 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, episode 748 for Monday, February 11th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, everything, our cool stuff found, all sorts of stuff. It doesn't matter. We just find it. You send it, we find it. We share it. Answers to the questions, sharing the tips, sharing the cool stuff found. It's like car talk for Apple users. Kids, ask your parents if the reference doesn't make sense because the goal is for each of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com. We'll talk more about those later for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How goes it today, Mr. John F. Braun? I never know how you're going to answer that question. That's good. I did solve a mystery. Every week as I'm asking it, I think I really shouldn't ask this question, but I do because it makes it interesting. So, yeah, tell me, okay, so you solved a mystery. What mystery did you solve? So we had, for a few episodes, we were talking about the mysterious system classification of storage. Right, which it turns out is not as mysterious as we thought. Well, we discovered one thing, but I was still having symptoms. Okay. So as we pointed out, you have to be sure to get the, in order for certain utilities to give you the right figures of free and taken space, you may have to add something to the privacy things. Also, it will be terminal. Run them the right way and or give them the right privacy full disk access. That's exactly it. Yeah, exactly. The thing is, I did that. To be, just to close that loop, if you're using DaisyDisk, you just need to give it full disk access and then scan as administrator and you're fine. If you're using OmniDisk Sweeper, also needs full disk access, but in order to scan as administrator, you have to do it from the terminal, which means terminal needs full disk access and that was sort of the missing piece for both you and me. Anyway, just to catch people up. So by doing the terminal thing, I got numbers that were more accurate, but I still, system was still taking up lots of space. The thing is, I was not getting the amount of free space that was reported in utility. What the heck? So I just decided to do a Hail Mary. So what did I do? I went in recovery and I reinstalled macOS, which as some of you may know, will download the latest version and then install it over your current installation or that's one way of doing it. Okay, so you didn't... It's not a new compave, but it's a reinstall of the OS, again, with the assumption being that it's going to download the latest revision and apply it. And the thing is, so I did that a couple of days ago and all of a sudden, Dave, I went from having 177 gigabytes free on my drive to having 347 free and the size of system went from 338 gigabytes to 169. What did you... Something... Did you try booting in Safe Mode before you did the whole maintenance reinstall over the top? I tried and the thing is when I tried to boot into Safe Mode, it would do it... To boot in Safe Mode, you hold down the shift key. And as some people know, that fixes a lot of things. The thing is, it would never successfully complete that. The progress bar would get all the way to the right and then just sit there and do nothing. Okay, so there was some cache file or something. So maybe that did it or the reinstall of the OS did it? Oh, I see. One of the two. The thing is, I recall, I had a lot of old iOS device backups and when I deleted them, I noticed that it wasn't freeing up the space and I think it considers those system files. So I don't know if it was running Safe Mode, even though it didn't boot me into the desktop, it did something. So maybe it cleaned something up. It does. It's supposed to, rather, clean things up. It's supposed to clean out your cache files and it rebuilds your boot caches and runs some maintenance scripts. So yeah, it could have been that. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay. Reinstalling the OS, I think also when it realizes, hey, I just got reinstalled, that I think also may do some... It does. Yeah, absolutely. Reconstituting of cache files and stuff like that, but... I like it. Cool. I'm glad to hear that, man. That's great. And I'm with you and we have some agreement here from our friend Brian Monroe in our chat room. Where is our chat room, Dave? Oh, it's... Macgeekyeb.com slash stream, you might ask. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Where you can join along. But yeah, so there was some cache somewhere that got reset by one of the things that I did. Sometimes you just got to keep throwing things against the wall and one of them will stick, right? Yeah. No, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's... Well, I mean, that's the very colloquial. Colloquial? Easy for me to say way of describing the troubleshooting process, right? It's just do one thing at a time. And, you know, obviously you want to do things that you think will help, but sometimes they don't. And you just don't give up, bullheaded persistence and just marching down the path. So, yeah, that's great. Cool. I'm glad. So maybe it's something they fixed them. Because as you probably saw, we got a 10.14.3 supplemental update two just came out recently. It feels like Captain's Log on next generation or something. Yeah, they weren't very specific. And I haven't seen a supplemental in a while. They maintain the same version number, but they say, oh, well, this is kind of version two of this, okay? Just all this. Yeah. Maybe they fixed it. Yeah. Or it just was random thing. But just thought I'd share that because it was bothering me because I was running out of free space. Yeah, no, you shouldn't be running out of free space. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, you don't want to. Especially when I delete things and it doesn't free the space up. Yes. Yeah. Oh, yes. And also as pointed out, Brian Monroe said they fixed the small FaceTime security bug that you may have heard about. Right. No, that's a good thing. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. All right. Let's see. We have some cool stuff found. So let's go through that. Tom shares first. He says, I don't remember the podcast number. You guys were where you guys were talking about the quick look plugins, but I have a great plugin that I use all the time and love. It's called better zip. It allows you to get a quick listing of the contents of a zip file without having to unzip it. It just peers in there. You select the zip file in the finder and hit the space bar. A list of the contents of the archive is shown. It's great to be able to do this when you are trying to see if a file exists in an archive and don't want to unzip it to find out. And of course, ended his email by saying it's free and then followed it up with a new email saying it used to be free, but it looks like it's still free. I don't know. A free download is available. Maybe you have to pay afterwards. Maybe it's a trial way or something. Thanks, Tom. That's great. Awesome. Very, very good. I had the opportunity at CES to check out this what's it's called the Navitas Mew or it's a Navitas based technology in this Mew one charger. Navitas Semiconductor is making what they call their GAN fast circuits that use gallium nitride in their power hub. So what this is, I've talked a lot about what's inside it, what it is, is it's a you plug it into the wall. It's a power delivery charger like, you know, wall wart, but it's not a wall wart. That's the thing. It's super thin. It's way smaller than like even Apple's 30 watt charger brick. And it's it's a 45 watt charger brick, 14 millimeters thick. It folds flat in. You plug it into the wall. You can plug your USB-C cable into it to charge whatever it is you want to charge your, you know, your MacBook or your iPad or whatever you got, or if you've got one of the, you know, USB-C to lightning cables, you can charge your iPhones with that and they'll actually charge a little bit. They'll charge as fast as the iPhone will safely allow, which is cool. But but yeah, this thing, like it's so tiny and lightweight as soon as I got it, it was like, oh, this is the one that's going in my travel bag because I don't have to think about it. It's always there. It's not big. It's not bulky. So you can you can get them. I guess they are available now. You can pre-order. They did a Kickstarter, but now they've got an Indiegogo that will allow you to buy them. I think they ship maybe next month or something for like 65 bucks. So pretty cool little thing. So put a link in the show notes for you. You can go check that out. Pretty good, huh, John? Did you check those out at CES or no? I don't know if I saw these guys. Now, is this, I'm looking at the picture of it. Does it have, are there prongs in it? Does it plug into the wall? Yeah, it plugs into the wall. It actually comes with, it's, you know, what I would call a universal power adapter. So it comes with, I think an EU plug-in, a UK plug-in, a US plug-in and something else. And you can, they're, they're, they're mod, it's modular so you can pop these things on it. Which means that there is actually quote unquote wasted space in this because if it weren't modular, you could actually make it even a little bit smaller because you don't need the little connectors and stuff to, you know, to do that. So yeah, it's, it's a pretty cool thing. When you look at it on Indiegogo, you'll see it looks like there's three pieces. There's actually four and one of them is connected to the main brick and then the other two are, are what you would use if you were in, you know, different countries or whatever. So yeah, it's pretty cool. I like it. Very nice seeing people taking advantage of new tech, all that good stuff. While we're on the subject of chargers and tech and all of that stuff, Jeremy writes, listening to episode 746, he says you mentioned Douji. I looked around their site and there was a picture for new arrivals. I didn't realize it was an ad for another site when I clicked it, but in any event, I was looking around and found something that some listeners might like. People were upset when MagSafe was taken away, but I found this little thing at dx.com that replaces it for USB-C devices. And it is, it's an elbow connector, which means it's got a little, you know, right angle in it that plugs into you. It's got two pieces. So one piece plugs into your USB-C port and gives it its own sort of MagSafe thing. And then the other piece is the other part of the MagSafe and another USB-C plug on a right angle so you can plug in and you're good to go. And now you've got MagSafe on one of your USB-C ports. The downside, of course, is that you're dedicating one of your USB-C ports to this unless you pull out the little, the little stub that's in there, which is fine. But 10 bucks, little magnetic elbow, which is awesome. I like it. Oh, look at that. And it looks like it doesn't infringe on any Apple patents so they're not going to get sued out of existence. Right. Yeah, it's not MagSafe, but it's MagSafe-ish. MagSafe-like. Yeah, I mean, I see, yeah, I mean, I see the, you know, they have like five contacts and... Yeah. But they're not using the same configuration. Hey. Yeah, I think we can all say that we've at least once taken advantage of MagSafe. I know I have. Taken advantage of, like, thanked our lucky stars for is the right translation of that. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I have been, you know, I'm a mesh Wi-Fi junkie, John. It's part of my stock-in-trade the last few years here. Oh, Guru. That's better than junkie. Yeah. Yeah. I would say you qualify as a Guru because I think you've used everyone that's out there and now there's one more. And well, there's always been more, right? You know, but yeah, so I started all the mesh Wi-Fi stuff that we've talked about on this show, you know, the Eero, the Orbi, the Plume, the Velop and Countless Others have are all what I would call consumer-focused mesh. And then there's enterprise-grade mesh, right? Like the high-end stuff that Ubiquiti makes and other companies make it too. I think, oh, the name was the tip of my tongue. It begins with an R and several of you out there right now are yelling at your car radios or whatever because you're helping me along with this, but it's not going to work. But anyway, you know, there's several companies that make enterprise-grade stuff. Ubiquiti being one of them. Well, Ubiquiti also makes something that lives in what I would call the middle. It's prosumer mesh Wi-Fi or really prosumer routing gear that happens to also include wireless access points that can be used in a mesh-type scenario. And it's called Unify, UNIFI. So I've had the opportunity to play with this stuff for the last couple of weeks, and I'm not quite ready to, like, weigh judgment on it yet in terms of whether I think it's better or worse. It's interesting. And in many ways, it's better. Like, it's... But in many ways, it's also far more confusing. And that's sort of the point of prosumer stuff is for the right person, it's the right thing. It's all very modular. So the interesting part about this is you don't buy... And we've talked about this on the show, right, John? When you buy a router, really what you're getting is three devices in one. You're getting your router that routes data. You're getting a wireless access point in there with most routers. And you're getting a switch so that you can plug multiple Ethernet devices into these things. So this is a three-in-one device. And that's how most consumer-grade routers are. It's how most mesh setups are because you're going to need all of those things. So why ask you to buy and manage different devices? Unify actually goes the other direction. Everything is modular. So you get a router or what they call the Unify Security Gateway. That's all it does is route traffic, right? And it's got, you know, an Ethernet port for the WAN, it's got some others on it too for management and things like that. But that's it. If you want Wi-Fi, then you add Unify's Wi-Fi access points. I've got a few of what they're newer ones, which are the Nano HD ones, which are 4x4 radios or 4x4 5 GHz radios and I think 2x2 2.4 GHz radios. And they can be connected over Ethernet or connected, you know, they can mesh with each other. Obviously, one of them has to be connected via Ethernet to the Security Gateway, otherwise it doesn't work. And then they have managed switches, Unify switches of different sizes and stuff. One of the cool parts about this, again, depending on your setup, it's either cool or not cool, is the access points run only on power over Ethernet. So you plug exactly one thing into them and that's an Ethernet cable. It doesn't necessarily, as I said, have to go all the way back to the switch or to the Security Gateway slash router because they can do it, they can connect to each other over Wi-Fi, but that's also how it gets its power. And their switches can provide power over Ethernet, so you can do it all in one. And that can be a very powerful thing or a very frustrating thing, again, depending on your setup. But it's all very modular. You pick the right things for your setup and then if you want to access it all remotely, in fact, if you want to access it at all, the router doesn't have a web management interface in it. In fact, it doesn't have any kind of interface in it at all. Mostly, it has a small one. But if you want to do any management, you have to run a device that has the management interface on it that you can connect to. You can run this on your Mac, you can run it on, you know, a Windows machine, you can run it on all manner of things, or you can get what they call their Cloud Key, which is a device that runs the management interface and make sure you can get remote access and all of that good stuff. Once you are in the interface, it's awesome because you've got visibility into everything all at once, all your devices, all your access points. You can build a dashboard custom with all your cool stuff. You will pay a little more for this. Again, it really depends because you're buying everything modularly, but you'll probably wind up paying a little bit more than you would for sort of a consumer grade mesh system with a few mesh units or whatever. But it's a pretty cool thing. And like I said, I kind of wanted to pave the way here. I'm sure we'll talk about it more. But that's how it works, and it works quite well. Speeds are, you know, I can, again, in the right range and all that stuff, I can get, you know, over 500 megabits a second on my iPhone, which is only a 2x2 device. So that's, you know, about the fastest the iPhone could possibly go wirelessly. And it seems to work fine. And, you know, it roams between them and you can turn on all the fast roaming or turn that off if you have devices that have problems with it and really, you know, control things at a very granular level. It's a pretty cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Monroe saved me on that last thing with the R and the steering wheel. It's ruckus is the... So hopefully many of you didn't... Too many, not too many of you created a ruckus trying to tell me what that was. So thank you, Brian Monroe. So any thoughts on this, John? Now that I've explained this a little bit, any... You want to poke some holes or ask some questions about how this all works? No. I mean, I get what they're doing. Yeah. But yeah, it's definitely looking at, I mean, it's rack mount components and stuff like that or it looks like a lot of it. Some of it could be. None of the stuff I have is. It does not have to be. But there are some things that are. Again, it sort of depends on what modules you want to buy. Like the security gateway I have is most definitely not a rack mount component. It's a tiny little thing that's probably about the size of like an ERO. It's smaller than the Wi-Fi access points, actually. It's just got four little ports on it. It's kind of crazy. But the stuff is, yeah, it's built to be... No, I like how they segment it. But yeah, I'm with you that it looks very prosumer. And that's what it's supposed to be. They're not trying to build this as anything else. In fact, that's exactly what they're aiming is the prosumer market. It's pretty cool. It's an interesting play. And of course, they have their own consumer grade mesh product called Amplify, which we've talked about and been very impressed with here. And we even said, when we first talked about it, it came from Ubiquiti, which was making enterprise grade Wi-Fi forever. And this Unify stuff, I think to be fair, this Unify stuff could very well be considered enterprise grade Wi-Fi or enterprise grade networking gear. For sure. It's just also the kind of thing that could work in your home. And I've met many of you over the years that have used, over the past couple of years anyway, that have used Unify in your homes and very happy with it. So yeah, it can work in small offices in your home or in large configurations too. So yeah, it's pretty... But I like the markets they address. So you can see on their page here, so of course they do Wi-Fi, as you mentioned, security gateways, switches. I mean, that's kind of a commodity these days. But the remote management, that's really nice. Yeah. So it would definitely be for, I would think like a small office or something like that. But then also they dip their toe into the... They have cameras and LED lighting from what I see here. So there's some smart home aspects as well. And that's the next part, is I've got a few of their cameras here too. And I figured we'd pave the way with the networking stuff and then maybe in the next episode or the next couple of episodes, we'll revisit this and talk about the cameras and how those work and all of that stuff too. Yep. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Lots of stuff out there. We've also got the... How much coin would you have to spend on these things here? That's a good question. Yep. Off top of your head. Yeah, no. So the security gateway that I have is $139, right? So that's your router. Oh, all right. Well, that's just to start, to be fair, right? The Wi-Fi points that I have are high-powered Wi-Fi points. Most people probably would only need two of these in their home. That's the Nano HD. And those are $179 a piece. So, you know, you're at what, $358 plus $139. So you're at about $500. You may or may not need a switch. The good thing is these Nano HD units come with what they call power over ethernet injectors, which means that they can provide their own power. Like, you don't have to have a switch that provides power over ethernet to use these. Obviously, you could. And it makes it a little simpler. But you can just take your ethernet cable and plug it into this thing that goes into the wall. And it gives your access point power. So you're fine there. You could be done at that point. You'd probably be happier, though, getting a cloud key, which is the thing that lets you, you know, kind of runs the management software. And that's another $100, depending on which one you get. If you want the one with the cameras, I think that's the cloud key Gen 2. And I'm looking at the price here. I think that's $120 or $130. So you're in like the $600 range to get a setup like this in your home. So, I mean, it's more than you would spend on, say, you know, a low-grade Eero or Vellop system, but not that much more than you'd spend for, you know, a higher-end Eero system. Eero, speaking of which, just moments before we started recording, the announcement came out that Amazon had bought Eero. So that gets interesting. So, yeah. Fascinating. Never, never, never dance with these guys. How long have they been? Yeah. Never know my radar. Oh, really? Yeah. Whenever they're doing. They've been doing this for decades. Yeah. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. And their, their Amplify system for a mesh system is, is quite fantastic. It's, they're the ones, they were the first ones to come out with the plug directly into the wall access point or mesh point, they called it, you know, units to work with the mesh. They were, they were the first to do that kind of model. And their, their stuff works well. It's, their radios are all three by three in those units, which is better than, you know, most of the rest of them are all two by two. So, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Cool. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see, especially with the, the looping back on this Amazon purchase here, curious to see what happens to, to Eero. I mean, it's not surprising. They were a VC funded company. So, you know, an exit was always in the cards. I suppose there are worse acquirers than Amazon from a, certainly from their standpoint. I'm sure it worked out great. I mean that from our standpoint as consumers that want to use this stuff. So, my guess is they'll, Amazon will keep this brand alive in a good way. I hope so. But there are others, you know, like I said, there's lots of options out there. So, if Eero winds up getting screwed by this Amazon, or if we wind up getting screwed by this, I'm sure Eero doesn't get screwed. If we wind up getting screwed by this Amazon acquisition of Eero, there's other options. But I, I don't anticipate that. I have no reason to think that that would be the issue. Now, Amazon has a pretty good track record of not turning things with their acquisitions. Right. That's been my view. Unlike Google, right? I mean, come on. Right. Right. Exactly. I mean, they acquire things and then shut them down. It's like, guys, come on. Yeah, thanks for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate it. No. One last cool stuff. Yeah. There are a couple of things that Google has done that are acquired that have worked out well. Like Google Voice, right? They bought, what was it? Global, something global diet? I can't remember the name. Thank you for banging on your steering wheel and trying to tell me. But, you know, Google Voice has turned out to be fantastic, right? So speaking of which, you know, we'll talk more about this in the next episode because I'm not quite finished with the transition. But we just migrated away from having our home, quote, unquote, home phone number on Comcast because they're Xfinity because they did away with their triple play plans. And they were going to charge us $24 a month to keep our phone line, you know, our VoIP line through them. It was like, yeah. So for $20, I can port a number into Google Voice and for, but you can't port directly from Xfinity to Google Voice. But what you can do is port from Google Voice to a cell carrier like T-Mobile who lets you have a $3 a month plan and that's all we needed. So for $23 and about four days worth of time, we've now taken our phone number out of Xfinity and it is a Google Voice number and we're using a cool stuff found, the OB200 from a previous episode. It hasn't arrived yet, but I ordered it today, actually. And we'll use that to connect it to our phones. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to have to make a decision soon. So I did, like you, Cable Vision or Optimum or whatever they're called this week. Some big company acquired them too, was it? I'll remember later. Sure. Anyway, no. My landline, I had Frontier, but I upgraded it, but I got a deal. So it's $14.95 a month, but it's only for a year. Then they're going to jack it up to $34, which is more than your $34. Now the thing is, I mean, it's unlimited U.S. calling and then, you know, kind of, you know, you get a pretty good deal calling other countries stuff that I call other countries. Yeah, but Google Voice is free, man. Yeah, no, I understand that. Yeah. So, but the thing is, I'm going to have to do the dance with them at some point, because I'm sure when it, you know, they jack up the price. I'm going to call them and say, OK, what deals you got now? Even at $14.99 a month, it's not worth it. For me, it is. For me, it is versus the price I paid Frontier, formerly AT&T for a landline. Right, but I'm saying that you can convert. So let's have this conversation, right? So my conversion in the end will cost me $73 in one time fees. And those fees are, I paid $3 to T-Mobile to buy a, or not to buy, actually, so sorry, $83. I paid $10 to buy the T-Mobile SIM. I then paid $3 to activate that T-Mobile SIM on a $3 a month plan, which I only needed for a few days. And that gives me 30 minutes or 30 messages. And I didn't need either of those. I just needed an active line. And when I activated it, I put in our quote unquote landline number, which is our Xfinity number. It took about two days. And then I got the email saying, yep, you're good to go. I made two phone calls, one from the iPhone that I'd plugged this T-Mobile SIM into and one to it to make sure that the phone number truly went that way. And then it was like, I was satisfied. Great, no problem. Good. Then I created a Google Voice account for free. And then I transferred that T-Mobile number into Google Voice because you can't transfer an Xfinity number to Google Voice. So once it was a T-Mobile number, I could transfer that to Google Voice. That Google charged me $20 to do. And now I'm done. That's where I am at this point in time. So I have a phone number that is in Google Voice, but it is my landline number that we've had for years that we wanted to preserve. Now, from there, we could be finished and just have this Google Voice number forward to our cell phones and we can have it forward to all of our phones or none of them, et cetera. What we are choosing to do is, in the last episode, and this is part of what inspired me to do this, we talked about the OB200, which is this device that plugs into your Internet, plugs via Ethernet, and will take your Google Voice line and VoIP it for you and give you an RJ11 port, which is your standard phone point. And so that costs $50. Again, one-time fee. Our friend Steve, Mr. Comlink, was the one that suggested that. And then that's it. And so we will be finished. There will be no more monthly fees, $83 in. And so, you know, $83 divided by $24. Within four months, we've paid it back. And we will never pay again unless Google decides to start charging for, you know, Google Voice, which they could, but they aren't. So I really am only taking a four-month gamble. And that's that. So, yeah, I highly recommend it, man. If you're already on a VoIP line, what's the difference? You know, mice will stop paying. So that's my theory, anyway. Well, I could stop paying, but... But you might as well keep the number. Like, if people have that number for you, which is true for us here. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. Yeah. I have two numbers, the landline number that I've had forever and the cell phone that I've had forever. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. They'll come a point where I have to, again, do the yearly dance with the cable company and say, okay, what deals you got now? Yeah. It was kind of annoying because all of a sudden, so the thing is I actually, the one nice thing with their bill pay is that it alerts you if it's over a certain amount. And I start saying, oh, this is over the amount that you authorized. And I'm like, oh, the free HBO and Showtime you gave me are now charging me for them. Hey, thanks. It's like the last deal I did with them, I supposedly got free HBO and Showtime. And I, there's not really any shows on either of those channels that I really want to watch. But all of a sudden, yeah, my bill increased by like, you know, 20 bucks because they were not charging me for those channels. And I'm like, no, no. Yep. Yep. Yep, exactly. Yeah, you do need to do that, that yearly dance. All right. One last cool stuff found. And this comes from listener Brian. And Brian writes and says, I don't know if you've talked about quickness. And this comes from DostDude1.com, which is the place that we talked about last week, maybe two weeks ago, that has the software to let you install Mojave and high Sierra and Sierra on Macs that don't technically support it. Yeah. Yeah, he is good. Yes. Quickness is a simple menu bar based Mac OS application that allows for quick and easy connecting of network attached storage devices. And it does. It looks pretty cool, actually. It allows you, if you want to connect to your NAS devices, you sort of set it up and then you've just got them right there in your menu bar and you just choose it and you're good to go. So yeah, a handy little tip. Well, we'll throw it out there. Thanks for that, Brian. Good stuff. Yeah, cool. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, John, which is ExpressVPN. I think we all know why we want a VPN here, but I'm going to rehash that for a quick moment anyway. If you ever use the Internet Wi-Fi, especially in coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, it doesn't matter somewhere else where you don't know who manages that Wi-Fi. And especially if it's Wi-Fi that doesn't have a password, anyone could be sniffing that data. At the very least, they could be seeing what sites you're going to, how you're getting there, all of that stuff and maybe, just maybe, even be able to sniff like the data that's going, including passwords and all of that. This is not okay. And this is why you want ExpressVPN because ExpressVPN creates a tunnel between your computer or your iPhone or your iPad or whatever, tablet doesn't matter, creates a tunnel between your computer and the outside world. So all anyone could see, even if they looked really, really hard, is that you're connecting to ExpressVPN. That's it. They don't know what websites. They certainly can't see your passwords or your data, your email or anything else going back and forth and you are covered. I've been using ExpressVPN for about the last two months here. We used it while we were at CES. Freakin' awesome. It works one click. It's super, super fast. And it just works and it protects you and it's smart. It'll figure out how to connect to the right closest server to get you the fastest speed. And here's even a cool part. If you have one app that, say, you don't want to be VPN, like maybe you want a browser that is just local, maybe you want it to connect to the hotels network or, you know, whatever it is, you can tell the app on your Mac. Don't make this app part of the VPN or you can flip it around and say, only make this app part of the VPN. So if you just want one browser on the VPN and the other stuff that you're doing, not you get to pick. It's super flexible and super cool. And it costs less than $7 a month. And it's not just my favorite VPN. It's TechRadar's number one rated VPN service. And it has a 30-day money back guarantee. ExpressVPN is what you want. So protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months for free at expressvpn.com-mgg. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com-mgg for three months free with a one-year package. One more time with feeling. ExpressVPN.com-mgg to learn more our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor, John, is BB Edit from Barebone Software. We love BB Edit. And, you know, the reason we love BB Edit is because it does what it's supposed to do. It is a text editor. I know that sounds crazy to be happy about a text editor, but we love BB Edit as a text editor because it's so smooth at what it does. I have it running all the time on my computers. I use it as we're doing the show to manage all the chapters and everything because it just works in text. I don't have to worry about little formatting things getting messed up in there. I get to see characters aligned as they're supposed to be. I get to count words. It's right there. I can compare two files to see what the difference is. And all of those things are available in the freely available version of BB Edit. There are some advanced features that you can pay for, but just try out the free version. That's the place to start. You can do a lot of coding with the free version. You can connect to servers and pull your files down. BB Edit is awesome. Go check it out. Go to bearbones.com and download your trial copy of BB Edit today. When the trial ends, it turns into a free copy of BB Edit. It doesn't stop working. Chances are most of the things, maybe all the things you do are available in that free version. Go check it out. Just right now, bearbones.com download BB Edit. That way you've got it. You can have it running all the time like I do, and your life can get better. Our thanks to Bearbones for making BB Edit and for sponsoring this episode. Hi, John. Let's go to some questions, shall we? Should we start with Greg here? Does that work for you? Sure. Okay. I wasn't sure if I lost you. Good stuff. Good. I know sometimes we have connection issues. All right. Oh, you did. Okay. Well, welcome back. Greg. I wasn't going to tell you that, I had a feeling. I had a feeling. So that answers the question, do you need to plug your audio device directly into your Mac? I am certain that, I'm not certain, but I'm 99% certain that the problem you keep having is that, because Discord is very finicky. It's plugged into a hub. Yeah. Discord, which is the, Discord's the app that John and I use to, so that we can hear each other. It's where the audio goes. And it did report, and I had to dismiss it on the top of my screen. It says, oh, I'm not hearing you. The thing is, this happened like 10 seconds ago. Right. Where I was hearing you, and you were hearing me, but Discord on my computer was saying, I don't hear anything. And I'm like, huh? I think that's, I've seen that too. That's, that's a different quirk of Discord. No, it's when, when you change audio devices while Discord is running, Discord will not hear the audio or play the audio too, depending on if it's your input or output device, a new device that you change to, you need to quit Discord and relaunch it, and then it will accept the new device. So with that in mind, I think what's happening is your device is going offline and online very, very quickly, probably because of, you know, it's connected to this hub, which audio devices should never be. And, and, and that's what's causing you to just stop hearing me because you're hearing me out through Discord. And, and, and for the record, for those of you following along, audio devices, audio is a real-time operation, right? And I know that sounds obvious to say, but USB is not a real-time, doesn't allow for, it queues up things, right? It's not a, it's not, it's not an isochronous connection where things happen in time predictably. USB kind of queues things and sends them and queues them and sends them. So the more interference or the more devices you have between the computer and the end of the chain, i.e. your audio interface, the more opportunities there are for things to get bogged down by USB. So USB really should never be used for audio, is really the truth. But it's what we use for audio most of the time. It's why FireWire is better for audio. But, Right, because the protocol is isochronous. For various reasons. Yes. Correct. And reliably deliver data. Exactly. Exactly. In a type of scanner. Kind of like TCPIP versus UDP, right? Um, yeah. In a sense, I think that's, yeah. Yes. If you want to geek out here, and I'll tell you a short joke and then we'll continue here, but a UDP packet walks into a bar and nobody acknowledges him. So he leaves. That's right. But everybody might have seen him anyway because UDP packets are never acknowledged. That's right. So. Sorry, I had to explain your joke so that it, you know, so that it tied into the conversation. Nobody got that. Well, one or two people got it. Okay. Sorry. Continue. Yeah. So anyway, I think if you plug in that this might be the last of those issues, hopefully we make it through the show without it being an issue. All right. I will re-architect my, my USB setup in order to put something. Now, I am going to do the best segue that you could possibly imagine because one way you could re-architect it, if you don't have a spare USB port on your computer, your computer is Thunderbolt capable. And so you could plug in a Thunderbolt to USB dock that, or a Thunderbolt dock that has a USB port on it. And that USB port is also now pretty much native to your computer because Thunderbolt really just plugs directly into the motherboard. What am I going to do because I already have a display port thing plugged into my mini? Well, you could go... So I could, could I plug because the connector on this machine for Thunderbolt and DisplayPort is the same connector. Right. I'm just using it as a display right now. So could I get a, so if I got a dock that would accommodate? Correct. You could have a dock that then has a DisplayPort on it and plug your display into the dock and then you're good to go. Yeah. Who would I go to for that, huh? Well, that's, OWC makes a great Thunderbolt 2 dock. Yeah. Yeah. I have OWC's Thunderbolt 2 dock on my Mac downstairs in the office. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that, because that's my 2014 Mac, which is a Thunderbolt 2. I've got the Thunderbolt 3 that I use, Thunderbolt 3 dock that I use with my, with my new MacBook Air. And then I've also got a CalDigit Thunderbolt 2 dock that sits up here in the studio and adds some USB ports that I needed. And the nice part is it adds USB 3 ports, even though this computer's not USB 3 native, but with Thunderbolt, it can be. And that brings us to Greg's question. Greg says, I'm trying to pick a hub for the 2018 MacBook Pro that I have. I want to connect one cable to hook up my charger, gigabit ethernet, an external display, or two, and two or three external USB devices with USB-A connectors. I plan to get two hubs, one for the office and one for home. So it'd be great to use USB-C to keep the price down. Thanks to MaciGab, I know that USB-C hubs support transfer speeds up to 10 gigabits while Thunderbolt 3 supports up to 40 gigabits. I don't know whether those transfer speeds include the bandwidth needed to drive the displays. In practice, if I'm using a USB-C hub to drive a display or two, will that slow down the read-write speeds from the external USB devices or the gigabit ethernet? So I'm not sure what USB-C hub you would use to do all of these things. You should be able, like in theory, I think you'd be okay either way. But I'm not sure what USB... I'm looking at OWC's USB-C hub here because that would be the first place I would go. And so we'll call it the USB-C dock, which is really a better way. And let's see. The OWC USB-C dock is... How much is it? Where is it? $119. So yeah, that saves you a bunch of money. It has three, four USB-A ports on it. Okay, that's good. It's got two USB-C ports on it, one of which you have to plug back into the computer so you get another one. It's got an HDMI port on it and it's got gigabit ethernet. So that would let you drive one display. Oh, and? And it has... Oh no, you can either get one with HDMI or with mini-display ports. So you can't get one from OWC with both. So that device might not do it for you, but it might because you could also just get... Your MacBook Pro has... Or actually, this has another USB-C port on it. You could hang a USB-C to HDMI, dongle, adaptor, whatever you want off of this and drive a second display. So yeah, I think that would do it. I think that would do it. What do you think, John? Yeah? Good? And that saves you a bunch of money? What's that? I have to look at all these docks here and figure out which one to get, man. I know. It's crazy. It's great. We love... Well, for you, I would say the OWC... They still sell the Thunderbolt 2 dock? They must. I'm looking at their list of products and I think they're backwards compatible so I can... No. Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 are not. No, no. Right, because the connector, right? Yeah, well, among other things, the connector, yes. Yeah, so you need a Thunderbolt 2 dock, which I'm not seeing on OWC's page. Oh, man. Yeah, I know. You know, we say it in the ads all the time that OWC is the first place that we go. It's actually quite true. I mean, you're seeing the proof is in the pudding right here. Let's see. All docs... Yeah, I'll search later. Oh, no, here you go. I found the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock. I'll put a link in the show notes for it. So it's $229. And it's got gobs and gobs of ports and all the stuff you would need. Yeah, maybe it's just to talk to them. Yeah. Maybe they'll... Good luck with that. Yeah. I mean, maybe... No, seriously, maybe, but not always with them. Yeah. They don't always... Just to be clear, John's talking about perhaps they would give them something as a review unit or something. Sometimes, yes. But oftentimes with OWC. And they are not alone in this. They don't necessarily... They certainly will send stuff out, but it's on a 30-day review or things like that. So I don't know if their policies are changed. I mean, if it's something that I'm going to use and it's like a hundred bucks, then it's like... Yeah. It's always nice to get free gifts. Of course. Yeah. On the other hand, you know, I mean, I'd like to reward people for their good work. Yeah. And they do good work. They do good work. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, so that would be the answer. Yeah, yeah. There you go. Cool. Well, see, Greg answered a question... Or Greg asked a question that we didn't even know we needed answered. See, we always say we all learn five new things and we need that, that we are involved in this. All right. Let's see. We have a CarPlay question from listener Scott, who writes, he says, I have CarPlay in my 2014 Silverado. That's an old vehicle for CarPlay. It's not that old a vehicle. It's just old for CarPlay. It says that works when I plug my iPhone 6 Plus into the USB slash CarPlay port. One of the issues with using CarPlay is that it's draining the iPhone's battery and not keeping the charge. This is a problem when I'm using Waze and other battery draining apps. To get around this, I'm using a Bluetooth connectivity solution and connecting the phone to the cigarette lighter or power port. Do they still call it a cigarette lighter? Well, maybe. He says, is this just Chevy's implementation of CarPlay or is there a setting I am missing? So it sounds like your car's USB port does not provide enough power. I mentioned in a recent episode that I traded in a 2011 BMW X3 that I had for since 2011 and now have a 2018 Subaru Upback, the latter of which has CarPlay. The former of which I did not have CarPlay because that didn't exist in 2010 or whatever it was when this came out. But it did have BMW's sort of BMW app solution. And the built-in USB port that would connect to the apps really didn't provide a ton of power. It provided some. And I found that most of the time it would provide enough power to sort of keep the phone in stasis, right? Like it wouldn't lose power, but it certainly wouldn't add power. And if I was doing anything with the phone, then of course I would lose power. So it sounds like you might be in that same scenario because not all cars have this problem. In fact, I would say most cars that I've used with CarPlay will charge my phone all the way up within a matter of whatever an hour, however long it would normally take. So yeah, I think this is your Silverado's issue. And it's worth having one of those inline USB power meters so that you can see how much power that's giving it versus, say, something that you plug into your cigarette lighter slash power port and see what you get there. But yeah, yeah. So that's where I am on it. Do you have any thoughts to add to that, John? No, I'm behind the times on this technology. I'm sorry. Your car wouldn't have USB ports either. So that would have been quite prescient of them when they built it. Well, Volt, as we call it, a cigarette lighter port, which I do have things plugged into. Sometimes things that melt your phones, but hopefully not again. Yeah, but now I have the thing you gave me. Oh, that's good. That's good. Hopefully that doesn't melt your phone. No, I don't think so. No, you gave me, yeah, if you recall, I think it's a Microsoft branded 2.1 amp dual port. And it works great. Good. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't melt my stuff like that. Device. Yeah. Uh, yes. Okay. Moving on to Jeff. Jeff has a question about photos. He says, I recently replaced my old iMac with a new iMac and realized that after about five generations of setting up my new Mac with my time machine backup or migration assistant, I am loaded down with cruft. Hence, I want to do a new clean install and just restore my data only. I need to know how to save all of my photos metadata. I've spent way too many hours manually entering the data and I don't want to do it again. Is there a way to preserve this metadata? Yeah, absolutely. I, unless I'm mistaken, I think all of us. Let's ask a question here. Let me, let me, let me answer, let me answer that by metadata. Okay, go. Then we can talk about what metadata. You're right. Yeah. But I, I, I think all of this metadata, which will come with a future definition is stored in your photos library. So when, and that's a, it's a folder, but Mac OS treats it as a package by default. It is in your home folder inside pictures. And it's called photos library and, or maybe I photo library converted or something. But whatever it is, you know, you can look in photos in preferences and it'll tell you which one it's using, copy that over to your new Mac and all of your data, your photos and all of your metadata, which John is going to explain in a moment here. It should go with it. Do you, do you agree with that part, John? Yes. Okay, cool. So now please, for everyone listening, explain metadata if you would please. Well, the thing is I, I, you could understand that term in one of two ways. So one is that any modern camera includes additional data with a photo and it's typically called EXIF, which I forget what it stands for. It doesn't matter, but it's all the parameters that were used to, you know, the lens, the resolution, the size of it, the ISO, the focal length, the exposure, F stop, all that stuff that, you know, photography, people get all excited about. That's not EXIF data, but then. Exchangeable image file format is EXIF. Right, and it's, and it's pretty much a standard among all modern cameras. So if you take a picture on one camera and then you try to load it into another piece of photo software, it should see that data. But then I think what he means by the metadata is that, so if you go into the latest version of photos and you highlight a photo and then you click on the info box, you're not only going to see the EXIF data represented within that window, but there's a lot of other things. And I think this is the data he's talking about. So right now I just have a photo up here and a lot of it is blank for this one photo because I didn't define anything, but it says at a title, at a description, at a keyword, at faces, at a location, or assigned a location. And I think that's the data he's talking about. And if you stick with Apple products, then I think you'll be fine. Are you with me on this? I am totally with you. Yeah. Okay. And that I think is the additional data that he's talking about. So you're going to have to stay within the Apple ecosystem to preserve that additional data. Whereas the EXIF data, that's going to come over, but I don't think that was what he meant when he said metadata. I think he meant the other stuff that puts your photos in a perspective. So if you want to search for super duper, whatever, if you didn't name the photo, I mean, that's one way to organize things. But most cameras generate things with some weird, you know, like even now I'm looking img underscore 0590.heic. That's not too descriptive. Right. Right. But in addition to that, photos actually has a bunch of other things that aren't stored in the photos themselves that are just stored like your albums. And even other data I think is not necessarily stored in the photos themselves. It's not stored as EXIF, right? So there's metadata beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. And as you pointed out, I believe you're correct. The package contains it. So it's additional data within the library or also known as a package file, which is it's buried in there somewhere. So. Yeah. Yeah, it's right. It's buried in there somewhere. Yeah. Just copy the whole thing over. Or if you really want to. Or migrate it. Well, or migrate it, you know, if you're moving over to a machine. Yeah. I mean, you can just copy it like that. If you copy that package, you've got everything. I was going to say if you want to, for whatever reason, if you don't trust that package anymore, you can, you could use something like Iphoto or sorry, power photos, not, you know, not Iphoto library manager because that was the one for Iphoto. But power photos would let you sort of extract the data and move it into a new library. I, unless you're having a problem with your library, you have something going on where you know, yeah, I need to do that. I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. In our, in our chat room here at mackeygab.com slash stream. Dogster is saying if you go into photos and go to file export, checking the include title, keywords and description and location information will get you all of that type of data as well. So thanks, man. That's great. You rock for lots of reasons and you know, but there you go. Cool. Right? Yeah. Good. Yeah. All right. Sweet. Moving on to Gary's question. This might be a geek challenge, but maybe not. Sounds like John has an answer. Okay. Cool. Believe it or not. Awesome. I was hoping. Okay. So, uh, Gary writes, when I woke up this morning, I noticed that my login plus the guest user choice appeared, which means my Mac rebooted overnight. I thought maybe we had a power failure at some point, but the windows desktop my parents use was still on and nobody mentioned anything about having to reset clocks. Then shortly after I came back, I noticed a notification saying that an update was installed and with the usual close option on top, but the bottom where it said details, clicking that only took me to the software update system preferences pane. And it told me the last time it checked was just now and that my Mac was up to date. Where can I find out what updates were installed and what they fixed added or modified? So this is a great question. And as I said at the beginning of this, to my knowledge, there's no update history, but I'm hoping I'm wrong and I'm looking forward to Mr. Braun dazzling us with your ability to find just these types of things. But this is the reason, well, let me finish my little, I'm just on a soapbox here for just one last second. So this is actually why I don't have auto update turned on on my machines Mac OS or iOS because I want to know what updates are coming. Like especially with iOS apps, I want to, and I update all the time. I'm really kind of obsessive about it, but I like to read through the release notes on some of the apps because there might be a feature that was added or something that was changed and I want to know and if I had told it to auto update, I have no idea. So that's why I have it off, but you're going to answer Gary's question. How do you know what's been applied? Now you may think if you go to the app store and you click on updates in the newly redesigned interface that you would have some data there about your recent updates, but sadly, that data is not there. And that just makes me sad. So you may ask yourself, not only how do I work this, but you may ask yourself, where is a list of things that have been installed on my computer as of late? Right, Dave? Sure. I'm going to tell you exactly where to go. So get ready. I'm ready. About this Mac, system report, software, let me know when you're there. I'm there. All right. You see that item? Installations. Yeah. Okay. There you go. Sort by install date. Huh. Okay. And look at that. Those are all the things. And actually I'm looking on my Mac Mini, Dave. I have a list of things dating back to 2012, which is I think when I put this machine into service. This is a history. I think this is actually digging things out of a receipts folder. So when Mac OS installs something, it creates a receipts file or there's a receipts directory or something like that, right? Yeah. I don't know the details. But it keeps track of where it's installed. Now, sadly, I don't know why they excluded that because I think the App Store used to show the most recent updates. Huh. Right? Didn't it? Look at that. Yeah, man. This is great. And again, I think that's digging through the receipt. This is the system folder that it's basically parsing and showing you and saying, okay, here's all the stuff. I mean, it has the version number, the source, whether it's Apple or third party and the date that it was installed. But here's the cooler part, Dave. Uh-oh. You can see some of the sneaky things that Apple is doing. Or the good things that Apple is doing. Like here, I see that Gatekeeper configuration data was updated on 2.8. What's Gatekeeper? Gatekeeper is one of, I think it's their antivirus deal, right? It's their anti-malware deal. Yeah, exactly. They're anti-malware. Yes. So look at that. Because I think my machine, and I think most machines, is that you can, say, install, I forget the exact term here. Yeah. There's a category of, and I think if you go to Software Update Advanced, yep. Okay, here it is. Oh, you know. That's pretty good. I think I should check this box. No, it's the install system data files security updates is the check box that you're looking for. And oddly enough, on this system, that box is not checked, but it looks like it did it anyways. Oh. Well, I have check, so there's five boxes here. Check for updates. Download new updates when available. Install macOS updates. Install apt updates from the app store. And install system data files. But it's not checked. But I think Gatekeeper, unless it doesn't consider Gatekeeper a system data file or security update. But I would recommend to people, I'm going to check that box right now, Dave, because that, I think, is something you do want to have. I've always left that checked. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting that yours did it without that box being checked. It makes me wonder if that's a different thing. Well, once again, they don't consider Gatekeeper system data files or security. But I mean, I think it kind of is, right? I think so. I thought I would have assumed so. No, nothing. I see MRT config data. I see that too. Yeah. There's an SU, there's a lot of interesting things happening here. I want to know what your Mac's doing behind your back when you're not looking. This is the, I don't know why I just, I don't know. It's how your brain works, man. I love it. That's great. Well, it's just like, where can I look for this? It's like, oh, it has to be in system info. It's like, oh, of course it is. No, it's good. It's good, man. It's good. All right. Let's see. We have, actually, we have a bunch of follow-ups from previous episodes to run through. First, I want to thank all of the premium supporters that have contributed in the last couple of weeks. It's been a few weeks since we've done this. So my apologies for omitting it. We've had so much content that it just, like, I don't know. Anyway, yeah, here we are. So for those of you that are interested in learning about our premium offering, you can go to mackeygab.com. Premium, it's essentially a program really built at your urging. For those of you that want to support the show directly, you certainly can. We appreciate it. It is not mandatory as you've probably figured out by now. We're happy to answer everyone's questions. But people that do support the show get a special premium at mackeygab.com email address that they can use. And we do prioritize that. Some weeks, like this one, actually, there's about 51 and a half weeks of the year where we answer every question. This week was not one of them. So we will get to the rest of them. We're not going to just let them go. But we prioritize the premium stuff. Among other things, you help us, we help you. It's how it goes. So I want to thank all the folks that contributed. I'll start with the one-time contributions. Tim T for $25, Ken M for $100, and Robert S for $50. So thanks to the three of you. You rock. On our monthly $10 plan, we have Jeff F, Gary B, Joe BP, Tony Z, Evdenerd, Robert D, Nick S, Stephen B, Beth B, Ward J, Olga P, Jason A, Stephen A, Jason T, Chris S actually at $20 a month. Paul M, Mike C, Mark R, Chris F, Bob at Working Smarter for Mac users. Ryan M, Neil L, Scott F, Dave C, James C, JC, no relation amongst the three of them. Joe S, Frank A, Abdullah B, Ari L, Michael P, Barry F, Bob L, different Bob L than before. Jeff P, John V, John D, Santiago M, Ken L, Dave G, Clive S, Scott G, and Jim M. So thanks to all of you and I didn't count how many there were but thank you. You rock. And on the biannual $25 every six month plan we would like to thank Antonio B, Brett H, Terence N, Warren R, Kurt W, Joe M, Robert P, Karen K, Richard S, Jeff F, Louis R, Brian G, David P, Mike M, Frank F, John I, Ian P, Mary G at $100 every six months. Corey A, Richard B at $30 every six months. Michael P, Andy W, Craig S, Joel F, Teresa B, Norton B, no relation. Edward W, John P at $50 every six months. Dan E, John O, Tony G, Richard J, Avram M, Paul W, Gary T, Ron G, Dennis J at $30. Bruce M, Greg H, Anthony N, Deb L, Eddie M, Mark S, Walter H, Robert T, Graham R, I told you it'd been a few weeks. James M, Eric D, George D, Cindy K, Racer G, Tom H at $75. Mark E at $100. Tony C, Michael E, Ben H, Mark S, Brett P, Michael D, Dionysio Y, Ralph M, Dan B, Tim M, Will S, Joe K, Jim K, Robert F, David H, not me. Carl B, Louis Michel, Joshua O, Peter P, Paolo B, and Margaret M, you all rock. So thank you. And again, mackeekup.com.com is where you can go if you are interested in joining all these great people and supporting us directly. If you're not or if you can't, if even if you are interested but you aren't able, that's okay. We love your questions. We love your tips. We love all that stuff. And that's really why I always hate it when I can't get through everything because we really do appreciate all of your questions and it's, you know, it's what keeps the, keeps things going here. So it's pretty, pretty awesome. All right. Now jumping in and let's see if we can get through all of these tips and follow-ups from previous shows. In show 746, we were talking about ways to find out whether your disk was created, your APFS disk was created directly with APFS or migrated from HFS plus to APFS. And Keith says, my MacBook had to go into Apple for a new keyboard. So I took a SuperDuper backup and then did a system restore and fresh install of Mojave, including formatting the drive fresh as APFS. When I got it back with a spanking new keyboard, I've restored my SuperDuper backup. But when I run disk first aid, I don't see formatted by new FS APFS. Mine says formatted by disk management D. He says, I know I formatted this as APFS from within disk utility as part of the recovery process. So just another data point and I appreciate you sharing that Keith. That's great. Yeah. So disk management D. When it's convert from HFS or whatever that one exactly is. That's the one that means it was converted and you may or may not have any issues. Certainly the drives that we've heard about having issues have been those have been converted. So actually two weekends ago, I converted this machine to not be converted anymore. I did the exactly the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Just to say I'm going to throw in a little piece of data here is that it may have in fact been formatted by this utility. I'm sure it was. He did. He did it himself. Right. All I'm saying is that here's a little data point just to if you want to go down the rabbit hole. Yeah. Go into terminal and type man disk management D. Oh, yeah. It's going to give you a little manual page telling you that it's basically the process that this utility and other things talk to. That's right. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. Yeah. Let's. And that happens for a lot of things. So if you see things in your either I set menus or activity monitor or something and it's something that ends in a D. Go to the terminal type in man. A space and then the name of that thing and you may get some information about what the heck it is. Yeah. Just so you for sure. Yep. Make sure it's not something evil. That's right. That's right. In the last episode 747 Stephen writes it was mentioned that in notes only the first page of a PDF is viewable without sharing to another app first. He says, well, in iOS you can just tap and hold on the PDF and then can scroll through the whole thing. It seems normal and the expected behavior to me says I don't remember having an issue when I first use it. I guess that they long touch is effectively doing quick look for iOS. You are absolutely right Stephen that that is how quick look works on iOS says this is the same with other attached multi-page documents and notes. What makes it seem different is that you may choose to show the attachment as a smaller large icon with the latter for a PDF that's the first page PDF is I think treated differently because of the close relationship between PDF and the court's composer says here's the interesting thing on the Mac you do exactly the same thing in notes select the attachment see only the first page press the space bar and quick look shows you the whole thing. So yeah, quick look to the rescue. Thanks Stephen. That's great. That's a great follow up on that. That's a great follow up on your implementation on the Mac is lame. At least it's consistent, right? because the finder is the same way, you know, yeah, yeah. No, no, I see what you're saying is that yeah, whatever platform you're on implementing quick look, yes, see all the pages. I just think it's lame that you can't see. You should be able to see all the pages with the native UI and not have to do something special. That's just my feeling. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Let's see here. Do I have this one? I thought I had a good question. Here it is. Yeah. Okay. So we had been talking with listener David about not being able to use his keyboard on his iPad when the iPad was shut down or when it would go to sleep, it would wake up and his Bluetooth keyboard would would not persist. Well, he says so often the simplest things are hidden until you know where to look. So going into settings face ID and passcode USB accessories needs to be green or on and that allowed the keyboard to persist. And that's it. So sorry, not a Bluetooth keyboard, a USB keyboard to persist. And just by turning that on, it kept it alive and you are good to go. So very cool. Thank you, David, for for sharing that good stuff. Craziness, huh, John? Crazy, crazy. All right. Let's see. Moving along to Michael, who has a couple of things to share actually. First is he says regarding carplay, I bought a used 2012 Honda Accord and installed a carplay capable radio myself. And these are available after market radios with carplay or head units as we call them now. Since I also install the backup camera and it all works great with iOS 12, my podcast will play for two to three minutes through carplay. Then the audio will stop while the counter still shows it is playing. The silence lasts for about 30 seconds, then the audio resumes with those 30 seconds missing. If I press pause and then play, the audio restarts immediately says I've sent Apple a movie of this and hopefully they will fix it. It happens in four different podcast players, overcast, cast-o-matic RSS radio and of course, apples, they all act the same way. Well, the good news is Michael followed up with us and he says, Apple recommended using the latest public beta, which at the time he sent this email about a week ago was 12.2.2. He says, so I did and that fixed it. He says, so I've reported that and hopefully in the next release, this problem is solved. So that's if anyone is having carplay issues with that in particular, it's fixed. Just either install the public beta or wait and install it when it's when it's out. It depends on how important that is to you. So pretty good. Thanks, Michael. Good stuff. Any thoughts on this jump before we wrap up with these? My only carplay issue is I don't have it. It really is quite spectacular, but it's interesting to hear. Maybe I will install a radio. It depends if you if you have a head unit. I don't know where. I wonder how that would work in your car because you don't have like a spot for a screen, right? And and so you would need one in order to know. I got a spot for a traditional radio, which mine also came with a set. I mean, I got that too. Right. But carplay needs a screen, right? I mean, carplay, that's really all carplay is, is a screen that's the main part of carplay. So I wonder, yeah, I wonder how you have to swap out the radio and then probably would have to run. And you know, I think I saw some people at CES. Yes. There's at least one company that, yes, I think had that. So I would have to get like a heads up display or something. Yeah, it would be a screen because it needs to be a touch screen for carplay to work. Yeah. Yeah. Plus I have to get a radio unit that, you know, the size of that standard, but then I have to run a screen somewhere. So yeah, not too complicated. Yeah. As long as it exists, the ones I've seen are all like, you know, all in one kind of things that replace whatever screen you've got and also add the backup camera, which is, you know, super, actually super handy. It that that's one of the best things they've put in cars in the last, you know, whatever, 10 years or whatever. Oh, yeah, those backup cameras. Yeah. Well, it's always good not to yeah, run over things. Yeah. My car will actually stop me from backing up. If it senses another car, you know, like in a parking lot or whatever, you're backing out and somebody's coming along. It'll actually stop me, even if I couldn't see it. It's pretty cool. So is it so is your sonar or is it just visual? Both. Yeah. It's it's OK. Because you want to have a backup thing. Yeah. But yeah, no, I'm with you. Yeah. So sound wave, if it sees a thing in the way. Yeah. That's a good picture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's fantastic. Yeah, it's great. All right. I think we have, well, we've got a couple of tips. One last follow-up from previous shows. Um, in 744, Mike Mark writes, at the end of the episode, you talked about not getting sound on the questioner's iPhone when a notification happened. This made a bell go off in my head with something that was also driving me crazy. You said that if you're wearing an Apple Watch, it could be sending the notification to the watch first, prioritizing that and not buzzing your phone. He says, when I, well, I purchased an iPhone 10S Max recently and was told that my Apple Watch Series Zero would not work with it. Indeed, most functions do not work, but I never thought the reason I was not hearing any sounds on my iPhone from notifications was because I still had it set up from my last iPhone to ping my Apple Watch. So I turned notifications off for the watch and now I get sound and notifications on my iPhone again. After I recover from the second mortgage for the iPhone purchase, it will be time to get a new watch. So, yeah, the watch can definitely be the thing that grabs those notifications before they ring anywhere else. Apple tries not to buzz you multiple places for their own notifications. And sometimes they succeed, perhaps too much. Yeah, there you go. Let's see. I think we can squeeze these malt these last three tips in. Maybe James writes, I have heard you talk about using the Combo Update Package to correct ills that other methods have not been able to fix. Well, I can attest to this working for me. In fact, I wonder if this would have worked for your issue that we started the show with, John. He says, my wife has a 2017 iMac that's been slow to boot from the time she got it. At first, I blamed this on the 5400 RPM disk drive that I mistakenly let her purchase to save some money. I figured it might be slower than the 2007 iMac with an SSD I had installed. It was replacing, but I did not expect it to be as slow as it was. What exacerbated the problem was that it took three minutes or more to get to the Apple login screen. My backup plan was if performance became an issue, I would move the boot disk to a USB Gen 2 external SSD connected via Thunderbolt 3. I eventually went that route and once booted performance was very good. But the time to get to the login screen was still three minutes or more while researching and trying many things to improve boot performance. I found a reply from someone who experienced a similar problem. They solved it by updating the iMac using the Combo Updater. So I did that. Lo and behold, time to boot or boot time to log in screen drop to approximately one minute. Needless to say, we are pleased. So yeah, very cool that it's a good reminder that the Combo Update can solve a lot of problems. Not only does it sort of do the dance that happens when you do an install and wiping out the cache files and all that, but it does install all of the components that are new since the point zero version of that OS doesn't replace everything like like John's update did, but it replaces a lot of things. And that may may do it. So thank you for sharing that, James. That's great. Pretty cool. So did so when you update from recovery, is that a Combo Update or a full update? No, that that pulls down the full updater of the current version. So it's it is the it's it's not the point zero. It's whatever the you know, whatever the current release is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because that's the Internet recovery or whatever they call it. The only other thing I'd add here is that just because a disk is 5400 RPM doesn't mean that it's slow. That's true. What you want to look at. So for any drive, what you want to look at it. And sometimes it's hard to get this, but from whatever vendor it is, get the data sheet and you want to find the raw throughput of. The platter and they use different terminology, but the thing is you're probably not going to operate at the speed of the interface, the SATA, and it's probably a SATA 3, but you will be operating. You in theory can operate at the speed that the data goes from the platter or the chips if it's an SSD to the interface and that data is available. And in theory, you can get a 5400 RPM drive that, you know, kicks, but but right. You've got to look at the numbers. Yeah. On the other hand, in general, yes, 5400 is kind of slow. I think I've even seen slower drives like 2700 sometimes. And I'm like, what? Yeah, you come up with this. Yeah, yeah. I think these days before 72 or I don't know, did I see a 10K drive? I don't know, but it's everybody. Oh, yeah, for sure. Oh, there's yeah, yeah. Yeah, but but he's right. Like just get an SSD if you want to if you want to address that problem, just get an SSD, you know, especially for your boot drive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. Let's see. Going to Jordan, who has a tip to share, he says. Long time listener, first time caller. I wanted to share a quick tip. I came across today on my MacBook Pro with touch bar. I'm a huge fan of using the terminal. And while I was running the software update command, I noticed that on touch bar and that that is a command you can run from terminal software update, all one word, all lowercase says, while I was doing that, I noticed that on the touch bar, I had an icon come up that looks like a document with the name of the command next to it. Clicking on it or tapping on it brings up the man page for the current command in a new terminal window with a yellow background. This is super handy since it gives an easy to read man page in a separate window versus typing man before the command you wish to know about. And then that way you automatically have the man page up in a separate window and you can kind of go back and forth. That's pretty cool. I like, yeah, no. Look at somebody at Apple thinking about the the touch bar in the terminal. I like it. It sounds like a it sounds like the title of the show of the touch bar on the terminal. It's like it sounds like a great adventure. Someone could go on. I don't know. No, no, I think so. Maybe. Yeah. Anyway, one last little heads up is from Don. Who? Yeah, it's a fish shake. He says I was getting he would he wrote us and he was getting all kinds of issues with with corruption on his drive. And he says I fixed all of this by eliminating the Microsoft OneDrive app and the folders associated with it. It involved a lengthy process. He says of removing the app, deleting the OneDrive folder from users and then cloning the drive with SuperDuper says I then booted from the SuperDuper clone reformatted my Mac's hard drive as APFS and then clone the SuperDuper back. I booted from the hard drive to make sure it booted, then booted the Mac from its recovery partition, ran disc utility, which ran first aid with no errors or warnings. Says I was clued into the problem with OneDrive by referencing the following website. Somebody on user voice talked about this issue. He says the the threads in the discussion indicate a problem with that whatever is causing disc utility return or warning message corrupts the time machine backup. I can confirm that this is a problem that I noticed with my new MacBook Air when attempting to correct its SSD by reinstalling Mac OS again and then migrate my data from time machine. It failed partway through the migration. The warning message is therefore critical. Anyone who is running Microsoft OneDrive app should run disc utilities first aid from the recovery partition ASAP. If warnings occur, get rid of the OneDrive app and the associated folders and recreate the Mac from a clone. So thanks for sharing that, Don. That's that's craziness. We will put we will put a link in the show notes. Of course, because, you know, that's how we roll here. But yeah, that's crazy, man. Huh? That's not not so good. But at least now we know. So there you go. Thanks. And thanks Microsoft. Thanks, Dan, really. Don, sorry, I had had your name wrong. Don, that's what I get for looking quickly. Well, we didn't make it through everything on the agenda, but we made it through a lot, John. And I feel pretty good about that. So I think there's only like four or five things left that we had to skip, one of which we were going to skip anyway, because it turned out to be incorrect. But, you know, there you go. We try to we try not to share incorrect data. So who's incorrect? One of the tips we've ever been incorrect. Well, we've been incorrect so many times. It's ridiculous. That's what I love about our community is like folks help us. We get it right in the end. Wow. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. That's I actually love being wrong because it means I'm going to learn something. That's like, it's the best. Really, and it means that somebody's paying attention, which that too. Yeah. If you do anything in your life, pay attention to what's going on around. That's yeah. There you go. It's good. Sweet. Maybe do something about it. Maybe do something about it. That's right. Yeah. Coolio, which but if you want to point out is artist Lee on Ivy Junior. But you know, there you go. But if you want to complain or you have a question or you have a tip or pretty much, you know, if you just want to feel like it, Dave, I think one thing that people could do is send an email to feedback at MackieGab.com. That's feedback at MackieGab.com for all of you that weren't paying attention the first time. And at least this time, Dave, you got it right in that it's feedback at MackieGab.com. And you can visit us on our forums at MackieGab.com slash forums. We'd love to see you there. We'd love to hang out with you there. We'd love to answer your questions. We can share tips. It's like MackieGab goes all week long right there at MackieGab.com slash forums. We want to thank all of you, of course, for sending in all your tips and everything. This episode was chock full. It was good. I'll thank you, Mr. John F. Brun, because without you, this show would not be the same at all. It would be terrible. It'd be half the show. Half the time. It'd be half the show, half the time. I don't know what that means, but it rolls off the tongue. So that's what we say. That could be the episode. Half the show, half the time. No, this show took almost this will be longer than most of our show. Double the show, double the time. There you go. Half the show, double the time. Double the show, half the double the show, half the time. No, no, we still have a lot of time. And the more we do this, the longer we take. I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you. Of course, I want to thank our sponsors, expressvpn.com slash MGG, where you can get three months free as part of that one year package, barebones.com, where you can get BB edits, smilesoftware.com slash podcast, otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com. Let's see, opsgenie.com, ero.com slash MGG. I think the slash MGG thing still works now, even though Amazon took some over, hopefully. Looks like it. Yeah, exactly. Have a have a good time all the time. Have a good evening or day or noon or whatever time it is you are choosing to listen. And yeah, don't get caught.