 The Mac Observers Mac Geekgub Episode Number Six Sixty-three for Sunday, June 25th, 2017. Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun, they are the geeks that turn us on. Talking Mac in iOS and Pilot Pete might be the guest. They often speak in terminal. Make it cool if you don't know. Just stick around, you'll understand. Just how to enter those commands. Hamilton and John F. Braun. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geekgub, the show where you send in your questions, tips, and cool stuff found so that we can share with everybody, answer your questions, and get everybody on their way, having learned at least four new things each and every time we get together. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Fairville, Connecticut, John F. Braun. Good morning, Mr. John F. Braun. Good day to all of you. How you doing, man? Good day. Good day. We're not in Canada. We're just close to Canada. That's right. But, you know, that's okay. All right, let's get things rolling with Petter here, because Petter has a great little tip for us. He says, whenever I sign up to some web service, I do as every web user should, and I give it a unique and strong password with my password manager. But I have also purchased a domain name with my own name, where I have the email activated. It's a simple catch-all setup where everything sent to anything at my domain just forwards to my personal email address. When I set up web services, I use the name of the service before my domain in the username email field. If I sign up for Facebook, for example, I'll write Facebook at my domain. This means practically every web service I use has a unique username and password. Would this not keep me even more protected where usernames and passwords are stolen, or am I just making fairy tales here? No, this is a great thing. And it's a great idea to do this, especially now that we all have password managers. I mean, there's obviously one built into iOS, or you could use LastPass or OnePassword or anything like that. But it's a great idea. And as I was answering this question, I immediately had my knee-jerk reaction to the concept of a catch-all address. And it's wrong now, but I'll explain my reaction, and then I'll explain why it's wrong. My reaction is, well, there was a period of time where setting up a catch-all address was a huge double-edged sword, because while you could do things like this with it, and it meant you didn't have to think about, oh, let me create this forward or anything. What it meant was, if anybody knew your domain name, they could just send email to anything at that domain name and spam the crap out of you. And that's bad. And that's still the case with a catch-all address. But here's the thing, and why that's been either mitigated or completely removed from any concern, is that every Gmail address, and that includes Google apps for domains and anything at gmail.com, every one of those addresses is a catch-all address. If I have, I think it would actually even work. Our feedback at macgeekab.com address, I think, is also a catch-all address. In fact, I see no reason why it wouldn't be because we host that with Google apps for domains. And the way that would work is you add a plus and then whatever you want to the end of that address. So, you know, feedback plus Facebook at macgeekab.com would accomplish the same thing that that Petter is doing here. So pretty much everything becomes a catch-all in that sense. So yeah, I like this idea where instead of just having a unique password with the same email address, you've got a unique email and password. What do you think, John? I like it. Yeah, it's pretty good. So if it would make it harder for someone to ruin your day right that they have to figure out each unique email address that you've used that whatever site you're at. Right. Yeah. So I like the concept. Yeah, it's pretty good. I don't like feedback. It's kind of like feedback. Yeah, but different. That's right. Somebody in our chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream, in fact, user Koran in our chat room says, I am anxious for Steve Gibson's, easy for me to say, Squirrel to take hold and Squirrel is SQL, which is for secure, quick, reliable login. And it's a QR code-based login. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe. I'll put a link to Gibson Squirrel in the show notes so that you can play with that if you care to. Cool. All right. I like that tip. Shall we move on here, John? Squirrel. Squirrel. Yeah, right. I know. I know. All right. Let's go to Paul. And Paul says, I just thought I'd give you some feedback on the performance I've been getting from using my Anchor Powercore Plus 20,100 and my 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro with Touchpad because I thought it might be of interest to the macgeekab audience. So this is a battery pack, like an external battery pack like you might use for your iPhone or your iPad, but because it's got USB-C output and enough output coming from it, you can plug it in to your MacBook Pro, which is USB-C and also your MacBook, if that happens to be USB-C. He says, I've been in a coffee shop working today, so the day he sent this, since 9 a.m. this morning, and it's now 2 p.m. I've had my Powercore Plus plugged into my Mac all the time, and I've been using my Mac for five hours straight, some web browsing, email, and writing today, so nothing too taxing. In that time, the Powercore has nearly depleted, but my Mac is still showing a 99% charge. I've been streaming music on my iPhone 7 Plus all the time via tethering. The iPhone has been providing a Wi-Fi hotspot for my Mac. In addition to charging my Mac, the Powercore has also bumped up the charge on my iPhone by 35%, and it's completely recharged my depleted AirPods as well. He says, in the UK here, the Anker Powercore Plus 20,100 costs under 30 pounds, which is quite remarkable for what it's able to achieve. Because of that, he says, I've got a second Powercore Plus in my bag, so just like the Duracell Bunny, I can keep going and going. Thanks, Paul. That's impressive. For so long, we all worked really hard to figure out ways of getting external batteries to connect to our various Apple laptops, and now, with USB-C, it's just like, all right, it's all set. Done. Ready to go? It's pretty good, huh, John? Well, in the battle days, you have to hack together an external power solution, right? Yeah. For the MacBook. Yeah. To use their, for better or worse, proprietary MagSafe. Yeah, proprietary MagSafe. Yeah, and there are things I like about MagSafe. I still use it, but yeah, I'm happy to not have to deal with that anymore in future devices. I think there are products out here. So some people lament the passing of MagSafe because, well, USB-C doesn't necessarily have the quick disconnect feature or prevent your laptop from crashing to the ground when you trip over your power cord. Right. Although Griffin has that thing, right? Yes. Yeah, I know in other words, I think a Kickstarter and then Griffin came out with something. Yeah, somebody makes something that gives you that ability to not destroy your machine. Right. Yeah, what's it called? I think it's called the Breaksafe, right, from Griffin. So we can put that in there. But yeah, it plugs into your USB-C port and then it's not MagSafe, but it's their own version of it, which is great. So yeah, good stuff. All right, Breaksafe it is. Cindy has a quick tip for us today, if I can get us there. And Cindy says, I have a tiny bit of hearing loss in my left ear. In accessibility, I found that on my Mac, I can adjust the left-right volume. But when I made a slight adjustment, it would snap back to center. And then I found this tip online where it says, I found a workaround for the slider snapping into place. I have a set of headphones where the balance is slightly off. When the balance control is centered, the volume in my right headphone speaker is noticeably louder. But the first spot the balance slider snaps to when I adjust it to the left is too much of an adjustment and makes the volume noticeably louder in my left ear. What I figured out is that when you adjust the slider, the balance shifts smoothly and only snaps into place when you release the mouse. If you find a non-snap location that you like, keep your finger on the slider in that position and hit the home button to get out of settings. The slider will not snap into place into a predefined location because it never detects your finger coming off the screen if you go, oh, so this is not, sorry, this is on iOS, not the Mac, sorry. So again, when you adjust the slider, the balance shifts smoothly and only snaps into place when you release. So if you find a non-snap location that you like, keep your finger on the slider in that position and hit the home button. And if you go back into settings, the balance will remain the same until you touch the balance slider. So this is sort of a hack in the way that iOS's sliders work that if you hit the home button, it will remain there and never snap because that's what the UI is built to do. Pretty good stuff. I like that, man. What do you think, John? Oh, snap. Oh, snap. I see what you did there. Oh, snap. Very good, John. Very, very good. All right, should we go into some questions now that we've, I don't know what we've done here. We're going to go into some questions anyway. Okay. We'll go to Andrew. Andrew asks, when using airplane mode, does the GPS radio get shut off as well? Related to that, is there any way to use GPS over Wi-Fi or is it only available via cellular radio? In other words, can I just turn on the GPS radio without activating cellular? In the city we visited, there were a ton of concrete buildings everywhere and I surmised that some of the difficulties navigating using Google Maps is due to the frequency, or sorry, where I got frequency, due to the accuracy of Maps over Wi-Fi. So here's an interesting thing, Andrew. As of iOS 8.3, the GPS receiver is still active and usable in airplane mode and that's just how it's been and that has yet to change and I don't think it will change. So your iPhone, but in terms of the extension to your question there, your iPhone determines your location via a mix of cell triangulation, GPS and Wi-Fi lookup data. And I think it's usually in that order, but cell triangulation is first and oftentimes, even when an app asks for your location, it does not activate the GPS receiver. If it has, if the app doesn't need it any more granular than your phone is already able to get based on cell triangulation, then it's done. It never goes further than that. And that, there you go. So it just stops and that saves your battery from having to listen and tune into all those satellites and all that stuff. So it's possible GPS might be the very last thing on the list and that cell triangulation is first, Wi-Fi second and GPS last. For turn-by-turn and walking directions in a city or whatever, I think it's going to turn on the GPS receiver there. But yeah, you can be in airplane mode and still have GPS active. In fact, I've done that on an airplane and it mostly works. So interesting stuff. Right, John? Absolutely. Any thoughts on that? I remember I actually explored, I think they call it location services. As you point out, it's a mishmash of whatever is there to provide location data. I remember actually doing an experiment. So I had an iPod touch and I was running one of these things that will track your bike ride or something like that. I was like, you know, I wonder if it will work on the iPod touch because it does use, it does determine location with Wi-Fi. And it did, for the most part. There was one area where there wasn't any Wi-Fi, so it just showed me going from point A to point B like through a swamp or something. But it was pretty impressive because there's enough Wi-Fi, I think in most areas, to provide reasonable location data. And your phone yells at you when you turn off Wi-Fi. Sometimes I have to do that like when I'm out and about and the Wi-Fi is not working. I'm like, all right, we'll go to LTE. Right, yeah, right, right. While we're on the subject, I should throw this in. This is an informative moment, but I'm going to throw in a proud Papa moment here, too. My daughter this year for her school paper interviewed Andy Grignan, who was in charge of all the radios on the original iPhone project. And it's a fascinating interview, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But in it, she asked him, what's your favorite tip for users of the iPhone? It might have even been, what's your favorite tip to make the battery work better? But that's where we went with it. And his advice, and not necessarily for the reason I expected, but his advice was go into location services and turn location services off for everything that you don't absolutely need it on for. The reason, though, is a little interesting. He says it's not because location services in and of itself abuses your battery. He says, as we just said here, by and large, your phone always kind of knows where it is just because it's connected to a cell signal. The problem is that when it alerts an app that, hey, my location has changed, just wanted to update you, apps are generally very irresponsible about what they do with that data and come to life all too quickly and all too frequently and do whatever processing they need to do based on your location. And he said, so that's really the issue is that these apps receiving this data are just being irresponsible with it. So aggressively managing what apps can use location services and especially whether or not they can use them all the time or just when they're running can really help your battery. And I've noticed that too. His tip was good. So I'll put a link in the show notes. It's a funny interview. He's a very colorful dude. And there's that tip in there too. So there you go. Good stuff, right? Yes, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I've noticed that the iOS every now and then we'll tell you that apps are doing something in the background. It's like, do you still want to let it do this? Well, it'll ask you the, it'll ask you once for every app, I think. And then after that, it's not so much. But I don't know. Yeah. Craziness. Okay. Moving on questions here. Chris has a question, which is good because we have an answer and that's kind of how we roll here. Chris says, oh, where are we here? Why are you scrolling? He says, I have a smart mailbox for all on red. And that mailbox has a notification on it that shows what would be an unread message. But there's definitely no unread mails. He says, I'm one of those OCD types who can't rest when there's unread mail. He says, I'm hardly in box zero, but I follow some of the usual guides by either dealing with things or putting them into an omni-focused action. Any ideas as to why this is happening, and more importantly, how to resolve it. Of course, as soon as Chris sent that email, this problem was resolved just magically, which is good because his computer knew that we were on the case. But I've experienced this with mail, especially with smart mailboxes, but not just with smart mailboxes. And it thinks there's something in there, there's not, or not the notification, but the badge on that mailbox stays active. I've often found that rebuilding the mailbox helps. And you can do this with smart mailboxes, too. So highlight the mailbox, go up to the menu and choose, from the mailbox menu, choose rebuild. And that should do it. If it doesn't, then using something like Onyx or your favorite terminal command to sweep or clean or delete or rebuild mail's envelope index might also do it. So that's what I do for that. Have you ever experienced that, John? Yes, I have. Yeah, where you see the badge says, oh, there's two unread in this mailbox, and you try to sort by that flag. Yeah. And I'm like, they're not there. It's not. It ain't there. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Sometimes a bit gets flipped in the IMAP database, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's trying to cache all this stuff is what it is, so that it's not recalculating it 100% of the time. It's trying to be efficient about it. But sometimes caches get a little bit clogged up. Another thing in the email trail that I had with Chris about this, he said, my other issue is pressing send on an email without adding the attachment I mentioned, and that was something that happened on this. He wanted to show a screenshot of this, and he didn't initially. And we are all guilty of that, I'm sure. I certainly am, where you say, hey, here's this thing attached, and then you hit send and you realize, oh, crap, no, it's not. Mailbutler from findgeist at mailbutler.io is actually a fun little mail plug-in, and solves this problem in addition to many, many other things. But it looks at your email, and if you have the word attached or attached or enclosed or any one of those sort of magic phrases, when you click send, if there is no attachment, it will throw up a dialogue and say, hey, you're trying to send an email where you said that there was something attached, but you didn't attach anything, do you want to go back and fix that? Which is really handy, and I've had it say my bacon a couple of times on that. There's a few mail plugins that I use, and Mailbutler is one of them these days. I've really come to like it. It's a little weird. It tries, it does do a lot. There are many, many things that it can do for you. I found it to be one of those things where I had to go in and say, okay, let's be less aggressive about some of these things, get out of my way with this, tweak that. But once I got through it, I find it really handy. The other thing that I really like that Mailbutler does, John, is it allows you to automatically delay sending all of your emails. I've got mine on a 60-second delay where I hit send, and it hangs for 60 seconds, and then fires it off. And the hanging and firing all happen in the background. So from my standpoint, it's off. But it saves you in those moments where you hit send, and then you're like, oh, crap, I also wanted to say this. You can go back and pull it out of the queue and edit it, which is really nice. Just gives you a little buffer. So it's good stuff. Would it let you... We had a question, and I was trying to figure a good answer to it. Would it let you abort moving mailboxes or emails? You mean when you file a message somewhere? Well, we had a question. I still scratched my head over it, but someone said, you know, I used Apple Mail, and I basically moved the mailbox from one place to another, and I can't abort the operation. Mail doesn't seem to allow you to do that anymore. In the past, I thought if you get the activity thing, there used to be an X there, and you could X the operation, but apparently that's no longer a feature in Apple Mail. Huh. So I'm wondering if this manages that task. If using that would... Yeah, I don't think it does. I mean, I've always found that I can use the undo feature that's just in mail by default, you know, command Z, and that'll put something back. So maybe that's the solution. Yeah. And I thought command period would have been a solution in some programs that tells it to cut it out. Stop. Yeah, right, right. But that didn't seem to do it. All right. Well, I guess off we go. Okay. Yeah, so yeah, try command Z. See if that does it for you. And in the meantime, we will go and Mr. Martellaro, John Martellaro from the TMO staff said, my wife is trying to get an old Kensington trackball to use to work with Mac OS Sierra. Kensington is now gone. So an authoritative download of the driver is not possible. And it might not even work with Sierra even if I could find it. And we haven't found anyone who's building trackballs for Modern Max that she likes. Any ideas? Yeah, I actually have three ideas. So if you can't find the driver for what you need, and these are, you know, USB input devices when I say what you need, mouse, trackball, even keyboards, there are three things that I found. USB overdrive is one. And that generally is going to take care of what you need. It's been around for a long time. They keep it updated. And it just, it works. Great stuff. So that's the first one. And then, and then there's one at boaster.net, which is called, as it comes up here, why can't I remember better touch tool? I never can remember the name of better touch tool. But better touch tool is is another one of these that really can help kind of expand various pointing devices for you. So including your magic mouse and your trackpad and all of that good stuff. So that's number two. And then there is steer mouse, which I'll put a link to the show notes in as well that can do kind of the same thing. So three of them for you. And I hope that one of them will do it. Have you, you are still a trackball guy, John? Yeah. I'm kind of confused about this question that it's making this statement that Kensington is now gone. I thought Kensington was still around, but, you know, yeah, because I'm on their website now. Looks like they got a new font and stuff, but they still have. I mean, I'm using one right now. And then the software for it is still available for for their trackballs. It's called, I think it's called Trackball Works. There you go. Trackball Works. I was able to find it and actually they last updated it in 2017. So it might just be that that he's got an older, she's got an older trackball and and there's no Sierra driver for that particular one. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As far as I know, Trackball Works is their software that should be able to manage any of their any of their devices. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was a little odd, too. But yeah, just search for Trackball Works and you should be good. It was like the second thing that came up in Google. Cool. Cool. Cool. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. I got a couple of a couple of cool stuff founds on the list, John. Shall we? Cool. Cool. All right. From Rico. I love this. He says, was it on MacKicab where I heard you or a listener looking for a security solution for cloud storage providers? And yeah, we were talking about that. And so he found one called Sukasa, spelled S-O-O-K-A-S-A. And Sukasa is it built basically built to allow you to use things like Dropbox or Google Drive or Box, any of those sort of public cloud services, but still maintain a secure storage on there. And what it does is it access an intermediate layer and creates a encrypted folder essentially out there and use stuff data into the encrypted folder. Your computer encrypts it, sends it up. And so now it's on Dropbox or wherever you want it. But if anybody at Dropbox or really even anybody with your user credentials is able to get in, they can't see the contents of that secured folder or encrypted folder. So great, I mean, great for privacy and security in general, but especially if you happen to need to worry about that for work or whatever and you've got some restrictions on what you can do, this might allow you to kind of have a best of both worlds scenario. So very cool stuff. Thanks, Rico. Pretty cool, huh, John? Encryption is good. Encryption can be good, yeah. And Scott chimes in. We were talking about converting videos and found a couple of front ends for FFMPEG to make it a little easier and more visually palatable in terms of the interface. And Scott says, from the creators of any MP4, there is a free version available in the Mac App Store. The free version lacks all of the full features and controls from their paid product, which is 30 bucks, but it works. You can convert MP4 and MOV files for the iPhone 2. Most people just need the basic conversion anyway, and this will do it. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. It's called the any MP4 free. And you know, all of these sort of, a lot of these, I don't want to say all, but a lot of these video converter apps come from a lot of companies that just work, they seem to all be out of Asia. A lot of them seem to share the same code bases or similar code bases to do what they do. And so getting it from the Mac App Store, especially a free app, you've got a little additional layer of protection there and that, you know, it's got to be signed and Apple can revoke that cert if anything wonky happens. So this is this is a good thing. Thank you, Scott, for finding that. Right? Good stuff, John. All right. Okay. Let's go to Jeff here. Jeff, Jeff has a, well, he says, now that another WWDC has come and gone and a slew of announcements about a new Apple desktop hardware has happened, no Mac mini update was announced. No surprise, he says, but no Mac mini update. He says, I need slash want a desktop and I like the mini. In the past, you have been somewhat bullish on the mini. Is it a good idea to get one now? It might be my last desktop. What do you think, John? You're a big fan of the mini. What do you think the future is? If I had to do it again, if I had to get something now that the mini serves my needs, but it may not for a lot of people, the thing is you, the bang for the buck with an iMac is pretty good these days. When you compare the, I mean, one piece of bad news about the mini is that it uses the integrated graphics. This one is the Intel Iris chipset. And for some people, you may want to have a discrete graphics chipset. And last night, look, the iMacs offer radion. Some of them do. Some offer the integrated graphics. Right. And some offer discrete graphics. And you can't get more than two cores in a mini right now either. I'm certain of this actually. I'm looking. The most you can upgrade it to. By default, they all seem to come with i5s. The high-end mini comes with a 2.8 gigahertz dual core i5. You can boost that to a 3.0 gigahertz dual core i7. But that's it. And then, you know, a lot of people are happy with dual cores, especially on the MacBooks and stuff. And these are desktop-class CPUs with the i5 and the i7. So it's got some power to it, but it's not the quad core or more that you can get as you move up the ladder. So yeah, you know, I like the mini. And over the years, I would say that, well, not every iMac, but many of the iMacs that we've wound up buying for the house have started in my mind as Mac minis. It's always, yeah, okay, cool. I'll go buy a mini. I'll buy, you know, an inexpensive monitor from whatever, mono price or Dell or whoever. And I'm good to go, you know, all set. And then as I start doing the research and pricing and everything and, you know, putting it all together, it's like, wow, you know, if I was willing to cough up an extra 50 bucks, I could do an iMac and get all of these other benefits. And every time it's been like, oh yeah, that's short money. That's easy. Even if it's, you know, 100 bucks or maybe even 200, you know, it's like, I'm going to use this machine for a long time. And that has paid off big time going to the iMac instead of the mini. So, but, you know, it would be nice, I guess, to have a non-screen dependent consumer class desktop machine that's a little beefier than the mini. But I mean, I guess you need a monitor with it anyway. And so you might as well just get the iMac. And then you're good to go. Yeah, it sounds like I'm with you, John. Yeah, it serves my needs. But yeah, yeah, I think I don't know if they're going to phase it out or what. I mean, it was a good idea at the time. I mean, I like the idea is like, hey, you know, provide your own screen and your own peripherals and we'll just give you the box. I think the mini, I mean, and Apple said, pretty much said as much at the time, the mini was built to be that device that made it really easy for people to switch from windows to the Mac because you've already got a keyboard, you've already got a monitor. All you want to do is replace that box with our box. And the mini was built for the switcher. I mean, you know, that was it. It was the iPod halo effect, the switcher world, all of that. But, you know, I think that transition has happened. And I think Apple knows that. So they're not really catering to that concept of a market anymore. So there you go. Yeah. I mean, the only thing is the fence. I mean, if you want to spend as little money as possible on our Mac, right, this is it. Looking now at the entry price is $4.99. Yeah. Right. Right. That's the thing. Yeah. You can refurb. You could probably do a little better than that. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have a friend that works for Apple, you could do maybe even a little even better than that. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Last I checked Apple employees can do friends and family discounts. Right. Yeah. You can at this moment, and this changes constantly, but at this moment, you can get a 2014 Mac mini with four gigs of memory and a 1.4 gigahertz i5 for 419 from the refurb store. It's got Thunderbolt 2 ports on it and an HDMI port. So, you know, that's, I mean, yeah, 419. Man, that ain't bad. Huh. The only caution is if you're going to go with the mini, the hard drive that it came with, and I knew this coming into to it, but the hard drive that it comes with, especially the rotational is pathetic. Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've either got to get an SSD or upgrade it to an SSD, but with Thunderbolt ports, you don't even have to, you don't even have to think about cracking it open, right? Just, you know, or USB 3. I mean, you don't even need to worry about Thunderbolt. Yeah. Just plug it in and go. I did just because I wanted to. No, there's nothing, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm saying if that's a deal killer for you, because opening, let's face it, opening up the mini can be a deal killer for a lot of people. It's not built to be opened, but you know, there you go. Yes. Yes. And you also need a special screwdriver. That was the other thing. Wow. That's not, yeah. So I get the thing. I'm, well, yeah, it's a security Torx that is, yeah, some sort of security Torx, because I tried to open it up and I put in my, you know, my screwdriver and it doesn't work. I'm like, well, why isn't it fitting in there? I'm like, oh, not another proprietary screw. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I'm also seeing that Touch Bar MacBook Pro 13 inch devices are on the refurb store. I hadn't, I haven't been looking, but I just noticed that now. So that there you go. If you're in the market, it might be your thing. All right, John, I love the Apple refurb store. I mean, it's, you know, it's bad for my wallet, but other than that, it's good. Speaking of migrating and all of that, Paul says, I'm going to be migrating, upgrading from my 2011 MacBook Air to a new 2017 MacBook Pro. Yay, you. I have a carbon copy clone of my MacBook Air and a time machine backup. There's also migration assistant, of course. So my question is, what is the best way to transfer everything over to the new laptop and are there pros and cons to each one? Well, of course, Paulo. Paulo. Sorry. I don't know why I have you written as Paul in here. Paulo. Yeah, of course, there are pros and cons. Here's the way I would go about this. If everything is going really well with your Air, other than speed, of course, trust me, I have a 2011 Air, I feel you. Then I would think doing migration assistant from your time machine backup or from the Air itself would be totally fine. But if you're having any issues or you simply want to start from scratch because you haven't started from scratch in, you know, six years, you could migrate everything manually with a clone that makes life a little easier because you can mount the clone on your new MacBook Pro and copy things over as needed until you have all your data. And if you're, if the point is to eliminate migrating cruft, that's that's sort of the path I would take is just going very, you know, carefully and slowly with the things that you bring over. Things like your photos, your iTunes library and your documents folders are all really easy to move. And those are kind of the things you would move anyway. Because they're right there. They're easy to find. They're right there in your home folder. No problem. Mail, generally, is the one that is most often desired and yet a little bit tricky. But it's only tricky because it's not just sitting right there at the top level of your user folder. You've got to go into the library folder from your home folder. So it's home library. And then there's a folder called Mail. That entire folder can be moved over or copied over. And I would do all of these copies, your photos, your iTunes library, your documents folder and your mail folder. I would do all of those before you ever launch any of those apps so that you're bringing your data over. You're not dealing with a system that has created that environment. You know, the first time you launch mail, it goes and sort of builds out this folder structure. And the same is true for iTunes and photos. They build their libraries. If they have yet to build those and do that, it's a little easier, just confusion-wise, to just bring that stuff over before you launch them the first time. And Migration Assistant does a little more than that. It brings some of your network settings over and things like that. But it doesn't bring over a lot of the stuff that we would classify as cruft here in MGG land. Again, if everything's working fine, I would go Migration Assistant. At least that's how it would start. I always make a clone of a computer before I sort of decommission it. And sometimes I'll make that clone to a physical drive, but more often than not, I'll make the clone to a disk image that I can leave on my archive storage like my NAS or my Synology or whatever it is. And that way it's just always there. So even if six months from now I say, oh, crap, there's that file that I stupidly hid in that weird location, it's like, all right, just go mount that drive. Doesn't matter what happened to the computer. I still have it and I can go find it. But yeah, I'd probably do Migration Assistant. What about you, John? Can you take the drive from the air and just put it in the new machine? No, no, the air's drives are not replaceable, not removable and not the same size because it's not a drive. The air's all solid state and so it's just a shift. All right, but it's not compatible. Yeah, it's not a standard form factor or anything. Yeah. Oh, well, because that's what I do if they were the same form factor, but they're not. So Dave Ginsburg is saying in the chat room here, I wrote about the fact that the version of Sierra is not the same on these new MacBook Pros as it is for everything else. And he says Migration Assistant failed for me and host my new machine. That's interesting. I'd still probably recommend Migration Assistant, at least for the first attempt. Again, if everything's working, I would recommend it. And if it does fail, I mean, it's not that big of a deal to restore your new machine. It started basically as a blank slate, so you can always bring it back. These days of high speed bandwidth and well thought out recovery protocols is handy for us. Less geeks. We like that. Yeah, good. Sure. Okay. All right, Mark. I'm hoping to get some of your help on this, John, but Mark says, I'm having an issue with updating keynote, notes, pages, and GarageBand. I think he meant numbers. So keynote, numbers, pages, and GarageBand. I've been trying to do it through iTunes, sorry, been trying to do it through the Mac App Store. I tried using the update pane and the previously purchased pane. It starts, but then it arrows out right away before it downloads anything. I've gone as far as removing the apps completely and even tried as a fresh install, still errors out. I'm using macOS 10.12.5. Google search has turned up what files to toss in the library folder, and I did that, but I still get the same issue. I even tried signing out of the Mac App Store and signing in as different users, not happening on any of my other computers, just this one. And the cache file that I always recommend is the one in home library caches, com.apple.app store, and killing off that cache file often solves this problem. But I think you had this problem too, John, and you were able to solve it. Yeah, I'm looking at one solution here. So yeah, so home library caches, com.apple.app store is one. Right. And I see an article here that suggests that going to private slash var slash folders, which mere mortals can't normally see. Well, you could, but you can if you go into the finder and go to the go menu and say go to folder and then just type slash private slash var slash folders. Folders. Yeah, I think those are the, I recall the last time I had this problem where yeah, the App Store was just confused. Yep. You had to whack caches in multiple areas to put everything back in a state where you could get your goodies again. Fun. Yeah. Any other thoughts? Was that, was that it? Did that do it for you when you whacked those cache files? Here's more. Okay. Yeah, I got a stack exchange. Someone asked a question on this here. Okay. There's one here that goes into more detail. All right. Those two. Then I think there's another store account store assets stored down. Okay, this sounds familiar. All right. So you found an article that you can link to in the show notes for us, John. Yeah. I will paste that in there. Cool. Cool. All right. Well, I want to take a moment and thank all of our premium subscribers. Let's see, this week we had on the one-time list, we had Kenneth M with 50 bucks. Thank you, Kenneth. And of course, you can learn all about this at macgeekab.com slash premium or macobserver.com slash shop. On the 10 bucks a month plan, this month we had, or this week, sorry, we had Ken L, Gary B, and Nick S. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And on the biannual plan at 25, we have Warren R, Joseph W, Rick S, Joe M, Antonio B, Terrence N, Andrew G, and Brett H. Thank you all for your renewals. You rock. And really all of you that are on the premium plan makes a huge difference for what we were able to do here and really makes a, it really does. It moves the needle and it helps. So thank you. Thank you. I had asked the guys, again, as I did a couple of months ago, to keep this show free of sponsors so that I felt like I had a little extra time to talk about premium. And really what I want to do, though, is I want to go through some of our iTunes reviews. We could really use your iTunes reviews. It really, that talk about moving the needle, it really, really helps. So I'm going to read some of our recent iTunes reviews. But if you are at all in front of a computer, go to mackeykev.com. That's the closest that I can get you. And then from there, just click on the leave a review link. And you can write a review. That's really helpful. But if you were in so much of a rush that you don't have time to write a review for us, go ahead and just rate the show. And I like to see five star ratings, but rate it whatever you like. I recommend five stars, of course. If you're on the fence, five it is. But take the extra 30 seconds if you've got them, please, and go ahead and add that review. In fact, you can do it while I'm reading some of these. And the last one that I read, I'm going to have asked for help with. But let's see, we've got we've got the Scottish Dave says truly one of the best and insightful Mac and Apple related podcasts around from fanboy to Apple newcomer. This is essential listening for anyone with an interest in Apple tech. And then from Wilson RRE, we have the title of the review is play it fluid. And it is dash V space dash dash verbose. That's the review. I like it. It's good. That's geeky from Jebrian says the best, the only podcast to learn about the Apple Mac slash iOS world from Loggins, Messina, R-N-R-H-O-F. The title of the review is D. G. Caught. Word. From nerdled, we have you will learn four new things every week. And it's presented by your best friends, the best of the best. Thank you. Thank you, you rock. Two more left. So we have the lone rambler says just as great as it ever was. This is a really rare podcast, an Apple tech podcast that is genuinely useful for the technically inclined. The only one I know of that doesn't patronize their listeners couldn't be more highly recommended. Thank you. Thank you. And finally, this one makes me scratch my head, John, from Hannibal 87. The title of the review is show links missing. For a while now, all of the show notes and links have been missing. It's frustrating when they talk about some neat product, but I have no link to it. And this is where I wish I could reply to this person. So if this person is you, or if even if it's not and you agree, I would love to know what you mean by this because we go crazy crafting these show notes and we put them everywhere we possibly can, but they're always up on the on the show page, you know. So obviously something in and we, you know, we constantly evolving the website and the app and the way that we do things. So I have no doubt that this person is correct. I just don't know where they are missing from because in all of our tests and everywhere we look, we've got these beautifully crafted show notes with with time stamps and hierarchical things and all of that. So I would love to know where you're looking if I wonder if this happened when we migrated over to WordPress and that they were could be. Sure. I mean, I don't but I don't know. I mean, everything is still there, you know, we're still every once in a while. We'll get an odd character in a link because like a cut and paste error. Sure. An invalid character and people let us know when they click on something. Right. Yeah. It's like, whoops. Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. But that's that's different from not appearing anywhere. Yeah. I guess we need to know what client you are using where you see them. What website. Right. Yeah. So anyway, it could be a third. Well, if we've had to deal with, you know, sometimes there's parties don't necessarily translate everything. Oh, that's true. Right. Yeah. It could be in a different spot and some third party podcast client, too. That's right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So just let us know because obviously we, you know, we put a lot of effort into the show notes that we craft here and we want to make sure they are as easy for you to find and use. So, you know, with all the links and everything, it's really, really kind of an important part of what we do here. So just let us know. Good stuff. So something's not working. There are a number of ways you could let us know. That's true, Dave. Probably the most immediate. You could try us on the Twitter's. I'm John F. Braun. He's Dave Hamilton. If it's podcast related, then Mac Geek app is appropriate. And there's also Mac Observer. And if you want to say hi to Pilot Pete, those are all on Twitter. But there's another, there are so many ways, Dave. And any, any occur to you? Well, if you're a premium member, as we just discussed, one of the main benefits that you get in addition, of course, to that warm, fuzzy feeling you get from supporting your two favorite geeks is you get premium at MacGeekGab.com as an email address for us to. We address those first. We really do address everything that comes in, but we address the premium stuff first. And if you're not a premium member, that's fine. As I said earlier in the show, feedback at MacGeekGab.com is the address that one could use. And that address, don't forget, is feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Now, if you were to get an email that came into any of those addresses, John, and you went to to print it, you earlier this week might have run into a problem because you had a little, you went through a story this week, my friend. Well, I'm going to tell you my story. It was a tale of woe and then a tale of redemption and learning as well. Here's what happened. So I have two printers. I still have a GCC 12 slash 1200, 1200 DPI laser printer. It, the thing is so old. It must be like 15 years old or 20 years old. I don't even know that I'm going to be able to put that in the show notes because I can't imagine a link to it still exists, does it? But anyway, I find I found a review on on CNET. Actually, I found somebody selling one on eBay, John. So 80 bucks. I mean, it still works. Sure. I was actually, I had to get a new toner cartridge a while ago and you can you can still get it. But anyway, so that's one of my printers. The other printer, which just died on me, is an HP B 8550, which is an inkjet, right? But it does 13 by 19, otherwise known as a three plus paper, because I like to print some of my photos and I'd like to print them on something larger than eight and a half by 11. And they make printers that do this. Well, I don't know what happened, but, you know, after 10 years of having this printer, I took out an ink cartridge. You know, I get the knockoffs like everybody else. Sure. So you don't go broke, right? Right. And I took one out and then I put it in, closed the cover and it did a little dance with the printhead. And then on the little LCD screen, it said, yeah, your printheads damaged or missing. I'm like, well, no, no, it's right there. So I have no idea what happened. I tried to reseed it and then it works. I'm like, okay, well, you know, it's 10 year old printer. Let's look for a new one. Sure. So I looked for a new one. I just did a search on, you know, 13 by 19 ink jets and found several references to what looked to be a nice Canon model. Okay. And I'm like, yeah, you know, it's got good reviews and all that. It's a, and it does 13 by 19. They advertise that fact. So I'm like, okay, it's a Canon IX6820. So it has all these wonderful new features. Airprint, which the other one didn't have. It has a USB port, of course. That's an option. It also has an Ethernet port on it. I mean, this is a... Really? It's kind of a business class printer, I would say. What did it run you? Like a work group. Here's the 105 bucks. Nice. That's what we like to hear. The retail on it is 199 or 149, but B&H, which is, you know, I'm buying stuff from there forever, is over in Manhattan and they had an additional discount. And it's like, sure. Yeah. Amazon's got it for 105 bucks. It's prime available. You could add installation for another 89 bucks. Maybe I should have done that. But here's what I learned. So when I set it up, when you go to printers and scanners, you hit the plus sign and the Mac will search for your printers. Right. I'll tell you what's available. So with this, the first thing I had to do though is I did have to run their setup utility and I had to plug in via USB in order to configure it to log into my wireless network. Yeah. That's not atypical, right? Yeah. All right. So then once I did that, then I tried to add it to my, you know, list of printers here. And so what happened is, you know, I click add and up comes Canon IX6820 and kind, Bonjour. And I'm like, oh, well that's, you know, that sounds nice. Sure. Let's add that. And so I added it and now it's a printer. And then I started going to my programs to try to print to, I wanted to print out some pictures, 13 by 19. Yeah. What's supposed to happen, and this happened with the prior printer, because I use the right driver, is it didn't appear in the list of valid paper sizes. I'm like, where is it? It just didn't have A3 plus again is what it's called or 13 by 19. There just wasn't a choice. And I'm like, well, you know, they lied to me. You know, it doesn't support it. So then I started searching around and here's the problem. I should have waited a little longer, because in addition to Bonjour, a Bonjour driver or air print driver showing up, eventually what'll show up in that list, I guess it does some probing is it shows the printer again, but the kind of driver or the kind of printer is a Canon IJ network. I'm going to guess IJ is inkjet. And that was the problem, Dave, because I found other people having the same problem. You know, I searched and I think I saw it on their support forums for a different model printer, but someone says, what's up? I can't print the 13 by 19 is just not listed as a valid paper size. And they're like, oh, well, that's because you're using the air printer Bonjour driver and not the Canon driver, use the Canon driver. The takeaway from this is once I did that, all sorts of different options. So the Bonjour, the driver available through Bonjour is kind of a basic generic driver. So instead of saying the driver available through Bonjour, I think more accurate to say the driver available through built into Mac OS as opposed to the drive, because you're still connecting to the printer with Bonjour, it's still finding it with Bonjour, you're just using Canon's provided driver as opposed to the one built into Mac OS. That seems to be the case. Okay. Once I did that, in addition to now getting more paper sizes available, there were also several additional features offered as well, you know, like doing color correction on the. So the story is when you add a printer to your Mac, be patient and choose. You may have multiple choices for your driver. And depending on your choice, you may not get features that you expect. That's what I learned. The other thing I learned, which is really fun, is this thing also participates in something that I had not really heard of or really dabbled with in the past, but it also supports Google Cloud Print. Oh, that's cool. So you sign up. So somehow the printer negotiates with has this feature built in. So it's some sort of network communication. Right. Right. And it's like, Hey, you want to, you know, you want to add this printer to your Google account? I'm like, okay. And then I can go to Google and from Google apps, like actually right now, you know, if I go to file and I say print for show notes here. Oh, from from our Google doc. Yeah, sure. That'll print locally for you. Yep. Or it should makes it. It makes it part of your Google ecosystem. Right. And I actually even shared it with a friend. And I'm like, yeah, here's here. You want to, you want to, you know, print the printer and they were able to send the document to my printer. Yeah. So it's kind of cool. It's a nice feature. That's cool. So it's got that it's got air print. So, you know, from iOS devices, it shows up as a destination. I can print from that. So it was about time. And I was actually surprised that it was so inexpensive. It seems to be a quality printer. Yeah, that's the beauty of it is that printers are so inexpensive. It's not worth repair, certainly not worth repairing them. There are times, especially if you've just got, you know, a standard kind of, you know, I'll call it run of the mill, although that definition keeps changing. Eight and a half by 11 sort of standard colored inkjet printer. There are times when it's actually cheaper to just buy a new printer instead of buying more ink. Well, I've been at like Walmart or whatever. And you'll see they've got some printer on special for 20 bucks. It's like, oh, and it comes with ink. It's like, great, perfect. We'll just take that. No problem. Yep. Don't need, you're good to go. So, yeah, there was a, there was a period of time where I think I just kept buying new printers because it was way cheaper than buying ink. It's not quite the case anymore. But now, if you ever checked out Gutenprint, John, Gutenprint for those of you that don't know is an open source printer driver collection. And we'll, we'll put, I'll put a link in the show notes. But, you know, when you were talking about your driver issues, I thought, well, I wonder if Gutenprint would solve this for you. And obviously, if you can get a better driver from the manufacturer, then that's not a bad place to go. But Gutenprint is great, especially if you've got a printer that's not quite jiving with, you know, your, your Mac, you can install these Gutenprint drivers and you're good to go. So I'll put a, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's fun stuff. The other thing I did is that, on the Canon site, so they offer, so one, they included a CD with a Windows installer only, just like guys. Yeah. But then, of course, you could download their installer from, from their website, but they also had a CUPS driver. Okay. Common UNIX system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was updated recently. So I'm like, well, you know, I better, better install that too. Sure. I mean, I think you only need the one driver, but, you know, sure, why not? Yeah. And I already have some compatible ink cartridges on the way. Okay. Because I don't think the ones they put in there are, are going to last or full. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they're not XL class. Right. Printers have XL, which means, yeah, we topped it off instead of filling it up halfway, which is like, sure. All right. Let's, it's good. Let's good stuff, man. All right. Let's move on. We got a couple of tips here. Let's go, let's go with John first and see what, see where we get. We've recently been talking about AT&T's routers and Corey had a question a couple of weeks ago about how to best connect and should we do double NAT and that sort of thing. And, and it turns out these, these AT&T routers can be put into what's called DMZ plus mode. And, and John described it as well, saying he's got AT&T's instructions on doing that. And what that means is it's, it kind of puts their router in bridge mode. It's, it's basically bridge mode with some very, very minor differences. But for the most part, if you want to run your own router, which, you know, for a lot of you that are running, you know, new mesh stuff or, or, you know, whatever, you kind of want that to be in full router mode. And by putting the AT&T U-Ver stuff into bridge, or sorry, into DMZ plus mode, it, it takes care of that for you. So thank you for everybody that sent in about that. That's handy, handy, handy stuff. So good. Right, John? Always best to be able to control your network. Yeah. All right. Moving on to Scott, actually, both Scott and Brett sent this in, but, but we'll, I don't know, we'll read Scott's first. Scott says, listening to the last episode, number 662, regarding AirPlay targets and non-Apple AirPlay targets, the Raspberry Pi Zero W is 10 bucks. And if you add some kind of DAC digital audio converter to it, and you can do a cheap USB one for 10 bucks, or you can spend as much as you like. And then on the Raspberry Pi running either Volumio or Diet Pi with SharePoint Sync, you can make a Raspberry Pi based AirPlay receiver for about 25 bucks. So there you go. So for much less than an AirPort Express, you can have much more. It's totally unclear at this point. It says, Scott, if these will support AirPlay 2, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do. I'm currently running a couple of these running Volumio and four AirPort Expresses tied together with Rogamieba's Airfoil to already have all of the abilities of AirPlay 2. I'm listening to this podcast, number 662, using Overcast on my phone to six speakers around the house all in sync. And he put links to all of this great stuff out there. So we will obviously put all that in the show notes. But thank you to Scott and Brett and everybody who chimed in with all that stuff. This is, it's good stuff. I like it. I like it. I like it. So, and there's a Tech Radar article about using a Raspberry Pi Zero that we will put in the show notes as well. So good stuff. Fun, right, John? You have a Raspberry Pi. Do you play with that thing at all? Not yet. Ah, I think you're missing out, man. All right. My AirPlay is an AirPort Express right now. Yeah, I know. But, you know, the Raspberry Pi should just be fun. That's sort of the idea, right? Yeah. All right. Swede, speaking of double NAT, Swede writes in, he says, I have a home network consisting of an AirPort extreme fed by my Fios ActionTech Router and an AirPort time capsule providing backup and extender services. Two things. First, a bizarre AirPort utility glitch. Oh, he ran into a weird AirPort utility glitch. But really, I think that's sort of a one-off. So the second question arises because while I was debugging this situation, I logged into the ActionTech Router and was reminded that it was doing DHCP and NAT provisioning. Thinking ahead to possibly getting mesh equipment, the house is over 3,000 square feet with some weak zones, I was wondering if it would be better to generally have the ActionTech Router providing a fixed IP address and letting the AirPort Extreme or a future mesh setup do DHCP and NAT. Since I re-listened to your Wi-Fi deep dive episode number 330, but this issue or choice was not specifically addressed. Yeah. If you can, in all cases, I would say, if you're running your own router, again, just like we said when we were talking about John's stuff earlier, if you're doing it because you want mesh or you just want more capabilities, putting that device from the cable company into bridge mode or pass-through mode or whatever they call it, like we said, DMZ plus with the AT&T router, this is what you want to do. There's just no question about it. Comcast lets you do this too. There are residential gateways. By default, will be your router and will provide Wi-Fi and all of that. And for many of you, that's going to be totally fine. But if you want to go beyond that, turn off the Wi-Fi and that thing and turn off the routing capabilities and just put it into pass-through mode or bridge mode, it's going to make your life a lot easier. It's not the end of the world. If you have to run double NAT, John and I both get pretty triggered when we think about having to do that. But the reality is that the way network tech works now versus say 10 years ago or even five years ago, double NAT's not the end of the world like it used to be. You can still get stuff in and out pretty well. But if you can avoid it, you're better off. Good question, Swede. Thanks for that. Yeah, I think certain type of a network traffic had difficulty transversing double NAT barrier is the problem. One network couldn't communicate certain things with the other network because they were two different networks. Because they were two different. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. All right. And then I think we'll wrap the show up by answering David's question, which might take a little bit here. David says, my internet speed is 200 down and he says, I believe 50 up, and he's on Comcast, which made me go down a rat hole. I don't think that's what it is. I think it's 10 up because that's how Comcast goes these days. He says, but in my house, it's 1100 square feet. My cable modem is at one end just inside the garage in the office. At the other end of the house are two TVs and a fourth generation Apple TV. My Wi-Fi service at that end of the house where the TVs are is pretty lousy. I would like to know your opinion of me upgrading at least my router to a Netgear X8 Nighthawk AC 5300 Quadstream tri-band router. I would be running Cat 6 to my Apple TV and looking at positioning the Wi-Fi router in about the center of the house. Between me and my wife, we have an iPhone 6S and an iPad Air 2, and my wife has an SE. Down the road, I will be looking at getting a second Apple TV to go with the other TV in the living room. My current Apple TV is in my bedroom. So I'm looking for your thoughts and suggestions on my router choice and whether or not you believe I will need to upgrade my current cable modem. I don't want to do mesh Wi-Fi because I believe it limits my expandability, like extra ports and Moomimo and things like that. I'm open to adding an AC 2200 Nighthawk Wi-Fi range extender if needed. In the end, I want kick-ass Wi-Fi with the router that would stay in the office. The router would stay in the office if I did a range extender. Okay, well, I think going to a 4x4 router with an 1,100 square foot house, that would likely be enough, especially if you can move that and place it in a central location. The router that he's got now is a N750 N750 router, so it's not even doing AC and it's just long in the tooth. So yeah, I think it would make a huge difference going from that N750 router to something like the X8, the Nighthawk. I ran the X8 here at the house for a long time and then replaced it with the Synology RT2600 AC. I like the Synology software better than I like the Netgear software, but they're both, in terms of Wi-Fi, they're both extremely capable routers. I don't know that you need tri-band for what you're doing. Really tri-band, in my opinion, is going to be for people who really need a separate 5 GHz and lots of streaming on that simultaneously, so either gaming or many, many people constantly streaming even Netflix or something like that. So maybe that's you and maybe that's why you need tri-band, but otherwise I think the dual band of the Synology would be perfectly adequate and because it's got those 4x4 quad stream radios, it'll go far and fast. I do want to address one point in what you said though, because you said you didn't want to go to mesh because of limitations of not being able to add extra ports and mesh not having MU MIMO, multi-user MIMO. I'm not sure you need mesh for your house, but the reason I say that is because your house is 1,100 square feet, so you probably don't need it, but when you say that you want kick-ass Wi-Fi and imply that you just don't want to have to worry about it, that's kind of what mesh is built for. I mean, that's sort of the point. Your house isn't that much bigger than 1,100 square feet, right, John? And mesh has served you very, very well. Yes. Yeah. And this thing about, so addressing those two things, number one, you can always add a very inexpensive switch to the Ethernet ports on your mesh and have more ports, or some mesh products come with more ports like the Nekir Orbi, right? And that might actually serve you really well to get the nice connection across your house because it's got the high-end Orbi has that great backhaul. The high-end Orbi also supports multi-user MIMO, so not all mesh products lack support for that. Most of them do, and the reason that they do is that MU MIMO is more hype than performance right now. So the idea behind multi-user, the idea behind MIMO, M-I-M-O, multiple in, multiple out is that your router has multiple antennas that can stream data to your clients, okay? And that's what I'm talking about with this quad stream. Even if your client's only a dual-stream thing, meaning the router can only send two streams to it from its four antennas, it can pick the best two of the four and get you faster connections, and that's why that's important. But in that case, of course, you might have two being used from your router and two empty. And the way single-user MIMO works, which is what everything supports, you don't, your router can only talk to one device at a time, and it sort of goes in a round robin. Multi-user MIMO is exactly what you'd think. It takes, lets you take advantage of those extra antennas, and it can talk simultaneously to two devices at a time, which is great. Here's the problem. In order for multi-user MIMO to work, your router has to support it, and every single client associated with that radio has to support it, right? So all of your clients have to support it. Now, it doesn't mean that all of your clients, but it means, say, on your 5 gigahertz radio, all your 5 gigahertz clients would support it. You could have 2.4 gigahertz clients on that other radio that don't, that wouldn't limit you. But if you want multi-user MIMO on, say, your 5 gigahertz radio, then 100% of your 5 gigahertz clients need to support it. Here's the bad news. Not a single device from Apple supports multi-user MIMO. So it doesn't matter if your router supports it or not. As soon as you have just one iPhone or one Mac connected or one Apple TV, your router now is not in multi-user MIMO mode. So I don't recommend focusing on that in your decision tree. It's fine to get a router that supports it, because who knows, maybe someday, it'll be a while, we could have that. But here's the thing. If you go with mesh and you have multiple access points throughout the house, you get the same benefit that you would get with multi-user MIMO because devices can associate with different access points and get to stream data simultaneously. It's just from two different places as opposed to two antennas in the same place. So that's why I keep coming back to mesh for you, David. And the same reason that mesh works really well for you. You're not in a huge house, John, and you're one person. And yet, with multiple devices, it tends to be a really good thing. Right? For the most part. There's one thing I got a diagnosed. There's one spot where... There's one spot where I guess less than full bandwidth. I think I know why. Well, first I see that the phone decides to connect it. There's a certain spot where it decides to connect at 2.4 instead of 5, which I'm like, why are you doing that? What spot is this? It's an upstairs bathroom. And I suspect it's because it's behind... It's behind all that. The shower. The tile. So I'm thinking the signal is having... Because I'm like, what is special about this spot versus the rest of the house where it's always connecting at... And of course, with their utility, I can tell if it's connecting at 5 or 2. It should be connecting at 5 all the time. Yeah, your house is sized, and you've got your access points positioned such that you're never too far away from one. Right? Huh. So how could you solve that? I don't think there's a way to deal with it. I mean, you know... Right. And no, I realize... Go somewhere else. Right. No, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like... But every now and then, we're on a bandwidth test. Just... Because you want to be obsessive about it. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, of course, also, I've been running it lately because for some reason, it seems that Optimum Online has increased my bandwidth without telling me. Go ahead, John. Yeah, make me feel envious of your upstream. What's your downloading upstream now? Well, I only... So I had... For the longest time, I was paying for... I think it was 25 or 30 down at 5 up. Okay. It was like 50 bucks a month. Right. You know, I think you convinced me. It's always good to call your cable provider, local monopoly. It is. And say, what can you do for me? And I did that. And so I called them and I said, I'm paying this much and I'm getting this. And they're like, yep, that's correct. That's the plan. I'm like, well, it's not that great. So over to customer retention. And they basically said, okay, yeah, we got some promotions and stuff. It may be only for a year, but the thing is, we'll up your speed. We'll put you on our 100 down, 35 up, and charge you less. And also charge you less for your cable package. Okay. Success. Yeah. But then I noticed, so the thing is, Eero every night runs a bandwidth test. Then if you run their app, you'll see the results of that. And all of a sudden, like I'll look right now, the results of the last one I ran, all of a sudden I'm now getting 198 down and 36 up. 36 up, huh? Crazy. Yeah, that's awesome. But I think you said that Comcast will do this sometimes. They'll just up everybody's bandwidth just because they're feeling nice. They do. They will. They haven't upped mine in a while. I mean, I'm at 250 down, or I mean, it's technically 200 down, but I get almost 250 down. And, but it's just 10 up. And, you know, I know I'm whining about something that's not really that big of a deal, but like when I'm about to upload the podcast here, I would like to blast more, but also like online backups and all of that. Having, you know, beefy upstream makes a huge difference. So that's a big barrier for a lot of people that use something like back plays or crash. Because your pipe going up is so wimpy. Right. Right. How about fiber? Fiber typically doesn't have this asymmetric no nature. In fact, Corey, the one that we were talking about with the AT&T thing, he texted me. He gets nine. I think he even said it in the show. He gets 950 down and 950 up. Yeah. Yeah, man. That's fast. Like that's the speed I have between all of my device. I was just going to say between the house in the office, but forget the house in the office between my iMac and the studio and my iMac down in the office. It's all like that's it's gigabit man. Yep. Yep. Oh, it looks like it looks like our friend Scott is in the in the chat room here and it looks like he's yeah, he's he's got it. He got the fiber, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's crazy, man. Oh, well, the things that we we always want more. That's I mean, think about how fast our internet speeds were when we started the show. Hey, by the way, 12 years ago, I totally missed it last week. I mean, we talked about it on Twitter and on Facebook a little bit and and thank you for everybody who who noticed and and congratulated us. But um earlier this month we hit our 12th anniversary, John. So happy anniversary. Oh, I didn't get your present. Ah, yeah, I know. Yeah. So that was on on June 13th. We hit 12 years of doing that gigabit. So I know it's crazy, crazy, crazy. Anyway, maybe we'll do something for Magic 13 next year, John. Oh, we told everybody how to how to reach us. We did. We did. I want to thank cash fly at cachefly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And and I want to thank even though I had him carve out sponsors from this show, I do want to thank our podcast marketplace sponsors of Smile at Smile Software dot com all the world computing at max sales dot com and bare bones software bare bones dot com you all rock. And of course, another great big thanks to all of our premium subscribers. Thank you so much for everything that you do. It really helps. It's awesome. It's good stuff. It's good. All right. I think that's all we got this week, John. So thank you everybody for hanging out with us. Thank you for all your questions. Thank you for being you. It's good stuff. Thanks, John. Thanks for 12 years of of gabbing about geek. Although we've been gabbing about geek for a lot more than 12 years. I think I lost John. That's it. Good news. We made it to the end of the show. I will say it since he cannot. Don't get caught.