 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, episode 793 for Monday, December 16th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, cool stuff that we've found, new tips that we've found, problems that we've had, mix it all together and mash it up, sharing the answers hopefully, but at least sharing enough. Such that every single one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include NativeDeodorant.com with promo code MGG, ifixit.com slash MGG, and ExpressVPN.com slash MGG. We'll talk all about each of those a little bit later here, but for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Freeville, Connecticut, this is John Afron. John, I am a happy camper this week with Mac OS Catalina 10.15.2. I am not one, especially on my production machine. I usually wait 24 hours, you know, to update because, you know, things might go wrong or whatever. But I always do like to stay up to date. As soon as I saw the release notes for Catalina 10.15.2, I immediately updated. And there were several things in there that blew me away. One of them was that, or several things that were of interest to me, one of them blew me away. And that was Restores, the column browser view for managing the music library. Now, to use the term Restores is a little bit misleading because it was never there to begin with in Apple's music app, which is the new, you know, sort of replacement for iTunes-ish. But it was there in iTunes. And that column browser, like when looking at my list of songs, it was a pain in the neck to not see the, to not be able to filter down by either band or album or genre is the other thing in the column browser. I never use that, but that's just me, right? But I always filter down band and column and all that good stuff. So this is fantastic. Like it makes the music app fully usable for me now without feeling like I'm stuck. So it, this is, this was, I mean, it was great for exactly what it is. But it's also interesting for like those of us that are perhaps not entirely happy about the way Apple has implemented the column browser in mail in Catalina. Maybe, maybe if enough people are like us, John, and are missing it, maybe it will come back in the future. So, so, you know, so that one was exciting. The, it, another item that says resolves an issue that may cause some AVI and MP4 files to appear as unsupported. That and one other in the list, I think would have solved the photos problem that I was having that caused me to rebuild my photos library a few weeks ago. But alas, you know, I, that, that ship had sailed. So I let it continue to sail instead of going back to a backup. But it was nice to see, like this, this release is, this is, you know, this is the one. There was another item that improves the reliability of syncing books and audio books to your iPad or iPhone through the finder that answers a question from that many of you have sent into us here. So, like this, this felt like, OK, now Catalina is where it needs to be. So last night, my daughter is home from school. I never do major updates on her machine in the midst of a semester. I always wait until after the semester is over for perhaps obvious reasons. And, and so with her being home, it was like, OK, let's get then she was she wanted it because she wanted to have the TV app to be able to watch Apple TV plus on her laptop and all that stuff. And we did the update and it was flawless. Like it just worked. There was no issue. There was no fanfare. It was exactly like you would expect it to be. We just ran the updater. We waited for it to download and install. And then when it came back up, it asked its few questions or what have you. And it was like, OK, here, good to go. All your stuff. Like so for those of you that have been waiting, we understand. And also it's at least based on what I'm seeing here. I think it's I think you're good to go. So I assume you've updated to 1015 to write, John. Oh, yeah. Any thoughts about that? None of those features were really. Things I've been worrying about. So, OK, no, I'm good, but I saw the update. Yeah, might as well. Yeah. I mean, there's quite a few updates. There was there were some updates specifically to mail with the preferences window and being this out. This one I've actually seen being unable to undo a deleted message. Now, I think they've fixed that too. So yeah, good stuff. So definitely make sure you've got that update there if you. If you, you know, if in fact you you haven't gotten it. So yeah, good. And for those of us with older devices that can't go on iOS 13, I noticed this the other day on my iPad air. There's now 12.4.4, which appears to be just a security update. So I, I, yeah, I noticed that I have an iPad mini two, I believe. I think it's a mini two, not a mini three that I use for like my stuff on stage or whatever. And I saw the little notification was like, what? There's an iOS update. No, no, no, this doesn't go to 13. Like, oh no. There it is. Yep. 12.4.4. So that's good. It's good that that that will continue to be updated at least for what we get another year out of those. And then they fall off the list. I think is that right? We get two more years out of it. We might get two more out of those. That's right. I think that's been their typical window for any device is still. Yeah. Or in Mac OS, they'll support, you know, back at least two versions. Sure. Sure. I've seen. That's great. Cool. All right. 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And this is why I love their tool kits there. You've got to go check this out. And this is a great gift to give your favorite geeks this holiday season. I just like this especially when it comes to these crazy proprietary things that Apple keeps doing that started with the Pentalobe and then I had by Mac mini the security torques which is like what's going on here. They give you that in their. Yeah, they know what you need. So they put it in there. It's great. And if you go to ifixit.com slash MGG, you can get this stuff. You can really you can get anything you want from ifixit. And at that URL, ifixit.com slash MGG, you get $10 off your next $50 fix. So go check it out. Go to ifixit.com slash MGG. Get the toolkit that John and I use. And actually, many of you use. It's really great and get $10 off your next $50 fix or thanks to I fix it for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's get into some questions. Shall we, my friend? Surely, surely. Stop calling me surely. Kids, you can ask your parents about that joke. I showed airplane to my kids. I want to say last winter, but I don't know that it was that long ago. They actually liked it. They like my son especially appreciated the humor in it. So, you know, so it still holds up. It's good. They spent enough time in airports and airplanes to, you know, to get it. So it's good. Anyway, Rick writes. He says I'm having an odd issue with Mako as Catalina that my Google foo has been too weak to help with. I'm visually impaired and with my particular condition, I find it substantially easier to read light on dark text on a screen dark mode. He says covers a lot of my needs and I also use dark mode for Safari a little plugin that helps with most websites. I commonly visit it converts them to dark mode, whether they have done the work to convert to dark mode or not to fill in the gaps. He says I also use the invert colors shortcut command control option eight is what that is by default. That particular shortcut is not only is not on by default, but it's the first thing I enable when I set up a new Mac inside system preferences keyboard shortcuts accessibility. Since I upgraded to Catalina on my 15 inch 2018 MacBook Pro, I find that the shortcut stops working even though it's checked in keyboard preferences. If I uncheck and recheck the preference, it starts working again, but then stops after some interval of time. I think usually after the laptop has been closed and asleep for a little while. So is there a way to read and write that preference in terminal app? If so, I can script the fix so I don't have to navigate through the GUI. Also, what would cause a system default preference to override a user preference? And could that be what's going on? That's a tough one, Rick. I think this is a damaged preference file. And so my first question is, does this persist after a reboot? Because that would rule out my... If the setting persists after reboot, then that would rule out my theory of a damaged preference file. But if you have to reset it or re-enable it after reboot, that might indicate a damaged preference file. I did some digging. I could not figure out which preference file this would fit in. In generally speaking, I would just blow the preference file away, reboot, come back up and see. Another thing to try is turn it off, right? Quit out of everything, including system preferences. Reboot your Mac. When it comes back up, turn it back on again. See if that helps kind of sink that setting in. If you, so to speak. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Yes. So I was asking myself the same question. Which preference file is it? And as far as I can tell, the place that you want to go and the strategy you want to take is as follows. So in my sidebar, I actually have my library folder. My user library folder is actually on the side there. Sure. Because sometimes I want to poke around in the system here. So if you go there, so if you go to your library folder and then your preferences, and then here's a secret date modified, you want to sort by that and then fiddle with the setting in question. And what should happen is that P list file should bubble to the top. For example, I was poking around in that area and there's a preference file called com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist. Oh, nice. So I think that may be the one that you want to, well, I guess make a backup of it and then whack it and it'll recreate it and then hopefully your changes will stick. All right. I'm looking because you can look inside P list files. Actually, quick look will do it in the finder, but also you could open them with BB editor or whatever. So I'm looking here and it's hard to say. Things are all sort of done by serial numbers. So it's hard to say which one is which, but this could well be that file. Yeah. Oh, I like it. I like it. Nice find, man. Symbolichotkeys.plist. Yeah, kind of a weird name, but it seems to have something to do with keys. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking on Stack Overflow. People are asking what they represent. I mean, another one that came up was Universal Access right under that and then. That could be another one. Yeah. Yeah, because I was mentioned during our discussion. So. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. I, you know, I will, this gets pretty geeky, but the contents of that Apple Symbolichotkeys.plist file are all just numbers. They were serial numbers, but they are, what's the right word for this? They are numbers that indicate. So like zero is no modifier. 131072 means shift. 262144 means control. But if you add shift and control, then that's those two numbers added together. So it's 393216. There's a term for these. It's the same way like Unix permissions are done similarly, where you're adding up from zero, one, two, four, you know. But anyway, I'll put a link in the show notes if somebody wants to dig deeper into that. But wow. Yeah. Cool. That's good, man. I like it. Yeah. Wow. Crazy. All right. So that we have what we want. Great. Let's move on to Gary, who asks, what is the difference between the spinning gear and the spinning beach ball? He says, I suspect it shows the machine is working, but we don't see either of those, of course, in iOS. This may become a geek challenge. I've heard some people talk about this in the past, but I couldn't find anything that definitively says, okay, when you see the spinning gear, it means this. When you see the spinning beach ball, it means that. I mean, in general, it means your machine is doing something. I think though, and this is part memory, but just part my experience that the colorful, you know, spinning beach ball means that the app in question has gone unresponsive to the system or has not reported back to the system in more than, I think, maybe 10 seconds or something like that. Does that bring any bells for you, John? Yeah, it means I'm busy. Hold on. Right. Well, it means that it's not responding. I think is what the beach ball means, whereas the gear just means it's busy, but expectedly busy, perhaps. Oh. If anybody knows. Oh, go ahead. I thought that underneath the covers, if an app knows it's going to take a moment to do something, like I'll have it happen with Twitter, terrific every now and then. Yep. I think it's the app itself that actually changes the cursor from the pointer, you know, the arrow to the beach ball. And then when it thinks it's done, it changes it back so you know that it's finished. I think that I think when it, when the app does it, it changes to the gear. And when the system says, I haven't heard from the app, that's when you get the beach ball. I don't think an app can manually invoke the beach ball. Well, other than, you know, intentionally going unresponsive and letting the system decide to do it. I think I could be totally wrong about this, but that was what my gut says. And I seem to remember hearing that somewhere. Maybe it was at WWDC, but I could be totally wrong. If you know better than us, feedback at MacGeekab.com, please let us know. Did you say feedback at MacGeekab.com? Yeah, man, I said feedback at MacGeekab.com for sure. All right. Spinning. Oh, OK. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Or like the... I don't know if I call it a gear, but yeah. No, I know the... Right. The one that's not a beach ball, but you also know means things are happening. It's like a bunch of lines radiating. Yes. Kind of like a clock almost. Right. Yeah. It's like a clock. OK. Yeah. That's the system. Is he doing something? Yeah. All right. All right. Ev asks, does time machine backup full-size photos when backing up from an optimized photo library? And the answer is no. When your time machine backs up what you have on your Mac at the time that time machine is running its backup. So if you have optimized photo library turned on, you will have potentially some of your full-size photos will be downloaded in the cache there. And I believe those are backed up by time machine. But anything that is not downloaded to your Mac is not backed up by time machine that only remains in iCloud. And, you know, this does bring up a question because we talk about how you want to have a cloud backup, but you also want to have a local backup. You know, one backup is never enough. Now, Apple also backs up their cloud. Apple also keeps your deleted photos for 30 days, right? In case you accidentally delete something. Both of those statements are true if you're using iCloud photo library. If you're not, then obviously they don't. We have not yet heard of anyone having their photos just get lost because of some iCloud-based data corruption. And it is totally possible that that could happen, but I think Apple has made it a huge priority not to let that happen. So my guess is they've got their own redundant backups. I don't want to suggest that you necessarily should trust that, but I just wanted to throw it out there that if that's the only place your photos exist, you're probably not going to be sorry about that. However, I don't do that. But like many of you, I don't have the room on my local machines, at least not on all of them, to store my photos library. So what I do on one of my machines, and it's a desktop machine at this point, it's the desktop machine down in my office, the new iMac, I have an external drive. And on that drive is where I have my iCloud photo library for that machine or that user account on that machine stored. And I tell it to download full copies to this computer. And then I make sure Time Machine is backing up that folder on that external drive, as well as all my other backups. But that way, A, they're in iCloud, B, they're locally synced to my computer now that I've solved the problem that we mentioned previously. So they are being synced again. And then I've got a carbon copy cloner backup that runs once a week that grabs all that stuff and moves it, not moves it, copies it to my disk station. And actually, I put it into a folder that can be parsed and organized by Synology Moments, which is their personal cloud-based photo management, photo indexing system, and it's awesome. So I've got these pictures not just stored in multiple places, but usable in multiple places. I can use them in iCloud on the web. I can use them on, of course, all my phones and iPads. I can see them and have them on my Mac in the Photos app. And then I can also use the Synology Moments app, which is available on the web or on my phone or whatever, to also see all my pictures. So that's how I do my photos backup. But to answer your question, no, Time Machine does not go out to the cloud and get the full copies of all your photos that aren't on your Mac. It only gets what's on your Mac. Makes sense? Good, right? Yeah. Yeah, I do it a little different. Yes. So first off, you may be asking yourself, what are these optimized photos you speak of? And the place to see how you're set up is in photos, preferences, iCloud. iCloud photos, and there's going to be two choices. And mine is set to download originals to this Mac. Then there's another choice that was pointed out here called Optimize Mac Storage, where if you're getting low on space, it's going to give you wimpy versions. But I don't back up. My photo library is so huge, Dave, that I don't back it up via Time Machine. I have it actually excluded, along with other monstrously huge files like my parallels VMs. Sure. I don't Time Machine those either. I just back those up with a CCC clone. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, and that makes perfect sense. As long as you know what you're doing and you're comfortable with the amount of protection that you've created for yourself via whatever methods. I mean, that sounds fine. You may be right. I have Time Machine going to a couple different places. My photo library might be excluded from some of those, I think. Yeah, I'm comfortable. So I'm not totally following the rule, but I do have a cloud copy and a local copy. There you go. Or a backup. Yeah, local. So you have a cloud copy, your local copy, and a backup of your local copy. Correct. So that's, I mean, like, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Because my, yeah, my, my photo library is like 200 gigs because I have like every photo that I've ever taken. Yeah, same. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The worst part was that Catalina photos changed the way, changed the structure of the photos libraries. And it used to be Mojave and Pryor that there was a master's folder inside that package. So if you go to your photos library package, you know, right click on it and say what, explore the contents of this package, I think is, is the thing, something right there. If you look in there, then there's just a series of folders. And there used to be one called master's. If you migrated a photo library from Mojave to Catalina, that folder will now be renamed to master's.legacy. The great part about that master's folder was it had organized by year all the photos that were stored in your local photos library. So if like John and I, you have it on at least on one machine set to download all copies, then every photo that you had would be in there. And the photos were all just named as their names. Right. So I mean a lot of them were image or IMG underscore 4732.jpg or .heic or you know, whatever. But there they were. That has now changed. In Catalina, there is no master's folder. There is an original's folder. And it's organized by I think UUID or serial number or something that, I mean it, the names are equally as not value. I don't want to say they're invaluable. They are equally as not valuable because they're just these sort of random names. And I guess that protects against if you change the name of a file somewhere in your library, the serial number for that photo would remain the same. And so maybe that helps keep things a little more organized. What it meant for me though was because I am sort of poking inside the library and syncing just the master's or now just the original's folder to my disk station so that moments on the disk station can properly parse through things. It made it such that I had to completely have it re-index all my photos on the disk station. Which is fine. But it was just like, oh, OK. That's fine. So if you're doing anything like that, be aware that that's not going to be working. You would have already gotten like me. You would have gotten a message from Carbon Copy Cloner or whatever you're using to do it that the master's folder that you were trying to back up doesn't exist. So help me find it. And when you go help find it, you'll realize, oh, there it is. But it's fine. I mean, all the photos are there. So at least they're not stored in some, I mean, they're all in there as individual files, which is really the key. So it's just different. But that's OK. Yeah? All right. Well, while we're talking about libraries, let's talk about the music library with Darren's question. He says, I have a large music collection, almost a terabyte, stored on an external drive. I just copied all my music to a new two terabyte external hard drive to allow for expansion. Now the music app cannot locate my files and prompts me with the question, would you like to locate it every time I go to play a file? The problem is I have over 32,000 songs and I don't want to manually point the music app 32,000 times. Any suggestions? So there are a couple of ways to do this. The first, given that you've already copied everything over, the first thing that I would do is give it the answer for one of those. Right? So when it says, I can't find the file, would you like to locate it? Go and find that song on the new drive. I have not tried this with the music app yet, but with iTunes and so I'm presuming also with the music app. Once you've relocated, once you've told it how to find one file, it's smart enough to look through its library and say, hey, are there any other missing files that have a prefix path that matches the one that I just was told to correct? And if so, let's go look and see if we apply that same logic to all these other files. Does it find them in the new location? I've done this a couple of times over the years with iTunes, again, not yet with music. And usually I have to do it less than 10 times. It doesn't go get everything every time, but it gets thousands of files all at once. It's like, okay, great. And then I'll see others with the little exclamation point. It's like, okay, let's go play that. It'll say, I can't find it. I go to show it where the file is. And then thousands more just immediately are found. And you do that a few times and then boom, everything's good. So that's one way to do it. And at this point, given that you've copied everything over, that is what I would recommend. The other way to do this though, especially if you're starting from scratch, is inside the Music app, you can go, and this is true of iTunes as well, if you go to Music Preferences and go to Advanced. Oh, maybe it's not there. Where is it now? Ah, Music Preferences Files. You will see your Music Media Folder location and you can change that. You could create this new folder on your new hard drive with both drives mounted, not yet having copied everything over. And change here in Preferences, Files, Music Media Folder location, change it to the new drive. Make sure the other two boxes on this screen are checked, which is keep Music Media Folder organized and copy Files to Music Media Folder when adding to Library. Once you're done with that, hit OK. Now, any new Files that you add to your Music Library will be in that new folder, but everything else is still in the old folder. And you could leave it like this, but obviously that's not what you want to do. Now go to File, Library, Organize Library and click Consolidate Files. And what that will do is, as it says right on the screen, put copies of all Media Files into the Media Folder and leaves the original Files in their current location. So this will take some time with 32,000 Files. But this would actually copy all of your Files into what you've now just defined as the New Media Folder and also repoint your Library to that New Media Folder so that when it finishes, everything is in sync and you can eject the old drive and you're good to go. So that's the Apple way of doing this. I will point out if you have all of your Library Files elsewhere. Now, there's two separate things about this. There are the Media Files, which is what we're talking about here. And then there are the sort of Index Library Files. I highly recommend leaving those in your home folder even if your Media Files are being stored elsewhere because that way things like what we just described here will work for you. So there you go. Those are my thoughts, Mr. Braun. Do you have any thoughts on this? Now that I look at it, it looks like my Music Library is kind of a mess. Uh-oh. Well, you can do this Consolidate thing. I mean, do it carefully and intentionally, but that is built to sort of fix that particular mess. Yeah, the thing is I don't have a lot of music that I've bought Most of my music is MP3s. Yeah, I think most of it is. You know, I would get it from sources that I either ripped it from my CDs or I got it from sources that didn't protect it. Now that I look at it, I don't think these would play nice. M4P means protected, right? M4P means protected and are usually files that you bought. Yes, like I'm looking here, Pink Floyd Animals. I bought that from the Apple Store and they're M4P. So copying over the rest of my library, I copied over to one of my NAS and then I share it using DLNA and that seems to work for me. Maybe I should figure out how to liberate these protected files. So that's not a lot of them. That's a good question because Apple, Apple at some level will let you download M4P no longer exists. There are no more DRM files. If you bought Pink Floyd Animals today, it would be M4A files. They would not be protected. They would be playable by anything. There is no more DRM on the stuff that you buy from the iTunes Store or whatever it's called, the Apple Music Store. There is DRM on the streaming tracks for Apple Music. So if you're an Apple Music subscriber and you download a track to play offline, that will have DRM because it's part of your subscription. Of course, your subscription, you could end your subscription and then you wouldn't be able to play those files anymore. But anything you purchase, that is now non-DRM. And I thought there was a way to ask Apple to get you non-DRM copies of your M4P files. So that's something to look into. Off the top of my head, I don't have it. I'm hoping somebody in the chat room maybe will kind of point us in the right direction on this before the show ends or we can find a link to put in the show. At the very least, we'll follow up in the next episode about it. But there is a way for some things. So there you go. But yeah, old M4P files to M4A. I mean, there are third-party tools to do this. You could do the trick that we all did before Apple relinquished the DRM on purchase files, which is burn it to a CD and then rip the CD. And once you rip the CD, you can rip it as a non-protected thing and you're good to go. But I think there's a better way. I'm forgetting. I know I did it when Apple first said, okay, here's the thing, there was a way. And it was like, all right, great. I went and did it to all my tracks so that I wasn't stuck with just being able to play them in iTunes. So there's a solution for you here, John. Or at least there was. I don't know if my question is, was there a time limit on this ability to convert or was it related somehow to iTunes match? Are you an Apple Music subscriber right now, John? No. No, okay, okay. So yeah, I don't know. If it's part of iTunes match, you might need to be an Apple Music subscriber, but it may well be worth your time to subscribe for a free trial or even a one-month thing to just get all this done and free all your tracks and then you could, you know, end your subscription or what have you. So we will investigate or you will investigate and report back to us. We will, we as Mackie Keb will investigate the community. So yeah. Anything more on that one, John? Nope. Okay. I want to talk about our next sponsor, which is Native. Native makes this fantastic deodorant that I just started using. I've never been happy with deodorant in the past. And now with Native, I truly like, I'm excited every day to put on deodorant. I know this sounds crazy, but it's probably really a welcome thing for the folks that, you know, have to live with me and interact with me. Their goal is to create safe, simple and effective products that people use every day, right? It's all formulated without aluminum, without parabens, without talc and is filled with ingredients found in nature. Hence the name. Native such as coconut oil, shea butter, moisturizer, tapioca starch. They never test on animals. They understand the value of direct to consumers. So they offer free shipping and returns because that's, you know, how that goes. 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So again, 20% off your first purchase is with promo code MGG at nativedeodorant.com. And our thanks to Native for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is ExpressVPN. We've been loving ExpressVPN for over a year now here at MacGeekab. And that continues to happen. These folks, not only do they make the fastest, simplest, easiest, best VPN I've ever used, and I say that certainly I started using them because they came on as a sponsor, but I continue to use them because they are the best, fastest, and easiest. It just works. One click and I'm on. No problem. On the last sponsor spot, I mentioned using ExpressVPN to watch Netflix shows that aren't necessarily available in the country that you're in. So here in the US, I had mentioned Rick and Morty. It was a show I couldn't watch on Netflix. And I was able to watch it by connecting to Paris. And then we found out the next day that that had been blocked. Well, ExpressVPN is constantly working on this. And if you contact their support, they will tell you which end point specifically to connect to in order to be able to watch these things. They're on top of it. So if you want to watch Star Trek Discovery on Netflix, but you're in the US, well, connect to the UK and they've got hybrid access points there that Netflix lets through. If you have a problem, contact support and they take care of it because that's how ExpressVPN is. Fantastic service. I was really happy with the way this all transpired. And I think you will be too. And I think you'll be especially happy getting an extra three months free by signing up at ExpressVPN.com. That gets you your extra three months for free with your subscription and it allows you to support the show. You can watch what you want and you can protect yourself. So that's ExpressVPN.com slash MGG, our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. John, last week, we talked about a lot of things. It's what we do. One of the things that we talked about was listeners Scott had a Mac Mini that would not wake up. Now, by not wake up, he specifically described, he said, I know the computer's on. I can hear it churning, but I can't get it to display anything on the screen. And all I can do is turn it off completely, turn it back on. And we went through troubleshooting assuming that there was a problem with the Mac Mini that it was in some kind of a crashed state and we offered a lot of solutions. And those may well be valuable for Scott particularly, but they also, you know, were valuable for dealing with a computer that truly is in a crashed state like that. And if you're having that problem, definitely go back and listen to that segment with Scott in 792. For the record, when you go and listen to the show, you can write it macicub.com. Every episode has timestamps in it and you can just click on the timestamp there and it jumps you right to that chapter so you don't have to scrub around or anything. We take care of that for you. That said, we got some comments that enlightened us a little bit and I'll state right up front, I should have at least thought about this because I've experienced the exact same thing that these people are all positing might in fact be Scott's problem. So we will start with a listener, Brian, who says, let me find Brian. I had the wrong thing up. He said, you suggested that Scott's Mac might be in a crashed state, but in my case, that did not seem to be the problem. At least once when I woke the machine and faced a blank screen, the attached time machine drives sprang into life as if the Mac Mini was just running a backup. I later confirmed this by checking the times of recent backups in Time Machine and System Preferences Energy Saver, my default setting was to turn the display off after a set period of time. I changed this to never and the blank screen problem has not returned. Now, if I'm leaving the Mac for a short period, I use hot corners to set the screen saver. If I expect to be away for a longer period, I turn off the display manually. Further, my display has its own turn off function. Once the Mac sleeps and the display senses no signal, it turns itself off after 10 minutes. Maybe this is a bug or maybe the system needs a reset, but for now this is working for me. And as soon as I read Brian, Brian's was the first of many responses that came in about this. As soon as I read it, it was like the light bulb went off. Like I said, I can't believe I didn't think of this before, but that's what we're all about here with the MaciGab family is kind of making sure the knowledge does not get lost just because one of us forgets it. We learned years ago because I dealt with it that some third-party monitors have a data path that works in a wonky way with the Mac and doesn't always wake up when the Mac wants it to. And I had this problem and it was with a mono price display. And I got a note from someone deep inside mono price that said the monitor I was having trouble with used what they called the standard 8-bit framerate controller. Like with a lot of monitors, varying computer configurations can cause handshake issues. So it really comes down to the individual setup. Framerate controls have improved over the last year, and the new monitor with which I was having no problems is using 10-bit, which gives it more bandwidth to handle EDID, which is... Maybe you can help me with this, John, but it's like the display to computer handshaking protocol that actually wakes things up. So that may well be Scott's problem because it certainly was mine, it certainly was Brian's, and perhaps this is a good thing to know, especially as lots of us are getting these Mac minis with third-party monitors that may or may not always sync quite right. Lisa earlier this week, before Brian's note came in, was pointing out to me that sometimes her display would just turn off. And if we just power-cycled it, it would come back on and it was fine. And then we got Glenn's note, John, and Glenn might have the actual answer here. Hi, Dave and Hamilton. Here's Glenn from Munich in Germany. A feedback to your 7-9-2 show when you make sleep too deeply. Scott's problem. I have the same problem when I start my Mac Mini before starting display. So Mac Mini assumes he's in headless mode and I found an article in German, unfortunately, where it mentions that in case there's no device monitor, the GPU switched off to save energy. And so that's why the screen is black when I start display. Maybe it's the same problem for Scott that after sleep, the Mac Mini maybe wakes up and doesn't find the display in switch off GPU. And I didn't find a solution to reactivate the GPU. That's why there's a product from OWC, New Attach Headless Mac Video Accelerator. It's just in black. You connect to your Mac Mini and it simulates in display. And so Mac Mini thinks he is connected to a display and so GPU is not deactivated. And for Scott maybe the solution is to keep the display on and try to prevent sleeping. Mac Mini, it's not energy saving way, but I don't have a better solution for him. Maybe someone else finds something. I hope it helps, Scott. And yes, thanks for your podcast and you again. Bye. Thanks, Glenn. Great stuff, right? So if the Mac thinks there is no display connected, probably because of this, you know, handshaking not happening the way the Mac would want, it turns off the GPU. That was really weird. I lost all sound for like a second. It turns off the GPU and then that's that. So what do you think, Mr. Braun? Were you thinking of HDMI CEC? No. No. That's a form of handshaking. Okay. Caching. Yeah, this is not what you were thinking of. These are not necessarily HDMI connected displays, although they could be. They're usually display port connected displays is where this happens. But I mean, it could be HDMI. Actually, that's interesting, right? Because you just pointed out that HDMI uses a different type of handshaking than display port would. So maybe moving to HDMI in these cases might be another answer, right? Use a different type of handshake and maybe that's going to work out fine. So maybe that's the option. Yeah. And I would think HDMI should give you, unless you're talking to, you know, super huge or 4K monitor, I would think HDMI would give you enough oomph. You may have to get a big boy cable, a better cable or something. Just thinking out loud here. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you need the, whatever it is, the HDMI 1.2 cable. But you don't, I mean, it's not like you need the gold cable or something. You know, just make sure you have a cable that supports all of the various handshakes that are available. Oh, yeah. When I upgraded my setup to all 4K, 4K TV, 4K player and all that. The cables that I had bought from Monoprice like five years ago did just fine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting. And now I need to think about what to do, how better to troubleshoot the issue that Lisa's having with the 2018 Mac Mini over there because she's using a third-party monitor. I'm pretty sure she's using the monitor that is that 10-bit frame rate controller through Monoprice, but who knows? Maybe, you know, maybe even that isn't handshaking quite the way the Mac Mini wants it to. I think I will start with an SMC, a reset on that machine and see if that resolves it and then go from there, perhaps. So, and I'm hoping my audio is okay. That was really weird. That was like that problem we had, like routinely a couple of months ago where things, USB power would just have to reset. But thankfully, that reset took all of about, you know, a second as opposed to 30 seconds. So, we'll let it ride. Yeah, I had kind of a bummer recently with the SMC reset, but I think I figured it out. So, I got a new battery for my aging machine because the other one was cheap and was dying. And I'm like, well, you know what, just to, you know, get it all calibrated and stuff like that, let's do an SMC reset because that's something you should do to... A lot of power related issues can be solved by... Totally. Doing an SMC reset. On the other hand, you may be creating problems. Did you create one? Yes, but then I think I undid it. So, what happened was, once I did the SMC reset, normally I put my MacBook to sleep when I'm not using it, you know, overnight and you see the pulsing LED on the front and that's all cool. On your old MacBook, you'll see a pulsing LED. Correct, yeah. Yeah, and the glowing apple. Yeah. I just love this machine. But anyways, so then what was happening is when I put it to sleep, instead of sleeping, it would restart. I would lift the lid and it was like, huh? And the screen didn't turn on and I'm like, okay, and I pressed the power button and I heard the chime twice and then it was like, you know, it powered down. Yeah. So it went into like full hibernate mode or whatever. Yeah, so, yeah, I don't know what it was doing. How did you fix it? So the way I fixed it is so I looked at the power management settings and how do you do that? There's a command called pmset and if you go to pmset and do pmset-g, it's going to show you a whole bunch of settings here and I noticed that a couple were not the values that I would necessarily like and there were two. One was the hibernate mode, which I think for most laptops should be three. Or I think I set it to 25 or something, which is supposedly a more efficient way to do it, but apparently that confused something. So I changed it back to three, which is the default value. Got it. And then there was another, another one of these parameters that I had to change it well. It was also in some, I can't see. Do you think another SMC reset or a PRAM reset would have resolved this? Because by default, the laptop should not be in any of those weird hibernate modes that you're describing. Like had you messed with those after your SMC reset? Yes, the thing is, yeah. So what I did is I messed with it. I'm like, oh, I should change it to that value that I thought I set it to before and it didn't work. So it wasn't the SMC reset in and of itself. It was that after the SMC reset, you went in and made some changes based on like memory as opposed to research. Is that a fair summation? Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if just another SMC reset, like if somebody else is having that problem, my advice to them would be, oh, first things first, do an SMC reset. Now let's see, are you still having these problems? If not, great. If so, okay. Now let's let's head down the path. And it sounds like that might have worked for you too. Yeah. Cool. Right? What's the other one? Oh, auto power off was also set to a value that didn't look right. Okay. Yeah, I think it was one. And it enables some, yeah, some, you know, like a very energy efficient mode here. And I think I changed that to, yeah, so I changed that to zero. So I changed hybrid mode to three, auto power off to zero. And it seems to restore to the behavior that I like, which is put down the lid and it sleeps, lift the lid and it wakes. Got it. Sorry. Got it. Cool. All right. Also in 792, we were talking about managing devices and how that has now changed. We were talking about listener Michael and how if a device was logged into his wife's account, he could not see it on his. And, and John, you had some interactions back and forth with listener David about perhaps a new way of thinking about this. Yes. And David says, gentlemen, the way I manage devices has changed. As John mentioned, devices are not necessarily on my account anymore. Devices like my wife, daughter grandchildren no longer show up on my iCloud account and haven't for a while. This is because they do show up under their iCloud account. This is because they do show up under their iCloud accounts. The way I manage the device is through the Apple family plan. I can see everyone I've added their devices purchased and other details into some extent managed minor accounts using screen time. So I dug into that may do it for him. If the goal is to see all devices in one place, then I think Apple family plan may do it for you. It might. You know, I'm limited to five. It's limited to five. I think it's limited to five devices. So that may be. Oh, I thought that's what I saw in the description. You're thinking it right. It is limited to five additional people. Right. Right. So you can have six total people on an Apple family plan, but beyond that, I mean, people can have devices to any number, which is which is great. The interesting thing is like when I go in either on my phone or on the web, I can see my devices, the things that are linked to my account. And I can get details like serial numbers and things like that for my devices, but I don't think I can get the only way I can see a list of all of my family's devices is in the new find my app where I can see each person and I can see all of their devices. But I don't get to see. I don't get to see serial numbers or purchase dates or Apple care exploration or anything there. I based on David's email, it seems like perhaps I'm missing something and perhaps there's another place to look to get that data. But I'm looking on the web and also on iOS 13 on my phone and I don't see it. I suppose I could check Catalina on my Mac, but this studio Mac isn't on Catalina. So I have to remote in to the computer downstairs and take a look in system preferences in the Apple ID and family sharing. And it takes a minute to come up. But so here's where I certainly could manage things like screen time and all of that. But yeah, I'm not sure I get to see all their devices here. So if there's more details about the only place I can see devices in is in the find my app, which is fine if I just want a list of devices. That's great. If I don't, if I want more details, then I would have to log in either via iCloud into my wife's iCloud account if I know her password, or I would need to sit down with her at one of her devices and then she can see all of her serial numbers and purchase dates and all that good stuff. But yeah, if I want to know when my wife's Mac Mini was purchased, other than looking in my email archive, but there's no way in iCloud that I can find to do that. If you know, let us know. We would love to know. Yeah. And one last thing is that for managing devices, another thing to consider, it doesn't cost a lot, would be something like Mac OS X server, which at this point is really the only thing it does. It used to do a lot more right now. They've decided to just make it a, I guess we could call it a MDM deployment. Yeah. You can register devices and you can see them all in one place. That's right. And you could use something, we were talking pre-show about this, like Jamf for, you know, monkey or any of those to do your, I mean, they might be overkill for a family or maybe not. Like, I know quite a few folks that use Jamf to manage devices just in their families. And Jamf now, I should say, which is the sort of simpler, more streamlined offering from Jamf. But that, that would be, that would be another way to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Interesting, interesting. All right. Let's, let's go, let's do some tips. I noticed something this week, John. You know how on iOS you can, when you're in mail, and maybe you don't know this, so maybe this is a bonus point. Oh, no, I do. And actually I ran into the same thing and I had it. Let me explain what we're doing here. So for those that aren't reading ahead, the, if you can slide a message in the message view and get various options like archive or trash and some others too. You can mark red and mark unwritten and that sort of thing. And you can do that in iOS. Well, it turns out at least in Catalina, you can do this in Mac OS. If you have a trackpad, either on your laptop or magic trackpad, you know, Bluetooth into your desktop or whatever, the same sort of thing in the Catalina, at least on mine in the, what we call the column view, but isn't really. You can slide and do red, sorry, you can do archive and trash on either side of the, you know, on the thing and just slide it and go. So I was shocked. It happened accidentally to me. I was like, hey, look at that. I know what that is. That's from iOS. So I thought that was pretty cool. You said you found it somewhere else too, John. Oh, no, I found the same thing. Yeah, I think I just accidentally, or I think just oops, I slid it. Now I don't see an archive option. I only see the red trash can. Oh, go the other way. You don't see archive. Oh, oh, slide to the right. Yeah. And there's a little envelope. Oh, it went away. I don't, I didn't want that to happen. So let's undo that. With 10.15.2, undo might work a little better in Mail. See, there we go. Pretty good, huh? Yep. Well, check in, if it put it in your archive, check in your, in your archive folder, and it's probably there. So, but there you go. Yeah, I, I'm actually, I'm really, I like this. It's good. Let's see, JP. JP found something interesting that might, I don't know, I have to experiment with this. Fellers, it's JP in the North Atlantic with a bizarre, cool stuff found. I have no idea what the purpose of it would be, but I stumbled upon it the other day when I was tinkering around with screens and screens connect. Picture this. I'm sitting in my office, which is a building not in my house, on my iMac, and I'm watching my Apple TV. I'm watching a football game on one of the apps. In my house, which is 100 yards, 100 feet away in a separate building, sits my laptop, my MacBook Pro, which is on at the dining room table. It's just sitting there. So for fun, I thought I would log into that laptop and look through the camera. And I did this by logging into, you know, I connected using screens, and I launched the QuickTime Player on the laptop remotely. And boom, I saw a picture of my kitchen, which was fine. Then I click on the little input button of the QuickTime Player on the laptop, which I'm controlling from the other building on my property. And to my surprise, a bunch of other devices were there as input, including my Apple TV, which was playing the football game. So I go, I'm going to click on this. So I change the input of QuickTime Player, which is on my laptop in the other building, to the Apple TV, and all of a sudden, what I was watching five feet away in my office was now transmitting to my QuickTime window on my laptop, which means I was remotely watching an Apple TV in another building on a laptop, which I had never known existed. So this is pretty cool, right? If you go into QuickTime Player and you say New Recording, it will by default show you the camera, as he said, right? So he could see his kitchen, and that's an interesting way to remote view, right? And then you can choose what camera you want right next to the little red record button that would be in the sort of bottom middle of that viewer window. There's a little carrot, like drop-down kind of thing, a chevron, rather, pointing down, and you click that and you can choose both video and audio devices that you want to be in that recording, and Apple TV will show up there. Now, when you choose it, you get a dialogue that says enter the AirPlay code for the name of your Apple TV, and on your Apple TV will be usually a four-character code that you have to type in so that you can't just, like, grab the video from an Apple TV without the person that's watching it to know that you are doing so. Once you do that, though, it'll appear. Where I said I need to experiment with this is to see how close to in sync these things are, because it's always been a... I've been trying, and I have, with Iogir's remote HDMI wireless adapter, I have solved this problem to a degree, but I like... I have many times where I want the same image to be on both, you know, on two different TVs in two different rooms. That used to be really easy when all we could do is watch live TV, but since live TV is something we rarely watch anymore, to get two devices in sync is sort of a trick. I wonder if this might, in fact, work to resolve that, assuming that you're getting your content through Apple TV. So that's it. I like this little thread here, JP. It's good stuff. It's fun. But I don't know if it's perfectly in sync yet or in sync enough that you could, say, walk from one room to another if you had, like JP does, you know, if you had a football game on or whatever, you're in the living room hanging out, you want to go to the kitchen to get some snacks. Could you have a display in the kitchen where the TV is on, or that same game is on in a way that's still watchable, et cetera. Very interesting. Thank you, JP. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? No, not on that, but on the thing that we just talked about, a clarification. Sliding right will toggle the red on red status, not archive it, at least on my system, which is the same behavior on iOS. If I slide right on something, it says, oh, what, a mark is unread? So I think I accidentally deleted an email because I looked in my deleted one. So I think I wonder how you change that because on mine, it was most definitely archive going the opposite direction of trash. But on iOS, those behaviors are configurable. If you go to what settings, is it settings mail swipe options and you can choose there. When you swipe left, is it none, mark is read flag or move message and then swipe right is none, flag, move message, archive or mark is read. So there's two options sets that you can add there. I wonder if those option sets are somehow configurable on the Mac. I don't see them, but I have not dug. So it would be really weird if they synced from iOS. That would be strange. iOS devices do not sync amongst each other. So I don't think this setting is syncing from an iOS device to your Mac. My iPad and my iPhone can be set differently and that's okay. It's okay by Apple, but it makes it really weird for me when they're set differently. That's how it goes. Listener Andrew, in response to our discussion in 792 about Parallels Toolbox offering the ability to do full screen or full page, single page web screenshots, which is a really handy thing, suggested another piece of software called Paparazzi at D-Railer.org. Of course, there's a link in the show notes at macgeekab.com where you can... This tool does this as well. Paparazzi is its own little web browser. So you use this... Where I need to send these a lot is when I want to send a PDF of a draft post on Mac Observer to someone, for a variety of reasons. And they don't have an account in our WordPress system, so they can't see things that aren't live. So I can't just send them the URL and say, go here. So I want to take a screenshot. But I have to be logged in to take a screenshot. So with Paparazzi, I just logged in and now that browser is logged in to our WordPress and so I can go and grab these things and it works out great. It really does a nice job. You can say, I want the mobile view. I want the full desktop view, the tablet view, et cetera. You can set different parameters to really give you the width, the maximum width, or the minimum width and height that you want to make sure you display. So pretty cool stuff. Thank you, Andrew. That's a good tool. I like it. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on? Moving on. Moving on. We have talked about smart thermostats a lot on this show over the years. And of course, when we first started talking about it, the Nest thermostats were obviously a part of the discussion. They were certainly one of the first Wi-Fi thermostats to come on the market. And at the time when I tested Nest versus some of the others, I found that Nest was not really geared towards people in colder climates. In that, it was initially, it was very difficult with Nest to say, essentially say to it, I already know how to manage the heat in my house. I want you to help me, but don't assume that I'm an idiot because I've already figured it out because here in the Northeast, if you don't know how to manage the heat in your house, it'll cost you thousands of dollars in wasted energy throughout the year. The Nest was, of course, built by a group, a small team in San Francisco, where a lot of people don't have heat or air conditioning. It's like it's a very temperate climate. So it made sense that the Nest would default to this, I know, I'll figure it out, you just do your thing and I'll sort it out. Which is why at the time I really found that I like the Ecobee, which happened to be designed in Toronto, colder climate. Well, I've tested Nest again and I've been very pleased with how their controls and setup process has evolved and they've added some cool things since we last looked at them many, many moons ago. So they're now up to version three of their Nest Learning thermostat, which has a gorgeous display. It is, and it works with all kinds of systems. And the best part about, not necessarily the best, but one key differentiator for Nest is that they work with two wire systems. None of the other smart thermostats that, certainly none of the other Wi-Fi thermostats that I've tested will work with your system unless you have a power wire or in thermostat parlance AC wire, which provides 24 volts of AC power. So the Nest thermostats all work with two wires. They use, they call it power stealing. It essentially takes enough power from the circuit without closing the circuit such that it turns your heat on, which is a trick. And they figured it out and it works, which is great because so many of us Oh, so you don't need the C wire. Correct. It will use it if you have it, of course, but it happily works without it. And I've tested them in various locations in my house. Yeah, I know. Which is the problem, right? I've also used the EcoV's, but I can't use those in locations where I don't have a C wire because it's mandatory for that. Nest, no problem. So I've tested both the Gen3 Learning thermostat and their new one, the Nest thermostat E, which is actually really inexpensive right now that I'm looking online. It's 129 for the Nest thermostat E. That's fantastic. That will work for most people. The differences between the two are the screen on the Learning thermostat is a touch display high res and can do some things like showing you, it has what they call Farsight where it'll show you like either the time or the temperature of the weather when you're far away and then as you get closer, it actually shows the controls and that sort of thing. That doesn't exist on the thermostat E, but the Nest Learning thermostat is 249 whereas the, right now, the E is 129. It's normally 169. So I don't know why it's 129. If you want to get it, order it like right away. But I've tested them both and with our, in one room of our house where we manage the whole house air conditioner in addition to a zone of heat, that room requires the higher end Nest Learning thermostat, but everywhere else in our house works fine with the Nest Thermostat E. For Black Friday, they were offering different bundles and stuff. Obviously that's over, but it seems to be the kind of thing that might pop up again. And I've been impressed with how well it works. I'll be honest, setting each of them up recently, I found that the Thermostat E was easier to get set up than the Learning Thermostat. Now, the Learning Thermostat tries to be easier, but the problem is that if it sees any other Nest product in your house, like say a Nest Protect smoke detector, which I also have, it wants to pair with that in order to connect to your Wi-Fi network as opposed to just asking you, hey, what's the password for your Wi-Fi network? And that actually caused a bunch of problems for me because my Nest Protect was too far away from where I was putting the thermostat in and I had to create a whole separate structure to get it not to try and pair with that. But, you know, that's just sort of a, that's a solvable problem for them. So I think they could make that work. But yeah, I've been, you know, I'm glad I took another look at these. Nest also has remote temperature sensors so that if you are in, if you're a heating or air conditioning system controls more rooms than just the one where the thermostat is, you might want to, like for you, John, you know, you've got your thermostat in your living room but you probably spend more time in your TV room. And so to put a sensor there, that, you know, that way the thermostat can manage to that room as opposed to just where the thermostat is. And for a lot of us, like here in the Northeast, where say, you know, the homes were retrofitted with, with, you know, whole house heat as opposed to, you know, different sources in each room. A lot of times thermostats are in the worst spot to actually sense the temperature that they need to manage and so this can help. I will say it is a little weird with the Nest sensors. It can only use one sensor at a time and you have to manually tell it or set a schedule to tell it, you know, during these hours use that sensor, during these hours use this sensor. The Ecobee, which is sort of my other, you know, favorite thermostat here. The Ecobee, you can have multiple sensors hooked up and it's smart. It knows, it has motion sensors in them. It knows what room you're in and says, okay, we'll just manage to this room right now, which is kind of cool. So, but I, you know, my initial experience with the Nest several years ago really kind of left me non-plussed, if you will. I'm not sure if that's the right word to use, but not impressed. Only because it was very difficult to get it not to try and outsmart me. And now with the Nest, you can start, you can tell it. Look, I just take over and you do your thing and I don't want to be involved. Just, you know, follow what I do with the, you know, setting of the temperature and you figure out my schedule or you can, you know, do what I've done where it's like, okay, I know my schedule. Let me put this in here and then you can decide whether or not you want it to evolve from there, which is great. So, yeah. So it's worth a, I'm glad I took a second look at these things and especially if you've got rooms where you only have two wires, which I know a lot of us do, the Nest is really the best game in town for a Wi-Fi thermostat. So, there you go. That's my second take on the Nest. Thoughts, John? Yeah, I still like the ones I got. Yours aren't really available to normal humans. They can be and I actually saw them at CES and talked to them about it. The thing is that they're, Go-Control is the brand. Yeah. And I was able to find them but I think it was being sold by contractors who had a couple of extras because I wasn't able, it was like I bought one from one guy, one from another guy, and from another guy, but they were all about the same price, like $45 and that was the other selling point. But these aren't smart thermostats. These are, in fact, they are extreme. No, they're not. Oh, yeah, no, but they're dumb. But they are controlled by smart things is what makes them smart. Otherwise, yeah, they're totally dumb. Yeah, they don't even have a schedule in them. They just, they're just Z-Wave compatible, right? Which is great. I mean, if you've already got a smart things hub, then by all means, like, you know, there you go. Good to go. So, yeah, I looked into those, but they're impossible to find. So, yeah, I wish somebody else would come out with, you know, something like truly consumer-targetive, targeted for folks. Yeah, I suggest that it's home. Because I think they have an audience. I agree. They're available right now, Amazon Prime for 80 bucks. And you need a hub, right? Like, they are completely, well, not completely, but mostly worthless without, you know, a smart things hub or whatever. For $129 for a nest, I would go with a nest. That's opposed to 80 bucks and then, you know, and then good luck. But I feel like there's a middle ground. Well, that's a more competitive price. Because when I got these, the nest option was like $300, which is like, I don't know if I want to pay that much. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's the thing. Like, this nest thermostat E is what most people need. It really, really, you know, cuts down on the cost, especially if you've got multiple zones, you know, and suddenly you're multiplying this number by, you know, two, three, four for a house. I've got six zones in my house. So, you know, four in the house and two in the office building here. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Apple Podcast is now available on your Amazon A-Lady devices. You can sync that up. And what's cool is it can know if you listen to say half of Mackie Gab on Apple Podcasts in the Apple Podcasts app and then you resume listening on your, you know, Amazon A-Lady device, it'll pick up where you took off from or where you left off from, which I think is pretty cool. Like, that's, I like that. That's exciting. And Spotify podcasts are also available on the A-Lady devices now as well. Oh, nice. I know. Yeah, I actually kind of got an upgrade in that world too. So, I think it was a Black Friday deal. Third generation dot and a smart plug for 25 bucks. That's a good deal. That's a good deal. So, now you've got another dot around the house somewhere. How are you using your smart plug? I have several wise smart plugs that I'm like, I have a couple of them that I had already sort of put into place for like timers for pet lamps and things like that. How else are you using smart plugs? I have one, so I have a humidifier and I have a WiIMO smart plug and basically, you know, but it's there. I say, you know, humidifier on or humidifier off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only other kind of smart plug things they're not strictly smart plugs are those AC controls that I got. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Tato ones or whatever. No, no, no. Different brand. That's right. Not the Tato ones. Oh, I like your idea about the humidifier. Like if you've got a humidifier in your bedroom, that makes good sense to put that on a smart plug and just let it roll. Huh. Yeah, the Atomi. Okay. AC control. Yeah. Yeah, it'll handle both power on and power off and power consumption, things like that. So it's a specialized smart plug. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, interesting. I like it, Mr. Braun. This is why I like doing this show. Very good. Very good. All right. What else do we have here? Plex. You know, we're big Plex fans here. I don't know how new this is. I think it's relatively new, but maybe no, it's not that new. That's sort of new. You can have Plex offer, send you push notifications to your iOS device when anything happens to your Plex library. And you can get really granular with it. Like you can say, if something was added to your Plex library, of course you can get a push notification. If someone starts playing something from your Plex library, you can get a push notification, which is kind of cool. If something is added to one of your friend's Plex libraries that you share with, you can get a push notification about that. So these are handy little things. You have to go in, there's an article that explains it, and of course it's linked in the show notes, but you go in, you tell your server that it's cool to send notifications and how, and then you go configure them on your iOS device, and then you can send notifications you want to get in. But I found it really handy. It's been great, in fact, because it keeps me, if I add a new movie or something, it keeps me from having to log in and see, oh, did it make it? Is it there? It's like, I see the notifications. It's like, yep, it made it. Okay, good to go. On to the next thing. I was pretty stoked to find out about that, Mr. Braun. Yeah? Nice. Yeah. Well, you know, we mentioned mail, so I think maybe we'll wrap up with Joe's question here, who, he says, have either, have either, either, I don't know, no, have either, either. There you go. Either, either or either. Have either of you noticed an issue with mail since upgrading to Catalina in terms of getting mail? I use GoDaddy as my mail handler, and my mail was always able to update incoming mail regularly until I upgraded to Catalina. Now, sometimes the only way I can get mail to update is to quit it, then restart, which will cause it to repopulate. I don't know if the problem is with getting mail from GoDaddy or taking it from what must be some kind of place. Maybe it temporarily puts it before it distributes it, like internally on my Mac. He says, sometimes I can leave mail running and it will populate, then it'll just stop. I'm guessing it must be some kind of timing thing, because sometimes mail will sit in the state of checking email for a while, when in fact, I know there's email to get. Any thoughts? Well, I will say that you're not alone. Catalina is weird when it comes to mail, but I also find that Mojave has gotten weirder and weirder with mail too. So this might be, this might not be a Catalina thing for you, Joe. Mojave on my machine here in the studio, I routinely have to either quit mail and relaunch, like you said, or click on, there's usually like a little squiggly, maybe a lightning bolt or an exclamation point. Of course, the one time I want to see it, it's not coming up, mail's working fine, but it essentially indicates it's offline and I have to click that little button. Going to the mailbox menu and saying take all accounts online does not solve it for me. I have to click on it next to each account and then click the check mail or get new messages in all accounts button. And then finally, the mail will just start pouring in. But that's happening to me here on Mojave and I also see it occasionally, but less so, believe it or not, with Catalina. There's something wonky about mail, yeah, for sure. And I'm not, I don't know why. Are you seeing anything like that, John? I'll get the, usually it's when I wake the machine up, which I think it hasn't fully connected to everything, but yeah, I'll get the same. So you get the little warning triangle and you click on that and you see bring all accounts online and that usually fixes it. The other thing you could do in that case is if you go into mail in the window menu there's this dandy tool called connection doctor and sometimes that pushes things in the right direction and it gives you a little more information about where the problem lies. Like one time, yeah. So one of my mail services was down. It was like, hey, I can't connect via SMTP or whatever to this server that I'm trying to get to. Yeah, right, right, right. Huh, huh. All right. Well, I wish I had an answer for this. I fight the same battle. So this might just be a cheer of solidarity together here, but I sure would like to solve it and I don't know what it takes. I don't know why. Yeah, I wish I could know like what the criteria was for mail to decide to just give up, right? Because clearly it's trying to connect. It's not connecting and it's just saying, oh, the server must be offline. It's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure Google's mail server is not offline. I'm pretty sure GoDaddy's mail server is not offline. Like, what's it going to take to convince you on your own to try again? And I think maybe that's it. Maybe whatever that tolerance is in mail has been reduced and it seems like it's across the board with Mojave and Catalina. So I don't know what the answer is, but I would love to find it. So if anybody knows, let us know. That's I think that's all we got for today, Mr. Braun. It's time to let the band in out of the warmth. It's relatively warm outside today here. Like I think in the 50s, maybe it was certainly in the 50s yesterday. It was raining. Unseasonably warm. Yeah. Yeah. Like all of our snow is gone with all the rain and everything that we got. Like, I don't think there's any snow left on the ground, maybe a little bit here or there, plow piles and such, but otherwise, yeah, nothing. Yep. And for my neighbors on the beach, you know what that means? Coastal flood alert. Oh, we had, well, yeah. I mean, we're relatively close to the coast, but we're not, you know, I mean, we're not on the water. We had floods throughout the area yesterday. I was at a rehearsal yesterday morning and everybody's phones once an hour were going off with, you know, flash flood warnings. And it was the roads were a mess. Yesterday morning getting out with just floods everywhere. I mean, I think we got here. We got three inches of rain in a couple of hours. I mean, if it, if it, if it had been snow, it would have been, you know, the blizzard of the century. But thankfully it was not. Yeah. And for goodness' sake, don't try to drive through water. Our cops yell at people every time this happens. They're like, don't do it because they have to rescue the people because, you know, your car stops working because. Yeah. Some of your guys not built to go through the water. Right. Yeah. I mean, we have some people with like crazy trucks that can get through it. Of course. Yeah. Unless you know that you are driving one of those vehicles, that's that's good advice, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that does it for this week. Thanks for listening as always. Thanks to all of our premium members. You have the email address of premium at MackieGab.com. I know it's been a couple of weeks since we've gone through the list and thanked all of you. A, we've had tons of content that we just wanted to get out. And B, we've been we've had, you know, a higher density of sponsor spots. It's Q4. So I've been saving those and and we will we will do them next week when we've got a little bit more room in the show. I just try to balance it out. I try to have a high high percentage of content. Not that the ads aren't content. I mean, some of these things are actually, you know, solving questions for us. That's fine. But, you know, still like, you know, we try to be respectful of everybody's time, but but it does not mean that we are are any less thankful. In fact, even more so are thankful for all of our premium contributors. So if you want to learn about that, MackieGab.com slash premium. And those of you that are premium contributors do in addition to several other things, get the email address of premium at MackieGab.com, which we prioritize when when when we're going through all the email, we don't it just so everybody knows, we don't sit right on top of those inboxes. So if something comes in, we may not see it for sometimes even a day or two. But but we do, you know, we are the secret goal is we try to get through everything every week. And we mostly hit that. But but when we're going through them, the premium box gets attention first. And there are times where it's like, oh, yeah, today all I had time to go through was the premium box. So that's that's kind of how that works. But we do try to get through everything. So, you know, just know that we're here to help. We like to help. That's probably what we do. So thanks to all of you. Thanks to cash fly at CACHEFLY.com. Of course, thanks to all of our sponsors. As we mentioned in the show, we have ifixit.com slash MGG. We have native deodorant.com with coupon code MGG. We have ExpressVPN.com slash MGG. Of course, other sponsors in the podcast marketplace SmileSoftware.com slash podcast other world computing at MacSales.com. Barebone Software at Barebones.com Eero.com slash MGG Lino.com slash MGG. It's good. Thank you. And Mr. Braun, you got anything to add here at the end here? Maybe. No, it's that time of year. And unless you want to get coal in your stocking, you better be good and don't get caught.