 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 770 for Monday, July 15th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap. You know, it's the place we all get together every week so that we can answer your questions and share your tips and share your cool stuff found. We can share some cool stuff found of our own. You know the goal, though, and that is for each of us to learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Cashfly at mac.cashfly.com and Experian.com slash MGG. We will talk about why you want to visit both of those URLs and get something free out of it of each of them. Yep, it's true. We'll talk about that in a moment for now here. Well, I'm here like joining all of you at Mac Geek Gap. But while I'm doing that, I'm simultaneously here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Braun. Mr. Braun, how are we today? It's getting hot, man. It is like red fishbone. Yeah. Mm hmm. Well, oh, boy, if that's not a buried reference, I don't know what is. Anyway, let's before we go too deep on that, because we can't. We don't know. We don't know where that came from. Domenico, save us. He has a quick tip. He says, this one gets me every time when setting up a smart home device that has built in Wi-Fi that lets you use it to configure it, like its own Wi-Fi router that you have to change your Wi-Fi signal to connect to the smart home device and then program it from there to connect to yours. Make sure that you turn off any VPN software that tries to turn itself on with new Wi-Fi networks. Because, of course, since that device can't connect to the Internet, the VPN can never fully activate and the smart home device will not connect with your phone because your phone VPN profile won't let any traffic across until the VPN is active. He says, you won't get any informative error message about this. And if you're like me, you'll pull your hair out trying to figure out why and you'll curse at that horrible piece of junk you bought. When in reality, it's just your dodgy memory and your VPN acting up again. Ask me how I know this, he says, I got caught. Now, hopefully others won't. This is great advice. I have gotten caught on this, too. So, yeah, especially if you set up, it doesn't matter how you set up. But yeah, if your VPN is set up to just auto join or auto connect and block traffic until it connects, which is how many of them work and how we want them to work, you have to turn that off. Otherwise, you would run into exactly this scenario. So thanks very much, man. That's great. Very, very good. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on to the next quick tip to start the day. Yeah, I've run into that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, like a lot of a look, for example, if you're in a Pokemon, going stuff like that, a lot of a lot of apps. Well, it gets upset because I think it thinks you're trying to change your location or spoof your location. Oh, that too. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had that happen one time. I was, you know, trying to run it in the app just failed. You would run properly and I'm like, gee, why is that? And then I look and I see the little VPN icon up in the menu bar there or on the top of the screen. Oh, that's why it's not running. Right. Right. A couple of years. This reminds me a couple of years ago. I don't know if it's still doable now, but my son had been able to like download or configure Pokemon Go and hack it in some way on his iPhone that he could travel to any location at any time. So like he could if he wanted to pretend he was in Paris, he could be in Paris. So I'll put a link to the thing that I think that he used. I think it was through Tutu app or something. Yeah. Obviously not blessed by the Pokemon Go people, of course, because, you know, that goes without saying, right? But yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. But yeah, right. But he did note that he had to kind of be careful doing that and make sure not to not to do it too often. Otherwise, it would it would cause issues. So yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, somebody will break out the band hammer. Right. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. Yes. All right. Keith has another quick tip for us. He says, I'm a couple of episodes behind. So playing catch up can't remember the exact episode where you mentioned the tip of swiping the screen sideways using the line at the bottom on the iPhone 10 series phones when in an app to switch to the last previously used apps instead of swiping up to get to the app switcher. He says, I have more swiping stuff for you. Is that that's like door explorer, right? Swiper more swiping, right? Some people may not realize that this sideways swipe is also available on the home screen, even though there's no horizontal line at the bottom. Simply swipe along the bottom of the screen below the springboard from left to right and you will switch to the last opened app. Another swipe tip at this time on Apple Watch. This is something I use all the time and absolutely amazed a friend of mine when I showed it to him. If you have a workout running and the workout activity screen is displayed, you can swipe from right to left to bring up now playing. This is great for getting quickly back to the volume control or the navigation controls to skip forwards and backwards. A swipe from left to right takes you back to the workout activity display. This works for anything you're playing. And I use it when I'm listening to music podcasts via the audible app or even the Mac Geek app, which is being played via the Mac Geek app on my iPhone, a friend always had to hit the button, find now playing and select it before I showed him the swipe. I hope this is useful. So there you go. Thank you, Keith. That's great that I always forget about the swipe on the home screen. Actually, I forget about both of these. So this is the epitome of a quick tip, which is great. So and, of course, don't forget about the Mac Geek app iOS app because it exists. It exists. It's good. I'll put it in. I'll put a link in the show notes at the show notes at MacGeek app.com, of course. Any thoughts on any of these swipes, John? Yeah, I ran across this the other day. It's I don't know. Yeah, I think so if you at least on my eight, if you. Just swipe from the center down, that brings up one of the auxiliary screens. I'm trying to I'm not even sure what it's called here. OK. Yeah, try it. Swiping, swiping. Wait, say describe that again. So just so just swipe from the center, swipe down from the center to the bottom of the screen. And it brings up serious suggestions and all that stuff here. Swipe down another way to get there from the center of the screen on your iPhone. Yeah, doesn't that just bring up notification center? Yeah, that's what's happening there. Oh, OK. Is that no, no, no, it's not notification center. It's another screen. I don't know. Try it sometime. I'm doing it right now. If I swipe down, if I swipe down from the left or the center, I get notification center and then can swipe, you know, left to right with my finger and get all my widgets. And then if I swipe from the upper right corner is where I get control center. But is there something else that I'm missing? Yeah, so that brings up notification center. But if you. No, I'm with you. So if you swipe down, like from the upper right hand corner, I get a control center center. Oh, you're not on an iPhone 10. We're on iPhones that made that. Is that I don't think that changes that, though. Yeah, OK. Right. So you swipe from the right corner down, you get no center. No, I get no in the upper right hand corner. I get notification center. Interesting. That's where I get control center. So maybe that is different on the iPhone 10. Yeah. Yes. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. OK, so if you swipe just from the center, you get you get you get a third option when swiping. Is that essentially what you're saying? If I swipe from the center to the bottom, yep. I get serious suggestions and some other things here. Interesting. And how do you just control center? Well, that I think if I swipe from the is that swiping? Yeah, so if I swipe from the left, no, no, if I swipe from the very bottom, right, which I can't do because I don't have a home button, right? OK, that night. OK, now we're now I think. OK, now it makes sense. Huh, interesting, interesting, interesting. I always forget about this because, right, because iPhone 10. Yeah, I'll have to mess with that later on the. I don't have a seven in front of me here. But yeah, anyway, there we go. Uh, let's see. I want to actually I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is Experian Boost. Man, like I mentioned that this was free, right? So you're going to go to Experian dot com slash MGG. That's E X P E R I A N dot com slash MGG because Experian is on a mission to help boost America's credit score. Which will help lots of us, right? And for the first time ever, you can do something that in real time can control your credit score. Because what Experian Boost does is it works by giving you credit for all the utility and telecom bills that you're paying with your checking or savings account, right? So water, gas, electric cable, cell phone. You aren't getting credit for those yet if you're not using Experian Boost. So you go to Experian dot com slash MGG and you can submit this stuff that way. And it will show you what it's going to do to your credit score. And if it's going to raise it, you say yes, if you want. You could say no, if you don't want it to raise it. But if it's going to lower it for some reason, then you could say no. And it's never added to your your score, right? So this is the first time that you really get to control what's going on in an instant way. And only positive payments will be factored in, right? So you really get to take control of this. It's awesome. You know, I'm crazy about my credit score. I have been for a very long time. It's one of the topics that John and I talk about when we're not doing this show, because we're both sort of crazy about our credit scores. This is a great way for you to get and control what's going on here. Total game changer. It's awesome. So you got to check it out. As I said, Experian dot com slash MGG. The link will be in the show notes, of course, our thanks to Experian for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, now that we are here, I want to take we had a couple of questions essentially about doing things different than the Apple way. And really, I'll just get into it because it's way easier once we're there to to do this. And of course, I say that while I'm trying to find. So Bob is asking about backups, right? He says, I've been using time machine scheduler since recommendation on your show. Probably Time Machine Editor is the one that that we that we like because it lets you really control when Time Machine is going to happen and all that stuff. It's awesome. He says, I've noticed lately that I'm having trouble making reliable backups. I'm getting messages that the backup is damaged and a new one must be made. This happens on both of my machines. For the last two and a half years, my network has been fundamentally the same. My internet modem feeds a netgear Orbi router in my barn about 100 feet away through two drywall walls is the Orbi satellite that the airport extreme is then connected to with the hard drive hanging off of it and via USB late last year. My longtime Seagate backup drive failed. I replaced it with a Western digital elements hard drive that will that never really worked reliably. So I returned it and replaced it with a my book hard drive. That seemed fine for a while until more file corruption issues started. In the case of both IMAX, new full backups were made, but both failed this past May as a full backup takes over 30 hours. I'm not anxious to start a new set of them until I figured out what is causing this file corruption. Do you think it could be Time Machine Editor? Or is it more likely to be my home network or the WD drives? Is there a way to attach a backup drive directly to the IMAX, then relocate it to my barn and get Time Machine to find, recognize and use that backup? It seemed that every time I tried to do that, it never really worked. Or, and this is the big question, should I just abandon Time Machine, spend some cubic dollars and get a sonology? So what you're talking about, Bob, is what I would call normal Time Machine behavior. And it happens, we talk about it fairly frequently on the show because anything that's going over a Wi-Fi connection is likely, more likely to cause a Time Machine network problem. Time Machine has no server component. Here's the issue, right? When you are backing up with Time Machine, your Mac that's running Time Machine is the only smart piece of the process, right? So your Mac is saying, I am going to take this file from my local drive and save it to this Time Machine backup over here. Now over here might be an external drive. Over here might be a drive across the network. Your Mac certainly can know that and it does know that and it behaves differently. If it's a locally attached drive, it just saves it to a folder on that drive. If it's a network drive, it creates a disk image and saves it to a folder inside that disk image so that it can truly control what the file structure looks like. So that answers your first question. No, you can't start it locally and then attach it to your airport extreme. That, I mean, there's a way, but it's not, certainly not easy. The real problem though comes in when you're doing it to a drive over there because your Mac is the only thing writing files to that drive. So if your Mac's connection to that drive gets interrupted for any reason and you know, Wi-Fi can, you know, you can have interference, you can have little things. It doesn't take very long if it happens at exactly the right or wrong time for this to corrupt your backup, which is why network time machine backups have always sort of been fraught with this kind of corruption. Add to that that it's inside a disk image which also requires some very careful sort of file management, opening and closing things to make sure it works right. And you will have problems when backing up time machine over Wi-Fi. My Wi-Fi based computers generally have to have my time machine backups repaired once or twice a year. My wired ones like Ethernet wired ones tend to survive a lot longer but I see those kind of go flaky too. And it doesn't matter whether I'm backing up to a time capsule, an airport extreme, a Synology, a Drobo, it doesn't like, it's just time machine across the network. It doesn't matter what the destination is because the destination isn't acting smart in this case. You're not, what would be great is if you were passing files to a server engine on the destination and it was dealing with writing locally so that that way if your connection got interrupted, like the management of this sparse bundle image would not get messed up but that's not how time machine works. So the type brand of network destination generally isn't a factor unless it's just a flaky piece of hardware or something. So there are other options. And you mentioned Synology in your question, Bob. Synology's drive, which is their piece of software that lets you essentially create what I like to call your own Dropbox or your own iCloud Drive-ish kind of thing where you have a folder or set of folders that are synced from your Mac to the disk station. Of course, they can be synced to your phone and other Macs so that you can put a folder or a file or a folder and inside this folder and then it gets synced to everything. Private Cloud kind of at its finest. Synology Drive does one other thing and it has what they call Synology Drive backup where it will take files and back them up across the network to your Synology. And this is done with a client server operation. Have you've messed with this, right, John? You've used Synology Drive before? Backup, I mean, yeah. It used to be called Cloud Station backup until they changed the name of Cloud Station to Synology Drive, but are you still using Synology Drive backup for some things? Yeah, I'm running, let me look here in my menu bar. So I'm actually syncing one of my folders. Sure, okay, so you're using it for sync, okay. Yep, is it only sync? So you're not using the backup option, you're using just the sync option, is that right? Yeah, I'm syncing my documents folder using Drive. Got it, okay, and that is another type of, I mean, I know we're supposed to say that sync isn't backup, but it is, especially if it has like version control or versioning, which Synology Drive does. So that's one way to do it. And then the other way is to just use, instead of a sync task, you can use a backup task, which is essentially a sync task in a one-way sort of setup, right, because you're just going from your computer to the Synology, if something gets changed over there, it doesn't sync back. That's really the difference between sync and backup. My only issue with this, and I started messing with this, it's really slow. Even sync is really slow, because I think it only copies one file at a time. So it just takes a long time. It's very robust, it's very reliable. I've never had any problems with it, but we'll talk a little bit later. I rolled some computers around here, and so I had to re-sync my Synology Drive folder, which is huge. I mean, it's, I don't know, 15 gigs or 20 gigs or something like that. And it took way longer than it would have to just copy across the network with the Finder where it uses, you know, parallel copies. So it is slow to do this Synology backup thing or a Synology Drive sync. But once it's in place, then the individual files, as you update them, sort of happen very, very quickly because it's just one file at a time and that tends to work. So yeah, have you had any issues with Synology Drive sync, John? None that I can tell. Yeah, yeah. So I would be, you know, so this is one option. And it's certainly the one that John and I use, you know, certainly more reliable than Time Machine. I also still do Time Machine across the network. I just have accepted that, you know, a couple of times a year, I need to let it wipe it out and start over again. And it's not universally true. You know, I might have a machine that goes 18 months before that needs to happen. But I don't worry about the years and years of Time Machine history like I was originally trained to do by Apple's marketing team. I worry about that differently now, so yeah. So I'm curious if anybody out there has any other solutions for, you know, a local network backup that is more robust for you than Time Machine. Time Machine's really nice, don't get me wrong in that it's definitely the easiest backup I've ever recovered anything from, right? Cause it's super easy to navigate the recovery interface and all of that, it just, it's just not robust for network backups, which is unfortunate, but that's how it goes. So I'm curious, feedback at macgeekab.com if you have any thoughts to share. Did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? You know, I did John say feedback at macgeekab.com. It's true, that's true. Do you have anything more to add to this conversation before we move on to Ed? Yes, one thing you may want to consider is making a backup of your backup. So you do this, right? So I backup the contents of one of my Synology, Synologies to my other Synology and that includes the Time Machine file. So if your Time Machine gets corrupted, you can just restore a previous backup and maintain your history. Right, so if it gets, yeah, so the thing is, but I haven't had to do this for a while. It's been amazingly stable. That's wireless and wired. So one of my machines, so my mini is wired and my MacBook, I typically do it over wifi. Sure, but yeah, I haven't had that problem for a while, but when it did report corruption, I'm like, oh, well, let me just go to yesterday's, let me just restore yesterday's Time Machine image. And then it did it again and, you know, it tried it again and everything was fine. So you may want to consider that, make a backup of your backup. So I have, this is brilliant, man. You're like totally blowing my mind because you could do this even if you only had one Synology because Synology's BTRFS file system now supports snapshots like APFS does. And it would stand to reason that you could set up snapshots on your Time Machine volume. And then you don't, then like restoration is instant. Dude, this is brilliant. Oh man. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I like this, John. See, this is it. These are the moments of brilliance for Mr. John F. Braun, folks. So I like this, man. What a great idea. Yeah, yeah. So not all backup destinations are created equal because if you've got a backup of your backup in one way, shape, or form, you're in great shape. I like it, man. This is, now see, I learned something. Like this is huge. I can't, like I'm eager to like pause the recording of the show and go turn on snapshots on my Time Machine volume on my Synology but I will maintain composure. I haven't actually done anything with snapshots as of. I started messing with it, but it's very simple. You go into your DSM interface, right? And look at me not having to pause the show to do this. And you go to, I think you go into Control Panel, Shared Folder and then you edit the Shared Folder there and I think this is where you can, no, no, no, no, no, you don't do it there. You do it in Snapshot Replication. I don't know, there's a place to do this. Yeah, you go into, so the main menu and there's an app called Snapshot Replication. You go into that and then select your Shared Folder and you can go to, so for me, I'm selecting my Time Machine folder. I go to Settings and I say Enable Snapshot Schedule and I can say Daily at Midnight, okay, that's fine. I can choose how long to retain them so I can retain by as many as will fit or a fixed amount of snapshots. I mean, I'm gonna set it to 100. I don't need more than, I don't need thousands of these. And then there you go and then you say, okay. And that's it, boom. So now I didn't, I didn't have to pause the show and I didn't have to wait till later and I was able to maintain my composure and perhaps teach somebody something. So there you go. And I'm gonna tell it to take a snapshot now. First snapshot, because I can. And then say, okay, and now, boom, it's taking a snapshot of my Time Machine volume right there on my six station. Yep, so go to main menu, Snapshot Replication. It's an app like Package Center or Control Panel or File Station or anything like that. All right, I don't see that app here. Aha, well, perhaps it's something that needs to be installed. Maybe it's not installed by default. Okay, I'll check it out. I can uninstall it so that would indicate that, yes. I think there are other ways to manage snapshots. I don't think this is the only way, but certainly. Yeah, there we go. I just searched for an app and there's an app here called Snapshot Replication. Well, let me install it, play with it later. Snapshot Replicate, just to keep any confusion from happening, Snapshot Replication is a different feature. It's just that the app allows you to manage your local snapshots on your volumes. But what Snapshot Replication does is lets you back up your snapshots to a different disk station. So this would be your new way of backing things up, John. You do snapshots locally and then you would say, okay, I want backups of these over there on that other disk station and now you'd run Snapshot Replication to do that. That's kind of how that's supposed to work, which is very confusing to me, but that they bake all this stuff sort of in the same app. But there you go, that's how it goes. Sweet, I love this. This is why we do this show because we love this stuff, folks. All right, let's see, Ed. Ed has a question. He says, I signed up for family sharing of iCloud storage. We are currently on the 200 gig plan. I've tried to figure out how to create a folder on iCloud Drive that can be shared with the family members to no avail. It appears that we can share the expense, but not actual data. We can just share the storage. Am I doing something wrong? I wanna remove our dependence on Dropbox because it has become a pain since they changed the rules to only three devices. If there is no iCloud folder sharing solution, do you recommend a Dropbox alternative? So you're right that iCloud doesn't allow folder sharing yet, but it's coming in iPadOS 13, MacOS Catalina, iOS 13 in the fall. So if you can wait, you can have this via iCloud, which is great. As long as everyone is running a supported operating system. I'm not sure how it's gonna work if you've got somebody that has to be running, say, high Sierra and can't be on this. So in the meantime, or alternatively, Google Drive allows this right now. So that's a freely available solution. You only get, I think, 15 gigs of storage for free, but that might be enough, depending on what you wanna share with the family. Synology Drive, which we just mentioned, also does this too if you have a disk station to run it. And I believe some others support this too. Boxnet comes to mind, but I haven't used that much. Perhaps, John, you have any thoughts on other options for this? I don't like to share, so. Right. I have not explored this issue. Got it, got it. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, I mean, but you have, right? Because you and I share a folder for Mac Geekab over Dropbox, which I'm thinking about we should move to Synology Drive, but because that way, just for the same reasons as Ed, reducing Dropbox dependence, but there you go. But iCloud Drive folder sharing would be another way to do this, which is perhaps easier. For you, it wouldn't matter, because you're already running Synology Drive on your Macs, right, but there you go. So, yeah, oh, another option. Man, I always forget about this too, is what previously was called BitTorrent Sync, but is called Resilio Sync. And the cool part about Resilio Sync is it requires no server. You just set up the Resilio Sync client on all of your Macs and or iOS devices and they just find each other locally or over the internet and sync with each other. So your folder can be as big as you want it to be as long as everybody has enough actual local storage to store it. So Resilio Sync might be another option for you. So, there you go. More thoughts on that, John? Anything before we move on? Continue. Continue. Let's continue. I want to take a minute and talk about, I alluded to this a few minutes ago. I rolled some Macs around. So, as some of you may have seen earlier this week, Apple finally put their 2019 iMacs on the refurb store, which is what I've been waiting for because here in the studio, I had that 2011 iMac, down in the office, I had a 2014, the first of the Retina 5K iMacs. Now, thankfully, I had bought that knowing that I would probably keep it for a very long time. So I bought the high-end CPU on that, which is the four gigahertz i7 and four core, you know, great. So, as soon as they went live on the store, I happened to catch it. I don't know why I happened to look, it was just, I just had a, actually, I was with my family, they were watching, we were watching some show that I didn't care about. And I'm like, eh, you know, it seems like it might be time, but what does it look like? I was like, oh, crap, there they are. So I ordered one and I ordered an i9, so the high-end CPU, I was able to order it with, it's really weird that the options that you, that are possible for the 2019 iMacs. And of course, not all of them are available at any one time on the refurb store. You'd have to kind of sift through and find what you're looking for. But there's four different graphics cards that you can get and each of the, one of them is only a build to order option. The other three are tied to the CPU that you start with, even though you can build to order, upgrade your CPU and still live with an older graphics card. So I wound up getting the core i9, which is the top-end CPU, eight core CPU with eight gigs of RAM, the 580X graphics card, which is the, it's not the total top-end because I don't need that. But I got whatever that one was, 580X, and a one terabyte SSD, which is great because I was able for 128 bucks to buy another 32 gigs of RAM, crucial RAM via Amazon and that worked out really, really well. So it's got 40 gigs of RAM in it, a terabyte SSD internal, which is double what I had previously. So more than I need and more graphics card than I need and more CPU than I need. So what I did, John, was I thought, okay, my plan and in retrospect, I think I would do this plan differently. But my plan was, okay, well, I'll put the new iMac in the office and I'll take the office iMac and put that up in the studio. And then I can decommission this older 2011 iMac. So that's what I did. And I wanna talk through that process. In retrospect, I only did that process because it's what I've always done. I put the new machine in the office, roll the old one up to the studio. That old machine, the 2014 5K, 4-core i7, is plenty fast for me in the office. And having this new 8-core machine in the office, I noticed literally no difference whatsoever. So I probably should have just put the new machine up here in the studio, but I didn't. And also noticing no speed problems here in the studio. So maybe it really doesn't matter. But what I'm doing, like music recording with multi-tracks and all that stuff, I might want the extra CPU up here. So I might wind up switching things around. But for now, that's what I did, which meant I was rolling two computers basically simultaneously. And that is a lot to think about. So I thought, okay, the studio one I have not nuke and paved this machine up here since before we started Mac Geek Gap. I mean, I've put new machines in place, but I've always just run migration assistant. I thought, you know, it's time, this should be done. So that was the decision for this one. And being that I needed to do two of these sort of simultaneously, I decided the one in the office, that's been nuke and paved relatively recently. I can just migration assistant to the new machine there. And that's fine. So that went fairly well. It went fairly slowly only because I do not follow my own advice and I clone to a rotational drive that's not terribly fast. And so it took, I don't know, it took several hours to clone everything back. I think I posted online, John, you saw that at one point it was reporting it was gonna take 18 hours to clone or to migrate my apps over. It didn't take quite that long. It took maybe three. But migration assistant is slow. Like Synology Drive, it copies one file at a time. There's no parallelization like there is in the Finder. So when it gets to all the like tiny little files that I installed for say homebrew or whatever, it takes a very, very, very long time. But it moved much faster than the 18 hours it reported. So that machine's fine. Up here in the studio, I started earlier this week, I started, I did two things. I started making a list of all the apps that I wanted to have on here because there's a lot of moving parts. Like, you know, I use Audio Hijack and Ferago and Discord and Loopback and, you know, my IRC client, all the things that I need to do to record this show. The other thing that I did on both computers was that I ran Carbon Copy Cloner and I cloned my drive to a disk image on the Synology. So no matter what happens in, you know, quote-unquote cold storage, I have those images to refer back to and that gave me the peace of mind to do whatever I need to do and, you know, mess with the system. So, so there you go. That, so with that in mind, I wiped the drive up here and I moved the computer from the office up to here and I installed Mojave Fresh. Then I set up my user account from scratch, got it all working, everything was fine. It took a little while, but not as never as long as I think that the whole new can pave thing is not nearly as scary as I always think it's gonna be. It took, I don't know, a few hours and I was back in business with pretty much everything that I needed. You know, I, having that list of things in that list was something I wrote on paper so that I had it without a computer being live, which was helpful. But yeah, you know, just kind of crossing things off the list. I put one password and Synology drive and text expander on first so that I'd kind of have all the things that I needed and software licenses and all that. I put set up on very early in the process to kind of pull the apps in that I use that way and, you know, it went relatively fine. And then John, I had to stop and think because I'm not the only person that uses this machine. I have, in fact, four different user accounts on this computer, one for me and that's the one that I built from scratch. Then my wife, Lisa, does a lot of our accounting and actually lots of other stuff for us here at Mac Observer and Backbeat Media and this is her work computer when I'm not podcasting. And I started thinking about what a nuke and pave was gonna mean for her and thought, man, okay, right, gotta deal with that. And then there's the whole concept of nuke and paving the other two accounts which are basically used for the same purpose which is audio recording. I have separate accounts for that so that I can give those passwords to like other band members and they can come into the studio when I'm not here if they wanna mix some things or whatever. And I thought, you know, those accounts, I don't wanna mess with those either. I thought, wait a minute, John F. Braun, he always reminds me that migration assistant has some granularity. So after I nuke and paved and got the machine all set up the way I wanted and got my user account set from scratch manually, the way that I wanted, then I launched migration assistant and pointed it only at those three user accounts. I unchecked the applications, I uncheck system settings, I uncheck network setting, like all of that stuff, the other files, whatever that is, I unchecked and just had it copy those user accounts in. And it did. And then I logged into leases and there were two apps that I knew that I had not installed that she would need to use. One was QuickBooks and the other is Yojimbo that she actually still uses for all her notes. And I wanted, I did not install those prior to setting up or prior to migrating her user account because I wanted to make sure it didn't try to bring in those apps, just because they were say in her doc or whatever. And it did not, like those apps were not there and it was like, great. Okay. And then I just installed them and the data files that she uses and that we sync and all that stuff were totally fine. Made life really, really easy. So this hybrid migration approach really worked well. And it made me think, you could do that even with your own user account. You could not migrate apps in but just migrate your user account in. And if you wanted to kind of sort of nuke and pave that that would potentially give you some, some cruft cleaning, not all of it, cause you'd still have whatever's in your user account. But yeah, there you go. So, so yeah, nuke and pave, but not nuke and pave, but like everything I'm using is new for me. And I had to kind of set it all up and again, it's fine. It seems to be working. A few folks are hearing the show success. So any thoughts about that, John? When the time comes, I think I'm going to use migration assistance. Okay, when was the last time you nuke and paved either of your machines? Has it, has it, it's been a while, huh? Yes. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, I realized that, and I mean, I've known this for a while, but as I started thinking about it, sort of the data point that stuck out in my head was that the folder to which I have audio hijacks saving our audio files for every podcast, you know, we record it has to save to a folder somewhere was a folder on my desktop named test. So that was the thing that made me realize, yeah, this is from like before Mackie cab ever started because test is test, you know, like testing this whole idea of maybe doing a podcast someday. So yeah, it was time. And I feel pretty good about it. It's been pretty good. So yeah, yep, yep. So anyway, I just figured I'd share that experience. It was, it less honestly, the biggest pain point that I had was I created my boot disk. You know, I created a USB boot stick for, you know, with Mojave on it, right? And I did it by running an app called disk maker X, which is what I've always used in the past. And I pointed disk maker X to a Mojave installation that I downloaded like last month, knowing that this was probably gonna come. And I wanted to grab as I mentioned on the show, and it's good advice, go download a copy of the Mojave installer. Now you get 10.14.5. And it's way easier to do now than it is after Catalina launches. It's still possible after Catalina launches. It's just not as easy. So I had the latest one, it was sitting there on my disk station because I put it in cold storage and I pointed disk maker 10 at it, disk maker X, whatever you wanna call it. And it was like, yeah, no problem. And it built the disk and they built the USB stick. And the USB stick worked. Like it booted my machine. I ran disk utility. It was fine. I wiped my drive. Great. Then I said, great, install. It's like the installer can't be run. It gave me that error that you get when the time is wrong on your machine. So I checked to make sure that like somehow the clock hadn't reset to like, you know, 1999 or something. No, it had not. Time was fine. It truly was corrupt on this thing. So I had to go and rebuild the USB stick and all of that stuff. I don't know why it was a problem. But I did it from, I redownloaded a copy of the Mojave installer and did it from my local drive and that worked fine. So, you know, buy or beware. But that was the thing that slowed me, that kind of tripped me up. But otherwise everything went really, really smoothly. At least so far. We'll see. All right, more thoughts, John? Anything? Huh. Why didn't you use create install media? So you're right. Because that's part of, because I had Disc Maker 10 and it's a click in the graphic interface instead of having to use the terminal. Okay. That's why. But when I did it the second time, I did not use Disc Maker 10. I used create install media, which is there's an Apple Knowledge Base article. We'll put a link in the show notes for it. But that's, you know, Apple's sort of official way but you have to do it from the terminal. And I was just being, you know, I thought I was being efficient about it. I clearly was not. But yeah, that's why. So, yeah, maybe I clearly made the wrong choice. Though I don't think there's anything wrong with Disc Maker 10. I think it was the image. I think it was trying to do it from my, across the network from my disk station. That maybe. I don't know. But yes, I did create install media the second time. That worked much better. So, there you go. But I also downloaded a fresh copy just in case. Any more thoughts? Nope. Okay. We have, we have some cool stuff found to share. Does that sound good, John? Can I do that now? Absolutely. Sweet. Actually, first, I want to talk about our sponsor, Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. Actually, Mac.Cashfly.com is where you want to go because the good people at Cashfly are going to provide you with a free optimization consultation for your website. So, you can learn exactly where your website stands today. They'll give you your lighthouse score report. And of course, they'll tell you how Cashfly's web optimization solutions can help add more points to your lighthouse score at Mac.Cashfly.com because the reality is, when websites don't load, we lose interest. For each second a page takes to load, it costs a company 16% in engagement. Fewer visitors means fewer customers. That's not good for any of us. And Cashfly has your back. They've had our back here at Mac eCab for almost all of our 14 years. And now they have your back too with that new web optimization capability that I just mentioned. All your content can be optimized before it's delivered to visitors without requiring any development efforts from you. Application load balancing, on-the-fly next-gen image optimization, all kinds of smart asset delivery. Just like we're doing with our podcasts to you, you can use this too. So, go check it out. Mac.Cashfly.com Mac.Cachefly.com Go check it out. And our thanks to Cashfly for sponsoring this episode and also providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Alrighty, so I said cool stuff found. We'll start with Bruce. And Bruce says, in episode 769 last week, Bill wrote in about noise-canceling earbuds. You listed two alternatives, the ear and M2s and the Pioneer Rays. I would suggest a third. The IsoTunes Pro Bluetooth Noise Isolating Earbuds from IsoTunesAudio.com. Link, of course, in the show notes. I learned about these at a woodworking conference. These are OSHA compliant hearing protectors with a noise reduction rating of 27 decibels. I listened to them briefly and they seem to work fairly well. They sounded good enough that I purchased a set on-site at the conference. I just pulled them out of the box and am listening to a recording of box Pasa-gaglia. Pasa-gaglia, sorry. And fugue in C minor. And they seem to cover a wide frequency range. The pedal is surprisingly full and the highs are clean and crisp. Not a scientific review, I know. But good enough for my ears, he says. They come with four different pairs of foam ear tips and one pair of those triple flanged silicone ear tips. List price is $89.99. I've seen them on the web for as low as $71.99. So very cool, yeah, I never even thought about OSHA compliant Bluetooth earbuds. But there you go, great stuff. Very good stuff. I have a cool stuff found in the same range that I tested out this week. John Optoma has been making earbuds for a little while. Their latest ones, their new Forrest B Free 6 earbuds. These are, they fit right in your ear. There's nothing that hangs like down or out. There's no cords, they are completely wireless. For 99 bucks, they pair really easily. They have their own charging case, which is great. They will support Bluetooth 5. They support AAC, which is Apple's tech for sending high quality audio to Bluetooth. And it works really, really well. I've been messing with them and they've been great. Six hours of battery life with the earbuds and then three more charges or an additional 18 hours through the charging base. So, and it's got like the case actually shows you like how they're charged. I've been messing with them. My favorite test is to put earbuds in and play my drums because that tells me how much they're isolating the outside world. I had to mess around like the other ones we mentioned. These come with a bunch of different sizes of silicone tips. And so I had to find the right ones to really lock into my ear and seal. But they work great. And charging is via a USB-C cable. But of course, you can plug it into a USB-A port to get charging, but it's got a USB-C port on it so that yeah, it's moving forward, not no more micro USB, just USB-C. So I've been, I'm actually really impressed by these. For 99 bucks, it's a decent price for what you're getting. Nice sealed. If you're on an airplane, you wouldn't hear the outside noise and all that stuff. So yeah, very good stuff. So I'm stoked about them. So I figured I didn't figure. I wanted to share that. So there we go. Any thoughts on that, John, before we keep moving on? Moving on. Moving on to, well, sort of a related tip from Bob. He was, we had an email trail going about AirPods and he says that he uses his AirPods while cycling. And I asked him how he felt about that. Like, first of all, you know, falling out, no problems with that, which I have also been amazed by that I just can't get these things to fall out of my ears. But, you know, one of the nice parts about AirPods that I find at least when walking around in, you know, crowded environments, is I can still hear people when they're talking to me. And he says, yeah, he also finds even on a bike that he can hear, you know, when another cyclist is coming and saying on your left or whatever, or certainly the noise of cars coming at him or behind him or from wherever, he has no trouble hearing any of that. And so he's able to maintain situational awareness while having even two earbuds in. So there you go. So, you know, obviously always be careful when cycling, but I was really glad to hear that Bob was able to, has, seems to have no trouble with that. So thank you for sharing that, Bob. Good stuff. Thoughts, my friend, before moving on? Nope, it's safety first. Safety first, indeed. All right, yeah, all right, let's go to, let's answer some more questions because that's fun, it seems to be a thing. It seems to be a thing that we do here, John. Nathan has a question. He says, I've been using Google Photos for the past few years and I recently upgraded my iCloud storage. I have yet to find a good method to transfer my Google Photos to iCloud Photos and any insight would be extremely helpful. Okay, so there are a few options. I am not, the order in which I am going to talk through these or we are going to talk through these is not indicative of which I certainly think is the best. I don't know that there is, I don't know which way is the best. Maybe we'll come to a consensus here, John. So the first is use Google Takeout at takeout.google.com. This allows you, this is actually a handy thing because it allows you to download all of the data that you have stored in Google. So takeout.google.com, you can go there. If all you want is your photos, deselect everything on this page and then only select Google Photos. That'll download them down into a folder and then you could just drag that folder into the Photos app which will upload them to iCloud sort of by nature. As long as you've attached photos to your iCloud photo library, obviously that's sort of a prerequisite or a post-requisite could be done after the fact, doesn't really matter. Another way is I found an article at Gizmodo that actually talks through a lot of this stuff and is a handy article. I will put that link in the show notes for sure. But the article is called How to Move Your Photo Library between Apple Photos and Google Photos and the section of it titled Switching from Google Photos to Apple Photos talks about a few different things. And you can use the Google Drive app to bring down your photos. You have to tell Google Drive to include your photos in the sync that it brings down. So Google Drive is their Dropbox-esque app where you can just sync a folder. Well, you can have it populate that folder with your Google Photos as well. You just have to go into your Google settings, your Google Drive settings and check a box that says automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in my drive and then boom, there they are. And then again, from there, drag them over and put them on your Mac. Another way to do it is you can do it directly from the web by just going to photos.google.com and download from there. Sorry about little hiccup here. I know no hiccup for you folks listening, except I'm gonna be a little out of sorts because we just spent about five minutes troubleshooting a weird audio problem again. Same one as last week with the static, which we switched from using FireWire to USB this time. I don't know. Doesn't really make sense, but we shall see if this continues to work. I hope it does. I hope, I hope. Anyway, yeah, I'm not really a fan of USB audio, but if that's how it goes. Anyway, Google Takeout. So yeah, no, sorry, not Google Takeout. Google Photos, yeah, you can just download from the web to a folder and good to go. And then the final option that I came up with, John, is you can do it with your phone. This actually seems to be the first option a lot of people suggest, but man, it seems like this would be the slowest way to do it. And the way that you would do this is, let me get there, let me get myself back in business here. But yeah, the way that you would do it is you run Google Photos on your phone and then you, and then have it copy those to your phone's photo library and then it'll go, but man, like, I don't know. That seems like it would take forever. It would be over wifi. It would require you to like slurp all that stuff down to your phone, which your phone might not fit. So it would have to do it in chunks. Like, man, I don't know. I don't know. What do you think, Mr. Braun? My one concern with all of these is maintaining a library, like your albums. Is how would that stuff migrate at all? Yeah, that's a good question. Let's talk that through a little bit. How would you do it? What would, if you wanted to maintain albums? I don't know. Well, I'm thinking like if you go to photos.google.com and you can see your albums there, right? So you could, theoretically, like just download an album at a time. Maybe, I have not tried this, but it's possible that Google Takeout would organize your photos into folders by album. So maybe. Yeah, and actually, yeah. So if I go to photos.google.com, which I don't use that. Sure, sure. I do see albums on the... Yeah. I do see an albums category. Okay, so that would be my concern. Yeah, totally. Moving between any photo services is how do you maintain your structure? Because people spend a lot of time creating albums. Absolutely. To find their stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd hate to lose that. So yeah, that's interesting. Like I do, I will create albums for things, but I do it less and less now only because things are so good at creating moments or memories or Google's assistant or whatever your particular photo engine of choice calls it. It's not as necessary to create. I used to create annual albums and those sorts of things. Those are gone, right? And even albums by location, it tries to do them by events, but obviously it can't always guess that quite right. So yeah, yeah, no, albums are still a thing, perhaps less of a thing than they used to be. So yeah. All right, any more on this one, John, before we move on to the next question? Okay. I really like that takeout.google.com site. That's pretty cool. I had not known about that and actually it's kind of creepy all the stuff they list there. It's like, wait, you know that? I mean, it's pages and pages of data that's on here. I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little crazy. Yeah. Oh, there it is. All photo albums included. Yeah, you get to pick that when you're doing your photos. So that would be, I think that would potentially solve the problem. Yeah. I haven't tried this because I, that would be a massive amount of data to slurp down. But yeah, there you go. Yep. Hopefully it's still organized by album when you bring it down. But that would be the only, the only question. So cool. All right. Let's see, while we're on the subject of media and moving it around. Let's go to Eduardo here who asks, he says, I have two Macs, a big 27 inch retina iMac with lots of storage and a 13 inch non-touch bar MacBook Pro with only 128 gigs of storage. I'm the only user of both. So I never use them at the same time. The iMac is for work at the home office and the MacBook for when I'm on the road. Since last month, my job includes a lot of video editing in iMovie. I separated the library between a ongoing folder and a finished folder. So I would not need to load all of those things every time I fired up iMovie. Considering that I'm the only user of both machines and I'm fully aware of the risks of opening the same file at the same time on different machines, would you say that it's safe to use iCloud Drive to keep the library in sync between the machines? So this is a good question. My first, my gut feeling was, yeah, it should work as long as you're aware of the true dangers of trying to open the same thing. And as long as you are like the biggest thing that I find, we sync our QuickBooks data between several computers here and we don't run multi-user QuickBooks. We might, but we don't currently because we don't really need to, but we have several companies so we can't use QuickBooks online in a cost-effective manner. So we use the desktop version, which is fine. And it runs really well. We have, using Synology Drive, we have a shared folder that we use to share our, I think, five different QuickBooks data files. And the only time we run into trouble is if someone opens a file that is not finished syncing. Like, let's say Synology Drive had quit or whatever. So, and Synology Drive is kind of like Dropbox where in the Finder it will put a, it puts a green checkbox, but it has, there are labels visible right there in the Finder that show you, is the file synced? Is it actively syncing or is Synology Drive not running and there is no little icon. So we make sure the icon's there and that the icon is green. And that tells us, yep, we're all good to go and now we can open it. Of course, QuickBooks for desktop has an automated backup function where it automatically backs up when you quit and all that. So we have that too just in case we ever make an error. So that, my gut on this says that if you did that with iMovie and we're just really intentional about making sure syncing was finished and happening, you'd be okay. But you know, there's that whole media browser thing that happens in Mac OS. And that feels like a thing that's sort of live all the time. So I don't know if that would muck with this. It's certainly worth an experiment, but your iMovie stuff might be open by things that are not iMovie. So even if iMovie is not running, that whole media browser thing that exists might still have it in there. I don't know. I haven't messed with it enough to know that, but... But maybe? I don't know. But what do you think, John? I haven't launched iMovie in ages. Yeah. I've been updating it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I just ran it here. It's like, hey, welcome to iMovie. It's like, oh, you haven't run me ever. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that, you know, again, you know, you're aware that's the trick, right? Just know that you might run into trouble, make like clones of clones and backups of backups. And, you know, I think you'll be all right. I think so. We have time for Scott. Yeah, sure. We have time for Scott. Let's let's let's try this. I don't know that we have an answer for Scott, but we have time for Scott. Scott says there appears to be some dispute between different apps about how much open disk space, free disk space I have available. I've attached some screenshots that show on the desktop highlighting the drives says I have 275 gigs available. I stat menu shows 500 gigs. When running Daisy disk, it shows a very large difference when looking at the main display between normal and hidden. This is I've used Daisy disk to attempt to delete purgeable space as it calls it, but it doesn't seem to change what my is reported on my desktop. I've used my carbon copy cloner backup and based on that, I'm only using about 500 gigs of a one terabyte drive. So there should be approximately 500 gigs available that the finder shows 280. So which one of these available space or free numbers? It's correct. And why do they differ? We've run into this before, Mr. Braun. What do you think about this? What was that? I think local snapshots there are some categories of files that one mechanism considers used space. And the other doesn't. And I think local snapshots was was one of the causes of the discrepancy, though. I mean, this one I'm you got me. I mean, yeah, it could be. It could be one hundred and it could be just having a lot of snapshots there. I don't know. No, and that is one place to check. You know, unfortunately, Apple doesn't make it easy to see what's in those local local snapshots. Carbon copy cloner does. So you could use carbon copy cloner to look at those local snapshots because it's just because it's it's right there. You can also do it. I think there's ways with the command line, of course, to see it. But but but snapshots snapshots like we mentioned in that section about Synology earlier. You know, they're a really, really easy thing to use to get that sort of local quick backup happening. It's not quite a backup, but it's sort of a backup. But yeah, it could be those. It could be log files, things that the system kind of holds separately. Daisy disk is usually pretty good at finding those, though, you know, when it shows you hidden files, dig into that and click on that and go deeper with Daisy disk and see what it says in there because that can that can be the, you know, it sometimes can tell you sometimes it doesn't clean my Mac also has something called Space Lens that I have found very, very handy in terms of finding what's being used on my on my system. So we'll put we'll pull links to all that. But those those are kind of the three. But I and I think based on, you know, some other emails that I've had with Scott, I don't think it's any of those are showing him where this is happening, which is sort of maddening and and I don't know where else to tell him to look. If anybody does, let us know. Please. It would be good. It would be really good. Any more thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Yeah, yeah. Did you link to this about Time Machine Local Snapshot? No, I will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, I found a, yeah, I'll put it in there. Okay. But they actually have a section here saying how local snapshots use storage space. Oh, there you go. Okay. That's great. That's great. Okay. Cool from that. Cool. All right. A couple other cool stuffs found to jump to because why not? It's what we do. Greg, follow up from 769. Greg says, you probably already have this app, but since you don't scan that much, perhaps only once a year, he was replying to my me lamenting that my scanner, my HP scanner software was, is not going to work with Catalina. He says, an awesome program is scanner pro by Riedel. And he says, you can make sure iPhone into your scanner. You can even pull down on the screen and select the new folder to drag things, different folders, or you can start a scan while you're in a folder and it will put it there automatically. He says, it's pretty great and works amazingly well. So thanks, Greg. That's good. Yeah, more options to do that with. I was asking actually on both Twitter and Facebook and really trying to kind of pull my iOS developer friends to see if there's an answer to my question and there's not. You know how on the Mac, when things are running slowly, you go and launch activity monitor to see what process is chewing up all the CPU or maybe using up lots of RAM or whatever it is. I want to do that on iOS sometimes, right? Just general troubleshooting. Phones being slow, being weird. Okay, what's using resources? Ever since iOS 10, Apple has limited third-party apps ability to show you this. There is a Unix command. It exists. Actually, there's two of them. They exist on both your Mac and on iOS. I think they both exist on Mac and iOS, but one of them does. It's called top or H top. I actually like H top. It lays things out a little bit better, but top is essentially the same view that activity monitor shows you lists. Your processes show CPU usage. You can show RAM usage and things like that. I want to run top on my iPhone. Nobody seems to be able to point me to a way to be able to do that other than jailbreaking, of course, which is just ridiculous because the only thing that Apple provides is in settings, battery and that lies. So, you know, there you go. Yeah, so in asking this though, Ty over on Facebook pointed out a piece of software that I had not seen before. It doesn't show you this because it can't because Apple won't let it be in the app store if it does. But it shows you a lot of information. It's called Lyram Info. L-I-R-U-M is Lyram and then info. And I'll put a link to it. They have a light and a light version for free and then a pro version, which I think is just like three bucks or something. And Lyram device info is there in the store and shows you all kinds of cool things about your iPhone. So I will, I'll put a link to this in the show notes. It's definitely worthy as a cool stuff found and I'm happy to have it on my on my phone. So pretty good stuff. Pretty good stuff. Any thoughts on that before we keep moving on? Uh-oh, John. Do you do you have to go? That's fine. OK, that's good. In addition to the other toys that I mentioned that I got this week, I finally got my order of Wyze bulbs. W-Y-Z-E. I had pre-ordered these. A pack of four Wi-Fi smart bulbs. $29.99 plus like five or six bucks shipping. So $9 a bulb is essentially what I paid for these Wi-Fi bulbs. They work with the Amazon A-Lady with Google Assistant and they work with Ift. So you can basically tie it into anything except home kit if you want. Wyze is the company that's out there. They, I'm just going to turn you down for a second. Wyze is the company that's out there saying that they are going to democratize the smart home by keeping things affordable. And, you know, they were the ones with those $20, you know, HD cameras, Wi-Fi cameras that you can put in your house and now they've got their bulbs and they have some motion sensors too. And man, I am blown away by these things. They're brightness and color temperature. So your white point temperature is totally controllable with these. You can group them together. You know, you can have them linked to your Amazon A-Lady routines and all of that stuff and to answer Mac Vader's question in our chat room at mackeykev.com slash stream. Yes, it is Wi-Fi like without a hub for sure. It just connects to your Wi-Fi router. It uses that same thing that we talked about in the beginning of the show with Domenico's quick tip but you connect to its Wi-Fi network and then from there you tell it about yours and how to log into yours and then it logs into yours and you're good to go. So nine bucks a bulb, great, great things. I have found having smart bulbs indoors is good and there are rooms in which it's great to be able to change the color temperature at different times a day and that sort of thing. Having them outside is life-changing. All the bulbs like in front of my front door and in my driveway and all that stuff, having those automatically come on at sundown and then, you know, turn off at midnight and then having it triggerable by my motion sensor, you know, my motion sensor has a light on it but I want the rest of the lights to turn on if there's motion and so I can with, you know, an IFT recipe or, you know, Amazon routine or whatever. It really, having smart bulbs is one of those. Smart bulbs and that Ufi robot vacuum that I have from Anchor, those are the two, that thing is like life-changing as well. You know, having the house vacuumed every morning when I wake up is fantastic. So smart bulbs outside, vacuum inside, this will change your smart home life. So, but yeah, anyway, wanted to point out those bulbs, great price, great, great price. Are you using any, like, you're using some smart bulbs that link to your hub, right, John? Yes, so I have the first ones I got which still work were the GE link bulbs. Oh, right, yep, yep, yep. But then I've, but, and I got that, it came, it was a kit that it came with a little hub and two bulbs. Got it. It's like 25 bucks, which is like, oh, it's not bad. Yeah, at the time, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Or 40 bucks, I forget, but now the future smart bulbs I've been getting is that Home Depot has Cree bulbs and they're about 12 bucks. To me, isn't bad for a bulb. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's still more expensive than a conventional one, but you know. Yeah, but not much. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And they all, yeah, and they all talk to my smart things. Okay, so those are hub dependent bulbs. Okay. Correct. Okay. Yeah, Zigbee, Zigbee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Okay, okay. Cool. So the thing I got, that I talked about last week, that's Wi-Fi only, that is not talking to the hub. Right. AC control. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I like these, these, you know, Wi-Fi stuff, not having to rely on a hub. I mean, if it's powered by, if it's powered by battery, hub sounds like a great idea because you can do Bluetooth, low energy, easy Wi-Fi is cost, is more energy, so it uses more juice. But, you know, doing Wi-Fi with, with a bulb makes perfect sense. It's great. Nine bucks a bulb, shipped, like freaking awesome. So, yeah, check out those Wyze bulbs. We'll put a link to those in the show notes. And while I'm on the smart home kick, I have had the opportunity to test Ecobee's latest, which is their new, they call it their smart thermostat. So Ecobee is my favorite thermostat. I've been using their original, like, OG Ecobee 3, before they even added home kit support, which now everything you get from Ecobee has home kit support, in addition to Google Assistant and, you know, Amazon A-Lady and all that stuff, in terms of controlling them. Now, the smart thermostat has voice control built into it. It's got Amazon's A-Lady right inside it, which is really super handy because then you don't need to have another device in the same room as the thermostat to control things with your voice. And it works really well. It's also got Spotify Connect built in. It can stream to your Bluetooth speakers so you're not listening through the, you know, the tiny speaker in the, in the thermostat itself. And my favorite part about Ecobee's thermostats is that they use these sensors and they've got new sensors that are a little bit faster and better at sensing both occupancy and temperature, obviously. What's really cool is you can put these sensors in other rooms. Most of us live in homes where the thermostat doesn't just control the temperature in the room that it's in. In fact, a lot of us live in homes where the location of the thermostat is nonoptimal for sensing the temperature of where it controls. And that's where these sensors come in. You put these sensors in the actual rooms that it controls and you can add, you know, a bunch of them and it will sense occupancy and then adjust your, you know, your heating and or cooling systems to maximize and get to the right temperature where you actually are, not where it is, which is really cool. So I've been really stoked this and this new smart thermostat having, you know, the A lady built into it and all that good stuff and being able to add it to home kit directly without having to use like, you know, home bridge like I did with the old, old Ecobee three. It's pretty cool. I'm pretty stoked with this thing. And they also have the Ecobee three light, which is controllable with, you know, the A lady and the Google assistant and also home kit. So totally, you know, happy with everything. It doesn't have the, you know, the built in A lady into it. You have to have a separate device, but you can get it for, I don't think 80 bucks less or something. I think it's 250 for the smart thermostat. And that comes with one sensor and then the Ecobee three light comes with no sensors and I think is 179 or something. So, so yeah, that's, they're doing it. They know what they're doing. That's, I like it. It's good. It's nice to have a smart thermostat. So there you go. Any more thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? No, I'm digging, digging my thermostats. Yeah, yeah. They're not a smart, but, you know. Yeah. We've got other smarts that are like smart enough to control them, right? So, yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. We're getting close to the end here. There were two things from the last show that I wanted to throw in here. Actually, the first thing I want to mention is that on Tuesday, I will be on Mac break weekly with Leo Laporte and whoever his crew is this week. So I think that's at 11 a.m. Pacific is what they tell me. So 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. So there you go. I'm looking forward to it. It should be fun. It's a marathon. You think this show is long? We're only at an hour and 20 minutes, man. We're just getting started. So, yeah. But there were two notes in the last episode that I wanted to share. Actually, two people, many people wrote about it, but I will share one or both of these. We were talking about one of our listeners wrote in about purchasing 2.16 terabyte and 2.10 terabyte drives for their photos and for their data and how they intended to raid them together to have their data be safe and all of that. And many of you, Robin Gillies and several others, in fact, pointed out that there was no mention of a third drive of each kind to do backups to and to keep at a different location. An accidental deletion or indeed corruption could be replicated across a raid pair and everything could be lost. So thank you. You're totally right that storing on a NAS and raid is not backup. It is just fault tolerance. So thank you to both of you for pointing that out. That's, yes, that's important. Good, important stuff. So thank you for noting that. And you're right. You need something to back that up to otherwise the data might as well not exist. Yes. Any thoughts on that before I move to this thing from Bob here, John? No, no. Good point. It is a good point. So in the last episode, we were also talking about Zoom, right? And that was, I guess, the episode that we released on Monday evening. Well, on Tuesday, things with Zoom tended to change a little bit when it came out that they were using a local web server that they had installed on your Mac to reinstall their software. And Bob asks now, what do you think about all this? And would you continue to use Zoom? And so here's, you know, here's the thing. I totally get, I actually understand how Zoom got to where they were with this. You know, we've seen, maybe not quite at this scale, but we've seen things like this from Apple before too, where, you know, engineers are just doing a thing and it's like, how do you solve this problem in the most elegant way so that it just works for the user, right? Zoom wanted someone to be able to click a link and it just worked. And their way of solving that was to put this web server there that was smart enough to just answer and then fire off and do whatever it needed to do. Of course, that leaves a huge security hole, as we found, because if you can click a link from an email from a trusted friend, you could accidentally click a link on the web from someone else or, even worse, have a link clicked for you because it's, you know, hidden in like an image tag or something. So this was a major security hole. Zoom's CEO's original response was not great. It was just like, you know, here's the thing. He basically said it's nothing. We'll take care of it, but don't worry about it. Jean-Louis Gasset had had a great principle that we talk about on my small business show all the time called his two tokens of customer service concept. And what that boils down to is when a customer brings a problem to you, you have, there are two tokens on the table. One says it's nothing and the other says it's awful. And you get to pick first because the customer has brought you the problem. So you get to pick first, but beware because whichever token you pick up, you are forcing the customer to pick up the other one. And by picking up the it's nothing token, Zoom's CEO forced his customers and by that nature, all of us to have to pick up the no, no, it's awful token. And that's exactly what happened this week. Now, in the end, Apple released a patch that would disable this, Zoom also released a patch, I think before Apple even, that completely disabled this. So they finally understood, no, actually it is awful, but they got a lot of flack for it. And if they had just come out and said, whoa, this is awful and like really gone and freaked out about it as they should have, then things might have ended better for them. Now, will I continue to use Zoom? I mean, I didn't use it a whole lot in the past. Like I said, I would use it if somebody sent me a meeting request. And if someone sends me a meeting request with it, yeah, I'll use it. I don't let, you know, if that if that's what I if I want to do business with someone and they're using Zoom, I use it. It's fine. It's all good. I can go and delete it afterwards. That's fine. I probably wouldn't now because I know that Apple has this this patch out there and also Zoom has this patch out there. But but it will give me pause. You know, Zoom has has to earn our trust back now. They've started down that path. They're not at the end of it. So that's kind of my feeling on it. So yeah, thoughts on that, John? Yeah, I'm with you on the customer service aspect of it. Yeah. The wrong answer is, oh, don't worry. Yeah, don't worry about it. It's okay. Yeah. Like I remember something similar happened with a certain piece of malware software. Okay. I think you may remember this where it was like, dude, this thing has like a serious memory leak. Memory leak. It was like consuming all resources and the response from the company was like, yeah, don't worry about it. No, no. Production software is not supposed to consume all resources. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. They eventually fixed it, but you know. Yeah, it's no bueno. You would think someone would kind of test that. Yeah. And one would think one would think. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I think if you if you were running something, you know, for this for Zoom, which I have, I don't think I've ever used it. But if he had something like little snitch, I think that would have given you a heads up that something wacky is going on. Oh, probably. Yeah. Yeah. That was sure. Yeah. Yeah. But you might not notice it, right? Like if it all, because it would all happen the first time you launched Zoom and it would be like Zoom wants to effectively access the internet. Like, yeah. Same. And so you probably say, yeah. You know, so there you go. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm trying to think if there's any, we're way past the end here. So I think we will leave things there. You know, we won't. Actually, there's something very important that I want to take care of here, John. And that's that I want to take care of our premium listeners and our premium supporters. And I want to say thank you to all of you who have contributed in the last week plus here. So on our monthly $10 plan, I want to say thank you to Elizabeth from Virginia, Steven from California, Ward from Arizona, Joan from Florida, Ev The Nerd from California, Olga from Washington, Jason from Charlestown, Steven from Illinois, Kenneth from New South Wales, Nick from Michigan, Paul from Indiana, Mark from Connecticut, Ryan from Texas, Neil from Connecticut, Scott from Portland, Peter from Maine, Bob whose question we just answered from working smarter for Mac users, James from San Antonio, Jay from New Jersey, Joe from Kansas, from Hartfordshire, Abdullah from Maryland and Ari from California on the $10 month plan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you on our biannual plan, which by default is $25 every six months. I want to say thanks to David P to John from Alabama to Robert from Florida, Mary from California at $100 every six months, Corey from Washington, Mike from Illinois, Richard from Gwynedd for $30 every six months, Jason from Missouri, Norton from Maryland, Edward from Texas, JP from California at $50 every six months, Michael from Michigan, Joel F, Greg S, Avram from California, Tony G, John O, Michael P, Paul from Kent, Gary from Chicago, Richard from Pennsylvania, Dennis from Chapel Hill also at $30, Bruce from Virginia, Greg from Los Angeles, Ron G, Anthony N, Deb from California and Doug from North York and two one-time contributions, $50 from Deborah from Houston and 20 from Paul Pizza. So thank you to all of you. And if you want to learn more about that, of course, go to mackeykeb.com slash premium. That will get you all of that good stuff. Anything else, John, while we're here, one last thing. I might share a quick tip. In fact, if we don't have anything else, there is one last quick tip I want to share. But, you know, we'll go there. But if you have something else, then that's fine. No. No. Okay. Mark has a quick tip for us. And Mark says, you talked about print dialogue some while ago, and I kept meaning to send you this note, but I never got around to it in last week, 769. You talked about printers again. So now I cannot avoid sending it. Like a lot of folks, I have printed many printers to find on my MacBook for both work and home. And it is not uncommon that I send a print job to the wrong printer. I would then typically recreate the content and send it to the right printer. But then came the day when I could not recreate the content and could not wait to go back to work the next day to print. I then realized it was as simple as opening both printer dialogues and dragging the document from one to the other. I have no idea if this is news to you, he says, but it sure was to me. I think we've talked about this on the show before, but it is a great quick tip. In fact, I think you mentioned it on the show in the past, John, that you do it by going to system preferences, printers, and scanners. And in there, you see all your printers. If you double-click them, it will open the print queue, or you can click the button to open the print queue. And do that for both printers. Drag the document from one to the other and boom. There you go. Good stuff. I like it. And I think with that, Mr. Braun, we've made it through. I was going to say unscathed, but not quite. We had those audio issues again, just weird on a new computer. So it's got to be something else. There's some talking in the chat room about maybe this Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter being the issue. So it could be. That is somewhat new. It's not new with this new computer, but it's new as of the last couple of weeks, maybe. Maybe a month and a half ago at most. So it could be. That could be the source of some of these problems. So we'll see. We'll see how we do with USB audio. We can always, always switch back. So we made it, John. Just not unscathed. Anything to add? I hear you wheezing. Everything all right over there? Oh, yeah. Okay. Mark pointed out that I think it was Mark. I might have it wrong. Matt, sorry, pointed out. He's like, I went to vote for you in the podcast awards at podcastawards.com, but I couldn't find you. And it's true. He says there was no place to link to voting. And it's true. It's nominations that are open. And it's sort of the same as voting. So when you get there, click the link to nominate and that should do it. So sorry about that. It says click here to nominate. I want to click. So thank you for those of you that have done that. And if you haven't, now's your chance. You can go do it still here in July. I think we've got, I don't know. I don't know if it runs all of July, but we certainly have a few more days. If you haven't done it yet, please, please, please. We would love it. Love it. We told you how to reach us. You premium listeners, of course, can use premium at MattGeekUp.com. I don't know. That's good enough. We've given a lot of instructions and requests. We can leave it at that for a little while. I want to thank all of our sponsors. Actually, I want to thank all of you, because without all of you, it doesn't matter if we have sponsors. In fact, sponsors probably wouldn't be interested. So we try to be very respectful of that. So thank you for listening, for doing all that you do. Make sure to sign up at MattGeekUp.com for our weekly emails that come out when the show comes out with all the links and everything. But where you can make sure to get everything. Anything else, John, before we head out for today? Nope. All right. Well, then it's time. I want to thank all our sponsors, as we mentioned in the show, Experian.com slash MGG, Mac.cashfly.com, Smile Software at Smile, or Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash podcast, Otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com, Iro.com slash MGG, Bearbones.com, Litto.com slash MGG. John, I hope you have a good week. Actually, we're recording next week's episode a little early because there's some travel. So we'll be recording on Friday, but of course just releasing Monday. So if you want to join us in the chat room, of course you can do that. You can join our calendar at MattGeekUp.com slash calendar so you know when all that's happening. But in the meantime, between now and when, we all get to chat next. I just want to wish you, to wish all of us. Well, maybe the best way to do that is harmonious wishing.