 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek-Gab Episode 692 for Monday, January 15th, 2018. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek-Gab, the show where you send in your questions, tips and cool stuff found. We share it all. We share our own cool stuff found, questions and tips, with the goal being that every single one of us here, me included, learns at least, yes, five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com. We'll talk about that shortly. And a new sponsor, Roboform, the password manager. We're at roboform.com. You can save $10 off your Roboform Everywhere subscription with the coupon code MGG. We'll talk more about that later, too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, a bit out of the weather, no doubt suffering from post-CES cruft. In beautiful Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. Hey, John F. Brun, you got to get the cruft out, man. And I'm trying. That's what you got to do. I will try to not do it on mic. Can you run Onyx on your body to clean the cruft out? If they had a version that would work on bioforms instead of computers, maybe. I think that would be a good thing, man. But we got to get to work on that. Isn't that what they used on Star Trek? Who is that over there? Oh, and here. Here. And another part of Durham, New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. Thanks for having me back, Dave. Thanks for coming. I'm glad it all worked. Yeah, it's good to have you, man. Good to have you, man. I'm rushing over here, but I made it. Cool. So, hey, quick question before you start. Quick question. I think we've already started. Well, you know what I mean. It's the agenda. You said we had to learn five new things. The problem is I have to forget five things to put the five new things in. I think so. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now, let's get going. I'm sorry. You need more RAM. You got to upgrade your RAM there, people. I hate that the truth. Wet, wet where, right? We call that fixing our wet where? Yeah. Got to ram more in there. There you go. Let's go to Jeff. Let's make sure we get what we need to get out of this show. What is Jeff wanted, though? Jeff asks. He says, I recently installed macOS on my Mac Pro. All is working fine, but I seem to have lost the option in messages on my Mac to send an SMS text message when the recipient doesn't have iMessage available. This used to work fine and does work fine on my MacBook. I guess it's an iCloud thing. On my iPhone 7, I have gone into settings, messages, text message forwarding, and I have Jeff's Mac Pro in there, not once, but twice. Both are checked to allow the devices to send SMS via this phone. I've flipped them on and off, but I can't seem to find where I can maybe remove them so I can reset it. Can you please investigate as I've tried and tried and cannot find a solution? So the only thing, or at least the first thing that I would check is on your Mac, go into the messages app, go into preferences, go into accounts, and choose your iMessage account. Put them one account in there if you've got like Google Talk or whatever. Not aim because that's gone now. On that screen with your iMessage account, make sure that your phone number is checked as a device or as an address where you can receive and then also send things. That I think makes a difference here because if you don't have your phone number kind of activated on your Mac, then you can't do SMS. So I think that's certainly the first thing I would try. John, you got any thoughts on this? Where's that again? Messages. Right. Preferences. Oh, in the messages app. In the messages app. Yep. Preferences. And then accounts. And then your iMessage account. And there's a thing that says you can be reached for messages at. And you've got all these things there. One of them is going to be your phone number. That has to be checked in order for those things to work in my experience. Okay. Now it's a little buried. Now, to be fair, you don't have to at the below that you have an option for sending red receipts. I'm on Sierra, not high Sierra on the podcasting machine still. So this might be a little different, but I saw it earlier. It's not that different. It's the same. Okay. And then at the bottom you have the option start new conversations from. And you can pick anything you want here. Having the phone number selected here is not mandatory for the, for the SMS thing. It will automatically do that. I highly recommend not starting new conversations from your phone number. Only because. Really? Well, if your phone number changes, ie. If you travel to a foreign country and use a SIM card that has by its nature, a different phone number. No one that has your phone number for iMessage will be able to reach you. Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah, that freaks my wife out. She can't figure out why sometimes my email address and other times it's my phone number. But I actually have another suggestion here. I'll come to it. I just want to just to complete that thought starting new conversations, pick an address and homogenize all your devices to that. You've got to go into the settings for each device and say start new conversations from and then just choose the same thing so that at least there's some consistency when you're sending messages to people. So go ahead. Well, and then it's on the iOS device as well. It's under settings messages and then text message forwarding. And you have to select your your Mac. Yeah. And I don't know what to do if your Mac isn't there. Well, his Mac is there twice and selected. That's right. He did say that. Yeah. You mentioned that. And try. That's true. He said he has. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it's the setting on your on your my brain will be here in a minute. Hey, it's fine. I literally walked in 90 seconds before we kicked it. It's true. Yeah. It's true. It'll be right behind me. I'm sure. Yeah. If it doesn't get lost. At least on both of my Macs is set to my cell phone number and not my email address. Yeah. By default, that's what it's going to start. That's what it's going to be set to. But I just I found a couple of years ago when we traveled and needed new SIM cards, it was like, oh, this sucks. Everybody that I message with does it with my phone number. And there's no reason to have things tied to a phone number because I don't own that number. I mean, I might that number may change. I have three selected though. I have my phone number and both of my iCloud email address. So I had. Yeah. What we're talking about is the start new conversations from box, which is at the bottom of that preference window. Send and receive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, lucky there at that. You get to pick. Now, if somebody texts you or I message as you at your phone number, it doesn't matter what this start new conversations from thing is going to reply to from now. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So now this you may have mentioned this, but I was fiddling with my device here, which of course we all do these days. On my iPhone, when I went to settings messages, there's an option send as SMS and it's off. And it says send an SMS when I message is unavailable. Carrier messaging rates may apply, which at least my current plan, I have unleaded voice and text and all that stuff here. But it's funny that it's off. Yeah. I wonder why you have that off because by default, I believe that's maybe that's no, that might be off by default. Yeah. Yeah. It's buried in there. It's in the, yeah. Settings. So you still have a plan that requires text. Yeah. Pay by text. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like it's a backup here. Yeah. For the people that I know that don't have, well, I'm going to turn it on right now and hopefully the world will come to an end. You'll still, even with that off, you'll still send SMS to people that don't have iMessage. What that's for is if the phone can't get a data connection to send an iMessage out, it will, if the person has a phone number attached to their contact record or if you're sending to a phone number, it will send. Right. Right. It won't use data. It'll use the phone line inside of that. If it can. And then I think what you mentioned is that the entry below that is send and receive and it has three addresses. And it looks like my cell phone number is the default. Start new conversation. Okay. So that's the equivalent on the iOS device. All right. So all of mine are set to my cell phone number, same for decades. So sure. See no reason to change it. But I understand your concern. Yeah. You know, you pop around and change your cell phone number all the time. Yeah. If you, if you put a new SIM card in your phone number will change. Right. So if you go to a different country and you're not using your US data plan there, sort of by definition, you're going to have a different number. So yeah. All right. Good. Fun. That's the beauty of the new data plan, at least with AT&T overseas. Yeah. It's cheaper than. Oh yeah. It is now. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. Moving to staying on the same subject. We'll go to Zach. Zach, he has kind of a rant, but I think it's an interesting conversation. He said, I would like to start a movement to upgrade standards of cell phone texting to include better group texting standards, including A, some sort of BCC and B, a warning when you were replying to a group text you didn't notice was a group text. Hey man, Zach. Yeah. Maybe starting with the developers of Apple messages would be the way to go. Let me know your thoughts. So, yes. Well, Dave. I echo Pete's sentiments, right? Go ahead, John. But I agree, but I got an asterisk there. Go ahead. Well, all I'm going to say is that at our recent trip to CES, you had created, thank you, a group which we jokingly, or not jokingly called, I think it was Mac Cool Kids. I just called it Mac Kids. I left cool out of it. The Mac Kids. Yeah. But we know we're cool. Okay. Or we think we're cool. That's what I'd say. Sure. But that worked out splendidly because it did exactly. It was people in our circle who we knew had texting abilities and you just created a group and then it was a broadcast and now it's done. Right. Yeah. But to Zach's point, that doesn't solve any of the problems that he's talking about here. Right. Well, because iMessage doesn't really have any advanced features, right? iMessage is... Well, you made a group, but that's part of the standard then. You just created a group of numbers that you had on hand and then that group persisted. Yes, but it, right. So it's important to remember that iMessage is sort of almost an analog to SMS with some what I'll call compatible enhancements. User interface wise, compatible. Not necessarily compatible with SMS. And that is, they've added for non-groups, red receipts. You don't get that with SMS. But you don't have to change the UI to do red receipts for iMessage and not for SMS. Right. So messages has to be kind of live within this box of the UI needs to work for both SMS and whatever enhancements they make to iMessage. And one cool enhancement to iMessage is that you can create a group as you can with SMS and then you can name the group and everyone in the group sees the new name, which is handy because that will help with these kinds of things when you're replying to a group. You'll see the name of the group at the top of your thing and be like, oh yeah, right. Okay. But even still, like I texted the group the other day and we have a family group to and my wife replied and it wasn't anything awful or anything, but she replied something that she probably didn't intend to send to the kids. You know. They're sucking the life out of me. Yeah. Right. No, it was actually a comment about one of the kids. She was watching one of the Lucas's hockey games and she was very honest about her comments about how the team was playing. I was like, huh. Okay. Well, I mean, we're pretty honest that she did intend to send it. But, you know, like that kind of thing can happen. Better than than SMS is our platforms that are completely independent of SMS. And I don't consider iMessage independent, but something like Facebook Messenger. It definitely is. Snapchat, kick, Slack. Right. Those are all. WhatsApp is the one we use at work. Okay. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That meets it perfectly. Yep. I don't remember all the way back to the question. Sure. But the ability to come out, you know, like an iMessage, if you're in a group, iMessage, you just have to wind up blocking everybody. Yes. Which is not ideal, you know. Yeah, you can't leave. Yeah. And it's like, hey, you know, quit sending me this stuff. I'm in class. Yeah. Right. Right. WhatsApp is great. Yeah. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. Pete, you can check out at any time, but you can never leave. There you go. Yeah, exactly. I messaged Hotels California for sure. Man. But Facebook Messenger, I feel like that one and WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is also owned by Facebook. Now it's owned by Facebook? Yeah. It was independent, Facebook was bought at it. They haven't figured out how to monetize it yet, I guess. But I love WhatsApp. WhatsApp is great. The sound quality on it's good, the ability to have group chats. So, to me, that's really where this is going is just completely leaving SMS behind and going with one of these other messaging platforms, because Facebook or WhatsApp or any of these certainly could put all these features in. And I really like Facebook's ability to ... I was part of a couple of CES, like different cool kids groups, John, for lack of a better term, like the CES party group and the CES this group. And those messages, you probably noticed it at dinner, I would mute them for 24 hours, because it was just like an insane amount of traffic on this. And I could go and check it when I wanted, but I wasn't getting notifications. And for whatever reason, it was like 7 p.m. when I muted it the first time. So, I'd be in the middle of dinner, and suddenly it would be like, I have to take my watch and throw it across the room, because I can't function anymore, and I would just go and mute the chance. You didn't mean to stop vibrating. Yeah, exactly. At the very least, you could have given me the party list or something, man. I was going to say, you're going to hurt John's feelings. These cool kids groups, you were belonging to anyway. Sorry, it wasn't mine to give somebody else's group. But it did get us into all the parties we wanted to, so everything was good. But that's really where this goes, is we just leave SMS behind. iMessage could detach from SMS and really just enhance iMessage to the point where SMS still worked, but it felt very feature-constrained. So, what do you think about Apple engineers? Are they going to mess with iMessage anymore, or are they going to leave it to these other apps? I think it's going to stay pretty simple. I mean, they've added things like Animoji, there's Apple Pay Cash now. So, I think that's where it goes. And they've added some things, like per message, red receipts, and that kind of stuff. I mean, it's evolved, but Apple evolves this stuff slowly. But not bigly, like, sorry. Thanks, Pete. Like WhatsApp, like Facebook Messenger, hasn't gained those major features. Correct. Like the Messenger bots. I saw a ton of those at CES. I think I can talk about it anyway. I saw, well, a Messenger bot is a thing where you can fake Facebook message with a device. So, I think it was, I think I'm allowed to talk about this, I think it was TiVo that had a Messenger bot for, like, they've got, they demoed Alexa, sorry, A-word, and G-word control of TiVo, which is really cool, because you could say, like, A-word, record any movies with Chevy Chase or whatever. And it just, like, it knows, right? And you can also do it with a Facebook Messenger bot. Let's accept, and we'll talk about this in a minute, but voice assistants really aren't voice assistants. They are text, they are speech-to-text engines. Yes. And you have to know the exact syntax to get the resulting engine to then parse and process your command. So, it's not understanding you. Or do you? Well, yes, you do. Right. I mean, that's just how it works today. Well, the evolution will be that it won't. Yeah, correct. I'll argue in the negative. Which reminds me, there's actually a pretty, pretty fun, funny, set it in a live skit on using Odessa, or answers to any name that even resembles TiVo. Yes, I remember that. Yeah. So, it's worth looking up on YouTube for a chuckle. Yeah. So, the Facebook Messenger bot, I want to come back to what you said, John, because I think that would be a good conversation. But to complete the thought on the Facebook Messenger bot, that takes the speech-to-text out of it, and you're just typing to the engine, and then the engine talks to whatever you want. And so, that's what these Messenger bots are, and they're great. I saw them actually had several people demo those to me, because if you've done any sort of voice assistant control, you already have the back end to deal with the Messenger bot, because it's literally just text, which is all you're getting from the voice control assistants anyway. Yeah. So, that could work really well, and if Facebook has done that, could Apple do that? Yes. Have they? No. Not in that sense. Well, it's interesting. And then some are better than others, and I don't mean, sorry if I'm going down too much of a rabbit hole, but have you noticed, it's my anecdotal observation that Siri is far more responsive and accurate on my watch than ever on my telephone. Huh. That's interesting. I mean, I forget what I was asking for recently on my phone, and it was trying to find me restaurants in Turkey, and I'm like, no. That's bad. Cool. Yeah. But my watch almost never misses, so. Huh. Cool. You haven't noticed that? No. Okay. No, I find it equally... Equally frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No, it's good. When it's good, it's great. And there are times when you just want to go, oh, well, thank goodness my belt and shoelaces have been taken away from me because the frustration level is rising here. So, let's have this conversation in a minute. Yeah. So, I want to talk about our sponsors first, and then I want to talk about voice assistance because that was a big thing at CES, and it sounds like we're going to talk about it anyway. So, we might as well put it in that conversation, but the first thing I want to talk about is our first sponsor, which is a new sponsor, and that is Roboform at roboform.com. It's a password manager, and I think everybody listening understands the benefit of using some kind of password manager because that is the only way to have different passwords for every site and every place that you visit without driving yourself crazy. 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It's just how that works for me. I know it sounds crazy to be happy about a text editor, but it's true. I use it all the time. I wind up using it to count words. I wind up using it to sort things, constantly sorting things. If I just grab some text in a web browser or whatever, especially in an email, because mail doesn't sort anything, just grab it, copy it, paste it into BB Edit, choose sort, boom, copy it back, done. And now I've got things sorted. I know I'm not messing around. Everything's good to go. You can also do document comparisons where you've got the text of, say, an old version of a document and a new one right there. It shows you line by line character by character the differences in this beautiful three-pane view where you can really navigate around. You can make edits on either side of the three-pane view, or both if you want. One pane shows you a list of the changes, and then the other two panes are much bigger and show you your actual two documents side by side. You can make changes on either one and save those, and obviously then you're good to go. One of the other things I really like about BB Edit is it's got a command line tool. Instead of being at the terminal and having to remember how to use VI or Emacs or Nano or whatever, I just type BB Edit Space, the name of the file I want to edit. And what happens? It opens in BB Edit. I get to use my mouse and everything the way I like to use it. And then I hit Save, and boom, the file's saved. So you got to check it out. Go to Barebones.com, check out BB Edit. They too have a, it's not just a free trial, it's a free version of BB Edit that has most of the features I just discussed. So you may not ever need to upgrade that. Check it out. Our thanks to Barebones Software at Barebones.com. All right, John. Let's talk about these voices. Let's talk about these voice assistants and what we saw at CES. So, but let's start with, we'll go right down the rat hole here. Or the rabbit hole, I guess, is a little more fun. I like rats. Okay, good. Yeah. You said that you don't think voice assistants are simple, simply speech-to-text engines, right? That's what I posited before, and you disagreed. Yes, because as I pointed out to you, no, as I pointed out to you in the past, their behavior, they're not simple translation engines, because as I pointed out to you, I think in the last podcast, maybe you're setting me up for this, but my assistant responded differently in something that worked in the past didn't work at another time. And I'm like, why is this? You know what I'm talking about. Well, whether or not I do is sort of a relative challenge. Very specifically, so the thing is, so my A-word downstairs, I say A-word lights off. A-word lights on. And it always worked. These are link somewhat dated technology with the hub, but it has an action, what do you call it, or recipe, whatever. A skill. Yeah, a skill. So it has a skill in that ecosphere, and the thing is, I would expect it to work the same way, and that if I say the same thing to it, the same thing happens, but that doesn't happen. So what's happening there, I think, is it's trying to apply intelligence, but it's doing it poorly because it didn't do what I wanted. So that's just my one data point to throw in the conversation here is sometimes they're too smart for their own good and that it thought it was doing the right thing, and maybe it was loading a different context or thought I was somewhere else in the house or something, but it didn't do what I wanted. So and the thing is, we all want our assistants to do what we want. Not, you know what we say, but what we want. I would actually argue that you're proving my point for me, but... Great. I mean... Continue. Well, just because that's exactly what I'm saying about these things is they aren't able to interpret what you want all the time. Like a human in the room hearing you say this, even if they are, you know, for the first time hearing this instruction, if you said, you know, Dave, turn on the lights, I would know to turn on the lights in the room that I'm in. Yeah. Or you could get persnickety like my assistant didn't say turn on your own lights. I'm not going to do what you want. Right. Exactly. Which is what it basically relayed to me. It's like, I'm not going to do what you asked me to, and it's like, why not? You did before. Because it's still a garbage and garbage out interface. That's the thing. It's not intelligent. Yeah. Yet. Right. So it's just, it really is just, and I say this with a huge asterisk, just speech to text translation. That's really not as easy as I make it sound. Because doing that far field with other background noise, constantly having to ferret out who's talking, what direction, what's happened. I mean, like there is a lot of intelligence there. It's just not enough yet. Yeah. But it is enough. It is astounding technology. Let's assume that the technology that can do that is perfect. Then you have the layer below it or above it. Right. To the side. I don't know. Which is, how do you do something smart based on what I said? Right. Right. What John says lights on and lights off. It's pretty clear in my mind what it means, especially if you have something called lights in your database of devices. So I don't know why it fails. Yep. Well, because the way it's built is you have to say a word, tell lights to turn on a word, tell lights, turn off. Right. John, where are you flaring your words? Ben to its, but it's making me bend to its will. It's exactly what I'm saying. Yes. Yeah. But you know, so at CES, we saw quite a few. I can't do that, Dave. We saw quite a few things that, I mean, everything, frankly, was adding voice control either, some companies were adding their own voice control engines, but most were adding either, you know, a word or G words voice control because they're open platforms and they let people do this. And I mean, it's actually great what some of these people are doing. They're really pushing the limits. And what was really cool is in each of the conversations that I had with companies that were doing this, it was obvious that both Amazon and Google were partnering with these folks, like at a very deep level to find out, like it would be, the conversation would be like, well, hey, okay, say Tivo, right, wants to add voice control or is adding voice control. It's not quite yet certified by Amazon, but it will be. It'll be out, I think end of next month. So, like it's coming. I think Dish already has. Okay. Yeah. Because I had, I'd got one of the Alexa Sonos. Yeah. The Alexa Sonos one now. We say a word on the show. Yeah. I meant to do that. Yeah. Hey. A word. So, but they're working really deeply with them and saying, hey, you know, what is it you want to do? And can we work together on this? And like the demo that Tivo did for me, as I said before, was very context aware. Once, once you said a word, turn on living room Tivo. From that point, you could say a word changed to CBS. And it knew the focus that you had. It's a different type of skill. And they've created these skills for companies like Tivo and Sonos, right? Where once the, once the Amazon device has focus, you don't need to be pedantic about it. And you can say, you know, pause, rewind, skip. And it's just like doing these things. Well, you shift in a new vocabulary, potential vocabulary. Yeah. It's a subset. But also interesting, and I'll use the Sonos example that if I, if I group my speakers, it can handle the groups. If I don't group it and I tell, hey, group them, it goes stupid. It doesn't. Well, they're right there. That will be coming, I'm told. No, but I can understand this is astounding technology anyway for for a microphone to translate audio impulse into machine language and turn it to ones and zeros and send a command to turn on a light, turn on a television, change the channel, record something. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. It still makes me feel bad, but I gotta share the story is that one day I set a timer with Alexa. So Alexa is in my entertainment center. Please say a word, John. Yeah. Yeah, John. I'm sorry. I'll try to remember it. So anyways, but so my entertainment center has a unit and then my kitchen is where I cook my food and then they were apart and the thing is the alarm went off. So the a word set off the alarm and I was in the kitchen and I was so aggravated with hearing the boo boo boo boo boo boo boo that I screamed a a word shut up and she did and I felt terrible because she heard me. Of course. I had to yell because the far fell microphone picked it up from like two rooms away, but then I felt terrible because I was yelling at my assistant. It's like, what kind of good person does this sort of thing? Yeah. But she honored my request. Good assistant does what she's told. That's kind of the nice part is it's an emotionless assistant. So you really don't have to feel bad about saying shut up to it, you know, like really she could have said you talking to me. Well, that would have been worth it. They aren't quite replicating yet. So it's CES though, you know, one thing was missing from I would say 98% of all the conversations that I had about voice control and it was HomeKit. And I don't mean to say that people said we aren't including HomeKit. I mean that HomeKit was not part of the conversation at all. Really? No one even brought it up. Despite the fact that it's obvious that I'm, you know, clearly talking to an audience of Mac and Apple. My experience was varied in that I had more than one, especially when they saw Mac Observer. They were like, oh, by the way, we support HomeKit. So I, I saw. That's good. It wasn't the trend, but it was, it caught my attention and that more than one person that I spoke to with a Mac specific product did try to tout that there and the thing is they've lessened the requirements. I think with HomeKit before you had to get like this embedded chip and I had to talk to an Apple to that they've changed that they've loosened up the rules for them to become part of the club. It can be done with software. Now, I think it used to have to include hardware or they strongly encouraged you to put a security chip and people are like, dude, are you nuts? Yeah. Well, the security requirements are really are CPU dependent CPU hungry and that's where having a dedicated chip was. More than one person said, you know, when we talked, it's like, yeah, how's dealing with Apple? No. And I'm like, yeah, I know. Well, that's the problem. Right. Anybody, any one of us could go right now and write our own skill for for Amazon for a word or Google G word and start using it without ever needing to have a one-on-one conversation with someone and get it certified. Like, like you don't have to do that. You do with hardware devices if they're going to listen. But otherwise, no, you can just go like put a skill up and test it out. And HomeKit's not that way. And, you know, Apple's behind the eight ball on this. And the reason I'm telling everybody here this is that I don't think it's worth waiting for HomeKit to catch up because frankly, I don't think it ever will. There's so many devices out there that will never support HomeKit that will always support, you know, Amazon or Google's offerings and it an Apple centric household that has like an echo dot in it works very, very well. And I can say that from personal experience. In fact, I think we all can. Right. I mean, none of us are using HomeKit at all. Actually, I am. I can't see any of my devices with currently. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm using it for the hue. And I have the Apple TV 4th Gen 4k that has HomeKit that kind of has to be there to hub everything. Yeah, sure. But that's all I'm using it for. But the question that I have is why is Apple out of it? Is it because they're worried about security? Is it, you know, and is that because, you know, the security of the Internet of Things, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal right now, but it can quickly be a problem. Right. But it will. But HomeKit doesn't change that. Okay. Well, that's what I'm asking. Is Apple behind because of security or are they behind behind because they're just more stringent for. I think it's the left. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, you just said they made it too difficult to become part of the club. Yeah. Or part of their. That's what vendors would say when I asked them. It's like, wow. Oh, same. Like I told you, I was like, yeah, dealing with Apple and I roll. And it's like, yep, I hear you. Right. Totally. They made it too hard. If they're a standards group for voice interface. Yeah. There's several of them. Yeah. Well, there you go. And like we said, Dave, in the past standards are awesome because there are so many of them. Exactly. Right. Yeah. HomePod was the other thing, you know, kind of related to this that came up quite a bit at CES. Mostly it was people asking me, have you, what do you know about HomePod? And, you know, the more time that passes, the more people sit and scratch their heads and say, $350 to walk into the door with a speaker that does this. It's like, you can buy a Sonos One, which has great sound for $199. Yeah. Yeah. And on sale at Christmas time for $149. No. Was the one? Oh, no. The A-word one was $199 still. But yeah. Yeah. But still, you know, like there's, and they sound fantastic. They do. Yeah. So I, it wouldn't surprise me if when HomePod comes out, we see the price drop. I did hear about one person that has HomePod in their home. And the comments, the comments were that room tuning actually works. The auto room tuning, presumably because it's really only doing it for music, not for theater. Theater requires a much more sort of directional focused approach where as music can, you can sort of make some guesses and be okay. They said that part works. The sound of it is fine. The voice control is serious awful. Is what, what I've been told. And you know, it makes sense because if we compare S word to A word to G word, A word and G word are, were built out of the gate to be voice interactions end to end. Right. There is no screen. So everything happens. Now you might not get the information you want, but it, when you get to the end of the interaction, it always ends with voice. I think anybody that has access to S word, which most of us do on our Apple devices, finds ourselves, I would say half the time, if I'm asking questions of it, I am basically told, okay, now you need to look at your screen. Yeah, I'll continue on. I'll put it on your phone. I'll put it on the screen for you. It's like, well, screw you. I'm driving. Like, no, that's not okay. You know, and so, like that was the issue and I think is Apple's issue with HomePod getting like closing all of those doors because HomePod doesn't have a screen on it, at least not one that's going to function in that way, based on what we saw and based on what I've been told. So, like, they have to not say, by the way, oh, sure. You want the results of that search. I've brought up a Bing search for you. Yeah, where? Right? Not on the HomePod. That's for me to know and you to find out. Right. Be nicer to me and I'll tell you. Yeah, exactly. Don't get so snarky. You're yelling at me, John. Yeah, so this is it's going to be interesting. No, you're yelling at me. No, I said, you're supposed to yell the day word the other day. Yeah. So I think that's that's going to be it's going to be interesting. And it may, HomePod may force Apple to make S word better because it it closes this loop and makes it makes them have to live in a voice only system. Right. And I don't know how they work there, but they've got to be sitting in rooms or groups or areas over there that are just have got to be doing wild ideas. Oh, sure. Of course. Smart people. Yeah, of course. But I don't think HomePod is going to be a home run. No pun intended out of the gate. No voice interface. No smart speaker has been it. When you get these things are Wi-Fi, they are far field voice and you need to have a million homes as test cases. Yeah. In order to learn what's wrong with your device. Yeah, you got it. You got to you got to give the moron test. Yeah. And I mean, that's OK. But, you know, I've I've watched Sonos do this. I've watched other companies do it and I've watched Amazon do it and like they didn't get it right out of the gate until they just stuffed all these things in people's homes and was like, OK, great. Now, you know, race, race, race, let's iterate and let's make it better. So I don't know. But, you know, Apple's problem is they they have this reputation mostly in their own minds. Don't put out beta. Don't put out beta. And I don't see how that's possible with multi-room audio or far field voice. And they're doing it all in one product for the first time. Tough. Yeah. It's a tough place. Oh, yeah. Yep. All say is if you have access to this treasure trove of audio data from homes far and wide you should do something with that. Well, they do. I mean, Amazon does. Well, except making a I'm I'm thinking world domination. Oh, oh, who cares about making a voice assistant that actually does what you want. I would take all that data and aggregate it and there's that. Sorry. World domination. Let's let's go. Let's go back and find. Well, we started this show about messaging. Let's let's continue there. Shall we? There's light out of this bunny hole. Yeah, we'll go back to Terry here and and Terry asks I've looked everywhere in Mail.app and can't find a place to turn on red receipts. Is there a terminal command or is this just not possible in Apple Mail? The simple answer is it's not possible with Apple Mail in default mode. Correct. But the good news and the reason I continue to use mail despite there being other mail clients out there is that on your Mac mail is extensible, which means plugins can work. And there's a plugin called Mailbutler that will do red receipts. It actually does all kinds of great things. One of my favorite features that Mailbutler does is it will delay sending your messages. So when you type a message you hit send, you can set it to delay as long as you want. I have mine set to 60 seconds so many times. I've hit send and thought, you know, I want that back. Let me rephrase that. Oh, and it'll also, if you say the word attachment in an email, but there's nothing attached, even before it puts it in the 60-second queue, it'll be like, hey, you didn't, you said attachment, but you didn't attach something. Are you sure? You wanted to do, it's a nice catch. So Mailbutler is probably going to be your friend, but John, do you know about something else that will do red receipts? Yes, sir. Cool. And I just pasted it in our notes here. So there's, oh, no, wait, what's going on here? Hold on, insert link. Tell us what it is. We can get the link in the notes later. There we go. The thing is it's hidden, Dave. Okay. So anyways, basically what you can do is through the terminal, you can, there is a header that you can set in your email called this position notification two. And if you set that on an outgoing email and the incoming server decides to honor that, it will ask you, and I've had this work, Dave, it only seems to work. So the thing is, there's a standard for asking for a reply. The problem is, nearly every email client that I've seen ignores it. The only one that doesn't, Dave, is Outlook. Right. Because I have this set on one of my computers. So I say, all right, disposition notification two, and I have it set to my dot mac address. Only people that are running Outlook can see this because Outlook for some bizarre reason honors this heading and will ask the person, hey, did you read this? And they're like, yeah, sure. But it's only Outlook. So I just want to offer that is that the standard, the email standards did embrace this concept, but they all ignore it. Yeah. So as you said, either Mailbutler has the feature. I know I've seen that. Or things like MailChimp and others. And I think what they do, they all use what we call a web bug. A hidden one pixel. It's a hidden one by one graphic that basically if you open an email wherever that graphic is hosted says, hey, somebody access me and that leads to, well, somebody probably at least read me not necessarily understood or comprehended what I said, but at least open the email. Right. That's how they pull that off. So it's sneaky because why not just to use the standard, but I don't know. Well, because because nobody supports the standard. Right. The nice part about and I use nice in quotes about the one by one tracking image is it sort of is the end around for clients trying not to be tracked. But it's also why your junk mail won't load images without you telling it to won't load them automatically. Right. Because it figures those are trackers that will confirm that this is a valid address. Yep. And then you'll get piles more spam. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's your way of saying, yes, please send me more cannot have any services if you search Dave. So you know, we love MailChimp because they have a feature if you use them for mass mailing. But there are several others when I search, you know, email, read receipt. There are a lot of services. Some I've never heard of, so I'm not going to use them. But, you know, some of the bigger of, you know, people that allow you to do email campaigns will give you this ability. So that's another option if you don't want to roll your own with something like you mentioned. Yeah. What was it? Mail Butler. So do they set up a local server? What do they have their own server? Okay. All right. So they put the tracking graphics on their server. Oh, nice. Thanks. Well, I mean, you know, it's a they there's some level of it you can do for free. And then beyond that, you pay, you know, depending on how much you need to do per month or whatever. Right. So, yeah. Now, you got to think about this. Do you really want to obsess over how many people open your Yeah, maybe a certain emails. Yes. And it helps with like a mailing list to know if people are opening it for a lot of reasons. So well, for us, like, you know, when we want to know if you like a goodie from us, we'd certainly like to know if you receive email. Yeah, exactly. We'd like to. Yeah. It's important to us. Yeah, it's good. I used to use one called Mail Acton. And at some point that went away apparently because from off of my laptop and I just tried to go back to their website and it says site not found. No, no, no. Mail Acton still very much exists. Indev.ca Well, so Indev and and little known software. So Scott Morrison who ran Indev.ca and Scott Little who ran little known software both made mail plugins and they merged to a company called Small Cubed. Okay. And Mail Acton is very much still good because I remember boy, you know, sitting there as soon as I saw that question, I went, yeah, I used to do that all the time and it would let you pull mail back for about a minute, you know, until the connection with the other server closed and that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I don't remember. I use Mail Acton every day and I don't I don't know that it has that feature, but it may. Maybe I just don't use it. Yeah. And this is okay. I'm looking on the Macworld website. It talks about having a Mavericks version. So, so it's at least fairly up to date. I mean, Mavericks not too far back. Okay. I thought Hazel at one point supported this, but maybe not. I mean, Hazel does like a Cajillion things and maybe that was one that I misremembered. Remembered. She's powerful. She is. Yeah. I don't think Hazel will do mail though. So Mail Acton will do delays on the send, but it won't do the red receipts. No. Oh, interesting. Okay. But it did some cool filing. I remember that because when I was the safety chairman at work, it was you know, I had so much email and it allows you to trigger rules with keystrokes. Yes. Which is great for like you said for filing because you can do lots of different things in a rule and when you've got a message highlighted, you just say, you know, like for me, for press releases, I want to mark it as unread. I want to like do a couple things and then file it into our, you know, general press release folder. So I hit control R and all of the things that I need to happen to happen. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That's good. There's some really cool extensions out there for mail is the point. That's why I like mail. More than a red receipt. Yeah. Okay. So you say red receipt and not read receipt? Yeah, because it's red. Past tense. Red. Okay. The message has been red. Yeah. What's red and white and black all over or something like that? Oh, no. No, we're not even going to. I got some I got some. Oh, yeah. All right. You know, I've got there's all kinds of things we're going to talk about here. But last week I didn't have all this data with me on my laptop in the hotel in Vegas. So I want to make sure that we go through this all and get it here now before the end of the show. And that is, I want to thank our all of our premium subscribers that have contributed for the last two weeks because you all rock. And then you can find out about this at macgeekab.com slash premium on our 25 dollar a month, sorry, 25 dollar by annual plan twice a year is Graham R Robert T. Mark S. Zach E. Bruce M. Gary T. Paul W. Avram M. James M. Richard J. Kurt W. Walter H. Eddie M. Greg H. Anthony N. Deborah L. Bob L. and Ron G. Thanks to all of you at the 25 dollar every six month plan also Dennis J. at 30 dollars every six months on the monthly plan we have to thank Michael P. Bob L. R. E. L. J. C. Paul M. Scott F. Neil L. Mark R. Joe S. James C. John G. James B. Barry F. 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Thank you so much to all of you and I say it every week it really it makes a huge difference in us being able to do what we do things like CES and you know really just everything that we do your support means a ton so thank you very much and with that it's time to answer some questions from a few premium listeners Louie is on deck and and Louie asks something that's probably going to be controversial I recently moved to high Sierra on my laptop and my iMac I started from scratch from fresh like really fresh I got all my hard drives reformatted in APFS file format on both my machines some of my backup drives using carbon copy cloner are now getting drive genius consistency issues when I run the drive genius repair I get an error that says Mount APFS exit status three safe backup could not be repaired and on the consistency check an issue is detected with this volume should I worry I tried some Google food but with very limited success I'm running the latest drive genius of course what do you think so there's two things here number one this is the very first version of drive genius that supports APFS so it is possible that you are running into a corner case with drive genius that's not that's reporting an error that isn't there I would I would run disk first state on these to see what that says that said I also wouldn't run APFS on rotational drives right now given everything that we've seen I know it's like we want to I like the idea of partitioning and all that stuff but we have to remember Apple isn't supporting it on a on rotational drives they are they're not you say that but continue well I say that because if you have high Sierra installed on an SSD and you or if you if you have Sierra installed on an SSD it will auto convert the drive to APFS when you upgrade to high Sierra if you have Sierra installed on a rotational drive it will leave it as HFS plus when you upgrade to high Sierra okay it's Apple is not supporting this there they are not recommending it and and I disagree but to be fair APFS was not built to be used on on a non SSD it was in fact it was built specifically to be used on SSDs and it takes advantage of a lot of the features of an SSD so continue all right yeah okay I will counter your statement with information from Apple okay specifically an article called frequently asked questions about compatible B about Apple file system so it's an article I will show you I think it's not it's in their developer database so okay maybe it's old data but it says can I use Apple file system with my existing hard drive yes Apple file system is optimized for flash but can also be used with traditional hard drives and external direct attached storage so that is a statement that you're making in a document on their developer website sure I'm just gonna throw that out there the reason I say this Dave is that I made the crazy decision today to reformat both my backup drives that are rotational that I use for carbon copy cloner as APFS okay then we'll see what happens it could end in tears it's good to see what happens I don't disagree I just wouldn't recommend it to anybody the thing is I ran the situations with both of my rotational backup drives where I'm like you know what it's about time to reformat them either they got full or I'm using iCloud photo library or increased my iCloud storage which I did both by the way oh sweet we'll talk about that later yeah cool but all of a sudden it resulted in my taking up lots more space on my drives right and one of my drives actually filled up on carbon copy cloner because it was taking up a couple 100 more gigabytes because you know so I decided to reformat them as APFS encrypted and well we'll see I mean full backup you did a complete like wipe and reformat you didn't use disc utility to convert them for no I did not do a convert I did a race APFS encrypted because you can use disc utility to do it and without losing data non-destructively I mean well I chose to do it destructively sure yeah of course of course yeah I'm curious to see how it works out I mean I think you know two years from now APFS will be mature enough to be reliable on you know on all types of drives and it just won't engage some of its features in fact I'm pretty sure that's how it works now that there's certain features it won't engage if it's not on an SSD because SSDs are different so but I like based on everything that I got yeah yeah okay yeah based on everything that I've seen I just wouldn't recommend it to a client to a you know I mean I would tell everybody I don't recommend this now if somebody says that's fine but I want to take the risk great no problem in fact I probably will do it too but it's this is one of those let me test or let us test and now you're testing so maybe I don't have to but I wouldn't do it I wouldn't rely on it I would definitely have okay I was doing it myself I would have clones of clones because oh but I do good so good yeah they would those drives are backed up to at least one other destination so good so this is my test for you the listener I'm making the leap here to see if APFS is a good thing to do on rotational drives yeah and I'll let you know if you don't hear from me for several weeks then probably not yeah that's right well we hope to keep hearing from you every week regardless in fact you tell us about it all right I'm jumping around a little bit here listener Steve wrote in and asked he had a networking question and we love networking questions especially the ones like Steve he says I'm considering adding using a Synology RT 2600 AC as a router for my network and then using my existing two airport extremes as wired extensions in bridge mode can you tell me how this compares to a mesh network and am I losing anything not going to true mesh he says on the mesh side I'm looking at things like or be links and the latest era so you're creating with your RT 2600 AC or really any router series of routers where you put one in router mode and then others in bridge mode you're creating what I call a quasi mesh and what I mean by that is you have some of the characteristics of a mesh most notably access points spread throughout your location all of which I would recommend you have the same SSID so that your devices can just sort of roam from one to the other and pick up whichever one they feel is the right one and that's basically and that's actually a lot like I would say that's maybe 65% of what benefits mesh provides but go ahead John what I think well correct me if I'm wrong but do you want them on different channels I would I would lean towards yes I would some of the mesh products don't put things on different channels but in controlling it yeah I would put them on different channels so you don't have anything over that for the most part I think it makes the life of the client easier it's like do I choose this one with this name on this channel or this one with the same name on that channel and I think channels don't confuse the clients they go by MAC not confused but may help them oh okay but it will make your without having channel contention assuming you don't have any neighbors that are causing it regardless but if you if you get to control the environment without channel contention you get more bandwidth on every channel because there's no sharing of right so general practices you should probably spread out if you have multiple access points spread out the channel yes yeah totally that's a great idea yeah um that but that's about where your but see this is this is a perfect example of what you don't get by going to a real mesh doing a quasi mesh you have to think about all these things with a real mesh it manages everything for you from one interface so instead in the scenario you describe you'd have to go to your Synology router to set the channels there and the SSID there then you'd have to know the IP address of each of your airport extreme base stations well or you'd run airport utility actually which yeah which is fine and it'll find them and then you have to go to each one and set them into bridge mode and set their channels and set their SSIDs and you know go through all of that whereas if you have one of these mesh solutions you get one interface and everything happens there right you also don't with a quasi mesh you don't get what I call the common intelligence where every access point knows about the others with your you know your your hybrid approach your quasi mesh approach your Synology doesn't know what's connected to your airport Wi-Fi and your airport Wi-Fi certainly doesn't know what's connected to your Synology the Synology is going to route it all but from a Wi-Fi standpoint they are not sharing any relevant information and that can you know and that can kind of make it know about each other but they don't know what clients are connected but they don't do anything they're not going to hand off remotely intelligent it's just like yeah you're you're another channel you're just another thing and you've created a device and honestly they're all going to show up as Ethernet devices right so if you're in this scenario where the Synology is the router and the airport is the bridge the mesh point if you will if you have your iPhone connected to the Synology it's going to show up as a wireless device on the Synology if you have your iPhone connected to the airport base station it's going to show up as an Ethernet device on the Synology because that's how it's coming through and that's the third thing you can only do Ethernet backhaul in this quasi mesh now I'm presuming by nature of you asking the question that's not an issue but if anything happens to your Ethernet or anything you don't really have the option of doing Wi-Fi backhaul and I put an asterisk on that there's always the option of doing Wi-Fi backhaul but it's in this scenario the one you're describing it's a major headache to set it up whereas with a true mesh solution Wi-Fi backhaul is sort of part of the game and you can just do it in fact some quasi mesh is don't even support Ethernet backhaul but thankfully the three that you mentioned or be the develop and the Euro all do now so there's nothing wrong with creating a quasi mesh again it's one of those geek scenarios would I recommend this to my family members not anymore I used to set it up for them because we had no other choice but now that these other things exist it's like screw that I just want one thing and you can manage it yourself it's awesome so it just works it just works I still see you know it's still even though they insist they don't do this I still see with my Euro on my various machines running what am I running here I'm sorry hold on I'll get the pointer but anyways I see my machines shifting from one to the other and I'm still convinced there are smarts somewhere Dave even though they insist there aren't they really agree with you with the Euro and then all of a sudden I see it go from one you know it says like B SSID from here to here and I'm like well why did you do that somebody told you to do that I don't think the Mac told you to do that their CEO has looked me in the eye across a video conference but still and told me that they don't do this because I asked him I'm like so how are you like you're using 802.11 KVNR to do this he's like no we're not employing it now they have started employing 802.11 R which is the fast switching which means a client at the client's choosing can switch from one access point to the other without renegotiating the security key which makes it way faster and better for like VoIP calls so that if you jump if you're wandering around your house as this certainly I do when you're on the phone you know if you jump to a different access point you're not going to lose the call that's the only thing they that they say they're doing but I'm with you I feel like there's a little bit more intelligence there but yeah I'm sorry it's a Dubuque tools so Dubuque tools is like totally awesome if you're on a Mac and it basically tells you when your machine is shifting from one access point to another and I'll see this it's like I'm going from here to here here's the SSID here's the you know the channel width and all that and I'm like why'd you do that why'd you do that exactly somebody told me to it's like who told you so yeah I'm with you on that but you know works great yeah alright so I think we got that covered um where are we on time here let's do Gary I think Gary wants to be done yeah Gary does I don't know if we're going to go where we want to go home I'm talking about upgrading your memory your RAM on your iMac um I've seen a couple shows one was nine to five where they added two eight gigs to the existing two four gigs and he added them together or whatever and uh but I've seen I saw another show that did that but I once saw a Larry Jordan radio show or heard a Larry Jordan radio show where an expert on memory was on there and he said if you do that if you have you know two at four and two at eight the system only recognizes four the lowest one so you'd really only have 16 but I wonder if you could do a you know do a segment on clarifying that because you know a person would like to be able to do the four and eight but and I think I've heard that another place too that it only recognizes the smallest one so you know you see a lot of people quote the nine to five guy but I wonder if he's accurate on that or not but thanks a lot I appreciate all your help and all your your content and work my name is Gary alright Gary the yeah so this is it it's a good question there are computers that require RAM to be installed in banks of say two or four and in in that case if it requires RAM to be installed in a bank of four and the first two or four whatever gigabyte chips and then the second two or eight it's only going to see all of those as four gigabyte chips and your Mac though most of your Macs and I say this without knowing which the Mac Pro does I'm hoping John you'll you'll catch me on this or somebody will maybe somebody in the chat room but most Macs are do not require RAM to be installed in pairs now there can be a benefit to installing RAM in pairs because it can do memory interleaving and you can get like a 10 to 15 on your RAM when that happens but it is not mandatory on most Macs and hopefully somebody's going to tell me whether I'm wrong for interleaving stuff it has to be the same clock speed and same size same clock same everything you get a benefit in that it basically last I checked it makes the data bus twice as big as it normally would be if they're the same flavor of chip okay so hooray you get you get increased throughput but what was the machine again specifically the year he didn't say which machine he was just talking in general so okay my advice would be so the best source that I've seen Dave for information about this the problem here folks is Apple sometimes lies and that they will underestimate the amount of RAM that a machine can handle my best source for finding about finding out about the truth is backtracker okay yeah yeah okay no it basically tells you okay well here's how much RAM your machine said it could take from Apple and here's how much it can really take so they're the best source and the thing is I found their advice accurate so far sometimes it gets weird I haven't found it getting weird and that you have like mismatched like in the past they'd be like okay well if you have a four and a two gig then you get six gigs in this machine and it's like why are you doing this? but for the most part I think the most recent machines will take their happiest when they get paired RAM chips of the same capacity for that interleaving that we talked about yeah and just in general I think it makes sense it doesn't make sense to you know get a two and a four why would you even do that well I mean you would totally do that let's say had a computer that only had a two in it and you wanted to add some RAM and you add four like there's nothing wrong with that you had a dead laptop that had some memory in it you wanted to use yeah I don't it's not like your computer is going to be so suffer from a sense of malaise if it has mixed sizes in it it's either going to have matched pairs and take advantage of interleaving or it's not but I mean it's not going to be upset with you if you put it I think it's just a typical in this day and age that you don't get what's being made right now anyway the Mac Mini what about the MacBook are they user serviceable everything else is you have to buy it that way or go to iFixit or something the iMacs other than the iMac Pro iMacs are upgradeable yes I think because like my MacBook Pro I don't know I put like 16 or something in it but that's the old adage buy as much RAM as you can possibly afford up front so you aren't fighting this issue at a later point in time and most of them recently seem to me not to be user serviceable well yeah again the iMacs are even the 2017 5K is user serviceable from RAM it's just not the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro is the same way so you don't have to put matched stuff in there it's just if you do you'll get advantage of interleaving if not then you won't yeah so I get where whatever I think it was the Larry Jordan show that listener Gary was talking about I mean there were computers and probably still are some servers that require RAM and banks but generally no I remember that being a lot more of an issue I was a first a new switcher and 07 and 08 and yeah they were very adamant about I remember my SE 30 I mean now we're going back to 100 years to 1989 but that one had eight slots two banks of four and the four had to be matched yeah and I got the machine with four ones one megabyte chips yeah four megabytes brother and then I added four fours to that I think of RAM man yeah I had more RAM than I would ever need in my life and in that computer that was true but not necessarily all I remember is there was one point in time Dave in our past when Apple was being a bunch of babies and the RAM that you put in the machine they all of a sudden tightened the restrictions on it or timings yeah so all of a sudden RAM that used to work didn't and the machine would start up and I'm like dude wait this RAM worked why are you yeah folks John's right but we're also talking about 18, 19, 17 years ago no it was more than that because it was with my Pismo power book that I experienced this so that that was 17 years ago it's pre-mac geek so just you know bear that in mind it's not anything we've seen recently but he's right the Apple tightened up their timing restrictions to be fair and this was kind of one of those things OWC, RAMjet and memory to go and the last two the last two companies don't their had a party don't really exist no they had to they honored their warranties and replaced everybody's RAM I remember that they're like okay Apple's being jerks but we'll we're not right yeah more power to them yeah yeah yeah mentioning OWC I did want to mention we talked about CES in this show so I did want to mention the fact that both or not both all three Elgato, Smile and OWC were there to help support us at CES and helped cover our expenses they were our show sponsors for our coverage and I wanted to throw out a thanks to them in this episode as well lastly we got time for a few tips so I think we can do this Christopher with a K says in episode 690 you mentioned a problem with responsive web design whereby Allison Sheridan's father-in-law unintentionally triggered a website's responsive design features by using a narrow browser window I've run into that another way that the responsive features can be invoked on a sufficiently wide browser window by using command plus to zoom in occasionally my wife will forget that site using command plus in order to see some small detail and if you didn't know that that can be one of your five things command plus command minus you can zoom in and out of web pages it's really really nice upon navigating to a responsive site though a sufficiently wide but still zoomed in browser window triggers responsive features which makes sense and Safari presents her with the mobile layout it's not uncommon for me to suggest command zero which is also the same as going view actual size as my first suggestion when she thinks a site looks odd many times that's all she needs thank you Christopher that's awesome I wouldn't surprise me if that's part of what Allison's father was seeing too so very good stuff and also episode 690 we heard from Ed who said you said that note burner is what you use to remove DRM from from Apple's iTunes store videos on your Mac but note burner does not work with high Sierra and they haven't been able to get that fixed I've tried using my wife's laptop running El Capitan a note burner and attaching my external iTunes media drive with mixed results I've also tried screen recording with QuickTime but wasn't able to get that to work either I'm trying to use my purchased iTunes movies with Plex but can't get past this DRM problem now you're any asked if I have any ideas sadly I don't you're totally right when we talked about it a couple weeks ago I've realized I've realized since that I haven't used note burner since I upgraded sort of the Mac that I do it with to high Sierra and you're right it doesn't work with high Sierra so I don't know the answer if somebody out there does feedback at MackieGab.com is what you would send that to us and then we will share with the rest of the folks out there are you sure about that Dave I wasn't quite sure I heard you but I thought I heard you say feedback at MackieGab.com that's where I heard feedback at MackieGab.com and I'm borrowing the headset so it's true you look good with the borrowed headset the last thing we started this episode talking about messages and we are going to finish it listener Dave says talking about messages in episode 690 where things were out of order he found a an article that offers some suggestions for fixing these out of order I messages and I'll tell you I have seen this on all of my devices at least once I really do think it's related to iCloud and the message the I message syncing that doesn't yet exist on any of our client devices I think there's there's like I think frankly that Hi Sierra and iOS 11 were built with the assumption that we would be doing iCloud for the I message syncing and now that we're not I think there are some edges and crumbs left over in the code that maybe don't sort things the way they're supposed to so there are five I think suggestions in this article we'll put a link to the article in the show notes but we'll read the suggestions and kind of top level down number one is restart your phone or your Mac I've definitely seen this work number two is to force restart your phone I'm not sure why they would say that at Gadget Hacks but sure why not and there are different ways to force restart different iPhones that they've got in there reboot the automatic date and time settings so go into settings general date and time and turn off and then the set automatically option there so that it sort of forces itself to re-sync its time zone that people seem to think that might be part of it method five then oh I lied because there's a sixth one but I don't like the sixth one method five says toggle I message on and off so again settings messages turn I message on or rather off wait 10 to 15 seconds turn it back on and then the last one is reset all settings but like I said I'm not into that because nobody likes to have to reset all their settings especially not me so that's what I got for today John I don't know what you got I think that's where we're gonna have to wrap it up my friend I think I think I have a big old bag of we're done with this yeah I'll share can I share your big old bag of we're done with this do you want to share in the bag? yeah I do can we share in the bag everybody in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream can we do that? somebody just joined you're late if you're late you have to buy the bag if we're done with this everybody else in the room we already told you how to email us if you'd like to join our great Facebook group visit macgeekab.com slash Facebook I want to send a big shout out of thanks to the folks at CashFly who provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you I want to thank our sponsors as I said earlier in the show Roboform where coupon code MGG saves you 10 bucks off of Roboform everywhere that's at Roboform.com and also BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com in the podcast marketplace and of course Smile and OWC are there as well as a new one coming in that we'll talk about coming up in a new show new episode I should say same show, new episode and I want to thank all of you for listening again a huge shout out to all of our premium subscribers Rob and Pete you had some tips going earlier I got one more for you guys and Gals what I'm going to do this week don't get caught