Mac 911: How to share a password via Airdrop, why your scanner won’t work with Image Capture
Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems.
GOT A MAC WITH AN SD CARD SLOT? DON’T RELY ON IT AS A STORAGE UPGRADE
Spinning disks are slow and solid-state drives (SSDS) used to cost a digital arm and a leg. That led many people to stick with hard drives or purchase Macs with low-capacity Ssds—like 250GB or 500Gb—because the next increment up added many hundreds of dollars to the cost. (I’m sitting here with a 2017 imac with a 1TB Fusion drive, so I am one of you.)
If you’ve got a hard drive in your Mac or a low-capacity SSD, you’re surely tempted to update your system by adding speed or capacity. And some of you might be tempted to trim costs on that upgrade by using an SD Card (typically in the Micro SD format) inserted into the card slot present on generations of Macs preceding those that incorporated USB-C or Thunderbolt 3.
I recommend against the SD Card route, tempting as it may be, unless you’re using a card for largely static storage—like offloading files you want on the devices but aren’t reading or writing—rather than as a boot drive or external active drive.
SD Cards use the same flash memory chips as SSDS, but the way in which the memory is packaged and managed is quite different. An SSD has a more sophisticated controller system designed to work with the limitations of flash memory, which wears out after a significant number of write operations. An SSD “levels” this usage so that no single location is written consecutively or excessively. Leveling wear dramatically extends SSD lifetime. Many drives optionally offer “trim,” a feature that enables the drive and operating system to pass information on file deletion, improving overall write speeds.
SSDS also have a distributed architecture for the flash memory chips that allows far faster speeds than SD
Cards do. A high-end 1TB Lexar HD Card that’s labeled 95 megabytes per second for reading data and marked Class 10, U3, or V30—three measures of performance— for about 30 Mbps of writing data is just around $200 street price. An SSD from Other World Computing (fave.co/2onrvqs) that can be installed in place of existing SSDS in the last generations of Macbook Pros with removable drives is $329 for 1TB and has a rated 3,282 Mbps read speed and 2,488 Mbps write speed. That’s rather a different story.
Even if you can’t swap your internal drive for a Mac mini or imac, you could use an external SSD in a USB 3– or Thunderbolt 3–equipped enclosure. OWC offers a 1TB Thunderbolt 3 SSD for just under $300. You can clone your startup volume to the external drive, restart, and discover that your machine has a new lease on life. While this is possible with a Mac laptop, ensuring the drive remains plugged in wherever you’re using it may be too stressful.
HOW TO SHARE A PASSWORD VIA AIRDROP FROM IOS 14, IPADOS 14, OR MACOS
Airdrop lets you send lots of kinds of data to people right around you who are receptive to it, but one of
the less-known elements is a password. Because Airdrop is both short range and encrypted between devices, it’s a secure way to transfer a password to someone else or even to another of your devices if you don’t have icloud Keychain enabled for syncing.
Here’s how to do it:
1. In IOS 14 or ipados 14, go to Settings → Passwords (earlier versions of IOS locate passwords in settings locations); in macos, open
Safari and go to Safari → Preferences → Passwords.
2. Unlock password access with Face ID, Touch ID, or your password.
3. Select a password entry in IOS or ipados; in macos, select it and then click Details.
4. Tap or click the Share icon and an Airdrop sharing sheet appears.
5. Tap or click the recipient.
6. He or she receives the entry in the appropriate location: in Settings → Passwords for IOS or ipados and in the Passwords tab of Safari’s Preferences for macos. The recipient can rename or change the entry before storing it.
Remember that Airdrop only shows destinations for people who have chosen to receive incoming messages from either everyone or for those who have you in their contacts list. If you can’t see their device in your list, have them temporarily change their Airdrop settings or add your icloud address to their contact for you.
YOUR SCANNER WON’T WORK WITH IMAGE CAPTURE? DISABLE A NETWORK SETTING ON YOUR ALL-IN-ONE
Many things in life are inexplicable, and operating systems are no exception. Search for logic and a pattern as much as you like, and you may never find one. That was my reaction to discovering the solution to a problem with Image Capture on the Mac when it stopped recognizing a scanner connected via USB.
After performing many scans, Image Capture began stating it had an error in connecting to the scanner. I did the usual troubleshooting: Disconnect and reconnect the scanner over USB, powercycle the scanner, disconnect the power from the scanner and then plug it back in, and restart the Mac. None of this sufficed.
In searching for an answer, I found scattered references to IPV6, a method of addressing devices on the internet. Why would Internet Protocol version 6 have anything to do with scanner problems? That question echoes into the void, as there’s no valid explanation for it.
IPV6 is the “modern” replacement for the original numbering scheme used to identify computers uniquely on the internet. The first flavor, IPV4, remains in use, but has a relatively small quantity of unique numbers—just over 4 billion—and we have more or less run out of them. (IPV5 is missing in action.) IPV6 increases the so-called “address space” by offering 340 undecillion (two raised to the 128th power) addresses.
Again, why does this have anything to do with scanners? Again, I have to redirect your question to the wind.
The solution unpicked by a handful of people independently over several years is that having IPV6 enabled can
interfere with the scanner driver and Image Capture, for whatever reason, and unless you have a specific reason that you need IPV6, you can typically disable it.
The most effective method that has the least likelihood to cause an impact on future networking is to disable IPV6 on printers on your local network. Yes, I know that’s very strange, getting even further away from the scanner issue, but it works for others and it solved my problem. (Though macos also includes IPV6 settings, the latest versions of macos don’t offer an “off” switch for IPV6, and you don’t need IPV6 enabled on the local network for a printer to work.)
Some printers come with native software that provide advanced networking settings in which you can opt to disable IPV6. Typically there’s an area that lists networking or networking protocols, and you can choose IPV4 only.
On the HP printer we’ve used for years, I can visit a webpage that the printer quietly makes available and make the change. Many printers have local web servers for configuration, but the navigation will be different.
Here’s how to configure an HP Officejet’s network protocol use:
1. Open the Printers & Scanners preference pane.
2. Click Options & Supplies.
3. Click Show Printer Webpage.
4. On the page that opens, click Network at the top and then click Network Protocols in the left navigation bar.
5. Select Enable IPV4 only.
6. Click Apply.
HOW TO PREPARE YOUR DIGITAL ASSETS IN CASE OF DEATH
Mac 911 has received a sadly unsurprising number of emails this year from people whose loved ones have passed away and who are left with computers, mobile devices, and cloud accounts that contain memories, legal documents, and much more.
I have written previously about various aspects of survivorship for Apple’s products and ecosystem, but it’s worth extending and collecting that information in one place, given all the questions many of you have.
Make a plan before it’s too late
Most of us feel macabre talking about death, but dealing with the fussy details ahead of time can solve endless problems later. It’s especially true with digital resources, as giant technology firms, including Apple, may not be responsive to your queries when someone’s gone.
Try to sort out with living relatives and partners a way for them to store their passwords so that you have access if they die or are incapacitated. If you have enough trust in another person, you can exchange passwords in a secure way. My wife and I use 1Password (fave.co/39hb1b5), and each of us has shared an entry with the other person that contains critical information in case of emergency or death.
You could also hire a lawyer, or your loved one, business partner, or other person you have a connection to could do so. A lawyer can draft a simple document that would let them hold passwords in escrow for another party, releasing them only under particular circumstances. (It’s critical to share that so the other party knows how to reach this lawyer or law firm.)
You can go one step further and encrypt the information provided to the lawyer, providing the password only to authorized parties. That prevents unauthorized ones from accessing your data if a firm, say, has an untrustworthy employee or your files get stolen.
(An easy way to encrypt is to make an encrypted disk image on which you put files. Use Disk Utility: File → New Image → Blank Image, set a name and disk size, choose 256-bit from the Encryption pop-up menu, and then enter and record a password. Only Macs can decrypt and mount such a disk image.)
A trusted party could fulfill that intermediary role instead of a lawyer if there’s someone who could be relied upon to release the encrypted information under the same restrictions.
Manage hardware
In happier times, in 2018, I explained how to handle inheriting a Mac, including what you can do ahead of time to prepare, if you have that ability: “What you need to do when you inherit a Mac” (fave.co/3rs4ren).
Macs have advantages in recovery, because it’s possible to store password hints that are displayed when you enter an account’s secret incorrectly, as well as to record a Recovery Key for Filevault or escrow it in icloud. An additional administrator account can be set up ahead
of time, giving another party an entrance if they inherit the machine or need access to it. (Things are trickier on Macs with a T2 Security Chip [fave.co/3dcdkqj], which requires more advance planning.)
It’s much harder to make advance arrangements for an iphone, ipad, Watch, or ipod touch, because the passcode or password to unlock these devices is never stored elsewhere and there’s no way to recover a lost or forgotten one. Someone has to provide you with that information or the device’s data could be lost forever.
You can restore device data from a backup without knowing the passcode of the original device in many circumstances, something I wrote about recently in “How to recover iphone and ipad data from a backup without the device’s passcode” (fave. co/3fmn7wk).
If you want to wipe the device and the Find My option was enabled, you will need its icloud password to disable Activation Lock, which may be impossible to do with a deceased owner. See “Need to disable Activation Lock on an iphone or ipad?
Here are the 3 Apple-connected options to do so” (fave.co/3svontx).
Retain account access
Apple doesn’t allow “survivorship” on its accounts. When someone dies, an estate’s executor or family has no rights to access to those accounts. That can be hard to swallow. Read “Can I keep my partner’s Apple purchases and account after they die?” (fave.co/39n04of ). ■