The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, Episode 705 for Monday, April 16th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we share them, we answer them, we do what we can to maximize the learning while having fun. The goal, of course, being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every week because we get together like this. Sponsors for this episode include a new one, crossover from Code Weavers. They've given us a special discount.  So we'll talk about why it might be time to revisit that, even if you've tried it in the past. We'll talk about that in a minute. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. You're doing John F. Braun from K-M-G-G, actually W-M-G-G, because we're both this side of the Mississippi. So that's how those collars work. Ah, you know the secret. Right? That's how it works. Depends on which side of the Mississippi you're on. And then your call letters, your W versus G, versus K. Why is it K versus W? That I don't know, do you? No. Well, that's gonna have to be something that we learn about, perhaps not during this episode, but possibly during this episode. Stranger things have happened. For now, though, let's go on to Mark. And Mark will hopefully bring us to something where we can all learn our first thing. But maybe we've already learned our first thing. Mark asks, he says, when I import my photos into iPhoto and photos, I get a message saying that one video can't be imported. I deleted several, but not all recent videos. Any idea how to determine which one I'm having an issue with? I was able to import photos I took earlier this morning, but I don't have any pictures or videos from the past week. Yeah, you know, the the image capture app on your Mac can still be a great troubleshooting and management tool for all of this. If you're not using iCloud photos, if you are, it gets a little bit different than it used to be a little less flexible. But that image capture tool, it's free on every Mac. I think it lives in the utilities folder if memory serves, but it's either in utilities or applications. And with that, you can move photos around. But more importantly, you can delete photos directly on your iPhone with this and of course videos too. So that might be the trick for you here is to is to open up image capture and point it at your phone. Right, John? If you're not using iCloud Photo Library, that is. Yeah, I think if you are using it, you can still see things, but it shows a little cloud and you don't get as much control over it as if it was Yeah, that's exactly right. A local reference versus a cloud reference. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I believe that's right. Yeah. I like image capture. I think it's also good for if you want to talk to a scanner, I believe it'll it'll give you a basic interface to a standard space image scanner, right? Yes, it I haven't tried it for that in a long time. I haven't just haven't had run into a case where that's even applicable. But yeah, I think I think it I that's how it used to work. Yeah. And Brother Jay in the chat room at MacGeekup.com Stream is is telling me now that it is applications, not applications, utilities. So thank you. Good stuff. Right, moving on. We will move on to Bill. Bill says recently the messages badge icon on my iPad running iOS 11.3 has become stuck showing two unread messages, even though all messages have been read. I've tried rebooting the iPad and turning badge notifications for the app off and on to no avail. I even texted myself four messages from my wife's phone to myself. But the badge app icon stayed at two rather than increasing to four, nor did it drop to zero. So it's just stuck at two. Says this happened to me once in the past. And the only way I was able to clear the badge app icon was to erase the iPad and restore from a backup. I suppose this means that some cash file is corrupt. Is there any easier way to fix such a problem erasing and restoring isn't hard, but it's rather time consuming to have all the apps redownload, sync 30 gigs of music, redownload my iCloud photo library, et cetera. Yeah, Bill, I think your diagnosis is correct. I think this is a cash file issue, especially given everything you've talked about here. So the question is, how do we clear the caches in iOS? Right? There is no onyx for iOS. There's like there could be, but it would have to be blessed by Apple to have root access and that's just not going to happen, which is why it doesn't exist. So there are a couple of other things to try. Number one would be sort of the right. This is a needle in a haystack thing when you're trying to clean out a cash, especially when you can't go touch that cash. So it's what operation could you do that would cause that cash to get rebuilt? And the answer might be there are no operations other than, of course, the one you mentioned, which is the Nuke and Pave and Restore. But I'm thinking if you signed yourself out of your iMessage account and then signed back in, that might touch the right things to cause that cash to break loose. So that that would be the first thing I would try. And that that would be that would be the one. The other is, you know, you can you can you can push a backup. You can use iMazing to push a backup back onto your device without wiping it. But again, I don't think that's going to help with your cash problem here, but it is sort of an interesting thing to remember when you're troubleshooting. The other thing that would I think be worth trying is to do what I call the the manual update to iOS 11.3, which is where you already are. And what you would do is you you need to download the iOS 11.3 build for your Mac for your iPad onto your Mac. And I always go get those. I mean, they're available from Apple, but in order to get the URL, I go to the is the Apple store down dot com site. And and you can click right at the top of the screen on where it says I'm going to find it iOS firmware. And then just go download the one that works for your Mac or for you. Sorry, I keep saying that. You go download the one that works for your specific model of iPad, in this case. And then go into iTunes, connect your iPad via USB and click on when you go into the kind of the device settings. You have update and restore. If you option click on update, it will change into check for update. Sorry, it'll change from check for update to install manual update. That's sorry, it's your option, clicking on the check for update button without the option key. It simply will check for an update and it won't find one because you're already on 11.3. But if you option click that, it'll ask you to pick a file and go and pick the file you just downloaded of 11.3 and reinstall that on your phone. It will take it and might because of that process sort of force those caches to be rebuilt. So that that might do this. But I I would try to turn off your messages, you know, account with essentially with iCloud just sign out of it and then sign back in that. I don't know. What do you think, John? Well, you know, when I have iOS apps give me inconsistent information, I find that a lot of times way to solve it is to delete it and reinstall it. Unfortunately, messages is not one of those. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah. If you can delete and reinstall that, that would fix this kind of problem, too. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had that and it's unnerving to see alerts when. There's nothing there. Yeah, right. Now, I had one app the other day was one of my banking apps and it showed a badge and then I run the app and there was no visual indicator. I had to really dig into the user interface to find out what it was talking about. And I eventually found it, but it was it was not very well done because at the first screen you come to, it doesn't show where this thing is. And in my humble opinion, it really should, at least at the highest level of the UI, tell you that. Sure. Yeah, sure. Sure. All right. Well, hopefully that hopefully one of those works for him. But you want to take us to Felix, John. Felix. Yes. Felix says, hi there, guys. My father has a MacBook Pro running El Capitan 10.11.6. He's continually getting this error message. There was a problem connecting to the server <IP_ADDRESS>. Contact your system administrator for more information. We can press OK, but it reappears 10 times before it stops reappearing. My question is, how would I go about finding what is causing this so I can stop it? And then he did a little follow up saying, I believe it is related to trying to connect to a time capsule as this is the final error message, which appears that it was not possible to connect to the time capsule in case that helps. And it could, not in this case though, as we'll find out. But here's what we've got to say about this. So my first instinct, Dave, is that one cause of this could be that you have a volume item in system preferences, users and groups, login items. Yep. Most of the things you see in login items normally are apps, and that's cool. But what you may not know, so we just learned plus one thing today is that you can drag a network volume into that window or sometimes add it, though that doesn't always work. But you can drag a network volume into that. And then what happens is when you start your system up, it'll try to log into that at work volume. And if you have the user and password cached or saved, then that's a pretty handy thing. That should only happen when he logs in, I would think. It should only happen when he logs in. Yeah, if that's where it is. But it might, depending on kind of how it was created originally, it might retry. And depending on what's out there on the network at that IP address, maybe it's giving a bounce reply or it's not replying at all. So, yeah, I think that could do it. Yeah, but you know, it's a 192 address, so it is a local. Yes, yeah, yeah, it's obviously something that was on his local network built to mount, that's intended to mount at some point. Right, now he also may want to see if there are any entries for that IP address in keychain access, and it'll probably be a network password type item, probably in the logging keychain, has been my experience. Yeah, yeah, and looking at what the login name is might jog your memory or his memory about what that actually is, like what it's trying to reach there, because maybe the IP address changed, and like you're gonna need to go on a little bit of a treasure hunt there to find that, yeah. And he did, but the final suggestion would be if it's happening on a periodic basis, it does sound like a time machine thing. So if you go to system preferences, time machine, select disk and remove whatever's there, verify that it stops the behavior, then add it back. Yeah, that'll fix it. Yeah. But the exciting conclusion, Dave, as it turns out, I don't know if you saw the reply, is that yes, it was an old or errant, it was an entry in the logging keychain. In login items in system preferences or just something that you're in the keychain. So we went to keychain access and there was a login item with that IP address and he whacked it and now it stops. So I'm not sure how that got in there. That's weird. Well, but correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think just having an item in your keychain will cause it to try and connect to that network device. It would read your keychain when it tries to connect to the network device, but that's as far as that would go. I mean, it may have been placed in the keychain due to time machine putting it in there at some point. It could have been time machine, it could have been anything. I mean, if it was time machine, it would say that, right? It would say time machine volume password or something. I'm pretty sure we can check while we're doing this, but yeah, I seem to remember seeing that. But maybe not. Maybe it's maybe time machine. Yeah, time machine password is exactly what you'd get. So if it doesn't say time machine password in the keychain, it probably I'll say is not related to time machine. It's odd that the error went away though because I don't think the root cause went away. If all he did was delete it from the keychain, again, I don't think just having it in the keychain is gonna cause your Mac to try and talk to this network drive just because it has a keychain entry for it. My next thing would be to look in launch D which is sort of where the other things are that start up at startup. And they're in many folders in many places and honestly the best way to pull them all together is to use a utility called Lingon, which we mentioned all the time. It's a paid utility, but it will, it'll let you see sort of in aggregate all of those other things that happen at startup and you might be able to find it kind of in that list and whack it there. You can either disable it or delete it with Lingon. So I will put a link to Lingon in the show notes because it's super handy for things like this. Good? Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, you wanna take us to Dan? Yeah. All right, Dan had a follow-up to a question that we had before, but he wanted us to wrap things up. So Dan said, just to wrap up this problem, I have one more follow-up. When a router is in bridge mode, there's adding DNS servers such as CloudFare, OpenDNS, et cetera to the device, be it an iMac or an iPhone, really do anything. Do those take priority for the device or does it still all funnel back through the ISP in this case? And the answer is, so we're gonna get some goodies here, we're gonna get at least three good things here, Dave. So the behavior that I see on my Mac, on my Mac, and I would assume it's the same for iOS. Are you gonna give the answer or are you gonna leave us hanging on that? Oh, I'm gonna give you multiple answers. Okay, all right, go ahead. So what we're talking about here is your router, and really bridge mode has nothing to do with this. It was sort of a, like John said, it was an unrelated question, but whatever mode your router is in, if your computer's getting an automated IP address from like DHCP, or if it just gathers its IP address, generally, but not always, that comes along with a domain name server, a DNS server. And so the question is, if you go and type a DNS server manually into your iPhone or iMac, does that even matter, or does your device just use the one that your network says to use? So with that, off we go. With that, so I tested this on my Mac, and the behavior that I see on the Mac is that if you look in system preferences, network, then whatever connection it is, be it Wi-Fi or whatever it is, advanced, and then there's a tab called DNS, and that will be populated with the DNS servers, server or servers that are on your router. Well, that's kind of handy, but you can override that because you're running the show here, and it's your machine. So if you override that, Dave, and you enter a DNS server on your local device, that will override the ones that are stored in the router. Yeah. That's right. You may not believe me, but I think I'm trying to trick you. So how can you verify this, you may ask? And I'm gonna tell you multiple ways. So one that I did, Dave, was using the dig command. So from the terminal, dig is a utility that can do all sorts of DNS type stuff. Now, if you go to the terminal and you type dig without any arguments, well, one thing I found, and this is handy, and this is why I love little snitch, little snitch will come up and say, hey, you're trying to talk to this DNS. Is that cool? And it'll give you the address you're trying to talk to. So you can see right there, you can verify is what I did having any effect. And yes, it does. Well, and diggle, if you're not running little snitch, diggle show you that at the bottom of the list. And it just says server and shows you what current DNS server it's talking to. Right. Now, here's another way you can find out about your DNS. So one is using our old favorite called NSLookup, which I believe it's an older command and maybe deprecated someday, but it still works. It's still there, at least on my machines. What's interesting about that one, Dave, is if you look at the man page for NSLookup, it says, oh, by the way, if you look in this file at slashetc slash resolve.conf, which is created by the system, you'll also see your DNS server or servers in that file. However, in the file itself, they say don't do that because you may not be able to rely on this in the future. Because again, I think NSLookup at some point is gonna go away. But that too, so I looked in that file and I saw my DNS servers. But what they do say in that file that's created by the system, Dave, they said, you know what, you should really be using and I didn't know this or I haven't, I don't use this command on a very frequent basis. They say you should really run something called scutill and type scutill space dash dash dns and that will also show your DNS servers. So there's just a plethora of ways you can find out what DNS servers you're talking to. That's delicious. Yeah, and you're right, the short answer to the question that Dan asked is yes, whatever you type in on your Mac will override what you've been fed by DHCP. I don't wanna say that it will use it. In 99.9% of the cases it will, but if your router is living between you and the internet which sort of by definition it is, it's possible that your router could redirect that traffic and take any DNS requests and route them to its preferred DNS server without you ever really knowing. But most routers do not do that. But you can set up your router to do that if you want. Right, but the general strategy here or I think the general message is that if you suspect you're having DNS issues, one way to find that out is to override it and see if things start working and if they do, then whatever DNS servers you're using may be acting up. Of course, the other way to get around that, Dave, is almost every implementation that I've seen is you can put multiple DNS servers which should happen is that if the first one fails or is getting cranky, it'll go to the next one in the list until it exhausts them all. Yeah, and I believe that's right. My experience certainly shows that Mac OS will go in order and treat them as fallbacks. Some devices will do what's called round robin where it just picks one of the bunch to use and so none is prioritized. I had a router that was doing that for a while and it was sort of frustrating because I wanted it to use open DNS and it was like sometimes it would and sometimes it would use Comcasts because that was also on the list. Like, no, no, I want it to go in fallback mode, not round robin mode, but your Mac... I don't want to speak about your Mac, but I think I can. My Macs definitely have always done fallback mode which is what you want, I think. So, there you go. And Brian Monroe wants to remind us of the NameBench tool as well for seeing what domain name server you are using. Well, I'm gonna shake my fist at NameBench because they broke something, Dave. What did they break? Well, what they broke is that if you try to run it now, so the thing is they're supposedly working on a 2.0 but I ran it the other day because I wanted to test out this <IP_ADDRESS> deal that you were telling us all about. Yeah. It doesn't generate the HTML report anymore. Okay, so you can see it, it just won't spit out a report. All it says is, and the way I did this is that, so it has a bunch of DNS servers that it likes to talk to or a list of open ones like Open DNS and all that. Sure. But you can type in manual ones as well and so when I ran it, I put <IP_ADDRESS> in the field where you can add them and once it finished running, it said, yep, 1.1.1, this is the best one but it didn't generate the detailed HTML report anymore. And I looked online and everybody else was shaking their fists saying it's not doing that anymore. Now, the thing is when it finishes running, it says, yeah, by the way, I'm storing a report in slash var slash private somewhere. The thing is I couldn't see the full path of that so I didn't know because they give a detailed, a very detailed report of all the ones they tried and the shortest, longest median or average time and all that. So supposedly somebody's working on 2.0. Cool. Cool. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Maybe there's some detail on the GitHub page or something. All right, John, why don't you... I'm on a roll, man. Yeah, why don't you keep rolling, man? All right, so who do we have here? Bill, William, Bill? Yep, Bill. Okay, Bill. Hi guys. I use my Retina iMac 27 inch as a media server. So I like to keep it on at all times. Wake for network access has never worked for any system I've ever owned. It doesn't work on this one. But after my last issue with this computer, see previous thread finder crashes and several reinstalls of macOS iNife, I now find that I cannot keep the iMac awake. This usually manifests itself when someone tries to watch or listen to something on Apple TV and the Apple TV won't connect. Walking up to the computer and hitting a key solves the problem. Therefore, the problem was that the computer was asleep. I can actually hear the system spinning up from sleep. But I've set all the energy saver settings to prevent sleep. I have checked system setup in the terminal and it says the system is set to never sleep. So at least the computer thinks it's not sleeping. And I've also done an SMC reset. I'm at my wit's end and ready to throw the thing. We'll keep that word out of there. Because we're a clean show. But he wants to throw the thing out the window. What can he do? What can he do? And I'll tell you what he can do. So first off, that was some good detective work in checking the system setup. So this is the command. Again, our pal, you can run it from the terminal. And the command to see the setting is you type in systems that up space dash get computer sleep. And it'll tell you what the setting is. And I would have also the SMC reset. Any power issues you have, which includes something and waking and stuff and SMC reset is always good to try to fix that. The other thing, Dave, is that as we all know, the system just sometimes lies to you and just does what it wants, right? Well, it sometimes lies to you. I don't think it's doing what it wants, but it's doing what it thinks you want. Let's put it that way. Right. And now this is digging deep here, Dave. So there is a way to tell what is making the system sleep and wake up by checking what a certain process is doing. But I had fun doing this. This was awesome. And the process in question, Dave, is called power D. And it will tell you the reason the system has fallen asleep or woken up. Now, how do you see this stuff? Well, you used to be able to do it in console. On console, they kind of ruined it a couple of versions ago. So you can't really see this sort of thing, but you can generate a file using what I think we'll call the syslog format here. I'll put the, there's a command you have to type at the terminal that I'll put in the show notes. So we're not trying to read it. Yeah, I'm not going to read it out. Yeah, but it's there. But anyways, if you type in the terminal wizardry that I just generated here, what you're going to get is a file that shows you when a power D sleep wake event occurs. And so the command I have here will actually push that all out to a text file. And for example, in my case here, Dave, so usually, so I did this in my MacBook Pro and what I do a lot of times when I'm not using the machine, I'll close the lid and it puts it to sleep. And then when I open the lid, it wakes up as expected. And so for those events, I would see power D events saying, oh, okay, you're entering sleep state due to clamshell sleep. Or I'm waking from normal sleep due to ec.lidopen slash lid open. So that's pretty specific. Yeah, that's human readable. Yeah. In the past, it would give you numeric codes, which we're not even going to start with that. But I'm going to say give that a spin. And if anybody is telling the machine to go to sleep, that that's going to tell you what it is. I like that. And it's kind of... And this is a good command. That's good stuff, man. Yeah. Now, a couple other suggestions. Apple does have a D&D article here called if your Mac doesn't sleep or wake when expected. And actually I had a few things in there that was notable, Dave, that I thought were kind of cool. So one thing they suggested is your power button. I think on a lot of Macs, if you hit the power button, it puts the Mac to sleep, right? Yeah, well, it'll pop up that dialogue and ask you what you want to do. I thought, but I could be wrong about that. So it could be. And I have worked in the past on iMacs that had flaky power buttons. Your power button may be flaking out. Yeah, sure. Here's the other thing they said in this article. So Dave, with power books, how does it know when you close the lid? It's a mystery. Well, not really. It's with magnets. Oh, that's true. Oh, yeah. Here's the other thing they say. If you bring a strong magnet to the right place on your portable Mac, it's going to put it to sleep. That's how it knows, because there's a magnet in the clamshell and another magnet in the other part of the machine. And when the magnet, I think it's called a reed switch or something. And when the reed switch activates, the Mac says, oh, you're telling me to go to sleep because you just closed me. I'll buy that, yeah. And finally, I'm not giving up. Finally, Dave, and I learned something. So one thing there's a utility called Caffeine from Lighthead Software. You might want to try that though. I think it's a bit dated, I think, when I looked at their page here. It might be, but you know, all Caffeine does is, well, it crosses the blood brain barrier. No, no, no. What Caffeine, the software does, is it invokes a terminal command that is built into Mac OS called Caffeinate. And so I think Caffeine, the app, will probably work across many different versions of the OS because the OS is actually bringing the sort of the guts of it with it. And Caffeine is just a graphic interface to this app called Caffeine that lives on your Mac. So you could just run Caffeine from the terminal and it would keep your Mac awake forever. Or you could run Caffeinate space dash S space 20,000 or something and it would keep your Mac awake for 20,000 seconds, right? And then it would allow it to go to sleep if there were no other factors keeping it awake. But if you just type Caffeinate in return, your terminal window will appear to have been stuck because Caffeinate is just running there, let it continue to run and your Mac will stay awake. If you close that terminal window, you will then also close Caffeinate and your Mac will fall asleep as it previously would. Cool? Almost. Oh, I'm trying to find the last thing he said, but there's another, I think, newer utility. Okay. Was it adrenaline? No, I don't know. I don't know. No, there's one last program. I'll let you look and I'll talk about the one that Brother Jay in the chat room is suggesting. And it's called the Power Manager. And it's available from dssw.co.uk, we will, of course, put a link. And it allows you to set a really kind of sophisticated automated tasks to kind of control your Mac's power management. And it might well be the thing that could help get this under control. I don't know if it's gonna tell you what's causing it, but it might get it under control on that in the end could be the thing you need. So thank you, Brother Jay. Okay. I got it close. I thought it was adrenaline. When I searched for that, I found a bunch of games. And Fetamine. Okay. All right. Okay, that's kind of edgy, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But there is a utility call and Fetamine that he said he was gonna give that a whirl and I guess that has similar, or maybe more functionality than caffeine. It's, yeah, it's available for free in the Mac App Store. We'll put a link in the show notes. But yeah, it might do the same thing as caffeine, rather. But, yeah, maybe it's an amphetamine. So maybe it's stronger than caffeine, I don't know. You think? You know, I don't know. I don't know that I've ever taken amphetamines so I can't compare. But for me, caffeine is a very, very powerful drug.  Oh, then you should stay away from the amphetamines, then. I, yeah, maybe it's a good thing I've never taken amphetamines, John. Yeah, that's good. I don't know quite how to jump from that to the next thing, so I'm just gonna do it. I would love to talk about our sponsor for this episode, which is Crossover from Code Weavers. And if you visit codeweavers.com slash mgg, you'll get to see their discounts for us and all this stuff. So they've got a 14-day free trial. This 14-day trial doesn't require a credit card, it doesn't require a Windows license, nor does it require a reboot. What Crossover does is it lets you run Windows apps almost natively on your Mac. Crossover 17 uses, there's a piece of software that's kind of at the core of this called Wine, which is when the wine is not an emulator. And it's an acronym for that. They're using version 2.8 now inside of Crossover, which makes life super easy. They have been working hard over there on Crossover. So there's a lot of folks, myself included, that tried Crossover years ago, back when it was first released, 2008, 2009. And maybe it worked, but probably didn't. And so it just sort of lives in your brain as this thing that doesn't work. It's time to try it again because there's a lot of games, there's a lot of software in general that you can run on this. And like I said, it doesn't require a Windows license, any of that. So you gotta just try it. Perhaps I can put it a different way. If you're holding a grudge, it's time to re-judge. So go download your 14-day free trial. Go to codeweavers.com slash mgg. You can download your 14-day free trial right there. And then when it's time to buy, save 35% off of a one-year subscription with coupon code MGG. Our sincere thanks to Codeweavers and of course Crossover at codeweavers.com slash mgg for sponsoring this episode. We really, really appreciate it. It's good, great stuff. And I'm glad to see this. So thank you. All right, Mr. Braun. Actually, let's take it to another level with JP here, shall we? Hey, John and Dave, JP from California. Quick question, might be interesting. Somebody might know the answer. I was sent a document of email addresses that I wanted to send a mass email with. However, the document was formatted with carriage returns in a long list rather than tab delimited. So naturally I copy and pasted into my mail program and of course it's not seeing them because they're not comma delimited when they go in. So I tried the search and replace command in pages to remove the carriage returns and insert a comma instead thinking it should be able to do that. But what I, much to my surprise, the Pages app does not consider a carriage return as a keystroke that is findable or replaceable, which just ended my glee right there. So question is, how would I convert a long list of emails that are carriage returned in one column on a piece of paper into comma delimited without having to copy and paste each one and drag it over into the, or paste it into my BCC field that I'm about to send an email with? I thought you would know instantly so rather than do some Google foo, I decided to send you this voice memo.  Okay, cut off, wow, a lot of road noise there. I tried to tune it out, not sure what I got. I do wanna know if that turn signal is truly a turn signal from like the 1970s or if it's just the sound of a turn signal from the 1970s, but that's just my question. Oh, with the big old relays, the clicky relay. Yeah, that clicky relay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember my dad had one in our Ford Pinto wagon and it was so loud that he just disconnected the relay. You'd still hear the click, because the light itself, you'd hear the light turning on and off, but it had that relay in the glove box that was like, you know, on volume 11, yeah. Pinto, didn't they have a problem with the? Not the hatchback, the Cooper, whatever it was, yes. The wagon. The problem blowing up. Yeah, the wagon didn't have that problem where you hit the back and it explodes, yep. Anyway, it was what we had. You're totally right that Pages won't let you do this this way, but I do know the answer and the answer is available for free. It's called BB Edit. BB Edit does see carriage returns as findable characters and you can really easily use its find and replace option to do it. I do it all the time. The best way I've found, although my friend, I think Mr. Braun here is gonna come up with yet another way, but the best way I found to get a carriage return into the BB Edit find and replace box is to select and copy that carriage return from your document. That way, if there's more to it, if it's just a new line or just a return character, it gets it or if it's both, it gets it correctly. And the way you would do it is just kind of drag your mouse from the end of a line. So if there's, you know, whatever characters at the end of the line, put your cursor there, position your mouse there and you can do it with your mouse or you can do it with a keyboard, but just drag kind of down with the mouse and then to the beginning of the next line and you'll see what you'll get is a full, the kind of the remainder of the line filled in. Just copy that, go into BB Edit, find and replace and paste it in. And then you can put in replace.  It's great. Couldn't imagine not having the ability to do that. So there you go. Yeah? But John, you had another way of getting the carriage return in into that. Oh, kind of. No, it's a little, yeah. Well, this gets a little geeky. So let's take a step back here. Sure. Last I checked, Dave, here's the problem, here's the problem with different platforms. Is that they do things differently? Yes. And last I checked, Dave, depending on whether you're on Mac or PC or UNIX type systems, though now, of course, back is UNIX. Different environments, though, I think this is still true. Different environments use different ways of indicating when you're at the end of a line and just start a new one. And it could be a line feed character, which its ASCII code is 10, or some use what's called a carriage return, which is ASCII code 13, and some use both. Right. Isn't that crazy? And it's annoying. I'm sure you've had to wrangle with this in the past, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's panning out. Also, depending on the environment you're in, like, for example, in C programming, or programming in a lot of languages, they'll represent them using something like a slash R or a slash N or something like that. Backslash R and backslash N for those of you playing along at home. So that on most Apple keyboards, that's the slash that is above the return key where it goes from top left to bottom right. Yeah. So if you can get an editor that will let you represent things as ASCII codes or the codes that I just talked about and you clarified for me, that's another option here. Yeah. And maybe Ed, it'll do it. I just tried it. So backslash R, if you just type in that backslash lowercase R, it will find returns for you happily. So you could do it that way too if you didn't wanna have to do the kind of the copy-paste thing that I mentioned. I love the copy-paste thing because it just makes sure I get exactly whatever that document is using. I don't even have to think about it. I just do it and done. Yep. And if you wanna use a Unix editor, whether it be Emax VI, I'm sure most of them support a mode where you can do replacements using either a numerical or character-based encoding. Back when I was an Emax guy, we had to do this regularly because we would get data files from various sources. And some of them, it just wouldn't work right because there was extraneous data that our environment, which was a prime. And if you know what that is, you've been using computers for a really, really long time. Way too long. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. But yeah, so we would use Emax to do data cleansing for data that we got that we read off of tapes, Dave. Huh. Yeah. I'm not kidding you. I believe you. I know. I know. It was fun. So now the thing is that this brings up actually a point here. So BB Edit, we all love here, but the thing is I was gonna be, I tried to fiddle with BB Edit on my Macbook Pro here and apparently I have not updated my copy of BB Edit in quite some time, Dave. Sure. Do you know how I know this? Well, I've probably told you. Or it won't run because you're getting the 64-bit warning. Is that right? Exactly. And I just thought we'd, I don't know if we've talked about this. No, we haven't talked about this. I know someone has. I haven't even seen this yet, believe it or not. So here's what's happening. So apparently this is a really old version that I have on this one machine here. So here's the deal. So you have, there's something called 32-bit apps and something called 64-bit apps. And 64 apps, 64-bit apps are better. From a speed point of view and accessing memory and all that great stuff. The problem here, Dave, is that Apple is at some point going to say go away. And I think they've already done this on iOS. Go away to 32-bit iOS apps. Yes, and we've already done it on iOS. Yep. All right, on the Mac, what's going to happen now, and I just got this error message because I'm running an ancient version of BB Edit on this one machine. It says BB Edit is not optimized for your Mac. This app needs to be updated by its developer to improve compatibility, which basically means at some point in the future, it's not going to run anymore. Yeah, and actually BB Edit only went 64-bit maybe six weeks ago, I want to say. So it's not, it might have been longer than that. Might have been two or three months, but that's, it's been relatively recent that they converted the code base and started releasing 64-bit builds. So I'm running, ooh, 11. No, that's not that old, but you'll want 12.1, I believe was the one that brought it to 64-bit. But you can go download a free copy, just go, you know, boom, good to go, yeah. Sure, but so if you get that message, check with your developer. Yeah. Because your app is not going to work on future versions of Mac OS. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's, I'm glad Apple's doing this in a sort of not overly intrusive way, right? That'll pop up once and then it goes away. I think you'll be able to launch those apps without it being a problem. And they're also not racing to get this done. I don't think, from what we're hearing 10.14, you know, whatever they're announcing at WWDC, I don't think that will mandate only 64-bit apps. It's possible, but I think that change is coming in 2019, not 2018, as I understand some. And the way you can find out what your apps are doing is if you go to Activity Monitor, the CPU category, there's gonna be a kind column. You can put the kind column there, it is not there by default. Yeah, so you've already put it on yours, but if you go to the view menu, go to columns and choose kind, just make sure that's checked. Then you'll get the kind column. Now, what's cracking me up here is several of the processes here as far. Oh no, okay, in the past, some of the 32-bit processes were actually Apple processes. Right, no, that went away with, certainly with High Sierra might have, no, it went away with Sierra. I can tell you it went away with Sierra because I'm looking at a Sierra Mac right now. So. The only ones I'm seeing here are, apparently, Synology's cloud station. It still has some 32-bit remnants and looks like Drobo's process, one of Drobo's processes, it's also a 32-bit. So I'm sure it'll fix it. I'm sure, yeah, no doubt, yep. All right, we have a bunch of quick tips to get into the first, right before we do that though, I want to take a minute here and thank our premium subscribers that contributed this week. Of course, macgeekyeb.com slash premium is where you would go if you are interested and able to contribute directly to us here. On the biannual $25 every six-month plan, we have actually quite a few. Steve R., Jed E., Gary B., Willie M., George C., Ken K., Andy D., Donald S., Mark W., Colby W., Rob W., I think they're all different Ws. And Robin J. on the $25 every six-month plan. Thank you so much to all of you, you're awesome. On the monthly $10 plan, we have James C., Joe S., Paul M., Ari L., Michael P., Bob L., Jeff P., and John V., thanks to all of you. And then a $100 one-time contribution from Sandra H. as well, and so thank you, Sandra, thank you to everybody, this is awesome. For those of you that wanna do one-time contributions, you can actually use Apple Pay. Now, when we made that work, I think at least I think we made it work. It seemed to work for me when we tested it. But that's working. You can't do Apple Pay for a recurring payment because Apple Pay doesn't support recurring payments. So it's not us, it's just a limitation of Apple Pay. But for a one-time thing, absolutely works great. So whatever works, we take PayPal, we take regular credit cards, we take Apple Pay, whatever works for you, works for us. We're not picky. Thank goodness we're not picky anymore. We got away from the credit card thieves that were stealing the money you guys were giving us. So I'm happy for that. Good, so thank you. We have a bunch of quick tips, as I said. So let's get into it. Let's go to Greg's quick tip here. This will be from MacGeekab701. We were talking about getting your serial numbers and having them so that when your iPhone or Mac is out for repair or it needs to go in for repair, you know the serial number and you don't have to go digging for it or if it's already out for repair, well, you have it and that's a good thing. He says, this is a great job for the new scanning feature in the Notes app. One of the first things I do, Greg says, is to scan the serial number off the side of the product box. I've created a folder named Apple Support in Notes. Anytime now that I contact Apple Support, I create a new note under that folder with the date and the contract with the scanned photo of the serial number right at the top of the note and that way everything's all together. It's good stuff. So thank you, Greg. I like that little tip. I forgot about that feature in coming to Notes or being added to Notes. So good. Joe has a quick, do you have anything on that, John, before we go to Joe? All right, sweet. Then Joe says, hi guys. I was trying to paste a screenshot into mail today and somehow fat fingered the keyboard shortcut and a neat thing happened. A find bar appeared at the top of the body of the email that I was sending or writing and it had search, find and replace options, neat. But how did I do that? The problem is I have no idea what keyboard shortcut I hit because I meant to hit Command V. After five minutes of trying instead of googling for it, I thought I'd just email you. I hope you would know right off and since it was new to me, thought it might be a good mention or remention for a quick tip. Yeah, I don't think we've ever talked about this before so it's certainly not a remention. It is Command F is what that is and you can find that if you're in mail and go to the edit menu find and then you can see what all the things are there. But yeah, Command F will bring you to the per message find window. So if you're reading a message, it will do the same thing except of course doesn't present you with a replace option because you can't edit a message that you're reading but one that you're sending has the replace option and you can do that. If you want to search all of mail which is sort of that normal top of window search box at the top if obviously you could click there and type but you can also do Command Option F and that'll bring you to that one but regular Command F and of course F being right above V makes sense that a slip of the finger would result in the one versus the other but that'll just do the per message search. It's pretty good. Right, John? It's pretty good but I got something even better Dave. Sweet. Sometimes I'm glad I get distracted easily because I'm gonna tell you there's a utility that you can use to show you all the keyboard shortcuts for the app that you're using. Isn't that cool? That is cool. I'm probably gonna say John, what's it called? Yeah, John, what's it called? It's called cheat sheet. Actually, I just ran it on one of my machines here and it said, hey, there's an update so it's current. What it does is basically if you sort of, I think what happens is it's default mode so it's an app but then if you hold down I think the Command key is the default behavior. After a moment or two, it'll show you all the keyboard shortcuts for the app that is currently up front. That's pretty good. It's pretty happening. So if you want to find out if you're like what did I just do? It's like, well, this'll probably help you figure it out. Rather than painstakingly digging through every one of your menus, it shows it all in one pane. I like it. That's pretty good. There is another one though that Brother Jay in the chat room is adding for us and that is KQ from Ergonis software and so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too because I think that will do something similar. I haven't used it in a long time but I think it sort of works in a similar way. So we'll put that out there. Good, yeah? Okay. Let's go to Ev the Nerd and Ev. We'll find it here. I promise Ev. Ev has a great tip that isn't quite a quick tip but it also includes a cool stuff found so that'll jump us to the next segment of the show which I really like. He says, I had an interesting experience today. I was on Safari and suddenly I looked and my favorites bar was blinking and then went blank. So I quit Safari and reopened it and all of my folders of bookmarks were gone. That sent panic all through me since those bookmarks were full of client config pages that would take me months to get back. So I started by mounting my clone and going to home library Safari and I saw my old bookmarks.plist that was about five days old. But I also noticed a file called automaticbookmarksbackup.html in that same home library Safari folder that was about a day older than the bookmarks.plist file. He said, so it gave me an idea. I went to my current boot drive into that same folder and there it was, a backup from the day before. He says, I imported that and bam, my imported folder showed up at the end of my bookmarks and I just copied the contents of my favorites folder back and boom, I was back in business. He said, I had no idea that Safari does an automatic backup. I've checked several machines and they all have it. So yeah, home library Safari does your automatic bookmarks backup. I think, I don't know whether this is only gonna happen on machines that are syncing bookmarks via iCloud or if it happens on every Mac, but it's certainly worth taking a look for. I know that sometimes those like apps, once iCloud syncing gets involved apps sort of say, but yeah, let me keep my own copy here just in case you tried to blow it away, some. Which is good, right? Anything on this before I kind of get into his cool stuff found and change gears for us here a little bit, John. No, I personally, I use the iCloud Safari bookmark syncing thing. Yeah, I think he does too. And I think that's what, I think somewhere in there it got wiped out and then it propagated that change, which is obviously bad. Bad in this case. He says, now back to what the bookmarks were. If you have friends or clients that you do work for, things like configuring their routers, their network printers, their switches, or any other network accessible devices. He says, this tip might help. He says, I make a folder for each network that I manage and I bookmark all the web accessible configuration pages inside that folder. Says normally one of the first things I do is run land scan, I'll come back and start bookmarking. He says, this helps a lot. When you get on site, you're not fumbling around looking for all the addresses that you had the last time you were there. And so I asked him, I said, land scan, what's that? And he told me, maybe he reminded me, I'm not sure I even knew, that the IWACS folks, the people that make Dubuque, which we've talked about here, make an app called land scan. And sure enough, land scan scans the network and discovers any active devices. It brings you their IPv4 addresses and you can, by default it just scans the local network, but of course you could change that and scan pretty much any network you want. It just shows you the device's IP address, its name, if it's registered one, the manufacturer, which can be gleaned from the MAC address and things like that. So it can really help to kind of narrow down that stuff. So, very cool. Have you used land scan before, John? Yes, I think it's. Yeah. I know I use some sort of network scanner here. Well, I've used Fing. Yeah, sometimes it's something. Right, I've used Fing on my iPhone and my iPad, but I'd never used, I don't think I'd ever even knew that land scan existed, so. Hold on, land scan. No, it's on my machine here. Oh, there you go. Yeah, it's got a little ducky face. Yup. Duck face. Yeah, it's a little duck face. Yeah, yeah, it's a good duck face, not the bad duck face. I told my daughter years ago, cause you know, like I'm her dad and so I have to pester her. She's 18 now. But I, you know, this was, I don't know, maybe she was like 12 or whatever. I said, okay, look, here's the deal. If I ever see a selfie of you with duck face, I'm taking your phone away.  And so I try to like take out my phone and take a picture of it. Cause it doesn't have to be a selfie. It's any picture of her duck face. Cause I didn't want her, you know, doing that with her friends or whatever either. It just had to pick something to pester her about. And so it was duck face. And so there are no, as far as I know, there are no pictures of her. Maybe she's like squirreled a secret one away. Like, ha, ha, I got that guy. But, but there you go. You know, I don't know. Since you got to pick something. So anyway, but the taboo key or the land scan duck face from eye wax, that's a good one. That's a real, it's a real duck face.  So there you go. Yeah. What I really like is the ability to identify the vendor and you hinted at this. So when they assign MAC addresses, which is basically the big long hexadecimal number that is unique to every device on the internet or it should be. Anyways, the first few characters, you actually got to sign up and there's a database of it. But land scan knows about that. But I find it interesting because sometimes you'll see weird things. Like for example, I see one on my list here, Texas Instruments. I'm almost certain that's my ring because I do believe they use TI parts in there or it could be another device that uses TI parts. Yep. Or so the chip that they're using for networking is from TI or Texas Instruments. Sure. But I just like that. A lot of other things here like it's showing Amazon, which is obviously the A-word device. Right, right, yep. But at the very least, you may wanna scan your network and just see what's out there. Yes, it's handy and free. So there you go. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, that sort of opened the door into cool stuff found. And we've got quite a few of these here. So we'll see if we can get these done and maybe we have a couple of geek challenges too to throw out before we wrap up the show, maybe. Robert brings us to, I'll pull it up here. Nope, wrong, Robert. There we go. He says, it may not fit the category exactly, but Dave, since you've been playing around with home automation and Stringify. By the way, Stringify, which we've mentioned in a couple of the shows or a couple of other episodes is owned by Comcast. They acquired that in September, just FYI. He says, it's time to introduce you to IndigoDomotics at indigodomo.com. This is an app that runs on your Mac, so it's a natural for any Mac eCab power user. He says, although I don't use it for professional clients, I use it at home. And it was the app that got me started in home integration and home automation integration years ago. With the built-in features and the incredible community support for third-party plugins, it can truly give you the power of a $50,000 professional level system for a very small cost. And there's a free trial so you can experiment freely. He says, don't be fooled by the legacy for supporting Insteon devices. He says, with the heavy support for added for Z-Wave about a year ago and the wide variety of network and Wi-Fi devices, it can control a lot. But the key is that Indigo has a full drag-and-drop GUI builder that lets you build your own custom screens for iOS to your own user interface without doing any coding. It's key for getting family members and non-techie household members on board. He says, it's got extensive scripting with full support for many external shell scripts, Python and Apple script and third-party plugins for things like Nest and Sonos and Lutron and Yamaha and all that stuff. And it's even got a new plugin called HomeKit Bridge that runs Homebridge so that you can connect to, you can sort of link your stuff that's not HomeKit compatible to HomeKit. Yeah, cool stuff. I've used Indigo a long time ago as my first kind of foray into this and it was the Instion type devices that were USB connected to your Mac and all that stuff. But I have not messed with Indigo for a little while. And so thank you, Robert. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Brother Jay in the chat room takes us on a little detour asking the question, what about thread? And it's a good question because thread is the new type of signaling, it's the, yeah, it's signaling, it's wireless, it's radio, signaling that'll be used, potentially used for home automation devices. But at the moment, there are no thread devices that I've seen in terms of individual devices. The Eero, the second gen Eeros and the Eero Beacons have thread radios in them, which will be great because it'll meet, like once you have actual thread devices to use, you'll have all kinds of, you know, you'd have all your stuff all over the house and so everything would always be in range and that would be great. But to my knowledge, that's the only device I've seen that has a thread radio in it. So there are no device like switches or bulbs or anything like that yet. So there you go. But I'm sure they'll come. Yeah. Have you seen anything about thread, John? Like you, the only thing I saw is that one of the recent Eero updates say, hey, you got thread, but then I found out, well, but that's only for second gen, I have the first gen. Right, right. Yeah. Which I'm thrilled with, hey. Sure, yeah. Blazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting. It's nice to see him looking forward. And I think they're one of the leaders of the pack. Yeah, I'm curious to see how thread sort of takes off. Zigbee, Z-I-G-B-E-E is the current sort of popular standard. I think your Wink bulbs use that, John. The Philips Hue bulbs sort of use it and now are compatible with Zigbee 3 devices. Or their bridge is, right? And that's kind of how it works. You connect a bridge to your Wi-Fi or to your network. Usually it's not Wi-Fi, actually, it's plugged in. And then from there, your light bulbs connect to this kind of lower cost Zigbee device that lets them do what they need to do without getting in the way of everything else. Right, I think your stuff is all Zigbee, right, John? That or Z-Wave? That's the other protocol, by the way. Is Z-Wave, I don't think you're Z-Wave. I think Z-Wave was the predecessor to Zigbee, but I'm not sure. No, I think they're individual. Is it a separate deal? I'll put a link in the show notes to Z-Wave. I haven't seen any Z-Wave devices in a long time. I mean, that was like- No, I'm looking here. I'm looking GE-Link smart LED bulb when I did a search, I don't know, it says Zigbee. But Z-Wave is another protocol. No, I talked with those guys at CES a couple of years ago and that's part of the whole smart home mix, right? Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah, for sure. Right, that's the thing is you gotta have, and that was sort of frustrating for Philips Hue customers too, because you have this, like when you buy a set of, like I did, you buy a set of four Hue bulbs, it comes with the Hue bridge, which is great. Everything works. It's like, okay, I wanna add a fifth bulb. Well, it used to have to be a Philips bulb, even though that bridge is really pretty much a Zigbee bridge. And now just, I think it was a software update in January, it was before I bought it, but very recently that they enable support, like official support for Zigbee three devices, which is sort of the current standard. So it's like, okay, thank goodness, now it should work. You could sort of kind of finagle it and make it work in the past, but now maybe that finagling is officially supported. I don't know if it, I don't know how much finagling it would require. It's all sort of wonky, like sometimes the bulbs don't wanna respond, and you know, but whatever, it creates a mesh is what it does. It's just sort of, so that's interesting. Yeah, I'm looking here, I found an article that compares them. So basically in concept, they're the same thing. Yeah, it's a mesh. They use different frequencies, different modulation, different data rates, and the ranges are slightly different on the order of tens of meters. Got it, got it. The benefit to having the radio in, you know, either a Zigbee radio or a Z-Wave or, you know, a Thread radio, the benefit to having that on the same chipset as your Wi-Fi is that these things, if they're placed in too close proximity, they can get in the way of each other. But the nice part is, if it's all on the same chipset, and I talked to the folks at Qualcomm about this, they can sort of, you know, put it in, what do they call it, coherence mode or something, where it makes sure that it's not in the way when there's a Zigbee command happening, the Wi-Fi can kind of get out of the way, and vice versa. So having it able to coordinate amongst those radios is huge, and so that's why there's a benefit to, that's why Qualcomm's putting it on their chips, and that's why companies like Euro are buying those, I assume they're buying Qualcomm chips, otherwise they're buying somebody that's doing the same thing, and then, you know, putting that out there. So it's good, that's good. The advantage I can see, so looking at this comparison chart, and then moving on, but the only thing I could see, the one thing I could see that would make Z-Wave desirable is that Zigbee operates on 2.4 gigahertz, like every other frickin' device on the planet. Sure. Z-Wave is 900 megahertz. Okay, so it could go a longer distance. Well, to me, it's just more that you're not on the same frequency as every other device, potentially, whereas 900, not a lot of devices. Well, your cell phone's on 900. Some of the cell phone frequencies are in 900, yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, and I know some wireless phones are on 900 as well. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh, interesting. Fun stuff. All right, let's move on. Well, we've got a couple of these cool stuffs found to finish here. Aaron brings us the next one, and Aaron writes, he says, I listened to your recent brief rundown of available password managers and thought I'd contribute another one, or maybe two, for the list. For a number of years now, everyone in my IT department has used the open source key pass program, K-E-E-P-A-S-S. This has allowed us to have a single database that we can all share, giving us access to common system passwords and services. Sadly, Apple device support has generally lagged behind other platforms when it comes to individual clients. He says there haven't been a whole lot of options for iOS and the Mac options haven't always been great. In the past few months, he says, I've discovered solutions for both iOS and Mac OS that provide a completely free password management system based on open source software while utilizing the standard key pass 2.x file format. This is on an iOS, I use key pass touch by Intervate. He says be careful to get the right one. There are other more expensive and less capable versions in the app store. So I have included his link in the show notes. He says this system will utilize a variety of network transports, FTP drop box cloud services, including iCloud, even Wi-Fi sync, and also providing touch ID or face ID integration. On Mac OS, the new Mac Pass by Hickenhack software is an open source program that provides all the best features of key pass and a beautifully crafted native Mac version. So thank you for this, Aaron. I had never even heard of key pass but actually just started a project where we're sharing some logins and passwords and I was kind of figuring, trying to figure out how to do that. Key pass, because it's different people on different platforms and all that stuff, but it sounds like key pass might be something to think about. So cool, thanks Aaron, good stuff. You ever checked out key pass, John? Nope. Well, that might change, right? So it's good. Moving on to Mark with what I'll call a cool stuff found reprise but a good one. And actually I think the two that are left are both cool stuff found reprises. Mark's is very quick and simple. He says, I'm pretty sure you know all about this but it's still a great tool and that is brezink.com's Tinkertool System 5 and he's right, it is a good tool and it's an easy one to forget about. It lets you do a lot of the things that we talk about Onyx doing in terms of both cash cleaning and system UI tweaking. You can access hidden preference settings in there, you can look at log files, it's got application uninstallers so it sort of goes beyond what Onyx generally does for folks. So we will put a link to Tinkertool System 5 in the show notes, we can go get that. So there you go. Yeah, good, any thoughts about that, John? Okay, cool, yeah. Have you ever used it? I know we've mentioned it a couple of times, I mean we've been doing this 13 years so it's good to reprise some things, some of the time. Have you ever used that one or no? Which one? Tinkertool System. Oh, do I, I don't know. Yeah, I'm putting a T-I-N-K-E-N, it's not on here, it looks like I wrote an article about it at some point in the past. Yeah, I thought you had, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why it, anyway. No, it's on my MacBook Pro. Okay. Tinkertool. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's just something. It's, yeah, there's so many things. I'll have to revisit. Yeah, cool. And then also in the cool stuff found reprise column, we have Steve who says you have often mentioned the understandable lack of support for APFS from third-party tools. Tech Tool Pro does rather well for both APFS and NVMe. This is, I don't have the latter, but I have experimented with the former on an external rotational drive, including booting from it. And unlike other utilities, Tech Tool Pro allows you to set the free space warning level. So that's referring to the issue in ProSoft's drive pulse that has its own, makes its own decisions about how much free space you should have and thou shalt not disagree with it lest you suffer its wrath. But so that's good. Tech Tool Pro lets you do that. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. I'm glad to hear this. Yeah, and to that point about the lack of support I was gonna say the lack of mature support, which is really what it is for APFS stuff. It's because APFS is not yet mature, right? It's brand new. It's only a few years old. And that, I mean, that's so new in terms of file systems and the fact that it's out there deployed on tens of millions of devices is just amazing. Like the fact that it works frankly at all and it works better than at all. It works really well as long as it's on the devices that it's been engineered for. But we have no experience with troubleshooting or even failure on it, right? Like, you know, we know about HFS Plus. I think those of us that have been doing this a long time like you and me, John and many of our listeners. Yeah, you almost have a gut feeling when your system starts acting funky. You're like, oh yeah, that's the, I gotta rebuild the catalog or the file system or whatever. Like you just know you can smell it. But with APFS, it's brand new. No idea, no experience. So that's why the drive, the third-party drive utility manufacturers or developers just can't do anything. There's no documentation or anything. Well, we shake our fist in unison. That's not really shaking it. I think it's just an acceptance. We're all on the same boat. We're all on the same boat. Yeah, exactly. We're at the same point in the program. In the program, yeah, we're at the acceptance point. That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because it's just how it is. I mean, I think certainly there are things Apple knows about APFS that they haven't documented or divulged, but I frankly don't think that there are many of those things. I think for the most part, Apple's been pretty forthcoming and pretty detailed about what they do know about it, so that people, developers can do what they need to do, but it's just so new that I'm not sure, I'm not sure we could expect to know a whole lot more right now. So that's fine, that's just how it is. You just have to kind of accept that for the next few years, the chances, the, I'll say this, three years from now, the amount of drives that suffer corruption that can be repaired will be higher than it is now, simply because we will know more and third-party developers will have figured out some, like, well, this is sort of how this works and so we can recreate what we need to and salvage your data and that sort of thing. It's just only gonna get better from here, I guess is the right way to say that. But that means for now, and pretty much forever, backup regularly, early, backup often, it's like voting, right, John? You like to vote early and often, right? I just vote once. Do I, is that all? Oh, that's too bad. Well, if you wanna vote here for your favorite topic or your favorite utility that maybe we haven't mentioned, the new cool stuff found, or vote for your question, you don't really have to vote for your question, just send in your question, we'll read it and we'll answer it. You can send that to feedback at McGeekGab.com. And brother, that is my vote in that you should send something, anything, to feedback at McGeekGab.com. Yeah, when you say that, our inbox fills up pretty well, so I just wanna make sure people know where they're sending it, and that is feedback at McGeekGab.com, we would love to hear from you. Of course, if you are a premium listener or if you become one, premium at McGeekGab.com is where you can go to send that stuff, and we do prioritize those. This week, things were crazy, I was in Philadelphia speaking and there was all kinds of other crazy stuff going on, so I got behind on the premium stuff, but it was all caught up and true to form, it was caught up before everything else was caught up. So it's how we do it, it's our way of, you're helping us keep the lights on, so we prioritize the questions that you have. It's good, good stuff. Let's see, where else are we here, John? Well, I liked what you talked about a couple of weeks ago, so I'm gonna say it again, iTunes Reviews, they really, really help us. If you could go to iTunes and leave us a review, we can't reply. If you do ask a question there, we will see it and we'll incorporate it in the show, but really just better to go and rate the show and then leave a written review, it can be short, doesn't have to be a big long thing, but of course it can be, really helps us. The link to go to the closest I can get you is if you go to macgeekgab.com slash iTunes, that will get you as close as we can get you and then you can click and write your review from there. That's what I got on this, John. You got anything else to add before we send everybody, including ourselves on our way? We'll have to check the reviews. Yeah. If we get enough and enough of the right type, then we're hot. Yeah, they put us in the what's hot and all that stuff, so it definitely helps surface the show, which of course attracts more listeners and more listeners means more people to hear your geek challenges, more people just keeping with it, you know. New influx of listeners constantly is a good thing because listeners drop off all the time, that happens, you either lose interest, maybe you don't have a Mac or an iOS device anymore or you'd stop commuting, so it's good to keep the show healthy and thriving, it really, really helps. And tell your friends about the show, just share it. If there's an episode or a segment of an episode that you like, just share it. That's it, that's cool. We put timestamps in. Yep. We're just gonna have a big old Macgie Gab group hug. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's actually coming soon. I have some ideas about that. Well, the replacement for the Facebook group, I have seen it. We've got it running on our Alpha server and I might even reach out to a couple of you that are more active on the Facebook group just to see what you think about what we're creating and get your input before we, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's close. Like, I don't know if it's close. It, one iteration of it exists. So, yeah, and obviously we can get you I didn't realize there was a consideration of abandoning the people that... There's no abandoning of the Facebook group.  I just, I don't like the way things get lost there. The order of things isn't there. You can't really easily search the group and see like questions organized into questions. Answers can't be rated in a way that's meaningful and frankly, that's not our content, right? I mean, that's Facebook's content. Oh, okay. So, okay. I just thought it was because we can't trust them. Oh, well, there's that too. And I also know that there are a lot of you that don't participate in our Facebook group because you don't participate on Facebook at all. And there's nothing wrong with that but we can host our own solution and do it exactly the way we want or at least close. So, there you go. It's good. It's good. We'll, like I said, I'll reach out to some of you and as it kind of comes along, we'll mention, certainly we'll mention it here first before we just roll it out and that kind of thing. So, there you go. That's, but we like to manage our own content to be perfectly frank. And then we can do it our way, which is good. Everybody should manage their own content because if you don't manage it, someone else will. Someone else will. That's exactly right. Yeah. And yes, I am threatening you. Okay, good. Good. I'll ask you that question later. I wanna thank CashFly for providing all the bandwidth for so many years for us and continuing to do so. They allow us to get the show from us to you in a very quick way and I appreciate that. The podcast marketplace, of course, we have smilesoftware.com slash podcast there. We have otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com. We have barebonessoftware at barebones.com. We've got Roboform at roboform.com and brand new, but very, very happy to have codeweavers.com slash MGG. Thanks so much, everybody. John, we had a good start to the episode. We had a nice, nice meet in the middle. I think we had a good end. We're here at the very, very end. Is there one last little thing that perhaps you'd like to share before we depart for a week? I think so. And to make sure I don't end and you don't end, my advice would be don't get caught.


Good morning, everyone. Good morning to all of you. From the beginning of the crisis, our government has announced a plan to mobilize the industrial sector so that we can quickly produce, here in Canada, the items we need. Since, companies from one end to the other in the country have been willing to help us and every week we carry out important progress. So I want to start today by making an update. First, we signed a contract with GL Chemtech-Dokeville to ensure the supply of chemical products that are essential to deforestation. While we are starting to resume certain activities, we must tighten other measures such as deforestation and contact research. We must therefore ensure that our health professionals have the right tools to administer more tests and analyze them. We also signed two new contracts to make sure our frontline workers can continue to do their jobs safely. Joseph Ribkoff, a clothing manufacturer based out of Dorval, will be providing us with 1.2 million made-in-Canada medical gowns with deliveries starting in July. And the Stevens Company, a medical supply distributor in Brampton, will be supplying 15 million shoe covers as well as 5 million disinfectant wipes, all made in Canada. Over the past few months, our government has helped companies retool their manufacturing facilities and massively scale up production to meet the demands of this crisis. I want to thank every entrepreneur and every worker who has stepped up to contribute to this fight. As we start to reopen and some people head back to work, the need for personal protective equipment and other essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant will continue to grow. We're making sure we're ready for that. On Saturday, a ship carrying 160,000 litres of hand sanitizer arrived in Vancouver and we're expecting seven more ships with hand sanitizer in the coming days. We also have almost a million face shields and more than 7 million pairs of gloves on their way to the provinces and territories. And to connect businesses looking for PPE with suppliers, today we're launching a PPE supply hub website. We also created new innovative procurement streams to allow more businesses to develop solutions and products Canadians need because of this pandemic. We've always known that Canada is home to some of the best innovators in the world and it's been great to see so many of them use their talent and know-how to help our communities during this crisis. In April, we put out a call asking for creative, Made in Canada prototypes that will help current and future outbreaks of COVID-19 and similar public health emergencies. And in just two weeks, we received over 550 proposals. We will soon be selecting some prototypes for testing and innovators will be able to work with the government to scale up production. After spending several months at our place, life is slowly starting to take its course. We have to stay vigilant and continue to follow the health authorities' guidelines, but some businesses can start opening up and that's a good news. The neighborhoods, small businesses and businesses play an essential role in our communities and we both got bored during the lockdown. And it's time to encourage them as much as possible, while paying attention and wearing a mask if necessary. The resumption presents several challenges for business owners. After closing their doors for several months, many of them had to go back to their activities and re-enter their employees because they are experiencing liquidity problems. Over the past few weeks, as businesses get ready to reopen, more employers are using the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy to re-hire their employees. Just take Track and Trail in Edmonton. Track and Trail was well established in the community, selling outdoor clothing, equipment and footwear for 36 years. When the pandemic hit, they had to close down their stores. After a number of challenging months, they are now ready to welcome customers again. And as part of getting their shops back up and running, they used the wage subsidy to help re-hire their employees. Shops, local entrepreneurs and business owners are the backbone of our economy. They make our towns and cities better places to call home. And collectively, they are the largest employer in the country. As we start to reopen, some businesses will need support to get back on their feet and our government will be there to help with programs like the Emergency Wage Subsidy. I also want to remind people that we launched a hotline service to help entrepreneurs and small business owners, including not-for-profit organizations and charities, navigate these uncertain times. People with pressing financial needs can now call 1-866-989-1080 to speak with an accountant or a business advisor. I want to finish this morning by reminding everyone that we launched a hotline service to help you navigate this uncertain time. Entrepreneurs and small businesses, including business owners and non-profit organizations, will now be able to make 1-866-989-1080 to get help from an accountant or a financial advisor. During this pandemic, our government has been there for Canadians every step of the way, and we will continue to propose measures to support them. On Saturday, we shared draft legislation with the opposition parties, which included additional proposals to help people. This legislation will aim to provide direct support to people with disabilities, support more workers through the wage subsidy, and ensure that Canadians who aren't able to meet certain judicial timelines, such as bankruptcy, aren't unfairly punished. We will also strive to make SERB payments more flexible, while making sure that those who knowingly and wrongfully claim the SERB face consequences. Discussions are ongoing, but I fully expect us to be able to work well with the opposition to deliver this important support to Canadians. The next few weeks will be loaded, so we will start to resume certain activities. But as always, you can count on our government for the rest of the things. Thank you very much.