 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, Episode 707. We're heading into Boeing land for Monday, April 30th, 2018. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show where we take your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found, we mix them all together into a salad, as you know, the salad of goodness, the salad of tastiness, the salad of learning, right? And we share your tips, we share your questions, we answer them, the goal being that each and every single one of us, every one of us learns at least five new things every time we get together. And today will be no different. Sponsors for this episode include Code Weavers, where at CodeWeavers.com You can get a 14-day free trial of crossover for Mac 17 and also save 35% when you're ready to buy it. We'll talk about why that's important, especially if you're someone that's tried it in the past and hasn't been entirely happy. I've got some things to tell you. Also sponsoring this episode, Other World Computing, we'll talk about their cool new eGPUs, the extended, the external GPUs over at macsales.com. We'll talk about all of that in a moment here, but here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, ready to throw some croutons into this salad of learning. This is John F. Ron salad of learning. Yeah. So this is the first of our Boeing episodes, right? Over the next few months, almost a year, we will, we will hit many of the, the Boeing things. Because, you know, every, almost every, you know, 7X7 show we do will have, you know, we'll have some Boeing reference that the next one will not. I'm sad that he should have done the introduction here. I know. I don't know if he's ever flown a 707, but I believe it's not a secret that he, he flew real jets back in the day. I don't know if it was that. I think it was probably more sophisticated than a biplane. He still flies real jets. I mean, he, but he flew a Harrier. Um, yeah. Right. He did Navy, Navy flying, right? He was in the Marines. Yeah. Marines. Okay. Yeah. But, but now, yeah, now he flies monster jets. So yeah, we will talk to him. It would be good to have Pete back. His schedule has been crazy, but I'm told that once May starts, things might get a little bit better for him. So with that in mind, let's dive into the meat of this, shall we, John? I saw this week that carbon copy cloner now supports APFS snapshots, right? So carbon copy cloner 5.1 came out, I think last Tuesday, right after we recorded here, um, and it added support for creating snapshots on APFS formatted sources at the beginning of a backup task. The snapshot is then mounted and used as the source for copying files, um, and by using a read-only volume as the source, this is they avoid rare, but potential conflicts that occur, that can occur during backup tasks if files are modified while being copied. And now they've moved their safety net feature to use APFS snapshots when the destination is an APFS volume, uh, and it will create a snapshot on APFS destination volumes at the end of a backup test to establish a point in time restore. So this is really cool that they're like, this is what APFS, one of the things that APFS is built for us to do these types of things and add these, uh, the ability for these sort of safety nets and, uh, efficiencies and all of that stuff. So, I mean, it's really cool to see carbon copy cloner doing this. I believe though, John, that Time Machine has been doing APFS snapshots too, because when I installed this new carbon copy cloner and went to the snapshot manager to turn that on, it showed me snapshots that it existed for the last 24 hours. And of course I had not been running the new carbon copy cloner until moments before. So something had been creating them, which must have been Time Machine, so. Or, yeah, Time Machine editor, because they introduced fairly recently, a check box called create local snapshots every hour. And if you check it, it'll, as far as I can tell, that's exactly what it's doing. Yeah, so that's not, because I'll see, I'll see a snapshot folder show up every now and then when it's doing other Time Machine things. So I believe that's been influenced by this as well. That's not a new feature of Time Machine editor. In fact, well, so Time Machine editor doesn't, the snapshot snapshot, it's the other. Well, Time Machine editor doesn't add any features to Time Machine. What Time Machine, and this is, I mean, it's a, we've mentioned it is cool stuff found before, but certainly we'll include it in this episode too. What Time Machine editor does is it lets you control some aspects of Time Machine that Apple's interface does not provide, specifically when to schedule the backups. Apple, it's either on or off and on means it does them every hour. Time Machine editor can be a little more fluid and intelligent or more rigorous. And you can actually set times and dates and all that stuff. And I had interpreted that checkbox that allowed snapshots to be controlled there as the, like Time Machine will automatically do those local snapshots if you have a laptop that's not connected to your Time Machine volume so that you're getting some of the benefits of Time Machine while you're away from whatever your backup destination is. And so I think this is just a more granular control to turn those on and off. That's how I interpret that. Okay. No, you're right. Now that I look at it, the way to see what's happening with local, so yeah, so a local snapshot and an APFS snapshot are indeed different things. But well, now I'm getting back on track. Well, if you type, oh, I think that the snapshot the time machine editor is talking about is the one where if you type TMUTIL space local snapshot, it'll say, oh, well, yeah, I did that. And you can also say whether to create them or not. And I think that that's what I'm saying is I think Apple is employing APFS snapshots for those now or because I had some APFS snapshots, at least that's what it seemed like when I launched Carbon Copy Cloner, 5.1. So I think that Time Machine is doing them, but I could be wrong about that because I think I also think that Time Machine, unless something's changed very recently, you cannot back up to an APFS volume as your Time Machine destination. I think that's still the case. It's been the case for a long time. Okay. Yeah. The only reason I know I have those that if you run this utility now, one thing it'll tell you towards the end of its scan if you do like a first date or a health check. Sure. It's like, oh, yeah, by the way, I'm going to look at like I have, I think, seven snapshots currently on my one terabyte drive. And it's like, I'm not sure why it's seven or if it's like a month or what they're doing in there. And I think it's actually a protected folder. So I can't even look to see what it is. Crazy. So yeah, this is good. It's really exciting though, like to see the APFS support growing and the third party stuff. And like I'm really stoked about this. Very, very cool stuff. Speaking of new features, sort of Joe sent us a cool stuff found and he says, as a photography enthusiast, I use photos on my Mac to organize my masterpieces, but sometimes use an external editor to fine tune them. And what he's talking, what I'm about to read is true of Sierra and prior and we'll get to that. And he gets there too. I just don't want anybody to be misled. Says the problem is that once I edit, I need to reimport the picture and then have a copy and original of the same picture. There's a plugin called external editors for photos that solves this. It allows you to access external editors from photos. Edit, you select external editors for photos and it will show you all the external editors available on your Mac. Once you're done editing, you save the picture and return to photos where the plugin receives the edited photo and inserts it in to the photos. And then you get just one. He says, but the app is only for 10.11 and 10.12 because he says, as I was researching the details, I realized the app was Sherlock kids. Ask your parents that that basically means that Apple included that functionality in High Sierra, which they did. And the interesting thing is I didn't quite realize the extent to this that this was included in High Sierra. I knew that we had photos plugins. So apps like say Pixelmator could expose certain edit operations that you can do right from within photos with those plugins. But you can also highlight an image and either right click on it or go to image, edit with and choose your external editor and do exactly what Joe describes where it literally opens the image in that external editor. You do whatever changes you want when you hit save, you can watch inside photos that that photo updates right there. So I had no idea I had heard people talk about this and I just assumed incorrectly that all they were talking about was the the plugins or the extensions, I should say. But it's not just the extensions. It is truly the ability to open a photo in an external editor like that, which is pretty cool. And if you want to manage the extensions, that's a whole other thing. Visit system preferences, extensions. I know we're moving fast on this one and go to photos and you can turn on which ones you want to appear in photos, which is kind of cool. So you can have stuff from third party apps sort of right there in photos. So there you go. Do you use any of that stuff, John? Yes, and I actually provided a supplemental article called how to edit with third party apps and extensions. Cool, perfect. Goes over some of the stuff that you were already brought up. Depending on what platform you're on, there is on both platforms the ability to access external editors, which I don't actually use them too much. So I actually looked at the setup on one of mine and I think I may change it in that it'll use graphic converter or it can use graphic converter as an external editor because graphic converter, I'm pretty sure, has way more of things that you can tweak versus photos itself. So I'll have to try that next time I'm filling with a photo. Cool, yeah, it's pretty cool. I was pretty impressed by it. It's just like it's supposed to work. So there you go. In the remaining in the cool stuff found category, I noticed this morning Gmail used to allow you to... Well, it still does. You can add, if you have a Gmail account, either a regular Gmail account or a Google Apps for Domains account, you can add other from addresses to your Gmail account. And then Gmail, once you configure them, will send from that address, which is very, very handy. It's also handy if you're connecting mail to Gmail and you're using Gmail as your outbound mail server because Gmail has to be configured to allow you to send through these other addresses. It used to work, John, that you would go into Gmail, you'd go to the settings, you'd go to addresses, you'd plug in the from address that you'd want to use. It would send you a confirmation email to confirm that you in fact received mail at this address so you weren't just trying to spoof somebody else's email. And then once you put that in, boom, it was done. It did it through its own service. About a year, maybe two years ago, they changed that and they said, no, we're not gonna do that anymore. Like, if you wanna send external email, that's for an email from a different domain, that's fine and we'll let you configure it, but you have to put in your SMTP server credentials. Like, we're not gonna be your server for this willy-nilly. I was like, ah, okay, that sucks. And this morning, I stumbled onto a way to sort of beat that system. And the way you beat that system is you go through the process, you tell it you wanna add the address, it says, great, what's the SMTP server? And it asks you for the server name, the user and the password. And instead of putting in some other SMTP server, you put in smtp.gmail.com and you put in your Gmail username and password, it confirms that that server with those credentials will let you send email out and voila, you beat the system and it will work. I've tried it and it works great. My guess is that this is a hole that they could plug, but I don't think they will because I'm assuming that this is how they allow, essentially have grandfathered in all of the addresses that you put in the old way because they didn't make you go back and redo those, it's only for new addresses. So I think there's a way to beat that system. For now, but I think with the old one, what they did at one point made sense, but then I think too many people figured out how to spoof that, that it didn't become an effective way of preventing people from using them as a spam. Lunch point. Correct. Correct. So it's the dance back and forth. It's the dance, correct, they plugged a hole. We found a new one. We'll see what happens. That's right. Yep. Yeah, I remember for a while I was using Yahoo as my base and doing the same sort of thing. And then at one point they were like, oh, well no, we're not gonna allow this forward mechanism anymore. And it's like, well, dude, without that, it's like, I really can't effectively use my... Yep. And then they loosened up the rules a bit because it was traumatizing too many people to like, dude, you said you could bring all my addresses over to you and now you're saying, well, no, not anymore. Not today, Satan, that's right. Yep. Yep. I mean, you get what you pay for. You do? In a lot of cases it's nothing. It's nothing, right. So lawyer Jeff hipped me to a tweet today from at Holman where he says, this is Zach Holman, who says, I just found out that you can turn off those annoying rate hour app notifications on your iPhone and of course your iPad. Go to settings, go to iTunes and App Store. And in there, there is an in app ratings and reviews option that is probably turned on for you and you can turn it off. I find that pretty helpful because those things come up at the worst time. Like, I don't mind, actually, I mean, I have a whole... Because of what we do here, I have sort of a whole policy about what I will and won't review, you know, just publicly with my name and all that. But still, like I get that developers wanna encourage you to send reviews, but man, they can be really pesky about it. Yeah, I mean, come on, let them have their fun. I mean, they wrote an app for us. Maybe you paid for the app. Like, I mean... Oh, in that case, then stop pestering me. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, so anyway, you can turn that off here and it is a global setting. It's not a per app setting or anything like that. So, there you go. It's good stuff. Thank you, lawyer Jeff. Hopefully soon to be judged, Jeff, I think. John, you found a cool stuff found, didn't you? Or you purchased, you have? Yeah, okay. So, I was wandering around the Burrana state and noticed a blinking LED, which means something's wrong. Uh-oh. And in this case, it was my link hub. What is a link hub? I bought this starter kit several years ago and it was GE and Quirky that came out. And it was two smart GE LED bulbs and what they called a link hub, which was a baby smart home hub in that it only talked to these lights. Then they gave you an app and everything was cool. And you even saw it when you went over, Dave. You know, they have a Wink plug-in for A-word. So... And you could say turn on the lights, turn off the lights. But the thing is, all of a sudden, it broke. Wait, hang on. The light was flashing. I need to ask you a question. You said Wink app, but did you say link LINK hub? Correct. Yes, they called it a link hub to distinguish it because it's like a baby hub with very limited functionality. Gotcha. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure I heard that correctly. Yep. Right. I think they still sell it, but you don't want it because it's so limited. You might as well do what I did. So for whatever reason, I don't know why it just was broke. Okay. In that, you know, I try to re-initialize it. I try to repair the bulbs and nothing was working. And, you know, the A-word was saying, I can't talk to the hub. And I'm like, all right. Well, you know, I got some gift cards for my birthday and I looked at Home Depot and they're like, yeah, well, we got the Wink hub too for 99 bucks. And I'm like, all right, here we go. The difference to our pickup, picked that up the next day. And so the difference is that this hub, so the reason I got it is because I had a pretty positive experience with its predecessor. Sure. So this basically supports Bluetooth Heli, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Kitty, which makes like fire stuff, mostly fire alarms, Lutron, which makes switches. And it also has now a comparison. So this is the version two of this hub, but it also has both 2.4 and five gigahertz Wi-Fi radios and an ethernet port, though a hundred megabits though for smart home stuff. I don't think you can get it. That's totally fine. Yeah, right. And so far I got hooked into the old bulbs. It was interesting. It actually said, oh, you want to use these? We're going to have to upgrade the firmware on this. So I think there was some firmware weirdness that all of a sudden caused this breakdown and maybe forced me to upgrade. I should have anyways. But the thing is now it talks to generic ZigBee and Z-Wave, which are like the two big kids on the block as far as smart home stuff is going to probably have either one of those. But also has an ethernet port, which its predecessor did not. And it has a five gig radio, which its predecessor did not as well. So I'm ready, man. That's pretty cool. So now I can even get. So like one of the bulbs it talks to that are smart bulbs, I think they're about like 15 bucks each. Cree, they talk to those, I think. But the thing is that they not only have plugins for a whole array of devices using their app, but they understand generic ZigBee or Z-Wave devices and provide basic functionality. Yeah. So for those of you that might have glossed over at some of those protocol names, when you get something like a smart light bulb or a smart outlet or a smart switch, sometimes those devices have their own wifi chip in them and talk directly to your router, right? And if they do, that's all you need, you're good to go. But a lot of times these devices will have low energy, low cost radios in them that need to talk to a hub, like the thing John just described, in order to then talk and then that hub talks to your network, either Ethernet or in John's case, like you could do wifi as well. Not every hub does wifi, that's pretty cool. And it has a backup, that was the cool thing. They're like, oh, by the way, if the Ethernet fails, do you want to use a wifi backhaul instead? And it's like, dude, are you kidding me? That's awesome. Well, yeah, because a lot of times you'll want to place the hub somewhere. You want to place it somewhat centralized, right? I mean, these things will build a mesh of their own amongst all of your devices, but you're better off if your hub can reach everything. So not having to be tied to an Ethernet port, that's pretty cool. That's really cool, man. I mean, I bought those Hue lights not that long ago and so they came with their own hub and that hub has been software crippled for a little while, but they've fixed it now and it'll do ZigBee three devices and things like that. So you can go and I don't have to buy Hue bulbs. I can go buy, like you said, the $12 to $15 ones on Amazon that all support ZigBee and I'm good to go. That's just pretty cool, man. Yeah, it's fun stuff. It was interesting that the vocabulary changed for the bulb. So now... You mean with the A-Lady device? Yes. Yeah, okay. Is that it's now between one and a hundred. Oh, in terms of brightness. Right, remember, before I thought you could say whatever percent and then you figured out that, well, no, you can just say an ordinal between one and 10. This now seems to want between zero and a hundred because if I say a hundred and one, it's like, that's out of range. So I'm like, oh, that's it. So I think the device itself maybe has a new, more enhanced vocabulary. Oh, that's cool. It's kind of fun. It's a hundred bucks, anything that I want to talk to, you know, Nest or thermostats, all this stuff. Did you compare this with the SmartThings Hub? Because that's generally, like before the Wink Hub 2 was out, the SmartThings Hub was sort of the, if you wanted to buy some, not generic, but Hub that worked with everything, like without question, you went and bought the SmartThings one. So, not really. The thing is because I was ready using the Wink app. Yeah, I didn't have to really change anything. All my, you know, except for the pairing operation, all the other stuff was the same. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just curious because, like I said, I know. And I looked at actually the words, I think a Tom's Hardware article and I actually said that Samsung has one that has a few more bells and whistles than this one. But they said this one was fine too. Cool. Cool. The talks are the things you wanna talk to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. I'm curious, I'm excited to hear how things evolve there this summer. Now I'm thinking of, you know, my strategy here is that, you know, should I get smart bulbs or should I get smart dimmers? Because I have dimmers, but they're not smart and I have LED bulbs. So do I upgrade the bulbs and just leave the dimmer at full? Yep. I know. I have to make a, I have to look at the economics of which thing I wanna upgrade or replace. Yes. At which point. Yes. The thing is right now, in all likelihood, all of the LED bulbs that I have in the house will probably outlive me. Right. Right. Well, I don't know. I've had LED bulbs die. I think that a lot of them, No, I've had them die. A lot of them they say, yeah, but I mean they say most LED bulbs will last like 20, 30 years, which, you know. Yeah, okay. Maybe I got 30 more years out. I don't know. We'll see. Well, and I'm not convinced. I think the LED bulbs are maybe five to 10. I mean, just based on what I've seen, I've had a couple of them die and, you know, like they just, Really? Yeah, they print out. I had CFLs like violently die. Sure. Like smoke and crackling and like almost fire and it's like, wow. Be careful of that. Cause there's mercury released when that happens. That's poisonous. Well, yeah. That's why I got rid of them all. Yeah. And actually at the local, you know, in this case our Home Depot will take the CFLs and dispose of them. You hope to dispose of them properly. You hope. That's right. That's what they claim to do. All right. So I have been and I have one more cool stuff found. And this comes from listener Stefan or Stefan. I'm actually not sure if I'm, I'm not sure which way I'm mispronouncing that. He says in episode 705, you talked about High Seer's 32 bit app warning. And as an aside, since then we got several emails from you folks asking, okay, how do I find which apps are 32 bit? I don't want to have to go like system preferences and do all I want it to like, I want something to find them for me. So Stefan has the answer. He says Howard Oakley, the incredibly productive author of Mac OS system utilities over at the eclectic light company has created a free tool to scan a Mac for applications that are still 32 bit. The latest version also detects plugins inside application bundles and command line tools and dynamic libraries. And it is called 32 bit check, 32 hyphen bit check, no spaces. But of course we'll put a link in the show notes to this. So there you go. And it looks like Howard's gonna stay right on that for us all. So very, very cool stuff. So thank you, Stefan. And of course, thanks to Howard for doing what he did to make all this stuff, which is great. Pretty good, Hanjon. Indeed. Cool. Hey, I wanna talk about our two sponsors. Does that work for you, my friend? Absolutely. Cool. Our first sponsor for today is Code Weavers. As I mentioned, they make crossover for the Mac. And in the last episode, I said something that they've really taken to heart and really it came from something they said. There's a lot of folks, myself included, that said, well, and what I said to them that they took to heart was, if you're holding a grudge, it's time to re-judge. And I said this in the last episode too. And it's because if you tried crossover, even just a couple of years ago, but certainly even more than a couple of years ago, you might have had an unhappy experience. Like it kind of worked or probably didn't maybe you found it weird and clunky to install and difficult to use because it was. In the last 10 years, they have spent a lot of time performance testing, fine-tuning and increasing support for over 10,000 Windows apps. And the way crossover works is you don't need to run Windows. These run almost like they're native apps on your Mac. I don't wanna say they're like they're native apps because they're not, but runs very, very close to that. And it's very, very cool. They just released their most powerful version back in December of 2017. And their highlights in that are support for Quicken 2018. And that means you get to run the Windows version of Quicken and you're not having to deal with the weird Mac version of Quicken and Microsoft Office 2016. So you can run the Windows versions of those programs on your Mac without installing a Windows license or even installing Windows, but you don't have to install it. You don't need to buy a Windows license. You just go do this. So do us a favor, do what I've done. Visit codeweavers.com slash MGG. Use coupon code MGG when you're ready to buy. But just visiting codeweavers.com slash MGG gets you a 14-day free trial. They don't ask for a credit card. And of course they don't ask for a Windows license because you'll never need one or a reboot. You just install it and can run it. And then when you're ready to buy, coupon code MGG saves you 35% off of a one-year subscription. So go check that out. Codeweavers.com slash MGG are thanks, sincere thanks to Codeweavers for sponsoring the episode and for doing what they do there. It's nice to see them really committed to making things happen. Our second sponsor is Otherworld Computing. At macsales.com. Now, Otherworld Computing is a place that John and I go for all kinds of things. They know the Mac. They understand the Mac. They know how to create things that will work perfectly with the Mac. And here's the thing, even when things don't work perfectly, like they figure it out and that's how they make things work perfectly. Right? That's how it works. They've now got the Helios FX, which is an external GPU chassis, right? So you can connect an external graphics unit to Thunderbolt 3. This is pretty cool, right? Anything for somebody that wants to do video editing, right? Or wants to play games on your Mac and external GPU can make a huge difference. And now that's the thing, right? You can do that now with Thunderbolt 3. Apple finally opened the door on that. It's actually more than just Apple, but it makes it work. And the Helios FX will do that. You can also go to OWC at maxsales.com to get RAM, you can get external hard drive cases or hard drives to put in those cases. Like OWC is the place to go if you wanna upgrade your Mac. Like I said, they really understand this stuff. So go check it out. Go to maxsales.com, find what you need. When you're telling them how much you love them for doing what they do, tell them you heard about them from here at Mac Geekab so that they know that we're sending you there. It's a good thing. Our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, where are we going next here? We should stay with the tips. Jeff has one from MGG705 if you're good with that. Yeah? We're good. Cool. All right, let's see. So let me find Jeff here. I'll find him. It's good. Jeff says, oh yeah, when we were talking about the iPads, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We were talking about the iPads messages badge showing unread and not being able to be reset. And we said, look, you gotta clear the caches, right? But the only way to do that on an iOS device is back up and restore. Because there's no clear caches button. You can't run onyx. You can't dig in and do any of that stuff unless you're jailbroken and then, you know, that's a different story. But most of us aren't gonna do that. So, Jeff says, if you go to settings, general reset, reset all settings. He said that's much better than reloading the full iOS again. And he says for him, that's cleared out the caches. So I thought that wiped out more than I would want it to wipe out. But admittedly, it's been a while since I've done that. So before anything like that, do a backup. Maybe even two, an iCloud backup and like an iTunes or an iMazing mini backup. But yeah, yeah, there you go. So thanks, Jeff. That's good, yeah? I found another way to solve a type of problem Dave because I just had it. Oh really? Like a day ago. Whoa. Yeah, so the notification numbered thing was on my phone icon. Yeah. Which usually means that you have a missed call or a voicemail. The thing is I looked and I clicked on both and that usually gets rid of them. Yeah, I was gonna say that. That's it, sure, yeah. But I went back and it was still there. So my suggestion here is just randomly fumbling about, well, no, it was actually, it wasn't random. But I'm like, you know what? What if I call my landline for my cell phone? Maybe that'll clear it. And you know what? It did. I don't know why. I don't know why I thought that would make any difference. But I'm like, it's the only thing I could think of trying. Otherwise it would have driven me mad. It's like, I see this notification, but it's not real. And I don't know why it's there. Huh. That's all I got. I don't know why it happened. So it's just these weird little, it was just funny because I know people have been mentioning the stale badge data thing. And I think the other thing I indicated in the past is sometimes you have an app that doesn't reveal it. In this case, that wasn't the case because Apple, when the badge in the topmost UI is there, then one of the underlying badges are also on as well. In this case, that was not the case. It was kind of distressing actually. Yeah. Yeah. I got a handle on it because then it's like, this thing is gonna be haunting me until I figure out how to get rid of it. And it's also now unreliable. It's smart. As brother Jay says in the chat room at mackeykeb.com slash stream, hello everyone. Attack of the phantom notification badges, right? It happens, but as Kiwi Graham also in the chat room says, touching the file, making some change to it. In your case, you made an outbound call, but anything to just force it to refresh that. To fiddle with the bits. To fiddle with the bits. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah, there you go. Good stuff, man. Following up from several previous episodes where we've talked about this, Ken wrote in and asked, he said, I was talking about a couple that I did some work for here with my Dave the Nerd consulting business where they wanted to share all their photos. And so what I did was I set them up where all of their devices use the same primary iCloud account because that's what syncs photos. And then we turned off a bunch of stuff in that and then set up secondary iCloud accounts for them for things that they didn't wanna share like calendars or contacts or something like that. Right. And Ken said, I don't think you explained that all that well. And he said, I'm confused. Does the couple use the same Apple ID or a separate one now? He says, I tried both, but having a shared ID lets us sync our contacts, reminders, photo stream and lots of stuff. So, yeah, the answer is I'm having them use two. The primary iCloud account that you put, and you can do this, you can have multiple iCloud accounts on all your Apple devices, but the primary one can do more. And iCloud photo sharing is one of those things. Find My iPhone's another iCloud key chain, I believe is only available to the primary one. Secondary iCloud accounts can be used for things like contacts or calendar syncing, email, things like that. So you can have two. And then where it gets really confusing is you can also have yet another Apple ID assigned for iTunes purchases that are separate, or that Apple ID can be separate from whatever you have configured for iCloud. So that's the problem is they're all Apple IDs. You're using some for iCloud, you're using some for your purchases, and it could be the same one for everything. For many of you, it is where it gets interesting as if you are sharing with other people in a specific way and you wanna sort of break the rules. It is important to remember Apple thinks about iCloud IDs as being one per person. So like for this couple that I set up, what I had to warn them of is we've got a solution that works today. But when Mac OS 10.14 or iOS 12 comes out, Apple may introduce some iCloud related feature that causes a problem here because they see iCloud IDs as being one per person and so there might be a thing. And so you just gotta kind of be eyes wide open on that sort of thing. So there you go. That's, hopefully that helps, but let us know if it doesn't. Feedback at macgeekab.com. I don't know if I heard you. I think you said feedback at macgeekab.com. I said feedback at macgeekab.com and that's the address to which Kent sent his email with a tip. We were talking in the last episode about carriage returns and finding them and changing them or replacing them in documents. And Kent found a way to find them within pages. We said use something like BB Edit where you can manipulate the text and copy paste and that sort of thing. He says, he found a Macworld article that we will link to, but he says in general he launched pages and then the key is to go to the view menu and turn on show invisibles. And then that way you can see the carriage returns that are there and you can actually highlight them and do something similar to what we described in the last episode where you go to the find menu, you use the selection for find and now you've already got it highlighted and so it uses the selection and searches for that. And then you can use things like you mentioned in the last episode or two episodes ago, John with the backslash N for carriage return or backslash R or whatever you're gonna use. So it's good stuff, man. We'll put a link in there. Thank you, Kent. Any thoughts about this? I moved quickly from those two, John. No, no, keep it up. Okay, well, it was more if you had anything to add. So there you go. That's a... No, I think we was exhausted in the sorry state of inconsistent end of whatever encodings. Yes, yes, I agree. I agree. I mentioned those two ways to contact us, John, but I also wanna mention premium at macgeekab.com because that's the address that premium members are able to send their emails to and we do check those first and admittedly more frequently than we do the regular box. And that's because you folks are the ones that are contributing directly. And so it's a little something that we can do as thanks in return. I wanna thank the... In addition to that, John, I wanna take a minute and thank everybody whose contributions came in this week. Good with that? Absolutely. Okay. A one-time contribution of 20 bucks came in from Mike R and then in the monthly column, $10 contributions from Joseph BP, John B, Tony Z, Nick S, Robert D, Elizabeth B, Jimmy E, Ward J, and Greg S, a $15 monthly contribution from Micah P and then $25 biannuals contributions for their every six month subscriptions from Charles K, Robert R, Ken C, Thomas S, Chuck J, James H, Edward I, Mark W, Stevie D, and Tony C. Thanks to all of you. You, like I say every week, you help us do what we do here. It really means a lot in so many ways. Obviously the financial aspect of it is a huge part of it but even more than that, we just really appreciate you folks thinking of us and doing this. And we appreciate everybody to be perfectly honest to all you that listen and send in your questions and your tips and just contribute in our part of our Mackie Gab family here. Thanks to everybody. Really, it's awesome. It's great. You know, here we are coming up on 13 years, what, in about six weeks, John? I think we'll celebrate our 13th year of doing this. Lucky. Our lucky 13, there you go. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm very lucky to be able to do this. So thank you for all of that. Let's see, where are we here, John? I think maybe we should take a minute. You know, this week, Apple announced. Fish shake. Fish shake. Well, not a fish now. Go ahead. Well, they announced that what we all suspected was true is true, that they will no longer be updating or doing anything to the hardware on the airport line. I think we'll still see the occasional software updates for patches and stuff. How did they announce this? They gave statements to a couple of different, they gave what seemed like the same statement to a couple of different folks that then spread it around for them. Oh, yeah. OK. And I confirmed it with them too. I talked to them about it and it's, I mean, it's legit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting. You know, Apple has done this before where, you know, they sort of let the rumors leak, which have been happening for six, eight months, right? About something that's going to change. And I think they sort of use that to gauge sentiment on things at times. It certainly, you know, it was, it felt like no secret when this news came out, but it was nice to have confirmation. And so here we are. No more airport hardware until Apple changes their mind. And I'm not convinced they will be changing their mind. So I think this is a pretty final thing. No, I don't think they should. I agree with that. Yeah, there are people. It was an area where it's funny because they kind of sort of innovated. I mean, they weren't the first. Right. You know, persons that offer Wi-Fi. And I still remember fondly back to the spaceship that actually I believe had a lucent card inside of it. It wasn't even Apple hardware. It was somebody else's, but then Apple added their firmware and, you know, they created the ecosystem. And yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah. But I think they also realized, I mean, there's a ton of people that are doing it way better than they are now. I mean, not that Apple doesn't have smart engineers, but they, yeah, strategically decided, does it make sense first off our Wi-Fi with all these other people doing, doing as good. That's it, yeah. And it's like, yeah. Can we add something to this, yeah, to this market that's going to make it better? And they did for a while. Again, they were using the same chips as everybody else was, Broadcom for the most part, stuff like that. And they had the engineers that did some innovations. But yeah, they made, you know, they did make meshing possible in the... Well, WDS kind of, sort of... Right. Well, that was the standards groups, you know, and I mean, they honestly kind of messed it up because the implementation was pretty pathetic. It was pathetic, but it, but it was easy to implement, right? I mean, you just set the things and it would, for the most part, like magically happen. Oh yeah, the passwords and all that, but I would say in the Mac addresses, it got kind of tedious, but then the results were disappointing. And that's just because we didn't have the oomph. Right. Yeah, there wasn't enough pipe to do, you know, meshy type of things. Yeah, it tried. It's actually, that's an interesting thing to bring up that really the thing that makes mesh possible, wireless mesh possible. It's, so there's a whole lot here. We've had, we as humans have had mesh networks for a long time in the enterprise, right? Where you got one SSID and you can roam everywhere and they're managed from a central location and all that. But they've always been ethernet backhauled, right? Where there's ethernet cable, hardwires connecting all of these base stations, you know, and it's like... Yeah, fiber. Drop ceilings. Yes, but right, but there's a wire connecting them. And so, you know, you could sort of do that in your home or you could do it in your home if you wanted to buy enterprise hardware. And then once 802.11ac came around, it was like, oh, hey, wait a minute. We have enough speed here if we tune these things the right way to do wireless backhaul. And that's a game changer in our homes where we don't have drop ceilings and you can't just, you know, throw hundreds of feet of cable around and just make it easy, right? And so that's the, that's really, that was the change to the market, the change to the technology that opened up the possibility for what we're seeing now with, you know, things like Eero and Orbi and, you know, Lynxus has developed and things like that to really happen. Because without 802.11ac, like you said, we just didn't have the oomph to do this the right way. So yeah, it's interesting, but it's good. So there you go. We have a couple of Wi-Fi related questions, John, that I figured would be timely to go through. But is there, before I cue those up, is there anything more that you wanted to say about this? No, it was fun to, you know, when I see people in our chat rooms say that a lot of them had the first UFO-shaped one as well. So yeah, it was nice that Apple was part of the beginning and they're just kind of stepping aside and hopefully spending their time doing other amazing things. There you go, there you go. So listener Jim asks, he says, I just bought an Eero Mesh router system. He says I was looking into getting it set up in my home and found that I need to run my Eero in bridge mode because I am a Verizon Fios customer for both internet and TV. My Verizon router slash modem needs to manage the network so that my Fios TV works. I understand I can use my Eero in bridge mode, but that it limits some of the Eero's advanced networking capabilities. Is it worth keeping the Eero and using it in bridge mode with the limited features? I'm tempted to return the Eero and get a Synology RT2600AC with that work better in my situation with my Verizon Fios setup. Says I currently have an old Apple airport running in bridge mode that handles my wireless needs. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. So the first thing to go at here is what problem are you trying to solve, right? Don't get me wrong, John and I love the new, the shiny, the fun, but if you're not having a problem then especially with the way technology is, wait, right? Wait until either you are or there's some solution that convinces you that you have a problem you didn't realize you had. With this, I talked with Jim a little bit about this, John, before answering the question here on the show. And he says, yeah, his airport is running in bridge mode and it's doing fine, but he's got some weak spots and things are slow in certain spots of his house. So that's the problem he's trying to solve. So, okay, like there you go. So he's trying, okay, because it wasn't clear to me because it almost sounded like there were two problems being presented here. One, that my Wi-Fi coverage could be better. And two, should I be using another router? Right, right. We had two different questions here. The thing is based on what he says Fios doesn't make it easy to decouple the TV part and the internet part, which just in the back of my mind here, is there a way to do that? I don't know, getting like a separate component or something, is there a way to not use them as the router? Yeah. But allow you to get the other services, is there a way, is there a splitter or something like that that can do that for you? Maybe there is and maybe a hack or maybe you could hack it together yourself, which is maybe what we're trying to do here, right? Well, a couple of years ago, we had somebody write in with a way to hack that and it was a very convoluted thing. You kind of had to let the Verizon router live out of band and only manage your TVs and then you would have your router of choice as your internet gateway and all of that stuff. It's doable, but or at least it was doable. I don't know if it's still currently doable. So hopefully somebody can- I mean, it's all digital data, whether it's light or electrical. Right. Verizon uses- Verizon uses IP, right? It's all TCP IP. It's Mocha that they use over your coax wires. So it- Okay. Then fiber is fiber. Yeah, fiber to the home and then either Ethernet or Mocha from there. And then they convert it to something else. Correct. But you're talking of, you know what I'm thinking. Yeah. So maybe it would have hacked it together. There may be a way to, but then do you need the enhanced functionality of the router? Well, that's- That's the other- And yeah, you're right to split this into two things because the question is, if your routing is working for you, I wouldn't necessarily open that can of worms. So let's assume that the routing is working okay, right? And you don't need to go nuts and deploy your own router as a router. And now you're trying to decide between you need better Wi-Fi and you know that both the Eero and the Synology RT2600AC have at least an R test here outperformed the airport extreme by quite a bit. So with either one of those, you would have better Wi-Fi. But here's the thing. If you're gonna get a, the Synology thing is just a standalone router. So it's just like, in that sense, it's just like the airport, right? It just happens to have better radios. But you're still gonna put it into bridge mode. So you lose some of that's the functionality that's there. Not all of it. You can still do things like cloud station if you hang a drive off of it. And so there's some interesting things that you can do but you're not getting the, you're still having all your Wi-Fi come from one fixed point, right? Whereas if you keep the Eros in bridge mode, which is how I have things here at my house most of the time right now, I'm actually running on the Linksys Vellop testing out their current firmware and frankly blown away by the front hall speeds that I'm getting, but we'll talk more about that. But that's generally what I do is I have a router that stays in place because I can't afford to completely, you know, rejigger my network all the time. So, but I do wanna test all these mesh things. So I generally deploy them in a couple of different ways but bridge mode is one of them. And then I can, I can experience the, you know, the meshing and that works really well with Eero. Eero, you know, the problem with a lot of these mesh systems is when you put them in bridge mode, not only do you turn off the routing functionality, which is sort of the point of putting it in bridge mode, but with a lot of them you lose the ability to have any visibility into the devices that are connected to your network. That's certainly true of the Vellop that I'm running now I'm kind of flying blind. I don't know where anything's connected because the Vellop app won't let me see that when it's in bridge mode, but the Eero app certainly does. It, you know, let's me see which access point something's connected to and I can get some, you know, rough details on it. It can't tell me anything about the routing because it's not doing that, but it can tell me everything about my mesh network and that's really handy. So I think sticking with the Eero in bridge mode is probably Joe's best answer here unless there's some reason to bypass the FIOS router. Yeah? Yeah, well, you got to, you know, I briefly went through this when when my parents got a new, you know, they wanted to ship them a new all-in-one thing that did the telephony and 802.11 AC and I'm like, you don't need your airport anymore. This is fun for you. And the thing is the interface that they provided once I think I found the magic password was, I mean, I think it's a, I don't know if it's an Eris product, but it's a product that they worked in conjunction with somebody else saying, yeah, make this work, okay? And it had most of the things that you'd expect, you know, universal PNP and port forwarding and so I think what you got to ask yourself is what feature that I want is missing from the current router. Now, like some, I mean, it all depends. I don't have a lot of hands on with this, but you know, some really locked down their router and that they don't let you change anything. Some are like, yeah, if you, you know, if you're brave enough and you know what you're doing, we'll let you access the admin interface for the router. It's just don't screw things up or we're gonna charge you for a service called dummy. If you manage to destroy things beyond, or just reset it, but still that's the other question I think I asked yourself. Cause you know, Eero does have, you know, they got their Eero, but what do they call it? You know, their enhanced plan there. Eero plus, yeah. Yeah, and things like that. Yeah, there would be no, no reason to have that if you're putting the Eero in bridge mode, like you wouldn't get any benefit or you wouldn't get much benefit out of something like Eero plus where you get the, you know, extra filtering and parental controls and all that stuff. And like the reservations, I like that feature. So I feel that's useful for me. Yeah, it depends on, depends on what his files router can do with reservations too, right? Yeah, it's kind of funny because both with this, it's interesting the data that you find out. So, you know, this wink two thing that I got. It's funny because it showed up as two different vendors depending of who I was connected with ethernet or wireless. In one mode it said, oh yeah, Flextronics, which is the company that kind of acquired some of the assets of this other company. And then when it connected via wireless it reported the maker of the wifi chip set on this thing. It uses one or the other. Huh. Same with my ring. It's like, oh, you got a TI instrument. Yeah. I'm like, oh, that must be the ring because they're probably using the TI chip set. That makes sense. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing I really do like of it. I mean, you know, at one point I was like, who's that going to my network? What is this? Oh, it's the thing I just added. Cool. All right. Well, there you go. You know, I posted a tweet about this and actually a post on Facebook too about this weekend. And I do this occasionally where I'll just change, you know, and I, like I said, I have a couple of different ways that I test. There's really three ways that I test any new wifi thing that shows up either a standalone router or a mesh system is, you know, I can't dismantle my home network, you know, in any meaningful way and still remain, you know, happily married and have kids that won't, that don't want to like, you know, attack me in my sleep. So what I do is I can set up a sub network, right? Where I set up the, like the Euro as its own thing in router mode, but it's a, you know, what we call a double net scenario. So my existing router stays right where it is and the Euro talks to it. One of the benefits of that is I get to test the upstream speeds up to full gigabit in both directions, right? Or the upstream and downstream speeds because I can put a device on the other side on the upstream side of the router, which is kind of cool. But that means I can test the routing stuff and I can even like, I can live with my devices internal to that network for a while and then the rest of the family is still happy. So I do that for a little bit, but then in order to, so that lets me test the routing functionality and the speeds of the, like the CPU in it and all that stuff. Then I put it in bridge mode and make it my wifi for the whole house with my normal SSID that everybody connects to and all that stuff. And I just change it. And I don't necessarily tell anybody in the house. I mean, sometimes I do. Sometimes I'll say, hey, I made a change. Let me know if you see anything weird, although they'd let me know anyway. So it's really not an issue. And then I run it, you know, and that's kind of the default mode is stuff like that. And then, so that's number two. And then number three, if I really want to test something as a router and wifi longterm, I find a friend or a family member that lives nearby and I go and, you know, bless them with a brand new wifi system for their house. And then I just, you know, ask them if they let me continue to be a manager on the system so I can see it and then they can give me feedback and I get these longterm tests. And so it's really, really handy. So what I did this weekend was I took the ERO out. I didn't take it out, I just turned them off or unpowered them and powered up the Linksys Vellop with the latest firmware in bridge mode to test the wifi. And I mean, I feel like anecdotally, and I gotta be really careful that I don't, you know, mislead anyone here. But anecdotally, I think my wifi speeds are at least double what I was getting with the ERO in my house in the same locations. You know, I'm getting 400 to 500 megabytes a second across the wifi link with my iPhone. So, you know, just a two radio device. And then, and with ERO, it was, you know, it was in that 250 range. So it's impressive. Now, you know, it's not all about speed. 250 is still plenty for what 99% of us do 99% of the time. So, but it's interesting seeing, you know, it was remarkable. I've never, like it's been a long time since I've seen speed tests or iPERF results hitting anything, you know, above 300, let alone above 400, which is just interesting. So, so, you know, that's why I keep testing and then report back to all of you. So there you go. Like I said, speed's not the most important thing to me. I mean, there is a minimum speed that it should hit, but, and that's, you know, usually, you know, if it can break past 150, 200, that's more than enough for most of us, because A, most of us don't have internet connections that go faster than that. And B, even if you do, like, you're never, you're not gonna get gigabit on wifi. It doesn't exist. So, well, no. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. Right, right. That's true. Well, what is it, AD? AD is supposedly gigabit or almost. No, no, I think it's past it. But yeah, it's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're right. But it's what, like 50 gigs or something crazy? Yeah, it's crazy. It's like what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, so that's how I test things here and that's what I'm doing right now with develop. They're all a little bit different. You know, and I mess with them. I use ethernet for backhaul or not ethernet. I use wifi and I, you know, test them and test them. So I'm not really ready to issue a verdict on where develop is currently. Although I am leaning towards it's way more stable than it was six months ago when I tried this the last time. So there you go. Yeah. Anything else to add to that, John? Yeah, crazy, 60 gigahertz. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Seven gigabits per second maximum theoretical speed or something like that. It's crazy. Crazy. 802.11 AD. What do they call it? Y max or something? Or do we stop calling it that? Gig, gig, gig, I don't know. All right. Wow, whatever. We'll put it out. I don't know. I'm just kind of concerned with those really high frequencies. They're not good for you. Is that true? Well, yeah. I mean, I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat. I'm sorry, aluminum foil hat as we speak. Aluminium, that's right. Yeah. Aluminium, yeah, safe like Johnny. That's right. So speaking of new tech though, we got a note from listener Tony today that says just spitballing here but with the coming of 5G technology and the availability of IPv6, will we need a home network going forward? Yes, there are some issues with peripherals and privacy security, but those might be solved easily enough by some sort of pairing protocol rather than access lists or subnets. So 5G is gonna be really interesting and we're very close. And by 5G, I mean 5G wireless from the mobile carriers where you can get really fast speeds across mobile devices. But, and so like faster than you're getting to your home and then most of us are getting to our homes quite a bit faster. So the question is, you know, what's it take, like what's the future look like? Right now there are, maybe there are phones, maybe there's one phone that supports 5G but I don't think any of the carriers have them. So the plan for the carriers is to give you essentially like a MiFi style device that gets the signal and then shares it with your other devices, either your home or, you know, out and about or whatever it is. So the idea is you would have a 5G antenna on your home, you would receive the signal there and then connect that to your existing router or a router type device and still share within the home. Cause I don't think 5G is gonna penetrate walls all that well. So it's not, and that scenario really isn't all that different from Fios, comes to your house or, you know, coax from Comcast or Xfinity or whatever comes to your house. Like it doesn't matter how it gets to the outside of your house, you just need an ethernet cable in and then you still got to route it internally. So I, and plus, even if 5G could penetrate walls, well, you'd need 100% of your devices to support it and right now 0% of your devices do. So you do the math, right? It's gonna be a while before we wouldn't need a router. I think. I don't know that we would ever not need some sort of device like that. But, you know, I don't, well, not never. I know, I know, I know better than to say that. But what do you think, John? I'm with you. Dude, there's still people in this country that can't get high speed internet. Yeah, well, 5G could fix that, right? Cause you don't have to worry about the last mile. Well, not if you're in the middle of nowhere just like the people that can't get 4G or other things like that. Fair, very fair. No, I got at least one of my friends in kind of Northern middle America. Okay. So Indiana or Michigan, but I know people in both states and if you're out in the boonies, man, you're not getting cable, maybe satellite, maybe DSL. Probably at least a phone line, but, you know, that pales in comparison. You know, I chuckled because, you know, we, we went to CES and the CEA is talking about how, you know, 5G is going to create a revolution and we're all going to be wearing VR headsets and living in the matrix. And it's like, not everybody. Yeah, some of us. That's right. Maybe the coastal elites or just people, people in densely populated areas like me and you. Right. Yeah. And, you know, we have more choices than others. Yes. Yes, or at least a better option than others. I mean, I don't have too many choices here to be perfectly honest. I can't get files. Like I can get Comcast. There are other things I can get, but they are not. I mean, they're higher speed than a phone line, but that's all I can say about them. My high speed is cable right now and the maximum speed they officially offer is 400. So it's frustrating because the pole outside of my house, I think I told you this, there is a fiber interchange. Of course. Whatever thing, but it's not for me. It's like a business thing. Cause I looked, I actually looked up the company. I'd like, you know, got my, you know, a magnifying glass and looked up the name of the company. Cause I'm like, you know, that looks like a fiber junction, you know, router thing. And I actually found their website and I tried calling them and I'm like, Hey, can you give me service? And they never returned my call because I don't think they're interested in dealing with individuals. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, tell them you're with a, you know, Mac observer and Mac key cab and see if they change their tune. Yeah. Show me, show me the fiber. I was going to say, at least get a price out of them. Yeah. You know, there you go. I mean, just get, I mean, the thing is I can literally see it. Just give me, give me the converter thing. Just run the fiber, you know, give me the thing that makes it a router and then, you know, we'll talk. That's just what they wanted. But no, I get the, well, the cable vision actually has something here called light stream as well, which they actually run a commercial fiber thing, but it's, it's not for, you know, the, it's not for you. It's not for muggles. It's, it's for, yeah, it's for people that, that, you know, have a, can write big checks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I always ask, like, what, what's the check? Maybe it's not probably. I mean, people get it, but it may be, you know, 1,000 bucks a month. Oh yeah. No, no, no, no, no. That's really not willing to pay that much. Right. But if they tell you it's 150 a month or something, you might be like, oh, right. See now. You gave me a gig? Right. You gave me a gig a bit? That's up and down, symmetric. There's no business is going to pay a thousand bucks a month for gigabit internet. Like it's, it's cheaper for them to relocate, you know, whatever, five miles in either direction to where they can get fiber. Right. So I don't think the price is going to be that much. I think order of magnitude wise, you're in the $100 range, not the $1,000 range. This is the way my mind works. I don't, I mean, I could be totally wrong, but this is. No, I'm thinking back in, I'm thinking back to the old days when I actually had a T1 lab that I managed. Then I think it was a thousand bucks a month. Yeah. But a T1 was one point five four megabits per second. One point five four, right? Even like the slowest TSL that people can get right now is way faster than that. Oh, yeah. But yeah, 20 years ago, that was like, correct. Correct. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. We all we all salivated for it. Did you see this thing? It just came up. Was it the 25th anniversary of Mosaic that just passed? Remember Mosaic? I do. I remember the first time I saw it. Was it your house? You had brought a Mac home from your it's got to be more than 25 years from your employer. Yeah. And and and you were like, dude, you got to see this thing. And and, you know, you connected to whatever, you know, portal or whatever, whatever ISP we were using at the time. I think it was portal and and, you know, and then you were like, oh, yeah, when she get like a PBB connection going, you can you can do this thing. And it was like, holy crap, this is going to change everything. And I've been sure enough it turns out it did. Yeah, that was pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. We're actually compiling it on an HPUX system. Yeah. Work. And then I think we got the version on disk for the for the Mac. Yeah. Oh, I still have. No, I think what I show you is that I still have the floppy kicking around somewhere. I just can't bear to part with the three and a half inch floppy of Netscape 1.0. Oh, that's pretty cool. I think what we just experienced was the 30th anniversary of Mosaic. It couldn't have been the 25th. Was it? Oh, OK. I think, yeah, because I mean, I'm just thinking about like how old my kids are and and when that was. And that was more than 25 years ago. Yeah. So it was the 30th anniversary of of, I don't know. Ninety three is when they say the initial. Ninety three. Yeah. 25th anniversary. That's 25. Yeah. OK. All right. There you go. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, it would have been. Yeah. OK. All right. Fair, fair enough of NCSA Mosaic. Right. Right. Isn't that what it was? Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. And then Netscape Navigator. Oh, that's right. April 22nd, 1993. There you go. Yeah. Cool. Changed everything. I don't I can't imagine what my life would be like without the web browser having. You know, having made the Internet a thing because you and I were using the Internet. We had been using it for years prior to that. But like you try to explain to people what it was. And it was like you'd immediately lose them. Like the the best thing was a gopher server. Right. Where it was this pseudo graphical. It wasn't a graphical. It was a text interface that you could navigate with arrow keys. And so it was like, oh, yeah, cool. No, connect to the gopher server and you can go and download files. And, you know, that's cool. But like, you know, it was marginally the same as the bulletin board interface. It just happened to be over the Internet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But then I remember the culture wars where it was like the Internet's for research and science and learning and stuff. And, and, you know, and all the all these, you know, evil capitalists were like, but we want to sell stuff. And it's like, no, you can't do that, man. Yeah. And the government was saying, no, no. It turns out it turns out it was like the best thing ever. Yeah. The government was saying we build this stuff and to give you a platform and then off you go. Yeah, it was good. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it wasn't the I mean, the government in a sense built it, you know, DoD and all that stuff there. But why not let people buy and sell things in addition to doing all the science-y stuff? It's like, well, can we do both? Yes. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So the backlash I still remember, and it was mostly, you know, spam and all those annoyances that was the thing that, you know, really got people worked up. It's like, you know, yeah. Yeah, sending me this email I didn't ask for. What are you doing? Right. Right. Well, the tech was was not built to be to protect against nefarious use, right, was the that was the issue is like email servers were just wide open. Why would someone I was thinking, I was thinking earlier today, why would anybody be a jerk? Was the mindset of the people right using it? Right. And all of a sudden, somebody decided to be a jerk. And it's like, well, stop being a jerk. It's like, no. Mm hmm. No, that's right. No. Yeah, that's because that's what a jerk's answer is, is that? Yeah. But, you know, it's it was interesting. Earlier today, I was setting up a new email forward or whatever. And and so I had to I wanted to see what the headers looked like of this new forward that I set up. So I sent an email to myself, you know, as one does. And as for whatever reason, as I did it, I was reminded of the first time that I sent an email to myself. Now, this was I think it was UUCP, John, which was was sort of the Unitunix copy protocol. Yeah, it was UUCP email, I think it might have been pre at sign where you so now we say, you know, send an email to this user at with the at sign, you know, that computer over there. But it used to be that you had to say send an email to that computer by way of this computer and this computer and this computer. With path with bang paths with the bangs being exclamation points. And it was Ray Tomlinson at BBN, who you and I happened to be what who you and I happened to be talking about pre show who created the concept of the at sign. Right. But anyway, whether this was pre or post at sign, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it was pre at sign, though, where I sent an email to myself, you know, I had I had accounts on two different Unitunix computers and I sent that were not mine, you know, but I was allowed to have accounts on these. And I sent an email to from one account, you know, my account on one computer to my account on this other computer to just to, you know, to test it and figure out how it worked. And I did that. And I logged this, I sent the email, I disconnected from the first I connected to the second logged in, I got my email. I was looking at the headers and I see, oh, not another another new message has come in. Who is it? Oh, it's from the system administrator saying, please don't abuse our system by sending emails to yourself. You know, we have limited bandwidth and we can't do this. And the guy was nice about it. He was like, you know, I understand if you want to test or whatever that you need to do something like that. But, you know, don't make a habit of it. It was like, wow. It's like, are you watching me? Yeah. Well, he was just watching all of his network traffic. Like that that was the thing is he wasn't watching my account. He was just literally watching all of his network traffic. Now, you couldn't even fathom doing that today as a human. It's bad. It's tough enough to have a tool and a filter. But yeah, but if he had enough spare time to like manually inspect packets and traffic and stuff because traffic was low enough that that he could. Yeah, exactly. So you told him to spend his time like doing something important. I think this was important back then. Yeah. So you were that much of a drain on the system by sending yourself an email. Well, no, I just think he wanted to discourage the habit. Yes, which I totally got. But it was really funny. And like I said, as I was sending this forward to myself today, I was like, wow, it's but we've come a long way because I guarantee you the only person that's going to know about this email. Should have been a crypto. No, I guess they really didn't have any good crypto back then, at least not for civilians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he would have still been able to see the source and the headers. And I think that's all I saw was, you know, that it came from Dave H. At one computer. Oh, gosh, this is before. Yeah, before all of that, man. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. I know it's crazy. I remember showing people how simple it was and then we'll move on. But I still remember this in the early days of the internet. I'm like, you know, you can't really trust where an email says it's from. And they're like, really? And I remember this is when, you know, we were starting to get on board with the internet at work and I was like, yeah, check this out. So, you know, I logged in manually to an SMTP server and manually typed in the from and the to and the message. And then all of a sudden, they got a message from our CEO saying, hey, great job. Nice going. And I'm like, see how easy that is. And they're like, oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah, we have some questions. We haven't quite exhausted all our time here with this trip down memory lane. So let me let me pull up Tony here because Tony's got a good question. He says, hey, Dave and John, not sure if you're aware, but Marco Polo is no longer being developed and control plane. Its replacement has not been updated in over a year. According to the developer, he hasn't had time and is soliciting for assistance in the maintenance and support of the code base. Given this, do you guys know of any alternatives? Here's what I want to do. My 2016 MacBook Pro I use at both work and home and I transport the computer between the two when I connect to my work network, either by Ethernet, Wi-Fi or VPN. I want to connect to various network storage devices in the form of NAS automatically and then conversely disconnect accordingly. I'm willing to write the Apple script and or automator for this, if necessary. My issue is I haven't been able to find any resources online that reference this type of activity where it utilizes some context based trigger to initiate whatever Apple script or automator I write. He says, for me, that would be when I connect or disconnect to or from my work network. Yeah, so it's a shame that control plane is fading away. I remember how happy we were here on this show to find it when we knew that Marco Polo was going away. That honestly, the best currently developed replacement that I know of and really, if anybody knows of anything else, let us know would be Keyboard Maestro because Keyboard Maestro, it's a bad name, I think, for for what it does because it will let you write these macros that are triggered by things. Now, they don't have all the same triggers in Keyboard Maestro that Control Plane did. And I think, you know, there are some limitations there. If you're looking to just copy, you know, or replicate functionality from one to the other. But, you know, the folks that develop Keyboard Maestro are really on the ball. So if there is a trigger that you need that's not there, ask about it. They either will. I've done this many times. And usually the answer I get is, oh, you're not looking at it the right way, right? You know, it's like, OK, right? Get a wrap your brain around the right way to think about this. And then it's like, oh, yeah, OK, I can I can make that work this way. Oh, that's great. And, you know, it's a very, very powerful thing. I keep saying it's the foundation of automation on the Mac right now because of how flexible and powerful it is. So that's that's where I would head down. And again, just bear in mind that you might have to, you know, warp. If you're coming from Control Plane, you might have to warp your brain a little bit differently to get Keyboard Maestro to do the same type of thing. But I bet you can find a way. It's it's pretty powerful. But if anybody knows of anything else, you know, let me know. Let us know. What do you think, John? I does. I do. What does you know? Well, I think I know this. So one thing I want to suggest here. So he's talking about. Customized behavior based on what type of network one is connecting to. And I would think, though, I haven't dug into this as deeply as you have to. But I would think maybe little snitch, maybe able to. I don't. Does little snitch let you I mean, I've never done this, but you've indicated to me in the past that you've written scripts that will do certain things, depending on what type of network you're connected to. Is that correct? It's true files. Yes. Now, can they launch scripts? Because I'm thinking he's like, OK, well, if I'm on work network, connect to server work one, work to work three. If I'm on the home network, connect to server home one, home two, home three. It would sound like that's something maybe little snitch could do if it. Well, little little snitch can do things. But I don't. But little snitch can change its own profile based on the the network that you're connected to. But it it doesn't offer an external trigger for that. Like, so it's not going to go launch some other Apple script. It's just going to change its. It's OK. So we can't launch an app or something. Yeah. But that's too bad. But I'm looking at Keyboard Maestro here and there is a wireless network trigger that says, you know, this wireless network is with this name either is connected or is disconnected. So that would be one way to do it. I don't see anything about an IP range. So if it's Ethernet, that's where things could get interesting. I there was a and I think automator is that I. Oh, did I lose John? What happened? It's like, hey, hello, you're back. Cool. Well, did I go away? You did. Oh, OK. Well, I was just rambling on about how automator I've done this makes it real easy. It's like connect to server X or Y or Z. Oh, yeah. No, he just needs he just needs something to trigger it, right? Because that's what you would do is you would have Keyboard Maestro run your automator script unless there was OK. It sounds like little snitch can't trigger your automator script. Yeah. So you can't OK. You can't really attach a trigger or something by switch networks. It's keyboard. Yeah. It's keyboard Maestro is the is is the thing now. You would love messing around with keyboard Maestro, John. I highly encourage it. I think you'd you'd get a kick out of it because it does all kinds of very, very cool things. So yeah. So that's it. If anybody else has has any thoughts, let us know. That's that. I would love to do more, John, but I know I know us and I know that I don't think we're going to be able to do that in a way. You know what? We're going to we are. We're going to do it. We're going to go to Greg. Those two. We're going to go to Greg. Oh, not there. Yeah. Yeah. So Greg, because the those two are they're going to we'll be here for 15 more minutes. Yeah. Right. And I don't want to I don't want to cut that one short. Yeah. So Greg writes, he said, curious if you've ever encountered an issue like I'm having says, I've got a 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. And the issue is with video playback in Quicktime Player 10.4. There are no issues with the audio, but the video will stutter momentarily for less than a second, but long enough to notice. Says the video and audio remain in sync throughout the playback, but the stutters and glitches happen at semi regular intervals. Says I'm just using basic video files and before movies from a few cameras and camcorders that are stored locally on my SSD and or external hard drive. The problem only exists when using Quicktime Engine, Quicktime Player, QuickLook, iTunes, etc. No issues with streaming video from sites like YouTube and no issues when playing the exact same files in VLC. Here's the headscratcher as if that it's in and of itself wasn't the headscratcher. Here's the headscratcher, he says. Everything is fine on my primary user account on the Mac. All of these files play flawlessly in Quicktime Player. However, if I try to play the exact same files when logged into another account on the exact same computer, I get the glitches with the video. And he says, I even created an additional standard user account so that I knew I was using something clean, same issue. So there's one account that this does not happen to. And all the others on this computer, it does. So he says, since the video plays back in VLC, it's not really a big deal. But it shouldn't be happening and it's weird. So I don't know if we're going to have an answer for this, John, but but I figured it would be good to chat about for a couple of minutes here. And then if maybe somebody else has an answer, even better. You know, thoughts on all those. The only time that I've observed this behavior when using Quicktime. So I'm going to just throw out a wild speculation. That's all we got for lack of it. So sometimes I'll be playing back Quicktime videos. And I will notice it get pixelated at its stutters. And what is always happening at the same time is a time machine backup is. Occurring. What I think is happening is Quicktime maybe has a little issue with bandwidth management when it and when another task kind of takes more than it should. Huh, or CPU, CPU management or IO management, right? I mean, there's more. There's more than just bandwidth. There's lots of different things that the time machine. I'll have to look closer. And yeah, that's, you know, something like I stat menus. Because there's always something that's going to be a bottleneck. Yeah. Maybe is it disk usage? Oh, yeah. Or you're disband with or you're like in my case, the thing is the only time I notice this behavior is when the machine is also running a time machine backup. So yeah, it's just saturating my network connection and Quicktime rather than just totally failing says, all right. Well, you know, the I can only use this much bandwidth. So I'll do that and do the best I can. And then, hey, I'm back. Yay. Oh, I like that. That's just my wild theory because that's the I don't know. I mean, the other thing is just I don't know if it was mentioned in the question here. I mean, also, if you're talking wireless, then, of course, you have relatively less bandwidth available and the prioritization may not be that great. I'm not sure if it was indicated if this is happening on wireless or wired or both. Or I would guess. Well, I mean, I will guess. I don't know if I'm correct in doing so that, you know, logging into a different user account, he's not also like disconnecting wireless. I mean, these are local files anyway. But but, you know, clearly, something's changing. One thing I have noticed. We talked about this a little bit last week is that display preferences are unique to each user. So if you go to system preferences displays, you can set your resolution, your color, the arrangement, even, but and refresh rate, like the whole thing you can change per user on your Mac. So it's possible that he's done something in his displays preference that, you know, I don't know. Again, I'm, you know, I'm just throwing, throwing straws at the Hail Mary or whatever you're supposed to do it. I don't know. I don't have the right answer. Yeah. Do you throw straws at the wall and hope one sticks? Is that what you do? So it works. I don't believe that's what you throw. OK. Yeah. It's something else. OK. Wait. You wait till the straws hit the fan. Is that what it is? I don't know. I think that's when you're real close. It begins with S. Oh, the band came in, John. Oh, well, we'll have to table this conversation for the next time. Oh, thank you so much. We told you the email. We did tell you the emails. You want to tell us the phone number, John, or shall I? It's where is it? No, I think I found it. It's always in the notes here. It is the bottom. And I don't always look. But if I did look, I would tell you that you can call us with your questions, your comments, your tips. At 224-888-Geek, which is Dave, 4-3-3-5. You can also find us on Facebook. Go to MacGeekyeb.com slash Facebook. And we would love to have you participate there. Yes, we are still working on the other thing. And it's actually coming along really nicely. I want to thank CacheFly, of course, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. They've been partners with us for a really long time, and they provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Let's see. Where else are we here? Oh, yeah, I want to thank... Well, I want to thank all of you for listening. I know I did that once already when I'm doing it again. I want to thank all of our sponsors. As we said in the show, go to CodeWeavers.com slash MGG. To check everything out there, go to MacSales.com. Go to SmileSoftware.com. Go to BearBones.com. Go to Ring.com slash MGG. They got some great deals still there for you. Really good stuff. Thanks so much, everybody. This is a fun episode, John. You got... I enjoyed this today. It was a crazy day. I was actually really happy to come and, like, I always enjoy doing this show, but I especially was looking forward to it today. And you delivered. So do you have any advice to share with with all of our friends here, John? I do. You should always remember, especially when you're down and are looking for something fun to do. That you have fun, but don't have too much fun because you always run the risk of getting caught.