 The Mac Observers Mac Geekab Episode 750 for Monday, February 25th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geekab Episode number 750. I don't know. It doesn't mean anything, but it seems like it's halfway through 700 and 800, so that's kind of a thing. It's a nice. It's a nice. It's a nice number. I like that. That's an accomplishment right there. 750. Uh, you know, we're the show. We're like car talk for Apple users. And if you don't grok that, you could kids ask your parents or just know that we're the show that takes your questions. We take your tips, your cool stuff found, really anything, and we kind of run it through the ringer here, churn it out, answer the questions as best we can, share the tips and the goal of the entire thing is that every one of us, me included, him included, you included, the goal is that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. That's the idea sponsors for this episode include Express VPN dot com slash MGG and other world computing at Mac sales dot com. We'll talk about both of those shortly here, of course, during the episode. But here for now, and very windy, very scarily windy, to be perfectly honest, Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in equally windy, along with National Weather Service warnings with gusts up to 60 miles an hour. It was scary. And let's hope I don't lose power because several people in my town have lost power. But here in fearful Connecticut. This is. Yeah. It's one of those shows where, well, if you're hearing this, folks, it means we made it through. So I guess that's a good thing, except for, of course, the folks that are hearing this live in our chat room at Mackeekab dot com slash stream. Hello to everybody there. You're always welcome to join us there. We stream the show live while we do it so that, A, you can enjoy it that way. But also, we really appreciate the interaction. You folks are out there helping us put this together. This is a community thing. And of course, you know, any input that we can get sort of during the show adds to everything and really makes it, you know, better for all of us in the end. So yeah, fun, fun stuff. Um, you know, last week, John, we were talking about, and I shared my tip that I've been using for years about how to trigger safari downloads in the, in the, you know, by pasting into the download menu. Turns out there's an even better way. Listener Ben chimed in and told us that while safari downloads has long supported pasting a URL, there's no need to use the downloads pane at all in safari. Simply type or paste the URL into the address field and plus press option return or option click a link in safari. The links are no problem, but it's this option return. That's the real key. Instead of just hitting return, which will load whatever it is in your browser window, option return will download it and accomplish exactly the same thing. So very, very cool. Thank you, Ben. That's a killer tip. That's what we do here. There's the there's at least one thing I've learned this week. So pretty good, huh, John? Sweet. Yeah, I know. I like it. Paul has has a tip for us here. Paul says I'm starting a new job and had a ton of stuff they needed to print physical copies of and wouldn't take signed PDFs. So I had to print multiple documents at once and I wanted to do it without having to open them at all. And he sent us a link to a YouTube video, which I'll put in the show notes. But the net of it is that you go in to system preferences. You open up printers and scanners and then double click on whichever printer it is that you want to print to that will bring up the print job list, which most of the time is just going to be blank unless there's a job actively printing. All you do is take these files, PDFs, word documents, pages, documents, you name it, put them, just drag them from the finder into this window and they will all print. So you don't get to control things like which pages print or anything like that, of course, but it will print the entirety of those documents. So very, very cool, Paul. That's a pretty good one. I knew of other ways to do this, John, but that actually I like that way. I think the best of all, so. All right, now in two things. So printers and scanners, you drag it onto the icon. Is that is that where you're trying? You open up printers and scanners. You double click on whatever printer or scanner it is. And so there's the hidden tip here. If, you know, when you print something in your dock, the printers icon will appear. And if you were to click it, then it will open this window that shows you the job and also lets you get at your printer settings and all of that. But if you want to get to those settings at a time when you're not printing something and therefore it's not living in the dock, this is how you do it, system preferences, printers and scanners. And then just double click on the printer in the list and you get that handy little thing. All right. And of course, the bonus, which we talked about in a prior episode, but might as well mention it again, is that if you go to the window menu, once you bring up that printer, show completed jobs is pretty handy dandy as well. Forget about that one every time. Because I'm sure because from what I recall, if you see, yeah, so if you bring up a printer and then you'll see the window menu and it says show completed jobs, typically Mac OS will. And I believe you can resubmit them from that list. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, interesting. That would, can you? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think it saves enough of the data about it. I think it's just the entry. I don't think you can resubmit from there. But you can see the the names of the completed jobs. Yeah. Yeah. Which from a security standpoint, if you don't want people to know about what you've been printing, not so good, especially if it's been is something of whatever. Yeah. We want to clear those jobs out. And I think from that dialogue, you can. Yeah, I can highlight them and kill them. Yep. Cool. This is great. I learned something I already knew. That's awesome. I've already said more than I know. What? But now you know it again. Now I know it again. It's like this is perfect. That's one of the benefits of living for, you know, a number of years as you can learn something you can enjoy learning something multiple times. This is this is fantastic. All right, Stephen. This is I like this. This is good. Stephen says, I have two terabytes of iCloud storage, which I share with my family. It was more than I currently use, given the way iCloud works. He says, I have my documents and my desktop and my photos in the cloud. But until recently, my main hard drive was only 500 gigs. And although I might be able to use symbolic links to locate documents on an external drive, I wish to avoid this. I wanted to keep it straight. Still, he says, I wanted to use more of that two terabytes without it being synced back to my Mac. This is the key, right? It doesn't matter about your drive storage and all that stuff. He wants to use more than two terabytes without it being synced back to his Mac. He says, that's when I decided to introduce a new family member backup family member. He says, you know, I have Stephen family member and wife family member and child family member. And now I have backup family member. He says, I can log into iCloud through the web interface using this account and upload any less used files and archive some carbon copy, cloner clones and that sort of thing. Because no one logs into this account other than via the web, it's never synced back down to a Mac because the account isn't logged in or attached as a user account on any Mac. He says, I since have got a two terabyte Thunderbolt drive to replace my internal 500 gig drive. But that's another story. Yeah. So I like this. This is great. If you've got like me, I don't think we're even using because we have the same deal. We've got, you know, for the family, we have two terabytes of iCloud storage because we need more than 250 gigs or whatever the tier below that is. And at the moment, with six of us, we have 714 gigs used. And that's everybody's photo libraries, everybody, whatever anybody wants to do, like we have not limited anyone. We haven't even given guidance to be careful with storage. It's just go run free and we haven't even used half of it. So I have another terabyte of storage in the cloud that I can upload things to. And I like this idea. Very cool, Stephen. Very, very cool. Good stuff, right, John? I think so. I'm a what tier am I on? No, I like that. Creating a separate account for doing smart data here. Now you're right. Now I'm looking right here. So I'm on the 200 gig plan, which for me is fine. Sure. Two ninety nine a month. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it looks you know, I've actually been seeing people discussing this here. So I guess that the only thing I see on this window, at least on one computer here, two terabyte is the maximum you can get. That's right. Yeah. Has anybody hit. So I've long wondered if two terabytes is really actually an unlimited plan. And it's just not advertised that way, right? Because I'm so I'm curious what happens as anyone hit two terabytes? Maybe Stephen has now, but I wondered like what happens when you hit that two terabytes? Does it truly limit you? And then what? Like, can you call Apple and get like a super secret three terabyte plan? Or are you just out of luck or is there no limit? Is it unlimited? But it says two terabytes, so as to discourage abuse. So I'm curious about this. I don't know the answer. I would love one feedback at Mackie cab. Oh, wow, I do too many shows. The email address is feedback at Mackie cab.com. That's OK. And just to make sure everybody heard that because they was kind of stumbling around here. But I don't know what's going on. Clueless. That's right. Clueless. It's the wind. But I do believe I do believe he said feedback at Mackie cab.com. I did. I said feedback at Mackie cab.com. So yeah, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. All right. One. Well, another tip, I'm not going to say last tip because the show is full of tips in the in last week's episode. We talked about college dorm rooms where if you wanted to add a device, especially a router specifically, you know, you usually have to call the IT group or whatever. And in the comments for last week's episode, form user do it, forming solutions says, I would think that in this scenario, instead of having to call it, you could use the same clever work around hack that I use when traveling in some hotels. He says, I bring a compact travel router with me and set up my own network. Most travel routers can clone Mac addresses so that you just initially log in with your laptop or even your iPhone, get through the, you know, the bonus page and agree and, you know, set up your billing to whatever it is you need to do. And then that Mac address of your phone or your or your computer, your laptop is approved in their system. Just like calling the IT department would approve. You know, you can go through the process and approve a Mac address. Well, if you can clone your computer's Mac address with your router, which as he points out, most routers can do not just travel routers, but most routers are built to do this for exactly this reason, then it wouldn't have any idea unless they do some deep packet inspection, which who knows, maybe they do, but I think I think this would work in a dorm room. So very, very cool. Thank you very much for me solutions. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. They want to share that with your daughter. She doesn't need a router in her in a room. And if she did, she would like, I would be in. I think I would be involved in that process. So yeah, I'm going to bury it in the back of my head. My guess is by the time she needs something like that, she would be off campus in an apartment anyway, in which case, you know, it's all that sort of thing is. I fondly remember during our travels in the past that sometimes, depending on where we were traveling as TMO. Yeah, one of us would set up and I've done this just with personal travel as well. One of us would would plug into the ethernet and then set up our own access point. Yeah, to kind of get the problem of hotels being very stingy with their that they gotten better like our last. Yes, I think the access was was OK. Yeah, right. Yeah. Oh, it was fantastic. I think while we were there. Yeah, yeah, it was good. Yeah, hotels have gotten better. They still charge a lot of money, but at least it's it's, you know, usually reliable. So hey, I want to speaking of external devices and all that, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor for this episode, which is Otherworld Computing at MacSales.com. These are the folks, right? When I need something to connect to my Mac, when John needs something, MacSales.com is where we go. And we've been doing that before they were sponsors. That's why they became sponsors, because they know how much we trust them. And it's a great fit for all of us here. They've got their new Envoy Pro EX up to 2800 megabytes per second of portable SSD performance in a rugged container, right? Perfect little portable powerhouse for whatever you need to do. I mean, that's freaking amazing. Their new USB-C travel dock. This is one of the best USB-C travel docs we've seen. And it plugs right into your iPad Pro. In addition to plugging into your Mac or your MacBook or whatever that is. You can with your iPad Pro now connect to display, access images from an SD card. You can even charge your device all through the dock. It literally fits in your pocket. And yes, you heard me right. You can use this to connect a display to your new USB-C based iPad Pro. That's pretty cool. This is what OWC does, like their Mercury Helios FX. You can connect it to any Thunderbolt 3 equipped Mac or PC for smoother frame rates, elevated game performance and an overall performance boost. Yeah, this is where you add this stuff, right? And you can move it from computer to computer to enhance your performance. It's amazing now that we can do this. External GPUs and all that with a Mac. Fantastic. So you got to check it out. Visit macsales.com for more information about these and really anything else you're looking to plug into and enhance your computer. That's the first place we go. And we think it's a great first place for you to go to. Macsales.com, our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, we've got more tips because, you know, it's how it works. Seems from from listener Ken. Actually, we'll we'll jump this to cool stuff found. He says, if anyone is bad at typing, grammar or spelling, you need to try Grammarian Pro to 10 and keystrokes keystrokes shows a window that lets you just click on the word in the window or type the number next to the word. It lets you pick an option to auto add a space after your selected word or punctuation, even when you select a word and it has a space after it. It lets you add punctuation and things just behind the word. Keystrokes lets you do lots of stuff. He says, I can't go into all the details because it would take too much time. Grammarian Pro to 10 is an app that lets you do grammar and spell checking. And if you spell the word wrong, it lets you set an option to auto correct the spelling by typing a number or clicking on the audio window. Very, very similar. Grammarian Pro to 10 lets you do lots of stuff like change the grammar settings, let you pick what app is should be used. He says, I'm using both of them when typing this email. Very, very cool stuff. So we will definitely put those on the on the cool stuff found list. Thank you, Ken. Good, good stuff. Good, good stuff. Let's see, we've got a second cool stuff found here or a third, depending on how you choose to count things from listener Joe. Listener Joe sent in a Kickstarter thing that he thinks is cool. It's the Thunder Mag. Yes, we've been talking about the and we talked about the the USB-C elbow adapter that also had a mag safe style thing going on with it. Well, there's another one and it's called the Thunder Mag. And this one passes full 40 gigabits a second Thunderbolt 3 through it, which I don't think the other ones that we mentioned a few episodes ago do. So really nice find Joe and we'll put a link to that. I think like it's a yeah, you're looking at like 50 bucks for for one of these these little things, which given that it's got Thunderbolt in it, 50 bucks is just about where that starts. So yeah, it seems to be it's pretty good. If and when I upgrade my MacBook Pro, something like this would probably fit into the equation. Yeah, because, dude, I got to say weekly, almost weekly for every couple of weeks. I disconnect my MagSafe to my MacBook Pro. Just, you know, we're humans. You know, you just oops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just one of the best inventions, I think. And I'm so sad that they that they kind of dissed it. Yeah, I do like that Apple is has moved on the laptops and has moved on the iPad. And I'm hoping with the phone moves to a like non-proprietary connector, right? USBC is a fantastic. It's reliable. It's a fantastic connector is what I was trying to say. Well, there's been talk of USBC on some devices. Yes. Well, there is USBC on devices like the new iPad Pro. That's what I'm saying. I'm hoping that it comes to the iPhone. That would be fantastic. It really it's a great interface and obviously, you know, can handle Thunderbolt 3 if if so desired. But it like moves power and you get power delivery. Like it really is. There's no reason to be locked into a proprietary connector right now. I don't think so. Oh, lightning like lightning. Yeah, yeah, no, or MagSafe, right? I mean, MagSafe at least had like there's still you can point to MagSafe and like just like we are now and say, yes, like that interface worked and had this cool feature that we now miss having. So at least there was that. But you couldn't add a battery to your laptop. You couldn't, you know, get third party adapters for it. Like it was just such a pain in the neck. You were locked into this ecosystem. And if you something happened to your power adapter, you needed to go to an Apple store nowhere else, right? You know, or at least somewhere that sold Apple stuff. So I like, I don't like that part of it and this sort of mitigates that, right? So it's pretty good. It's pretty good. You know, I like sound and music and picky about that stuff. And I like wireless sound and I love my AirPods. They aren't the best sound quality in the world, but it's good enough given that it's not a sealed system. I can hear well with them. Oh, we've talked about this. They're a product I shouldn't like and yet I love. But they are not sealed. So for some environments, that's actually preferable, right? If you're walking down a city street or if I am, I like to hear what's going on around me. So I like the AirPods for that. But when I really want to listen to music and be in it, especially if I'm like playing my drums, but really, or if I'm on an airplane, AirPods are terrible on an airplane because you get all that noise just bleeds right in. I like to have something that seals. And, you know, the folks at Anchor have been blowing me away routinely lately. And their new Soundcore brand, they've come out with what they call their Liberty Air. They look like black AirPods, right? Kind of. So easy to use. They come in a charging case. They seal fully in my ear. I've played my drums with these things in. I don't have any problem with one ear dropping out versus the other. And I test. Look, this is the first set of true wireless, you know, in-ear headphones that I've talked about in a while. I have not stopped testing them. Some just don't make the cut for me to talk about here in the show. The Anchor ones, these Soundcore Liberty Airs totally do. Like I'm really blown away by these things. And they're, you know, you can get them on Amazon for what's the price now? Well, turns out they're not available today. But I think they're just in the like the $79 range. I mean, it's not, you know, it's a cool thing. So hopefully they're back on Amazon soon and you folks can get them. But yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to them. Really fantastic blown away by these things. So, and, you know, Bluetooth and they work and they've got a microphone in them so you can use them for calls and all of that stuff. So, yep, I am, I'm a fan. So, very cool. Nice. I should get some AirPods. You should. Well, you know, if you want, like these to me, these are like a perfect compliment to AirPods, right? Because you kind of get, you know, you have your sealed and not sealed. If you're going to get AirPods though, I would wait. Like there's enough chatter out there about updated AirPods that I, you know, I would wait past March if you're not, I mean, if you're in a scenario where like, well, but I've got these four things happening in the next few weeks and I'm really like, that would be great. Then just buy them like any, like any piece of technology. If today's the day that you want and or need it, just get it, don't worry about it. Cause there's always gonna be something better coming. Right. I mean, you know this, right. But in terms of these, like right now, if you're just sort of saying, oh yeah, would AirPods would be cool. I'd wait a month. That's all. You know, so let's see what happens. I just know that lots of people are really happy with them. I'm totally not. The thing is, I'm not a big fan of, I've never been a big fan of in-ear anything. I mean, you know, going back to the, you know, the original days where Apple would put these, which I thought were kind of crummy in-ear things in most of the, and I just hated them. They were terrible. Right, right. I mean, they would fall out of my ear. It just wasn't a good fit. Maybe my ears aren't, you know, maybe I could. Well, so here's the thing. I wear a lot of stuff in my ears, right? And I mean, I wear, like right now, I'm wearing custom fit. These are the JH Audio Layla's that I have right now. And they sound freaking fantastic. I mean, in terms of like. Well, these are custom molded for you, right? They are, they've got multiple drivers per ear. I gotta look it up now. I forget how many drivers there are per ear, but I think it's 12. Oh, okay. They take like a cast of your ear and like develop it. So it's like, it's guaranteed to fit in your ear because it's like your ear. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, these were, these were done with a mold. And I use all kinds of them, right? I mean, these are the ones I use when I do the shows because they are built for mastering. And so I can get the sound that I want and I don't have to guess. You know, it's fantastic. They're comfortable. They sound great. You know, when I'm playing live, I have found the, with a band, I've found the Ultimate Ears UE11 Pros with the ambient option are what work for me there. So the Layla's are a 12 driver per ear setup. The UE11 Pro ambience I think are four drivers per ear. Number of drivers matters and also doesn't matter, but it really is about, you know, are you getting the sound that you want? All of those though, like the Apple ones have a cord coming from them. And I've learned to deal with the cord. A lot of times it's, you know, clipping it on my, like the top of my shirt or using mic tape, you know, like use live so that it's like stays stuck to my skin because if something tugs on that cord, that's a really uncomfortable thing for my ear. And I'm guessing for anybody's ear. And trying AirPods and really any of these, you know, the anchor sound cords are falling to this, any true wireless earphones, you free yourself from that cord. And man, like it is remarkable how different it feels to not have that cord, you know, even potentially tugging or even with like the ear pods, the old Apple, you know, the wired Apple ones, just the weight of the cord pulls, you know, like it's part, it's definitely part of the physics of it. And getting rid of that cord makes a huge difference. So you may like the AirPods, you may not. Like if you don't like something in your ear and it's not the cord, well, then yes. But otherwise I think you might like them. Yeah. I mean, from what I read though, is that the user, the UX, if you will, is very pleasant in that they seem to do what you want when you want it. Sure. They're not perfect. I mean, look, here's the reality of the AirPods. They are Bluetooth earphones, right? Like that's it, you know, they're not magic. That Apple with the W1 chip or whatever they call it, it does some trickery to make it sync with your phone easier. As I understand it from, you know, the little birdies over in Cupertino that fly above, far above the land, Apple actually, the way they do this trickery is they have a database of every Bluetooth Mac address so that for an Apple device, so that your phone can quote unquote auto pair to these AirPods when in reality it's just like pre-populating a Mac address and saying, no, you're already paired to it. You trusted this, don't worry about it. Like that's how that's done. But if you're not pairing to an iPhone, you know, they just, it's just Bluetooth. And once they're paired to your iPhone, it's just Bluetooth, right? So they suffer from many of the same problems that other Bluetooth things do. They sometimes don't pair, they sometimes, you know, you sometimes have to put them back in the case and take them out and jank with them. And that's really frustrating, like when you're trying to start a phone call and you just want to put them in and they work. And not always sometimes, but you know, they're fine. Like they're like any Bluetooth headphones. You just got to sort of got to deal with, you know, them being a little janky, that's all. So, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. So, but I like, like I said, I like them. I think they're great. So, I don't know. Where are we going with this? We have something else here. It's good. Yeah. No, we're above. The next thing off the plate. What do we got on the plate? We have one last cool stuff found from listener Mark, who says, after hearing several times on your show about the iPhone having only two antennas for WiFi, that is true, only two streams, and is restricted on maximum connection speed, I thought, what if I could connect via Ethernet? And he says, I found an Ethernet adapter and an iOS app. And it's true. It's actually gets way easier with the iPad Pro because, you know, with USB-C it's really easy to find a USB-C to Ethernet thing. But he found, you know, a lightning to USB to Ethernet setup, which is totally doable. Yep, I'm trying to think. I know I've seen it done. I can't remember if I did this with my iPhone or not. But, you know, it works. It's fine. But it's still going over USB out the lightning port. Right. Yeah, I was thinking that is that, yeah. So the underlying protocol going into lightning is typically, I think like on my current iPhone, iPhone 8, I believe it's USB 2. Right, that's correct. Yeah. And so he's seeing 225, 250 megabits per second over his Ethernet connection to his iPhone. And you can go way faster than that. Like you can go double that with WiFi, right? So, you know, there you go. But, you know, it's something. I'm curious. I haven't tried, I should try this next time I daughter's home with her iPad Pro. But I have not tried Ethernet over USB-C on the iPad Pro. I wonder how much faster that could go or would go. So I'll have to check that out. So, yeah, yeah. Very interesting, very cool, Mark. I like it. Good stuff, huh, John? These are the things we learned. It's fun. I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers who whose contributions came in in the last week or so here. And I'm going to change things a little bit about how we label everyone, how we refer to everyone. I don't like labels, but I like, yeah. Well, you know, so we're going to try this. In the monthly $10 plan, we have Tony from Massachusetts, Ken from Kailua, Clive from West Sussex, Jeff from Indiana, Dave from Illinois, Gary from New York State, Joseph from Georgia, Scott from California and Tony from California. You like how I'm doing this a little differently? Like we talk about, you know, I'm Dave from New Hampshire, right? You're John from Connecticut. It just, you know, like fits with the vibe a little bit better. I like it. It's good. Well, most radio shows that I listen to on certain stations do ask. See where you're calling from. Hey, where are you from? It's part of our identity. I'm choosing not to include the cities for most people here, unless it's something they've like clearly divulged on the show before. And if I screw that up, my apologies, you know, I don't want anybody to like, you know, I say I'm Dave from Durham, New Hampshire. That's quite different than me identifying what city in California, you know, Tony's from, or saying Tony's last name and all that stuff. So there you go. On the biannual plan, 25 bucks every six months, we've got Juergen from Germany, William J, there are some of you and specifically Paypal does not require you to give us your address. So some of you have and that's fine. And some of you have not like William J. It's just not, it's not that William J doesn't like us. It's that William J was never asked for his address as part of the signup process because Paypal doesn't need it. We have West G, Michael from Oklahoma, Stuart M, Mark from Colorado, Alan from Alabama, Kershan from Iowa, Michael from Avon, John from Virginia, Fernando from Ohio, Martin B, I can't remember what country Martin is from, and Peter from Peterborough. Then Mark I think. Ah, thank you, there you go. And then in the one time contributions category, we have 20 bucks from David from Texas and 140 bucks from Brian from California. So thank you to everyone. You all rock. It's, you know, I always say it, you know, it's a community here. And those of you that choose to contribute, that can, we obviously appreciate, not only appreciate it, but it is a part of what, you know, makes this show survive and thrive. So we thank you, thank you, thank you so, so much. All right, let's see. Shall we move on to a question from Dave? Absolutely. All right, so Dave says, I run my Mac with multiple user accounts. Primarily he says this is an admin account and a standard user account. He says sometimes I create other standard user accounts for certain tasks or purposes. This is all fine, except that when it comes to uninstalling software, the cleanup app will clean up global files like those in the applications folder, but then it only cleans up the current user's local library files. That is the files in the library folder of the account that's logged in when I run the cleanup or uninstall app. He says I use AppCleaner. I've taken to making a screenshot the files and directories that AppCleaner has identified is associated with the to be deleted app. After letting AppCleaner then delete those, I visit the other accounts on the system and using that screenshot, manually locate and delete all the application files and directories. He says I wonder if there's a way to avoid that manual cleanup. Is there some utility or method that will clean up the local library of all the accounts? And yeah, the answer is absolutely. Then it's called Hazel. Hazel does lots of things. It's like what watched folders should have been and it allows you to attach all kinds of scripts to folders and actions and it's fantastic. And again, one of those things that runs on my Macs and if it's not running, I notice it because it does so many things for me. But one of the things it has is it's got AppSweep in it, which is exactly this. It offers to uninstall all the related files when you delete an app and it's got a checkbox for enable multi-user sweep. And it says that on login, AppSweep will offer to throw away support files for applications thrown away by other Hazel users on this computer. So as long as everybody's running Hazel and you can install Hazel system-wide, then you get this. And to me, that's the answer. It's good stuff. What do you think, John? Well, I like AppCleaner. I'm just wondering if it offers that level of granular, maybe it doesn't. I don't run it, but I did some searching about it when researching for this question and I did not find anything about it. And it sounds like Dave probably would, he seems to be pretty comfortable and savvy running around the interface. So my guess is if it was there, he would have found it too. Yeah, yeah, so. Now, Hazel's great. I highly recommend it. Good stuff. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Hazel from Noodlesoft. And then magically, a link appears. A link? I say, noodles are delicious. All right. All right, John. This is one that's near and dear to your heart as well as mine. Steve writes, I love the show and hope you can help. I've been experiencing a relatively new problem when saving various documents from all the applications I use on my 2017 MacBook Pro. And I've never experienced this until recent weeks. When I save a document from any Office app, Adobe app, whatever the default directory slash folder in Finder is documents rather than the folder that I opened the document from. I often click save, but realizing later that it didn't save to my most recently used folder requiring me to do another save and click scroll in the Finder to the target folder every time I save the files from that point on. How can I fix this? So, yeah, I know how John and I solved this problem and my problem, and I use default folder 10 or default folder X, I always forget how John wants us to pronounce that. But it's default folder X is how it's spelled. We'll put a link in the show notes. And it will do this and more. You can set defaults for different applications and you can have favorites separate from the favorites in the Finder and all of that great stuff. But it has caused me to forget how to manipulate this without default folder in the operating system. Because I know there's some level of control that we have, it's just not all of them. So, what do you think, John? Do you know the answers? I don't know, I mean, honestly, I don't think I've used the Finder level things for this. I mean, I'm looking in general and there's a recent items. I don't know if that's quite what we're looking for though. Yeah, right, right, right, right. I mean, I think it offers some of that functionality, but yeah, I mean, default folder, I mean, I've just been using it forever as you have and it's just, I mean, to me, it's an extension of the operating system and it's just like, it does exactly what I need is like, well, where have I been recently? And I don't think Mac OS really does a great job of that. Yeah, I feel like there's a way though to at least control that and I can't find it. So, yeah, if somebody knows, send it in. We told you the email address was actually, we didn't tell you the email address that's reserved just for our premium users, which is premiumemackeykev.com, so you could send it to that. All right, let's see. We have a question from David in Texas. David says, let me think, he's got, he says, I wrote you several episodes ago to ask about possible background processes and power drain issues shortly after upgrading to Mojave. At the same time, and it's on his laptop, at the same time I wrote, I was experiencing rapid battery drain and the computer seemed warm at times even when in sleep mode for a while. Okay, he says, that issue seemed to resolve itself after a few days. He says, you guys suggested an SMC reset and that may have been what did the trick. Lately though, I've been noticing the same problem or something similar. I can leave my MacBook closed in a sleep overnight after it's at 100% charge when I unplug it. And many days when I open it up in the morning, it's lost easily 15 to 20% of its charge overnight or more. This is a noticeable departure from the usual three to five I would expect to see overnight. He says, I'm also seeing an increase in the CPU usage when this happens, according to iStat menus. Specifically, I've noticed lately that sync server will run for hours and hours at a time, chewing up my battery in the process. When it's running, I can expect to see CPU usage at around 20% on average devoted just to that task. I believe this is what's causing my battery drain overnight as on the days when this happens, I can see sync server running along when I open the machine. When the MacBook is up and running on battery power if sync server is active, I can only expect between one to two hours of useful battery life instead of the several hour life I normally see. He says it, when I see it running, it will normally stay active for a day or two until it decides to stop, but I can't narrow down a pattern. And I'm trying to, I'm just, he says as extra info, I don't store things in iCloud, but I do sync my iPhone, iPad Air and other iDevices to this laptop. But other than calendar syncing, I don't use, actually he'd corrected that. Other than contacts syncing, he doesn't use iCloud at all to speak of, doesn't even sync his iDevices over wifi, everything is done with a cable. Okay, so that's enough foundation here. So this sync server is causing the CPU to chew and battery life to be used. And presumably it's doing something with the cloud. Really, you know what we need in the cloud, John? We need batteries in the cloud. Wouldn't that be great? If we could just sync to a battery in the cloud and get juice down from that, wouldn't that be awesome? There are batteries in the cloud. Well, sort of, what do we call them? I think Tesla makes one, right? A battery in the cloud? What? Well, not a house battery, but yeah, I guess it's not really in the cloud. Yeah, I mean, I guess the sun is the battery in the clouds, right? I mean, it's behind the clouds, way behind the clouds, but you know, it is, right? It's this big, huge power source. So maybe that's what it is. Anyway, back to actually solving Steve's problem. Did I say Steve? It's David in Texas' problem. Steve was the last one. So the question is, I think you're right about it being sync server, right? Like that, like everything you've pointed to, you're finding this one process that's chewing lots of CPUs, CPUs chooses battery, et cetera. So the question is, what's it syncing, right? You think it might be contacts because that's the one thing that you've said that you sync with iCloud. But there are other things that you may sync with iCloud without knowing it, right? You've got your mobile documents folder, which has all kinds of things, including settings in it, like your keyboard shortcuts that are tied to OS X. There's lots of other things too, but that's one of them that syncs there. And that's done, I think, with sync server, but I'm guessing. And we'll get to how to stop guessing in a moment, but also messages. You know, if you've set iMessages to sync in the cloud, then they will sync in the cloud, and that could also be something. I don't know enough about what sync server touches, so I'm guessing. But the good news is we don't have to guess because you can go into activity monitor. And when you're in activity monitor and you're in the CPU list actually, and if you're in any of the lists, and you see an app that's using a lot of resources, in this case, the CPU, double click on it. That will bring up a window and there will be three tabs on the window. The rightmost tab is files and ports. This is a live, continually updated list of all of the files and all the network connections that this application has. So a lot of it's going to be just like basic framework stuff and might be unhelpful and might even be distracting and hard to sift through. Scroll all the way to the bottom. I always start at the bottom and move up because it lists things in the order in which they've been most recently opened. So all the frameworks and all the stuff to launch the app will be at the beginning. All the network connections and files that it's manipulating should be at or near the end. So going through all that, find what's there. You might see that it's pointing to a database called Contacts or something, right? Or you might see it's pointing to messages. That's gonna help us narrow this down and there you go. That would be one way to do it. If it is Contacts, I highly recommend, well, the first thing you wanna do is launch Contacts, go to File, Export. Actually, we'll talk about Contacts in a second. John, do you have any thoughts on diagnosing this before we get into any specifics? I thought I found something, but it was, so I did a little search here and the thing is there used to be, unfortunately, I don't think it exists anymore, but Apple used to include a utility called Synchrospector. If you were a developer, I don't think they do anymore. And that was something that would let you dig into what exactly was the Synch thing doing. The other thing, I tried to do a manual page on it and it didn't come up, you know, Synch server, Synch server to you or something like that. So, so this. Yeah, and it, you know, it's possible. I don't have a process running called Synch server. It certainly sounds like an Apple process, but it could be a third party process. You'll know that pretty quickly too when digging into files and ports and maybe it's some old app that you don't use anymore, right? And maybe that's part of this too, so. Really? I don't know. Like, I couldn't find it on mine, at least on a machine I checked. System. No, I'm not on this machine. I'm not, I'm not seeing anything that has the, no process that has the word Synch in it. So, yeah, it could be a third party. So, again, I searched online and Synch server at some point was a process within Mac OS. Okay. It sounds like it's not anymore. Okay. Huh, huh. And he says this is, this is now, oh yeah, I see, you're totally right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, that's an old, old process. I wonder if something about the migration to Mojave left this thing, you know, in limbo and it's trying its darnedest, but boy, it doesn't know what home looks like anymore. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know. Yeah. Huh. I'm with you. It could be left over from, depending on how old your original installation was, it could be something left over that's just, so, you know, just a. Dig. Dig, dig, dig. Go on an activity monitor and kill it or delete it. Yeah, you wanna figure out why it's running. Yeah, yeah, but yeah. All right, well, let's, for the sake of argument and for the sake of everyone here, because I, we get a lot of emails and I wound up answering a lot of emails about contacts in general and how to manage them when they get corrupted. And so here's the process. The first thing is launch contacts on your Mac, go to the file menu, go to export and choose contacts archive. That will let you save a snapshot in time of your contacts as they exist on your Mac right now. And it's easily importable, importing your contacts from a backup, like a time machine backup is doable, totally doable and a real pain in the neck way easier if you have one of these. So if you know you're gonna be mucking about with your contacts, just shoot one of these backups. It takes all of about 10 seconds, way longer, way longer to talk about than to do. Then in his scenario, what I would do is I would go into iCloud and turn off contact syncing, right? Your contacts will stay in the cloud but whatever you do on your computer next won't impact the cloud and that's the goal with this. So then delete all your contacts from your Mac, right? You've saved a backup, you've stopped syncing from the cloud. So now delete all your contacts from your Mac. Not only are they saved in your backup, they're also saved in the cloud, no worries. Then reboot your Mac. Now go back in and turn contact syncing back on and let it overwrite what's there on your Mac which should be nothing because you've erased everything and let it come back in. That may, if this sync server thing is in fact or whatever it is that anyone's having a problem with if you've got some corrupted contact record or something, this should fix that as it comes back down from the cloud. And if it doesn't, you've got your backup that you made in the first steps. There you go. Is good. We have a question from another David. So I'm gonna let you prep that, John. Well, I take a minute and talk about our second sponsor which is ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash MGG. You know, we're just talking about how David's computer was going to be syncing this data all the time, no matter where he is. Well, what if he's syncing that data and that data is private data but he happens to be at a coffee shop and his computer's doing this in the background because he can't stop it. And what if someone's sniffing the traffic at the coffee shop because the network's unencrypted and what if they get to see some of David's data that he didn't even know he was sending across the network, right? Just because he's connected to wifi. Now all of a sudden, anything his computer decides to do in the background, boom. It is being sent over that network potentially in an insecure way. This is why you need to think about this stuff because it's not just what you're doing. It's what your computer's doing in the background and you can take back your privacy just like we have here by using ExpressVPN. So ExpressVPN, we've talked about what VPNs are. They create a tunnel between your computer and the outside world. So anybody on your network, all they see is this encrypted stream of data. They can't tell what sites you're visiting. They can't tell what data you're sending. It's just this tunnel that's impenetrable and that's what you want. And it's easy to do. They have apps. You put an app on your Mac, boom, it works. One click, you put an app on your iPhone or your iPad, boom, it works. One click secures and anonymizes your browsing by encrypting your data and hiding your public IP address. So it's the same, the people on the other end also don't know that you're doing this from a coffee shop. It works both ways. And protecting yourself with ExpressVPN like this costs less than seven bucks a month. And it's not just us that likes it, although we do. But ExpressVPN is the number one rated VPN service by TechRadar and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you ever use public wifi and you wanna keep hackers and spies from seeing your data, ExpressVPN is the solution. Protect your online activity today. Find out how you can get three months free. You have to go to this special URL, expressvpn.com slash mgg. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash mgg for three months free with a one year package. Again, one more time with feeling. ExpressVPN.com slash mgg are thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you're up with David. To dovetail on what you just said here, have you noticed any mumblings from our friends over at Dubuque regarding analyzing traffic? It's true. Yeah, that's right. Dubuque version seven was released today and you can sniff even encrypted traffic, some of it on your local network. Yeah, all the more reason, right? Cause now somebody in the coffee shop could have Dubuque and potentially be seeing data you don't want them to see. Now on your home network, Dubuque, it's just a tool, right? It's not bad, it's not good. Actually, it's quite great, but it's not evil. It's not, you know, it's just how do you use the tool? Well, yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah, so I just wanna toss that in there because, you know, I mean, they, you know, alerted us to the upcoming release of this and... Yeah, I think it was this morning that came out. I love Dubuque. Yeah, we got a, well, we can't talk about the beta that we got, but of course. But it's a great tool, I love their tools. So anyways, moving on, where are we here? Let's see. So David, is it David? Not you, but another David. Different David, that's right. Yeah. He has, because I don't think you'd have this question, but he has a very basic question. Is there a way to select the folder and delete the contents of the folder without deleting the folder, other than opening the folder, selecting all and moving to the trash? Terminal commands count. And I'm glad you said that, David, because you know what, as far as I know, Dave, maybe with scripting or something, you're not gonna be able to do this from the Mac OS Finder. Yeah, I think you're right. Do you wanna delete the contents, but not the contents, but not the folder, right? You just, you want the structure to remain? Is that what he's saying? Well, I think the basic question is, how do you delete stuff in a folder, but not the folder itself? Without, so what he said. Okay. You're not gonna do this without going through these steps in the Finder. And as far as I know, Dave, the answer is no, but I'm glad that he said- Well, I mean, other than opening the folder, doing select all and delete. Right, which is what he doesn't want. Okay. So, as far as I could, but then I was happy to see that he said terminal commands count, because here's the terminal command to do that, Dave. So, number one, if you go into the terminal, you may wanna review the RM command, which is remove. And if you're in the terminal and you type man, which is a manual page and then a space and then a command line thing, it'll tell you all of the options available for that one. And so, you may wanna do that for RM, which is remove. And if you wanna remove things within a folder, Dave, you go into the terminal, make sure you're in the folder you want, and then if you wanna delete things within a folder in that directory, you say RM, the name of the folder slash star. And at least with most operating systems, star means everything. Yeah, that'll do it. And I even put this up and I verified this. Now, the thing is normally RM does not delete folders. If you want to delete a folder, then the command is RM, D-I-R, which I think may be of alias to the RM command. But normally, RM, if there's stuff in a folder, it's not gonna, it will not delete it. But if one of the things in that folder is another folder, this command will also not delete that, right? Just RM, the folder slash star, that it won't delete subfolders. And then that was a follow-up. So that follow-up, is it possible to delete files in subfolders of that folder, preserving the tree structure? Oh. And implementing my Google Foo and just figuring it out and not destroying anything. The variation of that command is, so it's the same command, RM, space, dash, R, I. R means recursive, I, and then the folder name slash star. So what R means is recursive, in that it's gonna drill down, which just sounds like what he wants to do here. And then I request confirmation for each item, which I think is probably a good thing, but the RM command can be dangerous. And just let everyone know here, you may see some people that jokingly say on various computer forms, oh, well, RM-FR will really speed your system up. What RM-FR does, so F means force and R means recursive, if you don't know what you're doing, RM-FR will destroy everything on your drive, will delete everything, because that's what you're asking it to do. I think typically you want to do pseudo, but I think typically pseudo is required before that, though maybe not, but that's my input on this. Well, but what you just described, we're not gonna spend a whole lot of time on this because it's really difficult, not only to talk about terminal commands in an audio-only setting, but it's difficult to listen to them in an audio-only setting. But what you just described, RM-RI, R does the recursive, absolutely. I asks for confirmation, but you still have, unless you manually say yes, which you would with this I there, unless you manually say yes and no to exactly the right things, you still could delete the folders within that path. Yes. Yeah. Agreed, but yeah. With the time I spent on this, which, you know, I mean... I'm thinking, I think Paul Frans has a good command in our chat room here, and so we'll put that command in there because I think I need to, we'll test it for sure before we post it, but I think Paul's command will do exactly what listener David wants, which is to delete all the files in a folder and its subdirectories while still leaving the folder and its subdirectories. Yeah. Cool. Thank you, David. Good stuff. And thank you, Paul Frans in the chat room there. Good stuff. Good. Good. Yeah. So I guess the takeaway is, look at the man page, look at the switches, and well, I did the same. The thing is, I actually created actual folders and put files in there that were, you know, dispensable and went through these. So maybe I didn't go deep enough, but I mean, when I tried this, you know, using the various commands we just mentioned, it did accomplish the task, which is get rid of the files without the folders. Right, right, right. So I agree that the, yeah, the, I mean, the I option was to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot, but... Yeah, no, there's nothing wrong with I. That's a good one. I like that on the RM terminal command. It's just, this still won't skip folders. It will, it will let you delete them. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But there we've got, the right people are on the job. So we've got the right command coming. So awesome. Thank you so much. Moving on, Jeremy in our forums asks, the question that we get asked a lot, and I don't think we have a good answer for it, or I don't think we have the answer people want for it, but here, let's go. Jeremy writes, I'm trying to send out a bulk SMS to over 100 people on my phone for the scout troop that I manage. I've created all the contacts that I need on my iPhone with the latest OS and then created a group called Cubs. I go in and try to create a new SMS, but I can't select the group to send it to. I can send it to individuals by selecting them one at a time, but I do not want to be doing that one at a time, every time. Am I missing something? Any help would be great. Yeah, so Jeremy's in Australia, as he says in the forum post, but I think you're running into the same thing that we run into here. I've only ever tried this with Verizon, which is odd because I don't have Verizon, but I was helping a friend solve this problem. I think every carrier is gonna have something similar. Verizon has, or had at the time, a 25 SMS at once limit, or at least the iPhone did. I think it was a Verizon limit that was pushed to the phone, but it could be that Apple has put that limit in there too. And I'm guessing you're running into the same thing. He was in a very similar thing. I think it was for his baseball organization or whatever, his youth baseball thing, and he had about 100 folks, and he broke it down into four groups of 25 and then just had to send the same text out to everybody. Honestly though, this gets to be unruly because it's not just you that can send to this group. Now, maybe that's fine, but I don't know that it's a good idea in a general sense to have, even if you could, a text group of 100 people, even 25 people, all able to text everyone. If you send out the thing and say, hey, we moved the Cub Scout meeting from 7 to 730 on Wednesday, and everybody says, got it, hey, thanks, this is awesome. Suddenly it just becomes noise and no one pays attention anymore. So there are things, I don't have kids and scouts so I'm not aware of the app specific to that, but I know my son's hockey team uses a thing called Team Snap that is perfectly built for exactly this. And you can get notifications as emails or push messages if you put the app on. It does require a little bit of buy-in I think there's probably a cost to it, although there might be something free for scouting organizations or whatever. But something like this, I think is probably your best bet because then you can control who gets to send the broadcast messages and not just opening it up to the world. But in terms of SMS, no, it is not a thing, at least not here that you can do to gobs and gobs and gobs of people. So there you go. I recall, I mean, I was looking at this stuff in the past but the thing is every provider, again, I haven't mess with it for a while, but most of them, whether it be Verizon or whoever, offer a web-based interface to send out SMSes. You may wanna look at that option. I don't know if we're originating it from iOS's. Oh, that's true. The best strategy. Right, there are APIs for SMS. So if everyone wants to use SMS as the notification, just like you've seen when you get like a, you can get broadcast messages through SMS. Hopefully they're opt-in and not spam. But assuming that that's the case, I certainly, there's some concert venues or whatever that I have opted to let me text me, let them text me and I get a message that I'm sure is sent out to thousands of people and it's probably using one of these types of services. Yeah, that's a better option too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I would say talk to your mobile provider and see what they have. Yeah, I don't think your mobile provider is the right one. I think you'd probably need to find some third-party service that can do this for you. I think so because your mobile provider, I mean, they only have an SMS gateway for themselves, right? In terms of like a bulk gateway, and you need one that works for all, right? So I think, you know, and you don't want it as, you want it as one message per person, not a message that's a hundred person group because that's like, that's not gonna happen. Right, right. And honestly, I mean, the thing is, I mean, I think most of us get SMS messages if we opt in from various places. And I'm curious as to who crafts the servers that do that. I mean, you know, I get things like, oh, you know, your bill pay is coming up, or this or that, and that they have to be using something. And they typically also have an opt-in opt-out. It's like, well, if you don't wanna hear from us, I'll say stop. Yeah. So there has to be some, and I think that's actually a legal thing too. It's like, you know, it just blasts people with SMSes. Right. Unless they ask for that, and that you have to let them opt out. And I honestly don't know what platform is used for that, but if you know, you can tell us. Yeah, I did a search here and was hesitant to recommend anything that we haven't used, but I will recommend this and start, I will mention this and say that we have not used it, but it actually has that decent ratings out there. So it seems like it's legit. If you search for, you know, bulk SMS services, you can find probably some scammy things and some not scammy things. This one seems on the surface like it's not and it's called send pulse. So I'll put a link for that in the show notes. And maybe that's an option for Jeremy or for anybody that wants to do this. So cool. And my guess is they keep you from being spamming and that's sort of the important part. All right. And of course, there's another option here. Well, as you saw in the chat room here, you may want to think of a different mechanism. I'll consider this, but our friend Brian I think suggested maybe a shared calendar would be better for doing these sort of things, but I don't know. Yeah, a shared calendar, you know, an email group or whatever. Honestly, I think this problem has been solved. Again, I'm not, I don't have kids in Scouts so I don't know the answer, but my guess is there's something like TeamSnap or whatever that's targeted towards Scout groups. Although there's like, based on my experience with TeamSnap, yes, it's geared towards sports organizations, but like it would totally work for what you want to do and keep it all very contained. And it does publish a shared calendar and has self-contained messaging and all that great stuff. So anyway, another one in the forums from Jeff Lambert, he is getting an interesting error and it reminds, I'm not gonna go through his setup, but the scenario that he's getting is that he's seeing an error that says not authorized to send Apple events to the Finder. And, yep, and this is one of those things, you know, there's a lot of places in Mac OS where things can be buried. The place I'm about to mention is not the solution to Jeff's problem, but it's an important place for us all to know about. If you go into system preferences, go to security and privacy, go to privacy, which is the tab at the top, and then go to automation on the left. All of the things here, in fact, this is just a good place to sort of dig through when you're, you know, I don't know, when you have a few minutes to be free and think about this stuff, because there are so many things here that you can turn on and off that just, I don't know, to me, they just don't come to mind. And it really can make a difference. And in this automation one in particular is do you allow Apple scripts or other, you know, automator stuff or whatever it is, or things that tap into those engines to do things. You know, I created like, well, in the list on my computer is the installer, right? And I have given the installer, or Apple probably has, given the installer permission to use system events. I also have BusyCal there, and I've given BusyCal permission to use mail and it's as part of its automation. I built my own thing that I can take an email and send it to Evernote so that it's shared between John and I. It's a little Apple script that I built and it sits in my print menu and it's awesome, but it needs access to both Evernote and system events and I've given it that access. And all of those things are stored here. It's a really handy place to be. So again, it's system preferences, go into security and privacy, click on the privacy tab, which is the fourth one on the right nowadays and then automation is one here. But really, there's all kinds of things. There's contacts, there's calendar, you know, like all kinds of stuff out here. And this is where full disk access is. We've talked about that in other shows. It's just a good place to know about and think about. So I wanted to make sure to mention it. You know, look at that. I never noticed that. Yeah, automation, PDF to Evernote MGG, which is your script and Evernote and system events are checked. Look at that. See? I just heard at least one thing. That's the idea. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's good. It's good. So I got to say that they've complicated things by requiring, especially the full disk access. I mean, we've discussed this as a... Yeah. I think what they've done, while it's meant to protect the user, complicates things a bit, right? Yeah. At least I think so. Yeah, it does. Why doesn't this app see that? It's like, oh, because it doesn't have full disk access. The problem with all these other ones even with my little script, but certainly like Busy Cal and other things, when it tries to do something for the first time, the system pops up a dialogue and says, hey, do you want to let Busy Cal access mail? And you say yes, and then it remembers that and now it lets it happen the next time. And that's great. For whatever reason, there isn't yet a pop-up that says, hey, do you want to give this app full disk access? So it just doesn't get it. And there's no error message unless the app generates its own custom error message. That's the problem to me with full disk access. I have no problem with the idea of blocking it without user permission. Like I think that's actually a really good idea. It's just they're missing this dialogue. So it's just like, oh, let me show you and app vendors have to like create their thing and you still have to do this janky, very manual process. I don't know. I agree with you. Yeah, it's like, well, you got to go here and then go here and then go here and do this and this and that in order for me to work properly. It's like, well, why can't you just ask me? Do this. Yeah, can I just give permission? Like I'm okay with the idea of giving permission. And I think it's because in Apple's mind and Apple's worldview, perhaps is a better way to say this, apps don't need full disk access except in very, very rare cases. So we don't want to give apps a way to ask for it. If a user wants to give an app full disk access, they're an expert user. So they know how to do this. And the reality is, not really, especially given that we want disc utilities to be able to like do stuff. And I don't know, it's sort of, yeah. I don't know. Concern could be that they're putting, they're restricting your ability to access all of your stuff. Because you know, I look in mind right now and so it has, you know, carbon copy cloner. And it's like, well, why should carbon copy cloner have to be in this list here? I mean, its intent is to back up your hard drive. Why put a roadblock in the way of that? Well, I mean, I get, no, I get the roadblock. Like that, that makes sense. Because you don't want to give apps access to just read everything else on your drive. Most apps should just be like, no, you stay in your sandbox. Like I get the concept, but carbon copy cloner should be able to just say, hey, or ask the system to say, hey, do you want to give access to this app? Yes, okay, cool. I want to back up the whole drive and not just select portions of it, so. Right, yeah, that's crazy, all right. Yawel, all right, let's see, moving on here. Where are we here? Sure, we'll go to Dick on this one. This is actually kind of interesting. He says, at work I'm running 10.13.6. A high Sierra on my 27 inch late 2013 iMac. About six months ago, I installed an internal one gig OWC SSD and everything has been working perfectly. I also have a couple of SSDs connected for my time machine and carbon copy cloner backups. I pretty much the same setup at home. And when Mojave was released, I did the update and did not experience any problems. That was months ago and nothing has changed. About two weeks after I did the update on my home computer, I decided that it was safe to do the same with the work computer. I ran the update from the app store and let it go overnight. When I returned the next morning, it did not seem that the update had finished. I waited a little bit before we're starting and found that Mojave had loaded, but something was wrong. It was slow as molasses. And so I tried a couple of restarts to reset my PRAM and SMC. After messing around for a few hours, I decided I couldn't waste any more time. So I restored my time machine. I contacted OWC and was told there might be some issues between Mojave and some third party SSDs back at the time. I have since found out that wasn't my issue. I waited a couple of weeks and tried again with the same result, ended up restoring back again. I then decided to load the installer on a USB drive that I ran with no success. Same issue of installation bogging down occurred, restored back to High Sierra. I then decided that perhaps my original app store download was corrupted, so I downloaded a new version. Once more, same dismal result. I did finally decide to do a clean install and that works. But the obvious problem of restoring all my apps, et cetera, was too daunting. So once more, I went back to High Sierra. Following that, I tried the app store upgrade to Mojave with the same result as the first time. Because I think I've tried everything I'm about to give up. The clean install works, but I have 25 years of stuff that I'm not ready to toss unless I have to. So that doesn't seem to be the best option. All right, well, this is an interesting scenario. And you've done all the required troubleshooting. You know, it's like you have a good Mojave installer and it works. The issue is all this data, right? So you could clone the drive, right? Wipe it, install Mojave from scratch, which I think is what you did. Then allow migration assistant as part of the installation to slurp in all your settings, apps, and data from your clone. To me, that would be the easiest path as long as it works, which it may not. If there's something about your data or your setup or something that's tripping up the installer when it tries to live within that data, it's possible that migration assistant will run into the same problem. We've seen things with migration assistant over the last couple of years, John. I think it started with High Sierra. If you had installed Homebrew, it took forever. It would complete. But it would take hours and hours to finish the migration for whatever reason. That may be what's going on here. I don't know. But yeah, that's what I would try is let migration assistant do its job and see if that works. And if it doesn't, I don't think there is an answer for you other than manually take this as the opportunity to nuke and pave, and then using one of your clones, copy your documents back in, copy your pictures back. I mean, it's not the most fun process, but it's not the worst process in the world. And there you go. That's my thoughts. What do you think, John? I think I'm with you. I've had installs that have failed. Sometimes I've tried to upgrade the OS and the progress bar will get all the way to the end, and then it'll be like nothing happens. And it just sits there forever, and it's stuck. And then I run it again, and it succeeds. And I'm like, ah, boy. Yeah, thanks. Right, yeah. But migration assistant, the last I've used it. Now, the thing is, I haven't looked at it lately, but it does offer you a level of granularity, which you may want to keep in mind. Last I checked, it would say, okay, well, what do you want to import from your data? And you could say import everything, or you could be selective and say, well, I only want this, or this, or this. There's probably an Apple article about this, as far as how deep it goes with that. But yeah, I mean, sometimes it's just something so corrupt that the updater can't update properly, and then you're like, well, now what? Yeah. So I'm with you, clean install, fresh install, and then importing selectively, I think, is probably the best way to go. Yeah, and it does suck. It's not, in that it sucks up time. But in the end, you wind up with a much cleaner scenario, and maybe that's the best option here. Clearly, there's something wrong. Do you really, if migration assistant can't sort through it, that's probably a good indicator that you don't necessarily want to inherit this problem, because it's gonna rear its ugly head down the road. All right, one last one, John. And I mean, I say this is a good one. I think I say that before every question. That's why we have them in the show here. Listener Brian writes, he says, I had a Western Digital Red 4TB hard drive on my Synology disk station start showing IO problems in bad sectors. It's still under warranty. I was wondering what you'd recommend to secure the data on the drive before shipping it off for replacement. I could use disk utility and an OWC toaster. If you don't have one of those toaster things, it's awesome, but they don't call it the toaster. They call it like the drive dock or something, but it's awesome to erase it. But the more passes, the more time to finish, and it's a large drive for this. You've already had some really great guidance on protecting the data on an SSD when getting rid of it, encrypt it, then use the recovery partition to erase the drive by deleting the encryption password, leaving the drive usable and the data encrypted. Would this be a good slash faster solution for a large spinning drive? I wonder if others in your audience have the same question. So yeah, this is good. You know, this is a NAS drive, which I'm assuming knowing that it was in a Synology, I'm guessing that it was at least a two drive Synology, but probably more than two drives. And if that's the case, you know, it especially if it was using Synology's hybrid RAID, the one drive probably doesn't have enough on it to really divulge your data. It could, but I think it's kind of, you know, happenstance and by chance something might be there. And I've been waiting to do this, but I wanna shake my fist at you. Okay. In this case, because I believe if you know what you're doing and you listen to this podcast and you have the right tools, getting at the data on a NAS drive that has not been wiped is pretty straightforward. And I'll tell you how you can do it. Okay, yes. All right, go. Well, so for example, a lot of the NAS drives these days use something called EXT4. Right. As their format. And guess what? If you go into Homebrew or like my favorite program, Cakebrew, which is the gully on top of that and you use something called MacFew. So part one. Now you can mount EXT4 drives on the Mac, but this isn't an EXT4 drive, right? This is a one of many in a RAID set that happens to then use EXT4, right? I understand that, but the thing is saying that you can't access that data I don't think is entirely accurate and that you can using MacFews and if you go to Cakebrew or Homebrew there is a thing called EXT4 fuse which will let you mount an EXT4. And I actually verified this. I actually pulled the drive out of one of my synologies that used EXT4 and tried this. And it's like, well, yeah, the data is kind of there. Were you able to read files from one of your Synology drives? Really? Well, that's what this thing does. EXT4 lets you. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Like you can have an HFS plus RAID, right? I mean, you can. Yes, your Mac can't read EXT4 natively but there's a way to get it there and you described one of those ways. But let's forget about that. Let's assume this is, you know, an HFS plus RAID connected to your Mac. If you take one drive out of that can you mount that drive on your Mac and read it? Oh, well, HFS. No, no, no, one of the RAID drives. Like you- EXT4 formatted RAID drives. Nope, forget about EXT4. Okay. You have a RAID, you know, a JBOD connected to your Mac and it's, you've used, you know, Apple's built-in stuff and formatted it HFS plus and there's four disks in it, great. You've stored your data on there, great. Now you disconnect that thing from your Mac, you turn it off. You pull out drive three and you put that in an OWC toaster or whatever you want and you turn it on. Can you read the data on that drive? I don't think so. I don't know the answer to that. But that's what you're saying you can do with the drive I pulled out of my Synology. All I'm saying is that using Mac Fuse, so natively Mac OS can't read EXT4 drives. But if you use this thing called Mac Fuse which has options. But I'm not talking about, that's not what we're talking, we're not talking about whether a Mac can read it. We're talking about whether any machine can read the data. I think you're missing that this is one of many in a raid. Forget it, don't, you're caught up on the format I think. And I wanna get the answer here. If I pull that drive and it's in a file system that the computer can read, forget about how we got there. I pulled drive three out of a four drive raid. Can I read that? Can I read the data on just that drive? I don't think the answer is yes. I think you're missing, you got caught up in the file system. But I wanna get this right. Yes? I guess I'm looking at the problem. I'm looking at this through a different lens than you are. Right. Another spam call. But I don't know that you're looking through it through the lens that listener Brian is asking about. Right, that's the question. I don't think the data on one raid drive is readable regardless of what format that entire raid presented itself as. I don't think so. You know what we gotta do here? I think the thing is we should probably confer with our friends at Synology or other raid manufacturers. I don't think we need to. I believe you can. I've read through this. I'm pretty sure that one drive out of a raid, I mean, it's gonna have some data on it, but it's all striped. So the same file could literally be spread across four volumes in that case or at least three volumes and then parody data. So if you pull one volume out, I don't think you can get at that data. However, so I think you're. I think you can. If you have the right tools. Okay. I think Brian is starting at a place where it's pretty secure. Not entirely secure, but pretty secure. Even just pulling that drive out. I agree with you that a drive that is part of a raid it's more difficult to get data off of that because the data is spread around. Cause it might not be there. There's still some data there. Maybe. I guess to wrap it up, I would say that my advice would be that you do a secure a race. If it's a rotational drive that I think and that with every drive that I've had that has died or is dying. That's what I do is I run this utility. I format it. I do a secure a race option that rewrites data over the drive. That's that would be my suggestion. Well, that's what he asked is, is there a way to avoid that? You know, just in terms of time. And I think his idea, so erasing the last four minutes of detour here. I think his idea of encrypting the drive, like putting it, I don't even think you're going to be able to mount it to be perfectly honest, Brian. So I think you reformat the drive with disc utility cause you're not going to be able to read it. Even if you install Mac fuse, it's not going to mount. It's not a volume. It's one slice of a volume. So it's not going to just magically mount because you installed Mac fuse and now it supports EXT for like that. That's not going to get you there. So I would put it in your machine. It's going to say it's unreadable. That is correct. Whether or not you have Mac fuse, it's going to say it's unreadable. That is correct. Offer to format it and format it as an encrypted volume and then do the thing like we would to an SSD where you go in and delete the encryption password and leave the drive usable, but with the data encrypted, there is no password anymore and you're done. I think that's the right answer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. You with me on this? Do you understand how we got here? I want to make sure. Okay. All I want to say is that I believe the thing is yes, it's somewhat unlikely that somebody's going to pull usable data off of it, but I would do a secure format. Yes. Absolutely. However you want to get there. Right. Yeah, Mac fuse. I just didn't want to, like it was kind of a detour that didn't, it's relevant, but not relevant, right? It doesn't matter. It's like, yeah, it's not that a Mac couldn't read it. It's that can any machine read it? That was his question. And the answer is it probes not, but do your secure race or do your encryption format, encrypted throw away the key. That'll deal with it mostly. I mean, even that, there's never a guarantee, right? But it's, you're starting so far away from where the actual data is, that it's probably not there anyway. Yeah, you're fine. Sorry folks. I meant for this to be about a four, I know 90 second thing and we took a John F. Braun, the patented tangents and there we are. So we'll put Mac, okay, we'll put Mac fuse in the, it's not, but it is, it's a tangent, right? It's a tangent, it's fine. We'll put Mac fuse in the show notes here and there we go. Yeah. If anything, it's what I love about John F. Braun. Yeah. I mean, if anything, is there a way to access data on the drive formatted outside of the Mac world? And I think, yes there is. Yes, but that's the question you answered. The question Brian asked was, is there a way to access data that's on a RAID array? And that's a very different question. That's the question. Yeah, so there you go. All right, well, here we are folks. We made it to the end by hook or by crook. You can find us on our forums at macgeekab.com slash forums, we would love to see you there. We wanna thank Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com. We wanna thank all our sponsors including ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash M-G-G, Otherworld Computing at macsales.com. Of course in the podcast marketplace, we have Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, barebonessoftware at barebones.com. Eero at Eero.com slash M-G-G. And so many more coming too. It's good stuff. It's always good to hear from you folks. Please send us your notes, find us. We'd love to hear from you. It is fantastic. All right, John, we finally made it here to the end. Do you have any words? I was gonna say three words that you wanna share, but there's really no way that I could, there's nothing I could say that would stop any potential tangents. So go. Well, there is, and they are three words, Dave, and they are don't get caught.