Macintosh Utilities, Part 1

For our February 18, 2025, Strait Macintosh User Group meeting, we talked about Apple utilities.

A utility is a program that performs a service for other programs, or for the computer itself.

Examples in macOS include Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, App Store, Automator, Calculator, Audio MIDI Setup, etc. None of these programs allows you to produce anything; each of them performs a service for either other programs or for the computer itself.

Most users have never used most of the included macOS utilities, or are unaware they exist, or are even afraid to touch them. We will start with a couple of specific requests: Disk Utility and Migration Assistant, plus a few of my favorites.

Video recording of the meeting

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Transcript of the meeting

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18:34:08 All right. I was asking if somebody had any questions and then my Internet went out.
18:34:16 Any questions from anyone?
18:34:23 Most people have their mics turned off so if you're I think you're saying something and I can't hear you. It's because I can't hear you.
18:34:30 I had a question, a couple of them. Do you mind answering them? They're not about utilities.
18:34:33 Yes. That's fine. Utilities is a topic, but you can ask about anything.
18:34:39 Okay. Okay, I'm still having problems trying to find an external desktop hard drive.
18:34:48 That's reliable. I have a lot of photos. And I just am sorting it out and they get such bad reviews. Seagate
18:35:01 Wd, things that I've used in the past la sea oh that's now owned by Seagate and it's terrible. And so I'm just like, I'd like something reliable, but I don't want to get a big RAID configuration.
18:35:15 Because I don't quite understand that. I just want some old fashioned, you know, two terabyte, four terabyte drives that I can back up just manually.
18:35:26 Do you have any recommendations? Reliability, not speed. Speed is not important to me.
18:35:26 Well, thanks. The that's…
18:35:35 That's a complicated question, even though it seems like a simple question.
18:35:40 Okay.
18:35:40 There used to be my first, I just found the receipt recently, my first hard drive was a 100 megabyte drive made by a company named Rodine which doesn't exist anymore.
18:35:57 Wow.
18:35:52 100 megabyte, it cost me 1200 bucks And… And… Where is it? This… this tiny little thumb drive that you can't see all that well holds 32 gigabytes.
18:36:13 Well, there are a thousand megabytes and a gigabyte.
18:36:18 So this is a lot larger than that drive that I had long ago. In fact.
18:36:28 Sometimes there are some cameras today, just a still camera that can take a one photo that would fill up that hard drive that I bought.
18:36:37 Many, many years ago. And there used to be lots and lots and lots of manufacturers. And now they pretty much collapsed into just a few.
18:36:49 In terms of the sea or… Western Digital or Seagate or whatnot There's something to note in as much as the container of the drive may not be the same as the people who make the contents.
18:37:10 As an example, the sea, which is French, it just means the company Lassie doesn't make the drives that it contains. Lasie packages up the externals And… Then they sell it to you. And Lassie was bought by I don't remember if it was Western Digital or
18:37:30 Seagate. That's what they say on the reviews. I think it was Seagate.
18:37:31 Seagate. Yeah. Yeah, I don't remember who bought it. But similarly, Western Digital, which you can go into um Costco and get a wet string digital What do they call it? Drive book or something With many terabytes for like a hundred and
18:37:52 20 bucks or something not too much money Western Digital sells these very expensive drives, but if you buy the raw hard drives and a raw hard drive I happen to have several of them.
18:38:15 This is a raw hard drive. And it weighs as much as um a laptop today.
18:38:23 Just the drive itself this one was originally one terabyte.
18:38:30 So that's a thousand one gigabyte drives in this one drive.
18:38:37 The big manufacturers right now are Seagate and Western Digital. The drives that I bought for a long time were made by Hitachi years and years ago when IBM was a personal computer company They sold their desktop line and their laptops to a Chinese company called levonne like
18:38:58 Livono and they sold their hard drive technology to Hitachi, which is a Japanese company.
18:39:06 And for years and years and years, because of the liability, I was only buying Hitachi drives.
18:39:12 Well, Hitachi decided that they needed some cash and they sold their Hitachi hard drives to Western Digital. So now Western Digital is the manufacturer of these Hitachi technology.
18:39:29 And so the answer is it's really kind of hard to say because the number of hard drive manufacturers has collapsed.
18:39:35 The other problem that you run into is that Drives are sold basically in many different classes. There are drives for security systems like the monitoring systems you have in businesses.
18:39:49 There's hard drives for security systems for game systems for laptops, for desktops, for RAIDs, for all kinds of things.
18:39:58 And they have different characteristics. The drives that you get in these $100, $120, 150, whatever.
18:40:06 Boxes that you can get at weston at Costco and they're designed, you just plug them into your computer and you format it and you're up and running with them.
18:40:15 Backup. These can be like… four terabyte drives, eight terabyte drives.
18:40:22 But internally, it gets a little bit more complicated. It's much cheaper to make a four terabyte drive Then an eight terabyte drive, especially if you make a slow four terabyte drive.
18:40:34 So in these cheap boxes that you can buy at Costco, they tend to put in the lower quality drives And it might be eight terabytes of storage, but it might actually have two drives inside.
18:40:45 So it's really kind of hard to tell what you're buying.
18:40:50 My my Rule of thumb, though, is that for backups, you really don't care.
18:40:56 If a backup is a backup. You just want it to be backed up and you want it to be done as cheaply as possible.
18:41:02 There's a built-in backup service in in mac os 10 called time machine You plug in a drive and Time Machine will back up to it.
18:41:15 So if you want to go and get one of those $120 drives or $150 drives or whatever at Costco, plug it into your machine.
18:41:23 Format it, always format it, even if they say it comes pre-formatted.
18:41:27 Format it and make sure it's done with a Mac format. And that's one of the things I'm going to talk about today.
18:41:34 When I talk about utilities. And then just let it do its thing. Time machine will back up every hour on the hour.
18:41:41 The first backup will take a long time. And then after that, it'll be much, much faster and you won't even know it's doing it. Why a cheap drive? Because the important thing is to have another copy.
18:41:53 It's not to have the greatest safest drive in the world is to have another copy.
18:41:58 If you are a professional photographer or you are an artist and you have things that you think are valuable that you want to keep, then there's a different kind of strategy that you want to use.
18:42:10 And that is you want to make backup copies, but you also want to make archival copies. And an archival copy is one that is not in your house. It's someplace else like a safe deposit box.
18:42:23 And you store copies of things there so that if someone comes and robs your house or your house burns down Or there's a forest fire and you have to abandon it for weeks on end or something like that, you still have access to your stuff.
18:42:36 Yes.
18:42:37 And for archival copies. Keep in mind that a floppy disk, when the floppy disk first came out, the little three and a half inch floppy disks were about two bucks a piece. So 10 of those would cost you 20 bucks.
18:42:51 And one of those floppy disks held 720k. 720,000 bytes.
18:42:59 And you take any picture with your iPhone, it's going to be larger than that. It would take several You take a whole box of those just to store one of them.
18:43:08 Photographs that you take now or possibly several boxes. So I recommend for our Cariboult storage to buy these. This is a thumb drive. This one here is 128 gigabytes.
18:43:21 So that's one tenth of a terabyte drive. But 128 gigabytes is an awful lot of storage. And they also come in larger sizes.
18:43:32 This one is five hundred and 500 and… 24 gigabytes. So it's basically the size of these And then they have terabyte ones. But these things, they require no power.
18:43:48 You copy things onto them. You stick it into an envelope and mail it to your brother in Oklahoma, or you take it down to the bank, put it in the bank vault. You've got a lot of these in And…
18:44:02 In a safe deposit box and they're inexpensive you can get I don't remember how much these are because I didn't buy them. My spouse bought them.
18:44:12 But for archival drives, I'm recommending that people use these flash drives.
18:44:19 This particular one that I have is a fancy one. It's got a USB connector at one end.
18:44:31 Oh, good.
18:44:24 Which is every single Mac you buy now has USB connectors. But if you flipped it the other way, it's got one of the older style connectors. So if you're concerned about, you know, you want to future proof things there are several
18:44:38 Of these drives that you can buy on Amazon that have both connectors.
18:44:41 And that's what I bought these for. Because my spouse died.
18:44:48 January, and I want to make electronic copies of a lot of photographs and documents for her five brothers and sister. And the easiest way to do that is to put them on these.
18:44:59 And give them copies. So it's an inexpensive way of having off-site storage. For on-site storage, just go buy a cheap drive from
18:45:13 Costco or Best Buy or something like that. If you're interested in something better than just the cheapest thing that you can buy.
18:45:22 I would recommend that you look online for other world computing.
18:45:27 Otherworld computing is a Mac specialty firm and they have inexpensive raids like you can get a raid for like 300 bucks. That's just the box. You have to buy the drive separate but The nice thing about a raid and all of my storage, except for what's in the computer, is rated.
18:45:48 Okay.
18:45:47 The nice thing is you can set up what a mirrored, what's called a mirrored rate. So when I write to something to my drive, it makes two copies, one on OneDrive.
18:45:55 One or the other. Does it automatically, I don't have to pay any attention to it. So if one watt drive were to fail.
18:46:03 I'd still have the other drive with everything I've saved. And all of my RAIDs are set up that way.
18:46:10 Um so
18:46:10 Do you know what kind of drives are inside? Who makes The OWC's actual drives.
18:46:15 The ones…
18:46:20 Are they their own? Okay.
18:46:20 The OWC doesn't make their own. They buy them and you can specify who you want them from.
18:46:27 And the one you want to look for, you want to look for things that say.
18:46:31 Desk star or ultra star And that's not the name of the company. That's the type of technology.
18:46:34 Desks.
18:46:38 Okay.
18:46:37 When Western Digital bought Hitachi, which again was the old ibmium drive company. Death Star and Ultra Star were the names under which they sold their drives. And if you buy a Western digital drive and it says it's a desk star or an Ultra Star.
18:46:54 Okay.
18:46:57 It means it uses Hitachi technology. And yes, that's a hint. That's what I buy.
18:47:05 Okay.
18:47:04 Since I can't buy Hitachi anymore, I buy Western Digital, Death Star, and Ultra Stars.
18:47:11 But OWC, Other World Computing.
18:47:16 And sell you an empty raid. And then they'll also sell you the drives to put in it.
18:47:16 Yes.
18:47:21 If you're interested in something that's not the cheapest thing on the planet. But for regular backups, I recommend just go into Costco buy one of those little Western digital books or whatever they want to call them.
18:47:35 The other thing to note is that there are also solid state drives and Costco has them as well. You can get a terabyte solid state drive for not much like They sell them for like 120 bucks or something like that.
18:47:50 And the nice thing about those, you just plug them into your machine and it's a great place if you have a laptop.
18:47:51 Okay.
18:47:55 To have an automatic backup using time machine because it's not as much storage as you have using it's… less space than you can get with these hard drive backups.
18:48:08 But for a laptop, you probably don't have as much stuff on your laptop anyway. And it's very portable, doesn't require an extra electrical outlet, you just literally plug it into the machine and your laptop powers it.
18:48:19 And that's another way to do it. But the important thing is that in any case, you always want to reformat them because the ones they sell at Costco and everywhere else are already pre-formatted for Windows.
18:48:34 Okay.
18:48:33 And that's not good. You definitely don't want to save things to a Windows format.
18:48:41 Yes.
18:48:40 Lawrence. Have you heard of the G Drive by Western Digital.
18:48:42 Okay.
18:48:48 Yes.
18:48:48 It's a very solid SSD drive, like you said, just plugs into your laptop. It takes no power.
18:48:56 And I've got it.
18:48:55 No, the G drive was actually the packaging company And Western Digital bought the packaging company.
18:49:03 The drives inside are Western Digital.
18:49:05 Right, right. But it's a great package because it's like a crash proof package it's, you know, you can drop it on the floor and it'll stay you know Hey, that's it.
18:49:22 Oh, well, it looks like the G drive from Western Digital.
18:49:19 This is actually made by Lassie.
18:49:25 That's because Lessee decided, Western Digital decided that having bought the G Drive, that they wanted to kind of rebrand it. But this is a Lassie drive.
18:49:35 And there's a Western digital drive inside of it. But again, I don't use that for anything. I use that for backups. I don't use that for archiving. I don't use that.
18:49:46 Main storage.
18:49:45 Yeah, right. I use it for backup. With Time Machine, I bought a two terabyte g drive And I have a one terabyte laptop.
18:49:57 Yeah. Yeah.
18:50:03 Well, the important thing with backups is to make sure that you're doing them all the time.
18:49:57 It's wonderful. It really is compact. It just fits in your pack and… You take…
18:50:08 And if you use Time Machine, you plug a drive in and you pay no attention whatsoever.
18:50:08 Right.
18:50:13 Time machine, once you set it up, just do it. Every single person that I've talked to in the past, oh, I don't know.
18:50:16 Right.
18:50:21 40 some years who crashed their machine and can't and lost a bunch of stuff.
18:50:26 It's because they didn't have a backup set up. This one woman said that she had time machine set up.
18:50:32 And I looked at her machine. It said she hadn't had time machine active since 2018.
18:50:38 Oh, gee.
18:50:39 And unfortunately, this was at the time, it was 2024 Yeah, it's a fairly long gap in there.
18:50:47 And since you don't need an outlet for it, you just need an outlet for your laptop, but not for the drive
18:50:54 Yes. And that's backups are one thing archiving in long-term storage and safety are another consideration. If you want safety, go with RAIDs and you want long-term storage.
18:51:04 Right.
18:51:08 Go with flash drives because you can put a whole bunch of them into a safe deposit box.
18:51:13 Let's see if I could…
18:51:15 What brand of those flash drives do you recommend? Any ones that are reputable?
18:51:22 Well, reputable is kind of hard to tell. These ones that Kathleen bought that I'm going to give to my relatives are made by Team Group, and I've never heard of them.
18:51:37 Good. Okay, next, sir.
18:51:32 This one here is made by Lexar, which is um very well known in the photographic field they make cards for cameras.
18:51:44 And… What is that? Oh, this is another Lexar. I'm kind of biased towards Lexar.
18:51:50 Okay. All right. Yeah, I've got some of those.
18:51:50 But… Understood.
18:51:55 And what is this one made by? I don't have any idea.
18:51:58 This one was one of the first I saw that had both a USB at one end and a And the older fashion USB at the other end.
18:52:07 I have one around here that's about the size of my fingernail. It's 512 gigabytes.
18:52:14 And it's made it was made by I think it was made by Western Digital, but they had it on sale for uh Oh, here it is.
18:52:24 Oh, no, this is made by SanDisk That is the size of a 512 gigabyte drive.
18:52:32 It's a regular USB-C. And the case and everything is plastic. So in terms of the build quality, it's not really very fancy at all.
18:52:41 But for 512 gigabytes, think about how many of these you can stick inside of them.
18:52:50 Yeah, that's great.
18:52:47 Inside of a safe deposit box. I mean, at that point, and the nice thing about these, if you know what a key envelope is, the key envelopes are those small little envelopes that they put keys in and they have them at apartment complexes and so on and so forth to make sure
18:53:03 You get a bunch of key envelopes, you get a bunch of these and you write on the envelope what's on the inside because the thing is so small.
18:53:09 You can't put a label on it, but it certainly carries a lot of space, a lot of storage in it.
18:53:12 Okay.
18:53:19 Great.
18:53:16 Very small space. And talking about storage is a good thing because one of the things, one of the utilities we're going to talk about tonight is is disk utility, which is important for a lot of the stuff we're talking about.
18:53:32 What time is it? We still have time for another question about something other than hard drives.
18:53:33 Quit.
18:53:39 Which is, it was a great question. So it's just a great question.
18:53:43 It's a complicated question. Any other questions?
18:53:47 Can you address how to erase your iPhone's data from your car's carplay
18:53:55 How do you erase the iPhone's data from your car? The answer to that is you have to, it depends upon the car. I have a Toyota RAV4.
18:54:06 And if you go through the phone connection, so on and so forth, there eventually is a button that allows you to erase that data. If you do something like I went through on a test drive of a Volkswagen ID, which is an electric
18:54:29 Suv. Volkswagen ID.4 and I wanted to see if it worked with CarPlay because the guy wasn't sure.
18:54:36 When a salesman doesn't know if it works with CarPlay, you kind of wonder about salesmen. But it was brand new, so I gave him the benefit of his doubt. I plugged my phone in. It works with CarPlay.
18:54:46 But since when I got out of the, before I got out of the car I erased it with the phone still there. And sometimes that's a lot easier to do because it knows that it's CarPlay and you just say.
18:54:57 Dump everything on the dump everything on the on the car and it'll do so. But it should be inside of the menus of the of the car itself inside of the flat screen menu, there should be something there.
18:55:14 On my RAV4, it's under phones and you go in there and find it and you can tell it to forget about my phone and when it forgets it, it forgets all that stuff too.
18:55:26 And I'm sorry there's no easy answer to that one, but it's really not.
18:55:25 Thank you.
18:55:32 It's the car technology is not Apple's. By the way, I expect GM to lose a lot of sales because GM decided they're going to make their own And they're not going to support CarPlay or Android play.
18:55:45 Which is this dumb idea.
18:55:50 Well… Okay.
18:55:49 There used to be a joke. It used to be a joke that… If GM made computers.
18:55:58 They would… be good for six months or until the warranty wore out.
18:56:03 And… I really don't think GM's a good computer manufacturer.
18:56:12 Which is, and I'm being unkind here because I actually know the chairman of gm chairwoman, I should say. Very brilliant woman. I was very impressed when they made her the chairwoman because she was the first chair of GM in a long time that was actually an engineer.
18:56:29 She used to design cars and she's But in that particular case um she confided that it wasn't her decision, that was the board's decision so Some things you don't have control over.
18:56:45 Yes.
18:56:42 I have a question, Lawrence. How do you delete duplicates on your pictures.
18:56:53 If you have the current Mac operating system or iPad operating system.
18:56:58 Or iPhone operating system When you launch photos, one of the options off to the side is duplicates and it'll find duplicates and it'll offer to delete duplicates. You can also buy utilities that do this, but I haven't seen any of the utilities that you can
18:57:18 Buy that do as good a job as iPhone does. Because it'll show you the duplicates and say which one you want to get rid of. And if you just leave it up to its own devices.
18:57:28 It chooses the one at the higher resolution, the one with the best. It does a really good job. It automatically chooses what would be the my best pick. And I've looked at thousands of choices right now by this point.
18:57:42 And it hasn't made a wrong choice. So this one photo that I have.
18:57:47 I had 18 copies. And they were in various sizes and resolutions and it picked the highest resolution copy And says, I'm keeping this one and getting rid of the rest of them. I said.
18:57:57 Go for it. And each one of these images was 20 some megabytes so you know It saved quite a bit of space right there.
18:58:07 But the latest version of photos on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS doesn't just absolutely splendid job.
18:58:17 So if I'm on my photos, which I have 32,700 and 57.
18:58:25 Then what do I do to get that?
18:58:28 Are you looking at it on an iPhone or what? The answer is I have to go look at it.
18:58:31 On my iPhone.
18:58:35 Because it looks different on my My desktop machine. If you scroll down to the bottom There's a section that says utilities And one of the four options there is duplicates.
18:58:51 And in my case, it says I still have 621 duplicates but
18:58:57 Oh, yeah.
18:58:59 Over here. Get it up there. And it doesn't see me so it's going to see me flicker it out. But anyway, the… It does a really good job. So I highly recommend using duplicates. There are some utilities that will do this automatically. I do not trust
18:59:17 Automation enough to have it done automatically. So having me agree. Sorry, James.
18:59:29 This is my… brother-in-law calling and I'm going to Not answered.
18:59:39 So this says merge.
18:59:42 When they say merge, they basically mean merge take these, yes, it'll do it automatically.
18:59:46 Pick one. Okay.
18:59:49 Unless you went to override it.
18:59:56 Yeah, I have quite a few.
18:59:57 So.
19:00:01 Okay, any other questions?
19:00:04 Yes. Sorry.
19:00:03 Well, this goes back to, go ahead. What?
19:00:08 Yeah, I made a file on my computer for all my passwords And in Excel. And so how safe is it? I mean, nobody looks at my computer, but Could hackers get into my computer and retrieve that file?
19:00:29 So I shouldn't have it.
19:00:28 Yes. Now, what version, is this on your computer or your iPhone?
19:00:36 On my MacBook Pro. Two years old.
19:00:38 How new is your MacBook Pro? Can you run the latest operating system?
19:00:45 Yes.
19:00:45 The latest operating system has a built-in database for passwords called Passwords and um you should start using that.
19:00:55 Okay, okay, okay. I'll delete that file then, so.
19:01:00 I printed everything off. It's just so easy to look at it, you know.
19:01:00 Well… Well, the…
19:01:08 There was a… hack of one of the national labs like there's Lawrence Livermore lab and there's Oak Ridge National Lab and these national labs There was a hack of a national lab that, among other things, hacked 2,000 some computers and 118 Macs.
19:01:27 And I was curious how they could hack the Macs. And since I was a government computer security person.
19:01:35 I asked and the answer was on the Sun computer system used by the main admin.
19:01:42 He had a file called passwords. That was the first one the the hacker looked for and they grab that and that's how they hacked the Macs because They didn't really hack them. They just used the passwords that the admin supplied in this handily named
19:01:59 Document called Passwords.
19:02:02 Yeah, that's yeah okay okay I did abbreviate all the institutions and stuff, so only i know and i abbreviated some of the passwords too so only i know But I will delete the file. So I got them all credit and I'll delete it.
19:02:21 Yeah, the other thing to do is make sure you have long passwords. My standard is to have absolutely at a minimum 12 characters and 15 or better is even better.
19:02:32 And a lot of people say, well, I can't remember passwords that long.
19:02:36 Yeah.
19:02:45 Okay.
19:02:36 Anybody can remember a poem. And so how about stopping by Woods on a snowy evening by Robert Frost. Stopping space, buy space, wood space, on space, a… Spaces count as special characters. So you've got uppercase characters, lowercase characters, special characters.
19:02:53 Hey.
19:02:52 Oh, really?
19:02:55 All you need to do is remember to throw in a number. And as a number, I recommend the last two digits of the current year.
19:03:00 Okay.
19:03:04 And the reason why you do that is later on when you're looking at your password, you say, oh, I haven't changed that one since 2004. I probably should do something about that
19:03:14 Thank you for the info.
19:03:16 That's a good idea.
19:03:19 Okay. I have some dashboards.
19:03:18 Yeah.
19:03:19 Yeah, be lazy. And by the way, I have a bank. I had a bank.
19:03:26 That insisted that I could not use a space as a password. It gave me a list of five possible special characters that I could use for a password.
19:03:36 And I immediately changed banks. Because if you limit what people can use as a special character, you also greatly improve the chances of a hacker hacking your password.
19:03:49 Because there's just less combinations. So really bad idea if your bank limits what you can have in a password.
19:03:58 Right now, of all the US government agencies that do that, the only one that does it still consistently is the Department of Defense. And that's the end of my editorial on that but
19:04:14 I want to turn it over to the president because among other things, I have a question that she should address.
19:04:22 And that is, well, we did not have elections last year. And so we should think about that. The other thing is that We've had a number of people recently who wanted to come in late because they're eating dinner at 630. So my question is, you might want to ask people what time they want to have the meetings.
19:04:42 And do they want to have a coup d'etat and get rid of everybody and have new leadership.
19:04:50 Good evening, everybody. I see there's a few new names.
19:04:56 Lucy, Patrick, and Lisa. I believe I haven't seen your names. I welcome you to this evening's meeting.
19:05:07 And… In regards to redoing the not the membership but the elected official positions, I would not mind having somebody else do my position.
19:05:22 If somebody else would like to do it, not that there's a lot to do.
19:05:28 Wow, crickets.
19:05:32 Surprise, surprise, huh?
19:05:37 Well, it's not the end of the world, but there's a few times where it definitely has a conflict for me when I'm either out of town or can't get back. Like the last meeting, I totally forgot to Let Lawrence know that we were in Issaquah for a doctor's appointment. And I mean, it doesn't always have to happen on smug but for whatever reason, recently it has been.
19:06:01 So if you don't mind me just not being here, Lawrence, you're always here.
19:06:07 Well, not necessarily but not necessarily And the other thing is the meeting time.
19:06:14 Yeah, I wouldn't mind. Well, I shouldn't speak for everybody. Why don't we just take a vote?
19:06:23 Is 6.30 too early? Would you like to move it back? Technically, the meeting doesn't start until 7.
19:06:28 But I don't want to interrupt people's Dinner.
19:06:42 Yes.
19:06:35 Well, I… I have a comment. Sometimes I think it's too early but I can arrange my schedule because I always learn something when I listen to other people's questions. And then starting the meeting at seven We sometimes go beyond eight because there's so much to cover
19:06:55 Yeah. Yes.
19:06:57 So I personally don't think we should go I think we should start at seven, unless we did something like an afternoon.
19:07:06 If we did an afternoon, I can tell you right now, it would be It would be in the afternoon and uh it would probably start like at one or two.
19:07:18 The problem right now is logistical finding a place that has the resources we need to.
19:07:27 Actually do something. And also in person I agree.
19:07:35 I'm very reluctant to go to public events right now because I'm emotionally a little bit fragile.
19:07:44 And so if we did, it would be probably later on.
19:07:48 In the air. I also know that people don't necessarily like going out when it's dark.
19:07:54 In the wintertime. We might want to look for something like maybe May or something.
19:08:02 So are we talking starting the Q&A at 7? It's 7.30 and ending at 8.30. Is this what we're thinking?
19:08:15 That seems late to me.
19:08:18 Oh, wow.
19:08:17 Yes, I agree. I think the way it is now
19:08:20 That's too late for me. That's too late for me. I like what we're doing. 630 question and answer and a meeting start at 7. I even like to go earlier, like 5, 5.30, but… This is perfect.
19:08:33 Yes. I agree. I agree too. Perfect.
19:08:33 Yep, yep, agreed.
19:08:35 Yeah, I agree too. I think 630 is a good time.
19:08:40 I agree too. 6.30. For me.
19:08:41 It is…
19:08:42 And if I want to eat dinner I can just turn off my video.
19:08:48 Good idea.
19:08:49 That's what I do.
19:08:51 It was interesting for 27 years, something like that I did a… a computer lecturer in Virginia.
19:09:02 And it was at nine o'clock in the morning. And I did not live in Virginia. So I had to get up like at 530 in order to get there.
19:09:13 And people ask me why I did that. And I said it was because of the pay.
19:09:17 I wasn't paid. I wasn't paid.
19:09:23 It was just um A couple of times somebody else did it and they didn't like it. And so they asked me to come back and And they even had even assembled a gas fund for me Let's pay for the gas.
19:09:37 But I used it instead to buy a laptop for doing demonstrations that we had.
19:09:43 But… Finding a good time is difficult.
19:09:48 So… Yes.
19:09:49 And George have a question.
19:09:51 Can you hear me? Okay, we love the time right now.
19:09:53 Yes.
19:09:58 If it doesn't bother you, if we're still eating supper during the question and answer period and we just take our turn our camera off.
19:10:07 We love the time and we certainly appreciate whatever is convenient for you all.
19:10:13 It's valuable to us when we're able to join and Thank you. That's it.
19:10:20 Okay. As far as I can see, the consensus is to continue on as we are now.
19:10:27 Yes. Okay.
19:10:29 Yep.
19:10:27 Sounds good. Oh, and can you post the… Sign and shield.
19:10:31 Yes. Oh, yeah.
19:10:37 Yeah, so I'm going to do that as soon as my, when I lost the internet, I lost my um My… My… my note that I was going to post Okay, the sign-in sheet should appear at the bottom of the chat window.
19:10:58 And if you don't see a chat window. At the bottom of your menu bar, there's a thing that says chat and you click on that and the chat window pops up.
19:11:08 Oh, okay. And what next?
19:11:14 Yeah, there's no fun there. No file there yet.
19:11:16 There's no what?
19:11:20 At least I don't see it.
19:11:22 Just says everyone top message here there's no sign-in sheet.
19:11:28 Right. No sign of receipt.
19:11:29 But it's…
19:11:30 Yes, there is. I'm signing in right now.
19:11:33 We'll work.
19:11:33 Oh, unfortunately, I sent it to Chris instead of everybody.
19:11:38 Well, at the top net At the top, there's sign in.
19:11:39 Well, thank you.
19:11:42 Let's try that.
19:11:44 There's sign in at the top. Next to the icon that says recording Is that it?
19:11:50 No, that's a different thing. That's if we're doing a webinar for a class or something like that.
19:11:53 Okay.
19:11:57 I don't want to tell Zoom, who's in our meeting, I want to know I want the club to know.
19:12:06 Anyway, it should appear now. I made the mistake of only sending it to Chris.
19:12:18 Okay.
19:12:18 How did you do that?
19:12:15 So I'm signed in. Click on the link, lawrence charters to everyone in the chat window.
19:12:26 You see the chat window? Did you click chat to get the chat window?
19:12:32 I got a chat window.
19:12:33 Dad.
19:12:35 You know.
19:12:34 Okay. And then… Lawrence posted a link HTTPS link to the form to sign in.
19:12:40 And posted it again.
19:12:46 Https. Oh.
19:12:47 It's in the chat.
19:12:49 In the chat window.
19:12:52 Okay, I think I'm there. All right.
19:12:56 Should be a pale blue form that says smug at the top.
19:12:59 Yes.
19:13:06 Lawrence. One second. We have a treasury report.
19:13:00 Okay. Tonight's topic is utilities, and it was inspired by a bunch of yes Oh, I'm sorry.
19:13:12 It's okay just a short one. Thank you to those members who send in the dues for this year for 2025.
19:13:22 We had quite a few. And so our balance The account right now is $2,204.63.
19:13:33 Quite a bit of which I will be spending when I send in Some receipts.
19:13:40 Yeah. That was all.
19:13:44 I just wrote my check out. I'll put it in the mail tomorrow. I apologize.
19:13:45 Okay.
19:13:49 Totally forgot.
19:13:50 Wonderful. Thank you very much.
19:13:53 Tonight's topic is utilities It was inspired by several questions that people had about two utilities in particular.
19:14:03 But the other question that somebody had was, what is a utility?
19:14:09 When you use something like Zoom. Zoom is considered an application because it allows you to do something. In this case, it's a communications application And Pages allows you to write pages and novels and so on and so forth.
19:14:26 Numbers allows you to make spreadsheets. They produce something. So an application is used generally to produce something.
19:14:34 A utility is something that does a service for another program or it does a service for the computer itself.
19:14:42 And the two that people asked for, and I can't do too much about these because unfortunately Both of these utilities don't work terribly well if you're doing a Zoom session.
19:14:53 The two utilities they asked about were disk utility and migration assistant.
19:15:01 And I'm going to share my screen and we're going to talk about that.
19:15:07 So… As soon as I find out how to share the screen, I always forget.
19:15:16 Share and get rid of some things that I don't need.
19:15:20 The dues are $12 a year, aren't they? Oh, 24, yeah, yeah. Yeah, never mind. Sorry.
19:15:24 24.
19:15:31 This is a list of an incomplete list of utilities that are on the MAC.
19:15:37 And I was writing notes in here, which is why you see some stuff there. But anyway, there's a long list of utilities on the Mac.
19:15:44 And the two that people wanted to that were asked questions about were disk utility. Now, disk utility and if you… launch it, it looks like this.
19:15:57 Disk utility is used for preparing checking on… erasing, changing the format of disk drives and other storage media.
19:16:12 When you get a USB drive like the ones that I showed you.
19:16:16 Almost every single USB drive ever made is formatted in advance in something called 32 or fat 16 or 32 expat or something like that.
19:16:30 Fat stands for file allocation table And it's terminology from Microsoft.
19:16:37 The original IBM PC drive was formatted with FAT and then Fat16 was a more advanced version of that and Fat32 was a more advanced version of that.
19:16:48 And XFAT, which is currently used by the latest versions of Windows, is even more.
19:16:54 The difference for human beings, most mortal human beings is that on something that's formatted with fat, you can't put too many files on it.
19:17:04 Doesn't understand more than about 256 files. Whereas FAT32, you can put thousands of them on, but they can't be over a particular size.
19:17:13 And exFAT, which is the current version, you can put a lot of stuff on it.
19:17:17 And that's what disk utility does. I'm not actually going to format anything because With disk utility, when it's doing things, it tends to use a great deal of the computer's intention and quite often i'll lose Zoom.
19:17:33 But I just plugged in a usb drive And if I open up the USB drive, you can see that this is a 15 gigabyte USB drive. I said 32. It's only 15.
19:17:45 And if I click on it once and say get info.
19:17:49 You'll see that it is formatted with FAT32.
19:17:55 And why FAT32 instead of ex fat if you're trying to exchange files with somebody who has an older Windows computer, they can probably read FAT32 Whereas ex fat they have to have one of the newer PC operating systems. And if you want to share something with somebody on a PC,
19:18:14 You would use probably formatted as expat.
19:18:18 Well, what if you didn't want to format it as an expat?
19:18:22 Well, if you come down here to where it shows up.
19:18:26 I click on it. I can say erase and it gives me a choice of things that I can have it. I can have it as Mac OS extended. I can have it as expat or old fashion fat. So I have different things that I can exchange and format it at.
19:18:44 And if it's going to store Mac files on it to say to put in a bank vault, I want Mac OS Extended Journal.
19:18:51 If I'm going to store things to share with people who might have windows, I'm probably going to choose either expat or just leave it at fat 32. And that's not actually going to demo a demonstration because if I do.
19:19:05 It'll probably knock off. Zoom. So I'm going to eject that.
19:19:12 Maybe? Eject?
19:19:19 Sometimes it's difficult to eject fat things, so I'm going to not pay too much attention to it.
19:19:25 There is a nice page on Apple's support site called Disk Utility Users Guide. It's got a table of contents tells you all kinds of things you can do about it. With disk utility. And I'll send that out in notes.
19:19:42 But if you want to go there in the meantime. I'll paste that into the chat.
19:19:47 If I can find the chat window. I don't know where the chat window went.
19:19:54 It's here someplace.
19:20:00 I'm not going to look for it. But I'll send it out later.
19:20:06 And here are some slides on disk utility.
19:20:11 You can have a different kind of view in disk utility in terms of what you're looking at and It shows you how the drive is divided up. Your hard drive is actually divided up into various sections.
19:20:23 And if you had multiple drives, they would appear in a chain coming down here.
19:20:27 So you can see what's on your machine. It shows you how much used space is on the drive.
19:20:33 How much is free space, tells you the total size of this particular drive, which is a half terabyte.
19:20:40 And what it's used by, depending upon what you're doing.
19:20:47 And that's the initial opening view. The most common thing you use disk utility for are two things one is Erasing a disk and the other one is for checking the health of a disk.
19:21:01 If you erase it, you click on the drive, you say erase, it pops up with a menu asking what format you want to have it and you have it erase it.
19:21:10 One thing to note If you erase a drive, you will never see anything on it again.
19:21:17 Now that's both good news and bad news. If you want to erase a drive, that's exactly what you want. But if you accidentally erase a drive with the data on it and you don't have it anywhere else, it's gone forever.
19:21:29 But that's one of the things you can do. You click on erase, point it at the drive and you can erase it.
19:21:34 The other thing that's used for is disk first aid. This, you pointed at a drive you say this first aid.
19:21:43 And it starts checking the drive. When it's checking the drive, it does two things. One is it actually looks for corrupt files on the drive.
19:21:52 And the other thing it does is it checks the catalog of the drive.
19:21:57 Store something under drive, especially a drive that you've been using a while, you might store a 20 megabyte pixel, a 20 megabyte picture And it may not have a space big enough for all 20 megabytes.
19:22:12 And it'll just go out with the first available space that it finds, put some of it there, next available space, put some of it there. Next available space, put some of it there. So that 20 megabyte picture could be in like 10 pieces or even 30 pieces scattered across the dry.
19:22:29 Howard puts it back together so that you can see it is called the catalog.
19:22:32 And if your catalog is corrupted, that's really bad. And disc first aid checks the catalog and can fix the catalog.
19:22:42 If it can't fix lead catalog, then the next thing you do is you back up everything off that drive They erased the drive and try and use the drive again, or you replace the drive.
19:22:52 So the first aid is very commonly used utility for checking the healthier drive. And I would give you a demonstration except that I'm positive that would knock us offline.
19:23:04 When you having it check the drive, it doesn't really tell you what it's doing.
19:23:08 Unless you click this little triangle that's right next to where it says details. If you click that, it drops this down and it tells you what it's doing. In this case, it said it found a problem And it was repaired successfully.
19:23:25 Because if it can repair it, it will. And then after it says it's repaired, be paranoid and sit and run First aid again, because sometimes it says it's repaired it, but it really hasn't.
19:23:39 And if you really can't repair it, you probably want to replace the dry.
19:23:44 If you click this button that says show all devices, it'll show all the different drives you have.
19:23:50 My computer that I'm using right now has one, two, three, four five drives that actually contain
19:24:01 Nine drives because I have them rated. But you just see a list of them running down the side.
19:24:08 And I'll send out a link to the documentation because Disciputility is extremely powerful.
19:24:15 And the thing that I use it most for is erasing thumb drives and formatting thumb drives and checking on hard drive.
19:24:23 Health. But this is something that everybody should learn how how it works.
19:24:28 One of the most important utilities on the Mac. The next one that I wanted to talk about is migration assistant. And migration assistant there's a documentation for that on Apple's site telling you about migration assistant This is another thing that I cannot.
19:24:50 Demonstrate because if I launch migration assistant
19:25:01 If I launch Migration Assistant. You'll see that the first thing it says it does, if I say continue, it'll quit.
19:25:11 All other applications. Now, I have a question for you.
19:25:16 Why would migration equipment quit everything?
19:25:22 Doesn't want you to change anything.
19:25:22 That's a good question.
19:25:25 If you're migrating everything on one computer to another computer. You really don't want your computer to be doing anything else at the same time, such as creating new documents.
19:25:36 Because that makes it really hard to migrate them. So the first thing it does is it quits all other applications so they won't interfere with the migration process.
19:25:45 And so that's what I'm going to do because I don't want to knock off the zoom but That's the first thing it does.
19:25:54 And migration equipment assistant is really powerful if you're setting up a new Mac.
19:26:00 Or if you're repurposing an old Mac to a new purpose, migration assistant saves an awful lot of time and headache.
19:26:09 And I have some screenshots of that. First thing it does.
19:26:17 Is ask you a question. Are you going from a Mac, a time machine backup, or a startup disk?
19:26:22 And that's one question. If you're going one of those, then you choose that. If you're coming from a Windows PC, you're doing another. Or if you're migrating to another machine.
19:26:35 So to use migration assistant, among other things, you have to have two machines.
19:26:40 One of them is a Mac that you have that you want things moved from. And the other one is you want the Mac that you're moving things to.
19:26:47 You start a migration assistant on your new machine right after you've bought it and before you've done anything else. And you say, I'm going to get it from a Mac or time machine backup or the startup disk of some other machine.
19:27:02 And if you're doing it for Windows PC, I've never done this. One of the questions I was asked in December, I think.
19:27:08 Was how do you migrate from a Windows machine? I've never done it. And in December, my Windows PC committed suicide. So I can't even try.
19:27:20 But when you started up Migration Assistant on a Mac. You start it up on your new machine and you say you're going to get it from one of these other sources. And if one of the other sources is another Mac.
19:27:31 Then you start up Migration Assistant on your old machine and you say to another Mac And they sit there and they talk to each other and they exchange little messages and you have to type in a number to make sure that nobody's trying to hijack it.
19:27:45 The easiest way to do it is say you start it from another machine or time machine backup If you back up your startup disk on your on your desktop machine or your MacBook, if you back it up using Time Machine every day and you know you haven't done anything else new.
19:28:05 The easiest way to do a migration is just to Take your backup disk, plug it into your new machine, say, I'm doing it from time machine. It goes out and finds the backup.
19:28:15 And just starts having a blast. Copying things. A couple of things to note.
19:28:21 If you're doing it from one Mac to another, they have to be able to talk to each other.
19:28:27 Which means they have to be on the same network plugged into the same network. They have to be plugged into the same Wi-Fi.
19:28:34 Or they have to be physically connected by using a a uh Thunderbolt cable or an ethernet cable or some kind of cable.
19:28:44 The first time I ever used Time Machine was when it first came out.
19:28:48 And I wanted to give it a really, really hard test.
19:28:51 So I had it back up from Kathleen's imac to where a new macbook over the air using the air early version of Wi-Fi.
19:29:01 Now, that Mac that she had at that time only had a 20 gig drive and there's about 10 gigs on it.
19:29:06 So how long did it take over Wi-Fi? Well, this is the old Wi-Fi, which was very slow. It took 24 hours.
19:29:14 So you need two machines. Or you need one machine and your time machine backup.
19:29:21 And you need time. And the more stuff you have that you're transferring from one to the other, the longer it's going to take.
19:29:28 Something else to consider is that… That's one reason why it's the simplest backup possible is to use a time machine backup.
19:29:40 Just plug the time machine drive into your new machine. And tell it to have at it.
19:29:46 If your machine is so old that it doesn't have the same kind of connectors, like all the Macs today have USB-C connectors and your old machine might have a USB-A connector on your on your little drive and you can buy adapters on Amazon that can connect in a usba
19:30:13 Plug to a usbc Or you can go out and get a drive dock. And if you have a Mac you have a MacBook, I highly recommend that you get a drive dock. Drive docs range anywhere from like 20 to
19:30:27 60 bucks depending on how fancy you are. I have several drive docks. My new machine, which is a new Mac Mini.
19:30:35 Has a… a drive doc that I have just for it. And why? And the reason is that it's so small and I don't want to crawl behind it. So I stuck a drive dock in so I can access things from in front without having to crawl behind it.
19:30:52 But you want to have at least two machines and you want to have some time.
19:30:58 The next thing after the things are connected, they'll say It'll ask which account are you doing and all kinds of things like that.
19:31:06 Well, this particular machine is owned by Danny Rico. Do you want to transfer the applications? Do you want to do other files, the system network information?
19:31:15 Which is things that'll back up things like Wi-Fi passwords and so on and so forth.
19:31:20 Check all those things if that's what you want to do.
19:31:24 Something to note, if you have multiple accounts on a machine.
19:31:29 Check all the ones that you want to move. If you're not sure, check it anyway and move it anyway.
19:31:35 It's easier to throw something away than it is to try and pull it on later.
19:31:43 And then that was a different thing entirely. The next thing to do is you're just going to have to wait.
19:31:52 When it's done, it'll And it'll tell you by rebooting the machine and when you bring it back up, it'll look like your old machine.
19:32:00 It's… as simple as that. You might get asked other questions like.
19:32:06 I already have an account on this machine. Like for example, if your name is Mary.
19:32:12 And your username on your old machine was Mary and you set up your new machine.
19:32:16 And you called yourself mary and you say, transfer Mary onto the new machine and say, which Mary do I want?
19:32:25 And you say, oh, oh, copy everything from the old machine that's called Mary and forget about the fact that there's Mary over here.
19:32:31 So it might ask you a few other questions just to make sure that it knows what it's doing.
19:32:36 It's a very powerful utility. I know a lot of people who have tried to transfer things manually.
19:32:44 And if you do it manually, you'll forget something important. And you'll be upset. This is by far the easiest way to do it.
19:32:53 I once set up
19:32:58 70 classroom computers in about three hours using micro using migration assistant.
19:33:06 I had one master copy and I went to every single machine, plugged it in.
19:33:10 It said use migration assistant, start it up on one machine, start up on another machine i had 40-some drives but some set it up and when I was done in a couple hours, I had a whole All the computers in the school were all set up and running.
19:33:28 But it does take time and you can't interrupt it. So you might as well go to oak table and have lunch or something because it'll take a while.
19:33:39 Go to Oak Table and also visit Costco and then go home because it could take a while.
19:33:45 And I'll send out the documentation link for it. It's not that difficult. It sounds worse than that.
19:33:53 Than it is. Any questions about that?
19:34:01 No questions.
19:34:02 Well, I had a question about the disk utility When you format the disk.
19:34:06 Yes.
19:34:10 And it erases the data Does it do a secure erase like the government
19:34:18 It can if you wish it to. If there's an option for that.
19:34:19 Oh, it does?
19:34:24 It can if you wish it to. I will warn you, though.
19:34:28 That a secure erase of a terabyte drive takes just as much time as it would take to completely fill the terabyte drive.
19:34:38 Oh.
19:34:37 Which means that if you wanted to fill up that drive.
19:34:44 With zeros or with a pattern of ones and zeros It'll take however long that takes.
19:34:50 If you need to give this drive You know, you're giving away this drive and you want to do it in a hurry.
19:34:57 This is not the way to do it because it could take hours and hours and hours and hours.
19:35:03 Depends upon how fast your machine is and how fast the drive is.
19:35:04 Okay. Right.
19:35:07 The faster the drive, the faster the machine, the faster it'll get it done. You have a slow drive and a slow machine, it's going to take a long Time.
19:35:19 I will give you a hint, though, of a fast way to do it.
19:35:17 Right. Thank you.
19:35:23 Yeah, go ahead.
19:35:24 Start to do a secure erase. And after having it done for an hour or so.
19:35:31 Quit disk utility, the drive will be toast.
19:35:37 Ooh. Really?
19:35:40 Yeah.
19:35:41 If you quit disk utility in the middle
19:35:45 It'll erase so much data that there's no way to recover the rest.
19:35:50 Ah, gotcha. Um…
19:35:52 Unless you're NSA, you know they can They can do it. The FBI. If you're a drug lord, don't do that. If you're a drug lord, let it complete it.
19:36:00 Right.
19:36:02 For most mortals, that's fine. I will also tell you that for some things like us, solid state drives.
19:36:10 Secure race doesn't really work. For a solid straight drive, the best way to erase it is to remove the drive from the machine and break it.
19:36:18 Oh, really? Okay. Interesting.
19:36:18 They're quite brittle. You just sit there and snap them.
19:36:25 One last quick question. When you buy a new Mac. Laptop, doesn't it already come formatted as extended journal?
19:36:38 If you buy a new Mac laptop today, no, it does not. It's formatted AFPS.
19:36:45 Apple. Actually, what is it called?
19:36:50 Apfs. Apple.
19:36:55 I don't remember. It's Apple File System. It's a new one. Hfs is the old one and Macs haven't come formatted with that way with that since Like 10, 13 or something. It's been quite a while.
19:37:08 They're now with this new, more advanced operating system. I'll give you an example. I had a I have a drive that's got a drive 17,000 photographs in it in one, not in one drive.
19:37:22 One folder has 17,000. Photos in it. With HFS plus or whatever the, you know, the older operating system It would take an hour to display the contents of that folder. I would just have this white box and I just wait there for an hour to show it.
19:37:42 With the new one, and I can actually, if I can remember why I have it.
19:37:45 I'll show you security clips. And this is going to take… Laidi.
19:37:56 Oh, it's taking longer than I thought it would.
19:38:03 I mean, I'm not going to bother. Oh, okay. That has 49,423 items in it. So basically twice as many as I had in the other one. So it would have taken at least two hours to just show you that file listing.
19:38:19 So the new operating system is much, much, much faster.
19:38:25 So when you get a like a new backup drive like you would format it with AFS.
19:38:34 Yes, if you have a new machine that if you're running anything after 10 I don't remember when they made the change.
19:38:43 But we have a browser here with Sierra so we can look it up.
19:38:56 Apfs. Came out in 2017.
19:39:04 With… Yeah, so it's been a while.
19:39:02 Okay. So my laptop is 2023. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
19:39:14 Oh, go ahead.
19:39:13 However, if you're… Yes. If you're formatting a drive to give to somebody else and you don't know what they have, yeah, you want to use HFS+.
19:39:25 Because if you don't know what they have, given something that's a common denominator.
19:39:30 Unless you want to frustrate them. Does somebody else had a question?
19:39:36 Yes.
19:39:36 Yes. Would you repeat, Lawrence? Kindly what you said about being on the same network.
19:39:44 Oh, you want to be on the same network. So if you're on your home network and everything's attached using ethernet cables.
19:39:51 Then you're on the same network. If it's on Wi-Fi, you want to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
19:39:57 As an example, though, with Wi-Fi. Wi-fi gets a lot of traffic from a lot of things that you don't necessarily control.
19:40:05 My Wi-Fi at home, I have the TV on it. I have my Apple Watch. I have my phone. I have my iPad. I have the computers.
19:40:12 If you're doing it on Wi-Fi and you're doing and you're transferring things from one computer to the other via Wi-Fi.
19:40:19 Definitely go to lunch because you don't want to be watching a streaming movie And using up your bandwidth.
19:40:27 When you're trying to transfer stuff from one computer to another.
19:40:30 It just gets, it'll just make things longer unless it's a really long movie and you want to watch like Russian version of War and Peace, which is seven hours long. You know, that's a nice long movie.
19:40:46 I watched the Russian version of War and Peace in Russian.
19:40:46 Thank you.
19:40:50 When i was when i was In college?
19:40:56 It was over two nights. It was an interesting experience. Fantastic film.
19:41:02 Particularly if you like Tolstoy. Any other questions?
19:41:09 Do you speak Russian and could you understand it directly?
19:41:11 Oh, no, no, no. I was reading subtitles. I know. I listened to it and so I could hear their emotions and I could hear the nice Tchaikovsky music and all that.
19:41:21 But no, I read the subtitles. I like watching foreign films in the original language.
19:41:29 Because when they debit, they get rid of the rest of the soundtrack. And so the horses sound strange and, you know, it just doesn't doesn't work the same.
19:41:40 Now, I have a lot of other utilities that I could cover. And so I'm going to just basically do it in alphabetical order.
19:41:49 The first one is activity monitor. Which is another thing that people And why is everything showing up on this wrong screen? It's because I have two strains, that's why.
19:42:01 Activity Monitor, which is on your Mac, and trying to find some of these utilities could be a challenge.
19:42:10 Under applications, there is a folder. If you tell it to show everything alphabetically.
19:42:15 There's a folder down at the bottom called utilities And Activity Monitor is in there.
19:42:22 And this is what activity monitor is. It shows every single application that is running on your computer at the same time. And a lot of these are ones that you don't see.
19:42:33 For example, root is running a whole bunch of stuff. If you look at this, it says root is running on just a whole bunch of stuff.
19:42:42 And then it's some other things that you don't know, network, Apple events and so on and so forth.
19:42:47 And it takes a while before I actually get to things that are run by me.
19:42:55 So… That's what Activity Monitor does. It shows everything that's running on your computer.
19:43:01 And you can look at it by percentage CPU usage right now it says 36% of my task right now is being run by a kernel task.
19:43:09 It doesn't say what that is. And it's been running for 13 days.
19:43:18 34 minutes, 37.15 seconds, whatever that is. But it's using up a lot of CPU time.
19:43:26 And things like, what's the one that… There's one that's called MD, which I don't see right this second.
19:43:36 Which is the indexing task force spotlight is running constantly and uses up a lot of things.
19:43:40 But if you think your machine is running slow, launch Activity Monitor, click on percent TCPU, and just see what's using the most task and right now it says that Zoom is using the most Most CPU time, Windows servers also using a bunch of it. And if you look at this, the percent of CPU, you'll notice that
19:44:00 47 plus 42, but 37, I'm already over 100%. How can I be over 100%?
19:44:12 Multi-cores.
19:44:10 Any idea? Yeah, I have multi-cores. This window over here, which is also part of Activity Monitor.
19:44:18 You can say what you want it to do. One of them is you can see CPU. Well, that's cpu memory Where's the chorus? Oh, here are the chorus. This has multiple cores.
19:44:29 The CPU has multiple cores. So I can be over 100%. I could be If I got over like 500%, things really bogged down. So you don't want to have all these things pegged out.
19:44:41 But this shows how much activity I am getting off of various cores.
19:44:46 And this is showing the efficiency of the cores over time.
19:44:52 And you'll notice that they start here that's because it's showing you the history since I started Activity Monitor.
19:45:00 But you can do things like you can have it sort things by alphabetical. You can have it sort by user over here in the user one by CPU percentage, by CPU time, what's been used the most.
19:45:16 By the number of threads the number of threads has to do with how many paths is something soaking up and right now Zoom is soaking up 134 threads, which means it's greedy.
19:45:30 And the GPU time, how much of the video processor is it using?
19:45:36 And the big videos processor right now is Windows Server. Windows Server is the one that runs all of the windows And Zoom is only using 2.9%.
19:45:49 Another way that it will do things, this is just looking at CPU, but also what's using the most memory The most memory right now is being used by a compression algorithm to compress things.
19:46:01 Bz is a type of compression. Zoom is using BZ to compress the video stream and it's using eight gigs of memory Almost nine gigs of memory. So the number of memory, the amount of energy, what is using the most energy.
19:46:19 And the most energy is being used by Safari, which is using up quite a bit of energy, but it's been open a lot.
19:46:28 How much disk resources are being used and what is using up the most?
19:46:32 The number of bytes written. It's being written by various and sundry things. Zoom is using a bunch of bytes because it's writing the video stream that I'm saving to disk and how much network space is, how much network activity is being used
19:46:50 And uh Zoom is using up a lot of network bandwidth as well.
19:46:54 So you can get CPU activity, memory, energy, disk utility, disk space space being read and written and network read and written.
19:47:07 All from Activity Monitor. And this shows basically the amount of how hard is the my mac working? It's not working very hard How much CPU time is being used. And again, I got a lot of CPUs, so they're not really terribly
19:47:23 Text. And this shows the text shows it broken down by CPU without the history.
19:47:29 So that's what Activity Monitor does. Very useful thing to happen.
19:47:35 If you see your machine is running really slow when you start up and you want to know why.
19:47:40 Launch Activity Monitor and find out. I use Activity and Monitor enough that it's actually stuck into my doc down at the bottom.
19:47:49 Yes.
19:47:49 Kill a process from Activity Monitor? Can you kill one of the processes?
19:47:53 Pardon me? Yes, you can kill a process from Activity Monitor. I didn't show you how to do that because it's a really dangerous thing.
19:48:03 Unless you know what it's doing, you don't want to do that. But if you have a program that's being stuck.
19:48:09 You can actually kill it using an activity monitor, but you can also go over to the finder And you can go down to say force quit And if I click on BB Edit and say force quit, it'll quit it.
19:48:22 You really want to do that as a last resort. Because when you quit it, it doesn't allow the program to gracefully quit things. So if BB Arnett was in the middle of writing something.
19:48:34 What is written will be corrected. It won't be complete. Generally speaking.
19:48:43 Right.
19:48:40 You don't want to. You don't want to force critical things, but if you absolutely positively have to, you can kill things with activity monitor.
19:48:49 And you can also use it with the force quit option but Anytime you force quit something, the very first thing you should do is restart your machine.
19:48:59 And launch disk utility to see if something's corrupted on the disk drive.
19:49:04 Because first quading things is not a good thing to do.
19:49:11 Next thing I'm going to talk about, but I'm not really going to talk too much about, is just because it's alphabetical.
19:49:16 Airport utility, if you have an old Apple airport And an airport is a combination of time machine backup storage It's also a network and it's also a network Wi-Fi router, and it's also print server. All those things you can do with
19:49:34 With airports. And Apple doesn't make them anymore. And that's a real shame. But I still have two two that are healthy and I'm going to use them until they die.
19:49:44 But that's what airport utility is for. You don't think of it as a… probably is a utility, but the app store is a utility So for example.
19:49:56 You can use it to find things to do things for you.
19:50:00 Convert JPEG. So I type in convert JPEG and it gives me a list of tools that will convert JPEGs. And this one here says it'll The default storage now for apple photos that you take with your phone is HEIC, which stands for high efficiency something or other.
19:50:24 I don't know. They're smaller than JPEGs. The trouble is if you send it to your friends who have PC, they probably can't read them. So how do you convert your HEIC.
19:50:36 Photos into JPEGs and this utility says it'll do that and other ones will do that.
19:50:41 But you got to notice the fine print. In-app purchases, a lot of these will be in demo mode. So you can download it for free, but then you want to use it.
19:50:49 Charges your money. And so you want to You want to be a little bit wary about that. But if you have a problem and you can't figure out how to do it on your computer, just launch the app store and go looking for something to solve that problem.
19:51:04 You want to edit it. Pdf and you can go out and buy a copy of Acrobat, which costs a lot.
19:51:11 Or PDF gear says it'll do it. Pdf Reader Pro will do it.
19:51:16 All kinds of things will write PDFs. So, and preview, by the way, will write PBS, previews on your machine already.
19:51:25 But think of the App Store as actually an app for finding other apps.
19:51:31 Because that's exactly what it is.
19:51:33 I have something to interject about HEIC and JPEG. I recently needed to send a photo And of course, from my phone took it to the Mac and then i just changed it. I didn't have to get an app to do it. I just changed it to JPEG so I could send it.
19:51:52 How did you change it?
19:51:53 In an email, I just, you know, just eliminated The HEIC and changed that.
19:52:02 I erased. Well, it worked. It worked.
19:52:02 No, that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't do well Whoever had it on the other end had something they could read HEIC because JPEG and HEIC are not the same thing at all.
19:52:13 And if you change the extension, that does not change the format.
19:52:14 Huh.
19:52:17 And if you try that with somebody who has an older machine, they will have a file that they can open.
19:52:23 Oh, okay. All right. I stand corrected. Thank you.
19:52:27 However, if you bring up I need a picture.
19:52:36 Pictures. Crean saver.
19:52:41 Grab this one.
19:52:46 Preview is also a utility that can change it. So here's a It's in JPEG. You come up here to save file export and it gives you a choice of jpeg HEIC.
19:53:00 Pdf, PNG, and TIFF. So you can do it.
19:53:05 Preview. Trouble is with preview, you can only do it once at a time and most of those utilities I showed you on the App Store can do whole batches at once.
19:53:15 Which is, it'll save you a lot of time that way.
19:53:19 Photos can do that as a whole batch at once. So you go into photos select like 200 photos and say export and say that you're one of the JPEGs and it'll turn them into JPEGs. But there are also people who have, they have specialized utilities for doing this because
19:53:34 Photographers They have different needs. But just think of the App Store as being a as a utility for finding Other utilities or other programs.
19:53:50 One that you're not going to use, so I'm not going to spend a lot of trouble on it.
19:53:55 Time on it is automated. Automator is a program that allows you to create other programs. And what it does is it creates scripts that allow you to change the behavior of other types of things. Like you can have a script
19:54:11 To do different things in calendar, do a script to do different things with image capture and so on and so forth.
19:54:18 I have a script that I made using automator, it's not really called automated, but on the iphone i have a script that when I plug my iPhone in, it says food And when I unplug my iPhone from power, it says food.
19:54:36 Why do I do that? Because I thought I had the iPhone plugged in to power and it wasn't it was just slightly off. And so I thought it was charging overnight and it wasn't.
19:54:47 And this annoyed me. So I've created a little program that uses the voices on the iPhone to say whether or not it either getting power or lost power.
19:54:59 And I did that using the The same kind of utility that's on the Mac. But that's what Automator does. It allows you to change programs doing from doing one thing into doing something else. And I'm not going to spend any more time on it because most of you will never do that.
19:55:16 But a lot of you probably have used calculator. And you know that you can use a calculator to do things like have a basic calculator and you can tell it to Do all kinds of things but some, ah, I didn't mean to close it.
19:55:36 You can have a basic calculator. This is a basic calculator, but you can have a scientific calculator which has a whole bunch of fancy mathematical functions you can have.
19:55:47 You can have a programmer's calculator that, among other things allows you to write things in hexadecimal If you really cared. But the one that's really cold that most people don't know about is the uh Go back to basic.
19:56:03 The convert one. So I'm going to be going to Great Britain in uh in… May, at the end of May.
19:56:15 And it would be nice to know How many American dollars?
19:56:22 Us dollars. And what that'll be in.
19:56:28 British pounds. British pounds. Okay, so say i go and i get $200 American money and i could convert it the exchange rate today, because it looks it up today, is 158.56 pounds for $200.
19:56:50 This currency calculator is built into the same calculator that comes with your Mac.
19:56:55 And it's been there for ages and ages and ages. And most people don't know that but you connect convert other things than that. You can convert angles, area.
19:57:05 Energy. Force, fuel, all kinds of things.
19:57:09 All kinds of different conversions that it'll do. The only trick is you have to remember to undo the conversion to other at least the next time you try to do straight math it'll you're trying to calculate your your bill at Costco and it comes up and it says it's 158 pounds which
19:57:28 Won't do you much good. But calculators really very, very flexible. It can do a lot.
19:57:36 And I highly recommend that you get familiar with it.
19:57:40 You may not think of this as a utility, but I use it so much that it also is in my menu bar and that's dictionary.
19:57:50 Say you want to have a you want to invent a new word One of the best ways to invent a new word is with a prefix. So if you type in pseudo.
19:58:02 It will list. All the english that it knows about that include the word pseudo. In this way, you can see what's already taken in create your own. The dictionary that it uses, and it says so in the about box, if you come up
19:58:17 Why isn't it telling me that? It used to tell you that.
19:58:22 Ah, it's Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford Dictionary of English. Uk edition, Polish Dictionary, all kinds of discs. These are all dictionaries that it uses.
19:58:36 The ones that I've checked are two Japanese dictionaries New Oxford American Dictionary, New Oxford American Writers Thesaurus, and the Apple Dictionary.
19:58:45 So you can, you know, what is what is a… Another word for fool And you'll see that there are all kinds of of cinnamon for cinnamon fool in English.
19:59:02 Or you can go to the… Apple dictionary and apple dictionary Somebody says, I have an iPod and you don't know what an iPod is. You type in iPod.
19:59:12 And it tells you what an iPod is. It's a line of portable music players And you click on iPod Touch and it tells you what iPod touches and There's Apple Dictionary, English Thesaurus.
19:59:27 And I added the Japanese dictionary, but you can also add Japanese dictionaries, German dictionaries.
19:59:32 And if you haven't used dictionary, it really is a really, really, really useful Utility.
19:59:45 And how much time do we have? We have about one more minute.
19:59:51 So I'm going to switch it back and allow you to ask questions.
19:59:57 Um the There are a whole bunch of utilities. And if you looked at the sign-in sheet, you'll see that I call this Utilities part one, because we can probably do two or three more on just various utilities. These are things that are
20:00:11 That come with your Mac. That allow you to do things that you probably didn't know you could do.
20:00:18 Any questions?
20:00:23 I have a question about uninstalling programs.
20:00:29 Okay.
20:00:30 Okay, so when you go on the web and you look to see how do you completely uninstall a program, they say go throw it in the trash, you know, go into applications and throw it in the trash. And they're saying that that's good.
20:00:45 And it's not. There's lots of other things, not like there is on windows but But still, it's not getting everything.
20:00:54 Yeah.
20:00:53 And so without buying the utility to do it, how can I uninstall things where it gets all parts of it?
20:01:03 I have mentioned this utility before, but I'll mention it. Again, because I really like it and you can't beat the price It's called…
20:01:16 App cleaner. And App Cleaner is made by a tiny little company.
20:01:25 Free soft, okay. As the name suggests, it's free.
20:01:34 Okay, so I have… hep cleaner and it doesn't work.
20:01:38 And I also have an old operating system. So if I download it, it probably won't re-download it, it probably won't work for my old operating system.
20:01:49 Well, here's the free soft website and you should see there's version 3.6.8 for Mac OS Mojave up to Sequoia.
20:01:58 Up to High Sierra, 10.10 to 10.12, 10.6 to 10.9. If you're running something older than 10.6, then that's probably… bad thing right there. But app cleaner.
20:02:09 Yeah, it's not that old
20:02:11 App Cleaner is free. You just download it. Your Mac will say, hey, do you really want to use this thing that's coming from an unknown source?
20:02:20 And you say, sure, but let me find something like Bitdefender.
20:02:23 Mm-hmm.
20:02:26 Bitdefender is a… utility for scanning for viruses And I say allow.
20:02:34 And you'll see that it's going to get rid of Bitdefender, but it also looks at this preferences folder.
20:02:39 Calm, Bitdefender, blah, blah, blah. That's an application scripts com It's going to look in library containers, com, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's going to look in Receipts, something rather blah, blah, blah, all these different places to get rid of things.
20:02:57 Perfect.
20:02:59 App Cleaner I don't know if anybody does a better job, especially not for the price of free.
20:03:06 Yeah, very good. Thank you. I will re-up it.
20:03:14 Okay. Do we have other questions?
20:03:20 Yeah, what they tell you is that they say basically that you have so much disk space now You just reach out and grab the application, throw it in the trash that's probably It's fine. But there are some things that are a little bit complicated. For example, I have a utility called
20:03:38 I don't remember the name of the utility, Tech Tool Pro.
20:03:43 And Tech Tool Pro comes in three pieces. It comes in a daemon, and a daemon is a program that resides in memory and just sits there waiting for something to happen.
20:03:52 Like a demon. Only you don't have to call this one. It's already called It has a control panel, which is a separate piece of software, and then it has the application itself.
20:04:02 When you install Tech Tool Pro, it installs a control panel, it installs the daemon and it installs the application If you just throw the application away.
20:04:13 A couple of things happen. One is you can't empty the trash because it says it can't because tech tool is running.
20:04:20 Well, it's not running. You threw it in the trash. You only threw part of it in the trash. You didn't throw the control panel away. You didn't throw away the demon.
20:04:29 With AppCleaner, you can get everything.
20:04:33 Well, I have a problem. I have a program that I use called Creality Print for 3D printing and and uh They update it.
20:04:44 And it keeps wanting to go back and grab the previous versions of previous versions settings and stuff and and uh I wanted to do a fresh install so that it doesn't do that.
20:04:57 Yeah. Well, applicant should be able to take care of that for you.
20:05:01 Cool.
20:05:04 Other questions? We have a choice next time. We can go through some more utilities or we can come up with a new topic.
20:05:17 And basically the topics that I've been going with are ones that people suggest.
20:05:23 So I'll go with either a continuation of utilities, which is easy for me.
20:05:27 Or we'll go with a new topic that actually might require that I do some you know, research.
20:05:35 Can you put a list of the utilities that you have considered but couldn't get to tonight. Can you post that on the website and then we can say which ones we're really interested in?
20:05:47 Sure.
20:05:51 I have a question about the photograph that you were showing of the waterfall.
20:05:57 Something you took something And where was it?
20:05:59 Oh, that wasn't a waterfall. That wasn't a waterfall. That was a… Nebula was an astronomical picture.
20:06:02 Oh.
20:06:07 Oh. Lovely.
20:06:11 Actually, I didn't actually look at it, but I think it's a yeah it's a It's a time lapse of, actually that's the Milky Way. That's a time lapse of the Milky Way.
20:06:20 I thought it was a nebula. I wasn't looking at that closely. I was much more interested in converting it.
20:06:29 I enjoyed it.
20:06:29 Most of my desktop photos are either pictures I took or there are pictures that I swipe from either know of, who I used to work for or NASA, who I Sometimes they thought I worked for them, but really I didn't.
20:06:45 You know, NASA's got a whole bunch of publicity and they're famous and so on and so forth more than two thirds of the people who work at NASA are are not employed by NASA. They're either contractors or they work for other government agencies.
20:07:00 They're very fond of borrowing people.
20:07:06 And they tried number of times to borrow me but I stayed with no. I liked what I was doing at No.
20:07:19 Other questions tonight?
20:07:23 Yeah, as a topic for next time I guess 18 iOS 18.4 will be out.
20:07:31 By then, and would it be worth going over any new features that we're expecting?
20:07:37 Sure.
20:07:37 I suspect that it's basically going to be bug fixes and tweaks to how it uses Apple intelligence.
20:07:45 There's been a lot. I read this long article in the Washington Post several weeks ago.
20:07:51 About the people are underwhelmed with Apple intelligence. And that brought up a comment that Mr. Lockwood made talking about this.
20:08:04 A Chinese program called Deep Seat. And I send out an email message talking about deep sea.
20:08:10 If you go to Apple's website and you can go to trying to find deep seek is a little bit of an issue because it's only written in Chinese, but you can find it.
20:08:20 When you were reading those applications and what all wonderful things it does and how much it costs and so on and so forth.
20:08:26 Scroll down to the bottom to where it's talking about privacy and security.
20:08:30 And basically it says that DeepSeek wants everything, all the information they can get off of your machine And they won't reveal any of it to anybody except for everybody who wants to pay for them.
20:08:43 To ask for it or the Chinese government, which doesn't have to pay for it.
20:08:47 Deepseak was actually paid for. By the Chinese government. So would I use deep sea? No.
20:08:55 Why is Apple kind of lackadaisical in their rollout of Apple intelligence?
20:09:02 Because their first priority is to have as much of the Apple intelligence, the AI work as possible done on your machine.
20:09:11 Whether your machine's an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac.
20:09:15 You'll notice that in the current versions of of Macs, the minimum amount of memory available now is 16 gigs. It used to be eight gigs forever.
20:09:27 Why is it 16 gigs? It's using that extra memory to process things like Apple intelligence. And on the iPad and the iPhone, again.
20:09:37 They've added more memory for that kind of processing. So they can do as much as possible on your phone without asking anybody else anything at all. And when they do, it's very specific.
20:09:49 It says, I want a picture of something rather. And it doesn't say why or who wants it.
20:09:55 Since no identifying information, they get that information back from Apple's computers, and then they give you the result.
20:10:01 So can you do fancier things using chat GPT than you can with Apple intelligence?
20:10:07 Well, yeah, if you were a professional, you know how to tweak it. But for what most people want Most people want, they want clip art for their for their garage sale brochure or they want to properly format something for a resume or they want to
20:10:26 Turn a legal brief into something that regular humans can read.
20:10:30 And doing that in pages and doing that in numbers and doing that and Rather, your existing Apple and iPhone applications, that's really where their focus is on.
20:10:45 Their focus is not trying to have the the smartest AI in the world. They want it to be secure. They want it to be stable, and they want it to be private.
20:10:56 And that's been their focus. So that's, I suspect the iOS 18.4 is going to be focusing on security, privacy and adding tweaks to Apple intelligence. I don't I'm not aware of anything dramatically different. So yes, we could cover it, but I just don't think I think it would be like a five minute
20:11:18 Conversation.
20:11:19 Okay, thanks.
20:11:22 Okay. All right. Signing off. Bye.
20:11:26 Okay. Bye.
20:11:28 Yeah, good night, Lauren.
20:11:30 Thank you, Lawrence.
20:11:32 Thank you.
20:11:33 Yeah, thank you.