 I believe we're ready five, four, three. The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap Episode eight oh eight for Monday, March 30th, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found, all of that stuff. We take it, we mash it together, we mix it up, we build an agenda, we loosely follow it. But sometimes we get off it. The goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Linode.com slash MGG, MacSales.com, ExpressVPN.com slash MGG and a new sponsor this week, DevonTechnologies.com slash MGG. We'll talk in detail about each of those shortly here. But for now, this will come as no surprise here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Tripple, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. All right, Mr. John F. Braun, we got lots of questions today. Let's let's dive right in to to this. And we'll start with TANL because I think this is a question that might apply to a lot of people. TANL says due to the closure of universities and everything, I have to teach online classes. The solution that I found was to use Zoom.us, which seems to be a pretty popular solution, not just for classes, but for business meetings and all that good stuff. He says, which works best for me because it also supports screen sharing for my iPad. He says, this is important because I teach theoretical mechanics and I need whiteboard iPad with Apple Pencil works perfectly for that. The problem is that during this setting, my 2019 MacBook Pro ventilators fans here in the U.S. we call them, are blowing like crazy. According to iStat menus around 6,000 RPM each. One lecture he says is two hours long and my worry is whether this can do any damage to the fans or anything else. What are your thoughts? So in theory, your Mac will not let itself get hot enough to cause any damage. If it gets there, it'll shut down. That's just how it's supposed to be built. That said, it's not generally not best to just be running at full steam all the time. So I also know that the new MacBook Pros, which I think is what you're talking about here, are susceptible to running their CPUs hot, especially when audio devices are engaged. We run into this. I've run into it with the machines I've tested. I've run into it with the machines I own. When core audio D is engaged, which basically means recording audio, even playing audio back, but it's the capturing of audio that for some reason forces the CPU to run at an elevated speed. Doesn't even have to be using a lot of CPU percentage. It's just running at elevated speed causes heat. That's how that works. Thankfully, there's an app called Turbo Boost Switcher. This is an app. We've used it here for a while. It allows you to turn off the Turbo Boost feature in your CPU. And you can use this on laptops, desktops. It does keep the CPU from clocking up, which may make some of your apps run slower if they tend to push on the CPU. But a lot of times, things aren't necessarily pushing on the CPU, especially with this audio stuff. It's just that the nature of having an audio running clocks the CPU up. So you can use Turbo Boost Switcher to turn that off and see it'll track your fan usage and everything so you can see exactly how it's working. And there's a free version available and then also a paid version. The nice part about the paid version is it can automatically kick it in when you're running certain apps. So like when you run Zoom, you could have it automatically turn on Turbo Boost Switcher and then automatically turn it off. That would be my advice for this. It seems like, I mean, it's probably a good thing to have. We just talked with Bob Levitis about it last week on daily observations here at Mac Observer. But it's probably a good thing to have anyway, but especially on those 2019 MacBook Pros, those new 16 inches, they seem to be more susceptible to this than others perhaps. But it's worth getting, it's free or 10 bucks. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I was looking here. I wonder if, so I stat menus if you have the sensor menu, one choice is fans. And normally it's at the system controlled. I wonder if you could use that to override what the system's doing. With the fans? Yeah, I mean, it actually has a little slider here for, or I think you can, yeah. So it has a little slider where I can actually set the fan speed and there are a couple of profiles here. But I don't think you can set a maximum fan speed, right? Nor should you, right? I mean, if you wouldn't want to, you wouldn't want to reduce the amount of ventilation, right? Wouldn't that, I mean, I don't know. That's, right? I mean. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't let you hurt your machine. Let's hope not. Yeah, exactly. All right, sticking with laptops for a little bit here, we'll go to Stelios and Stelios says I'm finding myself stuck at the house and my main machine, of course, is a 2017 MacBook Air. I'm connected to a second screen and external hard drive using software that sucks my battery juice very fast is the old paradigm of let the electrons flow still valid with these newer machines. Do I need to make sure I discharge the battery every so often or can I just leave it plugged in most of the time? So if we rewind 10 years and literally we could because we kept all the recordings, you would hear us talking about this all the time, like on your laptop, you cannot leave it plugged in. That was the mantra, right? That has changed largely because Apple has built the battery circuits in these machines to actually let them discharge. So they're keeping the electrons flowing either into the battery or out of the battery better than they were with machines that were built 10 years ago. They've gotten way better at that. That said, it is still good for the battery to keep the electrons flowing. So you can help Apple's efforts by letting it, especially if you know you're not going anywhere, let it charge down and bring it back up. I would do that, I would say once a week, just to make sure everything's, you don't want any surprises. You wanna know if you're running into a problem. And then there's an app that we've again been using for years. In fact, I think it was developed in part because of our conversations on this show about keeping electrons flowing called fruit juice. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. So, and you can go get fruit juice and it will remind you that you've been on battery too long or et cetera, right? Do you still use fruit juice on your laptop there, John? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I do too. But I remember we had people report if they leave it plugged in almost all the time, they don't see the degradation. Right, that's right. Apple's gotten, yeah, gotten way better at that. I would say with the, I think the machine starting, I think, what did we figure out? Like 2015, 2014, I wanna say is when that, you know, tech got better. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, moving on, more to say about Steelios, John? Sure. Nope. Okay, cool. Douglas brings up a great point. He says, I recently purchased the Anchor PowerCore Slim 10,000 PD battery pack with one USB-A port and one USB-C port. The USB-A port is Anchor's power IQ. The USB-C port is a power delivery port. It says, I also bought some USB-C to lightning and USB-C to micro USB-C cables and adapters for my devices. My goal is to carry the battery with only one USB-C cable. He says, I hate cables. And then use the adapters and such for different devices. Okay, fair. He says, I also purchased the Anchor PowerPort Atom 3 Slim, which is just a USB-C only wall charger that I can use when I have access to power. He says, here's my question. Can I charge all of my devices using the USB-C PD power delivery port? I know I can charge my iPhone and iPad using this port. How about my AirPods Pro? I also have a number of smaller devices that charge with micro USB. Some of these devices are compatible with quick charge and some are not. Can I charge these with the USB-C power delivery port as well? I understand these devices will not be able to take advantage of faster charging, but will it damage these lower power devices? Will the lower power devices be damaged if I'm charging them on a power delivery port? So the answer to that is there's no universal answers. In general, that's exactly how it's supposed to work, that the device pulls as much power as it needs and doesn't pull more. However, we've seen off-brand, third-party things over the years, even with just USB-A five-volt stuff blow things away. John, you had that problem with your old iPad. Yeah, a car charger blew up my iPhone and iPad, because one of the components failed. Yeah. But yeah, you're right. Normally, I mean, it just figures it out. Right. Yeah, it's up to the device. It'll negotiate the most power that it can. Yeah, my daughter, this is a great question though. And for the record, I would trust the anchor stuff for sure, like no question. I use that stuff personally. They build it right. So I think you're okay with the anchor stuff and make sure you get cables that are decent and pass the power properly. I highly recommend getting USB-like inline power meters. You plug them in either to your device and then plug the cable into them or on the other end the other way. So you can see how much power, and with a USB-C one, you get to see both the voltage and the amperage that is being pulled. My daughter just bought one of those Nintendo switches, John, because she wanted more stuff to do whilst we're kind of sequestered here at home. And I noticed that its power supply is a wall brick with a non-folding plug built-in cable and is USB-C on the other end. I'm like, okay, well, let's see. Like, can you charge this thing with a normal USB-C device? And I looked on it and it says at 15 watts, it does 2.6 amps is what this charger does. So that's, you know, what 2.6 times 15 is 40 or something like that, right? Is my math right? This one, yeah, it's 39. 2.6 times 15 is 39, right? So I put the power meter on it to see how much juice it was actually pulling. And I realized, okay, a 30 watt charger not gonna be enough, but a 45 watt charger is gonna be enough. And because it really is pulling that, you know, almost, you know, it was like 2.4 amps or something like that. But it was certainly more than it could get from a 30 watt charger. So as you're doing these things, see what your devices are actually pulling and know that your devices are gonna pull different amounts of power at different states of their charge too, right? The, if a device's battery is almost depleted, it will pull more power from the charger into the battery than it will if the device is at, say, like 90% or something like that. They slow themselves down so that they don't overheat is how that works. So any thoughts on that, Mr. Brumman? Yeah, I was actually, when I was experimenting with a USB-C charging, another thing to keep in mind. So one, I actually used the iStat menus and looked at the DC in wattage to see what it was doing. Of course, you know, like you said, you can use an inline meter also, but I wouldn't. But that reports accurately. And the thing is, not all cables are built alike. In that one cable that I used, it would not achieve the maximum charging. I'm like, well, that's kind of dumb, but that's the way it is. So just also keep in mind that, you know, you've got to select the right cable if you want to get the maximum charging. Right, right. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. That's right. Yep. Yeah, you gotta have all the right stuff. Okay, let's go to Michael here, John. And Michael asks, he says, I'm trying to reduce my monthly expenses as much as possible. What is the mechanism to download all of my music to either an external or my internal drive if there is room? I need to cancel my Apple Music Family Plan and I'm curious how to go about doing this. Okay, so your Apple Music tracks won't be playable without a valid subscription. However, all of your music, the things that you had ripped or purchased that you had been storing, that you had uploaded to the iCloud Music Library, those are yours, regardless of whether you have an Apple Music subscription. So you're smart to want to take a look and make sure you've pulled down everything that you can pull down. So piecemeal, you can just highlight a track in the music app or in iTunes if you're using prior OS and go to the song menu and choose download or you can right click on a song and choose download and the download option won't be there if the download's already there. Or if you want to be a little more exhaustive about it, which is actually what I recommend, you could make a smart playlist of all the songs that you have that are not on iCloud. So you would do a smart playlist, I named mine songs on iCloud only and I match all media for all of these three rules. One, location is iCloud and then the second one I put is location is not on this computer. That's more just to, the two should be mutually exclusive but I've found some things are a little weird and then for me I put the third rule as media kind is music and then that way we're saying what music is only in iCloud and not on my computer, put it in this smart playlist, then you can highlight the whole playlist, go to the songs menu, choose download and it'll slip them all down and in theory that playlist will empty itself once everything has downloaded and that should let you do it and be confident and then you can copy it off to another drive or something if you wanna, you know, which I would do, I would put it somewhere else before you turn off Apple music just in case something in that process goes a little bit wonky. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? No. No, okay. All right, I would love to take this opportunity and talk about our first two sponsors if that's okay with you, Mr. Braun. Fantastic. Alrighty, alright. Our next sponsor is a new sponsor for us although it's not a new product. We've mentioned Devon Think many times on the show and now Devon Think via devantechnologies.com slash MGG is a sponsor Devon Think is an information manager for everyone who has elevated information needs. So if your folders are a mess, if you work with information all day, some things you could do, you could, for example, archive all your email and correspondence and it's all separated into different databases but archived into one place and totally searchable or think about how you might organize a project. You'd have links, you'd have PDFs, you might have videos. You know, if you're a developer, you might have videos from Apple showing you how to do things. If you're doing a music project, you might have audio files, that sort of thing all in one database, right? One user of Devon Think used it for resumes. 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Well, you could set one of those up on your Linode server and now it's yours, right? You don't have to worry about other people's data being there because it's your server at Linode. And here's the cool thing about Linode. All their servers run on SSDs, so they're fast. Even if you start with their lowest priced $5 a month Nanode server, it's still running on an SSD. It's still on their 40 gigabit network, industry leading processors. You can pick from any of their 10 worldwide data centers and like I said, you get a $20 credit by going to linode.com slash mgg. So you get four months for free of that Nanode if that's the way you choose to go. You gotta go check this out, go to linode.com slash mgg and our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, we got some printing problems to go through, John, shall we? All right. Okay, Bill writes, he says, let's see. I'm looking for ideas as to why my wife's computer, Mojave, recently updated, would suddenly stop being able to talk to our brother laser printer. It will successfully print and then an hour later, it won't. The printer itself is only on Wi-Fi. My computer can print to it, also on Mojave, and my computer's connected to Ethernet, but my iPad can print to it. Obviously on Wi-Fi for that, wife's MacBook Air is connected by Wi-Fi as well. I've rebooted, I've tried a different user account, I tried deleting and setting up the printer again. I also tried sharing the printer from my iMac, it just doesn't seem to want to print. I downloaded Brothers Drivers, the setup saw that there was a firmware update, so I did, it did connect to the printer for the firmware update, right? So that's interesting. Since I tried installing, it started and the printer showed some activity but stopped at 90%. Fortunately, it must have some safeguards as it didn't break the printer. Okay, at a bit of a loss, he says as to further troubleshooting. For now, she just emails me the document, she needs printed and I print it, but I'm pretty sure she didn't change anything and we're not really sure what to do. Okay, my, well, this is one of those things where the best thing I can do is say, well, if I were there, here's what I would try next. And what I would try next is, it seems like your wife's computer's printing subsystem is a little bit foobar, because if printing to your Mac fails, it tells me things are not right, so let's reset it. Thankfully, Apple makes this really easy. Open up system preferences, open up printers and scanners, and then right click or you can control click if you don't have a multi-button pointing device. So right click or control click in the white space below where your printers are listed. So you're not right clicking on your printer, you're just right clicking kind of in the space in that list. And the only option you should get there is reset printing system, dot, dot, dot. Do that, allow it to do it. And that'll wipe everything out and let you start the printing subsystem from scratch. We've seen this enough. There's a reason Apple has put this in there. So that's where we're at with it. What do you think, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I had to, I was having printing issues a while back too, so I have a Canon inkjet. And I think I actually had to go into, or run their app and then log into the printer to activate the, the air print, I guess it's not on by default. And it was kind of a pain in the neck. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it sounds like this would do, this one does air print as well, right? Because he's able to print to it from his iPad so that probably means he's using air print to do that. But in theory, it should just be an IP based printer for certainly for the max. So, yeah. Yeah, interesting. It would be a good, another good test would be if you have another printer in your house, you know, will it print to that, but not this. Usually, you know, most of us don't necessarily have two printers, although some of us do, so. Shall we keep moving on, John? Okay, Bill, different Bill, but writes, how do you know if your router or the one you want to buy is up to the task? It's more of a rhetorical question, but you know, I like fostering discussions on the show, good, because I know your router geeks. He says, I moved from cable to gigabit files a couple of years ago due to cables, pathetic upload speeds, two megabits per second. Then they really stink for online backup. My setup is a Fios router with a Netgear R8500 router connected via DMZ to the Fios router. And he sends a hat tip to Alison Sheridan over at Podfeat for showing how to do that. And I think she's got an article on it. So if we can find it, we'll put it in the show notes and I'm certain we can find it. He says, while the Fios test router to the internet said I was near gigabit speeds, my computer wasn't even close. The Netgear tech said my old computer was to blame. Thanks to dual Ethernet ports on the Mac Pro 2008, I could test both a direct connection and through the Netgear router. Right, because you can bypass the router because of the way the Fios works. The direct connection was faster, but not by a huge amount. So first question, when a computer says gigabit Ethernet, can the port be capable, but not the rest of the computer? We'll put a pin in that, we'll come back to it. Now he says I have a 2019 iMac with i9 processors. Direct connect, I'm getting high 800 and 900 megabit per section speeds, both up and down. We're all jealous of you. He said I also saw the same through a Caldigit Thunderbolt hub while Ethernet, with gigabit Ethernet on that. Netgear, though, through it, I only get two to 300 megabits per second. I did some searching and a forum post said that having WAN-based QoS, buffer bloat protection here in MacGeekab Land, was potentially a problem on the R8500. People were saying that its performance was poor. Sure enough, turning that off boosted my speed to about 600 megabits per second. I'm assuming he says that that double slash triple speed was making up for the lack of QoS. Okay. He says the router has built-in speed testing to set QoS, but that reported the same two to 300 megabits of speeds. I tried manually setting QoS speed to 600 megabits per second, but that did not seem to make a difference. So it wasn't the router artificially limiting itself. Smart. He says there's definitely something odd here. What do you think is going on? Okay. So, any sort of routing requires processing, okay? You're taking all of the data from one pipe and routing it to all these other machines, but it's gotta look at all that data and decide, okay, because it's only coming into one IP address, your router's gotta do the work of saying, okay, which computer do I direct this information to? And it's gotta have a table and it's gotta do a lookup and all of that stuff. And obviously, they've built routers to be efficient about this, but there is a limit. And then when you add the processing power required by buffer bloat protection, in this case we're calling it WAN-based QoS, well, that gets even worse, right? Because now not only is it looking at all the traffic, both in and out, deciding how it should go, where it should go, put it in the lookup table, look it up in the lookup table, all of that. In addition to that, it's gotta manage the flow of that traffic so that it's not sending more, especially on the upstream, than your outbound device can take. And this can slow things way down. And it does not surprise me that you're finding routers that are not up to the task of a gigabit connection. In fact, we see that all the time here. We test all these sorts of things. It's very interesting to see a router that has like the R8500, I mean, it's Wi-Fi signal, especially for its time. It's a little aged now, but especially for its time, you know, it was very powerful Wi-Fi signal and certainly still a powerful Wi-Fi signal today. But its CPU wasn't quite up to that task. I remember running into some of this, I have an R8500 and it did great until I got a gigabit connection and it was like, oh, no, no, no, like it's just, the CPU just can't handle it. We have tested some things. The Synology RT2600 router, if you're looking for a standalone router, I've tested it. It will do gigabit speeds with QOS on the Eero. We've seen do gigabit speeds even with their, what do they call their, I can't remember off the top of my head, John. What's the name of their thing? It's smart queuing management, SQM or something. I think that's what they call it. Yep. And then the new Unify Dream Machine from Ubiquiti in the Unify line. Also, I was able to get past that 900 megabits per second with everything enabled, including their intrusion protection and detection, which is yet another thing that can, any filtering you're doing can slow things down. So, yeah, it does make sense. There's this other question I wanna come back to, John, but do you have any thoughts on this before we do? No, I ran into this, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned boxes that, do you do any sort of analysis, intrusion protection and stuff like that in that I actually looked at one unit a while ago and it was throttling, it was, it just had a wimpy processor. Right. Same thing. And I wasn't getting full speeds even direct connect. So, yeah. Yeah, it's just how it goes. Yeah, yeah. Bill also asked he had that problem with his 2008 Mac Pro where he asked, is it possible to have a gigabit port and the computer's not fast enough to send data at gigabit speeds? Technically, yes. I mean, that's essentially what's happening with your router, right? Your router's, but no, I've never seen a Mac and that could not, that had a gigabit port that could not just send data at gigabit speeds. I think something else was going on there. It doesn't take much, especially if you're just doing speed test or using an app like iPerf 3 or something. It's just blasting data. So there might have been something else going on with that computer at that point. Yeah, thoughts? Yeah, cause I mean, on the computer that's handled, I think for the most part, a Broadcom chip is handling the ethernet traffic and it should have enough oomph. I don't think the processor really gets too involved in that on the computer end. Right, on the computer. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, on the computer end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is, boy, I wish I had that problem. I get the full band with the optimum offers right now with a wired speed test. And what is your full? 200 down, 35 up. Okay. Yeah, see, 35 up. If I could get, I've said this many times, but if I could get 35 up, that's all I need. And I do now get that. Actually, it's like 42, but technically it's 35 on the thing. But in order to get that from Comcast, I have to have gigabit speeds, which is gigabit down. It's actually more than gigabit down if you've got an ethernet port that can handle it, but only 35 or 40 up or whatever it turns out to be. All right, where are we on time here? Oh, we're doing great. Oh, excellent. Let's go to Matt. Matt says, I'm considering my next purchase, should I get a USB-C based disk enclosure? I need more storage is what he says. Should I get a USB-C based disk or should I invest in network attached storage? Which is best? Do I need both? And what do you guys do? Okay, so simple questions, right John, but not so simple answers. In short, I have and use both. I use my network attached storage, for me mostly Synology, although I've got some Trouble and QNAP stuff scattered about. As that's sort of my long-term storage, that's my archive, that's for any shared data, things like my video library. You know, I put a copy of my music library out there, things that other people in the house might wanna have access to that sort of thing. And then I use direct attached USB and or Thunderbolt drives, depending on which Mac it's on, for my clones, right? So that I can have a clone that is external and bootable. And also my photos library, that does not live well on a NAS these days. And things like that, anything that doesn't do well on a NAS or like here in the studio, I've been doing a lot of tracking for some songs that we're doing with my band, Fling. And so I track, I store all the tracks on an external SSD up here just to, you know, because that way, storing it across, I guess I could track across the network. That would be interesting, I should try that. Now you got me thinking, maybe I should try that. But certainly photos library I can't do that with. I've tried it and failed. But yeah, maybe I could store my tracks on the NAS or stream it, record to the NAS. I've got gigabit ethernet. Huh, well I don't know. Learn something new every day. Here's one of my five things. Thoughts on that, John? Which is best? I would say the economics is that a direct connect would be the least expensive or less expensive way to get more storage. The reason that, but the NAS, I like the NAS because, especially with Synology, is that it has, it does so much more than just store your data. Right, right, right. To me, that would be the reason to explore NAS is do you want it to do more? I mean, like, you know, I run a VPN on my Synology. I run an audio server. I run all sorts of things. Sure. So that's my take. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair. In terms of the economics of it, I would put an asterisk on that. If you want gobs and gobs of storage, a NAS might actually wind up being less expensive. Well, in that you could, well, a multi-drive array, either direct attached or network, is gonna be cheaper for lots of storage than a single drive, right? You know, if you need, if you need what, eight terabytes of storage or something, it's gonna be cheaper to get four or two terabyte drives than it is to go buy like one eight terabyte drive. And I might have the math on that wrong, but you could get to a point very quickly where it's cheaper to buy multiple smaller drives than one very, very large drive. I think, you know, but in general, I agree with you. Yeah, direct attached, just starting out getting in the thing, you're totally right, I think, yeah. Yeah, I was tickled because I was doing, I was moving around some large files and now having the newer machine here with the USB-C or actually the high-speed cable. Dude, I was getting 500 megabytes a second. That's great. Throughput when I was restoring, it was a VM I'm playing with my setup here. Okay, cool. Actually what I'm doing, yeah, so one thing that I do is run, I'd like to play Team Fortress, and of course now on the Mac that's, it doesn't work on Catalina because it's 32-bit and they decided not to upgrade it. So one solution they offered was, well, run it in Windows. I'm like, dude, can't you just recompile it? And running it off of a backup was unsatisfactory. It was stuttering and stuff like that. So, but I did that and actually had to pull up a VM file off of a backup because something got screwed up with it. Yeah, it was amazing to see that level of throughput on a direct connect drive. Can you do snapshots of your drive with a VM and then just restore that snapshot instead of having to restore a whole thing? I'm just, I don't know. I took the Windows route and paralleled running Windows 10. No, that's what I mean. From your, like if we were restoring the VM, could that have been snapshotted so that you didn't have to just like bring the whole VM back across? I don't know. I feel like there's more for us to learn about how snapshots and all that work and everything. Yeah, well, I actually did learn about snapshots. So, we were, I had to upgrade some of my Logitech software and one installation put my Mac Mini in a state where it wouldn't boot anymore. Like, how great, what do I do now? And actually, I did restore from a snapshot, Dave. Okay. So, I didn't, yeah, and my system was up and running again. So, but here's how you do it. The thing is, I don't think we've ever discussed this and I don't know if you have ever done this, but here's how you restore from an APFS snapshot is you go into recovery, you then go to the time machine section and say, I wanna do a restore. The thing is, it's gonna show you not only your time machine drive, which for me is on my NAS, but it also shows the local hard drive. So, you select that and then it'll show you all of the local snapshots and I just selected one and it was like seconds or maybe a minute, less than a minute where it reverted me back to the state because I'm like, I don't wanna restore from a clone. Wow, huh, that's pretty cool. So, yeah, the funny thing is is that Apple doesn't really document how you're supposed to take advantage of these local snapshots or at least I couldn't find it. I found it at some other site. They were like, oh, here's how you're supposed to go about this. That's pretty cool, man. Okay, so you were, wow, that's like, that's how snapshots are supposed to make our lives better. That's pretty good, huh? Yeah, I mean, we talked about it briefly. The thing is a carbon copy clone will also show you these local snapshots. But you were, so in recovery mode, time machine is where you can go to sort of capitalize on these, right? Yeah, and then it'll show you the various drives and one of them is your local drive. And I guess the OS will frequently do these local snapshots going back like a couple of days. And I think what triggers it sometimes is when you do a software, especially if you do a software install. It's something that Windows has had for ages. You know, restore point, I guess, is what they call it. Huh, yeah, right, right, no, that's exactly right. Yeah, although with a snapshot, it's a much more efficient thing because it's built into the file system. But you're right, yeah, effectively, yeah, fascinating. All right, cool, cool. Oh, I'm glad that worked. That's good to know. I gotta put that in the troubleshooting, you know, try and lock it in the old brain there. All right, where are we in time? Yeah, all right, good. Let's go to Neil here. And Neil says, I have a few different questions related to setting up smart home devices. Number one, I've looked at two different products that I just stumbled on from WIZ, W-I-Z, and FATE, or FEIT, F-E-I-T, Electric. The WIZ devices, and so don't worry if you've never heard of these companies or don't intend on buying them. They're great examples here for all of us to sort of dig into as they sort of represent two different camps. He says, the WIZ devices appear to be Wi-Fi only and are not home kit enabled while FEIT has both Wi-Fi and home kit enabled devices. Sadly, in the latter case, they're not the same devices. It appears that for them, home kit devices talk to the home kit hub via Bluetooth LE. I had thought home kit devices talked via Wi-Fi, but apparently that's not exclusive. The Wi-Fi devices from both companies support Siri Short Kits via their respective iOS apps, but not home kit. Any thoughts or info on either company? And very quickly, I've used some FEIT or FATE electronic stuff over the years, but not any of their smart home. I've used just some of their regular bulbs. But in general, yeah, you can have, if you have a hub, it can do Bluetooth LE, then home kit can certainly work via that. That's fine. I've got that with some of my devices. In fact, I've got some UfiCams that are now doing home kit, but they connect to their hub and then the hub connects to the network, and that's just kind of how that works. But yeah, I mean, either is fine. Just know which path you're going down. If home kit's important to you, then I would go down the home kit path to be perfectly honest, but yeah, yeah. So thoughts on that, John, before we move on to his next question. My thought is also consider which hub you may want to use. And I actually went with SmartThings, Samsung SmartThings, and that's mostly Z-Wave. Right, right. Just how you talk to all your devices. And then it integrates also with the A-Lady. Yeah. It's kind of my hub, right? Well, yeah, that's your, yeah, that's your, you're right. That's your home management interface. I mean, it's really, it's not doing anything locally though. Locally, with the Amazon stuff and with the Google stuff, that's all really just an interface to their cloud service. It's a voice interface to their cloud service that is actually the thing that's doing the management of your smart home devices if you put them all in via the A-Lady app. But yeah, that's right. Yep, yep, that becomes your detached hub, if you will. Yeah, all right, so his next question is, he says, one thing that troubles me in the use of Wi-Fi-based smart home devices is the rapid, expansive expanse of the number of devices on the network compared with, for example, Philips Hue devices which require only a single hub on the network and one IP address. And perhaps that just pushes the bandwidth problem onto the hub bulb level instead of the Wi-Fi network level, he says. But thinking about my own house, he says, I can, from my armchair, without walking around, think of perhaps 60 light bulbs. Assuming all of those became smart bulbs, unlike these, he says, but possible. You know, think of all of the, oh wait, what's he saying here? Got a little confused. So when they all become smart bulbs, I've just thrown now another 60 devices onto my Wi-Fi network. Since supposedly each of my Eero units can handle 128 devices and I have three on my home network, I presumably have plenty of device capability, but I wonder about the rapid expansion of Wi-Fi devices and whether the hub method that Philips uses is not a more scalable approach. That's a fair point. We have lots of Wi-Fi devices out there and things can get confused. I mean, they're not all sending data and certainly your smart home devices, even when they are sending data, it's not gobs in gobs of data, but there is the association with the base that there is a limit to that with devices and so like, yeah, I don't have an answer for it, but it's an interesting question. If you have an answer, feedback at macgeekab.com. John, what do you think? Did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? I said feedback at macgeekab.com. Yeah, that's where we send the stuff. That's where they all send the stuff. What are you, any thoughts on any of this anymore? Well, again, all of the bulbs that I have, so I got, and they're not terribly expensive. The price has really gone down on these, but of all the smart bulbs that I have, I got the Cree brand and they're also using Z-Wave, so they're talking through the SmartThings Hub. Got it. So again, yeah, it avoids overloading the Wi-Fi. But you bring up a good point, is that, I mean, they're sending tiny little bits of data, but I can understand the concern about saturating your Wi-Fi with too many things. Well, the other thing, now that we're getting geeky on it, thankfully it's in the name of the show, is most of us run our local networks, like by default, our routers set up our local networks to give or take 250 IP addresses that can be freely assigned. Now, you start adding an IP address per light bulb. He's got 60. I've already got 60 devices in my house that need IP addresses, right? And sometimes that's two per device. If, for example, I want my Mac connected to both ethernet and then also Wi-Fi so that I can get the whole continuity mode and all that stuff, right? Like, you know, it's not, I'm been looking, because I, well, I'm about to tell you about a loop that I made. So I've been looking at how many devices are connected to my network, and it's, you know, it's 50, 60 without a ton of smart home stuff. And then when I did add some smart home stuff in a different way, it was like, you know, 75 or whatever. I mean, that's not 250 yet, but, you know, as everything gets an IP address, it starts to get up there. So we could move a lot of it to IPv6 though, and not even ask it to get IPv4 addresses if it's really, truly just used that way. And maybe, maybe that's where, maybe that's, you know, the baby steps that we used to get to IPv6. I don't know. I don't know. It's just thoughts. Any other thoughts on that, John? Nope, I'm very happy with smart things. Good, cool. Wink let me down, unfortunately. Well, yeah. Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's just the evolution of technology, right? Is, you know, we live on the cutting edge. Sometimes it's the bleeding edge. It's just how it goes. That's fine. All right, like I said, we've got some tips. I made a loop in my network that I really, I did not intend to make, John, and I wanna say it's not my fault, although that it's probably going a little too far. But I wanna tell you about it. And then we've got some cool stuff found that is actually really cool. So we've got all that, but first, John, I do wanna tell you about our next two sponsors if that's okay with you. Okay. All right, our next sponsor is Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com with their new Mercury Elite Pro dock. I got to check this thing out while I was at CES. In fact, I even did a little video on it, which I'll link for you folks so you can see this thing because it's the perfect combination of docking solutions and storage, right? So it's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports. So it's your Thunderbolt 3 dock, okay? Plug it into your, you know, your MacBook Pro, your MacBook Air, your Mac Mini, your iMac. It is your Thunderbolt 3 hub. Then it's got a one gigabit ethernet port on it. It's got a front side SD 4.0 card reader. It's got a display port 1.2 port for adding up to a 4K monitor. And then it's got two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports with type A connectors, right? And then inside it, it's got a hardware RAID controller and two Bays. So it's everything that you would plug in most of the time, right? It's got all your ports, it's got your storage and it provides power. So you just plug it in and you're good to go. Starting at just $299.99, this is right in the realm of the price of any Thunderbolt 3 dock you'd buy, but this one has the ability to add storage to it. So you gotta check this out. Go to OtherworldComputing at macsales.com and check out the Mercury Elite Pro dock or thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. Okay, we all know how ExpressVPN protects our privacy and our security online, right? We talk about that all the time. In fact, we talk about that even when it's not a sponsor spot because we use ExpressVPN all the time for exactly those reasons. But here's something you might not know. You can also use ExpressVPN to unlock those movies and shows that are only available in other countries and let's face it, we're all watching a lot more movies and shows right now. So it's only a matter of time until you run out of stuff to watch. Well, good news, you know, for example, I was able to tune in with Netflix UK by changing my location to the UK with ExpressVPN and then I could watch Star Trek Discovery. Good to go, right? It's super easy and ExpressVPN takes your IP address, runs it through ExpressVPN servers with that private secure tunnel that we're always talking about and then your out point, in this example, mine was in the UK, you can set that anywhere you want basically. It's worth checking out because it's very, very cool and if you visit our special link right now at expressvpn.com slash mgg, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. So you get to support the show because you know, it looks good when we send you there that's why we give you that link. You can watch what you want and you can protect yourself with ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash mgg and our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, so some tips. We'll start first with Donna. I don't know that I'd ever seen this before and I think she's right that it's new. iOS contacts app, when you add a photo to a contact, you now have filter choices like vivid, vivid, warm, vivid, cool, dramatic, dramatic, warm, dramatic, cool, mono, silver tone, noir, original, of course, unfiltered. Yeah, I had no idea, but that's why, maybe it's been there for a long time and we just hadn't noticed. That's also one of those things that happens all the time. So thank you, Donna, very cool stuff. I like that being able to kind of tweak things. So I wonder if that, we'll have to test this, John. I wonder if that filter is shared. So you know how like now with iOS 13, when you get a message from someone, sometimes it'll say, hey, they've added a new contact photo. Do you want to ingest that contact photo, right? So I wonder, does that, does that work? Like, would it make a difference there? I don't, like, I don't know, it's interesting. Yeah, I don't know, we'd have to mess with it. Like, I'll put like a new R filter or something on and see if that gets us there. Have you messed with it much with this yet, John? Since her email came in? Okay. No, but I have seen that notification. Yeah. When I do go to a contact. Most of mine are cartoons, though. Right, right, because everybody's using their Animoji or Memoji or, yeah, whatever it is. Yeah, I'm still kicking it old school with a photograph. With a photo. I think I am. Honestly, I don't know. Yeah, I'd have to ask people that I text. I forget what I've done for me. Anyway, okay, so John, I made this loop. I was having this problem where my network would just sort of crater and degrade, really. And we were noticing it in the show. In fact, if you rewind two to four weeks ago, John's audio sounded crummy. More, not crummy, but like skypey. It would get that weird thing. And John, on your end, you would hear my audio that way, but the recording is on my end, so that's where we were getting that stuff. But it would happen only for a couple of seconds, and then it would recover. And so I started doing all my testing. What's going on here? Is it my router? What's going on? And so I started pinging devices in my house. This is how I test things. I ping my, I'll start a ping stream to say www.apple.com. So I can see what's the, the ping measures the amount of time it takes a packet to get to and from. So round trip to whatever server you put in. So I would go to terminal type ping www.apple.com. Okay, great. So I get that going. And I would see, it would be whatever it was, some either 20 or 30 millisecond number, which is normal for me. Again, good to know what normal looks like. And then, you know, occasionally it would spike into the hundreds for like a second or two, and then it would come back down like, okay, what's going on? Fine. Then I would ping my router. Okay. And then I pinged some switches locally. And I also pinged my cable modem. So what's the first hop past the router look like? Which is 192.168.100.1. So I did all these things. And I would see that all of them would suffer this problem. So it's like, okay, it's not an internet problem. It's not a router problem. It's, you know, there's something going on in my network. I'm like, well, I've seen this before. You know me, John. I sometimes create loops. And it's cause I've got like six ethernet switches the way that our house and office is separated and all of that stuff. I have sort of network clusters. Just, and it's just how it sort of has to be. And occasionally it is possible for me to create a loop. So I'm sitting here thinking, okay, this is me. I can fix this. That's the good news. What loop did I create? And I couldn't figure it out. And I was down to the point where I was about to tear, like go through and start tracing wires. Like, how did I create this loop? And then finally I'm like, you know what it seems like? Is it seems like I have a Wi-Fi device. My loop is in my Wi-Fi network. I don't know why my gut was telling me this, but this is what my gut was telling me. That I have a device that is passing traffic. It's connected via both Wi-Fi and ethernet. And is routing traffic between the two of those. I've seen this with Sonos before. There's a protocol called STP, Spanning Tree Protocol. That what it does is it sends out traffic on all ports. And then it waits to see, does it get it back on the other port? So if you've got a device that's connected twice to the network, that's supposed to be forwarding things, like Sonos does create its own mesh. So it's kind of like your, you know, your Eero or your, you know, your Velop or your Google Wi-Fi or whatever. You know, Sonos was creating mesh long before the rest of us were. And if those Spanning Tree packets were not received by the interface on the other side, then it would say, okay, well, these are two separate links. So I've got to send the same data out both. And it would loop everything. Because I had some power line devices that were blocking those Spanning Tree, those STP packets. So it was, they were sending everything else. But when the Sonos said, oh, I don't see the Spanning Tree packet coming back, this must be fair game. Okay. So at the moment that I was doing this, I was running the UniFi's Wi-Fi stuff in the house. And that's pretty advanced network stuff, at least in that realm. And so I started looking and I'm like, yeah, no. And then I'm like, you know, it seems like it's the one in the living room, just based on kind of how things were happening. And so I did a, I looked and it said that it was using both Wi-Fi and Ethernet. But it was using, like, like your Eero, John, you would have, you know, you'd plug it in. If you had Ethernet backhaul, you would plug that in. And you would presume that when you plug that in, your device would, you know, know to use the Ethernet as the backhaul and not, you know, create a loop. Great. And it does, to be fair, the Eero stuff does. And the UniFi stuff does. Except I had one UniFi unit that did not. And no amount of settings changes in it would change this until I factory reset it. And once I factory reset it, it all came back up just fine. So it must have been one of those things where there was, you know, the analog of a P-list file that was not getting changed or was corrupted, you know, and the user interface wouldn't change it. So I had to just wipe it from scratch. And ever since I did that, the network's been rock solid. So it drove me crazy for a little while. Cause I started looking into the Sonos stuff cause that's where I've seen it before. Cause they do, you know, both Ethernet and Wi-Fi and they mesh themselves and all that. But no, it wasn't them. It was, and I think it was that I had installed, maybe years ago, some beta firmware on my UniFi's and maybe, you know, there was a setting that I had set and then a new version of the beta, you know, a new version of the software took that setting away. And so it was just out there, but no way to retweak it. So I created a loop, John. But I got it fixed, which was good, you know? So like, that's good. It's a fun of living with me, my poor family and all of you that have to, you know, podcast with me and all that stuff. I don't know, what do you think, John? I don't think I'd ever have that problem because my switch actually has a loop prevention feature, which I just looked is on. So. Yeah, so I think that- You can't get yourself a smart switch. I think that's my problem. I have one smart switch. I have a UniFi switch in the office that absolutely would have freaked out if it saw the looping traffic. And that's how I knew the loop wasn't in the office because that switch would have at least identified it. But my, you know, I have like six switches in the house. So replacing them all with smart switches is a costly endeavor. But that living room, that's a place where a smart switch for me would be a very good thing. It seems to be, because of, it's connected via Mocha. It's not a real ethernet link, you know? So there's always some strangeness. And I feel like putting a smart switch in the living room, that might be the next, that might be a smart move. Yeah, no, I was thinking about you a lot as I was going through this. Like if I had all smart, if I followed John Braun's advice and I had all smart switches, I would be in much better shape. So do as I say, not as I do, get smart switches, especially if you wind up with, you know, if you have like weird network links, if you're using things like Mocha or, you know, Powerline even if you're still using that to really rely on for your network, it's good to have some insight into how your network is operating and those smart switches really can do it. So I might have to spring for another Unify smart switch, John. I've got an eight port one in the office now. My problem is I would need like, you know, 16 ports by the TV, which is in the living room because, you know, we just, as we just said, we have lots and lots of ethernet devices. But it might be worth it because I don't want to count the hours that I spent looking into it. And also just the, you know, the wasted productivity of like doing the show and having your audio glitch out and things like that. I don't know. Any more thoughts to set me on the right track, John? Yeah. The one that I have is actually not terribly expensive. So I used to have an eight port switch but that didn't really cut it. Sure. I started getting more toys. No, I got the TP-Link TLSG 1024DE which is a 24 port switch. And I'm looking here and you can get that for about, it looks like about 120 bucks. The problem, the problem, that would work for me. There is no question in my mind that that would work for me. The problem is if I'm going to do this, I want all of my network stuff to like be able to see each other and be managed from the same interface and all from, you know, an app and everything. And that's where the Unify stuff really comes into play because it's now all, like not only can you see each switch but each switch knows about the other switches and all of your access points and like all of that stuff sort of ties together which is, you know, again, there's a reason it costs more money. I'm not complaining about that. I'm just acknowledging it. That's all, yeah. Yeah, no, that TP-Link switch would certainly have solved my problem. It just not the way that I want it solved but, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe. So, yeah. And Brian Monroe in the chat room, which is right now distributed all over the place but this one's at macgeekab.com slash stream or live.macgeekab.com. He is saying that he has a 24-port smart gigabit ethernet switch from Netgear by his TV. The other thing is if I'm going to invest in switches and this is part of why I didn't go like two months ago and spend 500 bucks on Unify stuff and just solve this problem is that if I'm going to do it, I want 10 gig ethernet for backhaul between the switches. At least I want the option of it. And right now Unify's stuff is just in beta for that, I think. So, I don't know. Well, we'll get there. It's 2020. I've got to have some project because otherwise. Hey, OK. I was actually looking for a while. The thing is 100% 10-gig switch, those are still kind of pricey. But I found a lot of them. Not that I have a reason to get one, except more toys. But they have a lot that'll have like one or two 10-gig ports and then the rest are just regular gigabit ports. Yeah, and that's all I need is like one or two 10-gig ports. That's because I just want the backhaul between the switches to be faster than a gigabit. Each device, I've got a couple of devices, like my disk stations that would be nice to have faster. Actually, my internet connection is faster than one gig down. So maybe doing that. Although there is now 2.5 gig ethernet on single port. Yeah, so that's what a lot of these things are doing. Yeah, I've actually got some stuff to test with that. So I've got to mess with it a little bit. Something to do. Speaking of mess with it and something to do and speaking of our chat room at live.macicab.com, we are now experimenting with doing live video. So this episode is, at least while we're recording it, being streamed live to both YouTube and Facebook, my intention is to leave all of that stuff up there. If you want to watch on Facebook or YouTube, you can just watch and you have the audio, obviously, but you also have the video. Really, the video is not, it's just me and John right now. We are going to add some things like being able to show things in Safari Windows or whatever. But do not worry, audio is our prime directive here. So it is not my intention to say, oh, and look at this and look at this and look at this. Because I know that's very frustrating when you're trying to listen to audio and most of you folks in our audience are audio. So that's the, just so you know, we're doing that. And we're doing it with an app. We've tried a couple of different ones, but far and away, the best app that I've been able to use for this is Memo Live from Boinks software. And it's very complex if you want it to be. You could build, you know, a pro TV thing with it. But it's, once you kind of get into it and they have some templates so you can see how other people might build some things, once you get into it and realize how it, you know, how the flow works, you add sources, then you add layers and you sort of add stacks of layers. And what's cool is now I've got my iPad running as a remote control for this. So I can switch with just the tap of a key between my different layers. And you know, you could see, you could see just me or you could see just John or you could see both of us. And it's really just easy to just tap and do as long as my iPad isn't falling over while I'm doing it. And there's other ways you can do it on my Mac too, but you know, my Mac has a lot of other stuff running. So yeah, Memo Live has been pretty cool this week. John and I have experimented a little bit with it. And I don't know, it's still good to see you, John. So there's that, at least we get to see each other. So yeah, let us know what you think. We would love to, we would love to, you know, hear your thoughts and advice and anything like that. Video is not something that we are experts at by any stretch. So any thoughts, advice, tips and all that stuff send them to us. We would love to hear about it. Okay, let's go, we've got some follow ups from prior shows and some cool stuff found to go through. So we were talking in show 805 about different sorts of not VPNs because you can't put a VPN directly on your Apple TV, but hacks around that. And one of the services that we mentioned was called or is called Unblock Us. And we heard back from Lynn from Unblock Us that, and she added some context here about how this all works. And she says, we use a DNS pair of addresses that gets customers into our network. So you put these addresses into your Apple TV. You can put them on your router if you want it, but you can just put them on your Apple TV. And from there, the query from the app or the browser is directed to the same region of the destination address. So you choose, you go into Unblock Us and you say, okay, this is, I wanna come out in France, whatever. Great, okay. The smart part is that only DNS queries from channels supported by the service that you want to target are picked up. All other traffic passes through your default ISP. And so it's really smart about which parts of your DNS it kind of hijacks for lack of a better term and puts over on this thing. So I like that. That way you're not in a scenario where you've got all of your sort of DNS results are coming from afar, which could result in you connecting to slower servers for things that you don't want to connect to those servers for, et cetera, et cetera. So very cool. Thank you, Lynn for providing that context. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on? Nope. Okay. In the last episode, we, 807, we threw out a geek challenge. And the geek challenge was go download this app that we linked from our Twitter account. It was an app for a guitar pedal board. So a very, you know, specific customized app. And it was meant to build, to update the firmware on it. But it would not run on the Mac. Our friend Andy had sent this to us and we dug into it. And we shared it with you. And a few of you got it, Bruce, you were the first. The way, what happened was the, well, you want to explain it, John? Because you, you figured, we each figured it out independently. And as did many of you, because it was just kind of a fun little thing to spend our time with. Well, I think we found the same article. I forget where it was. Yeah, so the error was, you know, the application whatever can't be launched or something along those lines. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, so I searched for that error and like the first or second hit was an article explaining why this happens. So before I searched, I would open up the app or open up the package and, you know, looked inside to see if, you know, I could directly launch the app. And that didn't work either. Right. I failed at that too. Yep. Yeah. But eventually I found an article that said, oh, here's the, here's the problem. If you get this error message is that the app has to have a certain flag set. I think it's a executable. And apparently whoever made this installer didn't. Yeah. Didn't check to see if the, I can't under, because it looked like it was created properly. And I would have the structure that I would expect from an app generated by Xcode or whatever. But yeah, they just didn't set this flag right. So, so you had to go in the terminal and do a CH mod, something or other. I think dash X was it or? Yeah. So this is interesting because I didn't, I took a very different path on this as did Bruce, but we all came up with the same thing. You're totally right. If you look in the, if you choose show library contents on an application, I think that's the right thing. If you right click on an app, which this was or is, and choose show package contents, sorry. And then you dig into those package contents, you will see a folder called contents, and then you'll see a folder called macOS. And in that folder, that's the app that's going to run in most cases when you just double click on the main application. Not always. And there might be more than one app in here if it's got something else that it can attach to or whatever. But by and large, this is how it is. And this one just had one app in there. I did not do, I was not smart enough to search to see if somebody else had solved this problem. I looked in console to see why it was failing. Cause at first I thought, is it like some security thing or whatever? And maybe console tell me. And so I ran console maybe I was running consolation and filter. I think it was just console and just filtering it by the name of this app. And then I added some other filters to try and kind of weed out the noise and just see what was coming in from this. And it basically said something along the line. It was much more, the error in console as usual was much more verbose. And it said, yeah, it's, you know, the app's not, there's no executable to run. Like, that's weird. So I dug in and I saw that. And then, yeah, I went to the terminal and I typed C H mod. I just did A plus X, which is all user permissions get to execute. And then the name of that, you know, actual executable. And then that fixed it for me. And so our friend Andy was, was able to update his guitar pedal. And so that was good. I think that's good. All right. Yeah. For some reason, my camera's out of focus, it'll figure itself out. I think maybe, maybe not. We will move on. Alistair sent in a tip, John. Actually, cool stuff out. Sorry, moving on to that. It says today I discovered by accident that Facebook has finally adopted slide over and split screen on its iPad app. It says, I don't know when this changed, but it certainly hasn't been there the whole time. Thought I'd let everybody know. Yeah. I had no idea that Facebook added this either because as Alistair pointed out in another part of his email, you know, they're very vague with their app descriptions, like their update descriptions. It's just like all it says in the Facebook app update description is every two weeks, we increase your, you know, we release an update. It's like, cool, but can we get change logs? So I had no idea that this was there. And it is really handy to be able to, you know, split screen and slide over and all that stuff on the iPad with Facebook. That's, you know, it doesn't need to be the main focus. In fact, it's probably best if it's not. There you go. Yeah, I hate when the release notes are bug fixes and performance improvements. Yeah, generic. Yeah. Come on. Come on, guys. Put a little work into this. Yeah, put a little something in, yeah. All right. Jason says, I found this cool stuff, I found courtesy of Brett Terpstra and wanted to pass it along. Shortcut detective from a radiated software listens for globally assigned keyboard shortcuts and tells you which app is intercepting it. Good for debugging those shortcut assignments. So if you are trying to add a, you know, a keyboard shortcut, you know, like we talked about in previous episodes and you don't know which app is grabbing it and doing that shortcut detective will show you. So that, yeah, handy little troubleshooting thing. I like that. Thank you, Jason. Very good stuff. This is why we do cool stuff found because that's how we learn. All right, I have, well, three things. The first one that I'll mention, John, there's two that sort of go together. Sabrent, you know, I've been looking at different Thunderbolt external storage devices, right? Thunderbolt drives. And then we're gonna kind of feature them individually and then I'll do like a little roundup of, you know, which way I think, you know, guiding people as to where to go. And the most recent one that I've checked out is from Sabrent. It's the Rocket Xtreme or XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive, detachable cable, aluminum enclosure. I measured it at 22,250 megabytes per second reads and 1,940 megabytes per second writes. It's got a detached cable. It's, you know, it's handy and small. It comes in aluminum enclosure. It's, you know, nice. Yeah, it's good. I like it. It's, you know, easily portable. Great. While I was checking it out though, John, they also sent me their Rocket Nano. And the Nano is a USB, it's got a USB-C port on it. It's USB 3.2, so speeds are slower than you would expect with Thunderbolt. It's also, you know, quite a bit less expensive. I don't actually, I didn't put a price in the thing. I meant to do that before the show. I think it's about 299 for the one terabyte Rocket Xtreme, the Thunderbolt 3.1, which is sort of where they all are. Maybe somebody in the chat can look that up for me and let me know, please. And then this one's 149 for one terabyte, but it is tiny. It is, you know, barely larger than a flash drive. Similar aluminum enclosure, separate cable, and it comes with a Thunderbolt 3 cable in the box even, I think, so, you know, it can do full speed. Again, USB 3.2, so that's where, that's why you can get those 880, 850 megabyte per second reads and writes. But yeah, handy. This USB, this USB one is interesting, you know, for a travel drive, Thunderbolt's good and it's fast. And if you need that speed, it's great. But USB, you know, the nice part about USB is it's compatible, right? You could plug this in to a slower, you know, machine and still have it work. So, there's a benefit there. But they come in a, like they ship in a really, it's like a nice, like aluminum case and stuff. So, it's cool, I don't know. I like them. Did, were you able to find a price, like from Amazon, John, on that Rocket Xtreme? I'll look. I didn't see one come up in the chat room either, so. Actually, they're the retail, yeah, I think I found a link on their site. The retail looks to be 400 bucks. So, 3.99, okay, okay, okay, cool. Yeah, all right. Good, good, well, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One terabyte, 3.49, 99 on Amazon. So, there we are. Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. That's right in the realm of everything else that we're, you know, seeing in this realm here. So, yeah, cool little thing. And they've got, they really do, do they have a four terabyte version? Amazon says they do. 999.99 for a four terabyte external SSD. Wow, that's awesome. Huh, that's great. If you need that kind of storage, wow. Same speeds too, at least same advertised speeds. So, presumably the same speeds. Wow, that's awesome. All right, cool. Any questions or thoughts on that, John? Nope. Okay. And then I mentioned earlier in the show that I'm using a Uficam with HomeKit. And I have, I've been experimenting with that. Well, this week in beta, but I think this coming week, last week in beta, and this coming week, I think as a release, they've added HomeKit secure video to Uficam 2, which is cool. They've added another cool thing. So, you gotta remind me not to forget to mention the other cool thing that's in there. But HomeKit secure video means that you can use HomeKit to both view the camera and store your video privately and securely. So, Uficam already could store your video privately because it can store it on its hub that has a little storage in it. You can also push it to a cloud and things like that if you want. But HomeKit secure video stores it securely for you encrypted in your iCloud. You get, I think the way Apple did it, you get I think two cameras on a 200 gig plan. It doesn't count against your storage, but you have a camera limit. I think it's two cameras on the 200 gig plan and five cameras on the one terabyte plan. And then it's storing all of that securely for you in iCloud. It's doing all the detection on device so that you're not, so it's like none of that processing is happening that way. It's a pretty cool thing and not everybody is adding HomeKit secure video to their cameras. So I was stoked to see Ufi do this. So, and it works great. Once I got the firmware update from the beta thing and there's a way to do it, then once it came through it was just like, oh yeah, HomeKit was like, the cameras were already in HomeKit. Like I could already see them in HomeKit but now I could stop doing all the recording and such in the Ufi app and I can see like events like if there was someone in my garage at night, I could look in the morning and watch the video of that and do it via HomeKit now, which is actually pretty cool. So, Apple had a rocky start with HomeKit that I think will leave HomeKit behind the eight ball for some time to come, but they've done a good job kind of opening it up and engaging partners. Any thoughts on any of that? Are you doing anything with any cameras with, with any of your smart home stuff other than just with the camera's own vendor app? Actually, the ring integrates with smart things. That's kind of interesting. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I can't get the ring into HomeKit. Yeah, actually, I, you know, I still got to hook it up here. I was actually kind of figuring out how my house was wired because I want to check out one of their doorbells, but they got some weird wiring requirements. Turn off your doorbell circuit. And I'm like, well, where is it? And I kind of took a guess as to which transformer in my basement was the power for the doorbells. And I'll continue on that path. But yeah, it's neat that the, you know, they appear to have a feature where, you know, unlike some other vendors where they charge you to store your video, it sounds like they don't. Well, yeah, Eufy, I mean, it like there's, with the Eufy home, what's it called? I forget, but their hub, they've got a name for the hub that's escaping me at the moment, but like their hub has storage in it. So, and others do too. They're not the only ones doing that, where, you know, everything is happening sort of on your network, which is good. Yeah, yeah, and there's no, I mean, once you've bought the hub, then there's no storage fees to pay, obviously, because it, well, it's your storage. And I think with the Eufy hub, you can plug in an external storage device if you really want to go like, you know, the distance on it, which is cool. Yeah, so my current, so yeah, I got a ring and then I got an old drop cam, which is now, you know, Nest picked them up, but they also charge, I think, for you to look at your video. Hey, gotta make money somehow, right? So we talk a lot here, John, about Surveillance Station, which is, actually we don't talk a lot about it, but we have talked about Surveillance Station, which is Synology's sort of open source, if you will, or it's Synology's home security or security, you can use it for your business too, system where you, it runs on your NAS and it connects to all of your cameras or at least all of the cameras that it can connect to, which basically means any direct addressable cameras. And by and large, there are no vendors that have names that we've heard of that allow their cameras to be direct addressable. So you're kind of in this weird scenario where FOSCAM is really kind of the only one that I've ever found that's like a name I know and is direct addressable, because direct addressable camera means they've gotta keep their firmware updates happening and you kind of care about security and things like that. And in order for Synology to be able to see it, the cameras need to be direct addressable. Well, good news, John. While I was digging around in the settings for Uficam, I saw that they have an RTSP section. And RTSP is the protocol that cameras use to be direct addressable. And sure enough, now I have my Uficams in their own app, in HomeKit, and now in Surveillance Station. So that's pretty cool that it's able to be all things at all times if you want it to be. And you can close that option if you want to for obvious reasons. So I was pretty stoked about that. I don't know. RTSP real-time streaming protocol. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying is that the camera has to have an IP address. I think that's what you were really trying to say. Not just an IP address. No, all of my cameras get IP addresses. My ring cameras, for example, get IP addresses as do yours. But they aren't directly addressable. Like, I can't go and stream directly from a ring. The only way to get that data is via their cloud. I mean, that's not entirely true. The only way to set up a connection to ring is via their cloud. So when you launch the ring app, it goes to the cloud, it creates this thing. And then locally or directly, you've got a connection to the camera. It's not looping through the cloud at that point. But you can't just say, I want to go see what that camera sees. No, no, that's not possible. There's no way to turn that on. Which is a shame, because that would be awesome if you could. So yeah, it's good. It's good. All right, where are we here? Well, you know, I think, I mean, I think that's gonna have to be it, John. We're almost at an hour and a half here. I mean, I know we've got extra, we've all got some extra time these days. But you know, the show's got to end at some point so that we can do it next week. Because otherwise we just keep going and then it would be too much. I think. Anything to add, John, before we bid everyone adieu? No. Okay. That's good. Thank you so much for listening, folks. Thanks to everybody that watched on the live stream. Thanks for watching on the live recording. Because I think these things will stay up and recorded if they don't. I'm sorry. We'll figure it out. It's all new to us. It's, we're just having fun with it and giving you folks something to watch while you're home. Although I think there's probably better things than just me and John. But I don't know. Maybe not. There you go. I haven't yet watched. So I don't, I can't tell you. I'll let you know next week. Next week, we've got some TV tracking follow up to do, John. I think it's time to kind of pull, we talked a lot about that. It's time to sort of put a button on that conversation. So we'll do that next week, certainly. But all the stuff you send in is gonna, you know, define how the show goes next week. And that's how it is every week. That's how it's been for, well, it wasn't week one and two weren't that way. But week three, like episode three was that way. So for 805 episodes, we've been answering your questions. So, you know, we'll do it for 806 too. Because that's how we, that's what we do. All right. A thanks to all of our sponsors, of course, as we mentioned, otherworldcomputingmaxsales.com, expressvpn.com slash mgglinno.com slash mgg. And of course, our newest sponsor, Devon think at devontechnologies.com slash mgg. Thanks to all of them for making this possible. Thanks to all of you premium subscribers for making this possible. We've got a list of you to thank, which we will also do in the next episode. Thanks to everybody that sent in questions and tips and cool stuff found this week. That's really what makes this show happen. Thanks to everybody viewing. Thanks to everybody that helped with making that happen so that the folks that you, those of you that wanna do that can. It makes it fun. It's good. Keeps us on our toes while we're recording here, which is good. Yeah, I think that's it, Sean. That's what we got. We'll see you next week. Stay safe, watch your hands. Have fun. Stay productive enough to, you know, keep yourself engaged and happy and all that. It's good. Ah, yeah. Well, John, you got us into this mess this week. So I've got some advice for everybody out there. I know I already gave you some advice, but there was one bit of advice that I kept back, and that's don't get caught. Maiden.