 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 725 for Monday, September 3rd, Labor Day here in the United States of America, 2018. These folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together so that there is a product by which listening or even producing the show, each and every one of us learns at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include PDF pen from Smile. You can learn more about that at Smilesoftware.com slash podcast and crossover from Code Weavers at CodeWeavers.com slash MGG. We will talk more about both of those things very shortly here and here on this very hot Labor Day here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in equally balmy, Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brunner. Yeah, man. Other than heat, how are you doing today? Good. Got my, you know, got my timetable going today. Got my power nap in and just a raring to go. Yeah. I know I'm going to do mine now, my power nap now. So you're on your own, man. I look this it's hot. I got it. No, no, no, no, no. In fact, I will start with a tip of my own. I was having trouble charging. We took a quick couple of days and the family went over to Maine and visited some relatives for a couple of days this weekend. And on the way in the car, I have two charging cables in the front seat and my son went to plug my phone into the charging cable. So that we could run ways and all that good stuff. And as an aside, my next car is definitely going to have car play. I made that decision this weekend. We'll talk more about that. But and one of the cords wouldn't it would like it would go in and start charging. And then I'd get the this accessory is not compatible with your phone message. I was like, that's weird. So he switched to the other cable and it was fine. And we were talking about it while we were up there in Maine. I've got a family full of engineers and such. So, you know, there's these things just come up. And it hit me that, you know, I've had this iPhone 10 for almost a year and have yet to do a d linting on the lightning port. So I took my thankfully in my travel travel case. I keep one of those. Actually, I keep several of those plastic toothpick kind of things that has the, you know, the little strip of dental floss on one end and a tooth plastic toothpick on the other. Plastic being a good thing to dig around in your lightning port with metal, perhaps not as good a thing, but I use wood. Yeah, you can use wood to use a tooth. Yeah, yeah, just a wooden toothpick. Yes. So this was a plastic toothpick and I dug around in there and I pulled out a huge chunk of lint and thought, oh, well, that's it. And I looked in and thought, oh, there's no thing in there, but I'll dig anyway. Huge chunk of lint. And then I proceeded to pull out eight more huge chunks of lint. And so that fixed things. And it's amazing how well lightning cables snap right into my phone now. So don't forget to do that. This is your pre, not pre, but introductory topic here on MGG today. So OK, so it was acting so there was so much at the bottom of the port that it was like not making a consistent contact or was it acting as an insulator or both? Oh, no, I don't think it was an insulator. That's a good question. No, I would say that it was just packed so so densely into the end that it essentially made the the port shallower than it should be. And so depending on, you know, the cable and all that, some cables weren't quite going in and making that connection. So, you know, I've always thought that that's maybe, you know, don't strike me down, but it's maybe as a small flaw in the design of lightning. And it's not just lightning. This happens to Android people, too. So OK, I've OK. I've never had it had it happen to me with a USB device, whether it be mini or micro or regular USB. And I, you know, I tried my iPad, too, and that had nothing in it. But of course, I'm not putting my iPad in my pockets. And that's really where this, you know, is the worst. So yeah, no, my uncle has an Android phone and he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I got to do this, too. And then we talked about how amazingly dense this gets. It's like wood if you, you know, when you take it out of there. But anyway, so does anybody. So here's how you solve the problem. I just thought about this, a new product idea. I'm sure somebody makes this already. But somebody has to make a plug that you can put into your lightning port when you're not using it. They do. And in fact, if you are someone that is routinely charging by Qi, right, wireless charging, you may well want to get one of those plugs to cover your right. Because now I think about it. That's the only reason that I plug my phone in. Otherwise, everything else happens wirelessly. Good point. Right. Right. So that may I've seen these things. They're like these little they call them anti dust plugs or you know, whatever it is. We'll we'll put a link in the show notes. I'll find some. But I've used them before and they work well. They the the one actually in the one that I found right here on Amazon, too. But comes with a headphone jack lint plug, too. Now, obviously, if your phone doesn't have a headphone jack, don't put that in there. But but I found these two. Yeah, I am. So I don't know, you know, it's one of those things that's that's just how it goes. But I'll put that in the show notes and we can now we can move on. Right. There we go. Nice. So I have to look for some of those the next time we're out and about. Yep. Cool. All right. Jumping to actually I'm going to jump to I'm going to jump to the chat room here, John. Because Brother Jay in the chat room says where's that chat room at, Dave? Macgeekgab.com slash stream. That's where we find it. Oh, thanks. OK, I should probably go there. Yeah. And that's that's always there while we're doing the show live. So Brother Jay in the chat room says, for all who be each an external battery pack, I recommend solely this. I use it with my MacBook Pro and everything else so reliable. It is unbelievable. And this is the HyperJuice external battery pack for MacBook. And it it's not cheap. It's four hundred ninety nine bucks, but it does come with a modified MagSafe power adapter so that you can actually use this thing. This is for pre USBC, MacBook and MacBook Pros. The if you have USBC, there's there's a wealth of plethora. A whole host of battery packs available because USBC is is way more standard. But but we will put this is HyperJuice external battery pack in the show notes. That's pretty good, man. Thanks for the thanks for the heads up. So yeah, yeah, wait in the club because at this point in time, Dave, I have absolutely zero USBC devices in my home. Yeah, I'm my guess. As far as I know, I may have something and I got in a goodie bag somewhere, but I have nothing I can use it with. Oh, I have I have quite a few USBC docks and hubs and stuff that that I'm looking forward to finally getting a chance to try. My guess is that within the next 12 months and probably a lot sooner than that, I will I will move to a USBC based MacBook Air or Pro or something along those lines. You know, I was the thing is my my 2012 MacBook Pro mid 2012 and it's still supported and it will run Mojave. But that is the last OS that it's going to run. But I've been looking, Dave, and I was like, you know, do I want to go through the trauma of USBC and adapter? Hell, yes, I mean, you know, or well, the thing is, no, is that I could get a slightly newer machine. And I think I looked and I think the 2015 is the last where you could get Thunderbolt and USB three versus USBC. I think around that. So there's a model that's like three years newer than what I have. So it's not the latest. But I'm wondering if I'm going to have to weigh the options, whether that's the direction I want to take or. USBC, yeah, I mean, eventually you're going to need to do it, right? I mean, like I said, this machine is the the last one that's going to run that OS. So if I want to run the next OS, I'm going to need another MacBook Pro. Right. But I mean, eventually you're going to need to go to USBC. So why kick that can down the road? Why buy a machine that is limited at this point? Like, right, I don't think it makes sense now if you're going to buy a new or even a refurb machine. And that's the path I would head down is the refurb path. Yeah. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. But you know what I mean? It's like you're you're you're artificially limiting yourself really to avoid what? I mean, it's not that big of a deal. And in fact, I'm just doing it to be difficult. Right. No, I don't know me long enough. I get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will. But the thing is, I don't need adapters. Well, no, I would because if it's Thunderbolt and USB three are the major connections on the 2015, then I'd have to get some Thunderbolt stuff, which I don't have any of that either. So sure. But I have USB C or USB three stuff, which is why I'll do. Well, and I mean, you like, I mean, anyone that gets a USB C based laptop would need some sort of adapter, right? Because so many of our peripherals are and will remain USB A ports. It's it's just how it's going to go. I really like this anchors and we've mentioned it before. But the they call it their five and one premium USB C data hub. It's got so cleverly designed. It plugs into your USB C port. It's got three USB A ports on it for and their USB three. It's got an HDMI port on it. And then at the end of this, it's it's almost just like a little tube. It, you know, it just seems like a little cable. It doesn't kind of look like a hub. But at the end, it's got a ethernet port. So you kind of get, you know, for 60 bucks, you get exactly what you need. So I don't know. It seems like a good one. I'll put a link in the show. OK. Yeah. Sorry for the tangent, but no, it actually did. It actually did come up within the last couple of weeks because I've noticed the GPU on my machine seemed. I'm noticing weird graphics things happening. So I think it may be expiring. Just oh, on a phone. Oh, yeah. Well, it's 2012, man. Right. That's the thing is right. We don't. I mean, it it's really interesting, right, because we. It used to be that you had to buy a new, especially laptop like every three years at the outside. And now, you know, that has not been the case for the last almost 10 years, right? You know, we've got you got a 2012 laptop. I've got a 2011 laptop. I know a lot of people with laptops in that vintage that are super happy and people with the 2014 MacBook Pros are ecstatic still, right? So it's really interesting how much longer we are able to get useful life out of these things. And that's oh, yeah. You know, I recall when I did Windows development, though, I'm sure it's changed with them as well as back then. Well, one, if you're a developer, you probably need a machine that has a bit more oomph than the average bear. Yes. But but back when I was doing the PC stuff, three years was about the time frame, which actually our management supported. They're like, OK, you know, once your machine is three years old, then you really need a new one to be productive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. The thing is, though, and this is the only real problem is because it's not an every three year thing for most of us. Like you said, for developers, it probably still is an every three year thing. But for most of us, it's not most of us can get, you know, six, eight, maybe even 10 years out of a laptop. And the problem is now we're not in the cycle of routinely just being like, oh, yeah, I've had this for a couple of years. I got to start thinking about, you know, budgeting for another laptop or whatever. Now it's like if you just you buy one in and you use it for a really long time, you know, major life events happen. You're like, oh, yeah, I still have that thing that I use it every day. So then it's like, oh, yeah, crap, I got to, you know, oh, right. Laptop got to be up. OK, here we go. So it's interesting. I don't know. It's interesting. But we all still spend a thousand bucks on a phone every year. So there's, you know, there's still a problem. We will hopefully solve. I don't mean to say we all do. I was, you know, a little hyperbole. All right. Let's move. Actually, you know what? I want to talk about our first sponsor, John, which is PDF Pen from Smile. PDF Pen is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs. It's so good that John's Fire Department has to come and listen to this spot, right? Because they know that using PDF Pen, you can go paperless with scanning and OCR, you can mark up and highlight PDFs, right? This makes paperwork really easy over there at your fire department. You can search and redact sensitive info, right? So if they had to log some stuff in a report that they need internally, but maybe shouldn't be shared with the public record, they use PDF Pen, I assume, to redact that stuff. And they can do it right on their max. It's awesome, right? You can correct text. You can insert, remove, reorder pages, move and adjust images. And then you can get PDF Pen Pro down there at the fire department. John, they can create fillable PDF forms that they could send to you after they've come to your house, right? And, you know, have you fill out like, what did you think? Were the firemen and women, you know, did they do their job well? And, you know, did your house stop burning and things like that? Like, these are good things to fill out in forms and you can create your own forms just like the fire department can with PDF Pen Pro. You can learn all about this at Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Yes, that's correct. I'm not just, you know, accidentally inserting a variable name. No, it is Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. And then on a check out, they will ask you, which podcast? Well, you know what to put in there. Our sincere thanks to Smile and John's fire department. But specifically our thanks to Smile for sponsoring this episode. All right, man. That was a very, very good save there. Thanks. Thanks. But it's not really a save. I just, you know, I take what I'm given and I work with it. That's how we. I was just like, OK, how are we going to do that? Because I heard them coming before you did. And I'm like, oh, boy, here we go. Here we go. Not a. Yeah. I mean, the good news is that I live in a street where the fire department and other departments are like right down the street. I knew there was likely not a problem locally, like hyper locally for you. Yes, that's right. I did not. I had one a week ago where so a lot of times when there's an ambulance call, they'll send a fire engine. They'll send rescue one or rescue three every which one. Yeah. But yeah, actually the other day I heard it and I could hear the sound of the siren and it was winding down right as it was approached. And I'm like, oh, and yeah, they parked right outside of my house because there was something happening across the street for me. So all right, we do have more. But they use. I know that. Of course they use PDFN. Well, who wouldn't if you're running a business? No, they do generate reports there. But then you know they're going to use PDFN. Of course they are. They're not. Fault child. Oh, well, you know, I'll check with them. Yeah, man. All right, we've got a couple of cool stuff. Stuff's found to go through here in addition to the one that brother Jay brought us into Rob says something that has me very excited over the past couple days since Tuesday, the 28th, specifically is the new firmware update that brings the addition of AirPlay to to the airport Express. This is firmware update 7.8. This is pretty impressive, right? Because this is a long in the tooth device and now, boom, it's also a first class citizen with AirPlay to and Rob says, basically, I have a lovely hi-fi in the dining room. However, this equipment is probably 25 years old says, as you know, with sound gear, this doesn't mean that it is defunct by any stretch. In fact, some would argue that it is better. I says, I have been looking for an answer to bring this beauty into the 21st century for a while, and it seems like Apple have answered my prayers by configuring an airport Express into client mode. So joining his home network using the airport utility app, he says, I have created for want of a better description, a wireless adapter for my hi-fi. I then connected it to the amp using its three and a half millimeter headphone jack into my amp's RCA connections and boom, a 25 year old AirPlay to speaker says, I plan to take this to the next level by purchasing a smart plug for the power to the amp. So I do not have to leave it running 24 seven. This way I can power it on from my iPhone and begin streaming to my hi-fi home pod and Apple TV around my house seamlessly. Neat, huh? He says, yeah, man, this is very cool. I'm stoked that that they've done this. It's it's good. AirPlay to like it continues to surprise me. You know, I've got a bunch of Sonos gear around the house and a lot of that is AirPlay to capable and compatible. And it's really cool to be able to just, you know, say, oh, right, I want this on that speaker and boom, there it is. Like, I don't have to think about how to get it to my Sonos speakers anymore because it's right there. So very, very cool. Yeah. The key is that you can have multiple targets as the correct multiple simultaneous targets AirPlay to. Well, and I upgraded mine too. And here's another tip. So normally, so I have an airport express, I'm not using it for internet. I'm just using it for for AirPlay. Yeah, that's all I'm using it for. Like Rob, yeah. And here's the deal, though. So if you'd like to. So every now and then the Apple base stations will blink their light. Here's what you want to make sure to do, because actually when I heard the update came out through an article on on the smack observer site. Yes. But I was like, well, why didn't my little yellow light blink? Because normally that's what the the certain airports do is when there's a firmware update, the light blinks. Sure. For the reason. So running airport utility, there is a box. Make sure you check it called monitor airport base station for problems. Not not that a firmware update is a problem, but you have to have this box check box check in order for the light to indicate that there's something interesting happening that you should probably know about. And once you run the utility, it'll tell you it's like, oh, yeah, here's a firmware update. So I got it, man. I got I got our play to and I didn't pay for it. Yeah, right. No, that's the beauty of this. Right. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Now I just need another airplay to device, because that's the only one I have right now. Yeah, right. All right. Yeah. Cool. All right. So speaking of speakers, we as I mentioned, we moved my daughter into her dorm room about a week and a half ago now, I guess. And and she said, dude, I need a waterproof speaker to be able to listen to music in the shower. And I I had the opportunity to check out the Anker Soundcore Flare, which is a waterproof speaker. It's got a little kind of light on it that can do a little pulsing light show kind of thing. It's sort of a little tube, if you will. And with a flare at the bottom, hence the its name, it's 60 bucks. It actually sounds pretty good. You there's an app you can get to tweak the EQ. If you're picky like me and, you know what, for the size, it sounds great. It's 360 degree all around sound. So you get there's no like weird dead spots or anything. You just put this thing wherever and and it's got this little light. And of course, waterproof, fantastic 60 bucks. And my daughter, I checked it out here at the house. And then I figured, well, this would be a good test. Brought it there. She said everybody on her floor comes by to borrow this thing before they before they go shower. So pretty cool stuff. So that's what she did. She actually say, dude, when she was conversing with you. Yes. So, yeah, this is perhaps peeling far deeper behind the curtain. And then, uh, oh, are you hearing that weirdness with my sound, John? Or is that just me? No, no, it's just you. OK, it's bad, though. Oh, I need to pause because I can't hear anything. All right. All right, I'm back. That was weird. Let's hope it doesn't happen again. So, yes, she calls me, dude, when she was in seventh and eighth grade. No, I was helping out a lot with her jazz band and. Oh, well, that explains. Yeah. And no, she would call me dad and I wouldn't hear it because there were, you know, 100 kids. And and I wasn't it wasn't like every dad was there, but there were other, you know, dads helping out. So I just should have called you daddy. Oh, yeah. And all the other kids would call me Dave, which was fine. But her band director's first name was also Dave. And so she decided to call me dude because it was it was just born out of a moment of frustration. She was, you know, she needed something from me. She was calling dad, dad. And then she said Dave and no. And finally, she said, dude, and I looked and it was like, all right, well, now I've trained her that that's the name that I evidently answer to. So, yeah, it's been that way ever since. So, yes. But she also called me, John. And and I'm now understanding how this works. And she said, dude, I need a printer. And so I said, OK, fine. And I knew she might need a printer. You know, in fact, I already had it on my list of things to maybe send her at some point. So it was dude like a lead in to. I mean, hmm. No, no, no. You buy me something or I need advice. Dude is her name for me. So it's a lead into everything. It's just it's just what she calls me. And and so she said, I need a printer. And I went and started researching, you know, all sorts of inkjet printers. It Wi-Fi on the printer didn't really matter because joining a IOT type device to the university Wi-Fi is is a wonky thing because you have the major login thing that you got to do. So she would have had to called, you know, the IT department and added the MAC address and all this stuff. And also then once you add it, you know, then anybody on the Wi-Fi can print to your printer. So maybe that's not such a good idea. So, you know, I was just kind of looking and didn't really care about Wi-Fi. And I just wanted to find a printer that people liked and I did. I found one and I said, do you need a scanner with her or whatever? She's like, no, I don't think so. And then I stopped and I thought, wait a minute, what would it cost to get a laser printer? Because we all as we all know, you know, she's not doing she's not getting this to print color. She's getting it to print black and white stuff for papers for school. And and I and, you know, you ink per page, generally speaking, a laser printer is cheaper in terms of of good point. Consumables, right? The ink versus. Yeah, supplies. So it's like, what's a laser printer going to cost? And I found this Samsung Express M 2020 W. It it does have Wi-Fi again. We've discussed that that has yet to be turned on for. It's a USB printer. It also has NFC. If you have a phone like an Android phone that can do that or a tablet. It's tiny. It fits like in this tiny little cupboard that they have. And it was 60 bucks. And that came with, obviously, a toner cartridge and a USB cable. So in the end, it turned out to be about ten dollars cheaper than an inkjet printer that I was going to send her. And it's 60. Yeah. So wrap your head around this, my friend. Sixty dollars. And she's been using it all week. I sent it to her at the beginning of the week. The last time I had to buy a toner cartridge. So a little tangent here, but somebody online, I found a discussion and they were saying, hey, you know, if you want a laser printer that lasts forever, make sure it supports something standard like PostScript or PCL, which are two major languages. Though I don't think this one uses that. But no, because it's funny. It's not a network device in that in that. Well, it's a Wi-Fi device, so maybe it does. I don't know. No, I get that. But then I actually looked at my printer. So, Dave, I still have my GCC Elite 12 slash 1200. And I looked at the back of it and it's a PostScript slash PCL printer. It was manufactured in November 1999. And it still works with the Mac because it does PostScript. So that is actually older than my daughter. But the thing is the toner cartridge for this thing. The last time I had to get a new one, I'm on my second one. It probably costs more than your entire printing system. Correct. And I think it was like 150 bucks or something. Yeah, I checked the toner cartridge is about half the price of the printer. It's about, it's somewhere between 20 and 30 bucks today to buy a new one. But I think she'll get about a thousand pages out of the built-in or the toner cartridge that came with it. So. I didn't know they, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, a black and white laser printer for 60 bucks. That's just amazing. It's freaking, and she loves it. She said, in fact, she said, you know, people on her floor are starting to print to it and stuff. And I'm like, well, you know, start a, start a collection cup. So if they, if they burn through your tone. You know, I'm thinking between the speaker and printing for people, I think she could set up a small business on her floor. And, you know, I have more power to her. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. So there you go. Uh, I, you know, so this next cool stuff found is something that I found out about because they were sponsors of TMO. They sponsored the, um, uh, the website. And then they're also currently sponsors of our small business show over at businessshow.co. But it really is a cool stuff found. And it's an app called timing at appropriately timing app.com. And it's really a multi-purpose app. You can use it in sort of what I'll call. What's the right way to say it? In intentional mode, where you tell it log time doing these things, right? And that's handy and okay, great. But so much of what we do is kind of jumping around. And wouldn't it be handy to be able to go back in time and say, Hey, how much time did I spend working on that document inside pages? That's what timing does. It pulls it all together and historically creates this. And then not only would this be good if you're like running a business like you're talking about Skyler doing, but also it's great for sort of tracking, you know, how much time did I spend working versus, you know, messing around today? And it'll it knows what not just that you were actively in Safari, but, you know, that you were on, say, Google Docs versus Facebook or whatever. You know, it's pretty cool. So you got to check it out timing app.com. That's a that's the the other cool stuff found. And if you're a listener to the small business show because they're a sponsor, they actually have a deal and that sort of thing. So maybe, maybe, maybe you want to check that out too. So all right. One last cool stuff found, John, from John, but not you from listening. As far as you know, right? That is true. That would be interesting under a good daily. Yeah. So he says, since Telnet went away in the terminal, and this is true as of High Sierra, the Telnet command is no longer in the terminal. And for those of you that don't know what Telnet did, what you would use it for is you would type Telnet, Telnet space, the name of a server or an IP address space, and then the port that you wanted to connect to. So I routinely if I needed to see if our like if I was doing something and needed to see if our web server was up, I would do Telnet space www.macobserver.com space for 43 because we run a secure web server. So it's like connect there. Does it answer? Yes. OK, cool. So it answers if there's a problem. It's it's beyond that. Right. It's it's answering. And this can be a handy thing from a troubleshooting standpoint. But they deprecated it and removed it from the default. That's terrible because it really was a very basic network. TCP IP network socket test diagnostic tool. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's not what it was built to be used for. It was actually built. No, but that's what we all used it for. I mean, I did the same thing. Yes. And so if you go to web server, you type get space slash and then it'll show you the web page. And it's like, oh, is my web server working? Or as you pointed out, just the just the fact that it responds saying, oh, I see somebody there. It's like, OK, well, it seemed to be working at some level. Right. At some level. Correct. Yeah. And and really, it was built to log in to a server in in a non secure way. And that's why it was deprecated because they're like, you should be using something like, say, SSH that gets a secure shell to another server. But again, we all learn to use Telnet in this alternative way. And here's the thing. He says, I found a command that does exactly this and appears to even have been meant for this purpose and for other network purposes. That terminal command is net cat, any TCAT or abbreviated N.C. He says you could check for a port and do something like N.C. Space dash VZ dub dub dub Mac observer dot com space for 43. He says this allows me to check the port and see if it is listening. And what's cool is you get all sorts of information about the connection. You don't get to interact with the connection like you could with Telnet, but you get it tells you all sorts of things about whether it answered and how it answered and and and what the return port was and all this stuff. So pretty cool. Now, so thank you for that. Listener John, if you want to tell that on your Mac, you can get it back. And of course, I got it back right away after I upgraded to high Sierra because I went to the terminal and type Telnet to do something. And it was like, you know, it's not there. And so the very next thing that I did was I typed brew space install space Telnet because I already have homebrew installed on my Mac and boom, then Telnet was installed. And if you don't have homebrew installed on your Mac, it's pretty easy to install. Just go to brew.sh. There is literally one command on that page that you copy and paste into your terminal and it will set up homebrew as a package manager. And you're good to go from there. Or John, maybe there's another way to install homebrew. Well, there's a different tool you can use, though. I think the installation is straightforward, but if you would like a gooey interface to homebrew, there is a dandy little program. And the icon is a piece of cake with cherry on top and whipped cream and chocolate. Oh my gosh, this looks delicious. That's a nice icon, but it's called cake brew. And they have a really nice looking cake. So if you want a gooey way to approach homebrew, there you go. And I'm going to toss in yet another thing here. So just a very quick tool that you can probably. Access. Through homebrew to look at ports on a remote machine is called NMAP. And that's all I'm going to say. NMAP, you could spend your entire life there are books written about NMAP. So NMAP is a very comprehensive tool for interrogating a remote computer. Now, be careful if it's not your computer, because what it does may appear to be hostile or overly, overly TMI. Got it. It's like, the thing is, it basically, it can, if you set it up that way, we'll basically ask a machine, hey, tell me all the ports that are open. Now, some people again, may view that as a hostile action. But the command to do that is very simple. I think it's like NMAP dash V and then the IP address. And then it basically interrogates a machine and says, hey, all these parts are open. So it will kind of complement what we just talked about. Actually, I thought you said NMAP, but I'm like, oh, no, you said net cap. OK, so net cap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So cool stuff that this is why we call it cool stuff found. It's not like we're geniuses. We just call it like it is. Well, we could be. We could be. It's possible, but I wouldn't necessarily equate the two. They they are, you know, it's it's it's a different thing. Yeah. Where are we going with this next? You know what I want to do? I want to talk about our second sponsor for this episode, John. And that is crossover from Code Weavers. If you go to Code Weavers dot com slash MGG, just do it. It's you get a 14 day free trial. Right. So have you done it yet? But then just go do it. Code Weavers dot com slash MGG MGG. You knew that 14 day free trial of crossover for Mac 17. And then when you're ready to buy after 14 days is up, use coupon code MGG at checkout, save 35 percent off of this freaking awesome piece of software that lets you run Windows apps on your Mac without having to run Windows. Like if you have to run a Windows app or if you want to run a Windows app, doesn't it sound better to do it without having to worry about running Windows? You don't want to run Windows. You want to run Mac OS, so keep running Mac OS and use crossover for Mac to run the Windows apps that you need to run. It doesn't work with everything, but it does work with a lot of things. And I got to tell you this, if you have tried this in the past and. Try it again, because if it didn't work for you in the past, they've made a ton of changes to this thing. I think it's going to work better for you now. It certainly worked better for me now. I to be perfectly honest, I had given up on it. Then when they kind of came back around, I was like, oh, yeah, all right, I should give this a fair shake. It's like, oh, this works great. You can like quicken and there's games that work with it and a lot of games, in fact, and Microsoft Office suite. I mean, you just just go check it out. It's free for two weeks. Code weavers.com slash MGG and our sincere thanks to the folks at Code Weavers for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's get into some questions here. Listener Yon has a path to head us down. He says, using high Sierra 10 dot 13 dot six, connecting a fire tablet through USB. I am unable to see the volume through the finder. Do you know if there are any terminal commands to mount the volume? So I want to talk about this in two different ways. First, we're going to just talk about in general, we're going to forget for the moment that we're talking about a fire tablet seven and we're going to talk about I connected a USB device and it doesn't appear in the finder. What do I do? And then we might have something specific about the fire tablet seven that might solve this very, very sort of narrow problem. So the first thing I would do if you if you put in a USB device and you don't see it mount and you expect it to mount like it's a disk or you know, something that should mount launch disk utility. Take a look there. It's possible that the disk is not sent to auto mount. This can happen. And if that's the case, you'll see it in the list in disk utility, but it'll be gray, light gray instead of like black or dark gray, highlight it and choose the mount button at the top of the screen. That might solve all your problems. You might be good to go. Or if it doesn't appear there at all in disk utility, well, then the next place to look is system profile or go to the Apple menu. My favorite shortcut for that is hold down the option key when you click the Apple menu or after you click the Apple menu and the about this Mac changes into system information. Go to that. That actually launches an app called system information, which I used to like to call system profiler. But, you know, these things change over time. And we have to, you know, we got to deal with change, whether we like it or not, because we're humans in there. Click on USB on the left hand side and look down the tree, which is sort of listed at the top and see does this device appear on your USB bus somewhere? Does the computer know that there is a thing plugged in? If it's not here, well, then that is a bigger problem, right? If it is here, but it doesn't appear in disk utility, it's not announcing itself as a disk that could indicate a hardware problem. Or like we're going to talk about in a minute here, might be something specific about the device. And there are some devices that do act different ways over USB. So you might, like with a, you know, with a tablet or something like that, it might be necessary to go in and say, I want or a camera. A lot of times with a camera, you have to tell it act like a disk. Now this is this is what your job is when I plug in a USB cable. And sometimes you just need to choose that from a menu. Another thing, but yeah, go ahead. So there is this tool that I love using and you probably know what it is. But here's a tool that can help you diagnose or at least track what your Mac thinks it's seeing, but it's called Hardware Growler. The nice thing about Hardware Growler is that it can show both detection of a USB device, but also if it's something that is disk like, you'll see that info as well. So it has different categories of things that it will show you. So I find this very useful. So for example, if you have like an external disk enclosure, when I plug one of mine in, it'll initially identify, it'll say, oh, yeah, this is a whatever brand enclosure. Sure. And then after a few moments, once it gets done with figuring out what it's talking to, then it'll be like, oh, well, the volume that I mounted. So it's giving you the the diagnostics at different levels. So I'd be curious what Hardware Growler would see when you plug in one of these Android based, as far as I know, fire tablets. It's a custom, it's FireOS, but it is an Android based thing. But it's very customized, at least it's been a little while since I've messed with the fire tablet. But yeah, but you found something for anyone that's having this very, very specific problem with fire tablets. You did find an app that that you need, right? Well, I found some advice, you know, so I searched for help from our friends here at Amazon and they were like, oh, yeah. Well, you know, if you have one of our things and you plug it into your Mac or PC, it should show up that if it doesn't and they redirect you, so basically saying important. Yeah. So first they have advice saying if you plug it in, you should see it on your desktop somewhere. OK, so it's like, OK. But then they're like, oh, by the way, this makes me laugh. If you want a Mac computer with OS 10, 10.5 or above or Windows XP computer, how old is this article? Oh, my gosh. But anyways, they make mention of a app called Android File Transfer app, which will. Sounds like it does exactly what you want here is it allows you to transfer files or see files. Well, I see, so if the finder doesn't see them, this this will talk to it in its own way and that appears to be what this article is stating. I'm trying to find the date on this article, but it's saying it works for fire tablet four, five, six and seventh generation. I don't know what generation they're up to now. OK, you know, you know, I had one of the very original fire tablets and actually I was I was really impressed by the thing. And and I know people, so we're I think we're at fire eight now, right? But no, no, where are we? Fire seven, fire eight, fire HD 10. No, these are sizes. I don't know if fire, fire 10. Yeah, so this could be useful. Yeah, I mean, I wish it I wish they date their stuff. Actually, I wish everybody would date anything they publish. Come on, people. Yeah, there's some there's some search engine optimization logic that says dating an article can be a bad thing. But I don't I don't subscribe to this. If you know what I'm saying, I mean, for the sake of version control or whatever, it's just like because once I started reading this, it's like making references to like ancient, you know, operating systems and like how current is this? But then there's this other line saying, oh, this is applicable to stuff for seventh generation product, which I think is yeah, wish. Yeah, yeah. All right, cool, fun. Good, I like it. Let's let's move on to Steve and Steve asks, he says, do you have any recommendations for financial software that could replace my ancient copy of Quicken 2007? I'm currently running Sierra 10.12.6 and one who eventually update to Mojave. Quicken 2007 is 32 bit and I don't think it'll survive the update. Do you know of any Mac based software, not web based that works similarly? I've done lots of searching, but haven't seen anything that doesn't either cost a small fortune or isn't terrible. Yeah, I like you, Steve. I was a Quicken user from years and years and years ago and migrating to a new package. I tried and, you know, it's tough because you think you want the historical data, even though you might not ever really dig deep into it. So so I'm with you and and perhaps the easiest solution for you is the solution we employed here in the Hamilton household, which was Quicken 2017 or Quicken 2018 for Mac. And you know what, it works really, really well. I don't have a problem with it. You can also use something like you like crossover, like we mentioned, to run the Windows version, which is a little more full featured. But ever since Quicken left into it, they have been a much better. It has been a much better product because it is, you know, singular focus now, right? They're not also thinking about QuickBooks and all this stuff. Quicken is just, you know, that's what they do there at Quicken. So, yeah, it's it's pretty good and I will put a link in the show notes to it. But that's that's what we use here and it works really, really well. And there's a new 2018 version that I honestly, I haven't upgraded to 2018 yet. I'm still on 2017 and it slurped in all of my old 2007 data and all of that stuff. I'm thinking that's still a possibility, at least I hope so. But but there you go. So, yeah, that's that's my that's my advice. What about you, John? Do you what do you use to track your your finances and all that stuff? Mint dot com. Oh, yes. Very good. And I believe that's an into a product. So mint is an into a product. Yeah, right. That's right. I use that. I think they offered they tried floating out a tax product. And it wasn't based on your income. A lot of that there are a lot of tax products where if your income is below a certain level, then you get it for free. Otherwise, you got to pay the money. Sure. But I remember them and I think it was another site I went to credit karma. I think they were offering tax services as well. So there's more people offering free online filing. The thing is, I tried one of them. I think it was the mint option last tax season and I punched in some data and the numbers that came up with just didn't match the. Shall we say creative way that I do my calculations? So I'm like, nope. Yeah. And then I did it on paper and it said, yeah, you know, you got to pay this much and then I use their tool. And it's like, well, you got to pay way more. And I'm like, yeah, I'll go I'll go with the paper. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I for taxes, I actually because we have the businesses and everything, I have an accountant that that does it for us. But and I do I do have the accountant. I pay the accountant to run and file our personal taxes as well. But but I always do them on my own, not because I don't trust my accountant, but for two reasons. Number one, it allows me to sort of prepare things for my accountant and have very intelligent conversations with him, because I know what's going on with the taxes and it makes life way easier for him to which then, of course, saves me money. But but it, you know, it also just kind of I want to have a sense of where we are. And, you know, I always learn things about deductions for my accountant. You know, he always is able to find more than than I do. And I'm pretty good. But but I use turbo tax here on my own to to process all that. And turbo tax is great because it lets you really be flexible with the way you do things. It, you know, it doesn't necessarily railroad you into into doing things only the one way. It's it's very flexible and lets you kind of do whatever you need to do. So so I like that. And I use the desktop version. There is an online version of turbo tax that is a little less flexible from from what I remember. But that's what my kids use, because they being students or whatever, they qualify for the free filing with with turbo tax. So they do the online thing. So yeah, that's good. And I applaud you for making them responsible tax paying citizens. They have to be they earn money. They get 10 or W two's and, you know, like the IRS will does not look too kindly upon people that because if you get a ten ninety nine or a W two, the IRS already knows about the income. Right. Right. But I've heard of people that have not filed for free. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But eventually that they'll get you eventually. Yeah. And then I mean, my kids don't have to pay very much in taxes. It's just filing. Yeah. Yeah. The fine. Well, both of them wind up with some self employment income. My sons are referee. And so that's all ten ninety nine. And my daughter did an internship for the past two years that so so they do. They have had to pay. They they understand the concept of finding deductions that will help keep them from paying too much and all that, which is a good lesson to learn sort of outside the scope of this show. But if you want to learn about that stuff, you know, I agree. There's a balance. So small business show. Business show.co. Pay as much pay as little as you can get away with, I think, is the is the the guidance side offer. Oh, yeah. Well, it's it's it's, you know, the way I always say it is, these are not my rules. So I, you know, find my best path through the rules that are written for this. And I don't recommend breaking the law, but, man, there are different paths through the rules that will work out to be very different financial financially in terms of the results. So yeah, I do. Speaking of financial results, I do want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers for this path that contributed for this past week. If you want to learn about MGG premium, of course, at Macgeekgab.com, premium is where you go on the twenty five dollar every six month plan. We had the following people contribute in the last week, either newly or in a renewal fashion. Eric WB, Jean R Bartek B, Bruce W, Randall S, Jim E, Jeff S, Daniel C, Doug S, Rob H, Bob P, Matt C and Tony B. Thank you to all of you, you rock. On the monthly plan at ten bucks, we have Ev The Nerd. Thank you, Nick S, Robert D, John B, but not this John B different. John B, you know who you are. Thank you. First you know. That's right. Beth B, that's correct. Ward J, Greg S, Olga P, Michael L, Bob P, but a different Bob P than the one I mentioned and thanked on the biannual plan, so distinguished. Jason A, Steven A, and those are all at ten dollars monthly. And then Christopher S now at twenty dollars monthly. Thank you so much to all of you. You all rock, everybody. Just by listening to this show, you rock and you know that because you contribute questions and things and awesome stuff. In fact, Christopher has a great question, which goes like this. He says, I have a late 2012 Mac mini with 16 gigs of RAM and a one terabyte hard drive that I recently replaced with a new 2017. I Mac for my wife. The Mac mini works fine. It was just getting long in the tooth. The question is, what is the best use of this old Mac mini moving forward? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations of how I can use it? I don't need it for desktop computing, as we both now have twenty seven inch IMAX at home and I have a mirrored version at work. All I carry now is an iPad to and from work for mobile use. All right, Christopher and Christopher also a premium member. So thank you for that. As for that Mac mini, you know, I think about, well, OK, it could become a server of some sort, right? Plex jumps to mind, you know, but in general, a media server. So that could be an iTunes server. It could be, you know, you could run a Kodi server on it. If you're so inclined, Kodi, you could run Mac OS server. If you want to share files in a more share files and resources, I should say, on your network in a more robust way, you could make it a time machine backup server. You could run own cloud or next cloud on it. We talked about those in the previous episode. Really, the the options are endless. But again, media server is kind of the thing that comes to mind because it is so relevant for so many people now to run something like a Plex server, especially if you've got an Apple TV for on your you know, on your TV, because you can get the Plex app for your Apple TV for and now look at, you know, all of your library. You could also do the same thing with iTunes and put all your movies in there and then browse them, you know, from an Apple TV or from your Mac or from your iPhone or whatever. So and it could also be another TV, right? If you put a display on that thing, you can. And that might might even have an IR port for remote control. But if not, you can get one and and then you can. Yes, right. You can and then you can run. I mean, it could be not just your server, but it could be the thing that displays on your TV like or on your screen, which then becomes TV. So lots of options. What do you think? And looking at those machines, so I have the twenty fourteen. Do I have what do I have here? I think I have the twenty fourteen, but the twenty twelve is very similar. The thing is, so it supports from what I see here. Yeah, I had a twenty twelve and then I got the twenty fourteen. I think so it has a SATA three port for the hard drive that you put in there. But I think it also has a E E SATA port. OK, because I'm looking at the description for the twenty twelve and then and later. And it looks like because you could get the option of getting a fusion drive, that would imply to me that the machine must have more than one hard drive port. So I think that class of machine has both. So what I'm saying is that you can put a drive in there. And unfortunately, and I just experienced this, I was hanging with my family over the weekend and my mom has an older iMac and it has a throttle hard drive and it just makes me sad. So even though it has a SATA three port, the rotational drive in there is limited to SATA two, which makes me very upset. So so if it doesn't have a higher performing drive, put one in there, it's it's kind of a pain to get into and out of. They they, you know, they could have done it, I would I would slow down on that advice. And first, well, I mean, like you said, only because it's a pain to get in and out of there. If if the drive doesn't need to be replaced and you're not doing something with it that requires a fast drive, I would frankly just leave the drive alone and or hang an external off of it. Because if you're going to put a media library on there, you might wind up wanting a lot more storage anyway. And it has USB three. So OK, I'm with you. It's just media is requires pretty pretty low bandwidth in terms of disk speed to, you know, I mean, you can even stream HD stuff and sort of 4K stuff for that matter. Any disk you've got in there is going to it's going to handle that. And and I'm just offering you this observation because when I got my machine, it had the most it had the same scenario is that it came with a one terabyte rotational SATA two throttled drive in a machine that has SATA three. So I'm just suggesting that if you're going to make if you're going to repurpose it, you may want to make it as. OK, so two points here. So yeah, I don't know. It needs to be fast. Yeah. But the USB three ports, which go at five gigabits, may do enough for you, combined with an SSD to give you the throughput that you want or even a good rotational drive. OK, I was going to say, really, I mean, the only reason not to go with an external rotational is noise. If it is going to be your TV, think about that because the rotational drive will make some amount of noise that, you know, again, once you get sound going and stuff in the room, it may or may not be noticeable. But but think about that. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and he's got 16 gigs in there. So that's that's plenty for anything. Right. Well, yeah. OK, so that was my only observation. Maybe you may want to think about your internal or external media options. Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. All right. You know, I'm not I don't mean to pick on you, John. But this is this is well, you know. But no, you bring up a really good point that I find for anyone advising people on, you know, technology. And I know we have a lot of consultants that listen to this show. And I do like to sort of acknowledge that and even cater to that at times. And this is going to be one of those times. It's really easy, especially in a scenario like this, right, to think about what would I do if it were mine and I were repurposing, you know, or or doing whatever it is, right? In this case, you know, if I were doing this and, you know, right away, John, you went to if it were mine, I would put a much better drive in. These drives drive me crazy and yada, yada, yada, right. And that's there's nothing wrong with that. But it is important when, you know, thinking about advising others like, OK, well, my I'm a geek, right? Self-professed, you know, card carrying. So maybe, you know, you're not. And it's always important to remember what the client's needs are and to separate that. And I, you know, I used to when we managed the team of nerds down at computer nerds in Austin, it was not uncommon, especially when I brought a new nerd on board, that I would get a call, you know, sometimes right away after they'd been out. But oftentimes it was, you know, six months, eight months later, somebody would call in and say, oh, yeah, I'm having a problem. You know, so-and-so came out and, you know, months ago. But I'm having a problem with this thing and I don't understand. And it's like, what's going on? Oh, OK, they installed it would be akin to installing something like, you know, I stat menus, which me as a geek, I can't deal with using a computer without having that. Right. But I know that that's me and I don't need to impose anything on my customers that they don't need and or request. So I always just make sure to think about that when you're, you know, when you're when I'm dispensing advice and my advice to all of you consultants is to consider the same thing. What's the what does the customer need? And and sometimes it does mean saying, hey, if this were mine, you know, I would also put a new drive in. And the reason you might want to consider that now, as opposed to down the road is putting a new drive in, replacing a drive once the machine is we're going to have to set it up anyway. Replacing the drive now means we get to set it all up on a new drive as opposed to, you know, six, eight, you know, 12, 18 months down the road. Oh, we need a new drive. OK, now we've got to take this thing. It's not that big of a deal. You carbon copy cloner it over and whatever. But but it's always good just to, you know, frame the I have to frame it for myself so that I'm not imposing my wishes on my customers. I tell them what I would do, explain all the options and then stop and listen to what they want and then just do it. So there you go. And a lot and there have been times where it's like somebody says, yeah, I hear you. I want to choose plan B, even though I'm saying plan B is a bad idea. It's like, OK, that's fine. Let's start. All I'm going to say is that the reason I did I said what I said is because I had upgraded my parents 2012 iMac, which had a SATA 2 throttle drive. It was an El Capitan and things every now and then when when I'm at their place, I check the machine out and I'm like, you know what? El Capitan, that's that's or actually I think had Yosemite and I'm like, you know what? It may be time to upgrade it. The thing is, dude, the upgrade took 45 minutes. In this case, and it's because it was a clunky, rotational throttle drive, in my humble opinion. Fair, it should have happened a lot faster. And I was just like, oh, gosh, I wish we had ordered this thing with a better drive. Yeah, for sure. Oh, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's still fine for what what they use it for, which is mostly photo management and all that and email. It's fine. But it just made the upgrade process incredibly time consuming. Yeah, versus. And that and that's like valuable stuff to to share, like, OK, that we can stick with the drive that's in there, but there's going to be all these things that might really the speed of this thing might really become a factor or maybe not, right? You know, and so that's that's where your expertise and your history and all that comes in. So all right now, while we're on the subject of rotational drives, John Doug had a question. He said, what is the current guidance of using carbon copy cloner on a destination APFS rotational drive back in March? The guidance was no, but with Mojave supporting fusion and other rotational drives with APFS has that guidance changed you using APFS as a destination seems to show advantages if it's solid on rotational devices. So yeah, I'm eager as well to take advantage of the benefits of APFS on my external drives, right? The malleable storage blob where you can it's not even repartitioning. It's just, you know, reassigning storage back and forth on an external drive, especially can be a benefit, right? You know, I think there's going to be some weirdness with that when it comes to rotational drives, because things really are laid out physically on the drive. So I'm curious to see how APFS is adapted to do that. APFS really isn't built in that sense for rotational drives. So I'm curious how that works. You know, I think officially I'd still say weight. You know, but, but that said, you've had decent luck, right, John? So the thing is I recently made a change in my setup, but I would say for maybe not a year, but at least several months I've been running using carpet cop a coloner APFS external rotational drives to do my backup. OK. And I have not received any complaints from Drive Genius or Drive Pulse, which I used to. But I think that was a bug in the OS. So that the OS was saying, well, there's something wrong. And so Drive Genius was like, oh, well, the OS says there's something wrong. So I'm going to tell the user there's something wrong, even though there wasn't anything actually wrong. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, right. OK. Because the thing is in a carpet copy cloner has a it's kind of hidden, but there's an option that basically does a verification. And it's called I think it's called find and replace corrupted files is an option when you create a backup. And I think they call it like backup integrity. But basically what it does is every now and then it's like, you know what? Let me compare what's on the backup to what's on the machine. And if there's anything that's different, I'll tell you about it, which to me was the test of is there anything really wrong? And this test never came up and said there was anything there was any discrepancy between the source and the destination. Sure. So I'm like, the the message is is a lie. Yeah, a lie. No, it's a lie. Well, I was doing what I thought. But but then also so you would ask me also, Dave. And so that's why I said I didn't entirely answer the question. She were like, have you ever booted from an externally PFS? Rotational drive. And my answer is no, I have not. No, I don't think you can with up until Mojave. I think I can. I'll tell you why I think I can. Here's why I tell you I think I can is that if I go to startup disk, I see that drive, even though it's not mounted in my startup disk. I'm convinced if I tried to boot from it, I could. You should test that. I thought I'm going to test it. All indications that I've gotten in that, yes, it shows up in startup disk. To me, that's a pretty strong hint that it's bootable. If it shows up, I would agree with that. I thought I had heard that that it would it would not do it with with high Sierra, if you put it also and also explicitly. Carbon copy cloner says. Right on the screen for the backup task, barring any hardware compatibility problems, the destination volume should also should be bootable. So the thing is, everybody thinks that it should be bootable. And I think it even copied over the recovery partition. You know, that's one thing the carbon copy cloner still does. So yeah, I am fine. It's going to be homework. I'm going to put it on my to do list and I'll report back next week. But I'm cool. All indications are that it's at least certain tools and maybe the OS itself don't freak out over a APFS rotational external encrypted, by the way, when I formatted it. Yeah. All right. We'll circle back to that. So we have some questions about cable modems and let's dive in. So Harvey starts us. He says. You were recently discussing the variables affecting internet speeds with an ever so brief mention of routers, speaking of which, I am using a Doxus 3.0 cable modem. It's an era surfboard SB 1641 or 6141. He says, for my Comcast Internet blast service, I regularly receive letters from Comcast urging me to upgrade my modem for faster speeds. But Comcast tech support told me that switching to a Doxus 3.1 modem would not increase the speed of my connection. Can you resolve this contradictory advice? And he says that Comcast blast speeds should be 250 down and 10 up, which means it's a little bit more than that because Comcast actually provisions things a little bit higher so that, you know, you would get the speeds that you're supposed to get. And sure enough, he says his wired speed test get him 255 down and 11 up. And whatever he's using to test Wi-Fi gets him 202 down and 11 up. So would a Doxus 3.1 cable modem help? And the answer that the tech is giving you is correct. You are getting your full speeds with your existing modem. So if you were to remain with Comcast blast service, you would not get faster speeds. The same provisioning profile or at least the same limits would be installed on the modem and you would still get 250 down and 10 up or 255 down and 11 up, whatever it works out to be that. That would be what you would get. There are two benefits to a Doxus 3.1 modem. Number one is the ability to connect to what is it? O F D M John or O D F M. It's a completely different signaling method that 3.1 brings. But it is backwards. All these modems are backwards compatible with the old signaling methods. And with Comcast anyway, you would use that it would take advantage of that on the downstream to get you up to gigabit speeds. But only if you buy the gigabit package from Comcast and then they install that profile on your modem. So if you stay with the same profile, it doesn't matter what kind of modem you have the second benefit, which will affect everyone. No matter what you are doing, if you buy a Doxus 3.1 modem, all the cable labs, which sets the standards for cable modems, said in order to call your modem, Doxus 3.1, you have to use this new signaling and queuing method called Doxus Pi D, Doxus D O C S Y S I S dash P I E. And essentially what that does is goes a great way towards completely alleviating any upstream buffer bloat because cable modems prior to Doxus 3.1 are awful at this. And so putting a Doxus 3.1 modem like for you, John, if you put a Doxus 3.1 modem in, even though your provider does not offer 3.1 service, you would still take advantage of this upstream buffer bloat. Potential fix is essentially what it comes down to. So so no, you won't get faster speeds, but you might get something if you're having buffer bloat problems that said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend an upgrade unless you're having specific issues. But if you are going to buy a new cable modem, thinking about a 3.1 modem has some advantages, including, of course, down the road, you could just upgrade to gigabit and you're good to go. So that's that's my thoughts on it. How about you, John? I'm sitting tight. So I, you know, as I mentioned before, but if you didn't hear that episode. So the thing is, at some point, my provider, which I'm pretty happy with. So it's a cable vision or a cable vision optimum online. They have another name. It's like all these guys have like three different names. I don't know what's up with them, even yours, right? Is it Comcast or is it Xfinity? Yeah, they're trying to rebrand to Xfinity. Good luck. It's a rebranding is tough, man. Yeah. The thing is, was there anything wrong with the old name? I don't know. But anyways, in their case, at some point, I saw a charge on my bill saying modem rental fee. And I'm like, well, where'd that come from? I haven't paid that since I started with you guys, like, like over a decade ago. They're like, well, yeah, because you changed your class of service, we were going to charge you. And I'm like, OK, well, went online and actually I went to their store and I was able to purchase an Eris cable vision branded. It actually has optimum printed on the modem. So it's a deal, you know, so it's one especially made for them. And I think I got it for 100 bucks and it's Docsis 3.0. And it handles the current packages that they offer. I think the maximum they offer now is 400 down and 50 up. So Docsis 3.1 from them doesn't make any sense. So right now they don't offer 3.1. Yeah, exactly. Right. So I'm so I got exactly what I need at this point in time and I'm not paying the monthly rental fee. So all right. And then Scott asks if I am going to get a Docsis 3.1 modem, which one do you recommend? He says I'm seriously thinking about upgrading to Docsis 3.1 through Xfinity slash Comcast. Since my 200 megabit service promotion ended and jumped 20 bucks, that means I'm only about $24 away from the one gigabit service. Hard not to give that serious consideration. And for sure, for me, it was a $17 delta whenever it was that I upgraded and was like, oh, yeah, that's easy. Short money. Let's go. There are essentially three Docsis 3.1 modems out there right now that you can get as a consumer. There's a there's a fourth. Netgear actually makes a home gateway device, which is a cable modem and there I think it's a it's a Nighthawk router. I think it's a tri-band router. I mean, it's it's pretty hooptie. But in terms of just yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. In terms of just cable modems, there are three. Right now, John, you are hearing me across our Netgear CM 1000, which is their Docsis 3.1 modem. But I've also tested the Ares SB 8200 and the Motorola MB 8600, both of which all three of them work extremely well. There are some people that might argue that Motorola's tech, which is really built by Zoom electronics, but that Motorola's tech is better than the other two in terms of the way it negotiates connections and headroom. But, you know, the reality is that I don't have congestion problems here, so I'm not sure I would ever notice needing that kind of headroom. And and and mine, the way Xfinity does it is. I only connect to the OFDM channel on the downstream. All my upstream is so it's Docsis 3.1 on the downstream for my gigabit connection. And then Docsis 3.0 on the upstream. And it gives me, I don't know, they say it's a thousand down. It's more than a thousand down, but, you know, I use a single gig e port. So there you go. A thousand is where it maxes out. Thousand down and 40 or 35 up. I get I think I get 42 up or something like that. So yeah, any of those three really, honestly, at this point, I would look at the price. I'll put links to all three of them in the show notes. And you can you can choose from there. But that I mean, it shouldn't make a difference because standards are standards, but then standards aren't always standard. So I guess the bottom line is, I mean, you, you know, get on the horn and ask them, say, which one do you guys like? In my case, they had a co-branded one with the logo. So it was like pretty straightforward. It's like, you know, I found no compelling reason to not get the heiress, whatever model they recommended, because it seemed to be a fine modem and it was a hundred bucks. Yeah, again, it's some providers. It's more than just the standard, though. It's the it's the hardware that's built into it, right? And and so that that that is different from manufacturer to manufacturer. They take the hardware, they build software and then they. Oh, no, I get it. I'm just saying just check with your provider because they operate the gate, even though they should let you use any standards compliant modem. They may have a problem with this one or that one. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. These three are certified by Comcast. So you can go buy them on. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then almost every provider has a list of approved modems. And sometimes we'll hear stories where they get a bit too aggressive about what you can only get the smaller, the smaller. Yeah, yeah, dude. But I think the major providers are are pretty cool. And like in my case, yeah, I mean, heiress is a, you know, world brand. I mean, it's, you know, it's probably going to work just fine. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it is worth checking the list. I'll put the Comcast list on the. Well, it's you go to mydeviceinfo.exfinity.com. I think is is where you can go and it will. They know it's a it's an, you know, you've peaked my interest because I think I may have some time to maybe research some alternative modems here. There you go. Like I said, next trade show we go to. It's like, hey, you guys got anything? Yeah, cool. You think it'll be better than. Yeah, right now. Right. And then the third question we have or topic that we have on the cable modem path here is from Karsten. He says over the last few years, there have been discussions about cable modems, routers and so on. I have a question that I do not believe has ever gotten answered. Do I have to reboot my router if I replace my cable modem? He says, Dave, with all your cable modems that you've tested, did you just hook up a new cable modem to your router? And it was fine or did you have to reboot your router as well? He says, like you, Dave, I use a Synology RT2600 as my main router connected to the WAN port is currently a 10 year old Motorola modem, which is then connected to Spectrum slash Charter Cable. Says my new modem is a Motorola MB8600 DOCSIS 3.1. And he says, I he says, my plan steps are to power off the old cable modem. Yes, I would agree with this. Disconnect the coax cable from the modem and the ethernet cable. Yep. Connect the new cable modem and connect coax and power. Connect the new cable modem to ethernet to my router. Power on the cable modem and then call Spectrum to add the new cable modem to the account because with them it requires a phone call, wait for provisioning and then boom, I'm online. He says, so here is where the rub is. Will the cable modem see the router? Yes, will the router be OK with the new MAC address on the WAN port and just accept it? Will it freak out because it expects to talk to the old one? So here's the thing. Once you unplug the ethernet port from a device, it should completely forget about what was previously plugged into that. And more specifically, when you plug a new device in, it's going to negotiate up front fresh. Now, so no, the answer is you don't need to reboot the router. At the very least, there might be a time in this process where you need to pull the ethernet cable from either the router or the cable modem. It doesn't matter which. Give it a second, then plug it back in. Why? Because the cable modem, when it's in provisioning mode, may deliver a different IP range to your router than it will once it is up and running in normal, fully operational mode. And you can either wait for your router to realize this and get the new IP address and new IP range. Or you can you can just unplug and replug ethernet and then it will reset because it says, oh, this is a brand new thing. Let's let's take a look. Now, that's the router. The cable modem on the other side is very particular. And once a cable modem hands out an address to a device, in this case, your router, it will, in most cases, especially for residential service, stop and will not hand out addresses or will not allow any other device to transmit data across it. Until the cable modem is rebooted. And why is this relevant? Well, with Comcast, you don't do the phone call. You can, I suppose, but you register your new cable modem with your account online and you do it across the cable modem. They have a whole provisioning web page and it's great. But it gets a little wonky trying to do this with a router in between your computer and the cable modem. So what I recommend for anybody that's a Comcast customer and he's not, he's a, like you said, a spectrum slash charter customer. So in this case, you're going to do the phone call anyway. You don't need to worry. But to provision the modem with Comcast, what I've found to be and I've done a lot of cable modem testing and switching them out and all that, the simplest thing is to plug my computer directly in via ethernet to the cable modem, go through the whole provisioning process. That way, I'm not dealing with a router that's trying to overthink things. Once the provisioning is done, I unplug my computer, I plug the cable into the router and I reboot the cable modem. When the cable modem comes back up, its memory is wiped in terms of what devices it's seen. Then it sees the router and never doesn't try to hang on to the computer. So hopefully that helps. But it's the it's the modem that you would want to be power cycling if anything in this process, not necessarily the router. There you go. That's my that's my advice on this. No, I'm with you. And that's actually the experience that I had because I bought a kind of co-branded modem. Yeah. You know, like you said, just, you know, turned every bit, you know, shut everything down, disconnected the old one, unscrewed the cable, screw in the new cable, powder it up. And the first thing that happened is, you know, I was running, I guess, Safari. I just want to rewind. You said shut everything down. You just mean to shut the modem down. You left your route. Correct. I'm sorry. Correct. That I just wanted to clarify. Yep. OK. Cool. So in this case, yes. So power down the cable modem, disconnect all the cables from it, put the new hook up the new one, hook it up to the router, in this case, an hero. And then as soon as I ran Safari, it's like, oh, something's different. And it's like, yeah, I kind of noticed that you had something with this MAC address, which is the hardware address of the old cable modem. And it's like, now I see this new thing. It's like you want to, you know, switch over. And I'm like, yeah. And that was basically all I had to do. That's awesome. I think because it's one that I purchased from them. So they knew the MAC address of it are ready. And yeah, but I mean, I was actually shocked. I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's like this is how it should always happen. Yeah. Here's your old device. Here's your new device. You want to try and then I return, you know, the old modem that, you know, they wanted money for every month, mailed it back to him and everything was fine. That's great. But it was it was such a smooth process. So I think you're going to run into that with pretty much any major national. That's good to hear that you were able to do it directly. I didn't have to deal with anybody. I didn't have to deal with a person which I have had to do in the past. I'm like, OK, we're going to do the provision thing. They're like, yeah, what's the MAC address? And I'm like, oh, dude, couldn't you automate this? And they did. Well, and it's nice to hear that you were able to do it without removing your router from the equation. That that has not been consistently has not been my experience with Comcast. It sometimes it works out. But when I'm testing lots of different things, I made a power cycle that just for good measure. From what I recall, I didn't have to. That's great. That's great. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah, that's cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, because they want to, you know, they don't want their people on the phone for trivial stuff like this. All right, now I'm going to share a piece of advice and this definitely falls into the don't get caught realm. So Comcast for me here, we happen to be fortunate in a lot of ways, right? But in terms of Comcast, we are in the Boston market here in New Hampshire. And Boston and San Francisco are the markets that Comcast really prioritizes both in terms of testing new things, which is why I have gigabit service available here and had it before most people before it was an option for most. Now, I think it's it's fairly common, perhaps not everywhere, but in a lot more places. But we get new stuff and they also don't mess with us here. There's a lot of, you know, Comcast headquarters is is in Massachusetts and there's a lot of Comcast employees and things like that. So they don't like to mess with things, especially in terms of. Bandwidth caps, so. But I figured something out that might be valuable to those of you that do have bandwidth caps. Comcast does not have a I think their limit on the number of cable modems that can be assigned to your account is three. So it's not one, it's three and they are automatically rotated. Right. So if it sees one, that's on your list and it will drop off, you know, the oldest one that it hasn't seen. But but for me, you know, I was I was rotating through cable modems like I was changing them faster than I changed my underwear for a little while there, right, because I was testing all these Docsis three one modems and all that stuff. And I realized that even though we don't have a bandwidth cap, I can look in the Comcast interface on online and see how much bandwidth I've used. And I happened to look after I went through this, you know, cable modem round robin kind of thing. And it said that I had used like, you know, whatever, I don't know, you know, four gigabytes of data or something like that. I was like, Oh, that's not how much I've used. I've used, you know, perhaps a terabyte and a half in the last month because I know what my usage is like and it was looking for the usage on an old modem that was assigned to the account. And I had essentially just confused it unintentionally by, you know, cycling through these these modems. And I think I I think I had put the whatever it was the netgear one on and then tried the heiress and then tried the Motorola and, you know, kind of bounced back and forth. And then I wound up with the netgear. But for whatever reason, it was saying, well, the newest one that you tried was, I don't know, the heiress. And so we're going to, you know, that's the one we're tracking your usage from. And and that lasted for a long time until I was on the phone with tech support about something completely unrelated. And they're like, what is going on here? Like, I don't know, I'm just, you know, Joe, customer, what do I know? And yeah, well, they don't know. And I'm sure they have a note on you. I have no doubt, man. Dave Hamilton. I have no actually I'm pretty sure they do have a note on me. But they've confirmed that in the past for other reasons. But but, you know, the guy was like, we need to like this. Can you do you mind? And I'm like, no, no, that's of course I don't mind. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Don't mess with it, man. Because it doesn't matter for me. And so now they are tracking, you know, their bandwidth is actually accurate on that. But if you happen to be in an area where they do have bandwidth caps and you are someone who might be hitting those, it's possible that if you had an old cable modem and a new cable modem, you might be able to get the system to stop paying attention to the bandwidth you're using. I have no idea if intentionally in fact, I'm pretty sure that intentionally doing this might constitute something, you know, along the lines of a civil tort. But, you know, I don't think Comcast is really going to spend a whole lot of time hunting that down. So I just share this information. It's like a tool, whatever you choose to do with it. Don't get caught. Yeah. So there you go. Fun. As far as I know, my company has, I mean, I'm sure internally they monitor bandwidth, but I've never been alerted to or exceeded any sort of data cap. Do they have a way of seeing what bandwidth they believe you're using? OK, OK. Well, that's a good that's a good sign. Oddly enough, for the Wi-Fi that they offer, if you're a subscriber, so they also offer Wi-Fi throughout the same area that they offer cable, that they'll show the bandwidth that you've used to make you realize, you know, how much money you've saved versus naturally. Yes, of course, versus your your cell company. But yeah, I'm not aware of. I may want to ask them, it may be hidden somewhere. I mean, I can see the stats on the cable boner, but that's, you know, that's kind of hard to extrapolate. Right, right, right, right. I mean, it shows the number of pieces of data that have been sent and received, but it's on 24 different channels. The ERO does not show monthly data usage. So, yeah, you don't have any way of seeing that. You know, I think they could, of course. So, you know, so I think we're both running the ERO Plus package. Yes, I mean, they do have and they send you a monthly report. Personally, I would like a bit more detail as to what's happening because it shows the number of events that it's looked at. So the thing is, it's looking at all my traffic. So in theory, it should be able to report the amount of traffic being sent and received if it's monitoring it, right? Yeah, yeah, like my my Synology Router, which is what I use at the house, I have ERO Plus on my dad system. And I actually am, yeah, well, I mean, you know, I bounce around. I'm actually right now employing the new TP-Link Deco as my mesh because, you know, I got to test these things. But but the Synology Router, yeah, it tracks my bandwidth usage across the month and shows me. It's just super handy because I can see which computers are using it and how they're using it really breaks it down and it's awesome. But I mean, it sort of like doesn't really matter. It's pretty good. So anyway, nice that, my friend. Yeah, where we in? Fun and the band must have been sweating out there. So could you on Labor Day? I know, I know, I know. You should pay him triple time. Yeah, I will. I'll make sure of that. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com is the place where you can. That's the address you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff down, whatever it is, send it in. Send it in. We want to hear. Yeah, you could also send them in to feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's true, you know, and I know it's weird, but we even have a 30 mil address. It's feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Just in case the other two don't work, like, you know, if those lines are busy, then you need the third one. And that's that. And and if all three lines are busy and you really want to jump to the top of the queue, premium at MacGeekGab.com is available to all of you who are premium subscribers. So feel free. In fact, I encourage you to use that if you're a premium subscriber and if you're not and you want to become one. And then that's something that's possible for you. Great. We'd love to have you. If it's not of interest or possible, that's also OK. It's like, you know, it takes all of us to make up the MacGeekGab family. And that's a beautiful thing. Two, two, four, eight, eight, eight. Geek is the number that you can call and leave us a voicemail or text. And John Geek is four, three, three, five. Indeed, I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth. I want to thank all of you for visiting the MacGeekGab forums at MacGeekGab.com slash forums. Great activity there. It's good. Let's let's let's even let's kick it up a notch. Let's let's try. We've done it before. But if you all ask your questions on the forums, we can do an entire show of questions that came from the forums, which would be awesome. So that would make me really happy. So MacGeekGab.com slash forums that would be great to to do. And of course, thank you to all our sponsors. Of course, crossover from Code Weavers at CodeWeavers.com slash MGG Smiles PDF pin at Smilessoftware.com slash podcast Other World Computing at MacSales.com Barebone Software at Barebones.com Ring Ring.com slash MGG some good deals there. Good stuff. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks, on this Labor Day or after Labor Day, because that's probably when you're listening. It's always fun. We always appreciate it. John, three words, three words. What are they? Oh, not those three words, but the other three words. OK, we'll talk about the other three words at some point in the future. But the three words I think Dave is referring to is don't get.