 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab episode number 649 for Sunday, March 19th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, and your cool stuff found all with the goal of us sharing and learning at least four new things. Now, we'll share more than four things. The goal is to learn at least four of them as new things when we get together. Right? Are we clear on that? Clear? Yes. If you're not clear, we've just taped this for you, just in case you missed it, so you can rewind and go back. Sponsors for this episode include Other World Computing at maxsales.com and Barebones Software at barebones.com. We'll talk more about both of them in a little bit here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. I'm here in Fruville, Connecticut. John F. Braun. How are you, John F. Braun? Good week for you and all that? Yeah. Just, yeah? Just meth? I suppose. All right, good. Yeah. I'm plotting my next moves against your neighbors. Yeah. Yeah, you saw that. You're meddling neighbors. It's always those meddling kids. You're the guy. You're the guy. Yeah, they wrote Scooby-Doo about you. That's it. But we're going to find you though in, you know, you're going to be like in a creature mask or whatever for Halloween and you're going to be railing against those meddling kids. I have a mask and I have a mystery machine. Well, there's a lot of mystery about you, my friend, you know. I think that's true. That's true. Okay. We've got some cool stuff found, stuff to go through and we'll start with Russell. Russell says, I've only been, oh, wait, wait, wait, different Russell. I have two things from Russell. Actually, it's two different Russell's. Russell says, regarding your tip about private browsing mode for running two Google accounts at the same time with separate cookies in the last show, related to that but slightly tangential is a cool stuff found at FluidApp at FluidApp.com. Surely you know about this. No, I don't know about this and stop calling me surely. He says it creates Fluid, creates native Mac apps out of websites. Each FluidApp you create, you can limit the domains that you can use within the app and the cookie store for each FluidApp is separate. It uses Safari or really WebKit for rendering, but the apps are proper separate apps. I've made FluidApps for my personal webmail, my work webmail, my feedbin.com RSS reader account, my Instapaper account and a few others. I can nuke all of the cookies in Safari proper, but my FluidApps stay logged in because they have their own cookies because FluidApps are native. You can launch them with keyboard shortcuts, such as through spotlight, launch bar, quick silver, etc. And you can command tab through your Mac apps and your FluidApps are right there, not stuck as tabs inside a browser. This is very interesting, John. Did you know about this? Kind of. Yeah. And it reminds me of a feature in the OS that we haven't looked at or I haven't looked at in ages. Because at the back of my mind when I looked at this, I'm like, wait a second, I thought the OS gave you a way to create kind of web like things. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? No. I rarely do though. So, you know, carry on and we'll actually probably get somewhere and learn something. So that's good. Well, I'm looking at the page here and it's, and it looks like the feature's still there. Well, as far as I can tell it is because I got a help page for it and the way to activate it is still in Safari. But it's a web clip widget. Are you starting to remember this here? Well, web clips are archives though. They're not live. I thought they were somewhat live and that a web clip widget, so it's something you create from within Safari. And then you basically highlight part of a web page and then what's supposed to do is create a little kind of connector, if you will, to a portion of a web page. I was thinking of web kit archive. Sorry. Yeah. Your web archives. Yeah. That's different. Sorry. Oh, yeah. So how do you do it? Well, where you start. All right. So you want to make sure that dashboard is turned on. So that's the first thing they say in this article. But then the rest of it starts in Safari. You go to the file menu and then you say open in dashboard and that sends you on a learning journey of creating this content. I'll have to revisit that because this looks way more full-featured, you know, that you're making a map. Fluid does. Yeah, right. Yeah, because it's a separate app. I wonder if web clip widgets are impacted by Safari's cookie store. So if you were to wipe out Safari's cookie store or to our point last week, if you wanted a web clip, you know, if you wanted some way of accessing a web page without it impacting all of the other cookies that you have in Safari, I wonder if a web clip widget would would do that. My guess is it would not. But it but, you know, you never know. So yeah, interesting stuff, man. All right. Well, there you go. There's two things right there. Yeah. Web clip widgets. I like it, John. Cool. Oh, I like this with the Earl. Cool. Oh, you're ready. Look at you. Yes. And John, of course, is talking about how we create our show notes here, which which we do in a live Google doc that not only John and I can edit, but actually you folks in the chat room, if you visit us at MacGeekGab.com slash stream during the show, you can find that too. And you can find out when we're in the show by doing a couple of things. You can subscribe to our calendar at at MacGeekGab.com slash calendar. You can follow us on Facebook. If you go to Facebook.com slash MacGeekGab, we always post an event for the live recording of the show. And if you have or I guess it's and or if you have our MacGeekGab app, which is, of course, available in the in the, you know, the iOS app store. From there, you can get notifications from us when not only the live stream is starting, but we're also doing notifications when the actual episode proper is out. I would actually love if you folks had ideas about other times you would like us to notify you. We certainly can. We don't want to pester you with things. So so you can let us know about that. In fact, at at Feedback at MacGeekGab.com, John. I think we had a connection problem because I thought you said Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. I said Feedback at MacGeekGab.com unless you're a premium listener and then you get a special email address to email us and you can find out all about MacGeekGab premium by going to MacGeekGab.com slash premium. And that will that will explain how you can support us directly. So good, good stuff. All right, John, we'll continue with cool stuff found after our little detours here with with John, not not you, but but listener, John, with with this next one, he says, for those not wanting to use terminal to create symbolic links, you'll remember we talked about symbolic links in the last show. Listener John says, I found a very nice GUI interface. And in fact, he certainly has. I think we've mentioned this or something very like it very much like it before. I think actually Bob Dr. McLevittis linked us to something called symbolic linker in the past. And that, in fact, is what John has found now. He says, what you do is you download this thing and you copy it. It's a service. You copy it to the library services folder when highlighting. And then after it's in there, when you're in the finder and you highlight a file or folder, the contextual menu in the services section now has create symbolic link as a service. So it's all right there, fully integrated into the finder. Very, very cool stuff. So there you go, right? You could put it in your main library services folder. You can also put it in home library services. I prefer to do it. And that's what I did when when I got this, because I like to have things sort of compartmentalized that way. If I have a problem, I can log into my test user account and it is as pure as possible. So whenever possible, I try to put things only in my user account. But but if you've got multiple people using the same Mac, then it actually makes more sense at times to put stuff system wide. Either the library services folder or simply the services folder. What do you think about that, John? I don't do much with services. I probably should. It's kind of a cool little way to keep the OS extensible, if you will. Yeah. And of course, you can access them from either. Well, yeah, there's two places. So it's contextual menu. And then I guess from the finder, you can do it or not. I'm sorry, file menu from the file menu. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yep. Yeah, I don't then a lot of apps will put handy dandy little services in that menu for you. Yeah, they will. Yeah, I see graphic converter, open PGP. Evernote, look at that. Drowning is my goodness. Yeah. So people already put things there for you. Those are probably in my system as versus the home directory. I think I looked at my home directory and there's nothing. There's nothing. Oh, OK. I have put anything in that directory. Right, right, right. Yeah, I have nothing on the iMac here in the studio. You're right. Yep, I've got nothing in the in the main one. But but I'm sure. Yeah, actually, that's that's interesting because the only my services, both of my services folders are empty. Save my main services folder has one thing and it's for the GPG services for Mac GPG, which is what I use for some of my encrypted email. We'll get to that actually. We might we might answer that question very, very quickly here. We might jump to that first once we get once we get through with cool stuff found, but but somehow these other apps are adding services without it being in that menu. It might just be because the app is running in the background or something like that. Right. And finally, it appears that you can set which services appear if you go to right on the enough keyboard and then shortcuts. And then there's a services category that I was just perusing. And not all of them are checked because I guess your services menu could spiral out of control if you had everything there. Yeah, a lot of that's a lot of stuff here. Oh, yeah, look at that. You want some handy little time savers, everyone? Check your services menu. Hey, yeah, save you time, save you money. That's pretty good. Your sanity. Oh, yeah. Huh. I like this. I just find I mean, you know, again, it's those kinds of things that you know are there, but they're not there. Yeah, you're right. System preferences, keyboard shortcuts and then services is a great place to go and look. Oh, good stuff, man. Really good stuff. And I do believe, yeah. So the reason it's there. So first, you'll be like, what's that doing there? Well, I believe you can customize the shortcuts if you so desire or can you not? No, it doesn't. Well, there's no. Oh, no, you can't sign a keyboard shortcut there. Yeah. Yeah, you can. So it shows you the shortcut assigned to it. And then if you'd like to change that, yeah, go for it. But you can also uncheck them so that they don't appear in in the menu, right? Isn't that right? Yes, sir. That's pretty good. I like that. Is that really? Is that really how it works? Yeah, sure enough. Look at that. You check it, uncheck it. It doesn't appear anymore, just like you would expect. Pretty good. Pretty good. Nice. Fine, man. Thank you for that. All right. Back to back to cool stuff found. We will go to Tony here and and Tony asks or Tony suggests, he says, I got behind in my podcast and just listened to MGT642. He says, I did a pretty exhaustive search a few years ago about the best grocery list app to find. And he says, my favorite is buy me a pie at, of course, buy me a pie dot com. It has a master list color coded and you can have multiple lists by store or whatever it is, whoever shopping, perhaps performance is fine and it doesn't have a lot of odd things like connections to menus. It's just a highly functional shareable list making app with a web interface as well. According to Tony, it is best in the class. So thank you for that, Tony. I like, you know, it's always good. It's always good. Fun stuff. Just do you use a are you have you migrated with the rest of us to using a grocery list app, John? No, no, OK, do it in my head. But sometimes it doesn't work like I told you, I realize the track, the track, a terrible tragedy this morning and that I didn't have any coffee left. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't have a coffee as a backup, caffeine backup, I have plenty of different types of tea. Well, that's good. That's good. All right. And then Everett wrote in and and says. Now, I'm not sure about you, but I would be lost without my Synology Disk Station. So I decided to ensure it. Did you know that square trade will ensure miscellaneous electronics? If you go to square trade dot com slash miscellaneous electronics, he says it gives me peace of mind knowing if it dies. I'm not out eight hundred bucks for a new DS 1815 plus. And that's great thinking. I actually never thought of square trade for that. But but, of course, they they they do. It's how it works. I went and checked it out a device that's eight hundred bucks. You can get a hunt. You can get three years of insurance for one forty nine ninety nine. Or if you want to add accident protection to that as well, then it's two twenty four ninety nine US dollars. So not inexpensive, but, you know, that's how insurance works. Right. You're you and the insurance company are balancing your risk back and forth. So yeah, good stuff. I like it. I like it. Pretty good, right, John? Yeah, I guess that's pretty good. So two things. One is the grocery store that I go to actually has a shopping list has a shopping list function within their app. Huh, maybe I'll try that. I think it ties into what they have on sale. So that's handy to see if your grocery store has a has an app. Maybe you could do a list there. But the second thing, Dave, I actually have some of my serious computing devices on my homeowner's insurance. Yeah, I give them I give them the, you know, the serial number, the device, you know, make up something as far as how much I think it's worth. Yeah. My laser printer is worth a thousand bucks, you know. Yeah, they might challenge that. But it's what I paid for it. But yeah, a lot of homeowners insurance will do a computing equipment sub thing. And I think I'm paying like tens of dollars a year. Yeah, you can. And with a lot of this stuff and it's not just your computers or your electronics, but you can have what they call scheduled property or listed property on your homeowner's policy. And that will oftentimes that will cover you at dollar zero for something. So it's it's usually separate. It can be separate from your deductible for for your entire house. And like John said, it's it's usually very inexpensive. I've got and again, you know, you'd have to check with your your homeowners or your renters insurance policy. But I've got things like my drums insured that way. And they are allowed to be used, you know, outside of the home for hire and for work and all of that stuff. And I'm still insured at dollar one, which is which is good, you know, because that that stuff can that kind of insurance can be tough to get for things like that. So so yeah, look into that. That's actually a really, really good, really good thing to check out. So OK. And then lastly, the other rustle that I was that I almost read earlier, which wouldn't have been too terrible. This is definitely a cool stuff found reprise, but it's always a good one. He says, I've been listening to your show for a couple of months. So you may have already covered this. This isn't anything new. But I came across it in someone else's web page years ago. It's field test mode on the iPhone. And and sure enough, you can now with field test mode, you can do some things, including altering the iPhone's display so that it permanently displays that your signal strength in decibels as opposed to the standard five bars slash dots. So we will put a link to Russell's post in in our show notes, because that's what we do. And then you can take it from there. But yeah, you you you type star three thousand one pound one two three four five pound star on your iPhone. And again, it's all covered in then Russell's post, but you can check it out. And I can confirm that this does. In fact, work. So good stuff. Thank you, Russell. I like it. Have you are you do you keep yourself in field test mode, John? Are you? Go normal. No, no, I played with it. And it's like, oh, OK, I get a finer grand indication of the signal strength. But I mean, if your signal sucks, your signal sucks. So I do like it more often than not. My a lot of times my display will say VZW Wi-Fi, I always that always tickles me when it switches over that where it's like, yeah, your cell signal is terrible, but your Wi-Fi is good. So let's let's do that on you. Then you also get at least when I'm on AT&T Wi-Fi, I get much higher definition calls than I do when I'm not in general. I mean, sometimes I get HD calling when I'm when I'm on LTE, but far more regularly, I get HD calling when I'm on AT&T Wi-Fi where the call quality is is like what we have here with Skype. It's just like totally crystal clear and much higher bandwidth. Do you experience that? There was one time I called our esteemed colleague, Katie Floyd, yeah, who I believe still does this Mac power users. Yeah, they do a great job with Mac power users. Yes. And I called her one time on my Verizon phone and she answered and I was honestly shocked that I'm like, oh, my gosh, this sounds awesome. Yeah. It was just like it was like, yeah, it was like hi-fi. It was just like a whole new world was opened up to me. I'm like, you know, I'm used to cell calls. Yeah, yeah, the old style, like 8K or whatever, you know, getting compressed and yeah. But it sounded, you know, as good as a landline. Yeah, well, much far, far better than a landline. Actually, it was better than a landline. Yeah, cell bandwidth is actually wider than a landline, even even crappy cell bandwidth. But but yeah. But yeah, unfortunately, and I think I tweeted this at them one time and I said something and they got back to me and said, yeah, that's what makes Verizon great. And I'm like, yeah, it'd be even better for work with other carriers. And they're like, well, yeah, we're it was supposed to we're getting we're there. I guess I'm working on it. We talked about this. It was it's it's supposed to have rolled out in a couple of cities already. And I think they say nationwide in the U.S. by the end of 2017, where we'll have intercarrier HD calling. But sweet. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. All right. I want to talk about our two sponsors here, John. And I'm going to start with the folks at Barebone Software. Of course, Barebone Software, the makers of BB Edit, and they also still make but are phasing out a product called Text Wrangler. Now, the difference between Text Wrangler and BB Edit was basically that Text Wrangler was and is a freely available feature light version of BB Edit. But for many, many people, Text Wrangler totally serve the purpose. So what they've done is they are moving into one product and it is just BB Edit, but the licensing changes. So now BB Edit, you can download for free. And for the first 30 days is in trial mode of everything, all the features. And then it scales back still for free. You can do a lot with BB Edit. And you can use it without purchasing a license in the same way that you would have used Text Wrangler for free. If you want BB Edit's complete feature set with their web authoring tools and other features, then, you know, you would you would go and pay the fifty bucks for a for a BB Edit license. And that's just how that works. So they've got a great FAQ on their website that sort of explains the difference between a what they call a licensed and an unlicensed copy of BB Edit, a free versus a paid copy. And then they also list the features that you get. But with with the way they're doing it now, not having BB Edit on your computer, there's no excuse. I mean, it literally is free. So go get it. And that way you have it. And when you need to edit text and do anything like that, you can do it. You can compare documents, you can count words. You can do multiple find and replace not just within one document, but across a folder of documents or any really collection of documents that you pull together. It's really, really great. So go check it out. Go to barebones.com and and we'll put a link to this great FAQ about the differences between free and or licensed and unlicensed versions of BB Edit. Our thanks to Bare Bones for sponsoring this episode. Another one of my favorite companies, and I truly mean this, and I'm totally thrilled that their sponsor is Otherworld Computing. Listeners to this show, now we mention them all the time, regardless of whether or not they're a sponsor. They haven't always been a sponsor of this show. It doesn't change anything. They make some fantastic products. They are the place that I would go if I needed RAM. I check them as, you know, kind of a first stop shop. If I need an external hard drive or even a case for an external hard drive that I have, they have what I need. If you need one of those newer tech drive adapters, right, where you've got external hard drives that you want to connect to your computer, but you don't want to have to put them in a case or take them out of a case when you're done. I know when I'm doing some troubleshooting for myself or for friends or for those of you that, you know, are out in the field serving clients when those newer tech drive adapters is absolutely, I mean, it is, it's worth its weight in gold and I think they're only like 30 bucks. So you got to go check that out too at maxsales.com. If you are a Mac Pro user, the Mercury Excelsior Pro Q is blazing fast PCI based storage up to almost 1,300 megabytes per second sustained speeds with up to two terabytes capacity. It's a PCI to SSD with a three year warranty. So you can check that out too. That's the Mercury Excelsior Pro Q. All of this, of course, available at maxsales.com. Yet another one of my favorite companies. I really love those guys and and thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's go to Cindy and Indy, shall we? John, still with me? OK, actually, you know what? We'll do Cindy and Indy and then we'll then we're going to jump to the the SMIME thing, the GPG thing, the email security thing, just so that we get there. But we're at Cindy and Indy. So let's do this. Cindy says my mother passed away more than two years ago. Since that time, I've been trying to log into her iHer iCloud account so her old iPad mini can be of use to someone. You know where this is going. I'm having no luck. I know her four digit code. And I'm fairly certain I used my email as her iCloud email since she had no need for email. She only used her iPad for looking at family members posts on Facebook. Yet when I need to get when I get to her security questions, it says her birth date is incorrect. But the heck? I thought I had set everything up and knew all the passwords, emails, logins, etc. So do you know of any tips or sites that you can send me to? I know this is a touchy subject, so I understand if you can't help, but I just don't know what to do before this $600 iPad ends up in the trash. So yeah, this is tough because you want to unlock this thing and free it from this iCloud stranglehold, if you will. The first thing I'll say, and I think you're past this point or perhaps it never mattered because maybe there wasn't any any real data on there. But if you don't want or need the data off of it, you and you probably have tried this, but but you can try doing a restore by connecting it to iTunes. You may need to put it into DFU mode and we'll put a link in the show notes as to how to do that. But that might just free it up and and get you past all of that. It's possible. So that excuse me, that's one way of doing of doing this. The other would be to bring it into the Genius Bar and basically explain to them exactly what you wrote us here. My guess is they will be able to help you with this. They'll confirm ownership and all of that of the device and then they'll just kind of free it up. But I think if you do a restore of the firmware onto it, especially if you start in DFU mode and especially since you know the passcode to the device, I think I think you're going to be able to just free this thing up on your own and wipe it clean and then you can do whatever you like with it. What do you think, John? Apple should be able to help. Yeah, I'm certain Apple will help with this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But but I think DFU mode and then restoring might even save you a trip to the Genius Bar. Don't you think worth a shot? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you can even tell Apple, look, you know, before I came in, if it didn't work and now it's in this weird mode, just tell Apple, look, I tried. I even listen to Matt Geek. And you know, then they'll they'll cringe. No, no, actually, no, the folks there always always really, really speak highly either. They don't know about Matt Geek or they speak highly of it and and either one of those is actually I prefer the latter, but but I can inform about the former so it's all fine. It's all good. All right. So that's that's Cindy and Indy. Anything else on that one, John? It's something we should look into at some point because I don't I was trying to find if Apple had a page. And this is called various things, an account custodian or a right, like, you know, Google has what they call an inactive account manager, which I guess is could be used for something like this. But I don't think there's really. And I remember one time I was actually looking at Apple to see how do I delete an Apple ID. I actually have an Apple ID that I haven't used in like decades and I just kind of let it slip into not being used. And one day I came across it and was able to reactivate it and I'm like, how do I delete it? And the thing is, you can't really no way. Yeah, officially. Apple does not offer you an easy way to get rid of your your ID. I think they have to intervene. So this gets into the issue of, yeah, what if, you know, someone shuffles from this mortal coil? How what do you do with that information then? Right, right. Totally. How do you get rid of it? Because it's a concern. You don't want that data hanging out, you know, on the on the Internet anymore. Yep, I don't see them. I mean, they have managing or Apple ID, but it doesn't it doesn't have a placeholder for the sort of scenario. So that's something I know our friend Allison did a presentation on strategies on dealing with this. The very least we should dig that up. Oh, sorry, bad choice words. We should so inappropriate. That's awful. We were talking about inappropriateness in the pre show. Yeah, I just walked right into it. You just walked right into it. Sorry. Yeah. My apologies for John. There you go. No, let's go to. So yeah, so I think I think just either either DFDFU mode or just a simple restore might even do it. But failing those two go to Apple. And I have no doubt they will be able to help you. They don't want you to be sitting on this this iPad that's, you know, unusable just because because of this scenario. So and and of course, our condolences to you, Cindy. Never easy. So OK, moving on to Scott and Scott has the question that we have referred to now three times. And that is you guys have frequently recommended GPG mail suite as a mechanism to secure emails sent through Apple Mail yet there are articles now on Mac Observer recently about using S Mime and how Apple makes this so easy. And indeed, Jeff Butts talked about a lot of this stuff. And we might even have him on the show to kind of do a little another deep dive on this stuff with us. He says, Scott continues, said, why should I use one over the other? I like the idea and simplicity of the built in S Mime functionality. And if that can obviate the need for the bolt on GPG mail suite, then why wouldn't I use it? Well, GPG has been reliable while waiting for updates has been excruciatingly painful and has kept me from updating to Sierra. Based on the article I read at TMO, I can ditch GPG and just use the built in function for the same level of security. Why would I not make the switch and have the advantage of Apple automatically updating their own email application instead of having to wait for GPG to get around to updating theirs? Yeah, you're totally you're absolutely on on the right track. Scott, I I have both installed, but I wouldn't just do GPG. I, you know, I have GPG installed because some of you folks like to use it. It is. I mean, all of these are cross platform GPG. It's just a different way of doing things. It's more more obvious. GPG is from 10 for. Oh, I'm losing it, John. And I think it's my fault. So I'm going to pause the show and we're going to dig into this and we'll be right back. All right. I think we're our connections. OK, we'll talk about that in a minute, but we'll let's finish finish your thought about about GPG, John, and then we'll then we'll talk about this this issue that we're having here. I'm GPG. I found the people that use that tend to be more hardcore privacy enthusiasts. Let me put it that way. Sure. How's that? And like you, I use both. But the thing is that they both have a we can both speak to this, but they have different models of trust. Yeah, well, you're right. But I'm more looking at it. And I think, you know, to keep it framed in Scott's question, like, what's the easiest thing to use for Apple users? And yeah, that's that's an easy one. Esmime is is absolutely it, right? Because not only is it natively supported on the Mac, it's natively supported on iOS. Now, as you know, on the Mac, you can bolt on this extension to Apple's Mail app for GPG mail. Yes, you have to wait for them to update to Sierra, which they've done. So you can update to Sierra now. But but, you know, you're you're kind of stuck on iOS. There is no native option. You have to run a separate client to deal with that. And there's some OK ones, but nothing stellar. So yeah, but but to be fair, Esmime decryption on iOS works great, perfect, awesome every time. Signing and encrypting a message with Esmime on iOS. The only the closest I get is when it realizes I want to do that and tells me I can't. But I've never been able to send an encrypted message from iOS with Esmime. And it's also hokey is that you would think it would be smart enough, but you actually have to like really burrow into your. Mail settings and then activate Esmime. And then I think you have to in addition say which certificate you want to use for the operation, which is kind of duh, because. Mail on you shouldn't even need to do that. It should be able to figure out. Oh, well, I'll use this certificate because you're sending, you know, it's from this person to this person. So I was this certificate. You know, it's like why why do you? Why is there even an option to explicitly state which one to use in iOS? It's just kind of a hack. Yeah. So by experience, it's been the same as yours. Getting it to do it has kind of hit or miss even in this day and age. Again, referring to our friend, Alison Sheridan over at Podfeet.com, she did a great tutorial a few years ago, how to set up Esmime on both Mac OS and iOS, OS 10 at the time and iOS. And and so we will link you to to both of those in the show notes here. Really, really good stuff. So I don't think that was the conclusion as well as good luck getting it to work on iOS consistently. Well, again, the decrypting and all of that works on iOS. Yeah. So at least at least you get that. But yeah, yeah. So there you go. There you go. OK, moving to listener Ken and Ken. Oh, actually, you know what? Let's let's talk about what happened here. So John's connection degraded. Now, this is the second time today that this has happened once was during the very beginnings of pre show. And and then it happened again just now. And so the first time it happened, it was obvious that one of us was having a connection problem. And there was all kinds of I was getting all kinds of receive packet loss from John. So what we did during pre show is we each started two ping trails. We open up the terminal and it respectively on our on our machines. And the first thing we did in one terminal window was type ping space dub dub dub dot apple dot com. And we've left that running through the entire show. And then the other thing we did was another terminal window with ping to one nine two dot one six eight dot one hundred dot one. Now, the reason for both is is this one nine two dot one six eight dot one hundred dot one is our we're both on cable connection. So that's our cable modems. That confirms that we can get out past our routers, but no, but no further, right? It's not checking anything further when we're pinging just the cable modem. So that's essentially testing our internal network and our routers to make sure that we have connectivity to the to what, you know, past our past the stuff we manage. And then ping to dub dub dub dot apple dot com, of course, goes all the way out to the internet and back and ping just sends a little it's just like one little ping and ask the server on the other end to response. So thank you to Apple for, you know, being responsive. And and we started that up and we just left it running. And, you know, it's been thirty six hundred seconds almost now since we've had this thing running, John, which is exactly an hour. In fact, in 10 seconds, it will be an hour for me. So there you go. So when John's connection started to flake out, I went to my my terminal window and saw immediately that I was getting some packet loss from Apple dot com. And so that's when we pause the show and we just sort of waited for it to settle down. I wasn't getting packet loss to to my cable modem. So my connection here at the house inside the house is fine to my cable modem. And then it was from the cable modem outbound. Now I saw this and we confirmed that John wasn't seeing anything. So the problem this time was here on my end. I saw this last week. After we recorded Mackie Keb, I went and recorded an episode of my giggab podcast for working musicians at giggabpodcast.com. Those of you that want to listen that I've been doing for about two years with Paul Kent and we had a similar problem, but it was much, much worse. I haven't had any problems like this throughout the week that I know of. But and I've recorded quite a few podcasts on Skype and had lots of, you know, Skype calls and things like that. So it's odd that I've had this problem and I I tested it with a with sort of deeper last week and I could get into Comcast's network, but basically getting passed about Boston was impossible for me last week. It was what the issue was and it got much worse. So there's not a whole lot you can do in those scenarios, but it did make me long for having a backup internet connection. And, you know, like, which I can plug into my we mentioned that Synology, the RT2600AC router, John, that that lets you dedicate one of the ports to a spare internet connection if you if you want to pay for that, which is kind of cool. But I don't have the spare internet connection, even though I have the router. So I just had to wait it out. But I think we're OK, right, John? I hope so. Yeah, you sound good. You sound good. It just clicked up. Yeah, it was at 16 out to 24. That's the sample rate that you can see in the technical call info window if you choose to display that with Skype. Well, only if you're using if only if you've got Skype set in the old mode. New Skype mode kind of acts very differently, but adds a lot of sort of noise to the signal that we don't like. So so we use Skype in the old mode. Yeah. All right. So hopefully our connection thing, but I just figured I'd walk you folks through the the troubleshooting that John and I set up with the two separate pings so that you can really see is the problem inside my house. Do I have some issue? Am I, you know, am I like blasting too much data? Is there something going on or? Or, you know, is there something something else ban in the in the chat room is recommending a tool called Ping Plotter at PingPlotter.com and no, I've never I've never used this. It looks like Ping Plotter is a service if I'm if I'm glancing and reading correctly where it's actually pinging you back and maybe you're pinging it. I'm not I'm not sure, but it kind of lets you see what's going on with your network long term. And maybe I should use this for a couple of weeks to to see what's going on, because I need to figure out something. And obviously, I have a problem of some sort here. Very, very cool. Have you ever used Ping Plotter, John? I've heard of it. And I go, oh, yeah, look at that. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's exactly. It's neat. Yeah. Yes, it does what we're doing manually in a nice graphical OK, OK, format, I would think. I mean, Pings are pretty straightforward. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, let's say Windows Mac OS iOS. Who could ask for anything more? Oh, we could ask. We tend to. We tend to get actually pretty picky when it comes to that stuff. All right, should we should we let's go to Ken, shall we? Ken, now that we're on the network thing, we'll jump to Ken here. Ken says, I live in a small ranch house about 1500 square feet. I'm fortunate to have unlimited gigabit fiber in my residential neighborhood at a price that makes me feel like I'm stealing it. The problem is that the fiber is run to the far wall of my garage while my office is on the complete opposite side of the house. They literally could not be further away from each other and still be in the same home. Due to the nature of my house, I'm unable to run ethernet. Trust me, I've tried every way that I can. My options are wireless or power line. Right now, I have a single AC 1750 router that provides about 200 megabits of speed to my office, but I want more judging from the reviews on Amazon. I do not see power line exceeding this performance. I'd gladly pay for a mesh networking solution. But with the nature of my situation, I don't feel that I'd see much of an increase as it's less mesh than a repeater setup for me. What should I do? P.S. and I think Ken does this just to twist the knife a little bit. He says, backblaze at one gigabit per second. Upload speed is incredible. Yeah, thanks for that, Ken. You wanted us to answer your question, right? Thanks, Ken. Yeah, thanks. My my 10 megabit per second upload speed. Yeah, cripples that. So thanks, man. Yes. Anyway, I will ask this question for Ken's benefit, but for anyone else's benefit, yes, you're right. Power line is going to at best get you like 200 megabits per second from what I've seen. Yeah, I know there's power line that says it does, you know, two gigabits now because it does the MIMO thing and all of that. Really, though, you're going to max out at about 200 or 250 based on everything that not only I've experienced in my own home, but that I've heard from all of you. So yeah, in your scenario, obviously, 200 is not a thousand. So you want to go faster with that in mind. I will ask if you have coax wire in your walls, because if you do or if you can if you can run coax outside the house. Remember, there's always, you know, a lot of this stuff is certified for use in in all sorts of weather and temperatures. So if you can get a coax, of course, if you can do coax, you can probably do ethernet. But but if you do happen to have coax, then you can use mocha. And I would recommend the Action Tech bonded 2.0 mocha adapters. The ECB, what's the model number? I'll pull it up here. But but these things, I've had them go on my crummy coax with lots of splitters. I've had them go, you know, over 800 megabits per second. So if you have coax already there, then I definitely do this. That's the ECB 6200. And I think you can tend to get a pair of them at Amazon for, you know, 150 bucks or so. So that's. That would be the first thing I'd do. After that, though, then, yeah, I, you know, I think a a mesh network type thing is probably going to be your best bet for you. I'd actually go with the Nettgear Orbi because the for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that the backhaul between the two Orbi units when you have, you know, a main router and one satellite, which is I think all you'd need here is it uses a four by four wireless radio. It is super fast and super long range. So my my gut says that in my experience also, but I haven't done this in your house, so that's that's the only variable here. But my guess is you're going to get somewhere in north of 500 megabits per second out of this thing in both directions. So I would do the Orbi and tested a couple of different ways because the Orbi has a dedicated backhaul channel. It when you connect wirelessly to it, it doesn't also then use up that channel. But you can connect in a wired capacity to the Orbi as well. So what I would first try is putting the Orbi close enough to your computer that you can just plug into the switch, the ethernet switch on the back of the Orbi and just use the Orbi as your as your kind of Wi-Fi backhaul between it. But you might find that moving the Orbi closer to the to the source gets it a faster connection than it can relay a faster connection to you. So you're just going to need to try a couple of different ways to see which one works best for you. But but because of that four by four radio for the backhaul, they're the only ones doing four by four radio on the backhaul. Everybody else, even even like the Lynxus fellow that's doing a separate third or a third radio, it's only a two by two radio, which is plenty fast for for many scenarios. But but for yours, I definitely go with the Orbi. So there you go. But that's that's my. Those are all of my thoughts on that, John. Do you have any thoughts on that? Mm hmm. OK, sweet. How about calling the guys that installed the fiber and tell them to make a run to your office instead of as far away from the office as possible? Well, when he said that he'd explored every option, you know, but yeah, but yeah, fair point. Yeah, maybe maybe he didn't think of that option. It's like, hey guys, could you or hey, you know, I'm I'm sure. You know, splicing that fiber isn't isn't, you know, doesn't require much. Because I'm suggesting here is buy some more fiber and just, you know, take the current fiber and just extend it and and do it yourself. We've got a great suggestion, I think, from the chat room from her friend, Furby's, suggesting that a small child or a trained ferret could pull cable through the ceiling. Yeah, I don't know. I'd rather go for a rat. I don't know how trainable ferrets are. OK, how did we get here again? Well, Furby's was making a suggestion. Yes, no, I know, yeah. But no, we're rallying around the same thought here. Is it any possible way to get that fiber closer to where you want it to be? Well, I mean, it would be ethernet, right? I mean, you don't want to splitting the fiber isn't going to help him because if he moves the fiber connection to his office, then he solves the problem there, but causes it on the other side of the house. Right, so moving the. Yeah, I think you're that's sort of a heading down the wrong path to be perfectly frank, I think. Yeah, sounds like he's ready. Yeah, getting ethernet between those two locations would be key. If he can't do that and if he has to do it wirelessly, the Orbi, in my opinion, is going to be your best bet. Yeah, I'm hoping there has to be. I mean, even I have. Yeah, I got cable in all my rooms. So I still want to experiment with Mocha. Love to do that someday. Oh, yeah. For sure. All right. Yeah, we should get you some of that stuff to experiment with. And yeah, because Mocha is awesome. It's like it's we are talking over Mocha right now in in in my setup because I have exactly not exactly, but I have something similar to what Ken has and I could pull ethernet cable, but there's no need to because I get like I said, it's close to 900 megabits a second across my Mocha link. It's like, yeah, that's fine. I can I can eat, you know, 150 off of a gigabit because I don't have gigabit ethernet speeds. So anyway. All right, gigabit internet speeds. OK, good stuff. Time to go to photos, John. Yes. OK. Listener Bruce writes to us. He's having problems migrating his photo library. He says I have a client. Actually, it's not him. He says I have a client with an I photo database, 160 gigs in size. I'm trying to convert and open that in photos. Consistently fails at about the 60 percent mark. I've tried all four rebuilds, which are options when holding down the option and command key when launching I photo, the resulting I photo file opens and appears to function fine under I photo, but simply will not convert to photos. Any ideas or tools to try to troubleshoot and fix this. So I know power photos from Fat Cat software. We'll do imports as well. It will sort of manually do those imports or do it. It's own way that that's the next thing I would try simply because it's a you know, it's a push button solution and it may get you there. So that that's certainly the first thing I'd try is power photos. I'd also do I had this problem when I. When I migrated Lisa's library and it was because we were storing her I photo library on our NAS drive and photos did not like importing something from across the network because it's well, because it's doing all these these it's it's not really importing. It's just sort of relaying out the the the file and using hard links and all that. So yeah, it didn't didn't like it. So I copied it to an external drive connected to her computer and then it worked fine. But but for different reasons, I'm wondering if a similar path would be good for you. You have this library on a drive, presumably either the internal driver one that's directly attached to this computer. Connect another drive up and just copy the library to it. That will sort of re set any permissions or any, you know, data corruption, not data corruption, file system corruption that might have been a part of this. Because as you know, your I photo library is truly just a folder with a series of subfolders with all this stuff. So when you copy it over, it's going to copy all the individual files one by one and sort of reassemble this folder structure on another in another location and simply reassembling that might get it into a state where photos says, oh, yeah, I can I can deal with this now. Not maybe not the ideal solution, but but I think we're past ideal on this one. At short of that, a user level permissions repair on the driver, at least the I photo library itself to ensure that the entire thing is readable and writable, because again, it's it's doing this whole kind of kind of thing there with all that. I would also check the check the structure of the drive with something like, you know, I mean, disc utility, you'll do it. You probably have something else in your toolkit like drive genius or or disk warrior to to do the same kind of thing. So those are those are my initial thoughts about it. What do you think, John? Yeah, it's a tough one. Trying to break it up into smaller problems. If you see where I'm going here. Oh, that's really so whether you do that from within. So I guess one thing is you could create a new library and. Move some things from the old one over to the new one. Yeah, something like power photos can do that for you or you could, you know, do it with I photo library manager would be the way to do it because it's because it well, but no, but you're right. It's it's right. It's just the I photo equivalent to power photos. Yeah. Yeah. So make it into smaller problems and then the import may yeah. Or their trade, whatever it's doing there, the conversion to photos. May work because yeah, I'm it absolutely sounds like there's some file corruption that unfortunately the built in tools were not able to repair. Right. But you know, you still get those options. I don't know if you get those options with photos. I guess you do. Yeah, a lot of different programs you hold down alt and sometimes you'll get a dialogue that asks you option on the Mac or you want to know, you know, we Mac you just call that option, but it's okay. But it says alt on it too. I know. Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. Yeah, we get we get both equal, equal opportunity, keyboard, keyboard labelers. All right. Yeah, so that that's those are my thoughts on that. But as always, you know, if you folks have ideas, we mentioned how to email us, but you can call us 206666 geek, which John is four, three, three, four, three, four, three, four, three, four, three, four, three, five. That's right. You can call us and leave us a message. We love those too. All right. While we're on the photos issue and also on the consultants helping clients issue, we have a great email from Graham on the same similar subject. Graham writes, I have a client with four family family members, each of whom has a Mac laptop with not enough space to store their individual photos libraries. As far as I'm aware, they all use their individual iPhones as their primary cameras. They want to maintain their individual photo libraries. Parents don't want to deal with the kids' photos, at least not being intermingled. He says, I have installed a Synology DS416J for them, a four base Synology as their family storage solution to cater for present and future requirements beyond just photos, time machine backups, household music, movies, et cetera. What I'm wondering is if you have a recommended method for each of them to have their primary photo storage on the Synology. My reading of forums with regard to the Photos app is that it is not compatible with either SMB or AFP connection and would need an iSCSI connection instead. While technically it would be possible for me to configure iSCSI and even get the client to pay for the iSCSI initiator software, I'm a bit hesitant about how this might work in practice for four non-geek family members. Would it be better to procedurally migrate them over to using Photo Station and DS Photo, or is there another set of software better suited that you know of, or a procedure that keeps them using photos on their Macs, but retaining only recent photos there with the remainder archived on the Synology? Yeah, you know, this is one of them holy grail questions we come up with here quite a bit because it's a problem everybody has, and Apple offers one solution. Of course, Apple's solution is iCloud Photo Library and paying for enough iCloud photo storage or enough iCloud storage to house the entirety of your library. And then to be fair, your Mac and your iPhone, or your client's Macs and iPhones will do a stellar job of managing their own local storage while ensuring that all of the photos are stored and backed up safely in the cloud. So there is that, and you know, in a lot of scenarios, especially one where it's a client that's non-geeky, this certainly needs to be discussed. And maybe they'll choose to rule it out, but I think, you know, it's one of those things where you have to get the clients buy in to this, anything geeky like anything, even what you've proposed, because it's not going to work as fluidly and they have to be on board with doing something other than the single path that Apple has laid out for us. And perhaps, you know, with good reason, right? So I've used photos across the land to the Synology before. Obviously, I mentioned, you know, just in the last question that migrating an iPhoto Library that way didn't work, but once it was migrated, I was actually able to do that. And it worked fine. Eventually I did just move it back to a locally attached drive and now have it carbon copy cloner synced over to the Synology, so I've got it backed up there. And then I have photo station pointing at it there so that we can access that stuff from wherever we want. But it definitely feels a little janky doing it that way. iSCSI is absolutely the right solution, much better than doing it over an SMB, over a network link. iSCSI, for those of you that are not familiar with it, essentially lets you carve out a block of storage on your network drive, so like on your Synology, and have your Mac address that, have an individual Mac address that as just a raw blob of storage. And your Mac formats it as though it's a local drive, it deals with it like it's a local drive and it actually works quite well. The problem is that the Mac does not support iSCSI natively, you need third-party software, iSCSI initiator being one, that will allow it to see it that way. And then it just works great. But you know, there's that whole thing about is it gonna be updated with each operating system update? Is something gonna break it? Then they lose access to their photos. You know, there's lots of reasons to sort of be wary of installing iSCSI, especially for non-geeky folks. I don't really have a solution for you. You could hang inexpensive drives off of everybody's Macs, if they're not laptops, if they are laptops that starts to get to be a pain, because now they've got this thing that they're dangling around with them. But if they're not, then that would give them enough storage on their Macs to do it. Not leveraging the Synology that they've bought though. So, you know, DS Photo and Photo Station work, they, it's actually, like we've mentioned before, you can set it up to Geofence so that it will automatically upload your new photos in the background when you get home, or wherever you want. You can have it upload at work across the WAN link. You know, you just kind of set your Geofences and it goes. And then you can use the DS Photo app to browse all your stuff on photos. It's not quite the same smooth, fluid experience that Apple gives you, but it's pretty good. So that's, I don't know. Those are my thoughts. What do you think, John? There's a lot of options. I don't know, I for the most part, stick with Apple stuff. Right, but you have enough storage for your photo library locally, right? You're not using iCloud Photo Library. You're not trying to store photos on your disk station. You happen to have a photo library that is not yet larger than whatever storage you choose to have. Yeah, so an As-based thing? Sure, that's a photo station, right? I mean, yeah, that's the thing, right? Do you use photo station? Again, have you used photo station? I dabbled with it. I mean, I installed it, you know, I guess you can create individual users and they can all have their own space and everything. I was like, mm, okay. That's nice, not for me. It does all those background uploads. I mean, it's pretty good. So, yeah, I don't know. It's just one of those. There's no perfect solution and that's sort of the frustrating part is exactly that, so. Yeah, it's the holy grail. It's a good question though, Graham. And I meant what I said and I know I say this a lot when we're talking about dealing with clients and that sort of thing, but getting the clients buy in, you know, I think Graham and I had a couple of emails back and forth after he sent this in, you know, working collaboratively with the client on the solution and you're the expert throwing ideas into the mix and advice about how those ideas would work and how you foresee them working through this particular client. That's what you're there for. You know, you're not generally not there to dictate a solution because if that solution does not work brilliantly for the client, you're now in an awful situation. Seasons consultants know this and probably don't even think about it anymore. Folks starting out can learn this lesson in a variety of ways and if we can be the ones to teach you as opposed to a bad client experience teaching you much, much better, I think. So yeah. Yes, yes, good stuff. So yeah, finding that collaborative solution, letting the client choose even if you feel like they're choosing the wrong thing and then implementing what they choose is a difficult thing for a lot of consultants and it's the thing that drives consultants out of the business. Actually, I'm not saying at all that that's you Graham. I'm just more speaking generally because it's a valuable skill to be able to give advice and then happily implement that which would not be your first choice. So, and just doing what the client asks. Making sure they understand what they're choosing and then eyes wide open, let's go. Okay, we had a question from Andrew about UPS battery life. Andrew writes, I do have a question about the UPS feature recently which I listed the UPS deep dive. I listened to that with great interest as I have often thought about buying one but I've never been sure about their expected lifespan. I remember Dave saying on an earlier episode that you need to keep the bits flowing in your laptop battery and is this the case with the UPS? If a UPS battery, if a UPS has a battery that's always plugged in in charge, if there's a power cut, how does this affect the longevity of the battery? I expect that someone else has already asked this question but as you said, you were going to do a followup and I would love to know. Yeah, so the short version is that UPS batteries are a little bit different than laptop batteries in this regard. They do tend to hold their capacity over time fairly well. They do trickle down and up pretty regularly. They do manage themselves to keep the bits flowing somewhat but it's not going all the way down and all the way back up. You can do that and some UPSs you can even schedule that if you want to truly get an accurate capacity of the battery but generally you don't have to worry about it except that every three or four years you've got to replace the battery in the UPS. It'll scream at you and then you can replace it. I always, when that happens to one of my UPSs and I think it's actually about to happen to the one right by my left foot here in the studio, I've had good luck at a place called ReplacementBatteryStore.com. You can certainly buy from the UPS manufacturer and pay lots more but I've had really good luck with the aftermarket batteries and they're usually really easy to replace. You just go to like recently I bought stuff from this ReplacementBatteryStore and it was great and you just pop up, you go in and put in the model number of your UPS and it'll say, oh yeah, this is the battery you need and then you buy it and they ship it to you and then you put it in and then you have to dispose of the old one responsibly with whatever method your local town or city or whatever it is requires. Mine just lets me bring them to the transfer station and they take them and deal with them, which is good. Yeah. Because aren't they using a lead acid battery in those things? That's exactly right. Okay, so that's the old, older technology. Yeah. But better for this type of use case. Yeah. Oh yeah, because the, right, versus the other technologies. Versus like lithium-ion. Yeah, they're not great for the environment. No, no, they're terrible. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yes, all right, so yeah, that's where you go and then somebody else, and I don't think I have it right in front of me but somebody else mentioned another place to get a replacement UPS battery. So I will, give me a week and I will report back on which one I chose for this battery here in the studio. I think it's flaking out. It certainly acted like that the other day and so I need to test it one more time and that's generally all I do. I give it one test and if it's not gonna work, then I'm out. I go and buy a new one. Because it's, you know, I mean, you're talking somewhere 50 bucks or less generally and sometimes a lot less. Sometimes it's, you know, 25 or something and that's just good to have reliable power in your UPS because otherwise it's not doing what you want it to do. Phil has a great question. He asks, I'm trying to figure out how to create a group within the Contacts app that I can enter all my clients, prospects and people's email addresses that I meet at open houses for the purpose of keeping them abreast of market conditions. Phil's a real estate agent. Can you point me to a tutorial that would allow me to type in a group name would see it's coming from me but not show all the other email addresses it's going to? And yeah, so this is actually a fairly overlooked feature of sort of the Contacts mail integration. So the first thing you do is you go into Contacts and choose File New Group and create a group and the first thing you're gonna do is name it and then from there you're just gonna drag all the it's gonna appear in the sidebar of Contacts and if you don't have a sidebar in Contacts and you might not go to the, I think it's the View menu and choose Show Groups and then that'll show you the groups and you just go through and drag everybody into this thing. They need to be in your Contacts in your address book and then drag them all over into the groups and now you've created the group. Then, and this is one of my favorite features of this, if you have people in that group that have more than one email address assigned to their contact record and this is true of any group, not just clients or prospects or anything, then I recommend this next feature, highlight the group in Contacts. Actually, I don't even think you have to do this but in Contacts, go to the Edit menu and choose Edit Distribution List. It's generally the third thing from the bottom and then from here, choose the group that you want to edit and you will see all of the members of the group listed with their email addresses and one of those email addresses will be bold. You can change which one is bold simply by clicking on it. You don't have to do anything else. Even though groups in Contacts are synced amongst your iCloud synced computers, the chosen email address is not synced. So if you're going to do this from multiple computers, you have to do this part of the process from each of them. But yeah, you just go in here, you pick which addresses you want to be, the default address for this group on this computer for that person and then you say, okay, now you've got your group set up the way you want it set up. From here, go into Mail and you can do what I'm about to tell you in any of the three address e-fields, two, CC or BCC. So in your case, if you don't want people to see who this is going to, you choose BCC, Blind Carbon Copy or Blind Complementary Copy. I think that's what the, I don't know, it depends on who you ask. It depends on which etymology you want to go with. Okay, that's fine. So choose BCC and begin typing the name of the group. If you have autofill, like you probably do in Mail, you will see the name of the group autocomplete, choose it. As soon as you do that, it will instantly expand all of those outward and put them there. So if you've done this in BCC, at this point you'll probably have a blank two, a blank CC field, fill out the subject, fill out your message. I generally like, if I'm going to do an all BCC message, I generally put myself in the two field as well, just so that there's something there, some mail clients kind of freak out if there's nothing in the two field. They shouldn't, but I've seen it in the past. It may not be a concern today, but it's a really easy thing to put yourself in the two field, so do that. And then you're good to go, except, you need to be aware of any limits of your outbound mail server. Every internet provider is different. I think Google limits you to, I think they're pretty tight. If you're using Google as your outbound, I think it limits to, I don't know, 25 or 50 recipients per message. So just be aware of that. Some ISPs limit that way. I know John, yours limits you to 50 recipients for message cable vision or opt online. Verizon, yep, per message. That's why, yeah, I was helping organize a group event and I ran into that, which is why I used iCloud instead. Yeah, there you go, right, right. So yeah, you're gonna, yeah. And I'll link to this article. Why not? And it's mailbox size and message sending limits and iCloud, and iCloud I guess lets you do 1,000 messages and 1,000 recipients. 1,000 recipients per day, right? And that's what like Comcast and- I'm sorry, maximum per message 500, okay. Okay, yeah, there you go. Those are pretty reasonable limits. Yeah, right. So be aware of this and Google might be different now. It's been a while since I've tried to do this with Google, but I seem to remember a time not too long ago where it was like that 50 thing. Comcast and Roadrunner have the same iCloud limit of 1,000 per day. Verizon has 100 recipients per message, like you said, iCloud seems to have 1,000 per day and 500 per any individual message. So just be aware that you might run into some of these limitations and you sort of have to figure that out as you go. I don't know how many clients or prospects you have, but you could, and regardless of how many messages you're gonna send out, I would break those up and have clients in one group prospects in another. I mean, that's just good CRM, you know, practice so that if you want to just email clients, then you can do that without having to stop and think and all that stuff, but that's business stuff. So I'll pimp the other show that I do, which is called The Small Business Show at businessshow.co because that's where we talk about all that kinds of stuff. And that show's been going almost two years now, so. Lots of shows for you folks to listen to, you know, but that's good. Yeah. And another thought. Yes. You make it to a point where you may want to use a third party to do this thing for you. Yes. Now, the one that I like because I've used it in the past for Mac Observer related things. Well, there are two reasons I like them. One, MailChimp is the group that does this. One, I like them because they do what they do well. And second, I like them because who doesn't love chimps? Right. And they got a cool little monkey as the... But MailChimp is something you may want to explore. If you exceed the capabilities of whoever you're connected to. So I'm going to point out, yeah, no, I love MailChimp. I use it for lots of things and I'm using it for a new thing that I can't talk about yet, but we'll talk about in the next couple of days here. However, I'm going to point out a problem that I found with MailChimp as we were testing for this new thing. And what I found out is with MailChimp, it's great. I mean, they're a full feature thing. You can send up to 3,000 messages per month for free. And then after that, you pay, you know, they have tiered plans and all that stuff, as you would expect. So MailChimp may be perfect for you, Phil, and you might be able to do it absolutely for free forever, maybe. I certainly do with fling and things like that, you know, the bands that I play in MailChimp's great. This other thing that I'm doing, I learned a lesson. We started testing because we're going to use MailChimp for a thing that we're doing and getting people to sign up. And of course, when you sign up, MailChimp's great because it asks people to click a link in their email so that, you know, you can't just sign people up. You can sign people up in MailChimp as the administrator, but other people can't, you know, just randomly sign, you know, other people up. So you have to get the email, the confirmation email. And so we started doing some testing and found that some addresses were going through five, like Google, Yahoo, getting the confirmation thing right away, looks great, click it, works, you're on the list. iCloud, nope, never came in. Like, what the dude, I've been using, like, so I opened up a support ticket with MailChimp. I'm like, guys, like, what's happening? They're like, well, we don't have an iCloud account. This went back and forth for a while and they asked me to try some things. They're like, no, we can see that iCloud servers accepted the message. I'm like, okay, but it didn't get to my box. They're like, well, it must be something with your client, spam filtering the set and the other. I said, yeah. I have a couple of iCloud accounts that aren't connected to any email clients. The only place you see mail from them is in the iCloud web interface and it's not appearing there in the inbox or in spam. So I'm feeling pretty good about saying that iCloud is doing something with these messages from MailChimp and not delivering them to the inbox. It's 100% of the time. And then I tried it with my fling mailing list, went right to the inbox, no problem whatsoever. And so I asked the MailChimp people. I said, would you please test with your iCloud account? You can sign up for our list. It's not public yet or anything. It's totally fine. And they're like, well, we don't have an iCloud account to test with. Yeah, I don't even know how to respond to that. I didn't respond. And then like 48 hours later, they... Maybe you can create one for free. Well, that was it. 48 hours or 24 hours later, they said, we still haven't gotten a response from you. Did you hear back? And I'm like, yeah, to be perfectly honest, I'm flabbergasted. I don't know how to respond to that. I know you know you can get an iCloud account for free. You folks are literally in the business of emailing things. Howard, what part of this conversation do you want me to be a part of here? How's that going to work? Because I'm going to be frustrated and I'm going to treat you like I'm going to be condescending like you're a child. And I know you're not children. And yet it's going to be very difficult for me not to get into that mode with you. Because that's ridiculous. What you just said to me makes like no sense whatsoever given that you're literally one of the biggest and most popular mailing engines on the planet. They're like, yeah, we don't have any problem emailing iCloud. Like that's the thing though, you do. I've confirmed it. I need you to see it. And they're like, well, we don't have an iCloud account to test with. And then I had a little thing that went off in my head. It went started going ding, ding, ding, ding. So I stopped. I detached from the go nowhere email trail with MailChimp support people. And the domain that we are using for this new project contained a five character combination that's spelled a-p-p-l-e. It's not apple.com. Obviously, we don't own apple.com. But the word Apple appears in our domain. And in the MailChimp confirmation email, the there is a link to this website that happens to contain those five letters in the domain. And I started thinking, I wonder if the problem is that it's Apple's overly aggressive anti-fishing filters are seeing this email from a domain that admittedly was only registered recently and doesn't have a lot of activity associated with it. And now suddenly they're getting emails from a known bulk mailer, a respected one, but one that obviously anybody can sign up for and start using. And so they've put them into a quarantine somewhere. And they just haven't been released from that quarantine yet. And so for this project, as one often does, we have many domains. And one of them does not contain the word Apple, but also refers to this new thing that we're likely to be rolling out in the next couple of days here. And sure enough, that went right through. So just be aware that some of these bulk mailer engines might trigger things like that. Interesting little story. I'm sorry to be cloudy about the target of this, but we'll talk more next week about that, I think. I think we'll be able to. But yeah, very interesting. Having the word Apple in the domain in a link inside the email. Because I changed it, and I made the from address not from this domain with the word Apple, and it still didn't go through. And then I changed the contact information for this thing. And it was instantly that worked. So they don't want they don't want a URL in the in the email, an HTML clickable URL in the email with the word Apple in it. And I get that, right? I mean, you know, I totally understand why that would happen. It's crazy, though. And Alex is asking me in my in my thing here, did I reach out to iCloud support during that drama? No, I didn't. I was about to. And I think that's kind of where my thought train led me of, wait a minute, this might be this. So I probably should reach out to iCloud support and and see if I can get them to whitelist this particular domain. But but no, I have not yet. I'm not sure what that's going to be like trying to reach out to iCloud support. But you know, it's it's worth a try. It doesn't never hurts to ask. Fun stuff, right, John? I'd be afraid. Yeah, I don't blame you. iCloud. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's such a mystery. That's the thing is right. But I my guess is that there's someone there that actually is meant to deal with these sorts of things. We'll see what happens. So yeah. Anyway, whatever you do, you don't want to put all your recipient addresses in the two field because you'll look like a noob. That's true. Yeah, totally. That's right. That's right. I've seen it happen a couple of times, especially like PR people that are kind of new at what they do. Yeah, I get an email and I see like literally hundreds of names. And I'm like, you're new at this, aren't you? Yeah, don't do that. It's bad. Hey, I want to invite you. I want to ask you. I would like to request that you folks leave us reviews on iTunes. The closest I can get you there is if you go to MacGeekGab.com slash iTunes that will bring you as close as we can. Please leave us a review. We'd love five stars if you're if you're so inclined. But, you know, choose whatever whatever you like and then write us something. And we've gotten a couple in the last couple of days here that I wanted to read. One was from Mike in the USA. He says, love your podcast. I learned so much every episode. I hope I never have some of the issues you diagnose and repair. Your community, your fun communication with each other keeps me interested, even when an issue could not happen to me, lacking the hardware. I'm considering becoming a premium subscriber. So that's Mike and thank you very much, Mike, for for saying that. And then from the Great Corn Holio in the USA, we got this review. I've been listening to the show for five plus years now and enjoy every minute of it. The amount of knowledge Dave, John and Pilot Pete have is awe inspiring. I've learned a ton since I started listening and I enjoy the show each week. Keep up the great work and well, don't get caught, he says. So thank you very much to Mike and, of course, the Great Corn Holio. We're honored to have you listening, both of you. Fantastic stuff. We've already told you how to email us. We've told you about premium. We've asked you to review it. We've told you how to contact, how to call us. I think that's that's enough instruction for one show. So I will simply say to all of you, thank you. Thank you for sending in your questions. Premium listeners in this episode were Graham, Bruce, Scott and Cindy and Indy. So thank you to all of you for supporting us. Of course, thanks to each and every one of you of our existing premium members. You really do help make us help make what we do possible. I mean that in every way. I also want to thank Cash Fly for providing the bandwidth, of course, to get the show from us to you. That's as important as anything else. And of course, all our great sponsors in the podcast marketplace. Barebones Software at Barebones.com, all the world computing at MaxSales.com. Smile Software or Smile Sorry at SmileSoftware.com. Go Daddy at GoDaddy.com. And of course, BlueAprin.com slash MGG were your first three meals are free. Thanks so much to everybody, all of you, each and every one of you. John, I started this one. We made it through with only one little hiccup. Why don't you lead us outward, my friend? I'm going to help us end it in the way that we should end it, Dave. So we want to remind everyone to not get caught.