The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 901 for Monday, November 22nd, 2021. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you, where we are here to help, we are here to help each other.  No, you just send in your cool stuff found. And we mash it all together into an agenda, hopefully adding answers or at least context to your questions and everything else. With the goal being that every single one of us learns at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Quip at getquip.com slash MGG, where you get your first refill for free. Coinbase.com slash MGG, where you can get 10 bucks in free Bitcoin. Truebill.com slash MGG, saving you thousands a year. And Wealthfront.com slash MGG, where you get your first 5,000 managed for free for life. We will talk more in-depth about each and every one of those for you shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in triple Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are we today, Mr. John F. Braun? Above average. Oh, I'd like to hear it. I am reminded of, I believe it's, oh, now I can't remember, is it George Benson or Grover Washington Jr.? It's just the two of us. We have had, why can't I remember who did that song? That's interesting. That's weird for me.  Really, what I want to do is run to the Googles and search. But I'm not going to, because we've got this thing that you and I are doing here, John. It is just the two of us. We have had guests the last two weeks. I've loved having guests. And I, from the feedback we've gotten from everybody at, you know, feedback at MackieCab.com. It has not just been me that's loved it, not just us that's loved it. Everybody seems to have loved having Gary and then, you know, a first time guest with Gary and then a long, long, long, long, long time. Almost our first guest with Pilot Pete. So, yeah. I could think of one or two. What's that? I could think of one or two people. One or two people, what? To bring on. I'll send it to feedback at MackieCab.com. Yeah. And actually everybody do that. Tell us who you would like to have join us on the show, because it seems like the guests are a good thing. They mix it up. Like last week Pete's tip with his, his adding another shortcut to the print menu. Game changing. Like for me and lots and lots and lots of you. I know. So, and then Gary had his tip about the MagSafe mount for a tripod mount. Like that seemed to like blow up all over the place. It's great. Fantastic. We love it. Who you would like to see join us here. Who you would like to hear join us here. And we will, we will reach out and go from there. Yeah. All right. So we have some cool stuff found to go through. Shall we do that, John? Indeed. All right. Steven. Hips us to a new thing in Monterey. If you go to the command line. He says there is a new command line tool to do a speed test. Yeah. It is called network quality. And the way it's listed in Monterey or the way it listed in the terminal is it's all one word network quality with a capital Q. Everything else is, is lower case. And it will immediately start doing a speed test. It doesn't tell you what, what servers it's using for the speed test. But it will go out and do a download test and an upload test.  So when it first started running for me, I thought, oh, it's never going to stop. Like the way it was reporting it, it seemed like it was just one of those commands that, that runs until you tell it to stop with another quick tip. Control C is generally the way that you would do that from the terminal to stop something that's running. But, but you don't have to stop this. It does the test and then gives you a summary. And I thought this is great having a, having speed test built into macOS. I think that's cool. Does this tell me anything that other tools don't? I mean, I ran it and yeah, it gave me my upstream and my downstream. It didn't give me what I thought I should get. Agreed. I got better results with like a Oogla's tool, give you different numbers. Well, I think the difference is that this is now baked into every version or every computer that has macOS monoray on it, right? So it, it doesn't give you information you can't get, but lots of people out there that don't have Oogla's command line speed speed test tool installed. Now it gives, it absolutely gives them information they can't get. So, but yeah, you're right that Oogla's command line tool, you install Oogla's, Oogla are the people that make speed test.net. That's how you know them more, more, more likely that is more familiar to you. But you can install, they have a command line tool, which if you have homebrew installed, you can install with brew install speed test dash CLI for command line interface. But then you invoke it by just typing speed test from the command line. So it's a little bit, it's one of those tools that's a little bit different. You, the name to install it is different from the name to invoke it. Yeah. And the other thing with network quality is there's not a man page for it. Really? Interesting. Unless I didn't type it in right. But yes, I mean, so in Unix, in the terminal, if you type man space and then a command, it'll bring up what they call the manual page, which is pretty much the instructions on how to use it. What I think did work is that I think I did network quality dash H or was it dash question mark with a lot of commands. If you do a dash H, that's usually help. Yeah, which is similar to probably condensed version of what's in the man page. So network quality does have a man page. You have to type it with the with the capital Q. And it says allows for measuring different aspects of network quality, including yada, yada, yada. And there are some switches for it. You can tell it what interface to test. So if you want it to test your wifi versus your, you know, your ethernet, if you've got both connected, you can do a dash C on it, which produces computer readable output. So potentially helpful for developers who want to get information about your connection. They don't have to bake in their own tool. They can just use this. And then there's also a custom configuration URL. So you probably could point it to your own speed test server if you decided to. So yeah, interesting stuff. Thank you for that, Stephen. I, you know, we love tools like this. It's great. Yeah. And more in our chat room, which is live.mechicab.com says that the Mac tool reports way slower than fast.com. That's funny, Dave, because I've had the opposite happen to me. So apparently they upgraded the 5G in my neighborhood and I used the fast tool on iOS and it was reporting like single digit megabits per second. And I'm like, sure, I must have like crummy 5G. Then I saw you posted something to a thread and you used Ukla's tool on iOS and you got hundreds. And I'm like, well, maybe I should use that tool instead. And I did. And I got hundreds down and tens of megabytes up. So I don't know what is wrong with the. Now you have some insight on why I was seeing this. Yeah, well, the tools all use different servers, right? Even Ukla's tool, depending on what you're on and how you're connecting and where you're connecting from and all of that factor into how it chooses what speed test server it's going to point you towards. On the web, you can manually choose your speed test server.  And I've had to do that here. Many times my, you know, now, especially now that I've gotten the consolidated fiber where I have gigabit in both directions. Most speed test servers will not successfully show gigabit on the upstream. They just they just don't have the capacity to or they're not configured to take that. So I have to choose one that I know is and I've found that out by trial and error. So it doesn't surprise me that one speed test tool gives, you know, dramatically different results from another. It's just kind of how it is. You got to test. You sort of need to know what you're hoping to see. And that which is an awful way to go go about collecting data. I like, you know, like, let me let me keep trying until I get the results I want. But in this case, it really is because what you're what you're hoping when you're doing a speed test, you're hoping that your connection is the weakest link in the chain, right? So that you can truly see what your connection can do. But sometimes you're not the weakest link in the chain. And so you have to find a scenario where that is the case. So it's not so much about seeking the data you're hoping to seek. It's finding the right test case. It's a lot like when people want to test their Wi-Fi in their house and they use speed test to do that speed test is testing your Wi-Fi or your Internet connection in and out of your house. And your Wi-Fi may travel much faster than your Internet connection can travel.  So my Wi-Fi in my house, even computer to computer or computer to server or something is limited to 105. It's like, no, that it's that's just based on the test that you're doing. So which is why we recommend using something like I perf in your house so that you're actually you're not you're not leaving the house. You're staying inside and you can test with that. So yeah, but I don't know keeps it fun. I love this stuff. Hey, you know what else I love is when you solve my problems for me and Elliot, you did it. So I mentioned in the last episode that or two episodes ago, I guess that I wanted. I asked Gary actually Gary Rosenzweig to he's a developer. I'm like, build me the app I want, which was to allow my iPhone to easily restart my Mac in the case where my Mac is frozen. And many, many, many of you wrote in and said, you know, there is a run script over SSH command in shortcuts on iOS now. So you could do it that way.  Didn't have to worry though, because listener Elliot went and built that shortcut and posted it to our forums. How he built it, what he did, the thinking behind it. It's brilliant, brilliant post. I encourage you to go read it. I followed his instructions, which are very, very straightforward and simple.   So it, but it works great. So I created one, tested it. It's great. And then I duplicated it and changed the IP address and name of it so that I have it for my second Mac that I would want to do this with. And it really works. So problems solved. And thank you, Elliot. So we call that cool stuff made, not cool stuff found because, because you made it. So thanks, Elliot. You rock. Fun stuff. Of course, the other way to do it is sharing remote login and that gives your Mac SSH ability. Well, right, you have to do that first. So what we were talking about was once you've turned on SSH login, which you're right, you have to turn on. Now, how do you go and talk to your Mac? The way I was previously doing it was with a third party app called prompt, which is an SSH app for the iPhone. So I would type SSH into my Mac. I would type the little command and then, you know, have to do it. But that, you know, that's fraught with opportunity for disaster. Fat fingering a command on an iPhone is a pretty common thing. So this takes care of all of it because it SSH is in without you even having to own a third party SSH app for your iPhone. So yeah, no, this is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah, that's good. I was using YouTube DL the other day. Another command line tool. I know we're getting a little geeky right out of the gate here and I love it. YouTube dash DL again installed with homebrew brew install YouTube dash DL is a fan has been, I should say is is perhaps incorrect based on where I'm going to take this. Is a has been supported to be reported to be a way of downloading an M4 v file from a YouTube video, which could be a great thing. You know, if you want to archive a copy of something that that you have on YouTube, I do it with sometimes with concert videos. I know there's probably some questions about that. But you know, whatever, I was downloading one the other day. In fact, it was a video of a show I was in. So I felt pretty good about this, but it was going super slow. I like this is weird, like 85 kilobits per second. It was going to take, you know, 20 hours, John, to download a one hour long performance. And so it was like, yeah, I don't know. And so I did some Googling and found that there is a fork of YouTube DL called YT dash DLP that they say has resolved a lot of these problems. It's in more active development and, you know, all of those things that happen with open source tools. So I tried brew space install space YT dash DLP and it downloaded. And then once it downloaded, I used YT dash DLP to download my performance that that concert I did in. And sure enough, it came down right away. So what I what I'm going to have to do though is either reteach my fingers to type YT dash DLP in the future or uninstall YouTube dash DL and then alias that command to YT dash DLP so that I type it the right way. I guess we're into terminal geekiness. I didn't realize it as I was pulling all this together, but you know, here we are. Everything we've talked about so far is the terminal, John. I like it. It's good. What are you bringing up, Mr. Braun? What's what's happening over there? What? Tell us tell us what's on your mind. Walk us through. I to download videos in the browser. I use something called Downey. I just wanted to mention it. Oh, it works really good. Yeah. So I think Downey, I don't know about Downey specifically. I know that a lot of those GUI tools to do this are based on YouTube dash DL at their core, right? Which is the open source way of slurping that down. And just so we're clear, despite the name of this tool, it's not just for YouTube. You can point a Facebook video URL at it. You can point if it's open a Vimeo URL. Like I've done other things with it and it's worked out really, really well. So, so it's a good tool. And I think, yeah, I think Downey, but Downey makes it easier. So we'll put a link to Downey in the show notes to John. I'll put that there. And how did I find Downey? How did you find out? Your set up. Oh, man, gosh, set up is one of those things. I don't think they've ever. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think setups ever sponsored the show. And yet I think we've probably sent more people to set up than any other of our sponsors, which is fine.  Obviously, we've been doing this 17 years. We're happy to talk about the things that we like and use. And then occasionally the two, you know, get to intersect. And that's where the sponsors come from, which is great. All right. We've got a lot more to talk about. But speaking of sponsors, John, now seems to be a good time to talk about our first two. I agree. Oh, here we go. All right. You know, here at, at Makikab, we're always talking about developing good habits, right? It's one of the things that we love to do and we love to use our technology to do it. And good health starts with good habits, too. Our sponsor Quip makes it super easy by delivering all the oral care essentials that you need to care for your mouth. The Quip electric toothbrush is loved by over 7 million mouths, including mine and a few other people in my household. This thing's pretty cool. It's got time sonic vibrations with 30 second pulses that guide you through a dentist recommended two-minute clean. 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Hey, I know we just finished our Cool Stuff Found segment, which really was like Cool Stuff Found in the terminal. There's one last bit of Cool Stuff Found I want to talk about in this episode. And that's something that came out last week with Apple's new self-service repair program. This just sort of appeared on Wednesday morning and like I didn't see rumors it was coming. In fact, I would never have predicted we would have seen this. However, Apple announced this program that gives us regular people access to genuine Apple parts and tools to repair our devices. They say it's coming early next year here in the US and then throughout next year will expand to additional countries. It will start with M1 Max, iPhone 12, and iPhone 13 models. And it'll focus on what Apple says are the most commonly serviced modules such as the iPhone's display, the battery, the camera, and it will expand to other types of repairs throughout the year. I mean, this is quite frankly, I think it's a game changer. In fact, even if it's not a game changer, it's a fantastic thing to see that Apple is finally allowing people to buy parts that are certified directly from Apple as opposed to having to get it on the gray market. And the gray market would essentially be Apple or their suppliers, but oftentimes it was even Apple, even though this was never said selling bulk parts out the back door to some trusted liquidator.  Somebody would take them, strip them apart for their parts and then go sell the parts. And there's obviously profit available there, which is a fine little business model. But that was the way that parts got into the hands of people like you and me, John. And that's a it's a ridiculous thing, but it's how it has worked for a very, very, very long time. And I'm stoked to see Apple opening this door. I think it's great. I really do. It's not it's it's not perfect, but it's way better than what we had a week ago. I think. What do you think? Yeah. I heard. Yeah, I heard this on the radio kind of surprised me. I'm like, why are they doing this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right now, replacing the battery in the phone is pretty straightforward, I think. But things like the screen. What I understand it does some sort of crypto bonding thing and only Apple can do that properly. Right. Yeah. And it sounds like that will change, right? I mean, it would have to in order for people to be able to replace the screen and still get the digitizer to work and the, you know, face ID and all that stuff. So yeah. Yeah, I've only had one screen replaced. I think it was 150. I did it at one of the Apple stores. Sure. Because it was cracked and they wouldn't take it for trade in if it was cracked. Right. Yeah, you mentioned that. That's right. You went across the street or went across the hallway at the mall or whatever and got it replaced and then went back and traded it. I went to Apple and then I went to Verizon and traded and upgraded my phone. Cool. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm stoked about this. There was some pre-show discussion, which you're always welcome to join folks. It's always at live.macgeekab.com. You can find out how to join it or when more specifically to by subscribing to our calendar at macgeekab.com slash calendar. But Warren in the pre-in the pre-show chat was pointing out that, you know, this might be a bad thing for Apple authorized service providers because people will now have the option at least to do their own repairs. And I think there's some truth in that, but I don't think it's a binary thing. Right. Like there's a lot of people that will still prefer to have someone else do this for them. So I think it opens the door for a lot of, you know, lone wolf consultants who are not able to currently procure Apple parts to be able to help their clients this way. But certainly, you know, for folks who are comfortable doing it, great. But I think there's a lot of people who are still going to be uncomfortable despite being able to get official Apple parts. They're just not going to want to do it themselves. So I think, I think the, I think the type of people that generally go to authorized providers will still probably go to authorized providers. But, but as Warren points out, yeah, they're, they're a techie neighbor can can do it now, which tells me that my non techie neighbors are going to be calling me asking me to do this for them starting early next year. So that sounds great. Maybe I'll find my favorite authorized Apple provider and direct them that way. I'm not a big fan of taking apart iPhones or laptops to be fair. They're built in layers, folks.  And then you have to go put it all back. So it's the fact that the parts and the tools are available is fantastic. I think it's a long, it's a, it's a huge win in the long battle for right to repair. But it doesn't, it's a game changer for some people. And for the rest of the people, you'll still take the Apple to get it fixed if you can. So, but it does open that door for people who are, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away from an Apple dealer like that. I think that to me is one of the best parts about this. So that's Warren says so many broken ribbon cables are about to happen that I agree with. That's the, yeah. And those, those fragile connectors that are almost like you're doing your own surface mount solder just without the solder in there. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. But it's fun. It's good. I don't know. You have anything more to add to that, John? No. I'm curious to see where it goes. Really curious to see where it goes. Yeah. All right. You want to take us to, to Druski? Yes. Yes. So Druski had two issues and this is the second one. And I think I have an answer for him. Okay. Excuse me. I still haven't figured out how to empty the trash with a time machine backup in it. I've renamed the file, renamed the folder, moved it to the desktop or another drive all to no avail. So I tried one, this used to work, but it didn't. Something called trash it. It didn't say it wouldn't work, but it sure didn't. It just didn't fail. It didn't succeed rather. So then I did some surfing. Okay. Surfing bird. Surfing USA. And I found this really good article that has some suggestions. Max trash won't empty. Here's how to fix it. And it's an article up at MacPaw and it's very recent. Like this year. Okay. And I think the best, of course, now Safari can't open the page because the server isn't responding. Great. Nice. That's excellent. Amazing. But they have like five suggestions in the article. You can read it. We'll link to it, of course. Sure. I think the one that will work for you is to use CleanMyMac X for 10.  There's many trashes. There's like user trashes and system trashes. Is that what? And like music trash, photos trash. Right. So there's trashes everywhere. CleanMyMac knows about them. Interesting. Okay. I would try that. Yeah. You know, I've been through this a few, as we all have, you know, I say we all, anybody who puts himself out there and hangs their shingle as, you know, I'm a person that can help you with your Mac, like I can't empty this out of my trash is something we get asked here a lot on the show. And a lot of these tools all sort of do things the same way. So I'm not entirely convinced that CleanMyMac X is going to do this. And the reason I say that is sometimes it won't empty if some very basic level system processes are running and owning those files. If those files are open, the trash will not empty. Right. And we've seen this a few times. And one way, there's no like definitive this will always work. But, but one way that works far more often than any of the others is to boot into safe mode. And then using the command that's right there when you boot into safe mode, mount the drive read write, because when you're in safe mode by default, the drive is read only so you can't obviously can't make any changes.   Your user trash is and I'm going to find my way there. But I think it's dot trash. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you go to it would be slash users slash your short user username. So on my machine, my short username is Dave with with four in a lowercase characters. slash users slash Dave slash dot trash with a capital T. And that's the folder that you want to go and empty. You do need to be mildly familiar with deleting files using the R M command in the terminal. And, and, and yes, you can screw things up for sure. Like, but the problem is the benefit is also the problem. There are no GUI tools to run. There are no other than some very, very basic Unix level processes. There's nothing running no Mac OS GUI or anything like that. You're just at a command line with nothing else around it. And, and so that is the way that I've been able to delete things in the past. But there's still even with that there still have been some files that won't delete that way. And, and it can be very, very frustrating for sure. So, but try it. That's one way. I'd love to hear about your ways, folks, feedback at mackeykev.com. Another command that's related is R M D I R, which removes directories. Only if they're empty, though. So like doing an R M D I R on your dot trash directory probably isn't going to help you because the R M D I R won't at least not. I don't even know if there are switches to force R M D I R to empty a directory that's not empty. I generally use if I need to empty directories, I will do use R M space dash capital R and then the path that I want to empty because that will recurse through those directories emptying their contents. And then the directory entry itself. So it kind of goes all the way deep and then and then comes back up through it. That that's more probably more relevant for this type of operation than an R M D I R would be. So man, we're we can't get out of the terminal. We're trapped. We're trapped in the terminal. I like it. Or maybe that's just maybe that's our fault. Like it's certainly my fault. I brought us to the terminal on this question. So and I think I might bring us to the terminal on the next one. But Warren says onyx is something that he has used to successfully empty the trash in the past. So I'll put it out there for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Any anything that works, you know, we're not proud here. We just want it. We want it to be done. What do you got? Yeah, man. This was an interesting one. You know that I got that new M one pro based MacBook Pro recently, which I'm still liking. It's heavier than the air. Not sure if I'll if I'll keep it or if I'll give it to my son, that's still that jury's still out on that. But it's a great machine, obviously. The battery has been dying while it's been sleeping. But I knew it wasn't a problem, not dying, but but draining rapidly, like going from I'll put it to sleep at, you know, 11 p.m. And it's at 70 percent and the next morning it'll be at 40 percent, you know, like that's not good, right? Over the course of, you know, it was draining 2 percent or more per hour. This seemed like a little much. Yeah. So but I knew it wasn't a problem with my with the hardware on my new M one pro MacBook Pro because I was having exactly the same issue on my on my my M one air and it had only started recently, like it was definitely a, you know, last few weeks kind of thing, but it was certainly happening and it transferred over whatever I did with migration assistant brought it with it. So it was like, OK, I've got to solve this problem. This is driving me crazy. But I know it's a software problem. Like I've proven that I've ruled that out. So I I started digging around and I found it's like, you know, this is always a thing, right? Like what's the what's the what's what's causing my battery to drain? Right? We get this question a lot. So I started digging and I found Apple discussion article with a command that I found super helpful to me. And the command John is here we are at the terminal again. I know. Sorry, I guess. Not sorry. Not at all. The command is PM set, which is the power manager set or set or set or upper configurator. There you go. Better word. PM spent PM set. This all be in the show notes. We always put commands in the show notes so you don't have to try and remember interpret what we said. PM set space dash G space log. And that will display a very long log of all of the power management related events. And so this was helpful. And now whenever I'm doing something with a log like that, I wind up wanting to use the the the pipe and a grep command so that I could so that I can, you know, narrow it down. So what I did was and this is the command I'll put in the show notes John is I did PM set dash G log pipe grep space colon a quote and in quotes with a capital W and a capital R I put wake requests because I had this feeling that my Mac was waking up during sleep. And as soon as I did that, all was revealed to me, John. And I can't believe we've been doing this show this long and I've never learned about the PM set log command. But this immediately showed me that every few seconds, my Mac was waking up so that an operation from an app could run. Now this made it super easy because I deleted the app and my problems were gone. Here's the interesting part about this. The app was the channels app, which is the the you know, the DVR that that I've been using the DVR runs on my Synology. There is no Mac channels app, but there is an iPhone and iPad channels app. And because it's an M1 Mac, I can download iPad apps onto it and I did. And for whatever reason, the it's hash operation was running every few seconds, even though it's only supposed to run in the background once every 24 hours. So there was a bug or I triggered some event that caused it to say it needed to run all the time instead of just one of the times. And I obviously reported this to the channels folks and they're digging in and like, you know, it was an interesting thing. But that PM set dash G log and then grepping for wake requests and you could just do PM set dash G log and then in the terminals find command for week space requests. Like that's totally fine. But as soon as I I deleted the channels app and then I noticed that they were still happening even after I deleted and emptied the trash. So I restarted my Mac and after that it settled right in and things have been totally fine. I'll put it to sleep with 70% battery and wake up and it's got, you know, 68% battery. It's like, okay, this is how it should be. Thank goodness I found this. But yeah, that PM set command that that's the what a great thing to have found. So I wanted to share. It was it was it was definitely something driving me crazy as I know it would any of you.  I thought it was like trying to do a time machine back. You know, my mind was going in all the obvious places and I proved that assumptions are not necessarily correct. So it's pretty cool though, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And in the old days you could, I think, and it doesn't work anymore. So I won't talk about using power D. That was the old way to find out. I think sharing wake events. You're right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, this is yeah, this is different. And I don't know where you would see that log otherwise, but I didn't. I stopped my search right there. So yeah. But yeah, I know PM set dash G log. It's great. But again, you're going to want to filter it down. And so I put the command in there to show you how to filter it. It's in the show notes at macgeekup.com. This is show 901. So you'll find them there. Cool. All right, John. Let's see the next question brings us to the terminal. Now I'm really curious. We're on a tear. I don't think so. Okay. Okay. All right. So Rob says this has been bugging me for quite a while, but it reached critical status lately when I needed some files for production class I'm teaching. When I try to connect between the machines on my small network, the system automatically logs me in on the other machine using my Apple ID and not my proper username. Note that I have a user on all my machines and it's the same on each. And I never asked to log in using my Apple ID. Well, maybe you did. I click on disconnect and try to log in using my account on the machine almost invariably. It logs in using the Apple ID. The problem is I'm not giving access to the drives, folders and files on the remote machine. And here I'm trying to access particular files or folders. I've given the account Dropbox folder and I can't get anywhere else on my remote machine frustrating. I'm running Big Sur on the i9 iMac and Catalina on the older MacBook Pro. My wife's iMac is running High Sierra as is her MacBook Air. All machines are running the highest level of O as permitted by the machine or by the software in use. That last is my i9 which can advance beyond Mac OS 11 4 right now because of one dongle's lack of compatibility. Oh, I hate that. All right. At first I was like, wow, computers like haunted or something. Or maybe you did tell it to do this at one point. So if it's logging you in automatically, it should, as you point out, populate the user field with your user name. And I verify that that's what my machine does. But the dialogue that you use to connect the server led me to the solution for this, Dave. Okay. Yeah, because this is not like I connect to my machines all the time and I connect as a local user on that machine despite being logged in as my Apple ID on both of them. Right. Usually, I think. Yeah. Yeah. You'll notice that the dialogue box that you use to log into a server also has a little check box. Remember this password in my keychain. Okay. So let's look at the keychain and that's exactly what he did. So you want to go in the keychain and search for like maybe the server name. Okay. Or something that is has a kind. Kind column. Kind network password. Okay. That's it. So he had an entry in his keychain that would automatically populate those fields with what at some point he must have clicked that button. Or that checkbox. And so it's his complaint is that it's logging in with his Apple ID not the local ID on that device. Right. And it's doing that because at some point he put the user name and password and the said remember it in my keychain. The Apple ID user name and password. Correct. Okay. Well I'm not. Did this solve it for him? Yes. Have we heard back? Okay. Yeah. Well I asked because I would have in fact I just said but I would have sworn that I was connecting to my other devices as my local user name. But I did just go and connect this and it connected me as my Apple ID. So I disconnected and I I then did connect as and let it let me choose you know from that dialogue and I put in my local user name and password on that machine and it logged me in and then when I went back it said I was connected as my Apple ID. And there's nothing in my keychain for there is one entry in my keychain for that computer and it is with my local account user name not with my Apple ID. Okay. So there might be more to this. Let me look here. Many office is what it's called. Yeah. My local thing it's logging in with account Dave not with you know my my Apple ID account. Huh. Huh. Yeah because if I go and reconnect yet showing up as my Apple ID but this did solve it for Rob. Huh. Huh. Yeah. All right. So the moral of story is that passwords is that the keychain may contain a login to a server. But what I'm telling you is mine doesn't. Right. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. So there's I think there's more to this but you're right. I mean that's a that is a great place to go and look for this. I wonder if there's I wonder where else it's looking because there's no obviously I'm logged into my Apple ID. So there's there's some separate thing where that's the case and now I can't log in at all. Now I seem to have broken it but I'm not going to try and fix that while we're you know while we're doing the show here. But this is interesting. I'll have to I'll have to reboot this machine now that I've told it to log in that way and see. So did he set a new did he tell it to remember to bring his local account as opposed to his Apple ID is that was that kind of the I'm I'm guessing that he deleted the entry. Yeah. Made it act the way that he wanted. Now do you look in all your keychains because there's a few different ones here. I have I have to I have a login keychain and a an iCloud keychain but which are which are I mean there's also a system and system well system roots no that's certificate. Those are you're right. Those are system keychains. Let me see if there's anything there you could be right.  I mean it's never it's never been a problem for me because my Apple ID is tied to the account that I want to log in as but if I had multiple accounts on those machines then this would be a frustration for sure. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I got some old stuff in here. Yeah. The keychain is is one of those things I you know nuking and paving can can help but even then like with iCloud things get synced back down sometimes you just got to go in and clean up keychain maybe that's one of those you know. Yeah. I got some stuff dated 2012. Yeah. Yeah. Here's one time capsule my time capsule is still in there and my 802n router still in there. Better clean that up. Time to clean it up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing stuff. I don't have stuff back to 2012 I've got stuff to 2018. I have a an application password for my iPhone 10 so that's cool. All right. Well. I'm glad this helped Rob. Hopefully it'll help other people. I wish it. I'm not sure it's not like I said it's not a problem for me but you know it's one of those things. Yeah. And it's interesting to see what's in there too just to it'll help you understand more how your computer works. How your computer works. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You get to see a little bit more about about how it works behind the scenes. All right. Well now my computer is going to keep sending me mini office so I'm going to be really excited about that while we're doing the show. It's a fun little thing. That'll teach me. But I like doing this stuff while we do the show. So hey Walter has a question for us John and and I'm curious as to your interpretation of this so or your answer for this. He says I'm setting up a new time machine backup for my 2017 MacBook Pro. I put all most of my time machine backups for my Apple machines on my Synology NAS. So saving them across the network. Great. I'm just curious. He asked. Do you lean towards Synology doing the encryption or Time Machine doing the encryption. I've done both and he says I don't see a huge difference. Apples is a little less hassle. Curious if you have an opinion on the matter. So John I'm curious. I have an opinion on the matter. I'm curious what your opinion on the matter is. I have time machine do it. So you do Apple's encryption. You check the box to say encrypt my backup. Right. Yeah. So what happens is when you set up a time machine there'll be an option saying encrypt backup. Sure. And then it'll ask you for a password. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess it uses that to encrypt. I mean I know you can encrypt things under DSM. You can encrypt create I think a secure folder if you want to. You can do it with folders. You can also do the entire shared. I guess maybe you're talking about the same thing. You can encrypt a shared folder and just let all of the contents be encrypted by by Synology. You then have to do that with any efficacy. Once you reboot your time cap time machine. Sorry.  So you can go do that manually or you can use their keychain manager as part of the the disk station manager and have it auto decrypt when you reboot. So but yeah I mean it's effectively the same thing. It's like storing in your keychain just like we talked about. So. All right. So you do encrypt your backup. See I don't encrypt either way. I use neither. I don't use time machines encryption and I don't encrypt on my disk station and part of it it's because I would I prioritize convenience so I would definitely store the password somewhere. Right.  Right. And to me if I'm going to do that that sort of negates any benefits of encrypting my backups because if you can get to the backup folder on my disk station then you've already bypassed most of my security anyway cloud backups things that leave my domain here physical domain those I definitely backup but definitely encrypt but yeah the rest of it I don't know I don't maybe I'm making a huge mistake that's entirely possible I make lots of them so this might be just another in my long long list of mistakes that I made but I don't know like it seems like it seems overkill to me and part of this is informed definitely by having to troubleshoot issues with exactly this for people that I that I help with their you know computers or whatever and you as listeners right we get questions in like oh you know every time I get why isn't my time machine backing up which you know it's sort of an open question and many times it's oh you're backing up to your disk station oh your disk station wasn't decrypting the thing properly okay yeah alright so let's go and let's set up keychain manager let's do all this like what a headache like this person would not have had this headache if they just didn't turn on encryption I think I think we air on air is the wrong word we choose more encryption than is convenient for us often and I'm not convinced we need it is really where that comes from so but it's you know it's the continuum right we talk about this on the show all the time you you choose your point on the continuum between ultimate security and ultimate convenience right and so for me it's it's leaning more towards convenience there's still security like you can't get into my disk station without passwords you can't get into my mac without passwords so if you get into one or both of those you've already got access to my data we're kind of you know that ship has sailed so I don't know my old copies of my old data in my backups are less relevant perhaps so I don't know right yeah I'm pretty sure I encrypt my carbon copy clone or clones do I or do I not I don't think I do clones oh you might put them on file vault drives like you right yeah yeah yeah that that makes sense yeah because that's that's easy encryption I'll call it yeah so maybe the right answer as we're dissecting this maybe the right answer is use Apple's encryption don't use Synologies because Apple's encryption is the most convenient encryption that you will find I think I think that's going to be my new answer for folks that want to encrypt their backups is use Apple's because that's going to store it in your key chain and you're not going to have to think about it ever again and that's sort of the key yeah all right I like it but don't lose your password when you encrypt something you know it's important all right we've got we've got some follow-ups to talk about from previous episodes that some of which reference back to to some of the your favorite things that we've talked about with our guests so we've got those coming up the next thing I'd like to do John is talk about our next two sponsors all right all right look how many free trial subscriptions end up costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars long after you forget to cancel if you're like me you sign up for something you're excited about it and then you know sometimes it sticks and that's great and other times not so much but you know things get going and there's lots to do especially this time of year with the holidays you're kind of all over the place and crazy and you forget to cancel true bill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need want or you simply forgot about on average people save up to $720 a year with true bill because companies make subscriptions hard to cancel true bill makes it incredibly simple you link your accounts and true bill will cancel your unwanted subscriptions in one tap and your true bill concierge is there when you need them to 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building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life go to wealth front dot com slash mg g that's w e a l t h f r o n t dot com slash mg g to start building your wealth wealth front dot com slash mg g get started today are thanks to wealth front for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode all right John hey the back in 899 we were talking about iCloud's private relay with with Gary and I mentioned that I was not seeing an option to turn on iCloud private relay on my ethernet connections I was only seeing it on my Wi-Fi connections I don't know what I was looking at I probably was looking at system preferences on my non Monterey machine at that point in time because that's what we record on and I probably wasn't thinking straight there is definitely the option to turn on iCloud private relay in on your ethernet connection and any other network connections like that so it's it's there we have been so I thank you for everybody who alerted us to that iCloud private relay has been causing me more problems since that episode then I had had previously I know it's in beta right I realized that it's in beta and that's how it is but it's it's been even on machines where I don't have a VPN installed like there are just moments pockets of time where it like I start getting that it's not working you know either we've turned it off and that's the best when it just fails gracefully the worst is when it starts making it so I can't see any of the the image elements inside my mail or whatever and I have to go and like you know turn it all off so yeah I I turned it off because a lot of my apps got confused by what it was doing and they would like ask me to log in again like provide your credentials again and I'm like why you know how I am like your hero app would keep asking me to log in or sending me up a text to verify my identity the hero app so if if private relay works the way Apple says it's supposed to work it it affects all of your Safari traffic and only traffic from third party apps if those apps are not using secure connections it would shock me if hero was not using a secure connection yeah I mean they have to be using TLS right so I cloud private relay does not impact your hero app that that's that was something different yeah okay maybe they just thought it was time maybe they thought it was time I have this problem one issue I've had you know when I had a cable modem John I had the same IP address for months or years even right you know with my fiber connection my IP address changes all the time yeah and so I have especially like banking apps or you know apps like that some crypto wallets and things like that are routinely now asking me oh hey we don't notice where you're logging in from you should do that now I also get that I can make it even worse by turning on iCloud private relay because it like intentionally changes your IP address and obscures it all the time I'm curious to see how banking apps or banking websites I should say start dealing with that because that would be it feels like there's there's another solution there so yeah I don't know I don't know oh Warren in the chat room says something and this actually this makes sense he says if private relay is on you won't be able to set up some of your smart devices took me forever to figure that one out private Wi-Fi address needs to be off under Wi-Fi preferences so that wait that's different from private relay right we're talking about the hang on I'm looking the settings on my iPhone go to Wi-Fi go to the thing yeah private Wi-Fi address so that's different from private relay he says private Wi-Fi address needs to be turned off under Wi-Fi preferences to help set up some smart devices I'm not sure which device specifically he was having trouble with but that's that interesting that makes that causes that I'm like yeah yeah I'm trying to think of why why would that matter I'm not sure why that would matter that's now I'm confused huh it was a light switch so yeah I turned that off too just for your local network right John mm-hmm yeah that makes sense that makes sense yeah interesting yeah broke it broke all my my mappings oh it breaks your DHCP reservation so do you do a DHCP reservation for your phone yes interesting alright any specific reason um I like to see it okay I have certain numbers so like you know this machine for whatever reason is 202 okay sure now it's just when I when I run a scanning tool you know I want all the addresses to be known I got that okay that makes sense yeah because for me I've I have too many devices so you know with well not now but at times for people living in the house you know and all the stuff so I decided the only things I was going to do reserved addresses for were devices that would act as servers so desktop max for sure because we constant I'm constantly going in and out of them but like my iPhone is not a server for anything so I'm happy to just let it get whatever address it gets and so yeah yeah or my printer same thing printers for sure I do reserved addresses on yeah no I don't want to have to guess correct the address of my laser printer exactly right you just want to know yeah I keep a spreadsheet with all that stuff in there um Mac address and IP address so that if I have to move to a different router or something I've got it all and it's up to date and everybody's happy and so yeah and I think what else my my inkjet is a Canon so I made it dot three ABC oh I like that okay yeah I don't have my router on dot one you know I haven't since I moved into this house um and it was because I set it up at our old house in Connecticut where my router was on dot one of you know whatever our our IP range was and I needed to set up this new router and it was like okay well I'm going to put that on dot ten and so my router sits on dot ten and I you know it's fine it like it causes zero problems at all but it's you know it's it's just interesting that you know the default is dot one everywhere and it's like no no no we're dot ten here it's fine I could put another device on dot one I haven't I've I've I've opted out of of letting dot one be something not a router but but yeah my router is at dot ten seems fine so you and I are able to talk so there you go you want to take a speaking of networks you want to take us to Michael um did I maybe maybe not all right no no I get where this is coming from cool yeah all right the lands so we're going to get a lesson on vlands here so uh vlands let you segment your network perhaps all IOT devices in one group segment isolated from the rest of the devices in your home perhaps the computer you use for work isolated from all other devices in your home smart TVs are known to spy on us so maybe isolate each one into a vlan on top of that you can isolate the devices in a vlan from each other so even if one device gets hacked it will think it's the only device that can get to the router vlands can also be used to restrict access to the router again limiting what a malicious device can go with the one time I went to DEF CON I spoke to a DEF CON is a security conference I spoke to a networking person there and he told me that each lecture room was its own vlan smart yeah I mean it's always great sport at DEF CON you know trying to grab people's passwords and then post them on the leader board of course it's like that's a stupid password alright the underlying assumption is that an infected malicious device can cause our search to be for other devices on the LAN yes not just packet storms non techies can use the guest network as an intro to isolating devices or as I just blog a second router but for techies it's vlands they may be like the defining feature that separates a consumer router from a professional one I recall you like the Synology router when I last looked in August they said they did not support vlands I think they do now right Dave I'll have to look I'll look while we're talking here but I don't know that they do yeah so a smart switch that supports vlands needs to work in concert with the router that also supports it so if you have a consumer router vlands in the smart switch are a relevant okay oh interesting right okay yeah this came out of us talking about smart switches and whether or not vlands were a useful feature for humans like us and I think I think it was me that was saying yeah I don't think so but yeah I don't know that Synology's router supports vlands one thing that does support it Dave is so the beauty of smart switches so I have a TP link smart switch and it does have a vlan setting so I haven't really played with it so right well based on what Mike what you just read from Michael that's irrelevant if your router doesn't support the vlands right right I mean like that's where this whole thing came up was we were talking about smart switches and we said well they support vlands and my question was why would anybody care about that and Michael answered that question but without vlands are great but you need to be based on I mean right I'm not misunderstanding what you just read from Michael right that without without your router supporting it you don't have it right he says for techies it's vlands the defining feature that separates a consumer router from a professional run a smart switch that supports vlands needs to work in concert with a router right so if your router supports vlands it doesn't matter that your smart switch does interesting yeah I'm not seeing I mean you know most of our routers support vlands in in the guest network realm right it's a very specific use of a vlan but that is where that lives I'm looking here I'm not seeing any vland support in the Synology router I did a search for vlands and it said to go to the local network section but I'm not seeing anything but maybe I'm just missing something I like I'm not I'm not a network geek in that way so I wouldn't know how to set this up if it were not like made obvious to me so yeah I'm not but I'm not seeing anything about routing vlands here it's an interesting concept yeah I like I now that you explain it Michael that would make a lot of sense I'll have to look I'll log into the the ubiquity router that I have here which I'm certain supports vlands and see if I can like create a way of of tunneling things because it really it's a logical tunnel not a physical tunnel is essentially what a vland creates like you say okay take these devices and segment them in this way and now it creates this logical tunnel throughout it's how it's how vlands work on a mesh network or it's sorry it's how guest networks work on a mesh network because all the devices are sharing the same path but the hardware is separating them your networking hardware is separating them by what it knows about those devices which is interesting right and actually I just did a search here so a euro support says that vland tagging is only available for Euro 6 and Euro pro 6 okay all right all right you don't you have the latest euro I do yeah I'm not running it as my router at the moment but but it but it is yeah I do have it let's see okay um yeah vlands are supported on a Synology what vland features does my Synology router support this would be the article uh network segmentation with vlands no so you can do a vland ID for your ISP but that's it so okay that that answers the question and so which type of vland support does Euro 6 have John uh maybe this is uh future reading yeah okay virtual put a link in the show notes and we'll we'll dig into it and then and then we'll we'll revisit if there is something there if the if the Euro supports it we'll talk about it in a future episode for sure yeah um one follow-up that came John was I was asking if anyone knew this was a geek challenge to which we got zero answers which was telling uh when I'm having Siri read me my messages most often with carplay but you can do it without carplay it's not unique to carplay uh if someone sent me a message with an emoji it would be there right the the Siri emoji would you know Siri would would would describe the emoji to me you know winking face emoji or whatever and so I was like great how do I reply with an emoji and the answer is you can't uh the issue is that when you are dictating with Siri it is effectively funneling you through a single keyboard and as we all know using emojis requires jumping to a different keyboard which is not possible when you are dictating text with Siri so for the moment we have no way of dictating emojis our long national nightmare continues but we'll get there someday folks we will get there really you can't you can't just say the name of it like no it'll spell it out if I say if I say you know thanks comma john exclamation point space smiley face emoji you will get the thanks john with the exclamation point as you would expect and then the words smiley face emoji so yeah it's fun it's fun but that's how it goes but you can do the things that I just said the you know dictating the comma the space the exclamation point all of that stuff works really well with Siri and I find it helpful you know text messages are cold anyway so to be able to add the same amount of personality to my text messages that I'm dictating that I can when I'm typing seems to be a helpful thing so um yeah alright so that was that one two more follow ups before we before we get the hook here john one is from listener Donna also back to episode 899 where we were talking about remembering how to restart your iPhone and that is a tip that's not just for face ID iPhones it's for any iPhone without a mechanical home button so the iPhone 8 and I believe the newest SE they have a what's called the virtual home button generally which is a thing that looks like a home button but it's haptic it's not doesn't actually move these also need the same restart procedure which is by doing up down and you hit up and release down and release volume up volume down and then hold the power button and Donna says I'm one of those people who finds acronyms helpful to learn things for me volume up volume down power to restart your iPhone is an unknown device problem aka UDP and UDP is up down power so however you want to remember UDP to restart your iPhone Donna does it with unknown device problem us techies that like networking stuff especially from the terminal see I had to rope it back into this one too think about UDP packets so maybe UDP is you know just the answer you need so there you go thank you for that Donna user data gram protocol I think is what that stands for I love that you come up with that stuff so you cut so there are two type of two major type of packets UDP is does not guarantee the arrival of data so it's good for things like streaming performance and it'll kind of figure out how to put things back together if it misses one or two TCP will guarantee delivery and will keep trying to deliver things but obviously that takes a lot more horsepower yep cool and I got a joke all right John go with your joke UDP packet walks into a bar nobody paid attention to him so he left or no one acknowledged him so he left there you go maybe we'll edit the audio get it right uh TANL thank you for sharing that joke TANL has a our final segment for the show here and TANL says uh back to show 898 where we were talking about when I got to your house and I got a notification on my phone when I walked into your backyard that my iPad was no longer with me TANL wrote first that I can confirm every time I leave my wi-fi my wi-fi only ipad pro in my car I get the ipad left behind alert same with my Airpods pro and he says a small clarification on that I can't see its location I just get the notification and that is the key I went and looked in the find my app on my phone it's the no longer with you notifications that I get not where it is just where it you know where it was and if I if you go in you can see there's a notify when left behind option in find my for those types of devices and and I and and so I just you know you can set it to accept it home and things like that but but that's why John's phone still ringing so we'll just leave him muted until he sorts that out alright looks like it stopped fun fun we will bring in different noise because the band needs to come in from outside thank you for that TANL that's great stuff that nice to know that we weren't going crazy with seeing that it's good they're coming to get you huh John I think you're still muted there we go alright cool uh yeah thanks everybody for hanging out with us thanks as always for sending in all of your stuff I hope everybody has a happy Thanksgiving if you are in the US and celebrating that this week um that's what I got you got anything else John nope alright make sure you check out our sponsors as we mentioned in the episode we uh we have getquip.com mggtruebill.com mgg and wealthfront.com mgg parent of our sponsors are listed at mackeycap.com all of those deals up to date for you as well subscribe on youtube please knackycap.com youtube is the best way to get there you know we've got you covered have fun with uh with Thanksgiving this week make sure if you're uh Like I will be that you do everything that you can to make sure that you have fun. Do you take care of your shoes? See you next time.