 The Mac Observers Mac Geekgab Episode 797 for Monday, January 13th, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geekgab, the show where we take your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take all the tips and cool stuff found and even questions that we come up with throughout the week. We mash them all together. We string them into an agenda. Then we go through the agenda, answering the questions, addressing the tips and cool stuff found with the goal being that every single one of us, including us, learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include MintMobile.com slash MGG, a new one at SimplySafe.com slash Mac Geekgab. Yeah, it's not an MGG one. It's a Mac Geekgab one. I don't know why they did that. But anyway, it's a good place to go. Be be edit from barebones.com and lino.com slash MGG. We'll talk about why you have already gone to those URLs, right? Because you've already gone there because that's that's all. That's our job is to get you to visit our sponsors and learn more there from that point forward. That's between you and them, whether you buy or download or whatever it is that's between you and them. Our job is to generate a little interest and have you visit them and that actually does help us. So we thank you for that. For now, we'll talk more about those later. For now, though, here in Balmy, Durham, New Hampshire, back in Balmy, Durham, New Hampshire, where it's warmer than it was where we were in Las Vegas, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John O'Brien. How are you? How are you? We made it, John. We survived the week of CES. We found a lot of cool stuff, some of which we'll talk about in the episode here. And then and and, you know, we survived Vegas, right? In fact, I think we did a fantastic job at at addressing, covering and conquering CES. So I thought that was good. Yeah. Yeah, that's a minor travel snafus. But we got the wrong. What were your travel snafus? Well, you and I both got there later than we were supposed to because there was like terrible weather somewhere. So they had to delay all these flights. It's true. There was it was certainly for me, it was I think ground delays in Boston. I'm not sure exactly what it was. But yeah, I think I was what we were each about two hours behind when we both finally got there. But we got there. Getting home was was cake for me, which is, you know, even better, right? To be able to. Yeah. So getting there was funny. So my first flight went to Houston. And when I got on it, they're like, yeah, we're going to Tennessee instead. It's like, what? Because there was weather had to get around and they didn't have enough. That particular plane didn't have enough fuel. Gotcha. Oh, yeah. To make the detour. I've had that on cross country flights before, not in a long time, but where, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, we're going to stop in, you know, wherever St. Louis or something. And it's like, what? This was nonstop. Like, yeah, nonstop ish. So, yeah. Yeah, the nice part. So I had a short layover. They just automatically rebooked than the same flight with a different number. It's like, oh, thank you. Oh, they got you on a later flight, you mean so that you didn't miss your connection. Got it. Oh, that's good. Well, I missed my connection. That's what I mean on the next one. And but they automatically did it. As soon as we landed, I got all these text messages saying, hey, you know, we just did this story. Yeah. Hey, do you use Tripit for your? No. Oh, dude, dude. Tripit is. So there's two apps that I use when I travel. One of them is Tripit, which now with Project Catalyst is available as a Mac app, though you could always have used it on the web, you know, in Safari or whatever your browser is on the Mac. But Tripit for iOS and especially Tripit Pro are fantastic for making it. Essentially, what happens is when you get your travel plans, you you can either manually put them in or you can make it very easy where you just forward your travel plans to plans at Tripit.com and it goes through and parses it most of the time. I would say 95 percent of the time, certainly with all the major like hotels and airlines and even concert tickets and all that, it parses the email, creates your plans and then you can have that sync with your calendar and all that. But the really cool part with Tripit Pro is you get these travel alerts where when there's problems, you know ahead of time, you know, as soon as it's put into the FAA system, especially with with airlines, when there's a delay and that almost always comes in long before you get your alerts from the airline. So I've had it where there's been a delay and I can go get in line at the counter or get on the phone before the airline alerts everybody and then, boom, I'm good to go. So Tripit and it just really makes organizing everything easier because you just sort of forward all the stuff in and it builds your your travel itinerary for you. You don't have to like add it to your calendar manually or track it if something about your flight changes. In fact, it'll even track the price of your flight and look for refunds or discounts or better seats. It's it's pretty cool. So I highly recommend that. And then the other app that I use and and I've well, I'll just say it, I use FlightAware. I think you have to sign up for an account, but it is free. And then once you've signed up for an account, you can get alerts that truly are sort of directly I mean, they're not directly from the FAA, they're directly from FlightAware, but they those alerts even come in perhaps split seconds sooner than the Tripit ones. And you can really get a feel for where your plane is coming in. Like like if you're at the airport waiting for a plane with flight aware, you can see where that equipment is. And if it's en route, then you can, of course, set an alert for that. So you know, like, all right, cool. I'm going to go get, you know, a burger at the restaurant because the my flight's delayed, but you know, when it has landed and then you, you know, you can sort of guesstimate the timing of what it's going to take to turn the plane around and all that good stuff. So I, you know, I'm, I'm, I like to sort of, you know, sweat the details and all that stuff. But I'd like to know when I'm flying where my plane is, because that tells me if my flight's going to be on time or if my connecting flight is going to be on time, if I happen to have to connect or whatever. So Tripit and FlightAware are my two. Do you use any, any travel apps, John, when you're, when you're traveling to do it? I think I used Kayak to monitor the price of my flight. Oh, before you bought? Yeah. Yes. OK. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Other than that. And, you know, you taught me this. I used to use Travelocity, but the problem with them so they were good for, you know, shopping for the best rate in like 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. But not anymore because now all the airlines have these, you know, really crummy, basic tickets. And the thing is, I want to select my seat. And by default, I think most of the cheap flights it finds, you can't pick your own seat. And I want to pick my own seat, man. Right. I mean, what's to get stuck in the middle? No, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's I do, I use Kayak when I'm booking flights just to get a feel for what's available from all the different airlines. It doesn't show Southwest. So I always have to look at Southwest site separately. But it but Kayak sort of homogenizes the rest of them. But you're right. It does homogenize down to the lowest priced flight. And that usually includes like, you know, maybe standing room only next to the bathroom or something. That's not quite that bad yet. But but oftentimes, you don't get a seat. You don't some with some airlines with the lowest price fair you don't even get a carry on. So so you got to you got to check those details. But but yeah, Kayak is Kayak is good. Kayak is good. But then my advice booked directly with whatever airline or airlines you are flying with. Because that way you're in their system when there's a problem like you had, John, they prioritize people that have booked directly with them versus people that have booked through an expediter or something to to get the rebookings and all of that. They take care of you because you're their customer, not, you know, arm's length customer kind of thing. So yeah. Yeah. And I never had problems with travel velocity. But I mean, you know, after I booked the flight with them, I would go directly to whoever booked with them and it was already in their system. So I never had that problem. But I think some people probably had where if your flight this week, you know what you described going out to CES, the travel velocity customers, in my experience, would have been would have been prioritized below those of you that booked directly with the airline. So yeah, no, it's good. It's good. Cool. Speaking of CES, you know, we did have four amazing sponsors that allowed us to do all that coverage that was amazing. No pun intended. Otherworld computing, the text expander and carbon copy cloner. So we've got a link in the show notes about them, too. But John, while we were at CES, you know, we we had our our room, our suite together and we were messing around with something. And yeah, and I looked at your dock and I'm like, oh, why do you have your dock there? Oh, right. I have my I keep my dock on all my max. I keep my dock on the left side. And I started doing that because the screens are wider than they are tall. And therefore, I figure, well, I've got more real estate left to right than I do top to bottom. And the menu bar is already going to take up some of the top of my screen. I want, you know, browser windows as tall as they possibly can be. So let's move and I like the dock to be there all the time. I don't like the dock hidden, although that's just personal preference. So I shifted the dock over to the left, which you can do in system preferences, or even if you just right click in the dock, you can choose position on screen left. And and then so the dock lives over there and you tried that. And you're like, whoa, without the problem with that is, of course, now the size of your dock is smaller because it is now going, you know, top to bottom instead of left to right. So you have. Yeah. And I got so much stuff in there that, yeah, it wasn't usable. But then you saw something and I explained to you why I did it. You're like, why do you have FaceTime there? Yeah, because FaceTime, if you have, oh, is it continuity? I think enabled the FaceTime icon will show you if you've had a missed call while you're away from the computer. Right. And I really like that little quick tip so that you've got, you know, those red, those red badges right there in your dock. You don't have to pick up your phone to see if you've missed a call. FaceTime, the app on your Mac will show you, which I think is pretty cool. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's good. All right. And then listener Rob has our next quick tip because we love quick tips. Rob says, I just found a great article from Cult of Mac highlighting a brilliant feature in Apple Watch that I never knew until now. And I figured that's what quick tips are all about. When you are using your AirPods and also wearing your Apple Watch, there's an easy way to check the battery of your AirPods. Swipe up from the bottom on your watch to get to the control center. This usually just shows the watch battery. If you tap on this, you have an option to enable power reserve mode. Don't. However, if you're using your AirPods, this screen not only gives you the option, but also shows you the battery life of your AirPods. It even separates it out between the pods and the case. Who knew? Thank you so much, Rob. That's the beauty of the quick tip. The stuff that like, I mean, your your FaceTime thing was perfect, right? Because I looked over your shoulder and I'm like, just get rid of that FaceTime icon. What do you need that in your dock for? And you're like, well, here's why. Like, aha, yes, brilliant idea. So good, good stuff. I don't like it. Speak any thoughts on that before we move on. We're still still on Apple Watch mode here. But can you ask, you know who what the level is? That's a good question. Does she understand that? I don't know. It's a good question. I don't want to do it in the middle of the show because I don't want to trigger everything else. Right, right. Although, although she is pretty good. Yeah, the ones that the planetronic ones that I have, that they both when you insert them will tell you the battery level. And also they have an app that shows you the battery level in either percent or time. Yeah, the Apple, the AirPods, when you open the case next to your phone, it is supposed to slide up from the bottom and show you the battery life left on both your AirPods and your case. I do not find that this happens consistently enough to yield me the desired result without a ton of frustration. It does work eventually. It's better if the AirPods are out of the case. Maybe there's a Bluetooth connection happening there that doesn't always happen when they are in the case. But anyway, this might be a better way to do it. OK, and we have a confirmation. Where did we get the confirmation from, Dave? We got it from our chat room, which is at MacGeekGab.com slash stream. And Warren said he just tested it and asking, you know, who does work? So, yeah. So the thing he said was, what's my bet? What's my battery level for AirPods? Perfect, perfect. Thanks, Warren. Yeah, good stuff. All right, while we're sort of on Apple Watch, I think this is Louis has something to add. Hey, Dave, this is Louis calling from the San Francisco Bay Area. Most recent show, 795, you were talking about features with your new Apple Watch 5, one of my favorite tips. And I'm surprised you didn't mention it because it seems like you went to a lot of pains to describe the icons for individual apps you were talking about. The grid view is really interesting. That honeycomb like view of apps that the iPhone shows or the Apple Watch shows by default is a really interesting display and kind of fun to play with, but it's really difficult to find individual apps. If you hold down, press and hold down on that screen on the honeycomb display of apps, you get a choice between switching between grid view and list view. And in list view apps simply show up in alphabetical order. It's much easier to find individual apps. Hope this helps. Probably knew about it, but no, thanks, Louis. That's a good one. I I always I I like I prefer the list view and I always forget how to get there on my Apple Watch. So I had not done that yet. But yeah, it's just just pushed down and and you can set it to list view. And you're right, it's way easier in list view to find apps because not only do you have the icon, which may or may not be helpful, but you have the name of the app in there and alphabetical order. So yeah, very cool. Thank you. Thank you, Louis. Good stuff. John, that wasn't the only tip, though, that you showed me at CES while we were sort of geeking out and messing around. Oh, yeah. We were a monitor. Well, we went to the fashion mall Apple Store, I think it is. And I was playing with the the new 16 inch pro, which I think is my going to be my next portable. Nice, really nice. But yeah, for Yucks, I was looking in the system info and activity monitor and I just stumbled across this. So this is interesting, Dave. So you have five different views, CPU, memory, energy, disk and network. We were and I think the CPU view, I'm mentioning this because actually, if so, we went to the CPU view and what you could do is right click on the row that shows the names of the things it's measuring for you. If you right click on that, you're going to get a list of the ones that are enabled and the ones that aren't enabled. Don't have a checkmark next to them. And we notice that there's one there, Dave. I don't think we've seen. I think it's new for Cataline and maybe not, but it's preventing sleep. Now, the interesting thing is if you go to the energy view, that column is already there, which kind of makes sense. Right. Right. At least on both of my machines. No, that makes sense. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I could see how that's related to energy. Yes, something's pretty preventing sleep. Of course. Right. Yeah, they got app nap and what else? A lot of things that are related to power consumption. So yeah, yeah, very cool. Good find machines not going to sleep. This will tell you why, hopefully. Hopefully. Well, at least give you a clue. And sometimes a clue is all it takes. Yeah, that's good. All right. Listener Todd has a nice little tip. He says, I love Apple notes, but searching for an item or phrase within a note on my Mac has been a pain as notes just returns a list of the notes the search phrase appears within, but does not locate the phrase within the note. Today, I decided to double click on one of the notes in the list. That in turn opened the note in a new window. Then I hit command F, revealing the search field at top of the note. I typed in the same phrase and notes highlighted all of the appearances of that phrase in the note typing command G cycles through them top to bottom and command shift G cycles through them in reverse. Life is good. He says, I have no idea how long that option has been there. I suspect a long time, but glad to have found it. Well, again, this is sort of the point of the quick tip is those things that, you know, if you don't know about them, you can't use them. So even though they might be easy. So thank you, Todd, that's great. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, two more quick tips. The next from Robert, who says, if your photo library can't fit on your internal SSD, instead of using Apple Cloud, Apple's iCloud photo library, another option to consider is Adobe Lightroom CC. Certainly not for everyone, but cheaper than buying a dedicated Mac mini. And there are advantages to using a non-Apple photo solution. Number one, it removes the one to one mapping between Apple IDs and cloud storage. This means you can sign up to two computers with the same Adobe account ID to sync and upload photos to a single Lightroom account, even if the two computers use different Apple IDs. So all those things where, you know, partners want to share a photo's library that they both sync to. Well, with iCloud photos, that's not the easiest thing in the world to do, so that's a good thing. Another, he says, it removes the tight linkage between your precious photo library and Mac OS and iOS operating system and application upgrades. Nuke and Pave, or restores of your operating system, don't have to do anything with your photos. And you don't have to worry about hidden changes to iCloud causing problems or syncing or accessing your photos as it seems to do with every major release. That's true. The flip side is that if something happens to break Lightroom integration, you know, until they release a new version, that too can be a problem. He says, if one is a hobbyist or serious photographer, all the tools included with Lightroom avoid buying a suite of ala cart photo editing apps. So although there is a monthly cost, there is that hidden savings of not having to buy other apps or services. And he says the web browser interface of Lightroom is fully functional, unlike Apple, he says, where iCloud features are still very primitive at iCloud.com. In a pinch, you can access and manipulate even your photos from any computer on any platform as long as it has a decent web browser. And he says cross platform support for your precious library is a very long term insurance policy. A cheap PC can always be deployed to sink down a full local copy of all your photos for archival backup or off site, but non cloud storage. So yeah, very cool. Thank you, Robert. It's a that's a good sort of perspective to have on on why Lightroom might make sense for some folks. So thank you for that stuff. Thoughts on that, Mr. Braun, before we move on to our last quick tip from Tony here. No, I know some people should their fist at Adobe for pretty much requiring that you have to use the cloud based subscription thing. But you know, I say some dough. I like subscriptions for software. I think it's way better than paying once because subscriptions encourage the developer and reward the developer for continuing to make the product relevant and upgrades and all of that. Whereas if you have to buy, you know, a new version every, let's say 12 to 18 months, developers are intentionally holding back features for to make that upgrade worthwhile. Right. Whereas I would want the feature now and I'm happy to pay now. So I think taking that that price and, you know, just sort of amortizing it over over, you know, at a monthly basis or even an annual basis for a subscription, I think it works out well for software. I grok why people are resistant to it, not just from the change standpoint, but from that whole, you know, death by a thousand cuts kind of thing. But if it is an app that matters to you, I think subscription is better than one time purchase because you you're hedging your bets towards the longevity of that app. So that's my that's my that's my spiel. Yeah, OK, yeah, I'd like to have a choice. Sure, but one or the other. But but that's not how it but that that doesn't actually work right. I mean, if somebody's doing it, think about it. Right. If somebody's doing a subscription to some of their users and then a, you know, flat rate purchase to others, you've now got two sets of customers that are going to be using the your same app with two different sets of features because you're necessarily going to hold you're going to give features to the subscription people as soon as you're finished writing and testing them, whereas you're going to hold back features from the folks that are paying a flat rate, you know. So that that's I don't know that's actually sustainable. I don't I don't think you get no, I get the yeah, I get that the revenue comes in fits and spurts. If you know you're doing the self direct whereas, you know, I think most businesses like to have a steady stream of revenue right is right and income versus a chaotic one. Right, right, right. Yeah, no, it's good. It's good. All right. Last quick tip. Tony says Dave and John and for those that use keyboard and maestro, I have a cool macro that I found on the keyboard and maestro forms. We'll link to it. The name of it is move mouse to front most window when window changes. This is especially helpful if you use multiple monitors with your Mac and switch among them a lot while switching apps. If you move your cursor to the active window slash application, but only use the application switcher shortcut, so command tab to change apps. This is very helpful that if you switch apps from screen one over to screen three, for example, you won't also have to move the mouse over manually to interact with the app on screen three. It just jumps the mouse for you. That's what this macro does. It saves a lot of mouse movement. Once you switch to the new app, your mouse cursor is already there waiting for you to interact. The macro allows you to customize where you would like to have the cursor placed in relation to the app that you have just switched to. He says, I use the toggle that remembers the last position used for that particular app, and it's really quite useful. So thanks for that. That's that's yeah, I've got to I have not installed this yet, but but I will. That's that's pretty good. I like it. I like it. I like it. Coolio. All right, thank you, Tony. What I want to do now, Mr. Braun, if it's OK with you is to talk about our first two sponsors. Sure. All right. Our next sponsor is Simply Save Home Security, because Simply Save is like getting commercial grade enterprise level security, but for your own home. Think about the security that Fortune 500 companies use, they need to know police are going to be on the scene immediately. And this is exactly the kind of security you get with Simply Safe. 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Easy to load and I can see all that I have on there. So that's his contribution for cool stuff found this week is the Sandisk clip sport. It you know, it's what it's a what's the price on this thing? Yeah, 50 bucks. So yeah, interesting. And the cool part is this will play MP3, AAC, Audible, FLAC, OGVorbis, WAV files, WMA files. So it's got good compatibility with things, perhaps even not perhaps a lot more than you might have been able to get away with with the with an old shuffle. So yeah, that's good. Yeah. And yeah, I'm looking here. So an iPod touch starts at $1.99. So you you save some bucks there. Yeah, depending on your needs. Yeah, fair point. Yeah, yeah. That's good. All right. Speaking of old Apple devices and what to do with them. Chris shares he says, I thought you might be interested. I'd been looking for a high quality digital photo frame, but not been able to find one. Then I tried to trade in an old iPad and realized that this was not worth much. And then it hit me. I looked on Amazon for iPad digital photo frame and found the eye frame that turns your iPad into a beautiful interactive digital picture frame. It's a picture frame, essentially, that fits on your iPad. And he says, I would recommend this to anyone with an old but working iPad with a screen in good condition. It comes with a range of mounts to accommodate different iPad sizes and allows access to the power button and has a route for the power cable. The screens on all iPads are of comparable or better quality to what is available with purpose made digital frames, which generally seem to be made to a price. He says, I've created a photos folder for the pictures that we want to display and both my wife and I can add to it. And then all the pictures come on the slideshow. He says, the only thing that is missing and this could be a geek challenge is the ability to add to the slideshow remotely. In other words, he says, I can add to the photos folder remotely, but I have to access the iPad to add them to the slideshow. What would be the icing on the cake would be the ability to do this remotely, say from Hong Kong. Some of the purpose made digital photo frames do offer this, but it does not seem to be available from within photos. So yeah, off the top of my head. And I've been thinking about this since we prepped this, you know, late last week. I'm not sure of how to add to a slideshow because even as he points out, even if you add them to an album, it doesn't change the slideshow. So I wonder if there's like, if there's another app to use, right? Because apps can read from photos libraries. So maybe there is a slideshow app that that will update itself from a library to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think? Any thoughts on that, John? Not yet. OK. All right. We will we will see where that gets. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We use I will add my own cool stuff found here. And that is we use something called the skylight frame here at home. They they've never sponsored this show, but they've sponsored other podcasts before, which is, you know, how I found out about it. But man, I mean, perfect for for this audience victim kind of surprised they haven't. But the skylight frame, you hang it on your wall and and it connects to your Wi-Fi, right? And so you have an email address. You can I think you can load things on with a with a USB cable if you want. But it's got, you know, its own memory on there and there's an email address that you can just send to. And you can, you know, A, it's sort of a security by obscurity address that no one would be able to guess. But B, I think you can sort of limit who gets to send to it if you want. But it's great. Yeah, because we just email photos to an address. And then, you know, at home, we have this frame, it's just hanging in our kitchen. But it's awesome. You know, all the little family events that we do, we just blast stuff, you know, sometimes even, you know, like if we're at a concert or something on set break, well, I'll send a couple of pictures that I took to the frame. And that way, even by the time we get home, you know, certainly there they are. And it's like, Oh, that's pretty cool. So it's kind of this this rotating thing that that's cool. So I totally grok why Chris wants to do what Chris wants to do. And if there's an app for the iPhone that does this, that would be stellar. So I think I got it. All right. Good. What is it? What if you make your what if you make what if you put the photos that you want to display in your iCloud drive? Those are shared between multiple devices, right? So you want to add some more photos, you just well, no, the question the question is how to get them added to the existing slideshow that's happening? Because I mean, if they're added to your iCloud photo library or even a shared album that say your your family has, like that's easy. But in order to get the iOS photos app slideshow to show those new photos, you have to sort of go and say make a slideshow with with this album as it exists. What I'm proposing is using something other than that to display the photos. So there has to be a I mean, somebody's make a slideshow app. Right. That's yeah, it's all that's sort of what I was saying. But my thought is to have a shared cloud folder and that will be how you would add new photos while it's still running. Right. And how do you add them to the slideshow? So you have a shared folder. OK. And the app that you're using points to that folder that has photos in it. Right. But what app are you using? Like what I don't know yet. OK. So that but that's the question. I need a slideshow app. I don't correct. Photos will do it. Well, photos will do a slideshow and photos also with iCloud photo library will do all the syncing. So you don't need to worry about the iCloud drive thing. Like the photos are already there. The trick is how do you tell the iPad to automatically include new photos added to album A to the already running slideshow. That's the that's the trick. And it seems like at least the way Chris is doing it, there is no there is no way to do that. So so that's the that's the trick. Yeah. Well, if anybody knows, we'll just treat it as a geek challenge. That's a good one. That's a good one. All right. Any more thoughts? Yeah, I'm looking here. It looks like if you make an album. Yeah. Yeah. But you once you start a slideshow from an album, I don't think it pulls in things that have been newly added to that album via iCloud. That's what keeps saying here. Yeah, I was hoping it would. But right. Right. It doesn't. That's right. Bummer. Right. Yeah, I'll have to poke around. See if there's another app that would handle this. I'm a big fan of busy Cal, John, because because it's a, in my opinion, a better calendar than than Apple's calendar is a little more full featured. But in iOS 13 and in Mac OS Catalina, Apple made a change to it. The way reminders are stored previously, reminders were visible via the CalDAV sync protocol. And if you do the reminders upgrade, so you don't have to. But once you do it, you can't go back. But, you know, when you launch reminders on on Mac OS or or iCloud or sorry, iOS or iPad OS, it will offer to convert to the new format, which adds some features and like not a bad thing. But what it does is it takes that away from the iCloud sync, sorry, not the iCloud sync, the CalDAV sync, which is what's available to third parties. And so if you were like me and you were or are a busy Cal or I don't know if it how it affects other calendar ops. I don't want to say the names of them. But but certainly with busy Cal, on both Mac OS and iOS, you you couldn't convert if you wanted to manage your reminders in those apps. Well, now you can because as a busy Cal three point eight on Mac OS Catalina and three point five point two on iOS, they've added the ability to do what they call reminders sync. So it will sync your calendars with CalDAV like it always has as it should. But your reminders you can now also sync locally with the copy that's on the device. So iCloud does the syncing brings it to your device. And then busy Cal just sort of peeks into that and can can read and write from it so you can actually manipulate the library and all that, which is great. That's that's the that is the work around. So good stuff. And I like it. So I'm glad now I can finally do my reminders upgrade. I haven't done it yet, but now I know I can. So thanks to Fahad and the team over there at busy Cal they're making that possible for us. Good stuff. Oh, let's see. Moving on Richard has a cool stuff found for us. He says, you know, you guys have been talking about different ways to rename files. And certainly that was true in 795, which is the last pre the last non-interview slash guest episode that we did. He says, one that I like is called a renamer at renamer.com says, I really like the layout of making recipes or renamerlets as they call them to rename files. It has saved me a ton of time so you can have it sort of automatically rename some files if you're downloading things like bank statements or things like that where it just automatically renames them and then off it goes. So thank you for that, Richard. Good stuff. We will, of course, as always, put a link in the show notes. You can see the show notes at MacGeekGab.com, but you can also have them delivered to your inbox so that you never miss out and you've always got a copy of them where you can click on the links and see all the stuff that we talked about, all that good stuff. Go to MacGeekGab.com, put in your email address there and and we'll send you the show notes every week when when they're ready. So when the show comes out, which is sort of the same. So yeah, good stuff, John. Yes, cool. So we were at CES last week, as we mentioned, and we saw lots of things. We've published a lot of a lot of pieces and videos and all sorts of things that we saw. And I don't know if you have any more in the queue as of the moment that we're recording the show, but I certainly do. So there'll be more going up probably throughout the day on Monday as well. There might be some still going up this weekend. I've been sort of processing when I can. But one thing that I haven't talked about yet is Wi-Fi. And there was a lot of Wi-Fi happening and evolving. We're seeing the evolution of Wi-Fi through a lot of products that that were that were shown both on the, you know, at the various events, but also sort of in private meetings and things like that at CES. And there's two sort of main pushes that I'm seeing from lots of different vendors. So meeting with companies like Netgear and D-Link and TP-Link. Wi-Fi 6 is in full force. And so Wi-Fi 6 operates over the five gigahertz band same as Wi-Fi 5, but it will also operate over a six gigahertz band. And and while very few of our Apple devices, our iPhones 11 are the only current Apple devices that support Wi-Fi 6. Right? It's weird that the MacBook Pro 16 doesn't have a Wi-Fi 6 chip in it, but, you know, whatever, that's fine. I'm sure they will. Where Wi-Fi 6 is immediately of interest is in a mesh scenario. Because what Wi-Fi 6 can do, even if you don't have any devices that support it. Your mesh system can still use Wi-Fi 6 for itself. And for example, with the TP-Link, their X96 has Wi-Fi 6E, which is the thing that uses six gigahertz. And the nice part about that is that's not a congested band right now. So you get that backhaul that's way faster than, potentially, way faster than Ethernet, than gigabit Ethernet, happening with, you know, amongst your mesh Wi-Fi, further alleviating the need to, you know, consider running cables or using something like Mocha to, you know, approximate or to leverage the coax cables that you have in your walls and things like that. So these Wi-Fi 6 mesh systems are very interesting and very relevant right out of the gate. Now, a year, maybe certainly two years from now, but probably less, we'll see a lot more devices that use Wi-Fi 6. And even, you know, even with your iPhones using it, the nice part about that is you know, Wi-Fi 6 is more efficient, it uses a better signaling algorithm, like DOCSIS 3.1, I think it's the same OFDMA, but if it's not, it's something very similar to that where it's way more efficient at sending data across, of course, therefore makes it faster. I thought you misspoke when you said 6 gigahertz, but I'm now looking at an article about it. And yeah, the other thing is the channels are bigger. So they have 80 megahertz and also 160 megahertz channels. Well, you can do 160 with Wi-Fi 5. Yeah, but it's like, I mean, so very rarely is the environment such that it actually works and stays at 160. Most of the time, it's dropping down to 80 at best. Whereas with Wi-Fi 6, it's a lot more robust. As I said, the signaling algorithm is way better at this. And also the whole multi-user MIMO, the Moo MIMO thing where multiple devices can talk simultaneous, truly talk simultaneously is part of the core standard with Wi-Fi 6. So you get that not only on your 5 gigahertz or maybe even 6 gigahertz channels, but you also get it on your 2.4, right? Because of the way Wi-Fi 6 works. Yeah. Oh, and look at, okay, so I actually it seems that even my first gen Eero is talking 80 megahertz depending on. Depending on your environment. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if the Eero will do 160 if it'll even try it might. It happens so infrequently in like real world scenarios that it's just not, you know, it's just not how it goes. And there's a lot of different options coming out. One thing that I'm very excited about comes from Netgear because Netgear's thus far Netgear's Wi-Fi mesh offering has been the Orbi, right? And the Orbi when it started life was not really mesh. It was star configuration, meaning the satellite units when talking back to the router had to talk directly back to the router. There was no multi-hop. So if let's say you have a long house and your router by definition of where your internet access is comes into one point. If you want to have a satellite unit at, you know, the far other end of your long but rectangular house that satellite unit way over there has to talk directly back. It could not hop via one say in the middle. So they changed that and they also added the ability for us to do Ethernet backhaul which was not part of the Netgear Orbi out of the box. What was part of the Netgear Orbi out of the box and still very much is is their backhaul used 4x4 Wi-Fi radio streams and was like the fastest backhaul that you could get. So depending on the right environment, you know Netgear Orbi could be perfect for you. But it did not have that flexibility out of the box and when they added multi-hop and when they added Ethernet backhaul, you know, it wasn't a core part of the firmware so it was sort of a bolt on thing and it felt like it and it was clunky. It's gotten way better. They keep updating the firmware and they're getting there in a lot of cases they've gotten there, right, which is great. So it has matured. However when I talk to them about it, they're like, well, you know, Orbi is built for the sort of casual user, the people that don't want to tweak things. And so the whole idea of Ethernet backhaul, that's a more advanced feature. We might argue that point, but that's sort of the way they look at it. And certainly the idea of multi-hop, they say that's a more advanced feature. Again, we might argue that, but that's how they look at it. However, they have a new Nighthawk mesh system, the MK63 that is for their Nighthawk line is the name that they assign to their you know, more geek focused or gamer sometimes focused routers, right? And so this has a little more features in the you know, in the software there. And a little more granular controls and so this Nighthawk mesh is very interesting to me because maybe this is what we want to see. Now, it's not out yet. We're very much looking forward to testing it when it does come out. You can pre-order on Amazon now, I believe, and they say it'll ship before the end of January. So we're close on this. It's not it's not out, but I wouldn't call it vaporware. Let's, you know, let's you know, I think it's coming. So I'm excited about that. So we'll check that out. I've got a video coming up so you can see some of that stuff on Mac Observer. So that's that's Netgear. I mentioned TP-Link. They, like I said, they've got several different options. And you know TP-Link's deco line has been the sort of low cost and yet fully functional mesh Wi-Fi system, but it was always missing WAN-based QoS to protect against that buffer bloat that we've talked about here. They say that it is now available WAN-based QoS is available in all of their Wi-Fi 6 decos and they're looking at bringing it to via software update to existing ones pre-Wi-Fi 6, which is good to see. So they've got some tri-band ones. They've got some dual-band ones. Really it depends on your environment. But the one that I've linked in the show notes here, the deco X96 that's the one that uses 6E with the 6 GHz for, you know, for the back hall. So that would be that would be a good thing. So we'll, we'll, you know, we'll check that out and see where it comes. And then and then where's the other one D-Link, right? So D-Link's doing taking an interesting approach here. Everything that D-Link makes now all of their current crop of routers and all of their sort of all their mesh systems support what they call D-Link mesh which means you can buy that, you know, super hoopty router that has all the configuration stuff and then add some D-Link access points and it all will mesh together. So you can sort of build your own mesh using different parts. You're not stuck with just like here's this mesh system that's separate from our routers. No, they all speak what they call D-Link mesh. It's similar to what ASUS is and has been doing. Although ASUS's stuff has been a little weird on the mesh side at least based on my testing. So there's a reason we don't recommend it a lot here on the show. I don't even talk about it here a lot on the show. But well, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, right? The whole Lyra thing from ASUS was a disaster. But this whole D-Link mesh thing with their Wi-Fi 6 stuff I like it. Their prices are good. The prices on all this stuff are good. In fact, the Netgear Nighthawk mesh system a 2-pack is only $2.29 right? So like these things are in the right realm. So this concept of the D-Link mesh, John is not the only mesh interoperability conversation that I've had though. Because both TP-Link and Netgear are supporting easy mesh, which is a standard for mesh interoperability across vendors. So just like with Wi-Fi, right? Like you don't have to have an Apple Wi-Fi access point to use your iPhone with Wi-Fi. But with mesh, up until now you do, right? You need all your mesh stuff to come from the same vendor. Your iPhones and other devices can connect to it. But in terms of your router and mesh hardware it all needs to come from the same place. That may not be true for you in the future with easy mesh. Because easy mesh is this standard that Netgear and TP-Link are doing D-Link says they may bake this into their stuff in the future. There are other vendors using it as well. But it allows for you to buy say a Netgear or TP-Link router and then a TP-Link or Netgear. Like it doesn't matter whose access points you buy by the ones that are of interest and the right form factor and have the right physical capabilities and features that you want and then you can add them via easy mesh. Now will most people do that? Probably not. Should most people do that? My advice currently? Probably not. And the reason is easy mesh doesn't cover every feature. Easy mesh covers connecting to the mesh sharing the same SSID the network name and encryption of the mesh password and also the meshing slash routing features. But easy mesh doesn't share parental controls it doesn't share any of those sort of more advanced things across the mesh. Now if your router is taking care of all that great but if you're running a mesh where the router is expecting the access points to say deny devices from connecting based on the way parental controls work for that vendor then easy mesh starts to get to be a little better. So I would say this is a nice thing to see from an industry standpoint I would not necessarily base I would not make any purchases based on this I might base my next purchase on this in that it would be nice to have the flexibility of easy mesh in the next you know thing that you get but I wouldn't count on it but I would just say oh it's it's a nice insurance policy I'll have easy mesh in this that way if it happens I've still got an easy mesh compatible system I can add other things to it even if the original vendor stops making the things I want or whatever so I would look at it right now as an insurance policy for us as consumers not as the thing that we start using it right away if that makes sense thoughts on that John now looking forward to it yeah yeah it's pretty cool so what did you what did did you notice any trends specific things John at CES that you want to tell us about um yeah what a few things caught my eye um yeah why are mental sensors I found one company to make it it's kind of cool so I think it's a French company but um so you make this cool little thing that has I think it's like six different sensors so measure quality uv light let's see yeah uv light volatile organic compounds or pollution both indoors and outdoors yep I never thought I needed something like this before but you never know um that was neat some health stuff so with things released a watch that not only does a e cg but it also does uh sleep apnea it'll get oxygen levels until you if you have a sleep apnea okay that's kind of neat so it's you know other other people entering that arena yep um I saw some neat pet things um you you may want to try this one out here but there's one company that made a smart cat feeder okay so um and they actually have an entire system so not only is it a feeder but they also make a door uh so you're you need to chip your cat um I don't know if cats are into that do you do you chip your cats or dogs or yeah we do both yeah yeah yeah okay so so the the uh so the door and this device and and they have one other um yeah we'll kind of you know give you a you know summary of you know your pet's health you know it's like how much is how much is your cat you know going inside and out I mean is it sitting around all day just you know eating or is it actually getting activity right right so the the pet related stuff was neat um what else did I see yeah another health thing the there was a company not selling direct to consumers but it was like a health vest so it has like all these sensors in it it's like a t-shirt yeah and it measures your uh you know your heart rate you know like six different parameters and then it'll upload it to uh your coach or your doctor or something like that so um there's a lot of health stuff um oh yeah fin this was a neat one so uh so you know they have all the I thought this was amazingly clever so uh they have a lot of these devices now that'll tell you about the water in your house right right this one kind of caught my eye because you don't need a plumber to install it now some most of the ones that are like at the start of your water line um you need a plumber to do that you can't do it yourself this new device though it doesn't have a shutoff in it um it will tell you and you install it at any one of your sinks and then what it does is it uses like little variations in pressure I think 240 per second and it'll kind of figure out what things in your house are using water it's kind of weird I guess there's a lot of science behind this huh so it'll know that you have a sink here and a shower here and and things like that and then tell you what's up you know if it's leaking or freezing or things like that that's crazy wow yeah a little bit everything I like to find the you know kind of offbeat stuff sure yeah of course and of course you know check out our if you go to macobserver.com you'll see CES 2020 and there's all the stuff that our team noted together yeah yeah cool cool that's great man I like it yeah there's lots more that I'm sure will come out I mean we've I've certainly seen more things than we've talked about both on the site in here so yeah but that's that's sort of the beauty of CES is and we try to filter through it all to find the things that either do exist or we're fairly confident will exist occasionally we choose to cover something that we're not sure about its existence just because the concept is cool but we try to we try to you know articulate that for you but yeah there you go it's good stuff it's good stuff all right Mr. Braun we have some questions to answer and the first thing I want to do though is talk about our next two sponsors if that's okay for you okay all right our next sponsor is linode at linode.com slash where you get a $20 credit to get started with this great hosting company right because you need a server for something in your life I mean if you're listening to the show chances are you might have already had one in the past 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of pre-built things if you want a VPN you want a wordpress server, you want a minecraft server they're all right there so go check it out and get your $20 credit at linode.com slash mggr thanks to linode for sponsoring this episode next up bbedit from barebones.com you need a text editor in your life I know that sounds crazy to say I never have my computer running without bbedit I mean maybe for 5 minutes and then it's like oh right bbedit's not running I gotta get it running because I use it for so many things sure I use it for coding and stuff me I use it for a lot of PHP and HTML stuff because we publish for the web so that's sort of where my days are at least in terms of programming but you can program in pretty much any language and the cool part is for that bbedit recognizes what language you're in and starts doing this very subtle but very helpful highlighting of your code it doesn't change your code on disk or anywhere else just on the screen does this little kind of subtle 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check it out you got nothing to lose barebones.com for bbedit and our thanks to barebones for making bbedit and for sponsoring this episode alright John we got an interesting question from Russell I don't know about a week and a half ago before we left for CES and while we were at CES we had the opportunity to do some testing to potentially answer this question so Russell wrote he says my iPhone 11 Pro connected to my Mac mini pulled enough power that the Mac mini shut down the USB bus the battery swelled in my daughter so that's his short summary now sort of longer story which is important he says started when the battery swelled in my daughter's iPhone 10 so I was on my way to the genius part to see what we could resolve I used iMazing to back up the phone and then restored that to an old 6s Plus that I've kept as a spare he says it was going to be about $550 US for an out of warranty repair on the iPhone 10 and she's been wanting a new phone anyway so we traded in the broken phone for an iPhone 11 Pro on a day with 6% cash back using Apple Pay on the Apple card so that's good he says it got interesting when I tried to use iMazing to restore her backup to the new phone the Mac mini displayed a message that the USB device was pulling too much power and shut off the USB ports on the Mac mini this of course corrupted the phone so it got the icons about plugging in a cable and restoring factory default so it went into restore mode or whatever that is he says I tried this several times I spent an hour on the phone with Apple support with the net result being that I had to take it back to the Apple store for them to restore the base image I was shocked when they pulled out a MacBook Air running on battery connected a USB cable to the phone and did a simple iTunes process to restore the phone my theory which I was unwilling to test because I wasn't going to fix a working phone until it was broken again that's smart he says is that using the USB-C to lightning cable the phone was pulling power like it was connected to its charger which is more than the Mac mini is designed to furnish to its USB ports when it was connected to the MacBook Air via a USB-A cable it pulled a more restrained power level he says I think it might have been able to do the I think I might have been able to do the restore if I'd used one of the Mac mini USB-A ports he says I was also thinking about using the camera connection kit dongle yet you guys have discussed I could have plugged the phone charger into the lightning port to power the phone and use the USB connection to get the data signal et cetera et cetera he says I finally moved her data to the new iPhone in the simplest way take a picture of the little blue circle to pair the phones to each other and leave them next to each other for a while to let them do the transfer themselves so yeah that is a good way to do it but this did get us thinking and so we tested this because I brought some USB-A and USB-C power meters with us to CES and one night we sat in the room and went through all this so using my I was using my iPad I believe to test this just to see truly how much and it was a low charged iPad because the amount of power that it will draw is inversely related to how much of a charge what the where the battery percentage is on the phone so the lower the battery percentage on the device the more power it will slurp through as it gets closer and closer it starts pulling less power so that you don't overheat the battery and blow things up or cause damage wouldn't necessarily blow it up but it could so doing this testing we saw some interesting things John on USB-A with direct power we were getting let's see 2.2 amps at 5 volts so essentially 10 watts right John if the if my math is right ok and then using a USB hub we were only getting 1 amp at 5 volts so the hub was sort of dumbing things down this is all over USB-A to so 1 amp at 5 volts would be 5 watts so ok USB-A the most that we could get this thing to draw was 10 watts of power and depending on how you connected it either 5 watts or 10 watts which makes sense that's what we've seen over the years that's normal USB-A ok now USB-C to lightning things got very interesting going direct and when I say direct power I mean direct from the from like a charger on the wall and then the other was a USB hub connected USB-A hub connected because I had my MacBook my 2018 MacBook Air which doesn't have USB-A ports so I was using various different USB hubs so direct power over USB-C we were able to get again and this is using a USB-C to lightning cable so with direct power from a power delivery charger we got 2 amps but at 14 and a half volts so you know 29 watts 30 watts so that's significantly more than 10 watts that we were getting from direct power with USB-A but from the laptop what we drew was 2.3 amps at 5 volts so 10 watts ish but that's double what we were pulling with USB-A from the laptop so it's entirely possible I've not tested this on the Mac mini because we didn't have a Mac mini with us but but it's entirely possible that pulling 10 watts of power out of the USB ports on your Mac mini especially sustained while you were connected and trying to transfer data and do all that stuff might be more there might be your theory might hold water rustle but yeah which is interesting it's great having these little power meters USB power meters because you can just see all this stuff in real time but yeah 10 watts we could not get any device to pull more than 5 watts using USB-A from the MacBook but we definitely could obviously get it to pull 10 watts when using USB-C direct so I don't know what do you think John? I like USB-C power delivery. I was testing this at some point with my phone to see which method of charging the iPhone 8 is the quickest and the quickest I think in many cases or all cases is USB-C with power delivery right so we would call that's what I was calling direct here so direct to A charger on the wall that supports PD right and most well USB-C chargers support power delivery but not all there are some that don't and they supported at different levels there's a lot of them that support it only at like 18 watts as opposed to you know there's some that'll go up to just shy of 100 although do 100 but the MacBook Pro only takes at it like 98 or something like that because of the battery size but yeah yeah I think the order I got was USB-C was the fastest then USB-A and then G right and whatever numbers you get on these you know on these little power meters the inline USB power meters we get I think with G basically I was talking to some people at CES to confirm this but basically it's that you'll lose 50% of that to the to heat in the process of getting the power over the G coil so yeah whatever you measured being pulled with G half of that is about what's going to your phone so right yeah which is because I think fast charge with the iPhone is 7 watts I think right 7 and a half yeah yeah for fast supposedly fast were you were you ever able to see like you know 10 plus or 15 on a fast charge G charger being pulled because if we're using the 50% number that's what it would that's what it would take right so right yeah no I forget what I got but when I did the power delivery I think it was like over 10 watts it was like 20 watts or something I don't know yeah try it again well it depends on your the device that you're charging the charge state of that device as we said the lower the more juice it needs the more it will pull because I like I noticed you know this thing was pulling 30 watts when we started the iPad Pro that I was testing with was pulling 30 watts when we started but you know it's pulling a lot of power and so it's charging the battery quickly and we started with it at maybe 12% of the battery I'd intentionally let it get low for these tests but by the time it got up to 50% it was only pulling maybe 20 watts of power so your iPhone I don't think I haven't tested but I don't think the iPhone will ever pull I don't think it would ever pull 30 even the charging brick that comes with the USB-C based iPad Pros the current crop of iPad Pros is only an 18 watt charger if memory serves so they're not even trying to give you more than that which is which is interesting so yeah I love this stuff I love getting geeky because it you know it's what we do speaking of getting geeky Matt writes I'm getting ready to upgrade my late 2012 21 inch iMac and I'm favoring the 2018 Mac Mini as a reasonably user upgradeable option says I would buy it with the maxed out CPU but with the minimum RAM and SSD and that configuration is currently 929 US dollars on the refurb store says I've been running my iMac from an externally enclosed 2.5 inch SSD boot drive for years with great results and that's obviously what I would be looking to do with the mini my question is how comfortable would you guys be using an NVMe with an enclosure as an external boot drive in theory this should allow for much faster storage since it wouldn't be going through a SATA interface but I'm not sure if these enclosures are designed for this kind of usage any thoughts or recommendations and yeah absolutely so first of all yes the the mini like for your uses and the way you want to do it I think the mini that you talked about is the right way to go definitely by the maxed out CPU because you can't change that after the fact with the mini you can change the RAM it's not technically user serviceable but it's sort of I mean it's do a totally doable as I have not been into the mini yet to do it but people say it's a 20 to 30 minute tour so not terrible right and then the SSD going external that's I think that's good I I would have hedged my bets towards a 256 gig internal not the 128 gig internal just to have a little more breathing room inside so that I kind of have some down the road flexibility but what you're talking about is totally doable and for an external NVMe drive the something like the OWC Envoy Pro EX is a good solution right and because it's Thunderbolt 3 the I'm trying to think of the I've got a link here but I mean I think it does like 2800 megabytes per second with the right NVMe drive in there so I will look it up while we're talking here Envoy Pro EX I have a link but it doesn't want to work now it works yeah 2500 megabytes a second I say megabits before if I did please excuse me 2500 megabytes per second it connects you know it's using an NVMe drive so that's fast and then Thunderbolt 3 direct so that's fast and it's portable and you know all of that good stuff some bus powered right and you can buy it I think you can buy it empty maybe no maybe not I think you can buy no but you know a 480 gig version of this is 199 1 terabyte 279 2 terabyte 499 so already that's way cheaper than what you would pay Apple for that kind of storage and you get the benefit of being able to sort of upgrade and do what you want to do so yeah yes John you're breathing heavy it tells me that you've got a thought on this yeah I was searching for one and actually they have one so if I was just doing if I already had an NVMe SSD which I've had them in the past because you can share in your Synology but I see this one on Amazon Sobrent now I already have some enclosure some of these guys okay and they got one here that's yeah 45 bucks okay just for an Amazon and it says Amazon's choice got it people like it got it got it all right yeah so if you've already got the drive yeah you're right I don't see if you wanted to do this via USB and doing it over USB 3 you would be at you know probably 500 megabytes per second as your as your speed not 2500 but that's really fast I mean you know your boot drive in your prior machine isn't anywhere near that speed SSD versus rotational is going to make the biggest difference in the speed of the data transfer for normal usage you might not even really notice a difference from 500 to 2500 certainly if you bench test it you know you will benchmark it rather you will and if you're doing a lot of large files or whatever sure but otherwise you know the USB C1 might work there's the the OWC Envoy Pro for 69 bucks empty and then you can put a way to so you know there's lots of options but yeah yeah yeah good I like it I like it it's good stuff it's fun this is what I love about about the you know everything speaking of OWC I spoke to OWC and I actually put up a little video of Larry showing off their Mercury Elite Pro Thunderbolt 3 dock which is freaking awesome by the way so I'll put a link to that video but you know I've had this problem recording the show where my USB interface will just reset right especially those of you in the live stream but even those of you on the regular stream like you've had to hear us talk about it even though we chopped out those parts out of the show if it takes a long time and it's been inconsistent well when I was talking to Larry we were talking about he's like oh yeah he had a problem he just happened to mention it where we saw that an iPhone using one of the newer LTE bands would interfere with the Thunderbolt 2 bus on that dock and it would make it look like you had a power reset and he's like so we had to like do a lot of testing and he's like now of course you know they've put shielding into their Thunderbolt 2 docks he wasn't sure if anybody any other vendors had put shielding in because you know he's OWC but you know they figured it out and this is one of the things we love about them is that the folks at OWC are obsessive about this stuff and it comes from the top Larry loves to be obsessive about it too he's a geek like us and as he's telling me this my eyes are opening wider and wider like wait a minute that's my problem when my phone is too close to my Thunderbolt 2 dock it's one of the ones because you know I've had it forever and so mine doesn't have that shielding and I've never sent it back to get the shielding put on or anything because I didn't know it was a thing and so I don't like to have my phone close to me anyway when I'm recording because you know I'm recording I don't need my phone but sometimes I'll grab it or whatever and then it gets closer and closer to the dock and so our working theory is that that's what the problem has been so I will endeavor to keep it from the dock but fascinating right so I know it's crazy let's see Mercury Elite Pro was the thing I mentioned right so I will I'll put that video on the in the show notes Larry talks through it's such a great little dock it's a Thunderbolt 3 dock and a dual drive raid all in one and it starts at $299.99 empty right and then you can put drives in it but like for a Thunderbolt 3 dock that's already like you know you're not paying very much to add raid capabilities and all that external storage and you know possibility and all that stuff so it's pretty cool alright John where are we here we have time for one more and I think Darius will probably actually no we're gonna do Eric we'll do Darius next week Eric's question is a good one I think because Eric asks he says I use a utility called IPA palette which is a menu bar item that appears under the flag icon when installed it's one of the best ways he says of finding and using obscure characters from the international phonetic alphabet IPA he says which I happen to use constantly in my job he says here's the thing the app is installed inside home library input methods and he says the app was updated recently and when I try to install the update I ran into a weird issue the app can't install into the input methods folder because for some reason this folder and only this folder has the little red circle with the white horizontal bar icon on it that says I don't have permission to even open this folder he says though I have full admin privileges on my Mac and I'm running the most up-to-date version of Catalina do you have any idea what's going on he says unless I can get access to this folder I don't think I can update my IPA palette alright so digging into this John the first thing I did was looked on my system to see if for whatever reason that folder is like off limits to us as users in general and the answer is no I can I can open mine I could put things in it I have full right access to it so I took a look at the permissions for that folder and sure enough my user which on my Mac that I tested is called Dave has read and write privileges and then everyone which is everyone else the group of everyone has no access so I trumped the group of everyone and therefore I can read and write no problem so I'm not sure what Eric says but when you're troubleshooting something like this that's the first thing to do is highlight in this case the folder but it might be a file highlight file go to the file menu and go to get info and take a look at the bottom you might have to twist open sharing and permissions there so that you can see what the list is and then it also gives you a summary of it where on mine it says you can read and write which is a great sort of helpful thing you can also that's weird because so everything on my system appears identical except on my system Dave yes it says you have custom access oh interesting so you've messed with it no oh on my night it says I have custom access to on this machine here which is interesting oh this is when you post it says you can read and write so that's kind of weird there's a difference I'm on my studio machine here which was I'm trying to think was this one you folks are going to have to help me remember no this was a fresh install of Catalina and there was no migration assistant here I did migration assistant on my machine in the office where it says you can read and write but but in either case like all you know all three of the computers were talking about yours and the two of mine on Catalina we have the ability to to to you know to read and write to this folder so with that in mind you should be able to read and write to this folder Eric and you can't so after testing this you could look there and maybe make a change to the sharing and permissions it might be as simple as highlighting yourself you might have to need to hit the lock in the lower right hand corner to give yourself permission but then you might need you might be able to highlight yourself and just change your privilege to read and write and that might do it if that doesn't do it though delete the folder sometimes the finder often times in fact when you try to delete a folder that you don't have access to the finder will ask you as an administrator to authenticate and when you do that then it sort of overrides everything yes Catalina makes some changes to what you have right and write access to and don't but that's part of the system volume this is not this is part of your user folder so it's it's it should be separate from any of that so just try to delete the folder my guess is you will be able to with a proper authentication and then just recreate it input space methods with capital I capital M and I think that would that would solve it that's what I would do that's that's sort of the path I would take they can either delete it from the GUI you know highlighted and hold down command delete or drag it to the trash or drag it to the trash or you may have to go you may have to go into the command line pseudo space RM space well yeah but that I mean the finder is usually pretty good at saying you don't have access it'll prompt you if you need special let's yeah let's sudo up here and and do it so yeah but yeah you're right and and there's and then there's third-party apps that that'll help you delete too and of course because we're in the midst of recording the show I can't think of on top of my head but it's weird though I wonder if I can't because well no it's working I mean it's working the way the icon says right he cannot make changes to it so it's not stale that's that's that's as it is oh wait wait oh no we don't have a picture of this okay yeah we do have a picture of his icon we don't have a picture of his get info so right right okay so I bet you yeah he doesn't have yeah but so you might be as simple as just changing him you might not even have to delete anything but but deleting it would be the next sort of the next step yeah yeah craziness but that's you know that's what we deal with here we have a lot more stuff to go through but but we just can't do it today because we're at the end so I guess we're gonna have to do this again next week how's that sound to you ah okay all right well there we are we'll bring the band in because they're uh they're getting warm out in the sun actually it might be raining out there now I know it was supposed to rain a lot here today so it's nice though because all this we had like for whatever reason during the last storm it just kept like coming and stopping coming stopping and it we wound up with like these just mounds of ice in the middle of our driveway that obviously we just these ice flows that we couldn't get rid of and so 60 degrees and a little bit of rain takes care of it in short order which is what which is great because what happens is well while we were away at CES John we were getting sort of daily dustings of snow and the problem is when you have these ice flows and then you get you know a quarter inch of snow that covers the entire driveway when you're walking across it you don't see where the ice is and you wind up falling because it's ice with a thin layer of snow on it and especially once you've got some snow sort of stuck in the the treads of your shoes no bueno so it's nice to have that go away all right Mr. Braun is dealing with whatever he picked up on it during his travels and I'm dealing with whatever I picked up a month and a half ago is that the the crazy cold years is I muted I mean as you probably know that I muted when I had to let's get a hawk a hawk up a loogie oh I'm sorry say that why why folks why want to give you the visual on that thanks yeah no we appreciate it post a picture hmm yeah okay so you can check us out on twitter at Matt geek I don't know what you're gonna find if you check out John F. Braun on Twitter I do know what you'll find if you check out Dave Hamilton on Twitter this week of course probably a lot of stuff about the late great Neil Peirce passing then thank you Neil for everything we'll talk more about that on gig gab tomorrow my podcast that I do with Paul Kent for working musicians so go listen to that if you're if you're into that sort of thing thanks to everyone who listened thanks to all of you sent in your comments and such to feedback at Mackie gab dot com that is feedback at Mackie gab dot com that is feedback at Mackie gab dot com unless you are a Mackie gab premium contributor in which case premium at Mackie gab dot com is for you thanks to again all of our CES sponsors amazing other world computing text expander carbon copy cloner and thanks to thanks to all of you for listening again of course and thanks to all of our sponsors for this episode which of course include simply safe dot com slash Mackie gab mint mobile dot com slash M G G lino dot com slash M G G and bare bones dot com of course others in the marketplace include hero dot com slash M G smile software dot com slash five more more it's good thank you so much for everything folks and we will see you well next week as we decided because that's just how it goes but between now and then do us a favor send in your questions collect your tips send those to us send us cool stuff found all of that stuff have fun while you're doing it all but no matter what make sure that you follow this one piece of advice that's universal don't get caught made up