hard drive. Not sure if you guys have ever encountered that. So thanks a lot. Don't get caught. Yeah. So maybe I have trouble believing that that would happen. But maybe there's something related to the time machine, local snapshots or whatever that took time there. Like that could explain what what Michael's seeing, too. Maybe. I guess. Yeah, I guess. Right. I'm just uncomfortable with the concept of not reporting reality. Yes. Yes. Well, it's that, you know, it's that Apple, the first the Apple frustration, right, where it's like, you don't need to know about. Yeah, we'll take care of this for you. And I mean, I get it. Like like Kiwi Graham in the chat room says, you know, no normal users that normal users shouldn't be thinking that they might have to delete snapshots. I mean, I get that. But at the same time, like, is there a better way to report this? And he, you know, he says it's fine for about this Mac to show purgeable space, but not the finder. I don't know. Like, yeah, it does it. The question is, does it eliminate confusion or add to it? And the answer, I think, is yes. Yes. That's right. But we're in agreement. Yeah, we're in agreement now, my friend. Jan has, again, back to 702. He said, I wanted to add something to the discussion on episode two about the password prompt that appeared on the screen for the iPhone or iPad that looked like an iCloud password prompt. He says it is possible to fake such a screen from an app, not only from a web browser. There are two caveats with it that, number one, the app would have to have gone through Apple's vetting process. And number two, you would have had to install the app and be running it. He says, as far as I know, there has been one such case in the news late last year, and he says, I can't remember seeing it since then. And it was just a proof of concept by a security researcher, which is true. We haven't seen any relapse with that. He says, my advice, and this is this is actually the meat of this here and the in the good part to sort of take away. My advice, he says, would be when you get an iCloud pop up, you do not expect to cancel it and instead go to settings, iCloud settings and log in there because that, of course, cannot be faked. Or when you get a pop up like that, press the home button. If the dialogue disappears, it is probably either a fake or not critical and you should be safe. That, which is interesting hitting the home button. I haven't tried that with a with what I believe to be a legit dialogue. But that's that's interesting. So there you go. Yeah. Thank you, John. Much appreciated. Good stuff. Yeah. But just like we've seen with Mac OS, yeah, people fake installers that look legitimate. But right. But the difference is those would have to make it through Apple's like you can't get an app onto your iPhone that just came from some nefarious source that can only come from the app store. Yeah. No, I'm with you. But I think I told you is that I found at least one or two rogue Mac OS installers and I actually and they had a certificate from Apple saying they were a certified developer and I actually wrote Apple a couple of times. I've talked to developer relations and I'm like, this guy's sending around malware and they're like, oh, OK, we'll shut them down. And they did. Right. Right. So then it wouldn't work anymore. And then it doesn't work. Yep. Yeah. Fun. Fun. One more one more audio comment from Scott, which could be helpful, goes back two episodes to 701. Hey, John, this is not down in DC. Well, I'm driving around to work on a Saturday as I always do. Listen, 701 moving stuff into the junk mail to this from iOS. Rather than move the item into the junk mail, click down at the bottom of the screen or the top of your on an iPad. Click through the flat button and there's a little item there that says move to junk. As part of moving to junk, there's a command that it uses as part of IMAP to tell the server that you've marked this item as junk and the server, whether your server does it or not, it depends on your your ISP and whatever, is supposed to take that and use that as input to the junk filters as part of the IMAP protocol. Instead of just moving it, I would use the little thing down in the plan. Remember, a little flag icon put up this thing, move to junk, press it and go. That should get most people what they want. Pretty good. Thank you, Scott. Much, much, much appreciated. Good stuff. Where is he? Scott's down in DC. No, I don't know. Oh, yeah. No. Oh, you're talking about that. Yeah. No, I'm just trying to find what he's he's talking about here. So you go to mail, you hit flag, hit the flag on him like you have to message your brain and then you can. OK, you swipe left and then say flag. OK, OK, I got it. Yeah. Yeah, pretty good. Right. Yeah. Cool, cool stuff. We have some questions to answer, John. But the first thing I want to do is thank our premium subscribers whose contributions came in this week on the biannual $25 every six month plan. We have actually it starts out with Martin S. Who is on the biannual plan at $50. And then so thank you, Martin S. And then on the $25 plan, we have Mark S. Not no relation, Robbie R. Lynn F. Randy B. Roger Y. Michael D. Ulysses B. Keith K. Mario Z. Jonathan G. and Ken L. Thanks to all of you on the monthly plan. We have Micah P at $15 a month. Thank you, Micah. And then at $10 a month, we have Nick S. David M. Elizabeth B. Jim E. Petter H. Ward J. Greg S. Olga P. Bob P. Jason A. Michael L. Chris F. And the B-man. So thanks to all of you for anyone who any well really to all of our premium subscribers, so you can learn all about it at Mackie Cub dot com slash premium. You like the B-man, John? That's we all like the B-man. We all do. Yeah. Well, it's I mean, we we like them all. I mean, he's a step behind the A-man, but. Oh, no, the B-man is number one in our book. Certainly today, the A-man wasn't on the list. So, you know, no love. Seriously, though, thanks to all of you. Like I know we say it every week and we mean it every week. It's it it's part of the fuel that keeps us going and it really means a lot. So thank you now to earn that fuel, John. It's let's talk about some of these things. Judy on Facebook was having an issue here. And Judy's issue is that she says I'm running high Sierra at the time it was 10 dot 13 dot three. When I look at all contacts in my contacts app, I see lots of duplicates using the fine duplicates, though, doesn't find any, but I can see them. I have five categories under iCloud, the list on the left. And the one that says all iCloud shows no duplicates. How do I fix this? I knew I had a problem when I tried to find my doctor's phone number on my iPhone six and couldn't find it. It is listed under all contacts, but not in all iCloud. It hasn't always been this way because I know I've pulled up my doctor's phone number on my iPhone in the recent past. Thanks for any help. I think and this was talked about in the comments, I think Warren on Facebook really kind of dug in on this one. All contacts shows everything from iCloud and anything else you have syncing. So you might have if you go into contacts accounts, you can see what else you might be syncing and what's enabled. You might have a Google or multiple Google accounts. You might have a Yahoo account. You might have a Facebook account for now, although Apple has seemed to come out this morning that they might not be continuing that. But LinkedIn could be in there. There's there's all kinds of things like you can put really any card dev server in there and it will start syncing with those. What's also entirely possible is that you still have an on my Mac database for lack of a better term. And that really if you're running iCloud, the on my Mac database should go away. And so you should take everything in the on my Mac section on the left and just move that into iCloud. And then you might have to run either a duplicate find or a merge. It might kind of do both for you. But but you want to get everything out of on my Mac and then you want to disable the on my Mac library unless you have a very specific reason to keep it running. But my guess is that your doctor's phone number is in your on my Mac list. And and that's why it's not syncing to iCloud and not appearing on your other devices and all of that good stuff. I found that I had an on my Mac list for a while. And I don't know why that was, you know, it just like that things. My Mac was defaulting to putting things in there and it was bad news. So I got rid of it and then, you know, then things were good. The other thing I went through this exercise once. So the problem is, yeah, through contacts, you can have multiple sources and what I what I did one day, Dave, just because I had nothing else to do now, I had plenty of things to do. But it was frustrating me because I would have multiple entries, as was pointed out here. And the thing is, I actually went through my list and the thing is, you can go through your list saying all contacts and then highlight. Multiple entries and then I'm trying to find it here. I think you say merge. Yeah, you go to the card menu, I think, right? Is that where it is? Merge selected cards. Yeah, card merge selected cards. Yep. So that should bring everybody on the same page. Well, that only merge cards that are in the same. Oh, all right. In the same. Sure. I'm pretty sure. I don't think you can merge from Google and iCloud, right? Maybe you can. You can link them that I know, but I think in terms of merging, it has to be like two iCloud cards or two Google cards or two on my Mac cards. I think I think that's how that works. Yeah. OK, but I went through that exercise once because, yeah, it just bothered me that I would see the same name more than once. Right now. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, and if all you had was things in iCloud, then that absolutely is the right thing to do. Usually when you do contacts, when you go to card and say, look for duplicates, when it finds a duplicate, it will offer to merge them into one record. But it's only it's not looking for duplicates. As Judy noted, everywhere it's looking for them in iCloud or in Google, but but not spread around, if that makes sense. So. Yeah, it's pretty. I contacts is actually a pretty powerful app for for what it is. It's pretty interesting. So Kiwi Graham says, be careful, because he had one client who merged all of his contacts into a single card. Well, I mean, you can see that happening. It, you know, one nice feature about contacts. If you go to the file menu, go to export and choose contacts archive, backs up your entire contacts database, saves it to a file. That's not a bad thing to do before you start messing around with this kind of stuff. So there you go. And Brian Monroe in the chat room points out that the same is true in terms of the on my Mac versus on iCloud thing. He says the same thing is true with the notes app. So be very careful with that as well. And the same can be true with your calendars. You can create on my Mac calendars and and wind up storing events there that aren't synced and potentially not backed up, depending on how you're backing things up. So be be aware of that. If you're using I like. I don't use any quote unquote on my Mac stuff for anything other than email where I have some local archives that I'm very particular about how I manage. But most of my email is just stored, you know, I map and so it's synced everywhere, but certainly for calendars and contacts and notes. I use everything in iCloud and nothing on my Mac so that I'm not left with this like weird thing. Like I swear I created that. Where is it? And you can do the same on your phone. You can have a calendar or contact record or a notes record that's on my iPhone. And it'll be stuck there for lack of a better term. So just be aware of that stuff. I think that's the that's the best I can offer. Yeah, right, John? Yeah, yeah. Mm hmm. That's what you say. All right. Let's go to Aaron here. Aaron says I got a new to me iMac to replace my 2009 Mac mini. I spent a few days testing out the new system and running diagnostics using Tech Tool Pro after determining that the system was solid. I went to move my data over using migration assistant. Well, I'd already created some user accounts on the new system that matched the old systems account names. Shouldn't it be as simple as moving the migrated files into the new account, then changing permissions to set the files to each user's directory in the new account, then remove the migrated user and whatever remains of the temporary directory? Well, kind of, but it's never that easy. Damian in the Facebook group has really, I think, had the best answer. It says if you don't care about the mostly empty new account on the iMac, it might be easier to, number one, create a new transfer account, call it transfer, log in as that account, delete the empty account with the same name as the one that your Mac mini and in the time machine backup and then use migration assistant to migrate the user entirely and then log into the user that was migrated and delete the empty transfer account. Like that's the best answer there. Trying to merge accounts like that, especially when there's no data that matter, like you're I think you're creating more trouble in its worth. Yes, Aaron, the reason is understandable, perhaps not to everyone, but certainly to me, Aaron is definitely a Unix type person, very comfortable with the command line and says that he wants his main user account to have a user ID of 501, which is the user ID that is assigned to the very first account that is created on your Mac when you either migrate or log in, but once something's created, then the next account would be 502 and 503 and 504, and that can make a difference if you have an external drive upon which permissions are active and you move it around from Mac to Mac. That can get very frustrating if you have, you know, files on there that are owned by user 501. And on one Mac, your user 501 and on another one, your 504. And now you don't have access to those files. So that there can be reasons other than just being, you know, particular about it, there can actually be practical implications of that. So. That but but Damien's answer is the right one. Like for for 99 percent of us, just don't worry about the user ID. Just delete it, migrate in, move on. Life will be good, right? And the follow up is don't do that. Well, I get why Aaron, I mean, the other answer would be to test it. Well, the thing is, I wouldn't create things. The first thing I do after installing a new OS is migrate data. I wouldn't create, I wouldn't start using the OS until I've brought things over from the prior installation, but that's just me. Well, but that's exactly why Aaron did that, right? Because Aaron got a new iMac that was used and was new to him, but was a used system and wanted to make sure it worked. So he had to create some kind of user account to do testing on it and this, that and the other thing. So, I mean, I get it. Like the process all makes sense. But but you could he could wipe the entire drive and reformat it, right? And then migrate in and this user account would be 501 and everything would be happy and he would never have any lingering. That's actually if that's really the best answer is just wipe it. And and now that it's tested, it's good. All right, cool. Forget about the test, wipe out any evidence of that. You know, boom, you're done. I think there you go. You want to take us to Patrick, my friend? Patrick has a fascinating one. All right. And I learned at least one new thing, Dave. That's cool. That's what we're here for. Patrick writes in and says, good morning, gents. Good morning, Patrick. About who is he talking about? Just looks like I got caught. My late 2013 Mac, but pro was running slowly and very hot. So I finally decided to boot into recovery mode and reinstall Mac OS. Sierra 10 dot 13 dot three in doing so. I lost all passwords stored in Safari. I did create a backup prior to doing the reinstall. Good man. But I don't know where the passwords are kept and I wouldn't know how to get them reloaded into Safari. Any thoughts? Oh, yeah. Also, I mean, need to do a full wipe and start again. Do either of you have best practices or list of steps to do this? So I'm going to try and answer both of those, Dave. So here's the thing. So the feature that he's talking about. So if you go into Safari, Safari preferences, and I think they changed this recently and then you click on passwords. And I've never seen this before. But now my system says Safari passwords are locked to unlock them. That's always been the case. Yeah. OK. Yeah, I don't use these. You just don't dig in there. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And once you put in the password, you then have a checkbox saying auto fill usernames and passwords, which sounds handy if you want to use Safari to do that. And then a list of the sites and the username and the passwords to do that. So apparently those got wiped out and that's sad. That makes me unhappy. Yeah. That's the thing is, where are they? And to me that and this is the question, Dave. Where do those passwords live? I'm going to tell you where they live, because actually the apple kind of got to be down the path. But I did some investigation. Anyway, stop babbling, John. Get to it. The passwords are not stored in Safari, Dave. You know where they're stored? They're stored in the key chain. That's right. Yeah. Which is why they can sync with iCloud key chain. And this is an interesting facet to this question, because I do not know if our friend Patrick is using that or not. And I actually found out that you may see different things depending on how your system is set up. So first off, the utility manage your key chain, which contains all sorts of usernames and passwords and other other fun things. So you run key chain access and what you're going to see is in the upper left hand corner of the screen, you're going to see a list of key chains. Now, here's the thing that I found, Dave. So you're going to see like the third entry down, you're going to see an entry that's going to have one of two values. It's either going to say local, which means that you are storing the username and password data locally only on your machine or you're going to see an icon saying iCloud, which means that you're using iCloud key chain. I suspect in his case, what happened is either the setting got flipped or he was just doing local storage and not using iCloud key chain. The other thing is that if you click on the passwords category, so there are two things you got to click on. So you click on key chains, you're going to either see local or iCloud. And then you click on the passwords category and you're going to see the entries that you also should have seen in Safari in the key chain. My guess is that Patrick is not running iCloud key chain or, and I found this in my case, Dave, as I actually found on my Mac, that it got disabled because I got this local icon. I'm like, what? I thought I was using iCloud key chain and I wasn't. Oh, so you were you were using local but not the thing is I don't use I don't use Apple's implementation to manage my website that I use last pass. So it wasn't an issue for me. But at some point, my iCloud key chain setting got turned off. And I don't know how that happened. Maybe the latest update, I don't know. So I guess my suggestion would be so maybe what happened is that he either had iCloud key chain disabled and just has to reenable it and then because they're stored in the cloud, he will then have access to his things again. Now, the bad news is that if that was not the case and they were only stored locally, then I think the only option is you have to go to your backup, run key chain access and painstakingly copy the things. I didn't find an option in key chain access to actually export that stuff. You actually have to manually copy and paste for each entry. I hope he doesn't have to do that. So I'm hoping that what happened here was that iCloud key chain was was disabled and that by reenabling it, you're going to get all your passwords and stuff back. Oh, that could work. Yeah, why not? Right. Right, because it's going to slurp them all back down from the cloud. Huh. And I found that in my case when I reenabled on my machine that had a disabled, then all of a sudden the icon changed and all the same data was there, but it was pulling it from the cloud and pulling it from my local storage. So you may also you may want to consider nothing wrong with iCloud key chain. You know, continue using it though. It sounds like in this case, something didn't work right. You may also want to consider maybe looking at another one like last pass or one password or another one I've seen floating around out there that I think it's fairly new. Well, we'll talk about it later unless you know what I'm talking about. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, I don't think there's another password manager. I've seen people talking about that. Well, I mean, there's Roboform, which has been a recent sponsor here. Yeah, there's another one out there. OK, I'll dig around. But there's a new kid on the block. But you know, I don't think you can go wrong with last pass or one password. Yeah, one password. I'm last pass and I've been running Roboform on one of my machines. And it's I mean, it's actually quite good. It's it's hard to, you know, to shift everything over all at once. But but yeah, I've been impressed with it. So yeah. Yeah. And then to a second question, as far as, you know, getting a fresh start, Dave, there's a number of paths you can take. So your favorite, I know, is the Nuke and Pave, which is basically you start from scratch, you erase your drive, you install the OS and then you install all your apps and migrate your data over. That's probably the best way to get a fresh start, but it's the most time consuming. Right. I will say that it is not as time consuming. Every time I've done it, it has been far less time consuming than I expected. So there you go. Yeah, especially if your apps are through the app store. If they're one offs that you purchased individually, then it can be kind of pain in the neck because you got to see how many apps do you run? I mean, like, that's the thing is like that. That's always my thought is, oh, yeah, I got to reinstall these apps. There's like seven. It's not usually tons. So I like, I don't know. And then there's what's that thing? Is it Mac back now? Is it Mac backup or something? Mac up, M-A-C-K-U-P. I think, hang on, let me look. I shouldn't be installing with Homebrew here. But I think it's called Mac up, M-A-C-K-U-P. That backs up things to Dropbox. It backs up all the apps that you have and all of that stuff and your settings and everything so that you can migrate to another computer really, really easily. I'll put a link in the show notes to Mac up and you can install it with Homebrew, just brew install Mac up. Now, OK, so so that's one strategy. And yeah, as Dave says, it probably isn't as bad as it sounds. The strategy I usually take, Dave, is that I'll erase the disk, install the OS, and then I'll use migration assistant. Yes, there is the potential to bring over cruft, but it's going to save you a lot of time. Maybe. Right. But that's what I've. Yeah, I'm just not a fan of the new compave. You are. I'm not. And you know, we're both still here. So yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, yeah. And lastly, the password manager that I just found here or just reminded myself by doing a Google search, Dashlane. You ever hear of this? Dashlane, no. Well, they claim it's never forget another password. Huh. Get Dashlane and it's free. So I may have to give it a whirl, though, you know, again, I'm very happy with the last pass and I'm very happy with one password. But, you know, can't hurt to check out the new kid on the block. All right, I'll put links to that and Roboform and Mac up all right there in the show notes, you can check them all out. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. So. Moving on to Chuck, Chuck, this might be a geek challenge or John, you might know the magic answer. Yep. I think you might know the magic answer. But so Chuck, Chuck actually has he had a tip or a request for us that I am going to pass to you because it's a great idea. He said, on your show notes, could you add a two to 10 word description of links, especially when it's products? And he gave us an exam. He's right. Like when we mention things, we'll sometimes just put. Like like I just did with Roboform, right? I'll put Roboform in the show notes or Mac up or Dashlane. And then we move on because there's, you know, things to do. We're doing the show. Well, when you go back to do the show notes, if you could add in, you know, Dashlane, new password manager on the block, somebody that listened might not remember the name Dashlane, but they did remember new password manager. And, you know, like seeing that in the show notes, I think would help immensely. So I think Chuck had a really good request there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. And on occasion, when you do, I know. When things are too obscure, then I will put in parents, typically. OK, well, this is what this means. Yeah. So it's a lot of like mostly the cool stuff found are just products that we mentioned like that. That would be good. Yeah. Or like he said, you know, thermal peanut. I mean, yeah, what is that? And it's like, well, what is it? I mean, thermal, it probably has something to do with temperature and peanut. I don't know. I have no peanuts in it. Right. Yeah. Good thing. Yeah. Well, it's about the size of a peanut. Yeah. All right. So it's a Bluetooth temperature monitor. Right. So very good advice. It's great advice. No, it's really good. And I wanted to share that in the show because we really do take all of this stuff that you folks send in, the ideas, the suggestions. I mean, we put them through a filter. Really, it's a filter of does that resonate with us and does that make sense for what we want to provide for all of you? And with Chuck, I mean, this was like as soon as I saw it, it's like, oh, yeah, and he did a great job. He copied the show notes from the last one and just did this for five or six of them. And as soon as we saw it, it was like, oh, yeah, we should be doing that. Thanks for the advice. You know, thanks for the suggestion. So thank you. Now, on to your question. Chuck asks, how do I add a location like something specific, say in the middle of the woods or a lat long to a, you know, to a certain location? How do I add that location after the fact to a photo or group of photos? Not just like Paris, France, but this particular location in Paris, France or this, like you said, in the woods, how do you do that after the fact to a bunch of photos, John? Yeah. Well, no, no, no, I know where this is stored. So the thing is that in photos, there's something called EXIF, which is additional data that's not the photo itself. And it's, you know, the camera you took it with and stuff like that. And I thought that photos itself had a way where you could post, where you could edit that if it wasn't supplied by the camera. I'm not seeing it right now. And I'm bringing up a photo and looking at the edit screen and photos and I don't see it, but I think either third party programs. So what you want to do is search for the term EXIF. So I found something called EXIF editor just now while we're going through this. Yeah, EXIF editor.com. It's available on the Mac App Store and it has a thing where it says you can use the map window to see a position of your photos on the map. You can also edit the position simply by dragging the pin on the map to where you want it to be. And he says, beside the map, you can also view the exact GPS numerical values. This can allow you, for example, to copy and paste the coordinates into maps on your browser, but you can edit it right from there, too. So EXIF editor might be your magic thing. Now, when I did find a photos, Dave, so I have a photo here. And so I clicked on the edit button and nothing amazing happened. But then there's a little info icon when I with a circle around it. When I click on that, it then says, oh, well, here's some info about your photo. All right, well, here's the name of it when you took it. You know, there's no information. And then the last item in that list, Dave, is location. OK. So it says assign a location. So I think you may be able. I'm not sure if they're asking for a name or a coordinate or whatever. But it looks like photos may have rudimentary abilities to do this. All right. Well, but there's definitely definitely ways to do this. It's kind of annoying in that, you know, everybody would prefer that the data is put in there when you take the picture. And, you know, most cameras now, the iPhone or any camera that has like a GPS, which I think most of them do, we'll put that in there for you. So, yeah, so photos may be but a third part of utility, definitely. And I also have one, you know, I think it's called EXIF edit on iOS that, you know, we'll do the same thing for you. So, all right, let's see. Um, let's go to let's go to Bill. Bill posted on Facebook and asked, I have a Verizon iPhone 6 Plus that randomly disconnects from Wi-Fi. I'll turn it on and then a few hours or days later, I'll notice that Wi-Fi is off. Any ideas appreciated. So he says he's still running 10.3. I think that's what he means. But maybe he means 11.3. Like, it would be pretty hard to have not updated your iPhone since then. Not impossible. My kids are always behind, especially my daughter, super behind on updates. But I feel like staying still being on 10.3 would be kind of impressive. But it's possible. Either way, my thought is go to settings, general reset and reset network settings. That sort of wipes out all of that without touching anything else. So anything to do with your network, it just wipes it out. And I've seen that fix some some Wi-Fi issues and, you know, connectivity wonkiness in the past. So, yeah. Sure. Any thoughts? I don't know, you know. You know, worse comes to worst is wiping a nuke and repave. But if he's truly running 10.3, obviously a nuke and repave means you're going to be updated to 11.3. No questions asked. So, yeah. But that settings, general reset, reset network settings has been quite handy in the past, so I just wanted to make sure we we covered that in there. All right. And then one last question, John, listener Mike over on Facebook, he asks, well, it's a very important question. He says, I hear a lot of chatter about Drive Genius. It recently was up for a bundle on bundle hunt that I missed. But is this app a must have for any Mac? And, you know, my my feelings on on Drive Genius have changed recently for two reasons. Number one has nothing to do with ProSoft and Drive Genius as an app. And that is APFS. Right. The introduction of APFS has put every drive utility, including Apple's own disc utility at a pretty significant disadvantage. Right. Yeah, right. Because there's just we don't have enough experience, history, learning anything. Right. It's not even like we can inherit some learning from other operating systems that have used this. I mean, it's brand new. So, like, is it the, you know, is Drive Genius the magic tool that's going to fix a drive that disc utility can't fix, right? Because that used to be the reason that you would want to have something like this around the answer, quite frankly, is I don't know. Like we haven't there haven't been enough instances where we've been able to say, oh, yeah, man, like that's it. Like the HFS Plus, we had like decades with it. Like HFS Plus is older than my children and one of them is going off to college. So we just don't have enough experience. So I don't know. And and then there's Drive Genius's bundled utility called Drive Pulse, which has been nothing for me other than a source of frustration and like boy who cried will false alarms. I'm sure it could tell me when a drive was about to die. But I would never know because it offers so many other alerts that turn out to be ignorable or incorrect, at least in terms of my feelings about where I want my system and how much free space I know I should be able to have and that sort of thing that there's no reason for me to even have it running because I don't look at those alerts. So there you go. I still like it because the thing I mean, the thing is it does offer things that you won't get easily on your Mac. It'll check the throughput of your drive, duplicates, large files, cloning, secure race, all sorts of things. OK, so you're talking about information on your system. You're talking about Drive Genius itself, not Drive Pulse. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It will do those things. And that those are handy, the handy tools to have around for sure. I don't disagree. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's good to have at least one utility beyond what Apple offers, whether it's Drive Genius or Disc Warrior. You know, there's there's a few others. Yeah. Out there that go beyond what Apple offers. I don't. Is that I like that? Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all. Yeah. Yeah. Or malware. So they have malware scan. You know, that's nice, the physical check of the drive. So, um, yeah. And I agree with you and, you know, I kind of feel bad because, you know, the thing is when I was getting some of these warnings, which I thought were bogus. I wrote and asked the email to ProSoft and then I took it back and said, you know, sorry, I was being a jerk. Sure. And that it's like, you guys, like you're not reporting the real error. And it's like, well, the thing is they're working with what they got, which is Apple doesn't offer. I mean, I even looked, dude. I mean, the thing is, so for some of their checks, they're running of FSCK, basically. And FSCK APFS, I think that's the name you run it from the canline. Yeah. Yeah. If it finds a problem, it says, oh, yeah, like in my case, when it reported my drive was about to die, it's like, oh, yeah, error 73 is an IO error, which is essentially useless. Right. Information. It's like, no, drive's working fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they were as frustrated as me. And, you know, I apologize and they apologize too. And they said, you know, we're, we're, we're all in the same boat here is that Apple is not off, is not very forthcoming with information about the internals of APFS at this point. Yeah. That's right. And to Apple's defense, Apple doesn't necessarily have all the information in a format that would be valuable to provide yet. Right. I mean, they, you know, they're well, I mean, you know, I've got to tell you, so for example, you know, I'm part of the developer program. I think you are too. And the thing is, I'm like, can I get some information on what these error codes within FSCK underscore APFS means? And there was no information that I could find. It's like, can I get the source for this? I'm, you know, I'm a developer or I claim to be, well, Apple doesn't provide the source for that stuff, John. No, but it's FSCK, dude. Why would you not provide the source for that? I don't know. Yeah, that's actually a good question. That's true. But actually, tell me what the error codes mean. Because, again, my humble opinion, Ioware is a useless error because it tells me nothing about what went wrong. Right. It tells you there's, yeah, there's an issue with the drive. You're getting data to and from the drive. Might be the drive. Yeah. But the fact that the drive still worked and I could read and write from it tells me that no, there really isn't an Ioware. Right. An Ioware to me is like the drive's not there or like, you know, violently crashed or whatever, but whatever. So, um, yeah, I as of late, I'm with you. I find drive pulse that the errors they generate, not that it's their fault or sometimes misleading. So, yep. Yep. I don't disagree, my friend. No, I don't disagree. So yeah, but I like your idea of making sure you have at least some utility from somebody other than Apple that might get you through or at least do different things. So yeah, and Drive Genius, you know, has worked well over the years. So, yeah, there you go. Oh, I got one thing to tell you. What's that? Feedback at MacGeekab.com. Yeah, you say that every week. It's feedback at MacGeekab.com, isn't it? You know, last I checked, Dave, you are absolutely correct. It's feedback at MacGeekab.com, unless unless. Unless you're a premium listener and then premium at MacGeekab.com is for you. You get you get top, top billing when your questions come in here. And that's as it should be. That's one of our ways of saying thanks to you. You can also call us. Go ahead, John. Well, no, I got to thank the people. So I requested I got several kitchen sinks, Dave. Yeah, last week I requested that everybody sends a nice. Now, shame on the person that sent me a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. Dude, what's up with that? But we got several clean sinks. We did things. I didn't mind that I like Kenny's, actually. Yeah, yeah, you did, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were good sinks. So, yeah, you can you can find us on Facebook. Like I said, many of the questions that I came from our Facebook group go to MacGeekab.com slash Facebook, that'll bring you right there. And and we would we would love to see you there until even after. But once we get our own solution, we'll obviously tell you that that's up and running and all that stuff, too. And you could get on the rap rod. Do you know what I'm even talking about? No, that's from. It's from Hikers Guide to the. Oh, OK. He's like, give me the give me the rap rod plate captain, which there you go. Means give me the phone waiter. Ah, two, two, four, eight, eight, eight geek is the the rap rod there, John. You want to tell us what geek means? Four, three, three, five. That's right. Don't panic. Is the is the is the advice for for calling on that line? I want to make sure we thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth from us to you. I want to thank all of our sponsors. Of course, ring at ring dot com slash MGG, the folks at Smile, TextExpander.com slash podcast, the folks at OtherworldComputing at MacSales.com, folks at Barebonessoftware, Barebones.com, Roboform, as we mentioned in the episode, coupon code MGG over there. Have a splendid week, folks. And and while don't panic is the advice when you call the phone number, don't get caught the advice every other time.