 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, Episode 782 for Monday, September 30th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together into an agenda. We loosely follow the agenda. And the goal being that every single one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include iFixit.com slash MGG and MacSales.com. We'll talk about each of those individually in a little while here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Trayville, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Peppy. All right, Peppy is good. Hey, no, I changed my name to Peppy. Oh, Peppy. Oh, so so you're going to start making pizza because that's some of the Peppy's pizza in in New Haven is some of the best pizza in the world, arguably the best pizza in the world. But they actually got one in Fairfield, too. Right. They have like five of them now. Yeah, I saw one and where were we? Oh, it like we went to see a concert at Mohican Sun and they have a Peppy's inside of Mohican now, too. Like a little Peppy's truck. Oh, yeah. I wanted to say, you know, lots of us got new iPhones and if you got a new iPhone, congratulations. Also, if you got a new iPhone, please, please launch the Mac GeekGab app on there that will register your new phone to get notifications from us when things like the live stream and episodes come out and things like that happen. So so just you just have to launch the app. That'll take care of it, assuming that you had opted into notifications before. If you hadn't, then that won't change anything. You still won't get them. It's all good. And of course, if you don't have the Mac GeekGab app, go download it from the app store. We'll put a link in the show notes, but you can find it in the app store at Mac GeekGab. It's free. You will love it. Check it out. We had some I guess that's a general tip is that so if so if you get a new phone, you want to relaunch your apps to get notifications. Depends on how the apps are doing notifications. But yes, that's right. Yes. Yeah, it is helpful to relaunch and and do all of those things. So and if you restore from a backup or migrate to a new phone, that setting, what you're saying is that setting may not migrate over. It may or may not. That's correct. Yeah, may or may not. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Speaking of all these changes, we have actually we have some some important stuff to get to. I posted something on Facebook about an article that we had written at Mac Observer about Safari 13 and how it changes extensions. In fact, exactly what we were talking about here last week on the show. Well, Rudy Richter from from one password. In fact, he makes the one. He writes the one password Safari extension. Comment in the first comment on my post on Facebook, which I'll give a link to was that you know, Apple gave everything all right over there. Mr. Ron, there's a little clicking and clacking. OK, just to make sure a cable by my bag safe on MagSafe. So I read MagSafe did. Gotcha. All right. Another thing he says Apple gave pretty ample warning that Safari extensions and the Safari extension gallery were going away. He says he said in his own admission, he says I was even a year late starting on the one password Safari app extension. But of course, he got it done in time. He did listen to the episode, though, and had a few things to note. He said there were a couple of things that weren't strictly true. Safari app extensions don't need to go through the App Store, which is something that we said they did in the last episode. He says they can be shipped inside a developer ID signed app, which goes through no review at all. If it's just coming direct from the developer, but it does need to be signed with a developer ID says no Mac App Store required, but in order for a Safari extension to exist, it does require an app, even if the app is simply a shell that does nothing. Old Safari extensions will call them legacy extensions. He said are largely HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Safari app extensions are Swift Objective C, CSS and JavaScript. The benefit is mostly to app developers where they need to have an extension that is incompatibility lockstep with a native application. So thanks for sharing that, Rudy. That's actually really good to know. So you don't it does not need to be bundled with an App Store app in the Mac App Store, but it does need to be shipped at bundled inside an app that is developer ID signed. And that kind of keeps things from we had. Many of us probably didn't didn't even weren't even aware, but there were a lot of extensions that were sort of cobbled together and just thrown out there, which was kind of cool initially, you know, to get things pulled together. But in Apple fashion, they wanted to tighten the reins. So thanks, Rudy. That's I love that we get that kind of help and clarification here. So yeah, man. The migration, though, is that it's weird because I saw different things happen on different machines. I want to my machines, all of them migrated over or upgraded themselves somehow. And then I'm looking on this machine here and in front of me, Dave, if I go to the Safari extensions, I see the ones that I thought had disappeared. It now shows a little download icon next to that. Interesting. It's just weird why, yeah. So, honey, go straight. And I run the same extensions on both right machines. So it's weird why they migrated on one and not the other. So if you notice that you've lost some of yours, look in the new in the Safari extensions and you may see the ones that disappeared with a little download icon or little cloud down thing next to them. Interesting. So that's what happened. So I don't know if. Cool. I guess that didn't happen to you. No, but I don't know that I run any old style extensions. I think I was. I mean, maybe I did. You know, I I actually was kind of fine with it clearing out whatever I whatever wasn't compatible. It seems to work just fine. But yeah, yeah, you don't know what you're missing. Yeah, a lot of those that were like JavaScripty were weird. But Ben was listening to the last episode and regarding compatibility, we've been talking about the changes to reminders. Don't fear the reminders, folks, but be wary of them because there are some of the things that we had posited in a previous episode are not necessarily the case, specifically with regards to third party apps and Caldav access to your reminders post upgrade. And listener Ben shared a note from Fahad, the developer of the to-do app and also the person who acquired Busy Cal, so is now the developer of Busy Cal as well. But he notes and there's a big long blog post that I will that I'll just link to in the show notes. But if you are syncing with a third party app that uses Caldav like Busy Cal and you tell your reminders to change, your app will still sync with the Caldav server, but the Caldav server will have nothing on it because all of your reminders that were in that database and Silo will be moved to a new database and Silo on iCloud when you upgrade them. And at this point, we don't think there's any Caldav access to the new Silo. However, there is still Caldav access to the old Silo. So if you want to use your third party apps to sync with iCloud over Caldav, you certainly can. Just take a backup of your calendar and then repopulate it when after you do the migration and boom, you pulled all that stuff up there, but it will be separate from what the reminders app sees post upgrade. So there's a lot going on here. And I think we need to give it a little time to shake it out. So personally, I am not going. I am not in any rush to click the upgrade button in the reminders app. I am fine living with the old school reminders and Caldav access to everything. And I'm going to give it a little time, but I really rely on reminders for my world. So like that's one of those things that I'm not in any rush to to change. I'm sure a year from now I will have changed and we'll figure out a new thing. But I think we need to let this is one of those things that wasn't really clear during the developer betas, at least not to me. And it seems like we kind of need to let this shake out for six months or so. So if you're relying on reminders and using anything outside of iOS 13 and Catalina devices running Apple stock apps to manage them, don't change the reminders. Don't fear the reminders. Just don't change the reminders. So yet we'll keep an eye on it. It is not only a professional interest because of what we do here in the show, but it's very much of personal interest to me. So never fear. We'll get you there. Thoughts on that, John. I'm not. Struck with reminder woes because I don't really use them. Yeah, you said it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mechanics of the mechanics are interesting, the underlying. Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. All right, speaking of compatibility, we might as well stay on this topic for a little bit, Mr. Braun. Jamie notes, he says we've known for a while that Apple is no longer supporting 32 bit apps on Mac OS and Catalina. But today, he says, I learned that the absence of those 32 bit libraries in Catalina also affects windows apps running under wine or as Mac users generally think of wine as an app called crossover. He says, I've been running some older windows apps under wine and crossover. I thought that I might simply need to update to a new 64 bit version of wine or crossover and all would be well. I imagine that 32 versus 64 bits would be a minor issue compared with supporting software design for an entirely different operating system. This is not so. No 32 bit windows programs will run under these apps in Catalina. And it sounds like any solution it is or would be a long way off. Yeah, because what wine does wine is a piece of software that's self-acronymic, self-referential acronym, acronym, recursive acronym, wine is not an emulator, right? Is what wine stands for because it runs your windows code natively on your processor inside Mac OS. Now, there's one abstraction layer and that's wine and that takes the windows APIs and frameworks and translates them to something that exists on Mac OS. But the actual code that's running is just running. So if that code is 32 bit and the host operating system doesn't have 32 bits, then there you go. That said, this sort of opens up a very good discussion for anyone, not just the small subset of you that are using wine and crossover. And that is I'll say it again, if your host operating system does not have 32 bit libraries like Catalina does not, it will not run 32 bit apps. But Mojave has those and you can take Mojave and virtualize it inside something like, you know, VMware Fusion or Parallels or even VirtualBox with that I highly, highly, highly recommend that everyone make a disk image clone of your Mojave Drive before you upgrade to Catalina. This way you will be certain to have your Mojave scenario with all the apps that run untouched before the upgrade or and then after the upgrade. And then you can virtualize and run that OS inside of your Catalina thing. If you ever run into a scenario in a week or a month or six months, you're like, oh, crap, there's that app that I run. I need to run it right now, like me with my scanner app, right? I know that that's not 32 bit compatible. So until I buy a new scanner, I cannot scan once I upgrade that one Mac that still can run the software. Once I upgrade that to Catalina, I'm done. I never will be able to scan again, because I can't even download the software and install it on Mojave. It's cobbled together and it works in that one scenario. So virtualize it and I can hold on to it for a very long time. So OK, so you would, you know, I don't think I've ever done this. So you would so you want to make an image so you would then import the image into whichever virtualization environment you want. Correct. Is it as simple as that? It? Yes, it is. It really is. Yeah. OK, cool. Yeah. But it has to be a disk image. OK. Well, I see it right now. I'm looking at parallels and it's like, oh, hey, you know, give me a DVD, a USB driver and image file. Yes. Do what you want. OK. And then I at that point, it would figure out that it's Mac. OK. Yeah. Yeah. But that I'm definitely going to do that. There's no quite. I mean, like that's an easy way to make sure you don't get yourself into a pickle where you're like, crap, I upgraded now. I can't do the thing I need to do. It's like, yeah, actually, you still can. So and you know, we always say it's a good idea to take, you know, a disk image of your drive on a regular basis. If for nothing else than to just have it in cold storage. Well, here's one of those great examples of why cold storage is a really good thing. So. Fun. Yeah. Keeps us. Don't put it in the freezer, though. But while you could, I mean, it depends. Like depends on what medium you have it on. But, you know, if you're if your fridge has enough storage, you could just copy it to your fridge. Wouldn't that be interesting if, you know, like refrigerators are huge things that powers running all the time. Why couldn't that be my server? Right. Like it's it's cooled. Like this like think about this when we got this crazy when we got our Synology disk stations and all that years and years ago. It was like, oh, wait a minute. This is cool because this is a computer that's running in my house at all times. It's got tons of storage in it. And so let's make use of it. And now, of course, we talk about how we run things like, you know, Plex and manage our media libraries and our backups and all that stuff on this computer that's running. Well, with refrigerators getting smarter and smarter, maybe it makes sense to just brief up their CPUs and put a little bit more storage in them because they cool themselves. They're something that's always running. You're always going to make sure your fridge has power even in the event of, you know, an extended power outage. You want to figure out how to power your fridge. So even for those of us that have like, you know, generators only on a few circuits, the fridge is always one of them. So I wonder, hmm, Frit, you're you're refrigerated in Nass. I don't know if I want a smart fridge. Oh, I think in the end, we'll all I mean, our fridges are way smarter now than they used to be. Right. And I think in the end, we will all wind up with fridges with with processors in them. So I'm just afraid it's going to like yell at me for like, you know, grabbing a midnight snack or something. They probably will. That's my myth. I mean, it knows what time it is. It's like, hey, you're not supposed to be eating. Don't eat now. It's not a good idea. Well, so that actually doesn't bother me. I don't mind when technology gives me help, helpful reminders like like my radar detector in my car. I honestly, when I drive, I rarely go more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit. Here in New Hampshire, that's the number, right? Judges won't don't want to see anybody as I'm told. Don't quote me. It's pretty much the same in most of these parts. Yeah. Although like Maine, I hear they're not there. They're a little tighter than that. But but here in New Hampshire, it's, you know, it's 10 over. And and and I don't really like I don't have some macho desire to speed. Right. If you do, don't take. Hopefully you won't take offense of that, but I don't. But 10 miles over, it's a nice little buffer. So I have my radar detector set. It can get the speed limits from, I guess, oh, from my app, because I use a escort radar detector and it has the app. It gets the speed limit from the app and then the the app will tell me. And you could do this with ways to write. I mean, it's the same kind of thing. You can have it warn you when you're 10 over. I don't mind that kind of reminder. I actually kind of like it. But I've had some people say, I hate that thing. It's scolding me. And like, no, no, this is a thing I told it to do. It's not scolding me. It's just telling me information I want to have. If and when that information starts getting shared with, say, my insurance company or my health insurance company, if it's my refrigerator, that's when I start getting a little worried. But but as long as it is self-contained and simply helping me, I'm in good shape. That's you could get a discount, you know, oh, I'm sure I could. Yeah. Well, no, they have those. Oh, I know, you know, they'll buy your information from you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And if you don't drive like a maniac, you get better insurance rights. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's a big brother. But, you know, it's how it goes. OK, yes, yes. In the morning here at Mackie Gab, Laura is next. And the final note on our and our Catalina migration thoughts. And as soon as I find it, I will read it. Oh, there it is. Laura is from Binary Fruit, which is the company that makes Drive DX. Really helpful utility that we've mentioned several times. And the most recent time we mentioned it, I think back in show seven seventy six. We mentioned an issue that we were concerned about because we were wondering whether they're smart driver because that's the only way to see smart status, at least in Mojave, for newer Macs, because Mojave has those old smart drivers. So it's not the only way, but it is one of the third parties are the only way to see them and Drive DX is one of those. We wondered if Drive DX's kernel extension would be compatible with Catalina. And in fact, it will. And we'll put a link to their to their release notes about it. But the current version, so the existing version, one point eight point three or later already has a driver that's compatible with Catalina. So you can do all the stuff that you would want to do in Drive DX with Catalina, which is great. So thank you for sharing that, Laura. That's super helpful to know. So I love that we have these app developers and companies paying attention and helping us kind of make sure we're all getting the right information out here. It's fantastic. I love I love that we get to be part of being that resource. It's good. Right, John, good. Absolutely. You know what resource I also love is I fix it at I fix it dot com slash MGG, where you can go to fix your Mac today and you get 10 bucks off at that link of your next fifty dollar purchase. We have to fix things all the time here. I, you know, actually had a rock star call me and ask me to take the hard drive out of his son's laptop like 20 years ago. And I had known this guy. It's actually it was actually Jan Homer, right? And I can share this story. Jan's been an old friend for a long time and he he needed the data out of his son's dead laptop. I was like, man, I don't take apart laptops anymore, but for you, Jan, I'll do it fine. And so I said, but it's a one way trip. I will go in and we'll get the hard drive out and then I will throw the shell away because it was like an old iBook. And I had no idea how to take this thing apart. So it meant sacrificing the computer, which was already sort of sacrificed because it wasn't working just to get the hard drive out. And so he was like, yeah, that's fine. I don't care. Just like we want the data. He's recorded some songs on there. It's like, yeah, no problem in. So I did success a successful operation. Had I had I fix it back then, though, A, I wouldn't have hesitated. B, I would not have had to destroy the laptop going in and C, maybe we would have been able to save that computer in its entirety all because I fix it is on a mission to make it easier for you to fix your electronics, especially your Mac because they've got all of those repair guides out there, John. And those are things that I use every time I open up a Mac because they know exactly what to do because they've done it. They have pictures. They have instructions. They tell you step by step what screws to mess with, what screws not to mess with. It's fantastic. And a difficulty rating and the difficulty rating. Yeah. So you can tell because, yeah, I've seen. It can help you determine whether you should try it yourself or maybe maybe not. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Perhaps someone else do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got to check it out. Go to ifixit.com slash MGG to fix your Mac today and get ten dollars off your next fifty dollar fix. Our thanks to I fix it as always for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, I have a quick tip for us all. If you are an Apple Watch user and you got a new iPhone, you may be like me, where you realize this is crazy. How come I have to keep typing in my passcode on my Apple Watch? That's new. Well, I realized that it was new because during my upgrade process somehow. And I don't think this happens for everyone, but it certainly happened for me. I did the device to device upgrade. I don't know if that makes a difference here, but my Apple Watch, my iPhone stopped unlocking my Apple Watch. And so I had to go into the watch app. And now, of course, I can't remember where I went, but it's in there somewhere. Oh, it's in. It's if you go into the watch app and go into passcode, there is an option there that says unlock your I can't even read it because I don't have my watch on. I don't. Anyway, there's an option in there to unlock your watch with your phone. I had that on previously upgrading to a new phone, and now I didn't have it anymore. So just go back in and turn that on. So good little quick tip. Yeah, Mr. Braun, thoughts on that? When I got to if and when I get an Apple Watch, that'll help. That's right. I forget you don't have one. I'm still I'm still analog in my I I I live in both worlds. I sometimes wear the analog. I sometimes wear the Apple Watch. I'm looking forward, though, to getting an Apple, a new Apple Watch. So I think I'm trying to wait for Christmas so that we can get them for for me and Lucas and make it a Christmas gift. We'll see. Nice. Yeah. Ah, yes. Thank you. I believe it's Brian Monroe that says the option is unlock with iPhone. He shared that in our chat room at mackeygub.com slash stream. So thank you, Brian. Excellent, excellent stuff. All right. Another quick tip. This one coming from listener Craig. And Craig says, I wanted to contribute in iOS Control Center, there is a feature to turn dark mode on or off. Go into Control Center and long press, which is where you just sort of hold on it because there's no more 3D touch, long press, the brightness intensity bar, and you'll be presented with several options. The option on the very left is the option to toggle dark mode. The label of the button is its current state. So if it says dark mode off, that means that dark mode is currently off. Not that the button will turn dark mode off. So it's just a little wonky. If you have it set to happen automatically, it's actually a little clearer because what it will say is dark mode off until sunset. But still, those are status reports, not labels for what the button does. The button will change that status is Craig's point here. So thank you, Craig, for sharing that. That's awesome. There is another way to do this in Control Center, John. If you go into you have to you have to add it to Control Center. If you go into Settings, Control Center, Customize Controls, you can add the dark mode standalone widget to Control Center. And in that way, you don't even have to long press on on the thing, you just you get a little thing that has the dark mode symbol, which is like two concentric circles with their half slight and dark. And you just tap that and it'll turn it one way or the other. So fun stuff. I like it. How do you use the dark mode on your phone, John? Go ahead. OK. No, there's something I think they change this in 13. Or maybe I was never aware of it. But if you also in the Control Center, if you press and hold down on the Wi-Fi icon, it'll list. It'll give you a list of other Wi-Fi's. I don't call it ever. No, that's maybe it didn't know you're totally right. That's new in iOS 13. Yeah. OK. And I think the same with Bluetooth. If I if I hold down on the Bluetooth, it'll show what Bluetooth devices are connected. OK, I thought that was new. Yeah, that's kind of handy. So you can select another base station if you want to. Yeah, without having to go into, you know, settings and Wi-Fi and all that stuff. Yeah, no, that's that's a great one. Very good. Very good. I'm going to have to press and hold on all of them now to see if there's new stuff. That's the key. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of glad they got rid of 3D touch. I always found that I'm glad they got rid of it and replaced it with long touch. That that feels like a much better long term sort of use case. The 3D touch, anybody that I've ever tried to show it to that's not, you know, geeky like us has always been like, hey, you pushed down like through it. Like, yeah, they're like, you don't just hold. I'm like, no, it's weird. Like, I don't want to push through my screen. I'm like, yeah, you won't. It'll be fine. You know, so yeah. One last quick tip from listener James. James says for the iOS keyboard with iOS 13, if you need a single character from a keyboard accessible from the keyboard switcher, i.e. the one to three button when viewing the alpha keyboard, you can tap on that button and slide to the desired character. So it's it's really hard to describe. But if you're on your keyboard and you see the little one, two, three in the lower left hand corner, tap and and you're not going to hold long, but you're just going to tap and it will change. And then you just slide to the number you want to hit and it will hit that number and then immediately go back to the alpha keyboard. So if, for example, you wanted to type the number six, the quote unquote old way would be to tap the one, two, three, tap six and tap the ABC again to get back to the alpha keyboard. Now you just tap and hold on one, two, three and slide your finger to six and you're automatically back at the alpha keyboard. I hope that makes sense. It does not work with emojis as it seems. Yeah, no, that doesn't work with emojis. You got to tap the emoji thing to get in there, probably because the emoji thing scrolls. So that would be a little weird, bright. But but yeah, so just tap the one, two, three and and get your character and then you're good to go. So very cool. And I will I will definitely use that, James. It's going to take a little bit to get into my, you know, into my muscle memory, but it'll get there. I think it'll get there, John. Do you think it'll get there? Only time will tell. Only time. That's right. For every season, turn, turn, turn. I don't know why I thought about that. Time is the essence. Time is the season. Time ain't no reason. Got no time to slow. Time everlasting. Time to play B sides. Anyway, well, it's one of my favorite lines ever written. Time to play B sides. Brilliant. Anyway, we're running out of time. We are running out of time. So says Jack Bauer. He would always say that. He would always say that. That's true. I think every episode he'd say that. Oh, yeah. OK. Three updates in one week, as long as you follow the Beatles definition. And then a week is eight days. I was 13.1.1 came out on Friday, John. So that's, you know, I see that. I mean, you can look at it either way. You can look at it as a reflection of the fact that I was 13 was pushed out before it was ready, which I think is certainly true. I think they were very much raced together. They were very much raced to get it out ahead of iPhones 11 arriving in people's homes and stores because if people needed to restore their iPhones 11, they needed to be able to download iOS 13. That said, it wasn't ready. So they had to do all these updates, but I'm glad to see them doing, you know, two updates to this within essentially a week of its release. To me, that's actually a good sign that they're, you know, aware, staying on top of it, very committed to making it, you know, good. We we had had iOS 12 was mostly an under the hood thing, right? So we had had some time of of stability, but not gobs of new features in iOS. And this time around, this is this is not the stability update. This is the features update, right? That said, it's been pretty stable for me. Even honestly, even 13.0 is fairly stable for me. But certainly 1311 has been good. But make sure you do those updates. Definitely, you know, just go to general software update and go grab the updates and make sure you're up to date, especially if you already updated to 13. If you had been waiting, well, you're probably fine to do it now. But if you had updated to 13, stay right on top of those. You don't want to mess this up. So. All right. Thoughts on that, John? I'm up to date. Good. David, listener David wrote, and he says, for some reason, my iOS mail doesn't show what I've done on the desktop. For example, emails remain in my iPhone's inbox, yet have been moved on the desktop to other folders. Any thoughts here? Well, I will tell you that you are in good company. I have seen this. I saw this in the last couple of betas of iOS 13 or iPadOS 13 on my iPad. And I saw it occasionally with the release version. I have not yet seen it since Friday with the 13.1.1 update. So it's possible that fixed it. It's also possible it didn't. And I've just been too busy to notice because it's been a busy weekend. But I think this is with not with iCloud accounts. I think it's with Gmail accounts, although listener David did email us from an iCloud account. So it's possible that that it's affecting more than just, you know, Gmail or IMAP accounts. It might be affecting iCloud as well. So if you've seen that and you're already up on iOS 13.1.1, let us know so that we can continue to track it and not just kind of put a pin in it. Market Fixed. Thoughts, Mr. Braun? Moving on. Moving on to listener Mike. He says, during episode 781, you had a question from John who was having issues with the new version of Safari. You discussed the problem with Gmail, but did not, which is now fixed with Safari 13.0.1. That problem where you couldn't add a Google account to macOS is now fixed with Safari 13.0.1. So I just wanted to get that out there. He says, but you did not answer his final question, which was how to revert back to an earlier version of Safari. Can you please explain how to do that? Well, yes, I can, but it involves formatting the drive and installing an earlier build of that flavor of the OS that does not yet have the Safari update. Safari is not like other web browsers when it comes to macOS because it very much also gets itself involved in the OS frameworks and things like that. So rolling back isn't as simple as just going and finding an old version of Safari and a time machine backup and putting it out there. It that generally will not work. And even if it were to launch, you're not necessarily getting the old version because again, it sort of, you know, Safari has impact on those foundational layers and stuff with macOS. That said, there is a browser called WebKit at webkit.org. WebKit is the name of a few things. It is the name of the frameworks that upon which Safari is built. Open source frameworks, I will note. But it is also the common name given to what Apple will call Safari Technology Preview, which is its own browser. And you can run WebKit, the browser, in your on your Mac alongside Safari. Most of the time, any of us that are running WebKit, the browser are doing it to get the new features of Safari, but it is self-contained. So if you get an old version of WebKit and they sometimes, well, they always have what they call WebKit build archives and we'll put a link to those, but they usually only go back a few days because they're just these nightly build, sometimes more frequently than nightly where they're just rolling them out. So that may or may not be the the best. You know, but that would be really the only way is, is, you know, go get the, you know, make sure you have an older build of WebKit and then you could use it would be the right thing to say. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? I like it. OK, that's good. Go to the past. It's too bad you can't downgrade Safari. Well, you'd have to, I mean, you're essentially downgrading your OS, right? I mean, a Safari update is an OS update, not just an application update, I think, is probably the right way to think of it. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, are we are we good there, my friend? OK, cool. Let's see, I want to talk about our next sponsor, which is Otherworld Computing at MacSales.com. When John and I need to buy new stuff for our Macs, MacSales.com is where we go. We say this all the time, but we say it because it's true. They really understand the Mac. They understand the products that they make. They understand how the two work together. And when there's a problem, they actually dig into it themselves to figure out what's going on where the compatibility issues are and how to fix them. They are they really are. There's a reason that they've been in business for, you know, what, 25 plus years. It's because they understand customer service and they understand technology really, really well. And they know how to marry the two together, which let me tell you, folks, it ain't easy. But they they're committed. They know what they're doing. And they're screaming new Envoy Pro EX with USB-C is, as they say, the fastest USB-C SSD ever built with speeds up to 980 megabytes per second on a bus powered, portable, dust tight and water resistant enclosure. It's an NVMe M.2 SSD in there. That's what gives it all that performance. Capacities up to two terabytes. It's IP67 rated, which means that it will last up to one 30 minutes in one meter of water, compatible with both Mac and PC, plus direct connected devices like USB-C cameras, which is cool and it's bus powered, fanless, super portable. That's the kind of thing we love out of OWC. And, you know, pricing, you can get the enclosure for less than 100 bucks and you can get the two terabytes for 29. Right. So like and then they have 250 to 500 to one terabyte underneath that. I think the one terabyte is 250 bucks. So you can, you know, pick your size. The prices are super reasonable. This is why we love OWC. They they make this great stuff and they're not out to get you. They're out to help you. So go check them out at maxsales.com and our thanks to OWC for sponsoring this episode. So, Mr. Braun, I have had the opportunity to check out the latest iteration of the low end MacBook Pro, the 13 inch 2019 MacBook Pro. I think I mentioned this on a previous episode that Apple had sent me one to check out because I wanted to know. I wanted the the new answer to the question that we were asking right about this time last year, maybe not quite a year ago, maybe 10 months ago, which was when Apple announced the new MacBook Air, aha, OK, do I get a MacBook Air or do I get a MacBook Pro? And back then the answer was really simple. I think it was a hundred dollar difference between the two. But it that the low end MacBook Pro was really not all that different from the air and it really didn't actually make sense to get the MacBook Pro then the air was the better machine. And that's what I wound up getting. And I have no regrets. I will say this, even after testing this and using this new MacBook Pro, I still have no regrets. This the air is still a really is a really capable machine. But let's talk about the differences between the 2019 MacBook Pro, 13 inch, the low end with two thunderbolt ports. And then the 2019 MacBook Air, which is almost the same as the 2018 MacBook Air, they added some stuff to the display and things like that and drop the price. So the price delta is now $200 for the base unit MacBook Air. It's a 1099, the base unit MacBook Pro 13 is 1299 and base unit is 128 gig SSD and eight gigs of RAM. We'll we'll circle back to that in a minute. But it's a $200 delta, no matter where you put the RAM in the SSD, it just, you know, it just sort of scales up and down. The biggest difference that you'll notice when looking at it is the touch bar on the MacBook Pro, which they've added now to this one versus the touch ID sensor on the MacBook Air. They both have touch ID sensors. The MacBook Pro also has the touch bar. You'll also notice, I also noticed the weight difference. It's an it's eight percent heavier on the MacBook Pro. It's 3.02 pounds versus 2.75. So about a quarter pound difference. It actually makes a much bigger difference than I thought it would on paper that MacBook Pro feels heavier, feels a little chunkier. It is a little chunkier, but the real reason I wanted to check it out, John, is that the new 13 inch MacBook Pro starts the low end version has a four core hyper threaded I five versus the two core hyper threaded I five on the air and geek bench speed tests confirm that. Like you get like seventy five hundred, you know, score multi core score on the air and like sixteen thousand on the on the MacBook Pro. That's screaming fast on that MacBook Pro. Like most of us probably have desktop machines that don't go that fast just because of the way these CPUs work now. It's also got a slightly better integrated GPU on the pro and Bluetooth five versus Bluetooth four point two. All of that said, I've spent probably two to three weeks using the MacBook Pro after spending six months with the air. So I, you know, I know what the air feels like. I've used the MacBook Pro for a few weeks. I even had my son use the MacBook Pro for, you know, a few days or whatever. We both really like that touch bar. That is the super handy. I really, really like the touch bar. It's at those of you that have them will think I'm, you know, sitting here like I invented fire, but it really makes a difference, especially now with the way Mac OS really makes it customizable. For example, it's it's very contextualized and you can have like mail is a great example because the touch bar for your male viewing window is different from the touch bar for your male composing window. And then you can customize those from there. So you really can get some things that are super handy changing tabs in your web browser is right there and it really, really handy. I do understand the the complaints that some folks have about a that the fact that the escape button is on the touch bar. It's not a physical escape button. That's that was honestly the weirdest thing to get used to. And I still find myself fumbling with it when I use the machine. It's like, oh, yeah, that's right. That's it's not there. But muscle memory, you know, we'll we'll come around on that. It's not so terrible, but it is noticeable. Screen brightness is also noticeable. I think the the MacBook Pro is, you know, what's 60 to 70 percent brighter than the air at its full brightness. And that makes a difference for sure. But speed wise, I never I mean, certainly with geek bench, John, I can run geek bench and see the difference between the two. There's absolutely no question. You know, it's two more cores, right, and faster GPU. No question. However, experientially with Mojave. I do not experience the difference no matter what I was doing. And, you know, I don't do a ton of like image manipulation. I do some, you know, we actually I do it fairly regularly, but they're not huge images we take. We'll create an image or something for, you know, for like the show notes, the crazy one that's that's on this with the cowbell because of, you know, the title of the, you know, don't fear the reminders. But, you know, we'll we'll create those images and then we run them through an optimizer called image optum, which I'll put in the in the show notes because it's super handy. But we run it through image optum and it, you know, it uses as much CPU as it possibly has to crunch that image down and compress it better for the web and strip out the extra stuff and all that. And it will. It'll use, you know, all of the CPUs and hyper threads on on any machine I have. So that, yes, I'm sure that goes faster on the on the MacBook Pro 13 inch. But, you know, I'm not doing that. If they regardless of which machine I'm on, it takes less than five seconds. So it's not like a huge time saver for me. I can totally appreciate, though, that if you if you are doing lots of truly CPU intensive stuff, that would make a difference. Most of us just aren't. So I really like no performance, responsiveness. Responsiveness is really probably the right word to use. They both machines are equally very responsive. No complaints about either one. And the air is lighter, you know, but the touch bar on the pros really nice. So when when we now ask, it's interesting because the differences between the two are are remarkable. Now it whereas a year ago, they were not. Or when the 2018 air came out, they were they were not remarkable. But now they are. It's like, OK, the pro has two more cores and the touch bar and a brighter screen. You know, it is it when you put the two next to each other, one feels like, OK, this is a pro machine. This is a general use machine. But for general use, the general use machine is actually a really good machine even compared to the pro machine sitting next to it. So unless you need or unless for peace of mind, you want that faster CPU, you really don't need the pro. But if you want or need the faster CPU, it's right there, which is awesome. And it's only 200 bucks. So, you know, boiling it all down and asking myself, what would you buy today? That's a really hard question because. It's easy to justify saying, OK, it's just 200 bucks, spend the 200 bucks, get the faster CPU and you're better off down the road. And knowing the way we sort of roll computers around in the house here, that's probably what I would do just betting on the future of that computer. But the other thing I could do is take that 200 bucks and buy some Apple stock with it. And then in like four or five years, that's probably appreciated. And, you know, don't that we're not I can't predict anything. But, you know, probably right. Apple seems to keep going up. Take that 200 bucks, put it in your favorite investment vehicle of choice and and then just use that money to buy yourself a new air in, you know, three or four years with a faster CPU and you're you're already then you're ahead of the game. So I there you go. Any thoughts on this, John? I know you are not quite yet, but soon to be in the market for a new laptop. And honestly, if you were in the market for a laptop today, I know you like the peace of mind of that faster CPU. So I think you would probably, if given the choice between these two, I think it correct me if I'm wrong, you'd probably lean towards the pro. I think this pro would be a great machine for you. I also think the air would be more machine than you need. But I grok the 200 bucks on the pro. So thoughts. Yeah. Well, I was looking at it. Yeah. So you pointed out, I think most of the differences. I'd probably opt for I like a larger screen, so I probably get the 15 inch. And also, there's an option where if you get the higher end, you get a four ports instead of two. So I'd like to have more ports because that was always the reason to get a pro or at least the last time I bought a pro was because I had all the great ports. Now it's less of a difference. You can get two or four. Right. Well, OK. So you get the higher end and the graphics. You know, I'd like to have better performing graphics because it looks like the air has the UHD or the discrete graphics. Right. They both have. They neither one of them has discrete graphics. Right. They both have embedded on the chip. Yeah. Yeah. I think the higher end pros you can get with a separate graphics chip, but these are both, you know, Intel on board. The let's see, the air has Intel Iris 645 and the. I need to pull this up because I think I mistyped what I was doing. But the pro, the pro has the Intel 645, which I think they call the UHD, but I'm pulling that up just to make sure of that. And that is the Intel. Oh, no, sorry. The pro has the Intel Iris plus 645 and the air has the where is it? Where is it? The Intel UHD graphics 617. I had them reversed on my chart here. So I'm glad you asked. That's good. But yeah, it is. It is a faster GPU in the or faster on chip GPU than it is. But I want to I want to address two things because I used to be very much of the 15 inch laptop variety. Pre retina days with retina, the 13 inch really is enough for me. It may or may not be enough for you. But I if you have not had a retina laptop yet, I you kind of have to go reset your brain because it's not the same and go and look at the 15 but also really give the 13 a fair shake because you you may find that that 13 is is what you what you really need. But you may you may not. But, you know, it's nice to have the portability of the or I'd like to think I need. Well, that's what I'm saying. You need to you need to sort of let go of those thoughts, right? And actually go and experience the 13 and the 15 and re decide from scratch, which which you actually need. Also, the same thing with the number of ports. Now that we are in USBC and Thunderbolt three, dongle land, you know, think about again, forget about the old days because they're no longer relevant. And think about what you're going to plug into this thing and how you're going to plug it in because two ports may be all you need. I've never been in a scenario where I'm like, oh, crap, I need another port because I'm using dongles to get the connectors that I need. And I get right. So I don't or a dock or whatever. Well, yeah, dock or dongle like you're right. Most of the dongles that we that I'm thinking about when I say that are portable docks is really the right way to think about it with several ports on them. Many of them, but not all can pass power back through. So, you know, the ones that that I tend to travel with are ones where, you know, I need one dock and it does everything. And I've got an extra port at all times, you know. So again, it's worth like these are not if you have a computer that's pre-USBC and pre-retina, you need to like what you know about how you use your laptop is not relevant to how you use these devices. That's all that that's all I'm saying is you just kind of need to come in with a fresh mind and look at it because it's, you know, because it's different. So but these are good machines. I'm really impressed. Yeah, I mean, you let me type on the one you had and keyboard seemed fine to me. So whatever they screwed up on the past ones. Yeah, the keyboards on both are fine. I my air that I bought back in whatever December had the repeating key issue as it seems they all did. My sons did as well. When I started testing this new one, I thought, well, this is a perfect opportunity. So I sent it into the depot and had them fix it, which they did. And now my airs keyboard is is I think they not only fixed it, but I think they updated it with the new layer that like that. I don't know, there's some layer that they have in the new ones that they are retrofitting into the old ones when they come into the depot. So yeah, the keyboard, I honestly, between the two machines, I I don't know if the two keyboard mechanisms are exactly the same. I actually like the air. My airs replacement keyboard mechanism, I like better than whatever this pro has. But that may or may not be your experience, because I don't know which is which. And they might be the same. And just, you know, one is one is broken in a little more. I don't know. So. But for me, I actually like currently I like my airs better. We'll see, you know, how it is in six months or something if it because it was just replaced. Yeah, it's fun. As Brian Monroe in the chat room says his advice to people, he's a consultant out in the Bay Area, and he says his advice is if you have a desktop, get the air. If you don't and your laptop is your only machine, get the pro. I generally would agree with that advice. I mean, there's, you know, asterisks that you can always put on things like that, but as a baseline to start with, that's pretty good advice. And then kind of apply your own scenarios to tweak it from there. Fun stuff, though, I'm really impressed. And I, you know, when that new laptop came out, I definitely had like that, that that new MacBook Pro, the rev to it came out. I had that FOMO like, crap, if this had existed back in the fall six months ago, that's what I would have gotten just based on specs alone, you know. And and so I that's why I wanted to dig into this to find out. OK, what's my fault? How bad is this FOMO really going to be after I get to experience it? That was I was surprised. It's like, no, actually, you know what? I really like my air like that's a really good machine. And I might even, you know, buy one for me or even for my kids or whatever. Like it's it's still still relevant. So, yeah, and the weight is nice. It's the lighter air. I know it's only a quarter pound, but cart that thing around a bunch and it actually makes a difference. Fun, fun, fun. Yeah, yeah. Brian in the chat room saying the air is a good machine. Don't overthink the specs. It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Apple, there's a lot that goes on between the hardware and the software to make things really efficient. And and it's it's worth remembering that. So. All right. Where are we here, John? I'm looking at the time now. I want to take a minute and thank all of this week's premium contributors that contributed as part of our Makikab premium program. As we always say, you know, it takes everything to make this work. Sending in your questions. Well, let me let me rewind that. Simply listening to the show and subscribing is awesome. Like that helps it immensely. But none of the rest of this exists without that happening. And if you're a listener and you want to help. Suggest to a friend or post somewhere that maybe somebody wants to subscribe because we can answer their questions and they can learn some stuff. That's great. Sending in your questions also helps, right? But we have one, you know, level beyond that, which is if you want to contribute directly, financially, you can do that. And we created this because you asked for it many, many years ago. And and it turns out it's it's what it's what some of you want to do. And for those of you, we thank you. It's all available at MacGeekUp.com slash premium on the monthly plan, which by default is ten dollars. We have Jeff from Chesterton, Frank from Tunbridge, James from Melville, Joseph from Marietta and Robert from Columbiana to thanks. So thanks to all of you. And on the biannual plan, the default of which is twenty dollars, but you can change. Sorry, twenty five dollars, but you can change that. We have to thank Andrew from Honolulu, Royce from Yua Beach, Lee from Hampton at fifty dollars every six months, Bryn from Sun City, James from Fredericksburg, Daniel from West Laco, Martin from Carlsbad at fifty dollars every six months, Sharon from Wesley Chapel, Roger Y and Randy from Westport. Thanks to all of you for participating and contributing and all of that stuff. You are amongst our most loyal fans and we appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Mr. Braun, what do we got here? You got anything or should we move on to some mesh questions? Because you know, mesh, all right. We love talking about mesh here. And and we have a question from Randall about mesh. He says Dave and John. I'm finally thinking of retiring my airport extreme router. It has been a rock and survived ten years of lightning power surges that killed Teavos and even a UPS and two software engineers, sons. Too bad, Apple bowed out of this market. I said, sorry to bug you about this, but I have total review fatigue. The ones I think will work for me end up having a ton of nasty reviews, I either neck here Orbeez and the hero sounds great, but has other disadvantages. He says, I need ease of setup, but I do not want iPhone setup. I am hooked on my ability to log into my router via web interface on my laptop. I also need three satellite, three ethernet ports at each satellite unit. I would add switches if the system was otherwise super good. OK, that's good to know, because most have two. Ideally, auto firmware updates, but this is not a deal killer. Ideally, three radios, but not two. He says, I cannot support wired backhaul, which is why I really want to lean towards three radios and good support and a durability record subscription only as a last resort. He says, really, what I'm looking for is a simple buy this, you dope, and I'll be fine. So your requirements do put you in a weird spot, Rand, because the good ones and that's my definition of good ones, which would be Eero, Deco, Amplify and Plume are all iPhone managed. Of those, most of them are cloud managed with the iPhone. And one of them, Amplify is not cloud managed, if that was your concern. So what I mean by cloud managed is, for example, with Eero, you never configure settings directly on any of your Eero devices. You configure them in the cloud and they are pushed down to your Eero devices from there, whereas Amplify does not have cloud management. You even though you do it with an iPhone app, you are talking directly to the Amplify. So that maybe I know some folks don't like the idea of cloud managed. And so maybe that helps for if not for Rand and for one of you listening. Synology's mesh is really the one that meets most of your requirements here with the MR-2200AC. It is web interface managed. It is. It's a great web interface. And my only hesitation about the Synology Mesh and why we haven't moved it to the top of our list is that it's new. Relatively speaking, it's new. I know now we're starting to get to the year plus period with it here. And that's a good thing. Software updates have been coming fairly regularly. Every new mesh product when it comes out has some scenario of unreliability because as much testing as you can do on your own in your labs and your employees' houses and all that stuff, there are tons of scenarios that you simply cannot test for with mesh. And we've seen this, right? And so it has to be iterative and they have to be committed to iterating on it. And Synology is, which is good. And now it's getting to the point where it's fairly stable. You know, you can sort of do whatever you want. There was a time right when it came out that if you hooked up via Ethernet in the wrong scenario, you would get like terrible performance. And it was just one of these, you know, edge, but not quite edge cases where if the two units were too far from each other and you connected them with Ethernet, if they couldn't really see each other Wi-Fi, it wouldn't work right. And I was like, well, that's sort of the point. But they fixed that, right? Like, and they've been continually iterating on this, which is really good. And what's cool is you can get, you know, our favorite router here, which is the RT-2600 AC, and that can participate in the mesh. Or you can just get the mesh routers and use one of those as your main router and then the others as your satellites. And they all have three radios, you know, and they're all going to be able to do what you want to do. So this may be the first time that I am recommending Synology's mesh to someone in this scenario. But for what you're looking for here, Rand, I think you're going to like it. And one of the benefits that you get is you get to do things like, you know, cloud station or Synology drive. So if you want to hang a USB drive off of this, it can now be your, you know, private cloud as well. There's some additional things that you get just by being in the Synology family. So I think that's where I would go with this. But I'll put a link to my my mesh piece. I've got to update it with the sort of the latest Synology stuff because that that is starting to percolate into the the realm of what I'm comfortable recommending. So. So yeah, one thing they mentioned that they're at the gig that they recently had. Not a big secret, but in the next DSM, they're going to they're going to create a new or they've created or made it easier to define a new category of storage. They call it hybrid cloud, which kind of brings their private cloud and cloud cloud stuff together. And that when you're setting it up, you can actually say, Oh, I'd like to use. Well, hang on. I want to I want to sort of draw a line here. What we're talking about has nothing to do with their mesh units, right? Other than they're made by the same company because at this point, the mesh units don't have the ram in them to do some of those more advanced things that you get out of a disk station, right? So so I just don't want people to be misled that that this feature is coming to the mesh units. It may, but I wouldn't count on it. That's all it is coming to the disk stations. But perhaps not all of those either, right? Whatever can run DSM seven gets right gets this, right? And maybe the mesh units do, too. I don't know. I just wanted to kind of draw a line that that DSM has nothing to do with the machine. That's all. But it is cool that. Yeah, explain that hybrid. So I interrupted you just to make sure we didn't get too deep without someone understanding, but explain this hybrid cloud thing. Please. But they're basically when you're setting up a cloud service so you could use their cloud cloud service, which they call C2, or you could use your own storage, you know, on your your DSM. They're going to or on your Synology, they're going to be creating an easier way to combine those. And I think they're going to be calling it hybrid cloud. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's too. Yeah, because the point that they made at the presentation is that, you know, people are moving more towards combining the two solutions rather than just having one or the other. Yeah, that you shouldn't have everything in someone's cloud and you shouldn't have everything just on your disk station. So fortunately, they offer both products. So that's nice. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. All right. In the in that. So yeah, I like that. That's pretty cool. That that makes sense. If you don't, if you want to have the flexibility of hosted cloud, while also having the benefits of private cloud and the speed of private cloud and all that stuff. So yeah, it's pretty good. I like it. Cool. Cool. And it's new. I think you were surprised about what's coming up here as I was or I don't know. Yeah, no, I didn't realize that was coming, but it makes sense. It's good. You know, it's it'll be I'll be curious to see how many people choose to take advantage of that, right? Because what are we talking about? First, go ahead. Yeah, the Euro introduced a new unit. So I guess now there are four distinct products, right? Uh, from the newest one, they're they're calling. Well, it's a ninety nine dollar Euro, right? Versus their higher end one, which I'll call the second gen. And then they have the beacon. So the three, three units. So they're probably. Yeah. Yeah. So the product line isn't getting to because at first I'm like, why would I want to get this? And why would you, Dave? Right. That's a good question, right? So the original Euro was a two radio unit, dual band. One, two point four, one, five gigahertz. And, you know, we we've talked about them for a very, very long time. The Euro Pro, when that came out as their second gen unit, had three radios, two, five gigahertz and one, two point four. And where that's handy in a mesh scenario is it means the extra radio can, if necessary, be used to dedicate for just backhaul between the mesh and really make things a little more efficient. Sometimes it makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn't. It depends on your house and your layout and how you're using bandwidth and all of that stuff, but certainly can make a huge difference. This new ninety nine dollar. So the Euro Pro, which is the second gen, is one ninety nine per unit. And you can buy bundles where you save a little bit on on buying and, you know, essentially bulk and all that stuff. But it's two hundred bucks a unit. The new Euro has a slightly different form factor, but is its own standalone thing that could be used without any of the other Euro products. I mean, you can obviously the point would be to mesh them together and make that work, but it can be your router. If you don't need to pair it with an Euro Pro to be the router, the ninety nine dollar Euro can be your router. You can get a three pack of them, but it's ninety nine bucks for the unit or two fifty for a three pack. So you save fifty bucks if you buy all three that for if that's what works for your home, that's a great price point, right? Two fifty for a three pack of these, you know, dual radio heroes is great. And I looked at the specs. I haven't talked with them about it, but I looked at the specs and the CPU RAM and storage in these is the same as the Euro Pro, which means all of the great stuff that you can do with the Euro Pro like queuing management and buffer bloat protection and all of that stuff. You know, with with Euro security, if you want to buy their subscription for the security stuff and all that, like in theory, the two are equally capable because really the only difference between them is the extra radio. So that that's what this is. And for a lot of people, I think this is great because Euro software is fantastic. They're the you know, the cloud learning and the machine learning that they've done to figure out how devices interact well with each other really has helped them and and is part of the reason that they are so far, you know, they are at the top of our list. And so to be able to do that and enter into this for two fifty, that's a pretty good deal. So so yeah, I'm stoked about it because it really does open this up for for folks. Yeah, as folks in the chat room are pointing out, you know, it doesn't have Wi-Fi six. No mesh solution has Wi-Fi six right now. Your iPhone 11 has Wi-Fi six, which is sort of odd because I'm not sure that an iPhone would need that speed more than, say, like a desktop or something. But for most people, your internet connection is not going to go fast enough for that to really matter, although it does help a little bit with range and that sort of thing. But yeah, you know, give it a few years. We'll get to where Wi-Fi six is helpful in some scenarios. But but you know, Wi-Fi five, which we call 802.11 AC is is fantastic and works really, really well. I certainly am not hearing from people or experiencing any issues where it's like, I can't wait. I need the next generation of Wi-Fi in my home. We're not there yet. We will get there as technology sort of moves forward and requires us to have more bandwidth. But at the moment, that's not the case. So yeah. Any thoughts on this, John? I need it. Yeah. Well, you already have. I mean, you've got what, a couple of Euro pros and a beacon now, right? Yeah. So works for me. I think you have too much Wi-Fi in your house. But, you know, but you also have no, I don't have enough. I don't have enough devices in my house. That's the problem. That is true. That's the that's the answer to that. That's right. You just need to get more clients and then and then to to overwhelm my network. Yeah, to overwhelm your network. Yeah, exactly. All right. Let's, yeah, we've got time for a few more questions here. Let's look. Gary has has an issue. Gary, number one, I'll call him. He has been having issues with his Mac and started doing some tests. And one of the tests that he did was he wanted to run disk first aid because he says, you know, he feels like his Mac is beach balling at times when it shouldn't be and apps are messing up when they shouldn't be. And he got online with Apple support and. They had him do what we will call a live mode disk first aid test that you can do inside of disk utility. And he said the system was so slow during that test that he was really worried about things. That is actually a very normal time for your Mac to be almost unresponsive. And by live mode, what I mean is you've booted from your Mac's drive in normal mode, right? Everything is, you know, as you normally would, you launch disk first aid or you launch disk utility and you tell it to run first aid on your boot disk. That's lie. That's what we call live mode for disk first aid. And when you are scouring your boot disks structure for problems, it will slow down everything on your Mac because your boot disk is no longer as accessible as your Mac normally needs it to be. So seeing beach balls during that test is not a problem. In fact, if you didn't see beach balls, I'd like to hear from you because I'd like to know what kind of drive you're running that can survive that sort of thing without any impact on performance. The the right way to run disk utility is in not live mode, either booting from a separate driver, simply booting from recovery partition that usually works. But even that will slow down a little bit, but you don't have other things running so you don't really care. Another thing that you can do, though, to test your disk is run a Blackmagic disk speed test. Blackmagic speed test is available on the Mac App Store. And it's super easy to point it at a drive by default. It looks at your, you know, your boot drive, but you can tell it to point at other drives and it will do it will by by default. It will write a five gig file to the disk and then it will read that five gig file and then it will wipe it and write that file and read that file back and forth until you tell it to stop. And you get it will show you all kinds of things. But really what you care about is how many megabytes per second that disk can do. You just heard us talking about the OWC, the external USPC SSD during the ad spot that does like, you know, 980 megabytes a second. That's really good. Internal drives will often go faster than that, just to point out, but not all of them. And and it's this is one of those things. You know, we talk in the show about knowing what normal looks like. You know, I just because I'm a geek, I run disk first. Sorry, black magic on pretty much every Mac that I get right out of the gate. And I log those numbers so that we can mention them here in the show, but I don't delete my log. I keep them so that four years from now, if I run that same test, I can say, is it still performing the way it did originally? You know, Gary and Gary did run black magic. And I think what Johnny found that his speeds were like 30 megabytes rights and 40 megabyte reads or something. That may well be normal if he's got a spindle drive in there. Right. So yeah, 30 right and 40 read. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your read is always, your read is typically always going to be faster than right. Right. Right. Yeah. First, when I saw those numbers, I was like, oh, well, that's terrible. And it may well be terrible. I would say for an SSD, I'd be automatically be like, there's something seriously wrong with it, but a rotational I'm with you. I'm trying to remember. Yeah. Because some rotationals, I think, can reach hundreds of megabytes per second, not many. Yeah. Right. Right. It's not the most common thing to see. That's right. Yeah. I wonder if they crippled, you know, they crippled the I remember this on one of my early, you didn't say what type of machine this is, but I remember they actually one of my IMAX, even though I had a SATA 3 port, they actually put a SATA 2 drive in there. I'm like, are you kidding me? How cheap can you get? So. Huh. Right. I remember that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So know what normal looks like. But also if that is, if that's not normal, then, you know, where the problem is, if that is normal for your drive, I would say you also now know where your problem is. Mojave and even High Sierra, but certainly Mojave and I would presume the same to be true about Catalina really isn't built to be run well on non SSD drives, rotational drives and Mojave. Like we don't talk about it. We talk about it fairly frequently on the show. We don't talk about it nearly as often on the show as we get emails about it. It is constant with people saying my max too slow. It's like, OK, well, what are you running? It's like, I'm running Mojave on this older machine that has a spindle drive. It's like, yeah. Yes. Unfortunately, that is just a fact of life. Right. So you need to if you're going to run Mojave and Catalina, do it with an SSD. You're huffing and puffing over there, Mr. Braun, everything OK? I'm having a thought. OK. I don't know if it's going to make you cringe or shake your fist. Defrag. Oh. If it's a rotational drive and it's getting full or it's been running for a while, drive genius. And I think some other utilities have a defragment. I don't know if that would help. You know what? It might. I don't honestly, I don't think it will. It may help incrementally, right? But I don't think it's going to help. It's not going to be like, oh, life is good again. Mac OS does a lot of its own defragging, right? Right. Right. To sort of ward off those terrible scenarios. But it's not. It can't do everything. So you certainly could, but I don't think it's worth it. And honestly, if you're going to do a defrag, the way I would do that and there's for the record, there's no defragging to do on SSDs. So do not do this. You'll just waste your time and burn up right cycles on your SSD. Well, they probably won't let you. Like right now, it's actually dimmed on my one machine or both. Because right, it's like you got an SSD. I'm not going to defrag that, dude. Right. Right. But the way I would defrag a disk is I would clone it to another drive. I would wipe the drive and I would clone it back. That will defragment the disk. But, you know, carbon copy cloner does that just fine. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't expect remarkable changes. You might get noticeable changes, not remarkable, but you're right. I mean, that that is that's you're right. That's the old school advice. If you rewind whatever, you know, 13 years and 12 years here on Mac eCab, somebody writes in and says, my machine has gotten slower. Defrag is the first thing we would have said. So, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Indeed. Indeed. All right. Gary, number two asked. I was on Mac break weekly earlier this week with Leo LaPorte and and Gary said, excellent job of lighting, sir. What did you use? How did you do that? So I sit here in my studio and which is, you know, my podcast studio, but it's also my music studio. So there's drums and amps and things like that in here. But when I built the studio, I made all the walls purple and the ceiling is also purple. It's a dark purple color. It's great. I love it. But it does give me a nice dark background. But I have no lights in front of me. So I bought one for like thirty five bucks on Amazon. I bought this LED panel, John, that allows me to set brightness and color temperature. And so I can get a really nice sort of diffused light to light my face when I'm doing any kind of video chats. And so I'll put a link to to that one in in the show notes. It's it's if you're doing any sort of thing like that, it's a really easy way to go. And it's super handy because it's battery powered or you can plug it in. I had a power adapter for it that, you know, it's just 12 volt power. I think it needs two amps or something. So I found I think it was an old Synology disk station or maybe a Drobo or something from years ago that I'm not using and it had come with a 12 volt three amp power adapter. So it's like, oh, yeah, perfect. That worked. But it's built for, you know, it's built for people using cameras and things like that. But there you go. I have the tacky Ted was asking how so how do you have it set? I have it set at the both the lowest percentage of brightness, which is 20 percent and 3,300 K, which is the warmest color you can do. You know, my face is always going to be lit by the computer screen in front of me, which is a very sort of cold color. So having this set warm, I really didn't need to add brightness to the scenario. I just needed to add some spread to the color. So I had this thing off to my side because I've got some lights over on my left. So I have this over on my right. And so if you were watching the video, it was on your left. And it makes a difference. So in like 35 bucks, easy. Andy and not code sort of turned me on to the concept. Then I sort of ran with it from there. But but Andy gets credit for it. So for the idea. Yeah, it's fun. You will see it soon here on Mac Geek. I promise we're going to start doing some video stuff, because. Yeah, no, it's fun. We'll get you one of these light panels, too, John. We'll make make you look all pro and and, you know, delicious. Maybe I'll use those new bulbs like that. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The light bulbs are not generally not the thing that works well for a scenario like this. But they can it. But the the panel where you've got, you know, more spread so that it's not just single source. It's a little bit, you know, right? Well, yeah, I mean, well, pro setups. I mean, they always have I'll call it a diffuser. I guess is what it is, is that you got a bright light and then you got something that the scatters it about. Right. Well, even and the panel sort of does that. Like that's the new way of doing it is just get a panel and then you can stuff diffuses. Yeah, it's worth taking a look. I put a link in the show notes and in our chat room. If you're if you're in our chat room, folks. All right. Where are we here? You know, I will share one last cool stuff found before we get out of here, John. We we have lots more to talk about. But as always, never enough time. But Peter did share a very handy little little tip with us because, you know, we talk about clipboard managers and he says, I thought you'd let I thought I'd let you know about unclutter, which I use constantly. It's in the Mac App Store and allows you to copy up to 25 different items, which you can then view with a very handy drop down from the top of the screen with a simple mouse swipe. You can click into it and it's ready to be copied. You can then scroll to find the appropriate text that you wish to select. It also allows you to favorite items, which is handy for repeat pastes. Oh, that's interesting. And also it stores files and notes in Dropbox so that you can sync them to your multiple computers. Oh, that's really interesting. So I couldn't live without this great little tool and I have it installed on both of my Macs. So we will put a link to that in the show notes as always because that's what we do here. And thank you for that, Peter. That's great, man. Cool. Fun, fun stuff, Mr. Braun, any more thoughts before we before we get ourselves out of here for the day? Nope. All right. Well, then we will find the band out in the beautiful New England fall day. Actually, I have a gig this afternoon in the fall, which is I love. I had an outdoor gig last night, even so. Yeah. Fun seems unseasonably warm. It was like 80 for a couple of days. I like it. I'll take it. It's good. It's good. Yeah, a little breeze and. Yep, it cools off nice at night, so it's good sleeping weather. It's good. It's good. Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can, because I hear we're going to get going to get slammed this winter. Yeah, the farmer's almanac says the winter is going to be going to be good old Ben Franklin, right? But that was him, right? Farmers almanac, right? At one point, I don't know what runes they cast to get their forecast. But, you know, yeah, exactly. Hey, if you would like to help us, leave us a review, go to MacGeekUp.com slash reviews, and that will get you as close as we can on Apple podcasts to where you can actually leave us a review. We got two this week that I want to read quickly here. One was from 27 Delta from Canada, five star review that says hands down the best podcast for solving problems and learning tips and tricks for iOS and Mac OS. Thank you, 27 Delta. That's awesome. And then from Geeks Corner UK from, as you might guess, the UK says the title is definitely worth listening to. I've been listening to these guys for several months now, and I absolutely love it. They always share five new things, which have often taught me something I didn't know. I listen on two time speed, which does cut down on the length, which at times can be long. But I would happily listen to more from these guys every week. So thanks for that Geeks Corner UK. That's pretty awesome. We love it. We really do it. And that it helps whatever, you know, algorithmic stuff goes on. It Apple podcast to help keep us in the charts, which brings in more listeners, which is good because it means more people to sort of share in the conversation and all of that. So it is a good thing. Anything else, John, before we before we get out of here. Hmm. No, OK. Make sure you listen to us wherever you want to listen. Subscribe wherever you want to subscribe. We hope we can be there. If there's any place where you listen to podcasts that you're like, oh, if only you could be here, let us know. I think we're everywhere we can be. But, you know, we're always we're here to learn. And that could be one of our five new things in a week. Email us your questions, your information, your tips, whatever it is, just to say hello if you want. 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