 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 685 for Monday, November 27th, 2017. Welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We show your questions, your tips. We answer your questions. We also show your cool stuff found. The goal is for all of us, each and every one of us to learn at least four new things every time we get together. That was the new number for 2017, four new things. As we come to the end, we're trying to decide, do we raise that to five? More on that later. Sponsors for this episode include Motive, or at MyMotive.com. You can get a, it's a really cool sleep, fitness, health, tracking wearable. It's a ring, actually. We'll talk more about that later, but coupon code MGG will save you $20 at MyMotiveMOTIV.com. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful, Connecticut, in somewhat of a state of panic, because we're trying something brand new, because my colleague here sometimes likes to just raise the bar as you heard, and we just raised the bar here. We are using a new audio platform, and it seems to be working out swimmingly. But yes, here in Fearful, Connecticut, John F. Braun. Yeah. Hey, John. Yeah, you're right. We've, for the last 12 and a half years, I mean, for all 684 prior episodes, including the one that you weren't on that I just did that interview with Paul Kent that was also done over Skype. We've used Skype, but Skype is changing. And specifically, they're changing the way it sounds and the way it processes sound. And the results are not good for podcasters. It's adding too much noise to the signal. So we decided to experiment, and we are breaking every rule that I could ever possibly have come up with for this, and that is that we're doing it for the first time. Like normally, we would have like over the weekend, maybe we'd get together and experiment and tweak things. No, no, we're just doing it today. But we are starting the show a little bit late, I mean, by about 20 minutes for everybody in the chat room here at MackieGab.com slash stream, where they've been a little patient with us and helping us test. But I think we've got the audio down. So I'm glad you brought it up, John, because I wanted everybody to know. And please do tell us if you hear anything positive or negative as compared to other shows. Because while we listen, you are, well, you're the ones that matter more about what it sounds like because it's you that we do this for. So let us know. Feedback at MackieGab.com. I think I heard you say feedback if this audio processor or codec is working properly. Feedback at MackieGab.com. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now let's get to the meat of this, John. Shall we? Let's just go straight to our friend, Michael, here who has it's actually our new friend, Michael, has a question. He says, I'm a relatively new listener. So I don't know whether you've covered this. My wife just received a computer from work, which was initially set up and has some special software she needs. She wants to move all of her files from her existing computer over to it. How do I move her files so there are no permissions issues since they will go into a user account set up by her work and may not match what was on her old computer? Do I just run migration assistant? What do I have to watch out for in terms of account naming? Yeah, it's a good question. So migration assistance actually probably not a terrible option for this. It doesn't let you get super granular, but it probably gets granular enough for what you're doing here. So that would that would certainly be one option. And then if it's truly just documents, though, depending on where they're coming from, are they coming from an external drive that you had, maybe a clone from another computer or are you copying them over the network? If you're copying over the network, they're automatically going to get the right permissions when you bring them in. If you're copying them from an external drive and you set that external drive to ignore ownership on this volume by highlight the drive, go to the in the finder, go to the file menu, choose get info and down at the bottom in sharing and permissions, you'll see a little checkbox that says ignore ownership on this on this volume. If you check that box and you might have to click the little lock that's right above it in order to be able to check that box, but it's generally set by default on external drives. Then when you copy things in, it'll just come in with the permissions of whatever user it is. So for that, you should be totally fine. La the last thing I'll add is before I throw it to you, John, is if you do wind up bringing it over using some other method where permissions are an issue, highlight the folder. I would say bring all the documents into one folder, maybe even a sub folder of your documents folder before you move them around and just make sure that things work and things are okay. If you are having a permissions problem, take that entire folder and do the same thing in the finder, go to file, get info. And then in that sharing and permissions, set the permissions the way you want and then hit the little gear icon and choose apply to all enclosed items and that will that'll go through and sort of change all those permissions. But you probably won't need to. I think most of the ways that you would copy this stuff in would inherit that. I think what do you think, John? I think I agree with what you think. And I'll just add something that does offer a level of granularity. So you're correct, my friend, but there is a dandy article here, how to move your content to a new Mac. And it does talk about migration assistant and you are correct, Dave. Now, the thing is this article, so when you get to a point where you want to tell the tool what to migrate, at least this article shows applications, which in this case you probably wouldn't want to migrate. Then it shows a user folder and the thing is then there's a little triangle next to it that shows that it opens it up to a level of detail. So I suspect you may have to be careful what you bring over if you are bringing over things which are in that user folder. And then they have these other categories, other files and folders. I don't know about that or computer network settings as well. So it sounds like in this case, because your primary goal is to bring over documents, I think, then clicking on the user folder that the tool will find and then clicking down and making sure you don't bring over stuff that's inappropriate, mostly documents or things that you recognize from your old installation. Right? Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah, I think you're going to be all right. And welcome to the MacGeekab family here, Michael. It's good to have you. All right, John, you want to take us to Dan? Dan, where is Dan? Here's Dan. Dan has a really good question, especially with us getting new versions of operating systems. Some things happen. So his question is, well, first he says he loves the show, but we love you. I know you guys often talk about coconut battery, but is there a battery app for the iPhone? And you know, that sounds like a simple question, Dave, but it really isn't. So what I'm going to say here is in my experience and then I have some additional information for him in my experience, Dave, the apps available on iOS to do battery type measurements. For the most part, lacking and kind of come and go and seem to break. And I think that was the reflection of our friend here as well. But I do have some things offered, Dave, there are ways you can talk to your battery and you can find out what is happening in your iOS battery, which is what he wants to do. So that was my rant or I don't know if it was a fish shake. Maybe it's a fish shake. But in my experience, Dave, the best apps to talk to your battery on your iOS device are on the Mac and the two best ones that I found, Dave. And I actually learned something. So I've learned at least one new thing researching this question, Dave. So there's coconut battery as he mentioned. The thing is they do have an app that will read not only your Mac battery, but your iOS device battery. Normally you got to plug it in. OK, it's not, you know, it works really well when you do that. And it does. And it tells you some basic information, Dave, but then guess what? I just checked and they now have a plus module. So it's like a bonus module. And guess what, Dave? You're going to be shocked by this, but I actually threw down nine ninety five to buy the enhanced module. So so for both. So yes, so you can get additional functionality. So the free tool tells you some information. But if you get the plus module, it goes in a great detail about the the battery either on your Mac or the machine itself. It tells you all sorts of additional information. So I suggest you check that out and they have a trial of it. But I'm like, come on, man, you know, it's 10 bucks. Yeah, we love these guys, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, unfortunately. And the other option, Dave, of course, is amazing mini. Oh, yeah. And and the thing is, in this case, Dave, I think it actually does the best job of reading the battery, despite it being free. Though, of course, you can give them money as well if you want to. But the thing is, you know, so I wrote this and Dan got back to me and said, well, all right, here's specifically what I was looking to do. And here's what he's specifically looking to do. And I think this may lead in a few directions here. He wants to see both the charger info. So he wants to see what information the charger says it's capable of, which for the most part, yeah, you and I have both used utilities in the past that does this. And typically they'll tell you the voltage, the current and the power that the charger can offer. That's not what it's always going to do, because if it did, it would blow up your battery and then you'd be sad. Right, right. But it's the max. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. But there are utilities that can do this. That the other thing is that utilities can also show you the power being drawn by the device, which if you do the math power being current times voltage, you can figure out of the various values that are are in effect for charging a battery because it's always going to be five volts. Is that right, John? As far as I know, though, you know, I've seen it very sometimes, though, and how would you see that? I'm going to let you look up the little gizmo while I continue to talk about the software, because you know, I'm going at this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the thing is software. So I found two pieces of software that can report this information. The thing is, I found I set menus. Actually, I'm sorry. I'm using many actually does show in the detailed list. It'll say here's the type of charger. So I'm looking. So this morning, I was charging my iPhone and it said, USB brick charger, Watts 12 charger, voltage, as you said, Dave, five. Well, five thousand millivolts, which is five volts, and then amperage two point four or twenty four hundred milliamps. So that's saying, OK, the thing you're plugged into can do this. Both of the programs will report real time charging performance. But what I found, Dave, only I'm easing many will report the details as a Mac app. So that's cool. Now, the other thing that they mentioned is said, well, the other thing that I like with these utility that now doesn't work anymore is that it would tell me how long my iPhone was running since I did a restart, since I like to do restarts every every few days for whatever reason. But he liked to see that stat. Well, you know, that's interesting, Dave, because, you know, the iPhone is almost like a little Unix computer. Well, it's it's definitely a little Unix computer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know what they have is when you reboot them. You can see where I'm going with this. When you reboot a computer, Dave, one of the things that Unix computers keep track of is something called uptime. Well, the good news here is if he wants to see how long it's been since he's restarted his iOS device. I couldn't see either of these utilities doing this. But what they what I did find, Dave, is that I have one. You may run this, I don't know. But the the company is tech at tech.net and they make two utilities. One is called system status and. Oddly enough, it has a stat within it saying uptime, which tells me the last time I restarted my phone. So that'll do it for you. They make another one called network analyzer, which does a whole bunch of cool network stuff. And I think they have both free and paid versions. Check these guys out. But that utility will tell you the last time you rebooted your phone. So cool. And then the sort of the one thing that you tasked me with, which I, of course, went and did is you can find out the true draw of your device by putting it on a USB power meter. And thankfully, these are available for, you know, less than 10 bucks on Amazon. And they're one of the coolest gadgets that I've ever had the pleasure of using. So I highly recommend everybody go and get one. We put a link in the show notes to one of them. And but, you know, they're they're all over the place. So I think I think the one that's in the show notes is essentially the one that I'm using. They kind of change. It's, you know, whatever the factory usually somewhere in China or whatever, you know, makes a bunch of them and then sells them out. So it's good stuff, though. And that that's how you can really see what's what's being used. So cool. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And and just one last thing on the on the sound here. I know my sound kind of conked out while I was trying to talk to John there. That has, believe it or not, nothing to do with this new setup that we're using. That's just actually an old piece of hardware that I've got in line here for the compressor that was acting up. But but we got past that without it being a too much too much of an issue. Really, the question is John's sound for this episode, because that's the sound that you're hearing coming across this new app. All right. Going to listener Bill with his question here. He asks, he says, I'm not sure if this is a drive permission issue or something else, but for some drives, I have two different behaviors. If the drive is or was a system drive at some point, he says the system files may have been deleted, but I still see this behavior. I am asked to authenticate if I want to make changes to files. It'll come up with a dialogue that says finder wants to make changes. Type your password to allow this. He says, for some other drives, if I delete a file, it doesn't go straight to the trash, then I'm asked to delete it immediately, behaving a lot like it is a network share, but it's not. It's either an internal drive or a directly attached drive. And it says, are you sure you want to delete whatever this item will be deleted immediately? You can't undo any ideas to change this to normal behavior. So, yeah, kind of circling back to the permissions discussion we just had. Um, if you're mounting an external or even an internal drive with permissions and it has had some odd permissions or non-standard permission set on it, then you certainly could wind up with this. But rewinding to what we talked about before, highlight the drive in the finder, go to File, Get Info and check that Ignore Ownership on this volume box. That should bypass this, you know, finder wants to make changes. Type your password to allow this box. The alternative would be, again, the same thing that we recommended before, highlight the drive, the entire drive in this case, and change the permissions in that same Get Info sharing and permissions section. And then choose Apply to all enclosed items, which when you're on the drive applies to everything. That should clear that up for both of these, unless on the second one, because it's possible that it doesn't have permission to put things in the trash and therefore it's saying I just have to delete it right away, right? If it can't create the .trash folder or whatever that is these days, which I think it's .trash, but it might be .trash is slash and then user number or whatever that is. But if it can't create that folder or even if it can't write to an existing folder, well, then, you know, that's that. So it could very well be solved by resetting those permissions. However, it's also possible that the drive that won't let you put things in the trash was formatted with a non-Apple file system. If it's not HFS Plus or not APFS, it's possible that whatever file system it is isn't supporting trash the way Mac OS needs it to. And so it's saying, yeah, we're just going to blow it away. But more than likely, it's a permissions issue. I've seen that before. So hopefully those two things, one of those two things will fix it for you. But ignore ownership on this volume is generally what I do for all of my non-boot drives. It just makes life simpler. So that's my thought on that, John. You got anything to add? I think my thought is that you shouldn't, if you're going to take a former system drive that has documents on it, you should take those documents and put them somewhere else in that reformat that drive so you can avoid this sort of trauma. Because I'm thinking, when was the last time I ran into this? And the thing is, I really either have external drives that are either clones or pure data drives, but not system, abandoned system drives. Right. So that's just kind of my thought is I wouldn't keep a drive around in that state. I would, yeah, either pull the docks off and wipe it. So this doesn't happen. I don't disagree with you on that in an ideal world. But we're helping solve a problem is that, well, we have a drive that used to be like, I mean, deal with it, because it always got me that there was that choice in the, you know, in the finder, you know, ignore permissions. It's almost like you're cheating. Yeah, I guess it is. It just, it is, it's cheating, but it's a direct attached drive unless you're sharing it, you know, that and I believe that behavior is the default, right? When you attach a drive, it's just ignore permissions here, because you're you're attaching it, presumably it's yours. So and that's, that sort of follows in the whole concept of if you have physical access to something, a computer, the hard drive, whatever it is, chances are you're going to be able to get into it. Now, that's not always true if it's encrypted or whatever. But but you have a much better chance of getting into it if you're if you can put literally put your hands on it. And then so this is just one of those things. It's like, yeah, just mount it without it. If it's not encrypted, if it is encrypted, you'd need the password and then you wouldn't have permissions to deal with. So yeah, it is good to know that there's that section in the finder. Yeah, because I rarely have to go there, Dave. Thank goodness. Kiwi Graham in the in the chat room just said, and I love this, permissions is only a request to observe protocols. And he's right. It's up to the computer to decide whether or not to honor those those permissions are up to the operating system, I should say, to decide. And this box is the yeah. No, no, no, no, don't don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. Yeah. Hey, I do want to talk about our first sponsor, which is motive, right? It's this ring that you wear and it tracks your activity, your steps and calories, distance, active minutes. It tracks your sleep. So it knows how many hours you slept. If you get up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep, it's smart enough to figure that out. And it tracks your heart rate. It's waterproof up to 165 feet. It's got a three day battery life. Honestly, in my test, my battery life went a little bit longer than that. I I was able to get through four days before I had to charge it. And and it's got it syncs with your phone regularly, so it's constantly pushing stuff to an app on your phone. But but if you're away from your phone, it's got up to two days of onboard memory. So you could be away from your phone for an exercise or a hike, you don't need to worry about it. 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The ring that I got, I wound up with with I chose a slate gray ring and it's in my mind size 10. Not that anybody cares because that's sort of irrelevant. Your your finger will fit you. You don't have to worry about mine. It works really, really well and it was very cool to be able to track my sleep, which is something that I haven't been able to do with any of the other wearables that that I've tested. So you got it. You got to check it out. It's really, really cool. And here's the deal. You go to mymotive.com, M-Y-M-O-T-I-V dot com and it check out, you just put in MGG as your promo code, saves you 20 bucks off of whatever the price is. So if they're having a sale, that's great. 20 bucks with MGG on top of whatever their deal is all good for you. So check it out. My motive M-Y-M-O-T-I-V dot com. And then it check out, use MGG. You save yourself 20 bucks. Check this thing out. Let us know what you think of it. I've been impressed with it. You know, I get to test a lot of tech and this one, it's simple. The app works. It just, it impressed me. So, so I'm very happy to have Motive as a sponsor. Again, mymotive.com is where you're going to go our thanks to Motive for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Well, you know, we had, we had some questions and actually a tip from the past couple of episodes. So let's, let's go with that. So we'll go to David here and David had a very interesting tip that I think I can find it. If I can't, maybe I didn't even put it in the, it doesn't look like I put it in the show there in the notes. Do you see it? I'm there. Yeah. Huh. I don't know why I can't see anything. I see your face next to it. What? Oh, yeah, there it is. Wow. OK, so he writes in. Thanks, John. He says in show 681, there was a member who reported Apple dumbing down the mail settings and one interesting note from, from Dave. Well, for me was that iOS was being too smart and circumvented any attempts to change the mail settings and servers back to back to their defaults, like for Gmail, if it saw you put in IMAP.gmail.com, boom. Or if you put in an email address, the Gmail address, boom, it would auto populate the servers. He says, I recently installed an ad blocker app on my iPhone seven plus. It's a ad. The name of the app is ad block AD capital BLOC with a black and red icon logo thing. He says, so I recently installed this and an interesting approach was that it installed a local proxy via a VPN. Nothing is sent from the device like a typical VPN. It's just pointing to itself locally to block incoming and outgoing ad traffic. He says, but it allows for me to set up domain to IP mapping through the proxy, meaning I can do things like IMAP dot Dave's mail service dot com and point that to the IP of IMAP dot Gmail dot com so that the phone never knows that I'm connecting to Gmail. It's it thinks I'm connecting to IMAP dot Dave's mail service dot com. He says it's kind of a technical solution and certainly one that if Gmail changes their IP addresses, then that could cause its own problems. He says, but, you know, it's a pretty good little hack. So I I like it. I think it's a good idea. I just I love things like this just to have them kind of swimming around in our heads when we're trying to solve problems. So that's a great one, David. Thanks. You think thank you for sending that in anything to add to that John, before we move on. I like it. Yeah, it's sneaky. It's clever. Point could be prone to disruption if somebody figures out what you're trying to pull. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You need to keep it in mind that that you're doing this. And that's sort of the problem with any any work around that you do is, you know, remembering that you've done it six months from now or 16 months from now when something goes wrong, I'm like, God, dang, it's not working well. We've had quite a few people, Dave, when they write in with questions about either their email or the browser, they're like, all of a sudden, it's doing this weird thing. And I'm like, check to see if your proxy server is enabled. More often than not, either because they set it up and forgot about it, or it was inadvertently activated by someone else. Their traffic is going through a place that they realized that they didn't realize it was going through. Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I don't even know what that's still there, Dave. I mean, who uses a proxy server? Do you know anybody? Well, like a proxy server for routine use. I know a lot of satellite ISPs do that. And I would I would guess that when you're connected on an airplane or something, you might be going through a proxy server, whether or not you actually know it. Just because it allows for some more local caching, right? You know, if you've got a slow or or otherwise imperfect internet connection, if it's got really high latency or something, it can pay off to use a proxy server that that's sort of aware of that. And then I guess there's some proxy servers in use that corporations to again for security or things like that. So yeah. OK, I just know. Yeah, in in back in the good old days of the or the battle days to bring you how you want to look at it. Right. But in the place I'm talking about, folks, is if you go to your network preferences and you click on Advanced, you will see a whole bunch of tabs and one of them is called proxies back in the old days in order to get to certain services like surfing the web or doing FTP or a lot of other things you had to go through, like I'll call it the master control program, which was the proxy server. So you had to go to it and say, could I please have permission to use this service? And it could say yes or no. That was how it was architected and it was, you know, kind of crummy because it was kind of a choke point. Right. Right. Right. Well, that's the problem. Yeah, it's like you did that. The one problem with the proxy server is that if the proxy server goes down, you won't route around it. Right. That and sort of the whole concept behind TCP is that it's built to route around problems. But if you're focused on that one thing, well, then you have a problem. But if it's at your house or whatever, you also have that same problem sort of by default. If your router dies, well, it doesn't matter that TCP is smart enough to route around it. There is no generally for most of us at home, there is no way to route around. Well, don't you have a backup router, dude? Well, I do. I don't either. Yeah. Do you really? Oh, no, not up and running constantly. No. But I will say this. The the Synology RT 2600 AC it's it's a standalone router. It really is the best standalone router that I think is on the market right now. And it's the one that I'm using. I'm using that. It's a little decadent, but it's that with the Wi-Fi turned off. And then I have any one of a variety of mesh systems in place as my as my Wi-Fi right now. It's it's Euro, but it could change at a moment's notice. But anyway, that that Synology is a great router and it allows you to have two connections that you can either use for load balancing or failover or whatever you like. And one of them could be like a cellular connection. So you really can get some robustness with it. And the router takes care of it. It'll do it all by itself. Just pretty cool. You know, that makes sense. Now that I think about it, the Synology itself has a similar network mapping. I can either bond two ports or I can say, all right, here's primary. And if this blows up, go back to the second. Yeah, because it has two ethernet ports. So so the 2600 has at least two ethernet. Well, two. What does it have? One and four. Hello. Yeah, I'm here. OK. Yeah. No, I was curious about the the number of ethernet ports on the. 2600. So it has five total. It's got a four port switch for the WAN for the LAN and then one port that's dedicated to the WAN. But if you're going to do this failover thing, you have two choices. One is a 4G modem that you'd plug into one of the USB ports on the router. And then two is if you had, say, two cable modems coming in or cable and DSL or whatever, you would use port one on the four port switch and that becomes WAN 2, which is interesting. WAN being a wide area network. That's the outward facing internet thing, LAN, local area network. That's your internal stuff. I like it. That's smart. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah, I'm just thinking about this because winters come in and power outages are coming and redundancies. Good. All right. It's all right. Yeah. No, no, you're right. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. Cool. All right. Well, that was a fun little detour. And I think that RT2600 you can also get a younger brother or older brother, I should say, which is slightly less powerful. The RT 1900 AC. But if you're just using it as a router, it can work well. So and they can save a little money. But I think it's like one ninety nine for the twenty six hundred. It's like if if an airport extreme works fine for you, but you want to upgrade to a better router, that's the one. It like if a standalone router is your bag. And for a lot of people, it is because you don't necessarily need mesh and in a lot of homes. And that's an ology thing. That's the way to go. I think that's all I can say. What I think. All right. It's got VPN server. It's got so we could talk all day. Maybe we should. But we'll move on for now. But it is fun. Ken writes in with a question. He says, I have learned more than four things during your recent discussion about APFS. That's Apple's new file system. He says, what I did not hear was anything about the advisability or inadvisability of using APFS on a rotational drive. I've heard several people say it's not advisable because of how APFS handles changes to copied files and the directory tree structure. Are you, Dave and John, running APFS on any of your rotational drives? What are your experiences? Yeah. So yes. I have tried APFS on rotational drives and by and large it has worked. But I am not running it on any of my relied upon rotationals. And the reason is it seems like, you know, with the fact that Apple's changing things about fusion drives and that's sort of all the rotational support aspect of APFS is still evolving as far as I can tell. And we have to remember that APFS was not engineered. Now, let me say this a different way. APFS was engineered to be used and take advantage of the characteristics of solid state drives. But what that means is it was not necessarily engineered to take advantage of the characteristics of rotational drives. And that's why Mac OS defaults to using HFS plus for your rotational drives. Now, there are some things about APFS that I really kind of would like on my rotational drives, especially if I've got, you know, I have like one four terabyte drive that hangs off of my Mac and I've carved out, you know, maybe 600 megs of it, sorry, 600 gigs of it as my clone because I have a 512 gig SSD inside my computer. So maybe it's 750 as a clone. And then the rest is used just as sort of a blob of storage where I can put things like my iTunes library and my photos library and things that I don't want to clog up my my internal drive on my iMac. It would be great to use APFS for that so that I didn't have to live with hard partition limits because APFS sort of lets that be fluid. But one of the reasons APFS lets that be fluid is because it's an SSD that you're on and, you know, having things sort of scattered about on the drive doesn't cause any latency problems, skipping around. If you've got files, you know, here and there and everywhere, it just doesn't matter where they are because there's no seek times really for that like there are on a rotational drive. So as much as I would like that characteristic, character character, easy for me to say of APFS on on a rotational drive, I don't I mean, I like it in theory. I like it from a management and logistics and theoretical standpoint, but I don't know if I would like that in practice long term. And I don't really want to test that on something that I have to rely on. And frankly, that's the only real test I could do to then come and talk to you folks about it. So that's my thoughts on it, John. I'm going to tell you my thought of someone else's thought. OK, because I got an email from our buddy Kenny. Yeah, I don't think we're met, but I met him recently at the the some thing man. Sure. Anyways, Kenny sent me an email saying I was listening or he was digesting the latest Mac Geekab. I'm not going to touch that. OK, basically, he said he heard both me and you talking about how we're backing up our APFS drives to HFS plus targets. Sure. Or external drives. And he's like, you know what? So he he. He did this one for the team in that he's using SuperDuper and he said, you know what? I have a SSD. Wait, let me see. Right. So he reformatted an SSD that he uses for external backup. As a PFS using SuperDuper and he says it works great. So one data point. Yeah, I haven't I haven't yet. So the thing is, it's not the thing is, you and I both recall that during the beta of high Sierra, if you try to run it and you try to install it on a rotational drive, it would refuse to reformat it as APFS. And I we have various conspiracy theories as to why that was one being that, well, it's not the best format for rotational drive, I think was the thing. And it was enforcing that by saying, don't do that. Right. Right. But it works. And as you said, it works. But I don't know if there's any if I I don't have enough information to know if there's any inherent distrust of it on a rotational drive. Then maybe we won't get the best performance, right? Yeah, yeah, I just, you know, Apple hasn't been entirely clear with statements about thou shalt not or thou shall or this is supported or this is not supported. So we kind of have to take by inference what they support. And clearly, they supported on SSDs because without even telling you, they'll convert your SSD over to APFS right during the high Sierra installation. So that's supported. Like tacitly, Apple has made that clear. But, you know, they don't convert rotational drives and they don't convert fusion drives. So that kind of again, just taking it implicitly. It's like, you know, hey, man, you went out of your way to do this. We assumed you knew what you were doing and we'll let you do it. But we have no idea how you would assume you knew what you were doing when like we don't even know what we're doing. You know, like I really I've talked to some of the people that that do this work and I mean, they've done an amazing thing developing a file system from scratch in, you know, just a few years. So I kind of want to take their lead in terms of where I want to put my data that I rely on. I'll test things. And it's again, like I said, I mean, and we've heard people that like you said, Kenny and Michael King in the chat room are doing exactly that they're cloning to a rotational APFS drive. That's fine. But if something goes haywire and ultimately it can be blamed on APFS, neither Kenny nor, you know, Michael King or anybody else that's sort of gone out of their way to do this would say, dang it, you know, I trusted you Apple. Be like, oh, yeah, OK. I mean, I think that's that's kind of how it would go. Be like, yeah, well, it died, but it was, you know, APFS. And so, you know, semi unsupported, you know, oh, well, that's my thought on it. And with that thought, my thought is what's next? What's next? And what's next is Ralph had a question we were talking about Docsis 3.1 modems last time and he said, hey, John and Dave, can you recommend a Docsis 3.1 modem that has voice capability or as the industry likes to call it, telephony? I'm looking to replace my Comcast modem rental, but none of the ones you talked about previously support voice. It's true. None of the ones I mentioned do because there is no. Are you kidding me? There is no Docsis 3.1 telephony modem available retail. There is one. What? Well, you know, these this is new, right? And so no, no telephony. VoIP isn't new. VoIP has been around for ages. Docsis 3.1 is new, though. And I agree. But because it it it's based on legacy protocols, in part, correct. I don't understand why why telephony support, which is basically right voice over IP. It's sending voice data over a TCBIP connection, which is that's what your cable modem does. Why would that all of a sudden disappear under 3.1? I so you're making an assumption and it did not disappear. What what has not be more continue has not happened is that the cable companies have not certified any of these modems for for retail sale or for for for their services. And here's the deal. Just like about a year ago, we had this conversation about Docsis 3.1, maybe a year and a half ago. And I said, yeah, there's a few Docsis 3.1 modems out, but don't spend your money. They're going to be a fortune wait a year and everything will come down. And that's in fact what happened. There are Docsis 3.1 telephony modems right now. Supplies of them are essentially being supplies of the ones that are approved for use on Comcast, approved by Comcast, have been gobbled up by Comcast so that they can rent you a Docsis 3.1 modem with telephony support. The Airis XB6 is the one and I've actually talked with listener Scott who's got one and it's I mean, it's working amazingly well for him, but he has to rent it from Comcast. It's not available for retail purchase anywhere yet, but wait six months, wait certainly 12 months. And I think there'll be more of these out there. There's always been sort of a in the third party or I should say retail cable modem market. The availability of telephony modems has always been limited as compared to all the sort of plethora of options that you would have with just a straight up cable modem. But there's another solution. Here's the deal, especially if you're with Comcast, they will allow you to run two modems simultaneously. So get a Docsis 3 or even like I'm running a Docsis 2 telephony modem for cheap. Just make sure it's one that's certified to run on Comcast and then get your Docsis 3.1 data only modem and run that for your internet connection. And here's the other deal. Comcast doesn't really talk about this. I'm sure they don't want me talking about it, but I don't work for them so I don't care. That Docsis 2 or 3, whatever telephony modem you have is a perfectly capable data modem at all times. So if your cable modem blows up, just move your ethernet cable from your router from the first modem to the second one. And you're online, perhaps a little bit more slowly, but you're online. So so that that would be my recommendation at this point. If you want to own them, if you want to rent from Comcast then the XB6. There you go. Yeah. Now, I like your point because especially the voice bandwidth, VoIP, is is so small, even on a Docsis 2 modem, you're not taking it and you're not taking up anywhere near the bandwidth of that modem by just doing voice stuff. It's pairing a different thing up, though. It that telephony is happening out of band of your internet connection, right? OK, so it's different frequencies. It's yeah, it's a it's a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. So. But it's nowhere taxing the abilities of even a 2.0 modem, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, it's very, very small. But but yeah. Yeah, there you go. And I think that XB6 is what they call a residential gateway, which means that it's your modem. It's your telephony device, right? It's also your router and also your wireless access point. So it's got all three in there and it's the residential gateway, which is what Comcast likes to deliver. Well, that way, you know, everything's all in it. You just get that you connect your wireless, you know, you connect to its Wi-Fi and you're done. There's no but yeah, a lot of listeners, not everybody, but a lot of listeners to the show like to use things like the Eero or Synology or whatever. And then off you go. So. And and to get a little bit geekier, even still, Graham in the chat room asks. And I think Graham is from either Australia or New Zealand. I'm going to get one of those wrong, but not from the U.S., not on Comcast and so you can't connect to the SIPP server independently, SIPP being the one of the protocols and the one most frequently used for telephony. And the answer is no. I mean, I assume we. Well, I don't even know that we could. I really think it's completely out of band from from Comcast Internet. So no, we can't connect to the SIPP server with our own VoIP client or anything. So. So there you go. And I got it right when wrong. He's from both Australia and New Zealand. So there you go. Yeah. How can you be from both? You know, that's probably outside the scope of this this episode. Sounds like a more philosophical question. It's a philosophical question. I think so. Hey, I want to take a minute and thank all the people that didn't get caught this week. The folks who are our premium subscribers and sent in their contributions for this week. So I want to take a minute and do that. On the monthly ten dollar plan, Clive S, Dave G, Ken L, Nick S, David M and lastly, but not leastly, Micah P, who instead of on the monthly ten dollar plan has put himself on the monthly fifteen dollar plan. So thank you very much, all of you, for that. And then on the twenty five dollar biannual plan, Timothy B, Philip C, Paul C, Steven S, Edward W, Patrick C, Andrew D, Monroe R, Paul D, Peter E, Brent G and Stephen B. Thank you so much, you rock. Anybody that wants to do what you can to not get caught, visit us at MacKicab.com slash premium and and we would love to have your direct support if you are interested and, of course, able. Really, really appreciate it. So thanks, everybody. Good stuff. OK, John, just to throw a curveball at you, Graham is, as we said, from both from Australia and New Zealand and currently listening from Switzerland. So I'm not even going to like I've got. I've said too much. I actually believe it or not, I saw that. So I clicked on his IP in our chat room and I saw he's in Switzerland. I'm like, I'm just not going to figure this guy out. So no, we're not going to figure it out. Let's he's like an international man of mystery at this point now. We've got three countries. Yeah, he's like Barry, Barry, Barry. You never know where he's at. I mean, he's always somewhere. He's always dressed really nice. The one nice thing about Barry that we know because he was the first. Barry is never going to get caught because he's always been a premium listener. There you go. Hey, all right. Let's talk about movies. We had quite a few questions come in recently about managing your movie library and Plex specifically. And I'll say right up front that Plex I think they've got one more sponsor slot left on their current contract, but may or may not renew. I don't know that Plex is a sponsor currently of the show. We've been talking about him for years. We would talk about him whether or not they were a sponsor. They're not a sponsor of this episode, but I think they're a sponsor. The next one, if I if my memory is. But anyway, that has no bearing on this conversation. I just wanted to throw that out there for full disclosure, but we've had a lot of questions from a lot of you about Plex and just managing your movies and all of that stuff. So let's start with Fred and see where this goes. Fred writes, he says, I know that during previous shows, you've made mention of Synology. So I sent some dollars in to purchase a DS216J with two Western digital red drives. I'm in the process of moving old files to the unit, but now I have general questions. I have loaded Plex on my Apple TV. It's available. The client app is available on Apple TV on the App Store. So Apple TV 4th Gen. Is it best to use the Plex server for movies or to use DS video from Synology? My research gives me the impression that Plex would be better because it has more features. And then second question, what are your views on using the Synology for pictures? I have a lot of pictures with albums, smart albums using keywords, using full title and descriptions. My testing shows that keywords, full titles and descriptions are not being copied over. I've only tested one picture, he says. It appears that Plex and DS Photo do not allow metadata to come across. Any ideas? Thanks, friend. Yeah, so let's start with photos, right? Because things have changed very recently. You're right. DS Photo is kind of a, which is Synology's photos app. It's not that great. Plex for photos is better, but I've found it to be sort of manual in the way that I need to interface with it. It's okay, but it's not great. It's not like photos on your Mac where you just slurp things in and magically everything's there. But Synology's got something in beta called Moments. Moments is part of the DSM 6.2 beta, but I think you can install it without that. I wound up in a scenario where my CPU died on my DS 18, 15 plus. And so I migrated over to a DS 18, 18, 17 plus that I had. But that was running DSM 6.2, so I had to run my production Synology on this beta software. So I figured, well, let's just embrace it. And their new Moments app is like running iCloud Photo Library locally. I synced up all my photos via my phone. It auto uploaded them all. It took about a day and a half to blaze them all over to the disk station. And in the process, the disk station started combing through all the metadata of the photos. And it created things like, hey, here's your European trip from 2016 because it knew where all those photos were, except of course the ones that my wife didn't geotech, that's just for people that remember us talking about that. But it'll find all those things, of course, sorts by date. It's just like, it creates all those auto albums so that you don't have to. And it's really good about it. It also does facial recognition, which is amazing. I mean, it works really well. And it's just amazing to think that it's doing that on the little disk station that I have in the office as opposed to using some mysterious cloud server like Apple does, or I guess Apple's doing it locally and then syncing that with the cloud. But it's really efficient about it. So as far as your pictures, the Synology Moments thing might be your magic answer. Have you messed with Moments yet, John, before we get into the movies thing? Not yet. I was at their event and they gave a whole, yeah. So they're introducing a cloud-based service similar to what Microsoft and other people have. Yeah. Yeah, I'll toss something in. Yeah, it's a, it gives you cloud-based document and media. Yeah. Yeah, they're not the first of the game, but the thing is that they're introducing their solution to the game. Makes it compelling because for a lot of them, you don't have to throw somebody membership fee or pay for it. Right, right. Yeah, it's nothing you haven't seen before. What's astounding about it is that you're hosting it and you don't have to let anybody else get involved. You don't have to buy storage from anybody else or rent storage. So that's one thing to look at. In terms of what to serve your movies with, I have both Plex and Video Station slash DS Video. Video Station is the thing that runs on the disk station. DS Video is the app that would run on either your Apple TV or on your phone or your iPad. Okay. I'm gonna throw one thing in here. So the unit that was mentioned, the DS216J, I have that exact same unit because I want it at one of their prior events, but I just want to point this out because I think it's relevant to what you may say, but it has a Marvel or Moda 385, something or other processor. So it has a one gighertz processor with two cores. Now, I don't know, I think that may be important to what you may say. Yeah. And that processor is not the greatest, but it's not, you know, I mean, it's a dual core gighertz processor. But anyways, I just want to see how that figures into what you're about to say, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, right. So you can run Plex on this or you can run Video Station. I believe, I'm pretty sure Plex runs on this one. In fact, I know it does, yeah. Because Fred said so. So I like Plex better because it's got, because as you said, it's got more features. There's nothing wrong with Video Station, it works. And on some Synology units that don't support Plex or that Plex doesn't have support for is probably a better way to say it because it's a third party app. Video Station is your only option. But I'm pretty sure on that one that Plex works it sounds like from some of the emails that I exchanged with Fred here. Plex, in my experience, does a better job when you slurp in a movie of going out and finding not only all the metadata for the movie, so you've got the poster and the rating and all the trailers and teasers and extra footage and all of that stuff. It just sort of builds it and it's there and it really looks like the Apple TV kind of movies interface. Video Station or DS Videos interface is pretty good but where I've found it, it begins to fall short as with subtitles and things like that where Plex has really built some robust functionality to go and find your subtitles out on these other services. But here's the great part. You don't have to choose. I'm running both and they are both pointed at exactly the same folder into which I put all my movies and they both automatically keep an eye on that folder and when a new movie's there, both Plex and Video Station just grind themselves up, chunk through the movie, do whatever they need to do and now it's part of that library without having to have two copies of the movie file. It probably has two copies of the metadata stored in their respective databases. In fact, I'm sure it does but otherwise it's all just right there. So you get to test both. Is the beauty of that and decide what works best for you. That's there you go. Were you going to go after something with video transcoding and all that, John? Is that is that where you were leading with that? It sounds like it's probably not an issue here. So I'm just, you know, it's come up in the past. So I look at it. So I have two units. I have a DS 713, which is a 2013 unit. And that has a two. Dual core, two gigahertz Intel atom. And that's always done wonderfully for me. But it sounds like at least in this case, either DS video or whatever, even though it's a relatively lower powered processor, it still has the oomph to do the video work on the 216. Yeah, I'm just babbling because I haven't done. I haven't done the only thing I use the 216 for is it's a target for my hyper backup. I haven't done any multi-video at all. Yeah, it, you know, you can, you don't. So what we're talking about here is putting a version of the movie file on your disk station or whatever that is not either ideal or not compatible with whatever your destination is. So let's say you put an MKV copy of the movie on your disk station and your Apple TV won't play that natively. So it needs to be transcoded before it can be displayed on the Apple TV. Converted is another way of thinking of transcoding. It's up to your disk station to do that work. And some of them, depending on, again, the CPU, like John said, the amount of RAM and which software can run, can do that transcoding on the fly, meaning fast enough that it can do it faster than real time. And you can just watch the movie. And some of them cannot. But there's nothing that stops you from doing that transcoding ahead of time. And Plex can do some of that for you, where you say, yeah, go ahead and transcode this movie now and it chunks, you know, maybe overnight or something and then you're good to go. Or you could do it on your Mac, right? You could run something like Don Melton's transcoding scripts and then you're good to go, right? Because those will convert it and you just store the resulting files in your library. And then you don't have to worry about it needing to do any transcoding. It's just gonna do it all by itself. So, there you go, right? All right, and I will put a link to Don Melton's scripts and the thing. I actually have a text expander snippet, comma, Melton for that because I send that link out pretty often. Anyway, so that's Fred's question. Let's move on, we've got a couple other and let's see how this goes here. So Andy writes, oh, where are we here? He says, I purchased a new Eero and I have a Mac Mini 2011 running macOS Hi Sierra. He says I plug it all in with a switch and then, or I plugged my Eero into a switch and then I also plug my Mac into a switch so it is connected via ethernet. If I let the computer go to sleep, the Eero cuts off wake for network access. Oh man, I don't think Andy speaks English as his first language. So, essentially what Andy has said here is that he can't get his Mac Mini to wake for network access when he tries to connect to it with Plex, right? If you've got a file server running on your Mac or a print server or something like that, you can let your Mac go to sleep and when you need to access it, it just still appears on the network most of the time and then magically wakes up with Plex that does not happen. And he's saying that the problem is between Eero and Plex, yeah. And here's the thing, there's two things. Number one, for that wake for network access to work as I described it, you need to have some other specific Apple device on your network, either an Apple router or an Apple TV. And that will take over is what they call this Bonjour Sleep Proxy where some other device says, okay, go to sleep, that's fine, I'll act like I'm you. And when a request comes in, I'll tell you to wake up and the way a computer is told to wake up over the network is what they call a magic packet. That's literally the name of it. And then the computer gets the magic packet, it wakes up. As soon as it's awake, then whatever was acting is the sleep proxy sends the request along. So even if you don't have an Apple router and you don't, you've got an Eero, with an Apple TV, if you have one of those and I think you do, it would still work but it's only gonna work for services that can be registered with the OS or are a part of the OS. So this Bonjour Sleep Proxy does not work for third-party stuff like Plex. You can run the Plex server on your Mac in addition to, in the last question, we talked about it on the disk station. So it doesn't matter what kind of router you have, this wake for network access is not gonna work the way you want it to with Plex. And so you need, whatever's running Plex needs to be on all the time. That's just the way that's gonna work. And there's no real magic there even though it's called the magic packet. So I think you just gotta leave your computer on all the time. If it's gonna be a server, it needs to be a server in that sense. So that's my thought, you know. Any thoughts on that, John? I think my thought is, I'm gonna link to this dandy article from Apple which I'm gonna read and experiment with because I understood most of what you said. But it's called about wake on demand and Bonjour Sleep Proxy, which I think is kind of what you were just talking about. That's exactly it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's great when, the interesting thing that I think is key about this is that I knew this, but you pointed this out, but having an Apple network device or Apple TV on the network is what enables this magic to happen. That's right. Otherwise it just falls apart. Yeah, yeah. It sort of relies on having something there. And who knows? Maybe, you know, the HomePod will act as a Bonjour Sleep Proxy whenever that arrives in our homes. And you know, we'll see when that happens. Oh, it's delayed, but, you know, that doesn't surprise me, by the way. What they're trying to do or what they're doing with the HomePod is not easy. And it was, you know, not... Oh, no, it's not. But it's also brilliant to create artificial demand. Right. That's right. I mean, is it a media trick or a marketing trick or... You know what I'm saying? I do. I mean, you and I both have seen this through our Mac Observer and other media channels. You know, Mac Observer and other media adventures. But it's like announcing all of a sudden that a product is constricted or going to ship late or something like that. Yeah. You got a question, the motive for that. Well, they, well, I mean, their motive is that they had told us at WWDC that the HomePod would ship before Christmas, essentially. And it obviously now will not. So they had to manage that expectation or... Right. But you know where I'm going is that, you know, creating a deadline and then missing it and or exceeding it is, you know, a trick in a lot of books. Well, I think they're, I think they truly believed and certainly hoped that it would be out by now. But, you know, what they're doing is difficult. We've seen a lot of companies come and go in this wireless speaker space and only a few of them. And, you know, a lot of times a few means one have done it in a way that just works for people. And I'm talking about Sonos, of course. And they really, I mean, they've done a stellar job, but they've been doing this for, you know, over a decade. And remember, they were the first consumer focused mesh wireless company, right? They built a mesh network in your house before anybody else did. And I've tested a lot of these things. I actually had this queued up for a cool stuff found, John, but I'll I'll go to it now since we're here. But I have found a speaker line, a wireless speaker line that actually makes me think, OK, for some people in the right circumstance, this is better or a comparable. It's an option to if you want wireless speakers in and around your home, JBL's link speakers are a really good option and can do a lot of the things that people would want. And previously, we'd only really be able to point to Sonos to do, at least from, you know, in terms of reliably and all that stuff. So the JBL link, I've tested a few of them. They have the link 300, which is a sort of a I mean, it's you could move it around, but it's not built to be moved around. It's it's, you know, built to it's kind of like home pod sized, if you will, it's shaped a little bit differently, but it's it's that size of a device. Actually, today it's just 200 bucks, but I think that's just because today's Cyber Monday. It's 250 bucks normally, but it's a wireless speaker. It connects over Wi-Fi. It's got Google Assistant built into it. And of course, you know, because it has Google Assistant built in, it connects to Google Play music, which is, you know, it's so it's not going to connect to Amazon music. It's not going to connect to Apple music. That's just sort of one of these things that, again, that's one of those places where Sonos really does being sort of platform agnostic. They sort of work with everybody, which is very interesting. But, you know, if you want to do this, then you get Google, you get wireless control of your music. With that, you can also control it with the Google Home app. And that's really the way to control the speaker. It had a really smooth setup experience in terms of connecting to my Wi-Fi network. And it's it's a Google Assistant. So I can say, you know, OKG Word or, you know, HeyG Word and I can ask it questions. And that's actually been really interesting having that the Echo Dot and and or the Sonos one, which right now only works with with A word. And then, you know, my phone, which lets me do S word, all in the same room, they all have very different strengths. None of them are perfect. But but it's been very interesting. The sound out of the JBL, the the Link 300 is great. You don't get to tweak the EQ on it, which, again, you know, if you're getting into audio file range, that can be a little frustrating, but and it will do multi room. So you can have different things. You could have, you know, two or three of these things set up. Different things playing in each room or the same thing synced up playing in rooms. It won't do stereo. So you couldn't buy two of them and do a stereo pair. But but you can have them synced up playing the same thing where it gets interesting and offers you something that you cannot get with Sonos is when you throw something like the JBL Link 20 into the line, because the JBL Link 20 has all of those same features and is battery powered and portable and also supports Bluetooth if you want on the go. So yeah, it'll do your Wi-Fi. It'll do your Google Assistant, hands free control of your music, simple setup, all of that stuff and multi room. And then you can take it with you and, you know, do all of that on via Bluetooth from your phone. So it becomes this thing that that, you know, Sonos users don't get because they don't offer that kind of thing, at least not yet. I don't know what their plans are. But it's really interesting. So like I said, this JBL Link line has become I've been very impressed with it. Like I said, it's the first thing that makes me think, OK, I can have something else I could recommend to people that are asking me about this. And and for a lot of folks, this might actually be better. So yeah, really interesting. I like you. It'd be great if you looked at the, you know, I have one of these and I think you check that out. But the I still think the Denon Heos, it really grew. So they give me a review unit, right? It's the Heos 3. So it's another one of these network speaker systems here. I kind of like it. Yeah. And that one does. It's got some battery powered units in the in the product line, right? So you can do your outdoor streaming and all that stuff if you want. Is that right? Yeah. So it's a yeah. So it's like the others. A I don't know how messy it is. You know, compared to what you were talking about. But it is absolutely a network speaker system. I mean, I can run the app and play things from tune in or my local the mode I have it now is DLNA. And you can network them and you can stereo them and do all sorts of funny things. I don't know if you were hooked up with them. I mean, I know you saw the one that I have at my house. Yeah. You know, for a portable, you know, powered speaker, it's it's it's all right. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And the software they keep adding to. But yeah, I wasn't impressed with their interface or their software when I first saw it at your place. But but you're right, I should dig back in because that might be another option for people, too. In fact, from what you're saying, it sounds like it. It certainly is. I mean, it's dead on. I mean, they had one last time. Sure. I don't think they do Apple music, but they will do Spotify. Oh, yeah. They'll do Amazon music. I don't think they do Google, but they'll also play music from your phone. So yeah. But I remember when they released the product to me, it was very young and it had very few options. One of the few was the LNA. And then they started saying, well, we're going to add this and that and that and that. Right. No, it's not better. And then I know you had some opinion about the coverage of their. Midsize speaker, I guess that I have. Right. Right. You do a vertical or horizontal, which to me, I'm not an audiophile. Right. Well, I mean, yeah, but and there's a difference between because I don't really consider myself an audiophile. I mean, I generally call myself one because there's no mid range. I'm not. I actually have really good hearing, but I can be happy with. I don't need to have. So my definition of an audiophile is someone that truly enjoys tinkering with their sound system. Right. They enjoy building speakers. They enjoy linking it all together. I've done all that. I I have enjoyed that. But I don't it doesn't need to be my hobby. Right. I've got a friend that will only use amplifiers that he has built himself. And that's cool. I mean, you know, he likes to tinker. There's nothing wrong with that. Right. That's cool. So when I tell him, oh, yeah, I know at home I use Sonos. It just like blows, you know, the top of his headlights on fire because he's like, oh, my God, but that's not you're not, you know, you didn't build the amp. Yeah, I know it's OK. Somebody else did. They're more qualified than me. It's fine. You know, so I'm not like that. I appreciate good sound, but I'm also realistic that having convenience is worth something and is long and there is a good enough sound level that's good for me. Now, there's a lot of stuff that's crap and I won't tolerate it. And I want to listen to music and I want to hear it like like like music should be heard, but I don't need to always be hearing it out of, you know, a five thousand dollars stack of speakers. You know what I mean? So and there is there are ways. So so I get it. It was just to your point. I remember one time you were over and you you looked at this speaker and you were like, you know what, let's change the orientation and see what happens. And I was like, I would never even think of doing that. Right. So I'm thinking about that. Yeah. You were like, I don't know if I like the spread or the coverage of it. I'm like, what are you talking about? It sounds fine to me, but right. No, I realize I accept that I am picky about this stuff, but I don't need to be tweaky about it. I guess is the right way to say it anyway. Tweaky. All right. Hey, let's let's finish this Plex this Plex thing now that we're here. Yeah. So we'll jump back to to Jim's question. If I can find my way there. Here we are. Jim says I started having a problem with Plex. I have a few hundred movies, all MP4s, which I have uploaded to OneDrive since I'm a Microsoft 365 subscriber. But I have a lot of problems watching movies at home and I'm using them built in Plex app on my Samsung Smart TV. I can access Plex, but the movies take several minutes to even load. Then it is constantly buffering. My TV is connected by Wi-Fi, but I'm pretty sure it's an adequate connection as Netflix and Amazon Prime don't have a problem. He says, what am I doing wrong? So this is this is an interesting set up here, right? So because well, we have multiple vectors here with different speeds and types of video. Go on. I'm just kind of. No, no. What's important to note is that he's using Plex Cloud, right? So he's uploaded all of his movies. They're stored on OneDrive. But what happens with Plex Cloud? So that becomes the server, right? Plex has a service where you can you don't have to host your own Plex server. It's it, you know, you store your stuff in one place. But when you upload to Plex Cloud, when you're doing the prep, it pre-transcodes your movies for whatever Plex Cloud is built to do. Right. Yeah. So they're pre-transcoded, I think, by your Mac before they're uploaded. I haven't played with Plex Cloud. The cloud. But what I do know about it is the cloud doesn't do any transcoding and your TV very likely needs whatever it is in a very specific format. But it's possible that whatever format it's getting is causing hiccups in the processing directly on your TV. And and so a good test would be to set up your Mac locally as a Plex server and point your TV to that temporarily and see if you can stream locally and maybe there's some tweak if that works, then maybe there's some tweaks you can make to the way you're transcoding these files as they're sending up to the cloud and maybe whatever it's getting, you know, maybe maybe your TV is asking the cloud for the wrong thing. Like you said, John, there's a lot of vectors, but that's how I would go about testing this is just thinking about the cloud in that way. And also Plex Cloud, I mean, it's a cool service because you get to do all this stuff without having to to do it all. So there you go. Right. No, no, I'm with you. So the vectors are the movie stored in the cloud and what format it's in. Yep. Is it something accessible or something transcoded, perhaps in a proprietary format, which I think is what you were suggesting with. Well, I don't think it's proprietary, but I think it's specific. But what I don't know is like, is it generic? Right. Is Plex Cloud this thing where you say, OK, TV vendor, if you want to support Plex Cloud, then you need to be able to to play a movie in this format go, right? Or is it saying, well, your Plex Cloud is connected to this Samsung TV that can accept XYZ format. So we're going to I don't know which way that goes. But my guess is my guess is it's the former and maybe the TV is good for Plex locally, but not really good for Plex Cloud. Right. So it may have a chip that decodes whatever. Right. Whatever it is. Yeah, some MP. So it's how it's stored on the server. Your pipe, which sounds like that's not the problem here. I would agree with that. And then and then the. Receiving device and its capabilities and what can it do or not do? Well, yeah. OK. Yeah. That's what that's where we that's where we go with this. And I think I think we've got to wrap it up here, John. I think we do. But, you know, it's good to talk about this, Dave, because. But the holidays coming up, I don't know if you've noticed. But if you step into certain establishments. You may hear. A certain type of music again and again and again. Yeah. If you step into my house, you'll hear it because we have a holiday playlist that we play. Yeah. Well, I'm not coming. I'm not stopping by because I don't need. I don't need that. Oh, but it's beautiful. I love Christmas music. It's whatever. I mean, we listen to all kinds of holiday music. It's not just Christmas stuff. I enjoy it on my own terms. Well, yeah. Right. Anyways, for the holidays, you may be considering video audio video gifts for those who want to give gifts. Yes. And that's why this talk is especially important. I think, Dave, I agree. I agree. You know what else is important, Dave? What's that? How to get in touch with us. Now, we talked about our email address, which is feedback at Becky Gap dot com, but I'm not going to say it a fourth time because they'll break the rules. That would there's also last I checked, Dave, you can not only email us at that email address, but you can call us. And you know what you can call us. I'm going to tell you because I see it in our show notes. Two, two, four, eight, eight, eight, which is. Wait, you missed the last one, John. Oh, I'm sorry. Two, two, four, eight, eight, eight, which is Dave. Four, three, three, five. And if you're a premium listener, you can email us at that premium at Matt geek up dot com address. That's prioritized for you because you help us keep the lights on. You help us not get caught. We like that. And you can find us in our Facebook group, too. 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Smile at smile software dot com. Other world computing at Mac sales dot com. Bare bones software at bare bones dot com. Harry's at Harry's dot com slash M G G. All through the backbeat media podcast network. Thanks so much, John. I I started us in here. What do you have to say before they leave? What I have to say, Dave, is that I'm especially. Pleased that even though we went off the rails and decided to use discord, it seems that we got through the entire episode, Dave. And what that means is we didn't get caught.