 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 690 for Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018. You thought I'd screw that up, didn't you? Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in tips, questions, and cool stuff found with the goal being... It's 2018, after all, that each of us learns five new things each and every time we get together. Yes, folks, we're leveling up for 2018. It's five, that's what we're going for. No, you're raising the bar. That's correct. It's pretty high. That's correct. Five? Five, man. It's five. Sponsors for this episode include Smile Software or smilesoftware.com slash podcast, where you'll learn about Smile's PDF pen for both Mac OS and iOS. We'll talk more about that here a little bit later. And also Eero, the whole house Wi-Fi that actually works. And we've got a coupon code for you and all kinds of things. We'll talk more about that later on in the show here in very cold Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in likewise, sub-freezing Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, John F. Braun, other than being cold? Well, just helping the gas company make money. That's right. That's the goal. My heat's been constantly, man. But then again, it's sub-freezing like single digits. It's not below zero Fahrenheit, but close. I think it's going to happen next couple of days. Yeah, it's about 11 here right now. But every morning when I've woken up, it's been well below zero Fahrenheit. I think today was pretty warm compared to the last week. It was only negative two, whereas the other day it was negative seven. Yeah, it's been cold. Hey, let's just jump right in. We'll warm things up by answering some questions and see what we can learn. We'll start with Bill, who says, I recently tried to use the markup feature in photos on my 9.7-inch iPad Pro, running the latest iOS 1121. However, when I try to save changes, I get a message in a pop-up that says unable to save changes and error occurred while saving, please try again later. Later seems to be never, as it doesn't work in the future as well. I've been able to successfully use the markup feature on the same photos on my iPhone 8 running iOS 1121 and on my Mac running high Sierra. While this may seem an adequate workaround, I desire to use my new Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro to make any markups. I have found that if I first crop or rotate an image on my iPad Pro, the markup feature will then be able to be saved. However, that's not really the workaround I'm looking for. Once an edit is made on any device, it is properly showing on all devices as I'm using iCloud Photo Library. So I'm going to ask the simple question first. And I know, I know, but did you restart your iPad? Because a lot of times that can solve these kinds of weird problems. And I also know, certainly from personal experience, that we generally tend not to think about restarting our iPhones or our iPads. It's, you know, they just, they sleep, they wake up, they're just always there. And so it could be weeks that we don't restart these things. So when you have a weird problem like this, try restarting your iPad. That said, let's assume that that doesn't work. I did a little digging and I found a Stack Overflow thread where a third party developer of a third party photo extension was saying that his photo extension was suffering from the same error. And the solution, and this is where it gets interesting, his solution was that turning iCloud Photo Library setting from optimizing storage on the phone, which only downloads thumbnails for everything and doesn't pull down full images unless it decides that it needs to, put an asterisk there and come back to it. He changed it from optimized to download all photos, which pulls down full copies of everything. And then it worked. So that gets interesting because iCloud Photo Library is on in Bill's case and he's not able to save a change. It makes me wonder if, for whatever reason, his iPad isn't pulling down the full copy of that photo when it goes to edit it. It should, when you go to view a photo, it should pull down the full copy at that point and not just the thumbnail. So it makes me, again, I sort of keep coming back to this, hey, let's restart the iPad and see if it resets whatever that cache is. And maybe that'll do it. I hate to, especially in this scenario, I hate to suggest sign out of iCloud, sign back into iCloud, because that can cause a whole re-sinking of that iCloud Photo Library. But that may, in fact, be what's necessary here. There might just be something a little bit confused. The another sort of indicator that this is exactly what's going on, although we don't know the one true fix, is when he says that if he crops or rotates a photo, then this works. It's like, okay, well, so now it's transitioned from being over there to on device, and now it's able to save to it. So I'm hoping a restart fixes it. Otherwise, again, troubleshooting iOS so very quickly comes down to turn, wipe it out and come back. Thankfully, with iCloud, we don't have to wipe out the whole thing. We don't have to do a restore from a backup, but you do sign out of iCloud and come back in. A lot of times that'll fix it. Any thoughts on that, John? We're going to go into more detail. It was a question that I researched a little while ago, and it had to do with the format of photos. The only reason I mentioned this, Dave, is that it regarded how you can access your photos on your iDevice with various things on the Mac. And one thing I found in brief was the setting that you had mentioned, which is changing the optimization, changed the behavior of the software on the Mac. So I just want to reinforce what I think you just said, is that sometimes you have to do that. No, I think you're talking about two different settings. I'm talking about the iCloud Photo Library setting, where you choose whether it's going to download everything from iCloud Photo Library or just thumbnails. Whereas I think you're talking about the format of the pictures that it shares. Optimized storage versus, okay, but it's a similar observation. Similarly named setting, completely different, though. They're two different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because one is in, the one I'm talking about is in settings. Then you go to your Apple ID, iCloud Photos, and then when you have iCloud Photo Library turned on, it's either optimized iPhone storage, which is what Bill has, or download and keep originals. I think the one you're talking about is in... Well, no, that's the setting that... We'll talk about it later. It's just interesting that changing that setting on the iOS device affected the behavior of other parts of the iCloud ecosphere, shall we say. That's what I found. Then let's dig into that, because I'm not sure... I mean, maybe it's helpful for Bill. So what did it change? Changing that on your phone from optimized phone storage to download and keep originals. What did that do? What it changed was image capture. Well, the thing is inadvertently, I had activated iCloud Photo Library on my device. So I'm going to go down with memory here, unless you want to bring up the question. But from memory here, so the problem was when I run image capture, I see the photos. It advertises the ability to download them in a certain format. And that's not what I want. And I'm like, well, yeah, that kind of sucks. And then I inadvertently had activated it on my phone at one point. So what I did is I deactivated it and then reactivated it. Deactivated iCloud Photo Library is the it here. And then redownloaded, but made the choice to do the... Rather than optimize storage, use the other choice. Yeah, okay. And I found that then when I ran image capture, it was like, oh, yeah, they're available in the new format. And it's like, well, that's weird. It wasn't really documented anywhere. They have an article that talks about it, but we should go into more detail. Yeah. On that question in a future episode, it's just the behavior is related, which is why I just thought it babble about it. No, that's interesting. When you said it was a different format, you're talking about it, you were just seeing the thumbnails in that folder that you can't touch with iCloud Photo, with image capture, right? Well, image capture with the old settings showed the photos as JPEGs, with the new settings that showed it as the new format. Oh, HEIF or whatever. Yes, the HEIC, I think, when it saves it to a file. I guess it's variation. Oh, right. That's kind of weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it just made me scratch my head as why is the Mac software behaving differently? And it's because, well, I think it's because I changed something on the iOS side. Yeah, it's not that the Mac software... Or the iCloud side. It's not that your Mac is behaving differently. It's that your Mac is seeing different data, is really what it is. Right. And it could be all based in iCloud, which was your suggestion too, though then the log out login thing is always makes me kind of jumpy because... Yeah, a lot of times that's the solution though. Well, it's traumatic though, because you get all these warnings when you do it. Totally. Totally. Because you think you're going to lose everything. Yeah. All right, let's... Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm curious if other folks have seen this. Yeah, it's interesting. And actually, you know what? Before we move on, I'm curious though, if you... Because you said it changed from JPEGs to HEIF. And that's where I thought you were going with this, which is why I said no, that's a different setting. Um, if you go in on your phone to Settings, Photos, I'll get this, yes. Down at the bottom, you have an option where it says Transfer to Mac or PC. It can either be Automatic or Keep Originals. Automatic will either expose them as JPEGs or HEIF, depending on what it thinks your Mac is capable of. Whereas Keep Originals will show whatever they were taken with, which in, you know, now with iOS 11 is HEIF. So which one do you have yours set to? Settings. Settings, photos go all the way to the bottom. Drum roll. I've got a drum maybe three feet too far from my hands to do this. Photos, all right. And you're saying at the bottom, Keep Originals. Okay, so that's interesting, right? So you're, it's going to force any device that sees them on your phone to see them as HEIF, like the format that they were taken in. Whereas if you set that to Automatic. So I think it's a, it's a combination of, yeah, I think it's a combination of that setting, which I never touched. It was just that way. And how you have iCloud Photo Library that has. Sure, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. And then you can also, Alex, in the chat room at mackeycup.com slash stream also points us to the other place where you can take a look at this, which is settings, camera, and image format, or formats, not, not image formats. And that's where you get to choose whether you're taking your pictures in this high efficiency format or JPEG more compatible format. Oh, duh. Look at that. Preserves a grid, scan QR codes, record a video slow-mo. Wow. Formats. Yeah. Formats is what he's talking about. But yeah, you're right. That this is, this, this setting, you know, is one of the things that solves a lot of headaches for people. So again, we're in settings camera on your, on your iPhone. And, and the first option there, preserve settings. This is one that, for people that don't like to take live photos, this is where you want to come in and set this live. I know it seems weird, but you're going to come into this preserve settings and set live photo to on, because that preserves whatever you have chosen as the live photos setting from session to session, as opposed to just turning it back to the default, which is on. So if you don't like live photos, come in here, and I know it's weird, settings, camera, preserve settings, turn that on and then, and then turn it off the next time you go take a picture and you're good to go. Wow. Yeah. The other thing in here, settings, camera, scan QR codes. I know we talked about it on the show, but if you turn this on, anytime your camera sees a QR code, it will put the contents of it on the clipboard and also in a notification so that you can do something with it. So there you go. Yeah. Some fun settings in there. I know. It's crazy. Just move a tangled web and I think learned at least three new things. We might have checked off all five, you know. Three to five, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we're done. We're done. All right, man. Thanks. Sure. Thanks, everyone. Happy New Year. Okay, now let's go to David. Let's see what he has to say. That was good. Well, I like that. David asks, he said, I got a new Synology for Christmas, but I'm going to stop right there. This is about movies, not about Synology. So even if you don't have a disk station, you might still want to listen to this question instead of hitting the skip thing to a new chapter. He says, I got a new, but if you don't care about movies, then you should skip for Christmas. And I've been working on moving all my media, photos, movies and music to the Synology rate. When trying to move all of my Apple purchased movies over, none of them are playable. He said, I suspected this would happen. He says, I do have Handbrake and VLC installed on my Mac. So I went about trying to remove the DRM protection from my movies, but they all say they start in Handbrake with no movement on past one of one 0.00%. At first, I thought maybe I was just being impatient. So I left one movie attempting to convert for over 24 hours with no progress at all. When I view the activity log, there are no signs of errors or anything else. He goes on to describe the rest of his setup. He says, am I missing something here, or is it that Handbrake and VLC are no longer able to remove DRM for me to use a different platform? So the answer is, I don't think Handbrake and VLC were ever able to remove this DRM. Together, they allow you to remove the DRM that's on a DVD. And so that's probably what you were thinking of, David. But they were never able to remove Apple's DRM. Which is fair play, or so they say, I think is the name of it, which involves some sort of encryption and some sort of key. And the thing is, unlike the other ripping software, I guess nobody knows the master key, or they're afraid that Apple's going to strike them down if they do that. If they share the master key. But yeah, I think it's fair to say that we don't know what Apple's master key is. But I have found a piece of software, and I wrote an article about it a couple of years ago called Note Burner. And there are others. But Note Burner is the one that I've used to do exactly this, where you can take the movies that you've purchased from Apple and strip the DRM from them. And then you can use them on your devices as you see fit. So obviously, with great power comes great responsibility. You don't want to do anything that's illegal, or at least I don't want to tell you to do anything that's illegal. I can't tell you what you're thinking. But yeah, Note Burner has worked well. They say that it's lossless conversion or DRM stripping. There's some question about that. The quality is pretty good. In fact, the quality is really good. But in terms of it truly being a lossless conversion, I'm not quite sure that that's correct. But it might be. Your mileage will vary. So we'll put a link to all of this in the show notes, including the article I wrote a couple of years ago about Note Burner. But it's still my only other thought is that you could do kind of a low tech analog or analog digital conversion. If you know where I'm going with this. Sure. Yeah. So if you have it in iTunes and you could play it on a screen somewhere, you could you could get some sort of screen capture. Sure. And in real time, you know, do a low tech rip of it is kind of the other. It's true. I could think of. You wouldn't get, I think the audio especially. I mean, the video would be limited by whatever capture engine you're using to do the video. And also what you're displaying to, right? Because if you're just displaying to a window on your computer, then that's going to be the size of the movie you get. If you display to your full display, well, then it's limited by the size of your full display. So if you don't have a 4K display on your computer, then you're not going to capture 4K output. So just bear that in mind. And I think audio is going to be massively down sampled for that. But it could work, especially if your goal is to just get it to be something that you could watch on your phone or whatever. So yeah. Interesting. All right. And then moving on to Brian who describes an odd issue. He says, since I updated my iPhone SE to iOS 1121, I cannot connect to any Wi-Fi network except my own home. I updated my iPad at the same time and I'm having no trouble at all. I have tried to connect the iPhone at the homes of friends and family and it simply will not connect. I select the Wi-Fi network. I enter the password. I get a blue check mark next to the network in settings. The Wi-Fi symbol shows very briefly at the top of the screen and then disappears. The blue check mark remains and selecting info shows the phone has received an IP address. But there is no connection. I restarted the phone. I've reset network settings. He says, and I've turned off Wi-Fi in location services. But to repeat, I can connect to my home Wi-Fi with no problems, just not anything else. So that's interesting because the first thing I was thinking as I sort of began pondering this question, John, was, yeah, settings, general, reset network settings. That wipes out everything in terms of the networks and can be really helpful to kind of rewind back to the beginning of our photos question, our epic photos question, I should say. We lamented the fact that there are lots of places in iOS that you just can't go to reset things, even though it's very simple. Well, reset network settings is one of those places where you can go. That can be very handy, but it sounds like he's tried that. So he asks, is my only option to wipe the phone and start over? Um, maybe, but, you know, if you have a mobile device management or remote management profile installed on your phone, that can restrict you as to which Wi-Fi networks you're allowed to connect to. So it's possible that you've got some profile on there, potentially that's run amok, and that might be the thing limiting you here because it sounds like your phone is actively successfully connecting to these networks and then deciding, whoa, nope, can't talk to that one and sort of detaching. So if you go to settings, general profiles on your phone, take a look there and see if you've got a profile from something that might be, you know, mobile device management service, maybe something you played with and installed, like a Jamf or a Meraki or something like that. And you should be able to remove it from there. You probably have to restart your phone after you do. And if so, maybe that'll, that'll wipe it out. That's my thought, John. I don't know if you have any thoughts. Another thought is that it could be an issue with iCloud Keychain slash storing of your Wi-Fi profiles. And actually, it just warms my heart, Dave. I'm looking right now on my Mac mini. And so I went to settings, network, my Wi-Fi, which is currently not on, but then I click on advanced. And in the Wi-Fi tab, Dave, you know what I see? That's a warm your heart. I see SFO free Wi-Fi. I haven't connected to that in like at least, why is that even there? So what am I suggesting people? And I see some other things here. These are access points I haven't connected to in years. Oh my, what, where did this garbage come from? Well, you can have it to them at some point and it saves it and syncs it amongst all your devices. What I'm thinking, syncing, is that you may want to look at that list and you may have weird things in there that are affecting the ability of your device to connect to Wi-Fi. I'm looking right now. And the thing is I haven't used Wi-Fi. I typically, this Mac mini is wired, but still it's coming up with stuff in this window, which doesn't make any sense to me. So just another thought, if you have weird Wi-Fi behavior. Yeah, for sure. See what the shared access points among your iCloud account say. Yep. It's been me. Yep. It's been you, Logan, right? Oh, dude. Remember, Logan? Oh, never forget, man. Uh, yeah. I think I've gotten it sorted out, though. I guess I'll find out, because I think I'm flying out of Logan to go, too. Well, you suspected iOS 11 fixed that. Yeah, it did. I think I was able to remedy it prior to that, but you're right. iOS 11, we're talking about, I couldn't get the Boston Logan Wi-Fi out of my syncing iCloud key chain. And I would delete it from a device and it would come back from another device. And I think finally I got it. But, yeah, with iOS 11, it's great. Like, it's so great, in fact, because what you can do with iOS 11 is per device, you can tell a device, don't auto-join this network. You don't tell it to forget it. So it still knows, it still syncs your credentials around to all your other devices with iCloud key chain. But on a per device basis, you can tell it whether or not to auto-join. You can still manually join. It's great, but once you leave the network, it won't automatically go back. And actually, I used that this past week to these theater shows, right? Go play the drums, right? And I use, I'm spoiled now, I use two iPads. I use the iPad Pro 10 inch, 10 and a half inch, sorry, to read my music. And then everything is on in ears now there. And to the point where a lot of the band isn't really even playing anything allowed on stage. It's, I mean, it's all coming out of the house. But in order for me to hear the band and the cast and everything, because I'm usually in behind a drum shield, I'm on in ears. And so I have another second iPad that I use to mix the levels of all the various things in my ears. I just run an app that wirelessly connects to the mixer. Well, the iPad that connects to the mixer needs to connect to a different Wi-Fi network than sort of the public Wi-Fi network at the theater. And it used to drive me crazy because I don't want my phone connected to the network where the mixer is because it's air-gapped. It's not connected to the internet, which is good. You don't want that one on the internet because you don't want all the extra traffic. But now it's great because I can set each iPad like I tell the one I use for the mixer, don't connect that to the main Wi-Fi network and then on the other ones and on my phone, I can say don't connect that to the mixer network and it's brilliant. So, yeah, it makes a lot of good things. It's good. Alex has a solution for this. He said there should be a hide unused connections three months or older setting in the... Right? Wouldn't that be good? Like, if you haven't used this in a while, hide it. Purge. Well, see, I don't know that you want to purge because if I come back to somewhere that I forget. Well, again, I don't want it to forget because if I come back to somewhere that I have been, you know, that I wasn't... Let's say it's been a year. If I come back and the Wi-Fi password's the same there, I want my phone to connect. I don't want to have to go and dig, like find out from the restaurant or whatever. Like, what's the name of, you know, what's your Wi-Fi password and all that? I just wanted to remember. De-prioritize. De-prior... That's what you need. Yes, de-prioritize. You used to be able to do... I don't think you can do that in that window anymore. Can you? Can you still move things around? You can still move things around on the Mac, not on the iPhone, but on the Mac. You can set a priority. Yeah, yeah. Hey, while we're talking about Wi-Fi, I want to talk about our first sponsor, which is Eero. But I'm going to tell you, yes, this is a sponsor spot, but I've got a story to tell about something else. So we'll do most of the sponsor stuff and then I'm going to talk about what I've done. So Eero is the home Wi-Fi solution that uses a mesh, meaning you're using multiple devices from Eero to create a blanket of Wi-Fi throughout your home. And it truly works. Both John and I use it. And it's stellar because you just set these things up. They can... If you happen to have Ethernet in your walls, they'll all connect up and that works. But if you don't have Ethernet or if you have a mix and you need more Wi-Fi somewhere where there's not Ethernet, which is sort of more often the case than not, the mesh builds itself both wirelessly and wired. It automatically just figures out how to get connection to all of the Eero points, the mesh points, and then you're good to go. And now they've got lots of different options. Now that they've come out with their second generation of hardware, the second gen Eero now actually has three Wi-Fi radios in it. It's got two 5 GHz radios, as well as one 2.4 GHz radio. And it'll use all of those or a mix of those to do both front hall, meaning talking to your devices and also back hall, to connect to each other. And now in addition to that, they also rolled out something called the Eero Beacon, which plugs right into an electrical outlet and will connect wirelessly to whatever you want. But it's really great because you can just sort of tuck it out of the way and it's got a nice little nightlight in it that you can have turn on when it's dark. If you want, you can control that. It's actually, the nightlight's pretty cool. And it's just fantastic because single routers generally don't work for most homes these days. Not only is it about coverage, and a lot of times you'll have dead spots, but it's about bandwidth. 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And again, that's for folks in the US and Canada. Now, John, I had an interesting experience. It turns out that 2017 was the year of learning lessons over and over again. And I've talked about some of this. Like I've just done some things that I should have known. Like we talked about spanning tree protocol, right? Well, I had to learn that lesson again. I also had to learn the lesson about using a UPS, battery backup. So I changed things with my network all the time. And that makes troubleshooting somewhat difficult. But I had this issue where my Eero in the living room would... The light would turn red on it, which means that it wasn't getting a connection to the rest of the network. And it would happen every... It was probably twice a week that this was happening. And I would reset the power on my Mocha adapters because I was using... Effectively, as far as the Eero was concerned, I was using Ethernet backhaul. But really, I was using Mocha backhaul, so Ethernet over coax to sort of string things throughout the house. And again, it worked great. And then suddenly it stopped working, right? It would do this. I would recycle the power on these Mocha adapters and everything would work fine. And it happened again and I'm like, man, okay, this is crazy. And I was right there when it happened at one point. So I went up to the bedroom where the other Mocha adapter was the ones in the living room where it was having the problem and one in the bedroom. And I went up to the bedroom and I saw my switch. I have an Ethernet switch up there. I saw it restarting. I was like, oh, wait a minute. There's a UPS here, like nothing... Okay, at least now I know what the cause of this problem is. It's that the power... Because we get power flickers every now and then. You don't really notice them, but electronics notice them. And so I looked and I realized that during our last power outage, I think the UPS up there in the bedroom had just flaked out and wouldn't come back online. So I just unplugged it and plugged everything back in, thinking, all right, I'll replace the battery or I'll get a new UPS or whatever. But things were sort of like mayhem in that moment as everything's coming back online after a couple of days of power outage or a day, whatever we had the last time. And I totally forgot about it. And of course, I had to learn the lesson again. Having these UPSs is really important because it keeps your electronics from getting freaked out. And what happened was the one in the bedroom, the Eero unit in the bedroom, would not come back online. And I was like, oh, man, that sucks. Like I fried it, which can happen when you have like these quick little brownouts or whatever. Well, I went online and looked at the Eero settings. This is on New Year's Eve, right? Like the afternoon of New Year's Eve. And I'm like, I know it's like a Sunday or whatever. They're not going to be in the office. Maybe they were. But I went and dug around in the website. And it was like, okay, I figured out how to factory reset this thing. So that's what I did. And sure enough, it came back online. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. But of course, I had to reconfigure it. As soon as my Eero app paired up with the thing, like I was going to have to go through the process and reattach it to my network. It said, oh, hey, by the way, this Eero is already connected. Like, you know, an Eero with this serial number is already part of your network. Do you want me to just like put it back and reconfigure it the way it was before? It's like, yeah. It was really awesome the way and now it just works. So the power flicker didn't damage it permanently. It just, you know, corrupted some software in there or whatever. So on New Year's Eve, I ordered a new UPS for the bedroom and it actually arrived about an hour ago. And so I plugged it in. And now it's up and running and that problem should be gone. So there you go. You know, it's craziness, John. Craziness. It is. I had something similar recently, my aging Drobo FS. Yeah, we had a glitch. I just want to say, as we're doing this, because I'm not sure if I actually ended the Eero sponsor spot. So one more. No, it's okay. I think I did. But one more time, it's Eero.com and for free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada at checkout, select overnight shipping, and then use the coupon code MGG to make that free. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. All right, go ahead, John. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. Now, all I'll say is that I had a similar. So one of those, you know, it's not a blackout or a brownout. It's just kind of a glitch where let's go out and come on. Sure. And the Drobo, every now and then, at least the one that I have, the older one, which I'm still very happy with, it was kind of in a state of, huh, in that I couldn't see it on the network, the lights were on as if it was operating. But when I tried to power it down, it didn't power down using the switch on it, which is like, okay, you're confused. So let's just disconnect power and then start you up again. And sure, it was fine. But it got into a weird state where I think it lost power and then got it back and it was just, they couldn't deal with the variation. And it's just like, okay, I'm just going to wedge and do nothing. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny though. I have, like you, various, some devices, they're dead. Some flash the clock saying, okay, something terrible happened and, you know, fix me. Right. And some just, some just are dead to the world. So yeah. And with this, it was interesting because with the, this was an ERO Gen 2 unit. So it's the one that kind of, you know, looks like a, it's about the size of an Apple TV or whatever. And it has a light on it to show you the status. But because it's in the bedroom, I've gone into the settings and told it, turn the light off. So the light never came on. And normally the light comes on while it boots up. And then it's like, oh, my light's supposed to be off. So I turned it off. The light never came on. And that's what made me think, oh man, this thing's fried. Okay. I've only seen the red light twice. And yeah, times. It's been because my ISP. Right. Something dumb. Right. Right. But this was not, there wasn't, this was no light. Like the one in the living room would do red light because it wasn't connected. But the one in the bedroom, there's just no light whatsoever, even if I pulled power. So that's when I thought, oh man, this thing's fried. But yeah. So ERO, we love you. Yeah, it worked great. It was really impressed. Really impressed. All right. You want to take us to Brother J there, John? Brother J, I'm going to try. I'm going to try to condense this a bit here. I'm going to start here, Dave. So Brother J says, seemingly randomly, Mac OS refuses to properly launch some programs. Transmission and back in time are the two which come to mind. I copy them from their images to the app folder, applications folder, and launch them. But nothing happens. I know part of their code runs because focus switches from Pathfinder or Finder, thus I must switch back. And he also notes that there's some bugs in Pathfinder. But he says, additionally, invocation of the Force Quit panel via command, you know, the magic incitation there shows that the offending program shows the offending program. Okay. And that's normal behavior. Is that if we see something in the dock and it's stuck and you click on it, I guess. Well, no, he's talking about hitting Command Option Escape and then seeing it in the list saying unresponsive. Command, Command Option Escape. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I thought it was different. No, you're right. And that's our sixth tip. Command Option Escape shows a list of apps running and if they're wedged, typically it'll show them in red and put them in print saying, you know, this app is being bad. Yeah, unresponsive. So Force Quit. So, and then he says that, you know, the troublesome apps, he also hears voiceover, speak them. So I gather Brother Jay here has a visual impairment there. Yeah. So he needs some tools to help him out with that so that that introduces an interesting layer here. But so he tried a few things with these cantankerous apps that wouldn't launch. He did some sort of quarantine thing, which kind of makes me nervous, Dave. I'm not sure about you. But apparently there's a thing you can run from the terminal that will un-quarantine apps. I don't know. What do you think? I've never seen that solve this particular problem. Okay. I personally would have never done a quarantine type of operation using X-A-T-T-R and then some incantations. So I guess the intent there was to reverse quarantine apps or maybe try to fix them. And I guess this is what this did. He then ran some utilities, our favorites here, Onyx, Cocktail, Tinker Tool, to clear out caches and another cruft. But it still doesn't work, Dave. So I'm sad. So he says he's baffled. Yeah, and for anybody listening along, in case that wasn't entirely clear, what's happening is he launches an app. It appears to launch, but it never actually becomes responsive. It doesn't get Windows, nothing happens. And I've seen this kind of thing before, John. But go ahead. I'll let you take it to the nerd. No, you're right. Yeah. But yeah, so it gets stuck. So it's in this quasi... Yeah, I don't know what to call it. But anyways, it's not doing what you want, which is running the app. It gets stuck. So I'm going to call this a launch issue or an app launch failure is how I titled the thing, Dave. And there are a few things I could think about here. One is that there are some specific... Although he said he ran everything, I just wanted to make sure. When you're talking about launching apps here, Dave, there are a couple of important portions of Mac OS that you may want to tweak or clear or mess with. One, Dave, that we talked about, so Onyx does have a specific setting. So one tab in it is called rebuilding. And there are a couple of things you can rebuild, Dave. One is called Launch Services, our friend. Launch Services, well, what does that do? Well, that's kind of the database that handles all of the mystery of launching an app. So clearing that out may do it. And then there's another thing called DYLD, which I think is dynamic loader or DYLD shared cache. That's another thing that has to do with launching applications. And if the dynamic loader, which is something that loads little pieces of software from other parts of the OS to make your app happy, doesn't work, that's another one. So I want to make sure he explicitly had done that. The second thing I could suggest, Dave, is that a safe boot always... Well, sometimes it can't make matters worse, or at least I haven't had to do that. But a safe boot also clears out some cruft. And a safe boot on the Mac right now, you hold down shift, when you boot, and it'll probably at some point in red letters, last I checked, it'll say safe boot to let you know that's happening. But that also clears up... Could clear up some issues. We've had many people report that. And then finally, they're throws in... Kind of thrown in the towel, Dave, but I've done it. I think you've done it. You go to Mac OS Recovery, which I believe is a command R, you boot, and you say reinstall the OS, then we'll be a part of the OS that is just so messed up or damaged that reapplying it will fix the problem. And it has... In desperation, Dave, I admit I have done that. Yeah, for sure. It can't make matters worse. Well, it could. I mean, you should have a backup before you do things like that. Okay. So those were... I don't know if you have any other thoughts on this, but it's a... But you said you had the problem. So I'm curious if you have any more detail. Yeah, I've seen it before with... For some reason, it happens a lot with iTunes for me, where I get this exact symptom where I click to launch it. I can tell that it's trying to launch based on... You look in Activity Monitor... It bounces. It bounces, right? Yeah, it responds like, I got you. I know what you just asked for, and then it never quite gets there. And oftentimes it's because there's a zombie process of iTunes already running, and it can't start the new one. But in those cases, a reboot totally solves it. So it's possible that's what's happening with Brother Jay here. And of course, if you're listening and you have this happen, oftentimes a reboot is really the only thing. I mean, I've spent a lot of my life chasing zombie processes on Unix. Sometimes the same kind of thing will happen on a web server or whatever. There'll be zombie apaches, and you'll try to... Apache being one of the engines that serves websites. And you'll try to kill it, or you do a kill all, or a kill-kill in all caps, which is like a kill-9. Sometimes you just can't get these zombie processes to go away. You just have to wait until you can reboot the server. Well, on your Mac, you probably have to wait less. And oftentimes that solves this problem. So I don't think that's exactly what Brother Jay has experienced here, because I think he has rebooted and still sees this even after a fresh reboot. But that's certainly... If you're seeing this at home, like those zombie processes, and you'll see them in Activity Monitor, it'll be like in my case, it's iTunes, but it's in parentheses. Yeah, I know it's supposed to be dead, and it's dying, but you can't quite, like, jettison me yet is basically what that's saying. But it could also be, like you said, a permissions thing. Brother Jay started heading down that path in kind of an advanced way with the extended attributes command, the XATTR command, where he was sort of messing with some of those, one of them being the quarantine thing. So I don't know. I don't know what the magic answer is. Are you still with me, John? I kind of get the feeling I'm alone here. I'm going to pause this because I think my internet connection just kind of flaked out a little bit. Is that going to do it? Am I... I believe we're recording and we are back, right? You're with me, John, yes? Yes, sir. Okay, so this was interesting. I think we're done with the app launch failure thing, but I think, honestly, it's been about 10 minutes here, but go ahead, was there something you wanted to wrap that up with, John? No, I think we're at the point where I was saying, okay, clearing cashers is good, clearing the launch services and DYLD is good, and I guess what was the last one there? You know, yeah, Safeboot, things that clear things up or OS reinstall. And I was wondering if you had any additional 10 certain bits there when apps don't launch. I actually think you probably... Again, I'm missing the timestamp here. Maybe you got through all your... I think we did. Sorry folks. No, so this was... What just happened here is interesting, and I think it's a problem that I caused right before we jumped over to do the show, because I said that I put the new UPS in place. Well, I also put a switch in place over at the house. I replaced... I had an old router in the bedroom that was turned into dumb mode, and literally I was just using it as a switch, nothing more. So I replaced it with a, you know, just an eight-port D-Link switch or whatever that I had, because why not? Well, whatever I did caused a loop in the network over at the house, and the way I finally solved it here in the office was by disconnecting the house from the network that way. And then as soon as I unplugged the cable that runs between the office and the house, everything in the office came back up. But prior to that, nothing would happen. So it was definitely a network looping thing. I'm not entirely sure how I created that, but I definitely created it. I think... I don't know what it is. I don't even want to speculate, but... We are here, so we're going to finish the show, and then I get to go troubleshoot a network issue. To explain to the studio audience, Dave, what is a network loop problem? What condition existed for this network loop issue to... That's a question I don't have the answer to, because I haven't diagnosed it yet. But what's a network loop? A network loop is when you have two different ways of getting a signal between two devices, right? So I have my computer in the studio and my computer in the office, right? There should only be one way that those two are going to connect over Ethernet. And a router figures that out, maybe? No, a switch figures that out, right? First switch, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wouldn't plug the same device into two different switches, right? You'd have to really work hard to create a network loop, and evidently, I did. But if you have multiple network segments and somehow they loop back upon each other, what will happen is all of your packets will be sent on both segments of the loop and then things start to cascade and cause trouble. So evidently, I have a loop over at the house. It might be this new switch that I put into place over there and maybe when I was plugging things into it, I wasn't being entirely thoughtful about what I was plugging in and it's possible I grabbed a cable I shouldn't have grabbed and just plugged it in. So now my family is over there wondering why they have no internet. But is it the two pieces of network equipment on the network are trying to do the same thing? Is that? No, it's that I literally have a loop connecting pieces together. When two devices are connected, it should just be an end-to-end thing, right? A network should be a star configuration and you should never have the star come back on itself. And evidently, I have the star coming back on itself somehow. Now, it could be two ethernet segments being joined in two places, right? Ethernet segments should only be joined in one place. But it could be that two are being joined or it could be that I have two devices connected both via Ethernet and via Wi-Fi as the same device and looping traffic. Like you could connect your Mac via Wi-Fi and via Ethernet to your router, but your Mac isn't going to try and bridge those two connections together. It's going to treat them separately. As long as they're treated separately, it's fine. As soon as you have a device that says, no, I'll bridge them. I'll bridge the Wi-Fi and the Ethernet. Now you have a problem and it's possible that's what I've got going on it, that I've got multiple devices bridging these things. So, there you go. So, we look forward to your detail. Yeah, yeah, I may never know the true answer to this. I've solved this particular problem once before and I'm not entirely sure, but we'll see. It could just, I don't know. We'll figure it out. Hey, let's talk about Mike because Mike's got something interesting going on too. Mike wrote us. He says, I usually have about four or five external hard drives plugged into my iMac. Two of them are four terabyte Western Digitals and have their own power supplies. And the others are either two or four terabyte Seagates using USB power without separate power supplies. Those are plugged into two different anchor USB hubs. He says, my question is that every time I wake up my iMac, I get a notification that says USB accessories disabled, unplug the accessories using too much power to re-enable USB devices. He says, I'm not having any problems that I'm aware of that all the drives stay mounted and they seem to work just fine in terms of accessing files and using carbon copy cloner and all of that. Is this anything I should worry about? So that's a good question. The first thing I would check is to make sure that your anchor hubs are actually being powered. And it would be worth checking the specs on them to see if they provide USB power. Most powered hubs do, but I've seen hubs that provide power for the hubbing of the USB but not actually providing power back to the devices. An easy way to check it is to plug your iPhone in to one of those ports and see if it starts charging. An indicator that the hub is going to charge things. When I say that, without your computer being connected. So don't have your computer connected to the hub. Just plug the hub into the wall, plug your iPhone into the hub. It should start charging. If it does, the hub's providing some level of power over USB. At least one amp. Correct. Correct. Right. It's right. Yeah. So. At five volts. Right. USB is five volts. That's right. So I would test that just to make sure that these hubs are providing the power that you think that they're providing. Another way to do it would be to plug your hard drive into them and see if the drive powers up. Again, without the computer being connected. It may not fully spin up without the computer being connected. But the drive itself should show some indication that it's being powered. So that's one thing. It's just make sure that these hubs are doing what you think they're doing. Assuming that they are, then the next thing to check, or even if they're not, the next thing to check is in system profiler on your Mac. And you can get there by, you can find it in the applications utilities folder, or you can go to about this Mac and choose system report. Look in the USB section there. So along the left, you'll find USB about halfway down. And as you click on each specific device in the USB device tree, which appears on the right, you'll see two entries among the many. There may be, I don't know, 10 entries there, 10 lines. And they'll each have current available and current required. What you're looking for is to see if something has less current available than is required. John, you've told the story many times on this show where in the past you found some devices misadvertising the current that they required. And well, no. And then why? Well, that's why. And that's what OS X or Mac OS is going by here. So if it sees that a device needs more power than it's able to get, it's going to pop up exactly the message that you got. But it could be more than that. So it's worth digging in and making sure that you've actually got power going to these devices where you think you do. Because if your Mac is trying to power these, you might wind up having trouble. And in fact, it might not be the drives that are spitting out or that are generating this error message. It might be a mouse that you have connected, maybe something you don't use regularly or something else. So look at each device and see if you have more current required than available on any one of them. And then try and diagnose from there. That's what I got. No, I'm with you. The only thing I'll add, I may have hinted at in the past here, but the current available and current required settings, based on the USB work that I've done, Dave, are hard-coded in the firmware, typically, of the USB device. The thing is, it can lie. It's not verifying that value. It's trusting that the device is telling the truth. And the device can lie, Dave. It could be a cheap knockoff. It could be poorly engineered. It could be advertising of capacity that is, which sounds to me like, so it could either be the firmware, maybe in the hub, though I don't know what the hub would limit you, or one of your devices is not quite accurate. Yeah, it could be the hub. I mean, the hub is going to have those same lines. You should take a look at those too and just make sure. So maybe, actually, I would suggest pull the hub out of the equation. It sounds like he was saying that he has two drives plugged into two USB hubs. So skip the hub, go to report. The other thing consider is that the USB in some Macs, especially laptops, gets kind of weird in that you would think that all the USB ports are on the same bus, especially for the older models. That's not necessarily the case. So depending on what port, what USB port you plug it into. So to your suggestion, Dave, the thing is to get the low down on whatever Mac you're running sees via USB. You go to system info, hardware, USB, and it'll show you the various hubs. Your machine may have more than one hub, and some of them may be limited on how the power they can provide. So it could be valid or it could be, yeah, so more detective work. We look forward to your report. For sure. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, very cool. I want to talk about our second sponsor, John, which is Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, where you'll learn about their PDF pen product line. PDF pen, they call it the ultimate tool for editing PDFs and going paperless. I couldn't agree more. Even as the PDF features of both Mac OS and iOS have become more and more robust, I still find use many times a week with PDF pen. If it's adding my signature or just adding like the right date line to a PDF, it's so flexible and so powerful. I can do way more with this way faster than I can with any other tool that I've tried to use to do the job. You can split and combine PDFs to send just the right things out. It's the end of the year, right? Which means you've got all of your year-end stuff to send out to your accountants and your lawyers and all that stuff. Well, a lot of times these things are spread across multiple PDFs. I do this every year where I need to send a bunch of documents to my accountant so that he can go through and kind of crunch everything. Well, instead of sending him one thing that says, look at page six of PDF A and pages seven through 10 of PDF C and page one and two of PDF B, well, I can take PDF pen and move all those pages around so that they're in one PDF together. And then I can go into pages and type up a little note explaining what it is he's about to see. And I can make that the first page of this multi-page PDF. And I can use PDF pen to pull it all together. I can even add fill-in forms. You can make them interactive if you want or not. You can add page numbers. You can redact things. So maybe your accountant doesn't need to see your bank account number, right? I mean, not that you don't trust your accountant, but maybe you just don't want that information out there. And it's on a need-to-know basis and your accountant doesn't need to know. So you cross that off. You redact it out. It's gone. If you've got documents that you've scanned, you can perform OCR, optical character recognition on them. You can then find and highlight all instances of a specific term. PDF pen is super powerful. And you can do all kinds of things with it. So I'm going to implore you to go to smilesoftware.com. It's a request, but I really think it's going to be a great thing. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast where they've got links to all of their great PDF pen stuff. Our sincere thanks to Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Well, this has been an interesting episode. We're not finished yet. We've actually got... Oh, no, no. We've got David and... We've got... Yeah, okay. We can do David and then we'll jump to our tips. David has a question about managing his devices because he says, I've tried some searches and can't seem to figure out how to remove the second Apple Watch that's appearing in System Preferences, Security and Privacy. He's got his Apple Watch set. That's where you go. If you're on your Mac, you go to System Preferences, Security and Privacy. In the General tab, if you have an Apple Watch, you will have a checkbox there that says allow Apple Watch to unlock your Mac. If you have multiple Apple Watches, which you might, we've actually got several listeners who have sent in questions that indicate you do have multiple Apple Watches, or if you had to replace one, you'll see multiple checkboxes there for different Apple Watches. David says, I recently broke the glass on my watch face and had to send it in for repair. When I got it back, now I have two watches that appear and I can't seem to figure out how to remove the old one. So this is interesting because these are just like, this looks like a pre-built form on this page like any other preference pane does, right? It doesn't look like, you don't have the option to say remove this. So the question is, where is it pulling this from? And my guess is that it's pulling it from iCloud. So on that same Mac, go to System Preferences, iCloud, Account Details, and then when that comes up, click Devices. You'll see all the devices that are signed into your iCloud account and your Apple Watch, or in David's case, Watches will be listed there and you can remove them. I would only remove the one that you don't have anymore, but my guess is, when you remove it from there, that's when it's going to disappear from this security and privacy pane. And David actually had a follow-up to that. He said, well, if I remove my watch from there, will it remove all the health data from iCloud that that watch populated? And I don't see any reason why that would be the case. Yes, now with iOS 11, health data is synced via iCloud. That's handy if you've got multiple iPhones that are pulling in data, but removing a device that's been contributing health data isn't going to remove that device's health data. It is your health data and it's all right there. But if you want, shoot a backup of your phone first because it's all stored on your phone as well and then that way you're sure to make sure. Just when you do that backup, make sure it's encrypted, either iCloud, which is always encrypted, or in iTunes, check the box to do a password protected backup that'll encrypt it and that'll include all your health data. Any thoughts on that, John? Now, you were suggesting the iCloud web page path to most definitely not and to pour your devices. No, I said system preferences, iCloud account details. I'm sorry, no. Okay, but on the Mac. On the Mac, correct. All right, the only thing I wanted to add is that I have in the past observed odd behavior on my iOS device and in that case you go to settings, then you'll see your iCloud account that should be logged in and you'll see the devices and Dave in the past, especially when I've transitioned from one device to another. Sometimes I've seen superfluous, right? Superfluous devices in that list and sometimes that's another place where these things may hide. Oh, totally. Well, it should be the same list, right? They should be. Absolutely. No, I agree with you. But I've had cases where things that appeared in the iOS settings Apple or Apple ID slash iCloud list didn't show up somewhere else. It was like, well, that's kind of weird. It's like, well, let's get rid of it. And the problem has been, yes. It's like, you'll see two of the same device and it's like, dude. Yeah, yeah, got to get it out. That's right. But I'm with you. Sometimes the data just lingers and that's not good. Just lingers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I thought we had another question that was similar to that. Oh, load of, oh. We have, yeah, we have all these tips, but so we will jump to our tips and get there. Bob, and actually many of you wrote in with various things. We talked about the transporter from Connected Data recently. And I mentioned how I tried to mount the drive from a transporter on my Mac and failed, leading to the assumption that it was a, you know, an encrypted drive or something like that. Well, turns out, no, I was wrong. It's not an encrypted drive. I just needed the very latest update to Mac OS Fuse or Fuse OS X or whatever it is. There's a piece of software called Fuse, F-U-S-E, that allows you to mount drives with other formats on your Mac. And it's what transporter uses. However, there was some issue with the version of Fuse that I had. Because it hadn't been updated for the way transporter needed it to be updated for High Sierra. And so the Perfect Storm presented itself, and I couldn't mount the drive. There is now an update to Fuse that works with High Sierra and Transporter Drive. So you should be able to mount the drive from a transporter on your Mac. And we've had several of you write in and talk about doing exactly that. Listener Bob even pointed out that he wasn't able to see his transporter library at all until he did this, and then it worked just fine. So there's a support article at Nexsan, which is the company that now owns the transporter product line, although they're killing it off. But it's there and they have a link to downloading OS X Fuse 3.7.1, which is the latest. And that should hopefully solve this for everybody. So thank you to everyone who wrote in about that really, really handy and very glad to hear that. That's going to be helpful for a lot of people. Any thoughts to add to that, John, before we move on to the next steps? I'm looking at my machine here, dude. I got Fuse 3.7.1 on both my Macs here. Good. So it's a good general purpose. I think Transporter was one of the companies that embraced it and that they used it as a part of it. And it's not a bad thing to have installed. If anything, it lets you see different file systems. Yeah, right, right. Cool. All right. Listener Jeff has a good tip for us. He says he had a failing high Sierra install happening that he said he was able to fix it. And the good news, he says, here's what he did. He booted from his carbon copy clone backup drive and remembered how painful it is booting from a spinning hard drive. Yes. Especially one that doesn't have any caches built on it that need to be built on boot up. Your clones will always have to build their caches the first time you boot from them. And spinning hard drives are terribly slow. Molasses. Yeah. He then formatted his internal SSD with APFS, redownloaded the installer again from the app store. I think that's the key right there, getting the fresh installer, ran the install, but selected show all disks and installed it on the internal. And then it did its thing this time without the firmware update failure. He says, well, and behold, I rebooted off the internal drive to a brand new fresh install. What a drama, but all is good now. So this is good. Yes. Yes. So thank you for sharing that, Jeff. And let's see. Moving on to listener Dave, who wanted to follow up about Expand Drive. He said, I put Expand Drive through a bunch of paces with Amazon S3. He says, and the bottom line is I like it. We talked about Expand Drive in a previous episode, and he was going to dig into it for us, which he did. He said, I didn't try it with any other cloud service. So your mileage may vary with those. But he said, Expand Drive currently supports S3, and it works great for him. He says, there were a few bumps in the road, mainly due to latency and other timing issues with S3. He says, a file or folder might be created on S3, but might not be immediately readable. So as it was putting files up there, it would create a folder and couldn't quite put it in there. But he said, Expand Drive just sort of retried and dealt with it. And he said, it worked quite well. So he said, what I also liked about Expand Drive is that it is simple to mount a cloud storage directory as a read-only drive, just a checkbox in the config. He says, mounting read only gives one great piece of mind when using cloud storage for archival purposes. A read-only drive prevents inadvertent finger fumbles from wiping out your archive, which is, of course, backed up somewhere else, but still. So thanks for that follow-up, Dave. That's great. I like the idea of mounting, say, Dropbox as a read-only device. Like, there's some benefit there. I like that. It's pretty good. At the right time, sure. At the right time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I like the fumble fingers. I mean, we've all fumbled fingered. Yeah, that's the problem. Whoops, I deleted everything. Whoops. Exactly. Yeah. We had an interesting Facebook discussion that I'll link to. Where Allison from Podfeat, from the New Silicast, she was having an issue, I think it was her mother who was having an issue getting to her bank's website and either logging in or seeing her accounts list or something. And Allison said, I tried it on my computer. It worked fine. I had my mother try it in other browsers, not just Safari. Didn't work there either. So we were going back and forth and back and forth. And finally, I think it was listener Graham who said, hey, what size browser window is she using? And that headed us down a path that solved the problem. What does that have to do with anything? Well, a lot of websites these days, most, in fact, are built to use what's called responsive web design. Well, the client says, well, it asks you if you're an iPhone or a... Yeah, I think the thing is... It doesn't ask. That's not how it's done. Or you tell. You don't tell. That what responsive web design is, is it looks at... It sends you all the code to your browser. And your browser draws it depending on the width of your browser. And there are assumptions made in the code saying, okay, if the browser is narrower than X, then let's draw the mobile version of the site as opposed to the desktop version. And you can see this. In fact, if you go and load macobserver.com in a new window and then start resizing that window down and down, you'll start getting the iPad version, or first the desktop version, then the iPad version, and then the iPhone version. So does the server send the code for all the renderings? Yeah, it's in the... And then the client picks which one is relevant? Well, the client knows the size of its own window and draws, yeah, draws what it's told based on the size. So it's just a series. So what I'm saying is, so the server can say, I'm going to send you a monster huge rendering and a itty-bitty rendering, and you, the client, decide which one you want to render. Well, I mean, rendering is the wrong term. It's not like we're sending a graphical representation of the page. You're sending... Okay, but a description. A description. Yes, exactly. Here's what you should... Yeah. And the description in the CSS, mostly in CSS, sometimes JavaScript, but it's all in CSS, basically has a series of if-then statements, for lack of a better, more detailed... No, I get it. Yeah, and it says, okay, if you have this capability or if the screen is this wide, lay it out this way. If the screen is narrower than X, ignore these elements and only draw these and lay it out differently and all of that stuff, which is great, because in that way, you don't have to visit like www.macobserver.com on your desktop and then mobile.macobserver.com on your phone. You don't have to do all that server-sensing like people used to do or whatever. So, coded properly, macobserver or macigab or whatever, no matter what device will look pretty. Will look like it's supposed to on that device. But what was happening with Alison's mom as she had her browser window narrow enough that her bank's website was rendering as the mobile version. And so she wasn't getting... Well, no, like she wasn't getting the top of screen menu bar. That might have been buried in like a little hamburger menu or something that would have been more obvious on iOS. I think we've seen this. Sometimes some websites would have an m.whatever.whatever. Old school. Which was the old way of doing it, saying, okay, here's the mobile version of her site, which is like, dude, you're so behind the times, you got to use CSS. Yeah, you got to do it responsive. That's exactly right. Because they would look terrible when they were reviewed in a full-size browser because they were meant for a teeny screen. Okay, go on. No, the lesson here is when... Especially doing phone support where you can't... Like that one thing that you don't see is like how wide things are for people. And whereas it might be really obvious to you, like, oh, why is your browser window so narrow? Somebody's just... They're used to that. So they're not going to tell you it's narrow. And that was what was happening here with Allison and her mom. And so the lesson is think about browser width if you're having trouble viewing something on whatever device it is. And then we had... We talked about earphones that would allow you to also hear ambient sounds in the last episode. And that we have two more solutions for that. The first is from Listener Stone, who says, if you're looking for a crystal clear, comfortable, unobtrusive in-ear monitor, the EarHero at earhero.com is by far the best I know of. He says with one caveat, these were not designed for big, full, deep bass if that's a requirement, look elsewhere. EarHero, I checked out the website. It's built for law enforcement and secret service or whatever. It's the tiny little almost invisible earbud that sort of wraps around your ear. Except for the big freaking coil that everybody sees. Correct. And they're like, yeah, your secret service. Right, exactly. But they are built to not seal in your ear. So you're not sealed out. You can still hear ambient sound. So that's one. We'll put that in the list here. So thank you, Stone. And then the other one came on Facebook from Terry, who suggests these bone conduction headphones that actually sit around your head. And we will link to... It's the aftershocks at AFTERSHOKZ, the Trek's air and the Trek's titanium, which are bone conduction earphones and would absolutely serve this purpose. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. But that's a pretty cool thing. I like the idea of these. I haven't seen them in ages, but Jabra? Remember Jabra? Yeah. Jabra, that was like their big deal was bone conduction earphones. Right, but they were... You were actually putting that in your ear. Right, right. But it was conduction, but it was still conduction. Yeah, this doesn't go in your ear. This goes just around your head and there's a pad that goes sort of right in front of your ear, but it doesn't block your ear at all. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And the other group I want to mention, Dave, we haven't talked to them in a while either, but Edimotic, I had, I think there were ER6s. But those will block sound out. That's right. Well, yeah, it was such a tight seal for earphones, which were ones that I was able to tolerate. I think I had the ER6s or something like that. But those, yeah, because they sealed airplane noise out, it was a very nice experience. Yeah, they were one of... I mean, there's a ton like that now, but you're right, 10 years ago, they were one of the first to really deliver that in a consumer package. Yeah. But they're still there. For sure, yeah. But Edimotic doesn't serve this purpose, right? They don't have the... They don't have... No, it's not in here. They're not... Let me see. Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah. All right. And then we have a cool stuff found from listener Kevin, who... Kevin from Connecticut, as he likes to say, who says, I had an iOS experience that I would file under cool stuff found. He says, I've been using an iPhone SE since July of 2016. And he said, at some point last year, I enabled restrictions. He said, but I couldn't remember the four-digit code. I had no clue. He says, after I failed six or seven times, the prompt told me I would have to wait five minutes before trying again. He said, I began googling. Some advice looked like a scam. Some led me to believe there was no hope except to wipe the phone or put it in recovery and wipe it. He said, finally though, I found some steps to follow that seemed like they would make sense. And he gave us a link to an iPhone Life article that talks about how to crack your restrictions pass code. But he said the essential component is that you have to create an unencrypted local iOS backup. He said, thankfully, he had done one recently, but you could do one on your phone. Just make sure, we talked about before, with your health data, you want to check the box to password protect it, that encrypts it, uncheck that box to make an unencrypted backup. And he said, you can find your password hash in there. And he used a piece of software called iBackupBot and then used iBackupBot to find the hash of the pass code key and also the SALT, which are the two things that are required to authenticate when you provide the right password. And because these are four-digit passwords, he used a website that we'll also link to called ios7hash.derson.us. And he plugged the hashes into the website and the website started banging away at it and it found his pass code in the 3000s range. And he was good to go, so pretty cool that that's possible to hack that. I like that. It's pretty good, huh, John? No? No? Kind of questionable. Well, yeah, it's questionable. Hacking is good, but... You know, there's a hole, man. Well, yeah, yeah. But, you know, if you've got an unencrypted backup of your phone, right? I mean, it's the raw data. So if you can find that raw data, then you're good to go. I think it's pretty cool that he was able to do it. And kudos to iPhone Life for putting the article together to make all that happen. So pretty good. Hidden gems. Hidden, I like it. Yeah, it's good, man. It's good, it's good, it's good. All right. Do you know what, bro? We have, well, we have some people to thank, John. Oh. We have quite a few people to thank, in fact. I want to start by thanking, and I'm talking about you, our premium subscribers. Me? Oh, sorry. Yeah. Frank F and Art C each made one-time contributions of $50, so thank you so much to both of you. On our monthly $10 a month plan, we have, in the last week, Elizabeth B, Greg S, Olga P, Michael L, Bob P, Jason A, Ward J, Jim E, Chris F, Petter H, Dave C, and the B-man. All, like I said, at $10 a month, thank you. On the biannual plan, which defaults to $25 a month, we have Robert P, Jeffrey F, Richard S, Karen K, David P, Michael M, Teresa B, Jason T, Michael P, Andy W, John I, Corey A, Joel F, Craig S, Dan E, all at $25 every six months. And then we have Mary G at $100 every six months. Thank you so much to all of you. You rock. We couldn't do this without you. It's really, it's a holistic thing that it all takes to put this together and you're a huge part of it. You're all a huge part of it, to be perfectly honest. Without your questions and your tips and your cool stuff found and really all your participation, any way that you can get engaged and involved, it makes a huge difference for us. It is what we do here and it's awesome. So we had another great year and we're looking forward to 2018. And Dave, you know what else we're doing? What are we doing? Well, you and I and, well, some other members of our staff are going to Vegas for you, the listeners. Yeah. To experience the horror that is C-S-C-E-S. You know, I get that, like the horror description. It is crazy out there, but I like it. I like, I mean, it's like the logistics of it or a pain in the neck getting around Vegas. Yeah. That is my biggest fish ache in the Manhattan. I'm cool. San Fran. I'm cool. Even Chicago. I'm cool getting around, going to things. The most of it has been on the coasts. Yeah. Vegas is just, it's deceptive in its glitter and the size of things. First time I came out with there with you to go to C-S, I'm like, oh, we just have to walk to that hotel that I can see from here. It's like an hour later. No, no. It's like, what? And the public transmit, well, it got much better with Lyft and they're permitted. They're getting the ride share. Yeah, Lyft and Uber and all that stuff. Yeah, for sure. Other than that, it's a major, it's the worst city I know of to get around to do a trade show. Now, they're getting better. They have the buses now. They have the ferries. They have, the management of the show, I think has done a much better job of allowing everyone to get from here to there quickly. You're complaining about Vegas in an umbrella sense. No, no, no, it really is only bad during C-E-S and presumably New Year's, although I've never been out there for New Year's, but I've been out there for other shows and it's cake to get around Vegas. The problem is C-E-S brings an extra 150,000 people to Vegas. Yeah, it's excess. Yeah, it's just, it's bursting at the seams is the problem. So, yeah, it's not so bad. So that they can manage this at all is probably hats off to them. Yes, yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, but Vegas in general is pretty easy to get around. It's just C-E-S, pain in the neck. And the shows and the food and this and that, it's just, yeah. It's crazy. Hi, folks. Well, thank you for giving us, for contributing so we can go to C-E-S and tell you about all the wonderful things that we're going to see. It's true, yeah. It's totally true, yeah. Feedback at MackieGab.com is the address that all of you can use if you want to send us anything. Yep, and although we have crystal clear audio, thanks to our new audio platform here. Dave, I think you said feedback at MackieGab.com. I said feedback at MackieGab.com unless you're a premium subscriber, in which case premium at MackieGab.com is your special email address that you get to use. We prioritize that. You can also call us 224-888-Geek, which John is? Four, three, three, five. And you can find us on Facebook. Go to MackieGab.com slash Facebook to join the Facebook group that we mentioned earlier in the show with all that stuff. I want to make sure we thank, in addition to everybody we've already thanked, Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Our podcast marketplace includes, of course, Eero as we mentioned in the show, where coupon code MGG gets you free overnight shipping to the U.S. and Canada. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Otherworld computing at maxsales.com. Barebones software at barebones.com. So much. Now I get to go figure out how to fix my network. You know what I got to make sure I do while I'm out there fixing my network, John? I couldn't even imagine the first thing to suggest, Dave. So, um, hit me, bro. Well, let's let I get to make sure I don't get caught. Maid on the back. Caught, folks!