 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, Episode 791 for Monday, December 2nd, 2019 and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show where we take all of your questions and tips and cool stuff found and we mash them all together into an agenda and then we kind of sort of follow the agenda, hopefully putting together a cohesive show for you that allows you and us, everybody, the goal, all of us combined, individually, collectively, is that we each learn five new things every single time we get together. You're allowed to learn more than five. That is OK. Nothing wrong with that. For now, here in Snowmageddon, Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in not snowy, but more sleety, rainy, yucky, fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. That's right. You were in the belt that might get snow and you didn't. So yeah, that makes it a little easier. Yeah, I heard it caused a lot of chaos throughout the country. It was... Well, it's winter. You know what else happens? Well, it's not winter. It's fall, but it will be winter soon. Yeah. Is it technically? Yeah. Until the 21st, I think it's somewhere between the 20th and the 22nd of December every year that we switch into what we call winter. I don't I don't know. I'll look up Winter Solstice 2019 and it will tell me Saturday, December 21st at 11.19 p.m. Eastern time. So there you go. All I know is before that, Dave, you know what happens that always warms my heart is the leaf fairy comes. Oh, and takes away all your leaves that you've bagged up. I did. You know, I did leave this weekend, you know, you bag them up, you put them on the sidewalk and, you know, I went out to do my chores this morning. And when I came back, they were gone. That's great. Just just pick them up. It's amazing. It's amazing. Your tax dollars hard at work. That's beautiful. Yes. Yeah. Cool. You have your Mac geek dollars hard at work here on three quick tips. One is a quick tip reprise, but it's such a good one that it's worth doing. So here we go. It's starting with the two new ones. The first from Graham, he says, while playing around with Sidecar in Mac OS Catalina, I was checking out what the zoom slash full screen green dot would do when on the iPad slash Sidecar display. When doing that, I left the cursor floating over the top of the green dot a little longer than usual and discovered that there is now, yes, now a drop down set of options that appear, which include tile window to left of screen and tile window to right is of screen, as well as an option to move the window between the iPad and the Mac. And just like holding down the option key changes the green button between full screen and zoom action, which is a bonus quick tip. I actually did not I did not know until this moment, in fact, that the option key changed the function of the green button between full screen and zoom mode. He says the option key also modifies the tile actions to become move actions. So that means that where if you just float over the green dot, it says tile window to left of screen or tile window to right of screen. If you hit the option key, it says move window to left side of screen or move window to right side of screen. And then, of course, enter full screen changes to zoom with the option key held down to this is the beauty of quick tips. I say that all the time about quick tips. There's so much to learn. And and now I've learned at least two things here. So like we're already on track, which is excellent. So thank you, Graham. Good stuff. Thoughts about that, John, before we move on to Tony here. Hmm, move on to Tony. Tony, I like this little tip. Tony says, as of today, me emojis can only be sent from iOS and iPad OS, but not Mac OS. However, if you want to send them from your Mac, open any synced writing application, say notes, open that on your iPhone and type in your collection of me emoji icons. Then let iCloud sync that to your Mac and you can copy and paste from that synced document in notes, offload the says you could offload the icons to a folder or link them to a text expander snippet or keyboard shortcut says, I imagine you could also get fancy with some kind of continuity shortcut, too. He says you could even email them to yourself and that way you can send your me emojis from your Mac right there. No problem. And he, of course, included one of himself and the email that he sent from his Mac. I like that tip. That's a great idea. So just go take all your me emojis, paste paste them one by one into a into a document and you're good to go. Smart. I like emoji being a somewhat personalized representation of yourself, which I have actually not activated that though. You haven't ran your me emojis yet, John. Oh, you need to create your me emojis and create several of them. That way, you know, you know, are they are they are they generated from a photograph of you or just don't make them yourself. OK, you pick it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're not I think about it wouldn't it be cool if they could take a photograph of you and kind of match it? Um, sure. Yeah. But but this way you get to accessorize and you can, you know, you can make it look like you want to look as opposed to what a picture might actually look like or what it might interpret a picture to look like. So yeah, it's good. And then our our our quick tip reprise. He is Eric comes from Eric who says recently my son realized that in iOS when in a text entry box holding down on the space bar and sliding to the left or right moves the cursor. That's true. That puts and it's it's a great tip. We've been talking about it for a while. It's existed for in different capacities for at least two versions of iOS maybe even longer. But only recently did I truly like finally get over the hump and start using this as I should be using it because what it does is it puts your it turns your iPad or your iPhone keyboard into a trackpad and then you can just drive around and position the cursor exactly where you want. And it's super handy. He says you can move left and right. That's true if you're in say messages. But if you're in say a notes document you can move up and down with it too. The the you know the trackpad function moves in every direction and you will see the keyboard sort of graze out when you when you hold it down and and then you can just move around when you let go of your keyboard reappears. So very good stuff. Eric, thank you. Thoughts on that, John. Cool. Not about that, but I'm going to I'm going to give you a quick tip that I was not aware of until today. So you know how a lot of times you will activate a service and you will be texted a activation code so they make sure that you are who you say you are. Yeah. Well, I just did this today and I didn't realize this may have been an iOS for a while. And I know that actually both on the Mac and a iOS it's it's usually pretty smart that when it receives a code it'll actually realize that fact and like automatically paste it in sometimes into the field that needs it. Yeah. But no, so I got one today. It was actually from Redbox, but they're like, yeah, you know, get a dollar fifty off, blah, blah, blah. And then they show the code and it's underlined. I'm like, that's interesting. Well, you know, let me let me highlight that. You know, we're like, you know, select all or select item. Sure. But when I pressed down on the code, Dave, it came up with a thing saying copy code. And this was in the messages app. Yeah. So it underlined it, which means that it kind of knew that it was probably an activation code. But when I pressed and held on it, it said copy code. Now, did it not automatically try and enter that? Correct. Oh, interesting. So you had to go and copy it. Huh. That's interesting. I wonder how it would have known that it was a code, but chosen not. Maybe it didn't realize the field that you were on was the field that wanted this this activation code. Oh, that's pretty cool. That's pretty good, man. I like it. Yeah. So I save, you know, I save $1.50, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that whole code thing that they put into Safari and linking it from messages, like it works so well that it's easy to overlook how difficult that must have been to make work as smoothly as it does on like its first foray out of the gate. I really am blown away by it. By just how smooth it is, you kind of feel like, oh, it's been there forever. And of course it hasn't. Yeah. So I like it. That's good. That's good. But I had no idea that you could go into messages and tap on. I mean, I know you can go and tap on things and choose copy, but that's interesting that it identified it as a code and said instead copy code. Yeah. So I don't know if they have some database saying, oh, okay, if it's from Breadbox and it looks like this, then it's a code or if it's from, so I don't know if they have some sort of database or algorithm. Well, that's the part that makes it magic, right? Is that somehow it just knows. Yeah, it's pretty good. All right. Well, we've got a bunch of cool stuff found to talk about first. I want to talk about our first sponsor for today. ExpressVPN.com slash MGG is where you're going to go. But what I didn't realize is just how much content on say Netflix is available to people not in the USA because I'm in the USA. And then I started digging a little bit and I realized I wanted to watch Rick and Morty because my son and I like to watch Rick and Morty. He's almost 18. So bear that in mind. Rick and Morty is not necessarily for your five-year-old. But my 18-year-old or almost 18-year-old son and I like to watch Rick and Morty. That's not in Netflix. Well, it is in Netflix in France. And I was able to use ExpressVPN to connect to a France endpoint. And then, boom, I could watch Rick and Morty in Netflix. Super, super simple. I just had to refresh the app. Good to go. Because ExpressVPN hides your IP and lets you control where you want sites to think you're coming from. And you can choose from almost 100 different countries. So just think about all the different Netflix libraries that you can go through. And it's not just Netflix. ExpressVPN works with any streaming service, Hulu, right? BBC's iPlayer, YouTube, you name it. There are a lot of VPNs out there. I've been using ExpressVPN now for a little over a year. It's super fast. It works on every network I've tried. There's never any buffering or lag. And I was able to stream in HD, no problem. And it's compatible with all your devices, your phones, your tablets, all of that stuff. You're Mac, of course. So you can watch what you want on the go. You can even watch on the big screen wherever you are. So as I said, ExpressVPN.com slash MGG is where you want to go. And the reason you want to go there is because for you, as a Mackey Kebb listener, you get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. So you can support the show, watch what you want, and protect yourself at ExpressVPN.com slash MGG. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. I also want to thank PDFPin11 from Smile. We love the folks at Smile because they make such great tools and we're about to talk about cool stuff found. The reality is we are talking about cool stuff found because PDFPin11 is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac. And PDFPin11.2, the most recent update, lets you easily edit the content inside of table cells. 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Smilesoftware.com slash podcast are thanks to Smile for making PDFPin 11 and for sponsoring this episode. All right. Ben has a... Well, let's let Ben say it. Here you go, Ben. Hi, John and Dave. In sunny Tacoma Park, Maryland, this is Ben Rosenthal. This morning I was listening to your discussion in episode 790 about earphones with or without transparency functions. And felt aligned with Dave's comment about not wanting to entrust his spatial awareness to a bunch of mechanical sensors. I was listening to all this while bicycling through the bone conduction speakers of my Coros Omni helmet. I've been riding with the Coros helmet since the company's first Kickstarter campaign delivered in fall 2016. And recently replaced my original Coros links with the higher quality Omni. In addition to better speakers, the Omni also has inbuilt taillights that flash for extra visibility and darkness. These helmets offer the ultimate in audio transparency while bicycling. A bone conduction speaker on each strap positioned to contact the upper cheekbone while leaving the ear open to external sound. The helmet also contains a microphone which makes it possible to accept phone calls. It's all Bluetooth so no wires dangling between my ears and my phone which is safely tucked in my pocket while riding. Each helmet comes with a small remote for play, pause, track and volume control which can be clamped onto the handlebar. The overall audio quality is quite good though in noisy settings like around overpasses and at busy intersections I usually pause my media. In any case, whether listening to the Mac Geek Gab or talking on the phone, Coros offers a great product for safe media consumption while bicycling. Very cool, that, wow! I wish I had known about that years ago but certainly this past summer I tend to ride my bike quite a bit over the summer as the exercise and also just to get out there. That's, man, what a great idea. Yeah, I got to look into getting one of these, John. This is cool. You ride your bike too, right? Yes, but I don't have any, yeah, the bone conduction thing always intrigued me. Yeah, yeah, it makes, and to have it built into a bike helmet, that's pretty good. I like it. Yeah, and you want to wear a helmet so you don't crack your skull because if you do, then you won't be able to listen to Mac Geek Gab. No, yeah, you want to protect your brain. Trust me on this, folks. Yep, yep, yep, for sure. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Thank you, Ben. Good stuff from listener Chris. He says, in a recent episode, a listener talked about how he's had trouble finding web pages. He knows that he has visited. He shared a tip for methods to search the Safari browsing history. But I wanted to remind everyone that the utility history hound from our friends at St. Clair Software collects and consolidates your browsing history from all the popular browsers. He says, and I always have better results finding web pages I previously visited using this utility than I do searching within the browsers, themselves. He says, and because Safari browsing history is synced between all of your devices, your iOS browsing is included in the search as well. I like it. That's pretty good, Chris. You know, I'm obviously a big fan of default folder from St. Clair Software and also a big fan of AppTamer. I've been aware of history hound, but never, I knew it by name only. I had no idea what it did. So thank you for sharing that, Chris. It's great stuff. Pretty cool, huh, John? Yeah, I just did that today. We were talking about something or other. And yeah, I did it within Safari, but yeah, if you use multiple browsers, then that sounds like that's the thing you should be using. That is. I like it. I like it. All right. Mike says, I recently upgraded my 2009 iMac to a 2017 27 inch 5k iMac with a one terabyte fusion drive. I have several USB drives attached and really started to notice how slow some of them are. For one thing, my USB hubs were both USB 2. I did some testing with Blackmagic disk speed test app, a great app that's available free on the Mac App Store. I'll put a link in the show notes, he says. Or I say, he says. And I found I was getting read and write speeds from about 150 megabytes per second for the fusion drive to 26 megabytes for my clone drive and even nine megabytes for a miscellaneous USB 2 storage drive that I keep connected. Thanks to your show, he says. I opted for an external SSD to boot from. I got a Sabrent Rocket XTRM 2 terabyte Thunderbolt 3 external SSD on sale for 466. I also upgraded my hubs to USB 3. Now, he says, I'm getting 2200 megabytes a second on the SSD and 120 megabytes a second on the clone drives. It feels super zoomy. He says, I put the USB 2 drive into cold storage. Thank you for sharing that, Mike. That's awesome. Yeah. We'll put a link to that Sabrent SSD in the show notes. It really makes a huge difference for sure. So, you know, especially with Mojave and Catalina, if you're doing clones, you want to be doing those clones to SSDs because those operating systems, especially, are really not built to be booted from a rotational drive, a solely rotational drive. And it can be really slow the moment you need to boot from that clone. So, I mean, it's a nice way to know you've booted from your clone that it's just dog slow. But beyond that, it starts to get kind of frustrating. So, there you go. I have another one that I've been testing, John, the Leci Mobile SSD. It's a USB-C device. And I've been getting 330 to 390 write and read speeds, megabytes per second from this, just on a USB-3 USB-C bus, which is great. They say that they go up to 540 megabytes a second. I have not gotten that, but I did format APFS. So, that may be the reason I know APFS is a little slower. But, you know, and I'm using the Blackmagic to speed test utility, which I know some people. It is the same one that Mike used in the previous segment there, but some folks will say it doesn't really show you everything with the caching and all that. But anyway, 350 megabytes a second is pretty darn good and makes a huge difference doing those clones and everything. So, yet another one to check out. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Thoughts, Mr. Braun? It's interesting, though. At first, I saw those speeds and I'm like, oh, those speeds kind of... That's not that great. But then you did them in MB, uppercase B. Megabytes, yes. It makes a big difference. Just let everybody know here, a lot of times, I don't know if it's like a conspiracy in the computer industry, but they like to measure throughput in usually something bits and you'll know that because it's a small b. Usually a small b. Well, I've seen things that say that bits can also be written as a large b, so it really truly gets confusing. But I'm with you. I will always write, especially megabits per second and things like that is capital M and then small BBS is how I do it. But I have seen some other people representing it, capital B for bits, which I don't think is right, yeah. But anyway. Right. So anyways, that's smoking. It's smoking. Yeah, no, it's great. That 2200 is killer. That's awesome. Yeah, those internal drives, those NVMe drives in the new Macs. I mean, even my MacBook Air, it's like 1200 megabytes a second or something. It's just ridiculously fast. Yeah, I even pop some in my Synology. One of the ones that I have actually has ports for those and I bought a couple of them or a few of them. Yep. And yeah, it's a nice form factor and it even set on the box fast. Really fast. Really fast, exactly. In 790, we were also talking about the ISH app that gives you a sandbox Linux environment on your iOS devices. And one of the things that I mentioned using that for was to do some network testing. A few of you, actually several of you wrote in and I want to highlight two of the emails that we got each that had two recommendations to do that without needing a command line on your iPhone. First comes from listener Bill who says, try both the Fing app and the Scani app. Fing is F-I-N-G, Scani is S-C-A-N-Y. Scani, Fing is something we've talked about on the show several times before. It is an awesome network scanner. If you need to join a network where I use it all the time, this might seem crazy, but when I play live with different bands, we mostly now all use digital mixers. And then the nice part is we can control our own mixes with our phones or our iPads. Most of the time, the person who's a sound engineer isn't necessarily also a network engineer. And sometimes the mixer, you know, gets turned on in a different order and gets a different IP address. And it's a pain in the neck to try and start, you know, punching in different IP addresses into the mixer app, trying to figure out where the mixer is living today on the Wi-Fi network for the board. Well, using Fing, I just run it. It shows me where it is. I type it in. I tell everybody, we're good to go. So Fing, Fing's super handy for that. Highly recommend keeping it on your iPhone and it's available for free. Scani is one I had not heard of before, John. And it's got all kinds of cool. Yeah, all kinds of cool network tools. DNS lookups. You can do port scans, G-O-I-P lookups. You can of course scan the network as well. It is, what is it? 599 US in the App Store for the iPhone. So thank you for that, Bill. Great. Yeah, I like those as well, especially when you're on a public Wi-Fi network and love running Fing to see who's out there. Yeah, right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. I could take it a step further and terrify them because it usually will display the name of the device, Joe's MacBook and I almost feel like saying, Joe, your MacBook, I can see you. That wouldn't be. Yeah. Well, it just because the machine shows up there doesn't mean that it's sharing any services necessarily, right? Oh, no, but of course Fing and I think this other utility will let you drill down and say, Oh, by the way, show me what this guy is exposing. And for the most part, it's just exposing naming services and not like file sharing. One would hope. Right, right. Depend on your goal. Yeah. Yeah, right, right, right. All right. All right. And then we have from listener Lewis in response to the same segment, he recommends two. One is called Nice Trace and the other is PNU. Nice Trace is from the same folks at happymagenta.com that make this Scanny app that we just mentioned. Nice Trace does trace routes only, I believe, and is $1.99. So a nice option. I think Scanny will do trace routes as well. So for $5.99, you get Scanny, which includes the, it seems like includes all the same functionality as Nice Trace. So just bear that in mind. And then one called PNU and PNU is available for free. It is, well, maybe it's not available for free. Maybe I have the wrong link in the show notes here. And I have the wrong thing because I don't think the app I wanted was for the Princess Nora Bint Abdul Aramon University, if I pronounce that correctly. So PNU is ping a network utility offered for free that lets you do all kinds of different things. You can test your connection to different services and that sort of thing, just like we were mentioning in the last show. So I think it is PNU ping network utility. And I will put the right link in the show notes. So by the time you get it, you've got the right thing, folks. So there you go. Pretty good, huh, Mr. Braun? Very good. Very good. All right. Andrew Orr at Mac Observer wrote up a cool stuff found or something that I consider cool stuff found the other day. It is tracking the trackers.com. And what it does is you plug in a URL and it tells you if the website that you plugged in tries to hide the trackers that they use by assigning them what are called C names or aliases of their own domain. So for example, let's say we use this tracker that actually we run ourselves called Matomo, right? But I run it through our backbeatmedia.com domain. I don't try to hide, actually that one I run at Mac Observer. So that's a bad example because we actually run it ourselves and it's not, it is at matomo.macobserver.com which you would see if you looked in our source. But for example, Google Analytics, right? We could create a redirect that instead of making Google Analytics load from Google.com, we could make it load or look like it's loading from say, you know, ga.macobserver.com and hide from you the fact that we are using Google Analytics. We don't do that. Some sites do and this tool at trackingthetrackers.com will show you what your sites are doing. Apple even does this, believe it or not. In fact, the weirdest part, John, is if you put in Apple.com into tracking the trackers, the disguised third-party tracker that Apple says is at securemetrics.apple.com is being attributed to the Adobe Experience Cloud, which seems odd to me. But there you go. That's at least what it's saying. And it'll tell you what cookies it's leaking and all of that stuff. So yeah, pretty good. Fun stuff. I always like to know what's going on, John, don't you? Yeah, well, if you like to know what's going on, there is another one, Dave. And I was actually, I finally completed my exploration here. I was looking for this when we were talking about browser extensions a while ago, but there's one called Ghostery or actually Ghostery Light, which when you boil it down, it's basically a utility that will show you trackers on the page that you're on. Oh. So if you want to know who's looking over your shoulder. Nice. I think we've mentioned Ghostery a couple of times on the show. I think, in fact, I think you've brought it up before. But yeah, no, that's a good one. I'll put that in the list. That's good. Good, good. I don't know where I found this one, so I can't give credit. Maybe I just stumbled on it somewhere. But there is a website called GetCap.co, GetKAP.co, which is an open source screen recorder built with web technology. And it is available for free. You download the app and you can do screen recording, just like you can in, say, QuickTime or in ScreenFlow, but you can do it right there on your Mac. And you can do it for free. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Pretty good. And thanks to whoever recommended it to me. I don't, I wish I knew where it came from, John. But, you know, there you go. Listener Chris, wait, wait, wait, where are we here? Listener Chris. Oh yeah. In episode 790, Steve wrote in, and we were talking about bridging Wi-Fi between two buildings. Chris reminds us of the ingenious ENH 500, which is, as he notes, specifically made for this situation. It is fast and has been rock steady for several years now. So I sent this link off to Steve so that he'd have it right away, but I wanted to share it with everybody. For 160 bucks, you get this 5 gigahertz wireless outdoor bridge with a directional antenna, which is the key that we were talking about last week. Says it's got long range. This one says it will do up to one mile. So that's pretty good. Wow, one mile is, what, 3,000 feet or something? 5,268 feet. Oh, 5,000. Isn't it, isn't it, isn't that how, like I'm just doing that off the top of my head. 5,280 feet. So I was off by 12 feet. Sorry about that. I don't know why I had 5268 in my brain, but 5 280 is the right one. So there you go. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's a lot of feet because I think normal Wi-Fi is normally in the hundreds of feet. Omni, let's say not normal, but because there's nothing, yeah, there's nothing abnormal about what NGenius is doing. It's just that they are doing it in a focused directional way. Whereas, yeah, like you said, the Wi-Fi we have in our homes is omni-directional and going every direction. And so you lose, you get directionality without or non-directionality without, but you sacrifice some range. But yeah, they're like an order of magnitude less range. Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah, at best, right? I mean, I don't know if I get 500 feet out of Wi-Fi here in my house. I mean, I need a lot of access points to cover 500 feet. So, yeah, it's pretty good. Although in an open room, you know, line of sight, you probably could get something close to that maybe. Yeah, I've done some tests in the past. And yeah, I can get 2 to 300 feet from 802 AC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, without walls or anything in the way, that makes sense. Yeah. One last little cool stuff found or quick tip. Well, it's cool stuff found if you don't know it about it yet, but we have an app for the Mackie Gab here where you can send in your questions. You can listen to the show. You can make bookmarks and all of that stuff. However, it seems like, at least for some of us, and I am one of the some of us, migrating my phone from an iPhone XR to my iPhone 11 Pro, and I did the over-the-air migration, so direct phone to phone, not via iCloud, for whatever reason, that seems to have broken my ability to get notifications from the Mackie Gab app. And I had to delete the app and reinstall it. So, if you want notifications that were starting to do the live stream or a new episode is out, that's basically all we notify you for. We try not to overdo it. You've got to delete the app and reinstall it if you're not getting them. So, I just wanted to mention that here in the show, because I can't send a notification out to tell you to do that, because then you wouldn't get it. So, I could say if you get this notification, don't worry about it, but that's a little, that's overdoing it, isn't it, John? So, anyway, there we go. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on? We're not going to send you a notification saying that you're not getting notifications. We would love to, but we can't... Well, we are, but we're doing it here is just like, we're doing a separate, different medium. Although, it's possible you're listening to this in the app, even if you're not getting notifications. So, okay. We have, well, we've got some more tips. We've got some questions to answer. And I want to talk about our next sponsor, John, which is Eero. In fact, we were just talking about how with our mesh networks from Eero, we can get great coverage throughout our homes and our offices, because Eero is the Wi-Fi that your home deserves. In addition to just doing the Wi-Fi though, Eero is a great router, because they've got all kinds of great technology in there to manage your network both inside and out. In fact, with their smart queuing management, they can pretty much eliminate all the buffer bloat problems that those of us on cable modems have when there's a backup happening or any of that where you're uploading all your photos and all of that, Eero's smart queuing management just addresses that. And it does it in an easy way. In fact, that's sort of how Eero is across the board, isn't it? It's just easy and it just works. 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You want something that's going to work for you so that you can actually do your business and not have to manage the software that is supposed to be helping you manage your business. That's what Captera is for because they make it easy to discover the right solution fast. So join the millions of people who use Captera each month and find the right tools for their business. Visit captera.com.mgg for free today. That's right. All of this is free. Captera.com.mgg to find the tools to make an informed decision for your business. That's captera.com.mgg. It's free, capterra.com.mgg. Captera is software selection simplified and our thanks to Captera for sponsoring this episode. John, you want to take us to... Tell us about what you learned about. But then a tale of not woe. All right. That works. So I think this happened, Dave. Well, if you recall, recently I was talking about issues I was having with my MacBook Pro after I upgraded to Catalina. The time machine was stuttering and I went to disutility and I was getting errors and I'm like, this ain't right. So I finally threw down the gauntlet and I was like, you know what? I'm going to reformat the internal drive and restore from a clone and lo and behold, all the errors went away. Oh, that's good. Right. And time machine worked and I didn't get the errors and disutilized. I'm like, okay, that fixed the problem. So, you know, make a clone, folks. But then I noticed one thing when I was going through answering some of the questions. For the podcast, Dave, I noticed that the signature for my reply was not going to the correct... It wasn't putting the correct signature and I'm like, well, that's crazy talk because I ran mail suite, right? 2019, from our friends at SmallCubed. And I'm like, well, duh. So I looked then, sure enough, it was not installed. So I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I got something, something went wrong. So I downloaded the installer, installed it. And, you know, part of the, you know, the dance you have to go through is in mail. When you install a new mail plugin with Apple's mail, you have to go to preferences, general, and there's going to be a tab saying manage plugins. I'm like, okay, maybe it's not enabled. And so I went to that screen and you know what I saw, Dave? Nothing. And I'm like, okay, that's not good. So fortunately, and although they're not sponsoring this show, I think they have in the past, but we love them anyways. So I wrote to their support and I said, basically, yeah, here's what happened. You know, I installed mail suite 2019. You have to enable full disk access, which I did. And they let you know that when I went to this, I saw nothing. You know, so I dug in a little bit, you know, being a troubleshooting type of guy. And, you know, I went to home, and, you know, I went to home, library, mail, and I saw a small cubed folder. And in the bundles folder, I saw a small cube mail bundle folder in there. So I'm like, all right, and installed it properly, as far as I can tell. So what the heck is going on? Now there's also a file called plugin console.log. I don't know if that's a general thing for mail or if it was specific to this one. Okay. And so I sent that off to them. Sure. And then I heard nothing and I'm like, oh gosh, this is terrible. The reason I heard nothing is because the reply that came from the same day from Beth on their support team was put in my spam folder, Dave. What the heck? I mean, how, why would it even classify something so complex as spam? But anyways, so here's what Beth has said. We've had several reports of plugins not being visible, as you pointed out. One cause of this is that because people have their user folder on an external drive, and that was not my case, but just one tip to people that may be a cause for you not seeing your mail plugins as far as they know. But she said also, the other reason is that a certain folder may not be a sim link. And you can tell something's a sim link because when you look at the folder, it has a little arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, I believe. That wasn't the case either. So I'm like, okay. What was the case? I'm just trying to help us get to like, you found a very cool thing here, and I want to teach people it before we lose them. So what is the cool thing? And their final statement was, if it isn't any of these things, I just wanted to include those because it could help people. But if it's not any of those things, then she said the issue is with Apple's data vault, which was introduced with system integrity protection in Mojave. It can be fixed, but it's a bit of an elaborate process. And I'm like, hey. Basically, the explanation is that they had these things called data vaults when you have system integrity protection. And mail will keep a copy of plugins in a hidden folder. The problem is, is that if there's a discrepancy between the ones in the hidden data vault and the ones in your normal user directory, you're not going to see them. Oh, interesting. So it should, in theory, migrate whatever you put into your, what we see, what you and I see is our mail plugins folder. It shouldn't migrate that to this data vault, but if it doesn't, then data vault is where it's actually reading these plugins from. It seems, or at least they have to be in both places. Otherwise, it won't read them or it won't activate them. Correct. So I don't know if it was because I did the migration and the reformatting that maybe has caused this, because it didn't happen on my Mac mini. The thing is, I have not reformatted my drive on my Mac mini. So I'm wondering if the reformat and the migrate and the restoring from the clone may have caused this. But anyways, the solution to this is pretty straightforward. So first, you have to disable SIP. I don't know. We may copy, I don't know if we should copy the text of this, or I'm hoping they have a link to what she sent me. I'm assuming they do. Yeah, we'll look for it. Otherwise, we can put it in the forums. But yeah. But basically, the three steps are as follows. You disable SIP and you do that by restarting your Mac, you go into recovery, and then the terminal, you say CSR-util-disable. That then allows you to do the next step, which is to remove the data vault that is out of sync. And that's in home, library, containers, comm, dot apple, dot mail, data, data vaults. And then you re-enable SIP at low and behold, I then saw the plug-in when I went back to the page. Nice. I like it. And just to boot, I, you know, there's actually a cyber Monday that term grates on my nerves. So I actually renewed my license for it, because so that was fantastic support. And I got to think they were ripping their hair out trying to figure this out, because I'm sure I'm not the only one that wrote them saying, I can't see your plug-in. Right, right. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, we'll have to see if they have a link to this that we can put in the show notes. So I'll let you shoot them an email and find that out. Yeah, that's great stuff. That's really good. Yeah, I had no idea about this data vaults thing, so I like it. That's good. We have had in the last two shows discussions about connecting to your Mac remotely. And one of the things that we talked about, in fact, the thing that I recommended is sort of the main way to do it, is this app called Screens Connect. And I misinterpreted how this app worked. And what I had said was, oh yeah, there's a proxy server, and it coordinates the connection without opening any holes in your firewall. That's not true. And we talked about that in the last episode. However, it's not actually insecure, which is what we were led to believe in the last episode, or at least it can be made secure very, very easily. And the way that that's done is inside Screens Connect, go to the preferences, and in general, there is a checkbox for use remote login, and then in parentheses, SSH tunneling. More secure, it says, but slower. And what this does is instead of opening up the VNC port on your router, it opens up a different port, not the default, but a different port for SSH, and then you're good to go. And it will secure the connection, it encrypts it because SSH is there, and then it sends this remote access or VNC connection across this secure tunnel that's created with SSH. So it can be done very securely without really having to do much of anything. I think this use remote tunneling or use remote login box is not yet checked by default, but Luke Vandal, who is the engineer that writes this, the developer I should say that writes this, I guess either term is appropriate, but says that he's considering enabling SSH by default in a future update just for this reason, so that everything is good to go. So there you go. That makes me feel a whole lot better about this, and I appreciate everybody writing in and asking about it, and all of that good stuff. So thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who wrote in, I think Chris and Robert, and of course to Luke at Adobe, who make screens connect so that we can all use it. But yeah, good stuff. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on? Why can't I? I could swear I had launched it. I think it's part of SetApp, but I can't seem to find it now, but I thought I ran it and looked for a little secure checkbox, but I couldn't find it, but apparently you did. So there's two apps that we're talking about here. One is called Screens, and the other is called Screens Connect. And I think Screens is a part of SetApp, but Screens Connect is not, but Screens is the paid for app. Screens Connect is available for free. So you can just go to, we'll put a link in the show notes, but you can go and download that from adovia.com. And then you're good to go. So yeah, yeah. So that should do it for you. And then Screens Connect just runs and manages the remote connection, which is great. Good? Makes sense? Yeah, I think we're good. Yeah, so I guess the message is that, yeah, basic screen sharing typically will not offer any sort of protection. So not necessarily. And that's why Luke built this SSH tunneling into the app so that you don't, so you don't have to worry about that. Yeah, it's good. It's good, it's good, it's good. All right. And then Raj found a fascinating thing. So Raj says, I was browsing my Apple Music Library and noticed that several songs were unplayable with the message, this song is no longer available. Even though I knew I had purchased it or uploaded it to my iCloud Music Library in the past. To figure out how many of these files were in my library, I made a smart playlist filtered by iCloud status and saw that many of them were files I had uploaded from my Mac years ago. Thankfully, I had a backup of these songs on my Mac, so I added a second rule for a location of on this computer. I then copied the files out to a folder, deleted them from my Music Library and then re-imported, which caused them to re-upload and the problem was fixed. He says, I think the reason is this. It seems that if a record label or artist decides to pull music matched to tracks that you uploaded or purchased in the past in Apple Music, it gets marked as unavailable, even though it'll reappear if you upload it. So what happens when you put a file that you own, right? You bought music, you've got the, whatever, the AAC or even an MP3, you put it into either iTunes or the Music app, depending on what version of the OS you're on. It will first look to see if it can match that with a file that is allowed to be matched in Apple's library. If it can, it doesn't upload, it just says, it just checks the box and says, okay, you can use this matched app or this matched file, you're good to go. The problem is, if that file becomes un-matchable in the future, as Raj points out, then you cannot play it. But if you have the original, which you do, you just remove it from your library and re-upload it. And now instead of matching, it will say, there is nothing to match it to. Let's upload it. And when it uploads, then you have access to it because that's how that works. Craziness. You'd think that there could be a better way for Apple to manage this, that respects the artist's rights and all of that stuff, but doesn't mess up us users. So what happened? Did the database of what you have versus what is allowed in the cloud break or did the audio pro... Because I assume what it does is that it does some sort of audio profiling, like Spotify and all that stuff. And it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, I know this song, so. It does a profile. Or does it match it by the name or the artist or by the audio signature, I guess is my question. So the problem is not that something broke. The problem is that a file that was previously licensed and allowed to be matched is no longer part of the list of files that can be matched. And if you matched to it, well, it's not in the database anymore, so you can't play it. If a file isn't matchable, then you upload it automatically. iTunes or the music app will just automatically upload it. But the problem is if you didn't upload it in the past because it matched, which is the default behavior, and now it can't match, now you're in this limbo land where you didn't upload it because you didn't need to. And of course all of this is happening. You don't actually get to decide whether it's uploaded or matched. The music app or iTunes decides whether it's uploaded or matched. But if it decided matched in the past and now it doesn't have access to a matched version, you can't play it. So you need to remove it from your library and re-add it so that it can upload it this time. It'll look at it and yeah, whatever process it does to match these things is whatever it does. And it does look at audio signature, but also at metadata, at artist name and all that good stuff. Yeah, it's one of those crazy things. Nuts. It's nuts, I tell you. All right. Where are we here on time? Oh, good. We've got time. I like it. You know, we asked if you folks would want us to... And I'll tell you what we asked and then I'll explain my thought process on this. We asked all you folks if you wanted us to do one 90-minute episode every week or two, say 45-minute episodes every week. Doesn't really change what we do here. It's the same amount of content, just whether we package it, you know, as one or as we have or as two. And not surprisingly, everybody that listens to this show said, no, I'm fine with the 90-minute version. Because of course you are, because you're still listening. The people I would love to poll are the people that no longer listen because the show's too long. And so it was interesting hearing, and I knew that. And it was one of those things where it just came up in the show and we just asked it off the cuff. But your responses were informative, nonetheless, because most of you said, no, no, no, I would much rather get all of the week's content at once instead of having it metered out one on Monday, one on Wednesday, or something like that. So that was actually valuable. There were very, very few of you. There were a lot of responses, but there were very, very few of you that said, I would rather it be chopped up, which again is no great surprise. But we are going to leave it at the 90-minute thing for now. And we might be doing some other things with the content to highlight some specific segments, but for now, and probably for the foreseeable future, the main show will be, as you are used to, this 90-minute thing. The reason we asked is because the show started as a 45-minute show and then 15 years goes by and it's creeped up to 90. So there you go. But thank you for all your responses. It's great. Feedback at MackieGab.com if you have any other thoughts about that. I don't know if I heard you, Dave. Even with my new earbuds here, ER4 Pro, I think they are or something like that. Yeah, from Edamon. But I'm pretty sure you said Feedback at MackieGab.com. I did. I said Feedback at MackieGab.com and John, I think Louie wrote into Feedback at MackieGab. I'm pretty sure it's Louie. You saw he put that right in there. Don't you see it? Oh, there you go. Oh, I have a little smiley right next to it. I see it. I, you know, we do have a Louie in Montreal who writes in quite a bit. So I thought that that was who this was. So you're right. This is Louie. So take us to Louie, please, John. All right. Louie has a really good one here and we haven't heard back yet, but I hope we do. But he says I have a 2017 27-inch 5K iMac running Catalina. I'm a firm believer in rebooting my computers at least once a day. I mean, it's not going to hurt things other than slowing it down. But I think once a week is good for a man. It makes me sad because, you know, a lot of computer people say that the way to solve any problem is to turn it off and on again. So anyways, I'm sorry. I feel like most problems can be resolved by simply turning the machine off and turning it back on again, as he says. I've always had the schedule in energy saver to shut down my computer at 11.45 p.m. every night and then start it back up at 6 a.m. every morning. When I'm out of town, that also assures that I can always remotely access my home machine using Splashtop, a very similar but less expensive alternative to log me in. This week, I've had to get up for 6 a.m. several times. Each time I discovered my machine was already booted and in a state consistent with having been shut down and rebooted, the new console has proven to be pretty opaque to me. Yes, I agree. Terrible. Yeah. I can see events going back to midnight the previous evening, but I can't pinpoint when the machine booted up to complicate things. I also recently attached the UPS. I live in Northern California and have been affected by the recent power shutdowns. I connected the UPS's USB cable to the Mac so it can manage shutdown in the case of an outage. I'm pretty sure the problem manifested before the UPS at any rate, I'll discount that and test tonight. I met a loss how to figure out what is going on. Any suggestions? So I do want to throw in that he shared a tip here and that is that if you need to, if you regularly need remote access to your computer, going in to energy saver into schedule and turning on just the start or wake up for every day at, say, 6 a.m. like he did, pick a time. It doesn't really matter. I mean, although it does if your computer's in your bedroom, you probably don't want it waking up at, say, 3 a.m. But having your computer start or wake up at a specific time every day will ensure that you go no more than 24 hours with your computer being off if something switches it off, right? Because it will start back up while you're traveling. So it's a great little tip and something that I do so that just so that I know, okay, I know that it's 7 o'clock tomorrow morning, the computer in my office is going to turn on, even if I'm not home, and then I can remote access in and I can get to it. So right. Yeah. So my initial thought, Dave, is do you have a cat? Okay. I'm not kidding. Sure. Okay. Yeah. No, no, no, something that touches the keyboard will wake it up for sure. Yeah. And cats love computers. You see it all the time. I love. We now have three. I know. Yeah. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. So you got Puck and you got the Coon cat and then another one now. Well, no, we've always had Puck for a couple of years. We've had Logan for a long time. And then we just recently added a main Coon cat. No. Oh, okay. So that's been after Ender's game. So Dave. Right. So my first suggestion, which I did not say in the reply, is make sure that your critters, whether they be cats or rats or whatever, sure, are not waking up your computer just to mess with you. But anyways, to figure out what's causing this and to get output in the old readable syslog format, his common being that the current console is pretty much useless for most humans, you can either issue a command from the terminal. And we actually did this. So I had to dig into the archives here, but there is a way to do this from the terminal. And we'll paste the command into our lovingly crafted show notes. But if you say log show style syslog. Well, we'll put it. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, right. Anyways, there is a way and the essence of this is that there is a process called power D, which is the power daemon or daemon, depending on how you pronounce it. And that's the process within Mac OS that handles all of these sleep, wake, and other power events here. So you could do that and pipe it out to a text file and then look through that to see what is happening around the time that it's waking up. So look at pre 6 a.m. and see who is... It could be that the computer is just confused and starting it up early. I've seen this happen with time machine backups that I schedule. Sure. Later is that it doesn't always do it on the spot because the computer is busy or it's asleep and it doesn't want to wake up. I don't know. Right. The other way to do it, Dave, which I think is probably better, so you could send it all to a text file, but you could also run something like consolation. So consolation is utility that among other things will take the new style console stuff and output it in a form that you can understand. And so I found here, so I dug around and so it has a section called filter and you can filter on a number of criteria. The one you want to do is say pattern subsystem power D and then it'll show you all the power D events in the output. So that's another way to do it. I like that. Yeah. And lastly, Dave, if it's a power event, you know, I hate to do the power on power off. The thing is it could be an SMC. So SMC is the system management controller in the Mac and it's a, I guess, you know, a little chip and it has some memory. And sometimes it gets messed up, but Apple has guidance on how to reset it because sometimes these power related operations like starting up or shutting down will get confused or it could be the PRAM. Last I checked Dave, I think some of these parameters like, you know, the time that you want it to wake up and shut down could be in the PRAM. So an SMC and or PRAM reset and actually PRAM reset is included in the SMC article. Could be what you need to do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. I'll put a link in the show notes to reset the SMC. It's different on every Mac, but it is worth going through and kind of learning how to do it on yours. Yeah. I mean, some is just like pulling the plug for 15 seconds. Others, it's you got to hold on certain keys, right? Yeah. On the desktop computers, it's all pretty, well, on non-T2 desktop computers, it is shut down, pull the power cord for 15 seconds, plug it back in, wait five seconds, then press the power button to turn on your Mac. If you've got T2 computers are all a little bit different, you've got to hold the power button with it shut down and wait a few seconds. And again, it's worth not only going to the support article and reading it, but do it. Go reset your SMC. You're certainly not going to break, well, if you do break something, resetting the SMC, it's because your computer had a problem to begin with. But generally, it fixes things very, very rarely would it even break something. But it's worth going through the process so that when you are doing this in a pressure situation and you're reading the instructions on your iPhone or trying to remember them, that you've at least been through it before. So, yeah, it's good. Yeah. I mean, I've had some weirdness in this respect. And so the one thing I found one time is like, my Mac mini guy typically put to sleep when I'm not doing the podcast or playing games or whatever. Sure. And a couple of times I noticed there was a wake and I'm like, why did you wake up? And here was the reason. So I did step similar to what we talked about. And as it turns out, there was some sort of vibration in the area of the computer. And it activated one of my user input devices. And the machine was like, up, time to wake up, John's here. Right. Right. Yeah, it said like HID, human interface device. It was like, yeah, HID, wake up. Interesting. Oh, that's why you're doing that. So it could be that. And again, I'm not joking when I say it could be a cat or. Yeah, totally. You know, or humidity or whatever, making one of your input devices, make the computer think it should wake up. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Cool. All right. Juergen writes and asks, he says the spindle drive of the fusion drive in my iMac was beginning to fail. I'm going to share his history here only because I think, I think, I think it's helpful. And so I decided to buy a new Mac mini 2018 because I'm cheap or rather because Apple is expensive when it comes to SSDs. Oh, she's right. I opted for the smallest internal SSD. That was because I read on the Internet that it would be no problem to put my user account on an external drive. And what can be read on the Internet is true. Right. So I installed the OS on the internal drive, started with a new user account to log in and migrated my old user to an external drive. I had nothing but trouble with the account on the external. The permissions were completely messed up. Owner of files would sometimes be my username, sometimes 501 from the old machine. You know the story. I do know the story. He says, so I went back to my old computer and sized my user account down so it would fit on the internal drive of the new one and migrated again this time completely to the internal drive because, and that was me being clever for the second time, I could simply put big folders of my home directory on the external. He says, you already guessed it wrong again. It simply is not possible to link folders like documents or music from an external drive to your home directory on the local drive. It was really messy and I finally ended up having an official home directory on the internal and a secondary home directory on the external. But not all apps work nicely with this combination. So I regularly end up with files in the internal documents folder because some naughty apps won't ask and rather just save their files there. That is not the way I like my computer. So I came up with a new plan says Juergen. I will create a completely new user and will put the home directory on an external drive right from the beginning. Then I will manually migrate all my user data and register all my apps again. I will not use migration assistant. I will copy everything manually to make sure that the permissions are set correctly for the new user. But before I do that, I have some questions. Do you see a flaw in my master plan? And will I run into any trouble when I have two different user accounts with different user names on the same Mac and log into that same Apple ID? So I'm going to answer the second question first. No, you shouldn't have a problem with that other than iCloud will sync the data, contacts and calendars and things like that between the two. So as long as you're aware of that, but that's sort of table stakes for the way iCloud works. As far as your master plan? Yeah, I think it's sound. I'm not sure that it's what I would do though. If it were me and I had a Mac mini with 128 gig SSD, I would probably just put everything, including my operating system on the external drive and boot from that and have my user account there and all of that. Dependently? Really? Yeah, I would. I would think you'd want the OS on the internal drive. Well, yes, no, you're not wrong. I would, but at 128 gigs, you're either inheriting the scenario where you have the OS on the external or you're inheriting a scenario where you've got your user account on the external. And that can be wonky as Jurgen is finding out. Once you get it running, it can be fine, but I'm not sure it's worth the headache there. No, actually they're saying it just seems unnatural to me. It is, but so it always should be on the internal drive and I'm just saying should, because should doesn't mean right or wrong. It's like it's a preference. No, and I would probably put a fresh OS on my internal drive in this scenario. I might boot from the external, but I would put a fresh OS on the internal just so that it's there as a spare or a troubleshooting or whatever. But yeah, I think with SSDs being relatively inexpensive, external SSDs being relatively inexpensive and fast and all of that, that might be the best way to go. You know, I mean, 256 gig internal, I have found both for myself and for everybody in the family, that works. Now, what I do is I put photos and music on an external drive in those scenarios. Even with a one terabyte internal, I put photos and music on an external. There's just, they don't need the speed that an internal SSD can provide and while you're right, that you can't move the music folder to an external drive. You can tell the music app or iTunes or the photos app to put its library and all of the media files on an external. And that works totally fine. So depending on how much stuff you actually have in your home folder, you might be able to pare it down and fit it on that 128. And if you can, great. For me, I found that 256 is the magic number there. And I'm talking about desktop machines. With a laptop, I actually find 256 works fine, but I don't, you know, I use iCloud Music Library and iCloud Photos, so I let it manage how much stuff is being saved locally and quite frankly, that works out great. So 256 has worked out fine for me for a very long time and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Yeah, but we're all different. I mean, but you know, for me and the way I manage things, yeah, 256 is fine. Yeah, you know, I was certainly tempted because I saw a Cyber Monday deal on a Mac Mini 2018, but it only had a 256 SSD and I'm like, you know, for a Mini, again, it's a desktop machine. You can easily manage 256, I think. Yeah, and actually it was a special, through Amazon, I think, and it was under, it was like 900 something, you know, with I think the i7 and I think 8GB or AM, which I was sorely tempted because they're not in the reverb store yet. Right, right, right, right. While we're talking about SSDs, John, you want to share what you told Todd when he wrote in about this? Yeah, this could be a learning journey for all of us here. Okay. Basically our friend, ADD Todd, who is now in Utah for some bizarre reason, but who knows? Utah's not that bizarre of a place. Oh, I see, got it. Okay. Well, no, he's usually, yeah, I think he's coastal. Got it in Utah. I don't know why and it doesn't really matter. But I think the gist of his question is that he was asking, John, how in the world do you ever get the SanDisk software to recognize your SSD when you're in your virtual machine? So what is he talking about? So the thing is, a little while ago, I got some SanDisk external SSDs because the price was really good. It was like a one terabyte for like 200 or like less than $200 or something. Like I got to get these and I use both of them. So I got one terabyte SSDs that are crucial in my two main machines. And then I bought these two SanDisk one terabyte SSDs and an external USB 3 enclosure to do my CCC backup. Works great. But SanDisk does offer utility and they actually have a little card and they say, hey, you know, download SanDisk SSD dashboard. It lets you do speed tests, use capacity, temperature, firmware updates, which that is important to me, I think. Smart attributes and stuff like that. So it's a really handy utility. The thing is, it's for Windows. So I'm like, how do I get this to work? The only way I was able to get it to work and I think he verified this in his email, the only way I was get it to work, Dave, is that I was able to run the Windows utility within parallels. And then when I put the drive, when I inserted the drive into the USB port, parallels along with most other VMs, where you're like, hey, I see a USB device. Who do you want to handle it? You want me to give it to the Mac or you want me to give it to the PC? And I'm like, wow, I'll give it to the PC. And the utility worked flawlessly. That makes sense. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he even in the follow-up. It's USB, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah, because USB can be assigned to the virtual machine and truly managed there. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. So their utility, though, I got to give the... So it's not, I don't know if I'd say it's atypical, but the thing is I've had other utilities that totally fail in this scenario. But their utility is smart enough, which over a USB interface versus something like SATA or something like that, it's able to see the drive and actually do things like a firmware update. To me, that is unusual. Yeah. Because usually you have to be on like the native operating system of the software in order to get that to happen. But apparently between parallels, which is what I was using and the Santa software, it worked. Now, his observation was that this did not work if he tried to do it with the boot drive. And... Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, because you can't let the virtual machine manage the boot drive natively because... I think that's a little too meta. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I think that's the case. I think that's what is happening in this case. Now, the one thing I could suggest, so he's like, how could I get around this? And I communicated to him a story about the software. So I also have crucial drives. And their way of at least updating the firmware is quite different in that they say, oh, download this ISO image, which is actually I think a little Unix kind of thing. Okay. Oh, yeah. And then boot that. Right, right. And I was able to use that to update the firmware in one of my machines. And that actually was an internal drive. But when I tried to do it to an external drive connected via Thunderbolt, it didn't work, which is weird because my understanding is that that's a low level enough connection. So Thunderbolt target dysmote, as far as I know, is like an NVMe connection when I researched this. So I don't know why their utility did not see it. The problem is when I tried to run the utility on my Mac Pro, it worked great. When I tried to run on my Mac Mini, it would crash. So I'm like, how do I get around this? But in his case, and I didn't write this to him. So if you're listening, listen, what I'm thinking is that you may be able to get around this by putting one of your machines in target dysmode. And then I think the utility may be able to see it. Yeah, for sure. Because now it's just a really expensive external drive case. Right. But I think because you're in a VM, it's not willing to let you get to the guts of the drive. I don't know your experience. Yeah, no, I've had mixed experience with that for sure. For sure, yeah. All right, so because the two SSDs, so I have Crucial and I have Sandisk, I don't know about you. I have the, well, I mean, I've got lots of them in internal SSDs. And yeah, I've got Crucial. I don't know that I have a Sandisk. I have got a couple of Crucials. And I think I have an old Kingston one in one of my Macs, too. So yeah, while we're talking about virtual machines, Brian asked, following up on things from an earlier episode, he says, you guys were talking about migrating a Mojave install into a Parallels virtual machine or the like. And he says, I'm trying to do this before I upgrade to Catalina. But you say, how did you do this? And he's right. This is not nearly as easy as we thought it should be. I had a long discussion actually while I was at Mac Tech with one of the folks from Parallels. And they've just never built an engine to do this because up until now, it has not been a thing that needs to be built. It may, that may change in the future, but at the moment, it doesn't exist. So there's no one step path to do this. The steps are, number one, you use something like carbon copy cloner to make a disk image of your Mojave install. So do that and that way you've got it. Then what you have to do is create a brand new virtual machine inside Parallels and install a brand new copy of Mojave into it. When that Mojave installation is booting, migration assistant will pop up or it will offer to pop up, let it and then mount the disk image that you made in step one and let it slurp in everything. So you can't boot directly from this Mojave disk image, but you can slurp the data from it into a virtual machine that you can then boot with Mojave and access your 32-bit type of stuff. So yeah, sorry that that, it seemed like a good idea and actually everybody I've talked with agrees that it's a good idea. It just isn't something that can be done because up until very recently, it hasn't been a thing that is needed. And Alex in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream asked, what do you mean by this? What I mean is we now with Catalina, we can't run our virtual or we can't run our 32-bit apps. So my thought was great clone the Mojave installation and there's just boot that in some virtualized environment and you're good to go, which would be true. The trick is you can't get there directly. You have to do this clone and then slurp in with migration assistant. So thank you for asking Alex. Thanks for the clarification. In fact, I'm sure everybody that's listening appreciates that too. All right, John, you want to take us to Rod. Rod. Yeah, please. I'll take us to Rod. So Rod has a good one. So Rod is a blast from the past or at least he has a machine that's a blast from the past. I have a mid-2007, yes, 2007 Core 2 Duo 20-inch iMac running El Capitan running, sitting in our kitchen, being used mostly for iTunes recipe, look up and occasional web browsing. Even with these light duties, it's painfully slow and almost not worth the trouble. Last month, I upgraded the memory from the original three gigabytes to six, which is the maximum allowed. While this has helped, it's not enough. I'm looking for more cheap ways to improve its performance. On your show, you said many times recommending switching from a rotational to an SSD drive. In situations such as this, where cracking open the machine to replace the drive is challenging, you suggested hanging an external SSD off of a Thunderbolt port and booting from that to improve performance. Alas, my iMac was released before the inclusion of Thunderbolt. What about FireWire 800? Is that fast enough? This iMac has a FireWire 800 port on the back, but I see performance improvements booting off an external FireWire 800 drive with the limitations of the interface speed make the speed boost negligible. So, number one, hats off to being able to... Dude, 2007, I mean, you thought I was bad. I think I've got a 2007 iMac running over in the house. Yeah. Yeah, they're totally functional for, you know, for what he's talking about here. But they're slow, like with today's web browsers and all of that stuff. It's slow. Yeah. Right. So, one of your friends, when you're considering an upgrade, especially for an older machine, the thing is, I don't think it's intentional, but Apple doesn't necessarily tell you the entire truth here. So, the tool that I love is Mac Tracker, Dave, because it tells you the truth. So, as he found out, this machine, although Apple says you can only get four gigs of RAM, he found out you can actually put six gigs, and that's the max. So, that's a good step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the thing is, when you look at this machine, Dave, so it has three USB 2 ports at 480 megabits per second, the FireWire 400 at 400 megabits per second. And then, as he noticed, the FireWire 800 port at 800 megabits per second. The only thing you got to say is, Dave, is all of these pale in comparison to the internal SATA 2 interface, which is at 3 gigabits per second. So, my recommendation is, I mean, go to iFixit. I think, as far as I know, you can replace the internal drive on this, but I think- Absolutely. That's where I have those crucial SSDs, is inside one of those, 2007. Okay. But I think for this machine, that is the only remaining thing you can do to increase the speed. You could certainly do a FireWire 800, but I think you'll be disappointed with the performance. No, I mean it's- Or maybe, well, you know, you could try it. Yeah, I've- I mean, FireWire is a more efficient protocol. Well, I don't- I mean, FireWire is more efficient than USB, I would say, but it's not more efficient than SATA, so I don't know. Yeah, even if you had- Well, if you had USB 3, which he doesn't, he's got USB 2, right? But if he had USB 3, putting an external SSD on there would certainly be the easiest thing. And you probably wouldn't notice a huge amount of difference with it as your boot drive on that machine, but he doesn't have USB 3. He's got USB 2. That said, when we did, you know, back in, I want to say 2010, I could be off by a year or two in either direction. When we did the kind of great SSD upgrade here at MacGeekab, the first thing I did on every machine was I put an SSD into a USB 2 external enclosure, cloned the internal drive to it, and booted from it to make sure it would boot before cracking the machine open and putting it inside. USB 2 limited, like you said, John to 480 megabits per second, right? So 48 megabytes per second ballpark. I realize I'm doing the math the wrong way, but close enough. Now, you're- I would say you're doing it right. 10, 8, 10, the thing is- Yeah, I know. You know, there's- But when I did that, the machine got way faster because I was booting from an SSD, even though it was on this slower external bus, like way faster. And when I moved those drives inside, I noticed no difference whatsoever. Now, if I ran like a Blackmagic disk speed test, sure, I could see the difference, but experientially, no. The biggest difference was because the SSD has the very, very low latency. So I think it- certainly on Firewire, that's almost double the speed of USB 2, probably gonna be fine. Yeah, you'd get a little bit of a boost, especially if you're reading large files or something, but in terms of just booting your OS and all that, probably not much experiential difference between external on Firewire 800 versus internal on SATA 2 for most people, especially on a machine like that, you know, 2007. So, you know, did I put mine inside eventually? Yes, absolutely. But did it make a huge difference? No, it didn't. So I- but I agree with you that changing from the rotational drive to an SSD, that's all that's left to do to this machine. And it's not- other than getting rid of macOS entirely and going with some, you know, Linux build or something that's gonna run more efficiently than El Capitan does. But other than that, no, that's pretty much it. So yeah, I'm- So is the bottom line, give Firewire 800 a shot and otherwise open or up? Yeah, I would. I mean, I wouldn't crack it open. I would definitely do it either over USB or Firewire. Firewire would give you a little more headroom. But yeah, that's what I would do is test it that way and see and see how it does. Yeah. All right. Yeah, there you go. And man, we've got so much more stuff, but John, we're at that 90-minute mark, which is our newly- Oh my gosh, look at that. I know. It's how it goes. So we kind of have to, you know, we got to live within our own limits here. So, there you go. Well, don't think of just us, Dave, but the band. I know. It's cold out there. It's still snowing. In fact, there's a second storm coming tonight. So yeah. That's what I hear. I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. Crazy. We told you how to reach us via email. Well, you know, there's always a Twitter thing. I'm John Afron. He's Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mackie Cab. The publication is Mack Observer. And there's that guy flying around somewhere. Pilot Pete. I miss Pilot Pete. Yeah. Twitters. Well, hey, and especially these days, man, I mean, he's Santa, right? Yeah, that is true. He really is. That's right. Yep. That's true. Hey, go to MackieCab.com slash reviews and leave us a review on iTunes. In fact, we got one recently in Apple Podcast. I said iTunes. It's Apple Podcast. It hasn't been called iTunes in a long time. We got one recently in Apple Podcast by loves to shop one from here in the USA saying, I enjoy listening to your podcast. My hubby calls me his geek girl. I do learn at least five new things, if not more. Thank you for helping us not so geeky people learn some important and helpful things about our Apple products. Thank you for the review. And seriously, and I'm glad, you know, that you learn stuff. I mean, this is what we this is why we do what we do. Helping to spread the love with those reviews really, really helps. Also, just tell your friends, like, you know, share it, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter or just, you know, tell somebody, hey, you might like this podcast because that's how that's the best way for people to learn about you know, gather around the old Victrola or maybe around like a Sonos speaker or a HomePod or something like that, you know, like, if anybody knows what a Victrola is, you're old. Well, that's kind of how it goes. Yeah, that's right. All right. Well, as fun as this is, it is time for things to wrap up. So thank you so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. As we mentioned in the show, we have capterra.com slash mggeiro.com slash mggexpressbbn.com slash mgge and smilesoftware.com slash podcast. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Stay warm. Stay dry. Stay happy. And and make sure that whatever you do, however you are staying, that you don't get caught.