 The Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab Episode 802 for Monday, February 17th, 2020. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in questions, cool stuff found, tips, all sorts of things. We try to get your answers to your questions. We share your tips, your cool stuff found, the goal being that every single one of us learns at least how many, how many. I know you were about to say it, weren't you, in your car right there. It's perfect. You. Five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors include Barebones.com, LegalZoom.com with promo code MGG, SimplySafe.com slash Mac GeekGab. I know that's different than the MGG thing. Honestly, that's my fault when they asked me for the coupon code. I don't know why I said, yeah, use Mac GeekGab. I've never said that in my life in, in, you know, almost 15 years. I don't know why I did, but I did. So I couldn't ask him to change it after that was on me. So SimplySafe.com slash Mac GeekGab and a new one feels, F-E-A-L-S.com slash MGG. I've got actually a little story about that, that hopefully might, might be helpful to some folks. We'll talk more in detail about each of those shortly. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here still in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Oh, great. Good. Last with the new toy, man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this thing. That's good. I'm glad. I'm glad, man. That's great. Yeah, it was a long time coming. Yeah. Of course, they've released the refurbs now, but I know I should I return it because technically I could have returned this and gotten a refurb. But I'm like, have you called customer support and seen like it? Well, they just give you like maybe a store credit or something like that. I mean, you know, I know it's a couple of bucks, but it's a couple of bucks. Like it to me, I would I would ask the question. I'm kind of with you that if I had bought and then, you know, whatever week or two later refurbs came out, I don't know that I'd want to go through the hassle of of that process for just a couple hundred bucks. But the phone call, why not? Right. If we don't ask, nothing happens. So I don't know. True. Maybe. Maybe. It's worth it. Yeah. But they, you know, I got credit for my trade in. Yeah. You know, yeah. Everything went according to plan. So that's good. That's good. That's good. Well, and quite honestly, knowing, you know, how Murphy lives on our respective favorites lists, we used to say speed dial, but nobody knows what speed dial is anymore. It makes perfect sense that after you buy your laptop, that they immediately appear on refurbs. I mean, that's basically what happened with my hair last year. I think it I think it was slightly. I had maybe three weeks as opposed to what a week and a half for you. But still, like it was the same thing. I was like, OK, you know what? I needed it. I had it for CES. I'm fine. I don't need to worry about it. So, yeah, yeah. And I'm learning all about USBC. Yes. Yeah. You get to write, you get to experience it now. And in all its glory and Thunderbolt 3. So that's good. That's good. Cool. All right. Let's do we usually start with tips or whatever. So let's start with some questions today. Dudley says after I upgraded to Catalina, which changed my hard drive to APFS, I became aware that I could no longer use SuperDuper to make a bootable backup of my drive onto my Drobo, since my Drobo doesn't support APFS. Drobo has not been able to tell me if they will support APFS in the future. So I'm going to have to find another way to store my bootable backups. I currently have 16 terabytes of space on my Drobo. What are your recommendations about the best systems that would allow me to create a RAID drive that I could partition for my bootable backup and also for other storage? Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is the Thunderbay from OWC, right? Like that's almost immediately the thing that you know, that comes to mind because it allows you to create, you can do anything with the, well, I don't want to say anything, but you can either do a RAID or just treat it like a JBOT or just a bunch of disks. You can, depending on the model, some of them have hardware RAID, but most of the time you're doing software RAID anyway, which is better when it comes to the, when it comes to letting the operating system manage it and all of that so that you're not left with some incompatibility issue in the future, that sort of thing. So that's really kind of where I start with this question is going to the Thunderbay and kind of going from there. And they've got various models of the Thunderbay. I don't think he said which computer it is, so I don't know if it's a Thunderbolt 3 computer or Thunderbolt 2 computer or whatever, but that's where I would start with that. And that way you're not left with a proprietary storage scenario like you have with the Trouble and left to them to decide if and when you get to move to APFS on that, you can just do it and you're good to go. So that's where I would start with that. Thoughts, John? So wait, so will the Thunderbay, so you could format it as APFS? I don't see why you can't. I mean, the Thunderbay is just a, it's an external box that lets you put multiple disks in it, and then you're using software, either soft RAID or Mac OS' own built-in RAID engine to put that together, so why couldn't it be done with APFS? Maybe soft RAID doesn't support APFS yet, but I mean, I think Apple's stuff would. Right? Okay. Yeah, I'm trying to think, does soft RAID, soft RAID APFS, I'm looking on their page right now, soft RAID 5.8.1 is required for Catalina. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. And they say that, okay, soft RAID 6.0 beta, which is coming soon, will support APFS. So you can either use APFS with soft RAID or you can just format with Apple's RAID and I'm presuming that, I don't have one of those to test, but I'm presuming that Apple's RAID supports APFS already, and that's why soft RAID is so close. So yeah, that's where I would go with it. And again, that way you're not kind of left with your stuff in a third-party enclave, if you will, which is sort of in the issue with Drobo all the way along is that when there's something like this, you sort of left them to help troubleshoot and everything because you can't really poke in there either. There's no third-party tools or anything like that. So yeah, there you go. Any thoughts? Okay, no, I'm with you on that. Okay, cool. Well, just my current thing, yeah, none of that I think about it a bit. Trying to think, but nothing happens. Yeah, I mean, currently what I do for a bootable backup is CCC to external APFS drive. Right, but just- Kind of what you're suggesting. Yes, but you're backing up to a single APFS drive Dudley is wanting to have some kind of fault tolerance or multi-drive thing. So yeah, so yeah, cool. Yeah, and Brian is pointing out that the Thunderbade, I thought it came with soft rate. Maybe it comes with soft rates, soft rate light, not soft rate full. So maybe that's the difference, Brian and Roe, but he's saying it doesn't come with the full soft rate, which I think is right, but yeah. And then there's the, while we're talking about the various Thunderbades, there is the new, oh, I'm trying to find it here. The, oh man, the Thunderbade Flex 8, which is sort of a monster thing, but comes with all kinds of cool stuff. So there's different comes with, yeah, all sorts of new things and adds the huge, you can do like eight drives and things like that in there. And it comes with some docks and ports on the front, which is great. I don't know, it's fun, right? Right? Yeah, I'll have to get one, build my own raid. Build your, well, that's what it is. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Looking for the other thing, they showed me at CES. The Mercury Elite Pro Thunderbolt 3 dock adds raid ports and power all in one, but that's just a two drive unit, but it's essentially a dock, a Thunderbolt dock with gigabit ethernet and display port and a couple of USB-A ports, all kind of in one, which is cool. So, and I think it's got an SD card port on the front and you know, so anyway, I'll put a link to that in the show notes, it's pretty good. So, OWC Mercury Elite Pro, we'll put a link to the little video that Larry did for us at CES. All right, cool. Speaking of Catalina, Felipe has a question for us. Felipe says, could you discuss the best practices for updating from Mojave to Catalina? He says, I know that a lot of folks have done it, but a lot of us have not, but it seems that Catalina has stabilized and based on my experience, both with my personal machines and with all the machines that I manage, I would agree with this. There are people out there that will still tell you and because they are running into problems that Catalina has not stabilized. So, bear that all in mind, but Felipe has proposed a process. So, he's running Go64 to determine what, if anything, won't work, right? And then he sort of goes through this whole big process of making sure that everything is backed up and all of that. I'll kind of cut to the chase on this and then you can discuss your best practice, John. The second thing I would do is run the MacUpdater client, which has become my new favorite app to have running and we'll put a link to that at macupdater.net to scour the drive and find anything that needs to be updated. I would do that first. Just make sure, so you've run Go64 to make sure that there's no 32-bit code left on your machine. Then you run MacUpdater to make sure everything's up to date, even the 64-bit stuff. You want to have the latest versions. Then make a clone and or a backup or both. And then do the update. That's, and I would do the update over the top. If you're doing it on the same machine, you, well, I think you did migration assistant, John, but well, you've done both, right? Because you've upgraded machines and then you've migrated machines. So, what was your path from Mojave? And would you do it again? Would you advise it for the next round? What I did at one point, yeah. So, once I upgraded, I think as it was mentioned, the fact that one of my machines, my old machine, which is gone. Right, right. But it was just acting up. So, one thing was yet to reformat the APFS and then restore, because yeah, I was just having. All sorts of issues. Sure. So, if you haven't done that already, that would be one thing to do. But the rest I did pretty much what you did is clear out, make sure I'm aware of the apps that probably will not run and go 64 is a good tool for that. Yeah. And then do the updates. Yeah. And I like your strategy, because it's quicker than running each app and seeing if it thinks it needs to be updated. Well, that's the thing is I never remember to run every app, right? And so, Mac Updater, it's great. I just, you know, my problem is there's some apps, well, some apps that I don't run all the time, when I run them, it's when I need to use them. And so, to run an app that I haven't run in, you know, a few months or whatever, and the first thing it does is say, hey, before you do the thing that you need to do right now, do you want to upgrade? And it's like, if I have the option to say no in that moment, I will say no in that moment. I will go, you know, say no, I don't want to upgrade right now. I know that what I want to do in this app works because I've done it before and I go do it and then I quit and I don't update. Now, some apps are nice. They'll say, do you want to update on quit? That I kind of like, right? It's like, let me do my thing. And then when I'm done with you, then you can do your thing. You know, I kind of like that. But most apps don't do that. And even still, it's sort of a frustrating thing. So I like to coalesce them all together and MacUpdate or let's me do that. Because it's like, okay, now I'm like waiting on hold or maybe I'm on a conference call and it's not requiring my full engagement. And I was like, okay, well, now I can go do my updates and be efficient about it. So that's... And the other thing I would do and I'm actually in progress doing this, as you recall, I don't know if people were aware of this, but I accidentally, so I made a full backup of my old drive before I upgraded because there are some apps, specifically Steam apps that will not run under Catalina. And they tell you as much when you update the client. And it's like, oh man. So I maintained, so I have a backup of the pre-Catalina drive, a full backup so I can play the game. Eventually, I think I want to image that and put it in parallels to make it a more elegant solution. You can't. You have to, there is... No, I'd have to install right and then do a migration. You, yes, that's right. If you want to take your old setup and have it virtualized in like parallels or VMware, at the moment there is no grab this image and make it a parallels or VMware virtual machine right now. You have to do exactly what you said, which is start, create a new one and then use the migration assistant from the new virtual machine to slurp the data from your old volume. And then that will work, but it's just a multi-step process. So just everybody bear that in mind. They are both aware of this. Parallels and VMware are both aware of this, but it's never been an issue before until now. You know, this 32-bit thing sort of made it an issue. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah, right. Moving on. I like it. That's good. You want to take us to Mike, John? Yes. Cool. Where is Mike? Ah, okay. All right, here we go. I have a question about hard drives. Maybe conceptually would include SSDs, but this is about spinning drives specifically. As you and probably other listeners, I have grown a collection of external hard drives to see what's on them and begin the process of streamlining my data and drives. My issue is that early on, I didn't have a good system of making the drives when I got them with the date, so I wouldn't know how old they are. I know the drive sizes and speeds, but not how old the drives are. I also know that some of the drives were less used on a regular basis than others, lower total lifetime spins, et cetera. Or even my own drives, versus drives given to me from others. My question is essentially, if you know of a way, software or otherwise to evaluate one drive versus another to know best guess its relative life expectancy. We've all learned from your show and conversations about drives and backups. And that's a matter of when, if and not when a drive will fail. That's right. Yup, somebody's listening. That's good. Yeah, I know the easiest thing would just buy new drives, but budget does not permit that. Well, here's what I would do. I love this question just because it's something near and dear to my heart. So every drive that I've run into, Dave, supports something called smart, self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology. And that can take two forms. One form is not very useful. The other is absolutely relevant to this discussion. One is that you get a smart status, which is reported by things like disutility. And it'll say verified or I guess not verified, but I've never seen that. But the other thing that smart does is that it maintains oodles of parameters about pretty much everything your drive has done. One relevant one here would be power on hours. Okay, so that'll tell you how many hours the drive has been spinning. That's probably one good parameter. Another is, and this could tell you the relative health of the drive, media and data integrity errors. That should be zero. If it's not, then that is another sign of what a drive is dying. So how do you get these values? Well, one, so starting at the bottom here, you could get a package manager and obtain something called smart mon tools. And then you run that on the drive and it'll spit out all the parameters and you can look through them. And that's a command line utility, is that right? Correct. Okay, interesting. Yeah. Yeah, so that's one. Now, another option would be you may want to get smart reporter. So smart reporter's utility that I've been using and it actually has smart mon tools built into it. Okay. So if you run smart reporter and then dig in, you'll find a section, I think it's advanced functions or something where you can basically say run smart mon tools and give me all the stats. So you can look at them that way. That's a little easier way. And you can also schedule. Smart mon tools I think is from the same folks that make MacUpdater, right? Corecode.io. Oh, okay, I didn't know that. Yeah. All right, but the question still here is, you know, I mean, some of the values, it's pretty obvious that, you know, if they're not zero, it means the drive is failing like the one I mentioned. But you may want to kick it up a notch here. And we like something from binary fruit called drive DX and they know what values are. So first off, they offer what they call an overall health rating. Okay. And you'll see it could be 100% or it could be less. And then they actually have a section that lists what they call important health indicators for the drive that are ones that indicate the drive is dying and I think they then, you know, weave them together and that gives you your overall health rating. There looks to be a free trial. Otherwise, a single license is $19.99 and $39.99 for a family license. And that would, that would be the quickest way to get this information on each of your drives. Yeah, I like drive DX because it takes the data that smart reporter or smart mon tools. And if I said smart mon tools was from core code, I meant smart reporter, but I'm not, I can't remember what I said. Good thing I recorded it, we can check later. But drive DX, you know, sort of filters the data, parses it and comes and gives you its own, you know, metric that's like, yeah, you should worry. No, you shouldn't worry. Now there's no, you should always back up because you never know. But this, yeah, I like drive DX for that. It's pretty good. That's pretty good. There's no magic. And we have another suggestion from the chat room here, which is at metgeekapp.com slash stream. Correct. That's where it is. Kiwi Graham says TechTool Pro also gives you a dandy chart that shows this stuff. So. I like it. Cool. I don't think I've ever used TechTool Pro or haven't used it in a long time. It's been a long time for me too. It's one of those things that's always sort of on my radar. But yeah, we should dig back into that. That would be good. That would be good. Cool, man. Yeah. And actually I haven't done this in a while because yeah, like most people I have a stack of old two and a half inch drives from devices in the past. And sometimes I'll put them in either my Drobo or my Synology when a drive dies. But that hasn't happened in a while. It will happen, right? Just, we don't know when. Cool. All right, while we're on the subject of drives, Wilco has a question that I think is gonna turn into a bit of a geek challenge. He says, in a recent episode, Dave mentioned not using FileVault on his iMac since the chance of it falling into the wrong hands is small and indeed in that case, if someone comes in my office and takes it, I have bigger problems. He says, however, I have the following scenario. Same new iMac 2019 and he says, and I decided to save some money by choosing the lowest RAM in SSD, eight gigs and 256. He says, at the same time, I bought some memory from OWC and their Envoy Pro EX one terabyte external Thunderbolt 3 SSD. He says, not everything in my home folder fits on the internal. So I had to find a solution for that. Two options are creating folders on the external and using SIM links to point to those or relocating the home folder. And so he says, I opted for the second since it seems cleaner. Okay, fine. He says, after a bit of messing around, that worked nicely. He says, he found a way to get it there, which is great. Created the home folder first and then copied everything visible and invisible from the current home folder to it and then created a test account with admin rights so that he could make the change without messing with things. So that I like that path. That's good. He says, now, since these are external drives, I wanted to put File Vault on them since they are much easier to grab than the complete system and they do contain all my personal data. Aha, okay. However, after I had done that, the system when starting up only requests one password for File Vault for the startup disk, the internal SSD. When logging in, Mac OS does not ask for the File Vault password of the external that contains my home folder, which he says, by the way, is the same password. And thus cannot find my home folder since it's on an encrypted disk that's not yet mounted. Instead, it gives some login error and gives up. He says, for now, I have decrypted the external SSD where my home folder resides to be able to log in and work normally. But I wonder if there's another solution or should I solder the SSD to the back of my Mac? Well, so that's really interesting. Yeah, that's, huh, huh, I don't know. You know, I've played with external encrypted drives but not in a while. I know you have, John, a little bit, but my past experience was that they did auto decrypt when mounted as long as I chose to store their, oh, now I'm answering my own question. As long as I chose to store the password in my login key chain, but my login key chain is stored in my home folder, then herein is the rub, right? So does, but maybe, maybe not. I'm wondering if the order of operations matters. You know, I've always encrypted disks while logged into my main account. And I wonder if that's what Wilco did here. Format the external, copy the data, create the user account, log in, then encrypt, as opposed to encrypting before copying everything over. Because that way you're encrypting while the user account is there. So I would, I wonder if now that you've decrypted it, if you were to re-encrypt now, would Mac OS do something to solve this problem at login? I'm not certain of that, because again, the key chain I believe is stored on what would be your encrypted drive. But I feel like doing it in this order gives Mac OS the opportunity to say, aha, this should be, you know, stored and maybe it will give you that option. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. I wonder, the other way to look at this is to have, to leave the home folder on the boot drive and then store the things that don't fit in the home folder on the external, which was sort of plan A that Wilco walked through. And that's the solution I've always gone with, and it's worked well for me. I kind of figure, you know, things like this that you might not be able to anticipate are gonna come up when you're doing, you know, when you have the home folder relocated somewhere else. Yeah, I don't know, geek challenge, maybe feedback at macgeekyeb.com. Do you have any thoughts on this, John? Did you say feedback at macgeekyeb.com? I sure did, yeah. Feedback at macgeekyeb.com. Any thoughts before we send them to the emails, John? I'm trying to find, I thought there was something that you could do on the command line, which would make it so a drive would not prompt you. Hmm, password. I know you can, I know there's a command you can do so that on the next reboot, it like auto decrypts itself, but I don't know if that's something that can persist. So, yeah, yeah. Oh, another option, this is interesting. Paul Frans in the chat room suggested not just moving the home folder to the external drive, but moving everything to the external drive but moving everything and booting from the external drive. And in that case, then you could get that as it boots, it asks you to decrypt the drive and now the drive's decrypted, so when it comes time to mount your home folder, it's already passed that point. That's another, that's sort of plan C there. I like it. Yeah. Huh. Huh, interesting. Well. Could you write, I don't know if they have an action for this, an automator script that could mount the drive for you? Well, but if the home folder's on the drive, then where does the automator script run from? Or even a term, yeah, this gets interesting. I don't know, we'll have to think about it. Well, we'll talk about this. I know we will revisit this in a future episode. Speaking of revisiting in a future episode, we had some question, we had a question in the last episode about tracking subscriptions and what to use for that, and we got a ton of responses. So I wanna go through those, but first, John, if it's all the same to you, I would like to talk about our first two sponsors for today. Okay. All right, our first sponsor for today is SimplySafe, where at simplysafe.com slash Mac Geek Gab, you'll get free shipping and a 60 day risk free trial of this fantastic home security, really home protection is the way I like to think of this. Sure, it will protect against security events, like people breaking in or people being in your home or office, because that's where I have mindset up is in the office, but it will also look for things like they've got freeze sensors, which you know is important to us. 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So you gotta check this out, it's super easy to set up, I was really happy to be able to get mine. Smart stuff, you gotta check it out. As I said, visit SimplySafe.com slash Mac GeekGab, you've got nothing to lose because you get free shipping and a 60 day risk free trial. So go now and be sure you go to SimplySafe, S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E.com slash Mac GeekGab so that they know you got sent by us. And I know that's a different URL than you're used to for us, but that's okay. You can remember it, or you can just visit MacGeekGab.com and click to it from there. But that's SimplySafe.com slash Mac GeekGab, our thanks to SimplySafe for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is a little different sponsor, but very relevant to the show. People might remember about 13 years ago, if you've listened that long, I suffered from Bell's palsy. And that was very obvious to people who were listening to the show because it caused some changes to the way that I spoke for a short period of time. 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I'll slide back over into the left seat here or right seat depending on how you have your headphones, folks. As I mentioned last week, we talked about, we asked about what to use to track subscriptions. And we got a lot of responses. Many of them focused on one thing, but there were enough that sort of represented everything. The first that we got was from Allison. And she noted that she did a video for Don McAllister's screencast online about track my subs to track subscriptions. It, ironically, is a subscription service. So you pay for this, but the idea is that by tracking your subscriptions, you'll probably save more money than it costs you. And it's a handy little thing. So that certainly is one of them to check out. The most popular one that we heard from by far was Bobby, this app. And it's an iOS app. It's at bobbyapp.co. Joe, John, Gary, Guido. Many Scots and many Adams, all recommended Bobby app. So thank you to all of you. And that one seems to be the one that everybody kind of uses. So we will put a link to that in the show notes too. And then finally, we heard from Ben. And I think one other, if I'm not mistaken, about True Bill, he says, really, this one, he says, he hasn't looked at it or hasn't used it, but seems like that would be a good option. And then he also pointed us to a Macworld article about this that talks about it in kind of a different way. A tech hive that's at techhive.com, which is still IDG and all that good stuff. But it sort of walks you through checking it out. And it does mention True Bill in there as well. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. But it's a lot. What do you think, John? Have you dug into any of these since then or no? Not really. No, okay. I know, it's getting crazy. Yeah, it's, there's a lot, you know? And that's, I don't know, gotta figure it out somehow. The other thing I want to, so thank you to all of you for sending in all your stuff and thoughts and all of this. Hopefully, I think I'm gonna try using Bobby simply because it seems like the one that so many of you are actually using and enjoying and all of that. So I'm gonna give that a shot and see how it is. I probably would have already done it, but I've been traveling and even right now I'm home sandwiched between two trips. So life's a little nuts, but it's on my list. So I'm gonna check it out. The other thing that I wanna do, and I actually had the opportunity to stay with Alison, Sheridan and Steve Sheridan from Podfeat from the Nozillicast. And we were talking about this too, I need a way to track what shows I'm watching with everything sort of spread out across these disparate services. I had solved this problem years ago with TiVo, right? And what TiVo did for me, of course all my shows only came in through over the air or maybe cable or, I was gonna say Cadillac because I was conflating cable and satellite dish. But yeah, came through those sorts of sources that we didn't have any streaming sources 20 years ago when I started with TiVo. And so it all made sense. And I moved having to think about what is on at what time to my now playing list or my shows list now that exists in TiVo. Well, now that things are so spread out, TiVo does some of that, but not enough of it so that there are shows that I'm watching. Like the other night I got home, I'd been away for a few days, Lisa and I were like, what should we watch? I don't know, so we found something to watch. And as we were going to bed, I'm like, oh crap, we could have watched Picard. Like we're really excited. We've really been enjoying watching Picard, but we forget about it, you know, because it's over there on that CBS thing that we pay for by the way. But you know, and then the same is true with stuff that's in Netflix. It's like, oh yeah, I gotta remember to go to Netflix. And then Netflix wants to tell me about other things and I gotta dig and okay, continue watching for Dave. Okay, yeah, that, and the same with HBO and you know, all of this stuff, so it's tough. TiVo is aiming to solve this problem again with the TiVo stream that they talked about at CES, but I'm not convinced that it's not gonna do it all because not every service is going to allow it, right? But it is an attempt at solving this problem and they gave me a great demo on it at CES. It really is the best of all of this because it's a $50 box that you plug or dongle really that you plug into your HDMI port and that's it. You're not paying them a monthly fee or anything like that. And then you do link it to most of your streaming services but it doesn't link with all of them right now. There's no Apple TV plus in there but it does have Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, you know, those sorts of things. So, and then it's got some of their own stuff and sling and you know, that sort of thing. So, you know, there's a hope here but again, I need something and the Sheridan's, Allison was showing me a spreadsheet that she made that just tracks everything. It's like, yeah, I guess that's what I'm gonna have to do. So I'm curious if anybody out there knows of an app that will sort of help track this stuff and maybe even taps into these databases so that it knows like, hey, there's a new episode of this show, you might wanna go and launch the CBS All Access app so you can go see the new episode of Picard or whatever, you know, that kind of thing. That would be, I don't know, I want something. So that's the next geek challenge. I don't, other than a spreadsheet which I should do because already I know I'm, I know there are shows that I've just abandoned out there that I really didn't want to abandon. Like Picard is a show that I really enjoy watching and it's just out of sight out of mind. It's the end of the day, you know, we don't watch TV all night, we watch it late and so by the end of the day, it's like I'm kind of, you know, burned out because I do a lot of work, I do a lot of different things and it's like, all right, I just want something to tell me what now I wanna turn my brain off and engage in a different way and I don't get to do that anymore if I wanna, you know, I don't want this stress point of trying to remember what it is I wanna watch, right? So the problem is that the Tivo is aware of shows that are in other worlds. Not, no, it's not. It's not aware of all of that. I thought when I searched for some things, it would say, oh, this is on Amazon Prime or on Netflix. It is aware of some of those and the new Tivo Stream 4K is aware of more of those which is great, but it's not aware of things that are on CBS All Access. It's not aware of things that are on Apple TV Plus. It's not aware of things that are on HBO because the HBO doesn't allow the Tivo to link to HBO in that way, right? You have to do it through your cable subscription which means recording over the air. And then Tivo and Comcast sort of messed up and didn't get their timing right and now there's no on demand Tivo with Comcasts which sort of, I mean, that's coming. They say they're fixing it, but still. Yeah, so I don't know. No, you bring up a good point. Yeah, cause most of my stuff is I record off of a cable but some things I hop into Netflix and now I think about it. I'm not always, Netflix makes me aware that there may be new episodes for something. Right. Well, and a lot of times, it's not even, folks are suggesting, Ari in the chat room suggests a calendar subscription which is one way of doing that but for Netflix shows a lot of times they just all drop at once. Now I don't necessarily watch all of them at once although it is fun to binge watch things so sure, but, but I just, you know, I wanna know that, okay, you know, there's more episodes of this and the idea of a spreadsheet and like checking off on it, like, okay, we've finished this one. It just seems so cumbersome. Like weren't these things supposed to make our lives easier? So I don't know, get off on my lawn. I don't know. I don't know. No, you're right. It's a, yeah, it's kind of a mess. It's a mess right now. There's so many sources right now. Yeah. Nobody's brought it all together. TiVo does pretty good, but... Pretty good, but that's, I think actually my problem is that I had for, you know, almost two decades gotten used to TiVo having, cause they did solve that problem for me and now that that's not solved. Like I don't know that someone that didn't have like, is there anybody that has streaming services that didn't at least have some DVR experience, be it TiVo or X1 or one of those. But, you know, I wonder if I'm just curious how other people solve this problem or maybe it's not a problem, but I think it probably is. I think it is, but TiVo sort of spoiled me because it did solve this. I stopped worrying about what network anything was on. That was one of my favorite things about TiVo. The time shifting was certainly number one, but number two was now I don't have to think about is this on NBC or CBS or whatever. It's just like, do I get the channel? Did I have the show? Is it here? Once it's here, now I can watch it. Great, I want that experience again, but nobody wants to open up their API in a full way. Now some people do, Netflix sort of opens it, but Netflix won't tell you what episodes you've watched unless you launch the Netflix app. It won't let TiVo, you know, you can sort of manually do it and say, yes, I've watched this one and I haven't watched that one, but if you, if not, you know, I don't think Prime Video and Netflix, I don't think Prime Video, but certainly Netflix doesn't expose that data because they don't want people knowing, you know, that that's their data and I get that, but it's starting to get to be a little bit cumbersome for the customer, which sort of sucks. So Ari suggests it's not a bad idea. Download everything and consolidate it into Plex and then watch from there. That is not a bad idea. I'm a huge fan of Plex. Now, to download Netflix stuff into Plex requires you to circumvent Netflix's DRM and probably head to BitTorrent. But you know, like that's the thing is if you're not gonna make my life work the way I want it to work, then I'm gonna make my life work the way I want it to work. And then suddenly now I'm, you know, I have no more incentive to pay Netflix anymore. I mean, I could do it as a matter of principle, but if I'm gonna download all the shows from BitTorrent and watch them in Plex, well, then now I'm not, you know, now I don't need to pay for the Netflix subscription. Again, as a matter of principle, I may or may not choose to, but that's really interesting. Yeah, I kind of like that. I like that solution from an ease of use thing because Plex will let you manage all of that. It's great. And I have done that where it's like, you know, like we paid for CBS, we pay for, not paid for, we pay for CBS All Access. It drove me crazy watching Star Trek Discovery. And so it was like, you know what? I'm just gonna download it and put it into Plex. I'm paying for it over here. So I, you know, it was like, okay, fine. Like the box is checked, but it was way easier to manage it in Plex than it was trying to dig through my various services to get to CBS All Access and watch and all that. So. So I'm still, I have, I'm like, I don't have CBS All Access and I have, I've watched some of the shows, but I've gotten them via another means, which is like I'm on DVD or Blu-ray. Sure. Yeah, sure. Cause I'm like, I already pay for CBS through my cable subscription. Why should I pay more, you know? Well, cause it's not the same CBS. You understand that, right? I know there are select shows that are only, yeah, through that means. I mean, it's CBS, but it's not, but I'm still kind of, I'm like, ah, you know, what's going to convince me to pay extra? I don't know how much is it a month? I think it's $5.99 or $6.99, I want to say. Oh, maybe I will get it. Yeah, it's not terrible. And, you know, and I pay for it while I'm watching the show. And then when the show's over, I, you know, I'd suspend it until they come up with the next Star Trek that I want to watch or the next season of the next Star Trek or whatever it is. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, so, you know, there you go. So let us know what you're doing to do this. And we'll, you know, we'll go from there. So, okay, while we're on the subject of subscriptions, we might as well go to Joe, who had a question about subscriptions of software. Sort of, or not a question, maybe just a thought that is worth sharing here. Rewinding back to show 797, he says Dave mentioned that he prefers subscription-based pricing for software licensing versus the traditional one-time purchase approach. He says, I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The problem with most subscription-based software is there's a built-in assumption that folks would rebuy the software yearly and then they price their monthly subscription accordingly. He says, I find I don't always need new features each year or even each month as the subscription plan could provide. He says, I have plenty of apps that continue to serve me well, having not been updated in quite some time. One example, he says, is Quicken. The yearly subscription is 75 bucks for the version most closely aligned with the old Quicken 2007, which he says he still uses. Well, not anymore, not with Catalina anyway. He says having to pay that price each year for what will be very minimal functionality differences after two to three years into the design cycle is, in his mind, ridiculous. The price per year is what I'd pay for a quote-unquote forever license previously. Now, there's no doubt that the developers prefer this schema as it gives them a more solid foundation for funding and planning, but the price points, he says, are all wrong. The biggest issue is that we've changed from a purchase license to a lease license, and when you cease to pay the lease, the application ceases to work or is hampered in some way. Paying a yearly rate for a subscription that is nominally the same as the full price license previously with the caveat that if you don't pay, you don't get to continue using it, is, in Joe's mind, a flawed pricing model. He says, we need a revolution in the software industry at this point, greed, he says, is taking over in his opinion. He says, I'm sure Dave will disagree with the above, but if you use any of this on the show, please at least give my perspective a fair hearing for any developers that might be listening. No, you're not wrong. It is an evolving thing. I think it is one of those things though where you have to kind of zoom out and embrace the change, right? Because change is the only constant we get, and change is hard for all of us. I'm not pointing out Joe here, it just is, and you're right, that you used to be able to pay, and then that was that. But I would argue that we're not paying more. I mean, we're paying the same now, but with kind of the weight, I mean, to take prices from what, 15, 13 years ago, and say that, okay, well, paying, if you paid 75 bucks for Quicken 2007, 13 years ago, and now you get, you know, you pay 75 bucks a year for Quicken, the latest Quicken, which actually works great, by the way, then like that's a, times have changed. But there's also support, there were security updates, like it wasn't like they got to make that piece of software and then stop working on it entirely. There is maintenance to be done. And I would say you're right that there is a flawed pricing model here. I would argue that it was the flat rate pricing model was flawed. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It made a lot of sense when you had to ship boxes of software because you couldn't ship update, like updates were not a thing that could be downloaded easily necessarily, right? Certainly purchasing software is not a downloadable event when that pricing model came into being. But it is now. And updates are able to be done now. Maintenance is much simpler, which is a good thing, bug fixes, that sort of thing. But because that those things can happen immediately, we expect them immediately. And so I think we, I think it's smart that the pricing model has evolved along with that. I do, I'm with you. You know, it does kind of suck to have to pay more. And like you said, that idea of leasing software, especially software that you rely upon is tough to swallow. The antidote I would offer is that by paying for it, you are encouraging the developer to stay in business and support the software that you have come to rely on. And that part I really like. So, but I get you, I feel you Joe, it's not. It's, you know, you're not wrong. I mean, because it is a change. So, I don't know. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on to some other questions? Yeah, the only thing that gets me, whether you're talking subscriptions or streaming services is, you know, and I guess that's why people are asking for ways to manage this is you die, you know, death by a thousand cuts or you go broke by a thousand subscriptions. Right. No, that's true. It is easier from a budgeting standpoint. I mean, it could be argued that one lump sum every year is not as easy to budget for, say a monthly fee, but those habitual monthly fees, you find, you could easily find yourself in a scenario where you're paying for things that you don't use or you wouldn't pay for if you stop to think about it, which is of course why, you know, an app like Bobby or track my subs, your true bill exists to help shine a light on that. So yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. It's interesting. All right, should we move on to Bob, John? Sure. Okay. Bob. Oh, I don't know. What did I do with Bob here? Did I not? I don't know that I prepped Bob properly here. Well, I know what question Bob asked us. Oh, I found it. He says, many months ago, Dave, you mentioned in an MGG episode that your home network is using IPv6. That's been on my mind since, and now finally I'm asking, why do you do that? Are there security benefits and are you still doing that? So it's a fair question. Mostly my reason for sticking, and I do still run IPv6 on my network, for sure. There have been times when it's sort of stopped working or whatever, and to be perfectly honest, I don't notice it right away because most of the. I was going to say most of the internet still runs on IPv4. That is true. The internet is still perfectly usable if only if the only thing you're running is IPv4. That is definitively true. But I do still like IPv6. It is interesting to be able to remotely and directly target a device that is beyond my router, which is kind of cool because everything now has its own IP address as long as the right security is in place, it's cool. It does sort of open that door so you need to make sure that your router is doing appropriate security to make sure that people aren't sniffing around all your machines on IPv6, which generally the case that most routers are doing a decent job of that out of the gate. But a lot of websites also use IPv6 for their connections. And so for that, I like being fully IPv6 compliant. Functionally, I don't think it makes a difference on the outbound stuff, but it makes me feel like my network's being more efficient because I'm not forced to go through the network address translation layer on that kind of stuff. And I find like all my email is checked over IPv6 automatically. And I would say probably 50% of the websites that I visit when I pay attention to it are using IPv6. I noticed the other day I was out and about, I wanted to connect back to the unified stuff, the networking stuff that I was talking about in the last show. And I realized, I saw in the logs, it said, you know, user admin logged in from and it gave an IPv6 address. It was like, oh, that's really interesting. So just on my, you know, wherever I was, I was connecting direct back via IPv6. It wasn't having to go through any translation layer. It's like, oh, that's kind of pretty cool. It opens up a lot of things. And of course it just, if future proofs the internet, that that's sort of the main reason I started doing it was just to have that. So yeah, I still use IPv6. I think it's a, it will become more and more important. I don't know, we're probably still a little ways away from the day where there are resources that are unavailable if you're not using IPv6, but we will get there. So, you know, I'd like to just be to know that that box is checked here on the network. So I still use it. Do you still use it, John? Your IP, your service, internet service provider doesn't really support it yet or have they changed that? I was just checking that. And how can you check that? So at least in my case, I went to the Docsis status page and then there's a tab here that says CM state. And way at the bottom, it says DHCP attempts to obtain CM IP address. And it lists a number for IPv4 and has zero for IPv6. So my conclusion is that they do not I'm thinking back to when we were exploring this before and I think with not my Eero, but a prior router I had a IPv6 tunnel. Tunnel, right? Yep. Defined so that I could pretend to be IPv6, but when I went to the Eero, I guess that ability went away. So, I wanted to support IPv6 because I was checking this too. So how do you know if you're even running IPv6? So one, you have to activate it on your router, which it is activated on my Eero. And then in Mac OS, I have it set up, I think it's a network TCP IP. It has a thing saying IPv6 and I have it set to automatic. Now, what's interesting is that when I get assigned an address, a hardware, yeah, a hardware crawler comes up and says, oh yeah, you got a new IP address. And it gives me both the IPv4 and V6 ones. So I'm running it internally. Okay. Maybe I should explore how to, if I can even set, can I set up that tunnel through Eero? I had that, I don't know. I'm not in a scenario where I have to run a tunnel. Comcast does IPv6 natively. So, yeah. Now I did wanna point out the, what your cable modem shows is not necessarily what your router will be able to access. Whether or not your cable modem supports IPv6 or even IPv4 is kind of irrelevant. Sort of. Yours not showing an IPv6 address may be indicative of the fact that your ISP doesn't support IPv6 anywhere. But it's possible that they could support IPv6 to your router. And it's just that your cable modem is not addressable via IPv6. And those are two very different things. For example, my cable modem from my ISP is exactly the opposite of yours. It gets no IPv4 address. It only gets an IPv6 address. But I'm perfectly capable of running IPv4. They tunnel, not tunnel, but they give me an IPv4 address as well as an IPv6 address for my network here. It's just that the cable modem isn't getting an IPv4 address from the outside world for itself. And that's a smart thing, right? If they're gonna support IPv6 on the network, why would the cable modem need two addresses? It's only internally used by Comcast. No one in the outside world is ever even gonna touch that cable modem. So there's no reason for the cable modem to get an IPv4 address. So just because your cable modem doesn't have IPv6 does not necessarily mean that your ISP doesn't support it for your router. Those are two separate things. That's all. So just bear that in mind. But again, in your case, they might be coincident facts, but they are simply coincident, not related to the other necessarily. Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, so. And Brian Monroe made a statement here. Yes, so IPv6, yeah, I know it's supported on the Euro and I actually have it turned on, but the thing is I'm only running it internally because if I wanted to, or if I could and my ISP supported it, then I think I'd wanna go the route that Dave goes, which is just get one of those. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, so like I said, so I see a V6 address come up when I'm assigned IP addresses and they're listed in the network control panel as well. Sure, sure. Yeah. But what's fun, and I think the thing you were talking about is this. So it, and it comes up with these like temporal addresses that people can use to get into your network. And I think we played around with that for a bit and that's a kind of a neat feature. Yeah, so each, what macOS does, and I haven't dug into this, so I'm gonna miss the particulars, but in a general sense, what macOS does is your device either is assigned or assigns itself an IPv6 address based on whatever prefix and network you're part of. And that address, that main address is fixed and does not change. It's usually based on your sort of network routing and then your machine's MAC address, but it could be based on other things. But that address doesn't change. And for inbound connections, you can certainly use that address to target that machine. But you don't necessarily want that one address that's always going to be attached to that machine accessible to everyone on the outside world, but the flip side is if you're visiting a website and you connect with IPv6, the same is true with IPv4, but when you connect with IPv6, it has to say, hey, here's my address so that you can answer me when I say, please send me the website. I wanna see www.apple.com. Well, www.apple.com needs to know where to send the data back to. So you have to give it your IPv6 address. And that's where they do what you were talking about, John, is they have this rotating list of IPv6 addresses that expire after some period of time. I think it's 60 minutes on macOS, but it could be wrong about that. And so that's the address that your machine uses when it's doing external connections. It's like, oh yeah, give me that. And that way after 60 minutes, that address is done and is no longer, does your machine answer on that? And so it just adds a little bit of security by obscurity, I guess, it's a nice way to look at that. So yeah, it's good. And we have a suggestion here. If you wanna see if your ISP can support IPv6, Brian gave us a thing, test-ipv6.com. Yeah. So I just ran it and got a big fat no. Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that doesn't, it doesn't just test whether your ISP can run IPv6. That tests whether or not the machine, the device, because you could run it on your phone too, whether the device you are on is fully IPv6 capable from the device to the internet. So even if your ISP supports it, if you have it turned off on your router or even have it turned off on your device, this test would also fail. It's not just testing your ISP, it's testing your device's ability to connect with IPv6. So just, just, yeah. But yeah, yeah, I got a, it's weird. As we were talking about this, I looked in system preferences and I'm not seeing an IPv6 address show up on my, oh, I wonder, it is showing up on my, I have both ethernet and Wi-Fi connected for whatever reason, my ethernet connection on this computer is not getting an IPv6 address, but my Wi-Fi connection is. And even though ethernet is the priority one, but I am able to get a 10 out of 10 on the test IPv6, which is new. I didn't always get a 10 out of 10. I got like a nine out of 10 because there was some tests that used to miss. So maybe they changed the test or they changed the, or something about Comcast changed or something. But yeah, I recommend running it if, if you can, like if you can, if you're in a scenario like, like you are John where you would have to run it over a tunnel because your provider doesn't support it. I don't know that I'd go through that trouble, but once your provider supports it, I would say definitely, yeah. While we're talking about internet, I wanna talk about troubleshooting slow internet speeds. Does that, I wanna do that, but the first thing, the next thing I want, before we talk about troubleshooting slow internet speeds, I wanna talk about our next two sponsors. Does that work for you, Mr. Braun? Fantastic. All right. Our next sponsor is BBedit from barebones.com. If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you've heard us talk about BBedit because holy cow, how could we live without it? I have it open right now. It's the thing that helps me manage the show notes and timings and all of that during the show and then process them because BBedit is at its core a text-only editor. I know it sounds crazy to be excited about something like that, but it's true. I am because I don't have any other editors that are text-only. This one makes sure that it doesn't inherit any of the weird fonts and formatting and all of that stuff. It's just text. Now you can use it for things like I'm using it for. Today, or you can use it for programming. When you do use it for programming, it applies its own lens. It auto-detects what language you're programming in and then gives you a view, adding soft colors and formatting just to the view of it. It doesn't alter the file, but so that you can sort of see through your code a little bit better. But it can also do other things like compare two documents and find the differences for you. And it's got a really great interface for showing you the differences between two. It's awesome. You can do things like counting words and all of that. You just gotta check it out. Go to barebones.com or you can buy it in the Mac App Store as a subscription. Either way, whatever way you like, you can go get it. But go get your free trial at barebones.com and then even once your free trial's over, maybe it will remain in a very useful mode for you. Some of the more pro features sort of fall away, but you gotta go check it out. Barebones.com, get your free trial and learn about it, take it from there. Our thanks to BBEdit and Barebones for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is LegalZoom. Listen, it's still early in the year, but if you run a small business or even if you run a family, you know that 2020 will fly by and that's why you should use LegalZoom right now to make sure that you're set up for success. 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It really kind of takes a lot of the guesswork out of it, really smart stuff and then that way you can have an attorney reviewing things for you and knowing that you're protected. So you gotta do it. Go to LegalZoom.com today and to promo code MGG in the box at checkout for special savings, that's LegalZoom.com. Code is MGG LegalZoom, where life meets legal. Our thanks to LegalZoom for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Now, slow internet speeds. Mark brings us in. He says, I have gigabit service from Comcast Business at work. When I first signed up, I was getting around 900 megabits per second, as expected, but now I'm only getting three to 400 megabits per second. I tried using several web-based speed tests, they all show the same. I only use hardwired connections, no Wi-Fi, all on a static IP. I've also, and he attached a few screenshots showing some of the terminal commands and things that he had test. He says, when I talked to Comcast support, they said I need to isolate the computer from any other devices that would be between it and their modem slash router, it's one unit. I did that, bypassed my network switch and connected direct, tried it with two different Macs, I get the same speed. I tried different ethernet cables and different ethernet ports on the Mac Pro because it has two, same. So I requested from Comcast to send a tech to check my signal strength and cable connections to the tech connected device to my cable directly and showed me my signal was very strong. He also showed me the speed that he was getting by connecting to the modem router's ethernet connection, 936 megabits per second. He claimed all is well on their end and something is wrong with my computers. My question is what settings do I need to look at? He says I tried firewall settings, there's no malware, I tried in safe mode, I made sure that I'm getting gigabit connections all of that good stuff. What is it that's causing these problems? Okay, so it seems your Macs are slowing down, right? But it's not one Mac, it's all of them. And the Comcast tech connected to the cable modem the same way that Mark did for at least some of his tests. So assuming that that's all true, I'd start looking internal first. I would install iPerf 3 on two of my Macs and this can be the easiest way to do it is with homebrew, we have an article that we wrote a few years ago, actually Jim Tannis wrote it for us a few years ago but it still totally works, it's just brew install iPerf 3 and then you run the iPerf 3 command. It really is the best way to do this, I haven't found a graphical tool to do iPerf but the cool part about iPerf is you run it on two different computers local to your network and you have two that each have ethernet ports so this is great. Run iPerf on one in server mode which is just iPerf 3 space dash S and then on the other run you run it in client mode iPerf 3 dash C with the IP address of the one that you're of the server and it will do a connection and then you can reverse that and test it going the other way because it just tests in one direction. That would be the first thing to try and make sure that you're getting your speeds because the problem with a speed test service is that you are of course testing over the internet but you're also at the mercy of whatever is in between you and then whatever that speed test is. Now sites like speedtest.net try to find you a local speed test server so that you're not like trying to go halfway around the world or something like that but still testing internally isolates all of that and make sure that at least your two Macs can speak or can transfer data at that fast rate. So that would be the first place I would look. What do you think John, any thoughts on this? I think that's a great idea. So one, excuse me. So he's showing that the network software on the Mac is seeing what appears to be a one gigabit per second. Ethernet connection. I mean he's connecting gigabit to the switch. Correct, yeah. Which is good. My one thought is, yeah so verify that you can get the one gigabit and it sounds like maybe you will but then I guess the next place to look would be your switch. Well, yeah. What's happening on your switch and I don't know it says he has a business account. I don't know if he has an IT department or something that. Well, but he says he's plugging into Comcast's modem slash router, which is at least it would have a switch on it. Probably a four port switch built into it. And he said that the Comcast tech plugged into the same thing. So presumably if we're taking everything at face value, presumably the switch is good but something about the Mac is not transmitting data and he said it did do it initially. So I'm just, you know, like I said, I would start with the, why can't I think of it? With iPerf so that we can test the local network but you're right, that would also test the switch. I mean it's testing whatever is between those two Macs we're just getting the internet out of the mix which might be the issue or might highlight if your Mac should be able to talk well north of 900 megabits per second to each other over internet. If they can't, that's your first red flag is like, okay, what's going on with that there? And like you said, you've tried Safe Mode, you've tried two different computers. So I'm gonna guess that you're gonna see that work fine and then it's gonna be your internet connection but we don't like to guess. We like to confirm. Then you might have to call Comcast back. Yeah, when I called my ISP it was their problem but in this case it sounds like it's not. Now you may want to ask yourself also and this is a good suggestion I didn't think of here but Ari in our chat room is basically asking the question what has changed? And I'm wondering, he's wondering if somebody has introduced a Fingbox or Intrusion Prevention or a VPN that could potentially slow down your connection. Right, cause a lot of these, cause I verified this is yeah, these Intrusion Prevention or other things that kind of monitor the network for evil may slow things down because they have to do processing. So I mean, I definitely saw that with one that I had looked at a while ago is yeah, my connection was the bottleneck so. Right, I wonder looking at the network, right? Yeah, like a Fingbox or anything like Ari said, looking at your network and seeing what the router address is would be very interesting. Yeah, yeah, right, cause if it's going through some box to yeah, I like it, smart, that's really smart. My guess is that Ari has seen that in the field and that's probably one of those things that the first time you encounter it takes three hours to troubleshoot because you don't even think to look at it and then the next time it's like three minutes it's like, oh, I think I know what your problem is. That's kind of how it goes. Yeah, it's good, it's good. Sweet, all right, let's move on to David, shall we hear John and see if we can't answer David's question while we're on the network thing. He says someone recently gave me two airport extreme routers. Would you have any ideas if I could make use of them other than recycling? So I'm gonna go ahead and assume that they are the latest airport extremes, right? They have dual band 802.11 AC, Wi-Fi 5, 4x4 radio on that 802.11 AC, the Wi-Fi 5 connection. That's, it's not a bad router, right? I mean, just cause Apple's not making it anymore, you know, I wouldn't necessarily go out and buy new ones or even used ones, but you've got them, there they are. So if you don't already have like a mesh system and you do have ethernet as, you know, backhaul throughout your home or your office or whatever, you could set up what we like to call a quasi mesh where you put those into bridge mode and then let them just be, you know, Wi-Fi access points on your network. And that, you know, that would work fine if you've got this setup to do that. They can also be time capsule clones, right? Where they will, they've got USB ports on them. You can hang a hard drive or an SSD off of them and then point your time capsule or point your time machine backups to those across the network and just let them do, and you could turn off their routing, put them in bridge mode and also turn off their Wi-Fi, right? And it's just this ethernet device that has a USB port and runs a file server inside that is fully Mac compatible and you're good to go, right? So those are the first two things I think of and that wouldn't be bad, you know, especially if you got laptops or whatever. So you don't have to plug a drive in. You can just let the time machine backups happen over the network. I don't know. And it can also act as a print server. So you can also plug a printer into that USB port. Right. I like it. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, no, it doesn't, no. Yeah, I use my old airport express as a audio server, but this does not have an audio. This doesn't do that. Yeah, right, right, right. Oh, I like that though. Yeah, right, right. So there's, you know, still uses for this stuff. Will your airport express like play nice in the AirPlay 2 world? I think it does, right? It's not just like feature limited to some AirPlay 1 subset, is it? I think it works okay, right? I mean, it shows up as a destination. Yeah, okay, right, there you go. In my audio, so maybe it's using AirPlay 1 protocol. I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah, I think it supports AirPlay 2 and would do, you know, your computer could do multi-room to it and that sort of thing. So yeah, cool, cool. You don't run HomeKit on your network at all, do you? As far as I know, no. No, okay, well, I mean, yeah, you've got an Apple TV so in theory, you have HomeKit, but you haven't messed with it because I think that's where you might, that's where you would see whether, right, whether, you know, it'd be, quite frankly, it would be worth you setting up a HomeKit network. I think you have some devices that are addressable HomeKit as well as through like your, you know, Amazon A lady or whatever. It is sort of interesting just to mess around with HomeKit and kind of, you know, compare and contrast. So, yeah. No, and again, boy, our chat room is just full of great information here. Someone asked the question, didn't they upgrade the Airport Express and I found an article here saying Airport Express, firmware updates, AirPlay 2 and HomeKit. Great, yeah, right. Okay, so there you go. Yeah, so you do, you've got at least two HomeKit devices, John, so, you know, that's cool. It's worth setting up a home, my friend. One last question, because I'm gonna be away and we will release a show next week. We're recording it early, but that's fine. But while I'm away, you can send in questions and John will see them and might have an answer for you. But if you want answers from the community, you can ask in the forums like Miles did with this question. Miles says, so lately I've been trying to use my Bluetooth headphones. Oh, and the MacGeek app forums are at macgeekapp.com slash forums. He says, so lately I've been trying to use my Bluetooth headphones, Sennheiser 4.5 BTNCs for audio input and output because it's a headset, it's got a microphone on it. He says, but there's always results in my Bluetooth codec switching back to SCO, which is sort of the lowest quality that's available. He says, even though I know that my headphones support aptX, aptX, which is a very high quality Bluetooth audio codec. Bluetooth audio requires that things be compressed and then other end decompressed just because of the bandwidth available in Bluetooth. And so depending on what compression slash decompression algorithm you use or codec compression, decompression codec, depending on what codec you use, you get different qualities. There is sort of a baseline codec for low-level, low-quality audio, but functional. And then there's various high-level ones. Apple uses their own AAC compression for their stuff and a lot of devices support it. aptX is a sort of industry standard and I'm using air quotes with standard because Apple doesn't really support aptX in all of its devices, but that's another one. And he is able to use aptX when he's using it. He says, I'm aware that you can fix the audio issue by switching back to the computer mic, but I haven't found any solution that allows me to continue using my headphone mic. So I've tried using Bluetooth Explorer to force aptX and using terminal to set aptX on and SEO off, but it always end up defaulting back to SEO when I use the Bluetooth mic. Is there a solution to this? So here's the thing. Bluetooth itself does not support aptX or any other high-quality codec when a Bluetooth microphone is in use from the same device. And this has to do with the fact that Bluetooth bandwidth is limited and the bi-directional nature of having both channels open means bandwidth has to be carved up a little bit differently. And there's a how-to geek article that I've linked in the forums that has some notes on that too. But yeah, when you're using a Bluetooth microphone, you will not get full Bluetooth audio quality because it's halving the bandwidth, right? It's chopping it in half so that you get half for inbound and half for outbound. So sadly, that's just a fact of life with Bluetooth. There you go. That's how it goes. Yeah? Right? I suppose, didn't they remember we went to that little Bluetooth event at CES? Weren't they talking about improving the audio quality? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, that's the new Bluetooth LE audio, right? Which is new. So that would be baked into new hardware devices. But yes, absolutely. There's that new LE audio. In fact, you and I talked about it on an episode of Daily Observations that we recorded while we were at CES. In fact, moments after we walked out of the Bluetooth event because it was rambling and slow. But we did get the information we needed. So I'll put a link to both of those things in the show notes. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. So this problem may be solvable going forward because they've got the LE audio is essentially the next generation of Bluetooth and it features a new codec. So number one and multi-stream audio, meaning multiple recipients getting the same stream which can be really handy at like a conference or a concert or something like that, right? And it adds support for hearing aids and like I said, the ability to broadcast. So that would be cool. So Bluetooth LE audio, yeah. I kind of chuckle at your commentary on the nature of the presentation. And you've pointed this out to me, but sometimes less is more. Sometimes less is more. Yeah, yeah, it was it was it. Yeah, I mean, it was a great thing that the Bluetooth consortium or whatever announced. They just they got to they got to deep in the weeds with their presentation. It was like, yeah, no, no, no, just tell people what the go through the highlights. Don't as Joe Perry from Aerosmith is known for having said, don't bore us, get to the chorus. So there you go. That's, you know, it's true. Go listen to like love in an elevator, right? How many times do they sing the chorus in that song? Versus, you know, there's verses like sort of. But you know, yeah, just start with the chorus. Let's go, let's get right to it. So it's not bad advice. It's not bad advice. All right. Yeah. Speaking of an elevator, we're going down, right? Going down or I'm going down to Mexico. That's true. Yeah. That's it was. Oh, you are. Yeah, that's why that's why we we got to record that. Oh, that's your trip. That's my next one. OK, yeah. Yeah, so. Hey, we're we're. Yeah, we went there as a family years ago. Oh, cool. Yeah, this is not a family trip. This is just a Lisa and Dave trip. We're going down to go down to see fish. They're playing at and just outside of Cancun or maybe right in Cancun this time. But yeah, yeah, maybe you can test your Spanish. I think you know a little, right? Yeah, it'll be interesting. We were noticing that are we used to speak Spanish in the house a lot when both kids were taking Spanish in school and our son, especially, he's just got a knack with language. He basically he is fluent in Spanish, not basically. Just because of the way he was taught in school, they use this O W L this world language thing where there's no chairs and there's no books they get in the classroom and there's no English. The moment they walk in the classroom from day one, they speak only Spanish to each other. Right. And it works for some kids. It doesn't work for others. My son is definitely in the former group because of that when he was actively speaking Spanish in school, he would speak it at home constantly. And my my comprehension of Spanish has always been good. Not always, but since I took it and then also lived in Austin, it was around it, you know, quite a bit. Even growing up, I was around it quite a bit. But my my able my ability to speak it was very difficult. But with Lucas, it worked out really, really well. So having having him in the house, you know, we were speaking it all the time. I have not been to a Spanish speaking land since, you know, it's been a little over a year now that Lucas hasn't been speaking Spanish at home. So we, you know, I'll see how I'll see how I do. What I did do, though, was I downloaded Google Translate on my phone and then I went into offline languages and I downloaded Spanish into my phone so that I at least have it. Even if I, you know, for whatever reason, have a weak data connection or whatever, totally fine. I will have Google Translate, if necessary, in those moments. There was something last time. I think I needed to tell housekeeping that my toilet was clogged the last time I was in Mexico. And well, no, Bono is bathroom. Yeah, or bath. Yeah. So I used Google Translate to to get that across. And they were very thankful. And so was I that I had the ability to look up like what I because I was just like, just give me a plunger. I will fix this, you know, but I did not know the word for plunger. And I don't know the word for plunger. It like I used it and it left. So, you know, there you go. When we traveled, the only funny thing is that if you saw us as a family, you wouldn't assume that anybody in the family knows Spanish. Sure. Especially since my parents are German. Right. Don't assume because of the way somebody looks that they don't understand what you're saying. Well, for sure. More than once, you know, some people would make commentary about us. And reply in Spanish. And they had this shocked look like, oh, yeah, that's right. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you for listening, folks. Thanks, of course, to our sponsors. As we mentioned in the show, simply safe dot com slash Mac Geek. Gab feels FEALS dot com slash MGG bare bones dot com and legal zoom dot com with promo code MGG. Thanks to all of them. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks for sending us all those emails and everything. Visit the forums, MacGeeke up dot com slash forums. We would love to see you there. And we will see you next time, of course, you know. And thanks to all our ongoing sponsors like Smile and Otherworld Computing and Eero and Linode, all good stuff. Thanks to everybody. Thanks to you, John. Yeah, John, thank you. I got I got some advice for you. Oh, yeah, you do. Oh, I do because it sounds like you're going to be crossing the border soon. Yeah, you're going to be crossing the border. You want to make sure you don't get caught. Maiden.