shownotes_20191019

Opening
  Opening Music
    Music is Say Anything by Manda and the Marbles
Sponsor: Smile
  PDFpen 11
    PDFpen 11 is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac.
      You can add headers and footers, along with watermarks to your documents
      It also includes a precision edit tool, plus you can OCR documents
    One of the great new features of support for Continuity Camera
      Snap an image with your iPhone and bring it right into PDFpen
    They also added a split view editing mode.
    View and edit documents on your Mac, iPad, or iPhone: PDFpen supports file syncing through many cloud services.
    PDFpen for iPad & iPhone 5 supports iOS 13 and syncs files seamlessly with PDFpen 11 on your Mac.
    Use your iPad or iPhone to scan documents directly into PDFpen on your Mac.
    PDFpenPro 11 can automatically turn your documents into fillable forms, plus export to Excel, PowerPoint, and more
News
  Apple's 5G Modem Timeline
    We've had quite a lot of discussion and debate about this one.
    Latest reports from Fast Company citing "a source familiar" with Apple's plans says the company wants to have their own 5G modems ready for devices by 2022
    The timeline is tight given the number of worldwide certifications required to get a new cellular modem device into public use.
    Apple has built up an amazing in-house team of cellular experts acquiring employees from companies like Qualcomm and Intel.
    Apple had also been working closely with Intel on their next gen XMM 8160 5G modem but then Intel was having trouble delivering and Apple lost faith and settled ongoing lawsuits with Qualcomm.
      Soon after Intel announced they'd be closing and selling off their modem business.
      Apple picked up a lot of talent and key cellular patents from Intel
    It's believed ultimately Apple's 5G modem solution will be integrated into their A-series chip as part of their SoC design.
      That might not happen right away.
      The sources think Apple will introduce a stand alone 5G chip in 2022 and then bring an integrated solution later possibly in 2023
    For the next couple years at least looks like will be seeing Qualcomm 5G solutions in Apple devices.
  Apple Studios?
    This could be amazing or all my years of concern about Apple becoming another Sony (maybe not that bad) could be coming true.
    The Hollywood reports says that Apple is going to launch it's own in-house studio with a project that will be a third in the series of WWII Drama's originally done for HBO.
    HBO produced Band Of Brother and The Pacific. Apple's series will be titled. Masters of the Air, and will be the story of the men of the Eighth Air Force — known as the men of the Mighty Eighth.
    Like the previous HBO series the show will be produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and Steven Spielberg
    This will be the first show done from Apple TV+ by Apple's own in-house Studio
      Seems like not a bad place to start
      Band of Brothers and The Pacific combined won a total of 14 Emmys
    The studio will be run by former Sony Studio executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht who also head up Apple's Worldwide Video.
    Some shows are already getting second season orders
      "For All Mankind," "Dickinson," "Little America" and "Home Before Dark."
      There was already a second season order for "The Morning Show" which is reportedly costing Apple more than $15M an episode.
    Apple TV app is now available on Roku
      Can be downloaded from the Roku Channel Store
    A Twitter user discovered that there seems to be a "hidden" diagnostic Lightning port on the Apple TV 4K
      It's deep inside the back of the Ethernet port
      Not clear how you would connect to it, but likely there for service
  The iPhone 8 SE 2
    Apple seems to planning an update for the iPhone SE 2, but it might not be the iPhone you're looking for.
      Especially if a small size is your number one feature
    This rumor has been around for a while, but Ming-Chi Kuo has added some more details this week in a recent note to investors
    Specs:
      An A13 processor
      3GB RAM
      64GB and 128GB options
      Space Gray, Silver, and Red color
    No mention of which camera system it will have. I would hope the iPhone X's dual lens system, but they could stick with the single lens system of the 8
    Here's the kicker, it's all in a package with the same design and form factor as the iPhone 8
    Expected to come in as Apple's "entry level" iPhone with a starting price point around USD $399
    The updated iPhone 8 SE 2 is expected to arrive sometime in the first quarter of next year.
    AnandTech finds the A13 in the iPhone 11 Pro to be a screamer
      They put the processor through the paces for their [in-depth review](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/)
      They found the CPU to be around 20 percent faster than the A12, but it needs to draw a bit more power than it predecessor to achieve that.
      Still they found overall that the A13 is about 30 percent more energy efficient than the A12
      The GPU also showed about a 20 percent improvement at peak performance, but the iPhone 11 Pro had 50 to 60 percent higher sustained performance
  Catalina Supplemental Update
    The launch has been a bit rocky, but there are some fixes out
    Fix for the issue I has where the Setup Assistant hung up during installation
    Be patient, my update took a LONG time and appeared to be stalled a few times.
    Addresses the iCloud login loop, with a fix for an iCloud Terms and Conditions acceptance issue.
    The update also:
      Improves installation reliability of ‌macOS Catalina‌ on Macs with low disk space
      Improves the reliability of saving Game Center data when playing Apple Arcade games offline
  More on possible "AirPods Pro"
    China Economic daily reports that Apple's third generation AirPods are being readied for an end of October launch
    They will have a new "in-ear" design with rubber ear tips and noise-canceling feature
    The new version will supposedly adopt the "Pro" labeling and a whopping USD $260 price.
    A separate report claims they will have a new metal design that increases heat dissipation.
Sponsor: Linode
  Linode
    Linode allows you to instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations.
    They are giving all new Maccast customers a $20 credit.
    I've been wanting to set up a Minecraft server and Linode offers One-click installs including gaming installs
      They have Minecraft, Ark, Terraria, and more.
      Also one-click installs for things like Wordpress, Drupal, GitLab, OpenVPN and more.
      Plus a whole bunch of distros. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode.
        Most Linux distributions available out of the box, but you can upload custom images or create your own
      Basically you can build whatever server you want.
    Featuring native SSD storage, a 40 Gbit network, with industry leading processors
    Pick from any of our 10 worldwide data centers
      They just opened their newest one in Toronto, Canada
        Built using their most up to date hardware and their Next Generation Network backbone
        Allows users to comply with in-country data protection requirements while taking advantage of all Linode's technology and tools.
      Additional datacenter opening in Mumbai India by end of 2019
    Pricing is simple with no surprise fees. Pay for what you use with hourly billing across all plans and add-on services
    Can get what you need from a $5/month Nanodes plan to high power Dedicated CPU plans
    Their dashboard makes it easy to manage your Linodes and upgrading your plan is easy.
      Can add-on backups, large storage volumes, and load balancing
    And if you need support they have 24x7 live customer support and a large documentation library which provides a great resource when you get stuck.
    Visit: linode.com/maccast to set up your first Linode and get a $20 credit when you use promo code: maccast2019
Feedback, commentary, opinions
  macOS Fatalina?
    Looks like the macOS Catalina installer needs a bit more room on your USB stick
    Play comment from Michael
    I actually ordered 10 new 64 GB Kingston DataTraveler SE9 G2 USB 3.0 drives because of this.
  How to get old macOS Installers
    So you used to be able to find them under the "Purchased" in the Mac App Store.
      This doesn't seem to be the case in macOS Catalina
    Turns out they are all still in the MAS if you know where to look.
    Apple has an article on "How to create a bootable installer for macOS" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372)
    In there they have links to pages for how to install macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, and OS X El Capitan.
    In the appropriate macOS page there is a direct App Store link for that OS. It's says "Get [macOS Name]".
  About your virtual Apple Card number
    There was another report last week about a user who claimed there were fraudulent charges on his Apple Card despite the facet that he had never used the physical card to pay for anything
    Unfortunately, most people probably missed the follow-up
      He later remembered we used his "virtual" card number to make an online purchase via his daughter's school website and it's likely that system was compromised.
    For those who may not know there are basically three ways payments can be made with Apple Card
      Apple Pay, the most secure, doesn't use card numbers, so that info is not ever shared with the retailer
      The physical Apple Card
        You can see it's last four digits in the Apple app
        Tap the "…", then Card information, authenticate with Face or Touch ID.
        You'll see an entry for "Physical Card"
      The "Card Number", this is a "virtual" number assigned to you when you set up Apple Card
        You can use this to make phone or online purchases with your Apple Card at places that don't Accept Apple Pay
        Tap the "…", then Card information, authenticate with Face or Touch ID.
        You'll see all the "virtual" card details in the Card information section at the top.
          Includes card number, expiration date, and CVV2
          You can tap the "Request New Card Number" link at anytime to get a new "virtual" card if you think the existing one has been compromised.
          Obviously if you do this you'll need to update any places that might be using the old card details for automated or recurring payments.
  Relocation makes us uneasy
    I received so many concerned emails about the "Relocated Items" folder
    The biggest questions are what is it? And can I safely delete it?
    What is it?
      After upgrading you may see a "Relocated Items" folder on your desktop.
      It will contain older files and data from previous macOS installations that can stay where the currently are in Catalina because of the latest security features
      Basically in Catalina Apple is finally fully adopting APFS features and using containers that can have multiple volumes
        It allows the disk's free space to be shared on demand and allocated to any of the individual volumes in the container as required
      As part of this set-up the system now lives in it's own "read-only" volume (Macintosh HD) to protect it from having anything else overwrite it's files.
      Your files and data are stored separately in another volume named "Macintosh HD - Data."
      You won't notice this separation in the Finder, but if you open Disk Utility you'll see the two distinct volumes
      The OS installer tries to move everything from the old set-up into this new split setup with the same locations, but there might be some files, configurations or 3rd party files installed inside the system folders, that don't have homes.
      It's these files that will land in "Relocated Items"
      I had some old Apache and MySQL configuration files in there for example.
    Can I get rid of it?
      In most cases maybe
      You'll want to review it
      Most likely many of the items, like configuration files that were modified by you, by another user, or by an app are incompatible with macOS Catalina.
      Still some items, like my customized Apache config file, might be things you need.
      I'm choosing to keep it around for a few months and then if i have no issues I'll delete it.
      It's worth noting the thing of the desktop is an alias for `/Users/Shared/Relocated Items.`
        Deleting the Desktop item will not remove the actual files.
    Also… the "Preboot" folders?
      Chuck found three folders named Preboot, Preboot 1 and Preboot 2 in the root of his installation drive after upgrading from macOS Mojave to Catalina.
      I’m not 100% sure those were created by the Catalina install, but it’s possible?
      Preboot, is responsible for booting tasks. When you bless a regular APFS volume (when it’s created), you're also configuring the Preboot volume in the container to support boot.
      There seems to be mixed opinions on if you can delete them or not and that is probably why the OS just doesn’t let you.
        Since it does control booting, so say if you delete them then your drive will not boot. That would be bad.
        Sorta like deleting the "Kernel" file back in the macOS 9 to X transition running "Classic" mode.
      That said, I don’t have ANY of these on my system, so I’m not sure why you do.
  Reminder about new Reminders
    When you launch reminders in iOS or macOS Catalina you'll see a message about the new Reminders and a need to upgrade the reminders in your iCloud account.
    ALL your and any people you have shared reminders with will need to be on the SAME version of Reminders to sync.
    It's a bummer because i have one older Mac that can't be upgraded to macOS Catalina
    Once you're upgraded on older devices and Mac your only option will be to go to iCloud.com
    Jeff, pointed out that on watchOS 6 there is no option to not upgrade and you're forced to the new reminders.
      So be careful there.
  Why "recovery" sucks. Backup is better.
    James sent me one of my most dreaded listener emails this week
    "My dad lost all his files on his iMac due to a hard drive failure and he had no backup."
    I know I harp on backup and everyone should do it, but the reality is a lot of folks don't
    We've discussed recovery options and apps in the past and Jame's Dad was lucky and able to recover many of the lost files.
      [Disk Drill](https://www.cleverfiles.com)
      [Data Rescue](https://www.prosofteng.com/data-recovery-software/)
    Here's the problem with recovery though and James question
      What you often get after recover is a giant folder with ALL recovered files and no real names or folder structure
      So all your photos (of everything) will be named like "File0001.jpg"
      And this could be from any place, inside apps, Application Support, email attachments, or maybe your pictures folder.
      Could be a thumbnail, and image asset for an app, or the actually original photo file you want.
    James wanted to know if there were any tools that could help.
    I Googled and found on app
      [Spotless](https://lightpillar.com/spotless.html)
      Part of Setapp
    It's really designed to "auto tidy" your files
    Can set up rules for files based on kind, size, dates, etc and it will automatically sort them into locations
    [Hazel](https://www.noodlesoft.com) might be able to do something similar
    At least it might separate image files into smaller catches that might be easier to sift through.
    Are there any other tools out there that might help with this situation that I'm missing?
Closing
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