 The Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab Episode 657 for Sunday, May 14th, Mother's Day, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab, the show, where the goal is for all of us to learn at least four new things. We do that by answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing cool stuff found, and coming together every week, like clockwork, mostly like clockwork. That's just how it works. Sponsors for this episode include bare-bones software at barebones.com. Makers of the esteemly fine BB edit. We'll talk more about that in a moment. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, Riverville, Connecticut, China Front. Don't get caught, my friend. I tried not to. I know. That's good. That's good. That's how we do it here. Anything to report before we dive right into Felix here? Nope. All right. Then dive in, we shall. I gotta have my windows in the right spot. I feel like I've completely forgotten how to do any of this. Felix writes. Oh, I should mark the timestamp. See, I'm just not doing it. Is there a way to share a contact group with a friend so that if the owner of the group adds a new card to the group, it will update in the shared contact group. So the answer is, well, yeah, but Apple doesn't provide you a way to do this. Apple should. Apple could. They certainly do with calendars, but they don't with contacts. But the important thing to remember for the workaround we're about to tell you is that Apple does let you put multiple iCloud accounts on all of your devices. So you would have what I would call your main one that is yours that you don't share with anyone. And I really like I can't stress enough. Don't share iCloud accounts. This isn't necessarily a security thing. I realize you might be sharing them with people you trust implicitly. I see a lot of families sharing them. No, don't do that. Do set up family sharing so that your iCloud accounts are tied together. But but do not share an iCloud account. You'll get weird things with iMessages and all that stuff. However, by sharing an iCloud account, you can, of course, share your contacts. So what you will do is you will set up two iCloud accounts on your device. One would be yours individually, and then the person with whom you want to share or the people with whom you want to share would each also set up theirs individually. And then you would create a second iCloud account or a fourth depending on how many people there are that is shared amongst all of you. And the only thing that you sync with this is contacts and specifically only the contacts that you want to share. So you can keep yours separate from the shared and then anybody can edit the shared group and everybody gets access to that. So there's a little article on a site called lennashore.com. I think Lena is an artist and so some things will block this for nudity. And my apologies for that. There is no nudity in that particular post, but I noticed it when I use Open DNS that it was blocking it here at my house. But in any event, there's a great little how to, but it's exactly as we just explained, set up another iCloud account, add that to your devices, and then you can share contacts that way. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? There's a low tech way to do it. What's the low tech way? It's kind of caveman, but you can't highlight a group within contacts and say export group V card. All right. Give that to the person. The other thing is, hey, if you're ambitious, you could set up a contact server of your very own. Oh, that's true. How would you do that? Well, you can get a Mac OS server and one of the services that it offers, among many others, is contacts. That's true. Yeah. And you could do this if you don't run Mac OS server, but you do run a Synology. You could run own cloud or something on there that would also do the same kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the standard here is, because I'm looking right now, I mean, if you look in your internet accounts, you can also, let me see, what is it? Yeah, you got to click on, I think, other, and then you'll see card DAV. Right. So that's what that particular standard embraces is sharing cards. That's true. And you could do this. You don't have to do it with another iCloud account. You could do it with another Google account, because Google accounts can sync and share contacts. Really, any account. That's a good point, John. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Good stuff. I like it. Fun. All right. Moving on to Andrew. Andrew writes, my son has an iPhone 5s, which has a weird issue. It randomly shuts down regularly and frequently, almost always when the iPhone plays a loud sound, a notification, music from Apple Music, et cetera. I mean, like, he can't replicate the issue quite reliably by playing certain songs. He can replicate the issue quite reliably by playing certain songs that start with an abrupt sound. It sometimes also seems to just randomly shut down even without sound playing, but sound sure seems to stimulate a shutdown. He has turned off notification sounds and apps so that the phone doesn't restart when he gets a notification. Do you have any idea what could be causing it? He says I've tried restarting, quitting apps, hard restarting, even a DFU reset followed by a restore, but the issue persists. I've tried googling for solutions, but can't find anything quite like he's experiencing. He's thinking his next option is to buy a new phone. I guess a 5s is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I suggested that before he does that, I'd ask you guys if you have any last suggestions. Well, Andrew, that's an interesting symptom. The fact that a loud sound or something else does it supports my initial guess that there's a loose connection inside the phone and the vibration from that sound is causing whatever that loose connection is just to jar loose for a second. It might be a loose connection on the battery. It might be some other component on the motherboard. The problem is, well, cold solder joints are usually really easy to fix except with surface mount components, which is exactly what's inside the iPhone. Not only would you have to get inside there and find where this connection is, you would also have to have some surface mount solder tools to fix it without melting the circuit board. That gets difficult. Good luck with that. Well, look, if you have the tools and know how to use them, this is a relatively straightforward process, but it requires both of those things. Generally, we don't tend to keep those kinds of things around. I think a replacement is likely your only option. You might have a really hard time finding where the loose connection or whatever it is is because it could be inside a component. It's a needle in a haystack even once you get in there. Really, what you'd have to do is somehow get in there with the ability to still power the phone and then try these things where you either jostle the phone or maybe even start with with perhaps a piece of plastic like toothpick or something that's non-conductive. Start poking at components and see which one of the ones you poke at causes the restart. Well, that's how I would do it. I wouldn't. Why not? I'd either get a do a flat rate repair if you can get Apple to do that for you. Yeah, of course. I don't think you're going to find many who would repair that, but I think it could be a power issue. So when the audio circuit draws a certain amount of power, it freaks out something else in the phone. It's definitely a hardware problem. Yeah, it's not software. Highly unlikely. I will point out one, I'll call it a flaw in your troubleshooting process, Andrew. Not that I think it would yield different results for you, but in general, let's go back through this. Andrew said I've tried restarting. I'm just using who is an example. So thank you, Andrew, for letting me do this for you. I've tried restarting, quitting apps, hard restarting, even a DFU reset followed by a restore from backup, but the issue persists. And I grok why you would want to do a restore from backup because if you don't, you have to reconfigure everything on your phone. However, it's possible that something, perhaps not in this instance, but in a general troubleshooting way, it's possible that something that you are restoring is causing whatever problem you're experiencing. So it is worth doing a DFU reset followed by no restore and then just sync back up with Apple Music, play those same songs, just to confirm that it's not some software thing. And again, I share that as sort of general troubleshooting advice, not yeah, I don't think it's can't hurt. I again, I don't think it's going to make a difference here, but before I punt on this phone, I would do that here to just to know so that I'm not, you know, a year from now. I wonder if you don't want to wonder if that's that's the bane of every troubleshooter. So anyway, good stuff. Yeah. Moving on, Mr. Braun. Sure. All right, cool. We had a we had quite a few things come from Facebook for this show at our Facebook group MacGeekGab.com slash Facebook is the easiest way to get there. And this one comes from let's see. Well, I guess it was Steve's post. And I don't know why I wrote it is Jeff and our notes here, John. But that's irrelevant. Steve asked how many of you have a Mac and iPad and an Android phone? I've been in this boat for the last two weeks. He says he won a Google Pixel, and he started to like it. So he's on the fence about whether or not he should keep it. And he says, so a few things I'm looking at are the following. What's the best way to manage contacts, notes and calendars synced between the two ecosystems? Number two, he says I use iCloud mail and I want to keep it that way. How can I easily access it on an Android mail client? The default Gmail app is not really perfect. And number three, any app you'd recommend for RSS and podcasts. So going in reverse order pocket casts is the one I've experimented with on Android and tends to work fairly well. But you never know anything is there are other apps, but pocket cast seems to be fairly well supported. In terms of connecting to iCloud, or yeah, it's connecting to iCloud, you can do that via imap. And that will work. Apple actually publishes the server names for those for those servers, for the imap inbound and outbound servers and all that stuff, or imap inbound and SMTP outbound. So they're all there. It's imap.mail.me.com is the name of the server for those of you that want to know, but we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to question number one, which is the migrating notes. Yeah, that's the most appropriate. I would think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then in terms of contacts, calendars and reminders and all that, I would sync honestly, I would just sync everything with Google because your Android phone is going to do that very, very well. And guess what? Your iPhone and your Mac are going to sync with Google's calendars and contacts very, very well. So I would I would just leave it leave that stuff at Google and sort of live with your feet in both worlds. You know, leave your mail over on iCloud if that's what you like. And that's totally fine. And leave your contacts and calendars over on Google. You can, of course, mix them all. On my phone, I sync my contacts with both iCloud and Google. And that way they are all there where I want them. In fact, maybe you want to do that too and at least let your iPhone continue to sync your phone's contacts with iCloud so that your mail on all your devices or even on the web has an updated version of your contacts. You can just have that stuff syncing to multiple places. And I've been doing it for years with absolutely no issue whatsoever. Any thoughts on that, John? Maybe I'll try that because right now I think I primarily sync at least my contacts with yeah, with Apple. Yeah. And again, I do that too, right? But I also sync with Google and probably several others. I know I sync my contacts with LinkedIn and Facebook too. And then this week, I started syncing my contacts with Amazon because now with the Alexa, I can make calls with Amazon as long as my contacts are in there. And we had a call this week, John. Yeah, it's not a hoot. Sure. I mean, we do wipe calling all the time. This podcast being, you know, perfect evidence of that. But I suppose it was cool to be able to do it with that too. Yeah. Of course, there was the mystery as to why is the green, why am I getting a pulsing green ring? Oh, yeah, the pulsing green ring you have, you got a call. Yeah. Yeah, but it works. It's an interesting thing, right? Like, why is Amazon doing that? And I suppose the answer is because they can and it opens up options for their ecosystem. So, I don't know. I think it's cool. I think I lost Mr. Braun, though. So I'm going to pause here and see if we can get him back. I think we have resumed now. Mr. Braun, you're back with us here. Yeah, that was weird. That's weird. Yeah. Everything just went away. Yeah, it happens. I odd that or ironic, perhaps a little bit of synchronicity that that happened right as we acknowledged the fact that we make VoIP calls every week for this show and then our VoIP call just died. But thankfully, it all came back. Yeah. So the fun part with Alexa, as I was saying, was what does the pulsing green ring mean? Oh, yeah. We talked about that when you left. So we've covered that. We're all good. Ah, okay. And I even asked her. I'm like, Alexa, what is the pulsing green ring? And she's like, huh? Yeah, she didn't, she can't tell you that, which is weird. Yeah. You would think after introducing a major feature like this that yeah, maybe she'll answer it now. Right. Yeah, that's true. Add it to her. Yeah, add it to her, her utterances list. Her knowledge store. That's what it is. It is when you build an app for Alexa, you put in all of the utterances that it should reply to. And so they are, it is not doing anything intelligent at all about parsing. It's just does that string of words fit an utterance that someone has already programmed into me. And if so, match it and go. So yeah. Yep. Okay. And then I learned something new this week in prepping the show. So I'm going to count this as one of my four. Ken wrote in and he was sort of in reply to the app that wouldn't work as it was supposed to conversation we had in a previous show. And he said the problem could be that there was an app trans location and what this is is something in in Sierra because a security researcher discovered a vulnerability in gatekeeper and here's the vulnerability. If a developer ID signed app loads resources that are outside of its app bundle and does so via a relative file path, not a direct file path, an attacker could package an app together with malicious external resources in order to work around the gatekeeper protection. Because you could say, you know, here, launch this app. The app has been approved by Apple. It's signed. Everything's cool. And then because I know where you're running me from, I'm just going to say load this, this local resource and let that be something that's, you know, outside of the app bundle. This would pass gatekeeper checks and be allowed to launch after which it would, you know, load these resources and a lot of apps, including some of Apple's could have done this. So Apple introduced something that it's called gatekeeper path randomization. But if you look at an app that's running, it's going to be put in a folder inside your temp folder and the name of the folder or one of the sub folder names is going to say app trans location. And it only happens for apps that you were running out of your downloads folder. Once you've moved the app to your applications folder, then everything changes and it doesn't do this. But what happens is that this app trans location thing actually moves the app to a disk image. It mounts a read only disk image in a temporary path, copies the app onto that disk image, makes it read only and then launches the app from there. So this can cause a lot of weird problems. Rogamieba actually put up a great blog post about this. I had never heard about it before. But if you download an app and run it from your downloads folder, this can potentially cause you some headaches because the app is going to be sandboxed in a very extreme way so that it can't get at these other local resources that might or might not have been bundled along with it. So there you go. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, John. Okay, I believe you. But I guess the lesson here is don't run apps from your downloads folder. Copy them to the applications folder if you want to run them and then they'll run the way they're supposed to. So there you go. Yeah, good, right? I'm with you. That's why most apps when you open the image, it shows the app and then it shows a shortcut to your application folder because that's what they want you to do. Because that's what you should be doing. Right, exactly. Yep. Cool. All right, John. Moving on. Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about our first sponsor here today, which is Barebone Software, John. Barebones makes BB Edit. Again, you know, I say this all the time, but BB Edit is an app that I literally couldn't live without. I just, I rely on it so much. It is on every Mac that I have and it is always running. Like I look right now and BB Edit is running on this Mac in the background. As soon as we finish the show, I'll use it to process the text file that becomes the show notes that are baked into the chapters. And it's not, I'm not doing anything crazy. I'm not programming it. I could be programming in whatever language I want, really. BB Edit will sort of detect that and highlight the code if I were doing any programming, but this is just for laying out a text file. And it's nice because it is only text. Even when it's doing, it's highlighting when it detects a programming language. It's not changing anything about the text. It's just letting it be text. And really it's just putting a visual filter on it to make it a little easier for you to navigate your way through it. But I'll just put the chapters in and I can look at them and lay them out just right because I have to feed a perfectly formed text file into the service that we use to kind of build the show file. BB Edit just makes this so much easier. And here's the cool thing. You can get BB Edit for free. Just go to barebones.com and download it. There is a fully functioning trial version. You get all the features for 30 days. But then after that, if you don't need all the advanced features, you don't pay for them. It's still free. And then if and when you want or need some of its advanced features, then you pay for it. So really, it's the kind of app that that I think everybody should have on their Mac. Go to barebones.com and download a copy of BB Edit and send them our thanks when you do that. Say thanks for Sponsor Mackie Gab. They've been a sponsor of the show for a long time and we really appreciate it. Barebones.com are thanks to them for sponsoring this show. All right, John, let's go. Let's talk about our homes. It's building season, you know, my friend. And I'm getting a lot of questions from friends and then we collectively are getting a lot of questions from you folks about just things to do in your house. So we're going to talk about a couple of these things and see what we can see what we can get to. We'll start with Ken just because we got to start somewhere. Ken asks, he says, you've talked about Wi-Fi extenders, routers and hubs, but I need a Bluetooth extender router or hub in my home so that my Bluetooth devices work when they are more than 30 feet away from their paired device, like my portable Bose SoundLink color or my J-Bird X2 earbuds paired to my iPhone. I've heard about the Cassia hub that goes up to a thousand feet and the hub needs to connect to the router or use Wi-Fi. I'm not sure how they get a thousand feet, but have you heard of any good Bluetooth extenders or have you tried the Cassia hub? I have not tried the Cassia hub other than at trade shows. It's a non-optimal environment because there's so much RF interference, but everything that I've tried with it there has worked great and I've seen them at trade shows for a couple of years, most specifically CES. So that's the path I would head down. I don't know of anything else that would do this, but it's an interesting question, especially as we have more and more stuff in our homes. What do you think, John? Never really had a need. I'm searching. I see mentions here and there, Bluetooth extenders. Oh, I got here. Elgato Dubuze Eve Extend for expanding Bluetooth home kit range. Interesting. I wonder if that's just specific to Bluetooth. Stop mumbling, John. We have people listening. Yeah, I wonder if this is just a home kit or if it's actually a Bluetooth thing. You could search for yourselves. I don't have any recommendations. I didn't realize Elgato made something like this. I don't know what the product does, but we'll put a link to that in the show notes along with this Cassia thing because it's an interesting problem. To solve. Yeah, it's definitely something we all, well, not all of us, but many of us kind of experience because you need to have all the stuff talking with each other. So if any of you have experience with it, please do send that into us. Feedback at MackieCab.com would be a great place to do that. I don't know. I think you were mumbling there. Did you say Feedback at MackieCab.com, Dave? I'm sorry, let me get very, very clear about this and we will say, hang on, let's do this and this and this. Feedback at MackieCab.com. Okay, there. I added the word. Did you implement an effect there? Yeah, you don't get to hear that just because of the way our audio routes, but sure enough, it was there. Okay, moving on, we've had a couple of questions. Like I said about what to do when building a new home and I'll read John's question here. Doesn't, they're all the same. He says, the question I have is how do I hardwire a new home for Wi-Fi? I'm a general contractor building a 20,000 square foot three-story log home in Colorado Mountains. There's no current internet service available at maybe one to four years before fiber or microwave is in the area. The current people get internet with satellite and he says but and his question, although that home is 10 times larger than most of our homes or at least five times larger than most of our homes, the question that he has is valid. How do I hardwire the home for Wi-Fi? It sounds like mesh systems are the way to go. I plan on running ethernet cable through the entire house. I will run it to every television and connected appliance. I also plan on running it to ideal locations for Wi-Fi slash mesh routers or access points. Any insight you have would be very helpful. I also wonder what cable you are suggesting, cat 5e, cat 6, cat 6a or other. Should I run fiber? And if so, what kind of fiber? I'm just thinking about what is cost effective now, but also to have wire on the walls for 10 and 20 years into the future. Some of the runs will be under 225 feet, but some will be longer than that. Should I base the wires on the length of the run or should I just run the best wire for the future? Okay, so great question. And again, although he's building a very large home, these things apply whether or not you're building an entirely new home from scratch or if you're doing an extension or expansion on your existing home. Really, all of this applies when the walls are open. So you've got your framing is done, the studs are up, but you have yet to screw the sheetrock in. When you're doing the wiring, this is when you want to do this. So my advice, and I'd love to hear from you folks about this too, my advice is to run two ethernet cables to every room, all in what I'll call a home run connection, meaning they all terminate in each room, of course, wherever you want them to go to. And then all of them run back to a central or common, it doesn't have to be central in the home, but one common network closet or location. And that's going to be somewhere where you're willing to have a bunch of wires coming in, a switch to plug them all into, and perhaps other network gear. So you need to think a little bit about heat in this space, depending on what kind of network gear you put in a switch, isn't going to generate a ton of heat, although it will generate a little, but this would also be a great place to put, say, a Synology NAS or things like that. And that's where you may start generating some heat, so you want to have some ventilation in this area. So I would also say to run coax cable, one length of coax to each of these locations, again in a home run situation. So don't just link them all together, just go all the way back. It's not going to cost you very much more to run three cables than it is to run one. Really, all you're doing is paying for the extra lengths of cable, which is negligible in a scenario like this. And then also the little terminators and things that you're going to put on them, but those are a few dollars each, sort of even less. It's not much cheaper to do it now with the walls open. So two ethernets, one coax. And I would say in large rooms, especially rooms where you think, well, you could put a TV over there or you could put a TV over there. Run two, two sets. So three cables, two ethernet, one coax to, you know, that corner, two ethernet, one coax to that corner. All home runs. It's just not going to hurt to have all this stuff in the walls before you put up the sheetrock. Now, in terms of what type of cable to use, Cat 6A should go 100 meters for 10 gig ethernet, which means for standard gigabit ethernet, you'd likely be fine. But if you're going to go much past that 100 meter, 330 feet mark, then what I would do for the ethernet cables is leave a spot sort of in the middle of the run where you could put really a switch would be a totally fine way of extending that run out. You just need something to provide some power to the circuit. And then you go from there. Any thoughts on this, John? I'm with you on, and I'm trying to find what it's called here. So yeah, I'm definitely with you on the ethernet and the coax. There was a question about fiber. The thing is, I know fiber is used sometimes for the backhaul on some of the big boy routers. So yeah, yeah, I mean, you could fiber starts getting expensive in terms of the cable. So just running it willy-nilly to me seems, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but that seems to be a little excessive. That's kind of where I draw the line. Yeah, again, I've only seen it in enterprise situations for high-speed backbone is typically, or a lot of times done over fiber. And I remember even a place I worked actually did have that when they built the building in the 90s, they actually did put fiber pickups because some of the higher-end work stations actually would talk over fiber. But for consumer, yeah, I think it'd probably be redundant. Yeah, right, right. But the best strategy is if you can at all use a wired backbone instead of wireless backbone, although we like wireless backhaul because, but you're always going to get the best speed out of physical cable. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I like your suggestion. I remember who's it? Back in the day, it was at home. I think they were one of the first people that was at them or is another company. But they actually, their strategy when they were deploying fiber, like out in the wild, is they actually did what you suggested. They're like, well, let's, if we're going to lay down fiber, let's lay down two. Yeah, right. Let's use two conduits instead of one. Because I don't think anybody's ever regretted over designing. No. But you've regretted under designing. Big time. And that's why, you know, one of these folks that had emailed me, and there's several, but several of you out there with great questions, one of you wrote back and said, well, what, what do I need the second ethernet cable for? And they said, that's exactly that question is why you run the second one. Because you don't know what you're going to need it for. And that's why you want to have it in the wall for the future. I've used them, you know, right now. So I have between the house and the office, as longtime listeners will know, I have four cables buried to ethernet. And I think they're just cat six, they might even be five. But anyway, two ethernet and two coax. And I use both ethernet. One is for ethernet. And then the other one, I use a single pair on it for connecting the one phone line that we have, which is really just a Voip line between the two buildings. And yes, I used to do that with one ethernet cable, especially, you know, when you were only using two pairs for ethernet, I could run the phone over another pair. It's not desirable that it's, you know, so many people will yell at you and tell you you're not supposed to do that, which is why it's better to have two. And where it got really handy was the day the the stump grinder guy came, despite the fact that I told him, don't grind right there, you know, there's four cables running in the ground. He did. And he cut only one magically. He cut only one of those four cables, and it was one of the ethernet cables. So I was able to just swap over to that. We lost phone connection to the house for a little while. But but at least we had internet and we're able to survive. So it's good. All right, John, you brought it up. So I will answer Russ's question next. Russ says yet another router question. Dave has stated that Eero is the hotness right now. I'm assuming that he's addressing purely wireless performance. If one has wired ethernet through the home, thus enabling what we'll call wired backhaul, is Eero still the best option? Or does Dave's recommendation change? So here's the thing. And this stuff changes dramatically. And I'm going to I'm going to highlight an example of this in a minute, but Eero is great for a lot of reasons. And believe it or not, their Wi-Fi backhaul is not the very best. Orbi's Wi-Fi backhaul is the best. They use different radios for their Wi-Fi backhaul. And they're a four. Well, if you get the high end Orbi, there are two models of Orbi now. One model of Orbi uses the same backhaul as everybody else, two by two backhaul, but it's it's a dedicated backhaul. So it's a third band. So it still has that going for it. But it's two by two. The higher end Orbi from Netgear uses four by four Wi-Fi backhaul, which means that there are four streams connecting the devices together, not just two. And it is amazing how fast and how far that goes. However, I still choose Eero from or recommend Eero for most people. And it's because Eero's routing and meshing functions are currently the best. And Eero with wired backhaul is outstanding. So and not every router out or not every mesh solution out there supports wired backhaul. For example, Orbi does not support wired backhaul, even though it has ethernet ports on all the devices. It could software update could change this. And to that point, the TP link deco units that that just came out, I've got some here that I'm testing so far so good. But up until a couple of weeks ago, they didn't support wired backhaul either. But via a software update, they do now. And that's sort of the thing you're banking on. When Lynx is first shipped the vellop product to me, which is their version of a mesh thing, to be perfectly honest, I was not impressed. It's a tri-band thing, supports all topologies, wired backhaul, wireless backhaul, it'll mix and match any way you want, performance on it in my tests and in tests of others that that I work with, awful. They released a firmware update last week, maybe a week before. Yeah, probably a week before that added bridge mode to it, which is a handy thing if you want to run just the mesh separate from your different router. And a lot of people wanted that. They added bridge mode. So I figured let me try it again. It's amazing now. And it's not just bridge mode, they also happen to update the wireless drivers on all the units when they pushed out this firmware update. And that's actually now what I'm running in my house. So I have my Synology router doing the routing. And I have all the other wireless radios turned off except for the Lynxus vellops. And I've got them connected, wired backhaul, and it works awesome. So it really is about the software. I mean, the hardware is going to limit what the software can do when the software is working at its best. But if the software is not working at its best, it doesn't matter what kind of hardware you have. So there you go. I don't know. I don't know what... I guess the question was, if you have wired backhaul, does the recommendation change? And the answer is not really. I would still go with Eero just because they have the most mature routing features of all of the mesh products. But again, three months from now that might change. Lynxus is... I mean, they have their pedal all the way down to the metal here. They are moving very, very quickly to be the best option on the market. And it shows. Everybody says they want to be the best option on the market. From what I'm seeing in terms of the pacing of software updates and the dedication, I feel like Lynxus is the one who has a lot of momentum right now and could easily surpass Eero if they put the right things in. So they're one to watch. They're expensive though. It's like $4.99, which is still a little like La La Land pricing compared to everybody else. They probably need to shave $100 off of that. But there you go. So that's the state of the mesh market right now. I don't know. Got any thoughts on that, John? That's good. Yeah. Yeah. I redesigned mine a bit. I took one of your suggestions. I have both of my entertainment center devices plugged into the Eero on the Ethernet ports. It's handy. That is handy. Yeah. Yeah. Some questions from the chat room here. Brian Monroe asked too. He says, in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream, if you want to join us. The best way to join us and to know when to join us, of course, is to download the free MacGeekab iOS app, put that on your phone, and we can send you a notification when the chat room is live. But generally, it's happening on Sunday mornings, Eastern time. But Brian Monroe in the chat room asks, so the vellop has good radios for coverage. And my answer is absolutely yes. There are three radios in the vellops. I have them on a wired backhaul. So all three can be dedicated to front hall connections. And they're all two by two radios. But with three of them, two five gigahertz, one 2.4, the coverage has been stellar. My devices are always able to get full speeds everywhere they go. It's just been it's frankly been been blissful. And then Brian also asked, I thought Orbe had the best radios. That is true in terms of backhaul. As I said, Orbe has a third radio that is only dedicated to backhaul so never can be used for front hall. And that radio in the high end Orbe is four by four. So if you need wireless backhaul, say if I didn't have ethernet between my house in the office and I had to do it with wireless Orbe would without question be the best solution for that. However, that's only backhaul. The Orbe's front hall radios are all the same as everybody else's two by two radios. So in that sense, I'm actually better off hardware wise with develop because the vellop has three two by two radios broadcasting out on the front hall. So hopefully that answers that question. It gets very confusing. And again, software could change all of this. So it's hard to be definitive about it. But but still today, my favorite is Euro in general, because their their routing functionality is the most mature of any of the mesh solutions. And then, like I said, the one to watch is is links us. I would I would pay close attention to them. And I will and I'll share that with you when it changes so you don't necessarily have to. So there you go. Okay. Yeah, good, John. While while we're on the subject of mesh, let's let Louis take us in another direction. He says I have a problem with a Nest camera, which seems to go offline fairly often. This means I receive an offline error message by email or push notification sometimes as often as 10 times a day. I already took one step to fix the problem with some success. But my geekiness prevents me from considering this a win. So I now turn to you guys to help me because I'm not sure where to go. He's got his he basically what it comes down to is that he's running an Orbi system. And it and and that's connected to his ISP and all of that. And he says the problem started when he put the Orbi system in place. And I have seen issues with Nest over the years. Specifically, it seems to be a device that for whatever reason has problems when it sees multiple radios using the same SSID. So my guess is that your Nest is seeing both of your Orbi devices and can't decide which one to stay connected with. And that this is going to be a problem with many mesh solutions, because they all do this. And frankly, is something that the folks at Google slash Nest should be working hard to solve. But there are some threads on the Netgear community forums talking about solutions for this for Orbi owners. And two of the things that have been suggested are to disable implicit beam forming and also to disable M.U. MIMO. And a lot of people have had success turning those things off in the Orbi and getting them to work with with this. Now, the questionable. Well, okay, so that's that's actually that's that's that would be a dummy down the right dummy down take some features out and it gets better. Okay, now let's talk about those two features. M.U. MIMO means that one radio can speak with multiple devices slash clients simultaneously. And I know you say but I have all my devices connected to one radio. That's true. They're all associated with it. But really, without M.U. MIMO all of your devices, each one only gets to speak at one at a time. And the router sort of goes in around Robin fashion says, okay, you stop, you go next, okay, you stop, you go next and just goes around around. It happens very quickly. But it does minimize the efficiency of it. M.U. MIMO deals with that problem by allowing multiple clients to have active simultaneous parallel conversation. Here's the deal. Your Apple clients do not support this. And in order for M.U. MIMO to work properly, all connected clients need to support it. So guess what? Your router is an S.U. MIMO mode anyway, if you have even just one Apple device in your network. So turning that off ain't gonna hurt. So that's one. Number two, implicit beamforming. So beamforming is this cool thing where the radios can sort of aim themselves and this happens in a variety of ways. There's there's many ways they can actually direct their energy or choose different antennas if there are multiple antennas to be chosen from so that the antenna closest or best oriented to serve that client is the one that is serving it as opposed to another antenna serving it less well. All of that factors into what we call beamforming. There's two different types of beamforming. Implicit and Explicit. Explicit beamforming means everybody talks about the fact that beamforming is happening. And what does that mean? Both the router and your device agree. Yes, let's beamform. Let's share data back and forth about what we both see and then we get to decide. Great. Explicit beamforming is not the problem. Implicit beamforming is when the client or the device has no idea that the router is going to try and do beamforming and the router tries to get really smart about it and say, I think it would be better to move you from this antenna to that antenna. And that can be funky with some clients. And it seems maybe it's funky with the nest. So implicit beamforming is the one that you're turning off. Yes, you might lose some speed for this, but you're gaining some reliability with with less intelligent clients. All of your 802.11 AC connections are all explicit beamforming. So that's going to stay on no matter what. It's part of the spec. It's part of the standard. You're good. Any thoughts on that, John? No. I have the predecessor, the drop cam. And yeah, that never disappears. So I don't know what they did with their. You haven't had any problems. That's good. That's good. That's how it should be. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they got acquired, but yeah, I've never, the only time I've had the thing report that it's offline is when my internet goes out, along with all my other stuff, my DDNS and everything. Everybody's like, Oh my gosh, sure. I can't. I can't see anymore. Yeah. But that's that's that's an accurate error. Right. Yeah. All right, John, while we're on this subject, do you want to take us to JP? Talk about remote access? Poor JP. JP's got a problem. And we'll see how we can solve it for him. So JP says, I'm up in Maine at my crash pad and today the internet at my home in Los Angeles. Oh, all right. So he's a bicoastal, I guess. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. In Los Angeles went out. I was able to reset the modem through the TWC page, Time Warner Cable, and confirm that it had power. But the Wi-Fi has not come back up five hours later. Am I nested in the nest again? No. And my nest and demo devices tell me that they are not getting internet connection. Next move is to reboot the airport, but I'm in Maine. Is there a way to get to my airport extreme over the internet and tell it to reboot? If not, then I chalk this up to another lesson learned. Never trust home modems or routers to perform perfectly 100% of the time. Maybe in the future, I should attach a manual lamp timer to the outlet. Have a power off and on once a day in the middle of the night. I do that here in Maine for the DSL modem when I'm in LA and never lost connection. Whether there's a geek challenge or not, thanks for the answer if you have one. Well, I got one answer. Dave, there is something you can do. I don't know if I necessarily recommend this, but if you, I noticed this, so I don't have an airport, so I had to surf around to find this here. Though I recall this option when I set up an airport. And the thing is, if you run the airport utility and go to the base station section, there's an allow setup over WAN checkbox. Okay. All right. And what's a WAN, you may ask? Well, there's two type of networks. There's WANs, which is a wide area network. And that's actually explicitly identified on the back of the airport. I think it shows a little ring. And then you'll have the LAN ports, which are your local network or local area network. So LAN, WAN. Okay. Thing is, if you say allow setup over WAN, and you know your IP address, or if you use a DDNS, then you could remotely access your airport. Okay. Yeah. Now, the thing is, I don't know if I'd necessarily want to expose that to the world. Yeah. Well, the thing is, whatever, so the thing is, I'm not as worried about as exposing, you know, a general purpose device that has like a web interface, because to access, to configure the airport, excuse me, of course, you have to run their software. So even if there is something, if it is exposed, and you try to access it, because it's kind of obscure, I would be less worried about exposing it. But you may be able, once you, you know, so if you allow this access and you're on the airport utility, you should be able to access it and maybe restart it or reconfigure it. I would much rather that you set up a VPN to get in and do this. Yeah. Totally. Yes. And you can set up a VPN using our friend, I just mentioned recently, Dave, Mac OS X server will allow you to set up a VPN. And I think it'll even fiddle with the port mapping to allow this on the airport. Last I tried it. So that's what I would do, so you can get remote access to your stuff. What do you think? I agree. Yeah, exposing your router's configuration interface to the internet at large is one step further than I like to go security-wise. And you folks know I'm pretty loose on security in terms of the continuum that exists between ultimate security slash privacy versus ultimate convenience. I'm definitely, you know, on convenience street. But it's like, yeah, that's something that is just going to be open to the world and people just get to beat on it all day until they get my password right. No, thank you. I'd much rather do what you suggested, John, which is only open it to the inside of my network and then have a VPN here that I can access. And that, you know, that's the thing. Yeah. And then run the utility and then you know, see if you if you get a response. Right. I do. I think it is, I mean, it's a high tech way to do what we hate suggesting people do to solve a problem, which is to turn it off and on again. But I kind of it's kind of clever actually, setting up one of those, you know, occupancy simulators to just turn it off and on. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Although, yeah, you know, I will say that on a lot of my devices, not a lot, some, I set things to, I don't, I haven't done auto restarts in a long time. But in terms of knowing that I want to have access to these things remotely, especially while I'm traveling, like I might set, like my disk station, for example, is set to either wake up or start up at 7am and 7pm every day. Now, this is a device that should be on 100% of the time. So the only reason I've put that in there is in case there's some weird power outage or whatever it is, and it doesn't auto restart after the network sort of wakes back up and everything comes back online. No problem. Within 12 hours or less, that device is going to at least attempt to start itself up and bring itself up on my network. And that way, you know, I do, and I do the same with my Mac. I think I have it set to wake up at, I don't know, 8am every morning or something like that. For the same reason, it should be on. No, it's fine. I'm fine with it going to sleep. In fact, I prefer that. And this does make it actually wake up. So if it's a sleep, it does have to wake up. And then after a few minutes, it realizes you're not using it and it goes back to sleep. But that's the, that's the price I'm willing to pay to know that when I'm not here, that thing is going to be on. And, you know, with my Mac, the worst thing I have to do is wait, you know, 24 hours. And then, and then everything's okay. So you can't do that with your airport base station. And, and you're not alone. I've heard a lot of people have a thing that just turns it off, you know, turn off their router at whatever, just a timer that pulls power for a minute at 3am and then puts it back on. And that way, the router reboots every day. And especially back in the day when, you know, we had those old, you know, very, very unreliable first gen Wi-Fi routers that like to crash and overheat a lot. This was not a bad thing to put into place. So there you go. Yeah. Now another solution, you know, this, this could be a stellar opportunity for someone like Hector to provide additional Hector being Dave's parrot or Dave being Hector's minion. Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's to get a smart pet that you could instruct to restart your Wi-Fi for you. Yeah. Sure. Good luck with that. I'll put a link to Hector in the, in the show notes. She tries to keep everybody happy, but she, Hector start, Hector is a, what did I say the other day? She's a serial mascot for members of the Apple community. She started life as the mascot of Ambrosia software. And now she is our mascot here at, at TMO Towers East. But yeah, she's in her, I guess her early 20s. She's 23, I think now. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think she's, she's now on Instagram. She has always been on Instagram, but, but she, yeah, she didn't know about her account there until recently. Yeah. So, and actually to be, to be accurate, she just in January turned 24 years old. So, yeah. Yeah. Is that in parrot years? No, no, that's human years. Parrots live a long time. Yeah. Yeah. So, serial mascot, we call her. Yeah. All right, JP. Hope, hope one of those does it for you. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. While we're on the subject, I love it when these things just string themselves together like this. You folks make our lives really easy. Phil asks, is there a way like Automator that TunnelBear could auto connect my iPhone to its VPN whenever I am not on my home Wi-Fi and have it do so automagically? So, the idea is you have an account, an unlimited VPN account with a service in Phil's case, it's TunnelBear, and he wants to have that auto connect when he's not at home. When he is at home, he trusts that network, he's good, doesn't need it connected. But anytime he connects to other Wi-Fi networks, he wants TunnelBear to just automatically connect. Here's the thing, TunnelBear doesn't work like that. However, it is possible to do this just not at the moment with TunnelBear. Any IKEv2 VPN can be configured to do exactly what you're asking for. So, Automator on the iPhone doesn't exist in that way. The automation tools that do exist on the iPhone don't have the access that deep into the OS to cause these sorts of triggers. But like I said, it's built in to IKEv2 on your iPhone. You just need a profile that will tell it what to do. You can actually do this on your own. If you configure your own IKEv2 VPN, when you build the profile, you put in there essentially the white-listed Wi-Fi networks. And then if you're not on one of those, it auto connects the VPN. And we've got an article at TMO about how to do that. So we will put that in there. If you don't want to roll your own IKEv2 VPN, and I can totally understand why you might not want to get that geeky, although it's fairly simple. Cloak will do exactly this and lets you configure that white list on the fly and works very, very well in this regard. So while that's not TunnelBear, it is Cloak. And Cloak works very, very well. So that would be my recommendation. I think Cloak's the only, ah, there's probably others that will do it. But I don't, off the top of my head, I don't know of them. The ones that I've tried are TunnelBear Cloak and then ProXPN. And I've actually been really impressed with ProXPN. They don't do this white listing though. So it's either all connect or not all connect. John, you seem to be hemming and hawing over there. I'm hemming. Speedify kind of, it's not, well, they did add a feature where it'll automatically engage itself. And it'll also warn you if you're on an open Wi-Fi. It'll be like, hey, your traffic's unencrypted. You better take care of that. It'll give you a notification. It's not automated, but it does give you a heads up when you're in a potentially unsecure or less secure situation. We'd like it for other reasons too. Right. Cool. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. So those are my things. So we'll put Speedify on the list there too. Cool. All right. We have some tips to go through. But the first or the next thing that I want to do is send a huge shout out of thanks to all of you that have been active or even passive in terms of your auto renewing subscriptions and sending us your financial support this week. Because without that, we don't do what we do here. So it means a whole lot each and every time one of those payments comes through. And we really appreciate it. So we have a monthly, we have a biannual schedule, and then you can just do one-offs anytime you like. I don't think we had any one-offs this week, which is fine. But what we did add this week is the ability for you to set your subscription amount. The one-offs you could always put in whatever amount you wanted. But with your subscriptions, it was a fixed amount. And some of you said, why are you limiting me that way? And I said, I don't know. And so we're not anymore. You can put in whatever amount you want. So the biannual subscription, the sort of default base amount is 25. Mikhail S. Chris F. Brian W. Scott G. Robert S. Craig R. T. Andrew W. Brian M. R. K. All at that sort of default ongoing 25 level. And new subscriber Daniel W. On that every six months schedule, he set it at 50. So thank you very much, all of you. And thanks, Daniel, for being the one who tested this system. We tested it. But you know, the real test is when you test it. So thank you for your generosity and for your test. On the monthly plan, we have James B., John G., J.C., Paul M., and Joe S. To thank and Joe S. is a new one. The rest of you are renewals. Thank you all, everybody. Thank you so much for your continued support. Like I said, it really means a ton to us. So I just can't... I can't thank you enough. But we will say thank you. And then we'll move on, because the best way we can thank you is to keep doing what we do. So we talked last show, John, about sending email and sending Gmail. And we had a lot of comments and thoughts. Paul is the first one. He said, catching up on MGG the other day, came across a segment where a lady was having problems with iOS mail. She was able to send it from home, but mostly not whilst away. I've been having similar problems, being able to receive email at any location, but only being able to send from my home network. Your discussion about some services requiring to log in got me curious. Digging into the mail app settings revealed that you need to set login credentials for both your receiving email and for your sending email, and they are not tied together. Somehow I had set the credentials of the incoming mail server, but not the outgoing mail server. I went and did that, and now everything is well. Could it be that simple? And the answer is, yes, it's possible that you're likely using your ISPs outbound mail server. And without credentials, it seems to let you send when you're on their network, which is your network. But when you're not on their network, they require credentials. And that's exactly what you're running into. And my guess is that's exactly what I think it was Sandra in the last show that was that was running into that. So thank you, Paul, for the reminder that those those credentials, even though they are the same, they are not synced on your system. You need to type them in twice stuff, right? Make sense, right? I think we had a discussion recently where that happened to our both our parents is that they changed the password further for their, I think it was Yahoo in one place, but it didn't change it in the others, right? It's like, over here. Yeah, dude, you're needed here, too. Yeah. I'm surprised the OS isn't smart enough. Yeah. Hey, do you have something over here that needs to be changed? You know, hey, I don't know. I mean, I was fiddling around with, with changing my email setup. And so I actually added a Google account. And when I went to my other machine, it's like, Oh yeah, by the way, there's new account, no doubt through iCloud, it was made aware of this. New stuff, Homeslice. Yeah. That's what that's the official way it says it, right? I can't do that. You can't call me Homeslice. I think that's the title of the show. Don't call your daughter that. Oh yeah. Yeah, she loved it. She, she still, she still reminds me of that. She says, do you remember that time you called me Homeslice? All right. Well, now we will always remember the time I called you Homeslice, John. Okay, Simon, similar response to the same discussion. He says, I was having the same problem as Sandra recently shared with you with regards to being able to, to being unable to send mail via iOS when using a Gmail account, but not consistently. Sometimes the mail is sent fine other times, you get the server error message. I tried multiple approaches to resolve this, including deleting and re-adding the account or even reinstalling. Since the problem I found came down to a combination of using two-factor authentication on Gmail and the default Google setup under iOS mail. The way which I solved this was I deleted the Gmail account from my iOS device, and then I set it up under accounts add account other as an IMAP account and not a Google account. I then had to look up Google's SMTP and IMAP servers together with the server ports, and then it worked just fine. And I've done that with Google accounts too. It seems like iOS might still make that into just what it, the way it wants to talk to Google sometimes won't let you just put in server names, but it's worth a shot. So thank you for that, Simon. Good stuff. It's fun. I like it, right? It's good. Okay. Also, from 656, listener Robin, when we were talking about malware, says, I can advise you as to two more security tools for the Mac, which are also free. One is called BlockBlock, and BlockBlock detects when software tries to nest itself in startup items and gives you the option to block that before it can cause problems. And then another one called Malware, M-A-L-W-H-E-R-E, from the same security researcher notices when multiple files are getting encrypted and works effectively against crypto lockers. He says, these are the only two products that I use with success. Thanks, Robin. That's great. That reminds me that Acronis backup, Acronis also looks and protects against files being encrypted, because that's how you get these bitware, essentially blackmail scams, I don't know if it's blackmail, but extortion scams, where they say, okay, we've encrypted all your data, and you can buy the password from us. Just send a thousand bucks of Bitcoin to this address, and we'll send you your password. And so, if something is watching actively, which backup software can do, but anything could do, if you tell it, to alert you when things are being encrypted, the nice part about Acronis is it has a backup of that file, and it can restore that once you've disabled whatever malware it is that's doing the encryption. We'll put links to all of those out there. It's good stuff. Yeah? Any thoughts on that, John? Yeah, I heard about that whole malware thing. This is why you make a backup. Right, but the problem is if you aren't paying attention, you start backing up the encrypted versions of these files, too. And over time, especially if all you're doing is a clone, well, not so good. So, not so good. Anyway. The only other thing that occurred to me as far as email and passwords and stuff like that is I've had this happen in the past. If you're having weird email issues, you may want to look in your key chain and make sure that you don't... Every now and then, I don't know why this happens. It seems that the problem has now gone away from my system. But at one point, it was either my system or someone else I was trying to help out. Sure. But there were multiple entries for a password for like smtp.yahoo.com, and I'm like, why is there multiple entries? Yeah. So I would get rid of the oldest one, because I think what happens sometimes is the wrong one would be picked, and then all of a sudden you get these weird issues. Well, I can't send it, and it's like, well, why not? Try the wrong password. Ben in the chat room recommends Etra check, E-T-R-E check, which he says it shows some of the odd launch agents and demons, and we'll kind of alert you to that stuff, and it too is free. So we have a link to that in the show notes. I don't want to give a big shout out to whomever it is. I think it's Brian Monroe, but it might be Brian and others who are helping flush out the show notes today in the chat room at matkeekip.com slash stream. You all rock. It's been like amazing. I type something in, and magically the links all appear, and it's awesome. So thank you. Lovingly handcrafted, not just by John and I, but by all of you, or select few of you, I suppose, but everyone is welcome to participate in flushing out the show notes during the show. Again, with reference to show 656, the last show, David writes, you covered the topic where Dave H says... What is the... I got to read through the email. Oh, mail flagging. Sorry. He said, I listened to show 656 where you covered the mail flagging topic, and something that Dave said I picked up on was something like, when I try this with Gmail, it works just fine. I do remember saying that. Listener David said, okay, maybe it's a problem with iCloud. So he did a test. He said, I flagged an email in my Gmail inbox on macOS, and within a few seconds, the flag appeared on my iPhone. I flagged the same email on iOS, and again within a few seconds, unflagged on macOS. All good. In both instances, the flagged email appeared, then did not in the flagged mailbox. All worked fine. All of these were expected behaviors and worked as Dave indicated within a few seconds. I repeated this same experiment with my iCloud mail, and the result was what I described earlier. For giggles, I also have a personal domain set up through AWS as a mail server using Exchange, and I tried the same step. It worked, but it took about a minute to sync the flag, but again, it worked as expected. For my original assertion, David says, I still think that the flagging capability is broken with iCloud between iOS and macOS, because clearly when using other mail services, it works perfectly fine. So there you go. That explains the mystery from last week that iCloud mail and flags not so good, at least not between macOS and iOS. So worth a shot. Yeah. That's what I said. It's broken. It's busted. Yeah. All right. And then also in our Facebook group, Victor Cahiao, who a longtime podcaster, friend to many of us, posted a great little work around when listener Mike asked, does anyone know if there's a way around the 100 megabyte download limit on mobile data? And Victor said, yeah, the work around is that you have to have two iPhones with you, and as long as you do, use the other iPhone, turn on mobile hotspot, and then connect to their mobile hotspot, and you'll be able to bypass the 100 megabyte download limit because your iPhone doesn't know it's on a cellular connection. It just knows it's on a wireless connection, and then the limit goes away. So it's kind of a stupid limit, but if you have two devices, you can bypass the limit, which is interesting. Even if they're on the same shared data pool or whatever, that's how you get around that. It's crazy. Thanks, Victor, for the work around. It's silly, but that's how it goes. I don't know, John. They don't let me write that software. I mean, I haven't asked. I haven't done anything, but there you go. And that, my friend, brings us to the end of our lovely show for today. This is the end. It's a beautiful end. Nice song, too. Any thoughts, John? Thoughts? I was thinking about how you could email us, but we've already talked about that. We didn't talk about how those of you who are premium supporters can email us, though. That's premium at MacGeekab.com, and that's one of the things we do for you because of what you do for us. So absolutely, you are able to use that address. You can also call us 224-888-geek, which, John, is? 4-3-3-5. We made some mention of Facebook. We did, but we didn't tell people how to get there. How do they get there, John? I don't know. How do they get there? Maybe we did tell people how to get there. It's macgeekab.com slash Facebook, and I have a distinct memory of saying that recently. Macgeekab.com slash Facebook. We get you there. Yep. And of course, there's a Twitter. Everybody loves Twitter. Always. At all hours. They're tweeting something. There's always something happening on my Twitter. And on Twitter, I am John Afron. He's Dave Hamilton. That other guy's Pilot Pete. The podcast is MacGeekab, and the publication is MacObserver, all at twitter.com. All at twitter.com. I want to make sure not only do we thank all of you, but that we thank our sponsors, of course, Barebones, this week. Smile Software.com. This is the home of Smile. Otherworld Computing is the home, or Otherworld Computing's home is macsales.com. Find other sponsors if you visit us at macgeekab.com. In fact, I think I'm going to put up an active sponsors page there. So find all of that. Thank you so much, folks, for listening, for contributing, for asking questions, and making sure that you absolutely, and we absolutely, don't get caught. Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there.