 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 768 for Monday, July 1st, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in the quicks, the quicks. Yeah, that's he. We're going to make everything really like efficient by shortening words and concatenating things together. You send in the questions, the tips, see how I got there and the cool stuff found. We mix them all together because that's what we do. We loosely form an agenda that we loosely follow. And the goal is that we go through all this stuff so that we can each learn five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Eero at Eero dot com slash m gg will tell you why you want to go there and TextExpander at TextExpander dot com slash podcast will tell you why you want to go there shortly. But for now here, I think in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here at Triple Connecticut, this is John Brown. Yeah, it's. We went with the kids last night to see. We brought the kids. I mean, I say their kids at 17 and 19 now. We brought them to, yeah, to to see, let's see, it was three bands, Nerf Herter, Real Big Fish and Bowling for Soup. Nerf Herter was fantastic. Yeah. They I'd never heard of this band before, but they were fantastic. And yeah, that's from a that's from Star Wars, right, right, exactly. What is a Nerf Herter? They follow that whole. Yeah, the the crowds for the first two bands were fine. The crowd for Real Big Fish was needed to have a mosh pit. So I'm I'm, you know, that's exhausting to be around, even though we weren't really in it. Anyway, throw the kids in the mosh pit. No, I actually got thrown in the mosh pit, believe it or not. And I had to I had to surprise and scold the man who did it. But you can read about that on my Facebook page. Anyway, it worked. And he was shocked by what I said to him and then he left. But I'll leave that for for elsewhere. But then we got home and it was like one o'clock in the morning or whatever, getting ready for bed, there had been storms all night. And just as we were getting ready to go to bed, the power went out. And and so this is where we record this on Sunday morning. So so it's about 10 a.m. Eastern on Sunday morning here. And and then at like four thirty, the power came back on. And there was a light on in the closet. But just as things come back on, you know, it it it makes noise. And I think and so I haven't really slept a whole lot. It feels like it's been morning forever. But where was I going with this? I think they turned the power off intentionally. There were power outages all around us. But but we were not affected. But like all our LED lights were really unhappy. You know, the power, the current level was fluctuating like crazy. Maybe the voltage level actually is probably more accurate to say. And and that's just not good. I was almost to the point where I was going to start turning off circuits like the thing for our well pump and the thing for, you know, those things that that aren't on UPS is and that sort of thing. But but then I think our power company just killed it. But and then got it sorted out and then turned it back on. So so yeah. So if I get lost in today's show, it's because I have had not nearly enough sleep and and my body is still recovering from from being next to the mosh pit. So so there you go. Hey, I do have something, though, to to share, John, and that is that now that it is July. So for those of you in the chat room at macky cub dot com slash stream, you can't do this quite yet. But as of July 1st, which is tomorrow, you can and I'll put a link in the show notes. Vote for Macky cub in the podcast awards this year. We would love it if you voted for us. So certainly by the time you're hearing this episode, the voting will be will be available. And I think you have to check the rules. The rules aren't quite clear yet because the voting isn't open yet. But but I think you can I think you can vote multiple times on a certain schedule or something. So check that out. Don't break the rules, please, because that doesn't look good for any of us. But but if you're if it's if it's acceptable, vote early, vote often, all of the stuff Mr. Braun always likes to say. So yeah, it'd be good. It's it's about time. We've never really asked folks to vote for this for us in this before. So it's time, right, John? What do we win? That warm, fuzzy feeling of of being loved by all of our listeners in the community. So there you go. Right. Good. I'm hoping for a large cash award. Yeah. We weren't we all weren't we all we we we've lost before it's even started, John. Let's see. Todd has I think it's the same Todd. But anyway, we've got quick tips from two Todd's. That sounds like a title if there isn't one and there isn't. So that might actually be it. Quick tips from two Todd's. Let's see. The first one is he says, I never thought of this, but it seems so obvious once I read it. He says. Getting handoff and universal clipboard to work from my Mac OS Mac to iOS device is critical, but copying a screenshot on iOS and then pasting it on the Mac is glorious for filing bugs or just getting photos from the from iOS to the Mac fast. After you trigger a screenshot, hit the share button and then choose copy. And as long as you are within range of your Mac and handoff is capable on both your iOS device and your Mac OS device, then that picture will be ready to go on your Mac's clipboard. I love doing this, especially like he says for screenshots or bug reports or things like that, where you don't want the picture stored in your photos library, even if you're using iCloud photos, this is not, you know, there's a lot of times where you're like, I just want to take a screenshot and send it in on this like bug report or or answering a question for a Mac Geekgab listener, right? Or helping a relative or a friend. Sometimes a screenshot is worth a thousand words. And so being able to paste that screenshot right into an email on your Mac without having to both go through the iCloud photo library and wait for that to sink in everything. It's awesome. So thank you, thank you, thank you for for sharing that, Todd. It's a great, great tip. You ever use that, John? Ever use the? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And to help people out, there's a dandy little article called Use Universal Clipboard to Copy and Paste between your Apple devices. And it tells you all the things you need to do in order to get that work. There's like four things that you have to do. Cool. That are engaged. Yeah, I do it. I do it. Not so much pictures, though. I kind of knew in the back of my mind that you should be able to do that. But I've used it to copy and paste little tech snippets. Yep. Yep. Yeah, it works. Yeah, whatever you can put on the clipboard. It just, yeah, that's yeah, fair, fair, fair stuff. Yeah, it's a new technology. It is. Handoff is one of those kind of, you know, man, yeah, that lack of sleep. It's something else. It's going to be a fun one, folks. But it's one of those things that you don't think about. And it works most of the time. It doesn't always work. And when it doesn't work and you want it to, it's frustrating. You know, I've had it where I'll go to paste on my Mac and it'll paste whatever was on my Mac's clipboard. And then I'll paste a second later and it's like, oh, copying from iOS. Yeah, why didn't you do that the first time? But but most of the time it actually works really well. And it's super handy. Yeah, I blame Bluetooth. It's Bluetooth. Is it Bluetooth? I thought it worked over that is one of the. Well, if you look at that little write up from what I can tell, it's actually both. OK. Oh, let's see. You have to be signed into iCloud, have Bluetooth on, have Wi-Fi on and have handoff turned on. Where do you turn handoff on? I didn't even know that was a thing. Well, gee, if you read this, you go to the Apple menu system preferences general and there should be an allow handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices. Huh. And also on Dandy, huh? Also on the iPhone or, you know, on your iOS device, you go to settings, general handoff and then you turn it on or off. I'm sure. There you go. Learn there. See five new things. It's easy when you don't get a lot of sleep to learn five new things, even if because if you knew them before, you don't remember. And then you get to count them on your list. That's awesome. That's great. OK, next tip from, I think, the same Todd says, just acted accidentally clicked on one inbox and then command clicked. So he's talking about mail here accidentally clicked on one inbox and then command clicked on another and the emails from both showed up in the list column. So I'm not sure when I would use this, but I didn't know you could do it after selecting the second inbox at the top of your mail window. It says two mailboxes selected and shows you all of the messages from both of them. I don't think this is limited to just inboxes. I think you can select multiple mailboxes using command click and and just see the contents of them, which yeah, you're you're right. It's one of those things that I don't know that you would do every day. In fact, if you were doing this every day, my advice would be, you know, if you had a scenario where you needed to see the contents of two mailboxes routinely, I would recommend creating a smart mailbox that shows you the contents of those two mailboxes, right? But if you need to do it as a one off or whatever, that's yeah, it's a handy little tip. I like it. It's good. I don't know that I knew that either. Yes, John. And here's a useless tip as if that wasn't actually useless enough. Yes, let's go. Well, no, if you highlight multiple mail messages, yes, it'll show you them stacked one on top of another, but there's no way to see anything beyond the first one. So I don't know why they do that. I guess it's just I can't eat that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one time I did it and I, well, that's neat visually, but functionally, it's not very helpful. But hey, yeah, hey, you know, what else? What else? It's good. All right. We have another one that I've called a quick tip and then three other tips anyway. But let's go to listener John, who says, oh, yeah, he had a problem where his his browser was redirecting to searchmine.net. And he went through all kinds of stuff. He ran malware bytes, which found some things that he quarantined, but it didn't fix it. He deleted his safari cookies. He emptied his cash. He ran onyx, did a shutdown and a restart. I suggested that he go to the extensions section in Safari. So it goes to Safari preferences, extensions that make sure there's no extension there. I've seen this before, where you can get an extension that in and of itself is malware or a browser hijacker or whatever. He there was nothing there for him. But for anybody else experiencing this, that certainly is one place to check. He, though, found the other place to check, which I always forget about. Go to system preferences profiles, which might not be there if you don't have any profiles loaded. And and in there, he found a profile for searchmine, which he immediately removed and everything was good to go. So check your check your profiles, check your extensions. I think in a general sense, that's a really smart thing to do on a regular basis, because I I have I don't know how things get installed here that you don't know about, but I've seen it happen enough to people that it's worth going and looking and being intentional about that. Yes, Mr. Braun. Yeah, I've seen this one before that. My only concern here is that I think at some point. Installing a profile requires authorization of the administrator. And I think an extension as well. Yeah, but, you know, those authorizations come up often enough, especially if you're installing something that you think you want to be installing and later then later find out, oh, no, I didn't want that app. But if it also side loaded a profile along with the installation, you might have agreed to it. You know what I mean? Like there's a there's a social engineering aspect of it. That that might have allowed that profile to get installed without, you know, at a time when you were expecting to authorize things. So yeah. And actually, we got a thanks to a dogster in the chat room. Unless you already pasted it in there, Dave, but it shows exactly the screenshot that we saw from from our friend. And yeah, so they hijack. So I think what they do is they yeah, they hijack your your search and then I think they get money anytime you use that search, right, right clicks or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's one of those things. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Very fun stuff. Good. Thank you, everybody. This is great tips, really great tips. I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which, as I mentioned, is Euro. We're at Euro dot com slash MGG. And then using promo code MGG at checkout, you get 100 bucks off the Euro base unit and two beacons package plus one year of Euro plus, which is awesome. You know, we're big fans of the mesh system here. John and I actually at this point in time are both using Euro and and loving it. But, you know, having a mesh system provides a lot of benefits distributing things around the home where you've got multiple access points, not just for coverage, but also for bandwidth purposes. If you've got multiple people streaming at the same time, you get to have, you know, those devices connect individually to different access points instead of trying to all like crowd in to one. But the cool part about Euro is you get one management interface, right? So you're not having to like you could create. We talked about this for 10 years on this show, creating what we call the quasi mesh. But you had to go to each device and manage it and they didn't know about each other. Well, Eros mesh system changed all that. Thank goodness. And really, at the moment, the only reason my house is functioning is because of Eros self healing ability. So I mentioned I had a power outage in my living room. I try to connect all of my hero units via Ethernet. I try to do Ethernet backhaul where I can, because that just makes things more efficient. I have one beacon down in the in the playroom that obviously is not on, you know, on Ethernet backhaul, because it's not built to be. And that's fine. But I try to have all the rest of them on backhaul. And to do that for the living room, I use a mocha adapter, which sends Ethernet signals over the coax lines that are in my house. Well, when the power came back on, I noticed that my mocha line was actually what I noticed was I launched my hero app to make sure that all four access points were on office, bedroom, living room, playroom, and they were like, great. And then I looked at each of them to make sure they were all connected wired versus wireless. I wanted to make sure there weren't any Ethernet switches that had not come back online or anything like that. And sure enough, the living room one said wireless, meaning that it was getting its signal wirelessly instead of wired. Now, the fact that it just does this automatically is awesome, because it means every Ethernet device in my living room now has Wi-Fi because or house has internet access because it's coming this way. Right. So I looked and it seems like one of my two mocha adapters, one at the one end or the other. And I haven't trouble shot this yet has flaked out and will not connect to the other and maybe both of them flaked out. I'm not sure why. Yes, there was lightning, but I'm really protected against that as long time listeners know. But anyway, one of them ain't working. Thankfully, Eero realized this and found another way to route my traffic. So all the devices in my living room are happily getting their their internet signal. And this is what we love about Eero. And you can have this too. As I said, go to Eero.com slash MGG at checkout enter promo code MGG. You have to use the URL to receive this offer. You will not see this if you go to Eero.com without using Eero.com slash MGG. So make sure you do that. And our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, I know that went a little long for an ad read for us, but but there's good tips in there. That's the whole point of this show. If we can get tips going, it's a good, good thing. Let's go to let's go to Greg, shall we, Mr. Braun? All right, all righty. Greg says I love it when it works like this. OK, he says I was listening to the show this morning. This was actually a couple of weeks ago. He says I agree, we were talking a few episodes ago about smart assistants and comparing Google and and Amazon's a lady and Siri. And and I had said in that show that in terms of getting information, the Google assistant is definitely the current king there. And he says, I agree with that when I'm in the car and I need to ask a question that I know Siri won't get right. I tell Siri to open the Google app. And then I say, OK, G lady, and ask the question. That way I can do entirely hands free while I'm driving. Also, I could say, OK, G lady, take me to this address or place and it will open Google Maps and route me there. Very, very cool. That's a great tip. I had not thought about that. I am also not certain, though, that this will work with car play. Car play is very particular about not launching non car play apps while you're driving, which is silly, but it is the way that it is. I get it in a general sense that it might not want to launch an app that's not that that is not if Apple's logical fallacy here is that they believe that if an app does not have a car play screen in it, that it therefore should not be launched while you're driving. The Google app is a great example of of a scenario where that's simply not true. And he just, you know, Greg here just gave us a great example of why that is. I also the app for my escort radar detector. I cannot get Siri to launch it while I'm driving. Now, I like literally it doesn't need a car play screen because it just Bluetooth to my radar detector, but it's really handy to have speed limits and stuff being displayed right up on there. And it warns me if I'm going over the speed limit and all that good stuff, but it won't launch it for me. So I have to if I want to launch it after I've started driving, I have to unlock my phone and launch the app manually. I cannot do it with Siri, which of course is is either dangerous or both dangerous and against the law, depending on what state I'm driving in. So it sort of drives me crazy. But anyway, this is a good tip. So thank you, Greg. Good stuff, huh, Mr. Braun? Yes. Good. Cool. Yeah, I don't ask too many questions while I'm driving. But no, no. And things come up. You want to know the answers, you know? And what I hate about Siri is if I ask it a question, it'll say I can't display web pages while you're driving. And if I ask it a question while I'm not driving, it'll say I've found you five web pages to answer your questions. If I ask the question audibly, I want it to be answered audibly. That's the deal. I do not want you to send me to web pages as the only answer. Don't think that you've, you know, taken care of my request if your way of taking care of it is to pass along my words to a Google search. Like, no, no girl. That's not what I'm looking for here. And the other thing, this is the thing that is a classic example of why Siri is the worst voice assistant that we have. Go to any of the other ones and tell them, you know, hey, a lady or okay, g lady or hey, s lady, whatever. Set an alarm for 7 a.m. And they'll all do it, which is great. And then when that alarm starts going off, now continuing to use your voice. Your voice is how you started this. Continuing to use your voice, tell it to snooze that alarm. Two of them will do it. One of them will not. My phone will not listen to me while it is ringing an alarm. To me, that's a fail. I started this process with my voice. I want to do the entire thing with my voice. What makes you think that I wanted to touch the screen to stop that alarm when I did not touch the screen to start it? This is the thing. This is what, it's classic. Classic drives me crazy. I've been having some weird things as of late. I don't know why she's asking me this, but my a lady as of late, when I give it a command, yes, it'll ask me, did I do what you needed or something along those lines? Like, are you happy with the results of this recent interaction? And I'm like, huh? It's done that. Yeah, it doesn't do it all the time, but that's not, the frequency of it might be newer, but I've experienced that in the past years too. Like, are you okay with this or whatever, which is great. And I will say Amazon's gotten way better with answering questions where you ask some random crazy question, like, why is the sky blue or whatever? And the Google thing would always sort of, on any of those questions would parse whatever web pages it needed to and give you a short little answer. My favorite one was when I, out of frustration, asked the Google assistant, how do I get my cat to not keep me up at night? How do I shift my cat's sleep schedule? I think it was the question I asked. And at the time, I haven't tested this recently, but at the time, Siri and Amazon were just, I can't answer that question. And the Google thing was like, great, do these five things? And it was like, and every one of them was like, oh, that's a great idea. It was like, holy crap, like this thing's amazing. So they each have their strengths. They each have their strengths. Siri's is that it's in my iPhone. That's its only strength, I think, in that particular scenario. It's not terrible, but compared to the others, it's terrible is the problem. So Siri and her voice failures. Speaking of voices, can we hear someone else's voice, John? Sure. Sweet. Let's go. Hi, John and Dave, and sometimes Pilot Pete. I was listening to 177 and realized when you guys were talking about family accounts, that I actually have a different setup that I use for my family account as well. You were talking about using it with an extra iPad for beta software that you're testing or beta OSs. But what I actually use my extra family account for is for work devices. That is devices that are owned by my employer and not by me. This way it keeps all of my contacts, all of my iCloud drive, everything like that is still separate. However, I can still access those lovely purchased apps that I use for work every day that my employer does not want to pay for. So this is kind of a good use case. I have a couple of audio apps that I use. There's one called RTA Analyzer. And that gives you a good idea of what's going on when you're running sound. When feedback happens, it tells you exactly what frequency to kill, stuff like that. So that's what I use my extra family account for. I hope you guys have a great day and enjoy your weekend. Thanks, Everett. That's... I like that idea because I know a lot of people that will sign into their iCloud accounts on their work devices or whatever and then immediately go in and have to turn off mail and contacts and reminders and calendar and all that. But it's not difficult for that stuff to wind up either staying on or getting turned on. Creating a separate family account. I like this idea. That's really smart. This is good. This is good. This is how this is how it works. Learning new things, John. I like it. Any thoughts on that, man? Hmm. Creative use of family account. I like it. I know. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Let's do let's take a last tip here. Let's do one from Robert who says, in a recent episode, you were discussing how to recover apps you bought outside the App Store in case of a system crash. In the same episode, you mentioned password managers. Last pass, he says, and I would assume other password managers, has a notes field for each website where you save login credentials. When I purchased software, I paced the installation keys, serial numbers or other information needed to install right into the notes field for the application's website. In addition, I put a copy of the emailed receipt into the notes field before below the installation info. The email will typically have the purchase date, confirmation number, payment method, et cetera. This becomes especially important for when the purchase is an annual subscription and I want an easy way to track when and what payment method it will try to use at renewal time. Last pass allows you to organize the saved sites into folders, and for these apps, I have a purchased Apple apps folder. Now if a meteor wipes out my house, when I get my replacement MacBook, all I have to do is open my password manager. I'd also like to know how he survives the meteor strike, but we'll get to that in a different episode, maybe even a different podcast. He says, I have a list of all the apps I purchased, the websites to go to to redownload them, and the information needed to install and activate the apps. Having all your purchased application information stored in a safe, secure, cloud-based solution means if disaster strikes, you won't get caught. Thanks, Robert. Yeah, that's good stuff. You're right. One password does this as well. In fact, one password takes it a step further and actually has a software licenses category so that you can put all this stuff into your software licenses category and store it sort of differently, but also with the receipts and the serial numbers and the version numbers of the software and all that stuff. So for me, we use FileMaker like crazy here because we couldn't possibly live without FileMaker here at Mac E-Cab and Mac Observer and Backbeat Media and all that stuff. But so I'll look and I'll see. I'll have 15 different FileMaker versions and licenses or whatever, but it sorts them and all that good stuff. So yeah, it's great. That's good. Thoughts on that, my friend, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I use LastPass in the notes category. If you haven't done this already, I like using it to store important documents like your driver's license, my passport, my social security, my health insurance. Take a picture of them and store them in your password manager. Yeah, yeah. Again, one password has categories and sort of layouts for all that stuff. So I have all our family's passports in the passports category and driver's license in the driver's license category. It's super handy. If one of us is booking travel or whatever, because we use the one password shared cloud, we have a family account with one password. And so we can have different vaults that we share. And I have one vault that's shared amongst the family and then we each have our own vaults. And in the family shared vaults, that's where I put the passports and the driver's licenses and actually even our software licenses I put in the family shared vault too, in case anybody needs a software license in the house or if I'm at someone's computer and it's like, oh, crap, I don't want to have to go to mine or go to my phone and text the thing. It's like, oh, right there. It's great. So yeah, it's good. Good, good. Yeah, I should get my act together regarding that because my management technique is to bring up spotlight and search for the title of the software and the word license and hope that it finds the email or note that it's in. You know, I mean, that's so 10 years ago, certainly 20 years ago, that wasn't even possible, right? Like there was no system-wide search. In fact, even application-specific search was limited at best, so much so that I think you did this and I certainly did it. In my email, I had, I think, 1,100 different mailboxes by the end of it where anytime I got an email from someone, like I had a John Braun mailbox and I had a mailbox for receipts and all that stuff because I had to pre-sort things. Otherwise, search wouldn't find it. But search got way better. And so you can kind of live that way, John, where you just search, you know. Oh yeah, like one time I was like, you know what? I think Dave sent me a license for whatever and it actually one time I think it found it in a slacker. Oh yeah. Chat, I'm like, wow, that's good, man. Yeah, yeah, like it seems like a lazy way to live or whatever, but it really isn't. It's how these computers are. The computer should be able to do this for us. We shouldn't have to think about how we're going to want the information in the future, right? We should just be able to get the information and the computer just finds it for us in the way that we want it to. Really what we want is Jane from Ender's Game, right? Like we want truly personal assistance, like truly personal where it knows everything we've experienced. It's right there alongside us. That would be great. If we could sort out the privacy part of that, I'm in. But only once we sort out the privacy part of that because otherwise, holy crap. Yeah. All right. Shall we move on to Johnny? John? Sure. All right. Johnny asks. He says, I write seeking aid in my role as an unwilling tech support person. I have a relative that lives far, far away from me who I'm trying to help create a backup of her MacBook Air. The questions are, what's the best easiest way for me to view slash control her Mac? She has a model six comma two air that's running 10.9.5. I have a Mac Pro that's stuck running 10.11.6. Would screens sharing with messages work with 10.9.5? She's never updated the OS as she is terrified that it will break something and then she will be stuck. He says, I know that there are other options but I'm not certain that others would be easier than messages if it would work. All right. Number two, I'm planning on sending her an external hard drive to use as a time machine volume. I'm thinking that I should have her manually trigger backups when she connects the drive. And number three, hopefully once issues one and two are solved, I can convince her that it's safe to update the OS on the air. However, I'm not sure if you can go directly from 10.9 to 10.14 or even 10.15. What do you advise as an upgrade path? Okay. Well, let's see. I can't remember how far back screen sharing and messages works but I think it goes all the way back to the beginning of messages. In fact, I think it was doable when it was called iMessage or iChat rather, sorry. But it's easy enough to try. Bring up your messages trail with her on your computer. Click on the dropdown next to her name. So in sort of the title bar, once you've clicked on a message with her, you'll see her name in the top there. Click on the dropdown next to it and choose ask to share screen. If that works, you're totally right. That is totally the best way, the easiest way to share screens. It starts up a voice chat and gives you mutual control over the screen. It's really and super simple and it works all the time. So if that works, do that. If it doesn't work, I think setting up a team viewer remote session would probably be the next best thing. It's definitely a pain in the neck in comparison but it works. Just be careful. Team viewer is free for personal use but they somehow monitor that in a way that if you use it too much, they'll ban you or put you in like 10 minute, short time Siberia. They've done this to me. I help a lot of people and they're like, oh yeah, you're using this in a commercial setting. It's like, not right now. I'm not, nobody's paying me for this particular session. Yeah, so team viewer is kind of a pain in the neck. Unless you are using it in a professional setting, then obviously sign up for it and all that stuff but yeah, I've basically standardized on. Whenever I'm helping Mac KeyCab listeners via my Dave the Nerd capacity or whatever, these days I always just use iMessage because it works and I don't have to send anybody a special link or anything because it's just built into the OSs. So yeah, check it out and there you go. Someone in our chat room here has put screens connect from Adobe in the show notes which is, yes, another way. I wasn't, I didn't realize screens connect. I've used it to remote control my own Mac and iPad but I don't know, oh, screens express allows you to grant access to your Mac to get help, collaborate, et cetera. So that would be another way. I think team viewer is more built for this but this seems interesting with screens express. So I'll have to check that out too. So thoughts on this, John? Who else logged me in? Is this maybe another one? I don't know. I haven't used that in a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, last time I used it was somebody was trying to dupe me into giving them remote access so they can install malware. Well, yeah, that's always fun. I let them get as far as like remote controlling me and then I shut down the session and wagged my finger at them for what they were doing. Right, of course. And told them that they should use their skills for good and not evil. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To circle back to searching for your application licenses or just searching in general, Dogster in the chat room mentioned who to spot which we will put a link to in the show notes there about to do the file search of really anything on your Mac and so not relying on spotlight but actually searching the files. So there you go, yeah, we will put a link for who to spot five in the show notes for everybody. And please remember that if you want to get the show notes if you are the kind of person where you're listening right now and you're like, oh, I'm on the treadmill or I'm in the car or whatever but I wanna go check that link in the show notes and then you forget to visit macgeekab.com. You can have the show notes delivered directly to your email box every single week. And the way you do that, now this is the place where it becomes a chicken and egg thing. We can't just intuit that from you. You do have to tell us. So go to macgeekab.com. I know you have to do it once but then you just sign up. You just put your email address in and sign up with our thing and then we'll send it to you every week when the show is published. So we would love to have you as a subscriber. It's great. And lots of folks are taking advantage of it. Thousands now, which is killer. It's awesome. All right. All right. Yes. Yes. All right. A question from JP. Shall we, John? All right. JP says, how can I get Siri to read my emails to me? When I ask her to read an email, she just tells me who it's from and what the subject is but never reads the body text of the email. I could have sworn I used to be able to have her do this. Any ideas? I would have sworn that I had Siri do this in the past too but I could not find a way. So perhaps this becomes a geek challenge. Do you know of any way, John? Maybe somebody in the chat room knows of a way. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I searched on it and it's weird. Yeah. It seems to claim you'll hear your subjects and senders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've never asked her to do that but I do not have an answer off the top of my head. Okay, so there is an article at Apple World Today which I will link to here that says, first to get Siri to start speaking to you on iOS, you need to enable an accessibility feature. So go to settings, general accessibility, speech and you have speak selection and speak screen. Enabling the first allows you to select a group of texts and have Siri read it. Selecting the second will have Siri read everything that's visible on your screen. Now you can press and hold the home button, et cetera, and say read to Siri, say read my unread emails and then it gives you a brief overview of them. Yeah. Oh, to get the full text of the email you need, ask read my last email. However, you'll have to repeatedly push the listen button and ask for emails to be read out one at a time. So if somebody knows a better way to do this, yes, great. But otherwise, we will put this link in the show notes. You can follow through it and see if it gets you there. Pretty good. Hi, Mr. Brunt. Hey, you know, I saw on social media, in fact, we had a nice little exchange back and forth, I think on your Facebook page. You got a new TV this week because you had to, but also, you know, upgrade time, right? Well, I didn't really have to, but so here's the story. So I was watching a new show and I don't know you know, Supernatural is the show. OK, you know, check it out. Sure. And they do some kind of creative, you know, stuff with lighting and all that here. And I was noticing that they were always it seems they're always like, you know, lighting up the face of one of the characters and stuff with a weird like, you know, off of camera spotlight. I'm like, this is really annoying. And I'm like, wait a second, let me watch something else. And I'm like, oh, gosh, that's happening everywhere. And then I just went to a regular screen and I saw a bright white spot on the screen. And I'm like, hmm, that's not good. So if you do a little search for LG, then white spot. Here's what happened. So LCD TVs have a backlight, right? And actually, I think my first HD TV, which, believe it or not, is still working. I gifted to my parents, used fluorescent tubes and made it way a ton. But the newer TVs use LEDs. The thing is this particular model, what they do is that they use an LED for the backlight, but then they'd have what I'll call a diffuser. That would distribute the light rather than having it be a point. Here's the bad news. Apparently, the adhesive that they used for these isn't very good and one of them fell off. OK, and I look for examples online and you could see people had ones were multiple of these and you would see multiple white spots. And so it's, you know, so the TV still works, but it's no bueno. You know, it's just annoying. Yeah. So I'm like, OK, you know, it's like three years old, which I guess in this day and age is not a bad lifespan for TV. You know, I say that. I think it's not a bad bad lifespan for an LCD or LED TV and and I and this is the reason I one of the reasons I skipped the whole LED disaster because they don't the viewing angle on them isn't great. For your scenario, it doesn't matter, right? You're basically looking straight on and not from above or below or from the sides. But, you know, our living room is set up a little wider. So we've been plasma people and and then we'll the next thing we'll do is go to OLED. But our plan, you know, our first plasma is 14, 15 years old and still going strong. And yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But we also paid like two grand a piece for our TVs and you're you're talking about, you know, sub 500 bucks. So it's a different scenario. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And the first one that I mentioned that I gifted that, I think I bought in 2006 and it's still working. And yeah, I think 1,700 bucks, which for them that wasn't a bad price for an HDTV. And that's not a bad price for now. If you're buying, you know, a higher quality, like an OLED or one of those types of screens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, well, you know, let me let me go to local DJs, which is where I got the last one and see what they got. And it's like, oh, well, look, here's a here's a 43 inch. And I saw they had a 43 inch HD, HDR, 4K, all of the stuff. Yeah, like 250 and I'm like, OK. Sure. And and it's it's a pretty picture and it's a little larger than my last one. So. So I got that, you know, on the screen, it'll show. Here was the first funny thing is that, you know, as I'm looking at the indicators on the screen to make sure I'm getting the right resolution here. And one thing I saw that kind of cracked me up and actually one of my friends, I'm like, oh, man, it says it only says 2160p. What happened? I thought this was a 4K TV. Well, 4K TV is the same as 2160p, which is the vertical resolution. Right. So don't worry. But anyways, once I got that, Dave, and it's a smart TV, and actually I'm playing with the smarts and I made disable them. But sure, it's kind of neat. Yeah. And as our friend, Brian is saying in the room here and they run WebOS, which I guess is their Java. OK. OK. Smarts. So that's kind of neat. But then now that I got that, Dave, well, now I got to upgrade everything else. So. Well, only because you had only one of your components was was going to send it 4K, right? You you your Tivo would send it 4K, but you didn't have an Apple TV 4K and you didn't have a Blu-ray 4K. Is that right? Correct. So I'm like, well, you know, let me let me upgrade the rest of the components. So so that they actually had a 4K HD Blu-ray Magnavox on sale for like forty six dollars. I'm like, OK, well, why not? And then, yeah, and then I ordered a refurb Apple TV 4K, which they knock a few bucks off of that. Yeah. So I'm there. Well, you did an interesting thing. And this is actually. Oh, right, right, right. I want to talk about this. You you. Yes, the sound. Right. So I have a Sony receiver and so the receiver did two things. It did the video switching and it did the sound decoding for surrounded all that stuff here. Right. The thing is when I purchase it, it's this device is locked to 1080p and that it would not pass anything greater than 1080p in it. So it wasn't a true pass through. The video. Well, yeah, no, no switcher is a true pass through. Right. So the video because it has to extract the audio from it. So the video switching capabilities of your receiver slash switcher are only 1080p. Right. And so the the question was, do you replace that or do you shift things around and you went with shift things around? Because the TV has three HDMI ports. And so the TV. Exactly. The number of devices. Right. Exactly. Got it. Yeah. And I renamed them and everything. And then the TV has a and and I also ordered a tosling cable. So the TV has an optical out and my receiver has an optical in. Right. So. Yeah. So so it's nice that it that the TV is is able to handle that function. And the Apple TV is kind of interesting. Yeah, I have mixed feelings that the the remote is different. But I do like the ability. So so one, I can, you know, it's 4K. And actually, I just temporarily I upgraded my Netflix to 4K. And, you know, when it's streaming it, it says, yep, it did. You're getting you're getting the 4K resolution. So do you notice a difference between I'd like to think I do. Got it. Yeah. So confirmation bias is a big part of this. Yeah, I I'm not sure I it's been a while since I've looked. I know that, like, from 720p to 1080p, there was no reason to do that on a on a on a screen smaller than, like, I think 60 inches or 50 something inches, as long as you're sitting more than three feet away from it. Right. If you're using it as a computer monitor, all of what we're saying goes completely out the window. But but in terms of, you know, if you're sitting back three feet or more or something, you know, you're not actually getting any additional resolution on the screen from, you know, at that size. And I don't know what the magic number for 4K is. But 4K also comes at times, like you said, with HDR, which can make a difference even if you're using a screen that's smaller than where you would actually get like a resolution difference. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then Brian asked an interesting question. Did I upgrade my HDMI cable? And the thing is, I don't think I need to. So at least the Apple TV has a little test saying, yeah. Yeah, let me test your cable and see if I can enable, you know, advanced features like HDR. So so one thing I'm definitely getting with this TV is that so. Compared to the last TV, why it may not be able to perceive the higher resolution, it is doing a different color space or something like that. But the Apple TV actually automatically set it up. Right. It was like, oh, yeah, you can do a OK, you can do HDR. So I'll switch over to that mode and it's like, oh, thanks. Nice. That's cool. OK, so you do need to make sure you're using a cable that's compatible, which yours, it turns out, was. And but this is good information for people. So like, yeah, you were able to you chose to buy the newer Apple TV, which I mean, anybody that's been listening for a while knows you were like, do for anyway, just so you have apps and a new Blu-ray player, because that, you know, makes sense for your scenario. But you were you were able to pop that TV in and really with just a tostling cable sort of rearrange things so that your your devices are happy. That's great, man. I'm stoked. That's good. Hey, we got we got sidetracked while we were helping out Johnny here. And we talked about how to do his remote control, but we didn't answer his other two questions. I wanted to come back to that. This happens to us often, especially on days where Dave doesn't sleep much. But and usually we get an email from several of you saying, hey, there were some other questions and I wanted the answers. So here you go. If you've already sent the email, don't sweat it. It's fine. As far as an external hard drive to use as a time machine volume, he said, I'm thinking that I should have her manually trigger backups when she connects the drive. Time machine will do this for you so that when you connect the drive, it will just automatically start backing up. And I really think that and that's time machine's default behavior. So I really think that that's the right way to go about this. I would not I would not turn off time machine and tell her to do it manually. Just just make plugging in the drive, the thing that that triggers time machine for her that way it's way safer. And then the final question was, can you upgrade from 10.9 to 10.14 or 10.15? And my answer is, yeah, I'm 99 percent. Sure, that's going to work just fine. You're really smart to have backups first. So, yes, obviously good. But yeah, it shouldn't be a problem. It should pull that data in Apple. Apple is usually pretty good about that stuff. I haven't tried it from 10.9 all the way to Mojave, but I think you're going to be totally fine. So. So, yeah, there you go. But yeah, oh, Brian Monroe is pointing out what you are pointing out, perhaps a misinterpretation of what I said. When you plug in a USB drive for the first time, it will ask you if you want to like what do you want to do with it? And time machine is one of the options. Do that, tell it you want to use time machine then going forward. Once that once that drive is configured and has a time machine backup on it from that machine, then when you plug that drive in, it will do its time machine backups to that drive right away. But yes, the first time, thank you, Brian Monroe, the first time you have to you have to tell it what you want to use the drive for all subsequent times, you are good to go. So. And then Eric has a very related question, which is. Well, I will I will ask it in Eric's words. He says. John F. Braun, I want to be just like you and have my time machine backups run on a specific schedule. What software do you use? And do you have a website where I should download it? And I think you probably mentioned something in a previous show, John, about this, but but I know we both use the same software to do this. And I'll I'll let you I'll let you take it from here or I'll take it from here. It's time time machine scheduler, right? Is time machine editor time machine editor, right? Oh, time machine schedule is a different one. Someone put that in the show notes. I don't think that's kept up to date. No, yeah, time machine editor, thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the one that that we use here. And it works really well. I I like it's weird, though, because you have to. So when you go to System Preferences Time Machine. There's a big on off switch there. In order to use time machine editor, you turn that switch off. This does not somehow uninstall or stop time machine from working. All that on off switch is for is for Apple's scheduler. So if you're using someone else's scheduler like time machine editor, then you turn off Apple scheduler, you turn on time machine editor and it will back up on whatever schedule you tell time machine editor to do. So, yeah, it's it works great. You you you use this too, right? You use time machine editor still? Yeah, I the what do I set it for? I think I set it to like six or eight hour intervals, which I think is is plenty because the default is every hour, which is just just crazy. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, every hour. Well, for some people, every hour is what you need. For the rest of us, it's really obsessive and and can even be a thing that sort of slows down your system. One cool thing you can do with time machine editor is set it to back up during idle time. So the system won't try to back up while you're working. Now, for some of you, you might want it to back up while you're working. If that's the case, let it do it. But if not, or if you only want it to back up once a day, just do that. It's totally fine. And this works really, really well. It uses the same system based scheduler that Apple's uses. It connects to launch services, like which is what Apple's does. So you're not really you're not. Yes, it's third party software to configure it, but it is 100 percent Apple software that actually goes and makes all of this happen. So you're in good shape with this. It's it's something I mean, I've been using it for what? 10 plus years, John, I think you have to. It's great. Yeah, it's good stuff. All right. Hey, I want to I want to take it to second, the second easy for me to say and talk about our second sponsor, if that's all right with you, Mr. Braun, fantastic, sweet. Our second sponsor, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, is TextExpander, where at TextExpander.com slash podcast. You get 20 percent off your first year of this tool that I I don't understand how I could live without this. In fact, I know that I couldn't. So what TextExpander lets me do is I have all of these things that I type regularly, right? It might be simple things like an email address or a phone number. They might be a physical address. They might be directions to my house. They might be full long emails that I send to, you know, queries of people that want to say, you know, buy ads from us or needs customer service or something like that. It used to be that any time I got a note that needed one of these things, I would go search through my old emails and find, you know, a place where I sent this and then copy and paste it and like go through it and how it doesn't have the right things or whatever. That takes forever. So now what I do is I have all that stuff in TextExpander. And I've massaged it perfectly so that it's there. And when I need it, I know that I'm getting the right version of it because I only keep the right version in TextExpander. And I can paste it into an email either with a couple of clicks of the mouse or hence the name TextExpander, I can type a short snippet of text and then it expands it into my much larger snippet of text, expanding it TextExpander, TextExpander.com slash podcast. You can also do other very cool things like have it insert the contents of the clipboard or prompt you for putting in different variables or, you know, whatever you want to put in, it's just great. And they've got a new visual editor now that makes life really easy to do all that stuff. You don't have to pretend you're programming just to make it all happen. It's awesome. As I said, TextExpander.com slash podcast. I know that sounds like a generic URL, it is. But when you go there, it asks you why you're at that URL. There's a list of podcasts there. Do I need to tell you which one to pick? I don't even think you need a TextExpander snippet for this. You already know. So check it out. TextExpander.com slash podcast and our thanks to TextExpander and the folks that smile for sponsoring this episode. All right, Mr. Braun, let's go to Adam. Let's talk about networks. Can we, shall we? Yeah. Yes. All right. Cool. Network. Network. Adam says there's always a ton of discussion around the topic of online privacy and security, especially with Internet of Things devices. We are a fully Apple household and everything that can be Internet connected is connected with the exception of televisions. Here's what we have currently and why I am concerned about what is going on about us. We have Xfinity Cable, Ubiquiti Amplify HD Mesh System. We've got five Apple TVs and a bunch of MacBooks and iPads and iPhones. We've got Ecobee Third Gen HomeKit compatible thermostats, Phillips Hue lights, Insignio Wi-Fi garage door opener, all of which are HomeKit, Ring Doorbell and Spotlight Cam, which isn't yet HomeKit and ADT Pulse. He says, so I have considered installing a VPN on the network. However, I don't think it will protect me from a privacy perspective. Recently, I've seen several products that might work like the Bitdefender box and the Winston privacy. Am I being paranoid slash tinfoil hat style, worrying, trying to protect our online privacy and security? Would either of these products protect us? If not, what do you recommend? So this is a good question. And I suppose the real question is what kind of protection do you want? If you're just looking for a simple firewall, meaning protecting yourself from people on the outside of your network, getting in, your router basically already provides that and that may well be enough. But if you're looking for something to inspect all of your both inbound and outbound packets for any signs of compromise, then, yeah, something local to your network, a box like what you mentioned, the Bitdefender box or Winston privacy or a router, which is an even better option is a router that has an intrusion protection system would be the next level. Unfortunately, as of right now anyway, ubiquities Amplify HD doesn't have an intrusion protection system or a, you know, a deep packet inspection going on. So you'd have to use a box like you mentioned to do that. A thing box is another one that that does some of this stuff. It doesn't do all of the packet inspection, but it keeps an eye on things at a very granular level, I'll say, and and might be enough for you. But it really depends on what you want. But if you want something that's truly going to inspect all those packets and and be totally aware of what's going on, then, yeah, you need, again, you know, the Synology Router I find is good at that. Some people may not like the way the interface works for it. There's several mesh routers that have something like this. Eros, ERO Plus service has, you know, this kind of sort of malware detection thing going on, right? So, yeah, I was going to mention that it. Yeah, we both have that activated now, I think. Yeah, I don't know if you still do, but I do. Yeah, it's it's detected shenanigans when it thought that they were occurring or reports like new devices that that was actually kind of cool when I got all my new toys here. It was like, oh, a new device from so and so is on your network. I'm like, I know. Yeah, thanks for telling me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I guess you have the thing box. And I guess that that does that, too. Right. Yeah. Well, kind of it monitors what's going on with the network. It doesn't do the the website threat protection because really in order to do that, you either have the device either has to be the router because everything passes through the router or something that is in line, like essentially in the way of the router, like one of those bit defender boxes or, you know, a Kujo box or something like that, where it's seeing all the traffic. But the router is really the best place to to do that because it's it's right there. That said, all of these things take a lot of CPU power. And so you need to have something that's going to be able to keep up with your network traffic. And, you know, if you're if you've got gigabit internet, well, you want something that can process data fast enough that it's not going to slow you down. Synologies, when theirs first came out with their even with their current router, the RT 2600, it it was not fast enough. It would slow you down to maybe 200, 250 megabits per second, which if you have 100 and 100 megabit connection, then that was not a problem. But for those of us with gigabit connections, it was they've retooled the software or used a different version of the whatever they did. They updated it and now it can keep up, which is great. But yeah, and the Euro keeps up at gigabit speeds, too. I think I had that problem with with the first version of the bit defender. That was that they suffered from that as well, is that the processor wasn't beefy enough to do the real time stuff. So it actually did limit your performance. Yeah, which in my mind is a bad thing. Is a bad thing. You don't want your router throttling you unless you ask it to. Yeah, but but it makes sense, right? Because this is a very CPU intensive thing to look at every packet in and out and compare it against the database. Again, things like machine learning, you know, that can sort of build these databases. I think Eros leveraging a lot of machine learning in their solution so that it can be very efficient and the processor doesn't have to do as much because it can compare against a known database of threats and things like that. So it, you know, it's able to be very quick about it. If you like the ubiquity stuff, Unify does have in their routers, they do have this this threat protection. But again, you've got to look at and buy the right one based on your internet speed because, you know, some of them, especially the lower cost ones, don't go fast enough. Stay tuned, though, because that might be changing and that would be a good thing. So so yeah, it's yeah, but I yeah, I I think finding a router with threat protection is something that you would like. And also, you know, I love the Amplify HD stuff. They don't have any buffer bloat protection, which just boggles my mind. But I think you said you've got Xfinity gigabit, which means you're on DOCSIS 3.1, so you don't need you already have buffer bloat protection essentially built into your cable modem, which is great. But knowing that Eero is on Apple's list of routers that are going to be home kit compatible, whatever that means. And we haven't gotten an answer out of Apple about this, nor do I expect it. But, you know, we had to ask, right? But as we get more details, that might be an interesting thing to consider. So your problem, my advice to you is unless you have some imminent security concern, I would wait a few months and let's see what what develops with these home kit compatible routers or home kit enabled routers and whatever whatever that's going to do because because that might do a thing that you want it to do, like, for example, you know, if you're controlling your ecobeat only with home kit, well, then you don't need that thing talking out on the network. So, you know, go in and filter that stuff. And I think that's what home kit enabled routers are going to do. We just we don't know enough yet. So stay tuned, I guess, is my advice. So hopefully that helps. Yeah. I mean, from what I've seen, the biggest threat that I run into, Dave, and I think the one that bites a lot of people, like one of our prior listeners who accidentally installed some malware is malware. Mm hmm. You know, I've been getting some of these guys are pretty good. I mean, some are horrible. You can tell that English isn't their first language because I get something that looks like it's from Apple has the Apple logo. But the the language is all twisted and I'm like, yeah, nice try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some are pretty convincing that I've received. I think I got one sent to my TMO address the other day and it was like, yeah, we're going to suspend your, you know, your Apple account. It's like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or they were like, yeah, there were too many, you know, faulty logins that we've disabled your right your account. And it's like, well, yeah, I guess what? I don't use the CMAIL for I don't use the CMAIL as an Apple ID. So get lost. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So yeah, good question. It you know, it's it it's it's not a it's a very open ended topic, right? Because the the real question comes back to sort of what I asked at the beginning, which is what kind of protection? What are you looking to protect against? And I realize the the answer to that might be, I don't know. What can I protect against? And so hopefully we answered some of those questions for you. All right, David, I'm going to change gears here, John. David asks a question. He says, as I support for my community, I'm dealing with a less than satisfactory experience with a cut rate toner vendor for brother printers. I'm putting it to the MacGear community to suggest known reliable vendors for my next attempt. This is a great question. I I've lately and when I say lately, I mean, for the past five years, I've purchased toner from Amazon. The nice part there is you get to see reviews from other customers. And, you know, it's easy enough to shop and find decent pricing for your toner. So and and really look at those reviews because the most expensive toner may not actually be any better and might even be worse than something that's half the price. So spend a little time and again, that's the nice part about Amazon is as you can and you have that data there to sort of go through. Make sure it's for your model printer. Make sure you are looking and comparing, you know, apples to apples, so to speak, some toner cartridges, even for the same printer, are high capacity or regular capacity. So make sure you look at that, too. And you're, you know, you're comparing how many paid average number of pages you get to print with the cartridge because, you know, high capacity might print double the pages that that your regular capacity toner cartridge would. And obviously that makes a difference. So, yeah, Amazon, but I'm curious to hear where where everybody else goes. Brian Roan, the chat room says Amazon's good or going to office depot, office max of staples will they'll let you trade in your old cartridges because there's a recycling process there. So I thought I was really smart, John. I just recently, you know, my laser printer, I have an HPLJ3055 all in one, and I mentioned that because it's an it's an important distinction. It's a great, it's been a great printer for us. And it's got a scanner in it and a fax so like I can scan to my computer or I can fax directly from it or, you know, whatever. And it's a killer network, obviously network enabled, fully laser printer. And, you know, our toner cartridges were getting it was getting a lot of starting to streak. It was like, ah, I need to buy them. So I bought two and they're great. And I put one in and it like everything looks good. And then it hit me. I don't know that I can use this printer come the fall because the software for it has not been updated since I think 10.8 and is not 64 bit. I've been able to keep it running on my Mac in the office. I don't know that I could install this software fresh on Mojave, but it does run on Mojave if it was sort of inherited into it. So I can still scan to my computer. I have not found any software from HP or any other vendor that will scan from this thing. So I may have to replace it in the fall when Catalina comes out. If if I want to continue scanning, which I think I do. But but maybe it's maybe I just leave the printer as a printer because it really works great as a printer, you know, and doesn't need, you know, the built-in software into Mac OS prints happily to it. It's just the inability to scan. So I don't know. Well, I'll make that decision when I get there. But maybe I'll just get a separate scanner or something. But yeah. So yeah, I'm with you. The last time I had to replace my toner, I think it was from Amazon and then I looked at the reviews, made sure the reviews yeah, bogus reviews, because sometimes people will load up or get people to make fake comments and fair star ratings. But yeah, I still got my GCC Elite 12 12. And the nice thing is I just set it up as a generic post-creditor. And right. And it's fine. Yeah, for as far as printing goes, even like you said, I mean, I think your laser printer is older than my kids. Right. I mean, I think you got that thing. 2000. I'm trying to remember. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's older than at least one of my kids. So yeah. But yeah, for printing, it, you know, the Mac OS drivers, it's postscript, right? So you're good to go. It's the real trick is, is that scanning thing. And it's just, I don't know, man, like I've tried. But I think the last time they updated the software before it was 2012. So yeah. Sad. Yeah. But, you know, like I found, like the thing is, I actually did find articles when my TV, they were like, here's what you can, here's how you can fix it yourself. And, you know, I saw the videos and they had, you know, step-by-step and I'm like, you know what, this is too much work. It's like, I can just buy a new one rather than, you know, put in all the effort to fix something. Yeah. It's starting to fall apart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. All right. All right. Let's let's continue with our gear changing here, John, if we can and and go to Mike. He says it's unfortunate that Apple has removed all support for address book plugins under Mojave. With it was lost. One of my favorite utilities with Brian Toth's post check, a plugin that provided zip plus four lookup as well as address cleanup and formatting based on USPS standards. I would simply enter an address in contacts in just a basic sloppy format, run, post check and presto. Perfect address formatting with fixed spellings and proper abbreviations would magically be there. Fixing addresses to look perfect will now have to be painstakingly done by hand. But maybe someone has another solution. Yeah, I don't know. Somebody put into put a utility or a web service, I should call it, called Smarty Streets into into our show notes, which I'll link to, you get 250 free lookups per month. And the way you have to do it is export your contacts as a CSV file and then import them back in when you get them. So it's not obviously not nearly as convenient as a plugin that can do it directly. But here's the thing. The contacts database is readable and writable by other apps. So I wonder if something like busy contacts would do this because that can monkey around with your contacts database and might just be able to do this. I'm looking here. I don't know that they have zip plus four lookups, but I'll put a link to this in in the show notes and and and we'll reach out to them to to see if to see if maybe there's something there. Do you know anything that would work for this, John? Man, I did this back in the day, but it was more commercial software. Yeah, there's cleansing as they call it. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if you could develop. I haven't done this for a while developing a little app within Safari, because you can, of course, go to usps.com. And that's what I do is that I'll I'll punch in the address there and then whatever the plus four is, I'll paste it into the. Yeah, kind of a kind of labor intensive doing it that way, though. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? I remember being able to design like a little. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about? Yes, maybe it sounds familiar at some level. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know. But anyway, there you go. So maybe somebody out there has a has an answer. Feedback at MackeyCab.com would be where we would love to hear about that. Did you say feedback at MackeyCab.com? I said feedback at MackeyCab.com. And really, that's for everybody, except I mean, everybody can use it. But if you are a premium supporter, then you get to use the premium at MackeyCab.com address. And we answer those first because, you know, for those it's for those of you that are, you know, contributing directly to the show. Everybody really contributes directly. So I'll say contributing directly financially to the show. We answer your questions first. The reality is we answer everybody's questions, which just sometimes takes us a little bit to get to everything. We prioritize the the premium stuff. In fact, I would like to go through right now and thank all of the premium subscribers who have contributed recently here since the last time we did this, which I think was two shows ago. So on the monthly ten dollar plan, we have Michael from Kansas, Dave from Socrates, New York, Bob from La Pesh, Timothy from Tennessee, Frank from Tunbridge, Jeff from Connecticut, Jim from San Jose, John from Pennsylvania, Santiago from Florida, Barry from Up, Up and Away, John from North Carolina, Tony from Massachusetts, Ken from Honolulu, Michael from Iowa, Dave from Illinois, Scott from Illinois, Clive from West Sussex, Jeff from Indiana, Joseph from Georgia, Scott from California, Robert from Alabama, Tony from San Francisco, Gary from New York and Frederick from Nashville. Those are all in the ten dollar monthly plan. Thank you to all of you on the biannual plan, which defaults to twenty five dollars every six months. We have Russell from Massachusetts, Thomas from Minnesota, Chuck from Boulder at 50 every six months, Richard from Florida, Peter from New York, Barry from Florida, Antonio B and Brett H, who are longtime PayPal subscribers and we don't have address information, which is fine. Don't need it. I just like to thank you. So there you go. Terrence from Ohio, Warren from Tennessee, Kurt from Princeton, Joe from Michigan, Robert from Shropshire, Karen from Ohio, Richard from New York and Jeff from New Mexico. Thanks to all of you. Very cool stuff. Really. And if you want to learn about MacGeekGab Premium, just visit macgeekgab.com slash premium. And all the details are right there. I think we have time for one more, John, and we've been in a geek challenge mode. So I feel like we should stay there and go to Chris. You might actually have the answer to this. You haven't talked about this one. So this might just be a geek challenge for me and not for both of us. Chris says, I'm having a spot of bother on my machine that I'm struggling to resolve. I believe Chris is from the UK. He says, search in mail has disappeared up its own backside. If I search for something in mail, it finds nothing. But if I search for a mail from someone in spotlight, it works. Also, I can't see flagged or unread mails, a royal pain. Now, I've rebuilt spotlight and I've rebuilt mails indexes with Onyx. Same results. I've deleted the mail indexes manually. Same result. What am I missing? I feel like we've seen this one before, but I don't have the magic answer. I mean, that envelope index and the spotlight index, that's it. That's where that data is indexed. So what's going on with mail to keep that from from happening? This is where I'm I this is truly a geek challenge for me. How about how about you, John? One place you could look. So if you go to system preferences, spotlight. Search results. There is a checkbox to include mail. I'm going to assume that's de-selected. I don't know. Yeah, I'm assuming that it's I mean, seeing the results in spotlight, but not in mail, I'm assuming that's checked. Right. Because yeah, I mean, but it's it's worth totally worth going and looking, for sure. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the magic answer here. You know, you could try rebuilding the mailbox right to go into mail highlight. And you got to do this one mailbox at a time, which is kind of a pain in the neck. But, you know, highlight the mailbox, maybe highlight your inbox and then just try it to see if this solves the problem by searching for something in the inbox. And then then obviously you can, you know, go round and round. But but go to the mailbox menu and choose rebuild. That will pull things down. But again, I don't think the problem is the data locally because you're able to find it with spotlight. You're just not able to find it in mail. One other thing. And again, this is just worth it from a general standpoint. When you search in mail, it often, but not always, defaults to only showing you results from the current mailbox. So look up in the top title bar. You'll see the current mailbox listed there or the top tab bar. I guess I'd call, I don't know, the mailbox bar, the shortcuts bar, whatever it's called in mail, all the way on the left of that little bar, we'll say all mailboxes, click that, make sure it's actually looking and not filtering your results down. That's a possibility. But then also try by filtering your results down and see if it gets better or worse. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Very interesting, very interesting. Yeah, it's a weird one. That's a weird one. But hopefully, even if these answers don't help, Chris, hopefully, in a general sense, they help someone out there because, you know, even that spotlight one, that's a good thing to check. Just in general, go to system preferences, spotlight. Like like you said, John, and look at search results and just decide what things you want in search results. You may not want your contacts appearing when you're searching in spotlight. For me, I'm very selective about what I want. I want applications because I use spotlight as an application's launcher. I use spotlight as a calculator, so I leave that on. I don't want my calendars in there, the calendar events. No, thank you. I don't I like to search for mail in mail, so I turn it off there so it's not cluttering up my results. Again, you can, you know, you can choose what you want. And that's a handy little thing. So. Yeah, and onyx will help you rebuild your mail in indexes as well as your spotlight ones. So I don't know, man. Any other thoughts, John, before we before we call this one a day? Not on this one. All right, scratcher. It's a head scratcher. All right. Yeah, man, I agree. I agree. Well, it's time to bring the band in from the warm or the cold or the rain or whatever's going on out there. It's been a lot of weather lately. I'm just glad we made it here. Aren't you? Of course you are. Yeah, I didn't think I was going to make it. Really? Well, I was hearing like noises outside. Oh, it was a passing tarantula downpour. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Craziness. All right. So make sure to vote for us in those podcast words. The links in the show notes. But I think it's just podcastwords.com. Let me look that up. But I'm 99 percent certain podcastwords.com. Yeah, but we'll put a link in the show notes. And if there's a link where we can sort of direct you to maybe our category or something, we will certainly update the link in the show notes to do that at this point. We can't see it either. So we are registered, though. So that I that I have confirmed. So Mackie Keb will be on the list in the technology category. So please, we would love it. It's awesome. It's a voting's open all month, July, I believe. At least for the first couple of weeks. Don't wait. Don't hesitate. Vote early. And if the rules let you vote often. So there you go. Thanks for that. Thanks for everything, really. Thanks to cash fly for providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Do you have anybody you want to thank, John? Our listeners. Yeah, I agreed without them. None of this just me and you. And. Yeah, who wants that? Yeah, well, I mean, that's fun. I mean, that's really why the show exists, right? Was it was an excuse for you and I to make sure we kept chatting about computers after we after I moved again. But. But then it's become so much more. And we wouldn't have to have these crazy microphones and everything if it was just you and me. This would be excessive, to be quite honest, if it was just you and me chatting once a week, you know, not that there's anything wrong with excessive, you know. I want to thank our sponsors, of course, you know, Eero at Eero dot com slash MGG, as we mentioned in the show, and Tex Expander from Smile at Tex Expander dot com slash podcast. Also want to thank Other World Computing, Barebones Software. This is an ops genie, too. They've got good stuff going on there. Clear at clear me dot com slash. Oh, is it fully Mac Geek out? Clear me dot com slash Mac Geek out. Is that right? That's right. No. I don't know. It's in the show notes. I'll make sure it's there. I didn't sleep. Yeah, it is. That's how it works. It is clear me dot com slash Mac Geek out. Because MGG was too short. So visit. It's cool. You get to go through airport security like a pro. John, you got us into this mess today. Do you have anything to say to get us out? Oh, I don't know if I do. No, I think I do. You got us in. I'm going to get us out. And the way I'm going to get us out is to tell everyone. Don't get caught. May.