 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab episodes 792 for Monday, December 9th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all of your questions, all of your tips, everything that you mail in to feedback at macgeekab.com, and we mix it all together into an agenda where each of us will learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include linode.com-mgg, ancestry.com-mgg, and barebones.com. We'll talk about the details of what you're going to find at each of those URLs in a few minutes here, but for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton, and here in Oddly Warm and Rainy, Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's Oddly Warm and Rainy here, too. In fact, it's not good because we had all that snow on Friday, I guess, and so now it's all pulling up in our driveways, which is, you know, fun. Yeah, but you were out on this little island, which I've been to as well. Yeah, I was down on Martha's Vineyard again over the weekend for a hockey tournament, which was fun. I will point out one thing, though, the hotel, this hotel, we had stayed there before in the same tournament previous years, and they had done some renovations. One of the things, they did a lot of things, including they put like these little things on the desk that have like three outlets and USB ports. All the outlets were used, the USB ports were ready for use, but it meant there was no outlet at the desk anywhere where you could charge your laptop, so I thought that was an oversight. In fact, there were many things in the room where it was obvious that someone like put stuff in because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one had actually like stayed in the room to figure it out, but that's OK. One of the things that they did, though, was they put Chromecasts on every TV in the hotel, which I've experienced before and is blissful because you just like connect to the Chromecast and then you can stream either directly from your laptop or your tablet. You can do it from your iPad. Most many apps will support. Obviously, Apples won't, but pretty much any other video player app, including like Plex will support streaming to a Chromecast. And the cool part is with something like Plex, once it picks it up, it'll stream directly from your Plex server. So you're not even like streaming through your iPad, which is cool, but they had not configured them. So there were all these unconfigured Chromecasts, one in every room. And what do Chromecasts do when they're not yet configured? They broadcast a Wi-Fi access point so that you can connect to them and configure them, which meant there was, you know, seventy five Wi-Fi access points that were completely useless, barfing all over the hotel's Wi-Fi in every way, shape and form, making it very difficult to get a signal through. So, you know, at least there was that. So if you're setting those things up, like finish setting them up or unplug them all until you've set them up because otherwise it's really confusing. And, Dave, you know, you help me see the light. What did I like that I know you mentioned Plex? Oh, yeah, as I finally threw down the gauntlet and I finally installed Plex because you were kind enough to share your Plex with me. To me, it's just magic how that works. Plex is great. I mean, it figures out all the I mean, it figures out all the firewall stuff and all that, but it's like. Yeah, you you shared your stuff with me. And then so I set it up on the Synology. It was pretty straightforward. There were a couple of quirks I had to you have to set the right permissions. So the only thing is if you're going to set up Plex on a Synology. Number one, you want to make sure that Plex is an authorized user of the video library you you want to share. And then number two, the path to your content is not entirely obvious. So in my case, it was like slash volume one slash movies, which is where I had my stuff that I use a video station. OK, OK. Yeah, you have to know where your stuff is, for sure. If if you're well, regardless of where you're setting it up, if you're setting up Plex on your Mac, you have to know where your stuff is there, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, right. But the permissions was important, too. And actually, so initially, I just set up read only permissions on that directly directory. And then when I was fiddling with it at some point and I want to delete contents, what I do is I'll rip content. And then when I watch it, I'll get rid of it and I try to. And it was like, well, no, you can't do that. And it's like, oh, because I didn't give right permissions. So yes. Now, there are a lot of people, Plex experts in the various communities and forums and Reddit channels and all of that stuff, where they highly recommend only setting read only access on your Plex library, just in case something goes haywire with Plex. You don't want your library getting wiped out by, you know, some update or you give someone the wrong permissions and then they can start deleting things from your library. So a lot of folks will choose to do exactly what you did originally, which is only give it read access because there's an argument to be made, especially if you're someone who believes in sharing your Plex library for other people to enjoy streaming from. Well, why would you delete something if you're if you're going to be sharing with others because then you don't like then others can't stream the things that you've that you've got. And you've got plenty of storage on your Synology. So maybe deleting things isn't, you know, isn't necessary. In theory, could you if you wanted to, could you delete content from my library because I now gave right permissions to the Plex user? I don't believe you gave me permissions for that. I think the only people that have permissions for that are people that you add to your Plex household, which is different than just sharing your library for streaming only. So, no, right. And then another thing about we're just in tangent mode here from the beginning. But Plex recently announced something kind of cool, right? That is true. In fact, I had this queued up for a cool stuff found later in the show. But while we're here, no, you're it it it's crazy because Plex now just added ad supported video on demand and for free, right? So you can go and watch and they've got a ton of different movies available in this in this thing. And so you just sign in and go a free Plex account will do it. I don't you don't need a Plex pass or anything like that. It's just free and ad supported. And they're they're adding stuff to it all the time and they've got movies out there and all that stuff. So if you're not yet a Plex user, this is a good opportunity to perhaps get started there, because maybe you'll be able to use Plex instead of perhaps one of the for pay video on demand services. So depending depending on what they have available to you. Right. I mean, is that even legal? It's ad supported. I'm sure it's legal. I'm sure they have rights. I'm sure they have the rights for it and and they're paying for those rights. And the way they're they're funding that is through the ads that appear when you go and choose to watch one of these movies. So yeah, no, I'm sure they're doing it on the up and up. I that yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, don't get me wrong. Like the people at Plex are are are one of the things I love about them is that they just try all kinds of stuff. And and that's why the Plex platform has grown the way it has grown. But I I've never known them to try something that's like against the law. So no, I'm sure they have all the rights and everything for this. Yeah. No, I'm pretty stoked about this. It was it was it immediately went on my cool stuff found list when they announced it this week. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know what else is cool stuff found? John is BB edit from bare bones software. And as I mentioned in the intro to the show, they are one of our sponsors for this week. BB edit is one of those apps that is always open on my Mac. I use it to manage the text file that we use to build the show notes for this show and then the other podcasts that I do. I use BB edit to do all my programming. And what's cool about BB edit is when when you're using it for programming is it can FTP directly to and from your server. So if you are reading and writing files, you know, live on a server or on a test server or something, BB edit can do it. It can also deal with your version control system. So it can read and write directly to that. And it's it's built by programmers for programmers, but also non programmers. And one of my favorite new things in BB edit now is the whole they call it their grep. I call it their regular expression library and evaluator. If you don't know all the right syntax to use for regular expressions, BB edit 13 now has all of this assistance built in, including like a little I call it a playground, right, where you can put a regular expression in and see how it matches in a file live. So as you're making edits, it shows you how it's working, and that is to me the easiest way to see what's going on there. So you got to check it out. Go to barebones.com and you can download it there and get a 30 day trial. And then you can buy directly there. Or of course, BB edit is now back in the app store, the Mac app store. And so you can you can subscribe there if you want to check it out. Barebones.com. And thanks to barebones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, while we're at it, why don't we just do a bunch of tips? How's that sound? Good. Fantastic. Landtastic listener, Bill. I love that I get to learn things like this because I had no idea. Bill writes, he says, did you know the answer is no, that the camera adapter allows for direct photo transfer from iPhone to iPhone. He said he wound up in the Apple store because his daughter's phone was having some problems and long story short. They try they decided to replace it instead of repair it because they were kind of going to do this anyway. He says we were trying to sync photos to the cloud because the phone hadn't yet been backed up and he didn't want his daughter to lose all her photos moving to a new phone. And the tech setting up the new phones said he had a better solution. He plugged both phones into the camera adapter. And one of them appeared as a you know, a camera to the other and it just let him slurp them all in. Two point three gigs in about 30 minutes, he says. So useful for anyone that has the camera adapter for which is essentially just a USB adapter. For the for the iPhone. So the lightning to USB camera adapter, and we'll put a link to the to that in the show notes so that you can go buy one. But I had no idea that you could do this with with an iPhone. So pretty good, right? So I'm looking here. Yeah, so I think I have the device you're talking about lightning to USB three camera adapter for thirty nine dollars. That's right. Yep. So it's lightning and then it has two ports. One looks to be is that a USB port? Correct. And then the other is another lightning port. And then the other is another lightning port. Well, no, the Apple lightning to USB camera adapter has one USB port on it, unless I'm right, unless I've got this wrong. Right. So it's got a US it's got a lightning plug on one end to plug into your phone and then a USB port on the other end. Yeah, it looks like it has two ports on the other end, though. The one you have one of these. No, but I'm looking at the Apple's product here. All right. Well, let me put a link in the show notes. Maybe you're looking at the older version of this, but the lightning to USB camera adapter is. And I just put it in the chat room at MacGicab dot com slash stream for everybody who's listening along and OK. Well, I put a link to the one that I found that no, you may know. Yeah, you I like this. Yeah, the one you found has right. It has lightning pass through on it. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the USB three one. Yeah, but this has USB three, whereas the one I found only has USB two. So I will replace my link with yours. That's pretty good. Nice, man. Good. Hey, we all learn at least at least five things. Yeah, I know. I just I just got like three in that one, you know, one question. So yeah, that's pretty good. Pretty good. Thank you, Bill. Good stuff. That's what we love about the quick tips. Speaking of quick tips. Listener Tony reminds us or tells us depending on whether you knew this already, that you can get precise control of the sound volume on your Mac by holding down the shift and option keys while adjusting the volume up and down with the with the buttons either on your keyboard there. He says it divides each notch of volume into four subnotches, which really helps if you're using very sensitive or efficient earphones. He says so. And Tony points out that it works best listening to his two teachers talking podcast. He says it's not bad with Mac Geek Gab either. So thanks for that, Tony. That's good stuff. I'll put a link to two teachers talking in the show notes. I like that I'm able to say that without twisting my tongue up because that's it feels like an exercise there. Two teachers talking. Like, that's a little bit of a it's almost like saying Mac Geek Gab. Like, that's a thing I can say all the time now, but it was not easy to learn how to make my mouth work so that it just rolls off the tongue as it will. So, but, you know, there you go. I was talking about that with Leo actually on his show. He's like, how do you say that? Like, well, like anything, a little bit of practice. M cubed, M cubed. No, MG cubed. MG cubed. Yeah. Yeah, MG cubed. I like it. MG cubed. Yeah, you know, I'm trying to remember, but I was using an app the other day and now I can't remember. I thought it was the QuickTime Player, but it actually showed an extended. It showed like the volume bar and went to a certain point, but then it seemed to offer maybe it was VLC or something like that. Yeah. I'll have to research it. But in the past, the QuickTime Player used to be able to let you go into, like, I'll call it overdrive is that, all right, if you want to go beyond 100 percent, we'll let you, you know, just be careful and don't ruin your ears. But huh. Well, let us know when you find it. The VLC definitely gives you a lot of granular control over a lot of things. I think audio is one of them, but yeah. Good. All right. More quick tips, including one from listener Paul, who says he was he was pointing out while he was trying to solve a problem because he found that every window that opened in the finder opened in a new tab. And I guess he had his old machine set that way and he wanted his new machine set that way and couldn't find out how to do it. Well, it turns out you can do this, but it is a system wide preference. It is not just for the finder. If you go to system preferences, doc prefer tabs when opening documents. You have three options. You can set it to always in full screen only, which is the default or manually. And if you set it to always, I have found that there is no way I can get a new window to open directly. Everything unless there is no window open. And then, of course, a new window open. But if a window for whatever app is open, and the app supports tabs, like I had forgotten that mail supports tabs for compose windows. And so suddenly, all of my new messages were appearing in the same compose window. If it's got a window open that supports tabs, all new windows will just be, you know, shoved in as tabs of the existing front, the frontmost existing window, which can be handy. If you need, though, to have one of those tabs open in its own window, just grab the tab with the mouse and drag it out. And then you can have it as its own window. So it's still possible to free it into a window. It just won't happen by default. But I thought that was a pretty cool one. I had no idea that that was even a thing. And it's sitting right there in preferences. So pretty good, huh? Finder with tab finder with tabs. That's right. Yeah. I remember your that was I chat with tabs. Was the was the was the the thing that we used to use the reverb. I remember you always used to go on about that because. Yeah. Well, you know, I chat with tabs. There you go. OK. The reverb on that. I did have the reverb on that. Yeah, I guess it doesn't send it across. Oh, no, I have the reverb not sent across to you because you would hear your channel through the reverb on a slight delay. And that might be weird. So yeah, that's why that's why you don't hear it. That's right. Yeah. All right. A couple more here. Scott writes in about iOS 13's optimized charging. He says, I woke up one evening and heard my phone buzzing. I was concerned since I have do not disturb turned on and only my favorites are able to get through. Although it turned out to be a mistake. He says, I became concerned when I noticed that the phone was only 80 percent charged. It had been a few hours and my phone, an iPhone eight plus should have been at 100 percent. I purchased the phone in August, but was concerned that maybe the battery was bad. I went into settings, battery, battery health to check on the battery at the bottom of that screen is a setting optimized battery charging that was turned on under the setting, it says to reduce battery aging. iPhone learns from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80 percent until you need to use it. In the few months I have used the phone, it has learned that I will plug it in at night and not plug it in and not unplug it until around 7 a.m. I have not looked up this new feature, but apparently it is trickle charging the battery. One morning I was up early and unplugged the phone at about 6 a.m. at about 98 percent charged. This was not a problem and the phone lasted almost all day as it usually does. He says, this must be something new in iOS 13 and an interesting yet subtle feature. Yeah, it I didn't quite until I got Scott's email. I had known about this, but I didn't quite grok how it was doing what it was doing. But yeah, it looks like it gets the phone up to 80 percent and then stops charging until you get close to the time when it thinks you're going to unplug it and then it gets it the rest of the way so that you're not adding to that. You're not leaving a phone plugged in at 100 percent for any significant length of time. Whereas with prior up until now, it would charge up to 100 percent and stay that way all night long, trickle charging. So this delays the the final, you know, 20 percent of charging until it knows you are approaching the time that you're going to unplug it, which is smart. It will save the battery. It'll keep it from overheating and all that good stuff and not add to the cycles. I know it's pretty smart, right, man? No. No. As the horse in Ren and Stimpy would say, no, sir. I don't like it. It's good. When I saw it, too, the thing is, I saw it on the battery screen one time and I'm like. I guess I kind of understand the intent, but yeah, it. As Scott pointed out, it kind of is a surprise. It's like, why are you acting this way? Well, to be fair, I got notifications on my phone after I upgraded to iOS 13 that this was turned on. I didn't quite understand what it meant, but I had not. OK, that's interesting. It definitely told me for a while. Like, I think it told me about it wasn't right away after I got iOS 13. It was, you know, maybe a week or two later after it had learned what it should do and it decided, OK, now I understand your pattern. Now I can I can manage this for you, which I think is smart. I do like it. Yeah. And the reason I like it is now that I understand what it's doing, I can say that it has never I have never gotten caught without enough battery. OK, so it seems smart. But I mean, I agree with you. Anything that that sort of takes control away has the potential. Like if let's say now I wonder, oh, so here's the thing. Let's say I knew that I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to go to the airport and I was going to spend all day traveling and wanted the phone, you know, fully charged. If I used the phone as my alarm and set it to 4 a.m., I wonder if it would let it charge fully to that point. I would not be surprised to find that the answer is yes. That if you have an alarm set, it's like, all right, make sure the phone is fully charged before that alarm goes off. I bet that's the case. I don't want to try it because I had a long weekend and I don't want to have an alarm go off at 4 a.m. tomorrow. But maybe later this week, I'll check it out. Good, maybe. I don't know. Good. Good. OK. And OK. Yeah. I think you got something good coming up. We have all kinds of good stuff coming up, man. It's like there's all kinds of stuff like one of our sponsors. That is another sponsor. It is Ancestry DNA, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show is not only a sponsor for this episode, but it's a truly meaningful gift with the power to connect families over the holidays, right? Because every family has a story and Ancestry DNA can reveal ethnic origins and provide historical details that bring your unique family stories to life, right? It's a gift that can bring your family closer to your origins and therefore to each other. And you can kind of see how the details of your family's past can spark new conversations with family today. It makes for good like holiday dinner table conversation. And it can really be one of those meaningful gifts as opposed if you don't know what to get somebody and they're in your family. This is a great way to do it. 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And I found some relatives that were already in the system and we were, you know, able to connect to each other that way and sort of flesh out everything. It's cool. So go to ancestry.com slash mgg. See, I can say it and and get that special holiday gift. No, seriously, it's good. Our thanks to Ancestry DNA for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Jesse, you know, I I I I wasn't sure whether to put this in as a tip or a question because Jesse asked a question and then answered it. So the question, as Jesse wrote, was I just started having an annoying issue with my Apple Watch every hour. It gives me a double tap buzz. I don't remember setting this up. And the research I've done says this is an hourly tactic chime everywhere in my settings says this is turned off. I've done the usual off and on to the setting and power cycle, the watch and my phone to no avail. And then several hours later, Jesse kept on the bullheaded persistence path and followed up and says, somehow in my watch's accessibility settings, chimes were turned on to do hourly. So I've turned that off and the problem went away. So it's yet another one of those things we're checking into the accessibility settings can reveal a, you know, in this case, you know, the solution to a problem, but it can also reveal some cool features that might be applicable to you, even if you wouldn't be the type of person if you don't have any, you know, disabilities or any scenarios in your life that would make you think, Oh, I need to go check out accessibility. Well, that may be true, but there might be something in accessibility that is helpful to you. In fact, the whole now it's it's dark mode, but the whole invert colors and then smart invert, all of that was inside accessibility until it became, you know, dark mode and and I think it's still in accessibility, not dark mode, but the the invert colors and all that. So there are there are cool things. It is it is one of those sort of hidden gems of both iOS and MacOS is to dig around in accessibility there. So thank you for that, Jesse. It's a good good little transition from quick tips to questions, because it sort of does both. Good thoughts on that, John. Um, not really every now and then I'll have something asked to what is it? Full keyboard access or something like that? Yeah. And that's very inaccessibility. But yeah, I'm with you is that there's some it's probably worth everybody's time to go into accessibility and just look at all the things they do there. Yeah. Some of it is as you pointed out, Dave, not necessarily meant for people that have disabilities. It's just enhanced control of of the system. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Cool. All right, man. You want to take us to Michael? All right, Michael, Michael has a good one here. Things have changed, Dave, and that bothers me. Change. We're humans. We're naturally change resistant. We need to hack our brains and change is not good. Change is terrible. No, no, it traumatizes everybody. No, change can be good. It's just it's not it can be. It's not uniformly bad, nor is it uniformly good. But it is. It is the one thing we can count on is change. So, yeah, yeah. So. Michael Ritzen and says, John and Dave, hi, I just bought my wife an 11 inch iPad Pro amazing machine and a pencil gen two. How do I register them under my stuff? I found a page at Apple support, check coverage, but could figure how to couldn't figure out how to add new stuff. I contact the support through chat and all they did was try to sell me Apple care. OK, all right. And Michael brings up a good point in the day, even the past. So Apple has changed their product registration infrastructure. And I think it's not for the better. In my humble opinion, OK, but so this this is this is something that you're putting on the list of bad change. Um, it changes. It used to be a straightforward process. So the thing is, in the past, you go to a page, you would put in the serial number of your Apple device. OK, unless Apple did it for you and they would do that. So I've bought Max in the past. And the thing is, if you bought it from Apple, they would automatically register your product under your Apple ID. And it was like, hey, that that that makes sense. OK, but now it's a bit more obscure. So anyways, from what I can tell Dave, what you have to do now is or what happens now is that once you get your new shiny or refer Apple device, you have to sign in through your iCloud account. OK, with your Apple ID. OK. With your Apple ID. And once you do that, then your device magically becomes registered and becomes part of a list of your devices. OK, now you can see that. So if you go, so Apple has one website here, mysupport.apple.com. And there's another site here. View your Apple devices and Apple care plans on my support, which is another article that we will link to in our notes here. But as far as I can tell, Dave, those that's how you currently register your devices. Oh, interesting. OK. And then the way you see the devices, so you may ask, how can I see them? So you can see them via the web page that I mentioned here. But also, which is kind of nice. So here, I'll I'll I'll give a thumbs up to Apple. So right now in the current operating system, if you go to your Apple ID. Hmm, whether it be on iOS or Mac, if you go to the Apple ID section, you're going to notice a list of all your devices like right now. I'm looking here and it has my Mac mini, my Apple TV, my iPad. My iPod touch, my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. And they're all listed in this category. So that's kind of nice. Yeah. So I think the answer to the question here. So one, there is a page you can go to to Apple to see all your registered devices. But but again, as far as I know, logging in under your Apple ID registers your device. And actually, when you think about it, that's probably kind of cool. That is kind of cool. I wonder how it like, let's say you have. I'm trying to think, is there a scenario where you would want to manually add a serial number to your iCloud or to your Apple ID, which, as you pointed out, is the same as your iCloud account without signing it into that account. Or yeah, huh, I guess not. I mean, I'm trying to think like, would I want let's say I mean, both my kids are 18 now, so it's all different. But, you know, let's say, you know, my kids were 10 and I bought them, you know, a MacBook or something. What if I wanted them to be able to sign into their iCloud account? But I wanted to manage their. I wanted the MacBook to be on mine because I wanted all the support requests to go through mine and all of that stuff would, you know, would that is that a realistic scenario? Probably not. I'm kind of, you know, I'm grasping at straws here. But yeah. And you can. Can I remove a device from my account? I don't know that. Yes. And actually, that's you read Michael's mind because Michael said he wrote back and said, hey, thanks. That's what I thought, you know, as far as logging in to register a device. But here's an here's an image that I want to show you because my wife's laptop appears on my page and it's not registered under my Apple ID. Would it be possible to log it to my Apple light, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. And here's the answer. If you look at the list of devices under your Apple ID, Dave. Yeah. Unless it's the device that you're currently using. You're going to see at the bottom of the description of the device remove from account so you can boot devices from one Apple ID. OK, so that's in Catalina on on your Mac or iOS 13. What's interesting and you're totally right because I have this the this loner MacBook Pro that Apple had loaned me, but I've since shipped it back and it's still showing up in my Apple account and it at my support or my devices, you know, dot Apple dot com and and so I went in there and I cannot remove it while I'm logged in on the web. But I can do it on my on my iPhone and iOS 13. So I'm going to go ahead and and do that. So, you know, OK, now, the final question he has and I don't know the answer to this because I don't have one of these. Sure. But he he said, I also have an Apple pencil. How do I register that? And the thing is, I'm not entirely clear. I don't believe that's registered with your Apple ID. He apparently he claims that is not the case. OK. All right. And then he doesn't see it. That's what I'm saying. It does not get registered with your Apple ID. Now, the only thing. Oh, OK. Sorry. That's OK. As for the pencil. So number one and I found a discussion thread at Apple. So first, how do you fricking get the serial number of your Apple pencil? So for the first gen, they're like, look at your receipt. Wow. OK. For Apple pencil to apparently if you if you screw off the tip of it and you peek into it, you can see the serial number. Some people could see the serial number. I you might need to use your iPhone's probably pretty tiny magnifying glass. Yeah. The thing is, Apple does have another site where I'm wondering what would happen. So my suggestion to him was try this. But Apple also has a site. Check coverage dot Apple dot com where if you enter a serial number. Hmm. Something will happen. Sure. In my case, for all my devices, because they're all registered or Apple knows about them, it's like, oh, OK. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, yeah, you have an old dusty. I have old machines. Sure. And upgrade them someday. I promise people. But. But it tells you the support status, though I'm wondering if you enter the serial number of a device that it does not know about if it's going to. Offer to bond it to your. Your device list. Right. I don't know. Do you have an Apple pencil? You know, it's funny you ask that. I have one in that I never gave it to anyone else. But at the moment and for the last several months, I could not tell you where it is. I do not use it often. And so it took me a while to realize that it was missing. And I'm sure it's, you know, I'm sure it's like like anything. It's somewhere obvious. So no, I don't have a way to test this. No, sorry. Yeah. Alas. All right. So. So I guess in summary, I appreciate Apple's effort to kind of make this a seamless process and that, you know, you just log in and it's like, oh, hey, you know, hi, here's the device, here's the serial number. Though they've changed it. And I don't know about you, but I kind of look back to the good old days where, you know, you enter your serial number and it registers it under your Apple ID. And that's not. No, I can see that game anymore. Yeah. And I get why they don't because they it's better if your stuff is registered and by having it register automatically that ensures that that it's going to be registered in part of your account and all of that stuff, all of the the benefits that come with having that track record of it being registered to your account and all of that stuff is is there. So I get it. I get why it's happening automatically. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So where are we here? Oh, yeah. All right. Well, sometimes, you know, Katnaps go on a little bit too long, John, and that is where Scott is going to take us next. Hey, John and Dave, Scott here, a long time, first time, like many other listeners, I was anxiously waiting for the new Mac mini and upgraded my 2012 to the 2018. And overall, it's been working fantastic, except for the couple problems. One is I have a continuous power issue. And what I mean by that is if I leave my computer on for a while, I'll come back and the screens will be off. But I can tell the computer still on I can hear activity running, but for whatever reason, it won't wake up. And there'd be many times when I turn my computer off and I go to turn the computer on, the computer boots up. But there's no nothing that gets popped on to the screen. And I'll have to do a hard reset. I'll do that a couple of times. And a lot of times the reset password screen will come up and I'll click restart and it'll come up usually. And so it's I can have my computer running for four days sometimes. And then it's basically blanked out. And then sometimes I can go and then wake up the next day and it only lasts less than 24 hours. And the same thing happens, which gets pretty frustrating because there's times I want to remote log into the machine. And when I'm away on vacation and I'm able to do it for a day or so. And then after that, it just doesn't happen. And when I came back on the last trip after a week, I wasn't able to remote log in after a few days. But when I came home, I could hear activity going on the computer. But the screens were off. There was nothing that I could do to bring the machine up. And when I tried to do a remote login, still couldn't get in. So I am completely baffled and wonder if anybody has any insight for me. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's interesting. OK, so there are always when when, you know, sleep happens too deeply. There are a few things to look at. You've ruled out that the system is actually sleeping. In fact, it sounds like it's in a some level of a crashed state because if it were even if it were in what Apple calls hibernate mode, where the system has saved the contents of memory out to disk and then effectively shut itself off. If it were in that mode, you could still turn it back on and it would it would restore back to where it was. But that's not happening. And because of that, I'm thinking that you. Well, I am fairly certain that your system is in, as I said, some level of a crashed state, you're hearing something. It could just be a fan that's still going. Those Mac minis don't have rotational drives in them. So it's not the spinning of a drive that you're hearing. It would almost have to be a fan unless there's something on the motherboard that's short circuiting or whatever. And that that would be bad, too. So that's I'm just kind of framing my my thought process here with with a machine that's that's crashed. There are some likely culprits, oftentimes peripherals, USB peripherals in particular, can be the things that either cause a machine not to sleep correctly or not to wake up correctly. So thinking about what you have plugged into that machine and perhaps even trying it with things not plugged in, especially via USB would be a test. Another thing, you know, we always say here when it sounds like hardware, but it's not hardware. Sometimes it's the SMC. So resetting your SMC on that machine would would probably be quite frankly, would be the first thing I would try because that may just solve it. It would not surprise me that system management controller is responsible for all kinds of things power related. And you are dancing very close to power related issues here when it comes to sleeping and all of that. So that would that would be. Yeah, that would be what I would check. You you could also check, John, right? There's the PM set command in the tunnel. That's where I was going to go. Yeah, if you do what PM set dash G. Right. And I actually just ran into this. So the thing is my aging MacBook Pro 2012. I bought a cheap knockoff battery that within less than a year was below 80 percent and fruit juice told me this. It keeps track of this, which is great. So I'm like, man, you know, all right, it's cheap battery. It was like 50 bucks. So like, you know what? Let me throw down the coin and get a good battery. So I got one for my fix it. And it was great because I get it. I put it in the machine, you know, it's not hard on this series of machine and it reported 100 percent, one hundred and seven percent of capacity. So they gave me more than I paid for. So, you know, we love I fix it. But then I probably shouldn't have done this, but I reset the SMC because I just wanted to make sure to calibrate it properly. And then weird things were happening. But I think I fixed them. And as you pointed out, Dave, PM set dash G will show you the parameters and apparently resetting the SMC, put this particular machine in a weird state. And there are a couple of parameters that I would suggest our listener looks at. So one is hibernate mode. And you only be careful about that, depending on how you set that. So if you go to the terminal and you do a man PM set, it'll explain to you what all these parameters mean. But hibernate mode is one of them that I had to change to another value in order to get it to act the way I expected it to, which is when I put it to sleep, it goes to sleep and it doesn't shut down. And when I turn it on, I have to hit the power button. So right. So I would I would look here at, I mean, hibernate mode, as I mentioned, should work, though, if it is set to hibernate mode, you're you're not going to be, you know, that it should wake up. However, if your sleep image is damaged and it is set to hibernate mode, right? Then that in and of itself could be a problem. So one thing to do would be to, like I was saying, go to PM set space dash G and look to see is hibernate mode set to zero or is it set to one? If it's set to one, then you might want to go and whack the contents of whatever is listed for hibernate file, right? And just make sure that that's not there anymore. Again, hibernate mode in and of itself is not your problem because it works, right? John didn't prefer it, but it won't leave your machine in a state where it can't be woken up or turned back on. And your machine is not off, right? That's the issue with Scott here is his machine is on unresponsive. So it is crashed at some level. But yeah, yeah, I think the SMC would be the place I would start and see if that solves it. If not, the next thing to do would be to pull power connections, you know, connections, not power connections, that would be bad. The Mac mini doesn't have a battery that would be able to power it. So leave it plugged in, but pull USB connections and things like that to see if if you've got something, you know, that's going to maybe you can, you know, you can also try looking in the console. These sorts of things are tough to see in the console, of course, because the machine is crashed. So it may not have been logged to the console when the issue happened. So might be hard to I wouldn't rely on the console to be that may tell you something and if it does great, but it probably won't in this scenario. Right. And then kind of a little tangent here. Yeah, apologies. But the current console sucks. I'm sorry. Yeah. And we actually had a listener. We're working through a power issue that he had. But the thing is if you want to get some decent information, there's a utility called consolation that will display or let you search the system logs for data in what they call, I believe, syslog format, which is much more comprehensible to normal humans. Yes. And you want to search for events that have to do with power D. Power D is the power daemon or daemon, depending on you want to pronounce it, that the Mac OS uses to handle power events. So that could be another path to take. So that's getting pretty geeky. But then, you know, we're pretty geeky. That's what we do here. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Thank you, Scott. That was a good good place to go here. All right. We have a question from Mace who writes, did I do a rip van Winkle and wake up in a new world? Well, maybe. I mean, we are talking about naps that last a little to that go a little too deep, right? So maybe, but prob's not. He says, I could have sworn I used to play MP3s on my MacBook Pro once upon a time. I downloaded a bunch of MP3s from a music tutorial website. And when I double clicked on them, the music app opens, but nothing plays. And I see no evidence of a song within the app. Import also seems to do nothing. Are these files corrupt? Does music no longer support MP3s? How do I play MP3 files in Catalina? And he sent me some of these, which was great because I was able to dig in. So what I first noticed was that I had no trouble playing them in the finder via QuickLook, and they also worked great in the QuickTime player. So it truly was an issue with the music app. So gave us somewhere to go with this. I, like Mace, though, could not get these files to be added to the music app, let alone play, they just would not add. So I went back to QuickTime player and looked a little more deeply. In QuickTime player, you can do Command-I and get more details about your file. And it will show you things like the format of the file, where it lives on the disk, the data size, sometimes it will show you the data rate. As I looked in QuickTime player, even though the file ended in dot mp3, the format showed that it was an AAC file. So, yeah. It's crazy. Well, it's fine. I mean, you know, they're music files, somebody just misnamed them. No problem. Well, it seems like the music app is a little more particular about the file name matching the actual contents of the file. Whereas iTunes and QuickTime and QuickLook in the Finder don't seem to care. So I changed the file name on these files to end in dot m4a, which is the correct extension for an AAC, or at least an incorrect, a correct extension. I don't know why I said, and then QuickTime player, actually, when I opened it in QuickTime player again, it started showing me more information because QuickTime player was parsing it as an AAC file and showing me the data rate, which it was not showing me when it opened as an mp3. And once I changed the file name from dot mp3 to dot m4a, boom, the music app in Catalina happily slurped it in and, you know, uploaded it to iCloud and all that stuff. So I deleted it because I didn't want to keep your files, Mike. But, but yeah, that's that's that's how it goes. So it seems like, I mean, this music app, it certainly uses a lot of code from from iTunes and a lot of modules from iTunes, of course. But it is it a, you know, rewritten app in many, many ways. And it certainly seems like the importer, at least, is this. I don't know if I had somehow, if I had, I'm curious, if I had had these files in there and they were migrated over from iTunes, what would have happened? That would be an interesting little experiment that to see whether it's truly that it won't play them or if it's just the importer that has a problem with it. But at least with these, we will we will never know. So. Well, you could know. Could I. I'm going to give you a tip, Dave, you know, we promise five. I think we're we're. Well, the idea is we go beyond five, just in case somebody comes in knowing some of the things we're already talking about. So the thing is, you brought up an interesting scenario in that the content of the file differed from the file name extension. Yes. And I get that. You know, people make mistakes and all that. Oh, I'll name it, you know, mp3. It's like, even though it's an AAC, that's crazy. But what if you want to find out what's really in a file, Dave? And I'll tell you how to do that. If you go to the terminal, there's a command surprisingly or not surprisingly called file. And if you say file and you then navigate to a particular file, it will tell you what the OS or at least some part of the OS thinks that file is. So, for example, I just did this. So I went into my movies directory and I said file, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, dot move. And it's like, oh, well, this is ISO media, Apple QuickTime movie, Apple QuickTime, per end dot move slash QT close per end. So, huh, if you want to know what the OS thinks something is, that's one way to do it. I like it. And I think it's a pretty generic Unix like thing. I don't think it's Mac OS specific. But it's how the OS sometimes tries to figure out. But as we just saw, the OS sometimes get confused. Yeah, I wish I still had Mike's files around because it would be an interesting thing to try. But but I don't have them right here. So I'm not going to get myself distracted by these. But my guess is it would tell. Now, I don't know what it would tell me. It it it. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, Mike's son again. Well, no, we have him in the in the email box. We don't need him to send him again. We just but I just don't want to go digging around for him. I figured I just looked to see if I still had him on in my have a kill me folder on my desktop that any of the content the contents of it are. It's just a really handy folder to be perfectly honest, because I know the only things I put in there are files that I need while I'm working on them and not ever again. So like these, right? You know, if I'm aware that I'm working on it, great. But if tomorrow I encounter that file and I it still hasn't been deleted, it's like, well, I don't need it. I know that I don't need it because I would have moved it somewhere if I did. So the kill me folder is a handy, handy thing. And I have it synced. You know, I have it as a subfolder of my desktop. And so it syncs to all of my iCloud connected Macs and devices, which is it's great. That kill me folder has then has been saved. So it has saved me many times. So I like it. It's good. Keeps me from pluttering. Now it seems to be a. Yeah, I looked at the man page and it says BSD general. So it seems to be a feature BSD Unix. So yay, Unix. Yeah, BSD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Cool. I know at the beginning of the episode, I told you the email address to contact us. But I want to tell you it again because Mike Bombeck, the maker of carbon copy cloner, is going to be coming on the show right at the beginning of January, actually. And he's going to he, of course, will talk, will answer any questions about carbon copy cloner. And I've already got some of those queued up, which is great. But I also want to throw APFS questions at him because he is certainly one of the few people on the planet. He's certainly not the only one, but he's one of the few that really has spent some time to understand how APFS works, how snapshots work. He's really dug deep into this, obviously, to make carbon copy cloner compatible with all this stuff and to make it a valuable tool for all of us. But he just happens to be that expert. So I'm looking forward to chatting with him on the show. So make sure you send in all of your questions, but but including the APFS ones. And we've got a few weeks, but feedback at MackieCab.com. And just to get the triumvirate here, Dave, I'm pretty sure you set feedback at MackieCab.com. I did. I did. That is what I said, unless you're a premium listener, in which case, premium at MackieCab.com gets you to the front of the queue because we appreciate you and we appreciate everybody. But those of you that help support us directly, we do a little bit extra, even though we try to get to every question every week and most of the time we succeed. We've actually been doing pretty well lately. I'm going to pat us on the back for that. You know what else I'm going to do, John? I'm going to talk about our next sponsor, which is Linode at L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G, where promo code M-G-G two zero one nine gets you a $20 credit to use however you want at Linode. And the cool thing about Linode is they are there to provide you a server for whatever you need it for. You need a WordPress site. Great. No problem. You need a VPN server that's not in like a regular VPN cloud. No problem. You need a Minecraft server. No problem. You just need a Linux server that you can use for whatever. No problem. What's cool about Linode is if you want to go to the command line and you enjoy that, great. If you don't, great. Their cloud manager allows you to build all of the things I just talked about and more without ever touching a command line. WordPress, great. You go and select. You want a WordPress server and how you want it configured and what you want the username and password to be and all that stuff. Boom. Now you've got it. You didn't have to think about how to install a patchy in my SQL and PHP and WordPress and all. No, it's all taken care of for you. And the same can be true with your VPN server and your Minecraft server and all the other stuff. You've got to go check it out at, of course, Linode.com slash MGG. All of their servers run on SSD storage, which means they are fast. Even the lowest cost one, which is just five bucks a month, is still on SSD storage and on their 40 gigabit network, meaning it is fast, fast to get your data in and out. And the biggest bottleneck is always that disk. Well, on an SSD, that helps to alleviate that in a big, big way, as we know. So you can start with their smallest server, which is a nanode for just five bucks a month, which means with your $20 credit using promo code MGG2019, you can get four months for free. Go check it out. Linode.com slash MGG coupon code or promo code MGG2019. And our thanks to Linode, of course, for sponsoring this episode. Want to take us to Julie, Mr. Braun? Yes, our friend Julie, one of the Mac Cool Kids, least as far as I'm concerned. And I think she does the WordPress thing, too. But anyways, she's a WordPress expert. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. So anyways, Julie has a question and I think it's a good one. I have a new job that provided me with a new 13 inch MacBook Pro that has two Thunderbolt 3 per end USB-C, close per end ports. 1.4 gigahertz quad core, 8 gigabytes, 256 gigs, touch bar, yada, yada, yada. Is there any way to connect two monitors to it and not have the mirror? I have two Dell U2419HC USB-C monitors available to me that I'd like to use. It would be great to daisy chain them, but that has the two monitors mirroring each other. Is there a dock, a dongle, or perhaps a dance that is needed to make this work? Here's where you cut me off. And Julie's in Fargo, which is probably buried in snow right now because it's Fargo. Dave, even though this is not in my vein here, and I would like to draw on your expertise here, as far as I can tell, this should just work. And according to Mac Tracker, the display support for this machine is up to two displays. And I'm assuming they mean two external displays with 4096 by 2034 pixels at 60 Hertz, millions of colors, up to two displays with 3840 by 2160 at 60 Hertz, with over a billion, a billion colors. And display modes include dual display extended. So based on what Mac Tracker said, but not only Mac Tracker, because I also went and Apple has a dandy article called use multiple displays with your Mac. And it would seem that all you have to do in this case, Dave, is on the Mac, you go to the Apple menu, system preferences, click displays, and then click arrangement, which I actually do on my Mac mini here, my humble 2014 Mac mini. And that allows me to use two displays. Now, my setup is a little different in that I have one display on display port and another on an HDMI adapter, but it works. Yeah. Yeah. And then they say, follow the onscreen instructions, which I can't do because I don't have this machine, but it would seem to me that the only issue here is that particular machine has two. So number one, these ports, as far as I can tell, even though I don't have a machine with this port, it would seem that these ports do carry video. Oh, absolutely. Things. Yeah, they carry a display port over them. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, right. So I'm kind of scratching my head over this question here. It would seem to me that it just works. Now, the only downside is that this particular machine only has two ports. So if you hook up two monitors, then you're in the situation where, well, now what? Yeah, you can't you can't plug in power if you do that or or any peripherals, but also not power because it's just to. So yeah. Right. So I'm kind of drawing on your expertise is that I would think in this case, unless you just want to dedicate your two ports to a display. Which it sounds like you can do. You may want to get a dock or two. I don't know a single a single dock would be enough, I think, for this. And you're totally right. The Apple's tech specs on that MacBook Pro say that it simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display plus up to two displays with 4096 by 2304 resolution at 60 Hertz. So this should work. I see no reason why it wouldn't. And yeah, the quick way to test it would be to just plug both in before you buy a dock and all of that stuff. But but I am confident that it will confirm that and you're right. I think I, you know, I haven't used these ultra sharps, but they are they max out, they are not retina or UHD monitors. They are they max out at 1920 by 1080. So they're 1080p monitors, which means that they're well under the limits of the resolution that this would support. So that's good. As far as daisy chaining them, I'm not sure that I don't know that these are daisy chainable. There's only one USB-C display port on these. So I think, yeah, if you were to daisy chain out of this, the way these monitors work, it would just give you a mirrored version because it would that your Mac would actually only see it as one monitor. But if you plugged both of them in, it would see them. And then, like you said, you'd have to go into system preferences, displays, arrangement and uncheck the mirroring button or a checkbox. I hate that checkbox, by the way. Don't get me wrong. It's functional. I just don't understand why it's checked by default with every new display that I plug into. I I wish I could tell it. No, I don't. I think that's her fish shake here, perhaps. Maybe. Well, that's the default behavior. I I don't know. I looking at this monitor, it only has one USB-C port. So the only way to daisy chain would be to go like to USB-C on the monitor and then daisy chain out from display port. And that might actually hard at a hardware level might monitor. It might mirror these two things. It might have nothing to do with Mac OS. But even once you plug them, but it's worth trying. But I don't think because there's not a second USB-C port, I don't think it's going to translate back that there are two displays connected to this Mac, but it might. It's worth trying that. And then certainly worth going into, you know, just press display as arrangement and see what's there. But I don't think you're going to. I don't think that's going to do it. I think you're going to need, but just try plugging both of them in. And if it works, then get yourself a dock, you know, some Thunderbolt 3 dock, I'm trying to think of getting a USB-C dock would do it. I don't know that it would. I think you'd need a Thunderbolt 3 dock to pass full USB, full display port across it. But either way, you know, it's certainly doable so that you could have ports and power and all of that stuff, but all simultaneously. Yeah. Right. I guess the other question I have is if you wanted to use more than, so it sounds like this machine out of the box, if you hook up Thunderbolt slash USB-C monitors, you're OK. But what if you wanted to do more? I think we talked about some vendors that have, you know, like HDMI splitters and then, you know, fun stuff like that, which. I don't know if that's something that she may need or want, but yeah, yeah. And this actually, you know, Brian Monroe in the chat room here, actually several folks have been researching this, pointed out in the tech specs of this monitor that it will do power delivery up to 65 watts, which is more than that machine needs over the USB-C port. So and it also has USB 3.0. Two USB three ports on it. So this might you might be able to just plug this in and not worry about and then plug your other peripherals into the monitor. You might not need a dock. It's got one built into it. So like a mini doc or baby doc. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this might work and yeah. Yeah, I could do it. I like this. Huh. That's interesting. I'm a I'm a what's a friend Alan five, six, seven in the chat room also says external GPU, which I think that's what you were trying to say, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I don't think. Well, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. But but she wouldn't need an external GPU with this. That's great. Good. Cool. Fun. All right. Where are we here on time? Yeah. OK. Listener David writes and says, can you guys fact check something for me after the last iOS update? My personal domain emails won't work on Gmail. The ones I set up in settings are gone. I tried adding Gmail back. I removed it from my iPhone and then re-added it. But it looks like just a text field now instead of an arrow that will allow me to add new ones. All right. So what David is looking for is when you configure Gmail online, right? And this could be a standard Gmail account or a Google apps for domains account. It doesn't matter. You can go into settings and you can add other addresses, right? To your account. So let's say you have, you know, my username at Gmail.com. But then you also have, you know, like, you know, your custom domain, which you can map to Gmail and that can work out fine. And you can add it there. The problem is when you add a Gmail account to iOS's mail app, it will not let you add other email addresses, even though Gmail knows about them. So let's say I have my DavidMacObserver.com account attached to my Gmail account. I don't, but let's just go with that. If I add my Gmail account to my phone, I won't see my DavidMacObserver account. And that's frustrating because I want to be able to send from that mail coming in will get to me, but outbound mail won't. And this is a it's it's been a problem with iOS for a long, long time. But there is a workaround. So remove the account from your iPhone and instead of adding a Gmail account to your iPhone, add a standard IMAP account, IMAP. And you will need to put in the server names and all of that stuff. So it's a little more pedantic than just setting up a Gmail account. And the server name is imap.gmail.com, imap.gmail.com. And then for outgoing mail, it's smtp.gmail.com. Once you do that, then you'll put in your username and your password. And that at that point, it will. Create the account and from there, you can go into settings and mail settings and internet accounts and you'll see your email address there and you can tap on it and add more addresses. So I don't know why they don't let you do this with a Gmail account, but but they don't, but you can certainly do it with an IMAP account and add as many email addresses as you want. They have to be addresses that are also added to your Gmail account. Otherwise, you it iOS will try to send it, but it won't work because they're not authenticated to send over there. But otherwise, yeah, you're good to go. Pretty good, right, John? That's Google, you know. No, it's not. It has nothing to do with Google. It's Apple. I don't know why like Google's Gmail app lets you do this. Gmail lets you do it on the on the web. This is the iOS mail settings. Don't let you do this. OK. Yeah. And I don't get why it. It's but it's been like this for many, many versions of iOS. Do you mail on the Mac? Totally works totally fine. Mail on iOS. You got to do this little work because I thought Google kind of screwed up the IMAP thing is it was like IMAP, but not really IMAP. So well, that's true. Yes, but but that's not the issue here. Yeah, no, it's just that. OK, it's an iOS. Yeah, Apple's implementation of of connecting to Google. They just don't have that feature. And I don't get it like it would be it would be simple to turn it on. But anyway. Anyway, there you go. Cool. Let's go to listener Joe here and see if we can help him through this. Joe says, I purchased a flash drive chip from Mac sales for my customers late 2013 MacBook Pro. I got the kit that comes with an Envoy enclosure and cable to connect to the MacBook. I'd never replaced a flash drive before, but I was hoping it would be as straightforward as replacing a mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive. So far, that has not turned out to be the case. This is my plan was to place the MacBook Pro's flash drive into the Envoy, place the larger capacity flash drive, the new one, into the MacBook Pro, boot from the Envoy clone using carbon copy cloner from the Envoy to the internal drive and boom. He says, I tried this, but it didn't work. And he goes through a series of issues where he could simply not get the new drive to boot or could not get anything. It couldn't get the drive that he had moved out to boot in the external. Everything all right over there, Joe? Yeah. OK. All right. And so he had reset the PRAM. He had done all kinds of things. And this is one of those scenarios where in theory, what you just described should work. But diagnosing and troubleshooting it is going to be a bear and would likely require a USB boot stick to see if the drive even shows up in disc utility. Right. It's possible that the cable is bad. It's possible that the case is bad. Right. None of this stuff has been tested by you before. So they're all kind of question marks. What I generally do in these scenarios. So this is advice for everyone else and for Joe advice for the next time. Is when I'm going to swap out a drive with something larger. I take the new drive, the new one, the bigger, the bigger one in this case. And I put that in the external enclosure first. Then I boot from my internal, which I know works because it's always worked. And I clone to the external. Now, now that I've cloned to the external, I've already tested several things. That the cable works, that the enclosure works and that the drive itself works. Great. The next thing I do now that I've cloned to it is I boot to the new drive in the external. This saves me the hassle of ripping apart my computer just to find out whether or not all the parts are going to work. I boot from it, make sure it works, everything's good. Once I have a successful boot from that new drive on the external, then I shut everything down and at that point I swap the drive in. I know it's bootable. I know it works. The chances that something inside the computer is going to be incompatible with it are much lower and everything's good. I also know that the drive that I'm pulling out is likely to work in this external enclosure because I've already tested it that way and everything should be good to go. At this point, for a scenario like Joe's having or if you're having something similar, you need to get something to boot from in order to test any of this. And you might need an SMC reset, too, but I think you're going to need to create a boot stick of Catalina and try and boot from that just so you can get a view of what drives are attached to the system, at least as far as the system sees it should see both, but it might not. And that could be informative about where to go next. So there you go. That's my those are my thoughts on that. Any thoughts, John? No, I like your sequence of your strategy for making sure that you always have at least one bootable devices is very good. Yeah, I and it's that's you know, I'd like to take credit for actually thinking of that and I did, but only after doing it the other way several times and getting caught and like, oh, no, no, no, no. OK, next time, here's how I'm going to do this and make sure that I don't make any difficult to reverse changes like ripping open a computer and swapping a new drive in, I consider that very difficult to reverse. It's nonoptimal, especially when in the end, that's what I want anyway. So I like to test things before I before I make those, you know, again, they're not impossible to reverse, but difficult to reverse changes. Yeah, right. And it's not hard to, I mean, I have tons of external enclosures, mostly three and a half inch and a ton of three and a half inch external drives, which I will use to access, which you should always do. Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, I mean, I still have I still have backups of my pre Catalina drives on both of my machines because, you know, something just could go terribly wrong. Of course, have those or I want to play my old 32 bit games, which, you know, yeah, yeah, there you go. There you go. All right, let's talk routers because I like talking routers. And Eric asks, he says, should I turn on air protection on my ASUS router? Are there any downsides I should consider? So I'm going to zoom this out. What the heck is that? Right? Good question. Yeah. I'm going to zoom this out. I've never heard of it, tell you the truth. In order to kind of make it accessible to everybody. Air protection is ASUS's name for their intrusion protection system. Lots of routers, but certainly not all routers have this. Most mesh systems do not. Synology's mesh certainly does. Netgear has this. Obviously, ASUS has it. Synology has it. Some Linksys routers have intrusion protection. Eero has their. Eero does not have intrusion protection. No. Oh, no. OK, they got something different. Yeah, Eero has some filters, but not intrusion protection or or any of this sort of active stuff that's happening locally. Right. Yep. So here's my thoughts about IPS. And I will say this as someone that is actively running IPS. And I'm using IPS as a generic term. Different vendors name it different things as you've seen. But IPS in general, I run it here. Currently running it through my Synology router, although that may change and we might talk about that next week. But for now, I'm running it through my Synology router. Might change to a ubiquity Unified Dream Machine, but we'll we'll get there. That also has IPS in it. So I recommend turning it on unless doing so causes some kind of problem. And I realized that, of course, is the question that you were asking. So let me get a little more detailed here. Air protection or it's sorry, not air protection. AI protection is what they call it. But IPS in general includes some filters that might get in the way of sites that you want to browse. I see constantly and it kind of drives us crazy here at the family. A lot of sites are classified as adult that really aren't. But, you know, they seem to air on the side of caution in their databases. So something that might have had adult content or might have it in a small section of the site would would get the entirety of the site just wiped wiped from the system. So that can be frustrating. And you've got to see if there's an easy way to whitelist sites that you want to make sure you can access and all of that. That would be the first thing to look at. And that's the outbound protection. But it they tend to be part of one in the same, the intrusion protection and this outbound protection, the second and perhaps bigger thing is that any kind of system like this might run into CPU barriers that slow down your overall connection. So because in any of these kinds of things require. Packets to be analyzed on the way in and on the way out. And that requires CPU time. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, your WAN connection, the CPU may or may not be powerful enough in your router to handle this. So the first thing to do is to do a speed test before you turn this on. And just, you know, see where it is, make sure it it should in theory, especially if you're doing the speed test over ethernet. And that's really the best way to do this. Make sure that it's matching what you expect. If your speeds from your, you know, ISP are in the 100 to 200 megabit per second range, you're probably not going to run into any issues. If you've got gigabit speeds, you may run into issues. The faster your speeds, the more of a chance that your CPU and your router isn't going to be able to hold up. So do a test, then turn on intrusion protection and do the test again. And then wait 30 minutes and do the test one more time, because a lot of these things take some time to get fully up and running and set on your router. And if that, you know, if your speeds are not negatively impacted or are, but they are in a way that you could stomach and you want to you want to take the compromise and take it. Yeah. I appreciate having these things running. It's nice to know that, you know, there's something out there kind of watching my back, if you will. I like I like it, but it's personal preference. Some folks, you know, drives you crazy and it's built to get in the way. So the question is, how much does it get in your way? And those are the main two. Do the filters really screw you up and do the speeds get in your way? So, yeah. But like, Synology, it's interesting with SRM, which is their router software, when version 1.0 came out, their intrusion protection system would like, I couldn't even get it to go faster than 100 megabits a second. I was like, OK, well, this is a non-starter. No problem. And then they came out with 1.2 and they had completely rewritten or used a different engine. I don't know if they rewrote it or just found a better engine and now it can do up to gigabit speeds. No problem. So it's like, OK, great. I'll turn it on and leave it on. It's good, you know, so. Yep, fun. I wouldn't say it's mandatory, but if you've got it. Yeah, if you've got it on your router, I would I would try it. Yeah, see how crazy it drives you and then and then go from there. So. Yeah, my experience with this is so are a lot of local businesses offer free Wi-Fi and a lot of them put filters in place and it was hilarious because so our local stop and shop, which is a grocery store popular in the Northeast, has free Wi-Fi. And so I hooked into it and I was like, oh, you know, I want to check out the latest lottery stats and stuff like that. The thing is, they sell lottery tickets when I tried to access it, Dave. On my phone, it said you can't access this site because it's classified as gambling gambling. Sure. Well, they I mean, they probably just have your store sells lottery tickets. So why can't I access? Well, yeah, no, I get the irony for what you sell. But that's the kind of thing to be aware of. It, you know, is that that there are these blanket groups that usually when you're turning on this kind of thing, you can say, OK, I don't want chat sites. I don't care about dating sites. I do care about adults. You know, I'd care about redirectors. I mean, I tried to go to, you know, I tried to go to porn, whatever. Yeah. It was like, yeah, it's porn. And it's like, yeah, I get that. You don't want people surfing porn in the store. But, you know, for a product that you sell to me, you know, that's a bit overly restrictive. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah. Well, and they would have to whitelist that, right? So that you're not going to some poker site that might be, you know, against the law in your local locale, right? But you could go to, say, the lottery sites. So they would have to and they just didn't. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I guess, you know, liability, they don't want to get busted. Oh, you know, we allow underage person to access, you know, legal content. And it's like, yeah, I get that. Oh, that's true. I didn't even think about it from that standpoint. Yeah. Right. Right. Yep. But, you know, you don't want to be overly restrictive. Correct. So the most part I found that most public Wi-Fi is well, again, these guys put it, it's some Cisco product that came up and said, hey, you're you're being naughty. And I'm like, well, no, I'm not. Well, but by their by their definition, you know, you are, you're trying to do something that they've decided they don't want. So, yeah, it's fine. All right. We have two quick ones left. Listener John, two cool stuffs found. I think that's how we're supposed to say it. We'll start with listener John here. He says, is a piece of software called Synergy. It allows you to use one mouse and keyboard connected to one computer to control multiple computers. He says, I've been using this for four or five years with a Mac, a PC, and a Raspberry Pi. I can even cut and paste text from one system to another. So I put a link to Synergy in the show notes. That seems like a pretty cool thing. I've been able to use that with a Raspberry Pi. That sounds that that's the use case that that really kind of sparked my interest. Like, right, I want to be able to do things like that. So thank you, John. That's a good one. I like it. And then one last one that solves a problem. If anybody else knows how to do this, I mean, I'm about to explain one way to do what I want. But if anyone else knows how to do it, please tell us about other tools because I used to have one and it doesn't work anymore. So listener Jeff points out, he says, I recently acquired Parallels Toolbox when I switched from VMware Fusion to Parallels for my Windows virtualization software. Parallels Toolbox is a collection of 34 Mac OS utilities accessible via the menu bar icon that is included with Parallels and is also available for separate purchase. One of these tools in particular is a real gem. It is called screenshot page and allows you to take a screenshot of the entire length of a scrollable web page, including the part that is not currently visible on the screen. The resulting file is a scrollable near perfect rendition of the original far superior to what you get when using Safari's PDF function. So thank you for that, Jeff. I have been looking for something to do this for a long time. And I never thought to ask on the show because I guess I never queued it up. So this is one. If you find another way, let us know. We would love to hear from you because that's what we do here. So I feel like I've learned my five things, John, at least. I hope everybody else has too. I hope. Did you learn your five things, John? No, I already knew it all. Oh, of course you did. Right. Of course. That's Mr. John F. Braun. He's a genius, ladies and gentlemen. What can I say? It's tough. It's tough teaching this guy anything. There you go. I'm going to step back. No, we all we all learn so much from each other. And that's what makes it. Fun. It is. I love it. It's good. So we're part of the cool kids. We're part of the. It's it's the MacGyp family. Yeah, it's just how we are. Posse, can we be a Posse? No, it's kind of we could, I guess. I've always thought of it as the MacGyp family. We called it the MacGyp crew for a while. So, yeah, I don't know. It's all we're all in this together. Thank you, everybody, for contributing all your questions and your tips. It really it means a lot. And as you as you can see, it makes the show what it is. So thank you. Thank you for that. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, BB edit from barebones software at barebones.com, AncestryDNA at ancestry.com slash MGG lino.com slash MGG. You can call us if you want at 224-888 Geek and leave a message like Scott did. John Geek is four, three, three, five. There you go. And come join us in the MacGyp forums at MacGyp.com slash forums. We would love to have you there and we've got some cool stuff coming, actually, from listeners being posted over there. Some great little tips. It's awesome. We love that we get to be able to do this. So much fun. So thank you to everybody. Thanks to all of our sponsors, the ones we mentioned, of course, plus Smilessoftware.com slash podcast, MaxSales.com, Ero.com slash MGG. It's good stuff. John, yes. I'm going to tell you, I'm very glad because you are on an island. I was on an island. Yeah. And you went on when you're on an island, you're isolated. That's correct. And I got to say that I'm so glad that they didn't keep you there because then you would have been caught.