 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gav shows 777 for Monday, September 2nd, 2019. You don't have to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you will be. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gav, a show where, like Pete says, you don't have to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you will be. It's true. Here is where we answer your questions, we share your tips, we share your cool stuff found, we share some cool things that we've found. The goal, of course, being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Linode at linode.com. MGG and TextExpander at TextExpander.com slash podcast. We'll talk more about both of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Freeville, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Braun. And here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire, right next to Dave is Pilot Pete. Thanks for having me, guys. That's thanks for coming back, Pete. It's been too long. Yeah, man. It's good. That's good. It's good. It's good. Good to have you here. Yeah. For those of you that have never heard Pilot Pete before, he was a staple on the show for many, many years. Really, you came on, I mean, sort of the way you pitched it was, hey, I can I can be that voice of a listener. And in real time, tell you if something is confusing and you should re explain it. And I'm still so confused. No, it's been great. It was before the chat room and everything. So we didn't we didn't have any of that real time feedback. 11, 12, 12 years ago. Yeah, it's been it's been a while. I want to say it was a seven time frame. It might have been. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, actually, yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So it's good to have you back. It's been our kids were all in elementary school. I know. Now they're doing that college. No, yeah. I know. It's crazy. It's as it should be. Like, that's OK. Yeah. At least you're one on the college thing. Well, you know, it's OK. Easy come, easy go. That's what I always say. Yeah. And what better to things to spend your money on than, you know, educating another human? Yeah. I mean, really, it's like it's great. In fact, that's why we do this. That's why we spend our time doing this, is to educate everybody, including ourselves. So yeah. How are you, Mr. Braun? Things good for you today? So far. All right. Good. That's good. If we, you know, this could almost go off the rails. Oh, I think it already has. Yes, it has. Yeah. But that's OK that we're doing it. We're doing all right so far. All right. Let's let's see if Mike can help us. We've got a few a few. I'll queue up a few little quick tips from from Mike. These are quick tips are sort of our favorite way of of sharing those things that are obvious to us, but may not be obvious to everyone else. They like those things that are it's easy when you already know the answer. So Mike has two of them to share with us. He says today I learned that I can screen capture video of my iOS screen. Of course, this is a feature that was introduced to iOS a little while ago, but he's totally right. And you can do it. You can actually even add it to Control Center. You get settings, Control Center, Customize, tap the plus next to screen recording. And then and then you either swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen or on the iPhone 10 or later or iPad with iOS 12 or later, you swipe down from the upper right hand corner, whatever brings up Control Center. And then you've got the little screen recording button and you can record a little screencast on your on your phone, which is great. So thank you for sharing that, Mike, because that's one of those things. If you know it, it's easy. It's not it's a quick tip. It's what it is. He says, also, I learned that there is a sweep second hand stopwatch in the iOS clock app. And he's totally right. If you launch the clock app and hit stopwatch, you can actually if you swipe to the right, like it'll show you a digital display by default. But you'll see between the lap and start buttons are two little dots, one dot to the right, just like you have on your home screen indicating there might be another page. Swipe right or swipe left to move it right. I don't I never quite understood. I guess not growing up in the tinder age of dating. I don't know which which way swipe left is. I know about swipe left and swipe right. I just don't know back on the rails. If you swipe to get to the screen to the right, you will see a stopwatch with a with a sweepable second hand there. So thank you for showing up with a date. But no, there's no dating involved. No one knows this is this is an Apple product. So all activity is happening on device. No one knows whether you've swiped left or swiped right in the SWAT stopwatch app. And if that's not the show title, I don't know what is. But anyway, I got another iOS one. OK, stumbled across this by accident. And maybe we've mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again. So if you're in Safari, you'll see on the bottom Safari on iOS, you'll see on the bottom of the screen a bunch of icons and there's a back and forward icon. And I just accidentally did this. If you hold down on that, it'll bring up the history. Of where the browser has been before and after. I never knew that. And similar on a yeah, pretty much the same thing on a Safari on on Mac OS. It's a little more obvious on Mac OS, I would say. But but I totally agree with you. Yeah, it's a great. It's one that I know it's there. I don't think about it. But it's a quick tip. I mean, that's a perfect quick tip. Yeah, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's the tabs. I have twenty nine open tabs on my Safari. Oh, you know how to close them all at once. Yes, yeah. Yeah, hold down on whatever's in the lower right corner and it'll say close all tabs. Now in iOS 13 betas and so presumably in iOS 13 when you do that for the first time or if you close multiple tabs manually in a row. It will pop up and give you the option to auto close your tabs after a day, a week, a month or never or something like that. I might be wrong on the options, but there are there is a way to sort of auto expunge. That's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know some people use their like their tabs as bookmarks and and don't want to touch them, which is that folks, I get it. I understand, you know, habits and how we all do them. That one is a dangerous one only because Apple does not see your tabs as something that need to be preserved. So there are times where you might, you know, you might be doing some troubleshooting and your tabs would get blown away where, say, your reading list or your bookmarks would not Apple sees your reading list as something that should persist. Apple sees your tabs as something that is, you know, what we would say, stateful, right? So they'll keep them around for you, but not necessarily. So just just a good warning. There you go. All right. Another quick tip grew out of that. I know, I know. I could see this is what we do with quick tips. That's good stuff. All right. Let's go to Brad. Brad had a good little question for us here that if we're not off the rails already might bring us there. But hopefully in a good way, he says, guys, have you ever done a comprehensive setup guide for a new Mac? I just bought my daughter a new MacBook Air to go off to college. And I wanted to make sure I set it up right since I won't be around to help her troubleshoot. My stable of Macs at home have been tweaked so much over time, I would really appreciate a list of the things you guys do, setting up a new machine, test user accounts, T2 encryption, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks as always. So I figured we would take Brad's question. We've answered this question a few times in the past. That being said, it's never bad to go back and revisit something because this stuff evolves. But I figured this time in revisiting this, we would approach it with sort of two categories of things. One that I would recommend or do for someone else's computer. And then we can mention a few of the things that are sort of personal preferences, things that we might like on our own Macs. But there is a distinction there. And that was one of the things when we were hiring nerds at computer nerds down in Austin, which was a business we had before Mac Geekab ever existed. It was kind of a geek squad sort of thing. So we had people going to people's homes and offices. And the hardest part, you could get a really smart nerd. But if they were insistent upon setting up and tweaking clients' computers to have all the little bells and whistles that they would have on their own computers, that would result in more customer service phone calls after the visit than anything else we ever did. So it was like, that's great for you. Please don't push this stuff on your clients. Offer, advise, and then stop and listen. And when the client tells you yes or no, follow their advice or follow their instruction. You've already advised them. Your value has been added to the equation. Now you are there to do the work that the client wants done. Anyway, so we are separating those two for this, which is a good thing. One of the first things I would do on anyone's Mac, especially in this scenario, Brad, where you are likely going to be called upon to troubleshoot it or to assist in the troubleshooting over the phone, is I would get Onyx installed on there. That is, it's just a great sort of all-in-one utility. We mention it here all the time. It can do lots of the things, perhaps even all of the things that we might want to do to troubleshoot a problem. So having that pre-installed on the system might make your life a little easier instead of having to walk someone through, you know, downloading it and all of that stuff. So Onyx is one thing I would start with. And honestly, the second one would be malware bytes. Having something to search for malware on there would be great. And you can run it in free mode. That's fine. You don't necessarily need its scheduler, but if you want to pay, I think it's like 15 bucks or something for at least a year or something of the schedule. So you could certainly do that, but even just having it there to run through. I would set up Time Machine on it and send her to school with some sort of backup drive. As you suggested, Brad, I would create a test user account. If only just to have, you know, you can set it to auto log into her user account. Doesn't need to be present and obvious all the time, but having that test user account set up sort of in the background, make sure it's an admin account, make sure you both know the password. Don't forget it. Having that set up there can make troubleshooting easier down the road. And for a machine like that, I would buy AppleCare Plus. It's going off to school. You get the damage involvement with AppleCare Plus, plus the extended warranty that makes life easier if she's walking into an Apple store or somewhere else, et cetera, et cetera. So those are kind of the universal things that I would do, John, what do you have on your universal list? I'm going to toss a few in here. So one, you mentioned if you have to remotely help someone diagnose problems, TeamViewer, I think it's great for that. Yeah, okay, I've had... Or I suppose you could use, I mean, you can do screen sharing with messages, so that's another option, right? Yeah, that's, you're right. I would, here, my problem with TeamViewer is that after a certain amount of something, it decides that you are doing this for pay and that it will lock you out of the app unless you pay there for, I mean, the price of TeamViewer for what you actually get with TeamViewer is fair, I suppose. I mean, they get to decide their price, so of course it's fair. But it's not cheap. It's like 50 bucks a month or something. So for using it, you know, for family and friends kind of thing, maybe it's not worth it. If you're supporting clients, 50 bucks a month is easy money to spend. If you're supporting family and friends for free, it just stings a little bit to spend that 50 a month when, like you said, yeah, messages with its screen sharing is actually way better. I've found that. I still use it when my parents are having a problem and I use it infrequently enough where they get upset. Yeah, I encourage you to try. The next time you have a problem, try it with messages, man. It's so, I think you and I did it with something once and I mean, it's just so easy. I frankly, it works way better than TeamViewer because you don't have to install additional software, right? You're not imposing that upon the person that you're helping. It's just like, yep, let's get a messages thing going and then I'll ask and you can, you know, they have to approve you of course, all that stuff. But yeah, all right. Any other sort of table stakes kind of stuff? Password manager. Ooh, you took mine. So again, this is, I think... Or you could use iCloud Keychain but I like LastPass, I think you'd like one password but that's, see, this now... Some form of password manager. Yes, yes, teaching, but I would set up the built-in one. Again, this is where that imposing my preferences on you thing I think kicks in. There is a perfectly adequate password manager built into Mac OS. I would not add one, you know, if someone says, well, I'm doing these other things, you might advise them, hey, you might really like one password or something and if they want that, great, but I would not install that by default on everyone's machine. There was a day where I would, and that was before iCloud Keychain existed. Does Keychain sync, well, between the iOS and... It arguably syncs better. I mean, now with iOS 12, password managers are all sort of given equal footing, but prior to iOS 12, iCloud Keychain was really the only functional way to have a password manager sync to iOS because you couldn't put extensions in Safari prior to iOS 12. All right, I'm just covering the topic. Okay, another one, some form of cloud storage, whether it be Dropbox or OneDrive, whatever, or you could use, again, iCloud. Right, so again, two things here. You're right, some kind of cloud storage, but I would do iCloud Drive, stick in the Apple ecosystem, right? Also, she's going off to school, so she very likely will get, you know, some monster amount of storage via the school. Most schools now are giving kids, it's not Dropbox, it's usually box.com or Microsoft's OneDrive. But yeah, again, I wouldn't install, I wouldn't impose a third party thing on him unless you absolutely have to, but like you said with this, you've got iCloud, and you can, I mean, storage is expensive with iCloud, so maybe it does make sense to go with, you know, something else, yep. All right, something to make a clone with, I don't think Apple's tools are sufficient. So, Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, are the two that most people like. I'll give you that as table stakes, yeah. Having a clone of the machine when things, when everything hits the fan is, yeah, that's table stakes. I'll give you that, yep, yep, for sure. All right, in addition to malware bites, I would suggest it's not as much of a problem on the Mac as it is on the PC, but any virus like Clam XAV, I like, because I've actually had it step in, like sometimes, you know, I'll get something that's obviously meant to infect me, and they do a good job of blocking that, you know, like I got an invoice the other day at my Mac Observer email, and they're like, here's your invoice for whatever, and I'm like, yeah, right. It was an infected document. Sure. And for diagnostics? Well, hang on, it sounds like we're tipping into that personal preference realm. So Pete, did you have something on the table stakes side of things? The universal advice? I think arguably, yes, which is SEDAP. Huh. Because it offers so many, a wide variety of utilities. Now it is subscription. Right. And I think it's $9.95 a month. Yeah, $10 a month or somewhere thereabouts, yep. But it offers, you know, from Mac Cleaner and a male client and so many utilities that bound to be two or three in there that you're gonna use that are key. Again, essential? No, you can get by without it, but boy, there's some really nice things in there. That's an interesting one. Yeah, does that become, is that, yeah, I would put that as a very high priority on the- Next. On the next list. Not essential. Yeah, but it's close though, right? I mean, it's not as important as a clone. Right, but we'll potentially save someone a lot of money down the road, yeah. It's got things, you know, Mac hacks like bartender and that sort of thing, and Clean My Mac, which I think is, some people have had bad experiences I've heard with it. Oh no, Clean My Mac's been great for me. I love Clean My Mac. Yep, same. It cleans out gigabytes of junk. Same, yeah. Yeah, and that would be another one to put on that. Yeah, boom 3Ds in there, which is a sound enhancer for your laptop. Canary mail I haven't tried yet, but, you know. No, they curate that list very well. It's true, it's true. All right, so tipping into the personal preference realm, we've kind of hit a few of those, I think already. For a college computer, I wouldn't recommend this because she will probably get a subscription to Microsoft Office from the school, but if you don't have a subscription to Office and you are living in a world where you might need to deal with Word and Excel documents on a semi-regular basis, certainly pages and numbers can do that, but I find that Libre Office is a much better experience. It is certainly the best of the open office clones for the Mac, and it's freely available. It will open and natively deal with Word and Excel documents so you're not having to do like a save as like you always are with pages and dealing with a conversion from, you know, Word or Excel, two pages or numbers, and then back. This is natively dealing with Word and Excel documents without paying for Microsoft Office. So I highly recommend that if she wouldn't naturally have Microsoft Office, that would definitely be one. You know, I like bartender to manage my menu bar. I personally, I wind up installing a lot of crap in my menu bar and I only need some of it to appear all of the time. And then bartender sort of lets you pick and choose what appears all the time versus what only appears when you want it to appear. And then, you know, right along those lines is iStatMenus. I like to see what's going on with my Mac. I realize that we're geeks here at MacGeekab and so maybe not everybody wants that stuff, but I like it and maybe because I like iStatMenus, so much, perhaps that's my reason for needing bartender to keep my menu bar clear. But yeah, there you go. So those would be three of mine sort of, that might be, you know, they're not universal, but might be applicable to lots of people. What else you got, Mr. Braun? A couple for general troubleshooting. Hardware growler I like. It'll tell you when disks mount, disks dismount, devices connect, devices disconnect. And the one thing I find interesting with it is it'll show you when secret updates are happening because certain programs like Dropbox and others, they'll kind of in the background do something and without really telling you that they are. Yep, okay. So, and the Debuki tools to tell you what's happening with your wireless. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. What else you got, Pete? I mean, I know we've, like I said, I know we've sort of already tipped our toes in this water, but anything left? No, that's, I was gonna say like something like screen sharing menu lit, but you can do that through messages. Yeah, right, right. As Brian Monroe in our chat room at mackeycub.com slash stream says, in his opinion, and Brian is a revered and respected consultant throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco. He says it's much better to keep it clean to start and then add in any of these third party solutions later. And I think that is sage advice. Stick with the basics that you can get by with and maybe just, you know, I mean, in the case of your daughter, you know, you're living with her until she goes off to school. So you can sort of have these conversations naturally if you are a consultant or advising someone, you can sort of, you know, give them the 30 second rundown of, hey, here's some other things that we could add down the road if you're interested, that sort of thing. Yeah, thank you, Brad. Oh, and actually there was one that was thrown in by someone in the chat room. I'm not sure who, but it's called, it's a book called This is the Light Side, The Mac Edition by Edward Eisen. It's available on Apple Books. So you don't need any third party stuff. It's 99 cents. And it looks to be sort of a book to get started with the Mac. A must read for new Mac owners is what one of the reviews says. So there you go. Maybe that's a nice way to kind of let somebody do some self exploration with that sort of thing. Thank you. It was Brian Monroe that tossed that in. So thank you very much. Good stuff. We will put it in the show notes. In fact, it's already there. Coolio. All right. John, you had a question on Twitter and I am going to talk about our first sponsor first. And then we'll go to your Twitter thing but our first sponsor is, as I mentioned, TextExpander. That would also be an app that for me, I would put on a Mac when installing and I would highly encourage others to do the same because TextExpander saves me so much time. I'm an efficiency maniac. I'm an impatient person and I'm obsessed with getting things accurate. Those three things generally don't go too well together but with TextExpander, they go perfectly together because all of those things that you write over and over again, those things, you know that you've done this. You go into your sent mailbox to look for something that you wrote to the last person that asked you a similar question and you're digging through your sent box, you're like, oh cool, I found it. Copy, paste. Now you gotta remove all of the forwarding that wants to be there because invariably it's baked in and you've got some weird formatting and all that stuff and then you gotta go through and change it because you might have written somebody's name in there and that is a tedious process and then when you're finished, you gotta read it again because you gotta make sure you got it right for this person. Well, here's the deal, you write it once. You put it into TextExpander, you proofread it there. You make sure it's exactly what you want. You can tweak it over time and now when that question is asked, boom, you put it in there. I have directions to my house in TextExpander. I've got like my address, I've got my phone number. I have customer service responses for the businesses. I've got sales inquiry responses for the businesses. They're all just right there in TextExpander and I can invoke them and send them from any of my devices without ever proofreading. This is amazing when somebody asks, hey, I want information on this. I can do this even on my phone because TextExpander has a keyboard. I just invoke it and boom! The responses there, I hit send. I don't have to read it because I know it's right. This is what you want and because you're a listener to this show, you get 20% off your first year. Visit TextExpander.com slash podcast to learn more or thanks to TextExpander at TextExpander.com slash podcast for sponsoring this episode. Hi, Mr. Braun, onto you. All right, so I got a tweet from my buddy, Todd McCann, who, one thing he does, he's kind of like pilot Pete, but instead of being a pilot, he's a trucker and he does a podcast called Trucker Dump. So you may want to check that out if you want to learn about trucking, but anyways, he tweeted me a question. Can a virus slash malware in Windows running in boot camp or parallels infect the Mac OS side? The opinions I'm seeing online seem to be all over the map. So I broke out the Google foo and he actually complimented me on my mad skills, but I went to the Parallel Support Forms and someone asked the question pretty much to that effect. And the answer from Parallel Support is that if sharing is enabled, so this is the feature within parallels, I'm not sure about boot camp. Dave, maybe you could shed some light on that once I'm done here, but anyways, so their answer is if sharing is enabled, then your Mac files are visible from the Windows side. And if it's visible, it can be accessed by Windows applications, including malware. Unfortunately, if you isolate Windows, then application sharing will not work. You need to have an anti-malware on the Windows side for better protection. So that's the answer. And the same would be true with boot camp because if your Mac files are available to any piece of software that's running, it is susceptible to whatever that software can do. Now, Apple does, and just like with Parallels, like full disk access security can help here, because unless you give Parallels full disk access, it can't see all of the files on your Mac. So, and it certainly can't write to them. So there might be some security protections. This was, you know, this Parallels thread, I think was like a year old, right? And so maybe doesn't reflect what Mojave can do in this regard, because that, you know, level of security has increased. I haven't messed with Parallels in this capacity with Mojave to see like what exactly it can do, but assume, yes, if you're running Windows in any capacity, I would run antivirus software, for sure. Long before you would feel the need to run it on the Mac. I don't, I run anti malware stuff, as I mentioned earlier, I don't run antivirus software. Thus far, I have not regretted that decision. The day may come when I do. That's fine. Thus far, I have not. On every Windows machine I have, I run antivirus software. That's table stakes. So, yeah. Okay. And on both my VMs and on the Mac side, I run Clam-AV, because... Okay, there you go. Yeah. Again, not as much of a threat. Though I like running it every now, especially, yeah, so it'll find like email with the, it'll get to the point of like finding email with weird HTML stuff happening in it. Yep. Yep, all right, cool. Coolie out. That's the answer. There's the answer. That's great. No, it's good. I like this. This is good. We're staying on the rails. It's amazing. I don't know how long we will stay here. I can fix that. Thanks for coming, Pete. Yeah. All right, we have some tips from previous episodes, starting with one from listener, John, who caught something, which is awesome. In the last episode, we said that you could set a fixed amount of minimum payment. This is talking about the Apple card. And I was saying how I like, with all of my credit cards, I just go in and I configure every one of them to do an auto payment of the minimum payment five days before the payment date. Nine times out of 10, maybe even more often than that, I get there in time, I process my monthly bills in time to pay everything off or do whatever I'm gonna do, whether I'm, if I'm gonna carry a balance, like, there's some intent. But if I miss it, because I'm traveling or busy or whatever, I want to make sure I don't have a late payment. So, I just go in and set them all to minimum. With Apple card, it did not seem, I did not see that that was possible. Thankfully listener, John, to the rescue, he says, not five minutes ago, I set up my Apple card to monthly pay the minimum. I like you, I like doing that just in case I forget to pay, which is unlikely and it's very easy to do. You go in, you set up a payment, go into the fixed amount choice, and using the slider, the scroller, slide all the way down to the smallest payment, which now it says, it just has, it doesn't have a dollar amount, it has the word minimum. Now I'm covered just in case for some odd reason, I don't pay off the balance ahead of time. Perfect, and he's totally right. I did this, it takes all of about four seconds and now I'm covered on the 31st of every month or whatever, whatever day it's due, it will pay my minimum if I haven't taken care of that already, which is great, arguably even better than most of my cards, which will auto pay the minimum, even if I've queued up a payment for the entire amount, it overpays me by the minimum, which is fine, it just rolls forward to the next month, it's no big deal for the way I do things here, but yeah, John, you found something about the Apple card too. Well, it looks like they fixed transient, so the end of the month is an exciting time for the Apple card, because that's when what I'll call your statement closing date is. Sure, and until that point, I wanted to schedule my payment today or September 1st. So one in the morning, I check out the screen and it's like, yep, thanks for scheduling your payment. And I'm like, I didn't schedule a payment. So I went into the app, called them up because what else are you gonna do at one in the morning? And of course they're there 24 seven and I spoke to someone and I'm like, yeah, what's going on here? She's like, yeah, hold on, I'll be right back. And she's like, yeah, there's a bug. Oh, interesting. There's some issue with the UI. So ignore that message and just hang on and try tomorrow morning when you wake up. And sure enough, about five in the morning, I got an email from Apple Card support saying, hey, your statement's ready. Nice. Now, if I look where it asks for the payment, it's like, yep, your payments through September 30th, which it should be for most of us. Huh, interesting, interesting. And I've tied in the account that I used to pay all my other bills. So I'm gonna schedule that soon. Cool, yeah, yeah, yeah, fun. All right. And you noticed something. I don't know if you want, you had a chat with them about, did they resolve your issue? What was my issue? You're right. I remember texting you something about a chat I had with them. I don't know, I had to ask them something and they immediately said, we will put you on with Goldman Sachs. But unlike, I've heard some other people who have said, like who have asked, am I on with Apple or am I on with Goldman Sachs? And the answer was this very sort of nebulous, I'm on the Apple Card team. It's like, yeah, but what company do you work for? Now they said, it was you. Okay, I thought it was you. Just to be a pain. It was like, are you an Apple employee or a Goldman Sachs employee? No, they said, yes, yes, we are. Yeah, I had asked a question. I had, oh, and this is actually a good little quick tip for everybody. You know, John, you had said that Uber gives you 3%. And so I put my Apple Card into Uber and I only got 1%. And so I wanted to ask. And the first thing they said to me was, I can help with that, but let me connect you with an Apple Card specialist at Goldman Sachs. So they were very clear about this transition was gonna happen. And they explained to me that you only get the Uber 3% benefit if you use Apple Pay via Uber, which I've always found to be a bit of a clunky experience because at the moment that I'm trying to request an Uber, now I'm doing an Apple Pay face ID disaster, which is, I mean, look, it's all fine. But when you're in the moment, you're trying to get this car, you know, you're standing on the curb of an airport. It's like, I don't wanna do that. And I've been there before. So when I heard you could do this with your Apple Card, I just put the number of my Apple Card directly into the Uber app so that I would be sure, so I could just default, good, okay, this is great. Like get off, I request, like there's no extra friction in the process because I've already put my card in. Well, turns out when you do it that way, you only get 1%. As you do with everything where the card number is used. So for Uber to work with Apple Pay, you gotta go through, for Uber to work with 3%, bonus, you've gotta go through Apple Pay. And so that's the price to pay. So, okay, good to know. That's right, yep. Right. Another thing I noticed is that so they mentioned the 3% for Apple stuff, that's only if you buy it from Apple. Right, you had mentioned that last episode. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. Yeah, and probably only if you use Apple Pay. I think all of those bonuses, sort of the gateway to them is paying with Apple Pay, not just using your Apple card. Clearly. Right. You know, I'll tell you though, if you do the math, you save 30 cents on a $15 Uber fee. Right. So it's just not worth it. No, it's not worth the headache. No. Take the 1% and vice the three. Correct. Well, really it's better for me if I just go back to using my Hotel Points card and mound them up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a better deal in the end, yep. And this was actually somebody else was paying the Uber, I was just paying the tip, so it was more just to, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. All right, so they're evolving. Yes, of course. Yeah. They're doing good. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's like the original Apple Maps, you know, the icon showed the card driving off the bridge. Yep. That's gone now. They're evolving. They're evolving. It's getting better. That's right. All right. Ed has a tip. He says, I wanted to respond to episode 775 where you talked about not worrying about encrypting a desktop hard drive versus a laptop device because you're not taking the desktop with you. That was my argument for not adding encryption necessarily, whereas on a laptop I always would. I says one situation that I was thinking of is if you ever need to take your desktop Mac in for repair or service. If you haven't yet encrypted your drive beforehand, you're pretty much handing over everything unencrypted during that time to get your machine repaired. While it might not be a common scenario, at that point it may well be too late to go back and enable FileVault on a non-functioning desktop Mac when you're in the scenario of having to take it in for repairs. And you're totally right, Ed. Absolutely. This is like no question. That's great advice. And so factor that in. Will I start encrypting all my desktops? Maybe. Honestly, maybe it's not a bad point. FileVault is so seamless. That's the thing is like why not? It's so good. Well, so here's the thing, though. I'm not ready to give my full review, so I'm not even going to begin that part. But earlier this week, I got only for as a loaner. I have to send it back. One of the new MacBook Pro, the lower end units that they revved this spring that has the, it's got the four core i5 in it. And it's only $200 more than the MacBook Air. And it's got the touch part. And so I started thinking, wow, if I had this decision to make over again, the one that I made in December, do I need a new Mac laptop? It doesn't need to be my daily driver. Which one do I get? And I was sort of deciding between the Air and the Pro. At the time, the Air was the obvious choice. Now with this rev for just $200, yes, it's 20% more, but it's only 200 bucks. You know, you get perhaps double the processor. Does it make a difference? So it is under that umbrella that I reached out to Apple and they provided us with a review unit to mess with. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to answer the question yet because there's a couple other tests that I need to do. But I figured I had an opportunity here because my MacBook Air, even though it's only six months old, suffers from the double keystroke issue on the butterfly keyboard, which I think they all will eventually. So I thought, well, perfect, I'll send it in. So I got online with Apple and they sent me a box to ship it to the Depot to take care of this. And after reading Ed's thing earlier this week, I was like, well, you know, I cloned this over, I cloned my Air over with migration assistant over to the MacBook Pro so that I could truly have an apples to apples, no pun intended, comparison. Great, no problem. That was easy. I have the same installation over there, but when the Air comes back, I'm gonna clone back to it. I'm not going to just go with what it had and deal with, you know, re-updating whatever updates I did on this Pro. And I thought, well, then I should just wipe the drive before I send it in because I'm gonna wipe it when it comes back. Might as well do it now, no problem. Command R to get into recovery mode, which I am certain I've done before because that is how I turned off the external boot drive limitation. And let me tell you in advance, I'm really glad I turned that off because Command R would not launch recovery mode on that computer. Now, they say that maybe because of the keyboard doing its repeat magic, possibly, sure. But internet recovery won't work on it either. Now, I've only spent about 30 minutes fighting this particular battle so far because I'm tempted to just send it in until Apple, while you have it, wipe the drive please. There's another problem that you now have to fix. But it's awfully disconcerting like I hold down Command R and it says starting internet recovery, this might take a while and then it goes all the way through and I think I get an error negative 9,004F or something in the end. Oh, yeah. It's like, dude, with a link to Apple support or something, right? So I don't know how far I'm gonna beat on this because one way or another on Tuesday, I'm shipping this, you know, this box is going to FedEx, so yeah. How much of your personal time is this worth? Correct. Well, it's, you know, this is a troubleshooting thing. So at some level, it's good for the show for me to have experience with this, but. Yeah. But I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall. Yeah, at some point. I guess I'm gonna try booting from a USB stick. But the only reason I can do that is because in the past I went into the, and I can't even remember the name of it now, but the little utility that's only available in recovery mode and it lets you change the default. No, by default on all the T2 Macs, you cannot boot from an external device because that's a security risk. I turned that off because I knew as a troubleshooting measure, I was willing to accept that security risk in exchange for the ability to boot from an external disk. Wow. Yeah. So, Brian Miro and Samram is saying he got the same error at a client's place. Cool. I'm glad to know I'm not alone. So that's good. Yeah. Go ahead, Joe. Also, it was whenever a drive gets out of my control, I erase it. Well, that's what I'm trying to do here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Even drives that have failed, so our town will accept electronics for they claim it's recycling. But whenever I have a drive, even if it's a drive that has like pad blocks and stuff, I'll do a secure erase, at least for a rotational drive. And then for an SSD, I guess, yeah, you would just do an erase after previously enabling. Yeah, that's a, huh. I know. Warren in the chat room reminded me, reminded us that that is called the Secure Boot Manager and is accessible from Recovery Mode. So, again, I'm really glad I did this. Man, it's just frustrating. Like, yeah. So, okay. Yeah, Brian Miro said he ran into the same thing he said, but the computer was going to e-waste, so it didn't really matter. So there you go. Okay, mine hopefully is not going to e-waste, but maybe Apple will decide to replace the SSD and all of this is moot. It will come back blank anyway, which is also fine. They did ask me, do you have a backup? And I was like, of course. They said, we would have expected nothing less from you, Mr. Hamilton. Like, well, you know, it's kind of how I roll. You know, I can't imagine though, in this day and age, still. Yeah. I have unencrypted drives going to e-waste, and many years ago, I had a friend in Miami who bought used computers from companies. Sure. He said the amount of data on there. He goes, thank God for them, I'm an honest person. Right. Oh. The data that gets left on there from personal and corporate secrets. Yep. Yeah. Well, here's another one. A friend of mine recently had this happen. Not only your drives should you secure or erase. A friend of mine started getting bills from a credit card he never applied for. And my guess is that he disposed of a credit card offer but did not shred it. So shred your paper and mail for anything that has to do with finances, folks. Can I offer a quick tip there? Yeah, sure. It used to cost money, it's free now. Yes. Freeze your credit. Just freeze your credit. Yep. And unfreeze it as needed with a pen. Right, right. All my credit is frozen anymore. Yep. No one can get a credit card. So you do it online, direct with the... Do it online with Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. With TransUnion. TransUnion, yeah. Okay. There's actually a fourth one out there now which still isn't big enough to be a problem, I don't think. But yeah, it used to cost $10 to freeze it. $10 to unfreeze it unless you were a victim. The law changed this year. It's free to freeze it. It's free to unfreeze it. You can unfreeze it temporarily if you're gonna get a car loan or a new credit card, something like that. Right. But else, if someone sends you a offer in the mail and you throw it away and someone decides to fill it out, it can't get a card in your name because they want to prove credit without running into check. Right. We will put links, because this is all, as Pete points out, you were able to do this for free. We will find and put links to... Yeah, let me see. I see you doing that. These in the show notes. Yeah, we will get those out before the show goes out just so that you have an easy place to go. And of course, if you want to get the show, you can always find the show notes at mackeykeb.com. No problem. You just choose the episode there right there. If you want the show notes to be delivered, hand delivered, well, sort of, to you via email every week in your inbox so you don't have to think about going to get them and then you can just get all the links that we do here. Go visit mackeykeb.com and sign in. I realize this is a little bit of chicken and egg. You've got to remember to go to mackeykeb.com to sign up so that you don't have to go to mackeykeb.com to get the show notes later. But trust me, that one trip will save you because now you get links to all of that. We've got some cool stuff found showing up here and, you know, so you'll want links to all of that good stuff. And this is how we get there. Cool. And it kind of varies. The Apple Card, actually, if you bring it up, has a option to lock the card. Yes. But not all cards offer that through wallet. I think some do through their apps also. Sure. That's another thing. Sure. If you think your card's been compromised or you lose your physical card. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll circle back briefly with one other thing, though. Use something like one password, last pass, iCloud Keychain, to keep your pin. It's very difficult to unfreeze your report without your pin. Yes. Yes. That is true. Yes. Yeah, without that pin, you're done. Yeah. It's kind of like your file vault if you lose your password. If you've got that key, you can unencrypt. Yep. Yep. Yep. Cool. All right. Great. Actually, as I mentioned, we have a ton of cool stuff found to go with. I want to take a minute before we do that and talk about Linode at linode.com. Which is our next sponsor here. Linode is offering you $20. Mackie Kebblissner, that's all you need to be. Go to linode.com.mgg promo code MGG2019. That gets you $20 a credit. Linode is the place where you can go to spin up a server and you can have a server spin up, spun up, spin up, spun up. Before I finish talking about this, it goes so, so quickly. And here's the cool part. You can spin up a server that just gets you to a command line if that's your thing. And that's totally fine. Like that's great. But also, if you just want to spin up a server that say has WordPress, you know, that's what you're going to use it for. They, they're cloud manager there. Let's you spin that up. And you don't ever have to see the command line. You don't ever have to install PHP or MySQL or WordPress or any of it. They take care of that for you because they've got these auto configuration things. You'd still be done before I finished the ad read. Like it's, it's that fast. It's that convenient. And it's not just WordPress. You can set up a VPN. You can set up a Minecraft server. There's, there's tons of these things that they've pre configured for you 100% of their servers featured native SSD storage. This makes them fast. Even the low end one is super fast because it's on these fast SSDs. And I mentioned the low end one, starts at just five bucks a month for their Nanode, which is their lowest cost server. That means you could get four months for free because I just told you how to get $20 credit. So go get your $20 credit. Go to linodelinode.com slash mgg use promo code mgg2019 for 20 bucks. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Okay. Now it is time to talk about some cool stuff found. And we will do Felipe first. Felipe says, if I can find, where is that app that I put all this? Where did it happen to ever know? Oh, the icon changed. I'm still looking for a green icon and it's a white icon. So anyway, Felipe says, I'm not sure if, oh yeah, we were talking in last episode about listener Mike was looking, sorry, listener Matt was looking for a way to have his clipboard manager act like a stack, right? Where when you pop things off of it, they were removed. And so Felipe found something close. He says, an app I've used in the past called CopyPastePro by PlumAmazing has a feature called ClipRevolver that pastes, deletes and moves on to the next one as well as some other features that might bring back some of the functionality that listener Matt was looking for. He says, I've switched since and I'm using PasteBot which also has sequential paste feature which I have had the occasion to use. So thank you for that. That's great, Felipe. Maybe that does solve it for matter. At least gets him a little bit closer than he was prior. All right, Ralph. Oh, this is great. It's not just Ralph, it's Ralph and Will and so many of you chimed in. We were talking about Mike's problem last week where he had a person he was supporting that wants to run Windows but wants the boot manager to come up every single time. And he mentioned an app called Refit which is no longer being maintained. Well, Roderick Smith created Refined Boot Manager at rodsbooks.com slash refine. Of course we'll put a link in the show notes. It's the spiritual successor as Ralph says it to refit and works wonderfully. He says, I use it to boot regularly into OS 10, Windows 10, Arch Linux and Ubuntu. It's highly configurable but after installation it automatically scans which OSes you have on your various partitions, thumb drives and or CD, DVD drives and presents a menu upon reboot. That shows your installed operating systems. You can configure it to boot to one of them by default or to just give you the menu. So I think that's the answer. So many of you wrote in with this. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is great. This is what I love about doing this show. It really is, the interaction is what keeps us going. So yeah, very cool. Any thoughts on any of this before we move on? No. Okay. We talked about Allison's potentially thermal issues or she was having or is having I guess issues where her CPU slows down. She's written a big long blog post about it which we will put out there. In fact, I recorded a segment with her to play into this week's episode and it was about halfway through her adventures and she realized that it was all wrong. The solution she had at the moment, the working theory turned out to be unprovable and unrepeatable. So she moved on and there's other stuff. So we'll link to her blog post about it but in a general sense listener Javier says I was listening and he says I may have an answer. I've watched many, many videos on YouTube where they compare the processor speed and other benchmarks of a CPU in a given Mac versus other machines running with the exact same CPU. The consensus among many of these experts is that most Macs suffer from a poor thermal curve for two reasons. One, the quest to make Macs ever slimmer means less space for cooling. Second, apparently the quality of the thermal paste Apple applies to their Macs in the factory. A YouTuber called Quinn actually did a tear down of a 2018 Mac mini and found that the CPU would thermal throttle itself very quickly ramping down to a lower clock speed just a couple of minutes after reaching full load. But after he replaced the thermal paste on the CPU something that is not for the faint of heart, Javier says. With Arctic Silver, which is evidently some super hooptie thermal paste, it allowed the mini to reach maximum clock speed and stay there pretty much indefinitely during all of his tests. This was interesting to me because I own precisely this computer and have been toying with the idea of performing this very particular hack. I hope this helps. Thanks Javier. Yeah, that's very interesting. I think Allison's problem is battery related as it turns out, but until she gets the battery replaced we won't really know for sure. So her trials continue, but thank you for the discussion Javier. That's great. Awesome. Cool. Fun. It's always fun. Thoughts, John? Well, to continue this discussion I'll bring up another option here. And speaking of the interaction, Dave, I actually posted a link to this in our forums which you can find at gosh, where is that? www.mechicap.com slash forms. That'll get you there. Yeah, we've got all the redirects you ever would need and that's one of them. Yep. So yeah, I haven't heard back. I posted in the thread and I don't know if Allison's tried this or not, but my thought process was I wonder if TurboBoost is disabled for whatever bizarre reason on her machine. Sure, because you can disable it. On the PC it's a little more straightforward and that you typically go into the BIOS and which lets you configure various aspects of the machine and on a lot of PCs you can say, I don't want to have TurboBoost. No, why you wouldn't want to is another question. I mean, well, you know, battery life, temperature. So I did a little surfing and I found something Dave called TurboBoost Switcher which does exactly what it says it does is that it can disable TurboBoost and it also has tools that'll show CPU load, temperature, fans, battery. So you can kind of diagnose the problem. That's cool. Yeah, the other thing I was suggesting that they do have a tool though it's only on Windows called I think it's TurboBoost Monitor. And I was like, huh, let me see if that'll work. Unfortunately, I tried running it in parallels and parallels virtualization apparently doesn't let that Intel program see the TurboBoost feature because I guess they virtualize the processor, right? Right, they do for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, because they thought that would be another one is like, you know, because that tool will let you see when TurboBoost is switching on and switching off. So interesting. So check out this tool if you, for whatever reason, if you have concerns about what TurboBoost is doing to your machine. Cool. I know I'm just wondering if it somehow got disabled on our machine. I mean, I don't know how it would happen unless you ran this program, but. Right, right, right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. I like it. Hey, while we're at it on the cool stuff found here, John, you have, you have another one. You found a health related item. Yeah, believe it or not. Yeah, I think I picked it up so that they had a deal where if you went to Whole Foods and you bought like $10 worth of stuff, which it's really hard to do that at Whole Foods. I thought that was just the cost of, I thought that was the cover charge, man. Yeah. But at the point I had a prime membership and yeah, I think it was part of prime. I got a prime membership. What did you get, John? Well, what I got, Dave, I think it was during prime day, so I had some credit and it was prime day, so it was on sale, but I got something from, how do you put, Ufi? Ufi. Ufi, which is anchors brand. Yeah, the smart scale P1. Nice. And what does it do? Yeah, well, it came up pre-show. You had speculated that I didn't have enough water and I got some water in front of me now, so hopefully everything's cool with that. But here's the neat thing about it. So not only is it a scale that shows your weight, but they have a smart app, which you run on iOS and it will talk to the scale and the thing is not only does it measure your weight, but it measures like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 different things or 13 things outside of your weight. So BMI, body fat, but water and the thing is yes, my water is low according to this program. Muscle mass, bone mass, all sorts of things and it also integrates with health, which is kind of, so the figures that it has that health knows about it will push them into the health app. That's freaking awesome. And it's less than 50 bucks. It's like 45 bucks, Amazon Prime. Get it tomorrow. And with all the credits I have, I got it for way less. I got it for like 20 something. So it, I mean, for all it does, I think it's pretty cool. I replaced, I had another scale that did something similar, but it didn't measure nearly this number of parameters. Yeah, right, right, right. And we got a question in the chat room. It's Bluetooth. I see a little, a little Bluetooth icon actually comes up on the display. Okay, so you didn't connect it to your Wi-Fi. It, you just, this is just- That's not how it works. So you gotta run the app. So you gotta be, you know, within Bluetooth range of the scale, you run the app and then it sucks the data out of the- And it looks like you can do, like it's got like 16 users and all that. That's pretty cool, man. Well, guess what? I just ordered one. There you go. Great, I did. Yep, I had, I've, I don't think I've ever placed an Amazon order during the show, but they said it'd be here tomorrow if I ordered within the next 26 minutes. So, you know, so I ordered within the next 26 minutes. I did it right now. That's pretty cool, man. Very cool. And Pete's back, which is good. Or Pete's almost back. Pete had an emergency. There you go. But that's okay. All good. An urgency. I don't wanna say an emergency. It's all good. It's here. He's back. All right, cool. Moving on, our cool stuff found. I actually have three of them in a roundup that I have been doing. You know, this power delivery world that we live in is pretty darn cool. And honestly, you know, one of the coolest parts about it is how easy it makes it for us to have an external battery for our laptops. Now, I know, I mean, today's Mac laptops run, you know, pretty, I mean, they run like 10 hours or something, you know, under normal usage. So it doesn't take, it's not normal that I'm like at the bottom, but to have a battery that could charge my phone, my iPad, my watch, and or my laptop is a really nice thing to be able to carry with me. So I've found three and I've tested three. They all cost the same thing at Amazon. They're 99.99 as of the moment that we're doing this. So, feature-wise, I've tested the Anker PowerCore Speed 20000. I've tested the Lifeproof PowerPack 20 and I've tested the MyCharge Portable Charger PowerBank Razer Extreme. Again, they're all 99.9999 on Amazon or wherever you're gonna get them. The first two, the Anker and the Life Active are 20,000 milliamp hour batteries, as might be evidenced by their name. The MyCharge is actually a 26,800 milliamp hour, so quite a bit more in terms of juice. The MyCharge is also different in that it has two USB-A and one USB-C port on it, whereas the other two only have one of each. So if you want one with two USB-A ports, they all have a USB-C port and that is used for charging the PowerBank as well as output charge power to either your laptop or your phone or your iPad if you're charging via a USB-C port. The Anker, weight-wise, I feel like the Anker is the lightest of these three and that can matter for sure. It's got a nice little form factor. It's not quite as bulky. The Life Active one is really, like the Life Proof one, the brand is Life Active or their sub-brand is Life Active. It feels like Life Active, like this thing feels like it would suffer quite a bit of impact to it. I wouldn't necessarily wanna test impacting a lithium ion battery, folks, but they say it's waterproof, drop-proof, dirt-proof and snow-proof, so that part's cool. The other part that's cool about the Life Proof one, John, is it has a series of, or it has LEDs on the front of it. The LEDs can either be bright white, dim white, or bright red and red, you know, is really nice if you're needing a light, say, in a tent or even in a dark hotel room. Red doesn't tend to burn your eyes quite as much when you are going from pitch black to not pitch black. So, I've used it in a hotel room when, you know, I put it next to the bed and if I need to get up and go pee in the middle of the night, I don't quite know the, you know, I don't have the path, yeah, and so I use the little red thing and that lights up the room enough without, you know, like actually starting to wake me up. So, Pete, you say you use your watch for that? Yeah, there's a flashlight in your watch. Yeah. Which is really cool. And there is a red one in there. Nice. The advantage to that is it doesn't destroy your night vision. Right, exactly. Yeah, the advantage for the red light. Yeah, the red light doesn't destroy, yeah. So these, so that one's pretty cool and they all work really well. I've tested them all either way and handy little things. The MyCharge one is a metal, it feels, the form factor feels very Apple-like. It's that brushed, you know, aluminum or whatever it is, but, you know, they all work really well and it, again, for $100 to have something that, you know, would give your laptop quite a boost is a really handy thing to have. So there you go. So I share. John, you had a question. Oh, we're just, just a comment is that the red light would also come in handy if you're backstage. I remember this from my stage days when they put red gels over the lights so you wouldn't annoy everybody. Got it. Interesting. Interesting. You must run into that all the time. Yeah, well, but see, that has changed. I much, many lights backstage and on stage are LEDs now. Right, so the colors are just built into them. The colors change much faster than gels that had to actually be, you know, manually rotate or mechanically rotated and they're way cooler, right? So not only does that mean they use less energy but they also cook you much less when you're, you know, under one on stage. That being said, they're, LEDs are great. There are times when incandescent lights are, they definitely, LEDs definitely don't look like incandescent lights in some scenarios, you know, so. And you don't pick them up on your infrared night vision on your hoods. No, no, that's right. Oh, pilot P. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, if you're flying into an airport at night and you've got any incandescent lights, you pick up the runway lights on your car. They're hard. Yeah. Yeah. Your LED lights and a lot of airports are going to LED. It's like, that's not helpful. So they're actually putting heaters in those lights so that you're. So they were putting LED lights out and then putting heaters in them so that they show up. For when you need them. For nap. Yeah, for night, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So they don't use them all the time, just when needed. So Pete also found there's two of these. There's the one, two of the my charges, both available at the same Amazon link. There's the 26,800 milliamp hour with power delivery. Oh, this is the difference. It's slightly less than 24,000. But it doesn't have power delivery. So there's another one that doesn't have power delivery for $79. So be careful. Although it does, I'm not seeing it say power delivery anywhere here, but it does say that it will extend the life of your devices and lists. The first thing it lists is MacBook. So maybe it does. It's an 18 watt output on this, which is the same as the other one. So yeah, maybe. And pass through charging. You can charge all at the same time. Yeah, yeah. If you have access to a plug. Yeah. So yeah, okay. So maybe, yeah, maybe this one would work. I haven't tested that one, so I can't say. But there you go. None of them have the Qi charge either though. You can set your phone on. Right, I do have one of those too. That's handy to have Qi on a power bank. Yeah, for sure. My charge has one of those. Yeah, I'll see if I can find the link for that too. So one thing we love here and we love it because it allows you to give us some feedback, which is always good, but also allows things to be highlighted at Apple is if you give us a review at Apple podcast reviews because it really, like I'm not kidding when I say it makes a difference. They use that as their metrics to decide when and whether to highlight shows. And of course, highlighting a show means new listeners come in that means more folks participating, more folks with questions, more folks with answers. Right, like this is a good thing. So it really helps if you haven't done a podcast review, an Apple podcast review for us or haven't done one in a while, you can actually go and update your old review and that actually helps things rank. So if you've got one out there that you did, you know, maybe a year or 10 years ago, you can, when it was called iTunes reviews before they changed the name, go ahead and update it. And we've got a link for you that will get you as close as I can. You go to MackieGubb.com slash reviews and then that will get you as close as we can link you to where you then go and leave us a review. But where is the show ranked these days? Yeah, well, I mean, we have lots of five-star reviews. It's great. No, I know that. What are you asking? I've gave you as many as I could. No, just like in the world, because we have one at work that we had just started. We actually broke the 1,500 with only an audience of 5,000. Nice. We broke the 1,500 in the world. Oh, in the world. So I imagine the MackieGubb is way above that. Yeah, I don't, I haven't looked. I gotta look. You gotta be in the top 200, I would say. I would hope so. Yeah, all right, I gotta look at that. Yeah. All right. Yeah, well, in fact, we'll make it a, we'll find out where it is. One of us will find out where it is. Maybe it'll be one of you. Maybe it's one of us. And then we'll make it a goal to run that number up together. So for now, I just wanted to share one of our most recent reviews which came from WIF567 and simply says, I've been listening for years and have even asked a few questions. These guys are awesome. Dave and John have answered my questions and provided countless tips and tricks. If you use a Mac, iPhone or other Apple device, you should give a listen. So thank you WIF567, that's pretty awesome. And like I said, you can do it too. I will put, I will put a link in the show notes cause it's how I, it's what we do. Reviews, mankeekub.com slash reviews. There you go. That should get us there. If it doesn't, I will make sure it does. Cause we have control over that. Where are we on time? We have time for a couple of these things, John. Are we ready? I'm gonna go to Kent, right? I didn't skip anything. I think we're doing all right. Kent writes, he says, my wife's 2011 MacBook Pro is finally indecisively bit in the dust. So we just placed an order for a new 27 inch iMac. The iMac has a multitude of ports, but FireWire isn't one of them. And she has an old but still very good UMAC's PowerLux scanner, which uses a FireWire 400 interface. We've been using it with a 400 to 800 adapter cable, which is fine. And with my 2013 MacBook Pro, a FireWire 2 mini display port thunderbolt to adapter. Okay, great. So no problem. So now I'm looking for a connector to allow use on the new iMac. And I am confused as to what does and does not work offhand. It looks like the easiest solution is something that will take me from the adapter I've been using. Okay, so FireWire 400 to 800 and then 800 to Thunderbolt 2. You are right. That is, so you've got Thunderbolt 2. You've got a Thunderbolt 2. You've essentially turned this into a Thunderbolt 2 scanner, right? With all those adapters. So let's look at it from that standpoint. He says, I've found a couple of things on Amazon. One is only $16 and the other is $60, two different adapters. And he's like, I'm wondering why the price discrepancy here? Well, I'll explain. It is definitely being informative, the price discrepancy, because the $16 one is not Thunderbolt. It goes mini display port, right? It'll go Thunderbolt, you know, USB-C to mini display port. Even though Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt 1 use mini display port as their connector, not every mini display port is Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt 1 capable. And this is the problem. The more expensive one does pass Thunderbolt data across that mini display port and that's what you want. You could also, if you're going with a dock, there is an old version of the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock that has a Thunderbolt 2 port on it. So that's another way to do it. There are some other docks that have Thunderbolt 2 ports. But I will tell you, I was using this for audio for a little while to get to Firewire audio from a USB, you know, from Thunderbolt 2. It starts to get to be a little bit wonky. You may be totally fine with your scanner because that's sort of, you know, you use it and then it stops. You're not recording for hours like we are here. So just be aware that, you know, I mean, I think you are aware that you're sort of, you know, Rube Goldberg-ing this solution together. And, you know, you may or may not, kids, you can ask your parents who Rube was, but you may or may not like the end result is what I will say, but it is doable. And I'm glad you actually found this adapter. I'm going to put a link to this in the show notes because these things are not easy to find these days, but this is a certified cable matters, unidirectional, Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter for 60 bucks. So that's not a bad thing. So we will put that in the show notes. Any thoughts on this, Mr. Braun? No, not really. I do have a Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt cable. What? Who is it? Yeah, I was trying to do a, I was trying to boot one, but you can, there is a Thunderbolt to target this mode. I don't know if you knew that, but... On some Macs, not all, right? Well, at least the two that I have. Okay, I think they, didn't make that goal away. No, it's still there. No, I was trying to... Maybe newer Macs, maybe not. Yeah. Yeah, but I got a very basic Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt cable. I know it worked. I was trying to mount the drive in one of my machines on another machine to apply some sort of update to the SSD. And it wasn't seeing it in the Mac environment, or no, it was crashing in the Mac environments. I'm like, oh, well, let me try to mount it as a drive on the other machine, which it did work and see if that works. And no, it didn't see it, which it should have, but it didn't. Oh well. Interesting. Cool, all right, well, thank you, Ken. That's great stuff. While we are sort of on the Thunderbolt subject, we will go to Craig here who has a question. He says, I'm running out of USB ports, having a couple of drives, a Luna display, a keyboard all connected to my iMac via an Elgato Thunderbolt 2 dock. The dock has two Thunderbolt 2 ports. One is going to the iMac. Can I connect another dock to get some more ports? I haven't been able to find out a definitive answer. If that dock truly has two Thunderbolt 2 ports and it's not just a display port, right, per our previous discussion in the last question, then yeah, you can daisy-chain them. I mean, it would be better if you, I think your Mac has two Thunderbolt ports. So in theory, I would put the second dock on a port connected to your Mac. But yeah, I mean, it's a Thunderbolt 2 port, so it should offer Thunderbolt pass-through. And I'm pretty sure that that Elgato dock, it does have two true Thunderbolt 2 ports on it. So yeah, I think you should be okay with that. I don't, I've done that with, I don't know that I've done it with the Elgato. I had that tested for a little while here. There was something about initially, and I might be, I'm misremembering, I'm sure the model, but there was something about the USB-A ports not being full-powered or something. But anyway, like yeah, the Thunderbolt stuff, I've done that with daisy-chaining Thunderbolt stuff and yes, it works. So you should be able to test it, but I think you're gonna be all right. And that is a good way to keep adding ports, so. More, John, thoughts? More, more, all right. More ports. More ports, more ports is good. Ev the nerd wrote in and says, I've been having the, I've always enjoyed Apple's level of technical support and customer service. However, I've recently been having the worst experience with Apple that I've ever had. It all started, and he tells a story about purchasing a top-of-the-line iMac and having all kinds of issues and basically using Final Cut Pro, all Apple hardware, all Apple software, and it's not working well together properly. And it sounds like it might be a hardware problem. And he said that he's been upgraded to tier two customer relations and was asking where to go from there if they need to escalate things. And, you know, is there somewhere else? And customer relations is usually the somewhere else. Sometimes, though, you need to be a little, I don't wanna say forceful, but you need to be a little insistent with them and very clear, you can't beat around the bush and wait for them to suggest replacing your computer. Sometimes if that's the obvious and only solution, they will, right? But if you wait for that, you may wind up with a non-optimal solution when, in fact, that may have been an option. And so my advice is politely, but very firmly and clearly say, hey, look, we've been through a lot here. As you know, you've seen this history or you've been a part of this, like whatever level the person that you're dealing with is involved. As you can see, we've tried a lot of different things. None of them have worked. This is all Apple hardware and Apple software, so there's no third party to look at and consult here. At this point, it sure seems like a hardware problem. And because of that, and because I don't wanna waste any more of my time or your time, I would like to request a replacement computer be sent to me. And I think being very clear and explaining the support behind your request is how things need to be done. And in fact, I remember being on the phone with customer relations and this was years ago. So like pre Angela Arons, perhaps even pre like retail storefronts. And I remember the woman on the phone saying something where she was essentially prompting me to ask that question. It was clear that she could not be the one to offer it. But she did say, wait, I said something. Like I think this thing just needs to be replaced. And she said, wait, are you asking for us to replace that, sir? And I said, yes, I am asking for you to replace this. And she said, okay, let me see if I can get that approved. It was very interesting. Like the whole tone of the conversation changed. And it was as though she were waiting for me to be the one to instigate that particular, you know, exception process, if you will, she was not permitted to throw that into the ring. But as soon as she heard me and it was an offhand remark, I was like, God, this really sucks. I just, I feel like it just needs to be replaced. And it was like, aha, she could, she finally had something she could hang her hat on, wanting to do customer service, but also of course following, you know, telling the line of what she can and cannot do. And, but if it was my idea, then she could run it up the flagpole. That may or may not still be the case there, but I think you just need to ask. That's my advice. Ask politely, because, you know, probably not the person's fault, the person you're talking to, it's probably not their fault that your computer isn't working. You know, they are the person there to help you. So be nice and all that good stuff. Yeah, I remember doing that. I had it back and forth. I think it was like a PowerBook G4 or something like that. Yeah. It was an older machine, but I was having an issue and, you know, I had a guy assigned to the case and I think we mailed it back and forth like four times. Yeah. Because there was still a problem. And I think they actually created problems every time they sent it back to me. And I was like, you know, the next time I spoke to him, like, you know, you know, first you're losing money on this because like you're paying all this overnight shipping and all that. And can we agree that if you don't fix it the fifth time around, I get a replacement machine. And he was like, yeah, that sounds reasonable. Yeah. Right. But that's it. But yeah, you had to throw that idea into the conversation and then they can take it and run with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would think their manager would say that too, but you know, who knows. And actually, it is interesting. Here's an interesting look. Another way to address the problem, Brian Monroe mentioned this in the chat room. Apparently, California has a lemon law as a do I think many states regarding vehicles. Apparently, it also applies to computers or so an article I found he found says. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, sure. It's worth. Yeah. Yeah. We'll put a link to that in the show. It's worth reviewing that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I love it. Fun stuff. Fun stuff. All right. Let's where are we here? Do we have we have time for one more? Sure. Why not? Right? You got time for one more, John? And I know you I know you have a thing with your family this afternoon as to a couple hours. OK, good. Sweet. All right. So Daniel asks, he says, so for a home or small office, would you recommend a VPN to address concerns such as what I got from a recent client? We have been hearing about some. So we have been hearing so much about security and hackers and is and and a VPN is supposed to be a great additional layer of security. And then if so, which VPN brands or providers do you like? So, you know, it's a good question. I I will start with what I what I do and I will give you advice as to what I think other people should do. What I do is I don't run a VPN at my house. Like, you know, I don't run one 100 percent of the time. There are some routers that, in fact, my router is one of them, the Synology Routers, where you can have it connect to a VPN so that your entire network's worth of traffic is tunneled over a VPN. I'm not concerned about Comcast or CableVision or, you know, Time Warner, any of those whoever whoever the major ISPs are here in the US. I'm really not concerned about them. I know there are people that are concerned about Comcast. I feel like I'm not. Maybe I should if that's if if I'm wrong, that's on me. I mean, I think most of the traffic is is encrypted anyways, right, SSL or TLS, everyone. Most, but like your your DNS probably isn't. Synology just added DNS over HTTPS to their routers. So now my DNS traffic is right. But, you know, your ISP generally speaking, you're using your ISP for DNS. And even if you're not DNS traffic by default is not encrypted, so you can see what domains you're you're looking for. But you're right. Other than DNS, most of what you're doing is encrypted. But I can see if I'm your ISP, I can see that you have an encrypted connection to Apple.com or an encrypted connection to Amazon.com. I can't see what's going across the connection. But I can see even if you're using DNS over HTTPS, like so encrypted DNS, I can still see that you're connecting to a server that belongs to Amazon or that belongs to Apple or that belongs to something that maybe, you know, someone doesn't want someone to know. So I don't I don't have enough of an issue to to impose that upon myself. And there are some costs that come with running a VPN for your entire network. And those costs might be speed, right? If your VPN provider's connection is slower than your home or office connection, then you are you are subject to whatever that limitation is. It's also potentially potentially going to slow things down. It's going to make it very difficult for you to host any servers or inbound connections. If you're doing any kind of thing like a VoIP connection might be weird or it might not. I mean, I proved that when I was in Orlando, I accidentally had left Express VPN running during our MacGeek app recording. And obviously, I'd all went just fine, no problem. So who knows? But yeah, so I wouldn't do it there, but I would recommend if there is anything in particular that they are concerned about keeping to themselves, that they that they have a VPN that maybe they can employ on their individual computers, you know, I know that you know Express VPN is a sponsor of MacGeek app. I did not I had not used Express VPN until about a year ago when they started to come on board as a sponsor. They very quickly became my favorite VPN and I've tested lots of them. The fact that they're a sponsor is the reason I tested them, but it is not the reason that they are my favorite. They are my favorite because it is super, super simple and it works and it's really good at getting around any problems that might exist with blocks or anything like that. So, and obviously it worked really well to record MacGeek app. So Express VPN truly is my favorite. The good news is because they are an ongoing sponsor, ExpressVPN.com slash MGG gets you some kind of a deal. I think you get like an extra three months or something like that. But I'll put that link in the show notes. They're not a sponsor of this episode, but but throwing it in there. Yes, Mr. Pete. Pilot Pete. I've got a question. Yeah. Let's say one of the listeners is at work and joins a Wi-Fi network at their place of work and then is asked to accept a certificate. Yep. Now, encrypted or not, that can be seen across. Everything that's done can be seen across, right? Won't you accept the certificate? Aren't you opening? You are joining, not necessarily. Okay. No, if you then launch a VPN connection, they can see that you're connected to a VPN, but that's it. They're not, they're not running. If they're running software on your computer, a certificate is not in this, in this, in this realm, I would not call a certificate software. I mean, it could be argued that it is, but. But I thought it was opening up the encryption to that, to that Wi-Fi, therefore, allowing what's ever on your computer to be. It would, it would open up. Yes, the certificate is just a different way of authenticating and encrypting onto that Wi-Fi network. But whatever you do on there, it certainly is seen if you're not doing anything to obscure that. But if you were to say, connect to ExpressVPN, then encrypts back again. Correct, correct. Yeah, yeah, it's tunneled within a tunnel, essentially. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting, Pete, that you bring that up because I just saw a story going around here. Apparently, many big companies are blocking a certificate from the government of Kazakhstan because they said, citizens, please install a certificate so we can watch what you're doing. And apparently, a lot of companies feel that that's not legit. So. Oh, interesting. Well, I knew there was actually a guy in one of our pilots over in Germany, but apparently it's a scam going around. He got a fine of $1,000 ostensibly from the German government for downloading some TV shows or movies that he shouldn't have downloaded. Yeah. That was a big scam. But yeah, there are others who are questioning how much can in fact be seen once they install the certificate in order to join the corporate Wi-Fi. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I had that same question, too. I couldn't answer it. I was like, I think you're allowing some encryption to be visible, but it makes sense. I see what you're saying now. Yeah, and there's a difference between a certificate and a profile, too. I mean, a profile usually does contain a certificate, but a profile can also give them the ability to do things to your Mac, like turn it off or shut it down or wipe it remotely. Which is what they do, in fact, accomplish when they issue us iPads. And they've got a tight reign on those. Because they're theirs. Well, one, they're theirs. And two, for good reason. I mean, you are relying on those for aircraft navigation. Yeah, your flight manual navigation, your charts, they don't, FAA doesn't want those corrupted. So they have them nice. As someone who, more often than maybe he likes lately, has been a passenger on planes, I'm good with that. Absolutely. Yeah, I don't need angry birds messing up the flight manual, man. Yep, that's good. All right, well, with that, I think it's time. We must, it all good things must come to an end. You know, as it goes. Visit us on Instagram, MacGeekUp.com. Oh, I guess it would just be Instagram.com slash MacGeekUp. But I'll put a redirect in. I said we can do redirects for anything. So I'll do one for this. It'll be Instagram or MacGeekUp.com slash Instagram. Whichever way you do it, it will work. Just for those of you in the chat room, not right at this moment, cause I'm doing a thing. But I will get that straightened out very, very quickly. But join us over there. It's, you know, it's good. It's fun. It's yet another, yet another place where we can be in touch. John, you already mentioned the forums, which is awesome. If you want to send us an email, you send it to feedback at MacGeekUp.com. I don't know if I heard you right, Dave. I'm not sure if you said feedback at MacGeekUp.com. What do you think, Peter? I heard feedback at MacGeekUp.com. I think that's right. I think you guys got it right. So thank you for the clarification, gentlemen. This is not feedback. Well, or that you could send a feedback if you have to, because listener Michael years ago wanted that and we were happy to oblige. I want to thank Cash Fly C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for sponsoring, or for, well, for sponsoring the show, but also for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank you, Pilot Pete, for making room in your schedule to come see us for special 777 today. It's thrilled to actually be able to be here. It's so rare. I get actually time to come to you. I know. Well, you are welcome any time, not just on the ones that are named after airplanes or numbered after airplanes. Too busy. Yeah. Oh, I hear you. I hear you. Yes, I get it. John, thank you for being you and, you know, all of this is good. It's good, right? No? Okay. Sure. All right, good. Whatever, whatever. Thanks to all our sponsors. As I mentioned during the show, we have linode at linode.com slash MGG and of course, smile at techsexpander.com slash podcast. Of course, otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com, barebones, software at barebones.com. Eero at Eero.com slash MGG, as I mentioned ExpressVPN.com slash MGG. We mentioned Experian in the show. Check that out too, because you can go to Experian.com slash MGG and actually help increase your credit rating. It's actually pretty cool. Whatever you're doing, though, go freeze your credit because we want to make sure. What do we want to make sure, Pete? What are we doing here? Well, good. Whatever you do, don't get caught. Made up.