 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab Episode 671 for Sunday, August 20th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in cool stuff tips and questions. We share the cool stuff and tips. We answer your questions. We share some stuff of our own. And the goal is for all of us to learn at least four new things each and every time we get together. Today's episode includes, we've actually got some hardware cool stuff found. We might have a couple of geek challenges. We will definitely address and discuss the NAS-related questions that you folks have been sending in. And this episode is sponsored by Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. Memory upgrades for the 2017 IMAX are there. We'll talk more about that shortly. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairville, Connecticut, John F. Brown. How are you doing, Mr. John F. Brown? I am much more chipper. I was off my game last week, but now I'm back on my game and I'm ready to rock. Ready to rock. All right, let's go. Let's let's jump to Dan then. We'll share some tips. Got some some interesting things. So Dan says, I wonder if other people have the same thing that I've discovered. Two months ago, I had a Mac Mini and several iOS devices. The Mac Mini had a homebrew fusion drive, which worked fantastically well. I pay Apple for extra iCloud space in order to use the iCloud Photo Library on all my mobile devices and my only Mac. I use optimized storage on all devices, but on my Mac Mini, I used the download originals option because I like to have at least one local copy of all my original photos. Sounds reasonable. He says, the Mac Mini got cloned to a NAS regularly, which fulfilled John's one, two, three backup theory or three, two, one backup theory. He says, however, I recently sold my Mac Mini and gathered enough dough to buy a lovely 2015 MacBook Pro with a 256 gig SSD. My problem is that I still want a local copy of my photos, but not on the SSD to do space limitations. I have loads of space on external drives, NAS, etc. I can't find a way of having my photos stored locally as well as optimized small versions on the SSD. And then he suggests and then he actually sent us in the tip with his solution. And because it's an interesting dilemma that he has, right? He does he wants to be able to access his photo library while he's traveling. And so he wants optimized versions local on his machine on that 256 gig boot drive so that he can see them wherever he is. But he also wants that same computer to store full copies of the photos when he's at home. And the magic answer is creating a second account on the MacBook Pro, which has the same iCloud photo library with download originals enabled, but located on an external disk. So he's got a second account, that photo library for that second account is stored on his external disk and boom. Now he has both pretty cool solution. I like this. I wish there was a better way, but it's not awful to have a second account that does just that. So livable. Pretty good. Huh, John? Hey, I mean, I like the work around. It's good. It sounded to me like initially there was not enough space on the new machine. Well, there's not. Now that's what I'm saying. Oh, does the second internal drive. Optimized storage, external drive, full originals. That's the beauty of it. Just two different photo libraries. From different user accounts, there are two. So he has two MacBook Pros, one with a smaller driver and absolutely not one same machine with the 256 gigs. So they can't be stored on the 256 gig SSD because it's too small. Correct. So he has an external drive that he wants to store him on, but. Can't do both in one user account. So the main user account stores optimized copies so that he's always got him wherever he is and he can have full access to his iCloud photo library. The second user account stores everything to a photo library on an external drive. And boom, there you go. I see. OK, yeah, it's pretty good. All right. They kind of suggest that in. So there's a it's a iCloud photo library. Article and they have a section saying back up your photos and videos. And I think they kind of suggest this. So they say, one thing you could do is you go to iCloud.com. And download from iCloud.com. Sure, yeah, I guess essentially what he's doing. Yeah, but but you have to then do that manually and manage importing those into whatever you've got, like that's a pain in the neck. Yep. I guess another thought would be to boot from a larger drive. And then download the full ones there. Yeah, but he doesn't have to. Right. Well, he's kind of doing that. But right, he's still booting from the internal drive. All right. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, of course, pretty good. Yeah, the advice here is buy buy more drive as much drive as you can. But I understand, you know, money's tight. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, for some people, it doesn't even matter. Like you might have more photos than you could fit even on a terabyte drive. Right. I mean, that, you know, well, in my case, that is, you know, I'm still not on the the bandwagon for iCloud PhotoLibrary because looking right now, my maybe I don't have a hundred and twenty three gigs is my PhotoLibrary. Oh, so you could get a you could get the one thing you can get. Yeah, but iCloud storage, they keep they keep changing their plan or they change their plans recently. So I got to make sure I get this right. Yeah, for three ninety nine a month, you could get two hundred gigs worth of iCloud drive storage. And that would be enough to store all your iOS backups plus your hundred, whatever, thirty gig iCloud PhotoLibrary. Yeah, I may I may have to come up with the extra coin because right now I think I have the ninety nine cent a month. Or no, I guess so I got the fifty gig plan right now. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So if I kick it up to the next year, then then. Then you're golden. Yeah, OK. Well, I can probably scrape together that extra extra couple of bucks a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's actually only two bucks extra because you're already paying ninety nine cents a month. So right. OK. Yeah. All right, cool. Very good. I like that solution, Dan. Thank you for bringing that to us. Moving on to Lars in show six sixty eight. I love it when my compressor acts up. Lars says I was listening to MGT six sixty eight and you mentioned you'd like a constant output of a terminal command. In this case, it was L S O F. There's a command for that. It's called watch. He says, I installed it through Mac ports, but you could just as easily install it through brew. And indeed, I installed it with brew, brew, install, watch. He says, so if I am configuring a server, I like to end map server name to see which services are running on it. Of course, I have to repeat that command when I want to look again. So I use watch and then single quote and map server IP and quote solves this. I run it in a separate window and watch runs this command every two seconds, which is configurable, of course. So if there's a change, I immediately see it, which watch you can run from any. I don't actually, I'm not sure what those words mean, but but there you go. That's a watch is the magic thing that just keeps running a terminal command on an interval that you would like. So thanks for that, Lars. I had, you know, I. I was aware of the existence of the watch command, but I feel like I was exposed to it very, very early on in my in my Unix dabblings and it didn't either. It didn't make sense to me at the time or it didn't apply or both. So I never dug back into it. And when Lars's thing came in, it was like, oh, OK, yeah, I got to I have to know about this. So I figured it was good to share. You want to take us to Jeff, John, or unless you have something to add about Lars? No, Jeff is to Jeff, it is. So Jeff asks, I'm curious to know if you know of a way to have handbrake message or email when it has completed encoding. It's Q. I routinely will encode numerous files at once, and it would be ideal if when handbrake has completed, it would alert me in some fashion so I can queue up the next bunch of files. I've seen growler, I think he means growl and not growler. They may want to have a growler when you're using growl. That being a certain size of beer container, right? Or at least that's one you one definition, right? A growler. It is. Yes, yes, yes. Being mentioned as a possible option, but the reviews on growl in the Mac App Store seem less than stellar for the latest version. And I'm not looking to to ensure any additional headaches if possible. Thanks. My answer is. Kind of like the comments section, ignore the reviews, because I looked over the reviews and one the reviews for the most part had nothing to do with the functionality of growl. One was like, oh, I tried to install it and the install was corrupt. And well, that's not their fault. That's the Mac. Oh, that's true. Another was like, it doesn't do what it used. But anyways, so I dug in and the thing is so growl, what is growl? Growl is a notification platform. It's been around forever. You got to throw some coin at them now, three ninety nine. And I gladly did because the thing is so you do have notifications in Mac OS, Dave. Yeah, but they're very rudimentary. They're very basic and that, you know, you get a banner coming up on your screen and that's about it. It can't really do much more than that. Well, it can if you wire growl into it, though. Well, that's the thing is that if you use the growl system, so so growl makes a API available and if application developer wants to take advantage of it, they can. And guess what? Handbrake has. An action on it that they tied into growl and the action is in code done. Gee, that sounds exactly like what we want. And then the actions that can be performed by growl so it could do. And it does, you know, the standard just puts up a banner. Well, it also has a bunch of additional actions, Dave. And here they are. Well, there's a sound action, something called prowl. I don't even know what that is. But here's one called mail me. That sounds like something we may want, right? Speech so we could speak or yell at you. SMS, which I think is what he said as well. Right. So it'll SMS message you boxcar and script action, which I guess you could even run an Apple script. So. I think that's the way to go, Dave. Yeah. And I think prowl is an iOS app that will receive growl notifications. If I am remembering that correctly. Yes, it's a push notification client for iOS. So you could install the prowl plug in into growl, then install prowl on your iPhone and get a notification on your phone when the handbrake in code completes on your Mac. Now, here's there's one other option. If you want to do this on the cheap Dave, the thing is so looking in handbrake, handbrake does have a number of options that are pretty much the standard, you know, throw up a notification, make a sound. They do have one option. So you could get creative here and it says send file to an application when it's done in coding. So I suppose what you could do is you could throw together an Apple script, you know, an app, an Apple script app or an automator app that will message you and then send the encoded file to that. You won't do anything with it, but it will send you either an email or an SMS. But to me, that's kind of a hack. And yeah, growl, it's much more straightforward with growl. Yeah. So this is interesting because we've been talking about this. We had somebody who wanted really it started, I think it was show 669, where we started with a discussion about someone who wanted to know when a progress bar was complete. So they wanted to have their thought was to have the progress bar somehow displayed in the screensaver. And we had several people right in. And Matt was one of them who said, Hey, you know, you can use keyboard maestro for this, because keyboard maestro allows you to do actions based on events that occur. And one of those trigger events can be that, you know, the window title contains something. So when if you wait for, say, handbrake to finish, it pops up a little window that says encode done whatever that window title is, you can then have keyboard maestro watch for that window title to appear and then have it do whatever its things are that it does that you want it to do because it's just a trigger. And now keyboard maestro can, you know, I mean, it could run your Apple script, it could run an automator do anything. So it's a very, very cool thing. I'm trying to think of what Matt says he used it for. He says, he says, I'm wondering if having keyboard maestro put the display to sleep, then watch for a dialogue with certain texts, wake the display or make a sound. He's like, that would work. So yeah, it's very, very cool what keyboard maestro can do. And you could probably have keyboard maestro send something to growl as well, right? I mean, it like this is the as I'm seeing it right now, this is the future of automation on the Mac. And I really believe a huge part of it rests on keyboard maestro right now, because it's so much more flexible than automator is currently in just in terms of what it can do and how it can sort of monitor the system and and see things that that otherwise we might not be able to see. So it's cool stuff, man. Very, very cool. Yeah, good. Time to move on. Yeah. NAS, you know, before we talk about NAS, I want to talk about other world computing. Our sponsor for this episode, OWC, they have been around longer, more than twice as long as Mac GeekGab. And that is saying something. And there's a reason that they're around that long. It's because they sell good products, they understand every aspect of every product they sell. They have their own labs here at their offices in the States, where their technicians, their customer service reps all get hands on time with all of their stuff. So they truly understand what they're selling you. They're not just, you know, some face of, you know, an anonymous storefront or something. These are people that actually not only do they understand, they care, and they've been doing this a long time. They understand how to do it. Like I mentioned in the intro to the show, they now have RAM for sale for 2017 IMAX. They will help you pick out exactly what's right. They are often, and anybody who listens to this show knows, they are often one of the places that the first place is to figure out how much RAM a computer can actually take versus what Apple says a computer can take. And they'll happily sell you that and warranty the RAM for life and all of that good stuff. You've heard us talk about their new Thunderbolt 3 dock, 13 ports on this thing, five of them USB and all sorts of other great stuff. But, you know, one thing that people often and me included forget about OWC is that they sell refurbs there and their refurbs go a lot deeper than Apple's do. For example, at the moment while I'm telling you this and these things change because they are refurbs. So inventory is is always going to be sort of fluid. But you can start getting a used or refurbished Mac from OWC for less than 200 bucks. So, you know, if you need something that's going to be sort of a lightweight server, or even just a, you know, a kind of a kick around the house or a machine just to do some Google Docs on or whatever, you can go to them and get something that's really, really inexpensive and is going to serve your needs. And it's not just Mac's, it's you've got iPads there, you've got displays, all kinds of other things. You really should check this out the next time you're in the market for a machine because OWC might just be the place to go. So you got to check it out. Go to macsales.com and tell them we sent you there. They love to hear that. And obviously, it's it's good for good for us. And what's good for us is good for you, at least in that regard. And that's how we do it. So a great big thanks to Other World Computing at macsales.com for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, now it's NAS time. And I figure the place to start is perhaps the hardest question to answer when the concept of NAS comes up. And that is Steve, who asks, I just got notification that Amazon is discontinuing their unlimited storage plan. This is my primary backup for my Netgear Ready NAS 102. I have about one terabyte of photos on the Ready NAS 102 and eight terabytes of video on a Ready NAS 204. I use the dark side by Windows PC, he says, to run Plex Media Server to stream my video and photos. I do have a 15 inch 2011 MacBook Pro to view my Plex Media when I'm away from home. I view Plex at home through my Samsung Smart TVs. I have AT&T Uvers, and my connection works all right. After listening to your podcast for the last six months, it's time for me to switch to a Synology NAS. Reviewing Synology's website, there are way too many to choose from. The one that looks good to me, he says, is the Synology DS1517 Plus 5-Bay NAS Disk Station. I would like your thoughts on what you think would be the best NAS for me. He says, what I plan to do with it is run Plex as a media server so it needs the ability to transcode, backup my time machines, MacBook Pro and PCs, use as my personal cloud. He says, I would like to also view and backup my home security cameras. So yeah, here you go. This is a good introduction to the NAS segment, John. The 1517 Plus or the 1817 Plus are going to be able to serve your needs. In many ways, they're very similar to the 1515 and 1815 Plus. The CPU is the same. That's what I run here. Now they're naming Dave. I believe the numbers give you a clue as to the functionality. I believe the first one or two numbers is the number of bays. Is that correct? So the second number is the number of bays. The first number is the year it was introduced. No. I actually don't know what the one means in this particular thing. I have a 713 and from what I recall, that has the potential to have. Well, the 13 I think is when this was released in 2013. Right. I know that with Synology, the Plus sign means that it has an Intel CPU whereas the Non Plus have the Marvel CPUs or some other sort of less capable CPU. The final numbers, in this case, the 17 are the year it was introduced. So the 1517 Plus was introduced in 2017. The 1515 Plus was introduced in 2015. And it's got five bays. The 1817 Plus has eight bays. But these units don't include a hardware transcoder. So it is up to the CPU to do all of the video transcoding. Now, I will say I've not had any major problems doing video transcoding when playing a movie. Anytime I'm converting a movie for, say, download to my iPad to take with me or something, it can always do it faster than 1x. And of course, 1x being the speed at which the movie can be played. So playing it around the house at whatever resolution is never a problem. And generally, I'm playing it at the highest resolution that I have. So there's no transcoding required in the house. It just beams the movie across and everything works fine. So while I would like to recommend you a unit that has hardware transcoding in it, if you're going to get one of these that has an Intel CPU, you don't really need it because the CPU is going to be able to do that transcoding essentially in software is what we call that. I mean, it's still using the hardware CPU to do it. In terms of backing up your time machine, yes. And we're going to talk about some details of that in a minute because John's dug into that. In order to use it as your personal cloud, absolutely. Include everything from Synology, including their router supports something called Cloud Station, which is like your own personal Dropbox, except, and you've heard me say this before, man, that Cloud Station interface on the Mac, the app that runs on the Mac, for me is way better than Dropbox. Morphal featured gives you a better view into what you're doing. And of course, it's private. So that's beautiful. And then they do have, in terms of security cameras, they do have a thing called Synology Surveillance Station, which you can install on your NAS and it can view all kinds of different cameras, including webcams that might have their own apps or something. A lot of those can just be addressed directly and you can manage all of that with Surveillance Station. It's actually pretty cool how that works. So yeah, I think that one is the right one for you. We've got some other people with some different needs, so we're going to talk about perhaps some different models as well. But there you go. Thoughts on that, John? All right. I got the full decode on the first two numbers there. Many, not just Synology, there are other vendors, but definitely Synology, because I have this setup Dave. So that first number is the maximum number of drives if you attach expansion unit or units. So for example, mine is the 713. So the 13 is the year it was introduced. The 7, so it has two bays, but you can probably figure it out. If you attach a five-bay expansion unit, then you can have up to seven drives. So that's the something to consider when you do get any NAS. Is the number of bays that it has, is that going to do it for you? Or if you probably pay a little extra, you can get one like the 1517, where if you need more than five drives at some point, well, you can get an expansion bay, which I think is a pretty slick feature. That's pretty good. Yeah, the expansion bay, which you did, right? You added some drives to that. So I have a two-bay expansion unit and the unit itself is two bay. So I have four drives. Well, three rotational drives and then an SSD cache, which is also another fun thing you can do with the Synology. Right, right, right, right. All right, so let's move on. I'm going to jump around a little bit just because we talked a lot about Plex answering Steve's question and in our chat room at macgeekab.com-slash-stream, listener Andy asked, I didn't think Plex could use the hardware transcoder inside of a Synology unit. And that is true, except that it's not. So when Synology says that it has a hardware video transcoder, that is for their own Plex-like app-slash service called VideoStation, which you can totally use for free. It's built into Synology. There's an Apple TV app for it. There's iOS apps for it. And you can use it just like Plex. And that will take advantage of the hardware transcoding chip if there is one in there. However, Plex has recently made a big update to the beta version of Plex so that it now does offer beta support for hardware transcoding. And we will put a link in the show notes so you can learn about that. I think you have to be a Plex pass member, which is available, that's there for pay service in order to get access to the beta builds. But it's relatively inexpensive and supports the good work that those folks are doing. So there you go. But yeah, there you go. So Plex can do hardware transcoding if your unit supports it and if you go get the Plex beta. And like I said, we'll put a link in the show notes to that. All right, John. Where else are we going here? You know, we talked enough about backups that I think you want to do. Is David the right one to do for this, John? David is a good one to visit. Okay, let's do it. Yeah. All right. So David says, is there any way to connect an external hard drive to an airport express for time machine backups? Right now, I'm using my old time capsule. All right, well, hang on, hang on, we'll get back to David. What I want to do while we're on the topic, I thought David was this, I know you prepped one of them in my apologies for jumping us around. You prepped something where you talked about and learned a lot about Synology's cloud station backup service and that's what I want to get to right now. Okay, well, that's Corey. All right, there you go. Perfect. So you want me to jump to Corey or you want me to finish David? No, no, no. David's later. Okay. All right, well, Corey says, says, okay, boys, here's a big one, likely to be a geek challenge as it's not a straightforward problem to solve. Sure it is. I've been tasked at my office to figure out a backup solution for our company. We have around 30 Macs, almost all MacBook Pros, and they're generally on Wi-Fi. I don't care about backing up while the laptop isn't in the office as that really happens. We also have a Synology rack station which was purchased on my suggestion with a ton of space. It has four gigabit bonded ports. So bandwidth between multiple machines at a time should be okay. I originally set up time machine on the rack station but as we know it's not super reliable. I concur. So how should I back up all these machines? I'd like to store everything locally if possible for case of retrieval. I'd also like to utilize the Synology so I don't look like a jerk for suggesting we buy it. I thought about installing crash plan on the Synology and using it as a backup destination but I'm not sure how the accounts will work. I'd also like to avoid having to pay extra per machine per month or year as I'd like to use their personal setup and not the business plan. I'm also a bit worried about all the work involved in keeping the unsupported crash plan running on the Synology. I'm not sure how involved that is. Maybe there are other solutions as well that I could utilize. Yes. And the price is right Dave. All right. And it's something that you mentioned very recently and I had not used it but I went on a learning journey. So there is something that you can install on the Synology. Let me bring it up here. Where's my disk station? Here we go. All right. So I want to make sure to get the name right because the naming so I'll fishake them a little bit here is that naming isn't... is a... I'm not happy with the naming Dave. Okay. Now is it cloud station server? It's not on this machine that I'm on. Hold on. I'll pull it up too so we can get there. But there's... It's cloud station and then it's... And cloud station is the thing that I discussed where you've got the ability to sync like Dropbox. But then there's cloud state... And cloud station server manages that and that's... I guess really... We've always called it cloud station but now it's called cloud station drive. And then there's a backup service called cloud station backup. Right. So here's what you do and I learned a bit here. So the thing is I installed cloud station server on one of my Synologies. Okay. And when we say we installed it there's a little package manager inside Synology. These packages that we've mentioned are all available for free with the exception of the Plex one that there's the free version and then of course the paid version. Carry on my friend. And so what you do is when you initially set it up and this is the learning here. So when you initially set it up it's going to say, okay, hi, I'm a cloud station server and would you like to share any of the folders on this machine and make them available for people that want to use cloud station to receive to send their data to? Sure. And I was like, yeah, sure. So I picked the top level folder that's called backup and within that folder I have subfolders for time machine and other things that I do something like, yeah, that's probably a good choice right? Well, you'll find out later. And then what you can do is download the appropriate client. So they have a client. They have a client for the Mac. They have a client for Windows. I think they even have a client for iOS and I think Android and maybe a few other platforms. Right? Sure. Yeah, I believe that's right. Yeah. All right. And then what you do there is you run the client or you install the client and then it's going to go through a similar kind of discussion here. It's going to be like, okay, what data? First off, where do you want to send the data? And so, you know, I set the target as the machine that I installed the server software on and so it asks for the IP address of it or, you know, it gets advertised because it's Synology software. And then it's like, okay, and how about an account? And so I just use my admin account because that's the only count on there. But if you're set up in a multi-user environment, which our friend Corey is, then why not log in with their account? Because then, here's the important part, then they could target their own folder. Now, here's the mistake that I and then what happens, Dave? So I don't know if I technically call this backup software. It really what it's doing is it's sinking between what's on the client and it puts it on the server. So it is a backup in a sense. It's not a clone. It's not bootable, but it is a backup. Now, the other feature of this software that's kind of interesting and it actually creates a little SQL database because I had to start digging around when I thought I did something wrong, it actually will do versioning and has a little version tracker and you can track versions of the file. So say somebody changes a file, so it's kind of time machine like sinking backup software. Well, it's, I mean, it Dropbox does the same thing. Right? Yeah. And so cloud station for it's sinking also does the same thing. So it's leveraging that same engine to do this for your backups as opposed to just your sinking, which makes sense. Yeah. But then once you do that, it pretty much just sits in the background. As far as I can see, it takes very little processor and anytime you change anything in the folder or folders that you've selected to synchronize or backup, it'll just send the new version up there. Yeah. And as Corey said, he seems to have enough bandwidth to handle this. Here's the only problem, Dave. When you choose the folder that you want to share or use from the server, I thought it would be smart enough to just replicate the data that was in the sub folder that I was sending. So when you choose the destination, so I created a new folder called cloud station. And then what happens is for each client, it'll then create a sub folder. So what I did is I said, okay, well, all right, on my MacBook Pro, send it to the cloud station folder. And it's like, okay, I'm going to make a sub folder called MacBook Pro. And it's like, great. And then my Mac mini, I did the same thing and it created a sub folder within the cloud station folder. Sure. I thought it'd be smart enough to just version or sync the cloud station folder. Yeah. It synchronized the entire contents of my backup folder. Because I went to the, I was looking at the lights on it and I was like, you know what? The lights have been blinking on this thing for a while. What is it doing? And eventually I went to the support forms. So my mistake was I chose my top level folder that I stored everything else in. It dutifully backed it up. Got it. Because when I went to back, when I went back to my disk station the next day, I was like, why are the lights flashing? It had like 80% of the total disk space consumed. And I finally went to the, and I finally went to the support forms and they're like, here's the mistake that you made. You got to make your own sub folder. So I made a unique sub folder just for cloud station at the top level and that solved that problem. Right. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Either that or just make sure that you're only using one folder for one thing. Right. As opposed to syncing the entire drive or like you did, you know, an entire hierarchy or something like that. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. But I'm hip to it. I think it'll do it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, it's interesting. And this is sort of the beauty of Synology and really a lot of these NAS units, as I've mentioned, I've become more and more enamored with the QNAP units. In fact, my only hesitation on them is that unlike Synology and Drobo, which allow you to mix and match drive sizes, QNAP still does not allow that. You must have all drives of the same size. And that's fine in the corporate environment. It's a burden, frankly, in the home environment. And that's why I'm always sort of hesitant to recommend them. But they do a lot of cool things. In fact, in the chat room, somebody was saying, in fact, Andy was saying, I wish that Synology would put better CPUs in their NAS units because we're using them for so much more. Man, QNAP solves that problem in a huge way. They put monster CPUs in a lot of their things. They put hardware transcoders in a lot of their units. And that's not a bad thing. Their units tend to run because you can get them with much better CPUs than you can sort of these from Synology. You wind up hanging on to it a lot longer. Like the new TS653B from QNAP has it's got a hardware trans coder in it. It has... Oh, why can't I find... I had it there. Oh, yeah. It's got... Well, actually, that one's just got a seller on CPU, but with the hardware trans coder. It's cooking. So they do understand the home user in an interesting and different way. They regularly put HDMI ports right on their NAS units so that you can plug it directly into your TV. You don't need to do anything else. They often have... Those units will often have infrared ports on them so that you can use a remote control to control that unit. It's a very, very interesting thing. And I'm constant... I've got one running in my office now. I've got the TS470 running in my office now. And I mean, that thing smokes. It's great. So, yeah, they're worth considering. If you can stomach the idea of needing to keep all of your drive sizes the same, which means if you've got a 4-bay unit, you'll need... And you want to put, let's say, 5TB drives in it. So you're going to need 4 or at least 3 in order to really use the rating of it where you're actually taking advantage of all the drives. But if you put, let's say, you put 3 5TB drives in there, that'll be 15TB. It's a total storage. You'll wind up getting about 10 when it does its fault tolerance. One drive fault tolerance. When you want to put another drive in, it has to be another 5TB drive. If you put a 6TB drive in, it will only use 5TB of that until you replace all of the other 3 drives with 6TB drives, and then it will use the 6TB on all of them. So, that can be a little frustrating and a little costly for the home user. But other than that, they are very, very capable units. They will run Plex. They have all of their own stuff, all their own packages. They do a lot of stuff. It's very similar to Synology. Sometimes they will release stuff first. I know NoteStation, which is kind of like an evernote type thing with a client-server relationship and it's got an iOS app. I think they were the first ones to have NoteStation out before Synology had NoteStation. That obviously Plex runs on it. Very, very cool stuff. So, QNAP is definitely worth looking into if you're interested in this NAS thing with that one sort of asterisk there. That may or may not impact you. But as a home user, I feel like it's worth saying. Thoughts, any thoughts on that, John? No, I've... We've had our many prejudice because they were traditional raid. Right. That's probably not a good outlook on our part. No, it... As you concluded, and I know they're very popular in the... I mean, we have a lot of listeners that have told us, oh, yeah, I got a QNAP in my enterprise and it's great and it's industrial-strength stuff. I think the last time I saw them at a show, they were like, oh, yeah, we got Thunderbolt, whatever, backhaul, and I'm like, wow. They came out with the faster interface a little quicker than some of the other guys. So, that's... Right. So, yeah, they're on top of their game and they've been around forever. They are, yeah. And I've been given a hard time about the not being able to mix and match drive sizes for a while. I don't think that's going to change, but they understand. They get it. Yeah. They'll deal with you. They'll deal with me. Yeah, exactly. Where are you? Right. Continue to ignore your our wishes. Yeah, they don't ignore them. They acknowledge them. They understand. It's good. You know, we had a Facebook discussion that was teed off by listener Jack. It sort of falls into this. And Jack simply asked thoughts on pros and cons of Synology Cloud Station versus Dropbox. And, you know, it's an interesting... It was an interesting discussion. Even though I use Cloud Station, and of course, QNAP has their own... Oh, what's it called? I've got it open here. Where is it? Tina, I think it's Qsync. But it's the same thing, right? I mean, it does the same thing. It's private. It's all that good stuff. But even though I'm using that for my own files, I still very much have and use a Dropbox account. The nice part is I can get away with a free Dropbox account because I don't need gobs and gobs of extra storage there. But I do need some level of Dropbox storage to use with all the other people that use Dropbox. Yes, I could add accounts to my Synology Cloud Station and link people in there. And I can certainly share files from me to you and also create an inbound sort of drop point for you to send me files. But in terms of sharing files and making life easy and all of that, Dropbox is ubiquitous these days. So I use both. But primarily I'm using Cloud Station for the stuff that's mine or that I share with family members because it's easy to set them up with accounts and then they've got them and we're good to go and then Dropbox with others. And I suppose you and I still use, at some level, we use Dropbox for our Mac Geekab stuff. It would be very, very trivial for us to use Cloud Station and switch to that. But really, we don't even use, we use Evernote for the most part now. So we don't even need the Dropbox stuff other than the occasional thing that we're sharing back and forth. So yeah, it's good stuff. I assume, what do you use for your syncing? I'm curious, John. Syncing what? So you have all your documents, right? And how do you make sure they stay in sync between all of your computers and that you have access to them when you need it? As of late, I'm using iCloud. So I sync my documents folder to iCloud and then I just added, and every now and then I would make a copy of the various folders. I mean, they're all backed up on Time Machine as well. Like I told you, I had that panic the other day where I was looking for a document and it somehow didn't get synced when the computer converted over to iCloud document folder syncing. Sure. Oh, right. So fortunately, yeah, I'm like, oh man, I'm like, well, good thing. I made another backup somewhere else. And it was on Time Machine backup from several months ago. I don't know what happened. The data just didn't make it over. That makes sense. I use a variety of things. You know, I still use Dropbox. And now, you know, since I added the Cloud Station backup, that also backs up those documents now to one of my synologies. So it's kind of a chaotic mix of things. That makes sense. And I got Dropbox. You know, I still use OneDrive for some things. Google Drive, you and I also use. You know, I had somebody the other day in my Twitter stream saying, gee, you know, I don't have enough space for, you know, Dropbox Cheapskate account only offers, I think, 10 gigs now or something. Right. And he was like, gee, you know, I need more than that. I'm like, well, Google Drive offers 15 gigs for free. And he's like, yeah, but I don't trust Google. And it's like, well, okay. Right. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. All right. So in terms of usage, we have a question from Brent. He says, it looks like I got caught. I purchased a new Synology NAS for a new iMac at the house and I made several assumptions about what can and can't be done with it. To help others. Here's what I wish I had known about NAS and Apple applications. Number one, the active photos library cannot reside on a NAS. Number two, the active iTunes libraries XML file cannot reside on a NAS. And number three, the active iMovie library cannot reside on a NAS. Apple states that these files must be located on an HFS plus direct attached storage. He says, and number four, to take full advantage of carbon copy cloner, it must be located on an HFS plus formatted disk. The Synology NAS, he says, is full of features, but it should not be confused for or considered to be a replacement for direct attached storage. He says, another assumption I made, I was also trying to make symbolic links for folders, documents, downloads, movies, desktop, et cetera, to the NAS. This did not work as I had expected and should only be done with direct attached storage. So you are right about this, Brent. And for good reason, these things should only be stored on volumes that the Mac can manage, where the Mac can manage the format of the volume. When you're saving across a network, all the Mac knows is that it sees this file system over there, but it has no idea what type of file system it is. It's just a network file system. Doesn't know how it's managed or anything like that. So it can't do all the funny things with hard links and things like that that your photos library does. In terms of your iTunes XML file, it wants to have that open and actively managed. And again, some of those things apply. And I wasn't aware of this with iMovie, but I certainly believe you. Then it's probably similar to photos. There is a workaround, though. And that workaround is called iSCSI. i-s-c-s-i. The idea behind iSCSI is that it is internet-based, or internet, I mean, internet. It's not, I guess it could be done across the internet. I wouldn't recommend it. And you'll understand why when I explain the rest of this. But across a network, you can attach to a blob of storage that your Mac will then treat as it would a local disk. You get the blob of storage. Let's say you give it, I don't know, 100 gigs of storage, whatever it is, or maybe a terabyte. And then your Mac is going to format that. It's going to apply a volume name to it. It's going to just do that, which it would do to a blob of storage that was attached to your Mac in the form of a disk. iSCSI is not natively supported on the Mac, but there are some iSCSI options that are regularly used and seem to be quite reliable for people. There's one free called iSCSI Initiator, but it requires, I think that one, you have to disable some of the system integrity protection to get it to work. And then there's another one from Studio Network Solutions called the GlobalSan iSCSI Initiator, but it is fully supported and all that. It's 89 bucks. Once you connect this, only one, unlike most network storage, iSCSI can only be connected to one client at a time, just like a direct attached disk can only be connected to one computer at a time. So you can absolutely store your photos library there and all of that. As long as you have what you consider to be a reliable network connection, right? Just like you don't want to yank the USB cable out when you've got your external drive connected. You don't want to yank the network connection out because that is your USB cable, if you would, to this blob of storage that's over there. Yes, it gets a little bit convoluted to manage, but there are lots of people doing it, many of them who listen to this show and have had an excellent time with it. People are also using it for time machine backups because when you do it that way, it is seen as a local time machine backup even though it's across the network and you can still sort of take that blob and clone it and back it up and do other things with it that network storage allows you to do. So there are options if you are willing to work around things. And iSCSI is one of those things that's worth knowing about, especially as you start getting gobs and gobs of storage available locally on your network to you this might be a thing that becomes valuable. So there you go. Are you doing anything with iSCSI, John? No, but I have something to add, my friend. Yes, please do. So while it's true that the native apps require you to store on your local drive, depending on the platform that you're on, there may be something that looks like the native app. So the one that I'm going to toss out here, Dave, so iTunes Server. So Synology has something called iTunes Server. Sure. And iTunes can connect to it and you can access your content that's stored on the Synology through iTunes. So that's kind of some of it. Yeah, yeah, I want to be very clear. It's not a direct replacement. Right, right, right, right. Similarly, so my video solution, Dave, is video station. Okay, nothing wrong with that. I mean, it could be iMovie, but it's not. Right. So I store my stuff on video station and then I stream it and that works for me. Likewise, Synology has something called photo station. I've dabbled with it. In theory, you could use it as your... I just want to make it clear that while what was said was correct, there may be a replacement, depending on the NAS or the software. I mean, I'm not on the Plex Bandwagon, believe it or not, but Plex works as a solution for a lot of people to store all your media. Yes, it's not just video, that's right. It's photos and music, too. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So I just want to add that. Yeah, yeah. Especially the iTunes server, I think, is a clever, you know, they somehow hacked something somewhere in order to get iTunes to talk to them. Well, kind of, it uses... I believe they're using Firefly, and that's just a guess on my part, but that's an open source iTunes server, but it's only for music, and that's what this does. So if, in fact, you were to copy or clone all of your music files, just raw music files over to your network storage drive. It could be a Synology, it could be your Drobo, it could be your QNAP device, they will all do this thing. You can then run this, you know, quote-unquote iTunes server. It will go through, index all of your music if you have an iTunes playlist file out there, it, most of them will sort of slurp that in, and then it advertises itself as a shared iTunes library on your local network, and then you can run iTunes on any computer, and with the appropriate permissions, of course, connect to that shared iTunes library. It'll appear in your iTunes sidebar, connect to it, and you can play music across it, but it, as I said, it's just music. It's not going to do the videos that you would have in your iTunes library, and it's also not going to do things like keeping play counts up to date or any of that. It's just sort of a one-way, here's my stuff, you can play it if you want. Anybody who's visited a hotel in the last five years when there's other people at the hotel, you might, or even the last 10 years, you might have seen, if you launched iTunes, you might have seen other people sharing their iTunes libraries, and that's sort of how that appears, so. Yeah, it just advertises itself that way, and makes it work, but it's... You can't copy any of those files back to your computer, you can just stream them, but again, it can work for you, so yeah, good stuff. All right, one, I think one last thing on this NAS stuff, and it really just speaks to how deep you can go and that is from Andrew, who shares, at about the 110 mark in episode 670, the most recent episode, he says, an audio comment had a guy saying that Apple no longer supports airport, wrong. He says, they still sell them and support them. The current utility supports airports. Going back to 2009, you can download the older utility, meaning that you can administer older airport expresses. He says, but, and related to our conversation here, he says, regarding a print server, did you know that you can use a Synology Disk Station as an air print server? Very cool. And I had no idea, or if I did, I learned it and forgot it, but yeah, if you go into the control panel, which is part of the Synology Web Interface, go to external devices, you can add either a local printer that you would connect directly to your Synology via USB, or you can have it attached to a network printer and add air print capability to it right there. And I did it. It took all of about, I don't know, 40 seconds for me to configure my printer to do this. And then I was immediately able to print to my non-air print network printer via my Synology Disk Station. And again, this is just one in the list of probably thousands of features that you're going to be able to find on, really on both a Synology and a QNAP NAS. The Drobo NASs are much more feature limited, but the benefit to that is you don't have this sea of things to sort of wade through when you're looking for something. And that's sort of the issue here is there's so many layers to the onion that without Andrew telling us and us telling you, you may never have known about it either. I'm not sure I ever would have stumbled onto it. And this is actually a problem I was looking to solve recently and had to, I wound up solving it a different way. I dug out some old piece of hardware that one of those Landtronics X-Print servers to do it. But I had my Disk Station sitting literally right next to where I plugged that X-Print server in, and it would have been way easier to just stay at my computer and configure it via a web browser. So always stuff. What's that? I did have a not quite satisfying experience with that a while back. Really? And I think you may recall, well, at one point I wanted to look at different ways, so the printer's dead, but it was a printer that I have since replaced, but it was an HP B8550 inkjet printer, USB, and that's the only interface it had. And the way I used to share it was I plugged it into my Mac mini and then said, share this printer. And it's like, sure. And that's totally doable. That's nothing wrong with that. I'm like, huh, you know, and I did the same thing you did, Dave, is that one day I plugged it into my Synology and all of a sudden the printer appeared. You know, when I went to another machine and said, I had printer, it's like, hey, yeah, you want to add a B8550 at Synology. And it's like, look at that. Here is the only downside. They didn't have a driver on the Synology that was quite compatible with this printer. Got it. So it is. It relies on cups and gluten print is what it does. And cups and gluten print did not have a B8550 specific driver. They had one that was close, but I didn't get quite the results that I wanted. So that's the only caution. Yeah. And you know why. So yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the printer that I have now actually has air print built into the printer itself, which is awesome. Right. Because it's like, you know, 10 years in the future from my last printer. Right. I've just died. The other thing I notice here is that I see Google Cloud Print as an option within the Synology control panel. And you can absolutely configure that too simultaneously. And I did that. I turned that on. So now when I'm in Google Drive and messing around with my documents, I can print from, actually, I could print to my home printer from wherever. And I did that for my kids, so that if they're at school working on something and they want to print something at home, they can just now do it and it'll magically be sitting there in the office when they... Yeah. And I did that too. The Canon that I got actually has a tie-in. And I actually, a friend of mine, I said, hey, let me invite you to my printer. And they're like, oh yeah, I can now through Google, I can print to your internet. Yeah, it's crazy. Again, here we are just randomly discussing this stuff and more layers of the onion get peeled off. So I would love to... We will, of course, as always happens whenever we do a long segment on something, we wind up getting lots of questions about it. One thing I would really love for you folks to do is email us feedback at MackieGab.com and send in all of these little, you know, NAS related quick tips of the things that you found that we probably don't know about so that we can all kind of learn. So send that to us. And he said feedback at MackieGab.com. That's right, feedback at MackieGab.com. All right, John, let's... Actually, the next thing that I want to do is thank all of our premium subscribers. We had quite a few this week that offered contributions as part of either a new setup or a renewal. So on the biannual $25 twice a year plan, we this week, the renewals were Harry M, Elliot G, Kevin S, James E, Drew T, Thomas M, David R, Michael P. Thank you. Thank you to all of you. You rock more than we could ever say all of you do. And then on the $10 a month plan or the monthly plan, I should say, most of which are on $10 plan, but Michael P is on the $15 a month plan. Thank you for your renewal there. And then John D, Gary B, Santiago M, Stephen A, and John V. You all rock. In fact, any listeners at all, we really, like I say, we really appreciate it. And those of you that are able and willing to support above and beyond that with our premium program, MackieGab.com slash premium. Thank you so much. And all of you, of course, get to also use the premium at MackieGab.com email address, which is prioritized internally here. And we actually do prioritize it. So thank you. Thank you. You rock. Now, John, we promised a little bit of hardware related cool stuff found. So I've got a couple of things here. I think you've got one or two things that you added to the list. I have two things from our friends at Anchor, A and K, E, R, that they understand power is really the best. And they understand batteries. They understand portable power. And they are one of the first places that I go when I need those types of things. And recently I checked out for their iPhone 7, they have their power core battery case. This thing's great. You know, a lot of battery cases, I don't know, I find them hard to put on and put off. And this one, not at all. The frame of it is, you know, as rigid as you would want it to be, except the very top of the frame is more rubbery than the rest. And you can just peel the top of the frame back and pull the phone right out or put the phone in. It's got obviously a little lightning jack at the bottom so that you can, you know, fit it in and you're good to go. And it's got 27, actually 2,750 milliamp hours worth of power in it. So that's going to get you a charge plus in my book. And that's a beautiful thing. It works, you know, works really well, 56 bucks on the anchor website. I'm happy about it. And then the other thing, you know, when I travel, I really like to, I mean, I need to charge all my devices. And I like to be able to plug one thing in and have lots of USB ports that I can just plug into. And they've now got the PowerPort Speed 5 port unit that it's actually got two quick charge ports, which might or might not be helpful for us with upcoming iPhones, but certainly works for any of your Android devices. But all five of the ports on this thing will charge at full speed on, you know, whatever the full speed of your Apple devices, let's put it that way. And they're all going to be a little bit different. iPads with larger batteries can take a faster charge than iPhones with slightly smaller batteries and all of that. But it plugs right in. It packs up real easily for travel. And, you know, I think get it in Amazon. I'll tell you what the price is. 30 bucks, $31, $30.99 for five ports to charge. You just plug it into one spot in your hotel room and now you can plug all your USB devices into it and boom, they charge. So I'm always happy about that, John. What do you got, my friend? What do I got? Well, I got at least one thing here. All right, cool. Well, I got two things. All right, the first one here, Dave, is from our friends at Tracker. They sent me their latest. So Tracker, if you don't know, they're in the market of making little gizmos that help you find your stuff. And there's Tracker and, you know, you probably heard a tile and all that. And there's a few other companies that make these. And they're pretty much Bluetooth is what they're using to find your stuff. So, you know, the range is going to be on the order of 100 feet or something like that. Sure. Here's what I like about the Pixel compared to the other offerings. So one, one thing that the prior units didn't have that this does have, but the thing is the other units, unless you were running the app, you didn't really know if it was working. I mean, you know, it has a button that you press, but it didn't make any noises. This one to kind of make sure that it's alive and that, you know, the battery is still running. If you click on the button, it goes beep boop. It's like, okay, thank you. So that's a nice touch that the other units didn't have. It also has a very bright LED. So the prior units did have an LED that you could blink to find your stuff, but it was really tiny and kind of hard to see. Okay. This one is very visible. Cool. When you, when you say blink the light. And then the third thing, Dave, I'm trying to find the DB factor here. You could also make the units make a noise. And a lot of them do. Dude, this one, let me see. They put the DB thing here. 90 DB siren. 90 decibels is loud, man. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to, if this thing goes off, you're going to find your stuff. And it also comes in designer, four different colors. Sure. So, yeah, of course, of course. So that's maybe worth checking out. They're constantly evolving their product line. Awesome. Yeah. I mentioned LED batteries are placeable. That's always good. Let's see. Oh, and yeah, they have a group crowd locate thing. So if you lose something, you could say go in a crowd located. If anybody else who's running the software finds it, it'll show you on the map where your thing is. Yeah. That's the beauty of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, you know, we'll bounce around. We'll come back to you because we've got several to go through. So there you go. Okay. Do one or two more and then I'll. Yeah, yeah. I got actually just, I have one addition just from the chat room. Andy suggests the dongle dangler. So those of us with iPhone sevens don't have headphone jacks, and we have the little lightning to mini eighth jack dongle. And that's great, except I never know where mine is. And that's kind of a pain in the neck. So the dongle dangler is a male mini eighth jack that has or a mini eighth adapt connector, I should say, that has a little key chain ring on it. And so you connect that to your key chain and you plug it into your dongle. And now your dongle is on your key chain. And when you need it, you just take it off, plug it in. Good to go. And when you're done, back on the key chain, dongle dangler. You can buy it now. It's only $6.99 Amazon Prime. So that's a pretty good thing there, Andy. I like it. And then I've been playing a little bit, and I might come back to this, John. But I got earlier this week, Kodak sent me their PixPro. It is Kodak, right? I've got that right. I feel like I've got that right. Yeah. The Kodak PixPro Orbit 364K camera. So as you might guess, it is a full 360-degree camera. It's actually two cameras right on this little blob. It's kind of the shape of a GoPro. Okay. And it's got two cameras on it. One is a 235-degree camera. The other is a 155-degree camera. And it can stitch them together such that you get a full 360-degree spherical view of the world around the camera. And it's actually pretty cool what you're able to do with it. You can take still pictures and you can take videos. And what I did yesterday with my son is we went out in the yard and took a video of, he actually wanted, he said, I want to see what I look like playing hockey in the yard. So he went and grabbed his stick and he played some hockey. And I actually moved around, which is very, very disconcerting when you're watching it back to have your frame of reference moving while you're sort of able to spin around in real space. And the way I watched the video was by putting my phone, the app that comes with the iOS app that's the companion app, you download it, it's available for free. The UI on it is, frankly, it's awful on the app. But once you sort of sniff your way through it, you can put it into Google Cardboard mode. And so I have one of those Google Cardboard viewers. I have the View Master one or whatever. You can get them for like 20 bucks or whatever. And I put my phone in it and then you put it up to your face and you can move all around and see inside this world that you've created with the camera. So I need to come back to it. Like I said, I need to spend a little more time with it and come back and do perhaps a little more in depth. Because like I said, the app, I feel like, is perhaps the limiting factor of this. It's very clunky. And of course, that's your conduit for getting your data off this thing. But very, very cool. The camera itself is very easy to use and all that. So we will come back to that. But fun stuff for sure. What do you got, John? What I got is just a general suggestion for anybody that uses electricity. Okay. That's me. One is, don't touch this. No, don't put a fork in there. But we all did it as a little kid, right? And we lived. Yes. At least I did. Or was it a knife? I forget. All right. So recently, I upped my power game, Dave. What prompted me to do this is that one of my older power strips, mostly these have lights on them showing if it offers protection and if it's grounded. And all of a sudden, I noticed a red light somewhere and I'm like, what? And one of my power strips said, yeah, your ground's bad. And I'm like, well, I don't think so. So first thing I did, Dave, and you can get these at pretty much any Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever. So I pulled out what I do is that I have a little device where if you plug it into your outlet, it'll tell you, is it wired correctly? Is it wired in reverse? Is it grounded properly? And I plugged that in and it said, yep, everything's great. And I'm like, OK, time to throw this thing away. What I did then, Dave, is revisited my power game. So I have several things. The things that concern me the most is that my Eros, the adapter for the Eros, I just had plugged directly into the wall. I'm like, no, I should fix that. Sure. And so I did two things. So one is that that old power strip, I actually got a new one. And I think it's their store brand. Four outlet with two USB chargers that'll go up to 3.1 amps. So that's cool. And it has both the ground and a protect light. And the ground light is on. So I'm like, OK, yeah, it's wired fine. But then I also got single outlet or a single or dual outlet things. So two, I put, they're just one outlet, but they also have the protect and the ground light. And I plugged my Ero adapters in there. So now I'm convinced that my Eros are at least better protected. Than they were before. But then another outlet I got, they had a replacement where it offers you not only two outlets for the two that you have, but two USB things. And I hadn't realized this at first. They're meant for charging. But, duh, Dave, they can also power things. The thing is I had a drop cam that had a cable running across my dining room. Like a really long cable plugged into the wall. And I'm like, wait a second, why don't I just plug it right into this thing? It needed two amps and it works fine. Oh, there you go. Revisit your power game. Your hardware store probably has both the devices to make sure your outlets are wired properly. Because if your ground is bad, then well, that's bad. You don't want your house to burn down. Right, right. Hey, in the same topic, I finally was able to test something that we mentioned a little while back. And that's called Bataru, B-A-T-T-E-R-O-O dot com. Which is a little clip. That fits over your batteries. Generally built for AA batteries, but you can get them for AAAs and actually the other sizes as well. But the idea behind this is that it's got a voltage regulator in it. And the trick is that as your battery's capacity diminishes, so does its output voltage. And generally when a battery's output voltage dips below about 1.2, they should be at 1.5 amps, right? But when a battery's output voltage... Sorry, thank you. Thank you for the correction. 1.5 volts for a AA battery. When that dips below about 1.2 or 1.1, that's when devices will say dead battery and you've got to replace the batteries. Well, the battery still has some juice left in it. By putting a voltage regulator on it, it keeps that voltage at 1.5 until of course there's not enough left to run the voltage regulator and then it's dead. But you can get more life out of your battery doing that. The other thing that you get is using this with rechargeables this week. I started experimenting because those are out of the gate at 1.2 volts, right? And that's not generally... Like a lot of my stuff in the house, even when I have fully charged rechargeables, I put them in and the battery light comes on. Now I've learned to ignore it because it's... I know that certainly for solid state things, that's okay and it's been fine. But by having this voltage regulator around it, the battery, it's good to go. And the battery light doesn't come on, but it's also really good for devices that have motors in them, where the voltage actually matters a lot. So it's a cool little thing. I think you can get a set of four of them for like 10 bucks and it's worth experimenting with. There's been a lot of talk on both sides of this. If you research battery, you'll find people complaining about it or whatever. But it does what it says it does. It's got a voltage regulator in it and it regulates the voltage out of your battery. And that's sort of the point. And you can get more life out of a battery. I definitely had one that the device was saying, nope, you got to change it, change it. I put this thing on it. I think I put it on it four weeks ago. It's still going. Like no problem. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, physics. Right. Yeah, I had something the other day. So I got a bunch of thermometers around the house that show the temperature and the humidity. Sure. And one of them apparently didn't have a low battery indicator, because all of a sudden it was like, yeah, dude, it's 95 degrees inside. And I'm like, no, it's not. Yeah. And I'm like, gee, let me guess. So popped out the batteries, hooked them up to my multimeter. And they were running at substandard voltage. Right. They're still enough to power the display. But I'm like, OK, put in some new batteries. And all of a sudden it said, yeah, it's 75. Right. Yeah. I got one last thing. You know, I'm a music junkie. And so I always love to find headphones that are going to make my life a little better. And I've been testing the JBL Everest Elite 750 NC which are Bluetooth and you can also wire them. So they are wired or wireless headphones. The NC is the part where this starts to get really interesting, though, because that means noise canceling. This one, but this one's more than that, or it is noise canceling, but it's more than most noise canceling because with the iOS app, you can actually tune the voice canceling or the noise canceling to your environment and you can choose to let in certain ambient levels and you can change that. So if you're in an environment where you're on a train or a plane or whatever, and you don't want to hear anything outside, you set it to cancel all the noise and don't let anything in and then you're good to go. Like you're in your own world. But if you're walking down a city street or doing something where being aware of that which is going on around you is good, you can start to increase the level and you can actually increase the level independently for each ear. So there's all kinds of options there. On top of that, it's got what they call true note sound calibration. So it calibrates the, basically sends a tone that's at safe levels. It's always good. You put the headphones on, sends this tone in, tunes itself to your ear and now provides you kind of a nice, consistent listening experience for everyone. Pretty cool stuff and very comfortable, lightweight, fun little case that it comes in the way they sort of pack in there. Very, very, they're over-the-ear headphones but pack down pretty tightly. So 300 bucks from JBL, the Everest Elite 750NCs. That's what I got. I think we have time, John, to share our two, at least one of our two geek challenges. Shall we? Shall we try that before we move on? Yeah, good. All right. Michael asks, and I'm sure I've got him here. There it is. Michael says, I have a question about mail in Mac OS Sierra. I received an email address to a bunch of people, 25 to be exact. I'd like to make a group from the 25 recipients and place that group into contacts so that I can email everyone back. How in the world is this done? I have selected all addresses and tried every key combination. I can think of, if I copy them, it makes one contact from the first address in the list, not useful. Your geek words of wisdom would be much appreciated. So in thinking about this, John, and of course, this being a geek challenge, everything really is on the table as a geek challenge. If you've got a better solution, tell us, please. But this one, we're sort of open in the doors and asking. I can't find a way to create a group in contacts from just this list. I think you'd have to manually create a contact for each of those people and then assign them all to the same group. Obviously, doable. Yeah, also, obviously, not all that efficient. But here's the thing. You have a list right there in mail. If you just copy that and then open a new message and paste that in, that should send to all of those people in that group. You haven't added them to your contacts, but it should work. So you could use something like TextExpander to store that and then just use a TextExpander shortcut to expand that group. And you're good to go. Again, it's not this fully elegant solution of having them all in your address book, but it also just saved you. Like, you could do that faster than I explained it. So that's one option for me. I don't know. What else you got, John? Any thoughts? That's pretty much it. Apple has a couple of support articles, but that's pretty much the path they suggest you take is make a group and then copy and paste. Yeah. Copy and paste from mail into that group, which, yes. It's slow. Right. It's just slow. Yeah. Yeah. Caveman. I mean, it's caveman. That's right. Yeah. We have computers to do these things for us is really what that comes down to. So yeah. So if you folks have any thoughts, please share them. And then I think, well, let's share Bart's concern and then maybe we'll go from there. He says, I have a very frustrating problem that I was hoping you might help me troubleshoot. For many years, I used a time capsule for my time machine backups at home, but I decommissioned it a few months ago because it was overheating. I had it plugged into an ARIS router provided by Time Warner. I have a 2009 iMac running on SSD that I've been using as a home media library. So I figured I'd throw down 30 bucks for macOS server and use the time machine service, a tip I learned from you guys. Another tip I learned was that my cable company might give me updated hardware. So now I have a new gateway. Anyway, he says sometime after that, I noticed that my 2013 MacBook Pro was no longer backing up to Time Machine, but I didn't troubleshoot it. My wife's 2010 white MacBook seemed to be continuing to back up fine on our Time Machine server. Then there was a macOS system update for the iMac server, which failed. It ended up in a kernel panic, which I remedied by restoring from its own Time Machine backup. I thought this might fix my original problem, so I deleted the previous and now outdated backup from my MacBook Pro, and I managed to get it to connect to the server and start a new one, but it wouldn't complete it. I created an additional user on the server to log into the backup disk thinking it might be an authentication issue. No, the iMac no longer appears. If I restart both computers, I can get the backup to begin again, but it keeps dropping. So I set both computers to never sleep and use caffeine to keep them awake. I just came back home from being away for a few hours and both computers are awake, but the initial backup has stopped and the backup disk is no longer available. The iMac no longer shows up on the network. So is this a hardware problem on the iMac? Is it a software problem on the iMac? Is it a problem with the MacBook Pro? It seems the network connection is failing, but I don't know what to try next. It says I have back plays running successfully, so I'm not totally exposed, but I need a local backup system that works. Any thoughts on this, John? Or from any of you? I don't have a magic answer. I'm unclear on what is meant by it wouldn't complete the first backup in that did you get an error? I mean, did the progress bar just sit there forever? It sounds like he's losing network access to that drive on his iMac server, but only from his MacBook Pro. His wife's MacBook connects no problem. So a couple of things, right? Number one would be to log him in as his wife's account and have him start a new backup from there, because that will rule out if it's any permissioning problem or anything like that. And then try backing up his Mac, maybe hang an external drive off of his wife's MacBook and backup across the network to that, which you can do. Just to test to see if it's something about the connection to that iMac or if it's something about his MacBook Pro trying to back up across the network. Right? That's, I mean... Yeah, and I'm going to assume Yeah, and I'm going to assume that this is being attempted wirelessly, though. Never assume. Yeah, but that's a safe assumption, but I'm also assuming that his wife's MacBook is also backing up wirelessly. So I don't think... Everything points to this MacBook having an issue. Here's the biggest problem, is that with Sierra, you don't get to see time machine backups in, or time machine information the same way in console that you used to. But there is that piece of software called Consolation, which is totally built to show you this. So we'll put a link to Consolation in the show notes. And it will help you parse through the console logs to see time machine errors. But I think, in fact, that's actually the first thing I do, because I think you're going to see some information in those logs that's going to give you a path to head down here. Yeah, you know, I've run into something similar, and I'm not sure how I'm going to solve the problem either, Dave. So, well, my Mac Mini, so it supports PowerNap. And one thing that PowerNap allows a machine to do, so normally I leave this machine to sleep, but PowerNap allows you, one feature it offers is, you can do a time machine backup when you tell it to. Right. So it's like in a quasi-sleep state. The thing is, every now and then I notice, Dave, I'll look at the time machine menu and it says, yeah, the last one I made was three days ago, and I'm like, well, what's wrong? So I go, I say back up now. Sure. And it's like, yeah, sorry, I can't find the time machine disc. You know, ask me again later when it's there. And ask me again, I'll tell you the same. It's like, no, it's right there. See? I can see it. It's right next to you. The Mac Mini is literally right next to the time machine backup drive. If I mount it, it works. So if I manually mount the share, the time machines are in the Synology, then it'll back up. Okay. Oh, that's interesting. But once that finished and it tried to do it automatically the next time, same thing. It's like, nope, unavailable. One thing I found that solved it, and the thing is my MacBook Pro, which is doing it wirelessly, it never has a problem. It's working spectacularly. Whereas this is wired. The one thing I found that does work, but I hate this to be a solution, is that if I reboot the Synology, apparently whatever is wrong with the Mac Mini's network connection fixes itself, and it'll do it again for a few days. And then I don't know. So I feel your pain. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And actually, maybe I should look into the logs and see what the problem is. Because I know. Yeah, it's solvable. Right. Because it's a hit. Yeah, the thing is it mounts it kind of secret-like. And you aren't necessarily aware of it. Oh, you know, Andy in the chat room has a thought, as does Graham. So Andy's thought was maybe it's a DNS issue, which could also be a Bonjour name issue. And with that, maybe it's worth setting up your time machine back up to back up to the server's IP address, as opposed to its name. Manually mount the drive by doing command K. And the finder, smb colon slash slash IP address of server, go that way. That way, you sort of bypass any DNS Bonjour stuff and try that. Right. And then the other thing would be, which Graham suggests is going and removing the key chain entry for that server. And of course, doing the DNS thing would likely bypass that because it'll create a new key chain entry for the IP address of the server, which is inherently different. But still, yeah, clearing out that key chain stuff can help too. You know what? That's a great suggestion. Yep. Because Dave, my MacBook Pro is connecting to the Synology via IP address. And my Mac Mini is connecting by the name JB Distation. There you go. I think I'm going to switch the Mini over to IP address and all my problems will be solved. Well, that's that's a good place to wrap this up. Thank you so much for listening, for sending in all your questions. Thanks, everybody, in the chat room, macikab.com slash stream. All very, very good stuff. Thanks, all of you premium supporters. Thanks, everybody that participates in our Facebook group. Visit us there, macikab.com slash Facebook. I hope you are able to see some level of the eclipse if you are here in the US or have seen it, depending on when you choose to listen to this show. That should be fun. And if not, if you can't see it, there's another one kind of crisscrossing the US in a complete in the completely opposite path in like seven years. So you only have to wait seven years this time if you want to see it. I think we are much closer to the path of totality here in New England, seven years from now. Of course, the question is, where will we be living seven years from now? And no one knows. But there you have it. That's right. I want to thank Cashfly, C-A-C-A-G-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you. Of course, I want to thank our sponsors, as I mentioned earlier, Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com, smilesoftware.com for smile, barebonessoftware at barebones.com. We've got a couple of new ones coming on board that we'll tell you about next week. Have a good one. Be careful of your eyes. You don't want retina burnout. Don't get caught.