 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 720, for Monday, July 30th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take all your questions, all your tips, all your cool stuff found, we mix them all together, and then we share them. And why do we share them? Well, so that we can hit our goal of each and every one of us learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing. We'll talk a little bit about their new OWC Express 4M2 external SSD enclosures and also Jamf Now. We're at jamf.com slash mgge. You get your first three devices for free for life. We'll talk more about those in a moment here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, as far as you know, this is John F. Brown. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Brown? Just trying to stay cool, my friend. Yeah, it's a little, it's hot and humid here in New England, which, you know, which is how our summers go, right? It's, but that's okay. Oh, but even better are the storms, which when you get all that humidity and heat and stuff during the day and then it cools off. I like the storm. I like lightning storms. Yeah, as long as you're protected against the lightning, that's good. Not a worry for me, but... No, no, it's a worry for everyone. Lightning is, we mustn't ignore it. I've never suffered a mishap due to it, but... So you don't, you don't, you don't buy homeowners insurance? Oh yeah, I got that. Okay, there you go. Yeah, okay. Just checking. Because, you know, I mean, we, like, for the same reason that we back up, even if we've never needed our backups, right, we still back up because we know that it could impact us. And the same is true for lightning for most folks. It's a matter of when, not if. And, you know, I mean, like me here, because I have those wires buried in the ground, it's far, I'm far more susceptible to, to lower voltage lightning strikes or, or further proximity strikes. But if one hits near you, man, you're going to want protection. Well also, your state motto is live free or dying. Your state's trying to kill you, you know. My state's motto is an interesting, the interpretation of it is interesting here. It's a whole different podcast, but, but, but yeah, that is true. For now though, let's go in and we've got some quick tips. So Steve is where we will start for today. And Steve reminds us about there is a way on iOS, like when you visit a website, oftentimes you will get the mobile version of the site either because of responsive design or because the server senses what you're on and gives you a different, a different layout than you would get on the desktop. And he points us to an Apple Insider article that they put up last, earlier this month, about, about two ways of doing this. Most people have seen the method that they list second in this article where you hit the sharing icon, the little square with the arrow pointing out of it. And then along the bottom there in your multitude of options, one of them is Request Desktop Site. But there's an even better way to do it. And that is on iOS. So this is an iPhone or iPad in the URL bar, like the bar at the top of the screen where the URL of the current site is shown in Safari. There's the little refresh icon. Hold down on that refresh icon and you get the same option, Request Desktop Site, but it's right there. And I'll tell you, I use this all the time. It's very handy. There's some things like I don't have Facebook Messenger. I don't have that app installed on my iPad, because frankly I don't want it on my iPad. But if I visit messenger.com, like if I visit messenger.com on my desktop, I get the Facebook Messenger web interface. If I visit messenger.com on my iPad, I get a link to go download the app in the App Store. It's like, no, no, no. I just want the web interface for Messenger because I just need to do a little bit here. And so by requesting Desktop Site there, I'm able to get past that and it brings me right in. And you know what? It works perfectly. So this is a handy way of sort of getting past some of those things where, you know, the mobile site. So what you're trying to say is that the browser on iOS and the browser on the Mac tell the server different things and it then tries to adjust the page to your needs, but it doesn't always get it right. That's partially true. They do tell the server different things and they do at there are some servers that will deliver a different piece of content to you. But also, but in addition to that, the iPad itself will render the page differently based on how the page describes that it should be rendered on mobile. And if you change to this desktop site, it actually changes both of those things. And so you have a pretty good chance of getting the desktop rendering of any given site. So. Right. Yeah. And that makes me think of this other handy tip, Dave. Which is, well, at least with Safari on Mac OS, if you enable the develop menu, I'm sure you knew this, but I want to share this with everybody. So if you enable the develop menu, which I think you have to do in the advanced tab, yes, you will then get a develop menu in Safari for Mac OS. And if you go to and then you'll get a menu that says user agent, you can trick other sites into thinking that you're on a different browser. On the Mac. Cool. Yeah. Like I'm looking here now and I can say I'm Safari on iPhone, on an iPod Touch, on an iPad, Microsoft Edge, whatever the heck that is, i.e. all the way back to version 7, Google Chrome, Firefox, it's crazy. Or you can make up your own, I guess. Do you find, I mean, I know we can do that. Do you find that it makes a difference when you do that on the Mac? I've had very few sites. I had one. I think it was so our state lets you file your income taxes online. Right. And for whatever reason, when I tried to do it, they just didn't program it right. And it just didn't work on Safari. So I could have changed the user agent, but I actually just ran Firefox and it worked fine. That's always my backup plan. Whenever I have a site that's acting wonky on Safari, it almost always works if I open it up in Firefox. Right. But changing Safari's user agent to Firefox fixes it or no? I'm trying to figure out if it's the WebKit renderer that's the problem, or if it's just, if they're actually sending different versions of the page based on your user agent. I have had occasions where, yes, changing either, you know, it's coin toss, which one I'm going to try. I mean, usually I just run Firefox, but sometimes I'll, because I have that menu enabled, I'll go there. Yeah. Sometimes they code a page and it just does something stupid if you're on Safari, but not if you're in Firefox. I don't know. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Fair enough. I thought Web, I thought service had stopped like doing that, but maybe. For the most part, I mean, you remember the bad old days when they would say, you know, IE required to, you know, run the site properly. Yeah. Why are you doing that? Why are you doing something so specific to IE that you have to have a browser requirement? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Or more importantly, what are you doing? But thankfully, those particular days are behind us. So yeah, good stuff. Thank you very much, Steve. Good. Another iOS tip that comes from Paul, and it's a good reminder, he says, I use this infrequently and my friends laugh at me. But if you delete an email or delete written text by accident, you can shake your iPhone or your iPad, and an option for undue move or undue typing shows up. And he's right. This, you know, this kind of works, I wouldn't say universally throughout the system, but there is that shake to undo thing. And I use it occasionally, but not frequently enough to remember to like tell new users about it. So it's worth mentioning. It is silly when you are trying to shake an iPad. In fact, it's hard. It's not just silly. It's hard to do because, you know, you're generally holding the iPad in two hands and so getting two hands to coordinate to shake is actually a little bit of a trick and probably looks sillier than it feels to. So yeah, there you go. I think you'd have to be careful that you don't toss it across the room when you're doing that with a larger device. Right. Yeah, exact. That's what it feels like is going to happen. Yeah, for sure. And then there was a setting somewhere for that. Yeah. Brother Jay reminds us that if you go to settings, general accessibility, I think shake to undo is, I don't know, it's maybe halfway down the list. It's in the interaction setting. Yep. So you can turn that on or off. I think in fact, I'm certain it's on by default. Now, that I've had to use because it's very easy to fumble finger selecting text or deleting it, which is when I've done more than once, where it's like I highlight something and then I accidentally hit a key and then it's like, oh, you know, all that text just disappeared. Yeah, right, right. Cool. All right. Let's go into some cool stuff found here. We will start with Craig and Craig says I was listening back to 718 and was interested to hear. Oh, never. We talked about the first half of this. Never mind. He says, I want to give a shout out to my, this has nothing to do with Mackie give 718 pay no attention to the two guys behind the curtain here. Shout out to my new favorite Mac photo editing app Luminar. It is a great mix between powerful but with one click options does batch processing and works as a plugin to Apple photos. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thanks, Craig. Always looking out for new photo editing apps. And this is from Skylum SKYLUM. And I know this isn't new, but you know, it's, I think we've probably mentioned it before. It sounds familiar. I've certainly come across it, but 69 bucks over at Skylum SKYLUM.com. So thanks, Craig. Good stuff. I also noticed that key Q nine, which is key Q is a keyboard shortcut enhancement tool. And version nine adds emoji typing. So you can really kind of search through and find emoji characters by keyword or choose from a list of recently used emojis and do this, of course, all on on your Mac. So pretty cool that, you know, like that's the thing that drives me crazy about emojis is, you know, it's like, oh, I want the one that that looks like, you know, somebody with, with, you know, like a face palm thing. It's like, okay, so now I just need to slowly scroll through to find the face palm. It's like, no, I just want to type face palm and find it. Well, there you go key Q key Q nine adds that in. So that's, you know, face gums. Yeah, face palm, right? You know, you face palm, like, no, doesn't you mean face plant? No, face plant would be you going like face down into the ground. Face palm is when the palm of your hand comes up to your face. Like, you know, you go, oh, and that's a face. Yeah. Yeah. Like I had a face palm yesterday. I play, we were playing Tommy. It was the last performance of Tommy, you know, and there's that song I cite to the blind is it's just starts out with quarter notes on the piano junk, junk, junk, junk. Then after a bunch of those, there's the floor tom thing that comes in where Keith Moons playing you know, and that thing. But I came in way early with that. That was a face palm moment. You know, so there you go. Thankfully, the singer on stage knew that I messed it up and did not follow me. So we were all good. All sweet and set. Yes. All right. You know, while I was on vacation, I had to do a quick edit to some PHP code to make a quick change. And I realized this as I woke up one morning and was checking, you know, through like either email or Slack or something from my iPad. And I thought, yeah, I could certainly go get my laptop and do this. I thought, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think I can do this from my iPad. And sure enough, I was able to use both prompt to, you know, to SSH in and then also the Coda app, you know, I SSH in to find which file I wanted or whatever. And then I could use the Coda app along with I could have used transmit to, but the Coda app has an FTP browser in it. And so I was able to go and use Coda and edit my code and look at it. Okay, yep, that's what I want. And then I saved it back to the FTP server and checked it and the code ran fine and all that was good. So just, you know, it's the things that you can do with an iPad are pretty interesting. And the folks at Panic who make Coda do a very good job with it. I have no doubt that they use this on their own all the time because it's pretty amazing how you can, you know, like do that kind of stuff on a tablet. So anyway, just wanted to share. It's good, right? Have you ever used Coda, John? No. Okay. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I like it. And they make prompt as well. And of course they make transmit too. So good. And while traveling, John, I've often, I've mostly been a fan of in-ear headphones on airplanes. They do a good job of sealing things, right? Because you put them in your ears, not like AirPods, but things that actually like go and seal in your ears. And then I've used things like the Pioneer Raise, which have noise canceling and some great processing and stuff and sound really good. And the nice part about noise canceling headphones, of course, is that they are small and easy to fit in a travel bag. But I knew I had some pretty, pretty long flights. And I'm actually thankful to Kelly or aka Verso in the chat room here today at mackev.com slash stream for reminding me of this earlier today. But for my recent flights, I thought, you know, it does get tiring having something in my ears for that many hours in a row. So I brought along a pair of over-the-ear headphones. These are the JBL. They're the Everest Elite 750 NC. And I think they're just about 210 maybe 220 bucks. They're over-the-ear. They are wireless. They've got a 15-hour battery. They are Bluetooth. They have noise canceling in them as well as they've got a microphone so you can, you know, you can actually press a little button and get, you know, the sound from the cabin. So if somebody's talking to you, you don't have to take the headphones off or whatever. But man, they're lightweight. They're comfortable. Really, really made it. And they sound fantastic. And it made such a difference on these flights not having something in my ear, you know, for the whole flight. And I will say this, using, it's been a long time since I've used wireless headphones on an airplane. It makes such a difference not having to contend with that wire in that sort of cramped space that you get of the airplane seat. When it's time to get up, you know, especially if somebody, you know, if I'm on the aisle or whatever and somebody in the, you know, in the row wants to get up, I don't have to worry about, you know, the cable of my headphones getting caught on something as I'm moving around and trying to get up. It's just boom, right there. You just get up. Good to go. So I was really impressed with these, these, these JBLs. So I'll put a link to those in the show notes too. One, one tip I will give. We were, I don't know, halfway to Vegas or wherever we were going first. And I took off my headphones because there was some announcement. And I put them down in my lap and I hear this high pitch sound and, and I'm like, oh, what, you know, what idiot is making this noise? Of course, I've realized very quickly that it was me. The, when the noise canceling had, because the noise canceling circuit was on and the headphones, the right and left headphones got close to each other, it actually started to cause feedback because the noise canceling system, of course, is creating an opposite signal, you know, I somewhere in the neighborhood of something that's 180 degrees out of phase so that it actually cancels out the noise that would be coming in, right? And it was still working and dutifully doing this and, and, you know, created this feedback loop amongst itself. So I, you know, I just grabbed them and turned it off, but there you go. So, you know, fun, right? Good. Makes sense. It just took me a minute to realize it, you know, it's like, oh, that's what that noise is. Yes. Yes. Right? Fun. Yes. Sometimes technology just doesn't always get it quite right. Well, I think, um, and I thought these headphones did it and maybe they just missed the sensor when I did it, when I took them off, but, but, but some headphones, possibly these, will sense when you take them off and pause your, you know, your show or whatever. And actually, I think that happened, but it didn't turn off the noise canceling circuit. So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's technology. Just turn it off. It's good. Uh, a tip from a different listener, Steve, uh, in show 717, we were talking about converting H.264 files to H.265 video files because that compression is more efficient and creates a much smaller file. And he has a large library and wanted to convert these files in place so that the file names would stay the same. I think it was his Plex library or something like that. So the files name file names would stay the same and it just, you know, kind of shrunk things down. And, uh, and listener Steve writes in and says, uh, I think that the listener already had software to do what he wants and he's already using it. IVI from South Pole Software isn't is easier to use handbrake than handbrake is and does a great job searching and including metadata from existing files. He says, I routinely use this as my primary media converter and have been using it for years. The developer is very responsive and it's worth every penny of the $19 and 99 cents they ask for the pro version. He says also make sure if you're going to buy it, buy it from the publisher's website, not the Mac App Store. The App Store one doesn't have a few features like DVD ripping. He says they added H.265 support a few versions ago. So if someone hasn't updated, they might, uh, that might be why they didn't see that option. So IVI, put a link in the, uh, in the show notes for that. That's pretty cool. I'm going to, I'm going to mess around with that with some larger movie files I have and see how it does. And, uh, yeah, yeah, because it, because most things are supporting H.265 now, at least most of the stuff that I use. So, uh, it would make sense to take those, you know, MP4 files that are encoded with H.264 and change them to H.265 because the file name gets to stay the same because MP4 or M4 v files are just containers that can have, uh, many, there's lots of things that could be inside them and then H.264 and H.265 are some of those things. So how do I, I answered my own question. Okay. But my question was, Dave, how do you know what codec you're using? And well, I just answered my own question here because I looked at a MP4 file, video file on my Mac mini here. And in the more, if you do a get info in the more info section, guess what there is? The codec that's being used. Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. The finder, the finder will, will expose that. That's true. Yeah. I wonder if you could do a script that could peek into that and say, Oh, if you're an H.264, let me convert you. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna have to scratch my head over that because yeah, I'm pretty sure all the videos I have are H.264 now. Right. Yeah. Well, yes, that, that good chance of that. That's right. Yep. Yep. Pretty cool. Um, you know what I want to take, we've got some more tips to do. I want to take a minute and talk about our two sponsors for this episode, if I may, Mr. Braun. You must. Sweet. Our first sponsor, as I mentioned earlier, is OtherworldComputing at macsales.com. Man, you know, these folks really know what they're doing. I, I know when you're going to buy something that you would add to your Mac, and the same is true for me, anything that I'm adding to my Mac. OWC is at macsales.com is the first place that I go. If it's RAM or an external hard drive or something, they just, they know what they're doing. They make, they make good stuff. They sell good quality stuff and they stand behind it. They've recently released their OWC Express 4M2 SSD enclosures. So this is a Thunderbolt 3 SSD enclosure. It's got four NVMe M.2 SSD slots. So you can put up to eight terabytes of data in it because of the way it works. You can get up to 2800 megabytes per second. Yep. And like super fast, this thing. Compact design, it uses soft RAID, right? Which we've talked about on this show. Soft RAID is actually often faster and better and more reliable than hardware RAID. It's certified, Thunderbolt certified for both Mac and Windows. The enclosures start at 349.99. You got to go check this out. So go to macsales.com, check this out, check it out, check them out for everything that they've got. And please send them our thanks, macsales.com, Otherworld Computing. They're good, good folks. So our thanks to them for sponsoring this episode. Jamf Now. Jamf Now allows you to set up, manage, and protect all of your Apple devices. So it's easy to keep track of your own Mac, your own iPad, your own iPhone. But what about all the other Apple devices at work, right? As your business grows, and really frankly, even as your family grows, so does the digital inventory associated with it, right? Making it exponentially harder to manage everybody's Apple devices. And this is especially true when people are remote. So you got remote employees or remote family members, you know, kids going off to college or, you know, maybe you're take care of your, you know, devices for your family, you know, your remote family, maybe your parents or your aunts, your uncles, your, your siblings, whatever it is. With Jamf Now, you can check your digital inventory. You can distribute things like Wi-Fi and email settings. So you can control those from your computer anywhere or your, you know, Apple device anywhere. And it can push these changes magically over to all of these devices that you manage. You can deploy apps. You can protect data. You can even lock or wipe it devices needed. And Jamf lets you manage devices so you can focus on your business instead. No IT experience needed. So start securing your business today, setting up your first three devices for free forever. That's right. The first three devices on your account are always going to be free. So, and it doesn't just mean the first three that you put on there. If you put three on, you take one off, you put another one on, guess what? All three are still free, right? After three, if you have more than three devices on your account at any point in time, it's a better way to look at it. Then it's just two bucks a month per device over three. But the first three are always free. So go jamf.com, jamf.com slash mgg. That's jamf.com slash mgg. That way you can create your account and get started managing your devices today. So our thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, more tips because I love tips. It's good. We talked on Show 716 about docs and multiple screens and trying to integrate them together. I know you were having some trouble with this, but you weren't alone, John. So Tim, let's hear what Tim has to say. His audio starts out just the beginning of it. It's a little rough and then it's okay. And then we'll take it from there. Let's see. Hey guys, this is Tim from Phoenix, Arizona. And I just wanted to give you a little bit more feedback on my experience regarding your topic of having multiple screens and having the dock be unpredictable. I have my dock set to the bottom of the screen. And I've noticed that if I set up my external monitor, so I have a MacBook Pro and I have an external monitor, if I set up the external monitor so that its proximity is higher than my laptop's monitor, so if it's relative to my laptop monitor, if I have to go up to the external screen, and therefore the external screen does not touch the bottom of the overall layout, then the dock doesn't show up on that screen. But if I move the external screen to be next to my laptop screen and align the bottoms of the screens, then if I go down to the bottom of that external screen, I can get the dock. So it may be something as trying to be as smart as that, that it knows if you've got your dock set to the bottom, but your screen doesn't touch the bottom, then it's not going to bring it up. Because it's not the bottom of the screen, it's the bottom of the overall layout. So anyway, thought I'd add just a little bit more context to that. My personal experience. Thanks. Thanks for the great job. Thanks, Tim. That actually makes a lot of sense. We have to think about this not as two separate screens, but as one screen, that one virtual screen, if you will, that has, that is made up of multiple components. So the bottom of the quote unquote screen may not be the one that you're on, if that makes sense. Right? Is that a good way to say it, John? Good as any. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. Makes sense though, right? You know, so kind of dragging things around and testing again. You know, you can do that system preferences, displays, arrangement, right, is where if you've got multiple screens, you'll get that arrangement tab. You can move things around in there. It's supposed to be so that you can reflect what things are actually like in the physical world, and then windows will drag appropriately. But you can certainly play with it a little bit to get the effect you want. Pretty good stuff. Robert chimes in along the same lines and says, regarding this discussion, one interesting tip to know is that if you choose to hide the dock, it will reappear on whichever screen you are using when you drag the mouse towards its location. So if you say that the dock's at the bottom, but you choose to hide it, if you drag down to the bottom of whatever screen you're on, then the dock will appear there. He says, and one more thing, when invoking Launchpad using gestures, it will show up on whatever screen you last accessed the dock on. So that's interesting to remember. So Launchpad follows the dock says, I hope these tips are helpful. Love the show. Thanks, Roberto. That's great. Awesome. Fun. Crazy. I feel like this is one of those scenarios where Apple is trying to guess what we users would want. And you know what? To be fair, they do this a lot. And most of the time, we don't notice it because they guess right, and it doesn't cause any trouble. But obviously, there are times when, you know, yeah, it doesn't work out. For the most part, Dave, that is one of the pleasures being a user of multiple operating systems as are you. Yeah. But that's always been one of the pleasures of macOS versus other operating systems is that you get the feeling that somebody put a little thought into the UI slash UX more than the other people, which I think are more approach it from a technical usability standpoint is like, hmm, you know, I bet you if I press that button or I move this there or do that or this or that, it'll do what I want. And it usually does. It usually does. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it right. And most of the time, this is a good thing. And we just have to sort of deal with the times when it's not. But that's why we get together on this show every week is to talk through some of those edge cases where, you know, we need to know how to navigate. And then we all learn together. And that's that's what we do. Peter writes in, I think it was in show 717, we were talking about Roger's incident where he lost his AirPods in the airport going through TSA. And he was able to find them using Find My AirPods. He said Roger mentioned that if he didn't find the last AirPods, he would have to buy a whole unit replacement. This is not true. In fact, Apple offers to order AirPod replacement for any of the three parts. So the three parts being either the left or right AirPod or the charging case for 69 bucks US and they have an AirPod service. The odd thing is that Apple does not offer this through their online store. But as a repair option where the missing AirPods are considered a service part, but you get a whole new set of AirPods when this when this happens, he said, the odd part is you don't need to return anything to Apple. So the way it works is you first try to locate it through Find My AirPods, then assuming that fails, you find the serial number of your AirPods and you need this. So I highly recommend everyone that uses AirPods, take your serial number, log it somewhere, you know, a secure note or you know, if you use one password, store it in there, you know, something even just like it doesn't need to need to be secure. It just needs to be somewhere you can put it in notes and let that sync to iCloud, whatever it is, save that serial number now so that when down the road you need it, you can you know, you can deal with it and find it. And actually, we should talk about how to we'll talk in a minute about how to find that serial number. But once you once you have that serial number, call Apple or chat with them, you know, we find the chat app, the Apple support app, fantastic for this. Tell them that you lost, you know, your AirPods or a piece of them and asked to order a replacement, the advisor will send you a link to pay your 69 bucks and then automatically a new set of AirPods will be sent to your address. And then obviously you can go and, you know, set them up and all that stuff. But that that's the key is is if you are an AirPods owner, you can you can do that. So yeah. And the serial number for your AirPods is is in two places. Physically, you can find it on your on the AirPods case. If you open them up, it's on the underside of the lid. And if they're already connected to your iPhone, you can go to settings, general about AirPods and the serial number will be listed there too. Wherever you get it from, just get it, save it so that you don't have to think about it. So pretty good. Right. Good stuff, John. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So thanks, Peter. That's great. Very, very cool. Anything to add to this, John, before we before we move on? I'm AirPods-less at the moment. I know I shouldn't be. I actually walk around all the time, man. Yeah, you'd love them. I would think. Well, you know, I do like situational awareness though. And that's the beauty of AirPods is, well, no, because they don't seal. You still hear everything around you. They are the only headphones that I feel comfortable walking around in like, you know, like a downtown area, like a New York City or Boston or even Portsmouth here. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Uh, also in show 717, we talked about how I was having this issue where my iPad, which is on the iOS 12 public beta or not public beta, developer beta, but public beta people are having the same problem, would occasionally and seemingly without any reason, just go to a black screen, I'd get the spinny thing for about almost exactly 60 seconds, sometimes 70, and then I'd be returned to the lock screen. And this was bad, right? I was the person foolish enough to put the developer beta on my iPad without thinking about the fact that I needed to use that iPad for a theater show. And so I got really nervous about, you know, because 70 seconds of not having my music in front of me during a theater show, that, you know, like it got to the point where I had most of the show memorized. But as I mentioned earlier, even with the music in front of me, I was still making, you know, still sounds like an iOS kernel panic almost. Well, maybe you should actually, you know, it'd be interesting if you looked in the console, which one can do, of course. I did. And there wasn't really anything listed there, at least nothing that made any sense to me. But I started thinking, okay, well, what can I do to mitigate this? Because it doesn't happen all the time. And so I would put my phone or my iPad into airplane mode, which I do on stage anyway. And then I have a separate iPad that I used to manage my in-ear mix with the wirelessly to the sound board. So that's, you know, that that one obviously stays online. What? Well, yeah, anyway. But this one, when I read the music from, you know, I put an airplane mode, and then I go in the background and I, I, you know, Jettison every app that's there just to get it clean. I know you don't have to do that. It's fine. I like, I like to hedge my bets here when I need something for real time operations. And I will say this, I have now made it through the run of not just Tommy, but, but for Midnight Rocky Horror performances. And my iPad did not reset on me once. And so that got me to thinking about halfway through the run, like, okay, why is it not causing me any trouble while I'm playing? But it definitely would happen like, you know, afterwards I'd be messing around in it or whatever. And, and I would get, you know, these resets. And I realized these resets were happening during network activity. And I thought, okay, well, that's interesting. And at first I thought, you know, this could be like a battery thing, like we saw on the iPhone, right, where they throttled the battery, but they're not throttling on the, on the iPad. So we're getting this reboot or whatever, you know, some approximation of a reboot kind of thing going on. It's like, okay. And then I thought, well, that might be it. But it really is network activity. It's not like when I'm doing something that's processor intensive on the iPad, it's just network activity. So I went to settings, general reset network settings. And I did that on my iPad. And that's it. That was the last time I had the problem. Good to go. I will say the problem did get better with not today's update, but whatever the most recent update was, it dropped the amount of time that it took on that, you know, black spinny screen. Instead of 70 seconds, it went down to about 10, which was, you know, much better than 70, but still bad. But now that I've done the network settings reset, it hasn't happened in like a week. So I think that solved it. And that's that's an interesting little option, because if you, if you sync all your Wi-Fi passwords with iCloud, which happens automatically if you're using iCloud Keychain, then that you don't lose much with reset network settings. You need to reconnect to the Wi-Fi network that that you're on, but then the rest of them will sort of repopulate into your database. And you also lose some of your VPN related settings, which I had to put back in. But otherwise, it's it's not a very destructive process. And I've had it solve certainly this issue and others in the past. So I recommend it, not not just routinely, but if you're having trouble or things are a little wonky with the network, I, you know, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. Like I said, it's not a very destructive or painful process to go through. So have you ever done it on one of your devices, John? Very rarely. But let me ask you this question, my friend. Yeah. So you say sometimes you have to repopulate your VPN settings. Have you ever thought of saving them in a profile using something like Apple Configurator 2? Excellent. Okay. Yeah, I could do it with with with Jamf now, too. Or Jamf, yeah. Yeah, they they accomplish it. Yeah, they they both, both products let you let you save things like that into a tiny little file where you double click on it and you're done. And then you don't have to worry about typos or other horrible things. Yeah, exactly. No, that's a good idea. I yeah, I have not put them in there, but but I should then then that would really free me up to do a reset network settings. I could do it daily, John. That would be great, except really not not advisable. Right. Well, yeah, I think that's that's getting a bit carried away. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. We have one more tip that's going to lead into another tip. Well, we've got a bunch more tips. I want to take a minute and we haven't done this for the past couple of episodes because I was traveling and and didn't have access to this data. And then I got back and things went haywire last week before the show. And so I didn't get to do this. I want to take a minute as we like to do here and thank all of our premium contributors and subscribers, especially the and I want to call out I want to thank all of you as we always do because without you, you know, you're a huge part of what makes this show possible for us. So thank you. And then as we like to do, I want to I want to highlight and mention each of you that have come in since the last time we did this. So the list is a little longer right now than it normally is. But but that's that's OK. So on the biannual plan, where it's 25 bucks every six months, and you can find out all about this at MacKicap.com premium. If you are interested and able, and if you are not interested or not able to do this, don't sweat it. You know, you can you can you can induce support us in other ways just by listening, you're supporting us, you know, by sending in questions and participating at, you know, MacKicap.com slash forums and the new forums and all that like it all that the whole thing is what we all get to do together. And so here we go for those of you that that contributed at the twenty five dollar level or at the every six month level. If I don't mention an amount, then it's it's 25. So Dan E, Mike P, Tony G, John O, Richard J, Avram M, Paul W, Gary T, Ron G, Bruce M, Zach E, Greg H, Deb L, Tony N, Mark S, Jim E, Eddie M, Robert T, Graham R, James M, Walter H, Kurt W, George D, Racer G, Cindy K, Perry M, Tony C, Michael E, Michael D, Brett P, Mark S, Ralph M, Dionysio Y, Tim M, William S, Dan B, Mike D, Joe K, Jim K, all of you at the twenty five dollar level. Thank you. And then on the six month plan at custom amounts, Dennis J at 30. Thank you. Tom H at 75 and Mark E at 100. Thank you for all of you for your contributions. So that's on the every six month level. So thank you. On the monthly level we have at 10 bucks a month, Chris F, Paul M, Mike C, Mark R, Bob at Working Smarter for Mac users. You know who you are. Dr. Mac, Ryan M, Neil L, Dave C, Scott F, John G, Abdullah B, Frank A, James C, Joe S, Barry F, R-E-L, Michael P, Bob L, different Bob L than the one mentioned before. John B, Jeff P, John V, John D, Santiago M, Ken L, Clive S, David G, Gary B, Jeff F, Tony Z, John B and F the nerd. And then Mike P at 15 dollars a month. So thank you all for your contributions in the last couple of weeks. And on the one time contribution list, Ken M actually is up for two mentions 50 bucks twice. So thank you so much Ken and for that and thanks to everyone for all of your contributions in the last couple of weeks since we've had an opportunity to go through this. So you rock. Thank you. They do. And I know some of these guys. It's the thing is right. We actually know quite a few. We know most of you. Yeah, it's sort of a beautiful thing. Well, I just saw Dr. Bob. It was great fun. Oh, that's right. And I think some of the other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I think you're right. I think you saw quite a few people that that we thanked on the list. Yeah. So thank you very much because by doing what you do, you make sure that neither Dave or I are going to live in a cardboard box on the corner. That's the idea. Yeah, makes a difference. It really does make a difference. So thank you. All right. We have some APFS stuff to talk about here, John. Perry and Perry and here I am like I'm in the name mode. I don't know that Perry's last name is in, but it might be. I think we always mentioned a Perry M. And I think it is actually that Perry writes in about APFS and he's been doing some testing and found we in fact, we talked about Perry set up and why booting from an external drive was slow. And we recommended to Perry a couple of episodes. I guess it was just the last episode in 719. We said, all right, well, you know, start up in verbose mode and see what messages you're getting. And as it turns out, Perry's not getting any messages. It's literally just taking that long. You know, it's like 30 seconds with one drive and up to a couple of minutes with another for the system to even begin booting. Perry did some research and found that this is common with APFS, that it takes especially some drives quite a bit longer to be ready to come online. And I'm wondering if this has to do with with whole disk encryption, if it's a file vault thing with the way APFS works, we've certainly found that APFS is slower than HFS plus for raw transfer speeds. There's, I mean, no question about that at the moment, that might change. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if it did change. But in terms of raw transfer, APFS is definitely slower. There are a lot of things that APFS does. And we'll talk about them in a minute that, or at least one of them in a minute that make it worth having, especially on a boot drive and that sort of thing. But in terms of raw speed, APFS is definitely slower. Our tests routinely still prove that out. So I'm pretty sure we concluded at some point that the current Mac processors that you actually get better throughput if you have file vault enabled because the processor has the fundamentals to do the encryption very, very quickly. Sure. That is true. The question is what's causing this startup, like a pre-startup delay, I'll call it, right? Before the drive is even online and able to begin loading the operating system is where these delays that Perry has found come from. And I wonder, like, I don't know what it is. I'm just speculating maybe it has something to do with whole disk encryption. Does it have to do a check some of, you know, some part of the disk or something? And it just takes a while. I don't know. I don't know. It's very interesting. Okay. I mean, I do recall someone wrote in as well, and they notice the shutdown sometimes takes a very, very long time. And I confirmed that. Yeah. Well, I think that's a different issue. But the thing is, even when APFS first came out, someone wrote in and I think I tested this. They're like, well, you know, it takes my machine like a minute before it actually shuts down. Yeah. And I checked it on both of mine. And well, sure enough, it takes like a minute, which, you know, is like eternity in computer time. It's like, what are you doing? Yeah. What's it doing? Right. Right. Yeah. Well, to answer that question, there are some things that we know, right? It's doing all of its any rights that have not been like the system often will cash rights. So it has to do those, but that shouldn't take a minute. You know, it shouldn't even take seconds. It's just it's got to do them. And then it, you know, it cleans through some caches as it clears out virtual memory and all of that. So I mean, maybe that's part of it. I know APFS sort of treats virtual memory a little bit differently than the way HFS Plus did in terms of where on the disk it stores it and how it compartmentalizes it. So maybe that's part of it. I don't know. Maybe that is part of it. Maybe setting up that virtual memory each time takes longer. Could be. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. On the flip side of this, a nice benefit with APFS is highlighted by listener Bill. He says, as a 4D developer, I installed Mojave on my spare MacBook Air to test 4D and my application on the upcoming OS. Public beta fine was fine, but public beta two broke something in 4D, which meant that I couldn't do touch up development when I was away from my iMac Pro at the at the desk. He says, not a deal breaker, but certainly annoying. My second thought after setting up an external drive with 10.13 was to open Disk Utility and repartition the internal drive, as it only held about 80 gigs of the total 250. However, Disk Utility and Mojave would not allow this, but did suggest that I add an APFS volume to the APFS container. Remember, APFS starts, there's one layer added to the sort of the stack, if you will, of how the system manages space on your drive. With HFS Plus and other file systems before it, you would, it would just create partitions and then you'd add volumes to those partitions. And that was that. If you wanted to change something, it really had to be repartitioned. With APFS, it creates a container of space. And then inside of that container, it starts adding volumes, but the volumes are virtual. They, they don't live in a certain place on the drive because with an SSD, that's, that doesn't, it doesn't matter where the data lives. It's, it can be all over the place and you still access it the same way. So he said, what I did, I selected edit, add APFS volume in Disk Utility. I accepted the default settings, I named it and clicked okay. I then copied the High Sierra installer over, double clicked it and installed 10.13, High Sierra, on the new volume. He says, I now have a dual boot machine. He didn't know repartitioning, just added a volume, installed High Sierra, good to go. And here's the cool part. The new volume he says only uses space as required and currently holds 25 gigs, which is just the OS mail 4D and my development folders for my app. This just reflects what a great step forward APFS is and certainly does because he didn't have to think about how much space do I need to carve out for this volume I'm going to create, just created the volume and you can reserve minimum and you can set maximum so that things like Time Machine won't just chew up space, but you don't have to. You can just let your volumes use whatever they use and you know, it's just pulling from that pool of space that is your hard disk or your SSD. Yeah, I know. So, you know, that's like a huge benefit right there, something that was very difficult to reliably do previously. Yeah, it almost sounds like a flexible quota kind of. Mm-hmm. That's the way to look at it, right? It's just flexible quotas for these things that we call volumes, but really, it's an arbitrary distinction to a degree, right? I mean, you can't just move files between volumes willy-nilly, like you'd have to copy them from one and delete from the other and all that, but it's pretty cool. I definitely like that way of thinking. It solves a lot of problems we're used to have, so it's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, someday it'd be nice if your drive just grew to be as large as you needed, but we're still a ways away from that. Well, not really. I mean, we have that in the cloud, right? You can... No, you're right. We do. Actually, iCloud, in the current Mac OS, there are a lot of features that will offset a lot of things to iCloud when it decides that it should do as much. Yeah. So, let's go to this question that Michael sent in about his Mac not properly shutting down. I don't think his problem was an APFS problem, but interesting nonetheless. He says, I have a late 2012 27-inch iMac with a three-terabyte Fusion drive, so he almost certainly wasn't using APFS. About 10 days ago, I found that when I restarted, I would get the small kernel panic screen telling me that I shut down to solve a problem in multiple languages. For the last couple of days, when I tried to shut down from the Apple menu, I got the kernel panic screen and it starts back up and will not shut down. When I hold down the power button, it will shut down. He says, that's the only way I can get it to turn off. And when it starts back up, of course, I get the kernel panic message again. And I never heard the bong since this has started. If something is really hosed, I am fully backed up and can nuke and pave. But I'm wondering, if you've ever seen this before, and if there's a quick terminal fixed, Drive Genius finds nothing wrong with the drive and discutility's first aid also says the drive is clean. So, this is interesting, right? Certainly when you force the machine to shut down, it's not unexpected to get a message saying you forced the machine to shut down, right, when you hold down the power button. But otherwise, this shouldn't be happening. And really that's, and I know Michael knows this, but that's to be avoided, right? I mean, he does it because it's the only way he can turn the computer off. So, it's better than pulling the plug from the wall. I think it's kind of the same thing. I don't actually, I would disagree with that, right? Because at least this way, the power supply keeps power through the whole thing, right? And the motherboard is deciding to shut down. So, components aren't, I mean, to say, the components are prepared. No, I'm with you. You know what I mean? It's a slightly more orderly way of pulling the juice. That's the right way. I would agree with that, slightly. And it really is slight. But things like your hard drive, especially if you've got a spinning drive, which he does, you know, that is better for a spinning drive. It's not great because you still might get some corruption on the drive, although he hasn't had that yet. But yeah. So, you know, like for this, my first thought is, okay, power management. So reset the SMC and then reset the PRAM, right? So on an iMac to reset the SMC, you turn off the machine or power it off as you can, pull power, wait 15 seconds or more, plug power back in, wait five seconds or more in addition, and then turn it back on. That will reset the SMC, the system management controller. And then when it boots or as it boots, hold down command option PR, wait till you hear the startup chime again, and then that will get the PRAM reset. And that would be the first thing I would do here. And then the second thing I would do, if that doesn't work, is I would boot into safe mode and or run Onyx and run Onyx through its maintenance thing. Just both of those will clean out a lot of the caches and sort of force things to be rebuilt. And that is part of the startup and shutdown process is that whole cache reading and writing process. And if one of those is kind of foobar, then that can cause an issue. As it turns out, Michael did an upgrade to 10.13. whatever after sending in this email, and that solved the problem. I think 10.13.6 is what we're on, right? Is that am I right about that, John? Yeah. So I think the upgrade to 10.13.6 did that. So yeah, right. But you know, Onyx or SafeBoot would also clean all that out too. So I'm now seeing that our connection dropped out and you rejoined. So I think you got enough of that based on when I know you came back, right? As far as we know. As far as I know. Do you have anything to add to this? No, I'm with you. Sometimes there's maintenance tasks that are done when you're shutting down and sometimes the things that it tries to do are screwed up. So yeah, Onyx caches. I blame caches. I blame caches for all of our problems in life, Dave. Caches and them being corrupt. So think about it. Think about it. You know? Yeah, could be. I mean, if you're out in the woods and you find a geocache and it doesn't have the logbook in it, that's a major problem in life, right? Well, same thing with money. Sometimes the money coming in and the money going out just doesn't get cached properly. You're going to clean up? Yeah. All right. Moving on to Jeff. Jeff, which Jeff, here we are. Jeff says, I have a problem that many people might choose to ignore, but it drives me nuts. He says, I have an external drive enclosure. It's an OWC Elite Pro Dual USB 3.1 and or FireWire 800 says, which I have connected to a 2017 Retina iMac via a Thunderbolt USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 dongle, which is then connected to a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 connector, which then goes to the enclosure. So it's FireWire 800 enclosure through a series of adapters just to get it plugged into the Mac. In the enclosure, he says, I have matching 2TB Western Digital Blue hard drives. The issue is that when I boot up my iMac, sometimes only one of the drives, and I'm going to change his terminology from mounts to appears on the desktop. The icon for the second one never appears. He says, however, when I look in my sidebar, I am able to see both drives listed, which is why I changed his terminology from mounts to appears on the desktop. He says, also the drive shows up in discutility, offering me an icon to eject the drive. If I click the eject button or select unmount in discutility, it does so. If it's still selected in the side panel of discutility, I can then click on mount, and then it mounts and appears on the desktop as it should have all along. He says, I've talked with OWC about this. They suggested I switch drives, but they're not quite sure what the cause would be. He says, all of the drives are HFS plus formatted and not APFS. He says, and this is the weird part. He says, this is a problem in that one of the discs is the data disc for my ITV, which captures my over-the-air broadcast that I want to watch without the drive appearing on the desktop launching ITV fails. I find that very strange. I could see if the drive wasn't mounted that it wouldn't work, but if it shows up, so here's the deal. If it shows up in the sidebar and in discutility and offers you to eject it, then the drive is mounted. It's just not having its icon appear on the desktop. And that really shouldn't affect the operation of anything other than us humans that want to click on an icon on the desktop. But if you can open up the finder window and click on it there and see the contents of the drive, then everything on the system can see the contents of the drive. It's mounted. But this is interesting because maybe he's telling us more than he realizes here. So there's a couple of things to think about. Number one is there is a setting. If you go into finder preferences general, there is a box there for show these items on the desktop. And there's four boxes. And one of them, the second one, is external discs. So one thing you could do is uncheck that box and recheck it. I know it seems a little pedantic, right? But sometimes we find that that works. The turn it off, turn it on again. We've talked about why it rewrites preference files and all that. But here's the interesting part, John. And here's what, as I'm reading this question allowed to all of us here, starts to chime in for me. He says that when the drive doesn't appear on the desktop, his ITV doesn't work. But we know the drive is mounted. But here's the thing. What you don't see in the finder is the name that the system is giving to the drive. So when you mount a drive, it creates a folder in on your on your boot drive in the volumes folder. So there'll be a sub folder of the boot drive called volumes. And then within that, there are our folders named after every drive that's mounted. Sometimes when a drive gets unmounted improperly, that folder that's there that points to the drive doesn't get deleted, and it should. So when a drive goes to mount again, it will see that there is something in that volumes folder. Like let's say the drive is named my drive, right? So you go to mount my drive. And when you do it and everything's working right in volumes, there is another folder that is my drive. So volumes my drive points to this drive in the and the Mac does a good job of sort of obscuring all of this from you and just showing you icons, which is great. But if the my drive folder already exists, when you plug in my drive, Mac OS knows that it can't have two folders with the same name. So what it does is it just adds a number to the end of the name. So you would wind up with volumes my drive one. And that's the thing that would mount. But on the desktop, you'd only ever or in the finder or wherever you would only ever see my drive named. But a program like ITV that remembers where the disk is mounted would know that there was that one there, right? That one would make a difference to it. So what I'm wondering is if your volumes folder has some things in it that it should not have and or sometimes has some things in it that it should not have. And therefore, it's causing problems both with it mounting on the desktop and with ITV because it's literally at a different location than it usually is. What do you think about that thought process, John? Yeah, I can go with that. Yeah. But I've, I've noticed every once in a great while on one of my machines, I will not see a drive that I expect to see on the desktop. So here's what I do is I'll go to in the devices sidebar, I'll click on the computer and invariably, I will see it listed there. So that's like, yeah, right. Well, that's what we're saying. Yeah. And it's annoying. It's annoying that one has to do that. But yeah, I think there's a, again, a very subtle bug in the finder that gets confused. And so it's like, So here's the thing for both of us, because I've seen this too. The next time it happens before you go looking elsewhere, go look in the volumes folder and see if it's mounted, you know, if there's duplicate names or multiple names with, you know, ones and twos and threes after them, because my guess is that might, that might be a big part of this issue here, John. And if to solve that, the way I solve it is eject all the drives so that you know that all the folders that, that the volumes folder should be empty, and then go into that volumes folder and erase anything, you know, just trash anything that's still there. It's, it's not going to show you that volumes folder in the, in the finder, but you can go, I usually do it in the terminal, but you can go to the Go menu in the finder. I'm trying this now, choose go to folder, and then just go to slash volumes with a capital V. And yeah, you can see everything that's here. And, and you'll see, I'm trying to think what's, what should be here. So com.apple.timemachine.local snapshots might be there, that's okay. And then an alias to your boot drive should be there. And obviously that's okay. You don't want to delete that. But anything else that's there, if you don't have anything mounted, can go away. That's, that's my feeling on it. Right? Right. I like it. All right. You want to take us to Robbie? Robbie's got a great question. I think we got a great answer. Oh, we got an answer. So anyways, Robbie asks, could you explain how messages in iCloud works? Does it only use the cloud to sync across Apple devices? Or could I log into iCloud and send messages from there? Having messages built into macOS is one of the main reasons for staying on this platform. Being able to use the service from a Windows PC would allow me to upgrade from my mid 2009 MacBook Pro with significant savings. He said the W word, but we'll still answer the question. Sure. I think it's a good question. Yeah. So the thing is, there is a handy dandy article from Apple that does explain what having your messages sync in iCloud is. And it's exactly what he suspected is it will sync across all of your Apple, your macOS and your iOS devices. It'll sync the messages so they're available everywhere, which is kind of the thing that iCloud can do. Unfortunately, you know, I was like, wow, you know what sounds like that's a great idea that you could from the web interface. And the thing is if you go to iCloud.com and you log into your account with your Apple ID, you can access many features that you cannot access from macOS and iOS from the web interface as well. Guess which isn't one of them, Dave? Well, I wouldn't expect messages to be there. I'm going to let you finish. Well, they could technically do it, but they don't. Well, I beg to differ. But if there's more to say on this, go ahead and say it. Then I'll explain why I don't think they could ever do this. Well, the thing is I can do mail from the web interface. I can do other things from the web interface. So I don't see technically why they would not let you do it. All right, let me explain. But as he pointed out, the thing is, okay, well, I can let you go on. It's a tangent. And then I'll come back. Well, the reason is that iMessage is an end-to-end encrypted scenario. And so when we've explained this before, but I'll go through it again just for the benefit of everybody listening, when you send me a message, John, what happens is I, and this happens automatically, my iPhone, my Mac and my iPad. And if I have multiple Macs, then each of my Macs creates a public key that can be used to encrypt messages for it. And then also creates a private key that can be used to decrypt messages on that device. But there are per device keys created. And then all of those keys of mine are shoved up all of the public keys, not the private keys. Private keys are only left on the devices. Public keys are left in iCloud. And then when you go to send me a message, you actually download those public keys to your device that's about to send me a message. You type the message. When you hit send, your device encrypts the message to me with those public keys and then sends the encrypted package up to iCloud, which iCloud then sends down or the messages server, which is iCloud, which then it sends down to my devices. And then my individual devices decrypt that blob of data into hopefully whatever message it was that you intended to send me. Our web browsers do not participate in this public key exchange. They could, but it would start to get really interesting. And actually, this makes me wonder. I'm assuming that messages in the cloud maintains that encryption. But the question is, does it? Because if I get a new iPhone and I started up fresh, you did not encrypt messages with the public key from that device because it literally didn't exist at the time that you sent messages in the past. So would those messages come down? And so the question is, is it using iCloud? Is it just pulling down the message history or is one of my devices or perhaps all of my devices taking these decrypted messages and syncing those back up to iCloud for the benefit of having these messages everywhere? And if it's doing that, I darn well hope it's doing it with encryption. Otherwise, why in the world are we doing end-to-end encryption on our iMessages in the first place? So I think that's why you can't do this in the web browser. I think it's the end-to-end encryption that gets in the way of that. That's my theory. All right. I'd buy that for a dollar. Sure. Right. You could send that to us at makikab.com slash premium, you know, John. But there's also feedback at makikab.com. Well, there is feedback at makikab.com. That's not where you sign up for premium Makikab or send donations, but there certainly is that address. Feedback at makikab.com. That's correct. To get back on track and then back off the track here. So I did notice something, Dave. If you do run Messages, though, there's an option in the Messages menu, and it says add Jabber account. What may you ask is Jabber. What's Jabber, John? I'm going to tell you it, because actually, I remember deploying this back in my corporate R&D days. Jabber is an open standard for messaging, and it looks like Messages supports it. It's also called XMPP, and it would seem that at least for now, Dave, that Messages supports that. And it also supports all sorts of fancy pants encryption stuff, because if you look at a list, so I found one list here, it's list.jabber.at. I forget which country that is, but if you look at that list, Dave, it gives you a whole bunch of public Jabber servers, and it also lists, by the way, the CA that they use, which of course, if they have a certificate from somebody, then in all likelihood, the contents are encrypted in some fashion, right? Well, let's assume that if they have a certificate, then, well, certificate, if you have a server that has a certificate, it'll provide both identity and it could provide security. It might provide transport encryption, so that people sniffing packets a long way, but the Messages themselves, I don't know enough about Jabber to say whether or not it supports end-to-end encryption. I don't think it does though, certainly not by default, because Google, for their Google Talk or whatever it is, uses Jabber, right? Because you can log into Jabber with Messages with your Gmail account, and then you're just connected, and now you're on Google Talk in Messages, which, by the way, is a great little bonus tip, because it's a handy way of doing that. And that's most definitely not end-to-end encrypted, because you can do it in a web browser. So, what I'm proposing, if you want to do, so it sounds like the desire here is to do cross-platform messaging. I think if you can find, you could either set up your own Jabber server or use one of these public ones and add an account to your Messages infrastructure, I think that will serve your cross-platform messaging needs. But it won't let you iMessage across platform, right? Well, the thing is, you can add the account. You can add an account. I haven't tried it, so give it a whirl. But here's the thing. If I'm sending you messages and all I have is your iMessage address, you adding a Jabber account to the Messages app, that doesn't magically make it so that iMessages are now sent to your Jabber thing, right? Someone on Windows logging into a Jabber account, let me say it this way. If you add a Jabber account to Messages on your Mac, and then you launch your Windows machine and you add a Jabber account to that same Jabber account to some Messaging app on Windows, someone sending you an iMessage will not make it to your Windows machine. The only thing that will make it is people sending you messages to your Jabber account, which is completely separate from iMessage, right? Right, agreed. But it's part of the Messages world. It's no. It's just that you can log into that with the app called Messages on the Mac. Yes. Yes. But I mean, it's not going to magically make it so that iMessages can be read on Windows. Correct. iMessages, no. Jabber Messages? Right. But then everybody he communicates with would need to then also go sign up for a Jabber account, which again, could be a Google chat account or something. Yes. So messages isn't going to be on Windows, but Jabber could be. I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around how this answers this question. I'm not sure that it I'm not sure that it answers this question and it's a facility to allow cross-platform messaging. Sure. Yeah. Well, yeah. But I mean, much this, yes, this would work much simpler Facebook Messenger. Oh, sure. Yeah. No, there are tons of them. Yes. It's just what I read from the question is how can I incorporate cross-platform messaging by using Messages? Yeah. Having Windows machine. Okay. So I read the question a little bit differently in that he wants iMessage on Windows and he's not going to get that. No, he will not. Right. Yeah. Right. But he can get messaging. Of course. Right. Using Messages. But as you pointed out, there's lots of other solutions. The other thing that disappointed me is that and I haven't looked at this in ages, Dave, but you know there is something called iCloud for Windows. Right. Right. For syncing your calendar data and all that stuff. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And iCloud Drive. Right. I guess it doesn't include Messages. Right. Of course. Yeah. I don't like it would need to be a platform specific app, just like we have on iOS and macOS in order for Messages to work. I mean, I guess it's possible they could build it into a web browser. Well, they could. Oh, absolutely. Because, you know, looking at the, if you look at the page for iCloud for Windows, I think it lets you access your photos. Yeah. A whole bunch of things. But Messages is not one of them, unfortunately. Right. Right. Yeah. What is Joe here? iCloud Drive. So you can access iCloud Drive photos, mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, bookmarks. Look at that. Yep. Why couldn't they have just taken a little extra time and added Messages to that? But they didn't. So. No, they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. But just to remind people there is a iCloud client for Windows. Yeah. You can become part of the club. Sort of. In a sense. Yeah. That's kind of part of the club. Chuck sent in a quick one, which we will address and then we will move on for, I think, I think we're at our limit for the week. But Chuck noticed something. He said, my wife's MacBook Air is saving her screenshot files to her Dropbox folder in a screenshot subfolder instead of to her desktop. I couldn't say how she accomplished that change. I looked up an article from March on how to change the screenshot location on the Mac, which requires a terminal command. It's defaults, write, com.apple.screencapture location. And he said, I tried doing that and it didn't work. So I've either entered the commanding correctly or maybe there's something else that's causing this behavior. And you're totally right. There is something else causing this behavior. It's Dropbox. If you were to quit Dropbox on your wife's MacBook Air, your screenshots would be saved back to the desktop or wherever you have told Mac OS to save them, which, of course, by default is the desktop. Dropbox, though, can be configured to change this. If you go in, if you launch Dropbox and then go into Dropbox's preferences from the little settings gear, so you go to the Dropbox drop down menu at the top of the, you know, in the menu bar, go to the settings gear, go to preferences in the account tab. I know it's a weird place for what you're about to hear, but in the account tab, there is a box that says share screenshots using Dropbox. If that box is checked, Dropbox takes over the system's saving of a screenshot and redirects it to Dropbox, which then, of course, syncs it to any other device you have that's running Dropbox. If you uncheck this box, then Dropbox does not hijack that behavior and puts it wherever you want, or wherever your Mac wants. So I am certain that that is the solution here for you, Chuck, and hopefully that gets you where you need to go. I will say that it is handy having Dropbox sync my screenshots. I really kind of like that, that they're just everywhere and I don't have to think about it. And especially if I'm preparing for like an article or for a, well, an article or a talk that I'm going to go give and I want screenshots, I can just take screenshots on all of my devices wherever I am and then boom, they are always synced to wherever I need them with Dropbox, which is, you know, handy. So do you sync your screenshots with Dropbox, John? Nope. I just looked at that box and it is unchecked. There you go. The other nice part is I can take a screenshot and Dropbox will put a link to the screenshot on my clipboard. So I can take a screenshot and then immediately able, I'm able to paste, you know, a link to someone to say, hey, go check this out. So it's super handy to, you know, to be able to share things around. So talk with your wife before you make this change because she may actually be using this functionality in a way that she doesn't quite realize. So there you go. Handy, right? Yeah. You should only talk to your wife anyways, you know. It's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have one, but that's what I hear. Yeah, it's a good, it's a very good thing. Yeah. All right. That brings us to the end. We've already told you about the email address we didn't share, but I think most of our premium listeners know this already. Premium at MackieGab.com is the email address that you can use. We do prioritize the stuff that comes in there. We answer those questions first, although we do try, and I think this week we succeeded in answering everything that came in, which is, which is good to do. We like to stay caught up on all that. Sometimes, especially when both John and I are traveling. Oh yeah. Things fall by the wayside, but actually I think this week we did a pretty good job, John. So yeah, we can pat ourselves on the back, but really we'll leave it to you to pat us on the back. So come visit us in the MackieGab forums at MackieGab.com slash forums. We love it there. It's a handy place to be and lots of great questions getting answered all the time. Let's see, what else do we have here? We have, I want to thank Cashfly, of course, CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth that gets this show from us to you. And then, of course, the podcast marketplace, which is where all our sponsors are, Smile at Smile Software.com, of course, Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com, Jamf at jamf.com slash mgg, Barebones, Barebones.com, Ring at ring.com slash mgg, OnePassword.com slash GeekGab, and CodeWeavers.com slash mgg. All great stuff, really great stuff. Go check those people out. That's good. John, you brought us in, why don't you get us out? What do you have to share with these nice people here? I'll tell you what I got to share, Dave. I got to share three small words, and those are don't get caught.