 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, episode 727 for Monday, September 17th, 2018. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we mash them all together, we mix them all up, we separate them apart, and then we discuss them with you, for you, amongst you. The goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebones Software and EeroMesh Wi-Fi. I've got a way for you to get free overnight shipping in the US and Canada. We'll talk more about both of those shortly here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brunn. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Brunn? I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing good, but there's something that's not doing that good, Dave. What's that, John? But I'll share it because it's going to offer a tip, a couple of tips. Okay. All right, good. Anyways. So, as you know, we have NAS devices. And so, my Drobo, which has five drive bays. It's the older FS, but it's still cranking. So, I started getting messages from it. It's like, yeah, something's wrong. I'm fixing it. Yep. And when you get that, at least with this Drobo, and I think with most Drobo's, but if you keep getting that message, that usually indicates that a drive is on the way out. And sure enough, it kept happening more often than all of a sudden I got a red light on one of the drive bays, which means I hate this drive. And I will never use it again. Right. Right. Now, I don't blame it. So, I looked at this drive. It was a two-terabyte WD green drive, but it was from 2011. So, that's not a bad run, you know, seven years. No, not a bad run, especially for a green drive, which as we've learned, we should never, ever, ever put in network attached storage devices. Yeah, but I didn't in the last seven years. So, the thing is, when it failed. Yeah, I do it too. I'm not, I'm not, that's not judgmental. That's just, we know that they're really not built to be used in those. But there you go. Yeah. So, the first thing I did was, well, you know, I'm really curious what exactly was the problem with this drive? And there's one program that you and I stumbled across at one point, Dave, that really did a good job of explaining to me what happened. And that's something called Drive DX. So, there's this thing called SMART that you know about. That's basically a bunch of parameters that the drive keeps track of, certain events, and there's a master status, and that's essentially useless in my, in my history. But utilities like Drive DX will look at various ones and give you like a health rating. And when I hooked it up to this, it was like, oh dude, this drive is in terrible shape. And it even indicated the parameters that were bad. And it gave the ID numbers. So, it said, okay, well, here's the ones that are bad. So, reallocated sector count, 10. That's not so bad. Right. Current pending sector count, 868. That's bad. That's bad. And then if you hover over things, it'll explain what it means. And I think this means, yeah, there are sectors that are bad, and I'm going to try to move them to other parts of the drive. But there are 868 of those lining up. And then another one, offline uncorrectable sector count, 525. Okay. So, based on those three values, Drive DX said, yeah, dude, this drive is in terrible shape here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I wanted to toss another drive in there, Dave. So, this is something, you know, I'm going to try. It seems to be working right now. But I do have a couple of two and a half inch drives kicking around one terabyte, two and a half inch drives. I'm like, wow, you know, I wish I could put those in this Drobo, but this Drobo takes three and a half inch drives. Well, I found this thing online. So, I guess, you know, because when I go to Amazon, I was looking at drives and stuff, it came up and it recommended something, the Oriko O-R-I-C-O 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch hard drive adapter. And it's only 7.99. So, I'm like, you know what? Let me give it a whirl. And at least as far as I can tell, it seems to work. So, I took one of my older two and a half inch one terabyte drives, put it in this adapter, and then slid it into the Drobo and it's like, okay, sure. So, we'll see. Now, I think you caution me that, you know, two and a half inch. Well, the thing is, dude, I mean, I think you caution me that two and a half inch drives are not necessarily meant to be put in an as, but I'm going to kind of like the green drive. I'm going to, I'll see how long it lasts. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But it's just neat that it was, you know, relatively inexpensive to get an adapter. So, for those that, you know, happen to have a bunch of two and a half inch drives that you want to try out. And, you know, I'll put a link to this here unless you've already found it. It's already there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yes. 7.99. I mean, that's, you know. All right. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, right. So, we acknowledge that this is probably not the advice we're actually giving to like put a two and a half inch drive in a NAS, and especially not a used two and a half inch drive in a NAS. I mean, unless it's an SSD, in which case maybe that's not such a bad idea, but this is a spindle drive, right? Well, you know, the thing is, is that Synology does make kind of adorable the last event I was at for them. They do make a Synology mixing unit that has bays that are all two and a half inch. Or SSDs. And I don't believe, I don't know if they restrict it to that. They don't restrict it, but it is like the purpose of that. That's the intent. Yeah. And so does Drobo. Drobo makes one too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, we appreciate you experimenting and taking one for the team on this. Hopefully, you've got backups of whatever that data is. So, yeah, no, you know, when it said the drive failed, I let it do it. So it was like, yeah, I'm rebuilding things. Don't touch anything until I'm done. And once it rebuilt, which means that it redistributed that data redundantly. And I also have this one set up for two drive redundancy. But no, as far as I can tell, all my data is intact. All right. Cool. It did its job. And it took a while to do the rebuild and redistribution of everything. But no, I just thought it was nifty because I was scratching my head over, does anybody make an adapter? And they sure do, but it's pretty affordable. But I also liked the ability of Drive DX or other utilities that let you look at smart, that it was able to highlight. It's like, okay, well, these are these three things that are wrong with this drive, which is why I'm going to say, you know, replace it now. So it's my adventure. I don't know if you've had, when was the last drive failure you've had with one of your NAS devices? It would have been the last green drive that I put in a NAS. Yeah. I think I had three of them. I had three Seagate, something or other green drives, and they all failed at almost exactly the same time. You know, thankfully, I was able to get them replaced. Seagate was great about warrantying them. But oh, actually, yeah, so I might still have, in one of my NASs, I might still have one or two of those green drives. But, you know, they warrantied them because it happened before the whatever three-year warranty was up. But yeah, anytime I've replaced drives for my NAS, I buy, you know, red drives or black drives or iron wolf drives or, you know, whatever the, you know, knot. I guess the problem with the green drives is they're, I mean, they're built to be power efficient, which is good. But they also take a long time to recover when they have a bad sector or something. And that delay is what really, like especially with a Drobo throws it off because it thinks, oh, the drive went offline. It didn't come back. And so blacklist the drive from this Drobo. And once that happens, that drive will never be allowed in that Drobo again, you know, once it's blacklisted. So. Oh, yeah. Same here. I mean, there were hundreds, as I told you, there were hundreds of sectors that were in trouble. And it just couldn't keep up, I guess, you know, because it's not the nature of these drives versus. Right. It just doesn't keep up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it, look, all rotational drives, all drives flash or rotational, well, we'll all fail eventually. But, but it's normal for a rotational drive to have a bad sector or something and go offline and come back and, and that's okay. But the green drives take very, a very long time to do that in relation to their NAS counterparts. And I think that's the thing that makes them bad for an ass. So. All right, cool. Well, you know, today is also iOS 12 release date day. And, and that is exciting. I've been running iOS 12 on my, I put it on my, you know, my quote unquote daily driver iPad, which is an iPad pro 10 and a half inch months ago. And it has been basically flawless. So about, I don't know, maybe three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I put it on my iPhone 10, which is my, you know, my main iPhone. And, and there too, it has been basically flawless. And of course, I've been running the betas and, and now I'm running the, the release. But, but it, you know, it's, we were talking about a little bit pre show. There's some new features for short, you know, an emoji, screen time, the, the whole shortcuts thing, which is pretty cool to have, which is, if you've used workflow in the past and have workflow installed on your phone, when you do your updates from the app store, just the app updates, that will update to shortcuts, right? Because Apple acquired workflow, brought the team in that was working on that, who presumably is still working on it now, now that it's called shortcuts. And, and that's what that is, but it gives it, you know, that being internal to Apple now gives them way tighter integration with the OS, which is, which is cool. So I'm, I'm excited to play with, with that, we use shortcut, I use shortcuts a ton. I have all kinds of them that I use for, I mean, I have one that, or I should say workflows now shortcuts. But you know, the, the, the one that I talk about all the time on here is the one that my brother, my brother, my son wrote to calculate palindromic tips. I, he, he tried to outsmart me and did, I realized he was getting faster at, at math than I was. And so I started doing this thing a couple years ago, where I would calculate the tip for a restaurant bill such that the end total was a palindrome. And that just made me, you know, think about things and do some math and, you know, and doing it in my head kept me fresh, right? Because otherwise he's doing more math in his head every day than I am, and I wanted to stay quick. And, and one night on the way home from eating dinner, he speculated, he's like, I bet I could do that in a workflow for you. And I didn't really want it in a workflow because I wanted to keep doing it in my head. And we talked a little bit about it. And I said, Ah, you would need case statements and workflow doesn't have those. He's like, No, I have an easier way to do it. And sure enough, he did it, you know, in the 10 minutes that it took to get home. And so now he's outsmarted me because I don't do math in my head anymore. I just use his workflow. So that's one. But I also have workflows that I use to share articles when I'm, you know, reading, if I read an article that maybe is something that I think somebody should cover at TMO or whatever, I have a thing that automatically pushes it to our Slack group. I have a workflow that automatically puts things in for our Makikev articles. And now I'm able to go a step beyond that. We all are with iOS 12 because shortcuts, aka workflows, now are able to be triggered by both Siri with a, with a command and, and or with suggestions and contextually, although you have a lot less control over how that works right now. So I'm, I'm curious to dig into it. The instantly frustrating part was I wanted to be able to ask Siri to calculate the tip, right? But you can't have any data input with that, right? I can, I can just launch a workflow, but it won't, I can't say, you know, hey, S lady, you know, calculate the tip on, on a bill that's, you know, 25 19 or something. It's like it won't take that 25 19 as input. But in any event, I have found iOS 12 very, very stable. And really, you know, the nice part about it is that it doesn't change a lot on the surface, which I think is good. You know, we talked about this at WWDC, right, John, when, when Apple announced it, that it was like they were going to take a minute and well, and by a minute, I mean a year and really focus on the stability and under the hood and, and optimizing things and cleaning it up and all of that. And it most definitely has that feel to it. So I, I, this is the first iOS upgrade that I would recommend as a 12 point, you know, as a 0.0 release. Normally, it's like, yeah, if you don't need to hang, hang tight, wait for 0.1, you're good to go. Not with this one. This feels like we're at 0.1 already. The developer beta frankly felt like 0.0. It was that stable. Because again, they didn't add a ton of new things, especially under the hood, the things that they did under the hood was just cleanups of iOS 11. So really it's like iOS 11.5. But, you know, they call it 12.0 to keep people happy. So I, yeah, yeah. Have you upgraded yet, John? Yeah, I'm going to do that real soon now. You could do it while we're doing the show. Yeah, I could. Okay. And you know, for the next update, Dave, I recently, for a, for a special project, which I may reveal at some point here, but I actually got myself a iPod Touch 6th generation. Right. Right. Right. Which, from what I understand, even though it's dated, will support iOS 12. It should. Not iOS 13, but iOS 12. Cool. So I'm just hoping it doesn't do anything that makes me twitchy. I remember the last iOS update, they changed the dots in the, in the, you know, the dots for your cell signal to bars. And I'm like, why did you do that? Well, I have no doubt there's something that will make you twitchy, but that's okay. That's just, that's pretty. You know, the fonts and, you know, the visual things. It's just like, wait, you know, that, you know, there are some things that are different, but, but not, not radically so. Like I said, I find it quite welcoming and quite stable. And then next week, of course, a week from today on the 24th, Mojave will be released for everyone that has a Mac that can run it. So that, and obviously we're happy to take questions and, you know, all that stuff about both iOS 12 and Mojave. Oddly enough, when I looked at my macOS updates today, Dave, they decided to release, not Mojave today, but they did release Safari 12 on macOS. And also they updated a macOS server along with a few other things. So that's kind of interesting. I guess they wanted to keep Safari because it has a lot of, I think the, you know, the key things to me with Safari is that they have more protections against people watching you. Yeah. Yeah, which is pretty cool. And I got to talk to some folks about how that's being done. And it's really, really interesting about, you know, just how they're compartmentalizing the data that a website gets to see, you know, it seems like they've really, and we're about to find out, right? But it seems like they've really figured out how to allow any given website to save the preferences that make life easier for you as a user without letting its access to those things spill over and track you as you, you know, navigate around the rest of the web, which is pretty, pretty darn cool if you ask me. Well, I think what I think would a lot of websites, so I think that the one issue is that a lot of browsers, mostly for technical reasons, were very chatty. They'd be like, hey, let me tell you all the stuff about the person that's coming to visit you. And the thing is they didn't really need to give away a lot of that information. And I think what websites would do is create, I'll call it a fingerprint. And they're like, ah, I know you. And I know exactly who you are because I see all this data that's unique to you on this device. And I'm going to keep track of that. And they've apparently masked that or offered less information to make it more difficult for somebody to identify you on this device as the person visiting a site. Well, yeah, but just to clarify that a little bit, if let's say you visit Mac Observer, right? And then you also visit Facebook. Okay. When you visit Facebook, Facebook will know who you are. That fingerprint is 100% accessible to them, right? They know that you are that user on Facebook. Same is true about Mac Observer. When you visit Mac Observer, we will know that you are you. And that's great. It allows us to keep you logged in so that you can comment and post in our forums at mackekeb.com slash forums, which then redirects to a Mac Observer page, which is why that works. And that's great. We also use Facebook login, right? But Facebook doesn't get to know who you are just because we have that login tracker on the website anymore. They only know who you are. If you intentionally tell them, yes, I am that Facebook user, right? So it's enough to keep things personalized for you, but not enough for Facebook. It's not that they lose their fingerprint of you. It's that they lose their ability to match that fingerprint with you when you are out on other sites. So, you know, for example, when you would visit a website and they had an Amazon ad or something, that Amazon ad would target the thing that you just looked at on Amazon. That kind of thing is not going to happen anymore as I understand it. And from what I've seen on my iPad, it doesn't anymore, which is pretty darn cool. So websites still get to know who you are, which is a good thing, very convenient, but they don't get to follow you around, even if the sites you're on have, you know, allow that website some visibility into you. So they don't get to follow you around, which is a good thing. So, which is good. I like it. No, I'm with you. I always found the weight. I just saw this on another site and now I'm seeing another totally different site thing, kind of kind of stocky. Yeah, it's stocky. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, no, this is, it's good. I'm happy about this. All right, there was one tip, though, that MGG Jim posted over on his tech review site. And that has to do with iOS 12 has USB restricted mode, which essentially is built as a security feature to prevent current and future hardware based methods from circumventing your iPhone or iPad passcode by internally disabling the USB data connection after a set period of time, right? So if somebody wanted to hack your iPhone's password, they could try to do that with USB. Now, after a fixed period of time, USB data connections are cut off, and that way it keeps somebody from just brute forcing your passcode, right? Well, that's nice. So it closes the door after a while. It's like, correct, or prevents you from knocking on it again by chopping your hand off or something. Yeah, that's kind of gross. However, this can cause issues with things like, say, car play, where you really do want the data connection to maintain itself over hours and hours and hours while you're in the car. So some people have been reporting issues. Jim has the fix over at tech review. You go again with iOS 12 into settings, go to touch ID and passcode, obviously enter your passcode, and then on the allow access when locked section at the bottom of that is an option for USB accessories, which is labeled unlock iPhone to allow USB accessories to connect when it has been more than an hour since your iPhone was locked. And if you turn that off, then that hour timer does not start. Now, you also don't get the brute force security protection that that would naturally involve. But at least if your car, car play issues are happening, this will alleviate that. Thanks for the tip, Jim. Good stuff. It's fun. Hey, look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So it's good. More tips. We'll move past the iOS 12 stuff here and we'll go to Robin. Robin has a nice little quick tip and says this was probably already in the show. I don't think it was. But here's how you can drag the downloaded item from the Safari download window into the finder to get yourself a copy. So if you're in Safari and you've downloaded something, you can hit the little download icon in the toolbar and you will see it and you can hit next to that, you know, the thing that says the little, you know, magnifying glass that will bring you to it in the finder. But you can also simply drag things right out of that window onto a finder window wherever you would like that to go. It is easy to just move them around. So you don't have to go digging to the downloads folder to copy something somewhere else. If you've got a finder window open, just drag and you are good to go. I had no idea that this was a thing you could do. But sure enough, it works. Haven't tried it in Safari 12 because Safari 12 came out just as we started this episode. And despite my urges to want to click the install button, I have resisted thus far, John. Can't promise it will stay that way through the show, but maybe with a little bit of luck it will. Yeah. I thought you were able, I tried this earlier. I thought you were also able to do this with things that were in your print queue, but I think that time has passed. Okay. Okay. I was fiddling with it. You can, with certain printers, and I tried this, at least in my PostScript printer, it'll show you all completed jobs. You have to open up the print queue and then select, I think, show all completed. And it'll show you a history of all the jobs you've ever printed, which may or may not want that there. But I thought at some point you could drag those to the desktop or run them again. I mean, you can. Maybe it's just... Oh, you can drag them between printers. I've done that. Okay. Yeah. If I printed something to one printer and then that printer proves to be offline or whatever, you can move to another printer and just drag them there. Yeah, that will work. That's a good quick tip. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which brings up the secured... Well, it kind of brings up talking about security. The data has to be stored somewhere. You may not... It'd be interesting to find out where that stuff is, Dave. I mean, it has to be a file on your computer somewhere along with the downloads. Well, downloads are in your downloads folder. I mean, they're not hidden. They're just in your downloads folder. Well, is that is what's listed in Safari a link to what's in your downloads folder? Yeah. Is it stored somewhere else? Or is it like a link or something? No, no, no. That's to... The item wherever it is, which by default is going to be in your downloads folder. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing hidden out there. I guess my question is if you remove it from the download window in Safari, does that remove it from the download folder? I don't know how you would remove it from the download window in Safari. I mean, do you just highlight it and... Oh, yeah. If you highlight it... Well, no, there's an X net. I don't know. There's not an X. Yeah, I just... I know it says remove from list. I right clicked on one item that I just downloaded and it says remove from list. But that's just from the list, right? It's not deleting it from the drive. Yeah. Yeah. But just a thought, same thing with... You may not want people to see all the documents that you've printed over the years, which... Right? But they would go away, right? I mean, things only are in the print queue until the print job has finished and then it's gone. Well, unless you select show all completed jobs. Really? I mean, it showed... Yeah. Dude, mine showed me... Mine showed me things I printed on my laser printer going way back. All right. So I'm here, show... Where do I tell it to show all... Oh, in the window menu. Show completed jobs. Look at that. Who knew? Oh. No, we all do. Dude. Oh, okay. I don't know if there's anything there. You may not want other people to see. Right. So yeah, I've got stuff going back to 2015. Holy cow. Right. So you go to open your printer... What is this even called? Your printer management window. Well, if you go to printers and scanners, you can say open print queue for the particular printer. Yeah. The print queue, there you go. And then you go specific to that printer. Yeah. So go to system preferences, printers and scanners, double click on a printer. Now, this is the window that you would normally be alive if you had an active print job. Right? But you can open it up anytime, as John said. So system preferences, printers and scanners, double click on your printer. Once that's open, go to the window menu and say show completed jobs. And there you go. Wow. Look at that. I don't print much from the studio here, but I do have things going back to 2015, as I said. Whoa, dude. That's crazy. Yeah, but again, I don't know if you tried to print them again, if you could, if they're on that list. Oh, no, that's just a... No, I can't print from there. That's just a history list. Okay. Yeah, no, the job is gone. It's still interesting, a little tidbit though. Yeah, there's nothing I can do. I mean, I can... I don't even know that I can remove these things. Nope. Sure can't. I don't know how you'd clear these out, to be honest, John. Yeah, they're... I mean, it has to be buried somewhere. Uh-huh. Yeah. I don't know where. Right? Right. Yeah. Same. Huh. Fascinating. I think we already learned five things right where we're done. I know. Let's wrap it up, man. Let's go. Wow. That's crazy though. Huh. I love it. This is why I like we do this. I'm glad I peaked your interest. Yes, you did. Yeah, no peaking though. No peaking. All right. Let's see. Another tip. Might as well. Let's stick with tips for a little bit here. We've got a lot on the list. And this next one comes from Ernesto, which is... I did some searching, but couldn't find a product that I was hoping existed. He says, I currently use the Belkin Lightning Audio and Charge Rockstar adapter so that I can charge and listen to audio at the same time. It says, but I'm going to be upgrading to the iPhone XS and I'm getting a fast charger and cable I checked with Belkin and their adapter does not support fast charging. Are you aware of any product that does? I don't know why I have this in tips, but there you go. It's a question, I suppose. I must have mismarked it. And then I miscategorized it in tips. So, right. So Ernesto, this Belkin Lightning Audio and Charge Rockstar thing allows you to charge the phone at the same time because the lightning port is the only thing that you can charge with if you want to charge with a wire. Obviously, he could charge with a Qi charger, but the Qi charger won't charge as fast as the wire anyway. So, yeah, I don't know of... I don't know of the answer here. Why is what? Because I just searched on this product and they make the claim that this device... So, I have an earlier version of the device. So, they have two. So, the first one that came out with was basically a lightning splitter, right? Yes. Yes. It was two light... So, it took one lightning port and made it into two. And that's the one that I bought when I first got my iPhone 7 and now 8 because it doesn't have the audio jack. But then they made a newer one that has one audio jack and one lightning port. The thing is, I just did a search here and the one that has two lightning ports makes the claim, at least in the text of the device, that it will allow maximum charging if you use that device. So, I wonder if you got a... So, this is the Belkin thing? Right. Okay. Again, you have two different ones, but I don't know. It seems that they indicate that... It says, supports pass-through charging for up to 12 watts for iPhone and iPad. Yeah. That should be... I mean, that should be fast enough. I wonder what... Maybe he was looking at a different... I'll put a link to this one in there, John. So... Well, again, there are two... I'm searching on... I found that statement being made for the one that has two lightning ports. Okay. Perhaps, for whatever reason, you don't have the juice in the one that has an audio port and a lightning port. Oh, I see what you're saying. Right. Right. So, maybe he has to swap it out. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Well, if anybody knows, let us know. And that's what I had told them. We would share it as a geek challenge. Maybe that's why I didn't mark it the right way. Yeah. How could they let us know, Dave? I always ask myself that time and time again. Feedback at MacGeekab.com, John. I heard you, brother. I think you said Feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's Feedback at MacGeekab.com, just in case you missed it. So, circling back, I tried to squeeze this in before, but I missed it, John. Circling back to the CarPlay issue with USB restricted mode in iOS 12, John in the chat room has been running iOS 12 for a while and says, at MacGeekab.com, which is where the chat room is, hello, says, my experience is that CarPlay keeps its connection, but you must unlock it if it was locked for over an hour before you plugged it in in the car in order to start the connection. So, that's where the trick is, at least for him. So, your mileage may vary, but thanks for that, John. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Let's see where we are here. I am going to, let's go to Jim here, John, because we have a success story, and I love success stories. He says, I appreciated your discussion over private cloud applications in Episode 724. I've been using Resilio Sync for about six months. I'm a professional photographer and have a Synology DS1513 at the studio with three terabytes or so worth of photos. I wanted a way to sync those files to an external drive at home attached to a 2016 MacBook Pro. Resilio Sync was the only service I found that had a native package for the Synology and could sync to an external drive on the Mac. I still use Dropbox to sync the relatively recent files to the MacBook's 1TB SSD, so I have them available when the external drive is disconnected. Resilio Sync seems to be okay with the external drive being disconnected and reconnected again if it's been disconnected too long. I bring the MacBook to the studio and get it caught up over the LAN instead of waiting for it to sync over the Internet. It's been solid and didn't require a lot of geeky setup, so there you go. I love it. Yeah, Resilio Sync, it's you know, it does all its magic with peer-to-peer. It doesn't require a server and there you go. It used to be called BitTorrent Sync, but I think people got confused between it and BitTorrent, so. Mal and BitTorrent had kind of a shady reputation, right? Well, people used it for shady things in addition to using it for lots of other great things, but yeah, but no, because of that, yeah, people didn't quite know, so. So I don't blame them for redeeming it. Yeah. Oh, I think it's good. I think it's good. But it's the same core technology, right? It's just. Oh, absolutely. It's peer-to-peer technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to be clear, and I think this is why they changed it, there are one of the reasons. BitTorrent generally speaking, when we think of BitTorrent, we think of the ability to share files with people we don't know, right? You get a tracker set up and you can just like copy movies back and forth or between people or whatever, and of course that's where there's questionable legality about the content that's being transmitted, not the tech that's doing it. Resilio Sync uses that same peer-to-peer concept, but you are not sharing your content with people you don't know. You are only sharing it either with yourself or if you happen to set up someone else in your sharing circle there, then you can say, like, hey, I want to share this folder with John, and so now John and I could both run Resilio Sync and sync with each other, but otherwise, no, it's only amongst yourselves, yourselves, your own computers, because it's just oneself. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Up next. Up next is actually our first sponsor for this episode, John. And then after that, we'll talk about Greg. How's that sound? Great. Cool. All right. Our first sponsor is Eero. Eero is the mesh Wi-Fi system that really that kind of started it all, right? They were the first ones to really make this work and because of that, they are far ahead of most everybody else in the market. The idea behind mesh, you set up multiple wireless access points in your home, you have one interface to configure them, they talk to each other, they share your internet connection amongst them, and by doing so, eliminate dead spots throughout your house without you having to really think about anything because it's all managed from one place. You plug these things in. Obviously, one of them you plug in to your cable modem or whatever device brings your internet into your house, and from there, wirelessly, they build this mesh that bathes your home in Wi-Fi. That way, you're not limited to the single router concept of one thing being where the one place where all of your Wi-Fi emanates from, no, now it just emanates from everywhere. And it's awesome, right? And it's super easy to set up. I've set it up here at my house, set it up at my dad's place. My dad is able to manage it very, very easily. It's just one little app. I can tweak his settings from here because I have access to his network. I don't have to be on the network to tweak it. It just works really, really well. And now they've got their second generation product out because they've been doing this for a while. So they've had time to iterate. The second generation product adds yet another radio to the Euro base stations, the Gen2 Eros. They have three radios in them, two 5 GHz radio and a 2.4 GHz radio. That really helps with the backhaul so that you can have more bandwidth available for the Eros to communicate with each other and still be able to communicate with all of your devices. And then they added this beacon thing, which is cool because it just plugs right into the wall. Don't need any cables or anything and it will join your network perfectly. So you got to check it out. Go to Ero.com, right? And this allows you to get free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada using promo code MGG. So visit Ero.com and check out, select overnight shipping, then enter promo code MGG to make the price of that overnight shipping free. Again, for free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, visit Ero.com and check out, select overnight shipping and then enter MGG as the promo code to make it free. Our sincere thanks to Ero for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, take it away. In order to catch your attention, Dave, I gave this, I titled this, I thought it was being funny. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't, but I'm going to call this question or this statement. Don't fear the Reaper or the dongles and check your classic rock people if you don't know what I just meant. More cowbell. You can never have too much cowbell. Oh gosh, or Saturday Night Live. Check it out, kids. We shouldn't link to both of those. So anyways, Greg says, and I think he makes some good points here, if John hasn't yet bought a new Mac, if John hasn't bought his new MacBook Pro yet, I'd advise him to bite the bullet and get the MacBook with USB C ports. He wants to avoid getting dongles, but here's the rub. There's no avoiding the dongles. Of course, John won't need to buy dongles now, but if he buys a MacBook with USB three ports, but since John likes to keep his stuff for a good long time, there will come a point in the future when new peripherals that have, have USB C ports only at that point to get a USB three to USB C dongle will be harder to get cost more and have less functionality. I'm experiencing something like that with my early 2011 MacBook Pro. Well, it has USB two and Thunderbolt two. So to get the increased speed of USB three peripherals, I'll need a Thunderbolt two hub, which is pretty expensive. And I think he's right. So I have a slightly newer machine and that I have USB that this 2012, the mid 2012, which I think was the last of the good MacBook Pros. I think people would argue the 2014 was the last of the good, but, but I'll say the mid 2012 was the last fully user serviceable in terms of an easily accessible battery hard drive and RAM. And I'm going to stick to that. And a lot of people agree with me. Then they started making it harder to do that stuff. But anyways, it's on the edge right now of what Apple will officially support is that I believe I can run Mojave on this. Now, it also has USB three ports and it has, I thought it had, you know, it may have Thunderbolt two as well. Yeah. Actually, when I looked in the system list that said two times 10 gigs, I'm sure it does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I can still use it for a bit longer. I mean, I thought about this when I got this machine. Yeah, but his point still stands. Your port shape is the quote unquote old kind, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's got Thunderbolt and USB three and as long as people still make those. I mean, I don't see it. The only thing is that it acts up that I always get messages with hardware growler about my FaceTime camera disconnecting and connecting and it traumatizes my USB bus and that I have to wait a few moments until I can actually type anything when I wake it up from sleep. Is that an issue with your Mac or is that a normal thing? And most people just don't notice it because they don't run hardware growler. Yes. I have no idea. Yeah. I don't know if it's a bad connection or yeah, it could be just the nature of this machine and other people just deal with it. Yeah. Right. Right. But no, he's right. No, it's great advice. And I will have to make a decision because Mojave is going to be the last OS that they're going to officially support on this particular model. Right. Thank you. But you still have years of support even after Mojave is not the latest version of Mac OS. Oh, yeah. And I'm not, you know, the thing is, Dave, I don't have, for what I use this for, I'm not doing. Yep. I've never had it peg the processor and I've never had it. I mean, I suppose it could be faster. Sure. But I don't know. I'm comfortable with it. This is my daily driver. The machine upstairs here, the Mac mini is my gaming and podcasting. So next year, you will need to replace that. Right. Because, I mean, we can't, and I say this fully aware of the scenario I'm in too, because it's eight. We are in a time where you're able to keep Macs for a much longer period than we used to. Right. But that means that at some point you get where you can't upgrade anymore, at least not upgrade the OS. Yeah. And for what we do here on this show, we need to be able to, we need to at least have devices that we're running as our daily drivers that run the latest operating system. And so, you know, that's, that's where that limitation for us. Now, the Mac mini is the 2014, but the thing is, I'm sure, I'm sure they're going to be, well, there's been a lot of talk about a new Mac mini, Dave. Yeah. And I think it's been mostly talk. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of wishful thinking is what it is, I think. So yeah, I mean, people have been talking about a Mac mini pro and, you know, because I mean, it does, I mean, the processor and the memory and the buses and all that are okay in this. The only thing I think where it's lacking is that, you know, it has one of these integrated GPUs. So it's a, it's, it wouldn't be the best machine if you're going to be doing graphics intensive sort of things. But, you know, I mean, it's, it's perfectly fine for podcasting. But um, yeah, no, I'd like, I'd love to buy another one. Apple hit me. Come on. I want a new Mac, more Mac mini, please. I think a lot of us do. Yeah. You probably wind up just buying an iMac. Yeah, probably. I mean, I probably get the iMac pro. Would you? Well, I'm a professional, right? Yeah. Yeah. Get your iMac pro, man. I'm gonna have to probably drop several, I could probably get away with under 10K, right? Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If 10K is your limit, you're good to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Huh. No, my goal would be to probably spend three. You're not getting an iMac pro for three. Oh no, no. No, a regular iMac, I certainly could. Oh, definitely, definitely. Yeah, yeah. You get retina screen and all that good stuff. iMac pro five, you think? What's the entry on that thing? Yeah, I think you probably should think about six or seven, man. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Moving. Moving along. We're going to jump to our questions here. And listener, Rick, I think John sent in something that you prepared for the show. You want me to read it? Because it has to do with Mojave and clean installs. Oh, you're jumping. I'm sorry. I'll read the question. You answer it. Rick says, since I do the clean install and have used the migration assistant since my original 2007 17 inch MacBook Pro, I figured it was time to really clean out. So I go to the internet and every guide gives me the painstakingly step by step instructions and ends with then reinstall your apps. Sort of like to change the clutch in your car. Step one, take out the engine. He says, I know how to reinstall the apps. My question is on all my various apps. Where is the data? And is it all in the same place for all apps? What is the recommended way to really do a clean install while still maintaining my preferences and settings for all my apps? John. And this is a fascinating question, Dave. Yeah. And I'm going to answer it. There's no one answer to this question. Sadly. Yeah. The answer to Rick's final question, you know, is it in the same place for all apps? No. Oh, no. Oh, no. But we're going to tell you how to figure this out. So the thing is, here's the good news, Dave. Some applications are just a single file. And we've all seen this. You download them and it says, Hey, just drag this in your application folder. It's like, cool. But that doesn't get his preferences. Oh, no, of course not. Okay. But the thing is, that's usually not the case because a lot of applications have extra little goodies that go in other places in the OS. Most of them, I would say, are typically almost all of them, but not all because I, you know, went on a learning journey here. But most of them are stored in either the system library folder or the user library folder. And then within those folders is a plethora of other folders. And I'm not even going to list them because they're too many. But here's how you can learn what's happening, Dave. Now, sometimes what you can do is you can take the installer, which will either be a DMG or a PKG file, a disk image or a package file. Sometimes you can right click on it and say open package contents. And then you can dig in. And in almost all cases, what I saw, Dave, is that the good stuff or the stuff that's going to be installed is stored in a folder that you will see called contents. All right. Yeah. I think you want to. Oh, okay. There you are. But then it gets kind of depending. I think it's depending on what utility you use to build the installer. Then it gets kind of weird. I took Dropbox and I opened that and saw under contents, there was some, there was one thing macOS was the main app. But then there were these language like EN for English and various languages.lproj stuff. And then I think that had links to the other things within the package. But here's how you look at this stuff here. So the thing is not all of them are things you can open with open package contents. What you want to get is something called pacifist from our pals at charlesoft at charlesoft.com. This can open DMG and PKG files. And then it shows you, it's like a file browser for these types of files. It'll even show you if the installer has a signature or it's signed, which is something you probably want usually. Well, can I interrupt here? Because if he already has the installer, yeah, I'd be right. So thank you. If he already has the installer, why does he need to dig into it? Why wouldn't he just run the installer and install? Well, I think he was asking the question, where is my application stuff located? Well, his question was, where is the data? Right? I know he says, I know how to reinstall my apps. The question on all the various apps is, where is the data? And is it all in the same place? I thought he meant the application data. All right. You didn't read it that way? No, I think he's looking. Well, if he has the installer, the app is installed. He's good to go, right? So I mean, it's cool to look into that stuff. But if he's truly reinstalling things and not trying to drag the apps from his old machine to the new machine, then I think we're talking about finding the data and preferences. At least that's what I was looking for here was that stuff. Because again, if you have the installer, it's cool to dig into it, but you don't need to. You just run the installer and it'll put the stuff where it needs to be, at least if it works right. Right? Okay. All right. That maybe, let's answer both. Sure. I'm going to continue on the path here, and then I'll get back to your point. No, it's a good point. So I may have misinterpreted what he was saying, though he wrote back and said thanks. Okay, cool. Apparently what I said was... Someone helpful. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. But so here's another example. So then I opened something that I think is using a newer installer. I opened up my malware bytes installer. And when you look in the contents folder in that, opening up with pacifist, it shows you, oh, well, I'm going to put something in applications, but I'm also going to put some stuff in library application support, library extensions, library launch agents, and library launch statements. But you make a great point. I would say, what he's looking for is application-specific settings that he'd like to migrate over Yeah. And I think I kind of answered that, but I think some of that may be in application support. I think that's the point. I agree with that. I think some of that goes into application support, not the other places that I mentioned. So application support is one place and preferences, as you indicated, would be another where if you want to restore it to its prior state, that's probably where you should look. Now, you could just throw in the towel here and just say, well, just pull in everything from my library folders. Oh, yeah. But that's the cruft you want to get rid of. So I have an idea here. But no, I'd love to hear your thoughts. So application is probably one. Preferences is another. What are your feeling about channel ones within the library folder? Well, so there are apps out there. And maybe you know, I'm hoping, in fact, that this might trigger a thought. There are apps like app. I want to say app tamer, but that's not what I'm talking about. Like I got it right here. The ones that delete things that delete things. Right. And if you go on your old computer and you take an app and throw it in the trash and simply wait, if you have one of these things installed, like I have Hazel installed, and I have it set to offer to delete all of the application support files. And it's because it has a database of where all these things are. It will show me a list and say, hey, do you want to also delete all these support files? And you could say no, right? And but take a screenshot of that. And now you know where to go for that app to migrate things over. And you could do that pedantically with all of your apps, unless as a user, you could just look at that database somewhere, right? Clean my Mac. The new Clean My Mac 10 or Clean My Mac X, I don't know. I don't know. When I see an X now, I don't know if it's Roman numeral or what I'm supposed to say because I get really confused. Because that's what I'm saying. Is it uppercase R or lowercase? It's all uppercase all the time. Freaking Apple. So. Oh, yeah. You were shaking your fist about that. I shook my fist right at Phil Schiller last week about it. And then Apple changed their press release after I did that. And they made it even more confusing. So that's cool that they edited their press release after the fact to clean that up and made it worse. So the one that I like, Dave, which I've been using, and I think you were thinking of, but couldn't quite remember it, but it's called App Cleaner from my friends at Free Macsoft. And that one is, and it looks like they updated fairly regularly. And it usually digs pretty darn deep, including slash var slash private things that you may not... Well, a lot of times it unchecks those because it's like, well, they're these cache things in the units of Unix, but I don't think you should let the OS deal with that. It's usually the behavior defaults, too, which I tend to agree with. So that's where I would dig. And so now you've got that stuff. And then also look... Yeah, really, though, home library application support, and then the name of your app is the place to look there. But also, home library containers is another place to look because that's where Sandbox stuff goes. Well, that's your App Store stuff, right? Well, anything that's Sandboxed could be App Store stuff, right? But there are preferences that can be buried there. And so it's worth looking in there. But yes, I mean, anything in the App Store, in theory, is putting its stuff out there. But it's not always the case. And then home library preferences, as you said, is the other place to look for that stuff. It's crazy. It's not easy. The net of this, Rick, is we just had a pretty... It sounded like a pretty meandering conversation, but for the most part, I think it was actually pretty targeted. And it's reflective of the fact that it is not easy to go and get all that stuff. And what I do, if I'm going to do a clean install, I will make a disk image of my old drive, or at the very least just keep a clone or my old drive right there. I don't leave it mounted, but when I go to launch an app and I realize, oh, crap, I don't have my license key or my preferences or whatever, I mount the old drive, I go and I dig, I put the stuff in place, I hope and I pray, and in the process, I add cruft right back to my system, which is why I tend to err on the side of, I might as well just use migration assistant, but that doesn't really solve the problem. And if you've got 11 years of potential cruft there, it's probably time to... It's not a bad time, I should say. Maybe it's not probably time, but it's not a bad time. Yeah, man. All right. We've got another one. All right. Where are we on time? Nope. We're going to do our second sponsor for the day, John, which is BBEdit from Barebone Software. Man, I loves me some BBEdit because it is something I use all the time. In fact, just earlier today, I had to go and update all of our articles because we decided here at Mac Observer to standardize on capital S's in the names of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. We decided to heck with whatever Apple's doing with their small caps, but we'll represent it as a lowercase character, even though we mean it to be uppercase. No. But I wanted to have a clipboard that had clean plain text X, capital X, and capital S on it, so that I could have that on my clipboard and go and paste it in and all of our articles, and I could just do a find and replace and quickly take care of that. But I needed that clean X and S on my clipboard without any font formatting or anything. So what did I do? I went to BBEdit. I was going to say I launched BBEdit, but it was already launched because it always is. I went into BBEdit. I opened a new document. I typed a capital X and a capital S. I highlighted them and I copied them. And I knew because BBEdit doesn't do anything with text formatting that it would have no formatting and it would inherit whatever formatting was in the article, wherever I was, whenever I had to paste this in and it worked flawlessly. I could have, though, copied the HTML from our articles in and done a multi-file search and replace in BBEdit to look for all instances of capital S, lowercase S, and replace with capital X. Did I say capital S, lowercase S? Capital X, lowercase S, and then replace with capital X, capital S, and boom, it would have fixed that too. I chose the other route because I didn't want to pull everything out of WordPress only to put it back in. But that's what BBEdit is good for, is any kind of text manipulation you need to do. And of course, it's also good for coding. It detects languages. It's a cool, cool thing. Go download it. You can download a copy for free. You get a 30-day free trial of all the features. And after 30 days, you get to keep it and you have less features. But for what I just described here, everything still works. So you got to check it out. Go to barebones.com, download BBEdit. That's it. That's all I'm asking. Just go do that. That's it. That's all I got. Thanks to BBEdit and Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Take us to JP, my friend. JP, if you guys recall, he's always asking us to cut him off. But I'm not going to cut him off because I answer his question. Right? It's the same one. JP says, hey guys, is it normal for my late 2017 MacBook Pro to boot up on its own when I open the lid even when I don't push the power key? I shut it down and wait extra long for the screen and keys to go dark because there's no other way to know if it's turned off. But when I open it the next day, it'll start up when I open the lid before I get a chance to hit the button. And it does indeed go through the progress bar. Start up. Is there a way to shut that feature off? And he also says, what do you think about Apple killing the home button and touch ID and the rest of the headphone jacks? I'm mildly annoyed. I will address that later. But to answer his question, David, first, I thought JP was insane because my computer doesn't do this, which is the mid-2012. Okay. But then I whipped out the Google Foo and you know what, Dave? It seems that the later Macs, which is why I don't want to change, because I couldn't handle the trauma of it doing this. But now you do what the thing is. Now you know the answer. You could handle this trauma. You researched it. Yes, I could. But doing a bit of research, Dave, it seems that the later models like his and beyond have a feature called Auto Booth and we're raising the lid will in fact make the machine start up. Now, do you want to disable this? Yeah, here's the bad news. Apple doesn't give you a way to do this through Mac OS or control panel or system preferences. You'll have to do some terminal magic. And the terminal magic here is pseudo space, NV RAM, space, capital auto, capital boot equals percent zero zero. Oh, sure. And I found an article titled how to stop the new MacBook Pro from automatically turning on when the lid is open over at iDownloadBlog so you can go there for more data. So that's where I got that magic. And for good measure, Dave, if you do want to learn about how to turn your Mac on and off straight from Apple, because they mentioned this as well, I think it's 2016 models and beyond, Apple has an article which you would think is dumb, but it's actually not called how to turn your Mac on or off, which of course we'll link to. I was actually kind of flabbergasted by this. I'm like, why would you... I don't know if to me that's necessarily desirable behavior. I expect my Mac when it's sleeping to wake up when I open the lid, but I wouldn't expect it to turn on when I open the lid. So I don't know. I've kind of mixed feelings about that, but it's good to know that you can impact the behavior. Well, I get why they've done this, right? Because if you open the lid to your Mac, you are generally expecting it to wake up, right? I mean, because that's what it does, right? You open the lid. Your intent is that you want to do something with your Mac really soon. So why put in the extra step? And if it's asleep, I can imagine people being like, well, I opened it. I turned it on, right? I opened the lid, which equates with turning it on, and there were probably a slew of support calls from people that had to be told push the power button, right? And because they weren't used to that. So I can see the logic path of this happening. I tend to agree with you, but it's better to turn it off, JP, and then press the button. But we're coming at this from the standpoint of users that are comfortable and understand how computers work and all of that. So we think about the steps that perhaps not everybody does. So there you go. Yeah. And as for a second question, personally, Dave, because I have the iPhone 8 and not the iPhone 10. As far as removing the home button and the touch ID, as the horse in Ren and Stimpy says, no, sir, I don't like it. But if we rewound 11 years, no, no, no, hear me out on this, right? And we had no iPhone. And suddenly the iPhone 10 was presented to us. We would be ecstatic and happy with this and never upset about the lack of a home button. And that's where Apple is with this, right? They're not worried about the people that are clinging to the way it's been done. Apple has never worried about that. They are thinking about what's the way we want to present it now. What's the best user experience? I mean, it's the same conversation with the laptop, right? I mean, it's both interesting and telling. And I think JP is OK with me shining this light here that the same person that is surprised by his laptop waking up, turning on when opening the lid, AKA new behavior, is also not entirely happy about giving up the home button. For a lot of people, this is, as we just said, this is not new behavior, this is expected behavior. So this is part of the deal of being an Apple user that we know that Apple is going to just plow ahead on us and not wait for those of us that are used to the way things used to be to catch up. That's just not their thing. And I'd figure it out. I mean, I've seen you use your 10, and I've seen the videos and all that, and I would grok it instantly, and it would just be a change of behavior. The thing is, I just think that the combination is so the home button to me was just kind of a brilliant thing because it's like there's this one button where no matter where you are, you can get back to a known state. And now with the 10, you got to know to up swipe, right? Right. To swipe up. But again, no different. It's just, they just have to know this thing to me having a button there is more obvious than having a gesture. But once you learn it, then you're good. But I get that. And the same thing with face ID, I don't know if I, because I just use touch ID and just rely on it on a daily basis. And it just works the way I want it to. I don't know if I trust face ID, but the thing is, I'll have to. Right. And I get my next phone. Yeah, exactly. I wish they would have given a choice that you could have still, that you could have gotten one or the other, but they're... That's not how they do it. Yeah, that's not Apple. So I don't think I'm going to upgrade anytime soon, because honestly, the eight I'm very happy with. So maybe a year or so, maybe a year or so, because there's nothing on the new phones that I really find compelling for me to upgrade. I mean, even the seven to the eight, I mean, there wasn't a lot. I mean, the screen quality, and the screen quality, I think, was the most compelling thing with the eight, which is why I decided to upgrade. Plus, Verizon makes it really easy. I basically just traded it in, and I stayed on the same payment plan, and they're like, yeah, here's your newer phone. So I've been thinking a lot about this, because the 10 is plenty for me. And the differences between the 10 and the 10S don't... I mean, they're obviously, from a performance standpoint, I have no doubt it would be faster. There's just no question. Faster CPU, faster, way faster GPU, that whole neural network and all that stuff. I mean, they're a neural processing engine, rather. But it's not enough to make me say, oh, immediately. I have not ordered one. Part of why I haven't ordered one is the 10R, because that 10R is a really interesting thing. It's the same speed as the 10S and 10S Max. It's better battery life than both of them. Yes, you give up the OLED screen, you go, quote unquote, back, which it is back to an LCD screen, but way... I mean, it's like you said, the screens now are awesome. And so will I notice the difference? I'm sure. But will it be the thing that would kill me? No, I don't think so. The glass back? No thanks. I'm happy to get rid of that. I lose 3D touch. So I have to pinch to zoom in order to create PDFs from printing, from mail. I can do that. That's cool. So the 10R is a very compelling thing to me. And being in a family where we hand iPhones down, I don't know that I could skip a year. I would pay for that at some point. So I might as well just stay up to date and begin or continue the hand-me-down process. Yeah. And the R, I've seen a lot of people in our circle comment that it really hits a sweet spot, mostly with features and price. Yeah. The other comment, though, with the other phones, not that the 8 was cheap. I mean, it's cheaper because I'm on a two-year plan, like a lot of people know. I guess that's kind of the new reality, at least with Apple. But I've seen more than one person comment, you know, that they're kind of pricing themselves out of the reach of a lot of people with a $1,000 phone. Absolutely. Or more. I mean, you'll pay more than that if you want more storage in the larger factor. Well, if you feature up, yeah. Yeah. If you feature up, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you spread it over 24 months, it's not so bad. You're talking probably under $100 a month. I will say this, though, and we had this conversation on our Mac Observer Daily Observations podcast today. I would highly recommend that whatever path you choose, you wind up getting an unlocked phone. If you're going to go with the XS, the XR, or the XS Max. And the reason is that dual SIM or eSIM slot, right? Or the dual SIM slot, or for most of us in the U.S. Is that in question now? Because my understanding is at least with Verizon, is that all Verizon phones, because they cut some sort of deal with the FCC, with Spectre and all that, they were required to make all their phones unlocked. And that is still the case. I believe that's still the case. But yeah, AT&T and T-Mobile, if you're in a contract plan through them, then the phone is locked. But if you're in a contract plan through Apple, and that's where your payment plan is, then your phone's unlocked. And that makes the difference, because with that eSIM, you have the ability to add either a second entire phone line and data plan, or just a second data plan. And that can be handy. Certainly handy if you travel out of the country. But perhaps even handy in the country, if you're traveling to a place where data is weak, or you have a limited data plan and you just want to add some data for a little while, you could use the eSIM and sign up with GigSky or any carrier to... Oh yeah, I saw the carriers. That would be amazing for, yeah, especially if you travel outside of the country. I mean, it was a nightmare when, I mean, it was probably 15 years ago, I traveled to Paris. I basically had to get another phone that I rented from Verizon, and then they forwarded mine. It was a nightmare. Yeah, right, right, right. Oh yeah, it's amazing. Because it was all CDMA and all that. That was the other thing is that they weren't really standard space. Now it's a lot. And I saw that GigSky, did you say? They were explicitly listed on the list of people that are supported, because I think you use them, right? I've used them many times. Yeah, it's a great service, because, and especially with the eSIM, it's awesome, right? You get off a plane, it's, you know, whatever time of day, midnight, you get to your hotel, all you want to do is check your email, maybe the hotel's Wi-Fi is flaky or whatever, or in the cab on the way, you want to get an Uber, right? So you need data on your device. If you can't go and get a SIM card in the country that you're in, you can't sign up for service, right? That's just how it goes. But the eSIM allows you to do that, because it's baked into the phone, and you just go into the settings and cellular, and they say add a plan, and GigSky's listed there. And all the others are too, and you can just, but GigSky's, I mean, this is their business, right? They've been on the eSIM in the iPad Pro, but before that, or not only before that, but still now, you can get a SIM from them, but this is even better because you don't need it. And you sign up for a data plan that works in the country that you're in, and I mean, like, this is a big deal. And again, you know, for travelers especially. But even for people that, you know, if you have a home number, like a personal cell phone number and a work cell phone number, well, here you go. Put them both on your phone. You're good to go. One phone, two numbers. You can choose which one is your primary, but you can choose it on the outbound. And like, I think this is going to make a big difference for folks. So don't lock yourself in, because if your phone is locked, then the only carrier that you can use on the second SIM is the same one that you have on the first. So just bear that in mind. Right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. It's funny, though, because I mean, this feature has been available on Android phones for quite a while. Oh, yeah. Our Android friends are laughing at us like crazy. Yeah. Well, they had two physical SIM slots, I think, a lot of the Android phones. That's right. And that's how it'll be in China, too, because China doesn't support Apple's eSIM. So it'll just be one SIM tray with, I think, two SIMs that you can kind of piggyback in there or whatever. So, yeah. It's crazy. All right. I want to talk about David. I want to answer David's question here. This is a good one. It comes up pretty regularly. And what David asks is, any recommendations on an Ethernet backhaul access point? Apparently, he says, Eero can't be set up to do this. He says, I have a Netgear R9000 X10 router that I want to keep, including its wireless network. So he has a great router, powerful router, no reason to turn off its wireless. He just needs wireless somewhere else in his house. He could, and as he implied in the question, he could try to do this with Eero or any of the mesh products, but they're not really built to coexist with another wireless network of the same name. You could do it, and it would probably work okay, but you're sort of paying for mesh benefits that you're not really taking advantage of. And so this is where the idea of a wireless extender comes in, or a wired extender. And most of the, we've talked a lot about wireless extenders in the show recently, but a lot of them have Ethernet ports that can be used with Ethernet backhaul. So if you've got Ethernet in the walls, you can just connect this to Ethernet. You're not even sharing it. You're not even using wireless for the backhaul. You're in good shape. You get your full wireless to your clients, and Ethernet connects your router and your extender. And there's lots of these things that he wound up getting, I think it was the Netgear EX8000, which is probably overkill for someone that's doing Ethernet backhaul, because this is a tri-band extender. So it's built to use the extra band, just like I mentioned earlier in the episode. Actually, it was in the ad spot for Eero, but it's that extra band really does help with the backhaul and freeing things up for the fronthaul. So, I mean, but you don't need it for the backhaul. You can use them all for fronthaul, and it's even more efficient that way. So he wound up getting the, yeah, it's the EX8000, which they call the Nighthawk X6S tri-band Wi-Fi mesh extender. And I mean, it's overkill, but it really not overly expensive. I think you can get it on Amazon for 150 bucks, maybe less. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. Yeah, I don't know. This is, yeah, they're showing it with extra stuff. I just want the thing, Amazon. There we go, 179 bucks on Amazon. So, okay. But you can, you know, we talked about it in previous shows. There's, you know, sub $100 wireless extenders that also have Ethernet ports in them. So they could be used wired. The EX7300 from Netgear is probably more along the lines. TP-Link makes some that we've talked about in previous episodes. Oh, yeah. I tried that. That was actually awesome. I was like, Yeah. There's an Ethernet port on a wireless extender. And it was a gig port too, not that it would reach that. Well, but it would go faster than 100. Oh, absolutely. And that's what you want, right? So, yeah, these things, and those wire, those Ethernet ports on these wireless extenders generally can be used for one of two purposes. One, of course, is the one we're talking about here, where you plug it in and wire it, you know, for the backhaul to your router. But the other is, if you're using wireless backhaul and you've just got this extender, but you've got some device that needs to plug in Ethernet, you plug it into the extender, and the device is none the wiser. It's plugged in Ethernet like your Tivo or something, right? You know, if you've got a Tivo mini or something that will not do wireless, but if it's plugged into a wireless extender, it has no idea. So you just plug it in, you're good to go. Oh, yeah. Well, you told me to do that. So I got the latest, the Tivo Bolt. Yeah. And there's an Eero in the same room. Right. And you're like, dude, why don't you plug the Tivo into the Eero? And I'm like, huh. And that's what I did. So I'm not using the Wi-Fi radio in the Tivo. I'm using the Ethernet port, assuming that I'm going to get better performance than if I did the Wi-Fi to the Eero right next to it. Well, yeah. My theory on this. So here is this Dave's, you know, crazy theory is that you already have, you're already quote unquote paying for the Wi-Fi signal between your two eros, right? So why clutter the airwaves with yet another wireless signal from your Eero to the Tivo when you could just plug a wire in and clear your airwaves of that constant chatter, right? That's my thought process on that. No, no, that's perfectly valid. The less devices connected to any Wi-Fi, the better because you're going to get better performance. In general, yeah. I eliminated one device from the, I think the last I looked at my Eero, I think I have 17 or 18 devices talking to it throughout the house. Right, right, right, right. So, you know, I'm probably at a good point where, you know, that's not unmanageable. How many do you have connected to yours? I'm afraid to ask. Yeah, I'm afraid to answer. I mean, you've got a family there. I mean, I'm just me here. We're down one on the family, though, John. So, it's as it should be. It's good. I have 24 connected devices. Oh, wow. At the moment. Yeah, yeah. So, there you go. All right. But no, your logic is sound. And I think if you can wire something, wire it. If not, then, you know, do the mesh or the Wi-Fi. Yeah, I guess that's the good rule is if you can wire it, you know, 99 times out of 100, that's going to be the right answer. So, yeah. Fun. I like this. I like the way we do this show. I also like our premium subscribers, John, because they, in addition to our sponsors, really make it so that we can continue to do this show week after week after week for you. I don't know if we like them. I think we really like them. I love them. I don't know if I, okay. I don't know if I'd go that far. No, I do. No, you're right. You know, you're right, because they enable us to do what we do from week to week. The reality is, though, I love all our listeners. I really do. Like, I know it sounds crazy, but when I'm sitting down and like last night, you know, the least I didn't like, then Lucas had gone to bed. I was going to say the kids, which is true. We actually had Skyler and her roommate over for her roommate wanted to watch the 49ers game. So this is actually interesting. What a pain in the neck. So her roommate is a San Francisco 49ers fan. This worked out to our benefit here in New England, because Sky had texted us the day before on Saturday or whatever and said, can we get the 49ers game at home? And if so, she said, you know, her roommate and she were going to come over and watch it. And I thought, well, an opportunity to have an afternoon at home with the family, this is worth some effort. So and maybe even a little money. Like if I could pay the NFL, say 20 bucks or something to watch this game, I happily would have spent that money. That, as many of you know, is not possible. This 49ers game they were playing Detroit, that is an out of market game, meaning none of our local networks are covering it. So we can't get it through our normal cable service. Do blackouts? No, no, not a blackout. No, no, just, it's just not, it's just not broadcast in New England. So can't get it through. You can't do a per game? Nope. Nope. The NFL has cut too many deals with too many people and they can't cut a deal with me. Right. I mean, that's essentially what it comes down to. And it's stupid and they probably regret this, but they're also, you know, basking and thriving with all the money that shows up every Sunday when they win every football game. Right. Remember that no matter what football game you watch, the NFL wins. So it's true. So I started digging and I found some like questionable, you know, if you search on Reddit or whatever, you can find places to get the game and stream it. But I knew that those would be like flaky and stuff. I didn't want to deal with flaky. I wanted to just have it work. So I kept digging. Now there is this thing called the NFL Sunday ticket that Direct TV offers to Direct TV subscribers where you can pay, I think it's 200 bucks for the season. They break it down into 50 bucks a month, but you got to buy the whole season and you get a one week free trial. And I'm thinking I only need about 20 hours. I'm good to go. And they offer it as a streaming thing. Right. So you don't need the satellite dish. I'm like, brilliant, cool. And this is after calling Comcast and seeing if there was like some plan we could get through Comcast for a day for a month, whatever. Like I was willing to spend a little money on this. It's fine. No, Comcast, no, they lied to us. They said, oh, yeah, get our sports and entertainment package. That'll include all football games. They lie and they lied. So no. So I like this Direct TV thing because I could buy it and stream it. And so I go to sign up for it, John. And it comes back and they say, oh, you're in an area where you can have a satellite dish. So the only way you can get our NFL Sunday ticket is if you are in like an apartment building where you cannot put up a satellite dish. And they now, you know, they know this is me. So I thought, well, I could think about what addresses have apartment buildings and maybe try and weasel that. But in the corner of the screen, there's an ad for NFL Sunday ticket, you. So I dig into that. This is for college students. It's half the price. It's, you know, 25 bucks a month instead of 50. But it also comes with the one week free trial. And it bypasses any restriction of needing a satellite dish because they figure you're probably not allowed to put a satellite dish outside your dorm room. So I go to sign up. And my son, as it turns out, is also taking a class at the UNH, the University of New Hampshire, which is where our daughter's going. So I put in my, it asked, it says, what school are you going to? What's your first name? What's your last name? And what's your birth date? This is information I have committed to memory for my children. Right. I was there. I remember. I created one of these things and I remember the other two quite distinctly. So, so I choose that I put in my son's name and, and, and birth date. And immediately it comes back and says, right, we don't have him in the system. Now he's not a full-time student there. He's only just taken one class. He's a junior in high school. So he's taking a math class there. So they're like upload the PDF of your, of your, you know, your receipt. I'm like, well, screw that. So I backed out. I changed the name to my daughter's first name. I changed the birth year because my kids share a birthday. So all I had to do was change two things. I hit next and it comes up and it says, yep, you're approved. So UNH in their infinite wisdom happily shares this information with Direct TV and the NFL. So in exchange for you probably violating the EULA for this. You did this on behalf of, of your daughter. I did. I do have a power of attorney in place with, with, with my daughter because she's 18, right? So I think this is legally, so I think legally you're on, you're on the right side. Yeah, it might be gray ground, but I think it's, I think it's, it's not shaky. The thing is, the thing is I'm, I'm with you in that why is it sometimes any company telecommunications or otherwise make it so hard for you to give them their money, your money. I'm sorry. I had the same thing. I actually, now the thing is, I think if you finagled, I was actually able to finagle one time. So the thing is the current package that I have when I call for my yearly, you know, renegotiation, they're like, Hey, we'll give you free HBO and showtime for a year. And it's like, well, I don't really want that. And then the thing is a show was coming up on, on a, on a network that they were battling with called stars and I really wanted it. So I called them up and I'm like, well, you know, you're giving me HBO and showtime for free. I really don't want that. Can you give me free stars for instead? And they're like, well, no. And I'm like, well, can you do anything? And they're like, well, you know, we'll, we'll give it to you free for a month. That's all you need. That's it. I don't think it was an official deal. I think it was just a customer service or I was just begging and I'm like, oh, it's like, come on. I'm like a longtime customer. Right. And they're like, all right, we'll give you this channel for a month. And then the thing is Comcast has no way of providing me with this particular game that we watch. And you know what? It worked totally fine. I know they enabled the NFL channel, right? No, the NFL channel doesn't have it. That's the thing. The NFL has a deal with direct TV and only direct TV. Oh, so there was no. This was the only. This was the only legal path to do this, right? Otherwise you're finding a stream or whatever. Yeah. But you know what? It worked. I downloaded the NFL Sunday ticket app to our, to our Apple TV. I pressed play. If there were another football game that were out of market that I wanted to watch simultaneously, I could have had them up picture in picture in the app. I mean, it was awesome. We also, the Patriots game happened to be on it exactly the same time. And of course, I would have done that. But since the Patriots game was in market, that wasn't in the NFL Sunday ticket because I was that was available other ways, etc., etc. So we watched the Pats game afterwards on Tivo. That was fine. But but yeah, what a I mean, what a fiasco that said, as I was saying, after the kids went to sleep last night, Lisa was messing around on her computer doing whatever she needed to do. I pulled out my laptop and I went to answer all of the questions that I had not yet gotten to for the week or that you had not gotten to for the week. And I really do love doing this. So it is true that we really do love everything about this. And I want to take a minute and thank our premium subscribers. I know we've gone a little longer than we normally do here. That's OK. On the biannual $25 every six month plan, thanking Joe S, David T, Mike F, Erica R, Kiwi Graham and Mike Z, thanks to all of you. And on the monthly $10 plan, a different Joe S, Barry F, Ari L, Michael P, Dom B, Bob L, Jeff P, John V, John D and Santiago M. Thank you so much to all of you. You rock, but really I don't want to say but really and really you all rock. So thank you very much. So I have a lot more I'd like to go through here, John. But we're already past the 90 minute mark and I feel irresponsible. I don't know why I should. I mean, like the most popular podcast on the planet is Joe Rogan's Three Hour Opus, right? So, but we, there is benefit in being consistent. So we're going to wrap things up even though we have lots more to go through. The good news, John. I have it on good authority. Good authority. We're going to get together next week and do this again. That's the plan. And we're also going to get together this week. Yes, we are. We're going to PEPCOM. PEPCOM and we're going to learn about new stuff hopefully. That's the plan. Have some good food, have some good drink and share what we learn with you unless we're under NDA. Right. Sometimes we are. That's true. But yeah, there's always good stuff with PEPCOM. And we get to see each other, which is even more fun. That's good. Michael King in the chat room says, Dave, the NFL also has a deal with Xbox as well. I did not think about that. And we have Xbox is connected to both of our TVs. So ah, ah, there you go. Well, wait, you know, that's right. Some of those video game consoles apparently do things other than let you play video games. Oh yeah, big time. Kind of makes sense, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Warren, I don't like what you're saying in the chat room. He's talking about the Patriots and losing in the same breath. And I don't understand that as a New England resident. It doesn't make any sense. So there you go. My opinion, Dave, about all of this stuff with all of these teams is I don't like your team. Wait, I like my team. And I'm speaking to everybody. Your team is terrible and my team rules. Okay. And that's just how it is. That's just how it is. Yeah. No, I agree. Same with politics and same with pretty much everything. Well, it certainly, I assumed you were talking about technology and you were you were saying that, you know, your choice of smartphone and computer manufacturer is better. Of course. Right. And by golly, it's a good thing we're ending because VI is way, way better than Emacs. Way better than Emacs. Why do you need all that fluff, dude? ED should be enough for anybody. I like it. All right, folks. Well, that's where the fun ends. You premium folks can email us at premium at macgeekyeb.com. That is one of the benefits that you get in addition to the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with supporting your two favorite geeks. Make sure to check out our forums. I know I gave the URL earlier, but I will give it again, macgeekyeb.com slash forums are thanks to cash fly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Our thanks to our sponsors. Of course, Eero coupon code MGG saves you on overnight shipping in US and Canada. BB edit from bare bones software. Of course, smile software.com slash podcast other world computing at max sales.com and ring at ring.com slash MGG. It's been fun. It's been real. It's been real fun. So much so, but I'm putting this on the calendar for next week. Between now and then, John, we will get together. We will head into New York together. We will go to pepcom together. But there is one thing that I'll say to you then, but I really want to say to you now, and I want to say it to everyone because it really is the, I know we gave a lot of little tidbits, both from us and listeners, but there is advice, one piece of advice that sort of covers all of it. It's the umbrella, if you will, like, you know, you buy your homeowners insurance, your car insurance, your life insurance, and then you buy an umbrella policy to kind of catch all the things that maybe the other stuff doesn't cover. Our umbrella policy is don't get caught.