 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 706 for Monday, April 23rd, 2018. Yes, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found that you send in. We answer your questions. We share your tips. The goal is for all of us to learn at least five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Ring, one of my favorite new pieces of tech, new families of tech, where at ring.com slash MGG, you can go and save up to a hundred and fifty bucks on on getting these cool like doorbells and cameras and floodlights and all these smart home things for your home. We'll talk more about the specifics later here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here it finally spring like Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. It's not just John F. Braun, ladies and gentlemen. That is John F. Braun one, John F. Braun plus plus one year older for Mr. John F. Braun. Happy birthday today, my friend. Yeah, that's what I hear. Yeah. Yeah. It's also Shakespeare's birthday. Somebody told me that. I think I myself more as a scientist than an artist. Yeah. Well, there you go. But but you've done one thing that Shakespeare couldn't is you made it to your birthday in twenty eighteen. Yes. So there you go. Yeah. You know, you have that up on him. That's right. Yeah. Hey, all right, let's go. Let's just dive in, shall we? It's time to go to Bob. We'll do some quick tips here. See what we can do. Bob says, Mac Ekeb taught me that command shift period causes the finder to display hidden files. I can't tell you how many times I've used this since we stumbled onto it and then and then shared it with all you folks, which was almost simultaneous. Bob continues, I extrapolated and found that file selection dialogue boxes also honor command shift period, which makes it easier to access hidden files and directories. For example, I needed to use the cups interface to attach a printer definition file to a printer. But the file was hidden in the Etsy cups, PPD folder and the dialogue box that came up would not show me that directory tree command shift period. And boom, I was navigating to the desired PPD file. But it seems that any app that is using standard file dialogue boxes gets this ability. I've tried text edit Safari terminal, I term to Evernote mail, iTunes, et cetera. Thank you, Bob. That's fantastic. And it is a toggle. It just turns it on or off the display of hidden files. It is a universal setting. It's not like per window or anything just turns it on or turns it off. It's not documented in the user interface anywhere. But thankfully it exists and we love it. So there you go. There you go. Thanks, Bob. Good stuff. Anything to add to that before we move on to Ken here, John? And it even works within default folder because I was wondering like, let me try this. Now, number one, I think maybe default folder may have a setting for that. But I just mentioned it because default folder has been coming up with some updates as of late to fix little bugs, which thanks, guys. Yeah, but yeah, I tried it. No, it was really neat to see the kind of come up in the gray. Like I'm hidden. No, I'm not. So right, right. Yeah, they're right. They show up great so that you can tell they would be hidden if they weren't unhidden. Yeah. All right. Ken found an interesting thing. Two tips from Ken. He says, I noticed in the recent updates for high Sierra in male preferences, you can no longer change the size of the preferences window. So if you go into male and you go to preferences in Sierra, you can grab the corners or the edges and stretch them out or do whatever you want with them within reason. In high Sierra, this is not possible. You cannot grab the edge of the window. He says, but in if you select the tab in preferences, that is the largest when you select something like, say, inbox rules, then the window is larger and you can actually see more. He says, for me, the largest window is Harold. So I select Harold and then I select inbox rules. And we'll come back to this because Ken, by accident, in unintentionally, anyway, has brought us into cool stuff found here. But we will stay with tips because Ken has two. He says, for a long time, I was wanting to find a way for keyboard maestro editor to start a rule on a specific date. I know it has the rule time of day trigger. It allows you to pick the time in days of the week, but not a specific date. He says, I just found the rule cron trigger and it does what I've been wanting. It's kind of complicated. So he links us to the instructions and it indeed it uses the Unix cron format where you like you Unix has this utility called cron, which runs things at certain times based on how you fill out these fields. But it's everything on one line and then a command is what you do. And so the fields are minute, then hour, then day of month, then month, then day of week, then year. And you can put stars in. So if it's on every day, if you wanted to do it at, say, midnight 30 every day, you'd put 30 in for the minute space, zero for the hour, because that's midnight space star for the day of the month, space star for the month, space star for the day of the week, and then also potentially star for the year. So it just includes everything and then the command. So that that's how that works. But but I had no idea that you could do cron triggers with keyboard maestro. So that's pretty good. Someone say cron is for cavemen. Whoa, it's so old. Well, it's all one, isn't it? Oh, it's old, but it like it works. And that to me, that's the key. Like, you know, like it it functions. Although Mac OS doesn't use cron anymore, right? It's all launch D. I don't know if cron still runs. I know it was like support for it was deprecated. Let me see. Do I still now I did man on cron and it's like, yep, there we go. It's still there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, at least there's a man page for it. So right. I don't know if it actually runs. Dated 2007. Right. Yeah, but that's an idea of when it was last updated. Right. Right. But it's it's it's decades older than that, I think. So. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So very cool. Thank you for finding that, Ken. And to bring us into cool stuff found. Ken mentioned something called Harold. Now, I knew that it must be a mail plugin based on the context of his email, but I had never heard of anything called Harold before, so I found it. And Eric Hinterbickler makes a plugin for mail called Harold that is mail dot app notifications done right from his web page. Harold allows you to perform common actions directly from within the notification window, including deleting, initiating replies or marking as read and Harold's appearance is customizable so you can tailor it to your own taste. Harold is a free download for High Sierra. If you like it, please consider donating donating. So there you go. Pretty good. I love I, you know, I I like fine. I don't think I'm going to use this particular plugin because I don't do anything with notifications with mail. In fact, for the most part, I don't have it notify me. But but I love finding more people developing plugins for mail because like that's one of the things I love about mail. And I know Apple doesn't necessarily go out of their way to make it super easy for developers to make plugins. But but it's like to me, it's it's the it is the reason I continue to use mail because without something like Mail Acton, I I would not be using mail. I mean, I would be using something else, but but I like to be able to use, you know, the thing that's built into the US and just extend it, which is the whole idea of a plugin. So there you go. Yeah, good. Sig Pro. Oh, Sig Pro. Right. I also use Sig Pro. I forget I forgot about it because I'm looking in mail and it doesn't get its own tab. It it it lives in the signatures tab. But yeah, that's right. Yeah. And then without it for those of us that have a plethora of email addresses, Sig Pro makes it is like night and day because mail can't really handle it. It doesn't do a great job with it. But but Sig Pro certainly certainly takes care of it. Yeah. And then handling signatures for various different addresses that you may have. It does a great job and all sorts of customization. Yep. That's good. That's really the only one I use, man. Well, you know, I and I've we've talked about it recently, but Mail Acton is the one that I use. I use it primarily. I started using it for its ability to trigger rules with keyboard keystrokes. And so I was doing all my mail archiving with Mail Acton because I could just like, you know, hit control T or whatever. And it would send it to my archive. It's a long story why it control T sends to my archive. But it made sense at the time and now it's built into my hand. So but but anyway, like I can do all kinds of things. I can move something to my watched folder with control W. And and and so I like that I can move spam in and out and mark them and mark things as red or unread or whatever. Lately, though, I've been using Mail Acton in addition to all of that for two things. Number one, I have it delay my email on the outbound. I have it delay it by one minute. That has I've been doing that with various other plugins over the years and just recently realized because the developers told me it was there that I could do it in Mail Acton. And it's really great to, you know, send an email and hit send. And you're like, oh, I forgot to CC so and so. Or oh, I should have said this at the end or whatever. And having that that one minute of, oh, it's still right there. It hasn't gone out yet. And you can change that like I said it to a minute, but you could set it to 10 if you wanted. So that that's one thing I use it for. And then the other is I have a smart outbox rule, John, that you that might interest you because when we answer our Mac Geekab email, we, both John and I like to CC our own Mac Geekab address. So it would be in the case of our normal address. It'd be feedback at MacGeekab.com is the address it would come from and then feedback at MacGeekab.com would be listed in the CC field. Right. Right. And I think you said to round it out, Dave, feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's correct. Got that out of the way. That's correct. Where you would write us. Yes. And just once though, not three times. Just just that's right. And so what I used to do before I would dive in and compose, you know, go and start answering emails, I would go into preferences, composing in mail and I would check the box that says automatically CC myself invariably, though, later that day, I would be sending emails and I would be CCing myself from other addresses and all that stuff. So mail act on, let's me create an outbox rule, John. And those outbox rules, I can have it CC myself. If the from address is, you know, the one of our Mac Geekab addresses, like if I'm sending from the premium account, it says, you know, if the from address is premium at MacGeekab.com, then CC premium at MacGeekab.com and I can do that for both addresses. And now I don't have to think about it. If I just go in, I just do it, it handles it for me. It works brilliantly. It sinks across all my computers because that's how the mail act on rules work and so it's great. So there you go. So maybe that's a reason to think about using mail act on John. It's from the same people that make. Say, SIGPRO, the two Scots, Morrison and little merged their companies and now they're small cubed. All right. So there you go. Yeah, fun, right? This is what we do. We get together, we geek out a little bit. Right. That's email. I mean, we're all about email, you know, people say, yeah, people say emails dying. No, no. I mean, and trust me, I like I live that. Bandwagon, but I use email as little as I can. We use Slack for our internal communications and, you know, Google Hangouts for for meetings and all that stuff. But but I mean, I still use email all the time and it works great for all the things that we do. So. So there you go. Right, John, where else? What else? Who else? Well, we have a bunch of cool stuffs found to go through. But but the next thing that I want to do is I want to talk about our sponsor for this episode, which is Ring. Is that all right for you, John? Indeed, sweet. So Ring has, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Ring is creating all kinds of things to make your home smarter and safer, right? And and really can go even beyond that, make your neighborhood safer. They make all kinds of things. They they have their doorbells, right? Where it's a Wi-Fi capable doorbell. It replaces your existing doorbell. And it works like your existing doorbell. Somebody can ring it and it'll even ring the, you know, the old doorbell, you know, thing that you've got in your house. But it also sends a notification to your smartphone and and you can grab your iPhone and see who's at your door because it has a camera in it. And you can hear them and they can hear you if you want. And it doesn't matter whether you're in the house or not. And this is very, very cool. So so this is how the Ring doorbell works. Same concept. Apply it to a floodlight outside your house. Same concept. Apply it to security cameras, right? So my floodlights now I have to I have too much of this stuff. I've been going a little bit nuts. But I've got the doorbell, of course, on the front door. And then I have the floodlights on both the driveway and all the back and on the back porch. And it's awesome because I can see what's going on. I can get notifications. I can customize the sensitivity of it all. The lights come on what they want. And then, of course, I can use things like ift and and Stringify to take the notifications that come from the the ring and say if there's, you know, somebody in the driveway, turn on these other lights that are it's just fantastic and it just works. Super home security, super great for your smart home in general. And at ring dot com slash M G G. You can save up to one hundred and fifty bucks off of their ring of security kits and start like me putting these things kind of all around the outside of your home. So you got to check it out. Go to ring dot com slash M G G. And that's where you're going to be able to really save you. If you just visit the ring website directly, you won't see these deals and you won't get to save up to one hundred and fifty bucks on this stuff. So check it out. Ring dot com slash M G G are huge. Thanks to ring for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's go to some cool stuff found. Shall we? Sure. OK. The first one actually comes from Robin, but it's something I use literally every day and hadn't even thought about it. Robin says in recent episodes, you've talked multiple times about ways to add EXIF data to existing photos, but never about ways to remove EXIF data. A use case can be that you don't want to share your photo with GPS coordinates inside it. For this, I use the free tool called Image Optum and it's I am A G E O P T I M is the name of the tool. Image Optum does this. It really is built to strip all the extraneous stuff out of an image so that when you put it up on your website, and this is why we use it to everybody that that writes articles here at TMO uses Image Optum because it will strip out all of this data. It strips out all the thumbnails that you don't need to send along when somebody's downloading an image from your website to, you know, to see. And you can also have it compress the image more than it might already be in order to, you know, kind of optimize the size. So it can be used for a lot. It's available in that case, in that sense, it's free. Yeah, so you got to check it out. Yeah, that's good. You have Image Optum, right? Image Optum dot com, John. No. Well, now you know to get it. There you go. Cool stuff found for all of us. See, I made it easy. I it's your birthday, right? So this is my gift to you. I wanted to make it easy for you to hit the learning five new things metric today. And so I hadn't pre told you about Image Optum so that I could tell you about it now. Yeah. Now, I the concept of taking something that's already compressed and compressing it more without losing quality, because it sounds like that's one thing they say they can do if you'd like. You can you can have it be lossless and that it's not actually recompressing it. But but it's just pulling out these things that you don't need like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sure. But but for the most part, a lot of times you can recompress it and it is lossy, but but you wind up saving some and you can't really usually you can't tell for the types of images we use on a lot of articles. It's that, you know, it doesn't really matter. So. Good. Yeah. We can move on. Cool. Surely. And stop calling me surely. Yeah. So Leon brings us to where's Leon? Come on. There we go. Computer will work someday. He says it's Leon from Maryland reaching out with a couple of cool stuff's found in show 705. You talked about name bench for DNS and benchmarking and how there's a pending update that will see the return of more detailed information for those with access to windows, including things like, you know, VMware Fusion or whatever, Steve Gibson at grc.com has a DNS benchmarking tool that provides a ton of information. And so we'll put a link to Steve's benchmarking tool there in the in the show notes at grc.com. Secondly, he says, also, since I'm sure you're not tired of follow-ups to the how to always have your serial number handy comments, check out this app called Home Inventory from binary formations. This inventory app has a ton of features beyond recording basic information about your valuables. Of course, you can store your serial number there along with receipts, photos, manuals, et cetera. They also have an iOS app that you can use to sync a backup of your inventory to your iDevice. If you do this, you'll have every serial number for every device, plus receipts and other goodies on your iPhone and or iPad at all times. As a bonus, a crouton, as it were, in MacGibb parlance. You can use your iPhone to scan barcodes for quick lookup of item information to add to your inventory. That's pretty good. We'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. That's pretty good stuff, Leon. Thanks for the thanks for the heads up. He mentioned something here that reminds me of something I've been doing for years and haven't. I don't think I've ever told anybody about this. It's not a secret. It's just like it's a quick tip, right? Because that's what quick tips are all about. Anytime I buy something new, I go and download the PDF manual and save it to a folder on my, you know, cloud sync drive. So I save it to my Synology Cloud Station, but you could save it to your Dropbox or your box or your iCloud drive or whatever you want. I have a folder called user manuals and it's just got, you know, 100 things in it now, whatever it is. These things are relatively small PDFs. And the reason I do this is because if you have a device for more than like five years and some things in your house, like a dishwasher, whatever you might have for 10 years, finding those manuals after the product is no longer being sold can often be a total chore. So I download the manual, like the regular user manual. If there's a service manual that I happen to find in my Googling or whatever, I download that too. I just save them all. And man, it has eliminated such a headache at times when you need, you know, that, that information. It's like, oh, yeah, I'm sure I have it right here. Oh, yeah, look at that. There it is. Good to go. Right? Yeah. Well, one power to the camp that keeps track of all the numbers, because one thing I found, especially the model number, especially with the dated, that there's a thriving fix at yourself industry out there. I know, because I love fixing my own stuff. And so if you put in the excessively complicated mishmash of numbers and letters, it's like, oh, yeah, I got the roller for this or the valve or the spring, whatever. Yeah. So I, and I highly recommend you go do this with your refrigerator right now, because there are all kinds of parts in your refrigerator that are easy to replace, if you know what to get. So go get the service. Pressure is the thing that's going to fail first. No, not even close. The things that fail are the stupid drawers. Like they, you know, they get cold and then they break after, you know, 10 years or whatever, like mechanical failure. Yeah, yeah. But that's the stuff that like if you're if the if the drawer or the like the the the I don't even know what you call it. Like the the thing that holds things into the door, right? Like if those break the shelves shelves and doors. Yeah, when those things break, your refrigerator becomes a lot less useful, right? So it's worth it to go spend like 30 bucks on Amazon to have one of these things delivered or whatever. So yeah, I just say compressor because every of my family so far now has had at least one refrigerator fail. And it was the compressor. Oh, I'm going to knock on wood, man. I I've never had an important. I mean, it's like it's the thing. Yeah, otherwise, it's just a nice cabinet. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's an insulated cabinet. Yeah. Oh, that's good. All right. And to answer our question, because we have questions in the chat room at Mackeykev.com slash stream Kiwi Graham asks, Dave, do you happen to have the manuals for my Swiss washing machine? Sadly, Kiwi Graham? No, I don't. We have been buying, I forget which washing. I think we have an LG now or something. But some no, I don't have. But is Swiss is this meal Swiss? Is that right? I don't know. I thought that was German. I'm whatever. I don't have. Sorry, man. All right. Going on to James here in the Cool Stuff Found category. He says, I saw this and will be purchasing one soon. It is the Ben Q, B-E-N-Q screen bar, E reading, L-E-D task lamp with auto dimming and hue adjustment features. Hang it on your monitor to save space. You get eye care, no screen glare or flicker. It's a matte black thing. This is pretty cool. So what it is is it's a light that go that you sit on top of your either your screen or your computer. It would it would easily fit on top of an iMac or on top of a monitor. It's got like an adjustable thing that just sort of balances it up on the top of the screen. And the cool part is that if you were to have a light directly above your computer facing down so that you had your desk lit, it would be reflecting off of the light itself, would be reflecting off of your computer screen and causing weird glare and all that stuff. With this Ben Q screen bar, E reading lamp, the light is angled because it's being projected right from the top of your computer. It can be angled so that the light is never aimed at your screen. It's aimed just at the, you know, the first bit of light hits the ground or the desk in front of your computer screen. So this is pretty cool. I'm pretty stoked about this thing. I'm going to have to check one out. So. That's pretty good. Thanks, James. Fun stuff. That's pretty cool, huh, John? I if you go to their Amazon page, you go to like the fourth, fifth image down. You can see the the sort of the diagram of how the light projects and how this thing looks. So we'll put that in the show notes. I put it in the chat room, too. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. Right. I like it. You know, I've found, John, as the years go by, the sun has gotten dimmer and dimmer. I think it's a problem with nature is what this is. I think your sensors are degrading slowly. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with you built in sensors. No, no, this has nothing to do with me, John. My sensors work perfectly. The sun's just gotten dimmer over the years. And so things like this are helpful. It's good. OK. Moving on, Kelly brings us to this is actually so we get PR emails from people all the time, you know. But this one, this person, obviously, Kelly obviously listens to the show. Kelly works for a company called Mini Creo and I and I see our EO and and they're the email here from Kelly. Is to tell us about the sync bird, which is an iTunes alternative for transferring music, photos, videos and more between your iPhone, iPad and your Mac. So it's available for free. They do have a pro version, but you can go download sync bird free and you can manage your photos and like do all kinds of stuff that you don't want to necessarily have to launch iTunes to do. So there you go. And check it out at Mini Creo dot com. So thanks for sending that in, Kelly. Good stuff. Any questions on that before I move on to my late addition to cool stuff found, John? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I love iTunes so much. I don't know if I can find a reason that now this. Yeah, right. Anything. Something a little little less bloated. Yeah, I guess may be appropriate to evaluate. Yeah, there you go. So I I've mentioned in recent episodes that I had one mono price screen. I had the 28 inch HD screen and it would not always wake up when my Mac woke up. And then I for the other computer, I got this other sort of newer screen. That's actually a 27 inch screen and and it always wakes up and it works better. And we figured that that was because it had a 10 bit data path instead of an 8 bit data path or something. So I now have two of these screens with the the 27 inch that have the 10 bit data path. I'll put a link to which screen this is in the show notes. I've got to look up the model number. So for those of you in the chat room helping out, just bear with me. However, today, I finally plugged in this other screen here. And I have a 2011 non retina iMac here in the studio. Now, this screen is UHD, which means it could be, you know, quote unquote retina, but not necessarily at the resolutions that a retina Mac could drive it because it just doesn't have the graphics horsepower to do so. That said, the other screen was the same way. That said, I was able to drive the screen at I want to get this right. So bear with me. I was able to drive the old screen. No problem at 2560 by 1440. Now, this was a non quote unquote retina resolution, right? The best I could do for retina on this would be the effective resolution of 1920 by oh, don't fall asleep, please. There you go. OK, 1920 by 1080. It would be really bad if my computer fell asleep. Yeah, that's right. 1920 by 1080, which is the screen's default resolution of 3840 by 2160 in half and then you get the nice clear retina. But I liked to run the screen at 2560 by 1440 because that's what the internal screen on the iMac runs at. And it's it's a, you know, consistent experience because they're about the same size or now they are the same size. The old screen would run at that resolution and it showed it it showed up in the displays system preference pane. Sometimes you have to option click on the word scaled in in the display system preference pane to see those options. But but I could do that and it would work fine. On the new screen, even when I option clicked on the word scaled for that screen in the display tab, not a wouldn't be there. Like, dang it. OK, I can't believe it. I outsmarted myself. You know, I got the screen that I thought I wanted and now I can't do the thing that I want to do. And so I started to try and live with, OK, well, you know what? I can do the 1920 thing and then it's retina so it's clearer and yeah, that's cool. And then I thought about this. I don't like like I want to make that choice. I don't want it made for me. And that's when I remembered and it's possible we've mentioned this in, you know, years past. But there's a utility called Switch Res X. And what Switch Res X does is it lets you define your own. One of the things it does, it actually does a lot of things. But the one thing that I used it for today is that it lets you define your own custom resolutions. So I threw caution to the wind and I defined a custom resolution of 25, 60 by 1440. And then I told the monitor to go to it. And you know what? The monitor went right to it. No problem whatsoever. Jumped right to it. Good to go. So so there you go. That's then it just worked great right out of the gate. I did in order to add custom resolutions, you have to turn off system integrity protection. So I did that because I hadn't I hadn't yet done that on this computer. But to do that, you boot into recovery mode, launch the terminal and type CSR util and then to turn it off, disable and then reboot again. But but then it looked like like once you do that once it looked like there was something that it did or it offered to do that would let you turn system integrity protection back on and still be able to customize resolutions. So there was some some little bit of magic that switch reds. Right. Switch res acts easy for me to say. But that's pretty good, huh, John? Yeah, so it makes it a little easier to access what you could access. If you yeah, if you help down, what is it? Option on the scale box. No, that's what I'm saying or more. It adds it. This was not there when I held down option. Like I there was no way for me to choose this resolution. Really? Yeah. OK. That's what I'm saying. I just look at mine. So all right. So I just looked at my mini and when I held down option on scale. But when I didn't, I got like four choices. When I did, I have like 15 choices. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But this kicks it up a notch. This lets you put whatever you want in. So you've got to be a little careful. Like I didn't know whether this screen would actually support the twenty five sixty right 1440 resolution. The worst that happens is it's like stays black. Yeah, but it's sure enough it came up and it showed it. And it was like, yeah, OK, twenty five sixty. That's fine. No problem. I don't know why my Mac doesn't see that this screen can do twenty five sixty or maybe it doesn't. It chooses not to expose that. I'd like that's that's a mystery for another day, perhaps. But yeah, it works. Yeah. So pretty cool. Now, it's interesting that you have this conversation. It's like, all right, well, I'd like you to display this. Can you do it? And it's like, yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a whole conversation. I think it's just kind of funny. And here's a cool thing because Lisa, my wife, uses this computer when she comes up to do work for us and that sort of thing. And she likes a different resolution than I do on that screen. And so the nice part is it resolutions are set per user. So when she switches to her user account, it just flips. It auto flips the resolution to whatever she had set the previous time. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there you go. John, yesterday I had a sad moment. I was arriving at a friend's house for a band rehearsal. I was getting out of the car. Yeah, it was right. It was awesome. The weather was nice. The sun was shining. I was getting out of my car. I had used the birds were singing. Yeah, I had used my iPhone as my my GPS to get to his house. So it was on my little charging mount thing. So I popped it off of that. So I had my iPhone in my hand. I was grabbing some other things. I got out of the car. All of a sudden I hear something hit the ground in his driveway. And it's my iPhone, my iPhone 10. And I can see the back of my iPhone 10. So I know that it landed face down. The glass back. Well, the glass back, but it's also a glass front on that particular device as it is on most iPhones. And I thought, crap, and I picked it up. And sure enough, I was looking at, you know, spider crack galore. Damn. And it was, you know, asphalt in his driveway. So I've seen this happen before, even though I have a shield. You know, I keep a tempered glass shield on my iPhone. And I'll talk about which one it was. I've seen when you drop them face down, oftentimes it'll shatter both the shield and the glass right behind it. And so I was like, crap. So I went around in the back of my car and opened up my trunk and kind of laid everything out and started peeling the glass. You know, I took the case off of the phone and I have it in that that rhino shield case. And the case, you know, was fine shape and that was good. So I took the case off the phone and started peeling the broken glass off. And sure enough, man, like I'm peeling. It's like, oh, wait, wait, no cracks, no cracks, no cracks. No, nothing. The glass was perfect on the iPhone. Oh, so the. Well, so there's to the first line of defense. But perhaps perhaps I used two lines of defense on this. So the shield that I had on there is one that you still can't buy. They are working on getting them into retail. And this is the one that I got at CES. It's the Zag Glass Plus Lux 360 for iPhone 10. And and it's got a shield for actually both the front and the back. And it's great. So hopefully, you know, they're working on it. Like they don't have like an ETA as to when you can buy these things. But but so there was that. And this was definitely a thicker. It felt like a like a meatier, thicker piece of glass. When I put this on, I think I said that back in January when we were talking about it. So so that's part of clearly part of the the defense here and may have all may have been the only thing that mattered. However, I can't talk about this without also saying that three days before I put this Glass Plus Lux 360 from Zag on my iPhone. I put the liquid screen protector from QMATX, their invisible first defense plus on my phone, which is it bonds with the glass on your your iPhone screen or your iPad screen. And they say it turns that into a, you know, nine H hardness or whatever. So I don't know if it was the two together that protected me or if it was just the Zag or, you know, the case probably helped a little bit, too, because it probably gave it a little bit of, you know, lifts it off the the the asphalt a little bit. So you're not just, you know, smacking right on it. I don't know. It's hard to it's hard to say. Hard to say. But that's there you go. Right. I'm glad you made it through it. I was so bummed. Well, you know, the QMATX stuff actually comes with some level of insurance. So if you're screen, if you put this on your screen and then your screen cracks or scratches at some level, they will, you know, write you a check or whatever for the for some portion of the repairs. So so there's that. Yeah, I got the two. Yeah, I got a card recently. I think it's a Wells Fargo card. And it's like, well, if you put your cell phone bill on this, we'll cover damage with a 25 dollar deductible. And it's like, oh, well, that's very nice. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So there you go. So I've always felt like I've always kept a screen protector on my iPhone before the hardened glass ones came out. I always hated the screen protectors because they made it like feel weird and look funny and all that stuff. But but putting the tempered glass on there, it just feels like glass. And you know, all the touching and all that stuff works fine through it. Like I just don't have a problem. So so there you go. And and you can get the, you know, the Zag one. Well, you can't get that. I often have taken the inexpensive route and buy the, you know, three for 10 bucks on Amazon or whatever. But I got to say those are way thinner than the thing I got from Zag. So bear that in mind. I'm certainly going to bear it in mind. So there you go. Anything anything else on that, John, before we move on to the next thing? OK, Kevin has some questions for us. So let's see where we are here. Kevin asks, he says, as I recall, in the past, an iCloud backup of my iPhone would also backup my Wi-Fi passwords. I had not heard of this behavior changing. However, recently I purchased an iPhone 8 and I restored from a backup for my old success, not one single Wi-Fi password was restored. Further, Apple replaced that old success with a new refurbed success after they couldn't replace the battery for the $29, which is a pretty sweet deal. I restored that phone from the successive backup from the iPhone 8 and you guessed it, still no Wi-Fi passwords. Everything else seems to work just fine in both cases. Has Apple modified this behavior? If so, I cannot imagine why. I hadn't heard that this had changed. That said, I do know that Wi-Fi passwords are now stored and shared and synced with iCloud Keychain syncing. So it's possible that they're not being saved to your backups because they are theoretically being saved to iCloud Keychain. Maybe you don't use iCloud Keychain or maybe you had not turned the iCloud Keychain back on at the point in time when you needed to connect to a Wi-Fi network or whatever that was. iCloud Keychain syncing can turn itself off, as we've mentioned recently. And it just kind of happens sometimes. And you just got to go into settings, iCloud or settings in iOS 11. Now you tap your name, then go to iCloud and Keychain should be in that list. And if you expect it to be on, well, then by golly, it should be on. Any thoughts about that, Mr. Braun? Sometimes things can go wrong or bad. Well, I'm going to tell you why I say that because I'm just looking here. So I was just, you know, traveling, you know, doing various family events here. Sure. And I was like, you know what? Let me look in my Keychain for the name of their base station that I helped them set up and see where it is. And so you're now talking to Keychain just to be clear, you're looking on your Mac. Yes, we got it. I just wanted to make sure because you can't look in your Keychain on iOS. And if you could, then we were going to have a different conversation because I wanted to learn how to do that. But this is a way to see why some things may be happening. So the thing is, and I think I may want to take care of this. But the name of the base station, I search for that. And it shows up in two Keychains, System and iCloud. iCloud, I expect because when I travel, all my devices are logged in iCloud. So it's going to be an iCloud Keychain. But it's also in the system Keychain. And I guess what I may be suggesting is that if you're having weird things happening with your. Things that you think should only be an iCloud Keychain. Look in your run Keychain access and just see where else it may be. Because we've had plenty of people tell us that. Yeah, getting rid of the older or duplicate entries kind of helps sometimes. Yeah, that is normal. And then it gets confused. I've seen it get confused where it's like, well, I mean, even things that I. Have used recently, like even the optimum stuff every now and then, something weird happens and it's like, well, your password's wrong. It's like, well, no, you save that in iCloud Keychain. The password's fine. But it will copy. Just my experience, right? But it is normal behavior for anything stored in your iCloud Keychain, especially like an airport password or Wi-Fi password. It is absolutely normal and expected behavior for those if stored in your iCloud Keychain to also then be in your system Keychain. Be because I'm looking at there's a wireless network that I only have ever connected to with my iPad or iPhone. I've never connected to it with my Mac. And I've certainly never connected to it with this stationery iMac here in my in my studio interest. Yeah, this is a network that that only exists on stage, really, to be perfectly honest, it's a it's a network that is matched to a mixer that belongs to a sound engineer that I work with routinely. But he that mixer has never been in my in my house. And yet the passwords for those, both of them, he's got a netgear router and it's set to the default so that you all you have to do is look on the thing and there's the password. It's written right on it. We haven't changed anything about it. So it's got the netgear. It's netgear forty four is the name of the router. And so it's got netgear forty four and netgear forty four dash five G because it broadcasts the network separately by default. And we left it at its default. And that that is in on this Mac twice in iCloud and in system. Right. So you're trying to say is maybe maybe she just not. That's with that. OK. Well, no, no, no. Actually, I don't that's not to disagree with your advice. In fact, I very much agree with your advice. If you've got something that's that's wonky, I think taking it out of the system key chain and letting iCloud repopulate it is like it's like a really good move. But I just like I just didn't want you or anyone else to to then look the next day and say, what's going on? I removed this from the system key chain and now it's back. Well, that's probably because that's what Apple that's how Apple does what Apple does some. Yeah, that's all. All right. Crazy iCloud, let's stay with iCloud, shall we, John? It's with so much fun. This is this is actually a geek challenge that has been floating here for a couple of weeks and I wanted to wanted to get it out and see if we could get some answers here. So this is listener Eric. He says this is perhaps both a quick tip and a geek challenge. And it has to do with none other than iCloud key chain. How does one reset their iCloud key chain? If something is corrupted within it and you want to start fresh, the answer to that depends on whether you have two factor authentication turned on. If it's turned off, it looks like it's pretty simple to reset by following some of Apple's instructions here. Oh, how come I can't open Apple's instructions? John, this is bad. But we'll put those instructions out there. I think I'm there. Are you there? iCloud key chain. Yeah, OK, cool. All right, cool. For whatever reason, my computer isn't letting me see it. So perfect. Great. So this is a you want to walk us through the steps and from a very 10,000 foot view kind of fashion there. Well, they do have an entry here. Yeah, if you forget your iCloud security code, so that's the heading. And then basically farther in the article, they say, if you haven't turned on two factor authentication, reset the security code for iCloud key chain or create a new one. And that'll wipe out your key chain because you're because you're essentially saying I don't have the security code for my iCloud key chain. I think, yeah, there's yeah, all right. And farther down, all right. So there's a section in this help article that says, right, here's how you can here's the steps to take to reset your iCloud key chain. Great. Yeah, we'll repopulate it. I hope. No, I think the idea is to reset it, right? To just wipe it out because you can't add a new device without a knowing your security code or B, having a device that's already logged into your iCloud key chain to approve the other one. Right. So if you need to if you need to wipe it out because you can't get into it, then that's what you have to do. So but that could be a good thing from a troubleshooting standpoint, right, to just wipe it out and start from scratch. Yeah, this seems to be at the level at the device level. Not I don't think there's a master kill switch for iCloud key chain. No, this is the master kill switch. That's what I'm saying. I've I've done this. Yeah, because you're resetting your entire iCloud key chain. Like if you if you can't log into it and this is just Apple's security protocols kind of in place. It's right. You're totally right that it's happening at the device level, but there's the unintended or intended consequence of if you have no way of authenticating into your iCloud key chain, then it'll let you in, but it will be a blank key chain and everything gets wiped out. That's just how it goes. Yeah, it's the kill switch. It's the kill switch. Yeah, because for right. But that's only if you don't have two factor enabled. If you do, Eric says it gets interesting. There doesn't seem to be any way to reset iCloud key chain. Because you're using your two factor to prove your identity. And then iCloud key chain is like, yeah, we'll let you in. If you have a Mac and you so you can't reset iCloud key chain from an iOS device if two factors on because you just you'll be able to get in. And then that's that says if you have a Mac, though, you can head to the preferences in key chain access and the verbiage of the reset button reads create a new create new empty login and iCloud key chains. You will lose all items currently stored in these key chains. Eric says my question is, is there some way to reset just the iCloud key chain via an iOS device for an account that has two factor authentication turned on? And I think we kind of answered why this doesn't exist because this this path to reset your iCloud key chain was not built to be a path to reset your iCloud key chain. It was built to be a security protection if you're trying to get into your iCloud key chain and can't. Right. I mean, it's two two different mindsets in creating this. So I don't know. It gets interesting. If somebody knows, let us know. We told you how to contact this. You can call us to us. Oh, no, no, no. And how many years has it been since we've had a 206 number? But anyway, it's two two four eight eight eight geek. So there you go. That's four, three, three, five. That's correct. Never change that part. Hopefully we'll never change. That's right. All right. Good. So that gets that geek challenge kind of floating out there. And we'll see what we can do. Bob has a question. Bob says. Let's see. Oh, I have always specified alerts for doctors, appointments, tax matters, etc. to come via email. I do not like notifications one bit since the upgrade calendar bombards me with notifications for each event with between five and nine identical during the day, starting the day before throughout the day, even after any suggestions regarding this. So, yeah, this is interesting mail. And I think this started with Sierra, John. Correct me if if you remember it before that. But mail has what it calls its data detectors. And if you go into mail's preferences and go to general, the first checkbox you see, at least on a high Sierra machine, is labeled add invitations to calendar automatically. And so I'm thinking maybe now I know that this is for like ICS file invitations that come in. But I've also seen it where I've got the calendar open and it says, oh, hey, I just found an event in mail. So I'm wondering if that also adds things automatically. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it does. Oh, it's smart. Yeah, I mean, it's been brought over from iOS to and pretty much. But no, I've seen it more and I just kind of ignore them. You know, the same with, you know, now in both iOS and Mac, you know, it'll say, oh, I think I found a contact, you know, yeah. A lot of this smart functionality used to only be in iOS. And then they started slowly bringing it over to the Mac as well. And I just kind of ignore it. Well, first, I unchecked that checkbox because I'm like, yeah, on the one hand, it's cool that it's like, oh, I see something with a time and a date. So I think it's probably an invite to something. And it's like, well, yeah, that's a good guess. Yeah, nice guess. Thanks for filling out my calendar. Yeah, get out of my face. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Hey, speaking of get out of my face, John. I had a really weird thing happen recently. I had it was a business conversation with someone who is I'll call him a minor celebrity, certainly far more of a celebrity than you or I are, John. And this person and I have been in a lot of the same circles for years. It's not really a tech thing. It's unrelated, but but had never been connected on like Facebook or anything like that. And I put his phone number because we've been texting each other in my contacts list and the next day I was on Facebook and it said, Facebook was suggesting like, hey, you should friend this person. Here's someone that we think you might know. Now, the only thing that changed was that I had put his phone number in my in my contacts database. Yeah. And I thought, all right, that's. Wow. So it's almost like some piece of software. Maybe like, yeah, made some sort of correlation between these events. Yeah. But I Facebook shouldn't have access to my contacts, right? So I understand that. But, you know, like everybody else, I mean, dude, everybody's watching you. Well, but I went to find out where this happened. So I went on my iPhone into settings and privacy and into contacts to see what apps I had given permission to have my contacts. And and Facebook itself doesn't even show up there. Messenger does and it's turned off. So I was like, OK, I know I didn't change the setting in the last two days. So it didn't pump his address or, you know, anything up to there. So, OK, where else could it be? And then it hit me. System preferences on your Mac, Internet accounts. You know, a Facebook account there, sure enough. Calendars was unchecked. Notifications was checked. Share menu was checked and contacts was checked. Yeah. Yep. So I've now turned that off on all my Macs. And and so hopefully this doesn't happen again in the future. It's not bad that it's just creepy is what it is. It's like, that's weird, man. It shouldn't happen that way. Man. Yeah. So let's look here. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Facebook contacts, calendars, notifications. Yep. Yeah. I got the whole whole enchilada there. Yeah. I feel like enchiladas. I don't know how you feel about enchiladas. I love enchiladas. I'm not a huge fan of empanadas, though. Some people like them. My wife likes empanadas, but, you know, I don't know. It's just not my thing. Yeah. I got some tamales. Somebody sent me some tamales. Do you like tamales? See, that's the other thing that in this same. These were kind of mild. They're pork. I think they need a little kick to them and they're available. But it's better to give somebody something that's not spicy rather than too spicy. So but I'd like a sauce on it. But no, it's fine. Yeah. Right. Tamales are are they're too bland to me. They're just very like, I mean, I've had them spicy. But like like you said, they're a little dry. I would like sauce. There you go. Yeah. Hey, in the chat room here, Kiwi Graham is saying, speaking of Internet accounts, Mr. John F. Braun, what do you think about the Flickr buyout? You saw that, right? That Smug Mug. So Smug Mug said they're going to buy Flickr. Yeah. I don't know. And they said they're going to like revitalize it. Well, I mean, I mean, I'm perfectly happy with the state that Flickr is in right now is that it's a repository for one of the places that I send my photos to. Huh. All right. You send photos out. But, you know, photos on the Mac shares with it. Fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So I don't know. I mean, yeah, I mean, they could ruin it. I don't know. The thing is, I don't have my photos in one place. So I'm not like, you know, I'm not like buried or anything. Yeah, right, right, right. I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it should be interesting. Yeah. Curious. All right. Sticking with actually, I'm going to take a quick second here because I'd like to not do this at the very end as I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers. You can learn more about premium at macgeekab.com slash premium. But these are the folks that these are your fellow listeners who are able to and interested in contributing directly to the show. And we like to shout them out every week. So the contributions that have come in this week on the biannual $25 every six month plan, Laura S, Scott C, Andrew G, Debbie F, Lyndon N and Michael H. Thank you to all of you. And on the monthly $10 plan, we have Steven A, John D, Santiago M, Ken from Kailua, Gary B, Clive S, Ev the Nerd, Dave G and Jeff F. Thank you so much to all of you. You you rock more than we can probably communicate. So thank you. Yeah, that's good. OK, let's see. Let's go. Should we let's, you know, it's been a little while since we've talked about networking and stuff, John. So let's jump to Steven here. We can always come back to this other stuff. So Steven asks, he says, I'm trying to determine the best solution to replace my current setup for my network, which includes an aris cable modem. He has Comcast service at 150 megabits downstream, I presume. He is an airport extreme and then another airport extreme connected wirelessly via the extend a wireless network option in the airport utility. He's got an HD home run in the attic of his townhome connected to a broadcast antenna and then to the airport expressed by Ethernet, three Apple TVs, two wireless one wired, two Drobos, one direct connected in one ethernet, two MacBooks, a Mac mini that's wired, an iMac that's wireless, a couple of iPhones, a Windows PC, an Android phone. What he needs in order of importance is he wants mesh. My current setup has issues with the HD home run dropping out when there is other streaming in progress. He wants to match his current solution because there is no way to cable from the attic to the router. So needs a mesh point with Ethernet up there. And he wants IPv6 full support because he actually uses IPv6 for his inbound traffic to connect to his devices, which is pretty cool. I'm glad to hear somebody using that. That's good. And he wants QOS. So that's where things get interesting because he says price is not the primary object. I'm willing to spend a little bit more to get the correct solution. So here's the thing. No mesh product, no consumer mesh product is doing QOS in a way that's going to make you happy. That's going to make any of us happy. So some of them do it OK, but it's not the way that that like you get would say the Synology router or even a Netgear standalone router like that. The Orbi doesn't quite have QOS in a way that we want. So I'm going to take QOS out of the table. But oh, I want to take something else off the table. I would just say right away is get rid of the airports. No, no, no, no, I'm taking QOS off the table. He's definitely getting rid of the airports. That's what he wants to replace. Yeah, no, no, no, we're just taking QOS off the table as a as a man, a mandate here because I think we can get close enough to that. But we're not. I just want to make sure we're advising. We're not advising that any of these things are going to do QOS in a in a real way. And that I don't think what's going to be put on the table really requires you to fiddle with that. Well, I mean, every device that we have, I think I think we all need it, like especially now with back up. Well, no, I understand we need it, but but not at the not at the level where the user has has to intervene is that. Right. But it should be automatic. It should just be. Yes. Yeah. Agreed. OK. And it's unfortunately not. Yeah. So and really what we're talking about here, just to kind of put a cap on that conversation is something to manage your outbound traffic so that when you have one device that's barfing all of its data, either your photos or its online backup or whatever up to the cloud, that it's not slowing down the rest of your network. When we talk about QOS in these scenarios, that's exactly what we're talking about. And there is no mesh product out there whose routing capabilities truly allows that to happen. But they they all do it in it like close, almost close enough, I'll say. That said, for Stephen, I'm thinking Eero is your best bet here. I'm tempted, though, to recommend Orbi, especially for its backhaul, which might really make a difference for the run that you have up to your attic and all that stuff. But I am not yet comfortable with their new firmware. They've been fighting with this since November there. It's getting closer. I might be a month away from saying, yeah, OK, cool. But I'm not there. And I don't want to say that I'm a month away from that because I don't know enough to be able to say that. Orbi. But yeah, with Orbi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've also had one or two people in my circle shake their fists at the sometimes inconsistent reliability. Exactly. Yeah, that's the problem. Well, they, you know, they change and then it rolls over and it's like, oh, well, get the firmware updated. It's like, well, why did the whole system just like break down? I mean, that shouldn't happen. That shouldn't happen. Yeah, I got the firmware update. Right. Yeah, exactly. I've never had that with Eero. I mean, all their updates always make things better. Right. Yeah. Orbi made a fundamental change to their kind of their whole topology and they've been fighting with getting it right. I mean, it's it's it's understandable from an engineering standpoint. It's frankly unacceptable from a, you know, customer centric standpoint. So UX. Yes. Yeah. For yeah, for user experience. Yeah, exactly. Ubiquities Amplify, though, is another viable option here. But you have to be careful because you need for Stephen's case, he needs something that will do wireless bridging to an ethernet device in the attic. Right. So he needs to be able to put some mesh point up in the attic and then plug his HD home run into that via ethernet. And the standard Amplify system does not have ethernet on the on the kind of the satellite mesh point units, but you can go and just buy another router unit and mesh that in and it will do exactly what what you would want. The nice part, I mean, it sounds like Stephen, you know, is is a bit of a geek. Right. Like the technology likes to be able to mess with it. Eero gives you some level of that, but Eero is very much a consumer centric thing that gives you a lot of features. But, you know, your tweaking is is limited. It's it's not it's not untweakable. It's just limited tweakability. But for most things, it's going to be fine. And I think for what Stephen has described would be fine. I'm just not sure it's fine for Stephen, if that makes sense. Right. Because Stephen likes to tweak and have fun with things. So ubiquities Amplify might be somewhere to go where you can do a little more tweaking or be again, you know, would would be that. But I think for today, for reliability and all that stuff, especially knowing that you want, you know, some some decent speeds for your streaming and all that stuff, I'd go, Eero, that that's that's the right move and also the safe bet right now. So that's that's my thoughts. Now, have you messed with, you know, there's, you know, there's a lot of players out there now. I haven't tried any of these. But but have you tried the the deco or the vellop? I have both, in fact. Yeah. So the the deco there are the new kids on the block. They're not that heroes. Oh, OK. No, they're they're they're all about the same age. Yeah. Right. They're the hero is the old kid. And then everybody else is pretty much the same age. Yeah. And but no, the deco from TP Link, I actually really like that. It at the price point, you know, you can get a three pack. I think the last time I checked, it was like, you know, one fifty or it's less than 200 bucks or something. And and it works really well. They had some software issues for a little while and now it's rock solid. I have those set up at two of my uncle's homes in Maine and they don't even think about it anymore. All of their Wi-Fi problems are solved. It's great. So yeah, the the deco is if you want something where it's truly just plug it in and there's not a whole lot to do, it works great. I will say that the deco is the only one that has any semblance of QOS like we have described. It's not perfect, but it does have it more so than anyone else. So there's that smart. No, no, I think it's it like it or you can you can fine tune it. No, it'll do it. You can sort of fine tune it, but it will do it. The the issue is that it's I think the CPU is not quite up to snuff to keep up with that kind of thing for for some scenarios. So just be aware. But I do like the deco a lot. And for the price, you just can't beat it. The vellop so they've they've they announced it. The vellop has always been a tri-band solution, which really is is great. And and and that's what I'm recommending. Steven here is the Euro Gen 2, which is the tri-band stuff for short. The vellop has been tri-band. They just announced a dual band that's coming or they announced it. CES just to give people a lower, you know, a lower price point. I have liked the vellop. It they had they, too, had some software hiccups. And I it's it's interesting you you asked about it, John, because it's on my list to kind of, you know, dig back into in the next week or two here and really just dig in and kind of get some some newer hands on with. But it's good. It was just a little funky at first. So. But, yeah. Yeah. It the last time I used it, it was it was uneventful. It it worked and I had no problems with it. So maybe that's a good thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. It's but I would say for what you're doing there, I think I think today, Euro is the answer. A month from now, that might be different. So. So there you go. While we're on the subject of mesh, we had we had another question from our listener, Arvind here, and Arvind asked, since you have been writing about mesh, I thought you'd be the right person. I need help finding a mesh system for my house. I have essentially set up a mesh with Apple products. You can only do it if you use the tools from Snow Leopard. Says, I've read your thorough articles about this and I'll link to those articles about how to choose mesh because it has kind of feature set comparisons and such amongst all the ones that we've discussed, including Deco and Vellop. He says, the two I felt that would suit my needs would be Vellop and Orbi. However, I've found major issues with them on the Vellop. He says, there isn't a WAN port, both ethernet porches are a sense that both ethernet ports are essentially bridges. If you have a wired network with items like a NAS on the system and then add a guest network, anyone on the guest network cannot access anything else on the wireless side. However, the guest has access to everything that is wired. There are many posts in the support groups for Vellop about this. That's a major issue and defeats the reason for me of having a guest network. Also, from what I'm reading, says it requires cloud management. It can do local, but it's limited and is a crutch until you can get the cloud back. Number two, he says, is the Orbi. They released a new firmware update and he said it adds ethernet backhaul, which is true. Have they fixed all the problems? And that's where I say a month from now. And then he asks, is it possible to restrict the Vellop or Orbi to only five gigahertz? I might want to do that and then keep my Apple router for a sandbox subnet. Says, I want to keep my guests media on a separate network. Then on my personal network, that's my primary concern. There have been increased attacks and flaws abound with IoT devices. So this is where mesh gets interesting because clearly from Arvin's email, he's happy digging in, you know, he's a geek like us. He wants to have full control over everything and also wants some intelligent meshing as opposed to the pseudo mesh that he's created with his Apple products. But that's where things get interesting because every one of the mesh systems out there that we've discussed so far is consumer focused. And therefore, at some level, watered down. It's worth knowing, though, that the company that makes Amplify, called Ubiquiti is the name of the company, has been making mesh products for a long time and they've been making them for enterprise. So Amplify is, and this is why I kind of, you know, mentioned Amplify for Steven, is that that one, it comes from a company that's been making consumer or enterprise grade mesh for a very long time. And so you get some of that thinking in the product and you can do some of that tweaking in the product that you're just not capable of with the others. You're just kind of more boxed in. But you can also jump to the Ubiquiti Unify system, which is their, you know, either prosumer or kind of light enterprise. And then you can start doing all kinds of things and really configuring it in a granular way. So that might be the answer for you is to take a look at the Ubiquiti Unify. So there you go. That's my thoughts on that, John. What do you think? I think the question of whether you can lock a mesh product into one frequency or the other is very interesting because I mean, I played with the Orbi a while ago. Yeah, I'm just considering whether that's something you want to let people do. Or do you want it? Yeah, I know, I know. I don't want to open the can of worms. Yeah, but you can, like with the Linksys Vellop, you can go into the local user interface. It does have a pretty robust local interface where you can turn off radios and set channels and that sort of thing. So so, yeah, it's possible. Not with all of them, though, but but certainly with some of them. But but, you know, you're it these are very much built to be. Remember, the whole promise of mesh is you want Wi-Fi everywhere in your house. You don't want to have to, you know, be a geek to either figure it out or manage it, right? It's it's the to set it and forget it mindset with with mesh. Yeah, yeah. And if you want to set it and tweak it forever, like it's it's just not none of these consumer grade ones are for you. So you just got to make a decision. I just love to try it one time. I think I told you there's one room in my house where when I bring my iPhone, the Euro always puts it on 2.4. And I think it's making a right decision because there's a lot of garbage in the way. And but couldn't I just switch to five temporarily? Just to see how it would. Oh, yeah. No, you cannot. That's right. Now, if I got some sort of wireless tool, I could probably convince it. But yeah, just. Yeah, he thoughts. Yeah, no, I'm with you. I yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing, right? Is as soon as you start wanting to play with that stuff, then you immediately see the box that you're in with most of the, you know, current mesh offerings that are out there. So. Yeah. All right. Well, where are we here on time? I think it's a do we have? Oh, sure. It's your birthday, John. You decide. Are we taking it out or are we going back to Carol and then Gary, maybe? Or is there anywhere else you want to go? But you got to make a decision because it's not that not that. OK. Yeah, I mean, there was Bruce, that was kind of interesting. All right, let's go to we'll go to Dave and then Bruce and see what we get here because those two are sort of related. So going to Dave, Dave says, I have a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro running Sierra. When I play YouTube or Vimeo videos in Firefox or Chrome, my computer gets quite warm and my battery starts draining at an alarming rate. I stat menu shows that the GPU is running at 60 FPS. When I play the same videos in Safari, I see a more normal state, normal rate of battery drain and my machine doesn't get warm. In this case, the GPU is running at 30 FPS. I noticed this starting sometime in the last six months. I initially thought I had it had something to do with the browser switching to prefer some new video format. So I try to plug in that tries to force H dot 264 instead of the new Google format, but that didn't affect any of this. So it seems to be primarily an issue with the frame rate. And it seems that both Chrome and Firefox are either always asking for the highest or they are specifically asking for 60. Is there anything I can do to force Firefox and Chrome to request 30 instead of best available? Am I misdiagnosing the root cause of this and that perhaps battery drain is related to something else? Says the workaround is, of course, to just use Safari every time I want to visit a page with video, awkward, but that's what I've been doing. Sometimes I get caught by running videos in Firefox and only realize it when a battery tells me it's at 20 or 30 percent. Says I worry that a future Safari update will change this or that upgrading to high Sierra will change it. I don't think I think I don't think upgrading to high Sierra will change it. I do think that this is about Apple's optimizations for Safari. Apple has worked very hard and toots their own horn quite a bit about how a battery efficient and power efficient and CPU efficient Safari has gotten its fast and it is power sensitive. And I think that's what you're seeing here. This is sort of the benefit of, you know, the people that write the software also having lunch with the people that write the hardware, right? And and you don't necessarily get that with Firefox and Chrome's interesting because that's sort of based on WebKit. So you'd think that there would be some of those optimizations. But but maybe not. Maybe that's sort of the difference between, you know, the WebKit engine and then Safari in and of itself. And remember, they've done a lot of this for iOS where obviously battery life matters, perhaps even more than it does on your Mac. So I think this is just Safari being Safari and being efficient. That's that's my thought on it. And I don't think that upgrading to high Sierra would change that. Do you have any thoughts on that, John? No, I think you're right. The settings aren't explicitly there anymore. Right. When I've seen looking at the preferences, but I remember them saying, well, yeah, for example, like, you know, for videos playing, but the window is not visible, that we shouldn't spend time. Yeah, yeah, right. That kind of thing too. Right. The the the pausing of activity in the background and all of that stuff. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right, cool. Well, while we're on the subject of video, John, you want to you want to sing the encore here and and take us to Bruce? Let's see. Where is Bruce? There is Bruce. All right. Bruce had a problem. It has to do with video. That's terrible. Here's what happened. He'd fire up a page in. I believe it was Safari, Safari. Yeah, that's right. Go to YouTube and then we'd say your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available. What's up with that? What's up with that? Well, one place you can go and I never knew about this, but the thing is if you go to www.youtube.com slash html five. So this is one way to kind of solve your problems or at least find out what problems you may have. It will show you all of the valid codecs, if you will, or video formats that your browser thinks it supports. So that's always something to try here. Huh, I don't know if you're trying this now. I never knew that was there. Same. Yeah. Because I looked up the page he sent me and that's actually supposedly where it goes. Or it's a close version of it. Sure. So his was telling him, well, I don't know what's going on. Right. So then my suggestion, Dave, was, you know, there's probably a couple of places you can look here. If you're not getting video to work, there are two primary ways that you can enhance the functionality of your browser. So one, at least in Safari is there's things called Safari extensions. If you go to Safari preferences, extensions, you'll see all of the extensions. If there are any that are video related, you may want to disable them or update them. Right. The other place, Dave, is that there's still the concept of plugins and the architecture and the language and the naming and all that have changed here and there. But there's still also within Safari, if you go to Safari preferences and websites, you'll then see a list of plug-in or ins in the lower left-hand corner of that panel that are also ways to extend your functionality. Yeah. And you can do those on a per website basis, too, which is where things get really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I threw kind of a wide net over that one. So he said, so Bruce were back and said, yeah, I figured it out. What was it? I'm like, dude, what was it? Click to flash. He had an old version of click to flash. So apparently click to flash. Oh, it was interrupting. It was telling you that he had something. It was sending. I think it was sending a flag that confused the website it was talking to saying, I don't support anything, man. Right. Which is basically what it does, right? Until you authorize playing back of flash, I think its purpose is to indicate that. It can't play anything. Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense how things like that work. So there is a better way. You don't need to use click to flash to control that anymore because of that very user interface. You just mentioned where you can go to Safari preferences websites. Right, I turn on the flash plugin. I know you people are going to think I'm crazy, but there are some crazy. I am crazy. There are some websites where I want to use flash, right? Like like Live Nation and Ticketmaster because you can choose your seats and things like that, right? So there's certain websites where I want to use flash. And I want those websites to know that I have flash and I want them to just use it out of the gate. So I turn on flash and plugins. And then I visit those websites and then I come in here and I set those websites to on, which means it's just going to expose flash and use it without ever asking me. Of course, it'll yell at me if my flash is out of date, which it seems like is an hourly occurrence. But, you know, but other than that, right? You know, yeah, right. So, but for everywhere else, I don't want it to even know. I don't want it to ask me if I want to use flash. I want it to think I don't have flash installed. So what I do is at the bottom of that, like once you go to Safari preferences websites, click on Adobe Flash Player, turn it on. This is where you can set your configured websites. And then in the lower right hand corner, it has an option that says when visiting other websites and it has the same dropdown, you can have on, off or ask. If you leave it on ask, it will tell the website you have flash, but it won't let the website launch flash until it pops up a dialogue and says, do you want to let this website launch flash? I don't even want it to try. I just want it to fall back to whatever else it might have on any other site. So I'm not pestered with these, hey, you should use flash kind of things. So I leave that at off. And that way it simply does not expose the fact that I have flash installed to those websites, to any website. And it really works. It's like it's great and I can just do what I want. And it's like not having flash installed except when I want it and then I have it, which is pretty cool. So there you go. All right. Yeah, that's that's my story. And and I'm sticking to it. Yeah, yeah. And and I think with that, it is time to to reintroduce the band, my friend. The band says happy birthday, by the way. Oh, thanks. You're welcome. Nice day for them to be outside. Yeah, it is. Yeah, they've been out for a while. They look a little sweaty, in fact. In fact, it's it's warm in the studio. It's like 75 degrees in here because it's a well, well, it's, you know, an attic, essentially an attic room, in a sense. And and, you know, and it's, you know, there's no air. So I don't know what's left. We told them the email. We told them the phone number. I know. What else can we tell them, Dave? Well, we can tell them we love them and thank you. Oh, we love you. Thank you. Group hug. Yeah, that's it. Come visit us. Our current group hug is happening on Facebook as it always has. So MacGeekev.com slash Facebook. But I will be reaching out to a few of you soon here, probably in the next week. Maybe we can have to to mess around with something we've created internally that a is ours so that we don't have to, you know, go with the whims of Facebook. But also will allow things like it drives me crazy when I look at a thread on Facebook, where somebody's answered a question and then you get like the same answer in 14 different ways below it because Facebook doesn't let you say, hey, this is the answer. Like show it to the next person that comes in regardless of when they show up. Our system that we've been messing with will let us do that and a bunch of other things. So so there you go. But that'll happen in parallel to all the other fun stuff we do together here. So for now, Facebook's there. And Facebook, I don't think there's no reason to make our group go away. It's just, you know, we're probably gonna prioritize our own and unless there's some reason not to. Yeah, so that's that. I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, our stellar sponsors that I want to thank. Smile at smilesoftware.com. Otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com. Ring, as we mentioned, at ring.com-mgg. Barebones at barebones.com. Roboform at roboform.com. Molecule at molecule with a k.com, m-o-l-e-k-u-l-e.com-m-g-g. Save a bunch of money over there. That thing's freaking awesome is what it is. John, I know you have a few hours of your birthday left here. And so we all have something that we would like to say to you.