July 2025: Short Technical Topics

The SMUG meeting for July 15, 2025, consisted of several short presentations on technical topics. “Technical topics” in this case refer to parts of Apple’s operating systems that are important, but not immediately apparent.

• How to get the highest resolution photos from your iPhone
• How to connect and use an external storage device on an iPhone or iPad
• Recovering archival information from floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, punch cards, paper…
• Related: how different file formats are handled by different devices
• How to delete synced photos from one device but not others on the same shared account

None of these topics is particularly sexy, but all of them are important in their own way.

Video recording of the meeting

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Transcript of the meeting

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18:24:26 I want to turn on recording…. And I like to turn on closed captions….
18:24:35 Okay.
18:24:41 Your microphone's turned off, but if you turn it on and you have a question, I'll answer it.
18:25:04 Siri Stomp?
18:27:16 Mr. John W, it doesn't say what the W stands for.
18:27:37 Um, John, could you tell me what your last name is?
18:27:40 Wycliffe. I didn't know I was supposed to spin.
18:27:41 Wycliffe, okay, thank you.
18:27:49 Well, it just helps me know who it is that I'm….
18:27:48 Tape out the whole thing.
18:27:52 Sane on the other end.
18:27:53 Yeah, I'm down here in Silicum.
18:27:56 Oh, all the way in silicone.
18:28:02 Well, if he had a physical meeting, I wouldn't be making it up there for….
18:28:02 My… my spouse was….
18:28:07 Like, a Tuesday night.
18:28:09 My, um, spouse grew up near Silicon at American Lake.
18:28:18 Anyway, um, the first…. Half hour or so we spend on questions and answers, so if anybody has a technical question.
18:28:26 Um, they can ask me, and…. With any luck, we'll have more people, but for the moment.
18:28:33 Any questions from anyone?
18:28:36 Well, I have a…. A, uh, Mac….
18:28:40 Many M4…. Machine that, uh….
18:28:43 Yes.
18:28:46 Something's happened where it…. It's not showing anything out of the HDMI output of it anymore, so I'll have to take it to the Apple store and….
18:28:54 See if they can help me to get it repaired.
18:29:00 Um, nothing at all?
18:29:02 Yeah, there's no output signal. I've tried it in several monitors and checked the monitors with other.
18:29:09 Other computers, and they… the monitors work fine, but. The apple isn't putting out any video signal.
18:29:15 Okay, one thing to think if you have another machine. And you can remotely log in to your Mac Mini.
18:29:22 You might check to see that the video has permission. Because the newest operating systems.
18:29:31 We'll put up a dialogue box asking, are you giving me permission to talk to this peripheral?
18:29:37 And if it doesn't, off the top of its head, recognize the peripheral, or if you're in a hurry and you just say no.
18:29:44 You basically have ordered the machine not to talk to the peripheral.
18:29:51 Um, so that's one thing that you can check if you have another machine that you can log into it and see how it's set up.
18:29:57 But otherwise, that's something that you probably want to make an appointment.
18:30:00 To the Genius Bar at Tacoma Mall.
18:30:03 Yeah, right. That's what I was planning. Because it was working before.
18:30:10 And, uh, I purchased it from… from the…. Small Apple store.
18:30:16 Yeah, the reason why Apple did that is that people were developing devices that.
18:30:23 Were… had built-in spyware, so you think you're buying just a regular.
18:30:25 Mm-hmm.
18:30:27 Usb drive, and you're buying a USB drive that sends copies of everything you save on it.
18:30:34 To somebody else. And things of that nature. So…. Apple started with the.
18:30:41 Um, just basically asking you, you know, you've plugged this thing in here to me, do you want to actually use it? And you have a choice of saying yes, no. I haven't heard of it doing that with a monitor.
18:30:53 But given the wide variety of people making monitors. Right now, it's kind of hard for Apple to guess what it is you're going to plug into it.
18:31:02 Yeah, I, uh…. Just recently, I don't know if you can….
18:31:07 See it or not behind me, but I got… recently got a monitor, it's the curved one.
18:31:12 Yeah.
18:31:12 From… from Costco. Huge thing, I think, is, like, 43 inches or something like that.
18:31:18 Diagonal, but it allows me to have. One monitor and be able to put up multiple screens on it.
18:31:26 And another thing, and it shouldn't make any difference. I was going to say that, um….
18:31:30 It could be that the video. Would exceed the capacity, but no.
18:31:37 The M4 Mac Mini can drive. A drive-in theater. I mean, it's not….
18:31:42 It's not really an issue with that. With some of the older Macs, sometimes you could plug in a monitor that.
18:31:50 It required more resources than the computer could…. Send out to it. But, no, that's not going to apply with your M4 Mini.
18:31:58 Yeah, I'm using it right now. I'm using, uh. My… I purchased from Green PC this, uh.
18:32:07 Macbook Pro, uh…. And I got it for $160.
18:32:13 Oh.
18:32:14 Of course, it's using the Intel chip rather than the. The, uh, the Raspberry Pi-type chip.
18:32:17 Yep.
18:32:22 That the M4 does.
18:32:25 Um, anyway….
18:32:27 Yeah, I've been working on… on a lot of programming. And the M4, I've been working on.
18:32:37 Software that works on. The, uh….
18:32:41 Arm-type processor that it has. And it's… it's quite different than working on.
18:32:47 Like the Intel chip…. Uh, laptop.
18:32:51 Yep, that's definitely the truth. Uh, any other questions from anyone? Oh, by the way.
18:32:57 I did remember to turn on recording tonight, and I did remember to turn on closed captioning, so….
18:33:03 With any luck, we'll actually have something that I can…. Post. So, um….
18:33:09 Any questions from anyone?
18:33:11 I have a question about migration assistance. If I'm setting up a new iMac.
18:33:17 And everything that I…. Want to use on that new iMac.
18:33:22 Is synced, that is copied to…. Icloud, do I need to worry about using my migration assistant to transfer anything at all?
18:33:31 Since it's all on….
18:33:31 Yeah, yeah, you want to use Migration Assistant. To say to pull it down from iCloud. The reason is that Migration Assistant.
18:33:42 Does more than just drag and drop files. Migration Assistant also does things like.
18:33:46 Checks permissions and where the preference files go, and so on and so forth. Migration Assistant.
18:33:54 If you tell migration assistant to pull it down from the cloud, that is the way that you want to do it.
18:34:00 Um, you don't want to try and…. Just grab stuff and drag it. Migration Assistant is… it's got a very simple interface, but underneath the hood, it's a very….
18:34:11 Clever and complex, uh, package, and it knows how to pull off, uh, things from a time capsule, from iCloud, from another Mac.
18:34:21 Um, it's really a…. A nice piece of software. And the nice thing is that if you use Migration Assistant.
18:34:29 And you don't like the result because you made one choice and you should have made another, don't worry about it, just erase what it did and start again.
18:34:37 Um, because whatever you're pulling it from is still intact. It doesn't change the original.
18:34:43 Okay.
18:34:47 Any other questions?
18:34:48 Um, Lawrence, can a migration assistant migrate from, uh, HP laptop?
18:34:55 To a Mac.
18:34:57 In theory, it can migrate from Windows. I've never done it.
18:35:03 And part of the…. I've never done it. But in theory, it can do that.
18:35:10 But we can't.
18:35:11 In theory, again, it's not something I've ever tried. One of the problems that you run into when going from a PC.
18:35:15 Right.
18:35:19 Is making sure that the two machines can actually see each other. And on Windows, it's… sometimes that's a little bit difficult trying to figure out how to.
18:35:30 Have it cooperate with the outside world. Windows was basically designed way, way, way back in the beginning.
18:35:37 To create a terminal for a mainframe, so Windows would be a window into a mainframe.
18:35:43 And you'd have a PC that would talk to a mainframe. Windows didn't have any inherent built-in networking until 1994.
18:35:53 What?
18:35:52 The Macintosh had built-in networking in 1984, a decade earlier. Uh, so in the… in that period between 1984 and 1994, if you wanted networking.
18:36:03 On a PC, you had to go out and buy extra software and add it to the….
18:36:08 Added to the machine, but Macs were designed for that right out of the box.
18:36:13 And as a result, a lot of the, um…. The way in which it talks to the outside world is….
18:36:22 Different. So, uh, the answer is it's supposed to, but I've never done it.
18:36:26 Can it do it wirelessly, or do you have to have a cable between the two?
18:36:29 Like I said, I've never done it, um…. I have a Windows machine.
18:36:34 It doesn't talk to my Mac. And I don't want it to talk to my Mac.
18:36:41 You know, 99.99% of all the malware in the world is on Windows.
18:36:40 Right.
18:36:46 And not on my Mac, so…. My Mac considers my Windows box to be a hostile device. It's just, they don't talk to each other.
18:36:55 Yeah, I work between Linux and the Mac a lot.
18:36:59 Yeah, Linux is a much different animal. For one thing, Linux was built with the same kind of networking protocols that the Mac was, so….
18:37:08 Getting them to talk to each other is actually fairly easy, but.
18:37:11 With Windows, allegedly, you can do it, but I haven't tried it.
18:37:15 Yeah. That's why I went to Linux, because Windows was…. Was such a mess. I… I've taken care of, uh….
18:37:25 Networks. For companies, you know, the state was the last place I worked at, and.
18:37:33 I mean, we were… we were always having problems with Windows.
18:37:37 Servers, especially, crashing. And causing problems, and so….
18:37:42 I don't know, a lot of companies have gone to Unix and Linux.
18:37:46 From, uh, from Windows, though. That's a large part of the internet.
18:37:49 Yeah. Um, Diane, before you disappeared, did… Diana, did you have a question?
18:38:00 She cut off her camera and her microphone, so I don't know.
18:38:04 Anybody else have any questions? Yes. Your microphone's not turned on.
18:38:17 Okay, that's good. Yes.
18:38:09 Yeah.
18:38:16 There we go. How's that? Can you hear me now? Okay. Um, I don't have a technical question, but it's kind of more of housekeeping. Um, because I don't have any technical know-how about anything, so I have….
18:38:32 So many old Macs sitting here. Um, they die, and I don't know what to do, and I get a new Mac. So I have.
18:38:42 But, um, I have two. Imax, and, um, they died on me, so now I have a… have a new one. Um, but do I just….
18:38:52 Take it somewhere. So…. There's a, you know, inside, there's financial information and things that….
18:39:00 You know, I don't think anybody really would. Take the trouble to get into the MAC to get that, but it's just kind of held me back from doing anything with it. And, um, I just wanted to know, what do you do with these.
18:39:15 Old computers, um…. Just some….
18:39:20 Yeah.
18:39:19 The… I'll give you… I can give you an answer to that, and that is, what is held on your old machine.
18:39:25 That might be of some value would be on the hard drive.
18:39:29 Yes.
18:39:29 So, um, if at all possible. You should remove the hard drive and destroy it. Uh, to give you….
18:39:37 To give you a kind of a parallel example. I found at my church.
18:39:43 An old, uh, HP laptop. And when I looked at the sticker on it that tells you what kind of windows it has.
18:39:50 It has Windows 2000 on it, so it's a really old.
18:39:54 Windows, uh, laptop. And because it wouldn't boot, and because I did not want to make any.
18:40:02 Effort to recover a 25-year-old machine, I decided I was going to destroy it, but because it belonged to my church.
18:40:09 I asked for permission for us to destroy it, and they asked me why, and the answer was because.
18:40:15 If this had been used by a pastor at our church, it could have confidential information on somebody who was going through a marital crisis, or.
18:40:25 Or whatever. We just don't know what was on it. And they gave me permission, and what I did is I took out a screwdriver, and I unscrewed it, and I took out the hard disk drive, and I bashed it with a, um….
18:40:37 Hammer, which, um…. Pretty much makes it unreadable.
18:40:42 As to why you might not think, you know, if you're not… if you did not work as a nuclear scientist.
18:40:48 Why would you care about that sort of stuff? A lot of very personal information is not only on your.
18:40:55 Laptop, but also, ah! On your phone. My phone has.
18:41:04 Photographs of relatives, it's got addresses of a whole bunch of people, it's got snarky comments that I made about politicians. There's a lot of stuff on it.
18:41:11 Oh, no!
18:41:14 But on your computer, you also probably have things either you did your income taxes on your computer.
18:41:20 Or you have tax-related information, so it's got your social security number, your birthdate, all kinds of stuff.
18:41:23 Yes.
18:41:27 So, if anyone wanted to commit identity theft, a hard drive is a really valuable resource. So, if at all possible, you should take out the, um.
18:41:37 Hard drive and just beat on it with something. If you don't know how, there are….
18:41:42 Manuals online, I'm telling you how to take. Depending upon what model you have.
18:41:45 Okay.
18:41:47 How to take them apart, and if you don't want to, you can write to me and either.
18:41:53 If I'm feeling generous someday, I'll come over and try and do so, or somebody else, a neighbor might do it. Or just somebody who's feeling malicious.
18:42:03 What you should not do, which is what one of, uh….
18:42:08 Uh-huh, a local resident did. They have a 2 and 8 half-acre farm someplace in the….
18:42:14 Swim area, and she decided she was going to blast it with her shotgun.
18:42:19 Oh, dear.
18:42:20 While this was very, very effective at destroying the computer, what she hadn't really thought about.
18:42:25 Is that it literally exploded, and now her two and a half acre farm has about an acre's worth of plastic and glass.
18:42:34 And metal debris scattered all over the place. So, that's not the, um….
18:42:38 That's not the preferred method. You kind of want to be a little bit more, um, surgical in removing the hard drive.
18:42:45 There's nothing else on the machine that's going to retain any data. When you turn off the machine, the only place it stores it is the hard drive. Technically, there are some internal chips that have some.
18:42:55 Information like your Wi-Fi, uh, password, and so on and so forth.
18:43:00 Nobody cares because it's too difficult to take out, and it's also encrypted, so it's not really gonna hurt… help you. Something to note, in new Macs, and when I say new Macs, like the new M-series Apple Silicon machines.
18:43:16 Um, you can encrypt the drive right from the start, so even if someone were to steal your laptop.
18:43:22 If they don't, or your desktop, or whatever it is you have, unless you have a really simple login, username, and password.
18:43:31 Nobody's ever going to be able to read anything on it, because everything is encrypted. But if you have an older Mac.
18:43:36 No, that didn't, uh, that didn't take place. So the only thing you really need to do, worry about is taking out the hard drive.
18:43:44 There are online manuals, and if that doesn't…. Work than just ask somebody with a screwdriver for help. Yeah.
18:43:36 Okay. I'll give you a call. Okay, um, and then I have… I do have some really old, um, monitors, Apple monitors, that worked perfectly, except the computer died, and.
18:44:04 Well, how do I recycle those? Um, they're just, you know….
18:44:08 You could… you could sell it over a green PC.
18:44:12 Hmm?
18:44:08 In theory, the… you should be able to do electronic. You should be able to do electronic recycling if you were in a major metropolitan area. Unfortunately.
18:44:19 Major mandaria doesn't really…. Describe where we are.
18:44:25 Plallum County is about one-fifth the size of all of Maryland, which has 5 million people.
18:44:31 And Clallam County has 70,000 people, so…. We don't really have electronics recycling.
18:44:37 Um, the best thing to do is just, uh, stick it into your SUV and take it to the dump.
18:44:43 And pay them to take it away. There's nothing on them.
18:44:48 No.
18:44:48 Confidential. Um, if… depending upon what the monitor is and what kind of computer you have now.
18:44:54 Many of the newer Macs are capable of running multiple monitors.
18:44:59 I have two. I have…. This one right in front of me, and then I have another one over here with my cheat sheet on what I'm going to do today.
18:45:07 Um, so you can run multiple monitors, and that's actually really handy. Like, for example, I do a lot of writing, and I'll have notes over here, and I can type over here, and read my notes, or I can look up.
18:45:19 Things on one monitor while typing on the other. It's also good for things if you do video editing or photo editing, or… it's having multiple monitors is cool.
18:45:29 But if you just want to get rid of them, I'm afraid the easiest thing to do is.
18:45:35 Load them into your car and go to the dump and….
18:45:41 Okay. Okay.
18:45:39 You will have to pay them to take that, but…. Um, in, um, in the DC… Washington, D.C. Area, there's an electronic recycling center in, um.
18:45:51 Northern Virginia, that my user group that I belong to, we actually help sponsor them.
18:45:58 Turning it into a business. Because at one point, we had 8,000 Apple IIs that we were getting rid of.
18:46:07 Wow.
18:46:08 Which is a lot of… stuff. So….
18:46:12 Well, I think these monitors are so old, I don't know if they would connect up to.
18:46:25 Oh, yeah, no, nothing's…. Nothing's going to talk to those.
18:46:19 Um, you know, they had the old… I think it was a SCSI or something like that, where back really old. Yeah, there's no way it can connect to anything new.
18:46:30 Yeah.
18:46:31 But, um, and then I also have a really high-end scanner that's got that SCSI connection.
18:46:38 Connector, and I don't think, uh, there's anything…. I can do with it, right?
18:46:42 No. No, um, I bought, um…. I was scanning things… I have a… I have several scanners for scanning documents, and this one said it was good for scanning documents.
18:46:53 And photos, so I tried it, and it was really bad on photos. I tried the scanner on my spouse's printer, and it was terrible on the photos.
18:47:01 And I went out and got a cannon scanner that cost me, like, $49.
18:47:07 And it's much, much, much, much, much better. And it's much better than the old SCSI scanners that used to cost $2,000, so….
18:47:16 Yes.
18:47:16 I'm afraid it just… in addition to not…. Being able to connect anything, the quality.
18:47:22 Has been far surpassed by, uh. More modern electronics. So….
18:47:26 Do they have scanners, um, that, um… so this old scanner, I used to, uh, do negatives and, um, slides, and, um, do they have good.
18:47:40 Scanners now to… say, if I had old 2.25 inch slide, negatives, or slides, I guess they're slides, transparencies, do they make them now that will, um, that you could just put your transparency on it?
18:47:55 Um, you should look up. The canon… not canon, the Epson scanners go on to, uh….
18:48:04 Um, Amazon, and look at Epson flatbed scanner. That's the clue that you want.
18:48:02 Flatbed, okay.
18:48:11 Um, and some of them have a slide attachment. The ones with the slide attachments.
18:48:16 It's important that you get that particular type, because normally in a scanner, it's a flat plane, and there's a light down below, and it shines up off and gets reflection.
18:48:27 Well, for a slide, it needs a light in the top of the scanner so it can shine through it.
18:48:32 Yeah, okay. Yee. Yes.
18:48:32 So that it can go down below. And Epson does make those.
18:48:37 Okay.
18:48:37 And it's a separate little attachment to get the slides, and you only can put, like, 5 slides into it, but….
18:48:45 That's….
18:48:44 Well, I have all these slides, you know, now everybody's doing digital, but I mean, I've got drawers of slides. It would be wonderful to be able to.
18:48:53 Digitize them.
18:48:53 Um, another… another possibility, aside from getting a scanner, is, um.
18:48:59 There's a place in town on, uh, Squim…. Um….
18:49:06 A couple blocks up from the intersection with Washington. He, um, says he does photography and scanning and so on and so forth. He has a slide scanner.
18:49:17 And he will slide… he will scan slides for a, uh….
18:49:21 Uh, there's a price for it. I don't know how much it is, but you might, given the amount of slides that you have.
18:49:29 And if you can only scan 5 at a time, you might want to think about just trying it out. You might just give them, like, a box of slides.
18:49:38 And see what you think of the result. Because it is very….
18:49:38 Yes, and see how they do. Is that… is that called clear image?
18:49:43 Clear image. It's that call… that place called Clear Image. It's on….
18:49:43 Pardon me? I think so. I've only talked to him on the phone. I've never… I've never actually used his service, but uh….
18:49:48 Yes. Okay.
18:49:53 I use the service, uh, just this week, I use Clear Image, and she did some slides for me.
18:49:54 Any slides is very….
18:49:59 Oh, good.
18:50:00 Yeah, it's….
18:50:00 They came out pretty good. I fought some old slides back from the 70s, and I had a handful, and she did them for me.
18:50:07 Okay.
18:50:06 Yeah, it's very time-intensive, so you might want to just. Put up the white flag and let somebody else do it.
18:50:13 Yes, yes, yes. Okay, thank you.
18:50:19 Um, any other questions?
18:50:20 Hey, Lawrence, um, I used to live in Southern California in LA County, and of course, that's a major metropolitan area.
18:50:27 And they had a recycling center, and a few of them, that when you… I had an iMac that, um, I brought to them to recycle.
18:50:36 And they opened it up for me, and they have a metal shredder.
18:50:41 And shredded the drive in front of my eyes, you know, into little… nothing. Now.
18:50:47 True swim is not in a place like that, but in Seattle, you'd think with Microsoft.
18:50:53 Uh, being, you know, a big computer outfit there, uh, you'd think there might be something like that in Seattle.
18:51:00 It might be worth the trip if she has that many, uh, things.
18:51:02 Well, the problem is that a lot of those services, they're either run by volunteers or they're run very low.
18:51:10 Even if she took it there, they will not take the time to remove the drive.
18:51:16 Oh…. Oh, really?
18:51:15 That's not… that's not something they're going to do. So, if you… if you're going to remove the drive anyway, then you can use your own little hammer and.
18:51:23 And beat on it. Yeah, the problem with a lot of these non-profit.
18:51:24 That's… that's true. But it's hard… it's hard to open an iMac, though.
18:51:29 Yeah, well, it depends upon the iMac, but yes, I agree with that. And it's not necessarily a pleasant experience, but….
18:51:37 That's… that's the only thing that's actually going to retain anything of value, and for people who steal, uh, identities, these….
18:51:45 As an example, there was an incident, um, one of, um….
18:51:50 Um…. George Bush's, um….
18:51:53 George Bush II. One of his advisors was a security advisor, and he threw away his, uh.
18:52:02 Oh, dear.
18:52:00 His computer, he didn't think of anything of it. And somebody got it at a wholesale and took it apart and got the drive, took everything off the drive, realized who it was.
18:52:12 The… this security advisor for, um, advisor for George Bush had never changed.
18:52:17 His Google password. So he logged into Google and read all of his messages and so on and so forth.
18:52:25 And, uh, the FBI took, uh, unkindly to this, but at the time, there was no law against it.
18:52:32 So, um…. He caused all kinds of embarrassment for this poor guy who, among other things, got fired, and there was no punishment.
18:52:41 So you don't… don't…. Don't, uh… don't… you don't want to trivialize what the, um….
18:52:49 Impact is, if identity theft. It can be pretty bad. Yeah. Any other questions?
18:52:55 Yeah, I don't want that. Yeah.
18:52:58 Lawrence, I have a question for you. Can I ask you a question about iPhone?
18:53:02 Sure.
18:53:04 I've got, uh…. These little folders on my iPhone, and it says, like, news, and I've got some… I have some applications in that folder that I want to take out of that folder and put back onto my phone so I can see it.
18:53:18 I added a couple things today. I got my photos and news, and I got them in the wrong place.
18:53:22 How do I take them back out of a folder? I can put them in by, you know, putting the minus sign and dragging them in, but I don't know how to drag them back out of the folders on your iPhone.
18:53:31 It's… it's the same way. You hold down, you open up the folder, you hold down your finger until it starts wiggling.
18:53:36 And then you pick the one that you want and say, uh, move to home screen, or something like that. And it just takes it out of the folder.
18:53:46 It says, well, this one says rename, edit home screen, so….
18:53:44 Where it puts it is somewhat random, but, um…. Home screen, home screen.
18:53:52 Okay, so I'll give it a shot. So you have to hit the exact one you want to move in that little….
18:53:57 That's correct.
18:53:57 Okay, I'll give it a shot. Thank you.
18:54:02 By the way, this also works on the Apple TV, but since you can't use your fingers, the process is a little bit different, but….
18:54:09 You can move things around on your Apple TV as well.
18:54:11 That did it. Thank you.
18:54:14 Um, I wanted to jump in here, um, that I think that goodwill takes some sorts of electronics.
18:54:21 For recycling, I took a. Something there last week, and they took it. So, and I don't know exactly what the recycling.
18:54:30 The means there, but um… after you've done your hard drive in, that may be an option for getting rid of your monitors and that sort of thing.
18:54:38 Yeah, I know they do some electronics, but I don't know what the limitations are. I know a lot of people, a lot of places have just….
18:54:45 Um, stopped. Um, doing electronic recycling, because Goodwill isn't really a recycling program, and it's not really a resale facility. It's really a jobs program. They hire people who can't get jobs, and they….
18:55:03 Train them up, and so on and so forth. So their business is not really recycling, their business is really jobs, and with.
18:55:10 Old electronics, the people who can do something useful with them, are probably not the people who are going to be paid minimum wage to work for goodwill, so they….
18:55:20 They do have restrictions on what they do. With all nonprofits, you kind of have to keep in mind.
18:55:27 What their, um…. What their purpose is. And a lot of them, they're run by volunteers that are run by people who aren't making a lot of money, so you just don't want to do anything that.
18:55:43 Makes life difficult for them. Um, and Goodwill, I think… I know they've been more selective than they have in the past, but I don't know what the limitations are.
18:55:54 Any other questions? Sure.
18:55:58 I have a question. Um, I've got… I'm running, uh.
18:56:04 Sonoma as my, uh…. Operating system right now, and of course, there's a subsequent version, but I really.
18:56:14 The, uh, the home screen, the, uh, what do you call it? The wallpaper.
18:56:18 Yes.
18:56:18 You know, it's a beautiful thing of…. Of an area I used to live. I grew up there in that Sonoma County.
18:56:26 And I'd like to keep it. Uh, but I've found that when you renew your, you know, upgrade.
18:56:32 Your operating system, you get a new wallpaper. How can I keep the one that I've got?
18:56:38 Well, they… when you upgrade your new operating system, it doesn't get rid of the old ones, it just adds new stuff.
18:56:43 So, what you do is you go into the wallpaper settings, and you pick out what you want.
18:56:43 Okay. Oh. Okay, well, paper settings, alright.
18:56:50 Yeah, um, in my case, my wallpaper is always custom. I don't mind what Apple has, but, um….
18:56:58 I liked… I like pictures of places that… I like photographs that I've taken, and I like, uh….
18:57:02 Yeah, sure.
18:57:04 Um, environmental things from my time at NOAA, or astronomical things, so….
18:57:11 Um, the Apple ones are fine, but…. I kind of like mine, just because I can have a lot more variety.
18:57:16 Sure, yeah. I particularly like this one, yeah, it's actually kind of dynamic. It moves….
18:57:24 Yeah.
18:57:23 Yes, it really is a small… actually, it's not a small… it really is a video, so it….
18:57:31 That's why it moves and changes with the time of the day. The, um….
18:57:30 Yeah. Yeah.
18:57:35 Uh, I'm running the, um…. Tahoe on a laptop here, and so that was one of the things I checked, was the wallpaper.
18:57:44 And Tahoe just has some of the, um, previous wallpapers, it doesn't.
18:57:51 You're just… you're adding to it. You're not…. You're not getting rid of anything.
18:57:54 Alright, good, thank you.
18:57:58 One more question, and then we're going to start the program.
18:58:02 I have, um…. Something called Newstream I use to.
18:58:08 Digitize some slides. I don't know if they're still in business, because it was about 10 years ago, but they're a squim company. I think they work out of their garage.
18:58:16 I have their phone number. If you want to check and see if they're still around, it's 565….
18:58:23 5669. So, it's just another choice if clear image.
18:58:31 Isn't working for you. And they did a nice job.
18:58:35 Okay, thank you.
18:58:36 Okay.
18:58:40 I will confess that I went by a slightly different route.
18:58:44 And I've ordered a, um…. Slide scanner that has an auto-feed.
18:58:49 So I can give it 50 slides and…. Tell it to do its thing, and….
18:58:55 Several hours later, it's done, but that hasn't arrived yet, and it's hideously expensive, so it's not something I'm going to recommend to.
18:59:03 Um, most people. But, um, I have probably 10,000 slides.
18:59:09 So….
18:59:11 Yeah.
18:59:13 Your slide-rich and time-poor.
18:59:15 Slide rich in time form, yes.
18:59:18 Yeah, I bought one of those Lawrence, and uh, cost, like, $1,500 several years ago. I had about 4,000 slides.
18:59:26 You can put 50 in at a time, and it automatically does it. Tooks about 35 seconds per slide, but they came out, like, 4 megabytes. I mean, their quality was excellent. They don't make the scanner anymore, and uh… it needed software, and the only software would go to old computers.
18:59:44 To be able to make it work. So, they went to the junk pile.
18:59:49 But I did 4,000 slides. It took me a couple of years to get it all done after, like.
18:59:49 Yep.
18:59:55 It was pretty nice. There was a Nikon, I believe.
18:59:59 Um, yes, I've used one of those at, um, at work once upon a time, and uh….
19:00:06 The complaint was that it occupied a machine. Well, I worked for NOAA, and we had… I personally controlled 20,000 computers.
19:00:15 So finding one just to run the slide scanner was not really an issue.
19:00:20 Um, we had… it was… it was cheaper to buy computers than it was to hire people, especially.
19:00:25 Since Congress puts limits on how many people you can hire, so….
19:00:30 Um, but I don't know if this new one will work, and I'm not recommending it. I think you….
19:00:35 Better off checking off, um. Clear image, and looking on….
19:00:39 Amazon for the Epson scanners. The Epson scanners, in terms of flatbed scanners.
19:00:41 Yeah.
19:00:45 Fantastic. I've never used them for slides, but I have heard good things about them.
19:00:51 Um, and we should start the meeting, and I shall start by.
19:00:50 Okay, thank you.
19:00:55 Asking our president and treasurer if they have anything they want to say.
19:01:00 Absolutely nothing. Hi, everybody. I have nothing to report. Treasury has nothing to report.
19:01:03 Absolutely.
19:01:08 Okay. Okay, that works.
19:01:08 Next time. We're slacking.
19:01:13 Oh, can you put in the, um, sign-up sheet?
19:01:16 Uh, I would put in the sign-up sheet. I made one. The problem is that Google is having a day of, uh, and….
19:01:24 They are not allowing me to share the sign-in sheet, so the only person who can sign in is me, and that's kind of pointless.
19:01:29 Hmm.
19:01:31 But I did make one. Um, it's just, it's not allowing me to, uh….
19:01:37 Sign it. It's not allowing me to share it. And I don't know why.
19:01:40 Okay, no problem.
19:01:43 Yep.
19:01:48 Um, there were a bunch of things that people submitted in terms of suggestions for the meeting.
19:01:54 And some of them I looked at and decided, nah, that would take a….
19:02:01 Link is not live for tonight's meeting. Uh, it is life.
19:02:19 I need to write to this person? Um, there were a bunch of, uh, topics, some of them….
19:02:27 Were things that were complex and…. Um, he wouldn't lend himself to, um….
19:02:36 A, um, Zoom meeting, and others were. Complex, just in terms of subject.
19:02:41 But I took several, and I'm going to make a, um….
19:02:46 Short, technical. Presentations. This is going to be more technical.
19:02:50 Then most of my presentations, simply because of the type of.
19:02:54 Topic. But there are a number of them, some of them on the iPhone, some of them about the iPad, some of them about other things.
19:03:02 And I'm going to share my screen. Which means, if I can remember how to do that….
19:03:10 Ah, there it is. Zoom does their best to confuse me by moving things around.
19:03:21 Okay. The first thing I wanted to talk about was, uh, the question was.
19:03:30 Um, someone wanted to know how to get the highest resolution photos on the iPhone.
19:03:36 And, um, one of the problems that I see a lot of people, uh.
19:03:40 Doing with their iPhones, when they take photos grasped with the iPhone, they….
19:03:47 Tend to think about, um. How much space they have on the iPhone, or they look at something on the iPhone and they think that, okay, it looks good on my iPhone, so that's all I need. No, you really want to take it at the highest possible.
19:04:03 A resolution, and um…. To do that, you want to make sure that it's not set at a lower resolution. And I have created a little video that shows.
19:04:14 How do you get to these settings. This is an iPhone, you open up Settings, and within Settings, you click on Camera.
19:04:23 Then you go to the camera controls, there are a bunch of controls that I'm not going to tell you about right now.
19:04:29 Photographic styles, these are styles that you can set up to customize to you. I don't care about that either.
19:04:36 On video, I never take high resolution video, so 1080p is fine with me.
19:04:42 Um, and then we come down to formats. Here's where it gets….
19:04:46 Where it gets important. You want to choose high efficiency. If you have more than one resolution, you want to choose the higher resolution.
19:04:54 24 megapixels in this case. You want to have ProRAW and, uh….
19:05:00 A video format. Even though these create large files, and there are some other things that you can do, like ProRes recording, if you're going to record video, you want that to be in high resolution as well.
19:05:12 So those are the kinds of camera controls that you want to pay attention to, and then there's some special things that you can do, like.
19:05:19 Do you want the phone to your scanned QR codes and detect text and a bunch of other things, and.
19:05:24 Turn on the things that meet your fancy. But, um, getting back to….
19:05:30 This earlier part. The part that is important is this, uh, the format that it saves things in, uh, by default.
19:05:39 If your camera supports ProRAW, you run ProRAW. And if it supports high efficiency, you want high efficiency.
19:05:49 Now, the good news, bad news about high efficiency and…. And pro-Raw, high-efficiency files.
19:05:58 Are unique to the iPhone, and if you send them off to somebody who has a Windows machine.
19:06:03 It won't do much any… it won't do them much good. But there's an easy fix for that, and that is when you export them out.
19:06:11 Of, uh, iPhoto, you just say, make them compatible. The, um, other issue is that the pro-raw.
19:06:20 On mine, with… if I take a 24 megapixel photo, the photo… each photo is 40….
19:06:27 Megabytes. Is that right? I don't remember how it is.
19:06:32 Maybe it's 20 megabytes. Anyway, they're large. So, the question then becomes, if you shoot at high resolution, are you going to fill up your phone faster?
19:06:42 Yes and no. But in terms of the resolution, you always want to shoot at the highest possible resolution.
19:06:51 Because you can always make something smaller. But if you try blowing up a small photograph into something large, it gets very pixely, and it looks like a.
19:07:00 Bad 1940s movie. Um…. To give you an example, I had a friend who… she was afraid she was going to use up all the space on her phone.
19:07:09 When she took to a trip to England, and so she took these small photographs, and all of her photographs are 640x480.
19:07:19 That's 640… 640 pixels across, 480 pixels down. Your current phone on most iPhones can take a photograph that's 4,000.
19:07:30 Pixels across. And so she was taking these tiny little things about the size of.
19:07:36 Postage stamps, and she didn't realize that's what she was doing. And there's no way to make them larger. So you always take them at the largest.
19:07:43 Possible resolution. Now, the next question that comes up is, if you take them at the largest possible resolution.
19:07:51 Won't you run out of space? Well, there are a couple things about that that you should note. And first of all.
19:07:57 Your, uh, iCloud account comes with. Um, 5GB worth of space in the cloud.
19:08:04 And it's well worth it to buy more space in the cloud, and then just sync everything on your phone into the cloud.
19:08:13 Sinking it into the cloud, it's going to be encrypted, it's going to be safe.
19:08:16 There's no downside, except that it costs you a couple bucks.
19:08:22 Um, I don't really even remember what the charge is. It's not much.
19:08:25 So, buy enough space in the cloud to sync everything into the cloud. And then, if you do that, this next step.
19:08:33 Is to have your phone optimize space. And to do that, you go into Settings again.
19:08:40 And you go into iCloud. Click on Photos, and then….
19:08:47 We'll stop it right here.
19:08:52 Optimize iPhone storage. If you click on Optimize iPhone Storage.
19:09:01 Uh, what happened to my participants list?
19:09:11 Oh, there you are. If you click on Optimize iPhone Storage.
19:09:17 Your phone stores everything in the iCloud at full resolution. But on the phone itself, it stores just enough so that when you're looking at it on the phone, it looks good.
19:09:29 It doesn't store the entire photograph. So these very large photographs that I routinely take, it doesn't keep those on the phone, it keeps those in the cloud, and locally, you only have a thumbnail.
19:09:42 And if you want a higher resolution one, you just tap on it and it'll download the high resolution.
19:09:47 But in the background, it just stores all that other stuff on the phone. And you'll see that in the cloud, I've got.
19:09:56 25,574 photos. If I tried to store those on my phone.
19:10:01 At full resolution, I'd need a lot more space than it actually has. So this.
19:10:08 Optimize it in this cloud is the way to store your….
19:10:13 Your original photos in the cloud at full resolution, and then you still have your whole library.
19:10:21 Available. Uh, to look at on your phone, just not at the full resolution.
19:10:27 Yes.
19:10:27 Lawrence? Um, if you do that. Uh, when you… if you want to delete a photo, do you have to go to the cloud to delete it, or can you delete it from the phone?
19:10:37 Well, I'm going to tell you the next question that someone had. They said, uh.
19:10:42 How do you delete photos from a sync device, but not on others on the same Apple account?
19:10:48 Which is related to the question you have. If you have everything in the cloud.
19:10:53 And you want to delete a photo on your phone. Does it delete it from the cloud? Yes. Not only does it delete it from the cloud, but it also deletes it from every.
19:11:06 Synced device. So, if you are storing. Full-size photos at home, which is what I do, I store full-size images on my computer at home.
19:11:15 If I delete it on my phone, it'll delete it from my computer as well.
19:11:21 Now, you may not think that's a great idea, so what do you do about it?
19:11:30 Ideas? The answer is, you don't have to store it in photos.
19:11:37 If you, for some reason, want to delete it, but you still want a copy.
19:11:42 Export it from photos to your desktop or to files on your phone.
19:11:47 So that it's no longer in photos. Just export it so that you have that copy, and then delete it. And it'll delete it on all the devices, but you still have a copy.
19:11:56 Yeah, I… I, uh, bought from Costco, I bought, uh, a number of these 5TB drives.
19:12:05 They're really small, and uh…. So I can plug them in to USB port and save all my stuff for them, unplug them, and I don't have to worry about it being.
19:12:14 Deleted by any of the…. Uh, added, uh, soft….
19:12:21 The remote software.
19:12:22 Yeah. So that's… that's the trick here, is that…. You make sure that you have enough space, and ICloud to store all your photos, and in my particular case.
19:12:32 I have a family account, and we have 2TB of storage.
19:12:36 That I share with my daughter, my son-in-law in England. Myself, I have my….
19:12:43 Uh, late spouses photos, they're all stored there in the cloud, and it's not that expensive to get. You don't want to spend 2 terabytes, you can get 1TB, and….
19:12:56 Half a terabyte, and I don't know what all the different.
19:13:00 Versions, but it's really inexpensive, um, to do that. But that's how to get around two problems. One is, how do you have all your photographs available on your phone without running out of space? And two.
19:13:13 How do you save. A photo for posterity, but delete it out of iCloud. And the answer to that is you export it.
19:13:23 Um, and the next question that came up…. Which is actually kind of related to this, but not quite.
19:13:30 Is how do you attach an external device. To an iPhone. Well, this is an iPhone.
19:13:39 And I've attached in this video, I've attached a, uh…. Usb device. The, uh… I'll even show you what I….
19:13:47 I'll stop sharing for a second, we're gonna have a little, um….
19:13:50 Show and tell. Um…. This is a, um….
19:13:58 Drive, and I don't remember how much it is, I don't remember if it's 1 or 2 terabytes. It's really, really tiny. I nicknamed it Porsche because the Porsche Design Lab actually designed the case. They didn't design the, uh.
19:14:10 The, um…. Dry, but it's, um, it's 1 or 2 terabytes. It's got a USB-C, so it'll work with.
19:14:19 All of the modern phones. And this is a, uh… this is a 128 gigabyte.
19:14:28 Usb drive, and it's a traditional one, which means it's got the large connector.
19:14:32 But you can go get these small adapters that. Plug onto it, and then you can attach it to a….
19:14:40 The USB connector on the new iPhones, or you can just use the old one with.
19:14:46 Some other kind of adapter. And I also have this USB device, which is… if you push it one way, it's got a USB-C connector, and if you push it the other way, it's got a USB-A connector, so it can do both.
19:15:00 Um, these were on sale during Amazon's Prime Day, and even though I didn't need more, I bought some more, because I'm going to give some to my brother.
19:15:08 And finally, if you want to be weird. Um….
19:15:14 This is a small drive. And at 1TB, it has a lot of capacity. But a regular.
19:15:21 Hard drive.
19:15:27 This is, um, three and a half inch hard drive. And it's 1TB.
19:15:34 And that's how physically large it is. Um….
19:15:42 This is an SD card, it's just a tiny little flat thing.
19:15:46 It's an SD card. This particular one is 512GB, so it's half the capacity.
19:15:52 Of this thing, and this…. Adapter here allows me to plug this in, and then I can plug it into my phone, and I can take up to half a gigabyte worth of stuff.
19:16:03 Off my phone and transfer it on to. Onto this drive. So, how do you do that?
19:16:10 We're gonna go back to my, uh…. Demonstration again.
19:16:14 And….
19:16:23 With my movie here. Yes, I know I'm screen sharing.
19:16:28 Um…. To do this, you come along here and you say search.
19:16:35 And you go to the Files application. And then I….
19:16:41 Point at my external drive, which is a Porsche. Is the name of the drive. And again, that's a very large drive.
19:16:50 But that's how you get to it, is you just, um.
19:16:55 Point to it. Here, I selected a bunch of photographs that have a QR code.
19:17:00 Why? It's because it was an easy thing to do. I say select all.
19:17:04 And then I come down and I push this little button down here that says Copy, and it asks what you want to do. I say.
19:17:15 Export, unmodified originals. And it says… it downloads them, because remember, I'm optimizing them, so it downloads them to the phone.
19:17:21 Then I go back, and I point to my Porsche drive.
19:17:25 And here, I say save. And you'll watch it as it slowly copies these files. Now, some of these files are actually quite large.
19:17:33 So it's going to take a while to download this. It's going to download 93.
19:17:37 Images, the only thing they have in common is they have a QR code on them.
19:17:42 And it's copying those. From my phone to this external drive.
19:17:48 Note that it's not touching. The photographs on my phone. These are copies, so it's copying all these… it's basically duplicating 93 things.
19:17:59 From my phone onto the, uh…. Drive, and then when I come back.
19:18:05 I say, I'm done with that, let's go back. I go back to Files, so I can show you that they're really there.
19:18:16 Go to Porsche, and there are the files. And, like I said, they're just QR codes.
19:18:24 So it's not particularly exciting, but it was a way to demonstrate.
19:18:28 That I can, uh, copy these things from the cloud. Full-size to this external drive using my… just using my phone.
19:18:39 And that's because my phone has a USB-C connector, and I've got a USB-C connector on my, uh….
19:18:46 Hard drive. And if you don't have that, there are adapters. If you have the old lightning cable.
19:18:53 You can do similar types of things, but it's really difficult. With the newer phones, with the USB-C connectors.
19:19:00 Um, it's… it's much easier and also much faster. Usb-c is quite a bit faster.
19:19:07 So….
19:19:12 I'm sorry?
19:19:07 Would you repeat the, uh, beginning stages of that process? Oh, would you repeat the first couple of clicks that you did to get that started? The rest of it I followed by missed the beginning.
19:19:19 Okay, well, we can go back, and I can start it up again.
19:19:25 I… it's plugged in to the machine, but in order to see it, I need to go to the Files application. The Files application.
19:19:34 Is on your phone. And the files application allows you to look at files on your phone, but if you go and then tell it to browse for other things, it'll find other storage devices.
19:19:46 That are attached to your phone. In this case, it's my Porsche drive.
19:19:50 And it says it's empty, so it just continues on. And now that I've shown you that it's connected.
19:19:57 I'm going to go to the process of copying it, so the rest of it is just the process of copying the….
19:20:03 The drives, but the files…. Application is on your iPhone if you have.
19:20:10 Any of the last 2 or 3 operating systems, and it allows you to.
19:20:15 Pull things off of your phone and stick them someplace else. Um, it's a really nice addition.
19:20:21 It's also available on, uh…. Ipad, and that's going to be the next thing I'm going to show in a second. Any other questions about that?
19:20:32 I have a question, Larry. Lawrence. Uh, I've got some stuff that's on FireWire.
19:20:39 Can you… can you, through a series of adapters. Bring firewire up, don't come into your….
19:20:44 C connector and bring it into your current system. Through our use of adapters.
19:20:51 Yeah….
19:20:52 I've got some older C hard drives I've had. I got a whole bunch of stuff on them.
19:20:57 But it's really out… there's still… it's still there. I'm sure they're still working, but I need to….
19:21:02 Try to get them up to currency, and up in a C drive.
19:21:05 Well. Um….
19:21:12 What I have done with that… there might be a way to do it through adapters, but I'd have to give that some thought, because….
19:21:19 You're going through several layers of technology. There are these things that I call drive toasters, and otherworld.
19:21:27 Computing cells on them. Um, and what it is, it's basically a dock for a drive, and you take that.
19:21:36 Raw drive, and you stick it into this thing that kind of looks like a toaster, you stick it in the slot.
19:21:42 And it can read the drive. That's how I've taken… worked with some of these things, is I've gotten… I've taken the drives out of the, uh, um….
19:21:53 Box that they're in, and I've stuck them into a drive.
19:21:57 Uh, toaster. Whether you can do it with adapters, I don't know. If you still have a computer that's capable of.
19:22:04 Talking to the FireWire drive, you can do it through networking.
19:22:09 Uh, just having one computer. Talk to another one.
19:22:10 I can't do that anymore. They're old.
19:22:14 Yeah… the answer is…. I don't know.
19:22:20 Um, but what I did in the past, I had a whole bunch of, uh.
19:22:19 Okay.
19:22:24 Scientific workstations that I needed to get stuff off of, and I just took them apart, and I grabbed the raw hard drives, and I….
19:22:33 Oh, sure. Okay, we'll try that.
19:22:31 Stuck them in this toaster and copied them that way. That's not called a toaster. I think it's called a drive dock or something, but Otherworld computing sells them.
19:22:41 Okay, Drybox.
19:22:46 Okay, thank you.
19:22:49 The next question I had was, can you do this sort of thing with an iPad?
19:22:53 Well, with an iPad, you can do the same thing, because the iPad, again, has that….
19:23:00 Files… pardon?
19:22:59 Lauren? I'm sorry, Lawrence. When you, um, you have that external plugged into the phone, do you have to eject it and be careful with how you.
19:23:08 Remove it, or do you just unplug it?
19:23:11 I'm careful in how I eject it, but exactly… in the case of the phone, because there's no eject button.
19:23:18 I just… I just log out of the phone. But do I have to? I don't know.
19:23:25 And since I don't want to screw up my data. Um, I'm just careful.
19:23:28 So, the top left that you saw that it was connected to in your screen.
19:23:34 Was there anything that you could have clicked on there to see, to, like.
19:23:38 Tell it to eject? Okay. That's all.
19:23:40 No. No, I just….
19:23:44 I've got one of those adapters that you're talking about that.
19:23:48 You can plug a drive into. I use it for a lot… I've got a stack of drives that I.
19:23:57 Use, and I can plug it in the USB. Port.
19:23:57 Yeah, but I haven't…. Yeah, I just haven't seen anything that does, uh, FireWire.
19:24:04 But, uh, again, I just used the side button on my phone to log out of my phone.
19:24:09 And then I unplugged the drive. And again, it may not harm it if I just pull it out, but I… I had no desire to find out.
19:24:19 Uh, the hard way that it was a bad thing to do.
19:24:21 This is my rather cluttered, um…. Imax screen. The photograph you see in the background, that's the Parliament Building in Victoria.
19:24:33 Um, which is probably a bad background, but it's my photograph, so….
19:24:37 I don't care. Because there's the file application on the iPad, you can do the same sort of thing.
19:24:44 That you do on the iPad that you could with the iPhone, in terms you plug in the drive.
19:24:50 Then you use the Files application to go and see what's on the drive, and copy things back and forth.
19:24:57 Um, one thing that's a little bit different is that this particular, um, iPad is running iPadOS 26.
19:25:05 So, sometimes the interface might look a little different. Like, for example, you'll notice the icons down at the bottom.
19:25:11 Don't look quite right. That's not the normal. Preview icon, but I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in something else instead.
19:25:19 So I, uh, fire it up, and…. I go into iCloud, yes, I got stuff on the iCloud, I've got something on my Mac, and then I go down to Untitled.
19:25:29 Untitled, in this particular case, is that small black USB drive that I was showing you earlier. It's plugged in.
19:25:38 And I went to selfies, and I'm grabbing some selfies. The selfies is anything that you take with the front camera.
19:25:47 Of your phone is considered a selfie. Now, these are actually….
19:25:52 Um, ceilings of a, uh, of a house in England. I tell that I went to export the unmodified originals.
19:26:01 It downloads them from the iCloud.
19:26:08 And it's downloading from the iCloud. And then I come down and I select the untitled drive, I click the blue checkmark in the upper right-hand corner, and it starts to download these. But about the selfies.
19:26:21 If you want to take a picture of a ceiling, you can bend your back over and screw up your neck.
19:26:27 Or you can just take your camera, have it…. Your phone, hold it flat.
19:26:32 Use the front-facing camera and have it fire a shot straight up, and you can take pictures of ceilings.
19:26:37 And with British architecture, sometimes the ceilings are just. Fascinating. So this is how I take pictures of, uh.
19:26:45 Of ceilings, as I use the front-facing camera. So, now I've copied these.
19:26:51 Half of, um, of, uh, out of eye photos, and I've copied them now to that external drive.
19:26:59 And it's basically the same process that I used for. Um, for, um….
19:27:06 The iPhone, in terms of I select what I want, and use the files to copy them to the external drive.
19:27:15 One thing that I have not talked about, and this is where we're going to get into the really technical part of the conversation, but you don't have to remember too much. I'm going to cover much more information.
19:27:26 Then you really want to know. Recently, I noticed that I have no computers left.
19:27:33 That have optical disk drives. And that's a problem, because I have….
19:27:38 About 800 optical. Discs that I've been storing things over the centuries, and an optical disc is basically a CD-ROM.
19:27:47 Or, uh, DVD ROM that I have information on it. So, I have an external.
19:27:54 Optical disk from Apple, and I just spent painstakingly stuffing things into them.
19:28:00 And copying stuff off. And then putting them on a hard drive so that I can then put them on other things and take them and stick them in my bank vault, or….
19:28:08 Whatever else I want to do with them. One of the first things I noticed is that I could not read some of the older.
19:28:15 Um, I want to actually see people when I'm doing this, so I'm going to stop here for a second.
19:28:21 Um, I could not read some of the older optical discs.
19:28:25 Um, they… I'd stick them in the machine, and the machine would spit them back out and said that it was unrecognized.
19:28:32 Well, that is, um…. Sucky. So, what do I do about that?
19:28:38 I gave it some thought, and I realized that the operating system, the Mac operating system, has changed the formatting it uses for storage over the years.
19:28:48 And so that's what I'm going to talk about, is the different types of storage.
19:28:52 That is used over the years. I'm going to also tell you how I solved my problem.
19:28:56 I set up a virtual machine on my Mac, a virtual machine that ran an old copy of the Mac operating system.
19:29:06 Macos Mojave. Was the last version of the operating system that could.
19:29:14 Read, uh, some of the optical discs, well, a lot of the optical disks that I have, and that's because Mac OS Mojave was the last one that allows you to.
19:29:22 Read and write to HFS file systems on optical disks. And they removed that after that, because Apple was moving to a new.
19:29:33 Storage. Directory structure that's called, uh….
19:29:39 Um, what is it called? Apfs, Apple….
19:29:44 File system. Um…. Eh, that's not right.
19:29:51 Apfs, yes, Amplifile system. Um, and the new Apple file system has been… if you have a Mac that has either a Fusion drive.
19:30:01 Or has a solid-state disk drive. The, uh…. Apfs formatting has been used on the internal drive since then.
19:30:12 So, if you have anything that has a fusion drive or a solid-state SPF drive, it's using APFS for the boot drive.
19:30:19 And it's much faster, you can store 9 quintillion files on your hard drive, if you have enough space. By comparison, the original Mac operating system, which didn't even have a name.
19:30:34 When it had 400K drives back in the beginning, you could store about 40 files on a floppy disk drive.
19:30:40 And I actually wrote a program once that did nothing but make copies of itself.
19:30:44 To see how long it would be before it filled up. And when it got to 99 files, it was taking two and a half hours to make another file.
19:30:55 So, technically, it was saving them, but obviously it wasn't useful at that point. A useful number of files was about.
19:31:03 40, 50 files. And then they went from 400 to 800, and from 800 to 1.3 meg.
19:31:10 Floppy disk, and then they had hard drives, and CD-ROMs, and so on and so forth.
19:31:13 I'm going to give you a brief history of that, and then I'm going to tell you how much of that you're gonna… you can actually ignore.
19:31:20 You don't have to remember the details. But it is an evolution. I'm going to share my screen again.
19:31:31 One of the first things I did was I stuck in an optical drive, and it sped it out.
19:31:37 And I thought, well, what am I going to do about this? Because it sped it out.
19:31:41 When I set up this virtual machine with Mojave, I had it look.
19:31:46 At the CD that was being. Rejected, and that's because it's a macOS standard formatting.
19:31:53 This is… and if you look at the date, this particular optical drive is made on August 9th, 1993.
19:31:59 Which was a long time ago. And…. I couldn't read it, but by having Mojave on the machine in a virtual operating system.
19:32:09 I stuck in the optical disk drive, and it was showing up, and I could copy the disk.
19:32:13 So that's, uh, the…. Macos, uh.
19:32:19 From 1993. And then it was macOS Extended, which is also called HFS.
19:32:27 This one is from 2005, that was also being…. Rejected, because, again, it's an operating system that you just can't use anymore.
19:32:37 And so, got around that. Mac OS extended with the DVD.
19:32:43 This is the… basically the same kind of Mac operating system.
19:32:47 Formatting that's no longer allowed, but in this case, it's got 3.7 gigabytes on it.
19:32:53 Instead of that CD, which had only 671,000. Bytes.
19:33:00 And then…. If I stuck it… if I point at one of the… my current drives, it'll tell you that it's got an.
19:33:09 Apfs, Apple. File system.
19:33:14 And in between, there is something else that stands for APF, but that's completely different, so ignore that. And this happens to be a 16 terabyte drive that's got 9.34 terabytes.
19:33:26 Of available space, and I've used 6 terabytes. This is the current Mac operating system.
19:33:33 Uses APFS. This is APFS case sensitive.
19:33:42 And even though the Mac will allow you to format things as APFS case sensitive.
19:33:47 Don't do that, because it'll drive you nuts. Apfs is used by time machine.
19:33:55 When Time Machine backs stuff up, it wants things to be case-sensitive. Why?
19:34:01 Because it saves just a huge amount of information about your files.
19:34:06 When the file was created, when it was modified, when it was the date, all kinds of things.
19:34:10 And the Mac allows you to have. To have a file named Fred.
19:34:16 So it's going to be Fred, uh, text. Uh, F-R-E-D dot….
19:34:21 Txt. The Mac will allow you to save it with a capital F, with a lowercase f.
19:34:27 With a lowercase f and a capital N. Uh, RED doesn't care.
19:34:32 How you do it. It'll accept all of those, and it'll alphabetize in the same way. But when it's saving them to a time machine store, it's important to know the differences.
19:34:42 So it stores them with exact same casing that it did before.
19:34:47 And that has those dates. And again, an example of something. I had this secretary once.
19:34:52 Who would write minutes to meeting, and she'd always just say minutes, minutes, minutes.
19:34:57 She had 13,000 files. Titled, Minutes.
19:35:03 No indication of the date at all. Time machine wouldn't have trouble with that, because it would look at the creation date, so even though they're all called the same, it can tell that they're different.
19:35:13 But if you, right now, were to try to write something, say, minutes, and then save in the same folder something with the exact same thing, your Mac's gonna say, uh-uh, you already got something with that name.
19:35:23 And it'll offer it to say, you know, I can save it as minutes, too, or minutes 3, or whatever.
19:35:28 But you don't want to have things as case-sensitive. Case-sensitive is basically used by.
19:35:34 Time machine, and that's all. One of the CDs that I could read.
19:35:40 But was old was this one from 2000, and it says that it's ISO 9660.
19:35:47 Joliet. Well…. Iso 9660 is the standard number.
19:35:54 When they finally came up with standards for CDs, that's what the formal name is. And Joliet happens to be the town in Illinois that they were staying in a motel when they came on the standard.
19:36:06 By the standard. The Bluetooth standard that we use for wireless, it's named after a Viking, uh.
19:36:14 Chieftain, and it's called Bluetooth because the hotel they were staying at was named Bluetooth.
19:36:21 So, there's your trivia for the day. Um, so…. This is for a standard format CD.
19:36:29 Uh, this is for a data disk done on a DVD, and it says, Universal Disk Format.
19:36:36 Eventually, they came up with a standard for…. Bluetooth….
19:36:43 Blu-ray discs that were being used for data, and it's called Universal Disk Format, so that's what this thing is.
19:36:50 Now we're going to get into the weeds here. One of my thumb drives.
19:36:57 Um, is, um…. It's a 15GB thumb drive, one of the little USB flash drives.
19:37:04 And thumb drives always come from the store, formatted as either FAT16 or FAT32.
19:37:13 And FAT16 stands for File Allocation Table. And this is a standard that Microsoft came up with.
19:37:20 Back in the early days of Windows. So, FAT16, nobody uses anymore. Fat32, you can put more stuff on a drive, and you can have larger files.
19:37:31 With FAT32. So almost everything, almost every USB drive you buy comes pre-formatted as FAT32.
19:37:39 And this is a 128 jig. Flash drive that's also FAT32. When I get these, I always reformat them as new standard.
19:37:52 Which is called XFAT. Xfat is….
19:37:59 A much more modern version of the Microsoft file allocation table.
19:38:03 Two reasons why it's a good idea to format flash drives as expat.
19:38:08 One is if you give it to somebody who's got a Windows machine, unless they have an old Windows machine, they'll be able to read it.
19:38:14 If they have a really all-in Windows machine, they may not be able to. But if you put a bunch of, uh.
19:38:19 Photographs on, uh, something that's formatted as XFAT. They can read it. Plug it into the machine, they can read it. And you can read it on your Mac.
19:38:28 If you're saving MAC data for use by Mac. User, you don't want to use any of the fat.
19:38:37 Formats for anything that you're keeping for your personal records, and the reason is that FAT doesn't understand a lot of things that Mac people do.
19:38:46 Mac people use colored icons. Mac people can paste an icon over a file. Mac people want this icon over in this corner and a different… different file over in this corner, and they can… they can even arrange them in patterns and all kinds of things.
19:39:00 Fat doesn't know anything about that, throws that information away. And you might think… you might find that information useful.
19:39:08 But if you're… if you get a… if you get a USB drive that you're going to hand to somebody who might have a Windows machine, you probably want to format as XFAC.
19:39:19 And this is…. That, um, SD card that I was holding up earlier, this is the formatting that it has natively.
19:39:29 When you format it with a camera. It'll usually format it as an XFAT.
19:39:34 And that doesn't mean you should format it on your computer. Anytime you get an SD card for a camera, stick it in, have the camera format it.
19:39:42 Because they might do something slightly different. But XFAT is used… this is a half.
19:39:47 Terabyte card. And it's about the size of my thumb, and very flat.
19:39:54 Um, if you think about storing things in a bank vault.
19:39:57 I could store hundreds of these in a bank vault and store just.
19:40:02 Terabytes worth of data in very little space. So, uh, in terms of a safety deposit vault, this is a….
19:40:08 Interesting and useful way to do things. But anyway, that's kind of the background. Now, having told you that, what do you really need to pay attention to?
19:40:17 If you have a Mac today. A fairly modern Mac. Anything that's got Apple silicon, anything that's got a salicate disk drive.
19:40:26 You want your boot drive to be formatted as APFS. And how to tell if… how it's formatted? You click on your boot drive.
19:40:34 And you say, get info. And the information here will say that my boot drive is formatted as APFS.
19:40:43 And that's what it should be. If you have…. A recent machine, and it's not formatted this way, it probably doesn't work very well.
19:40:52 And it'll work much, much slower. Apfs is a much faster, uh.
19:40:58 System for storing and retrieving things, and. Copying things, it's just faster all around.
19:41:03 So, APFS is important for you to remember, and the other one is the XFAT, so that if you go to the store and you get a bunch of SD cards, and you can.
19:41:14 Um, Kathleen bought, like. Five of these 128 gig ones for, like.
19:41:22 40 bucks or something, I don't remember how much you paid for. But the first thing I do is I reformat them from.
19:41:28 Uh, FAT32 to XFAT, because then… copying things to and from them is faster.
19:41:33 It'll still work with Windows people if I give them to them.
19:41:37 And you can store more files. There's… with FAT32, there's actually a limit on the number of files you can put on one of these.
19:41:46 You'll see there's still lots of space, and it says, oh, I can't….
19:41:49 I can't store anything else in there, because it just doesn't understand how to handle that.
19:41:56 Complex, uh, a, um, directory format. Now, having said all of that, I want to ask if there are any questions before I then show you a piece of magic.
19:42:08 Any questions? By the way, I am going to have notes listing.
19:42:13 These different formats and why you should pay attention to them.
19:42:17 And I'm going to post that on the website. So if your eyes are glazed over.
19:42:24 Wait until you get the notes. Any questions?
19:42:29 I'm assuming you're going to show us how to create a Mojave virtual machine.
19:42:35 Not tonight. That's, um…. That's, um….
19:42:38 No? That's how…. But then how would you open that CD?
19:42:44 Well, I don't want to sh… showing you how I created the virtual machine, that's an entire session unto itself.
19:42:51 Oh, yeah. Because among other….
19:42:50 Oh, really? Is it part of your current disk? I mean, you do it on your heart, or do you have to use an external drive, or…?
19:43:01 One of the above. The virtual machine.
19:43:05 First of all, you have to have a machine that you can plug an optical drive in, and because that's a USB device.
19:43:13 Just plug it in. Then you need a machine that's got enough memory and disk space to hold a virtual machine.
19:43:20 And in my case, I have that. And then you also need a copy of the Mojave operating system. Fortunately, you can get that from Apple. Apple has a.
19:43:30 Whole section of their Apple store with legacy operating systems. And you can download it.
19:43:36 And then you need a piece of specialized software. There are several places out there that have virtual machines. One is made… well.
19:43:44 I'll just tell you the one that I use, because it's the most reliable. I use Parallels.
19:43:49 And that's the name of the company, as well as the name of the.
19:43:53 Um, of the software. I use Parallels, and with Parallels, I can set up multiple virtual machines.
19:43:59 On the machine I'm using right now, I've got several Windows virtual machines, I've got a Linux virtual machine, I've got several Mac.
19:44:08 Virtual machines, which unfortunately don't work anymore. Because the particular machine I'm on right now is an Apple Silicon machine, and the old operating… Mac operating systems.
19:44:19 Require an Intel processor. So, the virtual machine where I did all this work is a different one. I'm sitting across the room from me.
19:44:27 It's an old Mac Pro from, uh, 2000…. 18. And so….
19:44:32 And is parallels expensive, or…?
19:44:35 Parallels is, depending upon how you buy it, anywhere from 70 to 100 bucks.
19:44:41 But it allows you to have multiple. Virtual machines on your Mac, and the advantage of having virtual machines over physical machines.
19:44:52 With a physical machine, like my Windows machine, even if I don't want to use it, I have to power it up every month.
19:44:58 To update the security on it, and a bunch of other stuff.
19:45:02 Plus, it takes up more room. With a virtual machine, it takes up the same amount of room as the computer you're using.
19:45:08 Already. But….
19:45:12 Can you have that… can you have the virtual machine? On an external drive.
19:45:17 Yes. Uh, in fact, that's where I usually put them, because if I….
19:45:22 If I had everything on my boot drive that I use.
19:45:27 Um, I would have had to spend a really huge amount of money on this.
19:45:32 Mac Mini, because I'd have to go out and spend it.
19:45:35 Staggering them out of space on a bunch of flash storage that I didn't want. So, uh, all of my virtual machines are on external devices.
19:45:44 Um, because I don't want to take up room on my boot drive.
19:45:50 So, having explained…. All these different formats to you.
19:45:55 What happens if you have. Machines, you have external drives or internal drives that have the wrong format on them.
19:46:04 Normally, you have to erase them. And start over again.
19:46:09 With APFS. There's a trick, though.
19:46:13 And I'm going to show you that. And it's a hidden trick, because Apple….
19:46:18 Doesn't want you to know about it, but it's not very well hidden, so I'll show you.
19:46:26 You have on your computer something called Disk Utility. So I'm gonna fire it up, I'm gonna look for Disk Utility.
19:46:33 Type it in, here's… up pops a disk utility. I'm going to stop right here.
19:46:38 Now, Disk Utility is a utility that's inside your utilities folder in your Applications folder, so if you scroll, if your applications are in alphabetical order, scroll down to the bottom to Utilities, there's a folder there.
19:46:51 You open that up, and Disk Utility's in there. You can use Discatility for a number of things. One is you can use it for disk first aid. You point it at a machine.
19:47:00 And you say, perform a first aid check on it, and it goes through the directory and looks for errors, and if it.
19:47:06 Can. It'll offer to fix them, and you can fix the errors.
19:47:10 You can use it to partition a drive, which. You don't really want to do. You can use it to erase a drive, which you want to think about this because erasing is usually bad.
19:47:19 But, uh, this is… this is disk utility. So I go here….
19:47:24 And I say, go to Porsche. This is that external drive I was playing with earlier.
19:47:30 And right now, it says that it is, uh, where is it?
19:47:36 I happen to know… oh yeah, right now it's got macOS Extended Journaled Forenit Matting on the drive.
19:47:42 So, we come here…. And I say….
19:47:47 Look down here at the bottom, you'll see it says, convert to APFS.
19:47:52 So it's not in the menu up here, you have to actually click on the drive.
19:47:57 And with a right click, and it pops up this menu, and one of the options is to convert to APFS.
19:48:02 Now, think about it. This is the catalog of everything that's on the drive.
19:48:10 Do you want to convert them if you have anything on the drive?
19:48:16 Yes, no? I'm paranoid. So when I first did this, I copied everything that was on that drive onto another drive, and then I had it converted to APFS.
19:48:28 But I'm going to show you this video because you can also do the same thing without.
19:48:33 Actually moving anything. You can see this drive has stuff on it, and I come here and I say.
19:48:41 Convert to APFS. Pressed the little button.
19:48:45 And it starts converting. Normally, you won't see this stuff. I asked it to show more.
19:48:50 Uh, I asked to show this stuff. It'll sit there, and it's converting, and it's gonna take a while as it thinks about it.
19:48:56 And it has to do a whole bunch of…. Of, uh, changes in order to pull off this trick.
19:49:03 And… then it's done. And now that it's done, let's go look at the drive and see if the stuff is still there.
19:49:10 And it's still there. Now, I wouldn't recommend that you do this, but it is possible to convert your drives that you have already.
19:49:21 From the old HFS operating system. To HPFS without removing everything.
19:49:28 If it's really important to you, I would… I would, uh….
19:49:32 I would, um, move the stuff someplace else first. But it is….
19:49:37 Um, Lauren?
19:49:38 It is something that you can do on the fly.
19:49:42 Does it require a certain amount of free space on the drive you're gonna convert?
19:49:49 It… it can't be too full. You want to make sure that it has room.
19:49:47 Or can it be a full dryer?
19:49:53 The other thing is that before you try it on this drive.
19:49:56 You want to use that disc first aid feature that's in Disk Utility, and check the drive.
19:50:02 If you ever have a drive that reports an error. Fix it. If you can't fix the error.
19:50:10 Replace the drive. No ifs, ands, or buts. You see people running around town with their… they've got a muffler that's… that needs to be replaced in their car, and they're not paying any attention.
19:50:21 And they're driving along. If your muffler on your car. Isn't working. You are getting bad gas mileage.
19:50:29 Just no ifs, ands, or buts. You're getting bad gas mileage. It really ruins the gas mileage.
19:50:35 You're also creating a lot of air pollution. And there's a good chance you're gonna blow a piston.
19:50:40 Because what you've done is you've changed the back pressure that your engine is… needs in order to operate, and there's a good chance you'll end up.
19:50:48 Blowing your engine. So, if you have enough muffling needs to replace, don't hesitate, go and change it.
19:50:55 If you have a drive that's reporting an error, stop using it.
19:50:59 Copy everything you can to a new drive. No Fsensor, buts, don't stop, don't hesitate, just do that. And the first thing you can do before you try this change, this conversion therapy is you want to, uh….
19:51:16 You went to check it with this first aid and make sure it comes back with a clean bill of health, because if there's anything wrong with your.
19:51:22 Your drive, you don't want to be changing the directory. This is a magic trick. You've seen the magicians where they have the table that's full of.
19:51:30 Of plates and glasses and wine, and candles are lit, and the magician comes along, and he jerks out the tablecloth underneath, and everything's fine.
19:51:39 This is what you're doing when you convert it from HFS to HPFS.
19:51:43 Because you're changing the entire directory that explains where everything on the drive is located.
19:51:49 And to just give you an example. If you have, say, a 220-page paper.
19:51:55 And you save it to your hard drive, and you've been using this hard drive for several years.
19:51:59 That 220-page paper could end up in literally thousands of segments across your hard drive.
19:52:08 So, if you damage the directory. That's really bad.
19:52:13 But if you have old drives and you want to convert them to HPFS, you can do it with Disk Utility.
19:52:19 And if you do that. Accessing the drives is much faster, things scroll faster. If you open up a folder, things display faster. It really is, um….
19:52:32 It really is something you want to do. Any questions?
19:52:37 What happens if the internal SSD on an M-Series Mac reports.
19:52:43 Disc error that… disk utility can't fix.
19:52:46 Uh, at that point, I would definitely call up your local.
19:52:50 Apple Genius, because that's, uh…. There are no good recovery tools for, um, for SSDs.
19:52:59 Uh, they don't work… they're not a mechanical. Device, the, uh, your… the old-fashioned hard drives, it's a whole… it's a metal platter.
19:53:08 That you record on both sides, and sometimes you'll have multiple metal platters in the dry.
19:53:13 And this comb-like thing comes and reads and writes. And the, uh….
19:53:18 The spots where it records are numbered. So, it knows that if the directory says.
19:53:25 Go on disk 4 to section 18, and you'll find this.
19:53:30 And it'll just go there. Ssds work very differently. They have a dynamic directory, they can scatter things all over the place.
19:53:39 And there's no…. There's no one-to-one correspondence with any kind of logical.
19:53:47 Path. It's, uh, it's more how, like, how your brain works, where it's got a whole bunch of divergent link paths, and that's how an SD works.
19:53:54 So, if your SSD is having problems, you need to seek professional help.
19:54:00 Possibly both from a counselor as well as from an Apple genius.
19:54:04 Um, because that's bad. Then the good news is, because they're solid estate, there's fewer of the muting parts, and there's less that can go wrong. But if they go bad, it's, um….
19:54:16 Much harder to, um…. Deal with.
19:54:23 Any other questions?
19:54:30 I did all of that, and you don't have any questions, I'm really….
19:54:33 Impressed.
19:54:37 So, are you gonna have a session where you show us how to set up a virtual drive?
19:54:44 I could, but I…. I would want to find out if there's really that much interest, because it is kind of in the weeds. It's a….
19:54:51 It's something that I use. Routinely, but most people.
19:54:56 Most Mac users aren't ever going to use Linux or Windows, and….
19:55:01 So, setting up a virtual machine so I can run Linux and Windows on my Mac is….
19:55:07 May not be something that has that much interest. But yeah, I could do it.
19:55:11 I was thinking more along the lines of those of us who have.
19:55:15 Cds and DVDs from the…. 1990s and early 2000s.
19:55:21 Okay, that's a… that's a good point.
19:55:23 Yeah, there's a bunch of us.
19:55:26 Yeah, I'll second… I'll second that.
19:55:27 Um…. Okay, I will… if someone sends me a message, I'll put that on my list of things to possibly do.
19:55:36 Um, one more thing that… piece of housekeeping before we…. Continue with any questions.
19:55:43 Um, next month, are we going to have a meeting, or are we going to skip it?
19:55:48 Why would we skip?
19:55:50 Bill, because a lot of people wander away in August. I'm not going anywhere that I'm aware of.
19:55:55 I'm….
19:55:58 But….
19:56:00 I'm tethered here.
19:56:06 Well, in that case, come up with ideas, um, above and beyond setting up a virtual machine.
19:56:12 Okay.
19:56:12 I will tell you that I have, like, 700…. Optical disks, and about 300 of them I needed the….
19:56:21 My virtual machine in order to read. So it was, uh… and it takes about….
19:56:27 Assuming I'm sitting in front of the machine and paying attention, it takes about 10 minutes per disk.
19:56:33 So, this was a lot of times. And I'm in impatient type, so I'd wander away, and then I'd remember, like, an hour later that I have to go switch out the disc, so….
19:56:43 It is a time-consuming task.
19:56:43 Laundry. Laundry? It reminds me of the laundry.
19:56:49 Uh, laundry is more interesting, believe it or not.
19:56:53 I forgot, I turned my mic on.
19:57:00 I did, uh, two loads of laundry on Monday. I did 3 loads of laundry on Monday.
19:57:06 And in that time, I did about 2 dozen deaths, so I'm….
19:57:10 I'm familiar with the metric. Any other questions tonight?
19:57:17 Yeah, I've got a question. I've got a, uh, an optical disc.
19:57:19 Yes?
19:57:23 And…. It worked… it worked on my older Mac. It's… it's supposedly a C….
19:57:32 C-drive compatible, or…. But my… my, uh, new Mac, it's a M1 or 1M.
19:57:41 Uh, it doesn't recognize it. It doesn't show up on the screen.
19:57:50 Who make… who made the drive? Is it apples?
19:57:51 Oh, boy. Um…. No, no, it's a… it's a third party.
19:58:00 Machined. That's… it wasn't very expensive.
19:58:04 I will confess that I don't know that I've plugged, uh….
19:58:08 My optical disk into my…. M1 machine.
19:58:14 Oh, oh, oh, I do have a thought, though. You definitely have to plug it directly into the machine.
19:58:24 You can't.
19:58:24 Oh, okay, I'm… not through a, uh…. What do you call it? A bus, or whatever the thing is?
19:58:31 Stuck.
19:58:32 A doc, yeah. Okay.
19:58:31 A doc. Yeah, it has to go directly into the machine, and if it's a USB-A, and you don't have a USB-A port on your M1, what you can do is you can use one of these adapters.
19:58:41 Yeah.
19:58:44 This is an adapter, it's not a dock. It actually fits over the USB-A, and it's got a USB-C on the other end.
19:58:47 Okay.
19:58:51 Uh, because if it… it's…. Storage devices, the Mac wants them to be directly stored. They don't… doesn't like them if they're….
19:58:59 Plugged into some intermediary. It doesn't like that at all. So that… that might be an issue.
19:59:04 Uh, that's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.
19:59:02 Okay.
19:59:07 I will confess that the optical disks that I've been using.
19:59:07 Okay.
19:59:11 It's been plugged into this Intel machine because the Intel machine is the only thing that can run.
19:59:17 My, uh… my Mojave. Uh, because it's an Intel… Mojave was an Intel.
19:59:24 Operating system. So, I didn't even try to do this on my, uh….
19:59:29 On my Mac Mini, because it…. It just doesn't… Mohammed not even as a virtual machine, will work on my….
19:59:38 Mac Mini. Because it doesn't have the right processor.
19:59:43 Okay, well, that might be the problem, because I think…. I think mine's… the old machine's an Intel machine. I think this is the first Apple one.
19:59:51 That I've got now. If that was the case, then….
19:59:56 Well, except that if it's just reading the drive, you should be able to….
20:00:01 Read the drive. With it plugged in, but if it's an old, old format drive that requires an.
20:00:02 Yeah.
20:00:08 Intel processor to run the operating system. That's a… that's a separate….
20:00:13 Problem. Any other questions?
20:00:14 Okay.
20:00:20 Well, send me your. Suggestions on what we will do in August. And, um, I will….
20:00:27 Give some thought to, uh…. To, uh, talking about virtual machines.
20:00:35 I have to find a…. Way to make it so that everyone's eyes don't glaze over.
20:00:43 But, uh, it is kind of neat to be able to run.
20:00:47 Linux. My… my…. Windows machine, by the way. Windows….
20:00:55 For the last 3 or 4 years, you can optionally download a developer package.
20:01:00 That allows you to run Linux. Within Windows from the terminal.
20:01:07 Again, this is not something that most people would ever want to do. When I bought this new machine, because my old Windows machine died, all I was doing was a simple update.
20:01:16 When I bought this new machine, the first thing I did was install.
20:01:19 Linux on it. So, I'm a little weird, and…. I want to make sure I can come up with something to… to….
20:01:28 Interests you without being as weird as I am. And, uh, you know.
20:01:36 So, send any suggestions you have, just email them to, uh….
20:01:41 Vice presidents, um…. And, uh, Straight Mac.
20:01:46 Anything else?
20:01:48 Well, um, this is Liam here, and I have, um…. Been trying to back up files from one hard drive to another hard drive.
20:01:57 Using the Mac through a dock. And it sounds like, and I find it's not working very easily.
20:02:07 Um, and so what I gathered from this is that. Maybe the best way of doing that is using the files application to transfer files.
20:02:17 Between different places. Um…. And, um….
20:02:22 Well, the files application applies only to the iPhone and the iPad, doesn't apply the Mac.
20:02:28 Oh, it's not gonna apply to a MacBook.
20:02:31 No. The. If you're trying to use a drive that's plugged into a dock, there's a good chance that you're running into a number of things.
20:02:40 This… this is a USB-C connector on the end of this adapter. If I plug.
20:02:46 Right.
20:02:47 This, uh, USB-A. Flash drive into….
20:02:55 That connector, if I can figure out how to get it in right.
20:03:01 We have alumni?
20:03:00 Okay, now I have a USB-A connector connected to my US, uh….
20:03:07 Bc adapter. Just by adding this does not make this.
20:03:08 Right.
20:03:13 Flash drive any faster. This is still a USB 3.1 flash drive.
20:03:19 Right. Seriously.
20:03:19 If I have a thunderbolt. Drive, and I plug it into a dock.
20:03:25 And the dock is a USB dock. It'll run much, much slower.
20:03:31 So, if at all possible you want to plug. Large storage devices directly into the machine. And if you need to get an adapter for that, the adapter is a better way to go than a dock.
20:03:43 The docs are for things like mice and low-speed devices. It's not a….
20:03:47 It's not a great thing for high-speed devices. I have another dock.
20:03:54 That's a Thunderbolt dock. And the dock itself extends the Thunderbolt interface so that I can….
20:04:02 Plug high-speed things into it. But that's a…. A very different kind of doc. Most of the docs are USB-A type docs.
20:04:09 And they're much slower, and they're good for… they're good for scanners and printers and… and uh….
20:04:16 Things where speed is not of the essence. You measure the speed of a printer and how many characters it can print out.
20:04:22 You measure the speed of hard drives and flash drives in millions and billions of a second.
20:04:31 So the… the scale is just vastly different.
20:04:32 Yeah. What I've found as problems is if you drag and drop with the Mac.
20:04:43 Uh, sometimes it would change the file format from JPEG to HEIC.
20:04:49 And often, it would also just change the entire file name to some cryptic long….
20:04:57 It shouldn't change the format.
20:04:56 Gibberish. Um…. Right. Uh, it did… well, I wish I could… it's been a while since I did it, and I got so….
20:05:05 Frustrated, I stopped trying to back up my photos, because it was changing the file names as well.
20:05:13 And when I was… you just kind of copy it, or drag and drop it?
20:05:12 Yeah, is the drive that you're…. Is the… is the, uh….
20:05:17 Drag and drop generally doesn't work on Mac very well. Um, but….
20:05:23 Um, is the drive that you're copying it to, is it formatted? Is APFS, or is it formatted?
20:05:29 I'm gonna have to go check that. I think it may not be.
20:05:33 Because if it's formatted as fat, you can have all kinds of trouble.
20:05:36 Yeah.
20:05:39 So, but again, to find out is you just click on it and say, get info, and it'll tell you what the formatting is.
20:05:44 I'll… that's, I think, maybe the first thing I need to do is make sure I know what format of my disks are.
20:05:50 Okay. Thank you, appreciate it.
20:05:54 Michael, your t-shirt is making me want some cheese.
20:05:58 I have a question. This is Carol. Yes.
20:06:02 Any other questions?
20:06:05 Uh, Lawrence, I just had a quick question. You had, um, recommended, um, Otherworld computing, um, external hard drive.
20:06:14 But I've read some, um, reviews that they can be kind of noisy. How are you finding your….
20:06:20 External hard drive.
20:06:22 Um, it depends upon the kind of external hard drive. Like, for example, there….
20:06:27 Our solid-state external hard drives, like these little flash drives that make no noise at all. This one here is extremely quiet.
20:06:35 The dock where I plugged this thing into, it's noisier simply because there's nothing at all.
20:06:45 Okay.
20:06:42 Between the drive and the outside world. Uh, it's…. That much of the drive is sticking out, so this is… it's not super noisy, but….
20:06:53 It's not quiet. It's something you could have a nice conversation while it was going, but it's not….
20:07:01 It's not… if you're trying to listen to classical music, you'd probably find it annoying.
20:07:06 It wouldn't wake up… so my computer's right by my sister's bedroom. I was afraid of waking her up if she's taking a nap.
20:07:15 Um, I can't really think of any hard drives that are that noisy.
20:07:20 Unless they're in the process of dying.
20:07:19 Okay. Okay, yeah, they make a loud noise.
20:07:27 Okay.
20:07:29 Yes.
20:07:27 I have a question. Um, when you said that you would put the lists of things on the website.
20:07:36 How do you get that? For the things that you talked about tonight.
20:07:41 Um, any of the messages that I send out, down at the bottom.
20:07:45 Where it's gone, it says, Lawrence Charters, Vice President. Down below that, it's got the website address. Just click on that.
20:07:53 Okay, thank you.
20:07:57 Okay, Lawrence, I have a bit of a follow-on to the question about my external drive. My old system is iCiera.
20:08:06 And my machine is a late 2009.
20:08:11 2009…. That is definitely on the old sign.
20:08:12 Yeah.
20:08:19 So that's obviously an Intel machine, yeah.
20:08:23 Um… yeah, yeah, Intel was still a company back then.
20:08:27 Yeah, yeah. So, so, so, uh, I guess what I'm trying to find out is, is it likely that I can use the external drive that works on that machine.
20:08:37 On my new machine, which is a… which is a, uh, Apple.
20:08:41 No, there's nothing that'll work on that 2009 machine that'll work on your new machine.
20:08:46 Okay, okay, that solves the problem, yeah. So I just… I'm just getting myself another….
20:08:46 Nothing at all.
20:08:51 External drive, then, yeah.
20:08:54 Yeah, the, um…. My advice on external drives, if you're using it for backup with Time Machine, just go into.
20:09:02 Costco, buy whatever drive seems… the general rule of thumb is, if you have a 1TB.
20:09:10 Internal drive that you should go buy at least a 2 or 3 terabyte external drive.
20:09:15 For Time Machine. You plug it in, Time Machine will format it, and you're away.
20:09:19 And if it's not a very good quality, you don't care, because it's only backup.
20:09:16 Yeah.
20:09:24 If you're storing data, like the photographs we were talking about earlier, you want to go for quality for storing something.
20:09:32 That you're going to be using on a regular basis. And for that, Otherworld computing and Newegg.
20:09:40 Newegg is another company. They sell quality drives, but the ones in Costco, they're going for price.
20:09:45 Okay. Yeah. Um, well, I'm talking about a optical drive.
20:09:49 Which is…. Or an optical drive.
20:09:53 So it's… yeah.
20:09:55 The optical drives, New World Computing is about the only game in town right now. I went to… you can go onto Amazon and search for optical drives, but you're going to find that there just aren't that many.
20:10:06 Lg, the Korean company, was the last maker of optical drives. They stopped.
20:10:12 Manufacturing optical drives in December of last year. So if you want an optical drive.
20:10:16 Oh, okay. So, from… from whom?
20:10:18 Better get one quick. Otherworld computing.
20:10:19 Okay.
20:10:23 Otherworld, okay.
20:10:26 Amazon sells them too, but you gotta read the fine print with the ones on Amazon.
20:10:30 Yeah.
20:10:31 Because most of the… most of the people are buying them from Amazon are PC users, and sometimes they're just….
20:10:42 Yeah. All right, that's good advice. I'll take your advice on that.
20:10:39 Really not something a Mac person wants.
20:10:46 All the other rural computing. Yeah, I think I might have dealt with them before, actually.
20:10:50 Yeah, okay, thank you.
20:10:54 Anything else? Okay? See you next month.
20:10:57 Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. Yeah, yeah, thank you.
20:11:02 Yeah, thanks a lot. We appreciate all the work you do, thank you.
20:11:02 That's great. Yes. Wonderful.
20:11:03 Yeah, thanks, Morris. Thanks.