 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 761 for Monday, May 13th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your questions, your cool stuff found, your tips. We share all of that, and today we will. We've got a whole cool stuff found segment, a whole quick tip segment and hopefully some of your questions, too. And the idea is we share all that stuff, mix it all together into like a salad, you know, with croutons, maybe to make it crunchy because we like, you know, a little bit of right. Yeah. And it's this tasty thing that not only is tasty, but but it's good for you in that each and every one of us. The goal is we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. And I mean that like I'm really excited every week to be able to learn five new things from Mac Geek Gap. Now, sometimes I learn it during the prep, but that's OK. That's all part of the system that we've got going here to further everyone's knowledge, to make us all better computer users, aspiring geeks, better geeks, all of that. Good stuff. Sponsors for this episode include a new sponsor, Linode. L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G can get a $20 credit there using coupon code M-G-G 2019. We'll talk all about what that credit gets you in a moment. Malware Bites for Mac at malware bites dot com slash Mac and cash fly at Mac dot cash fly dot com. We'll talk all about that in a moment here right now back in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here back. Yes, I've been traveling to that's right here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John and Ron. John, we have we have someone else that has something to say for today. So I'm just going to I'm just going to let us let we're going to. Here we go. Hello, John and Dave. This is Michael. I was listening to Monday's episode about your newsletter. I went to subscribe. I got the confirmation and hit subscribe. But when I got to the landing page, I had to prove I was not a robot. I am a robot and I feel bad that I cannot subscribe. Oh, well, yes, I got caught. Good bye. That's awesome, Michael. I mean, I'm sorry, Michael, of course, that perhaps you can get one of your human friends to click the check. The I'm not a robot box. Michael, of course, is referring to our new newsletter that you can sign up for it. Mackie cab dot com. We put it out every week after the show goes out. It's scheduled to go out at 8 a.m. So for example, this one, we're recording midday Monday. That means it will go out 8 a.m. on Tuesday, 8 a.m. Eastern for those of you that because that actually matters. And and it contains not only the handcrafted image for the show, but all the lovingly handcrafted show notes that we build during the show. You help us, actually, Mackie, Mackie cab dot com slash stream where everybody can kind of join in the chat room and help build these show notes has all the links that you want. Everything right there delivered to your email box. If you're not signed up, go to Mackie cab dot com. There's a sign up form right there. Tons of you signed up last week, which is awesome. Really, really it's great. And I hope you all really like it. But but obviously let us know we can we can tweak this thing together. So there you go. And and we can even make it so that Michael can use it. Yeah, we do have the the spam filter on the sign up there with MailChimp. So you do have to check the some of you. We'll have to prove that you're not a robot, but but that's a good thing. You know, it keeps you from getting subscribed by someone else accidentally and and that, you know, or intentionally, but that's a good thing. So yeah, speaking of robots, Dave, yes, John. I just like to alert you to the fact that. Yes, something to tell me over in Fairfield, Connecticut. Yes, yes. So our local grocery store just installed robots. All right, I'm not kidding you. I know I saw your pictures online. Yeah, and I encountered one and tried to mess with it. So our local store here, it's a product from Badger Technologies, Badger dash technologies dot com. And apparently in the intent right now is that it goes around the store and if it detects that there's a spill or which is important because, you know, there's liability issues because people seem to be really clumsy in the produce section when things fall on the ground and then they soothe the store. So this robot is to guard against that. I think it can also check for low stock. But oh, again, it was kind of fun to mess with it is that it was coming towards me and it has big googly eyes on it just to make it kind of friendly and not impersonal. But I stood in its way and it has like multiple cameras and it was like, oh, well, OK, I'm not going to run John over and it just, you know, kind of went around me. They're kind of they're kind of interesting. Interesting. Well, I put a link in the show notes to your tweet showing the picture of the robot. So you can click that either right now if you happen to be at a place where you can click it, or when you get home because it'll be in your email box. So or you can visit Mackie Kev dot com. And of course, but but it's interesting because it's kind of like rise of the machines because the thing is so it sees a mess and then it instructs a human to come clean it up. Oh, so it is delegating the robots are slowly taking over. So your store has hired a robot manager is what you're telling me. That's pretty good. In effect, yes, that's one of the things that I guess it does is that it tells, you know, it's like, come clean this up, man. I can't do it. I couldn't do it, you know, when I was talking to one of the employees and I'm like, why don't we just get like a fleet of Roombas? I mean, yeah, yeah, because they can actually clean up the mess. Right. Right. Right. Right. Robots everywhere, robots everywhere. John, I want to take a minute and talk about her first sponsor. I'm actually super, super excited to have Linode on board as a sponsor. L I N O D E dot com slash M G G Linode allows you to instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in their Linode cloud. And you can you truly can get a server up and running in seconds with your choice of Linux distributions, of course, different resources and a choice of 10 node locations, including their latest one, which is the one I'm using for the server I set up, which I'll talk about in a second at in Toronto, which a allows them to comply with all the in country data protection requirements, but also taking advantage of all of Linode's technology and tools. And Toronto is pretty close to me here in New Hampshire. So I thought, oh, OK, I'll set up a VPN server there. And the cool part about Linode is, yes, you can spin up a Linux SSD server and use of, you know, in a variety of different capacities, right? You know, they charge different amounts for different capacities, which is great. But they also have these one click distro distros set up. So I was able to say, oh, I want to try setting up a WireGuard VPN. And boom, I said, set up a WireGuard VPN and it like configured the system, asked me the right questions and boom, it was up and running. I could SSH into my little server at Linode and it works great. And actually is the one VPN that we're able to access from our local high school, which is great, because we can get to all the things that we need to get to well on the Wi-Fi there, which is awesome for my wife who's a sub and things like that. Really, really cool stuff. And you get a $20 credit as a new customer. Visit Linode, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G promo code M-G-G two zero one nine. Then you get to pick from any one of their 10 data centers. Like everything is on SSD storage. So these things are super fast. Even the like little nano Linode that only costs like five bucks a month or something. It like it's super fast when you spin it all up and get it going. And that's actually what I'm using for my WireGuard server and it works great. And you pay for what you use with hourly billing. So you can like, you know, test things out. You're not committed even to an entire month. You just set it up and see what you want to do. If you need to like do software builds and things like that, you can do all of that. And their web based Linode cloud interface is awesome. You got to check it out. So go to Linode, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash M-G-G. Use promo code M-G-G two zero one nine that adds a $20 credit to your account, which really can get you started for, you know, even several months, depending on what kind of what kind of server or servers you're going to spin up. So check it out. And our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. And now it's time for some quick tips, John. That Linode thing is cool, though. I like, well, you know, we're talking before the show, but so so they offer a Team Fortress 2 server option. That same one click thing. Yeah, man, you just you tell it you want to set up a Team Fortress 2 set. It's one of the games that I still play and it still runs well on. Yeah. Many here. They've got Counter Strike server for like instant set up, WordPress, open VPN, Minecraft, like all kinds of great stuff. That's really cool. Set up your own when they do it for you. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then it is your own. Like, that's the beauty of it. So yeah, it's cool. All right, now I really do want to get to these quick tips, but Linode is like, you know, cool, like a quick tip too. So it's all good. OK, going to Michael and Michael says, I just discovered today on Mojave, at least that you can drag a file that you have downloaded in Safari directly from now, he says, from the downloads folder in the dock to another folder or desktop. He says, I've always gone to my user downloads folder previously. Says this may or may not be new, but it's new to me. So I took this one step further and looked at the little downloads window in the Safari toolbar. Right. Like once you have a download, you can click and you can see it. You can drag from there, the place that we've pasted things into to download before you can drag out of there to a finder folder. And OK, that that is usually in the upper right hand corner, right? Which by default is mine, because I guess I haven't downloaded anything recently. Yeah, you can move it around, right? But that's where it that's I think I think you can move it around. But that's where it that's where it starts life. Yeah, it's in the upper upper right ish of your safari windows. Yep. Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. I had no idea you could just drag out of there if you want to drag something to the desktop or drag an app to your applications folder. Just go right there. Good to go. I like it. Another quick tip from Joe. This is one of those that it like is the epitome of quick tips. And because it's the thing that is obvious to people once it's obvious. But if you don't know that it's there, you don't even know to tell people about it, because that's just how it goes. And the quick tip is he says, I'm bringing home a work mini to become a personal mini. I had turned off iCloud photo sync at work since I'm a doctor, so I didn't want patient info syncing to my iCloud smart. Now that that's data is all gone and I'm wanting to use it as a personal iMac. I wanted to turn iPhoto sync back on. And of course, you get into the only one library at a time thing with photos on the Mac. This has long confounded me because these settings for this don't seem to live in the main photos toolbar or preferences and how to get it get to it is something I've never stumbled across taking through menus. But I finally found a link in the help pages. Who knew that you could hold down option and launch the photos app to get to the screen that I've basically been digging around for for 10 years. And he's right. When you do that, it brings up the choose library screen in photos. And again, this is the epitome of a quick tip. So we have talked about this many times on the show. And I know Joe, because he's emailed in many times over the years. He's definitely heard us talk about this. But for whatever reason, the way we've described it, never clicked with Joe. So I'm hoping that for those of you that this hasn't clicked with yet or anybody that it's new to, you'll get this. So you would hold down the option key and then launch photos. So you have to first quit photos if it's running, then hold that option. Then just if it's in your dock, you can click it. Otherwise you double click it from a finder window. And it launches and brings up this choose library window that lets you pick a different photos library and even create a new photos library. And it'll show you when the last time was it was opened and all of that stuff. Again, the epitome of a quick tip because once you know how to do it, it's super obvious and you'd never think to tell anybody about it. And yet here it is and solve Joe's problem. So thank you, Joe. Very, very cool. Very cool. And I'm going to throw another one in the ring, Dave. Great. Because there are certain magic key combinations. This is one of them. There's a lot of Apple apps and other apps. If you hold down option when you launch it, something magical happens or something different happens. Yep. Just to let people know, if you have problems with photos, if you hold down option and command and launch photos, that will engage the library repair tool. So nice. And that's pretty consistent, I think. I think iTunes does that too. But a lot of Apple apps, if you hold down option and command, it engages a repair. I think you're right. Utility. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. Cool. Cool. All right. I love these quick tips. It's like one of my favorite things. And here comes one. Man, I never would have thought of this. Listener Jim says, I don't know if this is cool stuff found, but it's maybe a life hack. He says, I got this from my brother and it has worked out great. So I wanted to share, you know, all the rechargeable hand tools, yard and lawn equipment, knees and even flashlights rechargeable toothbrushes, electric razors and other accessories that we all have. We're not supposed to leave them plugged in because of the danger of fire or of overcharging and ruining the battery. But if we don't keep them plugged in, then they're never ready when they're needed. The solution. Try this, plug them into a power strip or two or three and use a smart plug or even an old fashioned outlet timer to charge them for an hour or two periodically. Once a day, he says is what I do, but you can figure out what works best for you. I have mine on a WiIMO switch with a rule enabled to charge them for an hour every day. I'm careful not to overload the power strip, just three to four items per strip per outlet. And it's been working great. Everything's ready when I need it and there doesn't appear to be any negative impact to battery life. The best part, you'll never get caught with an uncharged tool when you need it. This might be the thing that makes me willing to go back to a battery powered drill. I used to have one and I would, you know, I don't use a drill all the time and so I would go to use it. And sure enough, like Jim said, dead crap, you know, now I got to do whatever I got to do to like wait or whatever. So I, when that died, finally, I just bought a corded drill so I could just plug it in and I don't have to deal with it. But this, this little trick, I like it. It's a good life hack. What do you think, John? Ah, other than having another battery for standby, which you know, I have the greatest of a 10 day now that it's going both ways. It's always even with a battery on standby. Like I've, I had two batteries for my drill and they would both be dead because, you know, they're just not charged. Yeah. Oh, no, I hear you. I actually, I have a battery powered drill as well. And eventually the battery just lost its oomph. So I was able to get it compatible. What I'm saying is that it doesn't hurt to have a second device. Now, the thing is that I have the best of intent, Dave, and that I grill pretty much all year round as long as I can get to the grill. Sure. You've seen pictures. Sure. I'll shovel a trail to the grill. That's one of the priorities. That's a pretty common thing for us New Englanders, right? You grill all year round. I don't have to go anywhere. I need to cook my food and grill. Right. But I always, my intent is always to have a backup propane bottle. And the thing is I've more than once not fulfilled that obligation. And like in this case, ran out of gas literally. It's like, oh, now what? I mean, usually I put it in the oven, but it's like. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cool. That's a great tip, Jim. Thank you so much for sharing. Very, very, very good. One last on the quick tip list here. Stefan says in the mail app on the Mac, if you have replied to an email, email, there will be a little arrow icon in the top left corner of the message in the message list. You can click that icon to quickly open your reply in a new window. Not something I use frequently says, but it might be handy to know. I had no idea that you could do that. Wait, what? He's I know, right? That's that's the beauty of the quick tip. Wait, what? Yep. That's it. We click on click on the little in the in the message message list. You'll have the little arrow icon. It's indicative of the fact that you have replied. And if you click that, it'll open the reply. It's pretty good. I know it's pretty good. I mean, again, he says it's not something he uses all the time and I kind of feel the same way, but it's a handy way to get there. You don't have to dig. You don't have to otherwise you're searching for the, you know, by subject name and your scent folder like it becomes quite a, you know, a multi-step process. I don't want to say it's an ordeal, but it's a multi-step process to get there, right? Not this way. I think it's pretty good. Alrighty. Alrighty. Shall we? We have a couple of other tips from from previous episodes. So let's share these so many tips. So little time. Actually, we're doing fine on time. Daniel says, in a recent episode, you guys were talking about the non-existent startup chime on the newer MacBook Pro. I had a thought in the back of my head that I had read about this and found an article about it that you can re-enable the sound effect on these machines. And sure enough, he linked us to a Verge article that talks about this. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes and of course, email and all of that stuff. But but it uses a NVRAM argument called boot audio. So you're setting boot audio to either percent zero or percent zero zero. We've pontificated about you. Yeah, you did. That's right. Question is, is the audio data still there? Even if you engage this and I'd be curious for anybody that has I'll try it on mine. I'll try it on my Mac. What was the year that Dr. Bob told what was the year they started pulling that 2014? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, it was it was several years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'd be nice if they just left the audio data there. It sounds like they have. So it was November of 2016 when they when you know, when Mac started started, you know, being released without it. But at least as of the 2016 Macs, the audio data was still there. You just had to turn boot audio back on as per this per this. All right. Because as we discussed, it's sometimes useful when you need to do magical keyboard combos and yeah to know that's right knowing what state the machine is. Yeah. It's true. It's true. All right. Well, we'll put that in the show notes. Pretty good stuff. Thank you. Thank you so much, Daniel. This is what we love about this show. We all get to learn. All right. Do you remember? I just want to yeah, it just occurred to me. Remember a lot of the older Macs. I don't think any of the newer ones do this, but do you remember the older Macs where you could hold down? I think the interrupt or programmer button and it would make it like a car crash sound. Yes. Database of that out there. It was just hilarious because it was like, here's what a crash sounds like and it was like car crashing. Yeah, because you interrupt button on the older machines, the interrupt button, I guess had special use for developers. It would, you know, I guess let you debug, right? Right. Yeah. You could you could drop in on your code at any point just by pushing the button, but you had to add that button to the side of your computer, right on the the original. I think it was. Yeah. It was like an insert on the side. Is it normally? Yeah. It wasn't meant for mere mortals. Yeah. But you had a restart button and the interrupt button was was there. Yeah. That's right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. That's good. That's good. Listener Scott says he he was very happy about us mentioning refurb.me in whatever it was most recent episode. I think maybe it was last week or the week before and but he pointed out something about refurb.me that I had no idea. He says after a quick search there, I purchased a late 2014 Mac mini for $399. So it was exactly what I was looking for. I'll pair it with a 19 inch monitor and and I'm good to go. He said this is the first time I found an eight gig Mac mini with a one terabyte drive for under 400 bucks. And he says I found this because refurb.me didn't just point to Apple's refurbs. It also pointed to a site called Back Market. B-A-C-K-M-A-R-K-E-T. He says which appears to have some excellent deals including this one. He says I don't know much about them but they now have my credit card. So we'll see what happens. So so thanks for that. That's great, Scott. I had I had no idea that refurb.me was doing that kind of thing. So we'll definitely we'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's cool. Thank you. Thank you. Pretty good. Had you ever heard of Back Market? John. No, no. Same. Yeah, I know. But I have bought yeah. I have bought non-Apple supposedly refurbished. Sure. But it's nice to know that there's a yeah, but it's it's it's seeking far and wide to get you a deal. Right. Right. Yep. Yep. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right. And then listener Tim had several notes about our discussion on the Apple remote app. And he he did say very interestingly that the Apple TV remote app cannot control iTunes, but from the iTunes remote app, you can control Apple TVs and from the watch remote app. You can also control both says I don't know why or how they made this so confusing, but it is and he says he says I'm a geek so I like all tools, but but he says I thought I would call this out. So yeah, there's there's the Apple TV remote app that you can put on your phone that just remote controls an Apple TV. There's the iTunes remote app that you can put on your phone that will remote control iTunes on another Mac or your Apple TV. So there you go. And then it has a related watch app too. So thanks for the clarification on that Tim. That's crazy, but it's good. Good. Good. Yeah. Which have two different. Why don't just to put whatever. Same. It's Apple. It's Apple. Exactly. I was doing some troubleshooting and my Mac started having some some some lags. My Mac in the office where it would just freeze or pause for a second or two at a time. And I realized two things. I started doing all sorts of troubleshooting. In fact, there's a thread in our forums that we have going where we were talking about all kinds of troubleshooting and one user. I think it was Allison from Podfeat from NoCillicast noted that she removed CleanMyMac, CleanMyMac 10 and that fixed some problems of hers. I didn't want to remove CleanMyMac, but because I used what do they call that thing? Space, space, space views, space, I don't know whatever it is. Space lens. Space lens. That's it. Thank you. But I thought, oh, OK, I'll go in and disable, you know, I'll use Lingon and disable the startup item so that it's not running in the background and see if that helps. It did not help. Didn't make a difference for me in terms of that. But in that process, I found a folder that is it crazy. It's it's at the root level of the drive library privileged helper tools. All one word, but with a capital P, H and T where you would expect them. And I looked in there and saw all kinds of things, especially from apps that were like old, old versions of apps. I think I found in something from an old version of CleanMyMac, but I also found like several versions from Lingon, several versions from Carbon Copy Cloner. And so I reached out to the developers of these apps. Yeah. And like what's going on here? I'll tell you, I'll tell you. The oldest thing I have here is something com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper. Yeah. From 2010. Good old 2020. You, I think you still want that though. I think if you're running Microsoft Office. I don't use Microsoft Office. Okay. Then you don't want that. Right. But I started it. I asked several people. Like I asked Mike at Mike Bombic at, you know, Carbon Copy Cloner and also Peter Borg, the maker of Lingon about this. And Mike pointed out, he said, well, it's actually a good sign that apps put things there because it means that they're playing by all of Apple's rules. So then the good news is, if they are playing by Apple's rules, you can remove something from there. And if the app needs it, it will put it in place the next time it launches. He said so. And he did note that Carbon Copy Cloner because of the way he had to update his helper tool, he couldn't actually remove the old one while putting the new one in. But now that some time has gone by, he said the next version of Carbon Copy Cloner will likely have something that will just go in and clean up that little mess. But you also want to go and remove it from your launch D items. And of course that's where Lingon gets really, really helpful because you can go in and see those things and remove them without having to issue terminal commands and muck about there. Right. And, and of course- Otherwise you'll get log entries saying, oh, I can't find this thing that you deleted. That's exactly right. Which is why you want to get rid of it via, I mean, it probably doesn't take lots of processing power, but it's just if anything, you want to keep your ship tidy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Not try to launch things that you've deleted. That you've deleted that aren't there. Yeah, exactly. And, and so Peter says any well-written well-written app that follows Apple's recommendations and by having the tool in privileged helper tools, one can basically assume the app is well-behaved, we'll use Apple's system APIs to place the tool there. He says, as for Lingon, I have included a built-in way in the latest version of the app to remove the tool. It can be done by clicking uninstall in preferences, so it can delete that. He says, but it will only remove the current version should someone want to keep older versions for some reason. So I had to go in and manually remove I had it from Lingon X2 and X4 and X6 and now I just have the Lingon X helper, I think, which is the, or maybe I've got Lingon X7 because the Lingon X7 just came out. So it is worth going through and and seeing what's there and if there's something that seems like it's old and you don't use or need anymore, go ahead and remove it but also use something either terminal commands with it would be launch CTL is the the beginning of the command and there's far more to it than that. If you know what that is, then go ahead and do it that way. If you don't, I don't recommend doing it that way. I recommend getting a tool like Lingon to to help you manage these things and and remove like John said, the entry that's going to go looking for it because now it's been removed and you don't want those log entries. But yeah, but yeah, there's a very eclectic collection of things, at least what I see in mind. So it seems to be mostly. So I see pro soft. So it looks like disk access. I see tunnel there. Yeah, we're right. So things that need privileged access to your system. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, but I had it's a new place for me. I had never dug into privileged helper tools before and when I was going clean my Mac puts its own thing out there, which is fine. But it was, you know, when I saw it, I'm like, ah, what's this folder? And so here we are tug on the threads crazy. I don't know. I see some Adobe stuff here. I think I want to get rid of. Yeah. So yeah, we all have some cleanup to do. That's right. John, you you mentioned malware bites and sure enough malware bites for Mac is our next sponsor here. You know, this is one of those tools that clearly John and I both run, right? I mean, we're just talking about it. It is so super handy and so super fast. Malware bites can scan the average Mac in under 30 seconds. And I have yet to find a Mac where it takes longer than 30 seconds to do it. It will scan. It will find any adware unwanted programs that are going to slow you down and then it'll offer to remove them. And of course, you'll probably let it because you know, that's the whole idea. Things like viruses, ransomware, other malware and all of that. Plus it has real time detection technology. If you want to use that so it can find it all without you even having to scan catching all your dangerous threats automatically. So you're protected without even having to think about it and that keeps your Mac running silky smooth. Very, very cool stuff. You got to check this out. John and I are big fans of this. You can use it to go to malwarebytes.com slash Mac for your free download and you get a 14 day free trial of their premium offering which is what gives you that real time monitoring so you can check it all out for free. You got to do this malwarebytes.com slash Mac M-A-L-W-A-R-E-B-Y-T-E-S dot com slash Mac our thanks to malwarebytes for sponsoring this episode. While we're here, John, I also want to talk about cash fly. Cash fly is someone it's a name that is almost synonymous with Mac Geekab anyone that's listened to Mac Geekab for I would say almost all of the last 14 years. I think it took us about six months maybe to get on board starting to use cash fly as our CDNs get all the data from us to you for the episodes. What's that? CDN, what's that? CDN content delivery network. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but cash fly also has this great new web optimization engine right where if you're running a website they can do a lot of the work for you similar to what they're doing with the CDN for us but even smarter than that and they can deal with all of your content distribution stuff because they've got these points of presence all over the place and their intelligent points of presence. They've got powerful APIs for solving all your content distribution problems and can do like image optimization application load balancing smart asset delivery. Look, if your website is tied directly to your revenue and most of the time it is you want to optimize your site's content so people get it immediately. Guarantee the best user experience for all of your customers no matter where they are or what device they're using and the good people at cash fly are even going to provide a free optimization consultation for you just because you're a Mackie Kebblissner. Free. You know exactly where your site your site stands when you do this optimization consultation and they might be able to help you speed things up quite a bit. Visit Mack.cashfly.com that's m-a-c dot c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com for your free consultation and learn all about what they can do for you after that too. Our thanks to cash fly for so much including sponsoring this episode. All right, John. Let's see what else we have here. Oh, you know what? We were in the forums. Let's go back to the forums in reply to the last week's episode do-it-for-me solutions had a comment where he said and talked a lot about you know we were talking about replacements for aperture and things like that and we sort of tangentialized that conversation into a discussion of photo editing software not just photo library software. Right, and I concur with many of you pointed out that what we were talking about was mostly editing and not photo management. Staying on that editing path for a minute at least do-it-for-me solutions had a very good point looking at different pieces of software and categorizing them into one of two buckets destructive photo editing software and non-destructive photo editing. So non-destructive means that you can go back to the original if you make edits and don't like them whereas destructive photo editing means you're taking the photo and truly changing the core file and it's important to note that you know things like Photoshop and GIMP and Pixelmator and all of that you know Photoshop in and of itself was just a bit level destructive editor and then like photos app is a non-destructive editor because it'll always let you revert to the original. So just bearing in mind which editors do which is important. The thing that occurs to me though so it's awesome and that was one of the things that I liked when you know I ran Aputure is that you'd literally I think say undo and it would go back in history. I guess the downside is that the way that it saves that change and my photo expert friends will probably shake their fist at me. I think it's somewhat proprietary to the program that you're using though maybe it's not maybe there's a standard for rollbacks in photo edits. I don't know. Let us know. Yeah. How can they let us know, Dave? Feedback at mackeygab.com. No, that's right. Yeah. I think I heard you say feedback at mackeygab.com. That's feedback at mackeygab.com. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Also from the forums on a forum post forum user smuscle said I was looking through lots of things and came across some very large files and and what he found he or she actually I don't know was that there was some massive mail log connect or mail connection log files in library home library containers com.apple.mail data library logs and and he found like hundreds of gigabytes of these things out there. So and he sort of explains where and how and all of that stuff in this forum post so we'll put a link in the show notes of course to this but and then there's a link from there to turn off mail to tell you how to turn off mail connection logging in case it's being overly chatty so thank you for that smuscle this is that's good stuff. We love all these little tips. Killer man. Yeah. Yeah. I check mine and they take up about 2k because I have the checkbox off. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Exactly. I know people have told us this is it. Yes. Logs can get very chatty. Very chatty. Yeah. For sure. For sure. All right. And then we got several comments one in the forum that I'll link to from Rolian and several from Martin and and other listeners in the two episodes ago we were talking about mail merge and how pages and numbers don't really have any mail merge functionality. Well, good news. There is an app called pages data merge. And it appears that they've got a version that works with Mojave and you can do all sorts of mail merge right there with it. So we'll we'll link we'll link to that in the show notes. Very, very cool stuff because you know that's what we do. That's how it works. So thank you for that. Did you did you mess with that at all? John. Yeah. No, I haven't really done mail merges and Oh, all right. Well, we do mail. We I mean, we sort of do mail merges with our with our MailChimp engine that you know, yeah, but I'm for for this, you know, I'm thinking like physical. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much manual right now. I used to use remember Ambrosia envelopes that used. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, printer, but that that's sure that's around anymore. I'm sure Hector knows all about it. Hector has stories to tell. I'm sure I am sure. So listener Eric asked a question based on our discussion about one password and the different types of background sync that are happening. And I'll let Eric ask the question instead of me paraphrasing it and then I'll I'll explain hopefully add some adding some clarity to this since I'm a longtime user of one password one who has not yet made the jump to the subscription model. After listening to you talk about using one password dot com to sync instead of iCloud. I decided to investigate going that route. I noticed when I open one password it immediately syncs to iCloud. If I make any changes I must be in the app. So I don't understand how syncing when I am not in the app adds anything. And iCloud is always syncing. If I make a change on any device when I go to fill a password on any other device it invokes one password which immediately updates. So in what instance does using one password dot com give me better data than iCloud which is always syncing. So the instance is this iCloud only syncs when the one password app is front most on your iOS devices. If you make a password change or addition on your Mac it will sync right if you then visit that same website on your iPhone in Safari it will offer you a list of passwords it will intermingle things based on all of the password managers you've chosen to use. So if you're using iCloud key chain those passwords will be there. If you're using one password those will be there. If you're using last pass those will be there. The one password passwords in that list will only be updated if you are using one password dot com sync. If you're using iCloud or Dropbox to sync you would have to go and launch the one password app wait a few seconds for it to do its launch and sync operation then go back to Safari and those passwords would be there. So the benefit is you can make a change on your Mac launch Safari on your iPhone and the new password is right there ready to go. You don't have to do anything else. That's the benefit of using the one password dot com and that's the thing that made me make the jump. So hopefully that Eric's question and the sort of TLDR answered there gets us there I hope but if not you know where to find us. Good. Yeah, John. Hmm. Okay. All right. All right. Good. And last pass is the same way, right? It's doing that same same but that's the only way you can sync last pass so there's no confusion there. It's only using like I said my understanding is that they claim it should push yeah things to the cloud immediately but sometimes it doesn't doesn't then you launch like I think all the other platforms are like well launch the app and it'll because who knows? I mean you're on reliable network or you got certificate or SS. Yeah. It doesn't always happen. It doesn't always happen for the most part but my my experience with last pass has been pretty fluid in that when I updated on one thing and I go to another thing it works. Which is there. Yeah. Good. Listener Scott has a question. He says if Apple could only turn the iPad into a computer with USB ports and Ethernet it would be awesome and he says Q the dream sequence. Well, I don't know that I have a dream sequence to Q for you but I do have an answer. I think they already have and it's called the 2019 iPad Pro. It has actually a 2018 iPad Pro, right? Sorry. Released just toward the end of last year. It has a USB-C port on it, right? That's what we're using for charging on that device. Well, you can plug in a USB-C dock into that like the OWC portable dock or whatever and add Ethernet, USB, HDMI all of that stuff. So Scott, your dreams, your iPad dreams anyway. Doesn't work. It definitely works. Let me try this. Yes. Oh, no, it's like, it's a thing. People are stoked about this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. USB-C to the rescue, all right. Correct. Yeah, it just, it makes it a thing. Yeah. It really is. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I like things. I know. So you got to check it out, Scott. Hopefully that'll, hopefully your iPad dreams are a reality now. I hope. All right. John, you got one for us, right? Yeah, Bill, Bill's got a good one here. We've talked about this before. We'll talk about it again because it's kind of timely because there are, especially in light of one of our sponsors that we just talked about. So, Dave and John, sometimes when I go to a URL, which is the thing you click on and it launches in a browser, I get this popup and you send us a nice picture. And on the top, it says software update and then it says, and it has a Adobe Flash icon and it says, Adobe Flash player might be out of date. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Download now. All right. I have set system preferences so that updates to Flash are installed automatically and he sent a screenshot of his Flash player system preference. Sure. Screen. And he says, when I click on check now, I'm told that I have the latest update. So I click. So he tried to dismiss it and it actually downloaded it. Of course. Anyways. And it's like, dude, your thoughts. All right. So, Bill, my thought is that your instincts are correct and that this is bogus. I tend to agree. You're not going to get a Flash update when you launch a URL within Safari or whatever your default browser is. Best I can tell, Dave, and actually I think your input, you know, running backbeat media. As far as I can tell, these are just ads that people somehow sneak into some of the ad networks like Google and some others. Yeah. Generally, that's fairly true. Google does a pretty good job of filtering those kinds of things out, especially the obvious ones, right, where they're trying to push Flash. But there are some, you know, of the sort of real-time bidding ad networks that are out there that these things do slip through occasionally. All right. So I think that's what you're running into or you're running into people and a personal story. When I want to find, every now and then I'll get an urge to identify malware and crush it. Sure. Search for an episode of a recent, of a popular show like, I don't know, S-O-1-E-O-1 Game of Thrones. Sure. Yeah. The pages that you go to that claim to offer those to stream them to you almost always have these bogus Flash update things because I think they're targeting these sites. And I guess whoever runs the site is less than honorable as far as what ads they accept. But anyways, what should happen here is two things. So number one, as you may or may not know, Apple has something called X-Protect, which is their malware, which is what at least this thing is. So it's trying to install software that's going to compromise some data on your computer. X-Protect, I found, is pretty good. If it's been around for a while, if it's fresh, it may not get it. And in which case, if it's newer, then our friends at Malwarebytes would probably pick it up as well. Yep. You can, and we'll list the path here, or I'll link to an article. But the thing is you can see the malware that X-Protect protects against and will identify the file that has it in there. What you want to make sure of is, in addition, is to make sure that your X-Protect is up to date because Apple does update this database, is go to System Preferences, Advanced, and then check the Install System Data Files and Security Updates. That's what updates this X-Protect database. My other thought, Dave, is that I don't know if I would necessarily want to be running Flash Player. I personally, and our former colleague, Jeff Gamet, was all about this, that Flash Player, I think, is just a security nightmare. I personally would not run it on its own. I would actually, and I just checked this in Chrome. So the Chrome browser from our friends at Google actually has an embedded Flash Player. So I may want to suggest that you not run the Flash Player within macOS and just isolate your interactions to something like Chrome, kind of like sandboxing your exposure. Even now, I've got to say, I mean, the last... I have a different piece. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm just saying that the other thing too is that I'm kind of scratching my head over why you're even running Flash Player. I mean, most content now is not, it doesn't require Flash. So I use Flash on Friday. And I was glad to have it. Ticketmaster or Live Nation, when you're buying tickets, if you have Flash installed on your Mac, you can actually see the seat map and select the seats that you want. I don't think they've HTML5ized that. In fact, I think I proved to myself last week that they didn't. Because I still using Flash. For part of it, if you don't have Flash though, you still get to pick the section and like do your thing, but you just can't dig in. And so what I do, I'm like you though, I don't want websites in general to know that I'm running Flash because I don't want them to try and offer me Flash content. Like for the most part, I'm fine living without Flash. But there are a few of these sites that I definitely want it running on. And so what I do, and you can do this in Safari 12, is you go into... So the idea is I load... I'll tell you how I do it, but just to kind of paint the picture, I load the Flash plug-in, but I hide its presence from everything except for a handful, a small handful, of websites where I know that I want it. Ticketmaster.com and Live Nation.com are some of them. I also have it turned on for MacObserver.com, not because we run any Flash, but because I want to know if someone pumps an ad through some ad network that uses Flash, right? So that's a little different for me, but in terms of utility, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are there. And Google Drive sometimes needs Flash. So I have that in my list too. But the way this works is if you go into Safari preferences, go to websites, and if you have the Flash plug-in install that'll be in the list, turn it on. And then what you'll do is the first thing you do is in the lower right corner of that window, it says, when visiting other websites, turn that to off. You don't want it on ask because what ask does is it tells the website, I have Flash, but then ask your permission before it turns it on. I don't want the website to know. I want the website to fall back to a non-Flash scenario in general. And then I'll go visit like Ticketmaster.com because I know that that's one of the ones where I want Flash. And you'll get a list of currently open websites in the top of that window. And they'll all be set to off because of course that's how that goes. And you just turn it to on. And then it will remember in theory, sometimes it forgets and that's what had happened the other day with Ticketmaster. So like, how come it's not showing me that? And I go in and I'm like, oh, because it's off and I turned it on and then everything came up and it was fine. So, but I missed my opportunity for those tickets. I had to buy them the next day. But anyway, yeah, you can turn it on for individual sites and leave it off for everything else. I do not recommend it being in ask mode. Although, like I said, for Mac Observer, I have it in ask mode because I want that prompt. I want that interruption. So yeah, so there you go. That's sort of, it really is the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned because I get it when I want it, but the rest of the time I'm totally isolated from it. So I don't know. There you go. Crazy. No, I was hoping we would go into different parts of this. And number one, should he be ranked a flash player? Maybe not. But if you are, then yeah, you can refine it with a... Yeah. Yeah, I haven't been in that part of the... You can do this with all plugins. It's not just... Right, right, right. Oh, no, it shows, yeah, it shows a whole list here. Readers, content blockers, all the categories. Well, your plugins will be at the bottom of that, like individual plugins are at the bottom of that list. Right, right. And right now the only ones I see here are Google Talk. Yeah, for Hangouts. Yep, exactly. Although, if anybody uses Google Hangouts, Chrome is your friend and Safari is not. We have found, we use Hangouts for a lot of meetings and stuff. And we found video always works. If you're in Safari, you sometimes don't hear select other members of the call. Unfortunately, you don't get to pick which members are muted, but if you were, then if you did, then maybe that would be a good thing. But no, Safari chooses for you, which members you just don't get to hear. So if you use Hangouts, just use Chrome. It's better. All right. Right, that was somewhat focused. I like it. Yeah, well, you know, it gets us there. Yeah, Dan has a follow-up question. It seems like this one keeps coming back. He says, we were talking about refurb iMacs in a recent episode and he says, I'm waiting to replace my early 2009 iMac and I'm hoping for a 2019 to show up in the refurb store soon. I am too. Although, after I bought my flights to WWDC, I could stand to wait another month. Man, it was like a thousand bucks to get out to WWDC. It's crazy. What? You know me. Like, I'm good at this. I have failed miserably. A round trip flight? Round trip. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And I don't think I've ever paid. Same. Four digits for a plane ticket. It wasn't quite four, but it was really close, like really close. Yeah, actually it was four. And then I think I got, you know, so I had to pick two legs, one on American and coming back, I think on Southwest or something to just to get the prices right. And my Southwest flight dropped by like forty eight dollars. And I think that actually brought me below the, the, you know, the one thousand mark. But yeah, freaking crazy, man. I don't know. I don't know. Well, when's this? I mean, the conventional wisdom from what I understand is that you should book a flight about two months before you're going to take it. That's when you're going to get, that's like the sweet spot for the best pricing. Yeah, maybe. I mean, yeah, it's, you know, you're not wrong. I mean, there's a lot of different thoughts on this, but, but anyway, I looked a month ago and was like, and flights were super expensive. I'm like, I don't know, man. I wasn't sure when I wanted to go. But you're going from, so you go from a major metro, you usually go from Logan, right? I am flying out of Logan and flying back to. Oh, wait, that's in Manchester, but it's in San Jose, which honestly though, I looked at flights to San Francisco knowing that once I got myself to San Francisco, I would either have to convince somebody like Brian to come and drive and pick me up or I'd pay about a hundred bucks for an Uber or whatever to get from SFO all the way down to to San Jose. Okay. But prices were really different. In my mind, I've been, but I know the way to San Jose number one, but just costs a lot. I really don't. No, I always thought that was a more. Well, no, I guess it's smaller than like SFO is is the big airport in the area. I guess they're not. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It but it wasn't really any different, but between San Francisco and San Jose on price wise. So I was like, OK, well, then I'll just fly to San Jose and save myself the hassle, you know. So anyway, you know, so it was it cost me fortune, but whatever it's fine. You know, it's it's I lead a relatively charmed life. I can deal with problems every now and then, you know, yeah, by the train. I have taken the train from not from here. Good God. It would take me longer to get there and get back than I would spend out there. Amtrak is good here in the Northeast elsewhere. No, not so good. Most pay. Well, yeah, they called the Northeast corridor. So most people acknowledge that because they have the Assella, which is the fastest train that they got. But yeah, pretty much between Boston and DC is the best Amtrak service you're going to get. Yes, we're also to train wreck. Well, sorry. No, it is kind of a train. Yeah, it's just a slow train is what it is. Anyway, back to Dan. Let's see. So he says, he says, do you have any recommendations? We're talking about the reefer by Mac. Do you have any recommendations about the processors? How does someone know what they need? I'm just a personal and basic user web surfing photo management and maybe tiny bit of editing, etc. I don't think I'm a power user. Is the basic processor enough? So this is a great question. And obviously I'm very interested in this because I have my eye on these machines, too. So Mac Tracker doesn't yet have these machines in there. And the sad part about that is Mac Tracker also bakes and results from geek bench. So I I've been waiting for those to appear so I could sort of think about what's different. It's not there, but you know, I'm a smart guy. I went to geek bench to start looking at benchmarks instead of waiting for them to appear in Mac Tracker. And the six core I'm using as a reference for myself, the six core I seven, the high end processor in the Mac mini, the current Mac mini averages 24,000. I'm rounding here like we're totally fine to round 24,000. Okay, I I'm using that as a benchmark because up until the 2019 IMAX came out, I was assuming that was the machine that I would get for myself this year in the office because it's smoking fast. It's great, really, really good machine. And and we have one for Lisa. So it was like, okay, I know this machine. I'm good prior to the 2019 IMAX being released. I did not want to get an IMAX because the 2017 IMAX the fastest CPU is not all that fast. I think it's like 16,000 or something like that. And it's not that much faster than my four gigahertz four core I seven in my 2014 IMAX that clocks in at about 14,000. So I looked there are four different processors in the 2019 IMAX. The top end one clocks in at 32,000. That's the I nine. That's pretty fast, almost 33,000. That's really fast. The and then we go to the rest are all I fives, all six cores, no hyper threading. And and they really are about the same. There's a 3.7, a 3.1 and a 3.0. The numbers in Geekbench will probably change a little bit as more and more data gets in there. But they there's enough to be sort of generalized. They run from 23,000 to 22,000 to 21,000. They're all very close to each other, 3.7, the 3.1 and the 3.0. So if you're getting a 2019 IMAX based on the Geekbench numbers. Either get the slowest I five or the fastest I nine at the moment. It doesn't seem like those middle CPUs are fast enough to make a difference. Now, if you're buying refurb, you know, you're saving about 15% in general anyway. So, you know, like take what you get. But but yeah, I'll probably lean toward the I nine on on mine. The I Mac Pro for reference. The low end CPU on that on Geekbench is at 30,000. The high end CPU is at 46,000. So that that I nine I Mac definitely sits in the pro range without question. So so there you go. And one other thing to note is that the I max all of them use a discrete separate GPU, whereas the Mac mini, the one I'm comparing against uses built-in GPU. Now you can always add one with a Thunderbolt 3 external GPU, but out of the box, you know, you're using built-in GPU, which may or may not make a difference depending on how much, what apps you're using and whether they will tax the and utilize the GPU or not. So yeah. And what are we talking about here? The thing is, you can have a GPU that uses a system RAM, or you can have a GPU that's a dedicated chip. And the thing is, the ones that use system RAM are typically not as well performing because I think the limitation is that it's not a dedicated chip and it's using system RAM, right? Number one, it takes away some of your RAM, but number two, it's just the RAM is just not as fast as the RAM that's in a dedicated chip. So you got away. What are you doing with the machine? Yep. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And because Apple's refurb store no longer really shows you details on the main screen, you have to dig into each option. I don't know why they did it. The way they allowed me to sort the machines to allow all of us to sort them, you know, by year and stuff like that just just made it a lot easier to make an informed choice. Now you just see kind of a high level. What? Yeah. Yeah, right. You got a drill. You got really got a drill. Fortunately, we got like things like Mac Tracker, which consolidate the data in a much nicer way. Well, and one way to think about it is that I'm trying to pull up Apple refurbish stuff to look here, but the 20 any iMac prior to 2019 is going to be four cores or less. The 2019 iMacs are either six cores for all the i5s or eight cores for the i9. So I think that starts to make it a little bit easier. Maybe that's that's at least my hope. I'm looking on the refurb store at the moment to see if they show that stuff. Yeah, they do. So they store, they show dual core quad core and that's all they have on there now is quad core. So looking on the store when they show, you know, six core eight core, you know, those are the 2019s. Everything else is, you know, at least two years old, if not older. So there you go. That'll make life a little easier in terms of the shopping. I don't know what I'm going to do. I know. I know. Yeah, I'm not. I have no interest in a 2017 iMac. If I'm going to buy one now, like I said, I can wait another month or three until the refurb show up. Just very apprehensive about my next machine purchase because it sounds like it's going to be really like stressful. Like, you know, what processor I get? How much memory do I get? Do I get an essay? Well, no, I think I know in general what I want. Yeah. Well, and the nice part is with the with the iMac upgrading the RAM is still super easy, right? I mean, it's it all it is as a CPU bump. It's not and a GPU bump, but but the shell of the device is the same. So you get all those great ports and everything. So yeah, I'll strongly consider it because the thing is right now I have two external displays. The thing is, as far as I understand, I could plug both of these displays into the iMac. So I'd have like three displays. You could just like, yeah. Yeah, you definitely could pretty cool. Oh, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I have two on on each of my iMacs. And and I it's I mean, I'm very spoiled, but you know, it's crazy to think that only 127 inch monitor isn't enough. I need I need to, you know, and having a third or the displays, how are they connected to the iMac? HDMI or I'm using DisplayPort because that's what's native to the iMac. Yeah, but you could do HDMI. There was a period of time where DisplayPort was was better. It may still be better in terms of the refresh rate and the resolution option, the number of different resolution options that you get. But but your iMac is natively display ports. So you're I mean, you're probably using DisplayPort on your external displays now anyway, right? Um, well, actually I'm using both. So my mini, so I have one display connected to HDMI and have the other one connected to a DisplayPort to DVI adapter. Oh, OK, OK. So it yeah, all right. That may be my next. We have a bunch now that I get the high res. But once I get a high res screen on the iMac, Dave, then I think you told me this. I'm going to hate my other displays. Oh, yeah, you're not going to want those. Yeah, you're going to you're going to spend another certainly another 400 three to 400 bucks to replace one of them so that you can at least have a second retina display. Yeah, for sure. Or UHD display retinas Apple's word. But whenever I yeah. All right, we have a bunch of cool stuff found and I want to I want to get through it. And I think we can first though, I want to talk about and thank our Makika premium listeners whose contributions have come in over the last two weeks. And on the well on the one time contribution plan, we have 25 bucks in from Leslie from Connecticut. Thank you and 100 bucks in from Will from New Hampshire. And thank you. You both really, really rock on the monthly $10 plan. We have Beth from Virginia, Stephen from California, Robert from Florida, Ward from Arizona, Joan from Florida, Olga from Washington, Jason from Charlestown, Stephen from Illinois, Kenneth from New South Wales. Easy for me to say Nick from Michigan, Paul from Indiana, Mark from Connecticut, Ryan from Texas, Neil from Connecticut, Scott from Portland, Peter from Maine, Bob from Working Smarter for Mac users, Jim from San Antonio, Chris from Hartfordshire, Joe from Kansas, Abdullah from Maryland, Ari from California, Michael from Kansas and Dave from Socrates. Thanks to all of you on the monthly $10 plan and on the $25 by annual plan. That means once every six months or twice a year. Wayne from Hawaii, thank you. Tony from Dorset, Jimmy from Oklahoma at 30 bucks every six months. Rob from Illinois, Doug from Texas, Mike from Ohio, Ed from California, David from Bucks, Scott from Maryland, Craig from New South Wales, Bob from California, David from Nashville, Brian from Ohio, Andrew from New South Wales, Dan from San Diego at $50 every six months. Brian from Maryland, Jim from South Carolina, Jay from New Jersey, Thomas from Kansas and Mikhail from California. Thanks to all of you and if you want to learn more, of course, mackekeb.com slash premium is where you can go and I will leave it at that because I really want to get to all this cool stuff found. So we will go to Timothy and Timothy starts us off with something that I wasn't sure we'd ever see. He says finally a perian equivalent for the finder and quick look to show thumbnails for non-quick time supported codecs. ASF, AVI, FAV, MKV, WMV, et cetera. It is a GitHub project called QL video and we'll have a link of course in the show notes but for those of you that used perian years ago had added all these codecs to allow quick time to be able to use lots of videos and display lots of videos that it otherwise couldn't and then perian was sort of end of life by the people that were maintaining it. There is something new called QL video and Timothy linked us to it. So thank you for that. Very, very cool stuff. Probably worth installing, huh, John? Yeah, I miss Perian. Yeah, exactly. Well, you don't have to miss it anymore. We install Perian because macOS isn't very good at natively playing the stupid Microsoft. Right, right. The Microsoft proprietary format. VLC is another good option there. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I'm with you. But most things, when I double click on them, we'll launch VNC and it can play them. Yeah, so we'll put a link to VLC but you can install QL video now, John. So you'd be good to go. All right. And then Rob, we were talking about video editing in the last show where a woman wanted to take a one long video and chop it up into various little pieces and we were lamenting that at least we didn't know of an option to do that. And Rob writes, guys, this is what I do for a living. I'm going to go out on a limb and recommend Da Vinci Resolve from blackmagicdesign.com. Now, this is actually a suite of super high-end tools for video editing and finishing. It's also free. That's right. Free. And doing what listener Barbara wants to do is a piece of cake. She can ignore everything except the drag-and-drop importing and editing. Export is already set up as presets on the delivery page and there are a world of simple and straightforward tutorials out there. He says, I use the paid version to do color effects and graphics professionally but the free version lacks nothing for what Barbara or really any of the geek ab listeners need or want. And did I mention that it's free? Don't be scared of its capabilities. Just ignore what you don't want. Go get Da Vinci Resolve from blackmagicdesign.com. Oh yeah, it's free. Thank you, Rob, for reminding us that it might actually be able to be downloaded for free. So this is really interesting. So I've downloaded it. I haven't messed with it yet, but that's pretty cool. Thank you for that, Rob. I never would have known. So cool. It's also cool, Dave, is... doesn't that name sound kind of familiar to you? Da Vinci Resolve? I mean... No, blackmagicdesign. Oh, blackmagic has a great free speed test app for your disks too. Yeah, that's where I want to highlight because that's where many of us were introduced to them. I guess they have a tool that does benchmarks because hey, they do video software and part of doing video is you got to have disks that don't suck. It's true. No, it's a great way. It's how I always test new SSD that I'm reviewing or whatever I plug it in. I run black magic against it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Cool. That's right. All right. So that link is now in the show notes for all of you. All right. Ed from Episode 759. We were talking about... Oh yeah, Mail and List and Merge and all that stuff. Well, Software Mac Kev has the Print Shop 4 and is another option for Mail Merge. So thank you for that, Ed. We'll put a link to that in the show notes too. I know. Let's go. Print Shop? Not like Broder... No, no. I don't think this is... Literally not Broderbund and Norse product. No, but probably better because it's up to date for the Mac, which is good. Oh man, I remember making posters and stuff. Dude, it was so revolutionary. It really... Yeah, there's a piece of software called Print Shop for the Apple II back in the day that really blew us away. Yeah, it really was. Not just posters, but you could do like multiple... Yeah, it was like the sign making... Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of paper and a lot of ink and a lot of ribbons were sacrificed in the name of Print Shop. Yeah, but a lot of my school project had cool covers because of Print Shop. No, it blew people away. Yeah. All right. In the cool stuff found realm, Listener Mark sent us a note actually about something else and happened to allude to the fact that Microsoft Edge, which is a new upcoming browser for the Mac, has now leaked. And I don't think it's leaked. Microsoft teased it and you can download it. It's based on Chromium. So it's not all that different from Chrome. You can actually use some Chrome plugins with it right now or extensions, but... Does Firefox use that same engine? No, it uses... They use the Mozilla engine. Oh, all right. Yeah, yeah. So, and Chrome... I thought Chrome at some level used WebKit too. So I'm not sure how different Edge is going to be for all of us, but anyway, it's out if you want to go check it out. So we'll put a link, of course, to that in the show notes too. I got actually a few cool things that crossed my desk here. One is called the Plugable Cube, which is a USB-C docking station. It's actually a pretty cool thing. It's a tiny little cube. Maybe like if you took an iPhone and cut it in half the wide way and then stacked it up, it's got two USB... It's a USB-C dock is really what it is. It's got, well, three USB-A ports on it, one of which can do USB-3, the other USB-2. It's got an HDMI port and it's got Ethernet on it. It has bus power if you want it, but you don't need it so you can use it with your laptop portably. It's a cool little... And of course, it's got a USB-C port on the front to connect to your laptop or your iPad Pro, as we mentioned earlier in the show. So yeah, it's just a cool little form factor and crams a ton into this. Three USB ports is pretty good, along with Ethernet and HDMI. So, you know, something fun little thing. I figured I'd mention it. And Plugable also makes, which is really nice, a 0.8 meter Thunderbolt 3 cable capable of full 40 gigabits per second and all that stuff. I think before, and it's 40 bucks, but I think before this, Apple was the only one making the 0.8 meter cable. So anyway, I share that out there. There are options if you want options, which is good, I think. Good. And then, I think we talked a couple of episodes ago about the new Gallium Nitrate or Nitride tech for charging bricks that allows a much flatter, much thinner, smaller, lighter charging brick for more power. And Anchor now has, when they call it, the Powerport Atom PD2, A-T-O-M, PD2 based on Gallium Nitride tech. And it's a small little thing and it has two USB-C ports on it. And it does 60 watts of output on them and so you can charge, you know, a laptop or whatever you want. So it's cool, this Gallium Nitride stuff that, I don't know what they're doing with it, but the tech is being baked into lots of different chargers and really cuts down on the weight and the size. So I'm on board. I'm stoked with it. I've got a couple of these things and very, very happy. I don't know, man. I'll let you be the guinea pig. Yeah, happily. What's wrong with, what's the problem? How do we know how safe this is? All of a sudden we get this new Gallium Nitride. Not even Nitrate, but Nitride. I know. So there's like three of something and a Gallium? What's Gallium? I don't even know. I mean, lithium ion I was okay with, you know. And lithium ion is one of the most unstable things to exist. This isn't a battery. Well, I know in general the metals that they put in batteries are on devices. This isn't a battery. This is not a battery. It's just a charger. It's essentially the transformer is made of Gallium Nitride. I see. I think. So less heat. So there's a converter that uses rather than, oh, okay. All right, sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, no. No, it's, yeah, it's just, it generates less heat in its transformation from AC to DC power. And so they can cram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Okay. All right. No, I'm kind of scared. No, we're not yet at a new battery technology. Sadly, no, I would like to be, but we are not there yet. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I think lithium ion is pretty much it. But for the moment, we got to do a circuitry. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just just cool runs cooler, which is great. So and then Luciano tells us about. Let me see if I can find it here. Right. The one switch as it's called, and it is actually a little app. And it is one switch that sits in your menu bar and it allows you to do all kinds of things. You can turn your AirPods on and off. You can turn keep awake on. So if you need your Mac alive, you can turn dark mode on and off. You can hide your desktop icons. It is one switch to do lots of different things. You can turn on your screen saver, all kinds of stuff. So we'll put a link to it. You can download it and use it for seven days for free. And then there's a, the price tag is actually in. It looks to be Mandarin here. So I don't, I'm not sure that I'm, I don't know how much it is. Oh, wait, wait, wait. It's five bucks for one device. So there you go. Five bucks US. So, you know, not so bad. Thanks for, thanks for that Luciano stuff. Yeah, John. Good. Yeah. Yes. All right. Cool. Cool. I'm going to take a minute on our, on our little outro here and, and share some of the reviews that you folks have sent in because I'm appreciative of all these reviews and you can leave us a review at macgeekab.com slash iTunes. A must for all geeks says Peter of JP. Dave and John troubleshoot all your Apple products and related tech gear. Awesome. Long time friend from JMAX F. I have listened to macgeekab since, since almost the inception of the podcast and never miss an episode. I do always learn something every time I listen. I trust their advice and too often it costs me money, but it's usually very well spent. The definitive Mac enthusiast podcast by Rob Roy 90. John and Dave put out a fantastic show each week and I've been enjoying it for many, many years. It is one of the few things I can think of that makes a commute to the office on a Monday and even remotely worthwhile endeavor. He says, I appreciate the effort they put into the production and the approach they take to producing the show just makes sense to me. They have a great format and I hope they continue helping us for many years to come. I definitely learned at least five new things. Well, that's pretty good. I like that. This is good. Yeah. Yeah. We like the iTunes reviews. It's important, man. Yeah. Your band must be like soaked. Oh, is it raining outside? You're not here. Oh, yeah. No, not here. Oh, no, we got predictions of a. Oh, that's rain heavy at times. Rain heavy. I should do like weather announcing. You could. Yeah. Side gig. Yeah. Maybe it's a side gig. I got I got I got three more reviews. I'll include the negative one in here too. So we have Kyle, the pokey dude from USA, who says five stars, very all the rest are five stars. That as is this one, very informative. And I learn a lot of new things every episode. Also very entertaining to thumbs up T. Michael B says novice advice. They give advice about tech. They are generally looking up while advising and the ad reads are way too long. I'm sorry to hear that. We actually really try to keep the ad reads tight. You know, for for exactly that reason. So but hey, you know, like they're too long for him. I get it. It's that, you know, we can't all be. It's we're not all the same. It's OK. And Slok from Denmark clocking in with a five star review owning anything Apple. This is a must the podcast about everything Apple Wi-Fi routers tips and tricks. This one has it all. John and Dave make it easy to understand. I learn at least five new things every time I listen. Keep up the good work and don't get caught. Well, thank you for that. I think that's a good spot for us to kind of, you know, just let things go for today. And you know, yeah, there you go. I'm sad to hear we have somebody that doesn't know that's a guy. You know what? I see that as a good thing. It's constructive criticism. I think it's always good. If we had only positive reviews, it would actually seem a little weird to me. Like, yeah, it's like the game's rigged. It's like the game's rigged. Yeah. If you know anything about iTunes reviews, you know, we can't rig them. We have no ability to reply or really do anything with them other than read them on the show. Right. Like that's all we can do. But and there's there's several more that for whatever reason I can't find right now. So I apologize for that. But thank you to everybody that's put them in. And really, if you have complaints, I mean, send them to us because we are. We actually take criticism and and you know, here's here's my here's my feeling on criticism. Accommodate your needs based on your feedback. Well, yes and no. I'm not going to tell them again to write to feedback at Mackie cup.com. No, we've already said that three times. So we can't say feedback at Mackie cup.com again. No, no, no, no, but but when a review or when a note comes in, I treat it. I've always treated things this way. I mean, first of all, thank you for sending it in, whether it's positive or negative. Thank you. You took the time and you care and I sincerely like it means something to us. It's great. If you complain about something, we read it. We don't necessarily make a change. If you suggest something, we read it. We don't necessarily make a change. However, we take it all sort of and mass and we also sort of listen to ourselves. If you say something like, Hey, I hate this thing that you guys are doing and you should change this. And it's like, oh, yeah, you know what? That's bothered us too, but we hadn't quite crystallized it yet. You just crystallized it for us. Like those changes we make all the time and and and really. So please do send in your thoughts. You know, we do sort of aggregate them together and all that stuff. So, yeah, there you go. I don't know. I don't know if that's on the other side of the coin. If there's something you don't like and we keep doing it. There's other podcasts. There are. There's a there's a universe of podcasts and maybe we're not the right podcast for you, though we hope to be. We do want to be, but we realize what we do here is is specific, right? We answer your questions. We solve your problems. It's what yeah, and sometimes it's a seat of the pants as was pointed out. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes we're sometimes not as much as he said. He seems to think, but you know, right, what else? Yeah, that was the only part that that stung a little. It was like generally looking up all advising. It's like, yeah, we put a lot of work into this show, but it's okay. Now we've had others have. Surmised as much, but all I can say, Dave is the one thing as far as advice that I like seeing in our chat room here. Yeah. Is more cowbell. More. I don't think anybody can deny that level of know that I have a cowbell within reach. I think there's one about 10 feet away from me. I can't hit more cowbell right now. I would think is a percussionist that that's a standard tool. I mean, I can see it. All right. You know what? You talk to him for a second. We got to hit the cowbell. Hang on. I can't. I'm going to talk to them. All right. You know what? Uncle P, you're going to get your cowbell. I think your John. I can't hear you. Yes, I am coming back here, man. I'm back and now I can hear you. Do you have a fever, John? Is there anything you need? No, I don't think I have a fever. But no, I do have a fever. And the only prescription Dave is more cowbell. There we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. OK, there you go, guys. Don't ever say we don't we don't listen. We don't accommodate. That's right. Yeah. You can call us at 224-888-Geek and John Geek is 433-5. We told you the email address. We told you the email address. You can find us in the forums. We mentioned several things from the forums. We didn't tell you how to get there. MacGeekGab.com slash forums is where you will go. I want to thank all our sponsors. As we mentioned in the episode, Linode at linode.com slash MGG with coupon code MGG 2019. Let's see. I want to make sure I get everything right. Malwarebytes.com slash Mac, of course, cashfly.com at or Mac.cashfly.com. But cash fly is also, of course, providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Sponsors in the podcast marketplace include Smile at smilesoftware.com slash MGG. No. Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. They have the generic URL. Otherworldcomputing at maxsales.com. Barebonesoftware at barebones.com. Eero at Eero.com slash MGG. You know what? You know what I want to say for all of our sponsors? That's right. They rock. You know what I want to say for all of our premium listeners who can email us at premiumamacgeekab.com? They rock. That's right. You got anything else to say, John? More cowbell. Oh, well, that's a given. Oh, man. I'm going to take that away from you. But the other thing I have to say is if you have a cowbell, make sure that you don't get caught. Made.