 The Mac Observers, Mac Keekab, Episode 883 for Monday, August 2nd, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Keekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take all of those things. We mash them up into an agenda and then we share them, answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing your cool stuff found, sharing some of our tips and cool stuff found as well. The goal being that each of us learns exactly or more than at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include TextExpander.com slash podcast, where you get 20% off your first year's subscription, LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG, where you can post your first job for free and upstart.com slash MGG, where you can take control of your credit. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a few minutes here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, being overrun by various beasts. This is John Fron. When we started this show, I had just moved to New Hampshire and Michael Johnston, well, I was going to say formerly of the iOS show, formerly of We Have Communicators. I suppose he might do another episode of the iOS show someday. But he he was a Mackie Cab Listener and started doing our chapterizations for us before he figured out a way for to do them internally in real time. But he was doing those for us for many years, probably 10 years, I would say. And early, early on, any time I would describe my my house here in New Hampshire, he would draw like this. He had this drawing that would come up in the enhanced AC feed that had like this house in the woods with like bears and things like that. And and I had always made me laugh. I wish I could find that drawing. I suppose it's embedded in some of our our old episodes. I'd have to go digging through them to find it. But but it always made me laugh. And so when you said you had beasts, it reminded me of that. So I hope Michael's doing well. In fact, I know Michael's doing well. He's literally a rocket scientist now working for JPL. So well, yeah, yeah, yeah. He when we were out there in LA as a family a couple of years ago, he gave us a tour of JPL and including a glimpse of the now on Mars rover. So it was pretty cool to be able to see all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do some quick tips, shall we? Indeed. All right. Tony brings us our first one. He says, just as a reminder, you can go directly to any preference pain if you use Alfred, the shortcut master there. For example, activate Alfred with your keyboard shortcut and then start to type doc. And usually with just a couple of characters, it will give you an option to go to the preference pane for doc starts to type keyboard. Same thing happens. As I remember, I've been able to get directly to any sub item directly. Of course, if you have, you have to know the name of the item that you are wanting to access. Of course, that's sort of the that comes part and parcel with shortcuts, right, is knowing what you want to do and then and then just getting there. So yeah, thanks for that, Tony. It's I, you know, Alfred's one of those productivity apps that every time we talk about it, I think I should be using it. But it has not made its way into my default vernacular yet. If that's likewise. Yeah, is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I it but it's one that like, I don't know, it probably should be on my list. So all right. Moving on to Matt here. Matt shares with us a quick tip about the iPad and and floating apps, slide over apps, really, is, I guess, what we want to call them. He says, I love being able to switch main windows and iPad OS by swiping the the little line at the bottom that sim that that is the replacement for the home button on non home button iPad. He says, I love being able to switch apps by just sliding the home button left or right. I recently accidentally found that slide over apps and floating windows are actually persistent and you can switch between those in rotation the same way by sliding the little at the bottom of each of those. There's a little home slider as well. And you can just slide left and right to get from one app to the other. I don't know that I ever noticed this, Matt. So thank you, you know, multitasking on the iPad. I'm I have not installed the iOS 15 beta on my iPad yet. But I am or the iPad OS 15 beta to be more correct. But I am eager for the improvements in the UX of multitasking because I always get lost whenever I get into like split window view. And I mean, I sometimes intentionally get myself there. But then it's like, wait, how do I get out of this again? What do I do? It's just not intuitive to me and clearly wasn't intuitive to lots of people with Apple having changed sort of the way it exposes what to do next in iPad OS 15. So I'm looking forward to that. So thank you for this, Matt. That's great to know. I I always feel like whatever window I have floating like in order to replace it, I have to figure out a way to like swipe it out of the way and bring a new one in and all of that. So yeah, pretty good. I like it. I'm looking forward to the being able to to jump between Mac OS and iPad OS. Say that again. The thing that demonstrated where you could bop between Mac OS and iPad OS. What am I missing here? How can on what device can you go from Mac OS to iPad OS? I thought that was something they demonstrated at a recent event. Yeah, but on what device would this happen? Well, I realize I might be missing something. You can jump from Mac OS to iPad OS. On what device like on a Mac, on an iPad, on an Android tablet, like which both? You don't remember that from the event? No, I'm not. It was kind of like sidecar, but better. OK. Oh, oh, oh, I see what you're saying. The enhancements to sidecars, right? So you're not actually running Mac OS on an iPad or or. OK, yeah, I I'm I'm remembering something about this, but it's not. I don't have a clear memory of how it worked. I'll have to go revisit that. Or if you find a link in the enhanced continuity, according to Hog Molly in the chat room at live.macicab.com. Thank you, Hog Molly. Yeah, OK, cool. OK, so that's that's. Is it bidirectional, though? Can you get like iPad OS screens on your Mac? That part was lost on me if that if that was the case. I'm pretty sure that was the case. Interesting. All right, OK. Enhanced continuity on Mac OS. OK, Hog Molly saying not that. Not that she saw. You got you got somebody rolling into your house there. With the new operating system Apple introduces universal control, which provides continuity by allowing users to effortlessly move between devices using a single mouse and keyboard. Right, right. OK, this part I remember. OK, so it's you. It's the the wireless KVM switch that your device that your Mac device becomes for your iPad. OK, got it. That makes sense. All right, I'll put a I'll put a link to this article about it. OK, nice. Yeah. Cool. All right. Yeah, no, it's like the stuff that they're doing to iPad OS is meaningful, in my opinion. So yeah, it's good. Yeah. Let's move it on to Jeff and thank you, Hog Molly. Thanks everybody in the chat room for helping us out during the show live.Mackeykev.com. Listener Jeff has our final what I think is our final quick tip of the day. I'm not sure if you talked about this before, but on the last show you mentioned moving your dock between monitors to move your dock to the monitor you want. All you have to do is bring your mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen and hold it there for a second. Your dock will disappear from the monitor it's on and pop up on the new monitor. That is correct if you keep your dock on the bottom of the screen. If you keep your dock on the left or the right, it will live on the left most edge of your entire screen real estate or the right most edge of your entire screen real estate. So if you have three monitors and you put it on the left it will be on the left of the left most monitor, the right the same with the right most monitor. But Jeff it's absolutely right if you keep your dock in the default position at the bottom. If you want it to move to another screen just float to the bottom and it will join you. So yes, thank you for that Jeff. That's good stuff. I forget about this because I am a left side of the screen dock person. I have far more, well I have far more horizontal real estate than I have vertical real estate. On any of my screens this is a truth, right? So because they're wider than they are tall. And if you have multiple screens that then is amplified. And so I found very quickly it started on laptops with me where I was like oh I hate having the dock eating into my safari screen space and I like to have the dock there all the time. It's just a personal preference. It was like wait if I put this on the left side of the screen then I've got my dock there all the time and I can use the full height of the monitor for my browsers and anything else I want to do and I sort of get the best of both worlds. So I'm using the space as it is presented to me. I suppose if I had a monitor that was in tall orientation maybe I'd put the dock at the bottom but I don't think I would. I think I'd still keep it on the side because I'm used to it. But yeah that's where that came from. Not working for me. What's that? Well I'm moving my cursor to my second screen and the dock is not following. And you put it at the bottom of the screen? Interesting. And you just left it there? I have seen that work. I mean I've certainly done it. It's interesting that it's not doing it on yours. I wonder what other conditions need to be true for that to happen. I mean maybe it's my dock and menu part. I'll sort of with it later. Okay. Cool. Uh, uh, uh, Hognolli again in the chat room says slide the mouse down and off the bottom of the second screen. So you've got to really go all the way as though you're scrolling off the screen and then what it hang there. Does that solve it for you John? No. Okay. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I think I know the answer. Are you in the old mode where you have one menu bar or in the new mode where you have two menu bars? Uh, I have one menu bar. That's the problem. So you, you are in, right? You're not in the new paradigm. And when I say new, I mean, I mean, you know, the 10 year old paradigm instead of the 20 year old paradigm. But yeah, if you go to, oh, where is it? It's, uh, uh, screen spaces. It's the option that have, oh, it's in mission control, system preferences, mission control. Now John, cause it'll force you to log out. Um, but the option in system preferences, mission control defaults to displays have separate spaces up until about a year ago. I was with you. I was with that box off cause it seemed weird to me, but now I love it because one of the things I get is if I'm say in an app on my, you know, on my right most monitor, I get its menu bar right above me. It's great. So I, I, I recommend making that change. It, it, it's the default. So it's what lots of apps and other things in the OS expect. Not that it breaks things, but obviously it breaks this. So because yet your, your doc isn't going to follow you in that point. So that's, that's the key. Cool. Uh, all right. Let's shall we do some cool stuffs found, my friend? Cool. Listener Tony, a different listener Tony. We have a lot of Tonys. Uh, it writes and says one day when summoning the character viewer using control command space to insert an emoji in a message, I noticed that things looked a little wonky. So I started playing. I learned that you a, and this is the, this is the key here to all of this. If you invoke the character viewer, uh, by default, you're going to see a, a collapsed window, the collapsed version of this window with just your emojis there with the frequently used at the top and then, and then the list and the icons below. If you go into the upper right corner of that and click the little icon that appears, the character viewer grows in size. And now you get a series of menus. And one of the things that you can see in the fourth column or the last column on the right is when you highlight anything and it can be emojis or arrows or bullets and stars, you can choose add to favorites and now you get add to favorites. Uh, and he says, uh, I learned that you can drag the different sets in the order that you prefer and the viewer will open to the top most set of characters, whatever that is. So if you make favorites, your top most set, well, and that's what it's going to open to. And he says for now, I have it open to the emoji set. Uh, you also have easy access to the characters you use frequently. Plus, of course, the favorites. And he reminds us that if we want to add the Apple icon to this, it is option shift. John, do you know the answer? Option shift. No, no, the Apple logo is option shift K. I don't know why it's K, but it is option shift K to get the Apple logo. So, uh, so there you go. Uh, yeah. So thank you for that, Tony. Great, great, uh, advice. I don't know. I guess that's a, I call it a cool stuff found. I'm not sure if it's a quick tip or what, but you know, it's a cool thing. So nice find, my friend. Uh, very good. Moving on. Indeed. Okay. Uh, Dr. Mack has one for us in Mac OS Monterey, Apple's upcoming OS. Uh, Monterey, he says, will make it easier to prep your old Mac for sale or donation with a new menu item in system preferences that is a race, all content and settings. So just like we have on iOS, now we have that on the Mac and it will do all of the things that, uh, that we want it to do. I'm curious. I have not done this yet for anyone that has. You know, we were talking last week about the best way to prep a Mac for sale. And, uh, you know, what, what we suggested was to wipe it completely, reinstall a new OS and then shut it off when it gets to the point where it starts to ask you, you know, the initial questions about logging into this OS for the first time so that the new user gets that pristine clean experience. I wonder if this gets that same experience. Like I assume this wipes out user accounts and everything and forces you to start from scratch. So I'd be curious to hear from anybody that's, that's attempted this. If, uh, if in fact that's what happened. So thank you for that, Dr. Mack. Pretty cool, huh? Well, it's nice that they, because yeah, we pointed out that Apple has an article saying, OK, here's the 10 things you got to do. Right. And this might collapse it into one. Yeah. I wonder if this would also log you out of your, like, will this disable find my Mac? Will this log you out of your Apple Music account so that you're not using a slot for that machine anymore? Like, I wonder how how that goes. As Kiwi Graham in the chat room reminds us that, uh, for, for years now, you know, the operating system is, uh, inviolable, untouchable. Uh, and it's on a separate volume, right? It's on the system volume. So you don't need to reinstall. You just wipe the data volume effectively. I'm not suggesting that anybody go out and wipe the data volume. It would be a good experiment, but know that it may fail miserably for you, but go wipe the data volume in whatever way appropriate. And then boom, it's like, oh, yeah, I've got an OS. I need a data volume. I'll create one. I'll ask the user to log in. Good to go. So that may be all it's doing, Kiwi Graham. Yeah. In fact, that may be all it's doing on iOS too, for that matter. Uh, Andrew War posted at Mac Observer, I'll say this morning, we're actually recording this on, uh, Thursday morning, uh, that Verizon has added a bunch of new mobile hotspots, uh, and hotspot plans. Most importantly, to their offerings. So they have four plans now, uh, that, uh, that work either with 5G or 4G LTE. And you get 15 gigs for 20 bucks a month. 50 gigs for 40, 100 gigs for 60. And then you can get unlimited, uh, for either 80 if you're a Verizon customer on an unlimited plan or 110 if you are not a Verizon customer in any, in any other way. Uh, you get, uh, and really what it's unlimited is defined as is 150 gigs of premium mobile hotspot data and then unlimited past that at lower speed. So, uh, both of these plan or all four of these plans require a, uh, a mobile hotspot device as, as Verizon calls them my fives. They have two that they are offering. The 5G version is 400 bucks and the LTE version is 200 bucks. And, uh, and of course they'll let you finance those as well. But, uh, but I think that's, it's cool. It like this, there's more doors opening for at home 5G at home, you know, wireless for your, but also for traveling, right? I mean, like that there's both of, both of those use cases very much, uh, the, you know, things that would work here. So pretty cool. I was, I was, you know, that's why we call it cool stuff found because we found it. It was cool. Yeah. Actually, I just got an email from them. I'll have to consider this. They're like, Hey, guess what? You're old. So we'll give you a discount on an unlimited data plan. Yeah. You told us about that last time. I thought you did it. Yeah. I don't really need it. Change is hard for you. I get it. I didn't use, I, I never, I don't exceed my right current cap right now. And, and with the price, would your net price go up to, to go to this, even though they're giving you a discount on the unlimited? Yeah. I think right now I think my plan is 40. And how much data do you get? Um, I get, um, five gigs, but they have rollover. And then they also have their up. They're like kind of rewards plan. And every now and then I'll, you know, every month they're like, Hey, you know, you, you can get a reward. And I'm like, Oh, well, give me, give me another gig of data. Got it. And they have the rollover, but I've never exceeded my, um, I've never exceeded my, uh, data, uh, other than that disaster that I had, I think. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Well, you're overpaying massively. I mean, if you, if you wanted to pay half that, right? So you're paying 40 bucks a month. If you paid half that with Mint Mobile, you'd get 10 gigs of data per month at 20 bucks. Or if you paid, if you wanted to, if you only wanted their four gig plan, that's 15 bucks a month. They used to be a sponsor here. They are not, uh, currently a sponsor of the show, but our mint mobile.com slash MGG link still works to get you those prices. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes, man. I, we moved to Mint last year. I mean, we've been talking about it for years, but like the whole family, we moved to Mint and it was like a mistake that we had not done that years prior. It's works great and it saves us. And we're saving thousands of dollars a year. So I highly recommend it. Yeah. In fact, you can get Mint's unlimited plan for 30 bucks a month. So less than you're currently paying for five gigs with Verizon. So I, and you bring your number with you. It took us like 20 minutes. It was super easy. Highly recommended. And I say that as a user, not as a paid spokesperson because I'm no longer a paid spokesperson. All right. John, listener John has a cool stuff found for us. Listener John tells us about tiny pilot. The problem that he wants to solve is that he has an M1 Mini with file vault turned on and it runs as his Plex server. He had to move out of his house for seven weeks due to construction but left the mini headless connected to his network and a UPS. Occasionally, the power there for the construction is cut for so long that the UPS runs out and the mini has to restart and require a manual login. He says I also have a Raspberry Pi connected near the mini. Do you see any issues if I use the Pi to act as a Bluetooth keyboard for the mini so that I can SSH or screen share remotely and then enter the password to log in. And he says after some Googling I found tiny pilot which does exactly this that essentially turns your Raspberry Pi into a network connected like KVM switch that you could access from anywhere. And do this. So I'll put a link to tiny pilot in the show notes of course. Thanks John for asking and answering your own question. I would not have had that answer. Maybe a little Googling would have found it for us but John's Google food was good and found tiny pilot. So that's not a bad thing to have a way of doing that. That's I like this idea. If you're going to have a server running file vault I feel like something like tiny pilot is almost mandatory so that you can you know mess with it remotely. So pretty cool, huh? Indeed. Yeah. All right. A couple more cool stuffs found. Jason actually a few more if I'm being accurate. Jason tells us about thread reader app which is a Twitter bot that helps read threads and makes things easier for sharing and reading to trigger it you just have to reply or quote any tweet of the thread you want to unroll and mention at thread reader app with the unroll keyword and boom you get a link back and good to go so you can read all about it at threadreaderapp.com but thank you for that Jason very good nice stuff nice stuff all right I have a follow up cool stuff found and we have a fun one and we'll talk about the follow up cool stuff found is we talked about latercase boy it sounds like laterhosen doesn't it no it's L-A-T-E-R case latercase on the show recently and they sent me one of these things and the listener who told us about it said it's great because it feels like you don't have a case on your phone these cases are made of Kevlar and are super thin and and really do like when they put it on your phone and for those of now and I'll have we'll we'll put this out as a separate video too but you can see just how thin this case is now Kevlar lightweight very very strong so very likely to protect from any sort of physical scratching damage those sorts of things what it likely will not protect very as well as some other cases against is drop protection it doesn't really have any you know cushioning or anything like that in it I'm sure it protects from drops more than the phone would be protected on its own but not as much as you know a case that's built for drop protection and actually has like corner you know corner cushions and things like that this case does protect all four corners you can see you know it it protects protects them quite well in fact so and super thin like it just and it's got it's funny this is intentional it's very grippy like my phone doesn't want to slip but to my my pockets of my you know pants and jeans and shorts it slides right in and out it's not catching on anything so the way they've they've sort of made the the surface of this Kevlar it really seems to work out so later case and I believe that's going to be at latercase.com if I am not mistaken it is latercase.com so check that out too okay fun and it looks like your accessories should go through it absolutely MagSafe works fine through it yep absolutely yeah I just searched here Kevlar is a heat resistant and strong synthetic fiber yep yeah so right it's not metal it's not blocking you know chi or anything like that so yeah yeah it's a nice little thing alright and then our last cool stuff found comes from listener Bruce it's for those of us that have M1 Max and are missing the noise of the fan and it's called fanfan at fanfan.rambo.codes and it is a little app that when you activate it it makes a sound out of your speakers that I swear to you the first place I did this was on the couch on my MacBook Air I happened to be reading through your emails and I saw this and I'm like oh cool let me install let me see what it's like and as soon as I turned it on you know and remember this is the couch that I've sat on for years with many prior iterations of MacBook Air all of which had fans all of which would get plenty loud whenever I was doing anything on the couch including my 2018 MacBook Air which is literally the same form factor as what I have in fact I have the same case on it so as soon as I turned it felt like my legs should be getting hot like I I naturally did this motion of like moving my legs apart to give the machine more like it was very much a visceral reaction so the sound is accurate is what I'm trying to say and it very and my wife even looked over and she's like what is that like because she knows that the machine doesn't have any fans in it I'm like oh it's a new little app she's like that sounds stupid like it's awesome so if you're missing that experience you can you can get you can get this for free you can also get yourself maybe like a a heating pad to put under your computer I don't recommend this but if you maybe you put it on your legs and you know put something else in between you don't want to heat up your computer unnecessarily but you know if you really want to go through the old experience I don't know where I'm going with this John how about we we take a minute and talk about our sponsors absolutely alright like me do you know that today many of us small business owners are busier nay more productive than ever and all that time that we have to spend searching for and interviewing the wrong candidates for a job opening could be time better spent growing our businesses that's why LinkedIn jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing faster and it's free it's true look you know we just hired Katie to do all this social and promotional work for us we use LinkedIn jobs and it was super easy in fact I started by thinking oh I'll just reach out on my socials or whatever like we have a decent following and stuff we do the show no no no I should have done the LinkedIn jobs thing quite frankly I should have done it a year prior take the lesson from me folks use LinkedIn jobs and now you get to do it for free you get to create LinkedIn jobs to reach your network and beyond to the world's largest professional network of over 750 million people and you can focus on candidates with the skills and experience that you need and then you get to use simple tools on LinkedIn jobs to filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster did you know that every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn yeah I know and post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG go try it out that's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free terms and conditions apply and our thanks to LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode next up is TextExpander look TextExpander removes the repetition out of work so that you can focus on what matters most we're just talking about being efficient about things TextExpander fits this mold perfectly accuracy and efficiency anybody that listens to the show knows this well sometimes those things are hard to reconcile at the same time TextExpander is one of those magic tools that makes it possible to do both accuracy and efficiency because with TextExpander you get to say goodbye to all that repetitive text entry all those spelling and message errors and even just trying to remember the right thing to say have you ever thought oh man you spend 20 minutes looking through your outbox to find that email don't do that anymore take the magic text put it into TextExpander and then you can invoke it whenever you want in the future it's right there you get to take your time back and increase your productivity and because you're a listener here of MacGeekGab you get 20% off your first year visit TextExpander.com slash podcast to learn more again our thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this episode alright look if you dread looking at your 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amounts will be determined based upon your credit income and certain other information provided in your loan application again go to upstart.com slash MGG and our thanks to Upstart for sponsoring this episode all right yes and I ran into this a while back but hi guys I get the following on startup of my iMac Retina 4K 21.5 inch 2017 running Big Sur and something comes up and it says error Finder 11.4 version 1350.5.3 has not been tested with the plug-in Synomac context menu 1.0 as a precaution has not been loaded please contact the plug-in developer for further information and I remember getting this error quite a while ago but the place you want to look is system preferences extensions Finder extensions and disable anything that looks Synology like would be my recommendation I wonder if he had do you think he had an old version of a Synology extension there because I have one and I don't get that error um I think it was part of yeah it's a contextual menu but I think that they didn't clean it up properly when you upgraded to a newer got it that makes sense okay yeah yeah yeah of the OS and I actually found a you know one link to this little thread here but I did find something on Apple discussions that basically talk about this exact issue the other thing is that you could go to home library application support Synology and maybe whack anything that's in there that sure yeah just be aware that you may be whacking something that you use so you know bear that in mind but you could in theory you could also search the drive for whatever that error is in his case Synomac context menu right um and see if you know if you find that somewhere and then and then just like specifically delete that and if you find multiple instances look at the get info for it at the version number because this is saying it's version 1.0 so maybe that you know again could help you narrow down what to remove and what to leave in place so that's pretty good I like it I like it more on that or we could move on moving on listener Bob has spent a little time for with us for us explaining garbage collection trim and how it all relates to SSDs so um as Bob explains SSDs need pre-cleaned sectors to write into this is we're dabbling into this uh in last week's episode where we were saying that you know SSDs can't write to a sector that has data in it it needs to be cleaned first pre-cleaned the SSD keeps a pool of pre-cleaned sectors SSD garbage collection does the pre-cleaning when a write happens the old logical sector gets put onto the garbage collection queue and the selected pre-clean select sector written to the old logical address ah okay so there's a map that between the physical um sectors and then the logical sectors and the map gets updated when something is uh is rewritten that makes sense this is the part I and he explains it well but now is the part I didn't realize John SSDs cannot clean a single sector physical sectors are divided into clusters on an SSD pre-cleaning a cluster means that no sector in the cluster can hold in use file system data if a cluster is chosen for pre-cleaning and there is valid file system data in the cluster then the SSD needs to read each one of those in use sectors and write them somewhere else this is background IO activity that slows the SSD down of course SSDs are therefore over provisioned with extra sectors by several gigabytes so that even if the file system fills the SSD there are still unassigned sectors that can be used for these writes these over provisioned sectors can also act as spares when a sector will no longer hold data when one goes bad trim now that we know all that trim is the agreement between the file system and the SSD when trim is enabled the file system will tell the SSD the logical addresses of deleted sectors via special trim commands for precleaning otherwise it sort of has to guess at this if the file system does not tell the SSD about deleted files then the SSD does not have any idea that the deleted file storage is available for precleaning as far as the SSD is concerned those sectors contain valuable data even if the file system and the user consider it trash it is trim and the agreement between the file system and the SSD that allows the SSD to preclean those sectors from the deleted file without trim eventually the file system and the SSD even the free space and SSDs don't know that but with trim enabled the SSD now has all the file systems free space as well as its over provision sectors available for precleaning so instead of a few gigabytes that can be hundreds of gigabytes or even a terabyte of preclean sectors when users decide to do huge multi-gigabyte writes the SSD will have lots of preclean sectors so this is why with trim enabled garbage collection can ignore cleaning clusters for a longer period of time ah this makes sense now okay so trim allows it to be way more efficient because it knows and I knew that trim was this agreement but I didn't understand this sector versus cluster thing so thank you for this Bob very very good stuff I appreciate it that's great hopefully that makes sense to you folks if it doesn't let us know feedback at mackeykeb.com we can dig deeper into that and explain it a little better perhaps but I think Bob hopefully I didn't screw it up did you say feedback at mackeykeb.com I said feedback at mackeykeb.com that's exactly right yeah man absolutely that's where everybody sent everything in so far except for the people at live.mackeykeb.com so yeah listener Jeff brings us into some networking interestingness Jeff wrote in and says a few months ago I must have checked some box in my Mac settings and what it has done is that in Safari ads are blocked on websites and in Apple email links are blocked sometimes even trying to visit a link I can't because it's on this blocked list this is not limited to Safari I get similar issues in both Firefox and Chrome as I said also in mail so it's not related to a single web browser settings this behavior is not being seen on my iPhone or iPad Pro or any other device on my network it is limited to my Mac but it is system-wide on my Mac I've searched through system preferences and haven't found what I might have checked to start this behavior I've also gone through clean my Mac X also but I don't see anything in there any help thanks and please don't get caught yeah I know I know what it is John and it's the the where where listener Jeff needs to look is in his what I'll call Etsy host file slash etc slash hosts this generally needs to be edited as a super user so if you're editing from the terminal you could use the sudo command if you're editing from the finder it will probably ask you when you go to save it to authenticate or if you're opening it up in text editor something it'll ask you to authenticate when you go to save it this file by default has about six lines in it I believe what and when Jeff looked in his he found that it had five hundred and sixty three thousand lines most of which so the way Etsy hosts what Etsy host does if you look at Etsy hosts you will have lines with essentially two items per line separated by either a space or a tab the first thing is an IP address the second thing is a name so it's a sort of like not sort of it is a DNS bypass right so the first thing you'll see there is 127.0.0.1 and then a tab and then local host what that says is that if someone looks for the address local host redirect them to 127.0.0.1 and do not check with any other resource I am telling you the truth so Etsy host becomes the primary truth of this if you know that you want to connect to a certain server let's say you your router doesn't do DNS for your local devices but you know that your iMac in the kitchen is 192.168.1.14 right you've got an IP address mapped to that great but you don't want to have to type that every time you want to type iMac kitchen well you could go into the Etsy host file and all your Macs type in 192.168.1.14 and then a space or a tab and then either one is fine you can type iMac kitchen and now if you go into your web browser and you say iMac kitchen and your iMac in the kitchen is set to answer when a web browser visits it then it will answer your Mac because your Mac is just going straight to that address so it's like your own little per Mac DNS hack what you can also use this for is for ad blocking because of those half a million entries that Jeff had most of them all except about four had 0.0.0.0 as their IP address to begin with that when you tried to go to say adserver1.backbeatmedia.com which I'm sure was in his list instead it goes to 0.0.0.0 that's a defunct address it's dead the Mac knows this it doesn't waste its time it fails and it can't load any resources from that address and so ads don't appear but it also will fail if you tried to say visit that in a web browser for other reasons or any of the other myriad listing or listed entries there and so deleting those either en masse or one by one for the places you want to visit is really the only way to get around that he said he said he found something that he told us what it was and I don't seem to have it here but he found something I think it was a cool stuff found maybe that somebody had sent into the show that was this list of all of these IP addresses so if you have those problems check your Etsy host file and then take the the additional tip that we just shared and give yourself some names for your other devices thoughts on that John? I looked at mine and mine's pretty thin so yeah I mean I have I probably have 15 entries in my Etsy host file but well but I use them so if I need to check the Mac Observer server directly without going through any of the caching or proxying that we use to help speed things up then I uncomment the line that brings me to the IP address for www.mackobserver.com and then I know that my Mac is visiting that directly it's not it's not going through any of the caches and I can see it's good for troubleshooting or whatever is there a problem yes okay it's the problem living in the cache the problem living on the server great yep but yeah it's very helpful I again I use it a lot for development too if you want to you know if you want to have a site that's up but not up just don't put it in your DNS entries in your main DNS and just put it you know on your thing so we might have like I don't know put it in there and map it to an IP and then it does exist only for you so yeah fun stuff good moving on moving on moving on moving on up all right to the east side that's right we're in the east side of the country so we're moving on up deluxe apart in the sky yeah being so unburned on the grill man okay listener Ben has a related link is going to be a geek challenge it sounds like somebody's using a leaf blower next to you John so I'm riding I'm riding your volume here yeah yeah I'm muting as appropriate here okay cool maybe I should go and shake my fist Adam we like shaking our fists in anger it's good yeah all right listener Ben has has a with a client he's has a weird network issue that I'm troubleshooting for this client and I'd love your insight it's a 2017 MacBook running Big Sur though the issue was occurring before the upgrade to Big Sur on high Sierra as well when on his home network and only on his home network Fred cannot make any network connections from his main user account that includes websites in any of his browsers Safari Firefox Opera as well as joining Zoom meetings to create a new user account and all online activities work fine additionally all network activities work fine from the main account when Fred is on other Wi-Fi networks so obviously something is running on this machine at the user level that's preventing network access but why is it only affecting A his home network and B just his user account any idea how I troubleshoot this it just occurred to me that I should have Fred I did have him try setting a custom DNS server but that didn't help okay so it's not the DNS server that's set I agree that that pinging either other local devices or the known IP address do a DNS lookup on another machine for something like www.apple.com and then ping the IP address that comes up to see is this a network issue or is it a DNS issue the aforementioned Etsy host file from the prior question with Jeff wouldn't really apply because that's a system wide thing that's read the same for every user and that's the weird part of this John right is most of the networking stack remain system wide so I'm a little confused as to what it could be I guess I it is possible that a network related utility could be set to a specific Wi-Fi network right so would with little snitch be able to be configured in this way that you know when I'm on a certain Wi-Fi network do something differently redirect all DNS to a certain spot I don't know the answer here but that you know that's what I would look for if I were there is like what's in startup items what's in launch agents you know is there anything related to the network or hog Molly again in the chat room I would blow away the stored Wi-Fi settings for the network in question and then add it back that's not a bad idea again that stuff is system wide but but you know but it's also synced with with iCloud Keychain or at least sometimes synced with iCloud Keychain if we as we've discussed so and then KiwiGram adds that device management may be locked on a particular Wi-Fi network and user oh so check check system preferences profiles right and see what you've got there yeah yeah yeah I mean the other thing that occurs to me thing desktop will often give me notifications as to what's happening network wise okay yep and that every now and then it'll come up with an error saying oh yeah your ISP's DNS is being stupid yeah right yeah yeah yeah fair fair fair yeah interesting interesting cool I found a I found a thing in my do you have any other thoughts on this I have a tangent I'm gonna take it on I don't want to mess with anything here when I looked in my profiles system preferences profiles on this computer John I see something that says enable unified log private data and it says that the developer ID is George Garcide from GeorgeGarcide.com and the details of the profile and I love that it shows this so that you know exactly what's happening is that the managed client logging section has the enable private data equals one option there and I remember doing this this is not some awful thing when they when Apple changed the console app in Sierra the logging mechanism changed and there were not separate files for individual logs but everything just got dumped into unified logging mechanism and centralized there but the problem is that there were a lot of things that would show up as private in this unified log because they weren't user specific anymore and so like it would just hide things but when troubleshooting stuff it got really difficult to see what you were seeing because it was being hidden from you with private and this entry will unprivatize those things it will allow private data to show up in a unified log and you can build your own profile to do this but the beauty is that that George Garcide built one for us and so I evidently installed that back then probably to troubleshoot something because it was driving me crazy and now it's there forever I don't know if we still need it in Big Sur I'm assuming we probably do but it's there so I'll put a link in the show notes to George's website so that others can see this thing but I was surprised to see profiles like system preferences profiles won't exist in your system preferences unless you have a profile installed at least one right it's hidden otherwise so yeah alright I don't know what's next John what do we have here you want to take us to Jose is that what's next let's go to Jose okay Jose says when using subfolders in the notes app on iOS and macOS the parent folder displays a number to represent how many notes there are in the parent folder only and excludes the number of notes in the subfolder therefore if no doubt is added at the parent folder level it displays a zero this is where I got caught uh-oh I deleted a parent folder because the zero that was displayed made me think it was an empty folder when there were actually six subfolders under it since the parent folder was not expanded at the time I didn't see the six subfolders I think the parent folder should display the total number of notes including those in subfolders instead of only the number of notes in the parent folder another solution could be to not have the parent folder behave like a note as well this would be akin to how the finder displays the number of items inside a folder I just thought I'd share this so no one else gets caught with misleading information displayed on the parent folder and note yes that does seem like a UI-UX oopsie on Apple's part the good news is that you should be able to restore the deleted items per this little ditty that I found on the Apple support site so what's the way of doing that is there a way we can describe without forcing people to go read an Apple article I think you should let's see what happens to my deleted if you delete a note that's stored on your Mac it's moved to the recently deleted folder and you can view and recover notes in the recently deleted folder for up to 30 days if you use upgraded iCloud notes deleted notes are moved to the recently deleted folder for that iCloud account after that time notes are permanently deleted from all your devices and that may take up to 40 days so okay so you've got time yeah the recently deleted folder is I suppose the okay yeah and I I did verify that I fiddled with this and if you delete a note all of a sudden this new folder appears called mmm recently or deleted notes yeah yeah no that's great that's great cool alright just knocking them down here let's go to Andrew and see if we can help him he says I attempted to install 11.5 on a 2017 MacBook Pro after it seemed to reboot it became stuck in a cycle that automatically rebooted and took me to recovery mode in other words it won't boot to the login credential screen in any attempt from recovery mode or holding down the option key at boot and choosing the volume just eventually reboots back into recovery mode the only error I recall is that seeing that user data could not be migrated okay fair this sounds sort of bad and I wondered how I can rectify this situation also it won't allow me to reinstall from recovery mode as after reboot it's still stuck going to recovery mode as well okay so yeah it seems like your user data is either missing or corrupted in a way that when the OS tried, remember before we were earlier in the episode we were talking about how the system partition and the user partition are separate and so the system partition seems like it's fine the recovery partition also seems like it's fine but when it starts to touch the user partition it hits a wall and comes back so something out there is not good you've effectively confirmed that by using the recovery partition to reinstall what's on the system partition and the same thing happens so definitely points to errors on the user partition and of course that's what you saw at some point with your with this installation so what I would do if I were there which is generally the way I approached any kind of question that we get what I would do next is I would back up the user data off of that volume you might have to use target disk mode to do this but get whatever you can if you already have a clone of that great then you don't need to worry about trying to figure it out you're already good but get that backup somewhere is easily plugged into this machine and then using recovery mode don't just reinstall the OS erase the the volume and reinstall a clean OS onto it that will also erase the data volume right from there it should boot up like a brand new operating system because you've blown away the data volume and the system volume but then you've reinstalled it would be nice if we could do what Dr. Mack was telling us before in the episode right to just blow away the data volume and maybe this is a good opportunity to experiment with that but whatever you know get to the point where you don't have a data volume anymore and the system is forced to recreate it usually that's part of also blowing away the installation maybe that changes in Monterey maybe there's other ways to do it but that's how I would do it blow it away reinstall the OS with recovery mode and then at that point I would say feel free the backup that you have from the other drive slurping in all your data hopefully whatever's wrong will be overlooked by migration assistant at that point and it'll just pull in whatever it can and leave you with hopefully a very you know capable and working machine that's what I would do what do you think John I recall running into a similar situation at one point and yeah the solution was blow it away you know first make sure you make a backup right or a clone but yeah I've had a couple of cases where I'm like okay something in the partition table or the volume table or whatever just didn't make it so start from scratch yeah yeah I agree I agree all right Tony has one John I am I'm I'm curious to see if we get an answer to this we might not get one while we're talking here we might need to wait for you to help us with this geek challenge feedback at MacGeekUp.com but let's see where we go Tony says I have a small but irritating problem that I can't seem to solve I'm running the latest version of Big Sur 11.5.1 on a late 2020 M1 MacBook Air but I don't think the model of the machine is relevant the problem I am unable to change my user photo go into contacts go to your card go to mail system preferences Apple ID doesn't matter I cannot change it I have successfully changed the photo on the iCloud Web interface on my iPad and on my iPhone for this Apple ID but on the Mac I've tried Safe Boots I've tried reinstalling the OS I've tried hunting down and trashing all the cash and preference files I could find or think of and yes I've logged out my iPhone ID slash iCloud account from the Mac I changed the photo it's there for about 1 to 2 seconds and then it reverts to the previous one this happens if I try to change the photo on system preferences mail or contacts after logging out and back into my Apple account the new desired photo remains on the iCloud page and my other devices so I'm pretty sure the problem is specific to this Mac yeah it's clear the Mac isn't pushing it to iCloud nor is it pulling it from iCloud which file but which one I have heard of this problem before Tony is not the first person to write in with this I don't recall that we've ever solved it but I have definitely heard of it it's possible I've even seen it like Tony said it's it's small but irritating so it's one of those things that after a little while you just like well whatever I'm done I'm moving on I'm using my computer but if anybody knows or John if you have a look for this any thoughts I mean I'm looking at my contact uh yeah I mean if you go to your contact card yeah there's you float over your picture and it says edit I wonder so okay so I wonder if changing like creating a new contact card and then making that new one your my contact right I mean it's you're right it's getting stuck somewhere that is unique to that particular Mac now I realize contacts are also synced but if that sync is failing try yeah I mean that's that's what I would try you just make a new card and then go to the card menu and say make this my card and I would say even before you you know before you do that before you make it your card change the photo yeah now the other thing I see here so yeah so if you go to your my card and then click on edit and then click on edit again you get current defaults camera maybe take a new photo oh you click on edit of the card and then edit again meaning edit on your actual picture yeah okay okay yeah I haven't been here in ages yeah yeah there yeah current defaults camera and photos yeah maybe maybe try a different option other than selecting the photo I don't know why it's reversing what you do well yeah I mean there's something on the Mac that's just saying no this is newer right like for whatever reason it's it's the classic sync conflict resolution issue it's something to do right to to deal with that so yeah from a programming standpoint conflict resolution in any kind of data stores is not easy so yeah I mean the other thing that occurs and you could be a permissions thing so maybe spin up disutility and do a little first aid action yeah but permissions aren't part of first aid anymore I mean they haven't been part of first aid they just get to do that anymore which which sucks because sometimes permissions are the issue right so yeah yep yeah it would be nice if we could repair permissions but with the system volume on a separate volume I think that's part of where Apple says yeah no but but there can be permissioning issues like just because we don't get repair permissions anymore doesn't mean that there aren't permissioning issues you could be very you know the trick would be finding the file and changing its permissions another thing you could do a thought if moving down the path or staying on the path pulling on the thread that it is contacts that's the issue do in the contacts app go to file export contacts archive and then delete be changed blowing it away and pulling the data back into it would fix that so that'd be yeah I like it it's good it's good alright we got a few more things we can talk about here listener has well they're all interesting aren't they listener Simon says I am missing audio devices it works in the evening when watching an online streaming service the next day I come to run a zoom meeting only to find zoom telling me there are no audio devices found when I check system preferences in one of those moments low and behold nothing is listed in input and sometimes even in output after a reboot all is well and works fine for another 24 hours this occurs on an almost daily basis any ideas surely it can't be hardware as it comes back to life after a reboot this is happening in the latest version of macOS running an M1 Air so you're right I don't think it's hardware I think it's software core audio can get particular and if it has too many things trying to tell it what to do that conflict with each other it will just wipe out you know that list and display no audio devices when asked essentially that's what's happening right when you open system preferences and go to sound and go to either input or output the OS is actually asking another part of the OS give me the list of all of the currently available audio devices that are either input devices or output devices right and so core audio is the part of the OS that is responsible for answering that question and clearly it's just dying and not answering that question so zooming out a little bit do you have anything running or installed that might be affecting your core audio background background processes so zoom could be an issue here because zoom installs if you tell zoom to share your screen and share your max audio so if you wanted to like play a movie on your mac and have people hear the audio from that if you want to have your max audio shared over zoom it installs another device right so it's like the zoom audio whatever something or other I don't want to mess with it now I don't want to mess with core audio while we're doing a podcast I've learned that less than the hard way so I'm not going to do it but there is something in there so removing that and we'll find a link to removing zoom's audio device maybe somebody in the chat room can find it if not we'll find it after the show but I'll put a link in here because I think they're stored in like your drive and then library audio where is audio here I think that's where they're stored plugins may know not plugins I might be I forget where it is I'm not going to drive everybody through it right now we'll find a link to removing third-party audio devices zoom audio device is the one and we'll find that link for you but that might be part of part of the answer here so it's just removing that and any others that you find also look at any third-party devices that you have or third-party apps that you have that manipulate audio so that would be things like boom which is a thing from I forget the name of the company but it enhances the way your audio sounds but again it's messing with core audio if you're running loopback if you're running sound source I mean those last two are from Rogamiba Rogamiba like if anybody on the planet knows core audio it's Paul Kaphasis and his team at Rogamiba like they are definitely experts as far as audio on the Mac goes but it doesn't mean that there aren't problems occasionally especially if they're crashing into other things so check are you running anything like that any audio enhancement things that might be an issue or do you have any truly physical you know audio devices plugged in and that could be your dock right if your dock's got a headphone jack on it that's another audio device so try for a day without one of those devices plugged in my my gut from reading your email is that it's like the zoom device and something's not right like maybe there was an update that's now conflicting and when you run zoom it you know it can't see it tries to and then you know twists everything and nots but that's where I would start looking is you know maybe check Lingon again to see if you have any any startup items that are related to audio that's where I would look alright you have any thoughts my friend you're the audio guy I am the audio guy no and I'm looking at my setup here and yeah honestly how do things even get here so yeah there you know this is that question is the reason that we occasionally recommend a clean install that how do these things even get here right we're geeks we you know we spend a lot of time working to continue our expanding our understanding of these things right but even us like sometimes we look and we're confused about things like why is this here what is this like that profile that I found earlier in the show I mean when I first saw it I'm like oh my gosh what is this and then I you know did a little search and I was like oh I remember okay you know but just because you did something doesn't mean you remember why you did it until until you dig in right so yeah yeah so I'm actually looking here now and I'm kind of surprised that some of the things I see here like an output it shows my monitors type display port yeah you didn't put that there you plugged in your monitor yeah and your monitor added that so but there you go right like that's another audio device I didn't even know my monitors speakers in them so yeah I have okay I have one other issue question it'll be a geek challenge of my own I have a mono price display plugged in HDMI to a 2018 Mac mini so an Intel Mac mini it's the one Lisa uses in the house this display has speakers in it I know it I've gone into the display's menu and I've cranked up the volume it has HDMI that the Mac sees that there is an HDMI audio out device much like you just identified there and it doesn't matter what I do I cannot make the Mac make sound out of that device I select it and nothing happens has anybody else seen this let us know feedback at macicab.com I think that's that's going to do it for the show though that's what we have that's what I have anyway we'll see you next week we're doing something a little different next week we're doing some mini dives maybe some snorkeling is that a shallow dive I don't know or maybe they'll wind up being deep dives I don't know we'll find out together when we do this next week alright you got anywhere to send them my friend feedback at macicab.com I like it feedback at macicab.com let us know what you got we will either share it or answer it or share it and answer it whatever it takes the goal is for us all to learn five new things I hope you learned five new things this episode folks I certainly did and I've realized five things that I don't know and so I'm going to work on that for the next time and that's what keeps the show going so thanks so much for hanging out with us thanks for everything thanks for all your premium support thanks for everything macicab.com is where you can go to support us directly if you like and we and we like that it really does make a difference so thank you to that alright make sure you check out our sponsors the three I mentioned in the episode of course upstart.com mggtextexpander.com podcastandlinkedin.com mgg of course you can also go to macicab.com sponsors to see all those and all the others John any last words of wisdom to share with our friends here today um wisdom um oh I almost forgot don't get caught and we're out fun that was good let's see recovery modes to have an option for home folder repair that's a good question Kiwi Grimm I don't know and you're right Hog Molly if you have fast internet and use iCloud clean installs aren't as terrible as they used to be that's it's true that I'm always pleasantly surprised um did we lose our youtube stream or am I just