The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 736 for Monday, November 19th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all of your questions, all of your tips, of all of our tips, all of your cool stuff found, all of our cool stuff found. We mix it all together. We mash it up. It's like potatoes, right?  Maybe you cook it in the new instant pot that you got, right? Because that thing's awesome. And it's delicious. And it's a delicious meal of learning and engagement and enjoyment and all of those things and other meant words that maybe are made up and maybe are not with the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every time we get together, including some new words that may or may not have existed before. Sponsors for this episode include Ops Genie now from Atlassian at OpsGenie.com, BB Edit from Barebones Software, Hopsie, a new one for us at TriHopsie.com slash MGG, and yes, Cashfly has some new things for us to tell you about that we are happy to do. In fact, we're happy to tell you about all of it, but we'll do that in a moment here for the moment. In Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Just had to swallow your last bite of potatoes. Those mashed potatoes are delicious, aren't they, John? I think we're probably going to do like a green bean casserole instead. You can do both. That's the beauty of Thanksgiving. So we have Thanksgiving coming up here in the States as probably everyone listening knows whether you live here in the States or not. But that's this week. So yeah, a little bit of feasting, a little bit of family time. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite of the holidays because it's like there's no gifts or anything that you have to obsess about and you just get together. Just stuff your face and have some maybe some adult beverages. Quality family time. And don't forget to talk about politics because that always brings people together at the Thanksgiving dinner table. You can talk tech. Maybe that's a safer topic. So much less controversial. Yeah. So but there are always conflicts and that brings us to Scots. I don't want to. Well, it's a tip. It's a warning. He said, guys, I just discovered something. I have multiple Macs, don't we all? And he says, my iMac is maxed out on its OS as El Capitan. Same. I have one in the house that's maxed out on that as well. He says, my MacBook Pro is on high Sierra, also maxed out. And he says, I have iWorks numbers, pages, keynote on both. Until the most recent update, which he said for him happened automatically on November 8th, the data files work across the versions. Now they do not. He says, when I try to open a numbers document on my El Capitan machine that I had edited on my high Sierra machine, it now says, it's time to update to open this spreadsheet. You'll need the latest version of numbers and it offers to bring you to the app store. But of course, that version of numbers is not available for El Cap and boom, you are out of luck. So a warning to all of us that that might find ourselves in that position. So is there a way to downgrade? You can probably export as a prior numbers version. I have not run into this yet. We just got Scott's note in today, so I haven't had time to experiment with this. But but it does not surprise me that this would happen. I mean, it's it, you know, you can't maintain the file format forever. And who knows? Maybe there's a little patch coming that might. Sure, you can. It almost sounds to me like a bug that they should not have. Perhaps. Yeah. Perhaps. I recommend if you need to. I recommend jumping to LibreOffice. It's not as smooth and nice as numbers, for sure. But but if you need something that's truly cross platform and won't do something that'll surprise you, I've been really blown away by LibreOffice lately. So it's not replacing pages or numbers for me, but it is replacing Excel and Word. So there you go. Yeah, the other thing I'm looking on one of my machines here. When I need to. So of course, there's OpenOffice. That's another. Well, so LibreOffice is is an open office. It is part of the or it is a descendant of the OpenOffice suite. I don't know what the right word is. It is just the one that. Yeah, maybe a branch. But it is it is a version of the OpenOffice suite that is perhaps the best one in terms of its Mac OS look and feel and integration and all that. So it is a feature for feature file format for file format. Microsoft Office clone that that is, you know, built for all platforms, Linux, Windows, Mac, you name it. And I guess I did name it those three and that's OpenOffice. And then LibreOffice is is the one one flavor of that. And it's for the Mac. It's the best one I've tried it and it really works well. I've blown away by it. So. So there you go. There you go. All right. Moving on. Right. Moving on from that. Larry has a Larry has a tip for us that that Eero helped him with. And now I've lost Larry. How did we lose Larry? Oh, there it is. Oh, I just lost it. I see him. He says, I use Eero for mesh Wi-Fi in my house. And they recently gave or added the ability to see the number of inspections on a per device basis. That's if you're using Eero Plus, he says, I'm attaching a screenshot. He says, and you'll note that a Visio device, which he says is my TV, is up there at 135,000 and that the next in line is my Amazon Echo device with a mere 40,000 says the Visio, of course, the TV, but we don't use it as a smart TV. And he says, I did not want to use it to provide content to me from the web. I use an Amazon Fire TV device in its place. But I did give the Visio access to the web for a firmware update. But now it seems to be talking all the time. Says, when I saw this data, I looked into the preferences screen of the TV and I did not see a way to control this behavior. I thereupon decided to reset the device, the device to its factory settings. And when I started to set it up again, I found I could not get the Wi-Fi connection screen to enable without giving them permission to use automatic content recognition and report such to Google. If this is not evil, I do not know what it is for it to access to the web. I have to give a third party to whom I use no services, all of my viewing habits and data, and then they can do with it what they want. He says, I decided to deny the TV rights to access the internet. He says, I use an external device to provide content and the inspections from Visio have now gone to zero. It says, people ought to know how their TV viewing habits are being monitored, shared and monetized by third parties without their explicit permission. Shame on them. That's very interesting. I'm sure it's buried in the EULS. Of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. You know, that's it's a cool point. So believe it or not, Dave, the devices in my entertainment center that could be networked. So Blu-ray player is the one I think they have this thing called Blu-ray live where you can do something similar, can reach out and get, you know, additional content and make your life wonderful. And the same with TVs. The thing is I intentionally wanted to buy a dumb, dumb, dumb TV that only did TV and none of the smart stuff because I don't want my TV to be smart or my Blu-ray player to be smart for exactly this reason. Yeah. Well, but your TVO is smart and your TVO is sharing all that data. So that's OK. But I know it is. Right. That's true. Fair. Right. Yeah. Eyes wide open. Yep. Yep. It was just an effort when I, you know, upgraded my TV, all the ones that they had on display, there were only like two models that didn't have the word smart in them. And it's like, well, that's that's the one I want. So here's here's the thing. You I think now would be hard pressed to find something that's truly marketed as a TV to to to not have any of those smart features. Like it's just baked into these things. However, I do want to point out that there if you take the smart features out of a TV, there is often very, very, very little difference between a TV and what we would call a monitor, right, that you would plug into your computer. We use HDMI for both nowadays, right? It's the same thing.  In fact, John, it's funny that you mention this because further down in the agenda, which we will jump to now, I found a cool thing recently. So we have in our house, we have our, you know, in the living room, we've got the big TV. We've got it's like a 60 inch plasma or something. And and, you know, we have our TV on our Apple TV and all that stuff plugged in there. And it works great from the kitchen. However, we cannot see the TV in the living room. Most of the time, that's fine. But there are times when we might want that content also visible simultaneously in the kitchen, for example, every year when we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. But also if we have like a football game on or something, it's kind of nice to be able to sort of, you know, wander between the two rooms and maybe cook some, get some dinner going or whatever in the kitchen. Well, you got the game sort of like idly on in the background. You can just sort of check in on it, whatever. And I've wanted to solve this problem for a while. And the folks at IO Gear have a product that does so. It is their wireless 4K video extender with local pass through. So it's not a very sexy product name, but it's a very descriptive product name. And that's all you need. You take the HDMI cable that plugs into the TV, so it doesn't matter what switch boxes you have or what that mess looks like. You've got one cable going to the TV. You take that, you plug that into the switch box or into that. Sorry, not the switch box into the transmitter of this IO Gear kit and then the other you take another HDMI cable, which it comes with and plug that into your TV. So it's just a pass through, doesn't mess with the signal. Everything's fine, doesn't delay it, everything's golden. Then there's a second unit that you put wirelessly up to 150 feet away and it transfers over five gigahertz. So, you know, bear all that in mind. And so I have a 27 inch mono price display that I got for like 300 bucks. And I put that in the kitchen and I plug this device into it and I plug them both into electrical power. And that's it. Now it mirrors the sink. Like, I think they say the latency on it is.  Like you just don't notice it. They they say that it's less than 200 milliseconds of latency. If it's I don't think it's that much. I think it's much less than that. And it just works. I mean, like I got to be honest when I I know that this is what this device is built to do and my wife was laughing at me because I was like, there's no way this is going to work because it's exactly what we want. And it would be great if it worked. And so therefore it's just going to be a headache and a disaster. And it's going to take me four times to try and get this thing right. And she's like, well, it says it's going to do what you want. Why would you expect it not to? I'm like, because I know how technology works. It's like this is too simple. And I plugged it in and it worked. It's great. Transfer sound across it. Good to go. We actually use Sonos for our sound. So I just mirror the sound with Sonos, but you don't have to. You could take the sound out of the HDMI signal and good to go. So the IO gear wireless 4K video extender. I'll put a link, of course, in the in the show notes. But so it sounds like it handles as pointed out by Kiwi Graham in our chat room and where is our chat room? It's at mechicab.com slash stream. That's correct. That's correct. But Kiwi Graham points out that some devices, less capable devices, there's this evil thing called HDCP. You sure. Yeah. And apparently this handles that HDCP is high definition copy protection and it's something to protect a digital data stream. And I think it does it over HDMI. And I guess that's correct. And your device as well. So apparently it carries that because they're they're terrified that people are going to suck down the pristine digital content and make a copy of it, I guess. Yeah. No, that's right. Like, well, it's happening anyways. You know, sorry, guys, but right. Yeah, this this this maintains that security in such a way that nothing seems to yell, which is which is all you need. So yeah, it's really it's it's quite. I mean, we've only had it for a couple of days, but we are very much looking forward to checking it out with the Thanksgiving Day parade and the next time we have a Patriots game to watch or something like just, you know, actually yesterday morning, Sunday morning, I had we were doing some chores around the house and we'll put on music to do that. But I put on a concert video of a rush concert and just turn that on on the both TVs and then also streamed it with Sonos to all the speakers in the house. And it was like, this is perfect. It was great. Just do you feel like I'm living in the future. Now, I'm curious if you've tried this because it sounds like this may work, but have you run the TV app on iOS? Oh, OK. Yeah. I mean, we haven't had TV, but. Well, no, but the TV app, it looks like it looks like I could watch shows. Well, I could do it through my TVO as well, I think. Sure. Yes. So I could do it through the TVO app, but it looks like the TV app here. Once I told it that I'm with Optimum, it's like, oh, and by the way, you got these channels, right? Absolutely. If I wanted to, I could watch my show on my iPad or my I think they introduced it in, you know, the latest iOS. I think it was iOS 11. But yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was it's been there for a year, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, no, it works great. Yeah. OK. So I'm thinking if the channel is exposed, that that could be a you know, you have a large device that could be another option. It could. But what I wanted was a mirror, like I wanted whatever's on that TV to be on this one in perfect sync. Like I didn't want to have to. But you're right. Yes. You could you could just put an Apple TV up and stream to that, too, for sure. Yep. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I'm pretty stoked about it. So anyway, just wanted to share my my cool stuff. Wait, are you saying that the TV app is married to the Apple TV somehow? No, I'm saying this. I owe gear thing mirrors my things. And that's what I wanted, which is why, yes, and with the Apple TV. OK, I get it. Yeah, you cannot do this with like if you have two Apple TVs, you can't have them both display the same thing in sync, right? Tivo should be able to do this with their their Tivo mini, right? Because it streams its content anyway from the the main source.  And he's like, well, yeah, right, all the text there. He's like, they just haven't turned that on in the software yet. Like, yes, that's correct. Yep. So. Yeah, it's pretty good. Nice. It's fun living in the future. So. All right. John has a quick tip to share. He says, I fixed my home folder permissions dozens of times on various computers. But I got one recently that had some issues after I set the owner and they still couldn't write to their desktop. After a little Google Foo, I found I had no idea about the new command line follow up from Apple using disc utility in the terminal to correct permissions. And it is, we'll put this in the show notes, of course, but it's disc utility reset user permissions. And then you do the slash and a couple of other things. Says I found it in a support article, which, of course, we will also link to. So, yeah, very cool that you can you can you can reset user permissions from from disc utility on the command line now, which is a pretty good thing. That's it's nice to see them not quite hiding that from us anymore. So good stuff, right? Yeah, I think that comes up a lot of times, especially when you do a system migration, we've had people mention that. Exactly. Yeah, I can't I can't I'm I'm the owner and I can't get into my home folder. It's like, yeah, I think even before you had you used to have to go into. Well, you could go to run something crazy from from recovery, I think. And then that went away, too. So I'm glad that this is back. Yeah, I think that was even gone. Like you could you just couldn't do it because they're like, oh, why would you need to read, you know, do a permissions repair? It's like, well, because this may be that. But it's cool. You guys know best. Thank you. All right. Let's go to. Yeah, let's do David. David, we have we have two ways of moving the cursor. First on iOS, second on Mac OS. So listener David says, I recently found out by mistake a feature of iOS and I had no idea it was there. Now, I'm going to point out this is a feature we've talked about before, but David describes how to invoke it in a way that I find to be the best description of that I've ever heard. The feature is that if you. Properly press on the iPhone or on the iOS keyboard, iPhone or iPad, the keyboard will like the labels on the keys will fade away to gray and now you can drag your finger around and use the iOS keyboard, the space where the iOS keyboard was as a trackpad to move your cursor around. So for example, you're editing an email, you want to move things around.  And then you've got a trackpad that lets you move the cursor around, which is very, very cool. Here's how David describes it. He says the new way is to press and hold the space bar on the iOS keyboard and then roll or move your finger. This is the simplest way to do this. It works every time. Yeah, it works on my iPhone 10 R, which of course is does not have a 3D touch, it's just flawless and fluid and smooth. So push and hold on the space bar and that will do exactly what you want. What's great, David, you you perfectly encapsulated the way to do this. So very cool. Pretty good, huh? Right, John? Yeah, it's kind of creepy how it blanks out the key word, though. It is. It feels like ghosty. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you now. That's how it goes. All right, here's another one. If if if you're ready for me to blow you away. So this one's from the Mac eCab forums at Mac eCab dot com slash forums from listener alpha man, who says the best trackpad gesture on the Mac is not found in system preferences trackpad. It's in accessibility. So it's going to accessibility, select mouse and trackpad on the left. Then trackpad options on the right. Then click the or check the box next to enable dragging with three finger drag. Now that you've turned that on, move to a window. There's no need to click. Just put three fingers on your trackpad when you're over the window handle at the top and now the window moves. He says, OK, maybe it's not the best. He says, but I sure like it. I like it, too. This is great. I'm I'm not a multi gesture kind of person, but I hate clicking and dragging on a trackpad. It's just a weird. I don't know why it's just a weird thing. I always like feel like I'm pushing too hard and all of this. You don't have to worry about it anymore. Third finger down, boom, just drag it around. Good to go. Thank you so much, alpha man. You rock. It's good stuff. You like that, John? I don't like that it's buried. Well, yeah, that's that's the thing is right. We always talk about both. And this is true on iOS as well. That the accessibility features are, you know, or the accessibility section is the place where it's so much of this stuff is. It's crazy. While we're on the subject of the MacGygab forums. We know I know we've talked about this, but we have. Well, if you're in the live stream, what I'm about to say is not true. But for most of you, this will be true. We have now closed the MacGygab Facebook group. And here's the thing. Yeah, I know. And I wanted to do this after we could. I wanted to talk about why in the episode here because of why we're doing it. The MacGygab Facebook group is a great thing. It really has been. It still is or was there are. It's a great resource to go and get information and get help. But it has nothing to do with MacGygab. It is Facebook's users using it. And most of the people in the group have never listened to the show, don't know anything about the show and aren't really a part of our community. They're part of Facebook's community. This is not a surprise. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just not something we need in our world. It offers no benefit to us. We don't get listeners from it. It gets to be a confusing thing. There's a management headaches with it. And it makes more sense for us to have our own community. That is, you know, part of our world. Now, will there be people? Are there people in the MacGygab forums that are not MacGygab listeners? Yes, that's fine. But we're not just getting drive by traffic from Facebook. And to be fair, you know, drive. There's nothing wrong with drive by traffic, but but it's not ours. There's no there's no benefit to the MacGygab family here to have this group over there with our name on it that really is just a odd conglomeration of folks. So the reason that that I wanted to talk about this here is because I don't want to bother explaining it over there. I'm just going to tell people to listen to the episode. Those of you that do both will already know and probably are already participating in the forums. Keeping up with that has almost become a full time job. It's great how much traffic we have in the forums now. But that's why I wanted to do this here, because this is our home and now we have our home that's our home. And we do it exactly the way we want, where we can have answers to questions and we can mark them solved and we can search and sort and categorize them the way that we as a as a community and a family want to. So this is why we've shut down the Facebook group. And I just wanted to quickly go through that. Do you have anything to add, John? No, I'm with you.  Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. And and it's under our control. Correct. Correct. And I mean, the bad news for Facebook is that you won't have to look at the ads that I'm sure they throw up every now and then, right? Right. Yeah, that's right. Well, you can look at our ads. Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, it's true. It's true. It's just our place. Yep. And we can. And there's nothing the other issue is, like, that's not our site. Facebook is is someone else's site, right? So they can make changes there any time they want. And they we may or may not like those. They may or may not work for us. There are things that we would like to change about the way Facebook's groups work. And of course, we can't because they're not ours, but we can with our own forums. And that's what we've been doing for several months. So I want to throw a huge shout out out to not only, of course, all the people that have been helping us in the forums, all the people that are participating and Alex and Graham, who have been moderating our forums. We probably will need another moderator or two and we'll let that happen organically as as some of you sort of percolate up. There's already some ideas that we have. But so a huge thank you to everybody that's that's gotten the forums up to where they are. And also a huge thank you to the folks like Alex and Brian and Michael who have been really helping and really helped us build the Facebook group as well. We did put a lot of effort into that at first.  So thank you to everybody and a good. Yeah, so it's nice software to it is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What is it? WP? WP for. Oh, yeah. Yeah.  Oh, is the software we use. So yeah. But I'm impressed with all of the all the features in there. It's pretty good. Yeah. It's it's interesting. It's it the core forum engine of WP for is free.  I mean, it's it's the prices are trivial, but that's how that's their business model. It's like, OK, look, here's this great, you know, foundation. And then the things you want to add, you know, that's where they make their money. And it's great. And we paid for all that stuff and turned it all on. And we've got a really nice, robust system that's constantly being updated. And we're really happy with it. Yeah, it's pretty good.  Yeah, where you can set that there were there were a lot of posts to our Twitter feed, I think. Right. I went through and cleaned all those up. Yep. Yep. Yep. OK, because yeah, I cleaned a few out as well, too. Cool. Like, what is what is all this? Oh, Marfe. Yeah. Clay, I saw it on my Twitter feed that there would appear to be spam posts. And by the time I got to them on my client, they almost all of them had disappeared. But. Yeah, I had the forums sort of echoing to several places, including our Twitter feed, which is, you know, OK, fine. But it was great because having these spammers constantly attack us for like three days allowed us to really tweak exactly where we wanted to set our spam thresholds and stuff. And now I think we've got it, it's I think it's perfect. But of course, there's no thing perfect. It'll it'll we'll need to continue to tweak. But it's all good. It's all good. So again, thank you to everybody. And we look forward to seeing you on the on the forums and all that stuff. John, I want to take a minute and talk about our our first two sponsors. If I if I may. Of course. Of course. All right. Our first sponsor is Ops Genie by Atlassian. If you're listening to this show, you know that incidents with technology, really, incidents of any kind are inevitable. And really, it comes down to how you and how your company respond to them that separates you from everybody who's not as good as you. And here's the thing. Any tricks that you can use to make yourself better in this regard are a good thing. In fact, they're not tricks. They're just tools. That's what Ops Genie is. It is a tool that lets you plan for your service disruptions and to stay in control during incidents. It gives your team the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues. We've talked about this. Are there planned issues? Maybe. But they're generally not surprises. It helps you to notify all the right people through a smart combination of scheduling and escalation paths that take into account things like time zones and holidays so that, say, the people in London can be the ones to handle things on Thanksgiving because your stuff and your face full of turkey here in the USA, right? Like you can factor that stuff in. It's smart enough. Ops Genie knows how to deal with this stuff. And it integrates deeply with all kinds of different things because Atlassian is there. That doesn't just mean it integrates with everything that Atlassian has. This means that Ops Genie integrates with so many different things because Atlassian is an open company like this. They truly understand that you need to use the tools that you need to use. And they make things work. Ops Genie is so cool. And it's already saved our butts here at Mackie Keb. It can save yours, too. With Ops Genie, your next incident doesn't stand a chance. Visit OpsGenie.com to sign up to get a free company account that lets you add up to five team members. Yes, free, no credit card, no nothing, just your five people and some peace of mind. That's OpsGenie.com. Never miss a critical alert again with Ops Genie. Our thanks to who? Ops Genie by Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is BBEdit from Bare Bones Software at BareBones.com. BBEdit 12.5 came out this month and now includes basic language support for Swift. Yes, Swift. A new commands dot dot dot command that provides rapid access to BBEdit's many menu commands, which is pretty cool to be able to use. A new lorem ipsum generator if you need to put some sample text out somewhere. Extensive internal improvements to improve performance and compatibility and enhancements to many of BBEdit's well-known features, including one of my favorites, which is Multi File Search. Also, what's another one of my favorites? Anybody that's listened to me knows, find differences. These are two things that make BBEdit so awesome. Do you have a folder full of stuff and you're wondering how to find the one file in there that has a reference to the piece of code or the instruction that you're calling and you don't want to go to the command line and use grep? Well, BBEdit is your answer. Multi File Search, you can throw a folder at it. Boom, you can have it search all of your open files if they don't have to necessarily all be stored in the same place. If you've got them open, just tell BBEdit to search all of them. You're golden. So awesome. I. I couldn't live without this tool. And I don't just say that because this is a sponsorship. I say it because it's true. And I happen to be saying it in the sponsorship message because it's true. Really, just go check it out. You can download it. You get a 30 day trial of all the features in BBEdit. And if you find that you don't need the paid features, well, guess what? BBEdit is free to use most of its features, probably the ones that matter to you. So go check it out. BBEdit from Barebones.com, our thanks to Barebones and BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Another cool stuff found from listener Joe now is actually an app that I use all the time in preparing Mac GeekGab. It's a little known fact. Astute listeners have picked up on it that I pre-record many of our sponsor spots to make sure I get them right and tight and good so that I don't ramble on and you folks get the right message without me stumbling on things. I can really focus on it. It's good, but I have to edit those. And what app do I use? Well, that's where Joe's suggestion comes in. He says, I know you often mention Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro, which is awesome, as you always say.  He says, I wanted a simple audio editor and Fission is it. It's super easy to pick up, very powerful and what you can do with it in terms of making complicated things quick and easy. I can now edit and produce files for a podcast. I help out with much quicker than before when I used GarageBand. He says, chapterized MP3 files work with alternate artwork for the chapters. And it's now a 30 second job with drag and drop. Yeah, you're right. I don't do our chapters with this. I do our chapters with a different tool called Authonic, but but Fission will do podcast chapters, but it just makes editing easy. And the cool part is it does the editing usually as long as the files are the right format in a non-destructive way. So you can non-destructively edit an MP3 without having to recompress the file, which is pretty darn cool. I always use it if we like last week. I don't I think I mentioned it in the show that I really screwed up and kept chopping the audio file at the wrong spots. Like while we were recording and I had to stitch it all together. And and Fission did a great job with it. So no, do they do they name it differently across the pond? Because I suspect that our friend is from across the pond because first he opened up his email with high chaps. But he also called it Fusion instead of Fission. No, that's two forms of Nuke and you corrected it. I just thought it was kind of interesting. Yeah. No, no, it's it's called Fission or Fission. It's called Fission. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I had to select a nuclear technology, I think fusion is what we really want, right? Sure. Well, I think the sun is is nuclear fusion. Whereas nuclear reactors, I think are Fission, right? And they create all this waste and it's just terrible. Yeah. OK. All right. There you go. Sure. Sure. I guess. I know it's not in the nuclear geek app. No, it's we we take just jumped out. We've taken worse detours, my friend. This is this is not a problem. I just am not prepared for this one. So you're on your own. Yeah. Listener Eric, last week, we talked about the fact that I went to the Mac tech conference and how much I liked it. And he says, Mac tech conferences are great, but not easily accessible for those of us living in other parts of the world. Fortunately, he says there exists similar conferences around the globe. And he says, tidbits, the folks, the Adam and Tonya angst, who actually were at and spoke at that Mac tech, says they maintain a list of some of the larger ones. So we will put that list in the show notes. So tidbits list of conferences. And there you go. Now it's in the show notes. He says, I regularly attend the Mac CIS admins conference, Mrs. admin conference in Gothenburg for some great presentations by some of the brightest minds in the Mac community, including the 2018 APFS session by Tim Standing, which Dave praised in MGT 735. Yeah. Says for an even deeper dive, Jonathan Levin of Mac OS internals gave a presentation on APFS deep internals. He says the best part is that almost all Mac CIS admin sessions are recorded and available for all to enjoy. So he says, head over to their documentation site, which is where we can see some of those. So I will put that in the show notes, too. So thanks for that, Eric. Very good. Yeah. Conferences are a good thing. This is as if, you know, if you're doing this for a living and supporting folks, that is a full contact sport. It's good to get out and especially for, you know, those of us that do some work as sort of lone wolf consultants, it's it's tough, right? Because I mean, you have Mac Geek Gab, right, as as a community and a resource. And we certainly have a lot of listeners like you and and and now we have the forums where we can all sort of, you know, pool our resources together. But it's really nice to see each other in in the flesh, as it were, and have some fun together, too. So that's where these conferences are a great thing. So thanks for that, Eric. Good stuff. Ready to jump to some questions, my friend? Yes, maybe. OK, well, then let's do that. All right, cool. Let's go to to Greg, who writes, he says my wife passed away suddenly in September and it provided a situation where I have Mac Geek Gab questions. She and I were on an iCloud family storage plan purchased under her Apple ID. We purchased it before we were able to share storage among family members. Well, I may not completely delete her Apple ID. It's certainly not going to be an active use any longer. So I'd really like to switch to the monthly storage. I'd like to switch that charge to my Apple ID. We also have several other family members using this storage. So I'd rather not have to cancel her plan and start with a new plan, since we have close to 200 gigs of photos, backups, etc., already uploaded. Is there any way to do this fairly easily? Also, is there a way to transfer iTunes store credit from her Apple ID to mine? I'd gotten into the habit of getting discounted iTunes cards and keeping a credit on her Apple ID to pay for storage and on mine to pay for the Apple Music family subscription. And it would be simpler to just run it all through mine, since I realized that I could just leave the storage charge on her ID until it's exhausted the current credit. But I really like to consolidate the storage and the Apple Music monthly charges to my ID. Totally makes sense. And I'm really sorry to hear about your wife, my friend. That's hopefully we can provide some some guidance with the tech stuff that maybe makes life a little easier for you. The thing is, you know, all of this, well, really would be easier if there was some way to just merge iCloud accounts. But there is no how to merge to iCloud accounts knowledge base article, because you cannot. We've even had folks call Apple about this. You cannot unless there's there's something along those lines. So, you know, it's I mean, you could do something crazy, like moving the music to hers and then changing the email address associated with hers to yours and and but I think that's going to create more headache than than you need at any point in time, especially right now. Honestly, I think you're going to have to call Apple for both of these things. There's no magic way to just like do this. But I am nearly certain that on the back end, they can do this for you. So so I think that's the answer. In terms of your iTunes store credit, again, while you're on the phone with Apple, I think they'll be able to just bounce that right over to you. But I think you could buy an iTunes gift card with your iTunes store credit so you could buy a gift card from her account and then send that to yours again. If that was the only thing you had to do, then that's probably the way I'd do it. But you're going to need to call Apple to sort of move some of these services around without everybody losing out. And I think, frankly, the easiest way to do that is is just, you know, call them and take care of it. So those are my thoughts on this. John, do you have any thoughts? I did a search and found a piece of software that claims to do this, but I've never heard of them. So. Yeah, I think that was a what is it claimed to do? Oh, it says, well, you know, the title of the articles had emerged two or multiple iCloud accounts into one. Yeah, but that's just software that downloads all the data to your Mac and reuploads it, right? I would assume that's what's involved. Yeah, that post is kind of a spam post. I've seen that post before. It's a that's just a piece of two somebody trying to sell their utility that you can't possibly merge to iCloud accounts without Apple blessing this behavior. So yeah.  So, you know, in theory, if you have the right access, you can you can merge them. I mean, yeah, but they can't. I mean, they won't we could probably write the sequel to do that, right? We could a little programming project. Yeah, I wonder if Apple runs on a sequel database for that, right? You'd have to. I mean, oh, no, no, the whole NoSQL movement, man, Facebook and Twitter basically, you know, eradicated sequel from the planet for those kinds of things. They're totally NoSQL over there because it's way faster, you know, to to not have indexes to populate and all that stuff. So yeah, it's possible. I'll put a link to the whole NoSQL thing and in the show notes. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah. Just the you know, corporate level database work that I've done that they used sequel just because. Well, it gives you flexibility, but then, yeah, as you point out, the cost of that is performance. Correct. Yeah, we we still use my sequel or some variant thereof for all our stuff here. I mean, it's it's still it there's still a lot of people that use it. I just on a large scale. Most of those things have moved to some NoSQL equivalent. So yeah. OK, for those wondering, sequel is structured query language and is a language that you can use to interact with a sequel database. Yeah. It's fun stuff.  Right. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Yeah, the the the idea is that sequel databases were are relational databases where you can have, you know, you might have a table of all your data and then a table of all your users. And in the data table, you have a user ID assigned to each piece of data.  I'm related to you. Here's the user ID of this user. I want to look up and then it returns a list of, hey, yep, here's your, you know, here's all the records associated with that user without showing you everything else. It's pretty straightforward when you kind of abstract it out. So yeah. So it was no sequel of flat file database. Well, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Because they said so in the beginning, there were something called flat file databases. You had all values defined in a single file. Right. That's not very efficient. Kind of what Dave said, I think what we're hinting at is that a relational database lets you take different containers, if you will, with certain items and link them together. And there's a huge when you think about it, there's a huge amount of power being able to do that. But as you mentioned, I remember doing this, you got to create keys and indices and and it gets kind of squirrely to get good performance because, you know, the performance or sophistication like that comes at a cost. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah. Go check this out. There's a the MongoDB people have a have a whole thing about no sequel. So and there's various different but no sequel databases you can you can use. So it sounds like a movement. It is a movement. It is sequel. That's yeah. No, it totally is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a thing. It's a thing. Yeah. Marching in the streets with no sequel science. That's right. That's right. That's right. No Roger, no sequel, no rent. All right. Yeah. Cindy in Indie writes. I'm looking for a way to compare two drives, my internal SSD and my external work related drive. That's a backup. Often clients will use the same images over and over. If a duplicate file exists on my backup, I want to set the color label on that SSD on that file on the SSD to green. And then I want to back up my SSD files to another drive, but don't back up the files that are labeled green. So I'm hoping then to back up the SSD without those files duplicated on the backup drive to a smaller bootable drive. And that way she kind of creates everything. She says I have hazel carbon copy cloner. I'm open to scripting, etc. So you know, the first thing that comes to mind and I haven't done anything, I haven't done enough with Chrono Sync to to know if it would do it. But that that's sort of the first thing that comes to mind is, well, that sort of intelligently lets you script and sync things. So maybe that would do it. Man, I don't. But I don't I don't know of any backup. I don't know of anything. So maybe this is a geek challenge. Feedback at MacGeekup.com if anybody has any ideas. John, do you have any ideas? One idea I have is that you could send an email to feedback at MacGeekup.com. Right. Or because it's a geek challenge, feedback at MacGeekup.com, obviously, would would be another place to go. But any other thoughts for the moment or do we move this on? You know, I was I mean, when I read this, my first thought was can't carbon copy cloner do this? And I think it may be able to. Yep. Well, the thing is, is that carbon copy cloner does have the flexibility to let you run what's known as a shell script before doing its thing. Sure. And and she said she was open to scripting. So that may be one part of it. Yeah. I mean, I was also thinking automator. I mean, a baby kind of, you know, may not give you the best performance, but automator has several finder functions. Fair. Yep. And I think you may be able to put together a sequence of things saying, OK, I mean, it's going to take a really long time, though, I think that my struggle with the task like this. My struggle with a task like this is that it sounds like one of the desires is to identify duplicates. Right. And most backup software I was actually looking, I thought that we'll see, see, see, do that. And I don't think it will, nor should it, you know? I mean, you're supposed to back things up, not make decisions. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah.  Well, what's a good dupe detector? You know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there'll be another. What is it?  I wonder if that would be. No, but you make a good point that especially given that one of these is an SSD like, do you I guess reading from its fine, that's not going to cause any trouble. But it is going to beat on these drives to to scour for duplicates as Kiwi Grant in the in the Graham, I should say, in the chat room notes, he says, I think it might be a pain down the line if your backups aren't true copies. And he says the price of storage is low enough now. Maybe, you know, like, is it is it worth it? I think is questioning the validity of the of the request. And I kind of get that. Like, is it really worth it to scour your drive all the time? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it could from a. You know, if you're not using a CMS. Yeah, then. I could understand why having multiple copies, probably different. Versions, you're talking about like a not a not necessarily a CMS, but a version control system of VCS. Yeah, OK, but I think a lot of. CMSs do that can do that. I think the intent here is that you want to avoid having two files with the same name, but they're different versions, or at least in my mind, that's one thing I'd want to avoid. It's like you have file one and file one. Are they identical or not? Yeah, right, right, right. Now, the nice thing is that Carbacopy Cloner does do that sort of comparison. It takes it a real long time. And I actually choose to do that like once a week or something like that. It will actually do a bite by bite. I think comparison and say is what's here. The same as what's there. OK, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you know ways to approach it, yeah, if you have an idea, send it in, we'd love to hear about it. And if you're a premium listener, send it to us at premium at MackeyCab.com. Of course, that's where all your questions as a premium listener go as well, because if you help us keep the lights on, we answer your questions first. It's just sort of how it goes. John, I want to talk about our next set of sponsors if that's OK by you. Oh, OK. All right. I'd like to tell you about Hopsie. Hopsie is this really cool system that lets you have craft beer on tap at home without getting sick of the beer or breaking the bank. So how do they do this? Right? Because you can have craft beer at home with like a kegerator or whatever. But that's a lot of beer to drink of all the same kind. You might not always like to drink the same kind. In fact, if you like craft beers, you probably like to mix it up a little bit. So the people that created Hopsie essentially like married the kegerator with a curing. They call it the sub, right? And it sits on your counter. It's small, kind of sits on its side, and then it fits into it.  But it also pressurizes it and it's got a little tap handle on the front. So you get the sub, you get a couple of these little mini kegs, you get a couple of glasses and now you have good tasting, cold draft beer, craft beer on tap, ready to go whenever you want.  You've got craft beer ready to go. And here's the thing, the sub, the the little two little kegs, right, the two six packs worth of kegs and two glasses, 99 bucks. Yep, it's crazy, really good price point on this really cool thing. And, you know, I've had one of these at home for a little bit. They sent us a couple of IPAs to test with because I kind of like the IPAs when I'm going to drink beer. That's the kind I like. I like it sort of hoppy. And man, these beers were great because they're craft beers from your local region. So not only does that mean that you're getting stuff that not everybody can get, but you're also getting stuff that's fresh because they're shipping it to you locally. Such a cool thing, so much fun, so easy to use. I really mean it. It's like curing for beer. So cool. So you got to check it out. Here's the deal. You go to try hopsi.com slash MGG again. That's try hopsi.com T R Y H O P S Y dot com slash MGG and use promo code MGG to get the sub home draft machine. Too many kegs of beer that are equivalent to about two six packs, two hopsi glasses and free membership in their monthly beer club for just ninety nine bucks. It's true, just ninety nine bucks. Terms and conditions apply again. It's T R Y H O P S Y dot com try hopsi.com slash MGG coupon code MGG are thanks to hopsi for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is someone you've heard about for a long time here on Mac Geek. And that is cash fly. We have been using cash fly to, as you know, get all of the content from us to you. Right. That's how the show gets to you. You download Mac Geek from cash fly. They run a distributed content distribution network that is planet wide and they know what they're doing. Now they're doing even more. They know that when websites don't load, we lose interest. Right. People fade off. It's not good. Fewer visits means fewer customers bad. Cash fly has your back just like they have ours. 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So know exactly where your site stands today with a lighthouse score report and learn how cash fly's web optimization solution can help add 60 points instantly to your score. Just visit mac.cashfly.com. That's m-a-c dot c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com. And I know I've said this hundreds of times, but I'll say it again, our thanks to cash fly for sponsoring this episode. John, it's time to go to the forums, shall we? Sure. Tyler Ver in the forum says my 2013 MacBook Pro is having a kernel task issue. I have tried an SMC and PRAM reset, an OS restore and now a nuke and pave with iStat menus. He says I can confirm there is no, there are no temperature issues and can use SMC fan control to set the fans to run based off of the temps so the fans slow down. But with the CPU being sucked up by kernel task, my Mac is useless for what I need to do. Before this, before I junk this laptop, is there any good advice to be had? Yeah. So here's the thing. And there's some great answers in the forums that anybody having this should go and read far more than we can share here.  And for whatever reason, I thought to turn on CPU frequency with iStat menus in the menu bar. And this displays the current frequency of the CPU clock.  But it doesn't always run at the same frequency. For power savings and heat heat savings and all that stuff, the CPU frequency actually moves all around and the computer can control this. Right. It can do things depending on the CPU model, like turbo boost, but it can also just throttle itself down. Well, when I turned on CPU frequency, any time I was experiencing this issue, my CPU would show 800 megahertz instead of, for me, something right in the 2 gigahertz range on that machine. And we talked about this. And it was, for me, it was happening mostly when my battery got to five percent or less, it would throttle down. Presumably it would do that so that it had a predictable current flow as the battery got low and you wouldn't wind up in the scenario where the battery just died. So it makes sense. For me, there were times, though, where I would put it to sleep, I'd put it on charge, I'd wake it up and it would never wake out of this 800 megahertz mode. So at least I knew by having it in the menu bar, just reboot. Everything was good. That may or may not be your issue, but it's certainly worth looking at and see what happens. An SMC reset is another good thing to do, but it sounds like actually, I don't know that you did that yet. Oh, yeah, you did. That was the first thing you tried. OK, well, for anyone listening that runs into this, you know, when it whenever it's it seems like it's hardware, but it might be, you know, software or firmware at the SMC reset can do that too. But thoughts on this, John? I mean, you could glean a little additional information by going to the activity monitor and highlighting kernel tasks. And when you highlight something, you get a couple of options here. One is it shows me the memory statistics here. And I wonder if you've changed your workflow in such a fashion that you're now stressing out kernel tasks and I think it needs to do something in order to, you know, as far as like memory allocation, because kernel task is responsible for that among ton of other things. But will you see that in as well as tasks, though? I don't know. Well, it shows a tab here. So I'm just looking at mine right now. It's a task. It says real memory size, 2.8 gigs. OK, virtual memory size, 71 gigs. Well, I don't have that much memory here because I thought that was I.O. Right. I mean, if you have I.O. spiking, you will see kernel tasks also also spike, right? Yeah, it has a statistics tab as well. Maybe that one is more important where it shows, you know, system calls, Unix, page ins. I mean, a lot of this may not be understandable by mere mortars. So yeah, but I mean, it will show the you know, the number of threads and wake ups and how long it's been running and stuff per cent of CPU. But yeah, another thing to look at. I'm going to send you folks to the terminal for this is no. Is it there? Did they take it out? Oh, seriously? I think they took it out. I was going to send people to the terminal to run the top command which is still there anymore. No, no, no, tops there. But what terminal? What what our version of top, at least on this machine, which is high Sierra, does not have an I.O. It doesn't have a CPU by I.O. broken out and that's a really handy thing, but you can't do it on a Mac. So maybe there's a version of top you could run that you could install with homebrew or something. But being able to see if the system is I.O. bound, how much of the CPU is being held up by input output operations like especially disk access can be really, really handy. But but I'm not seeing that in the version of top that that at least not that I'm running here. See does H top do it? I don't think so. Nope. Well, that was like I said, I only do that on our Linux machines and I just assumed it was there on Mac OS. So yeah, kernel task is I mean, I've always thought of maybe I'm wrong about this, but I've always thought of kernel task as sort of the thing that reports when other processes are using system resources, right? So again, like disk access gets assigned to kernel task, but it's not kernel task that's using it. It's you've got some process that's, you know, writing to the disk or reading from the disk and because it asks the system to do that, that shows up as kernel task. So and and of course, then for this throttling thing, it can also use kernel task to just account for the the unavailable CPU sort of artificially is is what will happen. So I guess I guess I would say he's got a look and see if the first thing to figure out is this something the system is doing artificially like throttling your CPU, or is it something that the system is doing on behalf of another process?  I don't know that's that but I could be I could be wrong about what kernel task does. That's that's always that that interpretation has always fit my my experience. But I mean, that doesn't mean it's right. So Kiwi Graham says maybe a memory fault or run hardware diagnostics, but also that kernel task is a big black box. So it can be it can be mine is mine is running for for I'm actually curious for you, John, too, because I'm you know, I'm recording the show, I'm streaming the audio. So and there's a lot of audio processing going on actively. My kernel task on this machine is sitting at about 35 percent right now, which is higher than normal for it. Uh huh. Mine's at 10 percent. OK. I'm many. Do you have nine percent? Do you have core audio D showing up as running? Yep, it's taken five point five. OK, because I'm at I'm at 30 percent with core audio D. But again, I'm doing a lot of different. There's you know, there's all sorts of things. Yeah, I'm just together. Talking. Right.  So that that's probably, you know, where some of that comes from. So yeah. It's interesting. All right. Also from the forums, a good one from HGH 15 who says I have some nest outside cameras that send me sound notifications when someone or some animal is approaching the house. It's very helpful in letting us know when a stray cat that we feed is around. Says I really don't want these sound notifications overnight when I'm sleeping.  Says I've used the schedule do not disturb, of course, which would do it automatically. The problem is that there are some notifications such as things related to my job that I need to hear as early as 5 30 am, which is not a time that I want to hear that a moth has flown by the camera. So in iOS 12, where we can create shortcuts, is there a shortcut that can be created that either simply turns the nest notifications on or off with a Siri command or one that can be made that will automatically at least open the settings notification nest so that I can just flip the switch without having to dig through everything. All right. So I dug into this, John. I don't think shortcuts is going to do what he wants. I'm hoping I'm wrong and I'm hoping that one of you tells me I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Assuming that I'm not wrong, you can invoke Siri and say open nest settings. And you can do this for any app that has settings in the you know, the settings app. And that will bring you right to the next setting screen where notifications are just one tap away. So it saves you digging through and scrolling in all of that disaster.  And of course, she replied, sorry, but I'm not able to change that setting. So, you know, there you go. So there you go. Not bad. But like there are some things that that Siri can do granularly to get in there and do that. This one, you know, won't go all the way. But if you find the right path, you can get yourself right there. So it's two taps instead of, you know, five taps and a long winded scrolling. So there you go. What do you think, John? Am I missing something on this? No, I don't think so. OK, that's too bad. That's too bad. All right, cool. You want to jump to the next one from the forums that you took care of about Mojave and printing. Yeah, those are the forums. After that. Since installing Mojave, I cannot print. I have an Epson ET 37 to 50. When I select print, I get the spinning ball. I uninstalled and reinstalled the printer. I cannot even access print the printer in system settings. When I select it, I get a spinning ball again. That's not good. That's not good. So there's a few things you could try here. And here we go. First thing is you may want to install. You may want to see if there's a new driver. And I actually did a search for that model of printer and their support page comes up. And they actually just updated it in September of 2018. So you may want to check that out. So number one, install a new driver. Number two, then the good folks at Apple have some guidance for us. And the article is called if you can't print from your Mac or iOS device. And if you scroll down a bit in it, you will see a couple of things we've suggested in the past that will remind you again. And this article, actually, I haven't seen this one before. So this actually has a lot of different things. I'll just cover Mac OS and iOS. But one thing you can do is if you go to system preferences, printers and scanners, you could reset the printing system. And that basically wipes out or supposedly wipes out all of the guts of printers that you've set up, including jobs and stuff like that.  This will remove all printers and scanners, including their print jobs and settings. So it sounds like you're not getting too far right now. So that may be another thing to try. The third thing to try, Dave, and this surprised me that they went into this little detail in this article is they suggest destroying all your printer drivers. Huh. And so resetting the printing system doesn't do that or it only does part of that? I think what they're suggesting is that if you're having real issues here, so they say if the issue continues on your Mac after resetting the printing system, take these final steps to remove any currently installed printer drivers. Oh, oh, yeah. That makes sense. OK. And they are stored in slash library slash printers. And my assumption is is that if you then try to install the printer after you've wiped out the drivers, it's going to download the latest hotness. Huh. Because last I checked, Dave, Apple has drive. There are drivers that are stored on Apple site and the vendors will provide those. But you can also go to the vendor themselves and download, as I just told you. You can download it from the vendor itself. But I think the intent here is that, OK, well, the drivers that are on here are corrupt or screwed up. So just just wipe them out and and I'll download them again when I think I need to, which if you're going to install the printer afresh or anew, then that's what should happen. I haven't seen it happen for a real long time on my machine. The other thing is that I seem to recall is that you may want to run software update or app store and do the refresh trick we told you about because typically when they update drivers, though, I haven't seen it for a real long time because I don't buy printers that often. Sure, every decade or so. Yeah, yeah. Oh, same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if the drivers are updated, that typically shows up. So you may want to do that rather than downloading it from Epson because typically what a lot of the vendors do is that it's not just the driver, but it's the the Hoosie. What's it? Photo service and they install all kinds of garbage. And actually, looking in the article here, one of our members here, Graham suggests something else that's kind of in left field, but I'll I'll roll with it. He says, another possibility is that an old kernel extension was not removed by the upgrade procedure. Oh, and apparently some printer scan drivers also have an associated kernel extension. So I think what he's suggesting. So I guess you look at the same. Well, no, the thing is, all right, so extensions, kernel extensions are stored in a number of places. My suggestion would be is that if you go to about this Mac system report, you didn't get the system info system information application. And if you go to the software category, hey, look, there's a tab called extensions. And that'll give you a summary of all of the kernel extensions on your system and tell you fascinating details about them, like whether they're loaded or not, the name and the path to them because there's kind of scattered about the thing is there are multiple, I think it's slash a lot. I think there's system library extensions. There's a home directory, so there's like three or four places where you have these kernel extensions, but the system information utility will identify all of them. It takes a little while to run. And yeah, if you see anything that has the name Epson in it, you know, you may want to, you know, drill down. You know, you probably have to provide an admin password. Because I doubt they take removing kernel extensions lightly, and that may fix it. And the claim was that, you know, if it's removed and it's needed again, it should be reinstalled. Right, right. Yeah, when you reinstall it. Yeah, cool. Cool. Yeah, that is upsetting that that it seems to be associated with upgrading our operating system. All of a sudden, you can't use your printers. I certainly didn't. Not surprising. Yeah, I haven't heard of this happening regularly, but, you know, I mean, there are wholesale changes happening to the system when you upgrade, you know, a major operating system version. Yeah, but I don't think they made any. No, I could be wrong, but I don't think they made any big changes to the whole printing infrastructure. I mean, I think that's been pretty. No, and quite, quite thankfully, my ancient HP. I've got a HP laser jet that also has a scanner in it. And the software for that hasn't been updated since like Mavericks or something. And it still works with Mojave. Like it should not. Well, I don't think it would install on Mojave. I don't think it would install on Sierra. Wait, it's a laser. Yeah. Well, yeah. So it's speaking of HP GL, I guess. Well, whatever it's speaking for the scanning functionality or PCL, I guess. Oh, I'm talking about printing is no problem. It's scanning that you need HP software to do and no other scan software that I've found. We'll we'll talk to it and forget what the model. So image capture will not see it. So it's not a twain or correct. Is this? Yeah. Compliant scanner. OK, it's kind of proprietary. Yeah, but it still works. I used it the other day. I am much to my surprise.  It was like, it's not going to happen. And it was like, oh, still works. OK, hold your mouth just right. Don't move. Yep. OK. So yeah, crazy. Hey, I got a I got an email from Tony, one of my clients who said. Is there an easy way to get a copy of Safari's saved passwords? And the answer to that question is complex, because if you want to, say, get a list of them that you could print, I think the answer is no. If you want to get a list of them that are in just a text file, the answer is no. But at least as far as I know, however, all those passwords are stored in your keychain, right? Your login keychain or your iCloud keychain, or really probably both if you're syncing. And they are of the kind web form password. So if you open applications, utilities, keychain access, in there, you'll see the login keychain and your iCloud keychain and perhaps any others that you've created. And if you choose the login keychain or the iCloud keychain and sort it by kind, you will see all of these web form passwords, you know, grouped together and you can highlight them. But unfortunately, the file export items option is not available for things of type web form passwords, but you can go in to edit and copy and you can copy multiples and then you could go to file and new keychain and save them all to a new keychain that you could then, you know, put on a thumb drive or do whatever you want with it to move it from Mac to Mac. Of course, this is only readable by Mac OS and keychain access, but that would be one way to get a copy of them that you could move to another machine without syncing with iCloud and all of that. So depending on how you want to use this copy of your your Safari passwords, that is one way to do it. Thoughts on that, John? You're going to be kidding me, man. Why? I can't I can't I know I'm just looking.  And actually, I have a couple, though I'm not currently actively using a keychain, but I do have a couple of entries in there and it shows you a list of all of them, except the password is blanked out unless you click on the entry. So I suppose you could write a script that could like scroll through the list and take it. Oh, that's true, because if you right click on it, if you right click on each one in that list in Safari, you get copy website, copy username and copy password. So you could do you could you could scroll through each of those three options and slurp them out. Yes. Yes. And also, oddly enough, there's a share with AirDrop. OK. Hmm. You know, that must be new and that must be new in Mojave. Yeah, because I don't see that on high Sierra here. Really? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you may be maybe able to script it. Yeah. Not my first choice. And Kiwi Graham and Michael King in the chat room are saying that one password does let you print this sort of thing if you want. And Michael King seems to think that last pass also will. So, you know, yet another argument for a third party password manager that has features that are different from apples and maybe features that you want. So and I will say with the new password manager functionality baked into iOS, I'm really impressed. It's like one password is an equal citizen to, you know, iCloud key chain, which is good. So hopefully that helps last pass because I've had situations where for whatever reason, the app that I'm running redirects to a web page.  But as soon as I get there and I highlight the username field, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, you want to you want to go to user or whatever in last pass, right? And I'm like, yeah, yeah. It's really amazing how they the integration that they do with that is. Oh, it's I think I was a naysayer to begin with. But now that I see more situations where I actually have to input a password through a web page rather than. Oh, it's an app. Yeah, it's great. All right. Moving on to Tim. Tim says, I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that I use for audio recording and production, but I think my USB port is wearing out and failing. Is there a way to plug my USB audio interface into the Thunderbolt port with a new cable? I keep hearing experts talk about getting specialized cables rather than adapters and dongles, but I can't seem to find this one. It would need to be a USB type B to Thunderbolt One. If not, is there a way to replace an aging USB port or is it time for a new machine? So working backwards, I don't think you want to replace your USB port because I'm pretty sure on that machine it requires replacing the entire motherboard. So that's just not going to be cost effective. So you're right to think about Thunderbolt as the option. But there is no such thing as a Thunderbolt to USB cable. In fact, the only thing that there is is a Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt cable. Now, you might see some things that look like cables, but they are, in fact, adapters, right? It's it's important to remember that Thunderbolt is like a PCI slot in a tower computer where whatever you plug in there needs to be the interface. So when you plug, if you wanted, if you had a tower computer and you wanted to add a USB interface to it, what you would do is you would get a USB PCI card and you would plug that in. And then on the back of the computer, where you plugged in the card, there would be some USB ports and you'd be good to go thinking of Thunderbolt that way. That's exactly what you need. So you're going to get a Thunderbolt to USB adapter. You're going to plug that in instead of into a PCI slot into a Thunderbolt port. But you're not going to get a USB B adapter there or a port interface. What do we call that the thing at the end of the cable? I can't, but whatever the shape of that, it's not going to be that. In fact, it's going to be the opposite of that. It's going to be a USB A port and then you will use the same cable that you've always used. And instead of plugging it into the USB A port on your laptop, you will plug it into the USB A port on the Thunderbolt adapter. And you're good to go and that way.  But I think that one only does USB two. But if you're for your printer, you don't need USB three. But if you wanted USB three, you could add that with a Thunderbolt to USB three adapter and you're good to go. So that's I think that's the answer. It's just always important to remember that Thunderbolt, I always think of it as a level, level deeper than the other ports on the outside of the Mac. The other ports have their adapters already built into them, whereas Thunderbolt lets you go one level deeper to the motherboard and choose what what functionality you want to add. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. Cool. So. Yeah, maybe I'm going down the wrong path here, but I was looking for a Thunderbolt USB three hub. I don't think well, there would be no hub. You would get perhaps. Well, I mean, we call them, I think, I think they have been called Thunderbolt hubs or Thunderbolt docks, right? Where you get a Thunderbolt device that has multiple ports on it, you know, and that certainly is a thing.  Do they call them Thunderbolt docks? Yeah, Thunderbolt dock is not not hub, but yeah. You know, OWC has their Thunderbolt two dock, their Thunderbolt three dock, right? And you can get portable Thunderbolt docks that are just like little dongles that have many ports on them. We talked about all kinds of these things. So, yep, that's that. But that's not that's not wrong, right, because you could get a Thunderbolt to, you know, USB thing that had three USB ports on it plug your audio device into one and you have two more or one that has a couple of USB ports and an Ethernet adapter or whatever you want. You know, it's a beautiful thing connects. K A N E X is the company that makes a lot of these things for for Thunderbolt. So it's worth. OK, well, I have yet to experience the joy of Thunderbolt, although both my machines surprisingly have Thunderbolt. Yeah, I haven't found an application yet. Really, I'm trying to think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I do have a video adapter plugged into my mini into the Thunderbolt slash display port. But that's, I'm going to say, not really Thunderbolt. Right. That's not really Thunderbolt. That's right. That's that's mini display port. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird that Thunderbolt doesn't have it. But yeah, I think we were talking to, you know, I should try to get I. Well, I guess one of the issues is that, you know, the technology is a little pricier than USB three. Like, for example, I think I could get a Thunderbolt enclosure and plug it into either of these machines for a hard drive. And that would work, right? Right. But but again, just for the sake of this conversation, that wouldn't be a Thunderbolt hard drive. It would be, as you said, an enclosure that has a Thunderbolt to SATA adapter in it. Yes. Right. It just just to just to paint the picture for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. So no, I think for I think for Tim, what he wants is this Kinex Thunderbolt to they call it their Thunderbolt to gigabit ethernet plus USB three adapter. That's the only one I can find that I would even be comfortable recommending. And I use this one. It's great. It's 80 bucks and it it's Thunderbolt and it has a USB three and a gigabit ethernet port on it. And it's, you know, it's great for being portable with like an old MacBook Pro or MacBook Air or whatever. So, yeah. Yawel. Yawel. All right, man. Speaking of gigabits, I don't know if you want to jump to Jeremy that had a gigabit question. If you can do it in two minutes or less, go. Oh, all right. Whoa. Now I'm under the gun here. All right. So Jeremy asked the question and I think it's a good question because now we're getting to the age of different terminology. And he says, now that I have my new Mac mini pro, I'm starting to look for other devices that have 10 gigabit ethernet. I started with devices I already have and I immediately became confused. Most devices I have are 10, 100 or 1000 megabits per second, which I expected. Then I am seeing in specification things like switch fabric, 32 slash 48 GBPS, 10 GBPS switching fabric and 16 GBPS switching capacity. So what exactly does Apple mean when it says that the ethernet on the mini is 10 gigabits? Is it all just hypers? It's something that doesn't matter yet because no one else is doing it. It's not like Apple hasn't done that before. All right. Well, here's the answer. So you are now seeing. So the quick answer is that there are two things. So one, yes, the port you can get on the new Macs. You can get what is called a 10 gigabit ethernet versus gigabit ethernet, which is more common now. The port of the machines here, a 10 gigabit ethernet port, it means exactly what it says. It can achieve up to 10 gigabits a second if you're using the right cables. It can also do one, two and a half, five and 10, or at least Apple claims that there it does over copper. But then I think the confusion comes in is because they're using the same units now. So a lot of switches, including the one that I have now. So, Dave, I have a TP-Link TLSG 1024DE. It's a 24 gigabit switch. Now, you may ask yourself, well, does it have the capacity to actually do that much traffic on what I'm going to call a backplane? And the answer is, yes, it does, Dave. And here's the quick math. And here's the quick math and Jeremy verified this. So I have a 24 gigabit switch. So that means in theory, it has 24 ports. It can send a gigabit both up and down. And if you do the math, Dave, you know what you get? You get 24 times 2 times 1. What does that equal? 48 gigabits per second. So your switch is capable of transmitting that much data at one moment if necessary. Correct. And in the specification for it, so I think this is what Jeremy was looking at, the specification for this switch says switching capacity of 48 gigabits per second. I think the confusion comes in now, because this has been common for a while. And to me, the assumption is that a switch should be able to do the full bandwidth of whatever protocol in both directions to all ports. And I just gave you the math here. 24 ports, one gigabit up and down. And they claim to be able to do that. So if I did want to blast that much data between all of the ports up and down, they claim that they can handle it. So the problem is the terminology for this is, so TP-Link calls this switching capacity, but he saw other terms used for the same sort of thing. And it's also representing a gigabits per second. Got it. I can understand the confusion. OK, so switching capacity and switch fabric are the same thing, is what you're telling us here? Yes, it sounds to me like the vendors are using different terminology to describe the same thing, which is what is the maximum capacity of this router or switch? That makes sense. And in theory, it should be, though, I suppose if they went on the cheap, you could have one that cannot handle full bandwidth up and down on all ports at all times. Sure. In my opinion, you shouldn't buy a switch that can't do its best. Yeah. All right, well, that was four minutes, but good and helpful. Yeah, I tried to condense it. That was good. Yeah, yeah. I knew it wouldn't really be good. Now, the thing is I checked the pricing. And I think even TP-Link has like a 16 port. The thing is, be careful. Number one, it's pricey, man. I saw like the like a 16 port TP-Link 10 gigabit switch was like 1,000 bucks online. Well, because it's got to I mean, if you want to be able to use 10 gigabits per port, it's got to be able to do 160 gigabits, right? Yes. So the other thing is at least the TP-Link models that I looked at, you may have to upgrade your copper. They claim that they'll work with cat 5E or cat 6 up to a certain length. But then if you want to go farther, you've got to get I guess cat 6 or cat 7 cable. Got it. So unless you really need 10 gigabit, I mean, it's nice to have. But unless you really need it, I mean, you may be talking rewiring things. Well, there are some switches that just have like one or two 10 gigabit ports on them. They had one as well. So it had like two 10 gig ports and then like a certain number of one gig ports. And that would be another thing if if, well, especially if you only have. Right. You know, one or two devices, which at this point now, I mean, the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, I guess, or the iMac Pro are the only ones right now. Yeah, your Synology might do that too. So, you know, like that. And that would be the thing, right? Is think about how you're going to use this bandwidth. Does it make sense for your, you know, what is your Mac Mini going to talk to that it needs to be able to pump 10 gigs in either direction simultaneously? Whereas your Synology, if it's and if a Mac Mini is going to be used as a file server, it might need the same thing. But the Synology might actually be talking to several devices at once, each of which are gigabit devices. Well, if, you know, you've got three Macs that are gigabit devices and they all want to, you know, send and receive data to your Synology, then it makes sense to plug your Synology into the 10 gig port so that each Mac could then get one gigabit dedicated, you know, not dedicated, but available to it. So, anyway, all right, now we're pushing past five minutes on this one. So we'll call it a day, but...  Next week, folks, it's, you know, it'll be Cyber Monday when the show comes out. So we are doing our cool stuff found gift guide or at least the first of them for the season. We tend to do a couple here because we know that you know that a lot of the stuff that we put in our gift guide isn't necessarily stuff you would buy for other people. It's stuff you'd buy for yourself. So it either means that you wait until after the holidays to, you know, see what you got, see what you had to get for other people, see how much money you got left and then maybe have some fun on your own. Or if you're like me, you buy yourself something and put it under the Christmas tree to Dave from Dave and, you know, you're good to go. So there you go. I do that every year, every year. Why not? I always buy myself presents. Correct, correct. Absolutely. So, so John, prep your stuff for the gift guide. If you have stuff for the gift guide, send it in to us. We'd love to see it. You can, you know, we told you the email addresses earlier. You can send it to us in the forums, if you like it, macgeekyeb.com slash forums. You can call in 224-888-GEEK. John, geek is? Four, three, three, five. I want to thank Cash Fly again, times two now, both for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you and for sponsoring us with their new web content optimization engine. Of course, the other sponsors in the show include great things like, smilesoftware.com slash podcast, otherworldcomputingmaxsales.com, barebonessoftware at barebones.com, ring at ring.com slash mgg, opsgeniefromatlassian at opsgenie.com, O-P-S-G-E-N-I-E, ero.com slash m-g-g, trihopsy.com slash mgg. So very cool. So very lucky. Thank you to all of you for listening, doing what you do. It's Thanksgiving week. So thanks to you, John, for doing the show together for all these years. It's a blast. I love getting together every week and chatting geek with my buddy. It's good. What do you have to say, Mr. Braun? Well, it's probably time to start thinking about this. The holiday season approaching us with Thanksgiving and then some other things, depending on what you're into.  So you want to make sure at this time of year that you don't get caught.


Welcome to Marshall Park where we have replaced an outdated playground for the community. The project was made possible by a Wells Fargo Grant and our contractor for the playground was Great Southern Recreation. The playground is a nature-based design theme that blends in well here in the natural landscape of Marshall Park. Innovative play features include a log jam climbing area, a swing that was provided by Earthscapes and a large climbing dome by Burliner. They both offer a play feature that children can explore creatively. There's no obvious play path which is a different approach from the standard post and platform type playgrounds and we're excited to introduce this to the community. Both the log jam and the swings are made from the black locus tree which is very resistant to decay and a sustainable product for playgrounds. The Burliner large climbing dome has been also very popular. They both offer continuous play for a variety of kids at the same time and can be quite challenging as well. The surfacing for this playground is engineered wood fiber. We have a large seating bench for you to spectate your kids as they climb on these innovative features. So we hope you can come out to Marshall Park and enjoy this new playground.