0:00

It's time for MacGeekGab and listener BlockTech brings us our quick tip of the

0:05

week by saying, I often pull my MacBook Pro out of my travel bag only to find

0:11

that the battery is dead or extremely depleted.

0:15

It seems that if I close the lid immediately after invoking the shutdown command,

0:19

it doesn't always have time to complete the process and instead goes to sleep

0:23

mid-process to make To make sure that my machine has completely shut down before

0:28

closing the lid, I now press the caps lock key first.

0:33

After shutting down, I know the lid is safe to shut once the key's LED turns off.

0:39

I just wish that there was a way to turn off the start up on open or key press

0:43

function, as I find that I still sometimes inadvertently restart the machine when closing it up.

0:49

More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab

0:55

1036 for Monday, May 6th, National Beverage Day.

0:59

Something near and dear to our hearts here at MacGeekGab 2024.

1:05

Music.

1:21

Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek of the Show,

1:24

where you send in quick tips just like that one. You send in your questions, which we try to answer.

1:29

We send in, we all send in cool stuff. We all send in quick tips, too.

1:32

And really, sometimes we all send in questions. Like, I'll bring questions to

1:35

the show, and hopefully we get to answer it together.

1:38

We also sometimes answer questions in our Discord community at macgeekof.com slash Discord.

1:43

And when I say sometimes, I mean all the time. Huge community of fantastic,

1:48

well-intentioned folks who are kind and helpful to one another. I can't.

1:55

More thankful for that as part of our community here.

1:59

Our sponsors for today include linkedin.com slash mgg where you can go and post your first job for free.

2:08

Backblaze.com slash mgg where you can go and start protecting yourself from potential bad times.

2:15

And also betterhelp.com slash geekgab.

2:19

That one's a little bit different. Betterhelp.com slash geekgab where you can

2:22

learn Learn about doing therapy completely online.

2:25

We will talk more in depth about each and every one of these shortly here.

2:30

For now, drinking my beverage of choice for today, Throat Coat Tea,

2:34

here in Durham, New Hampshire. I am Dave Hamilton.

2:37

And here, newly in lead in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete.

2:42

Yeah, that's the cool thing about our Discord channel. There's no flaming going on over there.

2:47

The only flaming that seems to be going on around here, Dave,

2:50

is towards me at the hands of your AI.

2:54

This is true this is true there's there's a not entirely kind uh um.

3:05

Moment in one of the ad spots and i swear i was reading a an ai generated script

3:12

and so uh pete i i i and the ai thank you for being the butt of that upcoming

3:19

joke yes that's right There you go.

3:21

Yes. Oh, well, don't forget. So.

3:25

What are you drinking here on National Beverage Day, Pete? I am having a,

3:29

it's kind of a cappuccino thing.

3:31

Nice. It's a coffee and a, but we, a couple years back, I got a,

3:36

I should put it in a cool stuff found.

3:38

It's one of those Nescafe milk foamers. Okay.

3:44

Foams up the milk nicely and nice and uh yeah

3:47

a little spring-loaded magnetic wheel in

3:50

there spins around foams the milk up heats it up too

3:53

sweet and i put it in my my coffee and

3:56

otherwise i don't drink anything i in my coffee i like it

3:59

black but okay yeah but i'll foam up some

4:01

milk now sure sure so yeah nothing wrong with that it's a

4:05

little bonus cool stuff found yeah drinking it in

4:07

my so there i was mug oh very nice very

4:11

nice i like it i like it um yeah so

4:15

uh in an effort to uh get

4:18

number one of five new things oh

4:21

and let me i was going to mention it but you mentioned it

4:24

in the quick tip yeah you can't touch any of the buttons or

4:27

your machine's going to come back yeah that's when

4:30

you try to shut down i hate that apple there's

4:33

a power button for a reason use it yeah

4:36

yeah yeah the space bar to wake up

4:39

the computer is great the space bar to turn on the computer

4:42

or open the lid to turn on the computer that's so

4:44

great yeah but he's is that our bias

4:47

because it's what it's how it used

4:50

to work like do our kids care

4:53

about this because they don't know any difference well necessarily i mean i

4:58

somebody cares because it got so bad that the gent who does better touch tool

5:03

and i can't think of his name i'm sorry yeah because i'm tired like you uh came

5:08

up with the keyboard lockout program so you could clean your keyboard without.

5:13

You know, waking your computer up or messing everything up. Yeah, that's fair.

5:18

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It just seems to me, why have a power button if.

5:22

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess to cut its throat and turn it off.

5:26

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.

5:32

How about I take a stunkle, Jamie, and another quick tip? Let's do that.

5:35

All right. I did say, did I say that we, I don't think I said that our goal

5:39

with the show is to learn at least five new things each time we get together.

5:43

I know we've got one though. Here's your use your caps lock LED to make sure your computers All right,

5:49

bring us to number two here Pete. Yeah, uncle Jamie says I use this tip frequently and preview on the Mac You

5:55

can merge PDFs merge pages from PDFs and delete and reorder pages within a PDF

6:01

document To do this open your PDF documents in preview and select it view.

6:07

Thumbnails, it should be checked You can drag thumbnails representing pages

6:12

from one document to another and drop them where you want them.

6:15

Be sure to drag them into the thumbnail area on the left.

6:19

You can also drag thumbnails up or down to reorder pages within the document.

6:23

And if you select a thumbnail, you can delete that page by pressing the backspace

6:27

or the delete key, depending on your keyboard's layout.

6:32

Out uh this handy this is

6:35

handy to assemble documents that have been scanned or generated separately

6:38

into a single pdf and

6:41

i've done some of that and yeah i you kind

6:44

of forget how versatile preview is preview is great for things like this you

6:49

can also mark things up with it you can sign things with it it has become you

6:54

know it it for what many of us need to do most of the time Preview has become a well,

7:02

I don't want to say fully featured PDF editor or PDF tool, but it's good.

7:09

Yeah, it's more than just what you need in a pinch. I do want to share.

7:15

Uh, the thumbnails, I guess he shared it there as well, but,

7:19

uh, making sure that you bring up thumbnails by going to view thumbnails or option command two,

7:24

just to bring that view up so that you can then do all of that work,

7:29

but yeah, manipulate it. Yeah. It doesn't always open that.

7:32

And it's been a long time since we mentioned it. So I will mention PDF expert

7:37

is the full featured, very intuitive PDF editing tool that, uh, you turned me on to.

7:44

Too i was using pdf pen for years and same pdf expert is

7:47

hands down a better program oh yeah available with

7:51

a student discount if you have a child with a

7:54

dot edu oh interesting email

7:58

address uh yeah i mean if you're

8:00

paying the bill for college paying the tuition brother i should get some of

8:04

that discount back with you yeah yeah because they don't make that cheap these

8:09

days the uh the tuition thing yeah no in fact i always like to say if any of

8:14

you out there have a quarter million dollars i can borrow and by borrowing mean

8:17

have and not give back send it to pilot pete at

8:20

mackinacab oh yeah you know do we even have i know uh we're gonna have to make

8:25

that email address for you i will take care of that i'll take care of that after

8:29

the show yeah yeah you know so uh all right i'm making myself a note that i

8:35

promise i won't put in the show notes when i when we actually publish them.

8:39

I had a thing this week, Pete.

8:44

Yeah. I, you know, I...

8:47

Try all kinds of different Wi-Fi networks here at the house, right? I might.

8:51

Yeah, it's the thing I do, right? And I recently moved from the Eero 6Es to

8:59

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

9:06

the Synology mesh because it turns out it's still a little bit janky.

9:11

I know it works well for some of us and doesn't work well for others of us.

9:16

And that's sort of what janky means is it's inconsistent.

9:20

And so I wanted to do a little bit more testing. I have a support ticket open

9:23

with them where I've been sort of trying to narrow down where the problems are.

9:27

So I've been going back and forth a lot. I have one of these skylight frames.

9:34

Oh, yeah. I love that thing. Right. And the one that we have, I've had forever.

9:40

And and it's just awesome because we can send pictures to and from it.

9:45

Well, I guess not so much from it.

9:47

I mean, you can you can download pictures from it, but but it's meant to send

9:52

pictures to it. We have them. Each of the three homes of our family have them.

9:57

You know, we've got one here in our house and then each of our kids has one

10:00

in their homes and we get to send each other pictures.

10:03

And it's really cool to just walk into the kitchen and see new pictures on the

10:07

wall from, you know, Skylar over in in in Italy or, you know,

10:12

Lucas from wherever, you know, he's on the other side of the state.

10:15

But, you know, wherever it's just a nice thing, we do it for each other.

10:18

I noticed that I had broken it and by broken it, I mean that it was complaining

10:26

about not being able to connect to Wi-Fi.

10:29

And it was like all right so i go through the thing i type in the

10:32

password and i can i get the notification from whatever

10:35

wife you know this time the sonology app saying oh

10:38

yeah a new device is joined but it doesn't the device doesn't

10:41

think it's joined it doesn't say that it can't join but it also doesn't say

10:45

that it has successfully joined it's in this like limbo and then i started thinking

10:50

lucas when he moved to his apartment said that he was at best getting it to

10:58

connect inconsistently. And I'm like, all right, well, he, I know he's on Eero over there.

11:04

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.

11:13

But you know, I'm testing. And so I'm on this Synology thing.

11:16

I can't wait to get back to my Eeros. In fact, I'm probably just going to do

11:19

that this weekend. I've, I've got enough answers. And, and,

11:25

And I'm like, okay, so it's not an Eero issue. It's, you know,

11:28

in fact, it was working for me on Eero. It wasn't here.

11:31

And then I started looking at my settings and comparing and contrasting my settings

11:35

between my Eeros, which are running just with a different SSID and this.

11:41

And I'm like, well, wait a minute. What if I just connect it to the Eero?

11:46

And one of my, I have two Eero networks. It's because the office and the house are far enough apart from each other,

11:51

but close enough that they were confusing each other. And Eero was like,

11:54

just run them as two separate networks. Most of us are never going to do this. Eero support knew immediately.

11:58

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,

12:05

just like my Synology network does.

12:07

The Eero network in the office does not have it enabled.

12:11

And I don't know why that is, but maybe I never went into Eero labs and turned

12:15

it on for that one, right? Never thought to.

12:18

And it was like, aha, wait a minute. it and

12:21

i turned off wpa3 and instantly the

12:24

frame can like without needing to do anything else yeah

12:27

the frame connected started slurping down you know 25 pictures that were in

12:33

the cloud queue to get to it because it finally was able to connect to wi-fi

12:36

and everything was fine i'm like okay i see so then i went in to the synology

12:42

network turned off wpa3 there and just set it to WPA2 personal.

12:47

And then it was able to connect to that. No issue whatsoever.

12:51

I sent Lucas a text. I'm like, I know what your problem is with your skylight frame, man.

12:55

And, but what really became interesting was as I did that, I saw like five or

13:01

six other notifications that devices had joined the Synology network.

13:07

A smart bulb that I had, a smart outlet that I had,

13:12

things like that, that had been also acting a

13:15

little bit janky just boom came right

13:18

online no problem so what i

13:21

learned is that wpa3 is

13:24

not meant for us to be using right now if

13:27

we especially if we have any older smart home devices and by older it's yeah

13:33

internet of things six months yeah i mean six months like some of these aren't

13:37

that old like i i definitely the one of the smart bulbs is a ge sync bulb and And that I know that I,

13:44

you know, got and it was a brand new product within the last year.

13:48

So and and to be fair, you know, Eero has one switch for WPA3 and it's not entirely clear what it does.

13:58

The Synology network is a little more a little more granular in what you can

14:04

choose it in the Synology network.

14:06

I had it set to WPA2 slash WPA3 personal. it turns out that is what the Eero

14:14

setting does so it doesn't exclude WPA2 stuff but it,

14:19

in theory, allows both to connect. The actual reality is that some devices,

14:25

even when the access points are in WPA2 slash WPA3 mode.

14:31

They still don't connect because the WPA3 thing sort of gets in the way and

14:35

they get stuck in this limbo that I described.

14:38

So it is now my blanket advice to not enable WPA3 on any of your access points,

14:48

especially at home unless you know that

14:51

all of your devices current and future are

14:55

going to work with wpa3 and that's that's

14:58

a that's a tough sell today there you

15:02

go so i got two questions for you then yeah one is uh

15:04

your separate eros one

15:08

in the office one in the home yeah do you separate their ssids

15:11

and passwords or are they the same no they all

15:14

my eros are running and when when i'm in sort

15:17

of what i'll call default like non-testing mode for

15:20

something my my main router that's

15:23

every third tuesday of i know yeah yeah yeah um

15:26

it my main router is the synology router that's doing routing and the wi-fi

15:31

on it will be off and then uh the eros are all in bridge mode eve it's so that

15:39

like they aren't doing any routing uh they are just doing wi-fi i know it's

15:43

it's a it's a it's an an embarrassment of riches to be able to,

15:46

I lead a charm. It's a first world problem. Right, exactly.

15:50

But even in bridge mode, having all of the heroes as one network,

15:56

they were getting confused with each other again, because they,

15:59

you know, because this, they all are, well, many, most of them are wifi,

16:05

are, are, are hardware backhaul, ethernet backhaul,

16:09

including the one in the office. There is ethernet cable that runs between the house and the office here.

16:15

But they they sort of see each other both

16:18

ways they see each other over the hard wire if it's there

16:20

and also at the same time over the

16:24

air and that over the air thing between the

16:27

house and the office was getting a little janky because it's just

16:30

close enough to kind of work and so it was causing some

16:32

problem so what ero had me do was create a a

16:36

second network that's in bridge mode with exactly

16:40

the same ssid and password and

16:44

uh and and it's it's fine everything like the ero can't control the roaming

16:50

as well between the house and the office because they're two separate networks

16:52

so they don't talk to each other in that sense but it doesn't need to because

16:56

it's far enough away that your devices are going to connect to the right one like it's totally fine.

17:03

Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. And then the, uh,

17:07

the other one, one is, uh, probably more difficult to answer,

17:10

which was, uh, what, what's the ostensible advantage to WPA three less crackable.

17:17

In theory, it is more secure than WPA two.

17:21

But as I started digging into this to see like, okay, like I've proven at my

17:26

house that this is 100% a problem in the way I want to run things.

17:31

But what do other people say? And there's plenty of other people that report all these things.

17:35

In that digging, I found that WPA3 has also been cracked.

17:42

So it's technically more secure, but not in any meaningful way.

17:49

From what I can tell, I could be wrong about this. In fact, I know that I am.

17:54

Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. I want to hear more of what you folks know about

17:58

this, too, so that we can kind of increase the hive mind brain trust on this. Right.

18:04

Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. But yeah, I would like even if you don't think you're

18:10

having problems because I didn't think I was either.

18:13

I just have gotten used to some IOT devices being janky because some of them

18:19

are like whether you have WPA3 on or not. If everything's solid,

18:23

yeah, they're still. They're still. And so I didn't realize that at least some of my problems were directly related

18:32

to me having enabled WPA3.

18:35

So it is now off for good.

18:37

And I had turned it on because I thought, well, it's more secure.

18:40

Like I should I should live in the future. Plus also I do this show that where

18:44

I like experiment with this stuff and learn and talk to people.

18:47

And so like, that's why I turned it on. And I, and I'm glad I did so that we

18:51

could have this conversation. There you go. Yup.

18:54

So, um, and one other admin thing that I, I forgot to mention earlier,

18:59

as did you is, uh, Adam sitting here completely quiet today.

19:05

Actually, he's not. You're quiet. Adam's not here today.

19:08

He's launching a new website, I think he said, for one of his clients.

19:13

Yeah. And he's there dealing with the denial, directed denial of service attack

19:18

that I launched on him this morning. Oh, that's nice of you, Pete.

19:21

Well, you know, I wanted him to earn his pay. You wanted to give him a few more

19:24

billable hours. I get it. That's nice. So, yeah.

19:28

So that's why Adam is with us today. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:33

Yeah, we talked about it a little pre-show, but you're right.

19:36

We did not talk about it here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Phil brings us to our next quick tip.

19:45

And he says, recently, I've noticed that when using AirDrop,

19:50

that my iPhone shows multiple shows up multiple times.

19:55

I can only drop to one of them.

19:58

And he says, I was on with Apple support and they asked if I had a VPN installed.

20:02

I use PIA courtesy of Matt Geek up here.

20:06

Yep. And he says it was on and they said that it could affect airdrop. I uninstalled it.

20:12

And so far it is back to only one iPhone and drops have been working as they should.

20:17

Yeah. VPNs can do strange things.

20:20

PIA and other VPNs also allow for I forget what they call the feature.

20:28

Everyone calls it something different but it's the the lockout

20:32

your network protect your network connection when you're

20:35

not connected thing and that can get even

20:38

stranger because it starts preventing you from doing things

20:41

if it's and if it's in the midst of connecting uh

20:45

i've seen that block things like um

20:48

uh the captive portal pages because

20:51

it's not letting you connect to a network work because it can't get to

20:54

its vpn server so just it's kind

20:57

of like the conversation with wpa3 understand the

21:00

implications of each of these features there's there are reasons that many of

21:05

them are left off by default my guess is phil probably had one of those sort

21:11

of extra security features on that was calling causing this this sort of device

21:17

echo if you will but it may not I don't know.

21:20

But but yeah, you know, anything that works over IP can be impacted by a VPN.

21:30

Yeah so thank you for that phil and uh

21:33

i i i know we

21:36

have more to dig into vpn yeah but we'll keep

21:39

with the vpn theme for a moment here and um

21:43

stephrab nyc 18 the this person's handle in uh in our discord says i was having

21:51

trouble logging into ticket master i think if you've listened to this show at

21:56

some point in the last six months you might have heard me rant about this and might He says,

22:01

I tried my iPhone, both the app and the different browsers,

22:05

my iPad, and finally my MacBook Air.

22:07

In all cases, I was getting an error message indicating I could not log on.

22:12

Yet less than two weeks earlier, I had logged on just fine. Can you guess the problem?

22:16

He says, I thought about it for a second, and it dawned on me what had changed.

22:21

I now always have my VPN active on all three devices. As soon as I turned off

22:27

my VPN, Ticketmaster let me in.

22:30

Once finished with my transaction, I turned my VPN back on.

22:34

I have lots of thoughts about this, but none that can be said in public.

22:37

Thanks for all you do. Yeah, well, I went through a similar thing where my former

22:45

now former provider had bought a block of IP addresses from a VPN provider.

22:50

And Ticketmaster was one of the several sites that locked me out when I wasn't

22:55

on a VPN because it said you're on a VPN.

22:57

In fact, the only way I could get to Ticketmaster was to go through Pete's VPN

23:01

because he's on a he was on a different provider than me. Now we're on the same provider.

23:06

Probably in the same block. Probably. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, be aware of, you know, in Ticketmaster,

23:15

they have you might have heard that they have a bit of a bot problem.

23:19

And so they have unilaterally sort of made the decision to block all VPN traffic

23:25

because because it's it's something a lot of websites will do,

23:30

especially websites that are targeted by by fraudsters.

23:35

Right and ticket master certainly falls into that into that

23:38

realm but yeah there were several sites i couldn't get to on this

23:41

provider and i worked with them but it's not up to the provider to

23:44

fix unless they want to move me to a different ip block like you know

23:47

it's they've got to fix the the internet's opinion of

23:50

that block this wasn't going to happen so so yeah here's i i have a quick tip

23:55

for you dave yes p if since since we're now on the same provider you would be

24:01

useless for you a vpn into my home and then try to get the ticket master correct

24:06

but i bet you could tether your cell phone.

24:10

Oh, you know, change your IP address that way you could. Yes.

24:14

And I did that. I started to do that once and then was like,

24:17

wait, I have access to Pete's VPN, but, but yeah, use his data. Right. Yeah.

24:23

Not that it mattered using mine. Cause we're unlimited. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

24:27

But yeah, it, um, yes. Tethering to your phone.

24:30

If yep. Yep, would be another way to do it. The way I did it the first time

24:35

when I was fighting with it was I just dropped my phone off of Wi-Fi and connected

24:40

over the cell network and was able to get right in.

24:42

And that's also what told me, okay, there's something wrong with my IP address

24:46

at home, which was, you know, the beginning of that sleuthing process.

24:51

But, yeah, ticket master. And I should have taken my own advice,

24:56

because yesterday and the day before yesterday, I had a problem in the hotel.

25:01

All of a sudden, I got out on the road, and I couldn't send email only from

25:06

my personal primary account. My Gmail worked.

25:11

Okay. So there I was mail worked.

25:14

My MacGycab mail worked. Are these all different providers? Yes.

25:19

Okay. And my iCloud worked. Got it. Well, I think MacGycab is a Gmail account. Mm-hmm.

25:24

Yes. Right. But the one that wasn't sending, the one that was blocking you was

25:31

a different provider than all the others.

25:33

Right. Got it. Okay. And so I should have tried to tether.

25:37

Now, that's a whole other thing. Another screenshot I sent you.

25:42

I wasn't going to try that from Alaska because my phone never worked in Alaska

25:46

until the day before yesterday.

25:48

It works in Alaska now. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Boom. So, yeah. Yeah.

25:53

So, but I couldn't figure out why. I could get my email all day long.

25:58

Okay. But I couldn't transmit. Every time I transmitted, I'd get it,

26:01

you know, unable, unable, unable. Send it back. Error. Couldn't.

26:05

Finally, I pulled up the error message and it was talking about spam house and all that. I'm going, oh.

26:10

Ah, so you were on a blacklisted IP address. Yes. It's similar to this other problem.

26:15

Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm going, well, what the heck? And I,

26:18

you know, I went and I checked private internet access was off.

26:23

And my VPN to my home, my VPN to your home, neither one of those were on.

26:28

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.

26:36

And it wasn't working. And I went in and checked, hey, send all traffic through.

26:40

Yeah. But the other thing that I noticed was that I had tail scale running.

26:44

So I tried to turn off tail scale VPN. Wouldn't do it.

26:48

So I had to go in and then I tried to go in the back door first instead of going

26:54

right to the interface and disconnecting or logging out of tail scale.

26:59

But eventually I did. I got it out of tail scale and it worked.

27:04

So I'm confused as to why and how that worked because it turns out in our pre-show

27:11

discussion that that really wasn't it after all.

27:14

Well, I think you're on to something. So what we sleuthed out was,

27:18

at best as we can tell, because you're home now, so you're not on that IP,

27:23

but the hotel that you were in, the IP address that the hotel in Alaska used

27:32

is, for whatever reason, on the blacklist of this one mail provider, not the rest, right?

27:37

But this one mail provider seems a little more aggressive than the others,

27:41

whether they are justified in that or not, we'll leave that for another day. Right.

27:46

So, OK, fine. You wanted to use a different IP address than that one.

27:52

And you had Tailscale running, which as far as your Mac is concerned, is a VPN. A VPN. Right.

28:01

And it probably and you could look at this in your network settings.

28:06

It's probably the first VPN in your list, at least based on what you're telling

28:10

me, because it is preempting the other VPNs from working.

28:16

Right. So, yeah, you could connect to your home.

28:21

But Tailscale still was sort of saying, no, I'm going to take the traffic over here using the hotels.

28:27

Tells and then when i did what's my ip it was

28:29

showing me in alaska not my right okay so at least the whole system was being

28:33

consistent okay that's good right yeah that's a that's a great and if you folks

28:37

don't know about that um what is my ip.com is a fantastic little place to go

28:45

to let you know if your VPN is working or not.

28:49

Yes. So you tried, well,

28:53

the first thing that I think we should address is that using the Mac OS's VPN management.

29:07

Although possible, although apparently possible to do for things that have their

29:14

own app like Tailscale and PIA and ExpressVPN and NordVPN and all of those,

29:19

it is not actually doable because turning it on or off,

29:28

turning Tailscale or PIA or Nord or any of those on or off in the max VPN settings.

29:33

System settings. In system settings or with the little menu bar thing that is

29:37

from system settings is not an exhaustive switch.

29:43

It doesn't necessarily turn it all off or all on.

29:47

If they have an app, especially Tailscale, PAA, Nord, ExpressVPN, use the app to do that.

29:54

Because if you were to have turned Tailscale off with Tailscale's app,

29:57

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

30:03

at the back door and not actually going in. You weren't actually going in. Yeah, exactly.

30:07

And the problem is it'll tell you that it's off, and then it might be half on

30:14

and those sorts of things. So if it has an app, in most cases, you just have to use the app.

30:19

And that's true on your iPhone, too, by the way.

30:23

So that was step one. and and then you

30:27

know well really we already talked about step two which

30:30

is the the order of the vpns when you're running multiples you can run multiples

30:34

but you gotta really think about which one's first and you can set the service

30:38

order when once they're active uh you can set the sir once they're installed

30:42

you can set the service to order in in network settings so um but i i.

30:49

If I were in your shoes and experiencing that, knowing or at least having sleuthed

30:55

out that, okay, it's the hotel's IP address.

30:57

I know my home IP address lets me do this. I would have just connected to a

31:02

tail scale exit node that I've already set up.

31:05

I just wrote down exit node. That's what I should have tried.

31:09

So great minds sometimes take a life. Yeah, I know.

31:12

And this is something you need to configure in advance. um

31:15

an exit node is a

31:19

tail scale device on presumably on your home network

31:21

it could be anywhere but it's part of your tail net so it's one

31:24

of your devices uh that hopefully is on all the time and then you can use it

31:31

to route all your traffic through whatever network that device is on so it's

31:36

like for me i have an exit node on one of my synology disk stations and so if i need,

31:44

to route traffic through my home network i'm always connected to

31:47

my tail net and then i just go to the tail scale menu and

31:50

choose exit node and that disk station and boom now all the traffic is routed

31:55

as though i were at home and it the nice part is it's all happening within tail

31:59

scale so i'm not at risk of to borrow a phrase from you pete outsmarting myself

32:04

so right yes so which Which brings me to another question.

32:10

Yes. I love doing this. Let's play Stump the Dummy.

32:15

I always hate that on a check ride and the check airman's going,

32:17

you know, what's the fuel weight in the right wing?

32:20

I don't know. I don't know. I'm flying a plane. Ask somebody else.

32:24

African or European swallow. If I were to go to that exit node, could I print something out on my printer at home?

32:37

Or do I have to put my printer on the Tailscale network?

32:41

So there is a setting in Tailscale.

32:46

If you go to your Tailscale menu and you go to exit nodes, you'll see a preference

32:52

that says allow local network access.

32:56

And it is checked. If you turn that on, you don't even need to be routed through

33:01

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.

33:09

I mean, it does use the exit node. Don't get me wrong. But it's not.

33:13

I'm not like all of my other traffic that's not aimed at my local network.

33:18

Correct. Is just going through whatever I'm connected to.

33:22

But yeah, I print to my home thing all the time. It's great.

33:25

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, tail scale. It's freaking magic, man. Yeah, I'm just amazed the more I learn about it. Yeah.

33:34

How seamless it is. Yeah. It shouldn't be that easy.

33:39

I know. I threw some brains back there. I agree. Well, and it's using WireGuard at the core.

33:45

You know, right before tail scale became a thing, we started experimenting with WireGuard here.

33:55

And I was it's an open or at least at the time it was and probably still is

34:00

an open source VPN I installed it I think Linode was sponsoring us and so I

34:05

spun up a Linode instance to test it and put WireGuard on there and you know

34:11

it kind of lets you do what Tailscale does which is.

34:14

It creates a network amongst your devices that feels and acts like a local area

34:22

network, but it doesn't matter where your devices are.

34:25

All they need is an Internet connection somewhere.

34:28

So everything just gets to talk to all of your devices, get to talk to one another

34:35

as though they are on a local network.

34:38

Whether you are or not, it doesn't matter.

34:41

That that's the i think that's the

34:44

the right way to explain it and and tail scales

34:47

available for free for most of us yeah yeah oh

34:50

well that's one for me you're talking about wire guard i just assumed wire guard

34:53

was an encryption protocol for

34:57

lack of a better word i mean it kind of is yeah because

35:00

private internet access uses wire guard

35:03

or uh the other one or open vpn

35:06

or ikev2 two or yeah they yeah they use different

35:09

ones yeah okay yeah yeah yeah so but i

35:12

didn't realize that that that that brings

35:15

me to maybe another way to skin the cat of uh trying to

35:18

use that travel router that barrel axe

35:21

router overseas because i

35:24

it was i had it working and somehow i checked something and i went back to try

35:28

and uncheck it and it doesn't work anymore to watch youtube tv in europe got

35:33

it yeah that's not allowed that's verboten you pay for this service you can't

35:37

use it right right so yeah interesting it no it's it's fascinating stuff it just be.

35:45

Be careful that you don't get caught confusing your VPNs with one another.

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Clearly, Backblaze knows that universal truth. You can't fix stupid.

40:30

Well, yeah. I swear.

40:33

They can make it pilot-proof, and that's something we've always said about airplane systems and all that.

40:38

And so Backblaze has apparently made their system pilot-proof.

40:42

I guess it's pilot-proof. Yeah i was i i you know

40:47

i i say this often in fact we talked about

40:50

it last week that you know i have chat gpt write the ad scripts because that

40:53

way it keeps it fresh yeah i have never told it that you all you know occasionally

41:00

make yourself the butt of some of these jokes like you know you're you you definitely

41:04

have a self-deprecating style that's that's very endearing and somehow it

41:09

new yeah oh

41:13

boy yep yeah anyway well

41:17

i have to be self-deprecating because i do stupid stuff to myself all the time

41:22

like say uh edit an etsy file uh my uh oh yeah the etsy host file esty host

41:31

file rather yeah and you know how many hours did you spend he edited an etsy host file uh on

41:37

his Mac fit that almost required me to use better help for couples counseling.

41:43

And I don't just mean for me and Pete, I mean for me and Lisa,

41:47

because it ate up a good chunk of a Saturday for me trying to diagnose something.

41:53

And then finally I was like. Check your Etsy host file just, just out of the blue.

41:59

And you sent it to me and it was like, yeah, he put an entry in there that screwed

42:03

everything up. No recollection of ever putting that entry in too.

42:06

That's the worst of it. You know, when you make a change like that and don't notice it for weeks.

42:12

Yep. Pete outsmarted himself. I did outsmart myself on that.

42:16

I think that might be the episode title.

42:18

I don't know, but it might be really right.

42:22

Yeah. No kidding. but um noticed another one around here this week and and when

42:28

it started blowing up on the discord.

42:31

Channels yeah two i went oh okay this

42:36

is my wife's like what is going on why

42:39

you know i'm blocked out of my apple account i yeah

42:42

it wants me to reset my passwords i can't

42:45

send mail i can't facetime i can't like what

42:48

and then i go you know you're crazy you

42:51

just mistyped your password work well turns out she

42:54

didn't yeah cut and paste and and.

42:57

This thing is but it didn't hit me and it didn't hit my

43:00

son i and this all happened i

43:03

believe on sunday of last weekend yeah

43:07

um and and we you know

43:10

we recorded uh last week's episode on friday

43:13

so we recorded before this ever happened which is why we're talking

43:16

about it essentially a week after the fact but it

43:19

hit me um it it did

43:23

not hit lisa nor lucas nor skyler that

43:26

we're all on the same family account uh is debbie

43:29

the lead on your family account pete okay i'm just

43:33

trying to sleuth out like well yeah what's the what's the

43:36

common denominator universal yeah yeah okay saturday

43:39

night is is what tennessee papa says that actually so

43:42

he checks out yeah because it was right before we went we went out and

43:45

um i'm still suffering our

43:48

family group chat i once

43:51

i got my i changed my password i got back in thankfully i don't have the like

43:56

keep me logged out for an hour if i change my password i hadn't turned any of

44:00

that on so but i know for a lot of people caused even more issues right as as as you would expect.

44:09

But it I changed my password and then

44:12

it wiped out all my app specific passwords that

44:16

I had created for things like busy Cal and my thing with iCloud so that fast

44:21

mail can send SMTP via iCloud and things like that and so I had to recreate

44:26

those and repopulate them in all the right places and all that stuff but but

44:31

and then I had to re-log in like you said to FaceTime and iMessage and.

44:36

Most of my iMessage has been fine. Our family group chat, once I re-added myself

44:42

or, you know, re-logged into iCloud, there was now, it was now a five-person

44:47

family group chat and there were two Daves in it. Yeah.

44:51

And I was like, okay, well, I don't know what's going on.

44:54

And then I realized, oh, OK, somehow I was in there with my at iCloud dot com

45:01

account, which was not part of my quote unquote me record in my contacts.

45:07

So I was like, all right, so somebody in my family must have me with that at iCloud address.

45:14

And somehow that is tied to our family group chat.

45:18

So I went into contacts and I added that to my me address. Like,

45:22

fine, if that's what it takes to solve this. Great.

45:25

Turns out that's not what it takes to solve. It didn't matter.

45:28

Restarted, did the whole thing. Still five people there. Like, OK.

45:32

And some texts that I had sent just before this issue happened were showing

45:38

as having come from a different person other than me.

45:42

You know, it was on the left side of the iMessage chat instead of the right

45:46

side, right? Like my things are always on the right. Everybody else's things are on the left. That's how iMessage works.

45:51

And so I was like, nope, it's still over there. Okay, fine.

45:56

I deleted. I was like, let me just delete that user from the chat thread.

46:00

Like I don't need them here anymore. Well, it removed me and still left a phantom me out there. So I was sitting

46:07

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.

46:14

I need to throw something at the TV and I don't want to break my phone.

46:17

Yeah, I need to break something and it's going to be yours.

46:21

Right. And so I used that, you know, I wiped the other Dave out of that chat

46:27

and then added myself back in.

46:30

I also went to my contact record first on Lisa's phone to make sure that there

46:35

wasn't something there. And there was like, she still had some old at MacObserver.com

46:40

addresses for me and her contact record on my phone.

46:42

And it was like, all right, well, let me get those out of there just so that

46:45

everything is like settled. Then I added it back in.

46:49

And on my well, let me look on my max there.

46:55

It's still showing those messages as having come from a Dave Hamilton that is not me.

47:00

But all other and prior messages that came from me are me and all messages since

47:06

then that came from me or me. So it's just the ones right before this happened that Saturday night.

47:13

Right. At see, no, this was Sunday night. It was definitely Sunday because I

47:19

messaged just telling me it was Sunday night and it's it was 920 p.m.

47:24

I sent a text to the family with a picture of one of the cats because that's

47:28

basically what our family chats all about.

47:31

Out and uh and then that was

47:34

at 9 20 an hour later at 10 24 i i

47:38

removed myself from the conversation and then

47:40

it said it says you removed dave hamilton dave hamilton removed dave hamilton

47:45

and then i left the conversation and then a couple of those again many of them

47:50

again and then finally my wife added me back to the conversation so uh but it's

47:56

still a little janky on but my iphone.

48:00

Somehow has decided that those messages with the pictures of the cat did come

48:05

from the person that it believes is me.

48:07

So there's still something weird out there, but none of my other group chats were impacted.

48:12

So go figure. Right. So, I mean, in the end, I am through this problem.

48:19

Right. Like I don't have other than this one sort of lingering anomalous group of texts.

48:25

I'm not experiencing any follow on issues to this.

48:30

Other than the fact that I had to reset all of my app specific passwords and,

48:34

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.

48:40

Oh, and it's, you know, I have busy Cal on my phone, my iPad and all three of

48:44

my Macs. And so it's like, okay, great.

48:46

You know, now I got to go and like deal with this.

48:48

And I also, just before this happened, I decided to move from the,

48:53

I had a paid subscription with busy Cal and it came up for renewal.

48:58

And I was like, you know, I have Setapp. I'm just going to use the version in Setapp.

49:02

Like I don't need to pay for BusyCal if I also have Setapp. So I moved to the

49:06

Setapp version of BusyCal, but that's been its own little sort of frustrating

49:09

headache that I caused for myself. That's on me. But the timing of it was like, great.

49:16

Now I've got two versions of BusyCal on my computer that keep asking me and

49:19

I don't want to answer for one of them. But yeah, it's a whole different thing.

49:22

Yeah, but which one? Right. And I don't, that's the problem is, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

49:28

It so but i but to answer your

49:31

question what the heck happened we don't know i posted

49:35

on twitter the moment that like it happened to me but nobody else in my house

49:39

and i was like okay this is weird that post blew up it was quoted in you know

49:43

i think both 95 mac and apple insiders pieces a lot of i had a lot of comments

49:47

and it they all were basically the same of this is what happened to them,

49:53

like, symptomatically. But there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that anyone has sleuthed out

50:00

as to... No, and Apple's not been like, hey, we know there's a problem and we're

50:06

working on it. No, nothing. The radio silence has been deafening.

50:10

Yeah, yes, yeah. I don't... I just don't understand why...

50:19

I like why they said nothing what is

50:23

this yeah like just acknowledge it we're aware

50:26

there's a problem we're still working on it yep it we we we know a thing happened

50:32

and we're sorry like something i don't know yeah well i yeah did the lawyers

50:40

stop them from sending something out Well, but isn't there a thing?

50:44

Didn't the SEC or some FTC, some three-letter agency, mandate that publicly

50:52

traded companies had to divulge any security issues within four business days of them happening?

50:59

Need to own it ASAP, yeah. Right? Like there's the, yeah, the need to own it

51:02

law. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So but if if that's I think that's the case, you know, I'm just a hack lawyer.

51:09

But assuming that that's the case, then this would tell me it doesn't fall under

51:15

that, which means it wasn't a security issue at Apple.

51:19

It was a just a technical glitch that some of us. Hey, let me ask you this.

51:24

When you log into iCloud, Pete, do you use at Mac dot com or at me dot com or at iCloud dot com?

51:33

Yes. So how's that for an answer?

51:37

Usually I log into iCloud using, now using iCloud.com, but still my primary is a me.com address.

51:50

So, you know, I did not try to log in. Is Debbie's, because I log in as Mac.com.

51:56

Does Debbie log in as Mac.com?

51:59

No. Okay. okay hers is w

52:04

at yeah my domain that's her

52:07

apple id that that yeah that's and

52:10

that's okay to have that's right yeah yeah okay all

52:14

right well so much for that theory because i thought maybe it was an authentication

52:17

issue with you know the at mac.com a path of getting it it's all the same account

52:24

right and but it just for clarity it's all the same account if you joined at

52:30

a time when you You could get, when they handed out a Mac.com address,

52:35

Mac.com was first, right? Then me.com, then iCloud. Right, then me.com.

52:39

Yeah. And while you were talking, I went to iCloud.com in Safari,

52:44

and it came up with a default login, my me.com.

52:49

Okay. With a finger. And I thought this had affected me at first,

52:54

because it was a passkey login, and it failed. And I went, huh, that's unusual.

53:02

Oh, I wonder if my passkey is going to fail.

53:06

And then I used my password and I got in. But just now, I used my passkey to get in. Okay.

53:15

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.

53:23

So my pre-existing passkey was not invalidated, whatever that means.

53:29

Yeah. Yeah. Well, folks, feedback at MattKeyCab.com.

53:33

Please, if you have any just symptoms to share that you think might help us,

53:39

I would love to sort of use our sort of size and brain trust to at least try

53:46

and figure out, if it's figureoutable, what,

53:50

who and what would have been impacted by this? Because Apple ain't talking.

53:56

Yeah. So if you have a swag, you can share with us. I'm sorry, Pete. What's a swag?

54:03

Dave? Yes, Pete? That's a scientific wild ass guess.

54:10

Now i don't know what to use for the uh yeah yeah send us your swag making swags

54:18

fun again there you go okay here you go uh we're just making swags again yeah

54:23

that's right yeah yeah yeah all right huh send us your swag send us your swags,

54:33

because we don't have any more yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah swagging left and right is what we do,

54:42

swags to the left of us jokers to the right here i am stuck in the middle with

54:46

middle again jt ray and his question to take us out of all this craziness uh

54:53

i'll read the question it's fine He says,

54:56

so my new Mac studio has a desktop local and a desktop iCloud.

55:01

I have sync this Mac turned on. Am I missing something? Do I need to turn off

55:06

iCloud and turn it back on? Do I need to turn off sync this Mac and turn it back on? So he did.

55:11

He sent us screenshots, Pete, and they showed that he's got two desktop folders.

55:17

One, it shows in the Finder title bar as desktop local. The other in the title bar is Desktop iCloud.

55:27

But the names of the folders are simply desktop.

55:31

The Mac is being smart enough to...

55:35

Differentiate with them in its labels but like

55:38

the desktop local folder is named desktop

55:41

in his home folder that's it and the desktop

55:44

icloud folder is named desktop in the mobile documents folder

55:48

which is the you know icloud synced folder so this

55:51

is interesting i don't know that i'd ever seen this before but

55:55

i checked on my mac just to confirm and i

55:58

do have documents and data syncing turned on and

56:01

i do not have a

56:04

desktop folder in my home folder so

56:08

there would be no reason for it to have to differentiate because

56:11

there's nothing to differentiate between on my computer and

56:14

uh his desktop in the screenshots

56:17

that jt ray sent his desktop folder the

56:21

local one is empty i mean it's a brand new mac uh so if if it were me i would

56:28

just delete the local desktop folder to eliminate the confusion and just let

56:31

everything and my guess is at that point the system will stop calling the desktop

56:36

icloud folder desktop icloud that it's worth a shot yeah.

56:43

I so this makes me wonder is this at all related because let's go down another rabbit hole sure,

56:51

I've got two email accounts in Mac mail that are identical my iCloud account I.

57:01

And I know I told you about this once before, and I managed to get it to delete

57:05

ever so briefly one time, but I called Apple support over it and they went through

57:11

it with me and they went, huh, that's wrong. Well, when, when you upgrade to, uh, Sonoma, it'll, it'll go away.

57:16

And it did. And then it came back. So this is, this is weird.

57:23

I don't, yeah, I don't think these two things are related. Well,

57:26

two desktop folders, two, two, and well, These aren't clones of one another.

57:31

Yeah, no, his are different. That's right. This is two completely separate photos.

57:34

Whereas I've got two clones on the iCloud mail account. Can you just deactivate one of them?

57:41

No, if I deactivate one, it deactivates the other. Oh, so they are truly close.

57:47

It is a display anomaly, not a duplicate.

57:52

I mean, what you're saying is they're both being treated the same.

57:57

Like if you go into one and change a setting, that setting is,

58:01

is, is, is mirrored on the other one. Oddly enough, I did go,

58:04

I took one offline and it usually, I thought it took them both offline, but it's not.

58:09

Do you get to in the sidebar of mail? Like do they, does it show up twice there?

58:15

Yes. And what happens if you go to your home library mail folder and you can

58:24

get to your library folder in the finder, go to the go menu,

58:27

hold down the option key and library will magically appear in the list.

58:31

Choose it and then go to home library mail and go. You're on Sonoma. Is that right?

58:38

Yeah. All right. So go to the V10 folder here.

58:42

And in there you will see a series of

58:46

folders with like serial number type names each one is a separate mail account

58:52

and so you kind of have to twist them open to see as you twist them open you'll

58:57

get a sense of which account is which don't change the names of these folders

59:01

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

59:06

one yeah okay and nothing more yeah nothing more well is it so twist open to see are there two,

59:15

folders here except one each for

59:18

these these two iCloud accounts

59:22

yeah yeah well the problem is I got since I have so many I have four mail accounts

59:28

okay in Mac mail so figuring out which one is which how many how many folders

59:34

are listed i mean you're going to have a mail data in v10 ignore the v10 i have uh 10 folders.

59:43

Oh, so you have some, you have some old data. Well, look at the ones that have

59:47

been modified recently. Oh, okay. Let me put it in list mode. Do that list date modified all today.

59:57

All 10 of them. Except for the one that says orphaned account.

1:00:02

Okay. June 1, 2023. Okay.

1:00:06

And that has one of the inbox inbox info. I could probably delete that,

1:00:11

right? Well, I wouldn't, if I were you, if I were there, what I would do next,

1:00:17

nope, I wouldn't do anything of the sort.

1:00:19

I would make a backup onto a separate disk of the entirety of the mail folder.

1:00:27

And it might be very big. Like, you know, because if it's going to have all

1:00:31

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

1:00:37

so that nothing can go find it. Because mail is smart.

1:00:41

It will go and seek things out. I've seen it do it, right? So get it offline, powered down.

1:00:47

You know you've got this backup in essentially cold storage.

1:00:50

And then what I would do is delete both of those iCloud accounts from mail and then add them back.

1:01:01

Add one back. Please don't add it twice.

1:01:04

And see what happens. Like if you delete two of them, it, what I've learned

1:01:11

about mail though, and this is true also on the iPhone, you just can't see it.

1:01:16

Is that when you delete an account.

1:01:19

At least in the past, it's been a little while. It doesn't delete the core data

1:01:24

from core data is the wrong term.

1:01:26

The previous data folder from the V10 account here in the V10 folder here in mail.

1:01:34

So it might wind up creating a new one in there. It might wind up reattaching to an old one.

1:01:40

I don't know. But when you add the new one in, I'd be curious to see whether

1:01:44

it adds one. I mean, this is obviously, like, this is probably the extent of,

1:01:48

as far as we're going to take it on the show here.

1:01:51

But that's the troubleshooting that I would do.

1:01:54

Yeah, with that. So delete that whole mail folder. No, don't delete anything.

1:02:00

Make the backup. Take it offline. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, then delete the mail

1:02:04

accounts. Delete them from system settings. The two iCloud accounts.

1:02:07

In system settings. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you asked that question.

1:02:10

No, that clarity was important. Well, I'm tired, man. So I'm just going to go delete and stuff. Same.

1:02:15

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Oh, too funny. Yeah.

1:02:20

All right. Shall I play JP's question here, Pete?

1:02:23

Let's do that. All right. Now I got to get my system back to where I can actually

1:02:27

find these things because, you know, I don't, I don't know where anything is

1:02:30

anymore, Pete. We've been doing all this crazy stuff.

1:02:33

All right, JP here. Let's see. of the geek gab

1:02:36

it's jp currently in los angeles here's a

1:02:39

uh uh a good

1:02:42

one i'm sure we all know something like this i have a

1:02:45

friend that uh i do their it for them over the years and this this is a person

1:02:50

that just refuses to update his machinery and his software and stuff so like

1:02:54

every five years you know i'll get an emergency oh my god my stuff i can't open

1:03:00

my blood you know i you know You know how it goes. I do.

1:03:03

Anyway, after spanking him for not having his time machine drive plugged in,

1:03:09

which I set up for him, yet he turned it off.

1:03:13

Once it started asking to be, you know, erased and reformatted and stuff.

1:03:19

Anyway, so he's basically lost everything from now back to 2021.

1:03:24

So he had to buy a new computer. Anyway, that's the nightmare part.

1:03:29

But that gets me to this. This guy has maybe 10 million files and folders on his computer.

1:03:39

And he's the guy that you know in the old days dating back to the 90s would

1:03:46

just back stuff up put it in a folder and then just save it and a lot of it

1:03:51

is sitting on his desktop, so i was going through that this morning looking at it via screen share and

1:03:58

it's uh it's a a shite storm uh so my question is this uh not that i'm gonna

1:04:06

go through with this but it made me curious For guys just like this,

1:04:10

is there an app somewhere in the universe that will scan a hard drive and literally

1:04:20

remove duplicates of stuff that's the same over the years?

1:04:27

I know one must exist, but I know that the gentleman of the gab...

1:04:35

Will absolutely know the correct one, whereas you can, it'll scan it,

1:04:40

show you the duplicates, and then you have the choice to delete them or put

1:04:46

them off onto a separate drive. So, you know, so you, in case there's a mistake.

1:04:52

So I wouldn't have to go through four million folders for this guy and try and organize for him.

1:05:00

I think that would be a mistake and it might be an even more More than this

1:05:05

organizational freak can handle.

1:05:08

Anyway, if you have any ideas, let me know. Thank you very much for all you do.

1:05:14

I'm tapping to you. JP, I resent that. You said you weren't going to tell on me.

1:05:21

Well played. Might you have an answer for him anyway? I do.

1:05:27

He said one must exist and one does in fact exist.

1:05:30

And it's one of my favorites. And lo and behold, set up to the rescue again, Gemini, right?

1:05:38

The astrological sign for the twins, Gemini, goes and finds the duplicates.

1:05:45

And it will find, stand by, JP, I can tell you, if you run Gemini on this computer,

1:05:51

it sounds to me like you're going to have 4, 6, 8, 40 copies,

1:05:57

and it will find all of them.

1:06:00

And it has a default delete

1:06:04

which I don't particularly care for sometimes I have

1:06:07

when I have a duplicate file I go oh I put

1:06:10

I put it in that folder and it selected that one

1:06:13

to delete but it finds it

1:06:16

it will set up an automatic delete and reserve

1:06:20

in fact if you have two identical files

1:06:24

and you select both of

1:06:27

them for deletion it will pop up with a warning which you

1:06:29

can disable that warning sure if you want to do so

1:06:32

at your own peril it will come up and say are you sure you want to delete both

1:06:36

of these because i'm going to get rid of them so so i like gemini and i run

1:06:41

it on my home folder and let it go and it it finds gigabytes of stuff for me

1:06:47

it's a really nice job i i mean i i know that

1:06:50

I've used Gemini in the past. Yeah.

1:06:53

And, and it, it almost certainly would have been my answer here too,

1:06:57

but I, I don't, like, I don't have the same working knowledge of it that you

1:07:02

do this. Like this really sounds like the answer to this. Like, I mean, it truly is.

1:07:07

Yeah. And it's reliable, reliable.

1:07:10

If they're from, it's from Mac paw. Right. Right.

1:07:13

And, and those guys know their, they know their max. They know their stuff for sure. Yeah.

1:07:18

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool.

1:07:22

All right. Shall we answer James's question, Pete? Yeah. All right.

1:07:29

Are you going to read it or should I read it? You know what?

1:07:32

Hang on. I can find James's question. I mean, I can read it. It's fine.

1:07:36

Yeah. Well, he basically wants to know about the – he says, what do I need to

1:07:43

connect IoT at 2.4 gigahertz?

1:07:47

He says, when I install a new IoT device, Internet of Things,

1:07:52

and that's your smart light bulbs and switches, that kind of stuff for those just joining us.

1:07:57

There is often a vague warning to ensure that I connect over 2.4 gigahertz rather

1:08:02

than 5 gigahertz band of my Wi-Fi during setup.

1:08:06

Why is this? How do I ensure I have a 2.4 gigahertz connection?

1:08:10

My Wi-Fi seems to make up its own mind in regards to which band it connects things onto.

1:08:16

And Dave, we chit-chatted about this a little bit before the show,

1:08:21

Joe, and you had a better answer than I did.

1:08:24

I thought it was just forced because that's, you know, that's where the light bulb works only.

1:08:30

You know, it only works in the 2.4 band.

1:08:33

That is true. In some cases, that's true. No, in many cases.

1:08:36

In fact, I would say in all of these cases, that's true.

1:08:39

But to his point, you know, his Wi-Fi or his devices seem to make up their own

1:08:45

minds in regards to which band they connect to.

1:08:47

And I will guarantee you that if you have an IoT device that has a 2.4 gigahertz

1:08:53

radio in it, it will only connect to another 2.4 gigahertz radio.

1:08:57

There is zero risk of it trying to connect or at least being able to connect

1:09:03

to a 5 gigahertz radio if it doesn't have 5.

1:09:05

Like, that's just a physical limitation. And that's okay. Yeah.

1:09:10

And you're right that when client devices are connecting to the named SSID,

1:09:17

this is the network name that you give your Wi-Fi.

1:09:20

You know, it might be like, you know, Pete's Castle or something.

1:09:24

I know that's not the name of your Wi-Fi, but, you know, we all have our names.

1:09:27

A lot of people like to use, you know, FBI surveillance van is the name of their Wi-Fi.

1:09:32

You know, whatever your Wi-Fi name is, if a device knows the name and is connecting

1:09:38

to the name, it will scan the list of available networks,

1:09:42

pick the one that has that name and has the strongest signal for it, whether it's 2.4 or 5.

1:09:49

You know, it has an algorithm that it makes this decision, and then it tries to connect to that one.

1:09:56

Every access every radio in every

1:09:59

access point has a separate hardware address

1:10:03

a separate mac address right and so

1:10:06

it pulls up you know a device like your mac

1:10:09

or your iphone will pull up the list it'll see all the 2.4 and 5 and now 6 gigahertz

1:10:13

radios out there pick the one like i said with the algorithm then it says all

1:10:19

right what's the mac address of that radio great i'll use that Mac address with

1:10:23

this password that you gave me and I will connect to that.

1:10:26

And it's made its decision on its own and it remembers the name so that as conditions

1:10:31

change, it might jump around and go to different things.

1:10:33

All of that is totally fine. However.

1:10:39

A lot of the software for these IOT devices is not written very well.

1:10:47

And what it does is it's lazy.

1:10:50

It doesn't look and do the scan by name.

1:10:54

It just asks the iPhone, what network are you connected to?

1:11:00

And more specifically, what is the MAC address of the access point that you're connected to?

1:11:06

And then it says, great, I'll use that. And if your iPhone is connected to a

1:11:12

five or six gigahertz access point, and the device needs a 2.4 gigahertz access point,

1:11:18

it's going to pass that hardware,

1:11:21

that Mac address along to the device and say, connect to this.

1:11:25

And it won't be able to connect because as we discussed, a 2.4 gigahertz radio

1:11:30

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

1:11:38

nebulous warning message that says,

1:11:42

make sure your phone is connected to a 2.4 gigahertz network before you try

1:11:46

to attach this new IOT device to a network.

1:11:51

And that's why this comes up.

1:11:55

The solution is to do exactly as they say.

1:11:59

Now, this often requires going into your router settings and changing a few

1:12:07

things, at least temporarily, so that devices so that your iPhone will connect to the device that you want

1:12:15

it to connect to to the radio. Some.

1:12:19

Some routers like Eero have a feature where you can temporarily turn off the

1:12:24

five gigahertz radio for and the six gigahertz radio for five minutes and then

1:12:30

do your thing and then it turns it back on and everything's happy.

1:12:32

Uh, others, like if I was going to do this on my Synology, I would have to turn

1:12:36

off what they call smart connect, uh, which smart connect bridges,

1:12:41

all of the radios together as one SSID.

1:12:44

You turn it off, you set your 2.4 gigahertz radio to the, uh,

1:12:49

the main SSID, the main network name that you use,

1:12:53

set the five gigahertz to something else, temporarily save those settings,

1:12:57

let it repopulate everything, then do your connection.

1:13:01

Then go back into your router turn all that back on it's

1:13:04

a pain in the neck and it's because software is in

1:13:07

for these iot devices the setup routines in this

1:13:10

software is lazily written that's really just what it is but that's

1:13:12

why did that make sense pete did i did i

1:13:15

do absolutely no absolutely all right it does and

1:13:18

then uh yeah yeah and also

1:13:22

as we said in the in the quick tip section of the show uh

1:13:25

make sure wpa3 is off otherwise you might be

1:13:27

heading down a separate heading for yourself so right

1:13:31

because speaking of banging your head against a brick wall yep through

1:13:34

which a 2.4 gigahertz signal will better penetrate better

1:13:38

better than your head anyway yeah better than your head that's true that's true

1:13:43

yep yep 2.4 gigahertz goes through brick walls better than your head yeah that's

1:13:50

a long show title yeah i don't know there's a lot of there's There's a lot of

1:13:55

options this week. Yeah. I'll be curious to see which one we have picked.

1:14:00

Yeah. Yeah. So Matt's question there, that's the next one.

1:14:05

All right. What's the best way to send documents to tax preparers?

1:14:08

Yes. Any decent tax preparer worth his salt is going to have a portal.

1:14:14

Yeah. So, yeah. So Matt, Matt needed or still needs, I know April 15th has passed

1:14:19

us by, but it doesn't help you. That doesn't help Matt, but sorry. Well, unless, unless Matt is on a,

1:14:25

uh, like a lot of us, Matt might have filed an extension for his taxes or need to do this next year.

1:14:30

And, uh, Matt's accountant has asked him to send him, um, documents and Matt wants to do it securely.

1:14:38

Securely and matt's tax preparer is uh

1:14:41

evidently not the most technologically savvy

1:14:45

one so or maybe you're a tax preparer out there

1:14:47

and you want to learn what to use for your

1:14:51

clients um if you're a listener to this show sonology would be the sonology

1:14:57

file sharing thing is a great way to set that up you can do that for inbound

1:15:01

or outbound stuff and it's all secure but if you want to do it without having

1:15:08

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.

1:15:17

ICloud can send outbound file requests and those can be secured.

1:15:22

And then Rod in our chat says he's used Tresorit, T-R-E-S-O-R-I-T,

1:15:30

for several years. So that would be another one.

1:15:33

Send.Tresorit.com. So that would be another one.

1:15:36

How do you do this with your tax preparer

1:15:39

pete so my guy does have a portal okay if he didn't one i would search for a

1:15:44

new tax guy yeah yeah fair and two but if i had to send a document i would just

1:15:51

use preview and save it as a pdf password protected yes,

1:15:59

yes yep i mean you know could it be hacked yeah.

1:16:04

But yeah, everything can, right. Even WPA three.

1:16:08

It turns out. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I,

1:16:11

but I'd be curious to hear what other people use or if you're a tax preparer,

1:16:15

you know, what you use with your clients or what you've looked at.

1:16:18

Cause I, uh, it would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:16:21

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Kiwi Graham in the chat says his accountant runs a box.com repository.

1:16:30

There you go. Tennessee Papa says he puts his on iCloud and sends a link to

1:16:34

his accountant. Yeah, all of these things are fine.

1:16:37

Yeah, I have two different accountants that I use, and they use different systems.

1:16:43

But Brian says that Adobe has an option, so we will put that link in the show notes too.

1:16:51

So, yeah, there's lots of – this is a solved problem, I like to say.

1:16:58

It is indeed in, in many different ways that cat has been skinned multiple times,

1:17:03

all nine lives gone. Yeah. But in a, like in a great way, I, yeah, it, it works well.

1:17:09

We were in the process of, um, selling a, a business that none of you know about.

1:17:16

It's not anything that's related to anything that you talk about.

1:17:19

It's a business that I've had kind of a, an interest in for about six years here.

1:17:23

And uh we needed to

1:17:26

create a data room to share all kinds of

1:17:29

things financial documents you know contracts like

1:17:31

they want to see everything about the business that they're acquiring which

1:17:35

absolutely makes sense and so i actually used our our my disk station for that

1:17:41

data room because our attorney was like well you're going to want to secure

1:17:44

this and you're going to want to limit who can download and who can do what

1:17:47

and maybe it would be nice if you could watermark things And I'm like,

1:17:50

actually, I think my disk station Synology office can do all of that.

1:17:54

So we set it up and it's been fantastic. It's worked really, really well. Yeah. Super smooth for everybody.

1:17:59

And so, yeah, it's like it, there's all kinds of these solutions out there.

1:18:04

So it's almost like those guys at Synology thought about it and understand how that works. Yeah.

1:18:11

Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:18:15

They've got it right. Right. I'm curious to see what Ugreen brings to the table on this front. Yeah.

1:18:20

Because they know where the bar is set, and that's the important part.

1:18:26

So, yeah, I'm curious to see what happens.

1:18:30

Dave. Pete. This has been a long show, hasn't it? You know what? It feels long.

1:18:35

We're at an hour and 18 minutes, which is, you know, yeah. Okay.

1:18:39

It's not as long as you thought. I didn't reset my clock. So we did 40 minutes before we got started.

1:18:44

That's the thing is, yeah, we did an extra 10 on the front end of this.

1:18:47

There was some additional tech support for Pete.

1:18:51

Yeah, because, you know. It was fun. Because it's Thursday. Yeah,

1:18:55

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.

1:19:03

Cashfly provides all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.

1:19:07

Make sure to check out Pete's other show, the one that his mug comes from. So there I was.

1:19:12

And then I have two other shows, Business Brain and Gig Gab.

1:19:17

Got some fun interviews coming up on Gig Gab.

1:19:20

We actually just interviewed Matt Musty from Train, the drummer from Train.

1:19:23

I've got probably the nerdiest sound.

1:19:29

Nerdiest sounds bad. One of the nerdiest sound engineers out there coming on. This guy, Robert Scoville.

1:19:36

He's done sound for everybody. He's currently out on the road doing stadiums

1:19:39

with Kenny Chesney. So we've got him coming on the show. It's been fun. Yeah, really.

1:19:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been learning a ton, and I love it. It's great.

1:19:47

Nice. If you're a musician or into music, please check out Gig Gab.

1:19:52

And share this show with somebody. Absolutely.

1:19:57

It doesn't cost you anything. Share the show. And those of you that contribute,

1:20:01

thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. Hey, Dave, I'm sorry. I'm going to take a point of personal privilege.

1:20:07

Oh, yeah, but the outro is playing. I've got a cool one this week. Okay.

1:20:11

She was born in East Germany, learned to fly four years ago,

1:20:17

flew her small airplane across the Atlantic and back.

1:20:19

An amazing oh i want

1:20:22

to listen to this so there i was yeah whoa that's great

1:20:27

i'm glad you i'm glad you took that moment pete

1:20:30

you want to take another moment and share a few more words of wisdom yeah by

1:20:35

few i mean three yeah she didn't and uh that was good because she's gonna do

1:20:40

it again this summer but for me i wouldn't do it the main reason is because

1:20:44

i would say i don't want to

1:20:49

and I'm going to tell you, don't get caught.

1:20:55

That's good advice. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. See ya. Later.