 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 756 for Monday, April 8th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take all your questions, all your tips, all your cool stuff found, some tips that we've found. We really collect it all together. We act like a funnel and a filter, where the goal is that whatever spits out the other end allows us all, each and every one of us, to learn at least five new things every week. What I like to say to people is you don't have to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you will be. Sponsors for this episode include Kaptera at Kaptera.com slash MGG, BB Edit from Barebone Software with some exciting news, and a new sponsor for us, but not something new to the show because we've talked about this a lot. Malwarebytes for Mac at malwarebytes.com slash Mac. We'll talk more about each and every one of those in a little bit here. But first here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in now springy and that it's over 60 degrees now, Fairfield, Connecticut. This is, and I got to recharge my AC in my car. This is John and Ron. It's interesting. And perhaps for the first time we hit 60 degrees, at least on a show day here in New Hampshire, further north of you a week before you hit it because we were in like the mid 60s last week. But yeah, the weather's finally breaking through. It's here in New England. It's good. Yeah, of course. Here come the allergies because the trees are going to be, everybody's going to do their pollen thing. Yeah, I think the allergies have been affecting around here. The allergies have been affecting people for probably a month. But yeah, that's just how it is. Including you. Yeah, are you better there? You had some... Yeah, I've had something going on with my throat. I think I mentioned it last week maybe. I mentioned that on one of the shows that I do. But yeah, and I think it's been going on certainly since January, maybe earlier. I've thrown the kitchen sink at it as it were. I was already taking one allergy med. And actually, I really appreciate it, several of you mentioned. You're like, Dave, what's going on with your voice? And that sort of made me stop and think about it. These things that happen gradually, you don't necessarily notice. But it did then get to the point where it was hurting like after shows and like after podcasting. Singing was affected by it, but didn't hurt me because talking is much worse for your voice, of course, than singing. But I had already been taking flonés because I take that anyway for when I'm in Austin for South by Southwest. So that was already happening. But I added another allergy med. I added Zyrtec. And while I didn't think the symptoms did not indicate, like the path of this did not indicate that it was anything to do with acid reflux, acid reflux is far and away the most common thing to cause like raw sore throat for an extended period of time. And so I started taking Renitidine and Omeprosol, which I think is Prilosec and Zantac, if I'm getting my brand names and drug names, right? But anyway, I've thrown the kitchen sink at this and it seems to be getting better. So that's good. Now, so I share this here. And of course, it, you know, it's not a Mac problem, but there is the troubleshooting process, right? So I have not honored the troubleshooting process because I didn't just change one variable and see if it worked because I was sick and tired of this problem. So I threw all sorts of things at it. If in fact it does clear up entirely, then I will start peeling off one by one to figure out what in fact is is helping me here. So I'll, you know, there you go. That's that. That's how it goes. I do have a tip that I came up with this week. So the troubleshooting process, you know, it applies to all facets of life, not just our computing and technology aspect. But I did come up with something that many people may not know because, you know, this is like the whole purpose of quick tips in our segments here are those things that you or I or John or any one of us might take for granted and do all the time, but not everyone else knows. And it's hard to remember these things because you just do them all the time. They're part of your normal workflow. Well, one of the things that I do all the time is something that, of course, my family and especially my son does all the time. He was at a friend's house where they were using the friend's Apple TV or whatever. And they had to type in a password for something, you know, in the Apple TV. And they started, you know, doing the thing with the remote. And my son was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, use the remote app on your iPhone and just type it in there. And no one in the room knew about it. And so, yes, there is the remote app that for the Apple TV that you can download onto your iPad or iPhone, any iOS device. And any time a keyboard pops up on the screen, you'll actually get a notification on your phone. So you don't even have to launch the app. You can do it right inside the interactive notification. You can just type whatever you need to type. It's great if you're in a, I mean, it's super convenient, way more convenient than driving with the remote. But even better is if you have to type a password or something, no one in the room gets to see what your password is while you drive around the letters. You just type it on your phone, all they see is the little dots appear, then you're good to go. So, yeah, there you go. Super handy. Yeah, I do have that app on my phone here. Now, can't you also pair a Bluetooth keyboard? That's correct. The Apple TV? That's right. Yeah. I don't think I've ever done it, but I've heard it can be done. And I guess that's another way. Because, yeah, using the remote for especially typing, like passwords is a chore. It's a drag is what it is, man. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's good. All right. So that's quick tip number one. Now, quick tip number two comes from listener Robin, who accidentally shared this tip, but it's a good one to remember. And in the Finder, and this is not, I can't find it, documented anywhere, and it's not in any of the menus. But in the Finder, if you want to show files that are hidden, they are normally hidden by nature, hidden files are hidden. But if you want to show them in the Finder command shift, so command is the clover key for those of you old school, command shift period in the Finder will toggle the display of hidden files. And it's a universal thing. It's not just for the window you're in. It's every window now will display hidden files or not display hidden files. And it this may seem counter intuitive to use the period as sort of the trigger key. But in Unix, the period by putting a period at the beginning of a file name, that's what tells Unix that you want to hide it from normal directory listings. So that's where I'm nearly certain that's where this came from is somebody said, oh, let's just make it the period that way we'll always remember. My guess is it's one of those things that, you know, an engineer threw in and that's that, but command shift period in the Finder. So, uh, right. And Alex in the chat room is saying it's command alt period. Am I incorrect on this? I just did, I just did command shift period on my Macbook Pro and that that did it right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So it's it's it's command shift. Yeah. Command shift period for sure. The way you can test this because you might not have hidden files in any given folder is to go to the root of your hard drive, your boot drive, and do it there because there's tons of hidden folders and files at the top of the drive that are there for boot purposes, but you know, should be kept from prying eyes most of the time. So yeah, there you go. Fun, fun stuff. So thank you, Robin. Good stuff. Including those. Yeah, like in and private. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep. Yeah, it's pretty good. All right. So moving on to Jeff with another tip here. Jeff says, Oh, yeah, we were talking, I was talking in a recent show about keeping my landline so that I could have a phone that rings in the middle of the night, you know, for one of many reasons, but one of them was that, you know, I said my daughter had tried to call us in the middle of the night and the only way that the only way she could make the phone ring in the house was to call the landline, which was great, because our phones were on Do Not Disturb. And I got this feedback from many, many people. And so I'll share it and then I'll also sort of explain the caveat. But Jeff says, there's an easy way to make sure that calls, emails and messages from people important to you pierce Do Not Disturb slumbrous veil in settings on your iPhone, navigate as follows, go to Do Not Disturb, allow calls from favorites, and then who are favorites, Jeff says, well, contacts you designate as such in the favorites tab, the leftmost icon in the phone app, you can also do this in the contact record itself. So you are right that that will work. However, the problem is that if my phone is muted with the hardware mute switch, which it almost always is, then those calls just buzz with no ring noise. Now, that is true, right? They will make a buzz, whereas if it's on Do Not Disturb, other people's calls will not even do that. You know, part of me wishes that there was some way the phone could read my mind and make noise when I want it to make noise, but not otherwise, right? But that's not realistic. And I do firmly believe that if the phone is in quiet mode, you know, with the mute switch on, that it should not make noise, no matter what. So this is one of those, you know, scenarios where the phone just can't do what I want it to do unless I remember to untoggle the mute switch before bed every night. And I don't actually want that, you know, so there you go. So that's that's other landline solves problem, but very good point, Jeff, and a good lesson for all of us that you can sort of designate some people as able to get past that veil of Do Not Disturb. So there you go. Right. And actually, an exciting update here. So you may recall that we recently spoke about Verizon offering a free version of their call filter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. And I finally got over the hurdle. So the thing is, I think it was kind of a rocky roll out in that the app wasn't doing what it should. Okay. Okay. And then it was like, you know, I go in the app and it's like, oh, okay, well, your trial has expired. And then there's a button saying, well, here's other options. One of them should have been sign up for free, but it didn't work. And I'm like, oh, man, VZW support hooked me up. Okay. And then I actually went online and I'm like, yeah, I got this problem. And they're like, okay. And they sent me, it's actually kind of interesting. And they sent me a URL. They're like, okay, well, you got to authenticate with us. You know, give us your phone number and then your pin. And all of a sudden, my status changed from your dirtbag. Right. And you didn't pay for it. My status changed to now I have the free call filter. So So you still, as of the time that you did it, there was no way for an end user to sign up for free, but customer service was able to facilitate this for you and for anybody else. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Smart. Yeah. So contact CS if you need, if you need to what, how did you contact Verizon customer service? It sounds like you did it online. Is there an app? Oh, interesting. VZW support. All right. Yeah, I basically just said, hey, you know, this isn't working. And they're like, okay, well, you know, here's this URL, go here and, you know, authenticate and, you know, prove that you own this phone number. Perfect. And then all of a sudden the status and the app changed to from your subscription has expired to, okay, we're going to give you the free version. Got it. The thing is, you get more functionality if you go for the, I think it's $2.99 a month. You know, it gives you. Yes. There's more. Right. Right. It's definitely a freemium thing. And now, now I think it's on par with what AT&T offers where you get, you know, this basic level of service for free. AT&T calls it their call protect app. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. But it's still a nightmare though, man. I get multiple calls a day from numbers that aren't in my contact list. At least now, the, you know, their app will say, hey, I think this is spam. And it's like, yep, it is. Yeah. Well, I will tell you, malware bytes for Mac is a sponsor today. And we'll talk about them shortly here. But malware bytes for iOS is out. And I was researching that now that they've come on board as a sponsor and sort of digging into it. And malware bytes for iOS talks about solving exactly the problem that you are detailing here, where people are spoofing numbers and that sort of thing. So I honestly have not dug into it yet. I only started looking at this, you know, in the feature set and all that yesterday. But, but there you go. So, and I think that's it. Malwarebytes.com slash iOS, but don't, I'm just going to say don't quote me. I just quoted me. It is malwarebytes.com slash iOS. So you can quote me on that. But, but yeah, yeah. So there you go. Yep. So yeah, we'll talk and we'll talk about malwarebytes for Mac in a minute, because, you know, that's, that's what we do here. But, but yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's all sorts of scams. Actually, we've had some alerts from like the local coppers. So now it's getting to tax time. And there are all these tax scams, mostly, of course, people pretending to be the IRS saying, hey, you know, we're going to bust you. And unless you pay us in gift cards, which that should be a warning to anybody. That is a good warning. And, you know, I will say this. I know that you're laughing, John, and, and perhaps lots of listeners are laughing because if you're listening to this show, you're, you're already a sort of by default, I guess. I mean, even if you've only listened to 15 minutes of this episode, you're probably already more informed than, than, you know, most just generic users of technology. And so you might, you also might be laughing along with this. And that's okay. A lot of people don't quite grok this. And when you hit the right trigger point for someone, they will do anything to avoid whatever the problem is. And that then stops the critical thinking element of, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense to pay for X in gift cards. And I've seen people fall for it with the tax scam, but I've also seen people fall for it with, you know, your daughter is in jail and the only way to bail her out is, you know, I'm a bail bonds person, but the only way to get the money is to, you know, the quickest way is with these gift cards. And so you got to do this in the, it's the middle of the night. And, you know, it's the only kind of thing. And I know people that have fallen for this. So I, I, I set it up this way that at your next family dinner, just share this, just say, Hey, look, you know, there's a lot of scams going around where people are trying to get you to use gift cards, you know, with something that, that means something to you and, you know, boom, you're good, you know, you're, you're done. There's no way to get your money back after that, because at least that plants, like, like we do with everything here at Mechicab, at least that plants the seed in everyone's head that when they hear, oh, gift card, like, ah, wait, I've heard about this before. And, and that might sort of cause a rethink of the scenario. So yeah, yeah, just like next family dinner, do that. It's good advice, you know, what do we say here at the end of every episode? Don't get caught, right? This is yet another way of, of ensuring that neither you nor anyone else gets caught. All right. Anything else on that before we move on to a cool stuff found mentioned here from Phil? Moving on. Moving on. Phil says in Mechicab 754, you had a discussion about travel adapters. Let me tell you about the one that I've been using. He says it's the all in one adapter with USB from Conair has been useful both overseas and here in the United States. He says it's compact, versatile, and also allows, also serves as a surge protector and a one amp USB charger. He says I keep it in my suitcase when in the U.S. I use it as a power hub for three devices plus one low power USB charger overseas. It adapts four different ways. The plugs are labeled to show which country or area they work in. It's like a Swiss army knife for power. And I think that is the best description that I could give when you look at this thing. It looks a little, it almost looks like, no, that's not real. Like, because it's got so many things on it, but it really is quite efficient when you look at what it's doing. And yeah, it'll, it'll let you adapt your, your plugs and power no matter where you are. So we'll put a, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you, Phil for sharing that. Conair? Conair. Hair dryers. Yeah. Yeah. Hair dryers are things that won't work overseas. Exactly. Actually, from what I recall, high power, high power devices like a hair dryer, which typically draw a lot of current, who better to design an adapter than these guys? Yep. Sounds like they're, what they're doing. Oh, and look at that. They're headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. They are. Wow. Yeah, they're right near you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Patrick has a tip to share. He says, after sharing, sending my new 2015 Retina MacBook Pro back into Apple twice for warranty repairs, I decided to reload macOS. He says, I did so via recovery mode, and it wiped out all my applications and moved them to, yeah, I know, and move them to the previous system folder. This is, of course, I can drag those back to the applications folder, but then everything else is gone to all the support files, so I have to re-input the license and registrations at best. So I thought it would leave it all in place, but I've learned, again, that these are two very different scenarios. So reinstalling macOS, at least macOS Mojave for Patrick, in recovery mode, wipes one's applications. He says, reinstalling macOS via the download where you re-run the installer from within macOS leaves it in place and only replenishes the new macOS. I have not experienced this, but I have not tried it since Patrick reported it, but I did this several times with high Sierra, and it did not do this. So be aware that Mojave, at least for Patrick, has changed this behavior and maybe for others. I haven't heard about it from anybody else yet, and I had the same response you did, John, when I was reading it. It's like, huh? But it definitely happened for Patrick, so just be aware that this may have changed in Mojave here. So pretty interesting. For goodness sake, make a backup. That's true. Yeah, for fair. Yeah, fair. And then one last tip. I'm a Libre office user. I've mentioned it several times. I canceled my office, whatever, 365-ish subscription last year because it wasn't worth paying whatever I was paying per month, five or 10 bucks a month, for the few times that I need to use office per month, but I do need to use it fairly regularly. Certainly pages and numbers can open Word and Excel files and save them, but that's not the same as being able to truly edit a Word file or an Excel file and share it back and forth via email with someone that does use those tools all the time. And so I needed something, and that's why I paid for an office subscription, until we started talking about it on this show and I started testing all sorts of things. And Libre office was the one that really, really works for me. And I find it quite valuable and helpful. But I also found that it wasn't updating. I would, you know, I have it set to check for updates, either weekly or daily or something. And even then, I manually told it to check. I'm like, man, it hasn't updated in a long time. And I was stuck on version 6.1.2.1. And I went to the website and 6.2 was available. And even a new version of 6.1 was available, but just wasn't taking any of them. So I had to download the update from the website. So I share that because I, you know, in our discussions, I'm sure we convinced several of you to also start using Libre office. Just wanted to give you a heads up that it might not be updating. Just check Libre office about and compare that to what's available on the website. And maybe you need to download a new copy too. So yeah, there you go. Hey, can I take a minute now and talk about our first sponsor, my friend? You could, I'll let you take more than a minute. All right. Our first sponsor for today is a new sponsor. And I'm totally stoked to have them on board. It's malware bytes for Mac. Malware bytes for Mac is an app that I have on every single Mac that I have, because I want to make sure that I don't have any malware, right? And the cool part about malware bytes is it will scan your Mac in like 30 seconds. It doesn't take forever to do this scan. And the nice part about that is if I run into a Mac that's having any problem helping family, friends, clients, whatever, I run malware bytes first. It doesn't take forever. It goes really quickly. And if there's malware on there, boom, we found it and we've removed it, quarantined it. We know what's going on. In addition to malware and adware, malware bytes detects and removes any viruses or ransomware that you have. And it does this in real time with their advanced anti malware technology, right? So it catches all your dangerous threats automatically. So you're protected without even having to think about it. And your Mac keeps running silky smooth. And the thing I really like about malware bytes, well, I like that it does this. One of the things in addition to that that I like is there's a reports tab right inside there. And it shows you not only when the scans have happened, and of course, what the results of those scans were, but it also shows you when their protection database has been updated, which is super handy for peace of mind and knowing, okay, things are working the way they're supposed to. I've got their latest protection database. I'm all good to go. Of course, when it finds something, it quarantines it. If it finds something, hopefully it doesn't. But if it does, you know, you're protected. So you got to go check it out. Go to malwarebytes.com slash Mac for your free download. It's free to download. And then you get a 14 day trial of their premium offering, which is the thing that offers scheduled scans and the real time scanning and all that. But you can always scan manually for free. So go check it out. Malwarebytes.com slash Mac free download and a 14 day trial of their premium offering are thanks to malwarebytes at malwarebytes.com slash Mac for supporting this episode. All right, John, I'm seeing that in the chat room here, Alex has shared a tip that we were going to move on to Wi-Fi, which we will. But while we were doing the ad, Alex, actually before, I guess Alex said, I just got a notes icon at the top of my finder window. Now I can launch with a click right from any finder window. Of course, you can do it with the doc, too. But this is interesting. Alex says, you can right click the finder toolbar to edit. Then from another finder window, just drag and drop your favorite app, file, folder, whatever, right to the finder toolbar area. And boom, you're good to go. He says, I wonder if I can create server aliases as well. And I think you can. I remember putting like an Apple script up there that opened that finder window in the terminal, like that, you know, the location of that finder window in the terminal. So I think you can put whatever you want in there. Man, this is what I love about this show is like these tips and good stuff. So thank you, Alex. Yep. Pretty cool. Our chat room is at macicab.com slash stream, right? That is correct. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. I forgot. I got so excited about sharing Alex tip. Hey, yeah, we cover. We cover each other. It's what we do. For the most part. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So our chat room is where we every whenever we're recording the show, you can listen in live and share feedback and things like that. It's really actually quite helpful for us and for everybody listening. And it's actually out of fun. It's, you know, sort of the next level of the macicab family here. So yeah. And speaking of feedback, Dave. Yes. If you want to email us with questions, tips, cookies. I love cookies. I do. I like cookies probably more than I should. I have a thing about cookies. The place you want to go or you want to email us is feedback at macicab.com. I think you said feedback at macicab.com. I absolutely said feedback at macicab.com. And about the cookies, you know, feedback at macicab.com is also a good place. So, yeah. All right. Mike has, we've got some Wi-Fi questions and, you know, I love Wi-Fi. In fact, I was, as I said, I was at Mac Tech Pro this week, earlier this week talking or last week talking about Wi-Fi there. And I love Mac Tech Pro because you can, like, you can know a lot about a subject, but you're definitely not the smartest person in the room, right? No one is, is the beautiful thing there. And while I was delivering my talk on Wi-Fi, which everybody found really helpful, it was fine. But I actually learned some new things that we'll talk about here, which is great. And so anyway, and I have, we have a deal for all the Mac Tech Pros. Actually, you can save 20 bucks off of basically the best price that they will offer online at any point. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Okay. Now, on to Mike. Mac Tech Pro discounts. I want to make sure I put that in the show notes. Okay. Moving on to Mike. He says, I have an issue whose solution evades me. I have a problem losing internet connectivity to some devices in my home. Every two or three days, I have a problem where my devices fall off the network. Waiting or simply rebooting the router and or access points will fix it. I'm not sure how to properly diagnose the issue. He says, I'm getting, I'm guessing router logs might help, but I have no idea what to look for. What happens? He says, all four of my WiIMO mini smart plugs show up as no response in the iOS home app. They will connect to the Amazon Fire TV, Netflix Hulu, but will not play. It says, I don't have an internet connection. He says, these are connected to an access point with Ethernet. What does this say? Okay. So that might be an English thing there, but it sounds like the these even things that are connected with Ethernet have a problem. D-Link camera via Wi-Fi is unreachable. He says, I have Wi-Fi set up using 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. I'll have the same SSID and password, but the channels are staggered between the three devices in order to minimize overlap of signal. This is my router is a Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway router. And he says, then I have a TP-Link N600 wireless dual band gigabit router that is in bridge mode as an access point. Okay. And he says, I also have two TP-Link N600 routers that he's also using as access points. So he's got these four Wi-Fi devices, the Verizon router, it's in router mode, and then these other three TP-Link devices that are in access point mode. He says, they're connected by Ethernet and their static IP is outside of the DHCP range. Ethernet is connected to a LAN port on the router, not the LAN port and it's in bridge mode. Okay. So what's interesting here is that some of your wireless devices are 802.11ac compatible, your Verizon router specifically, and then the rest are only 802.11n as evidenced by the model number N600 for these TP-Link access points or routers that you are using as access points. And it's also possible that you have too many access points. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but Wi-Fi congestion can be caused by the access points themselves. If you have too many of them, they'll actually start sort of reducing each other's efficiency and that can cause all kinds of things. If this were my setup or if I were there, my gut would say to disable one at a time of your access points and see how it goes. You can use something like either Wi-Fi Explorer or iStumblr, but Wi-Fi Explorer is actually part of SetApp. So if you have SetApp, you've already got Wi-Fi Explorer and it's got some cool things in it and if you don't have Wi-Fi Explorer or you already have iStumblr, use iStumblr, both will help you in this regard. They'll show you what radios are visible to you from whatever location you are currently in. So take your Mac laptop with one of these apps on it and sort of walk around and find to make sure, oh yeah actually I don't necessarily need this many, at least not for coverage. You might need them for density and speed, but that gets a little more complex. So think about coverage first and just get coverage to where you need to. You might have too many of these things. You might not, but that would be the first thing that I would think of. John, what do you think on all this? One thing that I'm thinking is you may want to check if there's a firmware update for your various Wi-Fi devices because bugs happen. Absolutely. And I've had applying a firmware update, so check with the TP-Link guys and see if there's a firmware update because they may have a bug where whatever silly reason it comes people and it shouldn't. Sure. Oh yeah, I mean they would most likely auto push firmware updates to their routers, but maybe not. Yeah, go check. And I would really, the question is of these devices that are falling off the network, are they connected via 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz? If they are connected via 5 and they're falling off, it's possible that your sort of mixed blend of 5 GHz networks, some of which are 802.11n and some of which are 802.11ac might be causing the problem. In theory, it shouldn't, but you know, theory and practical, there's sometimes a great divide there. And sometimes part of that divide is the unknown, right? These are radio waves that we're talking about. So what else do you have going on in your house that might be interfering with these sorts of things? Yeah, but I would simplify the network down to the minimum amount of access points that you need to run to get the coverage that you need. And again, I know that sounds a little counter intuitive, especially, you know, as we're always talking about mesh and add more, well, it's add more if you need it. If you can get away with one router, then by all means, that's the best thing. You know, it's only if you need more and many of us need more given, you know, either the size of our houses or the shape of our houses and interference that's caused. So yeah. Any other thoughts on this, John? Or time to move on to the listener, listener, John? Moving on. Moving on. Listener, John says, he says, I know you've spoken a few times about resetting Wi-Fi routers and modems on a regular basis. But I forget how often you recommend doing so. He says, I have an Amplify HD setup and I'm very happy with it. And some version of a Motorola Cable modem, which also works well, says the Amplify, however, gets wacky every once in a while, slow speeds, home kit stuff not working, etc. And a simple reset resolves the issue. But if resetting on a regular basis would not only solve the issue, but prevent it from happening, I'm all in. Any suggestions? Is it better to reset by pulling the plug or going through the app and rebooting? So this is interesting. I've used Amplify. I actually have a test environment where Amplify is running it at someone's house. And I've never seen this issue and I've never heard of others. But in general, yes, over the years, we've heard about issues where things get a little wonky. This could be very similar to, you know, actually, your issue or your solution of restarting the routers on a regular basis might actually solve Mike's problem. But both it's possible that both of you have a density problem where multiple access points can serve every area of the house. And it's possible that for some reason, your devices are jumping to the access point that's further away and therefore slower, even though there's another one that's better closer. So, you know, again, properly spacing things out can really help to solve exactly this kind of problem. It's important to remember that your devices make the ultimate decision about which access point to associate with. Yes, if you have a mesh system, it can give the devices sort of guidance and suggestions and hints and there's various ways that it can do that. But in the end, it's up to your up to each individual device to choose to associate with whichever access point it associates with. So, having too many choices available, especially with the same name in SSID, which is what happens in either mesh or like Mike has, you know, what I would call a quasi mesh scenario, can be a problem. So again, you know, using something like Wi-Fi Explorer, iStumblr to go around your house and find those things might be the trick. In terms of rebooting, I would do it in the app, but like pulling power isn't the worst thing. You know, if you're going to pull power, even though there's no moving parts in these devices, I would still give it a five second count before you plug it back in just to let any capacitors sort of chill out. But otherwise, yeah, I don't know. Those are my thoughts. How about you, John? No thoughts. No thoughts. Okay. Now I'm wrestling with something in front of me here for an upcoming question. Sorry. Ah, okay. Yes. Yes. All right. Disbehaving. Okay. Do we need to pause the show or are you going to be all right? I think it would be good. Okay. Well, are you, let's talk about, because you said you had a Wi-Fi issue here, so let's talk about that. You had, I think you mentioned it in the show, but you certainly mentioned it in either pre-show or post-show, if not mid-show, that you were having an issue in, I think, your bathroom, where you could only connect 2.4 gigahertz, not five. Is that, am I classifying it correctly? Okay. Yeah. So when I was there with my phone, and then I looked at the Eero, which one of the nice things about the Eero app is that it tells you at what frequency you're connected at, my phone would always be when I was in this room, connecting at 2.4 gigahertz, which is, of course, slower than 5 gigahertz. Well, potentially slower than 5 gigahertz. Yes. Yeah. The top speed on the Eero with 5 gigahertz is 433 megabits per second per stream, and on 2.4 with 802.11, and it's 150 megabits per second per stream. So, yes, in theory, slower, two streams per channel on the Eero, just for everybody keeps counting home. I was just cleaning up around the house and found something that you had given me, or actually TP-Link had given us and me, one of their Wi-Fi range extenders. Specifically, this is the AC-1200 Wi-Fi range extender, and I'm like, I just had it stored away, and I'm like, you know what? I wonder if I put this in that room, if it's going to make life better for me. You know what, Dave? It did. Well, not make my life better, but I got a better connection. So, you've taken a mesh network and added what I'll call an off brand, a different brand extender to it. So, your Eero only knows that there is this TP-Link extender connected and doesn't know anything about the Wi-Fi connection of anything that's connecting to it. Is that right? Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. And basically, it made my life better. Absolutely. Yeah. In that, once I installed this and gave it the same message as my Eero, which in general is a good thing. A lot of products will have separate SSIDs for the 2.4 and the 5, and that just makes me kind of jumpy, because I don't think you should manually choose it. You let the device choose it, right? But anyways, all I'll say is the benchmark results that I got showed that this does work, in that when I was in that room and without the extender, I was getting about, so I was using the fast utility on iOS. I was getting about 30 megabits per second. When I installed the extender and the extender was part of the conversation, I was getting about 110 megabits per second. So it definitely improved my coverage. It improved your speed. Yeah, it improved your five... Or it improved my speed. Well, no, and I would say it improved your coverage. You have no way of knowing via the... Or maybe you do. Do you have a way of knowing via the TP-Link app whether your iPhone is connecting 2.4 or 5 gigahertz in the bathroom? Yes. Yeah, it'll tell you that. Okay, great, and it is 5. Yeah, they have an app called Tether. Got it. Which will basically tell you what's up with the access point. But just a tip here, if you have some areas in your residence or wherever you live, even if you live in the woods, probably don't have Wi-Fi in the woods, they could. Good. All I'm saying is that... I'm just like, let me add this to the equation and see if it improves my speeds, and it did. Yeah, so I'm going to nitpick this a little bit here because you've added to the equation, but you've also added to the problem. You've created more Wi-Fi congestion or Wi-Fi noise in your house, potentially adding Wi-Fi congestion. And that could slow down other things, right? Very much so. But you've highlighted the solution to the problem. It's not necessarily add more its placement, right? Because your house is relatively small, right? Like 1,600, 1,200. Oh, 1,200. Okay, all right, there you go. But it's older construction and also porcelain and Wi-Fi tend not to mix all that well. And so you have all these tile between your router and you in the bathroom, and so it was blocking the 5 gigahertz signal there, right? But placing your access point or a new access point to it such that it had a straighter shot to your bathroom solved this, right? With this TP-Link thing. So my question would have been, and just in a general sense, would be, okay, where are your access points currently placed for your existing mesh? And could you just move one to be in a better spot for covering your house, right? And so that would be my first thought is, you never want to add adding to the equation should be, I don't want to say the last thing on the list, but not the first thing on the list. The first thing would be, okay, can we move something around to get better placement and better separation perhaps, right? In commercial mesh environments, you often have the ability to control the transmit power rate on your access points. And in almost all scenarios, you do not want the transmit rate at 100%. It's going to cause too much noise. In fact, you want to set your transmit rates down so that you don't have overlap so that in any given area, you only can see one access point, right? And that may have been your problem is that your iPhone is choosing based on what's the most powerful signal I see. And so it's choosing a 2.4 gigahertz network because that's the most powerful signal, although it might have been able to get a faster connection by connecting to the 5 gigahertz signal that I'm sure it saw, but deprioritized. And so this is where it can get really interesting, right? And so I would think about, okay, could you take that TP-Link extender out, but move one of your existing ERO points to a different spot that would better serve your house sort of holistically. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the other way I could have solved this was probably to add a ERO beacon. Correct. In that room instead of an extender because, well, that's pretty much what the beacon is. Yeah. And the beacon then would participate in the ERO mesh and you'd get more information and all of that stuff. Yeah, right. But you already had the extender, but if you were going to spend money on this, you know, from the get-go, absolutely, I would recommend the beacon not the, yeah, not the extender, but you already have it. So yeah, that's interesting. Maybe next time at your house, we'll dig through this stuff and see what we can do. Yeah. So it appears to have increased my throughput in this one room. Well, yeah, right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But it may have decreased throughput somewhere else. Yeah, potentially. Let's check that out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It gets really interesting. You have, you can look and you can, I mean, really the only way to test is to test, but you can use something like Wi-Fi Explorer or iStumbler to look at not only power levels, but interference numbers and see, okay, like how is this working? What do I need to do and can I tweak it, et cetera? Yeah. Yeah. I did learn something though. I mentioned it, Mac Tech Pro, that I learned something. And it's related to this because Apple devices are generally set to pick the strongest signal that they see from the top network in the list. What's the list? Well, you can't see the list on your iPhone, but if you sync with iCloud Keychain, it's the same list that you have on your Mac. And system preferences network, you go to Wi-Fi, I think you go to advanced, and then you can see the Wi-Fi list and you can change the order. It will pick. If it sees the first network on the list, it will pick it. Even if the second network or the fifth network is more powerful, it will pick the first network on the list if it sees it, which is why our advice is always name your 2.4 and 5 gigahertz the same, because even if your 5 gigahertz is faster, if you have 2.4 at the top of the list, it will pick it. But it's not foolproof and, you know, John scenario potentially highlights that we're not entirely sure, right? But it might. However, there is a way to tweak these things on your Mac. You can't tweak them on your iPhone without jailbreaking it because you can't get to a terminal prompt. But you can get to a terminal prompt on your Mac and there's a utility named airport. It's buried in a framework that I will link to in the show notes. But there is a parameter that you can set with this airport utility called join mode. And join mode can be set to preferred ranked recent automatic, which is sort of, you know, obscures everything and strongest. And if you set it to strongest, then it will start picking the strongest network that it sees, regardless of the order of that list. Now, this is not something that's feasible to do in like an environment where you have many different computers coming and going, because you have to do this on each Mac, right? But you could certainly do it in your house. But you can't do it on your iPhone. You can't do it on your iPad because you can't tweak this stuff. But it's very interesting. So I'll put a link to this so that you can monkey with this if you want to. Another thing that I learned, John, and this is even more fascinating, because I always say that there are no Apple devices that support multi-user MIMO or as it's often called 802.11 AC Wave 2. Maybe we call it Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 now. I'm not sure how that thing. But Wave 2 essentially means supporting this concept called multi-user MIMO where if the router and the devices support it, multiple devices can actually be communicating with the access point or router simultaneously. I know you think it looks like all our devices are always communicating with the router. That's not entirely correct. They're always associated with the router. But in most scenarios, only one device gets to talk at a time. So no. Multi-user MIMO fixes that, allowing multiple devices to actually talk and send data simultaneously. But no Macs, no devices from Apple support this. No iPhones, no Macs, no iPads. Well, that's not entirely true. They don't support it out of the box. And Apple's driver software for Wi-Fi doesn't support it. But the chips that are in those devices, most of them, are just Broadcom chips that happily would support Wave 2 if the feature is enabled. And as I'm told, I have not checked this out yet, but you can go to Broadcom's website, download the Unix drivers, not the Apple drivers, for your Wi-Fi, replace the drivers on your Mac with the Unix drivers for that wireless chip. And boom. Now you can enable Wave 2, you can do all kinds of things. And people were telling me, actually this one guy, not people, but this one guy was telling me that they've done it for all the computers in their office and they're getting way faster Wi-Fi speeds by doing it. So there you go. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. This is definitely geek realm, but pretty cool. So sweet. Yeah, I know. Fun. Let's see. One. Okay. We'll come back to wiring a new home another time. That's a whole other topic. It's not really the same thing. Actually, you know what I want to do, John, is I want to take a minute and talk about our next two sponsors if that's okay with you. Fantastic. All right. Our next sponsor is a sponsor that's been with us for a long time, but we've got some news about BB Edit. So BB Edit 12.6.3 has been released as a maintenance update. That's like, I like the fact that they keep updating the software, but the big news is that BB Edit is now back in the Mac App Store with subscriptions, right? And that's their new App Store only model, while they still have perpetual licenses that will remain directly available from them at barebones.com. And last but not least, they are still offering lots of cool BB Edit merch at merch.barebones.com. You've got to check this stuff out. I mean, this is just exciting on so many levels. So BB Edit in the Mac App Store, right? We'll have a link to that in the show notes of course. 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One more time with feeling that captera is software selection simplified. Say that 10 times fast, but more easily just go to captera.com slash mgg. Our thanks to captera for sponsoring this episode. And now, Dave, I think we should go to Dennis. What do you think? Sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a good one. So Dennis has an interesting one here. And Dennis says or writes, I'm confused about host naming on the Mac. I came from a Unix background. So I know my way around most Unix boxes, but not much internals of Mac and BSD, which if you don't know, Mac OS is kind of based on BSD Unix. I think it's open BSD. Yeah. Which I think is Berkeley System Distribution or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. So on my sharing preferences, I have my computer name as name one. Of course, before it was an iMac, it was a Mac mini that my Mac inherited. Then it was called another name or something like that. When I do a host name or SCU till get host name, which is something you can do from the terminal, I see yet another name. I'm not entirely sure how that came about. I would like to make them all the same. But what prompted this was the fact that LSLF, which is a command that can show you, which is a terminal command that shows you open files, and also network connections, is showing connections originating from yet another name. And that's the one that is puzzling me about how to change this one. The other two I believe I know how to change. I'm sure... All right. And he's saying on a Linux box, there's a file you can... Yeah, sysconfig.network-scripts-ifcfg, which is where you do it on some systems, but he's not sure how to do this on the Mac. So this is an odd one, Dave. Yeah, this is an odd one. And I will... I'll just say sort of very generically that macOS does its very best to take care of this stuff for you from things you can edit in the graphical interface instead of making you go to the terminal and do it. And as a reminder, or an informative note for those of you that don't already know, anything you edit in the graphical interface, especially in like system preferences, is really just changing things that you could also change in the terminal. They just make it way easier, but also consolidate some things and protect you there. So I'll sort of lay that foundation here before we move forward. Right. So first off, the suggestion that both you and I had was that using the Mac GUI, if you go to system preferences, sharing computer name, that's one place where you can set the name of your machine. And it sets it from there. This is exactly what we were just saying, right? Here is where it sets it in multiple places. So you set it once here and then in theory, that change should propagate, right? Yeah, but it sounds like that's not happening. So the first suggestion is go to that place in sharing and update the name and hopefully that will stick. So that was the one suggestion you and I had. Yeah. Yeah. Change it and then change it back, right? And hopefully that will, you know, sort of just, it's like turning it off and turning it on again, right? And we do this with other preferences when it, when something doesn't work, even though it says it's there, but it's not doing it. Well, you know, flip it, change it, chain, you know, do something to force macOS to go in and rewrite all those, you know, preference or P list files that are holding this information that might just fix it. In fact, I would, I would guess for Dennis this would fix it unless there's something else going on. In which case? In which case? I guess the point we want to make here is that your Mac can have many names. That's true. They can. It probably shouldn't in most scenarios, but it can. Yeah, that's right. Yes. And I think Dennis knew this, but if he didn't, the thing is, so you can have a machine name and a host name and those are, they can be different, which is kind of weird, right? Right, right. So if you do want to set the host name, which is initially as far as I can tell based on the computer name that we just talked about, you can go into the terminal and change that setting. And you would do that with sudo scutil dash set, and then the host name that you want to give. And I actually tried this and yes, you could have different names. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes so you don't have to remember to write down. Yep. Yeah, it gets kind of, you know, and then I did a bit more digging here. The thing is the hierarchy of how the Mac names itself gets to be kind of crazy. Is that right? I've never dug into that. Is there any? Some of it can be, sometimes the name is based on what comes from your DHCP server. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, I found an article and I'll have to, I think it was on Stack Exchange. Okay. But they were saying, okay, here's how the Mac, here's the hierarchy of how the Mac decides what its name should be. Oh, that's interesting. I forgot about it. Yeah, because it could be if the DHCP server is linked to DNS, the Mac could learn its host name via that path, too. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I was seeing hints of that in some of the articles that I found is that that could happen, too, because I saw some articles where people were like, why does my Mac have this name? It's like, I didn't give it to it. It's like, well, no, you did. The DHCP server kind of did. Yeah, somebody else did. That's right. Huh. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you know, just use the IP address. That's always the same. No, well, no, that's not. No, wait, that's sort of the problem. It can not be the same. Yeah. Cool. Oh, boy, here they come. Oh, they're coming to get you, John. They know you're messing with your Mac's host name and IP addresses. That's it. No, no, that's an ambulance. Oh, OK. All right. Well, I hope that I hope they I hope neither of those things needs to come and get you, my friend. So, you know, it's all factored into that. Don't get caught scenario. So, yeah. Oh, that's that's the fire engine. But so John's the only one hearing this. Your mic is actually doing a very good job of isolating us from most of this. Like when you said it, then I could sort of hear like a little bit in the background. But but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But but yeah, one way to not get caught is don't do anything wrong. That's that's one way. It does fit the bill, right? You're not doing anything wrong, so you're not getting caught. That's that's one way. But anyway, it's not always the most fun way. Rob is getting caught with a problem. And actually, we have Gary in the forums getting caught with the same problem. But the problem is Rob describes it is I have a 2014 Mac mini late 2014 running Mojave and an Apple Watch Series three running the latest iOS. When I sit at my Mac, occasionally, it unlocks with the Apple Watch and its magic. However, most of the time it doesn't. And as you know, debugging intermittent intermittent issues is a problem. And Gary in the forums will link to both of these says that he has a 2013 retina MacBook Pro and a Series zero Apple Watch and has never been able to get it to unlock. So and I will offer that I have a Series zero Apple Watch still and my 2018 Mac mini. And sorry, I do have a 2018 Mac mini, but Lisa uses it so my watch isn't paired to it. But I also have a 2018 MacBook Air that I am paired with. And I'm more in the category of Rob that sometimes it's more more often than not for me that that the watch unlocks but not always. And I did run into this same issue and it's blissful when it works because you just wake up your Mac and it unlocks. You do get a little buzz on your watch to know that it has woken up your Mac so that if you're not the one that did this, you know, but you're still in proximity to allow it to happen that, you know, you're at least alerted to it, assuming the watch is on your wrist. But I was having this issue just the other day actually sitting at Mac Tech Pro in Boston, I finished doing my my, you know, my talk or whatever, I went back to where I had my computer because we present on their computers there, which makes life way more efficient. It's really smart. And and it wouldn't do it. I mean, I had to unlock with my fingerprint. It's not like it was the end of the world, but it was just like, Oh, I didn't miss work. And so, you know, I'm amongst geeks. So we started troubleshooting at one of the breaks. And I turned off Bluetooth on my Mac turned it back on and my watch synced perfectly. Now, that's what worked. What didn't work was rebooting my watch. So it was not a problem for me anyway. It was not a problem with my watch. It was a problem with my Mac and whatever was going on with Bluetooth with my Mac, probably in a congested environment, it had stopped looking for my watch. And so it did not find it. And and that. So like, there's no magic answer to this. But there are there are some answers that help more often than not. I've had this problem where my watch doesn't sync to my phone at all. And turning Bluetooth again, rebooting the watch sometimes helps, but often does not turning Bluetooth off and on on the phone or rebooting the phone is the thing that helps. So it's often not the watch. It's the, you know, the, well, whatever, the not watch device. I don't know what the right name for that would be because it's a peer to peer connection. But yeah. So it's pretty interesting. It's it's Bluetooth, right? So there you go. I mean, that was my thought is as, you know, I started looking through this. Yeah. And congestion, potentially, which I think in your case, that's, that's, you know, there was just, because I'm sure everybody was geeking out and you probably had lots of people with all sorts of 2.4 gigahertz devices. Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, right. In addition to Wi-Fi, which, you know, actually, I didn't, you know, I should have run like iStumblr or Wi-Fi Explorer while I was there. I can't believe I didn't. I mean, there we were talking about Wi-Fi and it just, I don't know. I didn't think about it while I was in the room. But, but I'm sure there was way too much 2.4 going on. And, and, you know, kind of referencing our discussion earlier, it's not just Wi-Fi that competes with Wi-Fi and 2.4. It's not just Bluetooth that can be, competes with Bluetooth and 2.4. It's both of those things and anything else like a microwave oven that speaks 2.4, right? All of those things, some of which won't show up on Wi-Fi scanners if they're not Wi-Fi, but they're still 2.4 and it's still radio waves and they still get in each other's way. So, yes, craziness, craziness. All right, good to move on, John, with this one? Indeed. All right, sweet. Let's go to, let's see. Well, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to throw out a geek challenge here, because this will be relatively quick and then we'll, we'll circle back to Andrew here. But listener Brian says, I have an iPhone XS and I'm loving it. However, my car doesn't integrate well with it. I have no aux port and my car doesn't have Bluetooth capability. I've tried a few FM transmitters which work okay except for the mic. When I say, hey, S-Lady or use talk to text, it's kind of messed up or there's a delay or whatever. It's just not working right. Is there a certain brand or model of Bluetooth adapter that is better for all of this? And I've certainly run across some of them. So, what he's looking for just to sort of encapsulate it is a car to Bluetooth adapter, something where you can add Bluetooth capability to your car, either by, you know, connecting to an FM transmitter or a lot of these things actually don't even connect to your car's audio system. I've seen some that, you know, you just put on like the visor or whatever and it's its own self-contained device. Your phone pairs to it with Bluetooth and you can do all the things, the hands-free calling, the hey, S-Lady, you know, all of that stuff and the phones, you know, audio for that stuff just goes through this device. So, I'm very curious to hear what are you folks using that need something like this or your car doesn't have it automatically. That's sort of the geek challenge here is recommendations on this stuff because I don't have enough experience to, I've used like one of them and it was fine, but, you know, that was a couple of years ago. So, I'm the wrong guy to ask and I don't think you use anything like this, John, right? No. Okay, because your car certainly fits the same description as Brian's, right? No Bluetooth. I would have to upgrade my, I mean, yeah, with my dated vehicle. I mean, I have AMFM radio in the cassette. Sure, but, but like, you could have an oxport. Yeah, they didn't provide an oxport. Right. So, you're in exactly the same boat as Brian. So, looking for, you may not be looking for this, but the same thing would help you is some standalone Bluetooth car hands-free adapter thing. So, we'd love to hear about it and, you know, feedback at Mackeykev.com or if you are a premium subscriber, send us, send us your note to premium at Mackeykev.com. I actually want to take a minute while we've mentioned our premium subscribers and thank those of you whose contributions have come in in the last about 10 days, I guess, is the number that we're looking at here. On our monthly plan, which is $10 a month, like to thank Tony from San Francisco, Gary from New York, Everett from California, Elizabeth from Virginia, Robert from Florida, Steven from California, Ward from Arizona, Olga from Washington, Jason from South Carolina, Steven from Illinois, Nick from Michigan, Ken from New South Wales, Paul from Indiana, Mike from New York and Mike Mark from Connecticut. Thanks to all of you. On the biannual $25 a month, $25 every six month plan, we have Daniel from Texas, Martin from California actually at $50 every six months, Rob from Tennessee, Sharon from Florida, Randy from Connecticut, Roger Y, Craig from Florida, Michelle from Quebec, Ken from Vermont, Mike from Maryland, Keith from Washington, Ulysses from New York, Mario from North Carolina, John from New York, Paul from California, Ralph from Maine, Daniel from New York, Ken L, Dominic from Luxembourg for $50 every six months, David from Oregon, Chris from Gloucestershire and Lawrence from Connecticut. And then on the one-time contributions, we have matching $50 contributions from Ken from California and Tim from Kansas. Thanks so much to all of you. You folks, you really rock. I know we say this every week, but your contributions and your support really, really are a big part of what it takes to make this happen for you all the time. And we couldn't do it without you. So we really, really appreciate it. If you want to learn more about premium, mackeekeb.com.com is the place to go for that. But yeah, yeah, there you go. So thank you. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. We got time for one more. Do you have a preference from our plethora, John, of things that are left here? I'm tempted to go with Andrew's first one from our list here, but if there's... Yeah. Okay. So Andrew, I want to make sure I get the right one. There we go. Andrew says, I've been testing and attempting multiple methods to try and get macOS server on a 2018 Mac Mini from a disk image from a 2009 X-SERV. And here's the issue. X-SERV. Wow. Yeah. Let's go back. Well, his X-SERV was running OS 10.6.8. And of course, his 2018 Mac Mini can only run Mojave. So there's a little bit of a trick here because he wants to upgrade from 10.6 to 0.8 to Mojave without a machine that can run both of those. So this is where it gets interesting. He says, can you offer any suggestions and or steps to get from OS 10.6.8 to macOS 10.14.4 server running on a 2018 Mac Mini? So I've got a couple of thoughts. My first thought is to boot from another Mac, preferably one running Mojave. I think that will make life easier. And then connect to the Mini in target disk mode. So the Mini is now just a very expensive external drive enclosure with its drive in it. And from there, I would wipe the Mini's drive completely and restore the X-SERV's clone onto that drive. So now you have 10.6.8 installed on your Mac Mini. It's not going to boot. You could try it. It's not going to work. If it does, I'll be shocked. Then, without rebooting, run the Mojave installer and point it at, you know, when it asks you what disk do you want to install Mojave on, point it at the disk that you've got mounted in target disk mode from your Mac Mini. In theory, that would work. That would be the first thing that I would try. Alex in the chat room has a suggestion that actually dawned on me while I was reading Andrew's email here, which is, could you do this in a virtual container, get it all the way you want and then take the virtual container and restore that to the Mac Mini? And I think, yes, 10.6 server is a virtualizable OS, as is Mojave. I think 10.6 client was not virtualizable, but 10.6 server was, if my memory is correct on this. So you could use something like VMware or Parallels or, I think those are the only ones that will virtualize Mac OS and that I'm thinking, like VMware Fusion. So yeah, that could work too. What do you think, John? I mean, it's geeky stuff. That's what we do here. Migration assistant? Would that work? Would migration assistant work? Oh, it sounds like he wants to pull, right? I mean, you can run it manually last I checked. So, and usually it's, I don't know, maybe it may be too far back that it won't be able to parse what it's, what you're trying to import. I don't know. Maybe. That's a great, no, because you're right. Because even if you, like, let's talk through the mechanics of this, right? So you install a completely fresh copy of Mojave on the Mac mini and then in the first boot, before you even define a user account, it asks, do you want to restore from, you know, a backup? And you could just point it at this. I don't know if you could point it at the image at that point, but you certainly, if you restored the image to some external drive, you could plug that external drive in. That actually might be the simplest answer. Yeah, to your point, or maybe attach it because last time. Yeah, you have to attach it. Yeah, right. Yeah, so if you put it in, yeah, I think it'd be able to pull it from an image. Well, I don't know. I just don't know functionally if you have the opportunity to mount an image at that point, right? Maybe you do. I've never, I've just never dug that deep. But certainly, if that doesn't work, then just restore the image to an external drive temporarily and then just plug it in at that point. And it should appear and say, oh, do you want to restore your settings from this? I think the answer would be yes. That might be the simplest. Oh, I like this. This is what I love about this show. We learn stuff. Pretty freaking cool. Yeah, checking it out right now. So let's see, migration assistant, how do you want to transfer your information? From a Mac time machine backup or startup disk? Yeah, from Windows PC, or to another Mac? I think we're checking out, I think. Yeah, that's a great idea. I like it. You may run in, if you take the target disk mode route based on everything I understand, target disk mode will work out of the box by default on your 2018 Mac Mini or any T2 equipped Mac, right, with that security chip. However, it might not. And if it doesn't, you just have to disable secure boot first, which involves booting into recovery mode and doing some running the firmware or this, the security utility, the startup security utility. And we'll put a link in the show notes that explains how to do that. You recovery mode and then go to utilities and choose startup security utility. And then you can sort of set these things. But I think target disk mode is not impacted by this stuff. So it should be okay. But it's just a good thing to know how to do. And honestly, a good thing. I recommend that everybody that's listening to the show, if you've got a 2018 Mac or really any Mac with a T2 chip, I think there might be one stuff released prior to 2018. But if your Mac has a T2 chip, I highly recommend running this utility and being intentional about choosing what you want. Because by default, it's set to full security on secure boot, which means that only your current OS or an OS signed by Apple and a machine that at boot can confirm that or install can confirm that can can run. And that requires a network connection when you're installing software. So think about that, if your Mac's ever going to not be connected to a network or not have an airport network available, when you're installing software, if you don't change the defaults, your Mac will not let you install that software. And then you can set there's some other ones, you can set medium security, which says it just needs to be signed, but you don't need a network connection. And then no security means you can put any OS you want on your Mac at any point in time. And the same is true for external boot. By default out of the box, your T2 equipped Mac does not allow you to boot your Mac from external media. So if something happens to your internal hard drive, you cannot boot that Mac. That's it. You might not want that scenario. And you might want to make that choice before you're in that scenario, which is why I say to go into recovery mode, run the startup security utility and be very intentional about your choices here so that when you are in one of these scenarios in the future, you aren't there by default, you've chosen to be there. And there's nothing wrong with choosing to be there, except if you haven't chosen to be there and you are there anyway, because I want my Macs to be able to boot from external media. And I am willing to accept the security risk that comes from that. If somebody steals my MacBook Air, they can boot it with an external drive now. They can't get to my data because my disk is encrypted, but they can boot my Mac and it is functional to them. I'm okay with that because the alternative is if something happens, I can't boot my Mac externally either. So just be aware. Craziness, right, John? Yeah. Well, I know. It's nuts. All right. Well, I think with that, my friends and my friends and all of us, Mac, he kept family. It's time. It's as much fun as we're having. We've got to kind of move on. We've got to wrap it up somewhere, don't we, John? Don't you? Don't you think? I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Cool. I like wrapping presents. I am a former professional wrapper. Did you know that? Yeah. Yeah. I was paid. One of my first jobs was at the local pharmacy in my town in Roaton, Connecticut, for anybody that cares, Riverview Pharmacy. And all times of year, but certainly more during the December holiday season, we were often paid to wrap gifts. So I am a former professional wrapper. Absolutely. I was going to think you also in a past life were a musical wrapper. It's possible. They are, right? Yeah. You know, sometimes, sure. Yeah. But certainly, Jim bastard Dave. There you go. Oh, man. I want to thank cash fly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank all of you for listening. I would love to encourage you to join us in our forums at mackeykeb.com slash forums. And I'm not just encouraging our listeners, John, I'm encouraging you to join us in the forums. It would be great to have you there. My friend, lots of questions getting asked there, stuff that we can use in the show. It's good. I want to thank all our sponsors, of course, as we mentioned malware bites at malware bites.com slash Mac bare bones software at bare bones.com capterra at capterra.com slash M G G smile at smile software.com slash podcast other world computing at Mac sales.com Eero at Eero.com slash M G G. It's good stuff. And thanks to really thanks to all of you for listening and contributing and, you know, questions and tips, all that good stuff. It's great. It's been very harmonious here this episode, John. And so for that reason, I feel like the message we've shared it a few times during the episode. But but I feel like we should share this message harmoniously. So so let's all of us just share and sing no rapping. Well, you know what? If you want to rap, you can rap, but let's share and sing together here. It was beautiful.