 The MacObserver's MacGeekGab Episode 778 for Monday, September 9th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the MacObserver's MacGeekGab, the show where you send in all kinds of stuff. Questions, tips, cool stuff found? You know, the kind of things that get us all thinking about these Apple devices that we love. And then we, to your questions, try to provide answers into your tips and cool stuff found. We try to do our best in sharing them amongst all of us here, with the goal being that every single one of us, including me and that guy there, every one of us learns at least five new things every week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ExpressVPN.com slash MGG and Barebones.com where you'll get BB at it. We'll talk more about both of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Triple Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How are you today, Mr. John F. Brown? Things good? Yeah. Average. All right. Maybe a little below average. Oh, no, that's not good. It's like a beautiful not yet fall day out there because it's not yet fall. It's still summer. Yes. I hold on to the summer. I like it. I love fall here, too. But you know, every season gets its time and then it changes. And that's OK. But here in New England, summer is great and fall is arguably even better. But there you go. For those of you listening before Apple's event on Tuesday, or even those of you listening after, this is our plan to break from form this time around. Mr. Brown, do you want to tell them? You want to share the news with them? The news. No good news is good news. Well, except unless it comes from Gary Gnu. Right. Oh, well, you remember him. Of course. You want to share the news, though? We're going to be doing a special episode after the event and we're going to have a special guest. That is true. Should we tell them who the special guest is? No, we'll make them wait. It's fine. We'll be able to look online because we'll put it in the show notes. But there you go. Yeah. We won't tell you now. We may tell you by the end of this episode. But yeah, we figured we were talking about this and like, well, should we release an episode Monday only to have this Apple event Tuesday and then have to wait an entire week? It's like, wait a minute, we there's no rules here. We nobody tells us. We make the rules. We make the rules. Exactly. So that's what we're doing this time is we're making the rules, which is good. Yeah. So I don't know how long that episode will be. I'm not exactly sure what the format will take, but obviously we'll just focus on talking about whatever it is that Apple does and our thoughts about it and how it's going to affect all of us as like Mac users and iPhone users and Apple watch users and all of that good stuff. So yeah, fun, fun, fun, because that's why we do what we do here because it's fun. And that's what we tell ourselves every single time. No, it actually is fun. Donna has a quick tip that's fun. Donna said, if you long tap the iOS screenshot preview, it will bring up the share sheet. So you can quick tap it and then you get different options, but if you just hold on it, you get the share sheet immediately. And we're talking about that preview that appears in the corner of your screen right after you take a screenshot. It will disappear or you can swipe it to disappear and then it'll just save your picture. But, but if you long tap on that. So don't force tap, just hold for a little bit and then boom, up comes the share sheet and you can just share it immediately. And then of course, after you share it, it asks you, do you want to save this to photos or do you just want to delete it? Which is a really, I'm like, that was one of those evolutions that I was really glad to see. Like I want to be able to send a screenshot to that person, but I don't need it in my photos library. So there you go. Very cool. Thank you, Donna. Quick tips. It's good. Yeah. Of course, I was scratching my head over why I only saw one of my machines in the airdrop. Option. Yes. And then you told me, I forgot, Wi-Fi has to be on in order for you to airdrop things and it's not on one of my machines. So that's why I don't see it. Well, an airdrop kind of stinks on Mac OS anyway, it's in an unreliable way. But yes, Wi-Fi, having Wi-Fi on is, I think is table stakes for airdrop, right? I think that has to be there. Did turning it on work for you or didn't you want to mess with your network before we... I didn't want to mess with it. I appreciate that. It's on my podcasting machine, so... Sure. Yeah, I don't want to traumatize it. At this very moment, I'll do it later. That's good. Yeah, no problem. Yeah. Like I said, I appreciate that line of thinking. That's a good thing. Brian, listener Brian, reminds us that there was yet another Mojave supplemental update to 10.14.6 this week. And I... Yeah, it came through. What was interesting for me about it, I think it happened on all of my Macs. You know, it's hard to say, like, it's like, oh, yeah, okay, fine. There's the update. There it is again. Did I get it three times? I think so. I don't know. But on one of them, the one that I watched while it was happening, the screen went black. In fact, it was this one, the podcasting machine, screen went black. I got the, you know, Apple logo with the progress bar that told me how long it was going to take to do the update, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, no problem. And then when it finished, the black screen faded and gave way to my prior desktop and my machine had not rebooted. It was just still running, doing the update. Just didn't let me interact with it on a, you know, with the mouse or the keyboard while the update was happening. Did you notice that on yours, John? Or am I making things up? No, that wasn't weird. Some of the most recent updates have done bizarre things. Okay. All right. So it's not just me. Yeah. Okay. Huh? Good. Okay. I noticed a thing in Wallet on iOS, John's settings, go to Wallet and Apple Pay. There is an option for double-click side button, at least on the iPhone 10 series of phones. I don't know that I had seen that before. It may have been there for a very long time, but that's the way to like force Apple Pay, the Apple Pay interface to come up. Like I said, I had it turned off and I don't recall seeing it before while I was in there, but you know, you know how these things are. It's obvious once you know it. But there you go. Do you have that on yours? Wow. Did you just leave? Like there's something very loud happening over there for you. Bikers are out. Yes. Right. Beautiful weather. Muffling. Right. Mine says double-click home button, but that's because I have a home button. Okay. So, wow. So, your mileage may vary, but yeah, I think I've enabled that. Is it on for you? I think it's on by default. Interesting. I turned it on. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. It's just one of those things. It's interesting. I figure if it felt new to me, even if it's not, it's worth mentioning as a quick tip. So, that's why we do it. And Gavin has a nice piece of advice in the quick tip realm. He had actually sent us a question, and before we got to answer it, he answered it himself. His issue was that on his, I believe he's running High Sierra on his 2009 Mac Pro, the App Store was missing tabs, featured top charts, categories, purchased, and updates. They just weren't there. He could sort of get there if he had menu items to bring him there, but the tabs were gone. And he tried all kinds of things. He zapped the PRAM, he did an SMC reset, and then he downloaded the latest Combo Updater for that operating system, and it solved it. And so, the quick tip is just don't forget about the power of resolution that reinstalling the Combo Updater on top of itself can bring. Basically, that installs every changed operating system component, and then cleans out all the caches that exist. But every operating system component that has changed since the .0 release is included in that, you could also reinstall on top of itself. But reinstall the actual operating system. But the Combo Updater is generally faster and easier, so there you go. I just figured I'd, it was a nice little piece of quick tip there for all of us to not forget about the power of the Combo Updater. So there you go. Right, and if you want to find the power of the Combo Updater, one place to look is support.apple.com slash downloads. All right. Download stuff is. Okay. Cool. I will put that in the show notes so that we all know where to go there. Is support.apple.com still a UR? It is. Okay. For some reason, I thought it was apple.com slash support. But no. That may be another way to get there. Yeah. Is there a difference? Oh yeah, there is a difference. Well, no, no, wait. Is there a difference? Oh, no, apple.com slash support just brings you to support.apple.com. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Combo Updater from Mojave 10146 is actually the thing right at the top there, but you can find all the other ones. They even have a search functionality. Very nice. There are some interesting things that you can find digging around in Apple downloads too. When you have free time, that can be a fun place to go. Greg has what equates to a quick tip by way of audio comment in reaction till last week's episode. Hey guys, this is Greg from World Carolina. On the most recent episode, you were talking about someone outfitting a Mac for a college student and you mentioned Step App. I thought I'd let you know that Step App has a pretty hefty education discount. I think it's about half price. So if Step App is a little on the bubble at 10 bucks a month, it's a no-brainer at 5 bucks a month. I know because I'm a teacher and it applies to teachers as well as students. Great show, guys. Thanks a lot. Love you. Thanks, Greg. We love you too, man. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very good. Educational discounts. Don't forget about them. Of course, those of you in education are probably well-versed and accustomed to looking for those discounts because once you find one, you sort of tend to hunt for others. But there you go. Sweet. And it's good to know that Step App covers not just students but teachers. So there you go. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on here? Yeah. Get that education pricing while you can. While you can. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. In the, similarly in the last episode, we were talking about Thunderbolt adapters versus USB-C adapters and the difference in why listener Ken needed to spend the $60 instead of the $19 on the Thunderbolt versus the USB-C adapter, Ben wrote in and reminded us that Ken needn't spend $60 on a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter when Apple sells one for $49. And it's totally right. So yeah, there's the Apple adapter and we will share that URL right there. But yeah, Apple's got theirs for $49 bucks. So he also noted, Ben noted that Apple never killed target disc mode. They did kill target display mode and perhaps that's what I was thinking of or perhaps I was thinking of something completely different in the last episode. But yeah, target disc mode to your point, John, still happily exists. So that's good. Yeah. I knew that. I know you did. Yeah. No, that's why we do this show so we can all learn. Yeah. Yeah. Evidently, that's the thing I had to learn. I don't know, for some reason I thought, I guess when they changed from fire because it just originally was firewire target disc mode and USB target disc mode didn't work for a little bit and then it did start working. I don't know. Whatever. It works. It's good. It's a handy thing for sure. I've also noticed migration assistant because I've been, you know, as I mentioned, I've been testing that MacBook Pro, the new, you know, low end of the MacBook Pro thing. And so I've been using migration assistant to bounce my data back and forth between my MacBook Pro and my MacBook Air so that I'm actually testing comparing apples to apples. No pun re intended. When it starts doing the data transfer, the devices have to both be on the same Wi-Fi network to begin it. But then once the data transfer starts, the Wi-Fi indicator on the migration assistant screen changes and instead says peer to peer. So it's not going through your, you know, your access point to your router. It's just blasting straight from one to the other, kind of like AirDrop does, which I thought was interesting, John. Maybe it's always been that way, but it's explicit about it in the, in this, you know, current version, which I thought was pretty cool. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Good observation. Yeah. And it's probably more efficient. So, yeah. In that process, John, I have run into a problem twice now once copying the data to the MacBook Pro and then once copying it back because I sent my MacBook Air off for service. My Air, I'll be, I'll be at less than a year old, is like all of them will suffering from the keyboard issue. And now they're replacing the entire keyboards with the newly modified ones. I'm not going to say that they're fixed, but they are theoretically better. So I sent it in while I was, had the opportunity because I was testing this MacBook Pro and I didn't need my air for a few days. So they took care of that. And also while it was in there, they swapped out the motherboard because they said it was dead. So there you go. But when migrating over to the MacBook Pro and then migrating back, there are several applications that I use like Intel power gadget, which I like because I can see the speed, you know, the actual speed of the CPU that require system extensions. And it requires now come Catalina, I think Intel will need to do something different to make power gadget work happily. But but at least with Mojave and prior, you can load those. But those, the Intel power gadget system extension along with some others need your approval inside System Preferences Security General. And that's fine, except when you do migration assistant, those notices come up long before you are able to get to System Preferences Security General. And when you finally do go to System Preferences Security General, they are not there. There is no way to list those things if the little bubble at the bottom of that screen isn't there telling you, hey, you've got to do this. So if you miss the opportunity to approve a system extension, you don't get it again. This changes in Catalina, both in terms of what types of system extensions are able to be approved and where you go to approve them. And I think this sort of chicken and egg syndrome won't happen. But on Mojave, it very much happens. And it was driving me crazy, because I wanted like one of the things I'm looking at is when is the CPU running into turbo boost mode? And what's it running at? And the only way that I know of to tell the CPU frequency is Intel power gadget, which then will feed things like I step menus and that sort of thing. So I'm going to miss that in Catalina if they don't sort out a way to make that work, or maybe they already have. But I was missing it in Mojave because I couldn't approve the extension. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. And guess what? It didn't matter. And then I stumbled upon two commands, John. And it might be only one of these was necessary, but I did both. The KextCache command, the K-E-X-T-C-A-C-H-E is sudo, you type sudo kextcache. And we'll put these in the show notes, you don't have to remember them, they'll be right there. The first one you do is with the switch clear staging, which is dash dash clear dash staging that clears anything that was in the extension staging environment. And then the next one I do is kextcache dash i and then slash dash i says invalidate the cache on whatever drive you then specify next and slash is your boot drive. So doing that. And then they say to reboot. I don't even think I had to do that. As soon as I did that, I saw KextCache fire up in the background and start using lots of CPU. And sure enough, when it got to the end, it was like, hey, you have three extensions that you need to go in and approve. And I was able to go in and approve them. I quit system preferences while KextCache was running in the background. I don't know if that made a difference, but I'm going to share that here because I'm thinking maybe if the screen was up, maybe it would not have refreshed in the right way. And that launching system preferences fresh was the right way to do it. So there you go. So we'll put those commands in the show notes. But that's how I was able to force system extensions to re-ask for authentication. I think the other way you can do that. Yeah, to do tell. Well, I recall seeing this somewhere and I found it. So Onyx maintenance cleaning, then there's an options dot dot dot button. And one of the check boxes is kernel and extensions cache. So I think that would do it for you as well. I think that is, yes, I think you're absolutely right. I opted not to do that because I have all of my Onyx options set on the maintenance tab and I didn't want to have to uncheck everything just to do that one thing. Right, right. Yeah, because there's a lot of other stuff. There's a lot of other stuff there and there's no way to do just one thing on the Onyx maintenance tab. You can't isolate it without unchecking everything else. So yeah, so you're right. Yeah, that was my first thought was, Oh, Onyx will do this. I was like, I don't want to mess with that. But I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Cool. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is ExpressVPN because not only are they our sponsor, but they've turned out to become my favorite VPN of choice for really for both Mac OS and iOS. You know, I did a lot of travel this summer. I have some more travel happening this fall. But really, traveling is one spot to use VPNs because you're on unknown Wi-Fi networks, untrusted Wi-Fi networks. But also when you're at a coffee shop or really anywhere where you're on a Wi-Fi network that you don't control, having a VPN can be a really good thing to just ensure that you're getting the data that you want to get and that no one else knows what you're doing. And that is why I like to use ExpressVPN. It's the fastest VPN that I've tried, which is totally true. 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All right, man, we have some cool stuff found to get through, don't we? Indeed. Okay. I don't know how we forgot to include this first one last week, John, because I think as soon as you and I found out about MacUpdater, we went nuts for it. I certainly did. You and I haven't really talked about this, but it's from the corecode.io guys. And we mentioned Smart Reporter a couple of episodes ago. And as always, I tell them, hey, we mentioned your stuff on here on MacGeekUp. And they listened and were like, great. But hey, do you know about this other thing that we make called MacUpdater? Because it really seems to be going nuts about it. I stopped what I was doing, downloaded it, installed it. This thing's freaking awesome. It scours your Mac, tells you what apps are up to date and what apps specifically are not up to date. And for many of those just allows you one click to just update all of your apps in the background or, especially on the first pass, it identifies some apps that you downloaded a long time ago and haven't run. So they're out of date and you don't want anymore. So you can actually, you know, go and find them in the Finder and delete them, which is also cool. So yeah, in terms of like keeping your Mac both up to date and pruning of all those old things, MacUpdater, I'm loving it. What about you, John? I haven't tried it yet. Seriously? Oh, I would have, were you commented to me the next day about some app that was out of date for both of us? And I just assumed that you had used MacUpdater to sort that out. Oh, dude, you got to try this out. This is freaking amazing. It's great. I'm running it on everything now. I love it. So anyway, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And it's supported. I know other people have attempted to do this in the past and they've kind of fallen by the wayside. I am speculating here, but I think part of the support is a crowdsourcing because there's one thing, I downloaded this like, oh, in testing the new MacBook Pro, it has the touch bar, right? So I was messing around with it. And actually, the touch bar is pretty cool. I had never, you know, I had used Macs like in the stores, but I never had one that I was testing personally that had the touch bar. It's actually really kind of cool, but I had one app that's like, it was supposed to put the night rider thing in my touch bar. I was like, okay, let's see what that's like. And it crashes and doesn't work in whatever the current version of Mojave. But MacUpdater tells me that there's a new version of it. But as I dig into its information, it says that they know of exactly one user that's running the new version of this. And my guess is that that is the author of the app developing the new version. And they are running the new version, but it is not available anywhere. So I've had to tell MacUpdater to, you know, to stop pestering me about that particular version. So I think there's some crowdsourcing involved in this, which will help keep that database up to date without driving the core code people crazy. I think that would be the only way to do it. But yeah, I could be totally wrong about that. And they might write in and be like, dude, why are you telling people that it's crowdsourced? I'm just guessing. So I'm just guessing. But there you go. Pretty cool though. Right? Mr. Braun? Indeed. Okay. I wasn't sure if I lost you. As some of you may have noticed by now, 23, 26 minutes in that we are experimenting with the audio here on MacGeekUp again. Because why not? In the interest of making it better, we are re-experimenting with something that we tried, I think 12 years ago, John, and that is recording and releasing in stereo. I have us very slightly panned and I'm hoping that it's enough, but not too much with me on the left and John on the right for those of you paying attention at home, just to give a little separation so that when we do encounter those moments where we might be stumbling over each other a little bit, we are at least, you know, audibly separated, spatially separated in your listening environment. But, you know, we're not hard panning things. That would be very distracting to me. So and I have to listen to this while we're recording. So I'm hearing it in stereo just like you are. So I think I've got it right, but obviously please feel free to tell us at feedback at macgeekup.com. And in case you didn't hear that on one side or the other side, I think he said feedback at macgeekup.com for everybody over here. It's feedback at macgeekup.com. Yeah, good stuff. That's right. You have your side. I have my side now. That's very interesting. Okay, let's see. Let's let's keep plowing through these cool stuffs, shall we? In 776, John, we were talking about USB printing to a 3D printer, very different from just regular USB printing. And Robert says printing confirms that printing to a 3D printer is not like printing to a regular printer. So using printer sharing won't work. However, as you suspected, there is a Raspberry Pi solution. If you Google Raspberry Pi 3D printer octoprint, you'll get lots of information about octoprint and how to do this. And so we did some googling for you and we'll put that link in the show notes. But thank you, Robert, for highlighting this for us. I had no idea, but I had an idea. Well, actually, I did have an idea. I just didn't have any specifics on the idea. So yeah, there you go. Octoprint can be the thing that manages your 3D printer with a Raspberry Pi, allowing the listener back in 776 that wanted to have their 3D printer separated from where their computers are because it makes lots of noise while it's printing. So there you go. Yes, Mr. Braun. I'm still not clear. I was googling some stuff too and apparently there are different printing languages. There's PCL, there's PostScript, and then, I guess, 8Jets do their own thing. But I was looking. I'm like, what language does 3D printer do? 3D printer speak? And apparently, it's something called G-code. So I'm not sure why you couldn't do printer sharing because it's sending it over in a different language. But I guess there's queuing and other stuff that makes this a task. Well, I think as we sort of discussed in the episode and as others have commented in, the macOS printing engine does not handle the print tasks for 3D printers. So that's why printer sharing won't work because it is not a printer as far as macOS is concerned. So that's why this wouldn't work. It has its own, like if you connect a 3D printer to your Mac, you are running separate software to manage, right? Right. To render the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So there's not a driver? There's not a macOS driver to abstract it. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Okay, where's other printers? Yeah. Yeah, well, well, we're going to an event soon. Maybe we'll have some 3D printers there and we can ask them for the details on that. That would be a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it just seems weird. You can't share that type of printer, but actually it's not that kind of weird. No, until Apple builds, and they may never, but until they build that level of functionality into the printing subsystem in macOS, which really is based on CUPS, which is sort of a universal UNIX printing subsystem, until CUPS supports 3D printers, and maybe it does, maybe like, you know, I don't know. But until that happens, maybe. Yeah, so in 2015, I'm seeing an article from LibreGraphicsWorld.org that said the new or maybe even test versions of CUPS were featuring initial code for 3D printing support, and they're asking, but why? So there you go. So maybe someday 3D printers will actually be supported as a default in macOS. Cool. Yeah, cool. Yeah, you don't have a 3D printer, do you? I don't. You know, I'm surprised that with, you know, kids growing up right at that time when 3D printers were sort of becoming a thing. I'm surprised that I never went up, went about pursuing getting one. We talked about it many times, but the kids were doing so much of that at school. Their school had several 3D printers, if I'm not mistaken. And so they were doing it, and they weren't, like, it didn't seem to catch a whole lot of interest for them. There was a novelty of it, but, you know, it's just like, okay, well, that's cool. We can print to that. You know, honestly, the biggest use case that I've seen for them is prototyping, right? Like, for example, you know, the next cool stuff found I was going to mention was the Sonos Move, right? Which is Sonos's new speaker that is portable, Bluetooth. It, like, answers every outstanding query that existed from, you know, customers or potential customers. They, you know, people wanted an outdoor, water-resistant, weather-resistant Bluetooth speaker that also integrated with their Sonos system and was portable and, you know, had a long battery life, but still sounded really good and worked well outside and all of that stuff. And the Sonos Move does that. And I went, actually, last week, I want to say, two weeks ago, I think it was two weeks ago, now that memory, I don't know, time gets weird in the summer for me. But anyway, very recently, I went to New York and they showed off the move ahead of the announcement to all of us. And one of the cool things that they had, John, was in order, they put two speakers in this, you know, a woofer and a tweeter. The problem with tweeters and the problem with high-end sound in general is that it tends to go in the direction that you send it. Whereas low-end sound tends to radiate more in all directions. You can certainly be somewhat directional about it. But in general, low-end sound just sort of rumbles things and sort of goes, you know, everywhere, whereas high-end sound goes right where you direct it. And for a speaker that they wanted to work well outside, they didn't want the high-end sound to be super directional. They wanted it to sort of run a, you know, 180-ish gamut. But they didn't want to have to put a crap ton of tweeters in this thing. So they have a down-firing tweeter, John, that aims at this waved curve that they went through 60-something iterations of to find the right dispersion pattern that also would like drain water out of it in case this thing is, you know, outside in the rain or whatever. And it does. It works really well. I mean, they tested it for us. But then after they went through sort of their demos, they had a cocktail party on this deck. It was right on Manhattan's west side, John, down in the meat-packing district, as we like to call it. You know, you got Soho and Noho. So that was down in Meepaw. But it was overlooking. The water was really, really nice, but it was out on this deck. And they had some of these speakers around. Well, you know, people were just having a cocktail party. I was like, oh, look at that. Like it really did work in terms of dispersing the sound and spreading it, you know, ascending it, I should say, in a very nice direction. But in order to get that curve, they had, like I said, they had a prototype 60 something of them and 3D printer. Like, I can't imagine what it would be like having to do that sort of, you know, iterative design without a 3D printer. So there you go. That's kind of the thought. And the nice part is, you know, you can have people like that. That company is spread. They have offices in Boston, Santa Barbara, Germany, and I think in China, too, and the people all work on projects together. It's actually a very cool way that they work on things. They have separate, like, work rooms devoted to a given project in each of their locations where that project's being worked on. And there are 24, 7 video conferencing happening between all of the rooms, even though they're not in the same location. So you're, you're just constantly seeing your partners. But anyway, those 3D designs can be spread around, just send the file, go make the thing. So anyway, so that to me, that's where 3D printer is in. And there you go. That there's yet another cool stuff found baked into that with the Sonos move. 399. So I'm curious to see how people use that speaker. And I'm curious to see how I use it, be able to get some hands on it and tell you about that in a little bit, too. Any more thoughts, John, on 3D printers or anything like that? No? No. Okay. Chris has a scan scan snap alternative to tell us about. But before we go to that, I want to talk about our next sponsor, which is BB edit at barebones.com. If you haven't heard BB edit is back in the app store with subscriptions available. And that's a new app store only model, right? Well, perpetual licenses for BB edit remain directly from barebones.com and resellers. And if you want to be like John and I, well, first use BB edit because holy cow, like, it's awesome. And I can't I truly can't imagine like a day doesn't go by where I'm not using BB edit for something, it might be programming, but it might be something as simple as counting text, comparing two documents. I've been doing so much of that lately, just seeing what the differences are on whatever, like, you know, configuration files are a great place to do this, right? You know, if you're especially like me, we've been going through a server migration. So it's like, okay, what what are these two five? What's the difference between these two? You put them in, boom, it shows you it highlights. It's great. But if you really want to be like John and I, go to merch dot barebones.com and get yourself a t-shirt. John and I have the rebus t-shirts, which are fun because they, you know, via pictures tell you tell a story or at least a phrase. But yeah, you got it. You got to check all this out. Go to barebones.com, download your copy of BB edit. You get a 30 day free trial of everything. And then after the 30 days, it actually ratchets down into a perpetually free product that doesn't quite have all the features of full on BB edit, but that might actually be enough for you. There's only one way to find out. Go to barebones.com and download it today. Our thanks to barebones for sponsoring this episode and our thanks to Chris for the next cool stuff found, which is exact scan at exact scan.com. He says, you know, scan snap with its proprietary driver, which is getting more proprietary and perhaps, perhaps rather annoying with the new scan snap home application. He says exact scan is definitely not free, but it integrates well with other apps such as my favorite document management software, Dev and Think Pro, as Chris says, and has really good OCR and very flexible settings. So if you are a scan snap user and you don't like the way it's becoming more and more proprietary, or you just want to check out some other options, check out exact scan at exactscan.com. So thanks for sharing that, Chris. Very, very cool stuff. Yes, good Mr. Braun. Yep. And I'm going to assume that that 64 bit, which is the reason that you want to upgrade from the old scan snap software because it's not going to work in Catalina. Oh, yeah. Well, they tell you as much. Okay. Okay. On their page. They're like, this won't work in the Catalina. So you either go to the old software, I think was called scan snap manager, which was all right. Yep. And the new one is the scan snap home that Chris referred to. Is that right? Yes. Okay. Ah, interesting. Yeah. So upgrade to either one of those. Otherwise, your scan snap won't work anymore. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. All right. Allison sent in a note about an episode of her chit chat across the pond, Light podcast, where Bart Buschatz and she talk about why they, why we need DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS. So secure DNS was a topic that we discussed and sort of glanced upon previously here on Mackie Gab. And Bart, she says, starts by explaining the DNS domain name system and the different levels and then explains how it's not secure and then walks through how DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS will solve that for us. So we'll put a link to that episode. Thanks for sharing, Allison. That's the handy stuff. They, they dig into crazy, crazy things. So it's good. That's good. John, you're not going to guess what's next. I have another speaker to talk about. I know it's rare. I've long been a fan for portability, like true portability, like the kind of thing that I can fit in my suitcase and, or leave in my car for a summer. And I've long been a fan of JBL speakers for this reason. Their new flip five is the latest in their, I would say this is sort of their, their flagship of the portable speaker speakers. It's certainly not the most expensive one. It's the most popular one from what I can tell. It's this, it takes on the cylindrical form fits about, I roll all my clothes when I put them in a, you know, when I put them in a suitcase. And so this takes up about the size of a rolled long sleeve shirt in my suitcase, maybe a little bit less than that. So that's, that's how I decide it doesn't, can I fit it? Do I need one less long sleeve shirt? If so, yes, throw the flip in and it's great. The new fly, the new fly five has a, it's got, it basically the same size. I think it's a quarter inch taller than the flip four. It's got full waterproof. Of course, IPX seven, just like the four was 12 hours of playtime now, but it's got bigger amplifiers in it. And the low end on this is far more pronounced than, than previous iterations of the flip. And the four sounds good. In fact, it's, it's certainly possible that you would get the five and compare it to the four as I have done. You might find that you like the four even better. I could see where, where the five might begin even to sound a little muddy in the wrong circumstance, but outside where, you know, where I tend to use it or in a bigger space kind of thing, if I'm traveling, you know, set it up in the living room of like an Airbnb that we'll get or whatever. It's nice to be able to move a little bit of air with a small speaker and this flip five does that. It's a hundred bucks, same price as the, as the four was previously. The only down to me really the only downside is that JBL has long allowed you to pair multiple Bluetooth speakers together to have sound coming everywhere. So if we're traveling with the family and we can space wise afford to bring a couple of JBL speakers, we can, you can pair them up, they pair with each other, you Bluetooth your phone to one of them and then the same music comes out of all of them, which is awesome. That was previously called JBL's connect plus mode and all the JBL speakers that supported connect plus would do this. That was great. They've changed that with the flip five and other newer speakers. It's now called party boost mode and near as I can tell the two are not compatible. So if you have an older cadre of JBL speakers, the flip five might not integrate as well as you would want it to with those. But if you're looking for something on its own, the JBL flip five is, is awesome. So it is, it will now become my new default travel speaker. So maybe, maybe that's the best I can say about it. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Nope. Okay. Blatboy in the chat room at mackeycab.com slash stream earlier today hipped us to a piece of software called snapper snapper integrates with macOS finder. And when you highlight on and quick look and audio, I think this is how it works. Hopefully he'll tell me if I got it wrong. Quick look to an audio file, it will let you play it. It will let you see the waveform and it will actually even let you do a little bit of editing right there. Oftentimes, the best way to spot check an audio file is to look at it. I know it sounds weird to say that, but you can look at an audio file and say, oh, whoa, there's something clipping or what's that five seconds of dead silence in the middle of the podcast? What happened there? Like that can be a really valuable thing to look at. And being able to do that right in the finder, I have, I don't have this installed yet, but I'm, I'm salivating for it. So thanks for telling us about it, black boy. This is great. Pretty cool, huh, John? You can see sound, huh? I can see sound. Yeah. Yeah. This snapper gives you synesthesia. There you go. That's, it doesn't really, but you know, fun way to say it. Don't you think? No? All right. I didn't know that word. You didn't know that word. Oh, yeah. That's when your senses cross and you start being able to hear smells and things like that. Yeah. Some people, some people have it by default at birth. There's a great, great book called A Mango Shaped Space about a girl and a relative, I'll leave it at that, who both were synesthetes. And it is a genetic thing. It tends to run. And so A Mango Shaped Space is about, it's a great story. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. That's one of my favorite books. My daughter told me about it years and years ago, but but yeah. Yeah. And then there are, yeah. So yeah. Interesting. So you can, you can approximate that, John, with snapper, at least in one way. So there you go. Caldigit, John. We've talked about Caldigit many times over the years. Their Thunderbolt 3 offerings are actually very interesting. Their TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 dock is sort of the evolution of what they've had prior to Thunderbolt 2 docks and that sort of thing. And this one, I'm actually really impressed with this Thunderbolt 3 dock. It's got all kinds of ports on it. It's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports so you can do pass through. It's got a display port port. It's got five USB-A and one USB-C Gen 1 port. So that's in addition to the Thunderbolt 3 ports. So this is just USB. So you got five, six USB ports, five As and one USB 3.1 Gen 1. And then one USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 port for 10 gigabits a second worth of data. It's got gigabit ethernet. It's got an SD card slot. It's got optical audio out. And then it's got 3.5 millimeter, you know, headphone size jack, stereo audio in and out. What's cool about it is how much of this is on the back of it versus on the front of it. The two audio ports are on the front and two USB ports, one C and one A are on the front along with the SD card slot. So it really is built for use at your desk where, you know, and then of course the rest of them are on the back. So you've got, you know, four more USB-A ports on the back. Another, the 10 gig USB-C port is on the back as well as the Thunderbolt ports, the display port, ethernet, optical and of course power. And it'll provide 85 watts of power delivery to things that are plugged into the Thunderbolt port so you could power your computer that way. Very cool though. It's a nice little device, 309 bucks at Amazon, but packed into a nice little, nice little thing. So that's one part of cool stuff found, John. But the other part is the interesting thing that CalDigit is doing with their Thunderbolt 3 mini docks and they have two of them. One, and they both have, these are really built, I would say to be used, you know, portably, but there's no reason it has to be if you've got a need for this in your desktop setup by all means. This would be the right answer. They have Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 in a USB-A port, and then either two display ports or two HDMI ports on it. And it's so you can do these dual displays with your Thunderbolt 3 equipped Mac, which is pretty cool. And it plugs in, it's just got its own Thunderbolt cable with it, like, as part of the thing, so you can just plug it right in. It's pretty cool what they're doing there, you know, again, just in case you need it. And I think the one that's dual HDMI has two USB-A ports, one for USB 2 and one for USB 3, I think it's just got more room on it to fit that or maybe more bandwidth available to be able to do that. So anyway, again, this is why I love Dongle World that we live in, because you get to pick your options. By your computer, it doesn't matter. Don't worry about the ports. It's got Thunderbolt ports on it, that's all you need. And then, you know, for somewhere between, I don't know, 50 and 300 bucks, you buy the exact ports that you need for your setup and you're fully customized and everything is efficient because it's Thunderbolt plug direct into the, you know, into the motherboard as it is, and you're good to go. So pretty cool, huh, Mr. Braun? Yeah, once I need one. Right, right. Yeah. We won't go into it in another episode, but I'm thinking that the current MacBook Pro might very well be the right machine for you, my friend. I've got some thoughts about that, but we'll talk about them once I'm we'll dedicate a segment to it in another episode, but I'm impressed with that new MacBook Pro. I'm not sure I need one, which is interesting, but we'll more on that later. For those of us, one last cool stuff found, and then we have some questions to get to, I think, Mr. Braun, for those of us that have or are going to get that, Qi-enabled iPhones, 12 South has their new high-rise wireless out. It's a desk stand, if you will, or a bedside table stand where the Qi pad is built into the stand. So you can kind of tilt your iPhone up, you can see it, or you can take the Qi pad out and lay it flat, if you like, but the stand sort of holds the iPhone upright, so you can see the screen while it's charging really handy at your desk or at your bedside table or whatever that is where you want to see it. And it'll do up to 10 watts of fast charging in its stand. So there you go. We'll put a link in the show notes. I think it's like 75 bucks or something. So it's really well designed, heavy, nice, like it's not going to teeter over when you put a big iPhone on it or anything. Just nice. Good. Yeah, I got Qi everywhere. I know. It's handy, right? Having Qi everywhere. You just kind of, you know, put your phone down, boom, it's charging. I like it. What, are you, how are you Qi everywhere? And are you just basically using kind of the inexpensive, you know, like $10, $15 discs or whatever? Are you worrying about fast charging with them? Or are you just getting whatever you can get? I have fast charge at least by Apple's definition. Yes, which is seven and a half watts or something, right? Yeah, okay. Cool. Any particular brands that you get? I got a couple of inexpensive Samsung ones. My Charge, I got theirs. And I think I got Ventev's stand, similar to the one you just mentioned, except it's Ventev. Yep, that Ventev stand is the one I have at my desk. I've now got this 12 south one. Sorry, I've got the 12 south one at my desk. I've got the Ventev one on my bedside table. I like the Ventev one because the light doesn't stay on all night. It'll go on when I put the phone on charge so that I know that it's charging. And then after like 30 seconds, it turns off, which is cool, which I really like next to my bed. No blue light. Thanks. All right, John, we have some questions to get to, but I have solved a problem. And that problem is that when I'm traveling, my old workflow made it really difficult to keep up with the list of premium contributions that had come in because the way my mail is filtered, the way I had my mail filtered, I guess I still have it filtered this way. I've just solved the problem differently. The way I had my mail filtered, all the MacGeek premium emails would only come into my computer at my desk. And when I'm traveling, of course, I'm spending more time on my laptop than I am on my desktop. And my time on my desktop was sort of limited and all of that. So it has been a couple of weeks since we've gone through the list. I solved that problem, though, John, by using a service called Zapier. Have you used Zapier? No. What is it, dude? I've been using it for years. That's the worst part is I think I pay about whatever it is, 10 bucks a month or something. I forget what the price is, but we've been using it at Mac Observer for a long time to do like it basically what Zapier allows you to wire up other services together. So in this solution, what I'm doing is I'm taking WooCommerce, which is the WordPress engine that runs our MacGeek premium subscriptions, and linking it with Google Docs or Google Sheets more specifically. And Zapier is the thing that the glue that puts that together so that I can take when data, when like a new renewal or a new purchase or whatever comes into the MacGeek premium system, it automatically adds it to a Google Sheet. So now that Google Sheet is available wherever I want. It's exactly the details that I want because I can customize how that sheet is auto-populated. And now, no matter where I am, I can see all the recent stuff, which is awesome. So Zapier will solve this problem. So we have a lot of them to go through and sort of catch up with today, which I'm going to do. But I'll put a link to Zapier in the show notes because it's a cool service. The best part about Zapier is, and I learned about this at podcast movement, the conference that I went to back in August, somebody was saying, oh, you can do something like this with Zapier. I was like, oh, gosh, I'm so stupid. I already pay for Zapier. I never thought, but once you set something up with it, you don't like go and mess with it all the time. So you kind of forget that all the all the things that Zapier is doing for you, which is sort of the point of a service like that. But anyway, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But I do want to thank all of our recent Mackie Cub premium contributors. Is that is that OK, Mr. Braun? Oh, please. All right, sweet. So in the monthly $10 plan, we've gotten payments from Mark from Milford, Paul from Fishers, Ryan from McKinney, Neil from West Hartford, Scott from Portland, Peter from Auburn, Bob from Working Smarter for Mac users who may or may not be joining us on Tuesday. Hint hint. James from San Antonio, Jay from New Jersey, Joe from El Dorado, Chris from Hartfordshire, Ari from Kensington, Michael from Mission Hills, Phil from Tucson, Bob from Lapeche, Dave from Socrates, Timothy from Hendersonville, Jeff from West Haven, Frank from Tunbridge, Jim from San Jose, John from Sinking Spring, Santiago from Palm City, John from Wake Forest, Barry from Raleigh, I believe right now, Tony from Middleborough, Ken from Honolulu, Michael from Robbins, Dave from Mount Prospect, Scott from Bourbonais, Clive from West Sussex, Jeff from Chesterton, Joseph from Marietta, Robert from Colombiana, Frederick from Nashville, Gary from Babylon. Thank you to all of you for your contributions, you rock. And on the biannual, $25 every six month plan, Carl from Akron, Peter from Rochester, James from Port Albany, Peter from Sudbury, Louis Michel from Saint Laurent, Josh Oh from We Don't Know Where, Paolo from Mantica, Margaret from Waukegan, Jeff from North Belmore, Elliott from Brookline, Jim from Vancouver, Richard from Daniel Island, Harry from Durham, Mike from Milwaukee, Dave from Farmington Hills, Kevin S from We Don't Know Where, Thomas from Sacramento, Dmitri from Moscow, Drew from San Diego, Jurgen from Wielderstadt, Matthias from Reineck at $30 every six months, Gray from Jeffersonton, William J from Somewhere, Mark from Centennial, Allen from Montgomery, Wes J from Somewhere, Wes G, sorry, from Somewhere, John from Henrico, Michael from Spencer, Stewart M from Somewhere, Fernando from Cincinnati, Mike from Bristol, Kershin S from I Can't Remember Where and Martine B from I Can't Remember Where off the top of my head. These people that I don't know where they're from, it's only because they've been premium subscribers for so long that it was before we were forced to get addresses for billing purposes from anyone. So they're just not in the system, but they are from Somewhere. I just don't have it in the system. So Peter from Peterborough and Martine, you're from the Netherlands, of course, that's probably the easiest way to say it. Thank you. Peter from Peterborough, Jonathan C and Drake from Honolulu. Thanks to all of you. If you want to learn more about MacGeek Hub Premium, you now have the URL. It's macgeekhub.com slash premium. All right, Mr. Braun, shall we move on to some questions here as we tip the hour marker? Should we trade places at the hour marker and move you to the left and me to the right? No, no. No, we're staying right where we are. That's right. Shall we start with Matt? Is that a good one to go with here? All right, cool. So Matt says, longtime listener, just pre-show 200. He says, I've had some close calls, but I've never been caught yet. Awesome. He says, I listened to Scott's question back in MacGeek Hub 765 with interest where you talked about migrating to a new Mac with less internal storage. He says, my scenario is this. I've got a 2014 iMac with a one terabyte internal drive. My home drive, it is my home drive filled with like 800 gigs of stuff, including iTunes and photos, and an older unused OS, but I boot from an external 250 gig SSD with High Sierra and my apps folder. I did this two to three years ago as I heard it would be faster than booting from the internal spindle drive. And it's great. Yeah. And you're totally right. Like booting from an SSD is way faster than booting from a non SSD. And on most Macs, the external is going to be more, the external interface is going to be faster than the SSD could go. So yep. He says, after listening to your answer to Scott and the soft warning about splitting your boot and home drives, I think I'd like to reintegrate my boot system with my home drive perhaps to an upgraded one terabyte external SSD and then offloading my large media files to the internal iMac smart. How would you proceed? Can I install when ready Catalina on the fresh external new SSD formatted to APFS and then point migration assistant to the iMac's home drive after booting from it? What about the old SSD apps? Does migration assistant get them in a different slurp? I assume I can't just copy over the app folder 64 bit issues and support programs. Are there other things to look out for? So this is a good question. And I'm I anything that I offer here is going to be a, you know, mildly educated guess because I haven't been in this scenario. I haven't had a customer in this scenario. So I haven't experienced it. But I think migration assistant on a clean Catalina might actually do exactly what you want. If you point it at your old Mac and you tell it you want to get, you know, when you point migration assistant at your old boot drive, it will sort of scour that drive and offer you some level of granularity. You can get like system settings, you can get applications, you can get users and you can pick which users you want. And so I would think as part of that process, it might inherit that home folder over, or it might just point to it. And that would be less optimal, given your desired outcome here. I mean, it would still work, but it wouldn't be the data wouldn't be where you want it. So you may have to do the manual integration of the home folder in that scenario, but it might work. I would try it. I mean, what do you have to lose, right? But that would be my first try. If that doesn't work, then I would also try pointing migration assistant at your home folder directly, because migration assistant can be run manually, right? Like you get to run it not just at reinstallation time. You can run it whenever you want. It's in your applications, utilities folder. And in fact, that's how you run it. If you're going to like I mentioned earlier in the show that I was migrating, you know, between two Macs on the Mac from which the data is coming, you run migration assistant and tell it, you know, make me the source, another Mac is managing this operation. And that works out fine. But right from there, you can also choose to migrate in. So you may have to do two migration passes to get everything you want. In that case, if that's the case, there's probably some argument to doing the user folder first, because the one thing is that your user account is you, a user account will be created for you, regardless of whether you migrate one in. If you migrate one in, that will be your, you know, your first user account. If you don't, you will wind up with two user accounts on that Mac, the one that it creates at, you know, setup time, and then the one that you migrate in. You could then go and delete the one you created setup time, and that would probably be fine. Just bear that in mind. So you might be better off migrating the user account first, and then going back and pointing it at your boot, your old boot drive and grabbing apps and settings and those sorts of things. But I don't know, but that's sort of the, that's sort of the knowledge that I would come in with the potential caveats and pitfalls in the path that I would take. So what do you think, John? Yeah, as long as the, as long as the structure of the data is something that it can recognize as documents or music or things like that, then yeah, I mean, when, when I started up, it says, you know, gives a number of scenarios and the raw data looks to be one that it's smart enough to understand. So. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's true. You know, you could try to think, well, yeah, you'll actually get a feel for what's going to happen when you're, when you're doing it, even, even if, if you take sort of the, the first path that, that I suggested, which is just point it at your old boot drive and see, give it time, and it will show you the size of the data that it is going to offer to migrate for you. And your home folder should be the size that you expect it to be. If it is, then you're good to go. Yeah. So, you know, give it, give it time and see. I think, yeah, I think that would work. I don't know. It's fun. I like it. But migration assistant is Apple's done a really nice job with that and with keeping it, you know, relevant and helpful. I think it's a, it's a super handy thing. I mean, the only issue is you wind up with, you know, all of those apps or all of those settings that you may or may not have wanted, like it can't be smart enough to read your mind. And no, oh yeah, you know, bring over the settings for these three apps, but not those four and that kind of like, no. But that's why there's other utilities we've talked about, about pruning and cleaning. And I would do, if you're going to do migration assistant, I would do some of that. I would clone your drive first, then probably do the pruning and cleaning on the old Mac and then, and then migrate that to the new one. I think. What do you think? You can let us know. We already told you how to email us, but if you're a premium listener, you get access to our special premium at mackeykeb.com address that you can use. So there, I don't know. Time to move on, John. Sure. Okay. This one is actually has, I think, delves into something that you've wound up doing, John. Dave from Socrates writes, I'm installing another ERO system in a friend's house, replacing a couple of tall airport extreme units. One of them is a time capsule. I'm wondering, is it possible to use the time capsule at the other end of the house where there is an ethernet connection and use it to continue using time machine as well as another access point for the ERO system? If there is a relatively quick and easy way to do this, I know you are the guys to tell me. So I'm going to split this into two questions. First, yes, absolutely. You can put the airport extreme into bridge mode and or the time capsule, whatever it is into bridge mode and still use it for time machine, no problem. And you can do that even if its Wi-Fi is off. As long as it is connected to your network somehow, and you said that there's an ethernet port or an ethernet jack out there, you're going to be fine. And anything else connected to your network again via ethernet or Wi-Fi, as long as they're all bridged together like they are with an ERO system, you're going to be fine. So you don't have to use it as an access point. And there's some argument to not use it as an access point, although there might be argument to use it as an access point. There's nothing, there's nothing that's going to break. But when you are running a mesh system like with ERO, you're going to wind up with a system where all the access points know what's happening on all the other access points. And that's one of the beauties of mesh is it can sort of, the system can sort of be involved in guiding your devices as to which access point they should choose. It is always up to the device though, no matter how many smarts are built into the mesh system, the device chooses which access point and which radio on that access point. Now, the access point can block a device, it can essentially say no, you won't. And then that might encourage the device to choose a different access point. And there are other protocols where it can do so in a more elegant fashion as opposed to just blocking. There's 802.11R, which allows for some fast handoff and some more information sharing. But in the end, it's always up to the device. And that's why having a non-ERO access point will work, because your device can choose it. And you're fine. But it doesn't necessarily have all the same benefits as it would with an ERO. But it would work. So if you need the coverage out there, then sure, I would say try it. I would try it both ways. But you're probably going to find that it works fine turning it on. And John, you have, or at least for a while, you did have a scenario like that, right? I did something a little different. I put a... What I would do is, yeah, is enable the... If you get better wireless performance by connecting to it, then you may want to enable the wireless on it. I had the case, I think I told you with an extent that I extended my ERO and got better performance in one part of the house where there was good coverage. You extended it with a non-ERO device with like a T-peeling extender, not an ERO extender. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. And then we talked about a while ago, I have an airport express that's part of my network, but that's just giving me airplay. Right. And that's just a client on your network now, right? That's not share... Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. So maybe you need an ERO beacon, John, is what you're saying. And when I come down for PEPCOM, maybe I could bring you one, because I think I have an extender. Oh, great. And then... Yeah. Because that would be better. Right. Because to your point, the ERO doesn't really know about it. Right. So there's potential for the ERO not to make the right decision if something's connected to this. I don't know. Yeah. Right. But it worked for me. I was just going to say... But it'd be better to have them all know about each other. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We'll put a link to ERO beacons out there. But I think I've got an extra one. And if I do, it's yours. Yeah. Yeah. Brian's right. What I did is a hack. But I am getting better performance. So, you know, that's what I was looking for. I was looking for a better throughput. And this gave me a better throughput. Right. Well, pre-mesh... Beacon would be better. Yeah. Pre-mesh. Like when we started this podcast, there was no such thing as mesh. All right. Well, at least not in the way that we know it today. Well, whatever they called it. Yeah. That didn't work. So we all created, you know, what I call our quasi-mesh solutions where it was, you know, you run Ethernet and put several different access points out there, you know, one router, everything else in bridge mode and just, you know, let the devices choose. And to be perfectly honest, like that worked really well. My kids, they didn't quite realize how good they had it until they, you know, were like middle school or whatever and started going to friends' houses. And then they came back and, you know, I'll never forget at dinner, my daughter was like, you know, we have like the best Wi-Fi in the city here? I'm like, yeah. So how come nobody else's Wi-Fi works like ours does? You just everywhere you go, it's awesome and fast. Everybody had dead spots and all that. And I was like, well, because they didn't, you know, create this Frankenstein that I did here. I'm like, I need good Wi-Fi everywhere at home. So I made that a priority. She's like, yeah, it's amazing. And then it, you know, as throughout like their high school years as mesh started to become a thing and other people were like, oh, now we can do this without having to be a geek. That's awesome. So yeah, oh, it's good. All right. Let's see. I don't know where to go. It doesn't matter. Let's, oh, wait, I mean, it does matter, but there's so many good questions is really what it is. Andrew asks, I've been wondering for a while for those of us who choose optimize photos and videos on iPhones. What happens when you don't have free and decent Wi-Fi connectivity and speed, especially when browsing video? I've decided to never turn the option on for my devices. Oh, you must have a lot of storage or just a few pictures. But I'd like to know what the real world effects are since I have clients who may want to choose this option until we all have fast and unlimited data plans. I think this is an important issue for anyone to ponder unless Apple starts adding a micro SD slot to all iPhones. I'm pretty sure that's not coming on Tuesday. So yeah, it's a good question. I turn it on on mine and by and large, I don't encounter scenarios where I am found, you know, I find that, oh crap, like I don't have that or whatever. But I mean, it comes up and it comes in pretty quickly with, you know, with video and certainly with pictures, you know, you'll see a picture come up and like the thumbnails are all there when you dive into one, you know, it pulls down more data sort of very quickly. But I've never, you know, I let me put it this way. I do whatever I want on my phone. And most months, I never use more than about three gigs of data. I don't read, I mean, I'll join a Wi-Fi network if there's a good one nearby. But if it's a crummy Wi-Fi network, I don't suffer on it. I just, you know, turn off Wi-Fi and or disconnect from that network, which is like the iPhone's, you know, control centered use case for that is awesome now because you just turn it off and it doesn't kill you from all Wi-Fi just basically that one for 24 hours. And I just turn off Wi-Fi and use my data connection. I don't suffer through just because I'm worried about data or anything, because I can't live like that. And like I said, you know, when I travel, if I'm going nuts, maybe six gigs of data. But otherwise, you know, so I would say, wow, it's really going nuts over there John, look at that. They're using a lot of data. They're not on the information superhighway, those people driving by your house, they're just like treating your road like it's the highway man. You're still with me, right John? Okay. So yeah, so I don't worry about data and I use, you know, like I said, three on average, occasionally I've gone up to six, you know. So I would say you got to try it. Everybody's different. I don't mean to say that, you know, every single person listening is going to only use three or sometimes six. But my daughter certainly can put all of that to shame. But that's not from browsing pictures. You know, I think Apple does a pretty good job making that a very efficient part of the scenario there. I think like Snapchat and Instagram and all of that are what chew up my daughter's data to be perfectly honest. So, which is fine. But just, you know, I don't think it's, I think Apple's done a pretty good job making that efficient. What about you, John? Have you, do you think, I know you use iCloud PhotoLibrary, do you think about this? Is it part of your scenario? You know, it's funny because I look and on my phone, I have optimized iPhone storage set. On my Mac, I do not have optimized Mac storage set. I think that's smart. Probably because I have way more space. Right. Right. So, that's how I'm set up. And I think that's how most people are set up. But on your phone, specific to Andrew's question, on your phone, do you experience like any lags when looking at pictures? Like, is there anything about having that setting on that you find to be a negative on your iPhone? No, I've never noticed any sort of delay. And you don't find it chewing up more data than, you know, you expect on a monthly basis or anything like that? No, I'm good on data. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I like, I do the same thing as you. I leave my Mac there, my main Mac, my laptop I have on optimize. I think this computer in the studio, I don't even have logged into iCloud PhotoLibrary. But because it would want to decide while we were podcasting that it was a good time to like scour through and analyze all my pictures because I'm not clicking the mouse or doing anything. But even though the computer is very busy, we're talking here, you know, anyway. But on my main Mac, I have it set to download. That's the only device I have set to download everything. And that's so that I can have a local copy and then back up that local copy and then sync that to Synology Moments so that I can do all of my own photo analysis and all that stuff. So, yeah, but I have, like you said, you know, locally, I've got the storage. So why not? Cool. All right. Moving on to Jeff here who asks, he says, I was just importing some photos into Adobe Lightroom and I noticed a whole bunch of drive locations come up with the name Macintosh hard drive at snap dash and then a series of seven numbers, seven digits. I assume that what it's showing me are snapshots of my drive. But why does Lightroom see them when looking for import locations? Where are they? And what are they? I think you're very much right that they are your snapshots held by APFS. Why Lightroom is choosing to see and surface them for you is an odd flex to use the term that all the kids like to say. But I don't know. Yeah, it shouldn't be showing those to you, in my opinion. They might have a very good reason for choosing to show those. Maybe it's because Lightroom is built to import from all your SD cards and everything. And perhaps over the years, they found that Mac OS was not necessarily flagging those as the kind of thing that would appear in the finder or maybe a camera wouldn't appear. So perhaps they sort of peeled back the layers and said, show me everything, let the user decide. And that's actually probably what's going on here. So snapshots are not being filtered out from that. And so Lightroom's showing them to you. But that's your snapshots, most likely the ones created by Time Machine. But you can see them and manage them with Carbon Copy Cloner. If you launch, if you have Carbon Copy Cloner, or if you don't get it, and then launch Carbon Copy Cloner down in the lower left, you'll see a list of all of your drives. If you click on your Macintosh hard drive, in this case, then on the right, you will see a list of all the snapshots. And you can even let Carbon Copy Cloner manage them. And if you wait a second, it will populate with the sizes of each of those snapshots. And then you can decide if you want to keep them or delete them or browse them or whatever you want to do. So yeah, there you go. Thoughts on this, John? That's interesting. Yeah, I think it's a directory or a disk. Yeah, it's treating it as a disk, for sure. Just the way it's displaying it. It's treating it as a separate volume, which in essence, it is in the world of APFS, that's not entirely incorrect. But it should be hidden, I think. But, you know. Yeah, no, I just ran Carbon Copy Cloner and just right clicked on one of them and said show and finder and it shows it in the finder. Mac, N1, TB, SSD, at Snapdash, whatever. I also see them with Hardware Growler. I also see them get created. Oh, right. Machines. Yeah, that makes sense. Which is kind of neat. Oh, right. So they really are volumes. That's interesting that Hardware Growler sees those. How often do you see them created? Usually when it's connecting to Time Machine. When it's doing a Time Machine backup, that usually comes up as well. Does Hardware Growler say new volume mounted or something and it's named this snapshot thing or does it identify it differently? Yeah. Yeah, it shows a message with, you know, the name at Snapdash something. Yeah, that's interesting. Cool. Huh. That's fascinating, man. I like it. Good. All right. We are almost out of time here. I want to go to Mike because I think it's a timely question and Mike says he shared an awkward experience that he had with Gazelle recently. Gazelle, for a long time, was actually a sponsor of Makikab and we all used them and loved them. I have to, unfortunately, agree with Mike that since their acquisition a number of years ago and especially now as Time sort of marches on, Gazelle has not become my favorite company to deal with anymore and they really used to really prioritize customer service. And it's not that they're customer hostile now. It's just that they are no longer a good place, at least from what I found, no longer a good place to get any true value out of your old devices. I don't know why that is, but but Mike had essentially that experience and that's been mine as well. So and he said he had trouble getting them on the phone to iron out a specific issue that he had. In fact, they almost lost his device and yeah. So anyway, he says, are there any other sellers that you like? And he named two relatively newer ones. One is Swappa SWAPPA. The other that he asked about was D-Clutter, D-E-C-L-U-T-T-R. So dropping the vowel there, making it prime for a Yahoo acquisition. Just kidding. So I don't know anything about those two, but I am sort of throwing this out there as a geek challenge. I would love to know which of these services you use currently to sort of divest yourself or your family of old Apple devices. So Brian Monroe in the chat room says, what about Swappa? So there's another vote about Swappa. So we'll put a link to them in the show notes. I have no experience with them, but it sounds like at least Brian in the chat room does. So maybe that's maybe that's a good thing. Do you know any, John? Well, I see. So one person in the chat room mentions Apple's trade-up program. And I'm going to mention something similar because I've actually done this with my last several iPhones. There's a corporate Verizon store in Fairfield, and I go there. And they have a similar, they have a trade-in. My last phone, I did that. They, you know, as long as you're, I think, and I think the Apple program, most programs, I think it's similar. As long as you're at least halfway into your prior contract and your devices in working order, they'll take it. They'll give you a few hundred bucks for it, which they did for my last iPhone. And then, yeah. And then you continue with the latest phone. So check your, whoever you get your cell phone from. And this store also got the phone like the day it was released, you know, because they're a partner, an Apple partner. Sure. They got a few versus, I guess, non-corporate stores may not get that if they're a franchise, right? Right. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're either Apple or your phone company, maybe another place that's willing to give you some credit or something. Yeah, I didn't get top dollar, but, you know, I got enough where I was pretty happy. Yeah, you weren't right. Yeah, well, top dollar, the only way you're going to get top dollar is to sell it yourself on like eBay or maybe Craigslist. And I've used eBay in the past and it's worked out really, really well. There are people out there that are super happy to get, you know, a good condition, unlocked iPhone, you know, older model iPhone for sure. You know, and if you're willing to go through a little bit of headache, it really isn't that bad. You know, I've never, I've never really had a problem. I had one guy, you know, I mentioned years and years ago, my daughter, she came to me one day and said, dude, I'm buying a Dell. And it was because she wanted a laptop for herself and she was young. I mean, I think she was, you know, she was spending like Christmas and birthday money. She might have been 10 or something. And so we found at the time whatever Dell laptop was because it was way cheaper than buying a, you know, Mac laptop or something. And we did, we found a really inexpensive Dell laptop on refurb that we converted to a Hackintosh. And we actually then sold it years later in its Hackintosh state on eBay or whatever. And it was fine, you know, it went off. And I think the guy like the whoever bought it, I don't know if it was, I don't know their gender, but the person that bought it tried to like after they got it, they're like, oh, it doesn't work. And they were trying to, like they sent one email in or through the system that was that said, oh, you know, that you're, you're trying to scam me. This doesn't work. And I was like, no, it's not like, hey, by the way, I do this for a living, you know, here's my podcast, give me a call, we'll talk about it. And of course I did all this messaging through the eBay system. And I never heard from the person again. So I think they were trying to scam me about it. But that was one out of, I mean, I've probably sold a hundred pieces of technology on eBay. And I had that happen once. So if you're looking for top dollar from your phone and you don't mind spending, I mean, it takes, you know, five to 10 minutes to put the listing together. I go find an old listing from someone else that has sold, right? And I just say, sell one like this and eBay will copy the format of the listing and the details and you just go and change the tweak the stuff to match yours and and put in some pictures of your own item. That's important that you're showing pictures of the actual thing. And then, you know, like when it sells, and it usually sells really quickly, like I'll put things up, don't do a seven day auction. That's too long to like a three day auction and do a buy it now price that you're happy with and and just let it go. And, you know, and then it takes another five minutes to put it in a box. You're good to go. It's really eBay makes that problem. I mean, they take 10 percent. So they should make that process easy, but they really do. I've sold a lot of things that way. And it's really just not a big deal. There's no issue. If you don't want to haggle with people, you don't have to. You can just sort of ignore it or you can engage. It's fine. It's a very safe environment and eBay protects everybody. So yeah, anyway, Craigslist, that's more the Wild West. You're not, you know, you don't have Craigslist as your as your intermediary there. That's just where you're posting it so that you're dealing directly with these people. It can be kind of wishy-washy. So I've had good luck selling things on Craigslist there, but eBay is way smoother. I mean, again, you get what you pay for and you pay 10 percent on eBay. So as long as it sells, if it doesn't sell, you don't pay anything unless you don't unless you want to pay for like highlighting your listing or anything like that. But generally, you don't have to do that. Paul Frans in the chat room suggests Facebook Marketplace. Another great idea. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. There's all kinds of stuff out there now. So yeah, that's another good one. Have you have you done any of any of these other things, John, with all of your your tech that that mounds up that the crufty tech I like to call it? No, not really. All right. I did use Gazelle for an old Mac. Yeah. It looks like they don't take Macs anymore. Just phones and tablets. Interesting. All right. Well, I think, John, that it is time to see if I can bring the band in. Ah, why is the band only coming in one speaker? That's very interesting. Look at that. Yes. I don't know how to modify. Oh, I can modify the band. Let me see. Does my clicker work? No, it doesn't. Cool. Well, you hear the band over here. That's fun. Really? No, can't do it. All right. Well, there's the band. It's fine. They'll just be over here for now. I guess I need I guess I only recorded that in one channel and I need to I need to fix that. But really, that shouldn't be happening. Ah, it was an analog problem. There we are. What's going on? Yes. Okay. Dirty cable. Hey, there you go. Now the band's in two channels. We like it. We like it just fine, Mr. Braun. And that's how we do it. Hey, go give us a review. Go to macgeekup.com slash reviews. If you would please, we would love to get a review from you because it really helps us when we have these reviews just constantly being updated. And you can update your old reviews as we say all the time. But if you haven't done one, you can go add a new one. And these are on Apple podcasts. Go to macgeekup.com slash reviews. That'll get you there. I have I have a review to share, John. I have one from where is it here? I know it's somewhere. I know it's somewhere. There it is. We have two reviews that came in one from Scott in the US who says just briefly five stars one of my favorite podcasts. I love the topics they cover and the deep dives very helpful info. Thank you, Scott. That's a great review. Like that's all we need. And another one from Sakura 86 also in the US. This podcast is a great source of tips and ideas for Apple users. Awesome. Thank you to both of you. Like that's that's all we need. If you want to get wordy by all means write a novel. It's awesome. But don't feel like you have to whatever you want. And go to macgeekup.com and join up on our weekly newsletter. So you get all of these show notes with all of these links. You get a link to how to review us, but you also get links to all of the things we mentioned in the show delivered right to your email box. Just go to macgeekup.com and sign up there. And then you don't have to worry about it ever again. We'll just take care of it. It's good. Anything else to add, Mr. Braun? No. Okay. All right. Well, I think we're good until Tuesday until Tuesday. I know. It's like that band from from the 80s, right with Amy man till Tuesday. Wasn't that them? We will see you on Tuesday because that's when we'll talk next. And then the next, well, I'll call it normal show. I think it's happening. Sunday, the 15th is the recording. They released on Monday as usual. I think we're doing that a little bit early. Thank you, John, because I have a actually have a gig that afternoon. So yeah, fun, fun, fun, fun. All right. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to all of our sponsors. As we mentioned during the show, expressvpn.com slash mggbearbones.com. Smile software.com slash podcast other world computing at max sales.com Eero at Eero.com slash mgg. Thanks to the band for playing in stereo here. John, I know it's going to only be a couple of days before we talk again, but between now and then please, please make sure that you don't get