It's time for MacGeekGab and listener BlockTech brings us our quick tip of the week by saying, I often pull my MacBook Pro out of my travel bag only to find that the battery is dead or extremely depleted. It seems that if I close the lid immediately after invoking the shutdown command, it doesn't always have time to complete the process and instead goes to sleep mid-process to make To make sure that my machine has completely shut down before closing the lid, I now press the caps lock key first.
After shutting down, I know the lid is safe to shut once the key's LED turns off. I just wish that there was a way to turn off the start up on open or key press function, as I find that I still sometimes inadvertently restart the machine when closing it up. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1036 for Monday, May 6th, National Beverage Day. Something near and dear to our hearts here at MacGeekGab 2024. Music.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek of the Show, where you send in quick tips just like that one. You send in your questions, which we try to answer. We send in, we all send in cool stuff. We all send in quick tips, too. And really, sometimes we all send in questions. Like, I'll bring questions to the show, and hopefully we get to answer it together. We also sometimes answer questions in our Discord community at macgeekof.com slash Discord.
And when I say sometimes, I mean all the time. Huge community of fantastic, well-intentioned folks who are kind and helpful to one another. I can't. More thankful for that as part of our community here. Our sponsors for today include linkedin.com slash mgg where you can go and post your first job for free. Backblaze.com slash mgg where you can go and start protecting yourself from potential bad times. And also betterhelp.com slash geekgab.
That one's a little bit different. Betterhelp.com slash geekgab where you can learn Learn about doing therapy completely online. We will talk more in depth about each and every one of these shortly here. For now, drinking my beverage of choice for today, Throat Coat Tea, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I am Dave Hamilton. And here, newly in lead in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Yeah, that's the cool thing about our Discord channel. There's no flaming going on over there.
The only flaming that seems to be going on around here, Dave, is towards me at the hands of your AI. This is true this is true there's there's a not entirely kind uh um. Moment in one of the ad spots and i swear i was reading a an ai generated script and so uh pete i i i and the ai thank you for being the butt of that upcoming joke yes that's right There you go. Yes. Oh, well, don't forget. So.
What are you drinking here on National Beverage Day, Pete? I am having a, it's kind of a cappuccino thing. Nice. It's a coffee and a, but we, a couple years back, I got a, I should put it in a cool stuff found. It's one of those Nescafe milk foamers. Okay.
Foams up the milk nicely and nice and uh yeah a little spring-loaded magnetic wheel in there spins around foams the milk up heats it up too sweet and i put it in my my coffee and otherwise i don't drink anything i in my coffee i like it black but okay yeah but i'll foam up some milk now sure sure so yeah nothing wrong with that it's a little bonus cool stuff found yeah drinking it in my so there i was mug oh very nice very nice i like it i like it um yeah so uh in an effort to uh get
number one of five new things oh and let me i was going to mention it but you mentioned it in the quick tip yeah you can't touch any of the buttons or your machine's going to come back yeah that's when you try to shut down i hate that apple there's a power button for a reason use it yeah yeah yeah the space bar to wake up the computer is great the space bar to turn on the computer or open the lid to turn on the computer that's so great yeah but he's is that our bias
because it's what it's how it used to work like do our kids care about this because they don't know any difference well necessarily i mean i somebody cares because it got so bad that the gent who does better touch tool and i can't think of his name i'm sorry yeah because i'm tired like you uh came up with the keyboard lockout program so you could clean your keyboard without. You know, waking your computer up or messing everything up. Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It just seems to me, why have a power button if. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess to cut its throat and turn it off. But you don't want to turn your computer off that way. No. It's bad for it. It is bad for it. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. How about I take a stunkle, Jamie, and another quick tip? Let's do that. All right. I did say, did I say that we, I don't think I said that our goal with the show is to learn at least five new things each time we get together.
I know we've got one though. Here's your use your caps lock LED to make sure your computers All right, bring us to number two here Pete. Yeah, uncle Jamie says I use this tip frequently and preview on the Mac You can merge PDFs merge pages from PDFs and delete and reorder pages within a PDF document To do this open your PDF documents in preview and select it view.
Thumbnails, it should be checked You can drag thumbnails representing pages from one document to another and drop them where you want them. Be sure to drag them into the thumbnail area on the left. You can also drag thumbnails up or down to reorder pages within the document. And if you select a thumbnail, you can delete that page by pressing the backspace or the delete key, depending on your keyboard's layout.
Out uh this handy this is handy to assemble documents that have been scanned or generated separately into a single pdf and i've done some of that and yeah i you kind of forget how versatile preview is preview is great for things like this you can also mark things up with it you can sign things with it it has become you know it it for what many of us need to do most of the time Preview has become a well, I don't want to say fully featured PDF editor or PDF tool, but it's good.
Yeah, it's more than just what you need in a pinch. I do want to share. Uh, the thumbnails, I guess he shared it there as well, but, uh, making sure that you bring up thumbnails by going to view thumbnails or option command two, just to bring that view up so that you can then do all of that work, but yeah, manipulate it. Yeah. It doesn't always open that.
And it's been a long time since we mentioned it. So I will mention PDF expert is the full featured, very intuitive PDF editing tool that, uh, you turned me on to.
Too i was using pdf pen for years and same pdf expert is hands down a better program oh yeah available with a student discount if you have a child with a dot edu oh interesting email address uh yeah i mean if you're paying the bill for college paying the tuition brother i should get some of that discount back with you yeah yeah because they don't make that cheap these days the uh the tuition thing yeah no in fact i always like to say if any of
you out there have a quarter million dollars i can borrow and by borrowing mean have and not give back send it to pilot pete at mackinacab oh yeah you know do we even have i know uh we're gonna have to make that email address for you i will take care of that i'll take care of that after the show yeah yeah you know so uh all right i'm making myself a note that i promise i won't put in the show notes when i when we actually publish them. I had a thing this week, Pete. Yeah. I, you know, I...
Try all kinds of different Wi-Fi networks here at the house, right? I might. Yeah, it's the thing I do, right? And I recently moved from the Eero 6Es to the Eero 7s. We talked about that last episode. And then after I did that, there was some more testing that I needed to do with the Synology mesh because it turns out it's still a little bit janky. I know it works well for some of us and doesn't work well for others of us. And that's sort of what janky means is it's inconsistent.
And so I wanted to do a little bit more testing. I have a support ticket open with them where I've been sort of trying to narrow down where the problems are. So I've been going back and forth a lot. I have one of these skylight frames. Oh, yeah. I love that thing. Right. And the one that we have, I've had forever. And and it's just awesome because we can send pictures to and from it. Well, I guess not so much from it. I mean, you can you can download pictures from it, but but it's meant to send
pictures to it. We have them. Each of the three homes of our family have them. You know, we've got one here in our house and then each of our kids has one in their homes and we get to send each other pictures. And it's really cool to just walk into the kitchen and see new pictures on the wall from, you know, Skylar over in in in Italy or, you know, Lucas from wherever, you know, he's on the other side of the state. But, you know, wherever it's just a nice thing, we do it for each other.
I noticed that I had broken it and by broken it, I mean that it was complaining about not being able to connect to Wi-Fi.
And it was like all right so i go through the thing i type in the password and i can i get the notification from whatever wife you know this time the sonology app saying oh yeah a new device is joined but it doesn't the device doesn't think it's joined it doesn't say that it can't join but it also doesn't say that it has successfully joined it's in this like limbo and then i started thinking lucas when he moved to his apartment said that he was at best getting it to connect inconsistently.
And I'm like, all right, well, he, I know he's on Eero over there. We talked about that last, last episode too. And I'm not currently on Eero, but I was, you know, and I will be again, trust me. But you know, I'm testing. And so I'm on this Synology thing. I can't wait to get back to my Eeros. In fact, I'm probably just going to do that this weekend. I've, I've got enough answers. And, and, And I'm like, okay, so it's not an Eero issue. It's, you know,
in fact, it was working for me on Eero. It wasn't here. And then I started looking at my settings and comparing and contrasting my settings between my Eeros, which are running just with a different SSID and this. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. What if I just connect it to the Eero? And one of my, I have two Eero networks. It's because the office and the house are far enough apart from each other,
but close enough that they were confusing each other. And Eero was like, just run them as two separate networks. Most of us are never going to do this. Eero support knew immediately. They're like, just do this. It's going to solve the problem. And it did. One of my Eero networks, the one in the house, had WPA3 enabled, just like my Synology network does. The Eero network in the office does not have it enabled. And I don't know why that is, but maybe I never went into Eero labs and turned
it on for that one, right? Never thought to. And it was like, aha, wait a minute. it and i turned off wpa3 and instantly the frame can like without needing to do anything else yeah the frame connected started slurping down you know 25 pictures that were in the cloud queue to get to it because it finally was able to connect to wi-fi and everything was fine i'm like okay i see so then i went in to the synology network turned off wpa3 there and just set it to WPA2 personal.
And then it was able to connect to that. No issue whatsoever. I sent Lucas a text. I'm like, I know what your problem is with your skylight frame, man. And, but what really became interesting was as I did that, I saw like five or six other notifications that devices had joined the Synology network.
A smart bulb that I had, a smart outlet that I had, things like that, that had been also acting a little bit janky just boom came right online no problem so what i learned is that wpa3 is not meant for us to be using right now if we especially if we have any older smart home devices and by older it's yeah internet of things six months yeah i mean six months like some of these aren't that old like i i definitely the one of the smart bulbs is a ge sync bulb and And that I know that I,
you know, got and it was a brand new product within the last year. So and and to be fair, you know, Eero has one switch for WPA3 and it's not entirely clear what it does. The Synology network is a little more a little more granular in what you can choose it in the Synology network. I had it set to WPA2 slash WPA3 personal. it turns out that is what the Eero setting does so it doesn't exclude WPA2 stuff but it,
in theory, allows both to connect. The actual reality is that some devices, even when the access points are in WPA2 slash WPA3 mode. They still don't connect because the WPA3 thing sort of gets in the way and they get stuck in this limbo that I described.
So it is now my blanket advice to not enable WPA3 on any of your access points, especially at home unless you know that all of your devices current and future are going to work with wpa3 and that's that's a that's a tough sell today there you go so i got two questions for you then yeah one is uh your separate eros one in the office one in the home yeah do you separate their ssids and passwords or are they the same no they all my eros are running and when when i'm in sort
of what i'll call default like non-testing mode for something my my main router that's every third tuesday of i know yeah yeah yeah um it my main router is the synology router that's doing routing and the wi-fi on it will be off and then uh the eros are all in bridge mode eve it's so that like they aren't doing any routing uh they are just doing wi-fi i know it's it's a it's a it's an an embarrassment of riches to be able to, I lead a charm. It's a first world problem. Right, exactly.
But even in bridge mode, having all of the heroes as one network, they were getting confused with each other again, because they, you know, because this, they all are, well, many, most of them are wifi, are, are, are hardware backhaul, ethernet backhaul, including the one in the office. There is ethernet cable that runs between the house and the office here.
But they they sort of see each other both ways they see each other over the hard wire if it's there and also at the same time over the air and that over the air thing between the house and the office was getting a little janky because it's just close enough to kind of work and so it was causing some problem so what ero had me do was create a a second network that's in bridge mode with exactly the same ssid and password and
uh and and it's it's fine everything like the ero can't control the roaming as well between the house and the office because they're two separate networks so they don't talk to each other in that sense but it doesn't need to because it's far enough away that your devices are going to connect to the right one like it's totally fine.
Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. And then the, uh, the other one, one is, uh, probably more difficult to answer, which was, uh, what, what's the ostensible advantage to WPA three less crackable. In theory, it is more secure than WPA two. But as I started digging into this to see like, okay, like I've proven at my house that this is 100% a problem in the way I want to run things. But what do other people say? And there's plenty of other people that report all these things.
In that digging, I found that WPA3 has also been cracked. So it's technically more secure, but not in any meaningful way. From what I can tell, I could be wrong about this. In fact, I know that I am. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. I want to hear more of what you folks know about this, too, so that we can kind of increase the hive mind brain trust on this. Right. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. But yeah, I would like even if you don't think you're having problems because I didn't think I was either.
I just have gotten used to some IOT devices being janky because some of them are like whether you have WPA3 on or not. If everything's solid, yeah, they're still. They're still. And so I didn't realize that at least some of my problems were directly related to me having enabled WPA3. So it is now off for good. And I had turned it on because I thought, well, it's more secure.
Like I should I should live in the future. Plus also I do this show that where I like experiment with this stuff and learn and talk to people. And so like, that's why I turned it on. And I, and I'm glad I did so that we could have this conversation. There you go. Yup. So, um, and one other admin thing that I, I forgot to mention earlier, as did you is, uh, Adam sitting here completely quiet today. Actually, he's not. You're quiet. Adam's not here today.
He's launching a new website, I think he said, for one of his clients. Yeah. And he's there dealing with the denial, directed denial of service attack that I launched on him this morning. Oh, that's nice of you, Pete. Well, you know, I wanted him to earn his pay. You wanted to give him a few more billable hours. I get it. That's nice. So, yeah. So that's why Adam is with us today. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we talked about it a little pre-show, but you're right.
We did not talk about it here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Phil brings us to our next quick tip. And he says, recently, I've noticed that when using AirDrop, that my iPhone shows multiple shows up multiple times. I can only drop to one of them. And he says, I was on with Apple support and they asked if I had a VPN installed. I use PIA courtesy of Matt Geek up here. Yep. And he says it was on and they said that it could affect airdrop. I uninstalled it.
And so far it is back to only one iPhone and drops have been working as they should. Yeah. VPNs can do strange things. PIA and other VPNs also allow for I forget what they call the feature.
Everyone calls it something different but it's the the lockout your network protect your network connection when you're not connected thing and that can get even stranger because it starts preventing you from doing things if it's and if it's in the midst of connecting uh i've seen that block things like um uh the captive portal pages because it's not letting you connect to a network work because it can't get to its vpn server so just it's kind of like the conversation with wpa3 understand the
implications of each of these features there's there are reasons that many of them are left off by default my guess is phil probably had one of those sort of extra security features on that was calling causing this this sort of device echo if you will but it may not I don't know. But but yeah, you know, anything that works over IP can be impacted by a VPN.
Yeah so thank you for that phil and uh i i i know we have more to dig into vpn yeah but we'll keep with the vpn theme for a moment here and um stephrab nyc 18 the this person's handle in uh in our discord says i was having trouble logging into ticket master i think if you've listened to this show at some point in the last six months you might have heard me rant about this and might He says, I tried my iPhone, both the app and the different browsers, my iPad, and finally my MacBook Air.
In all cases, I was getting an error message indicating I could not log on. Yet less than two weeks earlier, I had logged on just fine. Can you guess the problem? He says, I thought about it for a second, and it dawned on me what had changed. I now always have my VPN active on all three devices. As soon as I turned off my VPN, Ticketmaster let me in. Once finished with my transaction, I turned my VPN back on. I have lots of thoughts about this, but none that can be said in public.
Thanks for all you do. Yeah, well, I went through a similar thing where my former now former provider had bought a block of IP addresses from a VPN provider. And Ticketmaster was one of the several sites that locked me out when I wasn't on a VPN because it said you're on a VPN. In fact, the only way I could get to Ticketmaster was to go through Pete's VPN because he's on a he was on a different provider than me. Now we're on the same provider. Probably in the same block. Probably.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, be aware of, you know, in Ticketmaster, they have you might have heard that they have a bit of a bot problem. And so they have unilaterally sort of made the decision to block all VPN traffic because because it's it's something a lot of websites will do, especially websites that are targeted by by fraudsters.
Right and ticket master certainly falls into that into that realm but yeah there were several sites i couldn't get to on this provider and i worked with them but it's not up to the provider to fix unless they want to move me to a different ip block like you know it's they've got to fix the the internet's opinion of that block this wasn't going to happen so so yeah here's i i have a quick tip for you dave yes p if since since we're now on the same provider you would be
useless for you a vpn into my home and then try to get the ticket master correct but i bet you could tether your cell phone. Oh, you know, change your IP address that way you could. Yes. And I did that. I started to do that once and then was like, wait, I have access to Pete's VPN, but, but yeah, use his data. Right. Yeah. Not that it mattered using mine. Cause we're unlimited. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, it, um, yes. Tethering to your phone.
If yep. Yep, would be another way to do it. The way I did it the first time when I was fighting with it was I just dropped my phone off of Wi-Fi and connected over the cell network and was able to get right in. And that's also what told me, okay, there's something wrong with my IP address at home, which was, you know, the beginning of that sleuthing process.
But, yeah, ticket master. And I should have taken my own advice, because yesterday and the day before yesterday, I had a problem in the hotel. All of a sudden, I got out on the road, and I couldn't send email only from my personal primary account. My Gmail worked. Okay. So there I was mail worked. My MacGycab mail worked. Are these all different providers? Yes. Okay. And my iCloud worked. Got it. Well, I think MacGycab is a Gmail account. Mm-hmm.
Yes. Right. But the one that wasn't sending, the one that was blocking you was a different provider than all the others. Right. Got it. Okay. And so I should have tried to tether. Now, that's a whole other thing. Another screenshot I sent you. I wasn't going to try that from Alaska because my phone never worked in Alaska until the day before yesterday. It works in Alaska now. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Boom. So, yeah. Yeah. So, but I couldn't figure out why. I could get my email all day long.
Okay. But I couldn't transmit. Every time I transmitted, I'd get it, you know, unable, unable, unable. Send it back. Error. Couldn't. Finally, I pulled up the error message and it was talking about spam house and all that. I'm going, oh. Ah, so you were on a blacklisted IP address. Yes. It's similar to this other problem. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm going, well, what the heck? And I, you know, I went and I checked private internet access was off.
And my VPN to my home, my VPN to your home, neither one of those were on. So I tried turning those on. Sure. Right. If you're on an IP that's being blocked, change to one that's not. Try another. And it wasn't working. And I went in and checked, hey, send all traffic through. Yeah. But the other thing that I noticed was that I had tail scale running. So I tried to turn off tail scale VPN. Wouldn't do it.
So I had to go in and then I tried to go in the back door first instead of going right to the interface and disconnecting or logging out of tail scale. But eventually I did. I got it out of tail scale and it worked. So I'm confused as to why and how that worked because it turns out in our pre-show discussion that that really wasn't it after all.
Well, I think you're on to something. So what we sleuthed out was, at best as we can tell, because you're home now, so you're not on that IP, but the hotel that you were in, the IP address that the hotel in Alaska used is, for whatever reason, on the blacklist of this one mail provider, not the rest, right? But this one mail provider seems a little more aggressive than the others, whether they are justified in that or not, we'll leave that for another day. Right.
So, OK, fine. You wanted to use a different IP address than that one. And you had Tailscale running, which as far as your Mac is concerned, is a VPN. A VPN. Right. And it probably and you could look at this in your network settings. It's probably the first VPN in your list, at least based on what you're telling me, because it is preempting the other VPNs from working. Right. So, yeah, you could connect to your home.
But Tailscale still was sort of saying, no, I'm going to take the traffic over here using the hotels. Tells and then when i did what's my ip it was showing me in alaska not my right okay so at least the whole system was being consistent okay that's good right yeah that's a that's a great and if you folks don't know about that um what is my ip.com is a fantastic little place to go to let you know if your VPN is working or not.
Yes. So you tried, well, the first thing that I think we should address is that using the Mac OS's VPN management. Although possible, although apparently possible to do for things that have their own app like Tailscale and PIA and ExpressVPN and NordVPN and all of those, it is not actually doable because turning it on or off, turning Tailscale or PIA or Nord or any of those on or off in the max VPN settings.
System settings. In system settings or with the little menu bar thing that is from system settings is not an exhaustive switch. It doesn't necessarily turn it all off or all on. If they have an app, especially Tailscale, PAA, Nord, ExpressVPN, use the app to do that. Because if you were to have turned Tailscale off with Tailscale's app, it would actually have turned it off, right? As opposed to trying to do it in the system settings. Turns out I was just knocking
at the back door and not actually going in. You weren't actually going in. Yeah, exactly. And the problem is it'll tell you that it's off, and then it might be half on and those sorts of things. So if it has an app, in most cases, you just have to use the app. And that's true on your iPhone, too, by the way.
So that was step one. and and then you know well really we already talked about step two which is the the order of the vpns when you're running multiples you can run multiples but you gotta really think about which one's first and you can set the service order when once they're active uh you can set the sir once they're installed you can set the service to order in in network settings so um but i i. If I were in your shoes and experiencing that, knowing or at least having sleuthed
out that, okay, it's the hotel's IP address. I know my home IP address lets me do this. I would have just connected to a tail scale exit node that I've already set up. I just wrote down exit node. That's what I should have tried. So great minds sometimes take a life. Yeah, I know.
And this is something you need to configure in advance. um an exit node is a tail scale device on presumably on your home network it could be anywhere but it's part of your tail net so it's one of your devices uh that hopefully is on all the time and then you can use it to route all your traffic through whatever network that device is on so it's like for me i have an exit node on one of my synology disk stations and so if i need, to route traffic through my home network i'm always connected to
my tail net and then i just go to the tail scale menu and choose exit node and that disk station and boom now all the traffic is routed as though i were at home and it the nice part is it's all happening within tail scale so i'm not at risk of to borrow a phrase from you pete outsmarting myself so right yes so which Which brings me to another question. Yes. I love doing this. Let's play Stump the Dummy.
I always hate that on a check ride and the check airman's going, you know, what's the fuel weight in the right wing? I don't know. I don't know. I'm flying a plane. Ask somebody else. African or European swallow. If I were to go to that exit node, could I print something out on my printer at home? Or do I have to put my printer on the Tailscale network? So there is a setting in Tailscale.
If you go to your Tailscale menu and you go to exit nodes, you'll see a preference that says allow local network access. And it is checked. If you turn that on, you don't even need to be routed through the exit node for all of your traffic. It will let you print. I'm able to print to my home network without routing through my exit node. I mean, it does use the exit node. Don't get me wrong. But it's not. I'm not like all of my other traffic that's not aimed at my local network.
Correct. Is just going through whatever I'm connected to. But yeah, I print to my home thing all the time. It's great. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, tail scale. It's freaking magic, man. Yeah, I'm just amazed the more I learn about it. Yeah. How seamless it is. Yeah. It shouldn't be that easy. I know. I threw some brains back there. I agree. Well, and it's using WireGuard at the core. You know, right before tail scale became a thing, we started experimenting with WireGuard here.
And I was it's an open or at least at the time it was and probably still is an open source VPN I installed it I think Linode was sponsoring us and so I spun up a Linode instance to test it and put WireGuard on there and you know it kind of lets you do what Tailscale does which is. It creates a network amongst your devices that feels and acts like a local area network, but it doesn't matter where your devices are. All they need is an Internet connection somewhere.
So everything just gets to talk to all of your devices, get to talk to one another as though they are on a local network. Whether you are or not, it doesn't matter.
That that's the i think that's the the right way to explain it and and tail scales available for free for most of us yeah yeah oh well that's one for me you're talking about wire guard i just assumed wire guard was an encryption protocol for lack of a better word i mean it kind of is yeah because private internet access uses wire guard or uh the other one or open vpn or ikev2 two or yeah they yeah they use different ones yeah okay yeah yeah yeah so but i didn't realize that that that that brings
me to maybe another way to skin the cat of uh trying to use that travel router that barrel axe router overseas because i it was i had it working and somehow i checked something and i went back to try and uncheck it and it doesn't work anymore to watch youtube tv in europe got it yeah that's not allowed that's verboten you pay for this service you can't use it right right so yeah interesting it no it's it's fascinating stuff it just be.
Be careful that you don't get caught confusing your VPNs with one another. All right, folks, you know that feeling when you're hunting for that rare limited edition gadget and it pops up only in the most unexpected places? Well, hiring top talent can be just like that unless you're using our sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs. Here's a quick story for us. Three years ago, we were on the lookout for a social media and promotions ninja. Enter LinkedIn Jobs. It wasn't just about posting a job.
It was like setting a beacon for the Sadie of social media to find us. And find us, she did. Thanks to LinkedIn Jobs, where over 70% of users aren't checking other job sites, we connected with the best hidden talent out there. And get this, 86% of small businesses report finding a qualified candidate within 24 hours on LinkedIn. It's like finding that needle in a haystack, except LinkedIn turns the haystack into a neat, organized display case.
So don't get caught spinning your wheels or missing out on the perfect hire. Whether you're swamped with running your business or just strapped for time, LinkedIn makes it super easy, even helping craft those pesky job descriptions. Hop on LinkedIn Jobs and see why 2.5 million small businesses are making hiring as smooth as their latest iOS update. You've got a mission to grow your team, and LinkedIn Jobs is the gadget that gets it done. Talk about cool stuff found.
Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And our thanks to LinkedIn Jobs for sponsoring this episode. All right, now it's time to dive into the world of data safety with our favorite backup guardian and our sponsor, Backblaze. Imagine this. You're about to hit save on that mega project you've been grinding on for weeks. And boom, your computer decides today is a good day to crash.
Nightmare? Nah, not for us. Because we're all snug under the safety blanket of Backblaze. For just $99 a year, Backblaze keeps our Macs and PCs backed up with unlimited cloud storage. It's like having an infinite digital attic where you can stash all your files, and it's all managed through a sleek admin console that even Pilot Pete can navigate. Trust me, he needs all the help he can get. Sorry, Pete. Chat GPT made me say that. I just got to do what I do.
And if disaster strikes, whether it's a rogue coffee spill or a pesky ransomware attack. Backblaze has our backs with multiple rapid restore options. Need that data back physically? They'll ship a hard drive straight to your door. Get your data off, send it back within 30 days, you get a full refund. So don't get caught without a backup plan. Head over to backblaze.com slash mgg for a no-risk free trial and see why over 55 billion files have been restored.
That's right, 55 billion. With Backblaze, you're not just protecting data, you're ensuring your peace of mind. So make sure you take advantage of that fully featured, no risk free trial because you're a MacGeekGab listener. Go to Backblaze.com slash MGG and our thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring this episode. All right. And as I said in the intro, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
So let's get real for a second. You know how a computer can slow down if it's overloaded with too many processes? Well, our brains are kind of similar. Keeping all those stressors bottled up can really bog down our mental processors. Now, I'm in therapy myself, and it's like having tech support for my brain, right? Not only does it help declutter my mind, it also helps me upgrade my mental operating system. And you can do the same thing, so you're running smoother than ever.
And therapy isn't just for those who feel like they've hit a major system crash. It's for anyone who needs to debug life's challenges. It's really nice just to talk things through. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. It's therapy that's completely online. Flexible, and tailored to fit your schedule. Just fill out a quick questionnaire and you're going to be matched with a licensed therapist. Not meshing well? Switch it up anytime.
No hard reboots required. So don't get caught with your emotional firewall down. Get it off your chest with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash geekgab today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash GeekGab. Start unloading those tabs that are slowing you down and maybe find a few upgrades along the way. And our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. Clearly, Backblaze knows that universal truth. You can't fix stupid. Well, yeah. I swear.
They can make it pilot-proof, and that's something we've always said about airplane systems and all that. And so Backblaze has apparently made their system pilot-proof. I guess it's pilot-proof.
Yeah i was i i you know i i say this often in fact we talked about it last week that you know i have chat gpt write the ad scripts because that way it keeps it fresh yeah i have never told it that you all you know occasionally make yourself the butt of some of these jokes like you know you're you you definitely have a self-deprecating style that's that's very endearing and somehow it new yeah oh boy yep yeah anyway well
i have to be self-deprecating because i do stupid stuff to myself all the time like say uh edit an etsy file uh my uh oh yeah the etsy host file esty host file rather yeah and you know how many hours did you spend he edited an etsy host file uh on his Mac fit that almost required me to use better help for couples counseling. And I don't just mean for me and Pete, I mean for me and Lisa, because it ate up a good chunk of a Saturday for me trying to diagnose something. And then finally I was like.
Check your Etsy host file just, just out of the blue. And you sent it to me and it was like, yeah, he put an entry in there that screwed everything up. No recollection of ever putting that entry in too. That's the worst of it. You know, when you make a change like that and don't notice it for weeks. Yep. Pete outsmarted himself. I did outsmart myself on that. I think that might be the episode title. I don't know, but it might be really right.
Yeah. No kidding. but um noticed another one around here this week and and when it started blowing up on the discord. Channels yeah two i went oh okay this is my wife's like what is going on why you know i'm blocked out of my apple account i yeah it wants me to reset my passwords i can't send mail i can't facetime i can't like what and then i go you know you're crazy you just mistyped your password work well turns out she didn't yeah cut and paste and and.
This thing is but it didn't hit me and it didn't hit my son i and this all happened i believe on sunday of last weekend yeah um and and we you know we recorded uh last week's episode on friday so we recorded before this ever happened which is why we're talking about it essentially a week after the fact but it hit me um it it did not hit lisa nor lucas nor skyler that we're all on the same family account uh is debbie the lead on your family account pete okay i'm just
trying to sleuth out like well yeah what's the what's the common denominator universal yeah yeah okay saturday night is is what tennessee papa says that actually so he checks out yeah because it was right before we went we went out and um i'm still suffering our family group chat i once i got my i changed my password i got back in thankfully i don't have the like keep me logged out for an hour if i change my password i hadn't turned any of
that on so but i know for a lot of people caused even more issues right as as as you would expect. But it I changed my password and then it wiped out all my app specific passwords that I had created for things like busy Cal and my thing with iCloud so that fast mail can send SMTP via iCloud and things like that and so I had to recreate those and repopulate them in all the right places and all that stuff but but and then I had to re-log in like you said to FaceTime and iMessage and.
Most of my iMessage has been fine. Our family group chat, once I re-added myself or, you know, re-logged into iCloud, there was now, it was now a five-person family group chat and there were two Daves in it. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, I don't know what's going on. And then I realized, oh, OK, somehow I was in there with my at iCloud dot com account, which was not part of my quote unquote me record in my contacts.
So I was like, all right, so somebody in my family must have me with that at iCloud address. And somehow that is tied to our family group chat. So I went into contacts and I added that to my me address. Like, fine, if that's what it takes to solve this. Great. Turns out that's not what it takes to solve. It didn't matter. Restarted, did the whole thing. Still five people there. Like, OK.
And some texts that I had sent just before this issue happened were showing as having come from a different person other than me. You know, it was on the left side of the iMessage chat instead of the right side, right? Like my things are always on the right. Everybody else's things are on the left. That's how iMessage works. And so I was like, nope, it's still over there. Okay, fine. I deleted. I was like, let me just delete that user from the chat thread. Like I don't need them here anymore.
Well, it removed me and still left a phantom me out there. So I was sitting on the couch. I'm like, Lee, hand me your phone. She's like, what? I'm like, I need to re-add myself to the stupid family group. I need to throw something at the TV and I don't want to break my phone. Yeah, I need to break something and it's going to be yours. Right. And so I used that, you know, I wiped the other Dave out of that chat and then added myself back in.
I also went to my contact record first on Lisa's phone to make sure that there wasn't something there. And there was like, she still had some old at MacObserver.com addresses for me and her contact record on my phone. And it was like, all right, well, let me get those out of there just so that everything is like settled. Then I added it back in. And on my well, let me look on my max there. It's still showing those messages as having come from a Dave Hamilton that is not me.
But all other and prior messages that came from me are me and all messages since then that came from me or me. So it's just the ones right before this happened that Saturday night. Right. At see, no, this was Sunday night. It was definitely Sunday because I messaged just telling me it was Sunday night and it's it was 920 p.m. I sent a text to the family with a picture of one of the cats because that's basically what our family chats all about.
Out and uh and then that was at 9 20 an hour later at 10 24 i i removed myself from the conversation and then it said it says you removed dave hamilton dave hamilton removed dave hamilton and then i left the conversation and then a couple of those again many of them again and then finally my wife added me back to the conversation so uh but it's still a little janky on but my iphone.
Somehow has decided that those messages with the pictures of the cat did come from the person that it believes is me. So there's still something weird out there, but none of my other group chats were impacted. So go figure. Right. So, I mean, in the end, I am through this problem. Right. Like I don't have other than this one sort of lingering anomalous group of texts. I'm not experiencing any follow on issues to this.
Other than the fact that I had to reset all of my app specific passwords and, and sort of deal with that. Yeah. Because that's just easy to do. That's, that's an hour of your life. You won't get back. Oh, and it's, you know, I have busy Cal on my phone, my iPad and all three of my Macs. And so it's like, okay, great. You know, now I got to go and like deal with this.
And I also, just before this happened, I decided to move from the, I had a paid subscription with busy Cal and it came up for renewal. And I was like, you know, I have Setapp. I'm just going to use the version in Setapp. Like I don't need to pay for BusyCal if I also have Setapp. So I moved to the Setapp version of BusyCal, but that's been its own little sort of frustrating headache that I caused for myself. That's on me. But the timing of it was like, great.
Now I've got two versions of BusyCal on my computer that keep asking me and I don't want to answer for one of them. But yeah, it's a whole different thing. Yeah, but which one? Right. And I don't, that's the problem is, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
It so but i but to answer your question what the heck happened we don't know i posted on twitter the moment that like it happened to me but nobody else in my house and i was like okay this is weird that post blew up it was quoted in you know i think both 95 mac and apple insiders pieces a lot of i had a lot of comments and it they all were basically the same of this is what happened to them, like, symptomatically. But there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that anyone has sleuthed out
as to... No, and Apple's not been like, hey, we know there's a problem and we're working on it. No, nothing. The radio silence has been deafening.
Yeah, yes, yeah. I don't... I just don't understand why... I like why they said nothing what is this yeah like just acknowledge it we're aware there's a problem we're still working on it yep it we we we know a thing happened and we're sorry like something i don't know yeah well i yeah did the lawyers stop them from sending something out Well, but isn't there a thing?
Didn't the SEC or some FTC, some three-letter agency, mandate that publicly traded companies had to divulge any security issues within four business days of them happening? Need to own it ASAP, yeah. Right? Like there's the, yeah, the need to own it law. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So but if if that's I think that's the case, you know, I'm just a hack lawyer. But assuming that that's the case, then this would tell me it doesn't fall under that, which means it wasn't a security issue at Apple.
It was a just a technical glitch that some of us. Hey, let me ask you this. When you log into iCloud, Pete, do you use at Mac dot com or at me dot com or at iCloud dot com? Yes. So how's that for an answer? Usually I log into iCloud using, now using iCloud.com, but still my primary is a me.com address. So, you know, I did not try to log in. Is Debbie's, because I log in as Mac.com. Does Debbie log in as Mac.com?
No. Okay. okay hers is w at yeah my domain that's her apple id that that yeah that's and that's okay to have that's right yeah yeah okay all right well so much for that theory because i thought maybe it was an authentication issue with you know the at mac.com a path of getting it it's all the same account right and but it just for clarity it's all the same account if you joined at a time when you You could get, when they handed out a Mac.com address,
Mac.com was first, right? Then me.com, then iCloud. Right, then me.com. Yeah. And while you were talking, I went to iCloud.com in Safari, and it came up with a default login, my me.com. Okay. With a finger. And I thought this had affected me at first, because it was a passkey login, and it failed. And I went, huh, that's unusual. Oh, I wonder if my passkey is going to fail. And then I used my password and I got in. But just now, I used my passkey to get in. Okay. I'm looking to see if I can sign
in with a passkey that I know was created prior to this. And yes, I can. So my pre-existing passkey was not invalidated, whatever that means. Yeah. Yeah. Well, folks, feedback at MattKeyCab.com. Please, if you have any just symptoms to share that you think might help us, I would love to sort of use our sort of size and brain trust to at least try and figure out, if it's figureoutable, what, who and what would have been impacted by this? Because Apple ain't talking.
Yeah. So if you have a swag, you can share with us. I'm sorry, Pete. What's a swag? Dave? Yes, Pete? That's a scientific wild ass guess.
Now i don't know what to use for the uh yeah yeah send us your swag making swags fun again there you go okay here you go uh we're just making swags again yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah all right huh send us your swag send us your swags, because we don't have any more yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah swagging left and right is what we do, swags to the left of us jokers to the right here i am stuck in the middle with middle again jt ray and his question to take us out of all this craziness uh
i'll read the question it's fine He says, so my new Mac studio has a desktop local and a desktop iCloud. I have sync this Mac turned on. Am I missing something? Do I need to turn off iCloud and turn it back on? Do I need to turn off sync this Mac and turn it back on? So he did. He sent us screenshots, Pete, and they showed that he's got two desktop folders. One, it shows in the Finder title bar as desktop local. The other in the title bar is Desktop iCloud.
But the names of the folders are simply desktop. The Mac is being smart enough to...
Differentiate with them in its labels but like the desktop local folder is named desktop in his home folder that's it and the desktop icloud folder is named desktop in the mobile documents folder which is the you know icloud synced folder so this is interesting i don't know that i'd ever seen this before but i checked on my mac just to confirm and i do have documents and data syncing turned on and i do not have a desktop folder in my home folder so
there would be no reason for it to have to differentiate because there's nothing to differentiate between on my computer and uh his desktop in the screenshots that jt ray sent his desktop folder the local one is empty i mean it's a brand new mac uh so if if it were me i would just delete the local desktop folder to eliminate the confusion and just let everything and my guess is at that point the system will stop calling the desktop icloud folder desktop icloud that it's worth a shot yeah.
I so this makes me wonder is this at all related because let's go down another rabbit hole sure, I've got two email accounts in Mac mail that are identical my iCloud account I. And I know I told you about this once before, and I managed to get it to delete ever so briefly one time, but I called Apple support over it and they went through it with me and they went, huh, that's wrong. Well, when, when you upgrade to, uh, Sonoma, it'll, it'll go away. And it did. And then it came back.
So this is, this is weird. I don't, yeah, I don't think these two things are related. Well, two desktop folders, two, two, and well, These aren't clones of one another. Yeah, no, his are different. That's right. This is two completely separate photos. Whereas I've got two clones on the iCloud mail account. Can you just deactivate one of them? No, if I deactivate one, it deactivates the other. Oh, so they are truly close. It is a display anomaly, not a duplicate.
I mean, what you're saying is they're both being treated the same. Like if you go into one and change a setting, that setting is, is, is, is mirrored on the other one. Oddly enough, I did go, I took one offline and it usually, I thought it took them both offline, but it's not. Do you get to in the sidebar of mail? Like do they, does it show up twice there?
Yes. And what happens if you go to your home library mail folder and you can get to your library folder in the finder, go to the go menu, hold down the option key and library will magically appear in the list. Choose it and then go to home library mail and go. You're on Sonoma. Is that right? Yeah. All right. So go to the V10 folder here.
And in there you will see a series of folders with like serial number type names each one is a separate mail account and so you kind of have to twist them open to see as you twist them open you'll get a sense of which account is which don't change the names of these folders to make your life easier it won't make your life right so i've got an i've got an inbox on the very top one yeah okay and nothing more yeah nothing more well is it so twist open to see are there two,
folders here except one each for these these two iCloud accounts yeah yeah well the problem is I got since I have so many I have four mail accounts okay in Mac mail so figuring out which one is which how many how many folders are listed i mean you're going to have a mail data in v10 ignore the v10 i have uh 10 folders. Oh, so you have some, you have some old data. Well, look at the ones that have been modified recently. Oh, okay. Let me put it in list mode. Do that list date modified all today.
All 10 of them. Except for the one that says orphaned account. Okay. June 1, 2023. Okay. And that has one of the inbox inbox info. I could probably delete that, right? Well, I wouldn't, if I were you, if I were there, what I would do next, nope, I wouldn't do anything of the sort. I would make a backup onto a separate disk of the entirety of the mail folder. And it might be very big. Like, you know, because if it's going to have all your archives and everything. It's going to be gigabytes.
Correct. Yeah. And I would make that backup and then I would eject that drive so that nothing can go find it. Because mail is smart. It will go and seek things out. I've seen it do it, right? So get it offline, powered down. You know you've got this backup in essentially cold storage. And then what I would do is delete both of those iCloud accounts from mail and then add them back. Add one back. Please don't add it twice.
And see what happens. Like if you delete two of them, it, what I've learned about mail though, and this is true also on the iPhone, you just can't see it. Is that when you delete an account. At least in the past, it's been a little while. It doesn't delete the core data from core data is the wrong term. The previous data folder from the V10 account here in the V10 folder here in mail. So it might wind up creating a new one in there. It might wind up reattaching to an old one.
I don't know. But when you add the new one in, I'd be curious to see whether it adds one. I mean, this is obviously, like, this is probably the extent of, as far as we're going to take it on the show here. But that's the troubleshooting that I would do. Yeah, with that. So delete that whole mail folder. No, don't delete anything. Make the backup. Take it offline. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, then delete the mail accounts. Delete them from system settings. The two iCloud accounts.
In system settings. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you asked that question. No, that clarity was important. Well, I'm tired, man. So I'm just going to go delete and stuff. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Oh, too funny. Yeah. All right. Shall I play JP's question here, Pete? Let's do that. All right. Now I got to get my system back to where I can actually find these things because, you know, I don't, I don't know where anything is anymore, Pete. We've been doing all this crazy stuff.
All right, JP here. Let's see. of the geek gab it's jp currently in los angeles here's a uh uh a good one i'm sure we all know something like this i have a friend that uh i do their it for them over the years and this this is a person that just refuses to update his machinery and his software and stuff so like every five years you know i'll get an emergency oh my god my stuff i can't open my blood you know i you know You know how it goes. I do.
Anyway, after spanking him for not having his time machine drive plugged in, which I set up for him, yet he turned it off. Once it started asking to be, you know, erased and reformatted and stuff. Anyway, so he's basically lost everything from now back to 2021. So he had to buy a new computer. Anyway, that's the nightmare part. But that gets me to this. This guy has maybe 10 million files and folders on his computer.
And he's the guy that you know in the old days dating back to the 90s would just back stuff up put it in a folder and then just save it and a lot of it is sitting on his desktop, so i was going through that this morning looking at it via screen share and it's uh it's a a shite storm uh so my question is this uh not that i'm gonna go through with this but it made me curious For guys just like this, is there an app somewhere in the universe that will scan a hard drive and literally
remove duplicates of stuff that's the same over the years? I know one must exist, but I know that the gentleman of the gab... Will absolutely know the correct one, whereas you can, it'll scan it, show you the duplicates, and then you have the choice to delete them or put them off onto a separate drive. So, you know, so you, in case there's a mistake. So I wouldn't have to go through four million folders for this guy and try and organize for him.
I think that would be a mistake and it might be an even more More than this organizational freak can handle. Anyway, if you have any ideas, let me know. Thank you very much for all you do. I'm tapping to you. JP, I resent that. You said you weren't going to tell on me. Well played. Might you have an answer for him anyway? I do. He said one must exist and one does in fact exist. And it's one of my favorites. And lo and behold, set up to the rescue again, Gemini, right?
The astrological sign for the twins, Gemini, goes and finds the duplicates. And it will find, stand by, JP, I can tell you, if you run Gemini on this computer, it sounds to me like you're going to have 4, 6, 8, 40 copies, and it will find all of them.
And it has a default delete which I don't particularly care for sometimes I have when I have a duplicate file I go oh I put I put it in that folder and it selected that one to delete but it finds it it will set up an automatic delete and reserve in fact if you have two identical files and you select both of them for deletion it will pop up with a warning which you can disable that warning sure if you want to do so at your own peril it will come up and say are you sure you want to delete both
of these because i'm going to get rid of them so so i like gemini and i run it on my home folder and let it go and it it finds gigabytes of stuff for me it's a really nice job i i mean i i know that I've used Gemini in the past. Yeah. And, and it, it almost certainly would have been my answer here too, but I, I don't, like, I don't have the same working knowledge of it that you do this. Like this really sounds like the answer to this. Like, I mean, it truly is. Yeah. And it's reliable, reliable.
If they're from, it's from Mac paw. Right. Right. And, and those guys know their, they know their max. They know their stuff for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. All right. Shall we answer James's question, Pete? Yeah. All right. Are you going to read it or should I read it? You know what? Hang on. I can find James's question. I mean, I can read it. It's fine. Yeah. Well, he basically wants to know about the – he says, what do I need to connect IoT at 2.4 gigahertz?
He says, when I install a new IoT device, Internet of Things, and that's your smart light bulbs and switches, that kind of stuff for those just joining us. There is often a vague warning to ensure that I connect over 2.4 gigahertz rather than 5 gigahertz band of my Wi-Fi during setup. Why is this? How do I ensure I have a 2.4 gigahertz connection? My Wi-Fi seems to make up its own mind in regards to which band it connects things onto.
And Dave, we chit-chatted about this a little bit before the show, Joe, and you had a better answer than I did. I thought it was just forced because that's, you know, that's where the light bulb works only. You know, it only works in the 2.4 band. That is true. In some cases, that's true. No, in many cases. In fact, I would say in all of these cases, that's true. But to his point, you know, his Wi-Fi or his devices seem to make up their own minds in regards to which band they connect to.
And I will guarantee you that if you have an IoT device that has a 2.4 gigahertz radio in it, it will only connect to another 2.4 gigahertz radio. There is zero risk of it trying to connect or at least being able to connect to a 5 gigahertz radio if it doesn't have 5. Like, that's just a physical limitation. And that's okay. Yeah. And you're right that when client devices are connecting to the named SSID, this is the network name that you give your Wi-Fi.
You know, it might be like, you know, Pete's Castle or something. I know that's not the name of your Wi-Fi, but, you know, we all have our names. A lot of people like to use, you know, FBI surveillance van is the name of their Wi-Fi. You know, whatever your Wi-Fi name is, if a device knows the name and is connecting to the name, it will scan the list of available networks, pick the one that has that name and has the strongest signal for it, whether it's 2.4 or 5.
You know, it has an algorithm that it makes this decision, and then it tries to connect to that one.
Every access every radio in every access point has a separate hardware address a separate mac address right and so it pulls up you know a device like your mac or your iphone will pull up the list it'll see all the 2.4 and 5 and now 6 gigahertz radios out there pick the one like i said with the algorithm then it says all right what's the mac address of that radio great i'll use that Mac address with this password that you gave me and I will connect to that.
And it's made its decision on its own and it remembers the name so that as conditions change, it might jump around and go to different things. All of that is totally fine. However. A lot of the software for these IOT devices is not written very well. And what it does is it's lazy. It doesn't look and do the scan by name. It just asks the iPhone, what network are you connected to? And more specifically, what is the MAC address of the access point that you're connected to?
And then it says, great, I'll use that. And if your iPhone is connected to a five or six gigahertz access point, and the device needs a 2.4 gigahertz access point, it's going to pass that hardware, that Mac address along to the device and say, connect to this. And it won't be able to connect because as we discussed, a 2.4 gigahertz radio can't connect to a five gigahertz radio.
It's just not how that works. So it is the lazy software that causes this really nebulous warning message that says, make sure your phone is connected to a 2.4 gigahertz network before you try to attach this new IOT device to a network. And that's why this comes up. The solution is to do exactly as they say. Now, this often requires going into your router settings and changing a few things, at least temporarily, so that devices so that your iPhone will connect to the device that you want
it to connect to to the radio. Some. Some routers like Eero have a feature where you can temporarily turn off the five gigahertz radio for and the six gigahertz radio for five minutes and then do your thing and then it turns it back on and everything's happy. Uh, others, like if I was going to do this on my Synology, I would have to turn off what they call smart connect, uh, which smart connect bridges, all of the radios together as one SSID.
You turn it off, you set your 2.4 gigahertz radio to the, uh, the main SSID, the main network name that you use, set the five gigahertz to something else, temporarily save those settings, let it repopulate everything, then do your connection.
Then go back into your router turn all that back on it's a pain in the neck and it's because software is in for these iot devices the setup routines in this software is lazily written that's really just what it is but that's why did that make sense pete did i did i do absolutely no absolutely all right it does and then uh yeah yeah and also as we said in the in the quick tip section of the show uh make sure wpa3 is off otherwise you might be heading down a separate heading for yourself so right
because speaking of banging your head against a brick wall yep through which a 2.4 gigahertz signal will better penetrate better better than your head anyway yeah better than your head that's true that's true yep yep 2.4 gigahertz goes through brick walls better than your head yeah that's a long show title yeah i don't know there's a lot of there's There's a lot of options this week. Yeah. I'll be curious to see which one we have picked. Yeah. Yeah. So Matt's question there, that's the next one.
All right. What's the best way to send documents to tax preparers? Yes. Any decent tax preparer worth his salt is going to have a portal. Yeah. So, yeah. So Matt, Matt needed or still needs, I know April 15th has passed us by, but it doesn't help you. That doesn't help Matt, but sorry. Well, unless, unless Matt is on a, uh, like a lot of us, Matt might have filed an extension for his taxes or need to do this next year.
And, uh, Matt's accountant has asked him to send him, um, documents and Matt wants to do it securely.
Securely and matt's tax preparer is uh evidently not the most technologically savvy one so or maybe you're a tax preparer out there and you want to learn what to use for your clients um if you're a listener to this show sonology would be the sonology file sharing thing is a great way to set that up you can do that for inbound or outbound stuff and it's all secure but if you want to do it without having to buy your own hardware and do all that stuff.
Dropbox has a service where you can do file requests and they are sent securely. ICloud can send outbound file requests and those can be secured. And then Rod in our chat says he's used Tresorit, T-R-E-S-O-R-I-T, for several years. So that would be another one. Send.Tresorit.com. So that would be another one.
How do you do this with your tax preparer pete so my guy does have a portal okay if he didn't one i would search for a new tax guy yeah yeah fair and two but if i had to send a document i would just use preview and save it as a pdf password protected yes, yes yep i mean you know could it be hacked yeah. But yeah, everything can, right. Even WPA three.
It turns out. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, but I'd be curious to hear what other people use or if you're a tax preparer, you know, what you use with your clients or what you've looked at. Cause I, uh, it would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Kiwi Graham in the chat says his accountant runs a box.com repository. There you go. Tennessee Papa says he puts his on iCloud and sends a link to his accountant. Yeah, all of these things are fine.
Yeah, I have two different accountants that I use, and they use different systems. But Brian says that Adobe has an option, so we will put that link in the show notes too. So, yeah, there's lots of – this is a solved problem, I like to say. It is indeed in, in many different ways that cat has been skinned multiple times, all nine lives gone. Yeah. But in a, like in a great way, I, yeah, it, it works well. We were in the process of, um, selling a, a business that none of you know about.
It's not anything that's related to anything that you talk about. It's a business that I've had kind of a, an interest in for about six years here.
And uh we needed to create a data room to share all kinds of things financial documents you know contracts like they want to see everything about the business that they're acquiring which absolutely makes sense and so i actually used our our my disk station for that data room because our attorney was like well you're going to want to secure this and you're going to want to limit who can download and who can do what and maybe it would be nice if you could watermark things And I'm like,
actually, I think my disk station Synology office can do all of that. So we set it up and it's been fantastic. It's worked really, really well. Yeah. Super smooth for everybody. And so, yeah, it's like it, there's all kinds of these solutions out there. So it's almost like those guys at Synology thought about it and understand how that works. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've got it right. Right. I'm curious to see what Ugreen brings to the table on this front. Yeah.
Because they know where the bar is set, and that's the important part. So, yeah, I'm curious to see what happens. Dave. Pete. This has been a long show, hasn't it? You know what? It feels long. We're at an hour and 18 minutes, which is, you know, yeah. Okay. It's not as long as you thought. I didn't reset my clock. So we did 40 minutes before we got started. That's the thing is, yeah, we did an extra 10 on the front end of this. There was some additional tech support for Pete.
Yeah, because, you know. It was fun. Because it's Thursday. Yeah, because it's a day that ends in Y. Yeah. Why? Because we like you. That's how it works. We also like Cashfly. That ends in Y. Cashfly provides all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out Pete's other show, the one that his mug comes from. So there I was. And then I have two other shows, Business Brain and Gig Gab. Got some fun interviews coming up on Gig Gab.
We actually just interviewed Matt Musty from Train, the drummer from Train. I've got probably the nerdiest sound. Nerdiest sounds bad. One of the nerdiest sound engineers out there coming on. This guy, Robert Scoville. He's done sound for everybody. He's currently out on the road doing stadiums with Kenny Chesney. So we've got him coming on the show. It's been fun. Yeah, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been learning a ton, and I love it. It's great.
Nice. If you're a musician or into music, please check out Gig Gab. And share this show with somebody. Absolutely. It doesn't cost you anything. Share the show. And those of you that contribute, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. Hey, Dave, I'm sorry. I'm going to take a point of personal privilege. Oh, yeah, but the outro is playing. I've got a cool one this week. Okay. She was born in East Germany, learned to fly four years ago, flew her small airplane across the Atlantic and back.
An amazing oh i want to listen to this so there i was yeah whoa that's great i'm glad you i'm glad you took that moment pete you want to take another moment and share a few more words of wisdom yeah by few i mean three yeah she didn't and uh that was good because she's gonna do it again this summer but for me i wouldn't do it the main reason is because i would say i don't want to and I'm going to tell you, don't get caught.
That's good advice. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. See ya. Later.