Heisenbugs Are Expected Behavior - podcast episode cover

Heisenbugs Are Expected Behavior

Apr 24, 20231 hr 17 minEp. 978
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

Welcome back, Mac Geek Gab listeners! In episode 978, our hosts Dave Hamilton, John F. Braun, and Pilot Pete dive into a wide range of Mac tips, tricks, and troubleshooting. This episode is packed with valuable advice for Mac users, covering topics from setting a shared screenshots folder to managing […]

Transcript

It's time for MacGeekGab and I have our quick tip of the week. I've mentioned this a few times in passing on the show. It is super valuable to, I find it super valuable, to store all of my screenshots from all of my Macs in a shared folder so that no matter where I took a screenshot, be it in the office, the studio or on my laptop, I can always see it on all of my Macs. And I do this using Onyx, the free software that you can use to do all kinds of tweaks.

You can set the location of screenshots. You can change it from being on your desktop to say a Dropbox shared folder or an iCloud drive shared folder. And then you're good to go. It's synced everywhere. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered and maybe some cool stuff found today on Mackey Cab nine seventy eight for Monday, April 24th, twenty twenty three. Music.

Greetings, folks, and indeed welcome to a Mackey Cab, the show where we send that where the point is that we each learn five new things. That's the point. We do that by sharing and sometimes we'll even play that sound if it's something really cool that we've learned. We do that. We learn those five new things by sharing quick tips like we just did. Sometimes there are, sometimes they're yours. You send them in to feedback at macgeekgab.com

and we share them. You can also send in your questions which we will answer and cool stuff found that that you know it's just cool stuff that we've all found. It's it's a good name. It's not clever. It's just a name We stitch that all together into the agenda. We loosely follow it and maybe hopefully we each hit our goal.

Sponsors for this episode include private internet access PIA VPN comm slash MGG is where you can go to save 82% off your VPN service plus for free months shadyrays.com slash mgg because you want to be able to get two pairs of sunglasses for the price of one. You buy one pair, you get a second pair free. And then honey at joinhoney.com slash mgg, the tool, the free tool that scours the internet for promo codes and automatically applies them to your shopping cart.

We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a few minutes here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in pollen-infested Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. And here in Lee, New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. Glad to be back, guys. I'm glad that we're all back. I'm glad we're all here. Yeah, good stuff. It's good stuff. All right. Should we keep rocking with these quick tips here, John? You want to take it to Steve?

Yeah, here's a good one, or a bad one. Hi guys, today I learned a handy little iPhone trick. Did you know you can tap the back of your iPhone as a shortcut to a whole host of quick features? Go to Settings, Accessibility, Touch, Back Tap, and then choose one of the many options. And, uh, boy, there's a ton of options. And you can, and you can have two backtaps set. You can have one for two taps and one for three taps.

And yeah, you're right. The options are almost endless because you can link to a shortcut. So write your shortcut or create your shortcut and then backtap can trigger it. But it can trigger all kinds of things. They've got a ton of stuff in there. Yeah. Right. And then the others app switcher, camera, control center, flashlight, home, lock rotation, lock screen.

I'll stop. You can see it for yourself. But a funny little story is I was experimenting, with this feature once and then I forgot that I had because every now and then when I was out and about, the control center would come up on my screen and I'm like, why are you doing this? And I'm like, oh, right. I set that in the past. So. John, you outsmarted yourself. I love that term. Um, and I, I do it to myself. I outsmart myself all the time.

Uh, I found, I had it set to do screenshots with either a double tap or a triple tap. And I had to change that because it will, it will false trigger this. So make it something that's not going to. Yeah. You know, at least be aware of that. You know, I used flashlight and ran my battery down a couple of times. All right, done with that. That was going to be my my next piece of advice was maybe don't do this with your flashlight. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

DJ Mac in our discord at Mackey kept a com slash discord another place. You can share tips and cool stuff found and answer questions. And what's cool is it's not just us there. It's everybody there, right? I mean, we're all everywhere because we're the Mackey cab family, but It's not just us answering your questions, it's the entire community answering your questions. But DJ Max shared a quick tip there.

I had no idea. You can use, on your Mac, in the Messages app, you can use Control-Tab to jump to the next message in line. And similarly, as you might guess, you can use Shift-Control-Tab, so adding Shift to that, to go to the previous message, assuming you're not at the top.

And, which I had no idea. And it was one of those things, like many quick tips, he mentioned it in passing while saying, this was the only way he was able to find and get rid of the unread messages badge because they weren't showing up anywhere else, but just, you know, kind of, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, you know, going through the whole thing. It'll work. Sorry if that, welcome to Mackie Keb ASMR. Sorry. Sound effects are us.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, I have a keyboard maestro set up, so control tab doesn't work for me, but shift control tab does go backwards. Oh, because you're not intercepting that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So I got to go in and figure out how to undo that one. Yeah. Yeah, that is sort of the interesting thing about running keyboard maestro or anything that's, you know, triggering actions based on your keystrokes, Because sometimes it will get in the way of things that the OS can do.

I think we ran into that with the app switcher too. Right, John? Like you, I forget you, you had one, or maybe it was you, Pete, I guess it was you that had your, the keyboard maestro app switcher came up and you started sharing a tip about it. It's like, I'm Pete. I don't think that works that way. And it was like, oh, but it does for you. It does work for me. Yeah, exactly. No matter what the rest of you use. Keyboard maestro is awesome. Like I can't, yeah, that's one of those.

I did nuke and pave the studio iMac here, so I am still on Monterey, but I am on a very, very fresh install of Monterey. No migration assistant, no jankiness coming from, you know, the downgrade from Ventura. It was a proof of concept and it was a good one. I did hear from Apple and they implied that this should have, that this is expected behavior.

The problem I was seeing is expected behavior and implied that it would have happened in Monterey and I was thankfully able to prove that was not accurate. So maybe they'll take a look, but for now I'm on Monterey, but Keyboard Maestro was one of the very first things I installed up here. Because like otherwise I wouldn't be able to do the show. Like, it just wouldn't happen. So, Gary next, John?

Gary says, just listen to the latest podcast and you talked about the caller who had to boot his Mac into safe mode to get his Apple Watch to unlock his Mac. On a somewhat related note, and I believe you may not have been aware of this at the time of the recording, but Apple released emergency updates to macOS Ventura, iOS and iPadOS. MacOS Ventura 13.3.1, iOS and iPad, 16.4.1 were released last Friday, April 7th, 2023. Several Fridays ago at this point. This email is a couple of weeks old.

Just, you know, just, I don't want people to think they're listening to the wrong episode, but yeah, keep going, sorry. Besides the active exploits that were discovered and reported to Apple, the update addresses the Apple Watch not being able to unlock an iPhone running the original 16.4 or a Mac that was updated to 13.3. If anyone who has Ventura and or iPhones. That suddenly lost the Apple Watch Unlock, hit your software update section in system settings.

Give up the good work and don't get caught. Thanks, Gary. Yeah, don't get caught yourself. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Staying up to date. I'm actually afraid to update my Macs, Dave. Why? I mean, you're already on Ventura. The Evernote bug. Oh, yeah, right. So you can't use the old version of Evernote all that well, but that part actually works fine, John. Yeah, so what happened in the latest Ventura update,

is it must have taken out some framework that the legacy version of Evernote relies on. Other apps might rely on it, too. We're deep in the weeds here. We're probably in like 1% of the audience that cares about this, but the solution for you, John, is run two copies of Evernote, one that we use when doing the show, the very latest one, and the other one, the old one that we use when creating the show because we like the Apple script support in there.

Really, we should probably move to notes and share our notes that way, would be probably the right way to do it. We just need to experiment with that. Feel free. Ben has a tip for us. I want to make sure I'm pulling up the right one. Right. Yeah. This, I get another thing. I just don't know. In Safari on iPhone, when the tab bar is visible. So you can see like the URL at the bottom there, a way to get to the tabs view of all,

of your open tabs is to swipe up on the address bar. This mimics the experience of swiping up on the home bar to reach the app switcher. So, whereas you would go all the way to the bottom of the screen to swipe up to get to the app switcher, you go not quite to the bottom of the screen, you go to Safari's address bar and swipe up from there to get to the

tab switcher. This is what we love about QuickTips. I had no idea it existed. So, thanks for letting for sharing that with us, Ben, you shared that in our, uh, in our discord chat, because, well, that's where, that's where he shared it. So yeah, pretty good. Did you guys know about that one? I did not. Yeah. Um, our last quick tip this week, I believe, unless one comes up later and they do, as you know, they're hidden little things, they, they're sneaky.

These quick tips, they, they sneak out when you least expect them. So, uh, Bav in discord says, did you know I did not that you can hover your mouse over the download icon and see the actual download speed and progress when you're in the Mac app store. So, and it's great. Like you, you see the little, the little wheel going, uh, and you just float over it and it'll say, you know, loading and it, it'll show you the, the progress and the speed and all that stuff.

So I don't know. another one of those things. Did you guys know about that one? I thought we covered that on this show at one point. Did we cover it, John? cover it? Is that something we talked about it? Did you know this one John we might have? For some reason I knew it and I thought it was I think I stumbled across it accidentally one time, Yeah, cool stuff. I love it, but it's still cool. Yeah. There's that sound that sound means I get to tell you about our sponsor shady rays.

What's worse than buying a pair of expensive sunglasses and losing them right after you get them? Breaking them is worse. Well Not for me and not for all of you who have already gone and bought Shady Rays. Shady Rays makes high quality sunglasses that are just as good, or even better, than the expensive ones. And Shady Rays are a fraction of the price. They're durable, they're built to tackle all of life's outdoor adventures.

My family, we've been using Shady Rays for years because every pair of Shady Rays is backed by their industry leading lost and broken replacements program. Break or lose your pair the second you take them out of the box, they'll send you a replacement pair no questions asked. Shady Rays isn't happy unless you're happy. That's why they give you 30 days to try them and if you don't like them, you can exchange or return them for free.

What could be better? Well, what's better than getting one pair of Shady Rays and not worrying if you break or lose them? Getting two! Go to shadyrays.com slash mgg and use code mgg and for a limited time when you buy one pair of Shady Rays you'll get a second pair free. That's s-h-a-d-y-r-a-y-s dot com slash mgg code mgg to get a second pair of Shady Rays free. Shady Rays dot com slash mgg code mgg and our thanks to Shady Rays for sponsoring this episode.

I want to tell you about one of the best VPNs out there, and easily one of the most affordable ones we've seen, P.I.A. P.I.A. stands for Private Internet Access, and they take privacy seriously. Not only does P.I.A. hide your IP address, it encrypts your entire connection. And P.I.A. Is the world's transparent VPN. They never record or store user data, and their no logs policy has even been verified in court.

You also get endless entertainment options. Not only does PIA work with all the major streaming services but it's one of the few VPNs that supports P2P file sharing so you can download just about anything. It's available for all platforms across all your devices and just one membership can protect up to 10 of your devices simultaneously. PIA is the one I use. I've been using it for, I think, well over a year now. And when I go to turn on a VPN, We were just talking about it,

I think in last week's episode. PIA is the one I use. You can use it too. Right now, go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two-year plan. It comes out to around two bucks a month. You can't beat that. And there's a 30-day money back guarantee. That's piavpn.com slash mgg for 83% off private internet access. Piavpn.com slash MGG and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode.

And today's episode is also sponsored by Honey, the easy way to save when shopping on your iPhone or your computer. You know how much fun it is when you find a deal, right? Like there's the price. You're kind of ready to pay it, but you're like, could it get better? And then it gets better. And then you feel smart. You feel lucky. You feel excited. I love that kind of stuff. Thanks to Honey, manually searching for coupon codes is a thing of the past.

Imagine you're shopping on one of your favorite sites. When you check out, the Honey button appears. All you have to do is click apply coupons. You wait a few seconds as Honey processes and searches for coupons that it can find for that site. And if it finds a working coupon, you'll watch the prices drop. I was buying jeans recently. I found some online, hit the little button, boom,

saved a bunch of money. They make it super easy. It's cool too, watching it kind of go through and trying the different coupons. As a nerd, I like that. Honey doesn't just work on desktops. It works on your iPhone too. Just activate it on Safari on your phone and save on the go. If you don't already have honey, you could be straight up missing out and by getting it You'll be doing yourself a solid and you support us here at the show get paypal honey for free at joinhoney.com,

Slash mgg. That's joinhoney.com Slash mgg and our thanks to honey for sponsoring this episode. All right, uh, let's do some questions shall we uh, shall we guys let's um, let's go to raymond john, Poor Raymond. I'm having a strange problem with my Apple TV HD in my family room. I bought this Apple TV in November 2015, so it's old. I have it hooked up with

Ethernet direct from my Fios router. So this problem is new and it's just started about two months ago. When watching Apple TV+, the show will stop and you get the spinning beach ball icon for up to a minute or more before it plays again. It can happen several times during the show. This will happen also while watching Disney as well. I did not check Netflix. The Apple TV has worked fine for over seven years until now.

Now I have two other Apple TVs in this house hooked up to Ethernet and they work fine with no problem. So what to do? I disconnected the Ethernet and connected the Wi-Fi on this Apple TV in the family room and now no more problems. Strange. It sounds like an Ethernet problem with with this Apple TV, what do you think? I've had similar issues, Dave, and I hate to suggest it, but settings system reset can get things back can get things back in a known state.

Yeah, I mean it that might do it it's what he's experiencing is is you know buffering right which is when the. There is not enough band with to. Deliver the content fast enough to to keep you watching in a steady uninterrupted stream right so it has to stop wait for more data to come in and then it goes.

So, switching to, you know, network interfaces, interesting, so, like, that's the part where I'm a little confused because I would think that, in general, Ethernet's going to be more reliable than Wi-Fi, however- Is Wi-Fi faster? Well, I mean, yeah, maybe, I don't know, like, Wi-Fi can be faster, not on an eight-year-old Apple TV, but, um, but maybe, you know, that, that Apple TV has a hundred megabit per second

ethernet port, not a gigabit ethernet port. So it's wifi could be faster, but like for 4k from Netflix, you need 25 megabits per second. So even a hundred megabit ethernet is way more than fast enough right to do that so and that's a 4k Atmos stream if you're watching 1080p on Netflix I think it's only like you know 6 megabits per second it's like way way way way less so it's.

Weird that you're getting that you know me I like to dig into stuff and so I would there is a speed test app for the Apple TV from the same Ookla people that make speed test for our phones and and our Macs and all that stuff. I love to have the speed test app on my Apple TV because it helps me answer exactly these things and it tells me what my Apple TV is seeing.

And now that I put ethernet in the house, like I'm getting, I used to get like 800 megabits over the Mocha connection, which is pretty good. Uh, but you know, the, the latency would be sort of variable because Mocha is a little bit weird. It's not terrible, but it's a little weird. Uh, now that I've got ethernet running there, it's, I get full nine 40 in both directions, 940 megabits up and down and five milliseconds solid of latency. That's it.

But like being able to know that is really handy and sure. You could plug your computer in and do the speed test on that, but that doesn't tell you what your Apple TV sees. And so in, in Raymond's case, I would say, do the, do the speed test app on there and do it once with, with plugged into ethernet and then change over to wifi and run the speed test app again. And see, like maybe there's something wrong with the Ethernet connection.

Could be the port on the Apple TV, could be the port on the switch that you're using, could be the cable in between the ports. So, but that's a good way to diagnose. I don't know, this is how Dave's brain works. And it could be the app. I was having issues with the CW app, where when I tried to navigate and like go from one button to another, it would bounce back. And I'm like, no, no, go, go here. And it's like, no, I'm not.

Yeah, that's true. The app. So I deleted the app and reinstalled it and problem. Oh, so it has gone away. It truly was the app and not the service behind the app, right? Correct. Interesting. All right. Yeah, that's a great. Yeah, that's a great thought. I hadn't I hadn't even thought of that. Yep. Yep. Time for a new Apple TV. That's all. It is time for, I mean, like the new Apple TV is really nice. It's fast. There you go, Raymond. It's new Apple TV. You can send your old ones to pilot Pete.

Uh, yeah, I mean the, the, yeah, the new Apple TV, it does make a difference with some apps. The, the faster, uh, the faster CPU. I found it on, you know, I'm a big channels user and channels, DVR user and the channels app, I think they fixed it, but there was a period of time when I first started using channels a couple of years ago, I had basically the same Apple TV that you had, I think, uh, Raymond and, or at least certainly an old one. and.

I was like, gosh, you know, if I'm doing it, if I set it this way, it skips frames and this, that, and the other thing. And of course the channels, uh, developers are very active in their community. And so I posted this and, you know, within about 40 seconds, I got a response. It was almost like I was texting with them and they're like, wow, we haven't tested it on that old Apple TV in a long time, but they were really interested. They're like, all right, well, let's look and

let's see. And they did, they found some optimizations that they could do. They're like, oh yeah, we never thought about that. So they rolled that in, but it was like, You know, if I'm going to be relying on my Apple TV this much, maybe it's time to upgrade to, you know, the current one.

So, so I did, um, unfortunately channels, uh, NBC is made some changes recently, Pete, uh, for us channels users that might, that are at least temporarily bad, meaning that they've added DRM to their TV everywhere streams. Oh, interesting. I haven't had an NBC issue yet, but. But we don't yet hear in our locale. It seems like people on the West Coast, some people on the West Coast of the United States are so I just share that.

Yeah. Cause the local Fox is difficult on, on my channel stream. Do you get. I have no problem with Fox. I have, I had. My is for YouTube TV though. You're using Fubo. I'm using Fubo. Yep. had issues with ABC authenticating up until recently. And then that went away, but that was like a, it was fascinating. ABC would not, I have a Fubo account that I pay for and I have a DirecTV stream account that they provide to me for free.

I don't know how long they're gonna provide it to me for free, which is why I continue to pay for Fubo. But every month or every quarter when it still is free, I keep thinking maybe I should just stop paying for Fubo, but I haven't yet. So I have both, but it's been a good test because Fubo is my primary, could not authenticate to ABC with Fubo.

Direct TV stream authenticates fine with channels to, to ABC, but now Fubo does like there was a week, about a month ago, there was like a week period where neither would authenticate to ABC. And I was like, oh man, this sucks. And then now they both do. So I don't know, like, who knows. Yeah. Uh, we, like I say, ours is the Fox. We, we don't generally get, usually it's

off the air, I guess I should say. Interesting. Oh. But the ABC affiliate in, you know, in Manchester, New Hampshire, we don't get, we get the one out of Portland. Yes. YouTube TV gets us out of Portland instead of WMUR in Manchester. I've gotten, I've seen that too. Yeah. Yeah. So, Deb likes to watch the local news. Sure. Therefore, we have to switch out of channels and onto YouTube TV. There you go. There you go. All right.

Oh, I was going to say, just real quickly, there's some other, I was looking around for some M3U files to use with channels. Yes. out there, some IPTV services out there, uh, they may be less than legal. It turns out, however, I didn't find that out until, well, I'd say it ain't so. So, well, I didn't find that out until us until I'd started paying with, playing with it a little bit, and then I did some more research on it and went, oh, okay. That's why I can't get a decent guide or anything.

So I immediately, I mean, 14 days money back, I, within hours, I went, I want my money back, I'm done, I'm out of here. I don't, I don't need to mess with it. Cause I'm paying for it. Yep. Yep. Yeah, but yeah, interesting. Be careful out there. I get, I hear tell of people being fined for using those. Oh, that's interesting. Not just the providers, but the, and then that's overseas. It isn't here yet. Got it. Got it. Okay. Interesting.

Sorry. Interesting. No, don't apologize. This is like, it's what we do. It's fun. We're having fun, right? That's the point. It's what we do. That's what we do. I need, yeah, it's good. Uh, all right, Phil, right. We're done with, uh, we're done with Raymond. John, is that correct? Yeah. Okay, cool. Uh, Phil says, asks, posits, perhaps. I might be dating myself. Oh, I, uh, he says I might be dating myself, but, but hearing, uh,

my name in question on the podcast reminds me of hearing my name on the radio. Well, you're welcome. Welcome to K M G G or W M G G. I guess we're on the East coast. So yeah. Uh, he says, uh, I love I love it, and I'm loving the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The display is amazing. Obviously, the speed is awesome as well. One question I have is with these new machines, it has such great battery life, how should one care for the battery these days?

I recall with earlier Apple laptops, it would be good to have something like fruit juice or coconut battery to regulate the usage and maintenance cycle. Do you know of any recommendations for the batteries with Apple Silicon chips? So this is what I'm about to share is not unique to Apple Silicon chips. Like Apple's done great with battery management for many years. And so we can go back to, you know, some of the later year Intel based laptops as well

with this advice. And the advice is you don't really need to do anything. Like there's not much to do. The one thing I would avoid. And this is just sort of a generic thing, is I would avoid keeping a laptop plugged in 100% of the time. Because if the day ever comes where you want to not use it plugged in, that's when you may have created some battery issues.

But even then, like, the way Apple's battery management and battery technology, like a combination of software and hardware, the thing, aka the thing Apple's really, really good at. Is something you just, like, there's not much we can do in addition to what's already happening on the devices to manage those things. It's not bad, fruit juice has been end of life, so that doesn't exist anymore, but coconut batteries still exist. It's not a bad tool to run.

It gets you some valid data, and it can log data over time, So you can see how things are progressing and at what rate things might be dwindling. Your battery capacity is going to dwindle. That's just normal.

Uh, so, uh, but it's, it's all pretty mitigated these days. So, you know, I, that's even the phones, if you're not careful, I think you experienced the one, and we talked about it where, you know, it'll, it'll wait until late in the night, early in the morning to finish charging all the way up the way to interesting one. I found though is that if I set my AirPods Pro on a Qi charger, that thing gets hot and heat is the enemy of all batteries.

So I've started just using the lightning cable to charge my AirPods Pro 2, second generation. Oh, so you're not charging them wirelessly, the AirPods? I can, but yeah, they get hot. It gets really hot. Yeah, it gets hotter than the phone does, which is much interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm just thinking that maybe there's something going, there's not the battery management smarts going on in that little thing.

Well, it might just be that there's, there's more insulation between the very good point, especially with a case with a case. Oh, do you have a case on your AirPods pro on my phone? I do. I have both actually. So it's probably the case on your AirPods pro is adding to that because I mean, it's, you know, right. And also it your more heat's gonna be absorbed by the materials between the two cheek oils, right?

So if you add more material more heat, it's absorbed. Oh, yeah, it's just like that's just how it is. Yeah, interesting. But yeah, that's that's that's been my experience John. You've got a late model Intel, Laptop like do you do anything? Do you find the need to do anything with your battery? No, I pretty much leave it plugged in all the time when I'm near power. And that hasn't been bad for you, right?

That's good. You know I thought there were some settings. Maybe they were on the previous os, Yeah, they seem to be gone now optimized battery charging, I Think that was the only setting but I think that's the Monterey thing so for your Mac. They're gone. I there might be some I think there's, With an Intel Mac you're Pete you're on an Intel Mac on Monterey right now on Ventura right now, right? Uh, no, I'm on a M1. That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. I, I, you, you answered the question I asked.

I don't, still don't know why you didn't read my mind here, Pete. Right. Uh. What I meant, not what I said. That's right. So, uh, check in the battery preference pane. Looking at that. Do you have the option of telling it to like optimize charging? Optimize battery charging. Yeah. So, uh, settings, uh, battery, battery health. The third one down is optimized battery charging to reduce battery aging.

Your Mac learns from your daily charging routine, so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use battery. And I do have that in fact toggled on. Yeah, yeah. But at 17 months, maybe 18 months old, my maximum capacity is 90%. This is a measure of battery capacity relative to when it was new. Lower capacity may result in fewer hours between charges. Got it. That being said... I'll go all day on this thing, unless I'm really crunching video or something like that.

These M1s are all day machines. Oh yeah. Yeah. They just, they, they, they run and they run and run. It's like the Energizer bunny. They run and run. That's great. That's great. All right. Uh, speaking of, uh, things we can do to keep our Macs running well, um, John Steve had a tip for us all. Yeah, this one's bizarre. I agree. I've been beating my head against the wall to figure out why I ran out of storage on my MacBook Pro M1 16-inch 2021.

I ran Onyx and CleanMyMac, its various categories, and could not reduce the 890 gigabytes of data. Whoa. I only have a one terabyte drive. When I ran Space Lens, it showed the 890 gigabytes was in cores. What is CORS? I found an article that said the CORS folder is where OS X stores the CORDUMPs. These are files that are intended for developers to troubleshoot and diagnose faults in their software. They are generated as software crashes. If you're not a developer or aren't testing

them then these files serve no purpose for you. The article said it was okay to delete cores and had a way to stop generating cores with the terminal command. So I did this and now I only have 35 gigabytes in system data. I hope this helps others with similar issues. Huh. I just checked to make sure I don't even I was not aware that my Mac even had a slash

cores folder. So this is literally the root of your hard drive. It is named cores all lowercase And it is where Unix in general does stores its core dumps when an app crashes and and you know it'll put the the dump of of your entire memory footprint in there so that you know as a developer you can go and poke through it and see what went wrong at the time that the app you know dumped. But I've never I've never seen anything in that folder on my Mac. I've seen it on like

Some of the Unix servers that we've run over the years. And when, when there's stuff there, it's bad. Like, cause it's like, Oh, why is Apache dying? Like, I remember this when I used to have to compile my own, like from hand, I would have to compile my own version of Apache, like before there were package managers on Linux and all that stuff. And I, I definitely would cause a core dumps all the time. Cause I didn't know what I was doing.

I'd just be like, well, we need these modules. So put them in, let's go. And like, nope. All right. Well, what did I do wrong? You know? Um... I've never seen that on the Mac. But yeah, with all the RAM that we have now, every core dump is, you know, if you got 16 gigs of RAM, well, it's 16 gig core dump. Next. So. Yeah, I always thought there was another place where it would store core dumps, but I can't recall off the top of my head. But I do have a cores folder on my Mac. It is empty, but.

Oh yeah, I did the same thing. I looked at both of my machines and there was a cores. Directory, but no data in it. So. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was going to bring up to people how to get there and see them because it is a hidden folder and I'm looking in Finder and I'm not seeing the setting where you know show hidden folders. Is that a terminal command? Is that how I did that?

I'm just going in there in the terminal. So I open up the terminal and I type cd, everything that I'm saying right now is located cd to change directory space slash cores c-o-r-e-s. And that brings me there. Okay, well somehow I have my hidden files and folders displayed in finder, and I don't know what what I yeah There is it used to be an option back in the day. It is no longer, No, not those folders. I think you'd have to do it with onyx. There's a terminal commander onyx

That's where it was it was an onyx. There's a checkbox in there. We're correct a display hidden correct Yeah, that's right, which reminds they hide them for a reason so be very yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. Poking around in your hidden folders. That was an interesting thing. When I did my little, you know, temporary experiment, when I rolled my data volume back from Ventura to Monterey, I had to go download the Monterey specific version of Onyx.

It is not a monolithic app. It is an operating system specific versioned app. So you have to run the one that is specific to your OS, like, cause I went to run it and, it was like, this won't run on this wrong OS. Like, oh, yeah, that's right. Boy, that's an essential though, right there. Yep. I need my Mac Onyx. Yipper. Ccleaner is the other one. Ccleaner. I forget about Ccleaner. cleaner. Yeah.

Ccleaner, which is short for crap cleaner, but is that right? Yes But it does a nice job of cleaning up, See cleaner, you know, I was poking around and there's another place you can look it's a home folder, library logs diagnostic reports or no or just, Library logs is another place where Mac OS may store Things that get out of control. Yeah, fair. I remember having a Skype log.

I turned on like Skype debug logging or something, you know, because we worked with them early early on in the show and for a long time. We use Skype is our VoIP engine between us and we had to work with Skype to turn off some of their Skype actually had a comfort noise generator. What a comfort noise generator was for was all of us who were used to talking on copper based landline phones, because there would be noise on the line.

And when Skype first started out, people weren't used to hearing silence on the line. And so they would think the other person hung up and they would stop talking and be like, are you there? Are you there? Are you there? And it would make them uncomfortable. So Skype actually added a white noise generator into Skype that they called the Comfort Noise Generator. It's gone now, thank goodness, but when you're doing that for a podcast, adding in hiss is kind of a bad idea.

So we had to work with them to turn it off. And I had these debug logs on and forgot about it. And then one day it was like, oh yeah, that's 25 gigs. Like, oh, I should turn that off. So. And then, but thinking of that now. Allison wrote in with the name of it, and I can't think of the name of it now, there is a... Hush. Hush, that's it. Came in, there you go. Yep. So if you do have that comfort noise and you want it out of your recordings, use Hush and it removes background noise.

Yes, we will put Hush in the, we've talked about Hush on the show before, but we will put it in the link again, it's at hushaudioapp.com. All right, speaking of audio, Pete, you want to take us to Jess's question? Jess, yeah, let me pull that one up. So Jess wrote in, my question is, I found your podcast a few months ago. I really enjoyed it. Appreciate everything I've learned from it. My question is, is there a way to get the S-Lady to read an entire email?

I have looked at settings and nothing really seems to work. I seem to remember many versions ago, she used to have that capability. Now she only reads a line or two. Well, you're doing better than me, Jess. I spend a lot of time in my vehicle and work, and it sure would be useful if she could read an entire email. And so I played with it a little bit. I know John answered this question as well and played with it a little bit, and we just couldn't get her to cooperate.

The closest thing I could find was under Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, Enable Speak Screen, and speak selection. It still requires some screen touching, which is less than ideal to say the least when you're driving. So, it gets the voice to read the text that's on the screen. Siri, I'm sorry, S-Lady continues, however, to stubbornly announce, there's nothing to read on the screen, when an email is open and you ask it to read it

to you. I have a link in the show notes with better for clarification it's the iGeeksBlog.com how to get Siri to read emails, articles, webpages, iPhone and iPad. It is at best frustrating. But there is, once you do those settings that I just talked about, you can swipe down from the top the screen with two fingers and there's a play box comes up and you can hit play and change the speed and that sort of thing,

and it will read it. But boy is it frustrating when you ask You know, Hey, read the screen, but there's nothing on the screen to read. Actually, there is, I'm looking right at it. Stop it. Interesting. Yeah. I had the same thing. I was like, you know, I brought up an email and, then I said, read this email. And she's like, oh, you have 2,500 emails. And I'm like, that's not what I asked you. Oh, she was going to read all of your email. Not just the one.

She's telling us how much she read. She can read. Right in front of me. Yeah. Interesting. So they gotta fix that. And if you say read the screen, and it's not like the home screen, which is the accessibility, I get it, for someone who's visually impaired, trying to navigate around on their screen and when they touch certain parts of the screen, it will read, hey, this is what's on the screen.

Yeah, right. If you've got an email up and say read the screen, it stubbornly comes back and says, oh, there's nothing on the screen to read. Yeah, looking right at it. Siri's gotten dumber. We talked about this in the last episode about the, um, when I would ranting about, uh, the elevation. No, yes. About that. I figured out the problem in our discord chat, somebody said, Oh yeah, I ran into the same thing. And so I found or created a shortcut that, that, you know, tells me the elevation.

And they said that in the part that sort of caught my, my eye was whoever it was in our discord that said this said I, uh, I named the shortcut. What's the elevation. And I'm like, but you can't name a shortcut, something that is already in a Siri function because it'll, you know, they'll fight with each other. So before I installed the shortcut. I was sitting at my desk, not in my car screen on. And I asked Siri, what's the elevation? And it said, I don't understand that request.

So like, it's not even that it couldn't read it to me in the cards, that Siri no longer has the ability to access that data natively, and she used to. So like, so I installed the shortcut and now it reads me my elevation happily. Cause it, you know, like the shortcut does its magic. So. Why is it getting dumber? This is not a good look for Apple, especially in today's AI world where right like, Well, I can only imagine I mean AI is so much more difficult,

then It seems intuitive to us. It's what we do every day. Yes, we are learning beans and it it's very frustrating that, These devices which are so much faster are calculating than we are and crunching data. That's all they're good at. They're not smart. They're good and they're fast. That's the point. And so making them smart, I think, is a monumental problem, obviously, is evidence.

But I think you're right. It appears that this assistant is getting much dumber while the other two, A-Lady and Google, are excelling. And Apple better catch up. I bet they've got a team working on it, but. Clearly, yeah, they're not dumb people at Apple. So yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're aware of their competition, yeah, so. All right, John, you want to take us to Deborah?

Sure. While we're on the email subject? Mm-hmm. Deborah says, I haven't given serious thought to archiving emails since the demise of Eudora. Oh, wow. That's a week or two ago. I used to like, I used to use that. But I find for a variety of reasons that I should clear an accumulation of email out of my system folder. There's been talk over the years on MekitGav about archiving email, mostly though I can recollect

talked about archiving it within Apple's email app. So it's no longer on the IMAP server, but not about archiving it right out of the system folder. Ideally, so that it would still be accessible and searchable if needed. Any thoughts? And maybe I misunderstood this question, Dave, and you can help me out here, but.

So there is, with IMAP, there is, you'll see an archive folder, which actually I should probably use at some point and put old stuff in there so that searches and other mailboxes speed up. But I don't think it removes it from the IMAP server if you do that. I verified this by checking my various email accounts on the web and sure enough the iMap or the archive folder is there. But it's probably not a bad idea to move all the emails.

As I said, if you want to clear out your email database, may I suggest Mail Steward? This program has been around for ages. And its purpose is to take your email and remove it from your main email account, and then you can use their program to search, which I think was indicated as a requirement, here. So that's one option. But then Dave, you came up with another very clever option. Well, and I mean, I think it's something that that Debra's already doing.

But just while we're, while we're having the conversation, I, you know, I, I have used mail steward in the past, but I've never actually moved things into it and had that as the only place they exist. And it's just because I'm nervous about, I, I have had moments where there is huge value in being able to go back to an email from, you know, 10 years prior. Right. I've had enough of these where I know that I will probably want that again in the future.

And relying on a single app that is developed by a single developer or a small development shop, I'm not sure how big they are, but you know, uh, to be around and updated in 10 years for the latest version then of Mac OS is not something I'm comfortable with. As you said, Mail Steward's been around for a very long time. My, my concerns are almost certainly unfounded. And I do recommend Mail Steward very often, but I haven't been able to bring myself to use it.

And really, maybe I should reach out to them, maybe I'll share this segment with them, and see if there is something about my concerns that is truly unfounded. If they say, okay, well look, if Mail Steward goes away, here's how you would access the data in the Mail Steward database in sort of an open way. Because of that, I still keep everything in mail on one computer. I have, you know, my entire life's email archive is still there.

And it is the reason that I need to keep getting larger and larger boot drives on my office Mac. Because my email archive simply cannot move off of it. And what I do is I store them on my Mac. So not on the iMap server where I have, you know, limited storage or storage that I would have to pay for to increase. I store it on my Mac and you can create an archive folder or any folder you want.

I have actually a series of folders because having one folder for several decades worth of email would probably be a nightmare. I don't think mail would index it very well. So I have a folder per year for all my sent mail for that year and all my archived mail for that year. And and so i just you know have a folder like i just created the one for.

Actually i actually just created the one for twenty twenty two although i generally don't archive that recently i found some things that i was just simpler but you know i can go and look in my archive twenty nineteen folder. And see my mail from twenty nineteen or my sent archive twenty nineteen folder and you do this by going into mail going to mailbox.

And say new mailbox and you get to pick the first thing the first option it asks you for is location and you can choose your IMAP server or a sub mailbox of your IMAP server and if you have multiple IMAP servers of course you will see them there and then you have an on my Mac folder generally at the bottom and you can start adding things to the on my Mac folder, And, you know, so that's what I've done is I add mailboxes in the on my Mac folder, they're only on that Mac.

So, you know, this is where backups start to become even more important. But yeah, that's how I do it. And it works well for me, the archive by year. I will share that when you're moving, when I'm moving an entire year's worth from say, my, you know, fast mail, my IMAP archive, it doesn't matter what the provider is, my iMap archive to my, on my Mac archive.

It can take a very long time, like hours. I generally try and leave it overnight, but sometimes I will do, you know, three months at a time just because that way if things, you know, sort of hiccup or break and I need to quit mail, I sort of, I'm not, like, I'm hedging my bets. So, but it's, you know, it's not all that often that I do this, it's maybe truly once a year. So, you know, I'll move, you know, the first quarter of a year into archive and then the second quarter

and the third quarter. And that's just because mail and the whole IMAP thing, it takes some time for it to do that. If you are doing this with Gmail, however. Moving it out of your archive folder will not delete it from Gmail. It will simply remove the archive tag from that message on Gmail and it will still be in your all mail folder and will not reduce the amount of storage that you're using.

So, you have to go into Gmail and with a very carefully crafted search find all of the messages that are only in all mail But you can't you can't do it that way so like if I just moved say 2019 into my archive my on my Mac archive folder I would go to gmail and I would craft a search I have one I will I will share, The the you know the sort of the bones of this the foundation of this search And then you'd modify it for your own thing, but it's you know messages before.

The beginning of 2020 right because I want everything because I presumably if I just moved 2019 I already have 2018 That's how I do things. So I would look for all messages before January 1st, 2020, that aren't, that don't have the label of inbox, that don't have the label of archive, that don't have the label of sent. And I kind of have to be sort of meticulous and and a little bit, obsessive about it to make sure I'm excluding everything that's not already in my archive folder on my Mac.

I'll put a link, not a link. I will put the, the, the search query in the, uh, in the show notes. Um, I'm making a note for myself to go. I can do that later because I got to dig and find it. I keep. Well, do it and talk, right? Yeah. And I keep this in my, actually I keep it in Evernote, which I'm again, trying to move over to notes. Um, but, uh, and maybe it's, maybe I've moved it. Maybe I've moved that one over, but yeah, that's it.

It's, it's, it's one of the few times where I, I, I sort of grumble about Gmail because it's, cause they don't do IMAP mailboxes. They do labels that are mapped to mailboxes. And so things can be in multiple places. It's a nightmare, but anyway, so anyway. Too bad it's such a good free service. That's the thing. Well, that's the thing. Get away from it, you know. Yeah, no, it's fine. I mean, I use, I do use fast mail for my primary mailbox now, but I, everything else is Gmail.

So I still have to live in this world. It's not like, yeah, I haven't, I haven't left it. So my, my search definitely still works properly as of a couple of months ago. But, but if you don't understand it, ask before you rely on it. We are happy to answer questions. Ask in our discord at mackeycab.com slash discord. Send us an email feedback at mackeycab.com. Like we're happy to help. Well, we're feedback at mackeycab.com. I think he said feedback at mackeycab.com. I did. Shall we go to Jörgen?

Yeah, all right. Here's a good one You might remember me contacting you several times about speed problems from my Mac to my psychology nas a, Different time intervals the transfer speed will slow down to a crawl only rebooting the Mac will get rid of this problem, I Thought I should write a script to measure the speed Regularly so I can be warned when problems occur I perf came to mind and I was looking into how to use it in a script,

I was happy to find a Python library to use iPerf, so I wrote a little Python program that uses iPerf every two minutes to test the speed for three seconds. The results were written to a database. My intention was to find out how often the problem occurred and if there are times when it fixes itself. And now the miracle! I've been running that program for over two months and now the problem has not occurred once.

It seems that testing the speed regularly prevents the problem from happening. I don't know why but honestly I don't care as long as it's not happening anymore Sharing this hoping to inspire other troubleshooters similar problems. Wow and I love this Dave because I'm gonna share a little term here that I learned back in my software days, It sounds like a Heisenberg you said Heisenberg Yes, and what is it?

Yeah, what's a Heisenbug? A Heisenbug is a software bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. I love it. I love it. It happens every time. In aviation too. Yeah. Yeah, call the mechanic, they come up to fix it, fixes itself.

Yeah, oh yeah, no, I experienced this at home, my, my, uh, Lisa, my wife hates, loves and hates this. She will have a problem with her computer, she will ask me to come over and look at it, and as soon as I touch it, it goes away, and, and remains away, and she's like, I hate that, that this is how it is, cause she's like, I tried for days to fix this, I'm like, yeah, it's just how it goes, I'm like, but, you know, it's good, like, you know, we, we, uh, my, my consulting business supported our family for, for many years,

So like all you had to do is show up. All I had to do was show up. They're only all that easy, right? I'll show up and collect a check, Pete. You got to get paid. If you're a consultant, do not forget to bill your clients. Remember I talked about how I had ethernet installed in my house. That was exactly a month ago today. As of the day we're recording this, uh. I still have not gotten a bill from that electrician.

He had two guys here all day. I'm kind of scared to see what the bill is to be perfectly candid. Uh, I'm going to pay it like I'm it's fine. Like I knew what their hourly rate was coming in and I can do math. Um, so I have the money saved aside, but, uh, you got to bill your, your clients, but yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this, this happens all the time. Okay. So that's, that's an expected behavior.

The Heisenberg is expected, right? Yeah. I like it. Well, that there's, there's our show title. I like it. All right. So this is super freaky though, because I had this almost exact thing happen two days ago. My my daughter who lives in Italy I mentioned I had to go over there You know Dave the nerd the business had to go and fly to Italy to help her fix her Plex streaming problem

She moved. All of her, all of the home internet over there, it's all, you know, 5G or 4G, but it's all, you know, nobody has like cables to their house or anything. It's all just, just, you know, mobile data to your head, to your thing. Or at least for her, maybe people who own their own homes, which, you know, they live in apartments that they rent or whatever. They rent or whatever. So they, they recently moved and.

Started having Plex problems, but nothing, no other service was having problems, right? Like, you know, uh, Netflix, Disney, all totally fine streaming from our Plex server here. She would get buffering, like terrible, terrible buffering. Uh, and she had to like slow it down to, you know, almost unwatchable in order to even be close to reliable. I have gigabit fiber here. So like, that's not a problem.

Like my, you know, my generically my speed out of the house is, you know, the speed of Ethernet, which is, as we previously discussed, way faster than she would need. So I said, all right, let's carve out some time. We will, you know, we'll test. So we did a screen share. All right, the first thing I want to do is because I'm like, this is happening on your TV and your computer, right?

She's like, yep, same and both. I'm like, okay, great. So we can test from your computer We don't have to try and like, you know get crazy set up a zoom thing, Uh zoom is great for tech support because you can share screen you can control the screen, And so we ran a speed test in the same browser that she's using to, you know, try and watch and I was like, yep

Okay. Yeah, it's speed test was totally fine. Like she was getting I don't know 40 megabits down or something It's like, yeah, it's way more than you would ever need. And, uh, I'm like, okay, well, I run an iPerf server on my Synology disk station here at home, and I have it very secretly exposed to the outside world. It's not on the normal port. It's like very much hidden, but.

So what port is that Dave? Correct. Sorry. Uh, and so I'm like, great, let's install iPerf on her Mac in Italy and do an iPerf test to me. Like let's quit. Cause I started doing speed tests because the first one we did was like to, you know, it picks some server in Italy, like, like it would normally would like, all right, let's pick the same one that I, that I connect to when I do a speed test in Portland, Maine.

So she connected to that and it was a little slower. It was, you know, maybe 30 megabits a second or something. I was like, okay, but still way faster. Yeah. It's plenty. Right. Like, and that's the one that I connect to and I see full gigabit traffic. I'm like, so like th there's, there's no extra hops here. So we did, but I'm like, still just test directly to the same disc station that Plex is streaming from, like, let's really do this.

And so she set up an iPerf thing and we did some iPerf tests. Cause there's publicly available iPerf servers, like throughout Italy. We did some there. We did some in, in, in, you know, the UK, which is where it would hop through. We looked at trace routes, looked at all this stuff, finally had her just do eye perps directly to my server here. And same 30 megabits a second. It is interesting, like everywhere she would do a speed test. The first two seconds would be really fast.

And then there would be like a second or maybe even two of no data. And then it would settle in and be totally solid. So there's clearly some provider, uh, created buffering or whatever that, you know, it lets you do like a quick little burst and then it throttles you to whatever speed they pay for or whatever, which is fine. Okay, great. But we could watch it. It was very consistent. She's literally doing speed tests to my house. Okay, great.

And I'm like, all right, well, now that we've sort of answered all these questions, let's open up Plex on your computer and, and start to stream. And I'll watch the Plex server from here and we'll, you know, we'll see if we can discover what's going on because nobody else has problems with the Plex server like this, you know, And so it's like, it's just her. And the problem wouldn't happen. And still, days later, has not happened. It could be just me, but it sounds like a Heisenberg to me.

Well, that's the thing, is like, Juergen used iPerf to solve his Mac to Synology speed issue. I used iPerf to solve an Italy to Durham, New Hampshire speed issue. And I said to Sky, I'm like, well, you know, maybe, I'm like, you know, we sort of talked about how the internet works, networks and it's built to route around, you know, damage and that's the beauty of TCP and all of that stuff. She's like, oh, I never realized. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty cool.

And I'm like, so maybe doing these speed tests direct between us, maybe that caused some router in the middle, some switch in the middle to reorient itself on our behalf. Like who knows? Like these things are constantly reevaluating themselves, all the, you know, the BGP packets that are floating around out there. They tell each the routers communicate to each other and switches communicate to each other and all this stuff.

Like maybe we just had to like, you know, sort of force the pipes to clean themselves. It's all black magic and BS Dave. Exactly Pete. And but I have no other way to explain this. Like the day before we did this test, the night before, you know, 12 hours before we we did this, things were awful for her. And since we did this, it's been totally fine. And it's very much the same thing Juergen did. That's the part that's a little bit freaky. Who knows somebody out there knows why this worked.

Somebody's a networking expert. I understand that the plural of anecdote is not data, but. Feedback at Mackey cab.com. Cause this is a little weird, a little weird. But clearly expected. But clearly expected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super weird. All right. Alex has a tip for us. We're just gonna, I think we just plow through some of these questions and I think we'll do some cool stuff found next week. Does that work you guys? I'm having fun. You got it. I needed a fun day.

I don't know why man for the last like couple of months I've just been like stressed but not, like non-specific stress. Like I, there's nothing, there's nothing in my life that I can point to and say like, oh, well, that obviously. It's like you need a float, Dave. I need to use mine. I got one for Christmas. I've been doing floats. I like, I, I do floats. I meditate. I see a therapist. I like, like, like all the things. It's like, I just can't figure out what the thing is.

I don't know, man. I don't know. So, but I've been having fun today. So this is, you know, we're, maybe we, maybe we've, maybe it was a hyzen bug. And as soon as I started talking about it, it went away. There you go. That's my hope. That's my. It's your story and you're stuck with it. You got it. I'm sorry. I'm stuck with it. This is true. All right. You take us to Alex, John. Yeah. And we'll condense some of this. So he was trying to solve a problem in his iPhone and Wi-Fi.

So what he did was, which maybe I would do, is that he went to reset network settings on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it removed all the Wi-Fi passwords from the phone, which kind of stinks. And I don't understand why this happened. I mean, come on! You know, I mean, sync back with iCloud and get all that data because that's where it lives. It's worse than that, usually, because it does sync with iCloud and wipes it out in iCloud. And that's the part that sucks. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll condense this and get to the part of it, but he found a way to solve the problem. And it's kind of funky but hey on the on the Mac open the app keychain access on the left select the keychain system in the table right-click on the row with the same name of the Wi-Fi network and copy that item and then then select on the left the keychain iCloud and right-click paste. Okay, okay, this actually makes sense, though, huh? Yeah, sometimes.

Yeah, keychain access is a good utility and it lets you do things like that and it lets you look at the state of your network and, who has what so right in essentially what he's what he's suggesting that it what he's telling us. He didn't he's not suggesting anything is there's multiple keychains on your Mac and one of them is the keychain that's synced with iCloud.

And, and he's acknowledging that these entries were no longer in the iCloud keychain and therefore not synced to all of his devices, but they are still there in his Mac system keychain. And so the idea is manually copy them from the system keychain to the iCloud keychain. I love that. What I want is a utility that goes and finds all of what they call in the keychain tool airport passwords in one keychain and copies them to another because that would be super handy to automate this.

That would be good. You know, I wish I'd have seen this before I wound up doing what I did. You may remember a few weeks back, my iPhone would not remember my home network. Okay. Just my 5GIG network. 2.4. Every time I'd leave and come back, it would pick that up. Oh, right. But it wouldn't pick it up, you know? And I'm wondering if this would have fixed it. Of course, it's too late now. I already changed the name of my home network to all caps, and it works fine.

Once I change the network name. But that would mean that the entries would still be in your iCloud keychain for the one with with mixed case.

The old network name. Yeah, yeah so you could at least look in your iCloud keychain and compare that to system and and get a sense for, sure what might have worked to fix it and and, Like if you if you see like, oh, all I would have had to do is delete that I would I would then delete that whatever that might be, you know, or copy the thing over or whatever or just to clear it out in case in the future. So, yeah, no, that's, that's a great point because boy, was that frustrating?

Own home password in every daggum time I went to use it. Yeah. That's not acceptable. Cause cause what that'll tempt you to do is to change your wifi password to something really simple and short. But of course you, you can't do that because it breaks everything else. Well, there was that, yeah, it does break everything else. But the other problem was, I'm not sure it would have remembered the new password.

So I just changed the wifi network name because it was remembering every other wifi network, just not my home five gig network. Right. Son of a bad word. Yeah. That's frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this would have been the right place to look when we were, when we were trying to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah. Looking and comparing the two key chains on your Mac. Yeah. Interesting. This explains a lot. I, you know, I remember.

Coming to your house, John, not that long ago, it was like, you know, the first time after like, you know, the COVID lockdowns had happened or whatever. And my phone didn't, wouldn't join your Wi-Fi network automatically. Because I had, you know, in the interim there somewhere had done a reset network settings on my phone, because sometimes it's just like the thing you have to to do to fix like weird cellular problems or whatever, you know, and, uh, but my Mac joined it and my Mac was also new.

Like both of these devices were new since the time the last time I'd been at your house. I had my, you know, M1 Air, which I got obviously during, you know, 2020. And so that was after all the lockdown started and whatever iPhone I had was, was also new. My iPhone wouldn't join my Mac wouldn't. I'm like, okay, why is this like, they're both getting this from iCloud. Why isn't the phone getting it from iCloud? if my Mac is, but my Mac wasn't.

My Mac was getting it from the system key chain that I had migration-assistanted over to, you know, from my old laptop to that new laptop. And so I could have repopulated my iCloud key chain from the Mac if I had known that this is how it worked. More ASMR for you, as Dave's brain thinks. Here, on WMGG! All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Dave's brain thinking silently. But, but if there's, if ever there was a need for the magical bell, that's the magical bell.

I feel like we, we need like the, uh, the achievement unlocked, you know, I don't know. Yes. Right. Like this is, this seems like a big one, John. Uh, it like this solves a problem we've had for a long time, cause I'm always hesitant to reset network settings because of exactly this.

The interesting thing is, not being a software engineer, it somehow seems that Apple has put this in there though to protect, that the way this works, works well, but they've put it in there to protect wiping out stuff that you don't want to be wiping out. Well, but it does wipe out stuff you don't want to wipe out. That's the thing. But I think you might be onto something, Pete. I think they're protecting against something.

It's not that, because they are wiping out, but I think it is that they intentionally don't want this to come back. If you reset network settings, because say your issue, right? Couldn't get to your wifi network, you reset network settings. If there's a bug in the iCloud key chain for your wifi network passwords, that's gonna sink right back down and you're gonna be in the same spot you were. So maybe this is why this happens. It's just the side effect is it wipes it out of iCloud entirely.

So like, I'm guessing this Mac doesn't have much in the way of iCloud, of Wi-Fi passwords because it's a fresh install that's only synced. Yeah, I mean, there's some in here, but I can see that they're only the new ones. Like, it's maybe a third of what would be on my other Macs. So, yes, this is fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Alright. Mind-blowing. This- I- group. I think it's just hokey design because maybe if something happens that surprises the user,

then you have failed. Well, that's true, right? Right, right, right. Like, like, but I, but I get where you, we as users would simultaneously want all our iCloud, network passwords to come in, but also simultaneously not want them to come in, Because if that's where the problem was, like with Pete, you don't want him back. But with the rest of the time, you do. So, like, I feel like there's a world where it should say, hey, you just reset network settings.

And so, this password exists in iCloud. Do you want me to use the one in iCloud or do you want to use the one. That you're about to type in manually? Like, give the user the choice if they've just reset network settings in the last, you know, X number of hours or something, right? Like, we're gonna repress your iCloud passwords temporarily here for this network.

Like, it should tell the user, if the user's gone through a reset network settings, they're already, you know, there is no novice, and it might be a novice that does it, but there is no unintention, lack of intention, making up words here, but there's no lack of intention in doing that. Like, it warns you several times, like, this is gonna mess with things.

It should say, like if you've done this in the last hour, like maybe this is the thing you were trying to mitigate against and I'm gonna tell you that. I don't know, I feel like there's. Yeah. Yeah, because I agree with you. It's hokey design. It's all key to that. Well, Then software engineers are trying to read our stinking minds. That's the problem, is right, like we've just come up with scenarios where we want exactly what's there, and exactly the opposite of what's there.

Listen, do what we want it to do, not what we're telling it to do. Exactly, read our minds. Right. Right. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. What's that Pete? I was just saying, in my own mind, I bet the music's gonna come in, and there it is. And there it is. It turns out you were correct. I know, it's amazing. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for sending in all your questions, your tips. It's amazing.

We're so fortunate that we get to do what we get to do here and that's all because of you. So thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks to all of our premium subscribers. If you want to learn more about that at matgeekab.com slash premium, we would love that. It is not mandatory, but any support you provide us is appreciated and very much makes a difference here. It truly is a part of the MacGeekGab revenue stack, and it takes the entire stack to keep the show going.

So it really, and you do it, it's amazing. So, macgeekgab.com slash premium if you want to learn more about that. Thanks to Cashfly, the good folks at Cashfly that provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out the other podcasts that we do. I do two others. I do one called Gig Gab for working musicians. I do another called Business Brain for entrepreneurs. Pete does a show called So There I Was with some great aviation stories. I don't want to say it's

just for aviation enthusiasts, but by listening, you might become one. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. We're having a ball. We had a guy this week, 88, he's going to be 89 this week. Another elderly gentleman who has some great memories from the 50s and 60s. One previous week was actually the one that came out yesterday. He's written five fun books. Amazing. Sea Stories of a U.S. Marine. Met Jack Kennedy.

Oh! Jack Kennedy took his lighter and never gave it back. Never gave it back. Brilliant. Thanks for hanging out, folks. Thanks for doing all that you do. Thanks for checking out our sponsors, PIAVPN.com slash MGG, ShadyRaze.com slash MGG, JoinHoney.com slash MGG. You can just go to MackeyCub.com slash sponsors. You see all the deals that are out there, even ones from non-current sponsors. Music. Um, I'm pretty sure it says don't get caught.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file