 Don't adjust your ears, folks. It's the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, number 714 for June 18th, 2018. These folks and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show into which you send your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix it all together. We share all of it. We try to answer your questions. We share some tips and cool stuff found of our own with the goal being that every single one of us me, you, him, him, especially you, but also us, learns at least five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Ring, we're at Ring.com slash MGG. You can save up to 150 bucks. Eero at Eero.com, coupon code MGG gets you free shipping in the US and Canada. New two new sponsors, Neutrophal, we're at Neutrophal.com, coupon code MGG gets you your first month of your subscription for just 10 bucks on this pretty cool supplement that I will tell you about with a surprising story. And LinkedIn Talent Solutions, we're at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. You get $50 off towards your first job post here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in somewhat sweltering Fairfield, Connecticut, but thank you, Mr. Carrier, for inventing that AC thing. This is John Brown. And here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire, because John and Dave were foolish enough to invite me back as pilot Pete. Thanks for having me, Gents. You're welcome. Thanks for thanks for doing this with us, pilot Pete. How are you doing? I'm well, thanks. Apparently you've forgotten how this devolves into me, him, when I'm here. But I have been pre-show has reminded me. So for those of you that don't know, because I've been asked this question by listeners whom I thought would know the answers. So clearly there's many of you that don't don't know. Maybe some of you that haven't met pilot Pete yet. John and I have been doing the show obviously now just a little over 13 years. Pete and I met years ago. Pete was actually a sponsor of the show with a travel business that he had. But he's he's been a listener for a very long time. And before we had the chat room, Pete was sort of the first opportunity we had to have sort of you folks, the listener represented while we did the show. Pete asked questions and kind of pesters us sometimes smart Alec questions. Yes, sometimes on the mic, sometimes off the mic. But but, you know, keeping us on track and and and making sure that the things we explain are good. And then, of course, Pete brings in his own perspective on some things as well. So welcome back to the show, Pete. It's a pleasure. Yeah, man. It's always good to have you. All right, let's let's just get right to it and and we'll see how it goes. So Errol starts with a quick tip back in show 713, which was really just what five days ago, right, John? He says, as I was listening to Mekki Gep 713, I have some additional tips to add to the comment from David about the app switcher, that's the command tab app switcher on the Mac. He says, I use app switcher all the time as well. He says, once you enter the app switcher by typing command tab and you hold down the command key, there are a number of additional things you can do besides shift tab, as you mentioned, John, to go backwards. You can just hit the apostrophe key right above tab to also go backwards. So you don't need to hold down the shift key. You can just use tab or apostrophe, the key above the tab, forward or backwards. Hitting home or page up will go to the beginning of the list and hitting end or page down will take you to the end of the list. Hitting H and that app that is selected in the switcher will be hidden if it is viewable or it will unhide if it is already hidden. Hit Q and the selected app will quit. I use that one all the time and I can't believe I didn't think to mention it last week. That's one of those things that lives in my fingers and I don't. I didn't even think about it when I read Errol's email and I had to do it out loud here in the show. And it was like, oh, yeah, I use that one. And he says hit one and it will change to showing all application windows for the selected app. Once in that view mode, you can use tab and apostrophe to switch between the app windows that you are viewing. So thank you for that, Errol. And then on that last one, the listener, Dan also had something to add because I'll find it here. There it is. He said what while you're in there, if you hit the down arrow, it opens up app expose for the selected app. Is that the same as one? I think it is. But I'm going to do it. No. Oh, what did I do? What did I do? I shouldn't be doing this while I do the show. Yeah, it does. So one and down arrow are the same thing. But what he says is. This also addresses the issue in a previous show about not being able to select the window, the hidden window or a minimized window of an app going into app expose. You can and it will pull back up that minimized window. So very cool. Pete, you had I got something really, really cool here. Speaking of cool stuff, we were talking about that earlier. This isn't strictly app switcher, but I used this little app called QQ. OK, yeah, we've talked about that a few times. Yeah. So but QQ is really cool. It if you hold down once you get loads when you start up your machine and if you hold down the command key, you can set it to any number amount of time. My mind's at about two seconds. It comes up with all of the various keystrokes that you can use in all of the programs that you have open and some that you don't. For instance, I have CallaQui open and it can tell me hide and unhide how to quit how to make a new sticky note, how to, you know, those sorts of things are all available to you. If you just hold that down, the screen comes up and it lists your options. Looking at mine right now, I want to say I probably have 50 keystroke options. Yeah, do cool stuff in with and I'm a huge keyboard user as opposed to to mouse or trackpad, so much slower to use that than when you can bang it out with a keystroke. So that's pretty good. So QQ, cool stuff. Cool. Thanks. What do you think, John? I seem to remember another one that I mentioned in the past episode. I'll see if I can dig it up. OK. But it does kind of the same thing. It shows you all your keyboard shortcuts, which sometimes are not clear. Yeah. I do want to add one other thing. Yes. We were talking about expose. Well, that's what it used to be called. But here's an interesting alternative tip. So if you go to this in the system preferences and you see the little in the upper right hand corner, the little search field there. Yeah. Guess what? If you type expose or if you type anything there, it'll highlight the appropriate preference or preferences. Sure. So for example, if you type expose, it's going to highlight Mission Control because that's what it's called now. And that lets you adjust many different handy shortcuts, including one that lets you see all your windows and stuff. So it's not to mention that because I haven't mentioned it in a while. Yeah, that's right. It's pretty smart. So for people that, you know, are looking at or have the legacy name of expose, they know that and they're like, now I'll go here instead. Yeah. So it's still the help still has the old name in it. That's pretty smart. I like that. You can even type expose. And you can type expose. That's right. You don't even have to type E with the accent on it. That's right. Well, it matches to that, which is interesting. The phrase it matches is expose with an accent on the E. Short does. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. One one last quick tip for now. And then we'll, well, then we've got some other tips. But Greg says, I have a Reminders iOS app. Quick tip here. He says, I recently discovered that you can drag and drop items in your reminders list instead of having to click the edit link. But S word, that lady that we say hey to, actually led me to a bonus tip. He says, I told Siri, remind me to deposit my paycheck tomorrow at three o'clock. In addition to the default reminders list, we have one shared one for our groceries, as well as four more. For some reason, Siri put the reminder in the groceries list instead of my reminders list. This is where the cool tip comes in. I held down the reminder I wanted to move until it detached from the list. Then I dragged it down to the bottom over the small area where the other reminder lists are minimized in about a second. It flashed, then opened up the other reminders list so that all the tabs were showing. While continuing to hold the reminder I wanted to move, I dragged it over to the default list, which is our groceries, which is our reminders list, not the groceries list. He says, again, it kind of flashed, turned a light gray color and finally opened the list. While still holding this reminder, I positioned it where I wanted it to go on the list. The other items moved out of the way and I finally let go. Walla, he says, it's kind of sensitive, but and it may take you a couple of attempts to learn exactly how it goes. He says, but it's a cool way to move reminder list items between lists. Thanks, Greg. And thanks for he also offered us congratulations on 13 years. So thanks for that, Greg. That's awesome. We were happy about it, too. It's good stuff. Cool. Honja, I don't use the reminders app. I use busy Cal both on my iOS devices and on my Mac to manage my calendar, especially to manage my to-dos. But I use it to manage my my calendar and it works. It works very well. I recently found out that busy Cal had changed developers and really changed owners. And I was very concerned about that because Dave Riggle and John Chaffee were the only people that I had encountered that could write a calendar app for the Mac that I liked. They made now up to date and contact back in the early nineties. And I use that until they sold it to somebody else and that person, that company ruined it. And then they came back with busy Cal, which was sort of the same thing for a new age. And it looks like the guy that they have sold busy Cal to it's the guy who makes the to-do app number two, Dio. And he's had it for almost a year. And I actually like what they slash he had been doing to it for the last year. So there's I think there's hope that that this particular transition is going to work well, because it seems like it already has, which is good. It's been nice. I love busy Cal. Yeah. Yeah. Even the dog has her own calendar in our family. So she knows when to get her heart warm pill. Oh, there you go. Yeah. It's handy having, right, having calendars shared amongst the family and like John, you and I share our Mackie Keb calendar, which, in fact, if you folks want to subscribe to it, Mackie Keb dot com slash calendar will get you there. No problem. Also, while we're here, visit the new Mackie Keb community forums at Mackie Keb dot com slash forums. We have we still have our Facebook group, of course, but the forums are so much better. The layout and the structure of them is so much better for Q&A. We actually have a specific Q&A module where you can upvote answers and that sort of thing. So if you haven't been there yet, go check it out. Premium users, your accounts for your premium stuff are the same accounts for the forum, so you can just log in. Don't have to create a new account. Non-premium users creating an account, of course, is free. Or if you've already got one, it's it's your Mac observer account. So if you've got one that you've used to comment at Mac observer, that account, it's the same one. So so come on over and check it out. Mackie Keb dot com slash forums, because there I think I think you're going to like it. We're all liking it over there. So it is good and a rewind a bit. Yeah, another app. So here's the one that I was that I finally found here. Oh, yeah. Similar to what Pete mentioned, but cheat sheet. So the way it works is if you hold down the option key after a couple of seconds, if there was up a screen and shows you every single keyboard shortcut for the app that you are currently is currently front most cool. Cheat sheet for Mac OS. All right, I will I will. And I remember looking at it, the last update I see here. So it has been updated as of 2018 this year. So it's still alive. Cool. Cool. All right. I got I got three more tips. How's that sound, John? Can we squeeze three more three? Three. Nice number. It is. Yeah. A listener, Bill says, in reference to your discussion in the last episode of how to get a Mac to unmount an external drive before sleeping, another solution is keyboard maestro, which has a sleep trigger that will do the job. Just create a macro that will unmount the drives when the computer sleeps. The sleep trigger will trigger keyboard maestro. Keyboard maestro then does whatever you have told it to do upon sleep. And then there's also a wake trigger that you can use for the other side. He says, but this question came from someone who was using the external drive to hold an iTunes library, which poses a special problem that you didn't address. If the drive is not mounted when iTunes is run, iTunes will revert without warning to its default media folder. Home music iTunes, iTunes media on the computer's main drive, not the external drive. This will result in all new media being added to the wrong drive. My solution again, he says, is keyboard maestro. The goal is to keep iTunes from running unless the external drive is mounted. So I have two main macros. One run iTunes when the drive is mounted to close iTunes when the drive is unmounted and in case iTunes reverts anyway, sometimes it does all on its own. I have yet a third script that watches the default iTunes media folder on the computer to see if any new items have been created. He says, I then have to manually reset iTunes and consolidate the media. But at least I know when it has happened. That's really smart, man. Keyboard maestro is one of those things that it like to me, it's at the core of automation on the Mac right now. It really has taken over for pretty much everything else. And its name is it's a misnomer now, right? Because it will do like those, you know, shortcut things like text expander can do and and that sort of thing. Although that's not really its forte, right? It's it's really built to do all this automation. And so, yeah, like that's that's huge. It's great. Yeah, it's a good tip. Do you do you happen to know if it does, you know, like Hazel will look at looking to PDFs and file PDFs based on the text? Can Keyboard Maestro do that too? Well, no, that's not really what Keyboard Maestro does. Hazel is another one, right? That is really powerful is right there and sort of takes over from what folder watched folders or folder actions could do. It'll actually like read the date on a given PDF and file it into an appropriate rename it and file it in an appropriate folder. That's pretty good. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I use it all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a bunch of them. Well, I say I use it all the time. It uses itself all the time. It just runs. It just runs. It works. Are you using either of these, John? We get a Hazel or Keyboard Maestro. Why don't I say it better? Keyboard Maestro or Hazel? Never, never gotten it either. No. OK. I think you would I think you would love both of them. If for someone who likes a clean desktop, they do cool stuff and like a clean downloads folder and that sort of thing. Man, Hazel especially might really be something that you would enjoy. Yeah, my downloads folder, it automatically sorts stuff in a subfolder by file type. Yeah, yeah, just does. It just does. I mean, I mean, Mac OS has added after two days. Some, you know, like emptying the trash after a certain amount of time. I know that's buried somewhere in the current OS. So here's the thing that Hazel will do, though, is you can tell Hazel to maximize to set a maximum size on your trash. And when your trash gets bigger than that size, it starts deleting the oldest stuff. So you have this, you know, FIFO first in, first out kind of thing going instead of it gets big and then you have to empty the whole thing. So it's pretty good. I'm a big fan of Hazel. If I don't have it on a Mac, I start to notice and it's like, oh, crap, yeah, I need to put it on there. Yeah, especially just for the trash and download folder, which is sort of automatic, it's built in, then you can create watch folders for, you know, everything else. It's all using the same engine. It's just, yeah, it's good. All right. Well, we're on the same sort of the same subject. Back in MacGeek EBS 707, listener Bob has a comment. He says, you were talking about writing a script to change your settings when you change network. He says, years ago, like 2005, he says, I wrote a script called Mac Auto Net Detective and posted it over on Mac OS Hints and elsewhere. This is the idea was that you generally only only wanted to change your network location when you moved your laptop from location A to location B. And during the move, your laptop is closed in sleep so that when you wake up, you want to make the location switch. Instead of installing installing sleep watch, he says it might be possible to create a watch paths launch DP list that triggers when the airport preferences P list changes, which tends to happen when your Mac wakes up. But we could also do it with keyboard Maestro as we heard in the last tip. And he says, wow, this script and I'll put a link to the script because evidently it it still exists was not may not directly address Tony's issues from 707, it has most of the logic to make the decisions he wants to make. Either sleep watcher or a watch paths or something that will trigger this like keyboard Maestro might do the trick. So we will put a link to that out there. That's very cool, Bob. Thanks for thanks for sharing that. That's pretty cool. Pretty good, huh, John? Yeah, and for those that don't know. So this is a handy feature, the way that I use it. So if you go in and network at the top of the screen, you're going to see location and when you first install the OS, I think there's just going to be one called default or something like that. But I actually do this and I don't know if it's necessarily a good reason, but I think it is. But I deactivate depending on the location. So I have one called HomeWired, another called HomeWired Sharing, another called HomeWireless. Another one called Bear Extender because I have a Bear Extender. It's a NATO 2.11 AC adapter. Yep. And another one called VPN. But I typically disable interfaces that or make them inactive because I just don't want to create conflict. So so, for example, right now, my Macbook Pro is set up for Wi-Fi, so the Wi-Fi interface is on. OK, Ethernet is inactive in that profile in that the computer doesn't even see the Ethernet port because I said, well, turn turn that off. Turn that off. And what's the what's the logic of having the Ethernet port disabled like when you're at home or or what have you? The rationale is I don't want to have interfaces fighting with each other. So I'm creating, you know, these silos. Huh. So I don't want a situation like where Wi-Fi and Ethernet are both on. And if they happen to be plugged in, then things can get weird. So I've heard you say that before, but I do this all the time. In fact, I think the computer that I'm on right now yeah, has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet active, right? And the reason I do that is so well because it makes it handy when I launch iStumbler, but and it's also handy for testing things, right? Because I can leave Ethernet connected to my main network and I have Ethernet prioritized and then Wi-Fi is is the second on the list. But I can have both connected and I can connect Wi-Fi to, say, a test router and I can talk to that test router by its IP address while still having internet access via my Ethernet cable. And Mac OS is really robust at that. But even if my computer, which I think this one currently is, is connected to the same Wi-Fi network that's connected, that the Ethernet is connected to, there's no issues like this is Unix. It's totally built to it and it's safe. Mac OS is really good about following the instructions you give it in terms of if you go into System Preferences Network and you go down that gear kind of at the bottom left and choose set service order, whatever order you have here, it will follow. But again, it's smart. Like, you know, if I try to connect to some my internal IP range is 192.168.42.x because, you know, 42. And that also keeps it non-standard so that when I plug in, you know, a new Wi-Fi router or some mesh system, it's probably going to be 192.168.1.x or .2.x or .0.x. And I can just connect to that and talk to the web interface if it has one. And there's no issue whatsoever because it, you know, Mac OS is smart enough to say, oh, I route to that here. Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. All right, I just seem to recall I had an issue at one point because the thing is each interface that's on, if it can talk to something that gives it an IP address, it will get it and it will get one. Yeah, so right now my concern is just but as you pointed out, so I guess the thing is, is that service order should make the one at the top of the list, the one that gets all the action. It does, definitely. Yeah. And what's really cool, if you, so like right now, my computer, this computer has .26 because that's its reserved address. And then that's via ethernet, that's its reserved address. And then on Wi-Fi, it has .242, which is just what it gets from the DHCP server. If I were to unplug the ethernet cable, I'm not going to do it right now. But why Dave, what could go wrong? Well, chances are nothing. No one would notice anything. Right. But it might. I haven't tested how Discord deals with it and Discord's a little weird. That's what we use for our audio. So it's possible there would be a little hiccup. But by and large, I've had file transfers going and I've unplugged the ethernet cable and like the transfer keeps going. It might change speeds, you know, because if there's a reason, you know, if the Wi-Fi finds its path of least resistance, yeah, exactly. It's finding it's yeah, but and then plug it back in. It's like, OK, I'll go over there. No problem. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So I mean, I may have to review. So what you're saying is it should, if one interface goes down, it should seamlessly fail the next one on the list. Correct. Yeah. And then that way, if you plug in ethernet at home, you're just good to go. That said, I do remember there being a time where and I don't know if this is the case anymore. So I could be like totally misleading everybody. So, you know, put on your your earmuffs or something. But I do remember a time where there were some mild battery savings associated with turning off like the ethernet interface and all that stuff. I'm not sure if that would really be the case. Certainly turning off Wi-Fi can save you battery because it's not scanning and looking for Wi-Fi networks. But but even that, I think it's it's marginal at best. But but yeah, I do this all the time. It's great. I even had a setup at one point and it would have been. Would it have been Mac OS? It might have been Mac OS 9 might have might not have been 10. I can't remember. But where I had the same IP address assigned to both Wi-Fi and ethernet manually. Gutsy move. Well, that way, things like, you know, if I was going to disconnect Discord, it'd be like, yeah, that's fine. And the switches and stuff on my network dealt with it fine. If I looked in my console log, I would see, you know, it yelling at me, obviously, but it didn't like it worked. So anyway, does Mac even or does Apple even make laptops anymore that have ethernet interfaces? No, USB-C to the internet. You're going to get an adapter. Yeah, OK, there you go. I saw this guy playing. He had like, I think he was triggering things from like Ableton or something on his MacBook at a it was just a restaurant we were at yesterday afternoon down in Portsmouth and he was doing like the one man band kind of thing where he had guitar and steel drum and he had his laptop and this guy had so many freaking dongles like strung both coming out of his machine and then he had like two or three dongles connected to each other in line to get from whatever he had, you know, from USB-C down to whatever he wanted. I was like, dude, this is not good. This is this this transition is taking longer to remain aligned off. Well, I think that's the point, Dave, where you may want to consider a dock, right? Right. That's true. That's right. Yeah, which is effectively a bunch of dongles all taped together all taped together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Powerful tape. I'm trying to think I there was a dock that that I recently was messing around with and I don't I don't want to I don't want to say the wrong thing. So I'm going to see if I can find a picture of it. But I thought there was a Kensington USB-C dock like a portable one. I'll have to look. I'll queue it up for the next show, folks. I promise I just don't I don't want to mislead you. So so I won't. So we will go to Dominic. How's that sound, John? Now that we've detoured here like crazy. Yeah, I was going to take another another turn here. But let's let's let's get back on. OK, we can take the other turn later. It's fine. Tangents are us, right? Good. So Dominic has a tip. That's Pete on his mic stand up the mic stand. Yeah, thanks for that. Anytime. Sorry about that, folks on headphones. Pete Dominic says just got around the listening to Mackiekep 712, where you quite rightly complained about the lack of first of a first party calculator app on iOS for iPad. To make up for this deficit, I tend to just swipe down. Here comes the tip from the center of the home screen to get a spotlight search bar. And then I type mathematical expressions. This is mentioned. So I wouldn't go far so as far as to say documented, but it's mentioned in Apple's note about Mac OS Sierra search with spotlight. But it also works in iOS as well. The calculator is fairly sophisticated. It knows about brackets, pi, trigonometry and logarithms, although you have to guess the names of the functions like sign, A, tan, L, N because of the lack of documentation. So that's pretty cool. Alternatively, he says you can ask Siri what's a 15% tip on $78 and so on. However, unlike spotlight series completely flummoxed by what's the tangent of pi upon eight, whereas typing tan per end pi over eight per end into pi slash eight, I should say, into a search light, as he calls it, comes up with the answer. It would be nice if you could copy the result in order to paste it into an app like you can do on the Mac, but too bad you can't to get copyable results. Just submit the expression into a search engine. He says I've tried Bing, Google and DuckDuckGo, which as a bonus will pop up a scientific calculator. For you. So two tips there. And then there was the the a side tip, which I casually mentioned on the Mac. If you go into spotlight command space bar and you type a calculation, it doesn't matter what it is. Once you've finished typing the calculation and it's showing you a result, command C will copy the result. You don't have to select anything. It just knows command C will copy the result to your clipboard. So if you're adding some numbers or doing some math or whatever, cop command C and then boom, you paste it into whatever your email or whatever you're doing and it's right there. I will add, though, that when it comes to calculations, Siri is able to come up with an answer for zero divided by zero. Ask her. All right. Well, we'll leave that as an exercise for the listener in this case. Right, John? Nan. Nan. Not a number. Not a number. Well, that's what the calculator says. But Siri has an answer for it. Ask her to do it. All right. Oh, is it going to cause like a spacial rift or something? No, no, it be prepared for a belly laugh. OK, all right. Well, we'll leave it at that. Hey, do you guys, John, are you good with? Well, what am I doing here? Pushing the bar on buttons here. See, I know I was by Dave, by Dave. Do you mind if I take a minute and talk about our first two sponsors for today? I actually fully support it. All right. I'd like to thank Ring for being a sponsor today. We're at ring.com slash MGG. You can save up to one hundred fifty bucks off a ring of security kit. And the way Ring works is their whole mission is to make neighborhoods safer. And over a million people, John and I included, are using their Ring video doorbell to help protect our homes. Ring knows that home security begins at the front door, but it doesn't end there. So now they extend that same level of security to the rest of the home. But the Ring floodlight cam, of which I have two on my property, one on my driveway, one off the back porch, just like the doorbell, the floodlight cam is a motion activated camera and a floodlight that connects right to your phone with HD video and two way audio that lets you know the moment anybody steps on your property and then you can see and speak to visitors or even set off an alarm right from your phone if you want. This morning at seven fifty five a.m. Our doorbell rang. I was still in bed and I was able to answer the doorbell and talk to the actually lovely gentleman from our electric company who was here to finally replace the pole that had come down on our property in the big storm that we had back in March. But it was great because I didn't have to like throw on clothes and run to the door. I was able to tell them, hey, yeah, sure, give me a couple of minutes, I'll be outside. Really, really awesome, convenient, secure, great, great stuff. Again, save up to one hundred fifty bucks off a ring of security kit when you go to ring dot com slash mg g. That's ring dot com slash mg g. Ring dot com slash mg g. Our thanks to ring for sponsoring this episode. Next up, I'd like to thank Eero, the great mesh Wi-Fi company for sponsoring the episode. Eero is certainly a top hour list of mesh Wi-Fi products here on Mac. And it's because not only do they make great hardware, but they also make the software to support it. I always say hardware is the most important thing except for software because without that software, you got nothing. And Eero delivers. They really have built out this app that gives you all the features that you need and actually quite a few more that most people don't need, but some of us do. And they've packaged it in a way that makes sense for everyone. Geeks, non-geeks, novice users, everybody can use this and it has all the stuff that you need. In fact, they just added their smart Q management, i.e. their buffer bloat protection to their software, both on the devices and in the app for all of the Eero hardware. All the way back to the first gen, speaking of the new second gen stuff, which includes the tri-band Eero Gen 2 and the Eero Beacon, which plugs right into the wall, makes expanding your network super easy. I was helping my daddy moved into a new house. We plugged in a couple of beacons here and there. We added a Gen 2 Eero in the bedroom so that he could also have an ethernet port there that he could then plug the thing that controls his blinds into. And it just works. Check it out. Go to Eero.com. And then use coupon code MGG for free overnight shipping to the US or Canada. Great stuff. It's what John and I are using in our homes. You got to check it out again. Eero.com, coupon code MGG, free overnight shipping to the US or Canada with that coupon code, our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this episode. All right. You know, while we're on that subject, John, why don't we answer some network related questions that work for you, my friend? Networking is important. Networking is important. In fact, like we were just talking about, right? I mean, if we're not, if we don't have our networks going right, we're not doing this show. So cool. All right, then let's go to Scott here and let me put that there. And let's find Scott. So Scott says, I've been really all the great. I've been really, I've been really enjoying. That's my man. This talking thing. Thirteen years, I guess, isn't enough practice ahead of your brain. Yeah, if that's exactly what's going on. I've been really enjoying all the great info on mesh systems that Dave's been reviewing, he says, and I am 10 hours away from being able to tell you about the new TP link mesh stuff. So we'll talk about that next time. But I was allowed to say that. He says, I don't think I really need to go with a mesh, but maybe I do. And you might, he says, I have the Synology RT2600AC, which is a great router, however, I can't really move it. So I because of where his internet comes into the house. This is the classic problem. This is one of the reasons that even in smaller homes, mesh makes a lot of sense. It says I really can't move it. So I get reasonably decent coverage in the furthest spot in the house. However, it could use a little help to give solid coverage instead of less than solid coverage. I tried implementing my former airport express, but that caused an interesting problem. I set up the express in bridge mode and extend wireless network, which is sort of that quasi mesh thing. I mean, it's technically mesh. It's WDS is sort of what it uses. It says, I gave it the same SSID and Wi-Fi password. The problem I ran into is that if my iPhone moved from one wireless to the other, I was prompted to input my password again. It was the same password, but I was constantly getting the message. The password is incorrect. I finally had to shut the express down. So we'll talk about that because that shouldn't be happening. He says, I've used this setup in the past with no issues, but it was two airport routers instead of one and another brand. Me thinks this is not the best way. He says, I did look at plume after hearing you talk about that in the last episode, but it seems you have to be a subscriber, even if you want to put the units in bridge mode, then we'll talk about that, that it is true with an asterisk. Do you know if that's true? Yes, I'd like to do the mesh thing, but I don't want to be forced into using anything other than my RT2600AC as the router and the mesh device is just as the mesh radios in bridge mode. And he says, I just can't do the cloud thing. I really struggle with that idea. And therefore I need to find something that would really let me extend the wireless or do mesh, perhaps the express is not dumb enough to act as an access point. So this is interesting, right? Because that that symptom, John, you said, as I was reading it, and I said, hmm, as I was reading it the first time, too, that shouldn't happen unless he's using different encryption, right? So if he's got the airport express, say, set to WPA, like personal WPA one, or maybe maybe even web, although he'd probably have a hard time setting that as web now, but it's got to be exactly the same. So WPA to personal on both should keep that problem from happening, right? Right. Yeah. OK, that make and the thing is there's I haven't had to make this setting in a while, but I recall at one point that the airport and I guess a lot of other ones, they would have WPA slash WPA to write explicitly WPA to and yeah, if they're not set exactly the same, it could be like, oh, well, I got to renegotiate this because you're you're choosing a different different encryption. Yeah, exactly protocol. Yeah, so I think I think I like I mean, it's always hard to troubleshoot from, you know, arms length or board, you know, airplanes length here. But that's why we have pilot Pete with us. So I think that's that problem. As far as like as far as plume, as I said, the answer is yes. You probably would want a subscription, as we talked about last week. You don't have to have one, but you miss out on all of sort of the cloud smarts that will help tune your system, especially initially. You certainly could plan to only use the subscription for one year. They they, of course, are confident that you will want to continue using the subscription, but, you know, obviously that choice is always yours. As far as any other devices like the, you know, what you're talking about here with the Synology RT 2600 AC is your main router and then Mesh as just your Wi-Fi, that's what I do here. I have actually turned it's it's it's a crime, but I have turned off the Wi-Fi radios in that Synology unit and they're strong, they're great radios. So it's kind of crazy to turn them off. But but then I use a mesh by and large, you sort of my default is the Euro because of just how robust it is. But obviously, there are times when I have something else running to test it or what have you. So so that's, you know, that's that if there is the the Amplify Mesh point HD is one option that will add Mesh to any router and does not rely on any cloud or subscription or anything like that. It's it's it's I mean, it works. It's not really mesh. It's doing kind of what you're doing with your airport Express. But but it it self configures once you kind of point it at it and it works. So that's one option. That's, you know, as far as that goes, yeah, if you want to buy, I've also tested some just some good range extenders over time, the new ones do work better than the old ones did. It's still not going to be like it like mesh, but it does work. So there you go. Dave, did you just accidentally delete your entire document? I did. Oh, yeah. Control Z, brother. Yeah. Sorry. I didn't mean to. No, no, that's fine. That's fine. I got it. Yeah. Yep. No, we the show notes. We have a show notes document in front of me. Yeah, that's not good. It's not good. Hey, where did it? It's not good. Where to go? Undo. There we go. Huh? There we are. Command Z, man. Command Z. I want to undo this. Yeah, it's fine. So so there's that one. And and then there's other extenders from Netgear. I've tried the EX7000 and the X4S and both of them let you let you, you know, configure with the same SSID if you want and all of that stuff. So, you know, that's that would be the the other the other option. Thoughts on this, John? I have one other option. Yeah, John, I'm still not seeing John's option. Well, I'm not seeing the document here. Totally fine. It will be dealt with, but go ahead and continue with the show. All right, because I want to pay something in there. And you will do that later. Yeah, but no. So the other one that I liked and they had sent us both some units to look at here, I think you gave me one on one. But the I like the TP-Link one. OK, yeah, TP-Link has a pretty wide array of of extenders. And I like the software. The setup is really smooth. And once you have it set up, it'll show you the throughput and the signal strength of whatever you're talking to to make sure you have good placement. And I even think they have a light on the thing, which if the placement is lame, it's going to blink the light. Sure. Saying, you know, I'm not getting enough signal here. Can you get me closer? I forget which one I had. It was the art that doesn't really matter. They have a whole page full of all their TP-Link range extenders. Yep. So we could just link to that page and check them out. Cool. What was your exit, dude? Right, because you got some at one point, you gave me one. Yeah, I think I didn't test the TP-Link. I mean, I tested that one here and then we tested it sort of long term at your place before you want to put the arrow and it worked. I mean, it seemed to work fine. The thing with range extenders is, you know, there's no smarts in the system, right? So if a device, it's up 100% up to your devices to decide when to switch. So if your device is connected to the far away router or whatever, even though you're sitting right next to the range extender, it may not jump to it. Some of the mesh products, but not all of them. Some of the mesh products actually include some smarts to sort of nudge things around and be intelligent about it. And that's what you don't get with these range extenders. So, yeah, good news, folks. The I was able to recover all the show notes and we didn't lose anything. So everything's good. Yeah, it's all based a link to that. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. All right. So I had that stupid question and I think I know the answer. But but things may have changed as well, which is with the Sonos products. Remember early on, they had the bridge. Uh-huh. Did they not sort of work as almost as a network extender at some point or and now they create their own network, though. So it doesn't work anymore, right? Um, or am I completely wet? What are you asking? I'm going to I know the Sonos. I thought the Sonos help kind of extend the signal of the of the network. Almost not acting as an access point, but because they're repeating the signal. OK, so other speakers, I know it's a stupid question. Not a stupid question. No, it's a confusing thing. So yes, so Sonos can be set up in one of two ways. But it is you're totally right. Sonos was the first consumer mesh product, wireless mesh product. Initially, the way Sonos worked is it had its own it would it would create its own mesh just for its own stuff. It wouldn't connect to your Wi-Fi. You had to plug at least one Sonos device in via ethernet. And you can still do it this way or the bridge or the bridge, which is a Sonos device, just not a speaker, right? Yes, right. And and then it would it would go from there and it would use sort of that. And it would build this mesh. And if you wanted, if you had one Sonos device plugged into ethernet, which you would have to. And then you had another Sonos device on the other side of your house and you needed to plug something into ethernet over there. You could plug it into your Sonos device, much like you can an euro today and bridge your wired parts of your network using Sonos in the middle. The problem is that, you know, Sonos wasn't built to be fast. It was built to be reliable, right? Their Wi-Fi mesh. So speeds would often be like really slow. But when I've had things die, like when I've had a power line thing die or when I was testing like some of these first gen Mocha things, when one of them would just, you know, sort of go belly up and you had to reset it to get it to work, I wouldn't know. Because my network would still function just fine. It would route across my Sonos like and then I'd realize, wow, you know, I'm like having a horrible time streaming to the TV. Why is this? Well, because the Sonos thing is doing, you know, it's like two megabits a second or something, which is all it needs. You know, so so there's that. The new sort of default way to set up Sonos is to connect it to your existing Wi-Fi and because most people have pretty strong Wi-Fi these days, that's that's there. It's certainly the easiest thing to do. If you have more than three, four Sonos devices, my experience is you want to run them as Sonos net the old way, which you can still do inside the app. OK. Yeah. So but but I haven't come into that. Well, I haven't come into that problem yet. But yeah. Yeah. So. So, yes, you could use Sonos to bridge your ethernet. And just to be clear, you can also do that with your mesh products, pretty much any mesh product that has ethernet ports on it can be used to do exactly that. And like I mentioned during the Euro ad earlier, that's exactly what I did at my dad's house. I put a Gen 2 Euro unit in his bedroom. It's connected wirelessly to his main base station, which is also a Gen 2 Euro unit. And then into that, I've plugged his it's Lutron is the company that he's got that does that has his, you know, he can control his blinds with his phone and he loves that now. And yeah. And I've plugged that device in. It's an ethernet only device, but it doesn't know how the signal is getting to the ethernet port and it doesn't care. So yeah, it's pretty cool. Good. Thoughts, John. Anything moving on to Frank? Moving on, moving on. OK, sort of topically related. Frank asks, he says, I have three pairs of lovely audio engine speakers throughout the house. Each are attached to an airport express with AirPlay to now out. Is there a receiver out there that supports AirPlay to that I can use to swap out the airport expresses that do not support AirPlay to. So here's the interesting part, Frank. What we've seen of the iOS 12 betas indicates that the airport express is supported with AirPlay to it has shown up in various places in the AirPlay listings on iOS 12 on people's iPhones. So it's possible you won't have to replace them. As far as other third parties that support AirPlay to, obviously, Sonos is going to support it in July with with some of their speakers. But in terms of something that you could plug into your own speakers, I'm not sure of anything yet. There is a device called AudioCast and that is an AirPlay receiver, but I'm not sure if it's AirPlay to. I've reached out to them to see if they will answer that question for me. And as of at least this point in time, they have not chosen to answer that question for me. I don't know if they're just busy or if they don't know or if they're working on it or what, but AudioCast is an interesting device to think about because it's exactly what you would you would want if it supports AirPlay to. It's it's just a standalone AirPlay receiver with outputs. So and it's at AudioCast.io. So so there you go. That's what I got. What do you got, John? Anything? No, no. I have an older express and some of the. Plugged into the audio engine A5s. OK, some of the classic ones. Sure. That's pretty much. Well, actually, no, I'll take that back. So is that showing up as an AirPort, an AirPlay to destination for you? Well, it's always shown up as a destination. Yeah, but can you let's see, can I do this without? So I think I actually named. So I so the airport express it. So if you actually named it, I think I call it. So it's not connected to Ethernet. It's that's fine, just like a standalone thing. And I call it J.B. AirPlay. And so any machine that I'm on, it shows up as an audio destination. So do this. If you know that's the old AirPlay, right? If if you launch the music app on your phone. Right. And then you don't have to play anything. But at the bottom, it probably says not playing, right? If you tap on on that to bring that sheet up. Right. Or all right. All right. So here's the music app. All right. So I got the music app. Great. At the bottom, it says probably above sort of above the button bar there. It probably says not playing or it shows you whatever song it's ready to play. Right. Correct. This is not playing. Great. Tap tap literally the words not playing to bring that sheet up. OK. And I see a red symbol on the bottom. Great. I see with the triangle and click that. And I see iPhone, Apple TV and JV AirPlay. Can you select Apple TV and JV AirPlay simultaneously? All right. I'll click on Apple TV. Actually, JV Air. It's not letting me select JV AirPlay. OK. Why? Yeah. No, no, no. Hold it down. No, you should just you should be able to just tap it. And if it does the check box doesn't fill. OK. So I don't know it does. Now, JV AirPlay is selected. Great. If I click on Apple TV. Yeah. Well, both of them stay selected. That's the key. No. OK. So that's all right. So you're saying that's one of the benefits of AirPlay 2. Correct. AirPlay 2. You can do multiple multi-room audio, which is which is why Sonos is now getting into this game because they they've always done multi-room audio. They didn't want to they didn't want to support airplay in a sort of crippled fashion. And so that would at least that's their story. It makes sense. Yeah. So OK. So on iOS 11, that does not work. But from what some people have said, it does work on iOS 12. So we'll just have to wait and see on that. Yeah. Oh, how do we find? Yeah. All right. Where are we on time here? OK, I've got to leave time for the second sponsor block. But I want to talk about Jim's question about sharing photos. Jim writes, he says, I've heard you mention many times the solution used for a couple that wants to share a single iCloud photo library account says, I think you said to use a master Apple ID for the photos account and then a separate iCloud account for each of them for everything else, mail messages, etc. He says, I believe the solution also requires family sharing, but not sure. No, it doesn't. And then he asked just specifically, how do you do this? Because he said, I can't figure out how to do it. So you're right. It's a little wonky how you do it. So first of all, family sharing doesn't need to be enabled, but it certainly could be for the other stuff that you want to do. iCloud photo library does not participate in family sharing. And that's sort of the part that sucks. So what you do is you set up your main single master iCloud account on each device as the same one and turn off everything except photos there. Right. It's only going to be used to share photos. Then the way you add sub Apple IDs or sub iCloud accounts, I should say, is a little bit different. It's a slightly different place on iPhone. So if you go into settings and you'll see your main iCloud accounts sitting at the top, ignore that, go down to accounts and passwords and say add account. And then there you get the option to add a second iCloud account or more iCloud accounts, I should say, to your device. And you can do the same thing on the Mac and internet, internet accounts. So that's where that is. All that said, I've recently been playing around with other photo sharing services because both Google and Amazon have provisions for sharing with a family. Google is actually pretty cool. You can say, I want to share with my partner like another person. And when you go through that process, it actually lets you choose the date after which you want all your photos shared with this other person. So if you broke up with somebody and now you've got a life together with this new person, but you don't need to twist the knife, you choose to share photos from the day that you got together and then everything is good to go. So you can do that with Google. Amazon Prime Photos, which I believe is free if you have an Amazon Prime account or included if you have an Amazon Prime account. Sorry, Pete. No, no worries. That actually allows you to create a family library where everybody can sort of join this library and you can either have it auto add your your upload photos to that or manually pick which photos you want to add to the family library, which is all pretty cool. And then the third one that I've been experimenting with, of course, is Synology's Moments. There are ways of sharing things, but Moments is is the new normal for Synology and we're sort of at version one. So I expect to see it evolve, but it's much better and much smarter and much easier to use than the prior DS photo or just Synology Photo Library. So Synology Moments works pretty well. The issue with all of these Google, Amazon, Synology Moments, they all you have to run the app to get it to upload. There there have been tricks in the past using like Synology with their old DS photos app used geofencing to get it to trigger like when you got home, it would fire up a thing and in the background upload all your photos. I don't see them doing that yet with Moments. Of course, they could Google and Amazon. I don't see them doing anything like that. And I've been testing it for the last couple of weeks. I feel like I have to launch the app. But the nice part is if you have iCloud Photo Library, which sort of defeats the purpose, but if you do, you can have, say, your iPad upload all the stuff to Amazon without you having to leave your phone on and open with the screen on in order to let all those uploads happen. The good news is every one of these apps is smart enough. If you're plugged in and the app is front and center, it will not let your phone go to sleep until all the uploads have finished, which is good. So only 20,000 photos. It should be fine. Yeah, I got 60,000 in my library. There you go. Yeah, it does. So and I'd be interested if you know the answer. If anyone knows the answer, I'm not entirely sure. I've been trying to use Google Photos. This is a huge problem in our house because I got all the I got all the kids photos and my wife doesn't. Yeah, something happens to you. Was it in half to call Dave? He'll show you how to get my stuff. But knowing all seriousness, I'm not sure that I've been using Google Photos and I really like it. But I'm not sure it's not doubling up on my hard drive space. I got Google Photos library and my photos library. Yeah, I don't sink them back down to your Mac. I think it is. And yeah, I figure that. OK, you got to do like in the same with Dropbox and actually the same with Synology Drive, you have if you're going to use Moments or Dropbox or Google Photos, you got to choose Selective Sync and not sync that folder back down unless you want yet another copy of your phone. That's what I've probably done then. Yeah. And finally, yes, Mr. Braun, I knew I knew I wanted to make sure something in there. Yeah, I'm done taking a couple pictures, I think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Instagram is what I use mostly. But I also want to mention Flickr and I think there's an indirect way to do the same sort of thing. OK, I'm bringing up one of my Flickr photos right now. The thing that has me shake my fist is that Instagram used to let me share to Flickr. So the people that follow me on Flickr could see my stuff in the few people that sent that that they kept breaking it. It just wouldn't work. But I still upload stuff mostly from my point and shoot. But they have an ability here. So both. So I'm looking at one photo here. And the thing is so they have a share selection. And if you say share, it'll bring up. OK, well, you know, you can use you can share via email, you can Facebook, Twitter, I think, whatever the heck that is, Pinterest, email, yes, BB code. Oh, that's interesting. But then also they have a further down on the sheet for this one, they say, oh, well, would you like to add this photo to a group or add it to an album? So I think if you create a family group, then maybe that could be another way to share the photos. So check it out. I mean, the price is right. I mean, Flickr is free. And I think they just got is it free right? Well, I'm not paying them anything. OK, all right. Well, that is two different methods at one point. And yeah, yeah, it well, they had a pro thing one time where you got some additional benefits or more space or something, but I was unlimited. But yeah, they give you a boatload of space here. So. But worth a look here. And if you Google Flickr family sharing, there's a bunch of things in their forms that I think have OK, additional wisdom on how you can use that. So just a suggestion for another platform, which yeah, I'm not. I haven't paid them anything in quite a while. OK, you're just still there. So yeah, all right. Cool. I will I will offer one caveat. Using Instagram as the go between, I would not recommend for anything you care about. I mean, Instagram is great for what it is. But Instagram reduces the resolution of your photos substantially because they're built to be shared on smartphones. So you don't need these, you know, super like high risk photos. So it, you know, it kills instant. We'll call it Instacrime. Instacrime in that sense. Yeah, exactly. So but and to be fair, all the things that we've mentioned are in some cases, recompressing your photos. Google does it. Amazon does it. Synology does it. So and I think Flickr even does it. So it's not like these are lossless, but it is. Whereas iCloud Photo Library is, I think, lossless. Oh, no, Flickr, I get full resolution when I look at the resolution. So it shows the EXIF data and it shows that full resolution. Yes, but you're it's not. I think it's reconverting the photo when you upload it. It's not it's not it's not reducing the the resolution. But it is reconverting it, I think it might not. I know Google, like I said, I know Google, Amazon and Synology do. I'm not sure if Flickr does. So just be aware that there's some lossiness involved in all of these at potentially different degrees. But from what I've seen on on Google, Amazon and Synology, the resulting photos that are there, I to my eye, I can't tell the difference between the two. But, you know, a better trained I may. So just saying. Well, and then it depends how big you want to print it. That's when it comes to an issue. Right, right. All right, I was our friend Kiwi Graham in the chat room. States and where is our chat room, Dave? Mackeekab.com slash stream. Cheesy. Oh, right. But a friend Kiwi Graham says so. So yes, he's accurate here. So Flickr is one terabyte for free. Cool. My last recollection is that's I think that's right. And they did. Yeah, I think that's right. All right, I want to talk about our second block of sponsors that that work for you, Mr. Braun. Fantastic. All right, I'm happy to welcome a new sponsor to Mackeekab here. And that is Nutrafall. This might seem off the beaten path, but let me tell you a story. Nutrafall is a new, safe and effective strategy to take control of your hair health. Anybody that's looked at me would have said, Dave doesn't need help with his hair. I got plenty of it, right? Well, here's the thing. Nutrafall was actually thinking about being on Mackeekab earlier this year. And then some of their plans changed. But in that process, they had sent me some of these supplements to start taking. And so they arrived and I looked at them because they arrived. And I realized, whoa, these are all natural. It's you know, it's basically like a multivitamin plus. So I figured, well, why not? I'll start taking these things. They gave me a bunch of them. Sure. Well, you know, four or five, six weeks later, I went to to get my hair cut. The woman that cuts my hair was like, what's going on? Your hair's like thicker and it like just she was just impressed. I'm like, huh, that's interesting. Then I was at WWDC last week. There were so many people there. I have never gotten more sort of like side comments about my hair like, oh, yeah, well, I saw you walk in the room with those, you know, golden locks and things like that that comments. I mean, they were fine and they were actually really nice. But I've never get comments like that. And it really I have to assume that it's this neutral fall, not crazy chemicals. It's 100 percent drug free. It's a nutraceutical, which means it's made of clinically tested medical grade, botanical ingredients, no bad side effects, no compromise to overall wellness. In fact, they say many users report better sleep, better digestion. It's got no GMOs, no soy, no eggs, no dairy, no gluten, no peanuts, all of that stuff not in it. And they make two different formulas, one for men, one for women. So you got to check this out. Go to Neutrophal.com and use the promo code MGG to get your first month's supply with a subscription for just ten bucks. Again, go to Neutrophal, N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com using promo code MGG to get your first month's supply with a subscription for ten bucks. Thank you very much to Neutrophal for sponsoring the episode. Next up, I'd like to thank LinkedIn for sponsoring the episode. Have you tried to hire somebody lately? It's hard, but you know what? It doesn't have to be thanks to the good folks at LinkedIn. As we all know, a business is only as strong as its people in every hire matters. And what LinkedIn has is they have the largest professional network in the world, which means that they're in touch with people that aren't necessarily actively signing up on other job search sites, but might very much be open to your opportunity. And you can reach out to them and find them with LinkedIn. And because LinkedIn considers skills, experiences, location and more to match and promote your job to potential candidates, businesses rate LinkedIn jobs 40 percent higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates. Twenty two million people view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week in every industry, even yours and ours. So if you're not using LinkedIn for your hiring needs, you're missing out, go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG and get 50 bucks off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG for $50 off terms and conditions apply. Of course, our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, where are we on time? You know what? We have I think you use multiple displays on your computers. Don't you, John? Absolutely. That's what I thought. I have a yeah. I have an ancient Samsung, I guess, the old four by three. Yeah. And then an ASUS widescreen, right? At one point, I retired the other one, but then I'm like, oh, wait a second, you know, I think I have enough plugs to plug all my stuff in. And so I actually have, let me see. So one is plugged into HDMI and the other is plugged into the thunder. Does it need a display port and going to a DVI adapter. And the Mac mini seems to be pretty happy with that. Cool. Well, John, then it's time for maybe not a full one, but certainly a mini one. Oh, you know, I do this and if I had all my faculties with me, which I should. So it's not a big one, but I think it's a mini. It's time for a deep dive. I like that audiophile. That's good. Dan sent in a question here that I think it's going to lead us down some interesting paths with multiple displays. So he says I have three external displays hanging off my late 2012 21 inch iMac. My external screens have resolutions of 2560 by 1440 connected via mini display port to HDMI, then 1920 by 1080 and then 1440 by 900. The last two are connected over USB using diamond external display adapters and require the display link driver. That means I'm stuck on high Sierra 10.13.3 because nothing past that is compatible with the driver. And so far display link has not come up with even a time frame to fully support two displays for a few other reasons. I'm thinking of buying a new iMac within the next year sooner. If there won't be a refresh of the non pro iMac reasonably soon. And I cannot find a straight answer about how to hang three monitors off an iMac using Thunderbolt 3 and ditching the USB adapters, although it seems like it can work. Maybe I should have more questions, but I've come up with three. Number one, do I need to choose my graphics card wisely other than all the displays? I don't do anything that requires much graphics muscle. Number two, I assume I need to get some sort of Thunderbolt 3 USB C dock, but not sure what to get since I don't need a lot of extra ports like more USB 3, although I have enough USB hubs already. But I do need to be able to get all my displays connected. I get the feeling that each USB C port is limited when it comes to how much it can support in terms of total resolution and how many displays can the current iMac support? And then he's got some tips that we'll come back around to. So this gets interesting, right? And I'm kind of hoping that we turn this into both a deep dive and a geek challenge here. I have played around with this with Thunderbolt and with multiple Thunderbolt devices, you can start multiple Thunderbolt hubs. You can start adding multiple displays, but it gets a little weird. And I would say get the most graphics that you can for this thing for two reasons. Number one, all the stuff you're doing here. Number two, graphics cards seem to be the things that die real soon in machines. They overheat and yeah, they they seem to be kind of the if something in an iMac is going to go, it's often that graphics card and getting the the hoopty graphics tends to run things a little bit better. So I I I always sort of err on the side of caution with that and that has served me well. And when I did not, I got burned again by it by burning out a graphics card. So I would err on the side of getting, you know, the upgraded graphics in there. But really, it's it's going to be multiple docs that that you're talking about here to do this or multiple display. But it needs to be like Thunderbolt to HDMI or Thunderbolt to display port and making sure it's not just passing through because then it's only what your Mac can support. So have you looked into any of that, John, with your with your setup there? I just did. Well, not mine. Well, I actually so John, what are you doing that? Here we go. I just ran our friend Mac Tracker, which is OK. The best database of like all sorts of interesting statistics about various Macs here. And so, for example, I'm looking on not the latest iMac, but the one before it's like, for example, if I bring up entry for the iMac, a retina, five K, twenty seven inch, twenty seventeen, and then you click on the memory graphics tab, it's like, oh, well, you know, here's your choice of of cards and get different radion cards and it tells you the memory. But then what I find useful is that they have a entry on the bottom here saying, oh, external resolution. Well, you can get up to forty ninety six by twenty thirty four per end to displays close per end or fifty one twenty by twenty eight eighty on one display. So. Got it. May want to fiddle with Mac Tracker just to get a feel for the capabilities of native capabilities. Of course, as you know, we were speculating here, you could get an external splitter gizmo. Well, and that's my question is when when you add these Thunderbolt to display devices, either a dock or just a single converter. Is it using it's not? I mean, these don't generally you can do the external GPU thing right now with Thunderbolt three, which which may be the path you need to head down here, Dan, because otherwise I think it's just leveraging what's in your Mac. And and that's that. So, yeah, I think I think you're going to need to consider the external GPU route, which is essentially what you were doing with the display link driver and display link USB adapters, right? It it it adds that it's a really slow display is what those add. It's a, you know, kind of crummy, slow graphics card. But you're not buying those to play games on them. You're buying them to have basically static images. I mean, you know, text and things like that. And and they tend to work just fine. So I think that's what you've got to deal with here is either something like that, which as you pointed out, there are no drivers for it or going the external GPU route and then that way you can connect a screen to it, I think. But I've not tested this. I would love to hear from some of you feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Oh, I don't know if I heard that right, Dave. Did you say feedback at MacGeekGab.com? What do you think, Pete? I heard him very clearly is feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Pete, if you look over your left shoulder, you will see what I said, and that is, oh, boy. Are you still there, John? You say, oh, boy. John Johnny Johnny. Welcome to the thunderstorm season. Yeah, no kidding. Huh. All right. I'm going to pause things here and we'll see John back. That was a brown out blackout. Yeah, sure was. All right, I think we're all back. So I experienced a Pete and I experienced a brown out here. Actually, two of them in a row. And if this is not the the argument for having a UPS, I don't know what is. Right. Absolutely. Because but here's the worst part. The UPS that's on my computer here in the studio works fine. No problem. The UPS on my computer down in the office. No problem. The UPS on the router, which is also on the disk station, all of that stuff. No good. The battery in it has died. And and so we have we had a little issue here where that router had to reboot. As I recall, Dave was telling me to look over my shoulder and then he turned out the lights. Yeah, that's exactly what I did in a studio with no windows. It was this weird thing. Dave, it's not my shoulder. Look over your shoulder again and you will see on the floor. The feedback, the official feedback. Have you got a picture of that up there? It will be in the show artwork for today. There you go. Yeah, absolutely. So the feedback doesn't know. But the router to use the joke. And of course, I didn't beat that dead horse today. No, that's right. Go ahead. Here's my question. Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't you expect that if the battery was shot in the UPS, it would have like kind of told you that or is there the make noise or a lighter? You just have to do something, though, once it tells you, right, Dave? Yes, yes, you have to listen to that. So here's the thing. Right. So, yes, it has told me, but it hasn't been entirely clear about if it's just like dying or if it's dead and has no ability to maintain power. We have now proven that the latter is true. The latter is true. Right. So I will order a new battery or a new UPS, as Pete said, sometimes it's cheaper to just buy a new UPS. That is true. I just need to figure out which path I want to go down with this particular one here. So it should have happened if the battery was charged, that you should have used the battery power to compliment or or or eliminate the effect of of the brown out or whatever you had there. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah, so. OK, fascinating. Fun stuff. So I and now, you know, it's really hard to kind of come back around on this. But I and so I want though we were an hour. I remember where we were because we were talking about the email addresses. Yeah, I have additional I have additional information here. Great. Go ahead. If the question is so looking into Mac Tracker and the iMac Pro, the iMac Pro, it claims can support up to four external displays. OK, so yeah. So in a nutshell, that answers your question. If you're just relying on the iMac itself, the latest one, which is last I checked, it requires a little bit of coin. Yeah, about five, five thousand of them. Yeah, but it's just a creamer. Yeah. But it's nice that it has abilities to reflect the amount of money that you're pouring into it. So it can it can support four displays. That's that's pretty good. Totally. Totally. All right. I'm going to throw in Dan's display multiple display display related tips here. He says, number one, sometimes a window will open on a display that is not powered. He says, that's a problem with USB connected displays when I don't want to have that tanning booth ambiance. He says, I have a keyboard maestro macro. This is a great one triggered by F five, but you could trigger it by anything you want that moves the active window to the center of my main iMac screen. That's really smart. I like that. Yep. Number two, if I can't find my mouse cursor, I have another keyboard maestro keyboard micro keyboard maestro macro. And this is not my day triggered by F six that moves it to the center of the iMac display. And he says, for the display that I rotate, I didn't mention that is twenty five sixty by fourteen forty can also go fourteen forty by twenty five sixty. He says, I use display rotation menu for mage software. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes. He says, it seems to have not been updated in ages. Proud to be a universal app, but it works just fine. So there you go. Yeah. So thanks for that. So crazy stuff, crazy stuff. We can't end with that. I actually there's there's a couple of things I want to go through here. So if you guys have the time, I'm I'm OK. Kind of, you know, nudging things along here a little bit. We good with that? Yes, yes, John. Anything at the time we've got the beer. OK, that's right. Remember the beer after beer. I do. So I in in the spirit of testing things that I really don't need. I have had the opportunity to test the new Signia Pure Charge and Go NX hearing aids. These things are so technologically advanced, it's crazy. So I really wanted to mention them as cool stuff found. They I mean, they're they're hearing they're hearing aids, right? Super high end. Yep. But they're they're pretty cool. And in fact, I wore them for a little bit at WWDC when I was in crowds of people because it allows you. You can use the iPhone app to actually focus where you want sound to be. Right. So if you've got all this sound around you, I can focus the sound in front of me and you can sort of decide how wide you want the field. You narrow it down and then I'm only hearing the person right in front of me. In fact, I was thinking of bringing it. We're going to PEPCOM, John, on on Thursday. So cool. Yep. And it does that whole live listen thing that we've heard about that AirPods will support in iOS 12. Well, these things support it in iOS 11. The idea behind live listen is you have a microphone that can be used as a remote microphone in your smartphone. Very directional. Yeah. So if you and I were at a dinner table in a crowded restaurant, Pete, I would hand you my smartphone. You'd put it in front of you and the mic on my phone would go direct to my ears. That's beautiful. Yep. And I wore these things at WWDC. I wore them around the house. No one, not even my family noticed that I had these things in. Oh, nice. Yes. That is I mean, if you look, you can see the little battery kind of hanging off the back of the ear, but really, really tiny things. And the like you can set your voice quality with it. You can set and it's all Bluetooth, right? Well, it's Bluetooth or it's sound activated. If it loses the Bluetooth connection with your phone, your phone actually sends out a high pitch sound that the hearing aids here and reconfigure themselves based on what you want. Yeah, it's really very, very cool. And I've been I've been totally blown away by its ability to not only, you know, sort of control sound either in an automated way or in, like I said, a very sort of self-selected and focused way, but also like when I went, I went to an audiologist, Signia sent me to an audiologist to test these things out and they programmed a couple of different EQ patterns in there. One was for like, if you're listening to music, one was for if you're watching TV and it just changes everything. It's really pretty cool. And one of the bonuses is that, you know, when you have your phone in mute mode all the time, like we all do, you never hear any of the audible cues that your phone gives you, like when it buzzes or whatever. Well, when you've got these, unless you're around my mother-in-law, in which case, you hear them all the time, you hear all of hers, right? Well, if your mother-in-law got these hearing aids, it beams them direct to your ears, right? So you're getting all the ambient, you know, benefits of these things plus that your phone's noise goes there and it'll play music there or podcasts or whatever you want. Very, very cool thing. And I mentioned TV. They've got this thing called the Streamline TV. You plug it into the sound out of your TV and it sends the signal direct from the TV to your hearing aids. Oh, I bet that can sound amazing. Right? Yeah. And then you don't have to turn it up or anything. It's it's really cool. Like I said, they, you know, I thankfully my hearing when they tested it and I've had it tested, I'm crazy about my hearing. And it's, you know, I have the hearing of someone younger than 30, which is great because I otherwise it could be easily proven that I am not younger than 30, even though sometimes I act like it. Very cool stuff. But Pete, earlier today, you mentioned Tinnitus. Oh, I've got the Tinnitus. I've been around jet engines for 30 years. And I've always been very careful with the earplugs, particularly out on the flight line, you know, got the earplugs in and all that, probably less so since I've been flying commercially, get up to the airplane, don't put them in for the 30 seconds. Yeah, it takes me to walk from the van. That's all it takes to the to the airplane. Yeah, sure. But I had a shot last Monday at a gig. We had a sound guy running things and he messed with the gain on something while we were playing and I couldn't get to anything in time. Fast enough to get it to protect your ears. And so I had like four days of ringing in my right ear and I was pissed. Oh, I mean, because I go crazy protecting myself. And here's the thing. And one of the first things people will notice is when you're having a conversation with somebody, if there's any background noise, the ability to hold that conversation just drops right out the window. That's the Tinnitus. Yeah. And when you're and I notice it there and I notice it like embedded at night or in the morning, when everything else is absolutely silent around me, that continual tone. So these mine aren't set this way because I I don't really have this problem. But these can be set to sign wave those out to emit a Tinnitus treatment tone. I don't want to call it a treatment tone. That's not what they call it. Canceling tone. Yeah. It's just something to essentially alleviate the symptom temporarily. Yeah. Yeah. Even a few minutes of silence would be so. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your brain tunes, you know, like anything else that gets used to it and it tunes it out. But right. But most of the time, most of the time. But it never is able to tune out the inability to hear conversational tones in when there's background noise. So sorry, John, you were going to say you go ahead, John. No, I just remember way back and I don't know why they did this. But you and I, Dave, we had gone to a live concert. Was it Boston? Yeah. Yeah, we saw Boston. And I remember you had suggested to me and I thought you were nuts is that you suggested and I think I actually purchased some eddy modic. I'll call them dampeners. Yeah, the earplugs. Yeah. Yeah, earplugs. Yeah. And I was like, why would I, you know what? It's like, what, are they going to play sound so loud? It's going to damage my hearing at a live concert? And it's like, yes. Yes. I feel bad for the people that were like right next to the speakers. I mean, they, yeah, I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So these things don't protect your hearing. They aren't sealing so they don't right. They're enhancing their and I don't know if I'm comfortable with the term hearing aid. I'd almost like hearing an answer. Yeah. Right. I mean, hearing aid just makes things louder because you're you're hearing. It's true. It's not just making it louder with these. And I've tried different ones over the years. I mean, these are far and away the best quality I've ever heard. It's really quite interesting, especially in a loud like trade show floor kind of environment really helps. It's pretty amazing or a loud restaurant. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So that's the sign of pure charge and go seven and X is the one that I tested out. We've got some more stuff that we'll go through. I want to take a minute and thank our premium contributors that contributed this week now it's been a short week, right? Because we just did an episode on Wednesday, which we delayed so we could do it on our 13th anniversary. So the the the number of people that have come in since then are a little lower, but it's all good. The monthly ten dollar plan we have had since then, John B. Jeff P. John V. John D. Santiago M. and Ken L. And on the biannual plan at fifty dollars, it's normally twenty five, but Chuck P. chose to do it at fifty. So thanks to all of you, you really rock. That's it's really awesome. And of course, the benefit that you get is premium at MacGeekGab.com is is the email address that you get to to use so that you get us a little bit before the regular stuff, but we try to get to everything. Really, it's just that warm, fuzzy feeling from supporting your two favorite geeks and we really appreciate it. All right, John, the other benefit is that we can maintain our state of the art podcasting set up here. Yeah, I got to go buy a battery cast. That's right. Yeah. And that we're not going to be podcasting inside of a cardboard box on the corner. That's correct, nor will it ever sound like we're broadcasting in a cardboard box. Yeah. All right. Where are we here? Should we I think we should probably save the APFS stuff till the next episode. I don't want to overdo it in terms of time for today, right, John? And the disc stuff. Yeah. Yeah, the disc stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that'll be a good dive because I've been having some many, many of us had had had disc related woes. Yes, that's OK. So we've got a couple of tips that we will share and and we'll go from there. So Aaron starts us off with this last little segment. He says a couple of items from show 7-Eleven a couple of weeks ago said first when trying to figure out where a file or folder is on your system, as Zach was asking about with his mail folders, there's another option. When you are in the folder in the finder, there's no need to command up arrow, as you said, Dave, but instead right or control click on the finder windows title, which will show you the entire hierarchy, allowing you to navigate to any point in the tree. This is a good tip for quickly moving up in a directory tree without having to worry about whether the back arrow will really take you up or somewhere else. So that's you're right. That's a great one. I always forget about that one as evidenced by the episode. On a second segment in the same show, the first thing I thought when Davy Dave said that his desktop files came back along with a different wallpaper after a reboot was that he was talking about a teachers Mac teachers have a tendency to use projectors. And what might have happened is that at some point the teacher had a projector plugged in and the main desktop got associated with the external display, but for some reason did not flip back when the projector was turned off or disconnected. That's why both the desktop files, which were still found in the desktop folder, as well as the wallpaper, would have changed. And when they switched back after she logged out, everything was good. That's really interesting. I you might be right, Aaron, that they were there just not there. There they were in the other there. I like it. I like it. That's good stuff. Thank you, Aaron. Very cool. I love those things that make us think differently about things we thought we knew. Any thoughts on that, John, or should I let J.P. Actually, we'll go to Jim and then we'll do J.P. We'll do J.P. last. But no, I always love the projector related stuff. I remember when I was the thing, I would be in a room full of PhDs and like brilliant people. And we couldn't get the fricking projector to work with the computer. It was just it's a black art to get projectors to work with computers. Well, yeah, that's right. It's always been that way. Yeah. All right. Let's see. Listener Jim, we were talking about actually Jim. We were emailing with Jim. He had asked why his male signatures were not sinking. In fact, he had an issue where he would make a change to his male signature on one computer and whatever was in the cloud would get pushed back down. And wipe out the change that he made locally. Yeah. So this is you don't want to change that. Yeah, this is like a classic, a classic problem with iCloud with any kind of sinking where if you've got, you know, the master thinks it's newer, then it doesn't accept a change from one of the clients. And that's what was happening here. So Jim saw this and he says the steps that I did were I turned off iCloud drive mail sinking on all my Macs. So he went into system preferences iCloud went to mail, turned it off. Then he said he replaced the file all signatures dot P list in his mail home. So it's home library mail v5 mail data signatures with a backup that he had. Then he launched mail on that machine and he edited one of the signatures and he made sure that file changed. Then he quit mail and he turned iCloud drive mail back on, waited for that to sink and then went around and did it on all the rest of his computers and that did it. So it's turned it all off, make a change locally, then push it all back up to the cloud. So thank you for that, Jim. It's always crazy when that stuff kind of comes around. One last one, John, or you got anything on on Jim's to to share? Well, I did a search just for additional information here, but I did a search on iCloud email signatures. And actually, Apple does have a very short article saying iCloud, create an email signature in iCloud mail. I guess what I just learned is that in addition to be in addition to being able to create signatures on mail on Mac OS, you can also go to iCloud.com. And I guess that also is another vector you could use to inspect your signatures. Right? You can't see them on iCloud.com. Can you? Are they are they? Oh, are they there? Can you edit them? Oh, in iCloud mail, of course. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think of that. And your clients don't pick them up, though. I don't think they ever say, you know, the way what works for me, you know, they probably it probably will. But. Oh, yeah. Well, I'll just I'll just paste that article in there unless you're ready to do it. No, no, no, I didn't. Oh, that's great, man. Oh, yeah. Huh. Huh. I like this. I rarely do. Yeah, I rarely log into iCloud.com proper. You know, I do every week now because well, because we have an Apple News presence with Mac Observer and so I have to log into iCloud to update the three highlighted articles twice a week. So, yeah, yeah. Interesting. All right, cool. All right. Well, one last one from JP here and that'll take us out. So JP will let you wrap up the content portion of the show. Hey, Johnny, Dave, it's JP from California. I'm on a cross country trip to Maine, and I wanted to let you know that the updated CarPlay and Sync 3 in the Ford product has an unusually new feature, which I never would have guessed someone would have thought of. But my iPhone is plugged in to the CarPlay and I'm listening to the Mac Geek Gab and my little 50 miles till empty dings in the dashboard of the Ford. OK, and then literally a beat later, the Maps app puts up a notification on the CarPlay screen that I'm low on fuel, but having nothing to do with the Ford. So somehow the iPhone is now talking to Sync 3 and alerts it when the Ford, you know, when it's a computer realizes I need gas, it's telling iPhone and CarPlay, which I never read for anywhere. So I thought you should know a little, little fun tip. Please cut me off. All right, you are you are cut off. So with any luck, you'll pay attention to that warning, Dave. Yes, and actually pull over and get gas before a brownout occurs or he runs out of gas. I feel like you mixed your metaphors and also got a little sassy, Pete. Sorry. I know myself. No, no, no, I definitely deserve that. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I was putting the link to the model number of my UPS in the show notes here so that from the house later tonight, I can go and order that new battery because that's what's going to need to happen. Obviously, I'm a little worried, too, because I noticed my iMac in the office rebooted, which I thought I just replaced that battery on the same UPS. No. Oh, OK. No. So I use old technology for my gas. So I know based on experience that my needle is on the dashboard. Well, my needle is on empty. It means I have about two gallons left, because whenever I fill up, it's about nine or 10 gallons. And I know in the documentation for my car, it says I have a 12 gallon tank. So. No, no, a little light. Actually, my past vehicles will actually have a little red LED that would light up saying, yeah, you got a couple of gallons left. Right. Right. Yeah. A little warning. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Nice to get a voice alert, though. That's that's really cool. I like it. All right. Well, we already told you folks how to email us. Come visit us on in the new forums. So go to MacGyp.com slash forums. There were there was actually more than a day. It was like three days where signing up for a new account was not the most fluid process. It was possible. But if you did it right on the MacGyp.com forums page, it would tell you you can't. That was, of course, not true and not correct. And now that has been remedied so you can sign up anywhere you want. And please do because I think it's going to be a great resource for all of us really help us out with sort of the long term archive of all of these great questions that we have answered. So we're definitely going to start using it a lot more. So go ahead there and and check it out. That's that's what we've got for today. I have let's see. We have this we want to thank Cash Fly, of course, CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the the show files, the audio files from us to you. And of course, we want to thank our sponsors, which include Ring at Ring.com slash MGG saves you 150 bucks. Eero, where coupon code MGG gets your free shipping in the US and Canada. And of course, Neutrophal, where coupon code MGG gets you your first month with a subscription for 10 bucks and linked in talent solutions. Linkedin.com slash MGG gets 50 bucks off of your first job post. Of course, Smile at Smile Software dot com slash. I can't remember podcast because it's not MGG. That's why other world computing at MacSales.com. Bearbone software at Bearbones.com. It's been real. It's been fun. I'm going to go order a UPS battery, folks. That's my plan, at least. Pete, what do you got for us? Well, I would say that if you have warnings from the weather service, the thunderstorm is coming and warnings from your iPhone that your UPS battery is low, if you pay attention to that, you would then take this other advice and not get caught.