 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 790 for Monday, November 25th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together, the goal being that we each learn at least five new things. Today we've got, well, we've got some great quick tips, including one we'll start with about zooming a message in mail. We've got some good cool stuff found, including something I never thought could exist on iOS, being a Linux geek. But, you know, there's, things happen. It's interesting. We'll see if it really can exist. Some keyboard questions and Mac stuff. It's all good. Sponsors for this episode include lino.com slash MGG, ifixit.com slash MGG, ancestry.com slash MGG and maxsales.com. You don't have to use the MGG there. They just like that you know about them. We'll talk about all of them in a moment. Well, not all of them together. You know how we do it. We separate them out so that, so that, you know, it paces things and all of that good stuff for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, rainy Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, also rainy. This is John F. Brown. Hey, man, how are you doing today? Yeah, I'm doing all right. Good, good, good. My toys and devices, less so, but, you know, everything's broken. Well, I did a song about that. It's, it sounds like a country song, maybe. We could we could write like the Mac geek country, you know, version, where instead of our like truck that that stopped working, it's our MacBook or something and we can include keyboards in there. Like, there's a song here. I feel like I feel like it. We got to we got to get a crowdsource this, John. We can Bob Dylan there. Bob Dylan did a song called Everything's Broke. Oh, well, there you go. All right. I just heard your connection like flake for half a second. So I'm hoping that's all we get out of that. It's been so good for so many weeks since you got your cable modem line fixed. Well, yes. Yeah. Let me look at my connection info. Yeah. Numbers look good. All right. It lost low ping times are in the below 20. So OK. All right. Good. Good. Hey, but it is a good time of year if you have to replace things because, you know, there's going to be sales and all sorts of good stuff. And if it's something you can use for your business, then, you know, you get that that last tax right off into offset any 2019 income. It's all, you know, there's there's ways to justify these purchases of new toys. It's all good. Nothing wrong with it. But we have some tips that won't cost you anything. Listener Dave points out, he says, I often receive emails in mail app where the font is quite small. It's not fun to read. Did I didn't know he says, did you that you could just hit command plus on that email or command equals really works because you don't have to hit the shift to get the plus key problem solved, says Dave. Well, that's true. I had no idea that you could do this. And what's really cool is that that zoom is only is temporary. It's only in effect for that viewing of that email. So if you move through a different message, it's not zoomed. If you move back to the original message that you zoomed, it's also not zoomed. So it it doesn't change any metadata or app wide viewing preferences. It's just that one thing like I want more boom, boom, boom. You know, great. You've got your you've got your zoom right in there. I like that. That's man, see, this is the beauty of these quick tips, John. How much we learn. I think it's my favorite segment of the show. It used to be cool stuff found as my favorite segment. And at times, you know, why it's my favorite segment because it's the segment we're doing right now. That's kind of how I always feel about these things. Listener Allison sends in well, she had a question, but really what she what she did accidentally was told us about a tip. In the last episode, we were talking about preview options or previews in the finder, right? The show or hide previews in the list view in the finder. So you can see, you know, different information about the file that you have selected. Well, what I had no idea about is that when you are there, you can go to the view option and or the view menu, sorry, and choose show preview options. And depending on the file type, you get different options that you can show. For example, on an audio file, I have all sorts of things like I can see the duration and the performers and the genre and the copyright and the audio channels and the sample rate and all of that good stuff. On a picture, I can choose to see dimensions, resolution and then all kinds of exif data right there in the finder preview. So you want to see your flash or your ISO speed or whatever. All of that stuff is viewable. If you're on a movie, you can get things like location, color profile, codecs, audio channels, sample rates, encoding format, you know, all of that stuff. It's really, really cool. I had no idea that any of these things existed. So in the view menu, go to show preview options. I think am I getting that right? View menu, show preview options. It's right below show view options on both my Mojave and Catalina machines. So it's been there for a while. I know and you can go and set them for different types of files. So you can you got to kind of revisit this a few times. It's fun. It's pretty good. I'm I'm I'm pretty stoked about it, Mr. Braun. I don't know how you feel. Mine is great out. Are you not in the list view? No, I'm in the list view. Oh, because you don't have your preview showing, you got to go to the view menu and first choose show preview. Then you can show preview options. OK. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Good question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. And there's I, you know, it's one of those things pretty stoked about in the finder. So there we go. Show preview, show preview options. Amazing. Amazing. Right. Pretty good. Pretty good. All right. I will link to this next one in the in the show notes. In the last episode, we were talking about JP's question, where he asked about various different ways to replace back to my Mac for controlling a remote computer. And we've got some more tips about that, too. But in terms of this quick tip, really, there's a link to it that he posted in the comments for or in the forum comments for the last for the last episode about using VNC over SSH. So being able to do this all with just the features that are on your Mac and securely getting across the Internet to another. To, you know, to one of your remote Macs. So it involves some terminal stuff that I'm not going to bother to read you here because it would get very confusing for both of us. So and I both, I mean, like me and you, the one, one of you that's listening, right? But I'll link to it and you can find it in the show notes. You can get the show notes at MacGeekGab.com while you're there. Sign up for our weekly email, which takes the show notes and emails them to you so that you don't forget. And the stuff is just right there in your box and you can get to everything. So. Good, John. Very good. Very good. Cool. One last tip related to the same thing. Listener Robert says, beware of screens. Connect. The thing that I recommended in the last episode, he says, a lot of people get caught by screens. Connect. I recommended it as the way to use remote access on another Mac without having to mess with your router and, you know, forwarding ports. But as Robert points out, screens is a decent VNC based remote screen utility, but it has no secure support for use outside the sheltered enclave of your local land. The screens connect utility does a disservice to most users. It is not a secure way to connect from the Internet. It is simply a thin veneer front end that hides the setup of port mapping or opening ports to expose your VNC connection to the public Internet. This is at least the last time I checked a few hours ago. It only supports certain routers and requires UPNP to be enabled on your network to actually open the ports. So that he's right, that that may not be the best option. So perhaps this thing that Christopher posted in the forums or one of the others who mentioned would be a better solution. So now I have to look into that, too, because I thought screens connect was was great. But thank you for that, Robert. And it's good to be informed. It's what we like here. Yeah, good, Mr. Braun. I think so. OK, cool, cool. Let's go to John. Listener, John, with a cool stuff found here. John says, like you all, I have and have had a number of external hard drives and SSDs. However, the new Samsung X5 just blew me away. It's a Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drive, and it is fast. He says, the best example I can give. He says, I do a lot of migrations using migration assistant. I usually put the old machine in target disk mode and then use Thunderbolt 3 or 2 or USB, whatever is available. Usually I see speeds around 70 to 80 megabytes a second, even among current line MacBook Pros, etc. I just migrated myself to a new MacBook Pro 16. Yes, he says I am that lucky. Using this new X5 drive, which contained a clone of my old MacBook Pro, I have 690 gigs of data. I expected a full afternoon of operation to get this done. Migration assistant reported that I was getting. Are you ready for this, John? One thousand ten megabytes a second and the migration took 22 minutes and 31 seconds. In decades of working with Maxon PCs, he says, I have never migrated nearly 700 gigs of data in under 30 minutes, let alone using migration assistant, which it is notoriously slow. Thought I would share. Well, thank you, John. That makes justifying the cost of that drive. You know, it's not super expensive, but it's not cheap, cheap, right? Like a one terabyte is three ninety nine, a two terabyte seven ninety nine. But it's because you're getting, I mean, you're paying for Thunderbolt three, for sure. And then you're also paying for the NVMe stuff. So that's pretty good, though. Like that those are good speed. I got to look and I got to get one of these. I got it that that needs to be my clone drive because that's that's where it's at, man. You got to have fast stuff. Really, that is the kind of thing that you want for your clone. And especially for those of you that want to boot from an external drive, like that's the key right there is is one of those so that you're you're really getting like those full full speeds. But the nice part with doing that with a clone is you want to you want your clone these days to be on an SSD. If it's not when you have to boot from it, oh, it's it's terribly, terribly slow because Mac OS really isn't built for straight up rotational drives anymore. So that's on that, Mr. Braun. No, that's such a that's fast. It's fast. It's super fast. I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, John, which is Otherworld Computing. You know, they are the place we go to buy all sorts of things, including, you know, our SSDs and all that stuff. Well, this is the week of Black Friday, right? And then Cyber Monday is a week from the day this show gets released. So they have several tons of Black Friday deals now and several more tons coming, including their Thunderbolt three dock, right? The O.W.C. Thunderbolt three dock is two ninety four ninety nine plus a free O.W.C. travel dock when you purchase it. So that's pretty cool. So you get a two for right there. The O.W.C. Envoy Pro EX with USB SSD. Think about these prices compared to what we've been talking about on the show here, folks, two terabytes is only four twenty nine ninety nine. That's a savings of seventy bucks over their normal price. And if you need a new machine or a replacement machine, I should say a mid twenty eighteen, thirteen inch used MacBook Pro with the retina display and touch bar starts at just ten ninety nine. So these are killer prices. I always forget that O.W.C. has used, you know, Max. So you got to go check this out. Max sales dot com for these and all your other deals and everything else you need and our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, Douglas, back to cool stuff found here or continuing with cool stuff found, I should say. Douglas says this is more of a long term tip. Well, I don't know about this. I think it's pretty good, pretty good, cool stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, his tip is that he says I've been using my original AirPods for about two years and I'm quite happy with them. During my train commute, I often listen to podcasts. And since it's only voice, I usually listen with one ear, specifically the left ear. But as we all know, rechargeable batteries have a limited life. And since I'd been using the left air pod more than the right one, that now drains much faster. Normally, he says both will charge up to about ninety two percent. But only after one hour, the left one is down to eight percent while the right is still at forty five. Therefore, he says, my tip is that if you want to use just one air pod when listening to, say, voice content, I would recommend switching back and forth between left and right and balancing their use so that you balance their battery use. It says better yet. And here's where the cool stuff found comes in. You can buy a cheap single earphone like the Go Novate for just twenty dollars on Amazon and he sent us a link for voice only. It lasts about five hours on one charge. He says, and I don't have to worry about losing it on a crowded train since I can just buy another one for twenty bucks. He says, I just bought the air pods. Prom was hoping to keep the original air pods as a backup, but with only one hour of play time on the left air pod, it looks like I got caught. Yeah. Yeah. So I like this. This Go Novate having a cheap earbud to use for voice and things like that. When if that's if you're used, if you're listening to podcast a lot, for example, that might not be a bad way to go. So I like that. Thanks. We'll put a link in the show notes. Thanks for sending that along to this pretty good. Huh, John? Yeah, yeah, for the money. Yeah, for the money. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure you're not going to get I haven't tested those. I'm sure you're not going to get like stellar studio quality out of them. But you know, for twenty bucks, you're good to go. If you do want stellar studio quality on your in ear, your earbuds, I should call them your phones. The new anchor or it's from anchor. It's the Soundcore Liberty to Pro. I've been a big fan of actually a lot of the stuff that that anchor has released under their Soundcore brand. And I recently just got a set of these Soundcore Liberty to pros to test. They are one hundred and fifty bucks on Amazon. So totally, you know, totally reasonable for what you're getting. There's two drivers in each earbud. Then these are true wireless earbuds, which is fantastic. And it's actually it's not two drivers. It's one dynamic driver in each ear for the low end sound. So it's a real speaker that's actually delivering real sound and bass to your ear. And then they've got a crossover in there. And the high end sound is coming out of a balanced armature for the detail and articulation that a balanced armature can deliver. So you've got two different drivers in your ear. One is a balanced armature, one is a true dynamic driver. And the sound out of these even out of the box blew me away. I was like, OK, this this is there's something serious going on here. And then they have a hearing test that you can do. Like it reminds me of when I go to the audiologist, you go, you launch the Soundcore app, it pairs with them because it's Bluetooth. And then it plays tones at varying frequencies and volume levels. And in the app, you hold down the the you know, the screen when you can hear it and you release the screen when you can't. You should be honest about this so that you get a good profile and it will profile your ears. I did it when I got home from a gig the other night, which may or may not have been the right time to do it. But they profile my ears perfectly. And then the sound was like then it came alive. It's like, oh, holy crap, like these things really blew me away for one hundred and fifty bucks. And they've got they come in a case like all of them do now. You get up to eight hours of playtime with these things, which is fantastic. They seal in your ear. They feel good. They come with different sized tips so that you can really get it, you know, get it settled out. And then you can tweak the EQ from where you from where it sets it if you like. Eight hours of playtime per charge. And then the case gets you thirty two hours of playtime because it's got its own battery in it. And the case itself is Qi wireless charging compatible. So you can put the case just on your Qi pad and charge the case up. So and it and it's a speaker phone or not a speaker phone, your, you know, phone headset to one hundred and fifty bucks. These are like I'm very impressed with these things. I've only been using them for, I don't know, a little under a week. So I can't speak to like, you know, how I feel about them, say, a month from now, but I'm feeling pretty good about these. So I'm pretty stoked. Pretty good. How Mr. Braun, you know what? In that vein, I think I will talk about something that I've been playing with. Yeah, go ahead. Since we're talking about earbuds. So. Plantronics Backbeat Pro fifty one hundred. OK. So they sent me some of these. And I'm like, no, my first earbuds. Really? Sure. Your first true wireless earbuds, right? Yes. Yeah. So the, you know, the tooth and all that. The setup process was really cool. So, you know, of course, you got to, you know, pair it. What I kind of like is so when you and they have a little case, you know, very similar, you know, the case has a battery and then you you put, you know, these guys in the case and it charges them. I think you get about six hours. They claim about six hours of playtime. OK. Um, it's kind of neat. So when you when you start up, you put the right one in your ear and it says power on battery high phone connected. So you get some status there and you put the left one in. It also says something that's power on battery high headset connected. So, you know, gives you a warm fuzzy that, you know, they're working. Right. Right. So yeah, the Apple show either the percentage or, you know, the amount of time and then they have an app that you install the phone. Um, and the features are pretty good. So you got to kind of learn their language. So, um, so you can either touch or click a button to make certain things happen. So, for example, the left ear pod, you know, if you tap it, the volume will go up. If you touch and hold the volume will go down or instead of the left one doing volume, you can actually have it do. You can program it to make many different things happen if you tap either once or twice. So, um, you can have that activate Siri. You can have it tell you the head, the status of the headset. You can set a timer. You can have it tell you the time. There's a stopwatch. You can set up a Spotify playlist, an Apple music playlist, or I never heard of this service before, a Deezer playlist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can program those actions for the left one. It supports something called HD Voice, which you may or may not have depending on your carrier. So it has support for that. And it's also kind of smart. So, for example, if you're on a call, if you remove them from your ears, it's smart enough to realize you did that and it's going to mute the mic. And it can also transfer the call to the phone from the AirPods if you remove them. So that's kind of neat. This is kind of interesting. Find My Headset feature. So if you activate the Find My Headset feature, it'll actually and they warn you of this, but it'll actually don't do it when you're in your ears. Right? Yeah. Right. They say, yeah, this is really loud. So, you know, don't leave them in your ears when it does that, but it helps you find them if you lose them. So I think that's neat. And of course, you can play music and do phone calls and all that stuff. And there's noise canceling. I see that. Yeah, they've got like noise and specifically tuned for wind canceling so that on the on the mics itself, so that it if you're in like a windy environment outside, it will try and isolate your voice for the people that are hearing it. So it's noise canceling on the microphone. Is there any sort of active noise cancellation on the? I don't think there is. There's no active noise cancellation on the on the speakers. But but if if they seal in your ear, which these do, yes, you don't. I mean, that's passive noise cancellation. Let's not wait in the conversation about ear pods or ear buds. In general, people lose sight of the fact that if it seals in your ear, that's that's passive noise cancellation that that can that can really help. So, yeah, that's pretty good. And yeah, and oh, we have a question from the chat room, which you can always go to at Mackeygab.com slash stream, I think. That's correct. Yeah. And Brian Monroe asked a question. Why would you get them versus AirPods? Or maybe he was asking you that. I guess one argument here is that they're one sixty nine ninety nine. So they're a little less expensive. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is a good question in general. Why would you get something like like these or the, you know, the anchor ones that we mentioned versus versus getting AirPods? And. Airpods are way more expensive. They don't necessarily the anchor ones that I mentioned with the the, you know, the manual. Well, they the assisted tuning experience that you're not going to get with AirPods, a comfort thing, perhaps, you know, yeah. So there you go. Oh, yeah. And they come with, you know, same thing. They came with, you know, small, medium and large. But the but the seal with the ones that were that were on there initially was fine for me. So I haven't tested the new AirPods Pro yet. I very much. So why get them versus regular AirPods because they seal, right? That's the big difference between regular AirPods and the two things that we've talked about here and also AirPods Pro, right? AirPods Pro truly seal in your ear. So they would be usable on an airplane. In fact, having wireless, true wireless earbuds on on an airplane is fantastic. It really makes a huge difference. But. But, you know, original gen AirPods don't seal in your ear. So they're terrible on an airplane. They're great when walking around in the city, though. So, you know, different. I I would I have whenever I travel, I bring a set of AirPods with me because I use them as my speakerphone. And then I also bring a set of non-Apple, you know, whatever, something like the ones we've been talking about here that seal in my ear and really kind of close me off to the world. And either one of the, you know, that that it's great to have both. So if you want that and you wanted Apple branded AirPods Pros the way to go, right? And you get AirPods for when you want that kind of open experience and AirPods Pro when you don't. Transparency mode or whatever any of these other manufacturers call it, not all earphones have that. I don't think either of the ones that we mentioned here today do. But say, you know, like the ear in M twos, definitely have that transparency mode where it lets some sound in from the outside. It's OK. It's definitely, you know, better than nothing. But it's not what you're it's not. It's not what I would want when walking around in a city. I actually want to hear the sound. I don't want to be relying on a microphone to try and orient me in time and space. So but, you know, yeah, no, there's I love my AirPods. They are they are the thing that I use constantly as my phone headset. And when again, walking around, you know, in a city or doing something like that where I want to listen to music or podcast or whatever. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And another point brought up is, yeah, AirPods don't fit everybody's ears. I never liked while I always hated the, you know, the round, you know, wired things that came with the iPod. I never liked the fit of those at all. We have learned since the AirPods came out, though, even though they look the same as AirPods, the lack of wire changes that dramatically for it is not. If you did not like earpods, it means that does not inform whether or not you will like AirPods. Is this really what we've what we found on that? Just so you know, John, it's great, right? Because I hated those those two. They always were kind of falling out of my ears and O.G. AirPods that don't seal, they feel loose in your ear, but I have not been able to get them to fall out. Even, you know, moving at 25 knots on the bow of a boat with the wind coming at me, it just they just stay right in. They're totally happy. So, yeah. Yeah. And I guess the other thing is would AirPods work with a Android device? Sure. They're regular Bluetooth headphones. So you can pair them. They've got a pairing button on the case and it's easy enough. Yeah. So. OK. But do you get all the features? Well, what features? So I'm I'm just wondering if. Well. Yeah, I don't know, but you can you can use. OK. Yeah, they're just Bluetooth headphones. You know, Apple has done their best to do some pairing magic with them. And that's great. Like they pair easier once you have them paired to one of your iOS devices. They, you know, they they then paired or once of your one of your Apple devices connected via iCloud. It that shares the MAC address so that your other devices know about it and they can do some smart handoff things in that. But in terms of them just being Bluetooth earbuds, they're Bluetooth earbuds. You can use them with anything. Yeah, for sure. OK, because I think another reason you may want to look at alternatives. So, for example, they have an app with this one. And I don't know if. Yeah. You mentioned the ones that you tried also have an app. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But I guess AirPods don't have an app. They just do their thing, right? Well, it's built into iOS and Mac OS. Yes. Yes. There's no there's no separate app. But but certainly if you have AirPods go into settings, Bluetooth and then hit the little eye next to your AirPods when they're connected and you can control all sorts of things like what a tap does or what a double tap does and kind of how it all balances out. So yeah, it's all right. OK, well, that was my question, though, is that that wouldn't translate. To an Android device. Yeah, probably not. See what I'm saying. I do. I do. I'm trying to think here there is. There is an app called Poddroid that someone has written. Yeah, that lets you control all this. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. Poddroid for AirPods on Android. There you go. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it looks like it's free. So I have to try this with my my Android phone. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. You have an Android phone? Of course. Oh, yeah. I always keep an Android phone like up and and running. These days, I use the the Douji S 70 is generally the one that I'm I'm using as my Android phone. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. But oh, yeah. Well, it's I mean, I find it good to have the perspective of, you know, being able to kind of test these things and experience like like car play, you know, versus Android auto. And that was a short experiment because it was like, OK, Android auto kind of sucks compared to car play. But yeah, but I always I when I travel, I always have my my Douji phone with me. Ask me next time if you want to mess with an Android phone. I always have one with me when I travel. So even when I like drive down to your place, I always keep one with me. So. Yes, yes. Good. Where are we on time here? We are in good shape. I like it. I mentioned in the intro to the show, John, that I found something I never thought I would be able to experience. And sure enough, I was I was actually on Leo's Leo Leporte's Mac break weekly this week. And what that means is keeping an eye on his live stream so that I know when Mac break weekly is about to start and then I can join the thing and do the show. And he does. Oh, I can't even remember the name of the show, but it's a show about iOS that he does right before Mac break weekly. And on it, they were talking about this app called ish I S H dot app is the URL where you can go find this thing. So I ish it's hard to easy for me to say I S H dot app. And it is a Linux shell on iOS. So I quickly installed this on my phone and I've since installed it on my iPad. It runs the Alpine shell on your iPhone. It lives inside the sandbox like an app would. Right now, I don't think it's in the app store. You have to install it via test flight, but that's fine. It like you can you can have that if you started doing it. When I first started talking about this, you'd already have it installed. It's super easy. And then there's a package manager there. So you can use it APK and even give instructions right when you launch the shell that you can add the package and you're good to go and you can do all kinds of cool things on it. One of the things you can do is run like ping or traceroute from your iPhone to an external device. And I'd never been able to do that before. I did try running I perf John. It's not installed by default. But of course, it's got a package manager. So I typed APK add I perf three and it let me install I perf. But I cannot connect to an I perf server with it, nor can I run an I perf server with it. So there's some something about the sandbox that limits that level of TCP IP connections inbound and outbound. I'll have to have to mess with it and see if I can get that working. But I'll report it to him. So it really super handy, even just to run ping and traceroute from your phone, like these are diagnostics that I try and you that I wind up using all the time. And I always have to go to a Mac or I have to SSH, like from using prompt or whatever from my phone into a Mac. Well, here I've got the shell local on my phone. You cannot you can't drive around your iOS file system and do, you know, anything like that because, of course, it's, you know, it's an app. So it's running inside its own sandbox so you can run around its file system, but you can't go mess with other apps, nor should you be able to. But but super handy for diagnostics and stuff, especially network stuff. So I was pretty stoked to find that pretty good. Huh, John? Yeah. And in that vein, yes, it looks like the tool still works here, H.E.net network tools. OK, another handy one that I've had on iOS for a while. And oh, yeah, it has iPerf and Mac browser, ping, ping, sweet, port skin routing. Oh, look at that. Right. Cool. All kind of stuff. And for the record, that is available also on on Android. So there you go. Yeah. Cool. Fun. Yeah. Hurricane Electric writes all these to all those H.E.net tools. So it's pretty good. One last kind of sort of cool stuff found. It'll help migrate us into the questions realm is that listener Bruce wrote in and said in the last episode, you mentioned that you have a mechanism whereby your website's SSL is renewed prior to expiring. And this is super helpful with Let's Encrypt because they expire every 90 days, but they are free. And yeah, I use something called CERTBOT, which is put out or at least hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so CERTBOT.EFF.org is the engine that I use and it's it's fantastic. It's super automated, really easy to interact with. I used to use a thing called Acme tool before CERTBOT existed. But when we migrated to our new server back in whatever it was, August, I guess, I figured, well, I've got to rebuild it from the ground up anyway. No reason to go with Acme tool when CERTBOT exists now. And so now we use CERTBOT. It's great. I love it. It makes all of this very, very easy. So highly recommended. And if you have a Synology unit that you are like a disk station or a router that you are hosting any kind of services on, be it your, you know, you could be hosting your website, but you could also just be hosting, say, your Synology Drive or cloud station or anything like that. I highly recommend getting your own certificate and they have Let's Encrypt built into them and they use CERTBOT, but they have a nice graphical interface for it. So go check that out. It's pretty good stuff. You're using certificates that you're that you're getting with Let's Encrypt for your Synology these days yet, John. Yes, when I set them up at one point, it said, hey, you want to you want to put a cert on this? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. OK, I'll get one for you. Yeah, I'll go get one for you. Yeah, exactly. That's the that really is the beauty of of of all of that. So yeah, it's pretty good stuff, man. Pretty good stuff. All right, Mr. Braun, I would love to talk about our next two sponsors if that's OK with you. Dandy. All right. You know, our genes aren't just about us, right? There's something that we share with the people closest to us. I'm not talking about the genes that you wear, although you might share those. I'm talking about our genetics, which you definitely share, right? And uncovering potential health issues early can help all of us with information that's empowering. That way, we and our families can move forward towards a healthier future. And that's where our sponsor Ancestry Health from Ancestry comes in because Ancestry Health helps us discover how our DNA might influence certain health conditions and the steps we can take with our health care providers to chart that healthier path forward. Every time I go to my doctor for my annual physical, you know, they ask a series of health questions and a bunch of those include what's going on with your family members. 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Our next sponsor for today is iFixit. Where at iFixit.com slash MGG? You'll get a code that gives you $10 off of $50 when you visit the link. The code only works if you visit that iFixit.com slash MGG link. So go check it out. And the reason you want to go check this out is because iFixit is the place where John and I go any time we need to repair our Macs. Their tool kits are awesome and without them, I don't think I would have been able to get through any repair. It's exactly the tools you need. It's not just like some generic tools. It's exactly what you need to get inside your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad, all of that stuff. Truly is the best electronics tool kit I've ever used because it's purpose built and iFixit is of course where we go to check out all the repair videos, the how to videos so that we know how to get in there and the tools are perfect because they match exactly with the people in the videos have. So you know you're using the right thing. You know you're using the best thing. And they're going to have a bunch of things on sale here coming up for like Black Friday and throughout the holidays. So you've got to check it out. Make sure you go to iFixit.com slash MGG. And that'll give you that special coupon code right there in the page gives you ten dollars off of fifty dollars right in that iFixit.com slash MGG link. You've got to know their premium tool kits are the perfect gift for the techies on your gift list. So go there now iFixit.com slash MGG. You can be just like John and me or thanks to iFixit. For sponsoring this episode. Excellent. And Greg has a question, which I think is a creative one. So here's Greg's story. I have an early 2015 MacBook Pro that is still serving my needs, thanks in part to my getting 16 gigs of RAM when I purchased it. Since I have an SD card slot, I've got an adapter that takes a micro SD card and remains flush with the side of the computer. And I keep a 256 gig card in it to match the 256 gigs of solid state storage in the machine. I currently run carbon copy cloner every so often to back up to the SD card in addition to other backups that I maintain such as time machine. I've wondered recently if I could or should set the OS up to treat the internal solid state and the SD card as a raid one, which is mirroring. Array, as a method of automating this process, is this possible? Is it desirable? Is it delightful, de-lovely or delicious? I like it. If I were to invest in a 512 gig card, could I partition it into a pair of 256 gig drives and then use a different rate set up to achieve more usable storage with backup and redundancy? I think it's a good question. I think we have the title for the show. Desirable, delightful, de-lovely or delicious? I mean, there you go. My opinion, Dave, is I'd give it a shot. Oh, OK. I had to keep myself from doing from from from what I'll fondly call doing a John F. Braun, which is when you you mentioned the idea in reading the question I wanted to go, but I didn't. But I wanted to. So explain why you think it's a good idea and we'll we'll we'll chat it out because maybe I'm wrong. Well, I have concerns, but you should be able to try. My only concern is that you may experience performance issues since the throughput of the last I tried on my machine, the throughput of the SD card slot in the Mac last I checked as well as the throughput of SD and micro SD cards are typically much less than that of the SSD. So yeah, well, that that's my only concern. As far as can you do it, I think you can. Because in this utility, they have something called the raid assistant. But they warn you, OK, so, you know, I'm not 100% on this idea. But, you know, the the caveats in the raid assistant, they say this specifically, even if you have a mirrored rate set, you still need to back up your data regularly. Mirroring protects you from some types of hardware failure, but not from user errors or software corruption. If you delete a file, it's deleted from the mirror. If software corrupts a file, it's also corrupted on the mirrored disk. So they warn you if you if you're going to do mirroring. Mirroring is not a backup solution. No, but it is fault tolerance. Like mirroring in and of itself is not my concern here. It it's mirroring to at a different medium. Right. And and and like your your caveats are exactly why I am like like 0% on doing this. I think this is a terrible idea. And the reason is, OK, that SD drive. Well, I mean, I could be wrong, right? That's the beauty of opinions is that SD card is going to run many, many times slower than your SSD will. And the what from what I know about raid zero or sorry, raid one, a.k.a. mirroring and clearly it's not a lot if I almost confused it for raid zero is that when you write data, the data needs to be written to both volumes simultaneously. And the raid only releases that when it's finished doing the writing, unless you've got some kind of right caching involved, in which case, you know, that that also creates its own like little problem scenario. So you'd be you would essentially be slowing your system down to run at the speed of an SD card, not your SSD. And it would probably be faster to go back 10 years and get a, you know, 5400 RPM hard drive and run your system off of that. Then it would be to run it off of an SD card. They're just super, super slow. Certainly there are they have gotten faster and all that. But in the grand scheme of things, they are there, it just pales in comparison. So and I think your reads would also be balanced between the two, right? Writes are written to both when you're in mirroring and reads, I think are balanced between the two to give you better performance than you would get out of a single drive. But when one of those drives is dog slow compared to the other. Yeah, I mean, it would be an interesting thing to try. But I think in the end, you would be like, Oh, I hate this. So like, is it dangerous? No, is it going to be the kind of thing that you're going to that's going to be worth? Like I always kind of look at this stuff as what would I advise someone to do if they were paying me, you know, some hourly rate to do this for them? And I if somebody said, could you set this up for me? I'd be like, yeah, but you're going to waste your money. Like we're going to have some fun together, but you're going to waste your money. If you're doing it on your own, you know, if you want to test it out and let us know, sure. But I think you're going to be I think we already know the outcome of your time. But, you know, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. The last thing is that as far as partitioning to explore more raid types. Well, I just toyed around again with the raid assistant in disutility and at least their implementation only recognizes drives and not partitions as a target. Oh, yeah, I don't think you would. I don't even. Yeah, part. Yeah, no, you would you you throw the rate is on dry. Raid is on the device level, not the partition level. Yeah, I think so. I'm trying to say. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, because raid is actually partitioning up your your volume into chunks and sort of balancing things back and forth. Not raid one, but but other types of raid most definitely are striping it across devices and that sort of thing. So yeah, I mean, it's I like this mental exercise. Don't get me wrong. I just don't I just don't think it's a good idea. In a practical sense. I think it's a great idea in a theoretical sense. But in a practical, yeah, now, if you had a desktop machine and you had high speed ports that I think the results of the experiment would be a lot more high speed ports. You mean like like Thunderbolt or or USB three or something like that? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it would. I mean, the idea of running a raid and spanned across different interfaces is sort of scary to me. Because you just create a scenario where one of your drives in the raid could fall offline without others falling offline, right? Like if you've got, you know, say your internal SSD on, you know, whatever the SATA bus or, you know, PCIe bus and then you've got something on your Thunderbolt bus and then something on your USB bus like that. And then you raid them all together and say, like, OK, cool. Now I have all the storage. I just feel like that might be disastrous. But I don't know. But you could set it up in a way where you're leveraging all of these different data channels and not being limited to, you know, the bottlenecks of anyone. So maybe, I don't know, I would back up a lot if I have. Oh, yeah. If I had something like this, like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but fun. I mean, I like talking about this stuff. I just don't know if it's practical. But maybe that's maybe I need to maybe I need to loosen my my filters for the show about, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be practical, which can just be geeky fun. There's nothing wrong with that. So. All right. Uh, are we good on this one? I like this. It's fun. OK, let's see. Listener David asks, he says, I'm having an issue with my multi device keyboard and some weird behavior with the command key. What I figured out is in his his his device is a K780 multi device keyboard. And I'm not actually sure what that is. I'm not sure why I didn't look it up when we prepped the show. But in any event, you know, we always take these things and try and zoom them out to give generic advice or not generic, but white more widespread advice. Anyway, I figured out two things. Number one, when the keyboard would connect via Bluetooth, the alt and command key functioned as any Mac keyboard would. However, when using a unifying USB Logitech receiver, this behavior switches to the start, alt and opt key, meaning that key now functions as the command key, not the one labeled command. I've sent this into Logitech and they have responded that this is the correct behavior, but it certainly seems like a bug to me. I've run into this with Logitech keyboards, too. It's because they're generally built to be multi-platform, right? So they could work on Windows or on the Mac. But you can go in and change this on a per keyboard basis. So if you go into system preferences, go into keyboard, then go into keyboard again on the keyboard preference pane. And then in the lower right hand corner, you'll find a button for modifier keys, dot, dot, dot. That means there's more. And when you click that, you can see what it's, what modifier key is being used and what it's being mapped to. So you'll see caps lock, control, option, command and function. And they should all be out of the gate, map to what they say is caps lock, control, option, command and function. In your scenario, you would map option to command and command to option to swap the interpretation of those two things to match what you are expecting them to be on your Mac. And I have to do this all the time with different logitech keyboards. So that's, that might be the simplest answer here. Thoughts on that, Mr. Brown? No, that's a. So yeah, I didn't know it's, I didn't know it's expected behavior, but well, it's expected in that it's happened with pretty much every logitech keyboard I've tried, at least if connected in a certain way, that it just sends through the command in a way that Mac OS interprets it as the opposite of what you would expect it to be. So you just go in and change those two things and you're good to go. At least that's what I've done. Yeah, good. Daniel has a topically similar question. He writes, is there a way to change the undo command in the Finder? Basically, I don't want command Z to undo when I'm in the Finder. I want to create a different key command. The reason being is that it's not always obvious when I'm in the Finder. Sometimes I think I'm in a program window. So I end up undoing things in the Finder and not realizing it sometimes I Googled it and thought I found my answer. But when I tried it, it didn't work. And what he tried was oh, so close. He tried going to system preferences keyboard. Same place as the last question here though, you'll go to shortcuts and you go to app shortcuts and you can add a shortcut for the Finder and he mapped undo to option shift command Z. The problem is that undo is already mapped in the Finder to command Z. And so that takes over. What you have to do and really this would be the best way to do it is go in and add an app shortcut to map command Z to something else in the Finder that will remove it from the undo menu. So one place you could map it to is about Finder, right? You're not going to make any changes if it accidentally brings up the about Finder window. You'll also know that the about Finder window came up and that'll be your cue to be like, Oh, I didn't undo in my app. I undid in the Finder, which brings this up. And this is actually a really smart thing to do. I've I think I've caused this problem many times and not even realized it by having the Finder accidentally undo things when I thought I was in an app undoing them. So I like that. That's a that's a that's a good little it's a good quandary. It's a good thing. And then once you have something else mapped to command Z, if you wanted, you know, for example, to have, you know, undoing the Finder map to option shift commands or something, you could then do that. And all of this is done in system preferences, keyboard, shortcuts, app shortcuts is where that goes. So I will I will write that in system preferences, keyboard, shortcuts, app shortcuts, that's where it's going to be. So that's now in the show notes, which as I mentioned earlier, you can get to with if you if you go to Mackie keb.com, you just sign up and then they'll be delivered to your inbox. Just great. Hi, Mr. Braun. Got one for me. Yeah. Well, we got something from John. OK. There's a real head scratcher. Well, no, actually, I don't think it's a scratcher. So John says I have an app called Wi-Fi signal that displayed. I think that's the issue. The signal strength and Wi-Fi speed installed on my iPhone XR. Recently, this app quit displaying these parameters. I tried to reinstall the app, but found it is no longer available in the app store. I believe it stopped working after upgrading to iOS 13. Something since this app quit working, I tried using Wi-Fi meter and Wi-Fi status with the same results. All the apps displayed the message Wi-Fi, no connect and signal strength, negative 1000 dbm, which is probably not right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that means not getting data. Yes. Yeah. When I checked the Wi-Fi info on the Wi-Fi meter app, the network name and BSSID are unknown. However, all the other information on my network is displayed, such as local IP, public IP, et cetera. Next, I installed Wi-Fi status on my iPad Air. It is running iOS 12.4.3. The app works on iPad. The signal strength is 46 dbm and the speed is 210 megabits per second. I'm not sure what the issue is. I believe it may be a setting or an iOS 13 issue, any suggestions? And yeah, I think we mentioned the source of the problem here a couple of times. As far as I can tell, Dave, it's a it's a bug in iOS 13. And I confirm this by as you may or may not know if you don't know, but there actually is a Wi-Fi scanner that you can get from Apple and it's the airport utility. They have to like do the secret handshake here in order to activate it and that you have to go to settings, airport utility, and then you'll see that there's a slider to enable Wi-Fi scanner. And then when you run the utility, you'll see an option in the upper right hand corner to do that. So I'm like, well, let me let me see what that reports. And yeah, I saw pretty wacky stuff with that as well. So it's wrong in the airport utility? No, but I here's what I would see is that I would only see. Base stations that were in my settings network advance preferred networks. So it would show like my main one. But all the others, it would say, I don't know, like name unknown or something like that, it wouldn't fill in that data. Though, which show the MAC address and I think one of the pieces. No, you know, you're you're seeing everything. That's your because you've got a mesh system. There are all kinds of live networks without SSIDs attached to them that your Euro mesh will use to communicate amongst itself. So because I've got some networks here and I am able to see in the Apple app, I am able to see the RSI and the channel and all that stuff for networks that I've never connected to. So I think I think your network name unavailable is just all of those mesh things that that are out there on the same channels and all that stuff. That's pretty normal. OK, OK, yeah, yeah, because I'm seeing I'm seeing the same thing. And if you look at the if you match the channel number to the Mac address, it's close, you know, it's like it's the same first five octets. And then the last one is like off by a digit that tells you it's the same device. It's just a different, you know, different radio. So yeah, that's all that is. That's all that is. So so Apple's utility works, nobody else's does. I wonder if it's an API change in iOS 13. And of course, it could be Apple using a private API in their app and no one else gets to do that. But it's possible that API that was public in. iOS 12 has changed into something else that's public in iOS 13. Or it's possible that it's shut down and that's the end of it. The only place you can see this is in Apple's air port utility. Well, actually, he did write back. And yeah, this is what I was fiddling with before the show, because I wanted to find it. He's like, oh, I found. But I did find an app called speed test. And the thing is, if you search for speed test in the app store, you're going to see a lot of options here. Sure. So this isn't the what is it? Ookla speed test. OK, it's another speed test. And I actually. Yeah, let me which. Yeah, who's it from? Is it like Master or something? No, no, no, you got to go down. It's a I'll paste the link here. OK, cool. All right. But there is one thing called speed test and then it seems to have been updated for iOS 13. OK, little show. More parameters or parameters that you expect. Got it. Got it. Got it. All right. Well, that's good. So it if that truly works in iOS 13, then. Then you've got the one that then we know that it it's theoretically a. An open API, unless Apple let it through by accident. So this is speed test by Xiaoyan Wang, I think is how I would pronounce that name. But as John pointed out, the link is in the show notes to make life easier for all of us. So cool. Thanks. So it sounds like, yeah, some people have to. Update their stuff. Yeah. Well, and let's hope that it truly like that this isn't a mistake that the existence of this particular one isn't a mistake because that would be sad. This has been a. Source of routine changes and lockdowns in iOS over the years. So it's it's possible that this is meant to actually go away. Hopefully not, but wouldn't surprise me if it was. So yeah, thanks for that tidbit on a network name unavailable. So yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what that is. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to see if you launch like I Stumbler or Wi-Fi Explorer, the latter of which is part of set up. You can sort by MAC address and start to see how these unnamed networks relate to your named networks. And it's just it's a nice, easy way to to see. Yeah, no, no, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. So I see my primary one has like four, eight, eight, five. And then I see and then I see another one with the name available for eight, eight, four. Right. Exactly. Yeah, it's just it's not I don't think if I if I hadn't seen it previously in Wi-Fi Explorer, I certainly wouldn't have noticed it in the Apple app because it's not organized in any in any way, let alone maybe it's organized by signal strength or something. But it's moving around and it's confusing. So one of these apps on your Mac is way easier. I wish these apps could exist on on iOS. I wish that these apps will continue to exist on Mac OS. And I'm hoping that things won't get locked down on the Mac like they have been on iOS because it's these types of things where it's really valuable to be able to just like have an app that talks directly to the network hardware so that you can get this data out of it and you're not blocked from from even seeing it. So let's let's hope that that doesn't change anytime soon. We can also hope that you when you need a server for your business or for your even just for your home stuff, that you listen to what we're saying here and check out Linode at Linode.com slash MGG there are next sponsor here. And these folks know how to do it because they understand what we were talking about just 10 minutes ago with regards to speeds versus different storage types. And they know that SSDs are the fastest. We know that too. Well, not only do they know it, they live it because every single one of their servers runs on an SSD. This is by far the biggest bottleneck when running servers is that you need your disks to be able to be accessed very quickly and it can hold you up. So everything that they do is on SSD. So you're not held up. And that means even if you've got something with a slower CPU because you don't need the fast CPU, you still benefit from the speed of that SSD and it makes a huge difference. Even on their lowest cost five dollar a month server, they call it their nanode over there at Linode.com slash MGG five bucks a month. You can set up a server. I've I've run like WordPress on it. I've run a VPN on it. You can do all kinds of things. Of course, if you have lots of traffic to your server, then you might want to increase your CPU or RAM or things like that. But certainly you can start there, experiment and you're good to go. And what's really cool is if you want to access the command line. Sure, of course, they'll let you. But if you don't, they've got their cloud manager that lets you configure everything right inside a web browser. You never have to touch a command line at all. Go check it out. Go to Linode.com slash MGG. And here's where it gets even better. You can have a twenty dollar credit automatically added to your account. Just for being a Mac, a Mac, keep your listeners easy for me to say. MGG two zero one nine is where you want to be. So go to Linode.com slash MGG. Use promo code MGG two zero one nine. That gets you a twenty dollar credit. That's four months for free of one of their nanode servers. So go check it out right now. Linode.com slash MGG promo code MGG two zero one nine are thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's see what Brian has to say for us. Hey, John and Dave, this is Brian W. From Cleveland, Ohio. Hey, I was just wondering about Catalina and printing and scanning software. It looks like any of the devices, printers, multifunction printers, scanners, desktop scanners, all the software they used to come with these machines no longer works in Catalina and it looks like we're forced to go back and use the image program by Apple. Are we moving back 20 years with this 64 bit and printer and 20 drivers because all the printers and scanners that I'm looking at and the ones that I have, none of the software works anymore. I like to get your guys thoughts on it. And if you know of any of the software that these companies are going to produce that are going to make these scanners and printers work like they used to. Thanks again. Yeah, absolutely, Brian. Yeah, we've talked about this a little bit on the show here. And there certainly seems to be a consolidation of now incompatible 32 bit apps in the category of I used to use this to manage my scanner for sure. And and we can probably look back to, you know, someone that wrote some library or whatever at some point that everybody just sort of copied and used or licensed and used whatever ongoing right up until today. And now no bueno. There is some good news, though. View scan, V. U. E. S. C. A. N. From Hamrick dot com. We'll put a link in the show notes. Has drivers that they have re-engineered to run in 64 bit on Catalina and other versions of Mac OS. Right there for you as part of view scan. They don't have everything, but they have most things and they really have built the right stuff for you so you really can get exactly what you need without having to wait for your manufacturer to update. And to be fair, the manufacturers probably will never update if they haven't yet, because why would they if you've got some, you know, five, maybe even 10 year old scanner that works just fine. Well, they want you to buy a new one. So why would they they're working on their Yes, they want you to buy a new one. But also they're working on the software for their newer ones. They're not going back that far and updating that old software. At least that's not what we've seen from like HP and others. So go check that out. Also, if you are using HP, there is an app called HP Smart that you might be able to use. And that is now 64 bit. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Thank you to Brian and Rowe in our chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream because it's possible you just need different software, not an update to the software that you have used in the past, but different software from your scanner manufacturer, printer, MFC manufacturer. So yeah, be be on the lookout for that because it's there there might well be an option for you. I will point out, I know we talked about this in a recent episode, but I am certainly in this boat with my multifunction device that I have yet to replace because it works as a great laser printer and also works as a great fax machine, which is weird that I had to use this week, but I had to fax something. I just can't scan to a Mac. I can scan to a Windows machine and ViewScan does make a Windows driver for it, just not a Mac driver for it. So I could use it that way in a pinch if I needed to. But in iOS 13's files app on, you know, on my iPhone, if I go to anywhere that I would want to save a file, so it could be in my iCloud drive, it could be on my Dropbox, but doing it from within the files app, getting to, you know, one of my favorite places to save something, pull down on the screen and at the top you will see sorted by, probably by name. You can change all your sorting there, but on the left side of that little bar that appears when you pull down is three dots. Tap those three dots and one of the options that comes up is scan documents. What's awesome about this is that it truly does, the last time we talked about it, I didn't realize this, it truly does automatic scanning. You can set it to be color, black and white or grayscale. It will auto find the edges of a document and when it finds it, if it's in auto mode, which you set in the upper right, it scans it and then you flip the page and scan the next one and scan the next one and scan the next one and then it saves it as a PDF to wherever you are in the files app. So it could be your iCloud drive, it could just be locally on your phone, could be your Dropbox, could be your Synology drive, whatever you've got that talks to the files app, you're good to go. So that's been tidying me over in the interim here. I'm sure at some point I will buy a new MFC device but I'll burn through my toner first. So yeah, fun stuff. Good Mr. Braun, thoughts on this? No. Okay, all right. Well then, we will move onward here to Steve, right? Oh yeah, well you know. It's time to talk about WiFi because Steve says, Dave and John, I need to wirelessly send a network signal to a building about 800 feet from my active network. I'm installing five power over ethernet cameras and a WiFi hotspot in said building. Any suggestions for the hardware used to create a wireless bridge? The specs on the cameras, I assume are 400 megabits or second with stand negative 35 degrees F. Wow, power over ethernet signal strength indicators and many to one. So yeah, this is interesting. We love questions like this, though neither of us has ever had to send a signal this far. At the moment, my knowledge is all mostly theoretical instead of practical. But I think something like the NanoBeam AC Gen 2 from Ubiquiti would be the place that I would start on this. I think that's gonna get you there. It is a, as they call it, a high performance air max AC bridge and is truly built to do beam performance across WiFi. The problem with most, I mean, it's not a problem. The way most WiFi routers and access points are built is that they are omnidirectional, right? So they take their signal and they spread it in every direction. And that's great in your house. That's pretty much what you want, right? But WiFi is capable of going much, much further if you focus it. And that's what this stuff starts to do when it focuses it into a beam. And it can really make a difference. Like you can go miles with WiFi if you're using the right hardware. So this is where I would start, but really I would probably contact the Unifier, the Ubiquiti folks and find what they would recommend for a scenario like this. But I'm pretty sure that's certainly where I would start with it is those kinds of things. My uncle did this on his own several years ago by buying some inexpensive dish antennas for like 20 bucks and plugging them into some equally inexpensive D-Link routers that had those removable antennas on them. And so you remove the antenna and instead into the, what are they being? They're not BNC connectors, they're screw-in connectors. But anyway, into the antenna connectors he screwed these dish antennas and aimed them and got them going. But he was only using, I think 802.11G on those. So his speeds were, you know, it would have maxed out at 54 or half of 54, so you know, 26, 27. And I think he was able to actually real world throughput get maybe half of that. So if you did this with an 802.11AC signal and got some antennas that were tuned for five gigahertz, probably could get speeds, I don't know that you're gonna get speeds of 400 megabits per second. That's a lot of bandwidth for wifi. I mean, your iPhone will barely do 400 megabits per second and it's a two by two device. So I'm not sure how you'd get that kind of speed with a one by one device, you know, one antenna for each direction. But maybe some of these things that like, you know, ubiquities put together in their unified line will bond multiple antennas together to get that kind of bandwidth across. But yeah, I mean, your iPhone is on AC, I mean, not on Wi-Fi 6, but on Wi-Fi 5 with AC is a two by two device, meaning it has two antennas in it. And like on a really good day at the right distance from the access point, I've seen the iPhone like, it hasn't certainly hasn't gotten to 500 megabits per second, but it, you know, it will tip the scales over 400, but that's like perfect scenario, real world scenario. So, you know, could you get that with a focused beam antenna? Maybe, yeah, I mean, but you'll probably want some hardware that is truly tuned to this and not, you know, MacGyver together with duct tape and, you know, dish antennas that you're buying kind of, you know, aftermarket, so I don't know. But anyway, it's a fun little thing. I think, I think there's an answer for you and I'll put a link to that, that NanoBeam AC in the show notes so that you at least have a place to start. So any thoughts on that one, John? Nah, not really. I think we talked about this before. I mean, dishes are nice. Yeah, as you pointed out, a dish is something that can help focus. Right. Right. Yeah, it's crazy. I like it though. It's fun. Fun stuff. All right, are we good on this one or do you have more thoughts to share? No, no, I think we're good. Okay. Listener John, this will probably be the last one that we get to today. Listener John ran into a scenario that matched my experience exactly. So I'll explain John's scenario, but just so you have the kind of the foundation of it. I, you know, I was testing that 13 inch, the kind of the lower cost MacBook Pro from Apple. When it came time to send that back, I wiped the drive on my MacBook Air and wanted to clone back to it. But the MacBook Pro was on Catalina and the MacBook Air that I got back from Apple after having its keyboard replaced was on Mojave. And so I needed to get that MacBook Air to Catalina in order to, you know, in order to copy everything over or to clone, to migrate it, to use migration assistance to get everything over. Okay. So Listener John went through a similar thing. He had a brand new MacBook Air that he was gonna migrate a user to that was currently on an older 12 inch MacBook which had been upgraded to Catalina. So like me, in order to migrate to the MacBook Air out of the box, John says, I needed to upgrade the new MacBook Air to Catalina. Since I'm a believer in saving bandwidth and being fast, I have an external USB-C SSD that I had put the latest Catalina installer 10.15.1 on. I created an admin account on the new MacBook Air and then rebooted into recovery mode in order to turn off secure boot and allow boot from external devices. Check. I then booted the external Catalina installer drive. Check. I went to install Catalina and it took the usual two to three minutes to copy some files from the external drive and then rebooted. And this is where the problems began. For the record, I ran into the same things but John has detailed them so much better than I would. He says the reboot went into a piece of software called Boot Recovery Assistant with a message that says, a software update is required to use this startup disk. Clicking update caused the system to try to perform an update and fail. I tried rebooting into Mojave and downloading the installer and after 30 minutes of running the installer from within Mojave, I also received an error occurred installing Mac OS, the request timed out. I tried this a few times and then contacted Apple who asked me to go to the App Store and download Catalina instead of clicking the upgrade button in software update. This had not surprisingly the same result as downloading it in the previous step. I contacted Apple again. He says and let them know of the error despite the alternate download path which he says I didn't understand because going through the App Store still uses software update to download Catalina, right? They didn't have another solution other than to offer me a return exchange which he says they wouldn't cross ship so I would be waiting another week. He says I opted for this. And in the meantime, while waiting for the RMA labeled to come through I decided to do a little more Google Foo and experimenting on tangential issues. I found an article that talked about using internet recovery and talking about the failures of the internet connection which he says got me to thinking about the T2 chip in these new MacBook Airs. I decided to test something he says and tried to use the external drive again the first thing that he tried to upgrade his own MacBook Pro to Catalina and got the same boot recovery assistant error. Since I returned my attention to the MacBook Air and with a glimmer of an idea booted from the external drive to upgrade and plugged in a Belkin USB-C to Ethernet adapter which is recognized natively by macOS so it doesn't need drivers. I still got the boot recovery assistant but magically the update now worked and I was able to update the drive and then install Catalina. So by having it connected via Ethernet instead of WiFi it solved this problem but the weird part is what did it need over the network when the entire Catalina installer was there locally on this USB-C drive and John's conjecture is he says I'm betting that the message from boot recovery assistant referring to a quote unquote drive that needed updating was actually talking about the T2 chip needing a firmware update to match the drive that he had booted from. Catalina related firmware update to boot from this Catalina installer drive. Once there was an internet connection for the MacBook Air to talk to Apple to get the update it worked. So I think he might be onto something here because like I said I ran into exactly this scenario. Now I did not solve it by putting an Ethernet adapter on John. I solved it with like well bullheaded persistence I like to call it. I just tried and tried and tried until it worked over WiFi. Why it was failing so much over WiFi didn't make any sense to me. I didn't know what it was trying to do. I figured it just needed something which of course it did and I just didn't know what the something was but I think listener John is right about this. And I mean I guess Ethernet is more reliable than WiFi but my WiFi here at the house is pretty darn reliable. I'm not sure. I think there's something about the way the boot recovery assistant or whatever it is is doing it that causes it to not really like fully use WiFi in the right way or something along those lines. I don't know the right technical term for this job. What do you think man? Like this is an interesting thing. Yeah I don't know if I call it interesting. Well yeah but my guess is that listener John and I are not the last two people that will run into this problem. So you know. Yeah it'll be a big fun once I upgrade my laptop. So your laptop is not on Catalina yet? Oh no it is. Oh okay okay oh but you don't have this right. You don't have a T2 chip machine there. That's right. Yeah I'll have to see what this is like. Well Lisa's Mac Mini that I have not updated to Catalina yet is a T2 chip device but it's connected via well both Ethernet and WiFi. The Ethernet cable there got a little weird so I just let them both run and at least if it falls off of Ethernet she's got WiFi and doesn't really notice that there's a problem. So which is good. Keeps things working so. All right well I think that does it for this week my friend. I think it does. Yeah thank you for listening everybody and for those of you in the US or anywhere that are choosing to celebrate Thanksgiving this week. Happy Thanksgiving. I think Canada was last week if I'm not. I don't know I might. Somebody in Canada had Black Friday misplaced in an email to me so that made me think that maybe they were celebrating Thanksgiving last week but Canadian Thanksgiving. I'll look it up 2019 that is the year we're in isn't it. Oh no that was back in October. Okay I knew it was celebrated at a different time. Okay so he just had the date wrong because he's in Canada and he didn't know when the US Thanksgiving was so happy belated Thanksgiving to everybody in Canada and happy Thanksgiving to everybody here in the US or anywhere like I said if you're celebrating it. Thanks to truly thanks to all of you. We love what we do here. Thanks to you John. I love doing this with you every week. It's a good thing man. Yeah. How can people reach us Dave? Yeah. Why don't you tell them Mr. Braun. Feedback. At Mackie Kev.com. That's feedback at Mackie Kev.com. And that's what I said feedback at Mackie Kev.com. Yeah. You can also, you can leave us a message if you want. In fact we have audio comments in this episode and we've got some more coming up for the next one too. 224-888 Geek which John is 4335. That it is. That's where you can leave us a message and we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to answer your questions. We really do. We love doing it all. It's a blast for us every week. We learn stuff. You learn stuff. It's really nice to kind of get lost in this every week no matter what's going on. We, you know, creating it. We're just as into it as you folks are listening. It's, it really is a great thing. Of course thanks to all of our Mackie Kev premium supporters and thanks to our sponsors. Sponsors for this episode of course were otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com, ancestry.com slash mgg, ifixit.com slash mgg, lino.com slash mgg. Other sponsors include smilesoftware.com slash podcast, barebones.com, ero.com slash mgg. Thanks everybody. Yes. Thanks for being you. John, you know this Thanksgiving thing has me thinking about all of us, you know, thanking one another in harmony and what a better way. There's no better way to share our really kind of overarching advice than to do so in harmony. So. Don't. I got caught. I played the wrong exit.