jjmarcus tech solutions

We have a lot of old backup drives that we don’t need anymore. How could we get rid of them?

I don’t want to enable any hoarding tendencies, but I really don’t like the thought of my hard drives, and thus my data, being out there in the wild. The US military does not believe that a magnetic hard disk drive can ever be truly erased, and I have no desire to test that.

That said, I know some people simply don’t care, and I can’t make ’em. Ideally you’d at least erase them so your stuff doesn’t get out there. But as I mature(-ish), I learn how unpractical—and maaaaybe bordering on paranoid—that might be. In which case take ’em to Best Buy for responsible recycling.

Does that help?

We bought the new Apple TV for the conference room. Is there anything special that I need to do besides plugging it in to to make sure that everyone is able to connect to it via AirPlay?

Should be pretty straightforward. Just name it something simpler, logical, and/or fun, and join it to your wifi. From there it should work straightaway.

There are some settings to consider for security, branding, and office environment in Settings > AirPlay and HomeKit, including new ones in the new aTV. You might especially look at Conference Room Display. I don’t think you necessarily want to require a PIN code every time someone wants to connect, unless that has ever been an issue, but you might wanna make sure that it is in fact off.

If you use AirPlay heavily in a business environment, and you have a more versatile router, we can give the Apple TV higher priority on the network to reduce hiccups.

Wrote this to some friends and family a while ago:

I realize this is out of left field, but call it a sanity check with people I know to be actively concerned with proper capitalization and writing well in general. I am curious whether this makes any sense to you:

I have always been really annoyed by the auto-capitalization on iPhone. And especially since dictation and now the slide-to-type keyboard in iOS 13, it feels like a lot of apps are increasingly arbitrary about what they capitalize. That makes me have to go back and fix things, which seems counter to the whole idea of automating something.

So…I turned off auto-capitalization in Settings > General > Keyboard. I already feel more relaxed. I can still double-tap the spacebar to get a “.” period. But any failure to capitalize is entirely my own, so less frustrating.

that’s my first question: if you are even interested in the experiment, does it have the same appeal for you?

second question is, how much does it bother you to see everything lowercased, as in these last paragraphs?

thank you for reading. I didn’t think this was going to be such a long explanation, but I realized I started writing a blog post. I still want to bounce it off y’all first though.

I may have to take back my iMac Pro! It keeps crashing while asleep. I put it to sleep at night and wake up to find it is off. When I turn it on I get the ol’ “Your computer was restarted because of a problem” error. It works ok when working but I wonder if this isn’t an omen? This happens almost every time I put it to sleep for a while, even while going to lunch.

I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that’s not your iMac but one of your peripheral devices. Try unplugging everything you can when you put it to sleep, even keyboard and mouse. If you don’t encounter that error, leave keyboard and mouse plugged in next time you put it to sleep. If no error, plug in main backup drive. If no error, add your next most important device. Rinse and repeat. Eventually we all—fine, the lucky ones—narrow it down to the cheap USB hub we bought 7 years ago… 😉 (In one case for me, it was actually a card reader that I had in the expansion slot of my MBP.)

In the end, after that experimentation, if it’s the Mac, it’s the Mac. Let me know what you find!

I am thinking of buying a new iPad or gently used one. My current phone is a 64GB model and I’ve barely used half of the storage, so I think a 64GB iPad would do it. But I don’t know about cellular. What are your thoughts?

I love the recent iPad Air models, and while I might enjoy a Pro that much more, I know my personal productivity wouldn’t benefit that much from the extra performance. The iPad minis are also super sleek and totable. (Might even be some new ones coming soon!)

I have found that, because of better cameras that inspire more photography, and more available media to enjoy, its really a good idea for most people to spring for at least 128GB. (I prefer 256GB so I don’t ever have to worry about it.) That said, I see your screenshot, so perhaps you’d do fine with 64GB. If you at all suspect your needs might increase, get the bigger size.

Since the phones have personal hotspots, I no longer keep a cellular account for my iPad. And I keep them long enough that the slightly higher resale value of the cellular-enabled models is great enough to justify the personal cost. If you’re that mobile and need the Internet always on at a moment’s notice, get the cellular, otherwise skip it.

And I’m alllll about buying refurbished devices as long as they are under warranty. Also used ones, for sure, from a site with buyer protections like eBay or my new fave, Mercari. Just be very clear about the model and specs you’re getting. Listers might be misleading or just mistaken.

A Mac-based business wrote:

We potentially have a virus issue. We all received an email from a colleague stating that he was sharing a document via OneDrive. Some employees clicked on the link, but could not open the attachment. So they sent a group email asking if anyone else got this email from the colleague.

I texted the sender asking if his email was legit…and he said “Don’t open that!” Apparently his boss got hacked last week and her email sent out those messages. He clicked on it. Now his email is sending out those same emails.

I’m not sure what to do here—can you assist? Is there a scan that they/we can run? Is it something you can help with remotely?

We don’t yet know that there’s any cause for concern. To start with, have any of you gotten any indication that your own accounts are spamming other people with this bogus message?

Additionally, I have somewhat less concern for anyone who tried to open it on a Mac or via Outlook on the web. How many of you use the Outlook app on Windows?

I don’t tend to act as an alarmist in these situations, not because there isn’t a concern, but because any cause for concern gets triggered by initially opening the attachment. If you don’t see misbehavior, sussing the possible attack or effects can’t be comprehensive. It could be something that hits your computer, or your email, or ransomware that locks your files, and you don’t know ’til you know.

So with all that said:

1. Any of y’all please be encouraged to change your email and computer passwords. Also, if you haven’t enabled two-factor authentication in your email accounts (or any other online service), run-don’t-walk to do that.
2. Please ask the team if anyone has noticed their computer misbehaving, especially the browsers. If Safari, Firefox, or Chrome (or Brave or Vivaldi or Opera or…probably not Lynx…) misbehave in any suspicious way, let’s check it out. Most likely symptoms would be pestilent pop-ups, bogus search engines (i.e. does that really look like the real google.com?), persistently changed homepages, or unwanted buttons or extensions.
3. We can do audits of each of your computers, or you can run manual scans in Windows (see below) or Malwarebytes for Mac: https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac/.
4. You could each check with your correspondents to see if anyone got similar spam from you.

Please holler as soon as you run into any of that!

I hit a file on the Synology the other day that was corrupt. Is there a Disk Utility equivalent to run?

Oy. I’m real sorry you encountered that stressor.

There are just a couple of tools in the Synology* to deal with file degradation after the fact. I know you don’t need me to say that probability of recovery is a black box, but it’s worth a go. Also, I prefer to have a backup of everything on a volume before I repair the file system on it:

First, look in Storage Manager > Overview. If the volume reports as anything but “✅ Healthy,” you can repair it. Look for the same kind of thing in Storage Manager > Storage Pool. More info here.

I’m always hesitant to give a “here’s how to prevent this in the future” after a bad event, but DSM Self Healing is worth considering, primarily because you keep live data, as opposed to just backups, on the box.

Note that you have to enable “Enable data checksum for advanced data integrity” when you first create a shared folder. But it would be easy enough to recreate your shares and move everything into them.

Also in the future-proofing vein, I absolutely recommend any Synology owner subscribe to Backblaze B2 backup. Enabling it on the NAS is a little nerdy, but worth it for peace of mind. Here’s a guide.

* The Synology OS is called Disk Station Manager (DSM)

How can I download and save videos from the Internet? Specifically from YouTube, rumble, etc.

Short answer: Click the big green “Get 4K Video Downloader ⬇” button on this page: https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloader/4

Free for 30 days, one-time $15 after that.

Alternatives: There are so many of these apps that it took a bit to find one I could trust and that wouldn’t have a bunch of ads and junk. Also, I got led down a couple nerdy paths, the only fruit of which was a little self-education.

And even as I’m typing this, I just thought “oh what about this” which finally led me to a good free GUI: ViDL (https://omz-software.com/vidl/). And I found some trustworthy reviews of it.

Obviously Google doesn’t want us to do this, so the tools are…not clandestine, but let’s say, a bit grass-roots.

And finally, I can’t help pointing to my own usual solution, youtube-dl, which is all done in the Mac’s command-line. Here’s a short explanation by beloved Apple podcaster Casey Liss: https://www.caseyliss.com/2017/8/10/youtube-dl

Should I clean out my Trash or Downloads folders regularly?

For sure, both Downloads and Trash are good to keep eyes on. The productivity nerds would say that ideally one keeps both folders empty, with the idea being that anything important enough to keep gets stashed somewhere else.

Less compulsive Mac folks might simply say that too many files in a folder can make Finder squirrelly, so keeping it under 500 files and definitely deleting bigger ones quicker should keep you running smoothly.

We bought the new Apple TV for the conference room. Is there anything special that I need to do besides plugging it in to to make sure that everyone is able to connect to it via AirPlay?

Should be pretty straightforward. Just name it something simpler, logical, and/or fun, and join it to your wifi. From there it should work straightaway.

There are some settings to consider for security, branding, and office environment in Settings > AirPlay and HomeKit, including new ones in the new aTV. You might especially look at Conference Room Display. I don’t think you necessarily want to require a PIN code every time someone wants to connect, unless that has ever been an issue, but you might wanna make sure that it is in fact off.

If you use AirPlay heavily in a business environment, and you have a more versatile router, you can give the Apple TV higher priority on the network to reduce hiccups.