 The Mac Observers, Mackie Keb, Episode 762 for Monday, May 20th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mackie Keb, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and we mix them all together to create a place every week where we get to come together and learn the goal being, well, we already know it, if you don't know it, you'll learn it now, and this could be one of them. The goal being that we each learn five new things every single time we get together. We like to say you don't have to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you will be. Sponsors for this episode include Malwarebytes for Mac at Malwarebytes.com slash MGG, that's a new URL for you, and BB at it from Barebones Software at Barebones.com. We'll talk more about the details of those in a moment here for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Just okay? Yeah, just okay. All right. Well, you know, speaking of okay, we talked last week about, in episode 761, about X-Protect, or Apple's own sort of, you know, Malware antivirus, whatever you want to call it, their system-level protection stuff. And we had two things about that. Number one, listener Bill wrote in and just wanted to make sure everybody understood that to turn this on, you go to System Preferences, Software Update, Advanced. And in there, there is a checkbox at the bottom, at least I'm no hobby, the final one, the fifth and final one says, Install System Data Files and Security Updates, you want that checked. Thank goodness Bill wrote in because I thought, okay, well, let me go and make sure so that we're going to talk about it in the show. I have the right details and I can speak about it and get a screenshot. But my box was not checked for that, John. And that was true on all of the Macs that I have here in my house. So I don't know how I got here. My guess is it's because I have, I don't have it installing Software Updates automatically, but I don't know. So, you know, I have it checking for them and downloading them. I just like to install them at a timely time. Unlike, you know, for example, this morning when I had to reboot my Mac before we recorded the show and we got to wait 20 minutes while it did a firmware update. But that's a whole other story. So, yeah, make sure that's turned on, folks. That's one that certainly caught me. And as you know, our motto is don't get caught. So you need to make sure of that. So I'm assuming yours are on, yes, John? Yeah, it's checked on both of my machines. That's fascinating. I don't know why it's unchecked on yours. Yeah. I just checked the machine in the studio is an older machine and is still running high Sierra. It's never bad to have for audio production a machine that is, you know, a little bit stable. But it's checked here, but it was not checked on my Mojave machines. So, so there you go. Just, you know, be aware. And in it's the checkbox is labeled the same in high Sierra. You just only need you don't need there's no advanced button. It's, but it is in system preferences app store, not software updates. So, but it is labeled install system data files and security updates. So just want to make sure you folks knew about that handy stuff. You know what I didn't know about. And this is what I love about quick tips, John, and why we like to do quick tips. I was at my local Mac user group meeting this week. And one of the folks there pointed out to me that on the Mac, if you hold down function and left arrow, that will scroll you to the top of just about any window view, including Safari, unless there's some JavaScript that's that's, you know, running on the page to, to otherwise grab that. But function left arrow is essentially the same thing. If you, if you have an extended keyboard, I guess you could still do this, but the home key would is would do this function left arrow maps to the home key function right arrow scrolls to the end it maps to the end key as you might imagine. So, so there you go. Yeah. Good stuff. Thanks, Peter. Excellent. I love, I love when when we can learn five new things. So we're well on our way. Pretty good. Did you know about that one, John, the function left arrow thing? No, no, see, there it is. We're checking boxes, man. It's good. But I assumed that yeah, but I like you figured that the right arrow must do the opposite. And it does. It turns out it does. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Super handy. All right. Similarly, Robin has a keyboard quick tip. Did you know that in most Mac apps, the tab key iterates over the most common buttons and text fields, hitting the spacebar activates the button. Of course, shift tab goes in reverse order. When you're in mail, press tab multiple times until you end up in the pain of the email. Hitting space there makes you walk over the emails. Shift space makes you walk down. When you've selected the mail you like to read, press enter and command W closes the mail. Like escape will likely do. These are probably not new, says Robin, but a refresher that you can do without a lot of moving the mouse or trackpad. Yeah. Mail is a great one for this, because it's super handy to not have to bounce your hand back and forth between keyboard and, you know, pointing device of choice. So, yeah, that's great, Robin. Thank you. Pretty good, huh, John? Did you know about those? My fingers know about tab. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's been accepted. Well, in other OSs and other environments, tab usually does. Well, that was just mentioned. So, yeah, I think we had to burn into our brains just because we've been using. Yeah. Computers for a long time. Yep. Yeah. It's funny. Somebody was asking, I forget what they were asking. It was something at the Mac User Group meeting. We sort of devolved into a conversation about different keyboard shortcuts. It was like, they asked, you know, how do you do this? It's like, oh, wait a minute, I need to pull it up. I don't like, I don't know it, but my fingers know it. So, I need to let my fingers do it without thinking. And then everything worked fine. So, yep. Pretty good. For a quick tip on iOS, Donna reminds us that in Apple Mail on the iPhone, you can tap on the little three lines at the bottom of your message window and choose to filter by, I think by default, it filters by unread. So, it only shows you unread messages, but you can also have it filter by flagged. And I think maybe it's just unread and flagged actually now that I'm thinking about it. But yeah, if you tap on unread, you can filter by unread, flagged, addressed to me, cc'd to me, only with attachments and only from VIPs. So, you would first tap on the thing, it's in the lower left-hand corner. I don't even know what you'd call that, but it's three lines and a circle on iOS 12. And once you do that, it filters and you can see what it's filtering by in the middle of that bottom bar. And then if you tap what it's filtering by there, you get to pick what your criteria is. That's a handy one. I always find, I always forget that one. So, yeah, it's good. I like these little quick tips. And we have one from the chat room too. Alan567 says one of his favorites is in the Finder, command up arrow opens the enclosing folder or goes up one level. And yeah, I use that all the time too. It's one of those that my fingers know. And I would never think to instruct people about because I just do it all the time. And this is what we love quick tips for, the things that somebody does automatically. And until you see them do it or until they think to share it, it just, the knowledge never gets shared. So, that's why we like to do it. So, thanks for that, Alan. Great stuff. And with the chat room is at macgeekab.com slash stream. And that's where you can join typically every either Sunday or Monday next week, it will be Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. And you can join us while we're recording the episode, interact and listen to the stream as well as the chat room. So, macgeekab.com slash stream. So, thanks for that, Alan. Yeah, good, John. I think we're good. Okay. I need anything to add. Yeah, go. Yeah, it's just something I've been doing lately, but just something I'll recommend that you all try sometime. I've been cleaning my system of or upgrading my 32-bit apps. Okay. And so what I did is I actually found that there were some newer versions of software for some of my devices. So, how do you find out which of your apps are 32-bit? Well, I think probably easiest way is you go into system information and then there's applications, software applications. And you click on that and it'll take a while and rip through all your apps. And then there's a column on the right that says type. I think it's type. I'm waiting for it to run right now. And it'll sort by bittiness. And you'll probably see, oh, yeah, 64-bit Intel. And if you click on that, it'll then reverse the sort and then show you which apps are not 32-bit. And I went through and actually found, for example, my ScanSnap had some new software available and a couple of other things. Some apps do not auto-update themselves even in this day and age. And so, yeah, looking and finding and all of that stuff. I believe, is it clean my Mac that will identify updates of your apps for you? I'm pretty sure it is. And, of course, clean my Mac, you can get it from macpaw.com, but you can also get it if you have setapp, which you can get from setapp.com. But yeah, clean my Mac is a good one for that because it just because it tells you what the deal is. Handy, handy, handy. Anything else to add, my friend? Oh, yeah, look at that. Okay. Applications, Updater. I don't know. It's good. Handy. Oh, actually, it says View All 27 Updates. I got 27 Updates, huh? Now might not be the right time as I proved before the show. As I mentioned, we were talking about Bill and X-Protect. Even though I'm running High Sierra here, I just, I had to reboot the machine before we recorded. My dock had disappeared. Well, my machine decided to do the most recent security update, which I thought, okay, that's fine. Those are, you know, very trivial. Evidently, this security update, even for High Sierra machines, like the one that's baked into the Mojave Updates, causes a firmware update, at least it did on this computer. And it sounds like it has for all of yours too, John. So, that is a normal thing as it turns out. And you're good. So, don't worry about it if you see it happen, but also plan some time for it when you do it. For me here, it took, what, 20 minutes or so. It said it was going to take about 45, which was a drag, but thankfully, in the end, it was a total of, grand total, about 20. So, yeah, good. And for goodness sake, don't turn the machine off while it's in progress. Yeah, I don't even like, I don't even like, you'll probably brick it. Would it brick it? I mean, I don't want to test that theory, but yeah, I would advise against it as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. One other thing, while we're kind of going through here, I have noticed, and we had, it was actually an Apple Support article, we discussed a couple of shows back about getting into the T2 chip reset mode on the, like on the new MacBook Airs and things like that, that where the instructions were unclear, it was you had to hit the power key and then hit these other keys, or maybe it was the reverse order, I have it in my notes. But the instructions didn't say that, they said hit the power key and then hit these other keys. But it didn't say the word then, it said hit the power key and hit these other keys. So it sounded like you had to hit them all together when in fact, no, you had to do it in this certain order. And I just wanted to highlight for those of us that, because I know there's a lot of consultants and stuff that listen, especially when writing instructions, emailing instructions to people, it was just happening here with our MaciGab calendar. I was helping somebody in the chat room get signed up with our MaciGab calendar, which is at macigab.com slash calendar, and you can see when we're going to record and all that stuff. But the word then really matters, because it was, you know, like, do this and then do that, just not like, and I had written do this and do that, like, right, but the then was implied, don't imply it, state it, it's helpful. So state the then. That's, that's my, that's my advice for you. State the then. Shall we, let's go to Dmitri, shall we, John? Okay. We'll have some fun stuff with, with a little bit of security this week. Dmitri writes, not quite a Mac question, but knowing that you both are Wi-Fi gurus, I thought you might have some ideas. A friend of mine has a single Wi-Fi router. He keeps wondering how his son accesses the admin config of the router. His 14 year old son has a personal Windows machine with admin access and an Android phone. My friend keeps changing the admin password on the router and manually blocks his son's phone's MAC address for parental reasons. Very quickly, he realizes that his son now has accessed the router and labeled his mom's device son's phone and his phone wife's phone and blocks the mom's phone. Wife isn't happy that her phone has no Wi-Fi, he says. And my friend pulls his hair out when troubleshooting the mess. So my question is, could it be that his son's PC Eve dropped the Wi-Fi for router authentication sessions of the father's devices? What other ways are there to learn the admin password and is there a way to secure the admin sessions to the router? So we will leave the obvious and difficult parenting advice out of this and just address this from a technical standpoint. People rarely want parenting advice from other parents and they never want it from non-parents. So we won't do that. But it's possible, most of the time, those router interfaces are not HTTPS. You just connect HTTP, which means that it is sent over the Wi-Fi in the clear. It is entirely possible that the son is running something. On the Mac, I would run Debuki on Windows. Actually, I don't know what I would run, but there are tools available. And Debuki is actually a great tool, but it's just a tool. It can be used for good or evil. But that's one way. The other way is perhaps he has installed a keylogger on his, the son has installed a keylogger on his father's computer. And so he can see what he types there. And if he can see what he types, well, then he can see what the new password is. And then he can just log into the router and patch things up to his liking. If the son was smart, he wouldn't block his mom's iPhone or phone, because then she knows that something has changed. If he doesn't want his phone blocked, he should just like change it to something else or remove the block entirely. But anyway, probably not here to instruct the son either. But yeah, I would, I don't, oftentimes there is no way to securely connect to the router's interface. But if the father's concerned about a keylogger, he can run something like malware bytes if it's a Mac. And again, malwarebytes.com slash mgg since they happen to be a sponsor this episode, but I would have recommended them anyway in this scenario. If it's not, you know, maybe use his phone where it's more difficult to install a keylogger, especially if it's an iPhone. I don't think that's even a remote possibility unless he's using a custom keyboard. But if he's using the iOS default keyboard, there is no keylogger there. So maybe that's that's a way to to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an interesting and fun little game of cat and mouse. Yeah, you asked before. So general purpose keylogger that I'm sorry. A packet sniffer is wire shark. And I believe that is available on multiple platforms. Yeah. So that's another tool. And yeah, I was thinking that as well is that if the connection to it is not secure. Yeah, which it probably isn't. Yeah. Yeah. So and as Kiwi Graham in the chat room points out, if the if anyone in this case, his son, but really if anyone has physical access to your router, that might basically trump any security that you've got because you could just, you know, firmware reset the router, it's back to factory defaults. And, you know, that's that, right? Then then it's back to its default passwords and all that good stuff or bad stuff or whatever you want. But yeah, physical access sort of by design is is right there for you. So I don't know. Good. Yeah. Anything else before we move on here, John? Well, I was going to suggest some discipline is in order here because that no one wants to hear parenting and no parent wants to hear parenting advice from non parents. I will I will I will share that advice with you. Yeah. Parents don't want it from other parents usually, unless they ask. Yeah. There is no wrong way. There is no one right way to raise your kids. There are a couple of wrong ways. I think we might all agree on, but but but there is no one right way to raise your kids. I mean, this, you know, maybe this kid will turn out to be a security expert later in life because he sort of learned, you know, how to get around it. And now can maybe later in life institute some blocks to keep people from doing these types of things and more and go on to, you know, look at Kevin Mitnick, right? And if you don't know who Kevin is, I'll just say that John and I ran into him before everybody else knew who he was. And maybe we just leave it at that. A life of crime or a life of crime. That's right. Yeah, could be. Could be. You never know. You never know. Listener Ken asks one question on my Wi-Fi is having a guest network safe? So the answer is generally yes. The guest network in and of itself can be safe. A lot of routers will offer to set up a guest network that has no password. I wouldn't do that. I would put a password on it for two reasons. Number one, because it keeps just anyone from joining your guest network and using your bandwidth and all of that. But secondly, a password on your Wi-Fi is the thing that encrypts the connection. The connection is not encrypted otherwise. So even if you trust everyone that has that can be within range of your Wi-Fi, which is, you know, sort of a question, you don't necessarily want everything you're sending to be in the clear and having a password encrypts your connections so that it can't be sniffed as one of the examples in the last question. So yes, a guest network is safe. One thing that's cool about most guest networks and the way routers set them up is yes, it's a separate SSID, so it's different password and all that. But it's also on what's generally called a separate VLAN, virtual local network. And the cool part about that is the packets for one are not shared with the other. Even though it's all through the same router and all of that stuff, they are, you know, virtually separated so that you aren't, you know, oftentimes you get a different IP range for your guest network. But the traffic just isn't shared. The bandwidth is shared because it's all, you know, it's pulling from like your cable modem or whatever that is. But your, but the actual traffic that's happening locally on your network is not shared. And so a VLAN can be a nice thing to sort of put a virtual wall down between what's on the guest network and what's on the, you know, your main network. So yeah. And the reason you'd want to do this is you don't want guests to see all your other devices like your file servers and writes. So it's invisible to them. They can't see it. They can get to the internet and that that's just to get people to dispute as to why would you want to guest network is so you can isolate guests from everyone else. Yeah. No, that's that's a great explanation. Right. Yeah. Your your printers, your file servers, your Apple TV, your whatever, none of that stuff. If you, assuming you join it to your main network, then none of that stuff is accessible to your guest network. If it's configured that way. And, you know, every different router manufacturer can, can and does implement it a little bit differently. But there's also times where you can say, you know, there's maybe a checkbox that says allow guests to access, you know, local resources or whatever. And, you know, you can choose whether you, how much of that you want to do and etc, etc. So yeah. And Sonos as Clayton points out, right? Yeah. If you want your guests accessing your Sonos or your Apple TVs or whatever, well, then you've got to sort of think about that a little differently. So yes, yes. All right. Are we good to move on? Yes. Cool. Listener Jeff asks, he says, you guys talk about clean my Mac. I don't use any Mac cleaning software as I felt some of them are bloatware. That's not false. It says I'll be transparent. The fact that I browse some adult sites rarely, YouTube, and often checked for sales on B&H and other discount sites that I'm sure place cookies and things on my Mac. Do you feel I should be running clean my Mac and or similar apps that perform cleaning? My 2017 iMac is currently running very well. Honestly, for what you're talking about, I would be more concerned about running malware bytes regularly than, but clean my Mac will help too. Obviously, this is the second time in this episode that we've mentioned it. But that's more for like cleaning up cruft, finding your, you know, finding how much space is being used on your Mac, finding your updates, that sort of thing. It will also do these malware things. But for, you know, sort of a single purpose thing, malware bytes is a good one. You know, especially with visiting like adult sites and things, most of them, I think these days are actually fine. They run fairly profitable businesses and aren't interested in, you know, being user hostile. But some of them, especially if they're running things from like third party ad networks or whatever, bad malicious ads might get in and do some things. So you definitely want to kind of clean that stuff up. And more so even if you're downloading files, even just attachments from people or whatever, that's where you want to be careful. So you have anything to add to that, my friend? I think I'm with you. Okay, good. You know, we've talked about it several times. So I want to take a minute now and actually officially do our sponsor break. And I'll start with our first sponsor, which is malwarebytesformac at malwarebytes.com. If you've listened this far in the episode, you already know because it's come up a couple of times. But, you know, malwarebytesformac is, it's an app that we've been running for years, regardless, long before they became sponsors, because they've got their proven technology that crushes anything that it finds, right? And it's, malwarebytesformac is so fast, it scans the average Mac in under 30 seconds. And then we'll offer to remove anything it finds, which is adware, unwanted programs, viruses, ransomware. Plus, they've got real-time detection technology so that you don't even have to run a scan. It will just find things as they pop up automatically. So you're protected without even having to think about it. And your Mac keeps running silpy smooth. Easy for me to say. Most of you will say silky smooth, really, really smart cybersecurity for the Mac that basically stays out of your way and just does what you need it to do. You've got to check it out. Again, like I said at the beginning of the episode, we have a new URL, malwarebytes.com slash mgg. They want to know that we sent you. And that's where you can get your free download. And that comes with a 14-day trial of their premium offering, which has that background scanner and all that great stuff. So you've got to check it out, malwarebytes.com slash mgg. And our thanks to malwarebytes for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is BBedit, another app that we've been using for years and years. In fact, it is currently running on my Mac because it's always running on my Mac. I use it to manage the show notes and the agenda. I use it to count the number of words or letters in a document. I really often use it to compare two different documents back and forth against each other, like two versions of something if I've got some files or whatever. And all of those uses have nothing to do with programming, which is what I also use it for because BBedit, that's what it's built to do. It's a text editor built for programmers. But there's so many more things you can do with it, it's worth just going and having a copy of it so that you can do all these things. But if you're a programmer, man, I couldn't do any of the PHP stuff that we do online, all our WordPress stuff and our templates and all that. Because BBedit's smart when you pull in, say, a PHP file. It knows that it's a PHP file. And on your screen only, it doesn't change the file, but it colors and lays out the code so that it's really easy and natural to flow through. You can fold up functions and things like that. Very, very cool stuff. You've got to check it out. And now BBedit is back in the Mac App Store with subscriptions available. And that's a new App Store only model. Well, perpetual licenses will remain directly available for download from Barebones.com. And if you're BBedit fans like us, you can show your BBedit pride at merch.barebones.com. You can get shirts like John and I have. Very, very cool stuff. You got to check this out and you can go download it for free at barebones.com. You get a 30-day trial of all the features that after 30 days, it pairs down to some basic functionality that, quite frankly, is probably all most of you will need. So just go get it. Go get it. It won't cost you anything. Barebones.com are thanks to Barebones software for sponsoring this episode. A couple of follow-ups, my good friend, Mr. Braun, from last week's episode. Well, we'll start with one from last week's episode. And then we'll dig maybe a little teacher? Deeper. Interesting. He says, you were talking about a few good password managers in the last episode. I want you to know about another one that I found called Code Book. He says, I found it many years ago on a Mac security website who at the time said it was one of the most secure and difficult to crack. I synchronized my iPads, my MacBook, manually with my iMac. He says, I could sync with Dropbox or Google Drive, but not iCloud at the moment. New functionalities of Mojave and latest iOS are totally okay. If you know, he says, if you know something about it, I would like to know. I had not heard of Code Book password manager before this, but that doesn't mean any much. It's just how it goes. So if anybody does know, we'd love to hear about it. Feedback at mackeygab.com is where all of this stuff gets sent in, because that's how we... Did you say feedback at mackeygab.com? Yeah, and they're coming to get you, man. So you better write feedback at mackeygab.com right away. That's... No, that's the fire engine. Oh, they're not coming to your house, right? Everything's okay. Okay, good. That's good. That's just passing by. Yeah, I know the different sirens. That's... Well, living where you live, yeah. If it was the coppers who wouldn't hear me anymore, I'd be right. You'd be running because you don't want to get caught. Yeah, absolutely. Here's another one, Dave. Yes. Speaking of password managers. Yes. I had never heard of this one until I was running another program that they make, but here's one that's really clever. And I know you're probably going to figure out who it's from, Dave. Okay. Remember.com. Oh, from the Tunnel Bear people? That's it? Oh, no kidding. Yeah, I think I was running their VPN and it came up and it's like, hey, did you know we'd make a password manager? And it's like, no. Okay. Let's see. iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Encrypted. Fascinating. Huh. So yeah, check it. Yeah, that's pretty good. I like that. That's great. That's great. Cool. Very, very cool. All right. You know what? Let's move on. I'm having fun answering these questions. This is good. Now, is that the police, John? No, that's the ambulance. Oh, okay. All right. As long as they're not coming for you. That's good. Man. That's the police. Well, that's okay. So do we need to put this on pause while you go? I think we know. I think they're done. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good. While you run and do the show from mobile. All right. So let's get into some troubleshooting here. Greg says, I've been having a weird thing going on with my Mac for the last three weeks or so and wanted to bounce it off all of you. What's happening is when I select a file or multiple files, the act of selecting them occasionally sticks as though the mouse slipped. So I end up accidentally selecting more files than I wanted moving a file sometimes or even opening them if it thinks it's a click. So to combat this, I have to pause briefly after I've selected the file and then move it. I'm running the latest version of High Sierra on this machine. And the only updating I've done is with apps and the occasional security update. I'm using a Kensington wired mouse for a while and it does not seem to have an accompanying system prep paint. So it's just using the default stuff. And I use Pathfinder instead of the Finder. It's still version 7. He says, since version 8 has been horrible, I haven't updated. What I haven't tried yet, but I will, is only using the Finder instead of Pathfinder. He says, I'll try and replicate it in a test user account and I'll try using a different mouse. Yeah, I like your, I mean, those steps are great, right? That's the troubleshooting model is, you know, try these things, pull out the factors that you think it might be. And when sort of deciding what to do and what order to do it, definitely trust your gut, right? You know what you've changed on your machine. And so, you know, if you've changed one of those things recently, well, then that's the first one to start with is, you know, rewind that back, but then also just trust what you're doing. Another thing I would throw into the mix, launch activity monitor and make sure you're viewing all processes because sometimes you aren't. And so, you will go to the view menu and just choose all processes instead of my processes. And then sort, click on the CPU tab at the top of activity monitor and then sort by CPU. I always sort by the most CPU at the top. And then take a, and have that up and running the next time you're selecting something so that you can look and see that window, see if something is pegging or using your CPU right at that moment because it's possible maybe you've got, I mean, it's possible maybe you've got some malware that's running on your Mac or maybe it's not malware, but it's some other thing that's running. And as you select these files, it's going and saying, oh, I need to go do that. Maybe like your quick look database is or your spotlight database is, you know, munged. And so it can't do the look up quickly. And it's got to do it, you know, and you'll see if it's spotlight, it would be like MD worker MDS stores or something like that, that, you know, would indicate, okay, maybe I need to rebuild my spotlight database. And that's what's causing these lags on the system. So that's where I generally speaking, that's where I start with these things. What about you, John? Hmm. Any more thoughts on this one? I'm trying to visualize what's happening here. I know. Yeah, it's one of those things that would be easier to easier if you could experience it, right? Because it's probably a timing thing too. So, yeah. I wonder if you've seen, I mean, we're talking keyboard. I wonder if using a keyboard modifier with as an alternative. What do you mean? If you hold down, so if you're trying to select a whole bunch of things rather than using the mouse for it, you can also use some keyboard modifiers. Sure. I think Shift typically will let you, you can click on to Shift will select a range and I think option is more a one off. Isn't it Command that's a one off? Am I getting that right? Sorry. Yeah, you're right. Right. Command, yeah, Command lets you add or remove. So you could do a range with Shift, you know, hitting the first and then last, hit the first, then hit Shift, then click the last and it'll select the first and last and everything in between. Now that it's selected, release your hands from the keyboard and hold down and then hold down option. Sorry, then hold down Command and you can either add some that are outside the range or clicking some inside the range will turn those off and so that's how those work. Yeah, I see what you're saying though. Yeah, interesting. Now the other thought is that maybe maybe he's already doing that and in that case, you could have hiccups if you have a wire that he didn't, did he say what type of keyboard he's running? He didn't. No, no. So yeah, that's another thing to look at. That's right. Are you using a default keyboard? Are you using a third party keyboard that for whatever reason requires a driver? Most of them don't require it, though some might come with it. You know, so yeah. Yeah, especially if it's a wireless keyboard, it could be interference issues that started as a blade because something changed somewhere. Right, right, right, right. I had a weird or replace the batteries. That's another thing when the battery start dying. If it's wireless devices. Yeah, we talked about that a few episodes ago. Apple doesn't do. Apple doesn't do a very good job of telling you the battery is dead until it's dead. So it's dead, dead. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep. I had a weird thing with only one of my Macs. And I think I talked about this last episode a little bit where my iMac in the office and only my iMac in the office was having a weird lag. And I narrowed it down to being keychain related. It was not a system wide thing. And I furthered and what the main symptom was, password prompt would come up, you know, and I use both iCloud keychain alongside one password. And I started doing that years ago because I started with one password before iCloud keychain existed. And then up until iOS 12, you know, third party password managers didn't really get great integration with iOS. So I, you know, I just ran them both and that's fine. And that's not my problem. But I would click in a password field. And there would be this like two second lag of the spinning beach ball before it presented my iCloud passwords. And if I turned off autofill passwords, it went away. So it was definitely iCloud passwords. Okay. And it, you know, it was only happening on this one Mac, which happens to be my fastest Mac, my, you know, my MacBook Air, which has the same iCloud keychain synced to it did not have this problem. I'm like, okay, maybe it has nothing to do with iCloud keychain. So the first thing I did was I went into home library keychains and I backed up the whole thing. I zipped it up and saved it somewhere because I knew I was about to mess with it. And then I turned off iCloud keychain on my Mac. And the problem persisted. So it was like, aha, it is something local on this Mac. When you turn off iCloud keychain, keychain access changes a little bit. Instead of seeing an iCloud a keychain named iCloud, you see one named local items. Well, I went in to local items and there were all kinds of things in there. Now, all of those things theoretically had been synced to my iCloud keychain. So what's going on? Like, why would, you know, why would these have a problem here? So I wiped out all the web form passwords and internet passwords from my local items keychain. Again, after making yet another backup, because now it's it's a different keychain than it was with with iCloud. And the problem went away. It's like, okay, so it was something in here. Of course, at this point, now I have no passwords for it to auto enter, but at least it's not lagging. So, okay, cool. I turned on iCloud keychain. It repopulated. It took a little, you know, a few minutes or whatever for it to rebuild all of that and convert and do whatever it's going to do. And the problem's gone. So there was something lingering on my Mac, but it didn't manifest until very, very recently. So I don't know that it was lingering cruft, but it was cruft. So there you go. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah. Troubleshooting keychains. It made me long for the days when keychain access included a little sort of sub app called Keychain First Aid, only because I wanted to run it and rule out that keychain first aid was going to fix my problem. But without being able to run keychain first aid, I couldn't do that. So in the back of my head, even now, I think, you know, probably keychain first aid would have fixed it for me. So, you know, there you go. Yes. Yes. So what do you think? Any thoughts on any of that before we move on? Yeah, I haven't had a need to fix my keychain. I think that's Apple's idea is that you don't need to fix it. So we don't need to give you the tool to do it. And, you know, if you look in Home Library keychains, you will see if you're not running iCloud keychain, everything in there is sort of what I would call normal and consistent, right? Everything is a .keychain file with related DB files, database files that sort of go along with them. But if you're running iCloud keychain, you will see a folder with, you know, some UDID type name that's just numbers and letters that don't really say anything, almost like a serial number. And if you look inside that, then you'll see these databases with a .db file and then a .db with shm and .db with dash wal. I learned from Jeff Lynch, the maker of Fruit Juice, which we mentioned here on the show all the time, that shm is shared memory for the database. And wal is the right ahead log. I've never known what those wal files were with databases, with SQLite databases, I guess. So anyway, there you go. But that's your iCloud keychain. So a little bit different than the other keychains. And maybe that's why Apple removed keychain access because it couldn't or keychain first aid, because maybe there is no good way to do keychain first aid on that. I don't know. I don't know. But it wasn't my iCloud keychain that was the problem anyway, because it was just local. It wasn't syncing. So anyway, any more thoughts on that before we move on to Timmy? Moving on. Moving on to Timmy. I know I have it in here. Timmy has a little bit of a geek challenge for us. He says, I just started a software services business, and I'm looking for an easy to use contacts app that will sync between Mac and iOS and does a great job making business contacts easier to enter and manage. So he doesn't want to use the contacts app that's built in. He wants to use something else. I'm a long fan of busy Cal from busy Mac software, and they have a piece of software for the Mac called busy contacts. It does sync with your contacts database. So it's sort of everywhere. But it's far more robust than your than the built-in app like in a in a huge way. So that might actually give you what you want. But it's only going to give you that interface on your Mac. There is no iOS interface for busy contacts. So you would just get the results of whatever you do in busy contacts would be stored in your iOS contacts database. I don't know of any iOS or cross platform business contact management apps other than, you know, maybe like whatever is baked into like Salesforce or, you know, something like that. So that's why I called this a geek challenge. If anybody has any advice, you know, send it to us. We told you were to send the email, you can call us at 224-888-geek, which John is 4335 that it is. Do you have any thoughts about about options for him here? Yeah, I mean, my first thought was just create a new group and contacts. My guess is he wants to have more fields and more ways to relate contacts together than just group. You know, like contacts is pretty bare bones. And intentionally so, right? It's not built to be that he didn't state his needs. But I'm pretty sure he wants to track like, you know, various things relate people to companies and things like that. So. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, there is a way. I mean, I'm just looking. So in the contacts app, in addition to being able to create a contact or a group, you actually can. There are a whole bunch of optional fields here. I don't think it'll let you create your own field. Okay. Okay. I'm also wondering, does office offer anything? No, you don't have to buy the whole thing. Daylight from Market Circle is another one that. Who was it? Jettie Jack, Jedi Jack. Sorry. In the in the chat room recommended. And that's a great idea. Yeah, you might really want a true CRM, right? Customer Relationship Manager is what I think CRM stands for. That's what I've always called it. Where you're not only having your contacts in there, but again, relating them to companies, relating them to notes, right? So that you can have like a three way thing going where the notes are related to both the contact and the company. So you've got sort of some institutional knowledge and daylight might well be what you want for this. And and there is, you know, iOS integration, as I understand it too, with daylight. So yeah, there is its Mac and iOS totally. And they are the folks at Market Circle are, you know, Apple people through and through. They've been building this for the Mac for a very long time. That's a great idea, Jedi Jack. That's why we do what we do. That's why we have these challenges. So if you have any others, let us know. If you want to, FileMaker would be another one, right? That's that's what I've used over the years, because when we started the businesses 20 years ago, there wasn't a lot of other options. And FileMaker is really nice because you can, you know, you can create whatever you want. They have some templates for exactly this, like for CRM, FileMaker is definitely, you know, there's an easy start path. But then you can massage and manipulate it to your heart's content because FileMaker really is built. If you want, you can create stuff, you know, from the ground up. It's it's just, I say it's just a database. It's a database that's easy to use for non programmers, but you can also do cool scripting and coding inside it to really powerful stuff. Obviously, I'm a big fan. So, so yeah, so they do have Microsoft does have something up. I'll link to it. They call it Outlook Customer Manager. Okay. And I guess, yeah, so it is Mac Mac and iOS and all that good stuff. It's not clear to me. It says buy now with Office 365. Huh. Okay. Yeah, we'll have to see. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not seeing anything about the Mac on here, but that doesn't mean that it's not, but it, well, no, they're, yeah, they're showing they are showing it on iPhone. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. There you go. Cool. We'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. But you can find it macgeekyub.com and you can also get the show notes delivered to your email box at if you go to macgeekyub.com and just sign up for the new mailing list that we have as many of you already know. It sends out the show notes every time an episode is released and that way you don't have to remember to go back to macgeekyub, especially if you're listening to the show, you know, while you're driving or whatever. And there's some stuff you want to click on. Maybe you want to go and check out Daylight from Market Circle and you might not even remember that you wanted to do that, let alone what the link is, which is just MarketCircle.com. But still, it'll be right there in your email box and once a week we send it out right after the show goes out. So go check that out at macgeekyub.com. That's good stuff. Good, good stuff. Also at macgeekyub.com, you can learn about how to become a macgeekyub premium supporter. You can do that at macgeekyub.com or just macgeekyub.com slash premium. Premium supporters are those of you that have chosen that you want to support the show more so than just listening to the show and contributing and visiting our advertisers. I always say, and I think you folks know this, but I'll say it again, our job with our sponsors is to encourage you and get you, hopefully, to visit them. After that, it's between you and them, whether you buy, but we are here to sort of build awareness and hopefully send you on your way there. So visiting our advertisers is another way to help the show. And of course, being a premium subscriber is even further along that path. And I want to thank our premium subscribers, the folks whose contributions came in this week. Bill from Florida sent in a one-time contribution of 50 bucks. Thank you, Bill. On the monthly $10 plan, Bob from Quebec, Timothy from Tennessee, Frank from Tunbridge, Jeff from New Haven, Jim from San Jose, John from Pennsylvania, Santiago from Florida, Barry from, well, up in the air everywhere, John from North Carolina, thanks to all of you. And on the biannual 25 bucks every six-month plan, we've got Bruce from Mississippi, Rick from Mississippi, Daniel from Pennsylvania, Harvey from New York, and John from Fredrickton. Thanks to all of you. You rock. Really, really cool. All right. We have another geek challenge, John. Shall we go to that? All right. And I'm thinking you might already know the answer to this, John, if there is an answer. Jeff asks, I wanted to see what thoughts you had on how to find and delete duplicate messages in Apple Mail. Some mail is on an IMAP server and some of it is stored locally. And I want to find the messages that are duplicates. All right, Jeff. Well, it's a good question. I don't have an answer. Do you have an answer, Mr. Braun? Maybe. I'm thinking of one thing. Okay. Are you are you are you researching? Yes. Okay. All right. I'm going to go through and see if they do emails. Oh, what what app are you looking at? Tidyup. Tidyup. Oh, interesting. Tidyup 5, a new generation of our duplicate finder. I don't know if it finds duplicate emails, though, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I heard the word duplicate. Oh, yeah. I'll put a link to that in the show notes anyway, even if it doesn't do emails. It is. It's a good one, you know, to be aware of for any of this. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Very cool. Well, I'm going to I'm going to answer another mail question while we while you do that research, Mr. Braun, and we'll we'll see where we get and we'll circle back to that. Andy Winter in the Mackie Keb forums at Mackie Keb.com slash forums has a question about mail badges. He says, whenever I have unread messages, my mail icon shows a badge with the correct count of unread mail. However, when I have no unread mail, the badge always shows five always without fail. Any ideas what might cause this? I have numerous accounts, including Gmail, iCloud and regular IMAP. I see this on both my iPhone and iPad. Yeah. So listener Jim Meiss in the chat room or in the forums also chimed in. He says, first, try going to settings notifications mail and turning all your notifications on and then off again. So that's actually not a bad idea. As we have found sometimes rewriting that preferences file, which is often what happens when you change a setting and sometimes just turning it off and on changes that setting that can do it. You also get to pick what mailboxes will give you notifications. And I've also found that that you can adjust for the badges. It's possible you have unread mail from your VIPs and that you are getting badges for that. And you will also find that in exactly the same spot, right? Settings notifications mail on iOS. You'll see a favorite mailboxes and also a VIP section there. And on VIP, you can set badges to be on. I'd be curious if that's on. What happens if you turn it off? Does it go away? Because it's possible you've got unreads from VIPs elsewhere on your iPhone and they're finding them. That would be one way of doing that. If this is if this problem were happening on your Mac and I realize Andy was for iOS, but if this were happening on your Mac, try going for your inbox anyway, go to mailbox, rebuild, see if that helps. And also similar to what we just found on iOS, go into mail, preferences, general, doc unread count and ensure that it is set to inbox only and not some other option that shows messages from additional mailboxes. So yeah, that's where I would go. Any thoughts on that, John? And then we'll circle back to Jeff's thing. But any thoughts on that? Okay. Well, I will share while we're talking about mail, doc things, there used to be a plug-in called Docstar that allowed you to do all kinds of things with badges on your Mac in terms of what appeared. I think you could have five different badges on the mail icon. So you could have, for us, for example, I could just have it show me not only my inbox, but my VIPs and maybe our Mac eCab box and our premium box. Actually, I didn't mention that when we were talking about premium. You get a special email address premium at Mac eCab.com because we answer that stuff first for you premium listeners. So I could have all of that. Unfortunately, Docstar went away. Fortunately, it has come back in the form of, oh, I had it right up here, mail perspectives from, which is part of the whole suite, I think it's part of the suite from SmallCubed. Yeah, and you can, and they have some, you know, functionality in there that you can configure different badges on your mail icon. So if you want that back, go to SmallCubed and get mail suite, which also includes one of my favorites, mail Acton and Sigpro, which we use quite a bit here, but mail perspectives is included in that. So there you go. Circling back to Jeff, Mr. Braun, what did you find, if anything? Oh, I think it'll do it. They mentioned in a description, I see multiple libraries support capability to search on the supported apps, Lightroom, Photos, iTunes, Mail, Aperture and iPhoto. So. Okay. It says mail. That's the word we're looking for. That's great. And there's a free trial. So. Okay. Oh, that's cool. Huh. Huh. I would, I would, I would back up first. So there you go. Yeah. Because yeah, especially if you're removing things, you may accidentally destroy everything. Yes, it's not, not so good. But you know, that's all right. As long as you have a backup, the trick is knowing what you removed. That's really the key. So. In the forums, we had another post from, from a listener called TechAddict, who was having a problem getting genius results updated in iTunes on his Mac. He would get the error routinely that says genius results can't be updated right now. An unknown error occurred and it would give the error code 4001. No searches helped. One, there's a couple of things to do when iTunes gets mucked up like this, especially in terms of its cloud integration, which is sort of what's going on here. Signing out of iTunes, go to the account menu and choose sign out and then sign back in. If that doesn't work, and it probably won't, but it's always a good first step. Quit iTunes and then go into your home music iTunes folders and move or simply delete or move out of the way. The iTunes library genius.itdb file, that's where it's storing your local stuff. And if it's having some trouble writing to that file, it's got corrupted or something then that might also cause this problem. So hopefully that helps you have any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun. No. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, where are we here? We have, well, sure. Yeah, we've got some more good questions, I think. Listener Jeff, I don't know if to call this a question or just a great cool thing. He says, a fun tip and then an interesting question. He says, months ago, I came across a unique product I've never heard about in Apple's history of great products, the Apple Hi-Fi. Yeah, it was their Apple's first speaker, right? It was the Proto HomePod, if you will. He says, I was immediately intrigued when I saw it. I decided to go on eBay and purchase one as the prices were reasonable. Then I heard about modifying it and an older airport express and updating the firmware so that it could be an AirPlay 2 compatible device. So I bought one of those too. I performed the firmware update and connected an audio cable from the aux out of the newly purchased Hi-Fi and connected it to the airport express. And voila, the original HomePod was born. He says, I got to tell you that it has some great sound to it. Sure, it's bigger than the HomePod, but its style is uniquely Apple. And with the AirPlay 2 compatibility, it works well with my smart home, which is great. It doesn't have the Siri capabilities, of course, but it'll play music when you tell it to and you can stream music to it because that's how the airport express works. And the airport express, just for clarity, could be used this way with any speaker that has an audio import. It doesn't have to be an Apple Hi-Fi. So his question, he says, is when adding the airport express to my home app, it allows me to give the express a name. So I call it a Hi-Fi speaker. When I'm using my iPhone and want to send the music over AirPlay, I see the Hi-Fi stereo listed and I can play the music to it. I am trying now to use all of Siri's capabilities. So I will ask Siri to play the song on Hi-Fi stereo and it doesn't. I have to say play the song in living room instead, which makes no sense to me. Does this make sense to you? So yes, it does in a sense because that speaker is attached to the room living room and you're generally saying I want to play it in the living room. It should though, based on what I've experienced, it should work with the, by saying the name of the speaker, unless the speaker's name has some words that Siri uses for other things. So it's possible that the word stereo or speaker are too generic for it. So I would say just experiment by changing the name of it in your home app and see what happens. Right? Dots on that, John? The Apple Hi-Fi. I know, right? Right. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah, you can build your own. So it sounds possible. It sounds possible. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So there you go. It's a fun, right? No? Not fun? I think it's sure. Sure. All right. What else do we have here? We've got another geek challenge. I like these. Let's see if we can knock out a few of these because we've been actually doing a pretty good job on these today. So Chris writes, I have a quick question. Has technology advanced enough now to where I can take photos that are immediately synced to the cloud using a camera rather than an iPhone? If so, what cameras are equipped to perform this task? This is very soon I'll be inspecting homes, both exterior and interior, with the latter being my main focus. These inspections will require that I share the photos with a team to evaluate the condition of the interior where decisions are made as to how much renovation work will be required. So I need the ability to take quality photos and as a convenience with less hassle, just have those photos synced to the cloud for immediate access or future access without me having to go through any manual steps. So is there a camera or something with this function? Man, I don't know the answer here. I mean, years ago, of course, I would have suggested the iFi card, but that's dead in the water and long defunct. So that's not the answer, but that was a card that sort of worked. I mean, when it worked, it was great. It was just a little temperamental, but it was an SD card that you would put in your camera and your phone would Wi-Fi sync to it and then, you know, slip down the photos, etc. etc. So, but I haven't dug into this in a while. John, you're our photo guy. What do you know about this? I know a few things. Okay. So one, depending on the camera you have, it may have this sort of functionality. Okay. I know that my Nikon does. Fair. So the first place to go, they're page, but they have a connected camera page that talks about which other cameras has Wi-Fi. So for example, I have, so they make a bunch of different accessories and apps here. Sure. So I got a little app called Wireless Mobile Utility that I can run on my phone and control the camera. It's not direct to the cloud. Okay. But you can pull the stuff off the camera and then put it on the phone and then put it from the phone to the cloud. I think he wants to avoid the manual process of, like, if there's something automated, that, like, I think that's our goal here, right? Is something where you take the picture with the phone and theoretically nothing else needs to happen, either using your phone or whatever, it syncs itself up to, you know, the cloud. Right. But I think there's something in that vein as well. Okay. So if you do a little search here for a camera. Yeah. Wi-Fi. I see a couple of recommendations here and they sound. Do they sound marvelous? Uh, also some, yeah, I see a bunch. Okay. An article, review of the best Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory cards. Some guy wrote up a little thing in January of this year. Okay. And then there's one, never heard of them. Transcend makes one. You've heard of Transcend. Okay. Yeah. Apparently, Transcend has one and Toshiba has one. Okay. It's little Wi-Fi SD cards. So it looks like there are people that are still making them. Okay. All right. Well, we will have links to all of that. Yeah, that's great. It's awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Well, if you folks know, obviously, let us know because we'd love to, we'd love to hear about it. Love to hear about it. We, you know, we're, we love the smart home stuff here. And so I want to take a minute and play a comment here from listener Marty and then, and then see where we go with it. Sound good to you, John? Indeed. Hey, Dave and John. This is Marty from Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Long time listener, first time caller. I have a feedback for show 759 for the guy with the water sensor. He could try two things. He could use your home assistant, which very, it's a very cool tool running on a Raspberry Pi, which allows you to connect and make a real home automation running on a Raspberry Pi. Or the other thing would be Habitat. Both are two interesting solutions that work great. I can highly recommend both of them. And for the guy with clicking on a link and having to change the default browser, I would use browser fairy, very cool tool, which lets you choose the browser by just clicking on the link and will not force you to change your default browser. And this is where you cut me off. All right. Thanks, Marty. Yeah, that's, I totally had forgotten about browser fairy. That's a great utility to have. So we'll get to the smart home stuff in a second. But yeah, Marty's last thing there about browser fairy, such a cool thing that you can choose which browser a link that you're clicking somewhere else is opening in. That can be really handy if you need that to happen. So yeah, thank you for that, Marty. In terms of home assistant and all these other things, I spent some time this week, John, messing around with this stuff. I actually installed home assistant inside a docker container on my Synology disk station, which is similar to being able to install it on a Raspberry Pi. It's a Linux machine. Docker is kind of a cool thing that it allows you to install sort of self-contained boot environments. So in this case, home assistant thinks it's running on its own separate virtual machine. It's really kind of the right way to say it. It's not quite virtualized. It's more containerized, but potato-potato-ish for most of us. And home assistant's pretty cool. It allows you to run your own sort of open source hub locally that manages all of your smart home devices as long as your smart home devices are manageable by home assistant. And they've got plugins for a lot of things, but not all of the things. So it's worth checking out. There's a few things that I have that don't have plugins for home assistant, but do have, you know, like ift integration. And you can link home assistant with ift and sort of get some of that functionality for your light bulbs and your triggers and all of that stuff. So pretty, pretty cool. And then Hubitat, H-U-B-I-T-A-T was the other one that Marty mentioned. And it is, yeah, a home automation platform. And I've seen a lot of folks sort of saying, if you're going to jump to this, because it, all of your automations with Hubitat are local. So you're not relying on the cloud to do anything. And of course, that was your problem, like with Wink, right, John, is relying on the cloud. And now Wink's cloud has been unreliable. And so, you know, what do you got? Like HomeKit, the automations are happening locally, right? Which can make them not only faster, but again, more reliable, assuming the device that's running them is reliable. And so that's that's Hubitat's thing. And very interesting from that standpoint. I also messed around with SmartThings this week, John. And I realized something. SmartThings automations are great. And you don't need a SmartThings hub to use them. You can just, yeah, you can just go, because SmartThings, you know, we talked about this couple of episodes ago, right? That SmartThings really is two separate pieces. You have the hub in your house, which really, I think it does some of the automations, but really what that hub is there for is to connect to devices that aren't Wi-Fi, right? So if you've got a, you know, your ZigBee or Bluetooth Low Energy, does it do Bluetooth Low Energy? I can't remember if the SmartThings does or not. But, you know, like your ZigBee and other like low power Wi-Fi, low power wireless stuff, not Wi-Fi stuff. But all the things that can't connect to your network on their own could, in theory, connect through SmartThings as the hub. So that's the hub part. But then there's the cloud piece that is the, you know, the automation brains and links it to all of your other things. So like, if you want to have, you know, SmartThings linked with Amazon A-Lady devices, well, that happens in the SmartThings cloud, right? That has nothing to do with your hub. But it's, that's all happening, you know, in the cloud. And the same with, like, if you want to do if integrations or if you want to link to, say, a Wi-Fi device, right? That has a SmartThings plug-in. Like, if you've got, you know, a Luma, sorry, not Luma, that's the browser, what's the, lifex, right? Lifex bulbs or whatever, they're just Wi-Fi bulbs. Well, those you can link to SmartThings, but they're not talking to your hub, they're talking to the SmartThings cloud. So there's the hub and the cloud. And I just signed up for the cloud and you can get a free account, use a Samsung login, create the account. And then I was able to install the app on my phone and link it with that. And from the app on my phone, I was able to connect to pretty much everything that I have with one interesting exception. I can't connect to my Philips Hue bulbs, even though they have their own hub and are connected to my network and accessible from the cloud and also locally. SmartThings integration is not built to use the Hue cloud. It's built to talk directly to your Hue bulbs and replace that hub. Or no, actually, I guess it talks directly to the Hue hub, but is only built to do it locally on your network. It's not built to use the cloud. So there's, so I would have to like hack around that and use, like I said, like if there's something to wire it all together. But yeah, yeah, you don't need the hub unless you need the hub, you know, in which case you do if you need something to talk to those devices. But yeah, it's very interesting, very, very interesting. And I set up WebCore, which is sort of the high octane programming scripting language for SmartThings that goes above and beyond the scripting that's built in to, you know, the SmartThings app and lets you do like some really crazy automations. So yeah, I'm messing around with it. It's fun. How far have you gone with you? Because you're essentially standardized on SmartThings or have you standardized on Amazon's A-Lady? Because I'm thinking of standardizing on the A-Lady. That's got more compatibility with more devices than anything I've found. Yeah, well, there's a SmartThings skill. Right. You can, yeah, you can link the two together, but I'm just, I guess what I'm, when I say standardizing, you can have both, but which one is like controlling all of your automations and all like, what's the main platform? Because you can have a SmartThings hub, but use, but not use any automations in SmartThings and instead do all your automations from say, you know, Alexa or, sorry, or Home Assistant or, or, you know, even with HomeBridge, right? You can do it with HomeKit. So I'm just curious what you're using as your, as your automation platform. The SmartThings app for the most part. Okay. So that's where you're doing your automations. That's smart. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's see. And they, in their language, yeah. So when you start the app, you can add a number of things. You can add a device, add a scene, add an automation, add a room or add a member. Right. Right. Those are the, so yeah, I just added some automations. Most of you are like, you know, turn the thermostat on and off. Sure. Well, you can, you can say the battery is low. Yeah. Turn your, turn your thermostat off when I'm not home or turn it on when I'm within 10 miles of home or like whatever, right? I mean, those are the kinds of things that, that you could do so that your home just kind of does what it does, which is pretty cool. Right. I haven't done the, yeah, I do it by the clock rather than some other criteria. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. How would I, how would it know how close I am to home? The smart things app can do geofencing or some, some level of location awareness. So you would, you would sort of, Oh, okay. Probably use my phone. It would use your phone as, as, as you, right. That's right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And you, I mean, you can do other things too, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just finding, you know, all of these, as I'm testing all of these things, I would love to use HomeKit for these, because I'm finding, especially if you run like the Eve home app, HomeKit can do way more than the home app will, will let you access like the, the automations and, and the ability to do like Siri, things in series and, and like the different triggers and all that, the home app is, is okay, but it's fairly limited. But the Eve home app is way better. And, and so that's like, I would love to use that, but I have all these ring sensors, like my floodlight cams and stuff that are not at least not yet HomeKit compatible. And so I'm using HomeBridge to trigger, to use those, but the HomeBridge plugin for ring is sort of janky, especially when it comes to not, like, notifications from the most motion sensors. So it's, it's worthless to me. So I've, you know, it's like, okay, well, what else can I use? And I could, again, like link with if, or something to get that done, or even link with Home Assistant and kind of get it all. But I, you know, I would, I would like to have something with great flexibility in terms of the automations and work with all the stuff that I have. And work with all the stuff that I have is a box that is only checked by Amazon with the, with the A-Lady. That's, that's the only platform that seems to be able to talk to every device that I've got. And maybe Google Assistant now too. And Google Assistant, now you can, you can take your voice activated Sonos devices and choose as of this week, right? Which, which Assistant you want on them. You can have Amazon's A-Lady or you can have Google's G-Lady, which is great. So yes, yes, yes, yes. Fun stuff. So I don't know if you folks have tried that out yet, but it's free. Just go into your Sonos, make sure it's up to date and you're good to go. So it's pretty cool stuff, pretty cool stuff. Any more thoughts on any of this, John? Every now and then I get a little glitch. Like the other day, I tried to use voice control to turn on the lights and it was like, I can't do that right now. It's like. Voice control from, from what device? A-Lady. Oh, A-Lady. Okay. Yeah. So that means that the Amazon cloud was having trouble talking to the smart things cloud. Oh, right. Right. Because that's not that work. Because, because I use the app and, you know, I was able to do it that way. Sure. Sure. Well, for you, your, your lights are low power RF lights that are, that are like locally connected to your smart things hub, right? So the app didn't even have to use the smart things cloud in that regard. It could just talk directly to the hub, potentially. I don't know how, you know, I mean it, but, but yeah, it, because if you talk to the, the A-Lady and say, turn on my lights, A-Lady talks to the cloud and says, oh, those lights means this smart thing device. Great. Go tell smart things to turn it on. It goes to the smart things cloud tells it to turn it on. The smart things cloud sends the signal back down to your smart things hub because that's what's going to do it and it turns it on. So, so it was very likely some issue in the cloud. So, there you go. Yeah, it's fun. Clayton says something interesting in the chat room here. He says, I wish I could use both Amazon's A-Lady and Google Assistant on simultaneously on the same Sonos device. I talked with them about this. This is not impossible, right? Technically, there's no reason you couldn't have both because the wake words are, are different for both of them. And in fact, in our kitchen, we have a JBL device that's been on Google Assistant forever. And then we have a dot or maybe it's a Sonos one or something, but whatever we have, you know, that, that, that is our, or was our, you know, Amazon A-Lady in the kitchen. And as I was talking to Sonos about this and asking them sort of before this launch, like, you know, which way are you going to go with it? And they're like, oh, we're not sure. What do you think? Like, well, you know, that's interesting because even though we've got them both in the same room, we think of the device as the, like as the, you know, A-Lady or as the G-Lady. It's like, I don't know how like, certainly intellectually, we can wrap our heads around the fact that A-Lady and G-Lady are these virtual things and they can both be accessed from the same device. No problem. But in terms of like regular use case, it's like, you know, we think of the device as the thing and that starts to get a little weird, especially for the non-power users out there, right? Like this paradigm of what do you mean they're both in there? That doesn't make sense. And like I said, it does make sense. But I see why, you know, I mean, it's similar to the way Apple does things. Sonos likes to make things simple and elegant and delightful to use. And so I think it was pretty obvious that they were going to go this way and obviously they have. But I also sort of understand why. I mean, I know why I would want the flexibility of saying, no, no, I'm a geek. Let me turn them both on, right? And you know that somewhere inside Sonos, there's a version of the software that would do exactly that. I have no doubt, right? Because I'm sure they experimented with it. But yeah, I see why they didn't want to roll that out to us mortals. So anyway, there you go. That's my thoughts on it. What do you think about that, John? There's lots of options. There's always options. Yeah. Just have two devices in your living room. You know, why not? Or your kitchen, like we do. I will tell you in terms of getting information, nothing beats Google Assistant. Like it is so good at answering your question and taking like the results of several web pages and distilling them down into something that it can audibly answer. I get so frustrated when I'm in the car and I ask Siri, you know, hey, what's, you know, how does this work or something? And it's like, well, I can't answer that for you in the car or or if you're not in the car and it says, oh, yeah, I hear some links to some web pages. It's like, I asked you audibly. I don't want to go visit a web page. Like if I wanted to go visit a web page, I probably would have done that already. Nope. Siri doesn't get it. Amazon eight ladies, not bad. Google Assistant totally wins. So yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Well, all good things, my friend. And that's the band coming in from the cold. That's actually it's not that cold out, but I think it is raining outside. Right? I'm supposed to get some rain here today. Yeah, I saw it. I think we got like a thunderstorm alert or something. Yeah. Oh, really? Well, be careful, man. The police have already left. So the fire department's already left. So they're not there to help you to be careful. You're on your own. I saw a funny picture the other day. I think it was in Texas that it showed how people in the community prepared for a hail storm. It was pretty much putting like, you know, inflatable rafts or, you know, kiddie pools or something on your car. Oh, so it wouldn't get smashed by. Yeah, that's I mean, you're laughing, but that's that's pretty serious. I remember we would get hail storms pretty regularly when I lived in Austin, you know, this time of year, April, not so much May, but, you know, April was always pretty crazy with the weather there and we would get hail storms. And like there were a few of them where car dealers had to like just get rid of their entire inventory because the hail destroyed every car that was on their lots. I mean, it was, you know, and then obviously, you know, they were insured, I assume. But, you know, obviously, like you said, people at their homes and stuff, I mean, it would, yeah, it was pretty destructive. The largest I've seen personally, I'd say is pea sized. Even pea sized hail can be pretty damaging. But yeah, when it gets to golf ball size, it's like way worse, right? Yeah. Have you ever had hail damage to your car because you don't leave, you don't have your car covered? Right? Nope. That's good. That's good. That's good. All right. Well, thank you folks for listening. Thank you. 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