The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, episode 731 for Monday, October 15th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix it all together. And the goal is that each and every one of us learns five new things. Books on the list today include some APFS troubles, explanations about Wi-Fi and what matters with the new version numbers and how to translate them, and some great stuff from our forums. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebone Software, LinkedIn.com-MGG where you can get $50 off your first job post, and Capterra.com-MGG where you can join the millions of people who use Capterra to find software each month. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Boy, It's Starting to Get Chilly, Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. Yeah, it's fall. I love it. It's, the air is crisp, it gets cool at night, it's good sleeping weather. It's time to have fires and, like, you know, enjoy the smell of smoke and, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. It's good. It's good. It's good for energy. I saw tweet the, so I fall Z-Wave. Sure. You probably know Z-Wave. It's a protocol for things to talk to each other and become part of your smart home. And I saw a tweet and they're like, Hey, maybe you should get a Z-Wave thermostat. So I dug around and found one, and it's on the way, and we'll, ah, see how that works out. Yeah. I'm curious about that. I've used the Ecobee thermostat. I've used the Nest thermostat, but those are both Wi-Fi thermostats. And so I'm curious how the Z-Wave works. And you said yours is going to be battery powered because you don't have a lot of smart thermostats. This is an important thing for everybody who's thinking about a smart thermostat to consider. A lot of smart thermostats require, they need to be powered somehow, right? Some of them require what's called a C-Wire, which is, I think, 24 volts DC coming usually, but not always, coming from your boiler, your furnace, or whatever it is. You certainly can get a 24 volts DC from AC adapter and plug it in. I have never done that because with our power outages here, I don't want to have my thermostat dependent on power separate from my boiler. I want, if the boiler gets power, if somehow I can get power to the boiler, I want my thermostat to work. So, but we have in our house, we have a couple of C-Wired. We have four zones in the house and two here in the office. And in the house, two of the zones have the C-Wire. Ecobee requires the C-Wire. I believe the Honeywell thermostats require it, but don't quote me on that, even though I've recorded this, so I'm definitely going to be quoted on that. The ones that I saw at Home Depot, at least one of them said, oh, well, yeah, you can get a, you know, you need a C-Wire, but you can also get a C-Wire adapter, which is basically, as you said, a 24 volt. So Nest would prefer a C-Wire, but Nest will do something called power stealing, where, you know, the other two wires that come into your very rudimentary, you know, thermostat setup do have 24 volts passing across them. The trick is that when you short them together, it opens the valve and or does whatever it needs to do to start the, you know, the heating process. The Nest that I have in the studio, we only have two wire here in the studio in the office, and that works really well. It's actually impressive. I mean, I've had this Nest here for several years. There's a lot of things about the Nest I don't like. It's really not applicable to a home in an area where it's cold. It's more applicable to an area where it's temperate. We can have that conversation at another time, but the Nest works really well with the power stealing. So there you go. But yeah, I'm curious to find out about your upcoming thermostat there, man. That's fun stuff. Yeah, and also it was like at the time I got it, the price waivers that are 60 bucks. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if, yeah, I mean, the Nest is what, like 200 bucks or something. I don't know if I paid that much for a thermostat. It depends on, you know, I'm very, the Nest in the studio here, having a smart thermostat in the studio is awesome, because I can set a schedule and match it, you know, our podcasting, my podcasting schedule, I record three different shows. It, you know, it varies all the time. So having something that I can program and say, okay, here's what next week's schedule looks like, I can open up a web browser and say, and boom, I'm good to go, right? Which is nice. Yeah, exactly. Or here's when band practice is going to be, and so I want the temperature different for that, because if I go too hot before band practice, and then you put, you know, five sweaty guys in the room, that gets uncomfortable, right? So that part of it's great. The problem with the Nest is that Nest actually makes it very difficult to do exactly that. It wants to be really, really smart for you, and it wants to think for you. And that just doesn't apply, I guess we're having a conversation now. That just doesn't apply when you live in an area where it gets cold. You don't need a thermostat to think for you. You've already figured that out.  You know, I mean, so anyway, Nest works great in temperate environments where maybe you haven't learned, you haven't had to, you haven't had a financial incentive to obsess and figure out how the heat flow in your house works. But like if we hadn't figured that, you know, I mean, if you didn't know how the heat flow in your house worked in living in New England, it would cost you a few grand a year in inefficient heating practices. That's why I like the Ecobee in the house, because it was built by people in Toronto, and it really does reflect that in its user experience. But the Nest can be dumbed down. It just takes a lot of hard work to get it there. Anyway, I want to talk about some stuff from our forums here, John, because we had some great discussions in our forums this week first. And so we've got some questions and tips and, you know, great content. First though, I want to answer Barebones software at barebones.com.  And this is a piece of software that is always running on all of my Macs. And I know that seems crazy, but I'm using it constantly. Yes, I use it for some coding. But what's really cool is it integrates in every way from a coding standpoint, right? We have some of our stuff where we store it in Git repositories, where they allow us for version control. And BB Edit, of course, works perfectly with that. But also, there are some things that I just edit live on the server. And I know I shouldn't do that. I've been doing it for 20 years. It's only burned us a few times. But here's the cool part, right? BB Edit allows me to open direct over FTP or SFTP, however, I want to connect. And then when I edit and I hit Command-S, if it was opened locally on my drive, it saves it locally. If it was opened over FTP, Command-S saves it across the network link. There's no fanfare to it. It just works. It's really awesome. And of course, it has many, many, many, many, many levels, almost unlimited, I think, levels of undo, so that when I do make a mistake, can roll back pretty easily with just another couple of Command-Zs and a Command-S. So there it works. But I also use it just to count words and documents and compare to text documents. You can launch it from the terminal, so you're not having to use our cane terminal editors. We argue VI versus Emacs. Well, you could do that, and that's fun. Don't get me wrong. I like that. But as soon as you say VI versus Emacs versus BB Edit, well, there's no competition anymore. The Holy War is over. You just use BB Edit. So you got to check it out. Go to Barebones.com, and our thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's go and let's talk about a post in our forums from Mr. Hooks here. Mr. Hooks asked several questions, and one of them was, I'll say it's a he, since we're calling you Mr. Hooks.  Some versions of macOS ago, it used to be optional. Now that no longer appears to be the case, it says, is there any way to turn that off? And so the trick is, you used to, if you went into System Preferences Dock, sorry, System Preferences Desktop and Screensaver, you used to be able to turn off just menu bar translucency. However, that's gone, as Mr. Hooks astutely notes. But if you go into System Preferences Accessibility Display, Reduce Transparency is there, and that will stop the menu bar, but also the dock from being transparent or translucent and all of that. But you can do it. There's also some other cool things here. If you go into that, again, it's System Preferences Accessibility Display.  But this can be really handy, especially for those of you that either, for whatever reason, don't want to use dark mode or aren't yet on Mojave, or can't be on Mojave. But you want to approximate dark mode for those scenarios where, say, you're in a dark room and taking some notes or whatever. Invert Colors can make a really, I mean, it takes everything on your screen that's white in terms of black and vice versa. So you can really reduce that blue glow that happens when you're using a laptop in a darkened room with that invert colors thing. And then you can also turn on Use Grayscale too, which can, Jeff Gammit swears that that helps battery life and some glare and stuff too. So anyway, there you go. Good stuff in the forums. We like it. What do you think, John? What I think is, so the question was, is there a way for me to affect some of the visual effects in the Finder? And there kind of is. So I look to, you probably don't know what program I'm going to mention here, but for those that want to modify some of these things, our Pal Onyx lets you do that.  And it also has a Finder tab, but I don't believe it lets you modify the exact. That was the first place I looked too. And yeah, there's lots of options there, but that's not one of them, which tells me that there's probably not a defaults right command from the terminal that you can use to do this, because that's all Onyx is doing for all of those user interface tweaks, is essentially flipping those switches without you having to go to the terminal and do it. But yeah, I know. So they took it away from us. They took it away. Yeah, which is weird. I mean, it's, but it's still there, like you, the dock in, excuse me, inherits the same, the same setting, which is, I don't know, whatever, you know, infinite wisdom of, of Apple, I suppose. All right, also here in, in our forums, we had a question from Bamboozle, who was, was having an issue with contacts permissions. And, and the issue is, he says, when I go to settings, privacy contacts, I can't see the apps that have access to my contacts. But the whole screen is kind of grayed out, and I can't make any changes there. I also can't allow new apps to access my contacts. Is there another setting I have to enable first? And, and he said, he said, actually, Graham McKay answered the question. He says, these symptoms sounds exactly the same as how my iPhone looks, if I have gone into settings, screen time, content and privacy restrictions, contacts, don't allow.  And that did it. So this is really interesting that not only do we have, like, privacy settings, but inside screen time, we have content and privacy restrictions there. And then, of course, parental controls can do the same thing. So this gets interesting, John. Yet another place to dig. I never would have thought to go there. So this is, you know, I say we each learn five new things that is most definitely true. Craziness, huh, Mr. Braun? I'm scratching my head why they put certain things where they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. Content and privacy restrictions, look at this, and there it is, contacts. Oh, man, there's so much here. Thanks, Apple. Cool. Hey, that's what the forum, that's what we love about our forums is, you know, there's so many smart people and we can all help each other and we can all participate in the conversations are there and they're archived and oh yeah, it's good. It's good. It's delicious. Another one from the forums, my friend, Mr. Braun, is from Niceville, Steve, who asks, do you know if a person consumes more data connecting to an external device versus then using an iPhone alone and he's asking about personal hotspots? So do you wind up using more data if, say, you connect your iPad to your iPhone for personal hotspot than if your iPad were just connected to cellular data directly? And the answer is, yeah, it's totally possible because we have settings on our iOS devices where we can say, don't let this app talk over cellular data, but it will still talk over Wi-Fi data. Well, the problem comes in when you do personal hotspot from any of your devices, those restrictions don't apply because the device that's asking for it thinks it's on Wi-Fi, right? So that whole app updates over 150 megs, those limitations don't happen when you're on personal hotspot. It is a non-restrictive scenario once you're there, which can be a nice little hack, right? I mean, we've heard from some of you that have said, oh yeah, I needed to update such and such Apple, I was out, couldn't do it, but I was with my husband and so I turned on hotspot on his phone and downloaded my update and then we flip-flop back and forth and I turned on hotspot on mine and he was able to download the update. That's a nice little hack, but there is no way to avoid that if you don't want it. So yes, you can easily use more data when your device thinks it's on Wi-Fi than when it's actually using its own cellular signal. If you're connecting your Mac to one of these devices or if you're just connecting your Mac and you want to limit data usage, there's an app called Trip Mode that will do exactly this kind of thing and you can really use it to tweak. Long before Trip Mode came out, I started using Little Snitch to do this and it works because you can have it automatically change per connection or you can manually change the profiles and so I built a Little Snitch profile that does this, but boy, howdy, it's a bear to create that and set it all up because it's all very, very manual whereas Trip Mode has done a lot of the hard work for you. So we will put a link to Trip Mode in the show notes too. Thoughts on any of this, Mr. Braun? Ah, really? I'm with the others. Yeah. Yeah. Haven't had to use it too much, but yes, you are correct is that, yeah, I was just picturing it in my mind here is that it's Wi-Fi to to anything. Wi-Fi to hotspot. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Coolio. All right, we will go, we will stick in the forums. We've got two more from the forums, I think. So this one comes from Apple Seed, who says, I have a friend with a strange duplicate track problem that has developed over the past few months. Three computers slash devices are involved, a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad. Typically she buys music on her iPhone, running on iOS 12, but this has happened prior and plays it from both her iPhone and iPad. Auto-download music features turned on on both under Apple ID, iTunes, and AppStores. For instance, she just bought an album from the iTunes music store. On her phone, she sees every track duplicated. If she plays the album, the tracks do indeed play twice, but on her iPad, only the first three tracks are duplicated. The rest of the album are single tracks. She's never subscribed to Apple Music or had iTunes match or iCloud Music library turned on as far as she knows. One possible complication is that her old iPad is maxed out at iOS 9.3.5. So this is odd, and I can speak to this a little bit, because I have an old iPad that lives in my mixer. We use a Mackey DL-1608, I guess, is the mixer. I can't remember the model number off the top of my head, but we'll put a link in the show notes, which uses an iPad in it, and you can play music from the iPad. And just this week, I loaded some tracks on to Apple Music, and it worked great. It synced to it. It didn't do any duplication. So I can tell you, this is not happening because of that. And it's certainly obviously not supposed to happen. But yeah, this is interesting. Like, why is it duplicating these tracks? So, John, this is like you, right? You don't have Apple Music, right? And so you haven't used iCloud Music library. I wonder. I don't have any duplicates either. And you don't have any duplicates. Yeah. Like, it feels like what's happening is her phone is, like, I would wonder what happens if you buy the tracks on the iPad, right? And then, does any of it get duplicated? I think that's where we have to sort of head down this path, right? Is test and see where the problem begins. Because without iCloud Music library, or Apple Music, or iTunes Match involved, there's no syncing happening between these. The only thing is that you're telling it to auto download whatever you've purchased. And I would also watch that purchase process to see if perhaps there's, you know, something in the workflow that she's doing where she's tapping twice on something, or I don't know. But that's I would use the troubleshooting process and start, you know, try it from a different avenue. Does the auto download cause this problem? If auto download is turned off on one or both devices, what happens? Does, you know, is auto download causing this issue? Like, what's the what's the trick? Any other thoughts, my friend? I mean, there is an article here called delete music movies and TV shows from your device from Apple. And they offer, you know, doesn't look to be very useful. It's pretty much if you see a duplicate deleted. It was just going to say, what's the trick there? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if this has any additional wisdom. Right. There are also some, I mean, if you search for iTunes remove duplicates, there appear to be some nothing from any company that I'm familiar with. But I don't think she's seeing duplicates on our Mac, right? I mean, this is just, this is on iOS. So, yeah. Oh, man. It's interesting. You can visit the forums at macgeekyub.com slash forums and help out here. In fact, we would love it if you did. It is that the community there is really fantastic. It's, it's stellar. All right. And then lastly, from the forums anyway, we've got plenty more show to go for you, of course. Lastly, from the forums, listener Joel says, a bus buddy and I says, we commute together to work on the bus, listen and play trivia, play a trivia podcast together on our commute. Cool. With iPhone 7 and the lightning only audio. He says, I find splitting the audio tedious since we both have recent iPhones. Is there a way to get two headphones connected to the iPhones without my current method of lightning to analog audio to an analog audio splitter to two analog earbuds? It says most of the adapters that are dual lightning play audio through one and charge on the other. That is correct. There's a lot of these dual lightning adapters, but one of the ports is audio only and one of the ports is charge only. So I looked around a bit and we kind of went back and forth on this. There is, I think it seems like there is something about lightning audio and the way it works on iOS devices that only one audio output can happen at a time. And where this really came home was when I found a three-way adapter, which has two lightning ports and one analog headphone jack. The lightning ports are, of course, one of them is charge only. The other is audio only. And then, of course, the analog headphone jack is also audio only. However, you can only use one of the two audio outputs at the same time. And I think that's because there is a digital to analog converter happening either in the analog jack that's right in the adapter or past the lightning port to whatever you're choosing to plug in. And then that DAC, the digital to analog converter, is happening down the line. So yeah, I am, this is not a thing that's going to work. I think you've got to go back to your, you know, split the things or, you know, in this, you may or may not be comfortable doing this. But if you have a pair of AirPods, right, you could each put one in and listen that way. You could do the same with a single headphone, you know, split the earbuds and put one in. Of course, we've seen people do that, too. But, you know, there's some proximity requirements for that. But also, you know, if you're worried about sharing, you know, ear germs and things like that, then obviously that's a bad path to head down. So very interesting, very limiting. But that's how it goes, right, John? I suppose. Yeah, I almost paired with some AirPods. I was on the train and I turned my phone on and I got a dialogue very quickly. And then it went away because there were actually two people next to me that had AirPods. And I don't know why I thought that they should be paired. But that thing with the lightning is disappointing because technically you should be able, I mean, you know, with like a different, as you said, a digital analog converter, apparently the one that they have in there only they only got one that does one channel. Well, no, I think it's that I think it's that iOS will only talk to one DAC at a time, right? Because there are two that you could have a scenario where there's two DACs connected, right? I mean, there's the one in the for the analog port on this, you know, on this three-way device that we found, and then you would have another if say you plugged in, you know, your lightning ear pods or whatever, there's an analog, right? There's a there's a DAC in there too. But yeah, I think it's that really I think it's that like Rogamiba can't write device level driver software for iOS and say, hey, use two audio outputs or or like, you know, on the Mac, you can you don't even need something third party, you can go into audio MIDI setup and create an aggregate audio device, right? But but just like on on the Mac, where you go into system preferences and the sound, you would see, you know, two audio devices, you'd see the, you know, built-in output and then third party, you know, USB or whatever. And I'm sure iOS sees the same thing and it just auto selects only one of them. It doesn't just barf audio out everything. Because otherwise, then if it did that, it wouldn't know where you wanted audio to go. And you would wind up with audio coming out of the speakers in the phone. And, you know, like we need we need that aggregate audio device functionality added to the user interface of iOS. And we're not going to get it. I mean, it's a very limited use case. In fact, I'm happily surprised that it's still around on the Mac, but but it's got good and obviously handy, right? So I think I think that's the issue is it's just selecting one at a time. And my guess is just like the Mac, it's fully capable of doing more than one at a time. There's just no way to tell it. Now that I think about it, right? Sure, sure. Cool. Hey, let's talk about let's talk about our next sponsor. Our next sponsor is LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG, where you can get $50 off towards your first job post. Here's the thing, the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. And that's why it's so important to find the right person. But where do you find that person, right? You could try posting on regular job boards, but can you really be sure the right person sees your job? Here's the thing, right? 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Our sincere thanks to Kaptera for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. It's time to talk about APFS, and it's not all roses, man. I've got three questions queued up for this. I'm not sure how we're going to go through these, but here's sort of the thing. We now have had APFS running on Max, not all Max, of course, but SSD Max for over a year. And we're starting to begin to see some of those things where sort of natural file system corruption comes into play. And there is no history, there's not enough history for third-party tools to really be able to do the hard work of digging in. Yes, you can do some repairs and things like that, but not all the repairs we would need to do. It's not as mature as HFS Plus, and that means that the tools are also not as mature, in fact, far less so. So Ron writes, he says, I need advice. After listening to MackieKap730 last week's show, it reminded me that Mojave's install on my late 2012 Fusion iMac was behaving in a similar manner to what you guys were describing, where things were a little wonky. He says, I tried the Mojave version of Onyx, which completely froze my computer. Then my journey began. The iMac froze while booting in safe mode, then booted into recovery partition with a wired keyboard. Disk utility fixed something, okay, so that's good, and he says, then the computer booted normally. This morning, it wouldn't wake from sleep, and rebooting again froze in mid startup. He says, I went to verbose mode and saw some different things. He says there were some APFS failure, or APFS keybag failures just before it froze. There was also a PCI Pause SDXC listed there. He says, my question is this, Bruce, in the last episode mentioned, he reinstalled APFS and then it did a clean install of Mojave. I wasn't sure how that would work on a Fusion drive. My stuff is on Dropbox and iCloud, and my pictures and the rest are cloned by SuperDuper. He says, so I'm going to try it tonight and see. This is interesting, and what he wound up doing was reformatted his Fusion, his APFS Fusion drive, reformatted his Fusion drive as APFS from scratch, not the migrated upgrade. He says, and I moved things over from my SuperDuper backup, and he says, everything is good. He says, adding to this discussion, I ran into a similar situation last night with my Mac mini also with an APFS formatted slash upgraded SSD. It would start to boot, but the progress bar would get stuck at the end. It got stuck on the exact same PCI. Oh, wait, wait, I'm reading. That's me. That's you. You ran into the same thing on your Mac mini. All right, and you got stuck on the same PCI Pause SDXC line, John? So I wanted to do a bit of gaming. Sure. Came upstairs, turned on, fired up the machine. And the progress bar, when I booted it, got stuck at the end. I'm like, what's going on here? Or I think something, no, I'm sorry. So something froze, and so I held the power button, held that down, and then rebooted, and it wouldn't, the progress bar got to the end, and that was it. And I'm like, okay. So I did a similar thing is, you know, I rebooted. I accidentally, actually, I thought, okay, well, it's not booting. Well, let me do a safe boot, and I held down Command S, which is actually single user mode. But it got stuck at the same place. Safe boot is shift key, but, right. But oh, but single user, safe mode did not work, right? Well, in single user mode, what happened, as it turns out, I didn't try that. So in single user mode, it got stuck at the exact same spot, that whole PCI SDXC, which is, you know, the secure digital slot. But it got stuck at the exact same spot, and I'm like, oh, great. Now what do I do? And what I did was similar, is that I went into recovery, ran this utility, once I mounted the partition, and it complained about the snapshot index something or other, and then the last line, though, is it said, you know, deploying delayed fixes or something, and then a booted just fine. I guess the takeaway here is that going into recovery and running this utility is something you may want to do every now and then. Here's the thing, right? So, I mean, this is interesting, right? Because now we're starting to hear about these, and the fact that both you and Ron had had similar, like, various, that you had the same problem, right, is interesting. And, you know, here's the thing, man, your drive and Ron's drive originally were upgraded from HFS Plus, right? And I've looked at HFS Plus, like, if you go in and you start doing, like, discutile list and you start looking in the terminal at how these volumes are organized, APFS does a very different thing from HFS Plus. With HFS Plus, the drive is organized into partitions, and those partitions are formatted and named, and that's it, right? It's pretty much, you know, the volume just lives on the partition. That gets a little bit obscured when you run File Vault 2, right, the whole disk encryption, because the way that works is it actually takes the partition and starts, kind of, you go one level up from that, and it starts creating some virtual, logical volumes there. It needs to create, obviously, the one with your data that's encrypted, but it also has to create a small one that's not encrypted so that it can load the software to decrypt the volume, right? And so that needs to be there. So, things get a little bit different with the way Core Storage organizes it. Well, APFS takes this fully into everything, is just virtual and logical volumes. I mean, not everything. At some level, yes, it's partitioned the drive, but generally, APFS just partitions one big blob, and then you have your logical volume sort of mixed in there. But it looks very different when you have, well, two things look different. If you migrate from or convert a volume from HFS plus to APFS, that looks a whole lot more convoluted than if you format a drive as APFS to begin with, right? They're both more convoluted than it used to be, for sure. But formatting as APFS from scratch is a much cleaner disk structure than the migrated one from HFS plus, because it's not actually erasing your HFS plus partition. It's sort of fitting the APFS structure into this thing that was created for a different file system. And that, I think, is problematic for some folks, and we'll talk about some other instances of this. In fact, with that in mind, let's get on to this. In fact, we'll go to Adam and we'll talk about some of the stuff he's done and why there might be a really good argument to clone your drive and format it as APFS from scratch and then just clone back to it. You don't necessarily need to do a full Nuke and Pave where you're reinstalling the OS, but that part of the Nuke and Pave that starts a fresh volume on APFS for you may well be something very handy. And here we go with Adam. Adam says, I have a 13-inch 2011 MacBook Pro that is just my play machine, but they're both running High Sierra from third-party SSDs and all upgraded such formatted to APFS. The MacBook Pro is just a play machine. He says, I wanted to try installing Mojave on it using DostDude1's install patcher. So this is DostDude1's install patcher is a way of getting Mojave onto machines that might not run Mojave. But he didn't get that far. I don't think that's his issue here. He says, but I wanted to make a full backup first to an external 3.5-inch USB 3 drive. He says, so I tried booting into recovery mode and using disk utility to restore the SSD to the external to make a bootable backup. Okay, smart. He's going to do some funky stuff. He wants a clone first. No problem. That failed for some reason. So he says, I decided to break out the one Thunderbolt cable I have and put the MacBook Pro into target disk mode and plug it into my Mac mini. I would then plug the external into the Mac mini and use carbon copy cloner on the Mac mini to clone from the target disk mode attached MacBook Pro to this other USB drive. Perfect. When I opened the MacBook Pro's icon on the desktop, all I saw was a single file, he says I forget the name, that said it was some 200 plus gigs in size. I thought this isn't right. And I ejected the volume and then unplugged and powered off the laptop. When I booted the laptop back up, I got the symbol for no bootable volume found. Uh-oh. Reboot with the option held down, R held down, no recovery partition available. He says I tried again with Command R to get to the network recovery going. And when I got into disk utility there, the SSD was listed. Good news. In the side column in bright red. And when I clicked on it, it said that the device was now damaged. I should recover what files I can and replace the drive. Is this some new security self-destruct feature that I don't know about? No, I don't think so. You hadn't done anything wrong. This is I don't think the MacBook Pro is encrypted. Even if it was, how could this possibly destroy a physical drive with no moving parts like this? All I did was plug it in Thunderbolt for target disk mode. Says, can I just reformat the SSD and rebuild? Or is this thing actually toast? He says, I have another spinning drive that I can put in there along with the time machine backup that I can restore from. But what do you think happened? So, you know, my first reaction in reading this was, okay, well, maybe the Mac Mini didn't understand APFS containers. And that's the issue. But of course, he says that he's running High Sierra on the Mac Mini and it's booting from APFS. So that gets thrown out the window. The Thunderbolt cable would be the next likely target. But again, like, if that were the case, I think it wouldn't show up at all. It wouldn't show up as some weird volume. I mean, that would take a pretty special bit of damage to a cable, right, John? To make it display the wrong thing as opposed to no thing. But that 200 gig file he saw, I think is almost certainly his data container. And as I mentioned, that's the thing about core storage, right, is that everything's a container. And so I wonder if this volume was, you know, mildly corrupted before you did anything here, right? And just this alternative mounting process, or maybe the attempt to clone it with disk utility or something just kind of pushed it over the edge. There's no way to know. We can't go back in time. But without there being, you know, third party disk utilities, as we mentioned, I don't know that there's anything to do other than exactly what you suggested, which is just reformat the drive and restore from a backup. Because I don't think the hardware is damaged. I don't think any of the things that he did would be, I mean, it's possible the hardware could have just died on its own coincidentally, but I don't think anything he did would have caused it. And as it turns out, we've heard back and that's exactly the case. He was able to reformat, everything was good. So thoughts on this, John? Interesting, because when I had my situation and I repaired the volume, when I went back to disk utility, I didn't see my volume. I saw two individual partitions and I'm like, oh, that's not good. Did it make matters worse? But when I rebooted, everything seemed to be fine. So that struck me as kind of bizarre that, don't know what I'm saying, not the exact situation, but a similar situation. Is that I wasn't seeing what I expected, but a reboot. I don't know. Yeah. I'm with you on this. Again, I think, so here's the thing, regardless of the reason, APFS drives, like every drive before and after, are going to suffer from file system corruption at some point. Something's going to happen that's going to cause it. It's just, we've seen it in every file system ever.  If things don't shut down exactly the right way or something wonky happens, then you wind up in that scenario. And without robust tools to fix it, I think we're going to find ourselves certainly for the next few years in a scenario routinely where the answer is, yep, clone it. Hopefully you already have a clone format, restore the clone, you're good to go. Especially these drives that have this additional layer of complexity having been migrated from HFS plus to APFS. So I know we preach backups here all the time. I would implore you, especially now if you're running APFS to do those backups more deliberately, more robustly, because otherwise, I don't know, it's not good. It's not good. It's not good. So there you go. And I would, ahead of time, I would create a boot disk, a USB boot stick for Mojave, if that's your main OS, or if not, for High Sierra, if that's your main OS on your Mac, and keep those aside, because that might be the thing.  But that troubleshooting tool of having that installer and boot disk available to use anywhere, and we talked about this last week creating that Linux boot disk, right?  I think that's more important now than ever. And Apple has an article about creating an installer, a boot disk. You download the installer, and then you use some terminal magic to beam that over in a bootable way to to a USB stick. Or if you really want to just make life easier, and there's no reason not to, you can use Disk Maker X. I think it's Disk Maker 10, but it's at DiskMakerX.com, and that will create you a bootable stick. I made mine the other day as we were prepping this show, John, because yeah, man, it's not good. Yeah, I think I should make one too. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the Apple way of doing it, because before they didn't make it easy at all to make a bootable. Right, right. Bootable stick. But yeah, as you mentioned, now you can do it from the terminal. Yeah. I'll just have to find a USB stick. Yeah, my guess is that you've got hundreds of them in your drawers from all these press events we go to. Yeah, I think for High Sierra and Mojave, I don't think a four gig USB stick is quite big enough. It might be, but certainly an eight gig stick is plenty. And those are relatively inexpensive these days too. So. Oh, okay. Because they, yeah, I think, what was the, I mean, the guidance was that I think it was around four gigs, because that was typically the size of a DVD. Right. Single layer DVD, so they tried to keep it below that, but. Yeah, it's possible a four gig would work. But I think the Mojave downloader was like 4.7 or something like that, but yeah. Brian Monroe is in our chat room at mackeykeb.com stream is saying an eight gig stick is good for both macOS and Windows 10 booting. He says plus four gig sticks are getting harder and harder to find now.  There you go. All right. Where are we here on time? Okay, good. We're cooking along. This is actually, we're, but anyway, we're at the 50 minute mark, as those of you who are looking at your clocks can see it's not quite as far along as I thought we were, which means we have more time for good stuff. One good thing that I would like to do is thank all of our mackeykeb premium subscribers at mackeykeb.com slash premiums where you can go if you are interested and of course able to offer direct financial support for the show. We certainly appreciate it. It is not mandatory. It is not necessary in order for you to be a valued member of our community. There's lots of things you can do. Of course, you can visit the mackeykeb forums at mackeykeb.com slash forums. You can send in your questions. You can help answer questions. You know, there's lots that you can do to participate, and it all matters, right? Without all of it, this show doesn't exist the way that it currently does. But there is a component of this where your direct financial support truly, truly helps, and that's why we want to take a minute and thank everyone. So this actually in the past two weeks, on the monthly $10 plan, we have had support and now offer our thanks. So thanks to John B., Elizabeth B., Ward J., Olga P., Bob P., Michael L., Jason A., Steven A., Christopher S. at a monthly $20 contribution, not just 10. 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I test new routers all the time. And I like to push the envelope. We've talked a lot about mesh, and we will continue to talk a lot about mesh. But for many people, a standalone router is the right thing if you can get it in a spot in your home where the router is powerful enough to just get your whole home, then you don't need mesh. And some people like a router with a lot of functionality. We often talk about the Synology router because of the functionality that it provides for geeks like us. Well, there are other routers like that. And this week, I had the opportunity to check out Netgear's new XR700 gaming router. So this is an interesting piece of gear. It is a tri-band router, John. And I will put an asterisk on the third band because we'll talk about that in a minute. But it is a 4x4 router. It is one of the fastest standalone routers and with the best range that I've ever seen. These 4x4 routers make a huge difference in terms of their range because they're able to really kind of tune their antennas in and pick the right antennas to talk to your device. So when I say 4x4, what I mean is that there are four streams going out and going in on each of the three bands. Now, your iPhone is a 2x2 device, which means there are two streams going in and out. So it can only connect to two of the four on a router like this. But the cool part is the router gets to help it pick which two of the four and the antennas are kind of aimed and tuned a little differently so that you're picking the right two of the four. That helps cut through interference, that helps with range. It really does make a difference. I was able to get from across my house 500 megabits per second on my iPhone, which is crazy fast, especially for the distance and especially given that my house at the time had three, if not four other complete wireless mesh systems up and running layered on top and competing for available spectrum with each other. So the fact that this thing was able to just cut through and do that is pretty crazy. The cool part is that this router, because it's a gaming router, has some additional features, John, and it's Nekir has their Nighthawk Pro Gaming Duma OS, D-U-M-A. And it does some cool stuff. So it's got QOS, which of course you definitely want for a lot of things, but gaming it really matters for. It's got a VPN server so you could VPN into your house. It also has on the outbound, John, what's called a hybrid VPN. And this is pretty cool. So you'd have to sign up for some third-party VPN provider or set up your own somewhere else. And then you connect your router to it, you put in the credentials, so it will connect to the VPN. And then the way, the reason they call it hybrid VPN is because you certainly can choose to have your entire network of data sent across the VPN. But with hybrid, you can choose to have only specific devices or specific traffic. So let's say that you're totally fine with using your VPN, you want to use it for security, so you set up with this VPN, you send everything across it, but Netflix doesn't like it when you connect with a VPN, Hulu doesn't like it when you connect with a VPN, maybe, right? Fine, no problem. You go in and you say, great, I don't want Netflix traffic to be sent across this VPN or I don't want my gaming traffic sent across a VPN because it slows things down. It adds another layer. It's pretty cool how you're able to just do this or you can do the opposite. You can say, don't send any of my traffic over the VPN except these couple of things. So maybe you're somewhere where you do want to use a VPN with Netflix and you find one that works and it allows you to get your Netflix content from your home country while you're traveling somewhere else. Okay, no problem. It can do that.  That could also be done. It's a pretty cool thing. And then, John, because this also matters to gaming people, you can actually tell it to only allow you to connect to servers in a certain geographic area so that you are insured getting low ping times and it will actually block. You can say, okay, cool. I'm going to play Call of Duty or whatever. Great. I want to only connect to servers within a thousand kilometers of me so that you're physically close to them. You get lower latency and all that stuff. You can actually do all of that stuff too. So it's just pretty cool, right? This is a cool thing and if you're a gamer, this is exactly the kind of thing that you'd want. And then, John, so any questions on that, John, before I open up the next can of worms here? Open away. Okay. I didn't even realize this when I asked to test this router, but the third band on this, normally when we talk about tri-band routers, we have a 2.4 gigahertz radio and then two 5 gigahertz radios, right? And those both can be used for 802.11ac. A lot of times, especially with a router that's gaming focused, you would want to not have those all used the same SSID so that your second 5 gigahertz band can be dedicated only for your one gaming device so that it's not sharing the pipe with any other devices, all that stuff. This one has a 2.4 gigahertz radio, a 5 gigahertz radio, and a 60 gigahertz radio, John. And that 60 gigahertz radio uses something called 802.11ad. Now, great. Yet another Wi-Fi standard to think about, right? Here's the thing. So we've seen 802.11ad before. It's been floated around. We've run into it at various press events and CESs and things like that. It uses 60 gigahertz. Now, in a nutshell, as you increase the frequency, you get the opportunity for more bandwidth, more data, at a shorter range. If you might remember, when 5 gigahertz came out, when we were talking about 802.11ac over 5 gigahertz, it was like, well, but it won't go through walls. And of course, we've proven that to be wholly untrue in most homes. If you've got plasters, that's probably pretty true. But otherwise, in most homes, with studs and sheetrock and stuff, it's fine. This is almost certainly going to be true with 802.11ad, right? It's 60 gigahertz. It's really just meant for that one room. But again, for a gaming setup, this sort of makes sense. But 802.11ad doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think, for most scenarios. It is not backwards compatible. Like, that radio is unusable to me, because that is the only AD device I have in the house, John. So I can't test it. I can't even tell you. I have no way of looking to see if it's even broadcasting a signal. I'm assuming it is. The rest of the router works as advertised. I would assume this part does, too. But I have no way of testing that, right? Speeds on AD, they say that, you know, we're probably going to get somewhere in the 5 to 7 gigabit range. That's really fast. But again, you probably wouldn't use all that bandwidth, but just having that spectrum available allows for better speeds. So, 802.11ad is in the market. It's actually been in the market for a little while. Probably a non-starter for most people. However, John, that doesn't mean that we're stopping with 802.11ac. In fact, 802.11ax is probably something that we will begin to see pretty quickly in 2019. And as you may have heard, it also has another name. And that other name is Wi-Fi 6. Okay? The Wi-Fi or the IEEE Wi-Fi Alliance has decided in their infinite wisdom that thinking about 802.11b and g and n and ac and ad and ax is confusing for people because it's confusing for people. So, they have decided to rename Wi-Fi. So, we're going all the way back to 802.11b, which is now Wi-Fi 1. 802.11a, which came out basically at the same time as b, is Wi-Fi 2. 802.11g, which most of us used 10 years ago or so, is Wi-Fi 3. 802.11n, which works. So, the first three, well, actually b is 2.4 gigahertz, a is 5 gigahertz, g is 2.4n is either 2.4 or 5. So, that's Wi-Fi 4. And then 802.11ac, again, all of these backwards compatible with each other, at least if you support the radios involved. 802.11ac, which we've had for the last, you know, whatever, three or four years. The thing that opened up mesh and all that. 802.11ac is Wi-Fi 5. So, we are currently at Wi-Fi 5 with most devices. And Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, is coming next year. Now, why is 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 better than AD? AD doesn't have a Wi-Fi number, by the way, if that's any indication as to what the Wi-Fi Alliance thinks of its future. What's the difference? Well, the difference is that Wi-Fi 6, aka AX, uses both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and does some additional, some different signaling in order to increase its bandwidth. The best, there's two ways to analogs to this. One is LTE, right? LTE changed the way it was using signaling over the radio in order to fit more bandwidth into the same pipe. Cable modems, we've talked a lot about the difference between DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1. Same cable using a different signaling method called OFDMA, multiple access. You can fit more bandwidth by chopping up the spectrum into smaller bits and sending more across simultaneously. OFDMA is what allows your DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem to go up to gigabit speeds. It is also what allows Wi-Fi 6 to go much, much faster. In the lab, they've got it going 11 gigabits. In real world, again, we're probably going to see something in that 4 to 7 gigabit per second range, just because you can't use all the spectrum in real world that you actually can in the lab, not realistically. Yeah. Again, are we going to be sending data at those speeds? Ethernet in most homes, gigabit is the max, right? No, but again, having that spectrum available makes a big difference in terms of extended range and all of that. Because 8 Wi-Fi 6 uses both 2.4 and 5 GHz, well, then you'll get at least the same range that you get with Wi-Fi 5 and maybe even faster. Yay. We got through the Wi-Fi 5 to 6 discussion. Thoughts on any of this, John? 160 MHz channels, right? Well, maybe. I thought that was... I'm poking around and then I found a reference to bigger channels. I skipped that. You can do 160 MHz channels with Wi-Fi 5 now, 802.11ac. Most things do not. Most things use 80 MHz channels. That's where the difference between on Wi-Fi 6, that's where the difference between that 11 gigabits per second versus the 4 to 7 comes in, because 11, they're using 160 MHz channels, but in real world, we're probably not going to be doing that realistically, just like we can't with Wi-Fi 5. That's why it's going to be a little slower, so it's going to be 80 MHz channels. In most use cases, that's right. Yep. But there's potential. There is. Have you ever tried to use 160 GHz channels? It's really difficult to get your router to use that big, huge swath of bandwidth. I used to try it years ago when AC first came out and we could install DDWRT on our routers and really tweak everything. You could turn it on and then the router would come back. The radio would come back and say, yeah, there's too much interference. I'm back down to 80. It's just not going to happen. That was when most people didn't have 5 GHz radios. I don't think it's realistic to use 160 MHz channels, but still, 80 MHz using this new signaling method is going to make us easily get gigabit speeds, gigabit plus multi-gigabit speeds over Wi-Fi. Then the nice part is, once they put this in phones and things like that, which I really think they will, I think Wi-Fi 6 is where it's going, not this AD thing, but it's interesting. It's fun. I'm really glad that we've got these new names. We will routinely refer to them both for a little while just to help us all, not just you, but us too, remember where the translation layer is so that when we're thinking and we run across a router that was built before October of 2018 and doesn't say a Wi-Fi number, it just has a protocol on it. You'll know how to translate that. We'll keep reinforcing this lesson together. How's that sound, John? Good. Good. Yeah. I'm excited about this. This is cool stuff. I've got some other routers to test. I always have routers to test. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, one that I think you'll be testing is the one that's Synology. You can actually buy it now. I think you talked about the software and all that, but they actually officially announced the release of it. I just checked now if you go to Amazon, you can actually purchase it. You're talking about the MR-2200AC mesh router? Correct. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is what we talked about last week. I'm stoked about it because I really like the feature set that Synology offers. I'm curious, I've got one of these on the way. Actually, I think I've got a couple of them on the way. You can add them as mesh points to either your Synology router system if you have the latest RT-2600AC from Synology, or you can add them to your existing router. This is that whole mesh 2.0 thing we were talking about last week. I think in the latter scenario, it adds, it brings in some of those features, this MR-2200AC from Synology. If you've got a router that you like or you're stuck with because it's from your ISP and you can't change, but you want some of these Synology features, I think like CloudStation and some of these others are supported independently on this new device from Synology. You can add a mesh point that does some meshing and also adds these features while still keeping your existing router. I'm interested in testing from a lot of angles. Like I said last week, this is exciting, man. It's good. You got to see the thing, right, John, at the Synology event this week? Yeah, they had it displayed and they showed the interface, which is similar to their existing products, or the same OS. Yeah, it's similar. It's SRM, not DSM. It's Synology Router Manager, not Disk Station Manager. If you're comfortable with Synology's Disk Stations user interface, their web interface, then you're totally good to go with this. It's the same, which is awesome. It's really, yeah. I'm excited, man. I'm just excited about it all. I don't know why Wi-Fi makes me so happy. You know why it makes me happy? Because I have a family of, well, now three in the house, but a family of four, we all really use our Wi-Fi regularly. I love it when everything just works and it's smooth. Even though I've got two kids streaming Netflix in different places and we're streaming to our Apple TV in the living room or whatever and my son's playing games on the PlayStation downstairs or the Xbox, we don't have PlayStation. Why did I say that? We have an old PlayStation, but he's on the Xbox now. I'm podcasting and it used to be that if my wife started uploading pictures while we were doing a podcast, I had to pause the show and text her and be like, hey, hey, Lisa, please don't. And we've solved all these problems and now it just works. Of course, because I'm me, that's not okay. That's not good enough. Now I want to break it until I fix it again or fix it until I break it, whatever it is, but anyway, it's fun. Yeah, I'm excited. It's good. You got a similar setup. I mean, I know it's just you at your house, but you do a lot with beaming data around and backups and bandwidth and streaming to your TV and you don't want it to stutter ever for anybody, you or anybody else, right? No. And yeah, and with the other three euros, I'm pretty good. Yeah. Just looking here with the, yeah, I see. What do I see here? Yeah. So I have a 80 megahertz channel at 5 gigahertz and 20 megahertz at 2.4. Cool. That's good. Not all my devices talk AC, but hey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. I like this stuff. All right. Well, we'll talk more. I'm sure we'll talk more about it. Where are we? We're here. Should we answer a couple of questions, John? Or should we? I think we should blow through some cool stuff found, but I'm open. You choose, my friend. Cool. Go for the cool. Cool. Okay. Cool. So we will start with Scott, who was just listening to episode 726 and says you were talking about cloud storage for cheap long term storage. He says, I suggest looking at wasabi.com, other than the wonderful taste of wasabi. The wasabi.com service is compatible to Amazon, but cheaper, even better. They don't charge egress fees to get to your data. In fact, all they charge for is storage space. Check it out. He says it's been working very well for me, and I looked into this. I haven't signed up yet, but wasabi, it's S3 compatible in terms of just the way their infrastructure works and the way you can plug into it with various pieces of software, but it's 499 a terabyte per month. And as he said, no data transfer fees. So with Amazon's S3, you wind up paying for bandwidth, too, in a lot of cases. But with this, it's 499, 5 bucks a terabyte a month. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I am becoming, I don't know, this whole thing with Backplace. I know that Backplace has fixed their app now, so that it's far more Mojave compatible. But this whole thing has sort of left me with a sour taste, like, do I really want to have my cloud backups all kind of owned by one entity? Wouldn't it be better if I was running software here? And I'm thinking of Arc by ARQ by Haystack Software, right? And then just beaming to a data provider and kind of controlling the whole widget myself. I realize this is a geeky solution and not the all-in-one, but after the crash plan thing where they sort of abandoned their consumer market, it's like, yeah, maybe there's a better way. I don't know. I got to think, and this wasabi thing makes me think, so it's good. Pretty good, right, John? Yeah. I don't do too much cloud outside of iCloud. Hmm. Yeah, right. Well, that's the thing is, yeah, we probably should. I agree. All right, who is next here? James sends in a note about the Sandisk I Expand Base for iPhone, which looks like a Qi charging puck, but it's not, right? But it does have some interesting things in it. It's got a, you just plug in your lightning cable into this thing. It will charge from there for you, but, and it will fast charge with up to 15 watts of power, it says. But it's also got a 64 gig storage inside it, right? So it charges your phone, it backs it up, all of that stuff so you can do your backups locally and own your own data and all of that stuff.  And James says he has it and likes it. And so thank you, James, for sending that along. Good, good stuff. Fun. I like it. Yeah, I remember seeing that at a prior show. Huh. Yeah. It looks like you need to, it looks like, yeah, it's not doing the data transfer wirelessly. It's doing it with the, you need a cable. You need a cable. Yes, exactly, right. And no charging wireless. No, nothing wireless about this. That's right. While talking about backups, Curtis reminds us of Duplicati. He says Duplicati is an open source piece of backup software. It is block based, uses compression and strong encryption. It can store data locally on a hard drive or an SSD or your NAS. It can also upload to cloud services like Dropbox and B2. Yes, it does work with Wasabi. I checked into that. He says I've been testing it for about a week with a limited backup set of about 10 gigs from my MacBook Air. He says I'm using box.com as my destination and it's working reliably so far with scheduled backups once per day. I've done a restore operation with a few files just to see how it works. Everything, configuration, scheduling, restoration is done via a local browser based interface. He says I think it's comparable to back plays, but being open sourced, you get to know exactly what's going on. You just get to pick what you're doing. So we will put that in the show notes too. I know we've talked about that before, but great stuff. So thank you. Good, good, good, good. I like it. I like options. I got it. I remember checking out Duplicati, John, and I don't know. It was, I didn't dig deeper, but that's, we must. Let's see. James, lots of us have been updating our Apple watches, those of us that can. I say us. I'm not in that group because I can't run the latest WatchOS because I am still on my series zero that I got on day one, but he's, there it is, John. They're coming to get us. He says, James writes, I tried this tip updating to the latest watchOS 5.1 and was able to update way faster than I ever have in the past.  So the steps are open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, go to my watch settings, general software update. This is how you would update your watch. Great. Tap on download install, which downloads the latest software to your phone and then begins the process of putting it on your, on your watch. When you see a time estimate in place of time remaining, then open the settings app on your iPhone and turn off Bluetooth.  Now complete the update process. That's it. Just let it complete and then go back afterwards and turn Bluetooth on to reestablish a Bluetooth connection to your phone. Right, turn watch rather. This will force the Apple Watch to connect to your iPhone over Wi-Fi and it goes much faster. So we will, we will put a link in the show notes to an article at brothertech.com where James found this little tip. So very, very cool. Thanks, man. I like that. It makes sense too. Bluetooth is super handy, obviously, but also, you know, slow. In the forums, John, Alex mentioned something that I will definitely call cool stuff found. It was as part of an answer and it is disk arbitrator. And he says, this was, this was in terms of he, somebody wanted in the forums wanted to set their volume on their Mac to not mount at startup and disk arbitrator. It's, it's free. It's available via GitHub. And it, it says normally it's, you can use it to prevent a disk from mounting or to, to mount as read only. So you can't write to it. He says it's totally useful for running forensics on a dying disk so that you're not, you know, mounting it in the wrong way. Really, really cool stuff. So super handy utility to, you know, mount disks or disk images. And yeah. So there you go.  And we'll put a link to the, to that in the show notes too. So thanks, Alex, for posting that in the forums. That's awesome. Very good. Two more cool stuffs found, John, unless you have a thought about disk arbitrator. Now have to have to give it a whirl. I know, same. Yeah. I recently was able to check out this new mic stand. You know, I, I podcast here in the studio and I also routinely, in fact, podcast from my desk down in the office because when we record TMOs daily observations, when Jeff has me as a guest on that show, I obviously, you know, I have to have to be there. And so I have a different mic. I actually have a road podcaster connected USB to my Mac there. It's a great dynamic mic, really easy to use. And I had previously been using some, you know, $12 clip onto your desk mic stands. I have a standing sitting desk down in my office so I can raise it or lower it as I choose. So I do a clip on mic stand so that it is, my mic is always sort of right at the right height and all that stuff. And you know, these $12 clamp on mic stands that you get from Amazon are fine. They do work. They are reliable, but they're not really elegant and they're a little janky. Enter the new blue compass mic stand that clamps onto your desk. It has this beautiful boom arm. It's much longer than I've ever seen before in one of these clamp on stands and that's because it's a little more robust. It can support itself better. My desk supports it just fine. You grab it, you move it to a new location and it just stays there. It's like magic. You know, it's like the, for those of you, kids, you might have to ask your parents, the old lampshade iMac where you could move the screen around and wherever you put it, it just stayed. Same thing happens with this blue compass mic stand. You just kind of grab the mic, put it where you want it and it just stays right there. You don't have to like, you know, unscrew and re-screw and tighten and all that stuff. You just get it set up and you're good to go. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes, but I've been really impressed with that thing down at the desk. So very, very happy now. Things just work the way they're supposed to. Yeah? Questions, John, before we do our last cool stuff found? Nope. All right, cool. Well, our last cool stuff found also comes from, we started with the forums and we're going to end this show with the forums. Sync Folders Pro is the cool stuff found. It comes from a question where somebody was asking about syncing docs and documents and desktop to iCloud, but wanting to be able to really control it. And Sync Folders Pro is the key there. Listener Michael participated in the forums and showed us this because the problem is with iCloud, you wind up where it sometimes will optimize your storage for you, even if you don't tell it to. And you're sort of stuck with this sort of very generic on and off switch, but Sync Folders Pro gives you the option of really managing and tweaking and all of that stuff. So thank you, Michael, for shouting out to that. Have you ever used Sync Folders Pro, John? No, no. Yes. You know, he says it does exactly what's wanted here. It syncs between Mac and iCloud automatically or manually without deleting from one place or the other, depending on the syncing mode selected. So again, very granular control over that. And again, it will use iCloud as its storage, if you like. So you don't even have to change that, which is pretty darn cool. And because it's doing a sync, the files are just their files. It's not storing them as things that have to be read by Sync Folders Pro on another computer or whatever. It's just iCloud. You're good to go, which I really like. So there you go. Good stuff, Mr. Braun. Good, good stuff. Yeah, I use Synology, the kind of sync. And actually, I did recently have a hiccup with it. I've been really happy with Cloud Station Sync and now Drive Sync, which is Synology's syncing thing. That's great, because I control all the data everywhere and it works really well. And then I just back it up. Yeah, maybe I should move to that because I'm using what they call Cloud Station Backup. I use both. I use Cloud Station Backup for my local backups, but that's a little wonkier. I found it less reliable. It works for a little while and then it just stops working and you have to like jump through hoops. Is that what you got? Okay, yeah. No, I had it happen. Yeah, all of a sudden, I was looking at the status of it. Here's a tip, folks, make sure that your backups are actually running because I looked at it and it's like, yeah, the last time I synced was on 10.4 and I'm like, it's later than that. It's 10.14 or 10.15. Yeah, exactly. And the error was something like, can't find destination. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? It's right there. That's exactly what I had too. I had to start from scratch to get it. I tried everything. Yeah. Yeah. But the Cloud Station Sync, so it's two completely different products, but named very, very similar. Cloud Station Sync or now it's just called Synology Drive. That has worked really well for me, super reliable for the last five years. So I've been really happy with that. That's my Dropbox slash, you know, iCloud replacement. Coolio. All right, folks. Well, that brings us to the end of yet another fun week here at MacGeekab Land. Feedback at macgeekab.com is the address that you can write to if you have a question or tip. Right? Sure. For that other guy, though, they may want to send something to feedback at macgeekab.com. Right. And if you're not in the first two groups, definitely feedback at macgeekab.com is going to be for you, unless you're in the fourth slightly separate group, but still the same.  And we do check that box more frequently and and first because, you know, it's how it works. But we do really, the secret is we attempt to, and most weeks do, get to and answer everything that comes in. Even if we don't include it in the show, we definitely go through it all. It helps us kind of take a pulse and, you know, like that whole APFS thing this week. And it was really weird that so many of you and it turns out us, we're having APFS problems. In fact, I think I'm having an APFS problem on this machine up here in the studio, too. So I might do that clone and restore to get life back in order up here. Yes. Good stuff. You can visit us on the forums at, as we said, macgeekab.com slash forums. It is so great to have you all there really, really working out well. And I want to thank, of course, all of you for listening. I want to thank CacheFly at CacheFly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank everybody in our podcast marketplace. Of course, our sponsors, BB Edit from Bare Bones, capterra.com slash mgg, linkedin.com slash mgg, Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, ring at ring.com slash mgg. Fun stuff, folks. Fun, fun stuff. It's like the band's getting louder, John. I think we timed it perfectly. I started this off here, my friend.  What's the, what's the last little tidbit we're going to share for this week? I don't want to wrap it up. I want to open a present, but you got to be careful when you're opening a present because you don't want to get caught.


The U.S. Marines with Marine Wing Support Squadron. Marine Air Control Group, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. Conduct Arming and Loading Ordnance Operations and Refuel CH-53E Super Stallion Aircraft. With Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron, Marine Aircraft Group, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. And F-35B Lightning II Aircraft, with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211, MAG-13. With Marine Aircraft Wing at a forward arming and refueling point in support of Exercise Steel Knighted in Yocan Airfield, California, December 2, 2023.


It is very important by the way when we talk about cold reading to bring up ethical issues and there's one important ethical issue which I should have warned you right away. When I taught you how to do cold readings last lecture, I should have warned you also that don't run out and do it and compete with other people doing it. You'll be better than they are, but it's also a dangerous thing to do. If you're doing a reading even for fun, remember people take it seriously. Even when it's a party or something like that, they can take it seriously. And I could watch the examples and demonstrate that. People who were told that someone was reading a poem and by someone just an amateur playing with it and said you got a very short lifeline and these people were worried for most of their life they're going to die soon, you know.  The other thing about the ethics of doing readings is that among mentalists and people who are cold readers there's a big fight about should you do a monotony. And you have to realize that when you're doing a psychic reading or a cold reading you are essentially dealing with fire, dealing with psychology. It works because people want to believe these things, but also everyone has problems and stuff like that and inadvertently you can give them wrong information. Poor man is a psychologist. Right, yes. And it turns out that many of my colleagues in that psychic entertainment business found they made no money by giving up doing stage shows and just giving private readings because that's where the money was. And unfortunately I got worried about these people because they're not trained psychologists. People can be suicidal as Barbara might tell you. And it's very hard for even specialists to know that. But people coming off the street who are just magic magicians and stuff like that and now doing private readings with no training whatsoever can be very dangerous to have someone not recognize that they're suicidal and not know you to get them off to the right areas. So it can be a very dangerous thing to play with. And even though I'm teaching you how to do it, I'll show you how to do it. I want to get across the power of it and how it works. At the same time I want to warn you that you got to be careful when you do it. Okay, thanks. Okay, so...


It was all business as usual at first. We moved into a new neighborhood a few months ago, so our new tricks got a fresh audience. My wife, Jamie, manned the door, dressed as a fairy godmother and handing out candies to smiling little kids. When the older ones showed up, she would give me a signal and I would spring into action in my generic monster getup, scaring the daylights out of them before stabbing her with a fake knife. The kids would run away screaming and dissolve into giggles by the end of the driveway. She was just coming back from a bathroom break when we heard a loud knocking, trick or treat. The voice sounded like that of a grown man. Jamie stepped onto the porch holding the candy bowl with me waiting just out of sight for her signal. What? Is all she got out before the bowl spilled all over our entryway? I leapt to the door to meet a truly gruesome sight, two men, one tall and wiry, holding a wreath of pumpkins I'd never seen before around Jamie's neck, the other short and holding a gun to her head. One wrong move and she'll be haunting your house. He spat at me. I held my hands up and took a step back. If it was just me, I'd be fighting for my life. But I couldn't let Jamie get hurt. She was everything to me. I backed up into the house all the way into the kitchen doorway with the two of them pulling her along after me. The tall one took her past me towards the dining room. And when the short man lagged behind, I took my chance. I'd hoped to knock the wind out of him when I slammed him against the wall, but he didn't even look confused. He fought back with a strength I'd never expect from someone his size. Having at least six inches and 50 pounds on the guy, we were evenly matched. The struggle went on until we were both panting for air. Jamie screamed, not fully, just a strangled sort of yelp. I looked up and saw the tall man had leveraged his weight against the wreath, halfway crushing her windpipe with plastic pumpkins.    She still couldn't catch her breath. Okay, okay. I whimpered, holding my hands up. I won't fight. Just don't hurt her. The two men looked at each other for a minute, ignoring my pleading looks. They eventually nodded at each other, to which the short one turned his gun casually toward me, while the tall one threw my wife to the floor, letting her head bounce off a cabinet on the way down. I felt the impulse to run to her, but the gun was still pointed at my face. Dining room, now. The tall one ordered. After a glance at the short one, I helped Jamie to her feet, and the two of us led the way into the dining room. Sit. He barked. I immediately helped her into a chair facing the kitchen and then took the one beside her. The short one handed his gun over to the tall one and pulled a long coil of rope from his jacket. In minutes, we were both tied very securely to our own kitchen chairs. Jamie tried to talk to him to beg for our lives. She offered money and anything else she could think of, but the two men didn't seem to care for any of it. The short one just watched us expressionless, while the tall one rummaged through our kitchen. He came back with a glass jar and a knife. I'll spare you the gory details, but he whistled to himself while filling the jar with our blood. I don't think he spilled a single drop. I was feeling faint, and I'm sure Jamie was too, but we both watched him like a hawk. He put on a vinyl glove and started smearing the blood very carefully on our walls and furniture. I swear he was writing something in the entryway across from our front door, but I couldn't make out the words. Happy Halloween. Jamie whispered from beside me. I turned to give her a questioning look. She tilted her head towards the tall man writing on our wall with our own blood, and she repeated herself. Glad you're getting in the spirit of the holiday. The short man grinned at her, because the festivities have just begun. The neighbors called the cops. I blurted out. I just wanted his attention off of her. They heard the screaming. He laughed at me. Did you hear that? He called to the tall man, who was now rinsing out the blood jar in our sink. The neighbors must have heard the screaming. They'll call the police. The two of them broke into laughter.  The tall one mocked me. Screaming in blood is part of the deal. The doorbell rang just then. Trick or treat. A small chorus of voices rang out. So foolishly thinking the men would be scared of getting caught, I sighed with relief. That only made them laugh again. Let's get this show going. The short man grinned at the tall one and gestured towards the door. The tall man headed through the kitchen while the short one circled around behind us with the knife. Hey kids. The tall man greeted the trick or treaters enthusiastically. Would any of you want to see a haunted house? Just as he finished asking, the short man pressed the tip of the knife into Jamie's elbow, making her scream. I could see several kids poke their heads in the door, intrigued. I was suddenly overwhelmed with terror at the thought of what they might do to those children. Don't do it. I said to the kids, get out of here, run. The warning was met with giggles. The tall man turned towards the crowd with an exaggerated wink ingested inside the door. The kids shoved each other through our entryway and kitchen, giggling at the fake bloodstains on the walls. They finally filed into the dining room, lining up across from us, watching expectantly. You kids ever seen a murder? The short man raised his knife to Jamie's neck. She began to scream and thrash against her restraints. The pumpkin reef, still hanging from her neck, bounced wildly. Get out of here. Tell your parents. I said over her screams, run and tell them to call the police. I begged. The children giggled and clapped before the tall man loaded them up with candy and ushered them back out. We tried every variation we could think of that night. Help was useless.  This is real, earned an actual eye roll. Meanwhile, we were more beaten and bloodied after every show. Eventually Jamie fainted in her chair from the pain or the stress. I don't know. The short man sulked, but only for a minute. By the time the next group of trick or treaters arrived, he was grinning like a maniac. You kids ever seen a murder? He repeated his favorite opening line. This time he took the knife and plunged it straight into her neck, spraying me with blood. The kids screamed and ran out. But just like our tricks at the beginning of the night, I could hear them laughing outside. The next group was met with one bloodstained captive, one probably dead woman, and one very real murderer. I remember babbling at both the children and my captors begging for an ambulance, for police, for my freedom for anything. Tears streamed down my face. I tried not to look at Jamie convincing myself it wasn't too late. I woke up when the knife pierced my eye socket. Never in my life have I had a dream so real, so vivid, or so detailed. I cried most of the morning while Jamie was at work. I touched the clean walls, not yet stained with our blood. I found the empty jar in the cabinet. I'd never noticed it before. The gloves were under the sink with the cleaning supplies, the knife they used on us or are going to use is still sitting in a kitchen drawer. I don't know how to tell Jamie what's going to happen. I don't know if she'd believe me because honestly, I don't even know if it's going to happen. But my gut tells me it is and that there's nothing I can do to escape our fates. Because when Jamie got home, she'd brought one last decoration for the house. It was a wreath of plastic pumpkins.