 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab episode 719 for Tuesday, July 24th, 2018. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show that takes all your questions, tips, cool stuff found, some adds in some of our own tips, some of our own cool stuff found, mixes it all together, makes it fun, makes it entertaining, makes it informative, and makes it so that the goal is that each and every one of us, including us, me, and John, your hosts, we all learn at least five new things each and every time we get together. That's how we define success here at Mac GeekGab, and we have fun doing it. Our sponsors for this episode include a couple of new ones and a couple of returning ones. Masterclass at masterclass.com.mgg gets you a free seven-day trial to a really cool place where you can learn from the best in the world. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Onepassword.com.geekgab gets you three months free of my favorite password manager. LinkedIn.com.mgg gets you 50 bucks off towards your first job posting. If you're looking for talent, LinkedIn is the place to do that. And crossover from CodeWeavers.com.mgg gets you 35% off after your 14-day free trial, which you also get at that same link. We'll talk more about all of those things in a moment here, back here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And likewise, back here from a mini vacation event in the Chicago area, but now back here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Good. Good. As I just mentioned, was at the MacStock Expo in Chicago there. Got to hang out with all the Mac cool kids pretty much. Yeah, it'd be terrible if something bad happened at that event. The Apple podcasting ecosphere would take a major hit. Yeah, it really is kind of in a sense, certainly has a lot of the best Mac podcasters there. You know, it's almost a Mac podcasting event. And that's where it's that's where its roots are, right? You know, Mike's a podcaster and obviously, you know, and so and Barry Falk, big fan of podcasts and the two of them are sort of at the core of of what brought it together, even though, you know, Mac stock itself is is just is Mike's event. But yeah, yeah, really, I love that conference. I was sorry to have had to miss it. It seems like every other year it coincides perfectly or imperfectly with family travels for me. But yeah, I'm hoping to make it next year. Yeah. And I even learned a little something. That's the sea. That's what we do, right, man? That's great. Many of the sessions. I think the biggest thing that was totally new to me that I knew about, but I hadn't looked at, but I think I will. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm mark up. Mark down. Mark down. Sorry. That's OK. But there was a Adam Christensen to the. Thing on Markdown and actually our friend Brett, one of the other people there actually writes a Markdown parser, which is cool and we got to do some hands on with that. It's pretty neat stuff. It is neat stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, we use WordPress internally here for all of our stuff and for publishing Mac Geekab, but also for publishing all of Mac Observer and all of that. And on the back end, you know, you can use Markdown. The back end editor supports full Markdown. And I think at least one of the authors authors here writes and in Markdown, for those of you that don't know, Markdown was created actually by John Gruber and the guy who writes Daring Fireball Fireball and does that podcast, the talk show. He created it a long time ago as a way of having he wanted something that wasn't HTML, but wanted the ability to write and inform formatting, right? So that if you want to do something in bold, you wrap stars around it. If you want italics, you put underlines around it. And there's, of course, far more to it than just that. But that was sort of the idea for Markdown was something that could be read as plain text, but also then formatted by a parser automatically to create, you know, formatted stylized text for, you know, for articles on a website like, you know, Mac Observer, in his case, like Daring Fireball. So yeah, so that's that's where Markdown started. And now it's very, very widely adopted. But, you know, as you're finding, yeah, it's pretty. It's a pretty cool thing. And it's it's it's really easy to wrap your head around if you're doing that type of thing where you're you're writing a lot that that is built to then be published on the web. Markdown is very, very much worth your time to to to consider. It's way better than writing in, say, Microsoft Word or pages and then trying to copy that into a WYSIWYG editor. And what you what happens is you inherit all of this weird font stuff and everything that just gets in the way. And Markdown keeps it all very clean. So. And it's all text. And it's all text. Right. That's right. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, technically, it's always HTML. But you could stylize your. Yeah. So, for example, if you want to make something bold, I think in HTML, you would do, you know, left, you know, left thing slash B would something like that. But but it's it. Yeah. So it makes it even simpler in that, you know, you shouldn't have any parsing problems. Well, and it makes Markdown is far more human readable. Like if you took a Markdown version of an article, you could read it as a human and it would make it would be far more, more you'd be able to comprehend it a lot easier than you would something with, you know, that had HTML formatting wrapped all around it. So, yeah. Coolio, Coolio. All right, let's we've had a bunch of follow-ups from the last couple of episodes, you know, as you as you probably know, we recorded the last two over two weeks ago and then released them while John and I were both sort of traveling and we have a lot of follow-ups here. We had a discussion about capturing text from the screen in an in an image and then converting that to actual text. So if an image has some text in it, you know, what can you do with that? And we had so many of you right in about how to address that. And so we'll start with Neil. Neil says, I'm in the middle of the podcast, but I think that these links might be some help. He says there is an app called Condense yeah, condense at condense app.com and of course on the App Store, which can perform OCR on the text contained in a selected area of the screen. I have used it in the past. The OCR is not, in my experience, fully reliable, but it still might be of benefit for the writer looking to have the screen read to him by performing OCR on parts of the screen. Very, very interesting. So thank you so much for that, Neil. That's that's great. We will we will put that link in the show notes as we always do, as we always do. Any thoughts about that, John, before we move on to Greg's comment about the same same kind of thing. No, not really. No, these are mostly these all are just, you know, really clever ways of extracting text from an image, which is somewhat of a complex. Yes, it's non-trivial. That's right. Yep. And these things all make it trivial. Greg says, I'm blind and I use OCR software all the time. He says, I use an app called Microsoft Seeing AI, which allows you to grab text from a photo or basically anything and it reads it out to you in real time. It also allows you to scan documents and save them. It reads currencies, too. It does a lot more other things that assist the blind and the visually impaired. Thank you so much, Greg. That's what a what a what a cool app. And it's available for free. We put a again, a link will be in the show notes for you. But yeah, very cool. From Microsoft. From Microsoft, I know, man. Yeah, yeah, they got well, they have smart people at Microsoft, which is no great surprise. You know, we give Microsoft a lot of guff because, you know, windows. But but, you know, there's there's really smart people doing cool things there, just like there are a lot of companies along the same lines. Ev the nerd writes in and says, I am dyslexic and this is what helps me read all the time in terms of having the iPhone read nonselectable text inside of accessibility speech in settings. You can turn on speak screen that will speak all the text on the screen. So then all you have to do is scroll and zoom to the body of a web page. You want it to speak and swipe down with two fingers and it will start speaking the text. I use this constantly, especially when the admins of the church I work for send out the notes of their meeting. And I have to read the whole thing to get a couple of sentences that pertain to me. Now I can do this when working and have my hands and eyes free to do other things. So very cool. So that's not coming from an image, but that is just allowing it to to kind of do that. You know, you can select text on iOS and choose speak. But a lot of times web pages aren't easy to to select the way Safari renders things on the page can make it very cumbersome to quickly select something and choose speak. So this works very, very well. So thanks, I have thanks, everybody, that for those, that's great. That then brings us, John, into the scanning world, which starts to get also interesting. And and we'll jump to Elliot to start us from there. Elliot says in show 718, you asked about on the fly OCR of text from images. I use one of two apps to do each of these perfectly. One is Prismo Go and the other is text grabber from Abby, ABB YY. And so there you go. That will OCR the images that you've that you've scanned in. And of course, you could take a screenshot and that then becomes a scanned image, just like or an image, just like something you would have scanned. So lots of great stuff here, man. Any any comments on this before we keep going, John? Now, Abby, yeah, I think Abby gets bundled with scan snap, I think. Yeah, I've seen it bundled with with various scanners. So yeah, whenever you get an image scanner, be sure to look at the goodies they throw in there, because they probably will toss in something that will do OCR for you. Right. That's true. Yeah. I hadn't quite thought about that. Neil was trying to think if he had if he had something. Yeah, he said he talked about in terms of scanning book pages. There was that whole cookbook scanning thing, right, which we'll get to here. A couple other people have comments about it, but he says in terms of scanning book pages, there's a scanner from ScanSnap, the model SV 600 designed for scanning book pages in which claims to perform distortion correction to deal with the curve on the pages from the binding. He says, I've not seen it in operation, so I can't vouch for its function, but it might be of use to people looking to scan books, especially cookbooks. But it's not cheap. He says it's currently on sale from Fujitsu at eight ninety five. So there you go. That I think is the one that I recall seeing at a show. The only thing I don't think it does is it will not flip the pages for you. I think you still have to you have to have someone do that manual. That's a manual thing. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'm thinking I'd almost want to build a contraption that would flip the pages. Yeah, good. Man. A fun little project. Yeah. Like deciding how much pressure to apply to pull any given page. Right. I mean, if you think about it, like when any of us sit down to flip the pages of a book, right, it just happens automatically. We don't even think about it. But if you do stop to think about it, think about like the amount of physics that your body and brain are applying to that process. It's intensely complex, right? Because if you put too much pressure on, you'll bend the page. If you put really too much pressure on, you'll get four pages, right? You just want to get just enough to lift that page and go. And of course, we all know that sometimes our hands are too dry. So you need to, you know, wet your finger. But again, don't wet it too much. Otherwise, you'll soak the page. You just want enough to get some, you know, a little bit of friction. It's that would be quite quite a thing to build that could do it universally, right? If you knew the thickness and weight of the pages that you were pulling and and and not just thickness and weight, but but also the texture of those pages, because some pages are shiny and require a different approach. If you knew that going in and could eliminate those variables, that would be interesting. But otherwise, right? Am I am I crazy? I know. Oh, no, no, no, you're not. I'm I'm I just had an image in my head is that could you train Hector the bird, yes, that and I would imagine it's possible. But I think more than likely Hector would destroy the book. Hector would destroy the book. Yeah, Hector loves to destroy books. Hector is an African Gray parrot that has lived in the Mac industry for all of her 20. Oh, how old is she now? Twenty four, maybe twenty four years. So started with Ambrosia and then took kind of a an interesting and circuitous path and and has has wound up with us. And the plan is that that she will remain with us for either the rest of her life or the rest of hours, whichever comes first, parrots tend to live or can live a very, very long time. So yeah, interesting. All right, sticking with this, why not? Bill says the best results can be had using an open source program called Scan Taylor. This is for the cookbooks thing. And it's it's available at code dot Google dot coms. And I'll put a link for that. And also scan Taylor dot org S C A N T A I L O R over the past few years, I have scanned hundreds of books and thousands of pieces of sheet music. And it found that scan Taylor is essential to getting good, clean pages. Scan Taylor does things like split pages, to skew them, darken text, lighten backgrounds, add margins, eliminate speckles, set DPI and generally clean things up. Once you've got clear images from Scan Taylor, you can convert them to PDF and even OCR them using software such as Abby's Fine Reader. And again, that's a B B Y Y PDF, Penn Devon think and Adobe Acrobat Pro. There are many options in this space, including open source programs and built in automator actions, whatever PDF slash OCR programs you use. Scan Taylor is the secret sauce that makes your PDFs look good. You'll also get better OCR from text images created by scan Taylor. So so thank you. Yeah. And he says there's a lot of help for book scanning at D I Y book scanner dot org in the forums. So we will definitely put that link in the show notes, which of course I'm doing right now, which is why I have to pause when I speak because, you know, we humans are not actually good at doing more than one thing at a time, despite our misconceptions to the contrary. Pretty good, huh, John? Mm hmm. All right. One more free option and then one more very specified option before we move topics here. Patrick along these lines says, in regards to converting images into text, although this is not an on the fly solution, the solution I use to convert images to text is for the purpose of having my Mac dictate the text to me. I use an online OCR converter called free online OCR at free dash OCR dot com that converts the text in an image electronically for me. I sometimes take it further and convert the text into an audio file that I can play later. You can create automator scripts to do this for you in the Mac, but there are other online services that have even better and naturally sounding voices. I use another online service called from text to speech dot com that uses the George voice or at least the George voice is the one that he has chosen. So from text to speech dot com. I don't know. That's that's where it is, right? Good. Mm hmm. OK, cool. And then Harvey comes up with perhaps the most specified answer that we have seen to this. He says you were asking about the way to scan cookbook index pages. He says, but wait, check out eat your books dot com. They've already got them scanned and you can search them online. You can even search a database with five books of your choice for free. There's a fee to search additional books. Then all you need to do is open your cookbook to the page number indicated online bone appetite. So when there's a will, there's a way. I like it. That's good. Thanks, everybody, for all your tips on that stuff. That's that's crazy. How much like we've gotten more calm. I mean, I didn't read half the comments that we got about this, but but yeah, good stuff, huh, man? Right. Good. Yeah, you know, I think in the back of my mind, I was remembering that Google was doing something with OCR. OK, I actually came up with something here. Google's OCR software now works. Hmm. Yeah, is there is there a link or anything? I'll put a little placeholder in the show notes. Yeah, I'll have to look more into it. I'm not sure about the availability of all. I know it created a OK. Was it them or Amazon? I think that somebody was OCRing books. Oh, Amazon, Amazon, you definitely like I find Google searches pointing me like deep into books at Amazon all the time. Yeah. And I can see where people would get, you know, mildly upset about it. They do it. They display it in a I think a mostly useful way. You actually see the scan of the book page. And then the text there is is sort of keyed to the words that are that are in it. So you can, you know, kind of go through and find and it works. It works really well, at least the the little bit that I've used it. But I think it's cumbersome enough that you wouldn't want to read a book that way. And I don't know if there's a maximum number of pages or something that that stops you there, too. So. Yeah, yeah. Hey, can I talk about two of our sponsors at the moment, John? Please do. Awesome. 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It's a little different. This is a password manager, right? And you need a password manager. You can't use the same password everywhere. You know that we talk about this all the time. One password is my favorite password manager. I've tried them all. It's the one that I I always come back to after I test something new. They keep adding new features. They've got a thing in the new version that will check to see if your passwords, any of your passwords are on the lists of passwords that have sort of leaked out into the world. They don't share your passwords with these lists. Of course, they download the list of your computer and compare it there. But it works out really, really, really well. You've got to check this out. You need a password manager. Go get three months for free of one password at the number one password.com slash GeekGab and make it really easy to use different passwords everywhere, sync them everywhere and just make your life safer and easier. Right? One password is one of those those rare things that adds both security and convenience simultaneously. You can't not use it. One password.com slash GeekGab for three months free are thanks to the folks at One Password and Agile for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, shall we move on here? We have we have some more tips. In fact, I have an audio tip from our friend, Allison, who I think you saw this weekend at Mac stock. Yeah, relating to our UPS discussion. I've learned almost everything I know about UPS is from Dave Hamilton and living out in California, we don't really have a huge need for them. But I do find them very useful and I have one. And I wanted to make a recommendation to people buying a new one, a recommendation that Dave himself might never think of as a necessary recommendation because he never experienced what I experienced with mine. We've had one for quite a while. It was from cyber power. It was pretty old. It was maybe eight years old. And my two year old grandson walked into the room where it was and it happened to be at eye level to him. And so he reached up and he hit the power button. So down came all of my drobos and my my router, everything. Oh, it's just a big mess. And about an hour later, he did it again. Well, shortly after that, my my UPS died and we figured it was as old as it was. It probably wasn't worth replacing the battery. So we ended up getting a new one. We got a cyber power 1500 volt amp unit. And it has one very, very important feature. You can't just press the power button and shut it off. When you press power button, you have to hold it down for like down on 10 or 15 seconds before it'll shut off. So my recommendation when choosing a UPS is that it not have a power supply that you can shut off with a single button just in case you have wee ones running around your house. Yeah. So her advice is great. And I wish I had had this advice about 13 and a half months ago because Alison listens to a lot of Makikem, but she must have missed episode 664, which we titled Puck killed the Wi-Fi because Puck, our cat, killed the Wi-Fi by doing exactly the same thing. He stepped on the button and then he did it again. So now we have a bottle cap taped over the button of that UPS that we can flip up and turn the UPS off or on if we so choose. But Puck cannot step on it to turn it off. So yeah, I and the newer ones, actually, she said she got a cyber power, but the link she sent me was for the same one that I use in the office, which is the APC BR 1500G, I think. And that one, as she said, you have to hold the power button down for a not insignificant amount of time before it will turn off. That that can be a very handy feature. You don't want these things simply turning off willy nilly. The whole point, in fact, is that they do not let things that are plugged into them get turned off willy nilly. So yeah, good advice. Tape over the power button if it is a, you know, one one tap and it's off kind of thing. So you go ahead. Yeah. I'm saying that. So at least to make it childproof, put it above. Child level. Yeah, like maybe put it in an elevated position, though I don't think that would work too well with the cat. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't have mattered. This one, the one that that that Puck was turning off is on the floor behind the TV. And that's also where our cable modem was. I've actually, I keep going back and forth with having the cable modem at the house versus here at the office. Now the cable modem is here at the here at the office for different reasons. But yeah, Helen, I think about it. If I had to design something that could not be easily turned off, I'd almost think of doing something like kind of like the nuclear launch. Oh, yeah. Missile launch thing. Yeah. We're. Engaging one device doesn't perform the action. You actually have to engage at least two devices in the case of you know, or at least what I've seen in the movies, you need two keys from two individuals to write it. So I'm wondering if, you know, designing one with two buttons that, you know, most, you know, I mean, a child may be able to figure out the cat. Well, maybe the cat could figure it out now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're right. Something that can't happen accidentally, certainly is is a good thing. Yeah, like control. I'll delete right keys on opposite corners of the keyboard. So the yep, yep. Ah, fun stuff, fun stuff. All right, this is simply just a cool thing that Gene sent in. He says open Google Maps in a browser. So maps.google.com, select the satellite layer, hold shift. Now, I'm going to warn you before I tell you how to do this. Gene sent this email and I was in a, you know, I got home from vacation, had a lot of your email to go through and and and I lost 10 minutes. After reading Gene's email, because this was so cool. So open Google Maps in a browser, select the satellite layer, hold shift. Then click and drag on the map in the screen and watch as it rotates into a controllable, zoomable 3D view. He says it works great in the mountains as well as for buildings in bigger cities where oblique information has been gathered. He says I'm not sure when this cool stuff was added. Maybe it has been there for a long time. And I just found it, the view is very similar to what Google Earth and Google Earth Pro, which Pro is now free, have been offering for a long time. It is cool. Not everything has this as he calls it oblique information. Some cities do, some areas do not. I actually like wound up driving the map up from my house to the lake where my son is at camp. And it's a lake I know very, very well because we vacationed there many times as well. And like there were some edges of the islands that were obviously not rendered quite right. But that's very nitpicky. I still lost 10 minutes driving around in there. It's pretty, pretty cool. So so, yeah, there you go. Thanks for sending that engine. I don't had you seen that before, John, is that new to you? Are you now lost in this? I tried it when I was going through the agenda earlier today. And now it's a, you know, it's kind of like you're you're in a little airplane flying over a train. Yeah. And you can change your altitude. Like, that's the cool part is you can if as you zoom in, you get closer in on it. Yeah, it's very cool. Very, very cool. Though. You know what you know what I have to try? And this is something that's interesting with Google Maps for a lot of places. There are certain things that are fuzzed out because they're sensitive. Really? I think the last time I looked at Google Maps, that's the reason I went there. It's like, you know, let's, you know, look at this like the White House, I think, at one point had the top, you know, blurred out because there's, you know, secret sensors or something there. Military installations, all that fun stuff. Yeah, I think if you try to go to certain places, you may not get a full resolution rendering of it. Interesting. Interesting. Cool. Huh, very, very cool. In 718, we talked about backing up your Synology and that got us into a discussion about various cloud services, specifically the ones that were supported by Synology, but just other cloud services, too, that, you know, you could back up to. And I mentioned one called Hubic, H-U-B-I-C, that I'd been using and was telling you about it, John, because, you know, I suggested maybe you should use it because I think they were giving like 25 or 30 gigs free of online storage and I was using and I still am using that. Unfortunately, as Seth informs us, Hubic is now closed to new customers. It really wasn't their core business and it wound up growing faster than they then then worked for them. So they will continue to support it for any of us that had signed up prior to whenever they they did this close, but it is now closed. So sorry about the potentially misleading comments in the last show. It's they are looking for someone to take over that business. But my guess is if if and when they do that, the kind of the free deals will change as you would expect. Almost too good to be true, I think. And in fact, maybe it was. So there you go. Thanks for that, Seth. And sorry about that. I was traveling, John, as you know, and we were in many cities. We were in Las Vegas, we're in the Los Angeles area. And then my wife and I went up to Lake Tahoe, just kind of bouncing around the West Coast. And I've learned when walking around in cities, especially with my phone where I need to like be looking at maps or whatever. I like to have a good firm grip on my phone. And in the past, I've always used handle cases, H-A-N-D-L, because they've got like a little it's a very flat handle on the back that you kind of slip your fingers into. And then it really kind of snugs that phone up on your hand. So you can really trust that even if you lose your grip for a moment on the phone, it's not going anywhere because it's sort of wedged between two of your fingers with the way this case is. As we were prepping for this trip, I realized I did not have a handle case for my iPhone 10. So I went with Plan B, which was I put a pop socket on my iPhone case. For those of you that haven't seen it, and I think if you're not like, you know, a teenager, you might not know what a pop socket is, but they seem to be growing in popularity. They are a an adhesive. It's a little disk, essentially, that you a telescoping disk that you adhere to the back of your phone. And then it can flatten almost to the, you know, to the to your case. But then you pull it out and it creates this little telescope thing that serves the same purpose. You kind of wedge it between your I wedge mine between my index and middle fingers on the hand that I'm holding the phone with. And it does sort of the same thing as the handle case. And and then you can kind of wedge it to me. The the UX of the pop socket isn't quite as good as the handle case. But of course, it works with any case. And I happened to have one, which meant that, you know, the day that I was packing for the trip, it was like, oh, right, got this problem solved. And there you go. And much to my surprise, John, when I got home, I tried wireless charging, Qi charging with the pop socket on there. And it actually still worked. I was able to charge my phone with the charger in the car through the pop socket, even though it added, you know, quite a bit of thickness to it. It still was enough. Well, what's the what's the material? Plastic plastic. Yeah, no, you should be able to get through that. No, I think you'd have issues. Yeah, something's metallic. I think is the only way you'd have if there's any sort of metal, then that that would certainly break the induction. Right. Mechanism there. Right. Yeah. And the other material, I think it should be able to get through it. Though you bring up a good point is that, you know, if it's too far away, right, cases too thick, that may also. Yeah, the very least impact the the effectiveness of the signal. You may not get full charge. Yeah, exactly. Far away. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, but it's a cool thing. Really, you know, I I'm always worried about dropping my phone, especially walking and, you know, using directions like in city streets. I'm always worried about, you know, getting jostled or, you know, bumping something and then the phone drops and that's always a bad scene. So cool, cool. Todd has a little quick tip. I suppose I could have found a way to put this in our easier ways to see stuff on the screen segment earlier in the show. But really, it's quite separate from that. Todd says, often on my iPhone, there are apps or screens where I cannot zoom in. He says, what I do in those cases is I take a screenshot then because of the way iOS 11 works with screenshots and it puts it in the lower left corner, I just tap on the image in the lower corner and I zoom in on the screen screenshot. He says, note that you have to zoom out if you want to move to another section and zoom in. But the nice part is after, you know, he says, after he zooms in, he clicks done and it offers to save or delete the screenshot. So he's not left with, you know, his photo library littered with all these screenshots. He just deletes it when he's done after he's finished zooming in. Nice little, nice little tip. I like it. There have certainly been times where it's like, what does that say? Or I want to read that better than doing a screen in a screenshot would solve that problem. So thanks, Todd. Good stuff. Fun, huh, John? Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, exactly. I'm categorizing this as a tip, though it certainly came in as a question. Listener Alan wrote in asking. He says, and the tip is I didn't even know you could do this. So, you know, sort of a double layer here, he says, prior to High Sierra, I could right click on a dock icon of an app. And within the options section, it would show a menu, including the option to assign to this desktop, which allowed me to specify, for instance, that I want mail to always open in desktop number four. So if you are running mission control, is that what we call it now in High Sierra? Right. Yeah. Mission control where you can have multiple spaces running, right? Then you can have apps automatically launch into specific spaces. Now, you have to have those spaces created. There's many ways to invoke mission control. The most common one with a trackpad is you swipe all four fingers up on the trackpad, and then that will sort of bring down the mission control bar, and you can add a desktop with the plus sign in the upper right corner. And then you can do this thing. His problem is that even though this still is supposed to work in High Sierra for him, that option simply wouldn't appear even when he had multiple desktops open. He said, I was messing around with it one day and I did see it appear, but it's not consistent. And most of the time it's not there. So we found that by going into system preferences, mission control and then unchecking displays have separate spaces. That turned the option back or resurfaced that option for him. The question and I'm still waiting on a reply on this as of at least as of the last time I checked before we started recording. The question is if now unchecking that box or or rechecking that box would also leave it. Is it just a scenario where it needed to be turned off and then on again as so many things can be in Mac OS these days? It's worth remembering just from a troubleshooting standpoint that all that happens when you make settings changes in the UI, you know, especially in system preferences, is it's writing a new entry or replacing an entry in a P list file in, you know, usually your preferences folder could be anywhere that the system uses. Sometimes those files can get corrupted. And when you change a setting, it's rewriting at least a portion of those files or that file and that can fix a problem. So that's why a lot of times, you know, turn the setting off, close system preferences, reopen system preferences, turn the setting on or vice versa can solve problems. It's it's it's not voodoo. It's just, you know, sort of a wave of very meticulously and surgically dealing with that corruption. So there you go. That's right. Did I get that right, John? As far as I know. Cool. One way to do it, it's another version of turning it off and on again. Yeah. But, you know, it's nice to know why these things work. And then that one seemed like that that that solution seems to work on a lot of things. And I think that's why it's just like, OK, something in the file, you know, an end parentheses or an end semicolon or an end bracket got lost somewhere. And so things aren't being parsed right and yada, yada, yada. You could go into the file and edit it manually, but unless you know what it's supposed to look like, it's very hard to do that and guess correctly. Not impossible, but you have to have some sense of whether it's actually wrong or not, whereas flipping the switch, it's already hard coded into, say, the system preferences app. What that or the preference pain in this case, you know, what what to write to that file or what to change in that file. So it's a safer bet if it works. And often it does. I finally get to use Airplay 2 in my house now, John, thanks to Sonos. And this is a pretty cool thing. I found myself last night, you know, we were in Tahoe, of course, seeing the band Fish, because Lisa and I like to do things like that. And we, you know, we get now we used to get with our ticket purchase, we used to get streams. We used to get downloads of the show. And sometimes it's fun to listen back to a show you were at, especially if it was a good show. Now, though, they've changed it and we don't get the download for quote unquote free with our ticket. We just get the ability to stream it. And only to the app on our phones. So I was like, oh, I really want to kind of listen to this while we were making dinner last night. I'm like, I want to listen to this while we're, you know, while we're making dinner on the Sonos in the kitchen. And the thing is our kitchen Sonos is not one of the models that supports Airplay 2, but we have a model in the house that supports Airplay 2. We have several, but in this case, the new Sonos Beam that we just talked about recently supports Airplay 2. And so what I did was I airplayed from the live fish app on my iPhone to the beam. And then from there, I was able to do the multi room thing and pair the beam with the speakers in the kitchen. So I had the music coming out of both places, which is actually what I would have wanted anyway. And then boom, I was I was, you know, streaming from my phone. So even though the speakers in the kitchen didn't don't support Airplay 2, once you have one speaker that does, that can be the gateway and then, you know, and then it uses the Sonos stuff to magic to to stream. So Airplay 2 is pretty cool, man, being able to select multiple speakers right there and do all that stuff. It's a pretty good UX. And I'm pretty sure Sonos is the first company to really have that running on non-Apple hardware. So it's it's pretty cool. Very well done. So kudos to everybody. Sonos, Apple, everywhere that worked to make that possible. But the nice part was here was this app that I don't think has been updated, you know, but it supports Airplay and supports those frameworks. And so iOS was like, yeah, of course, if you support Airplay, then you support Airplay 2 because that's just how, you know, the frameworks work, they get expanded and you don't have to do anything different to your app. We'll take care of it from there. And it just it just worked. It was like, hey, I can solve this problem now, which is great. So cool, cool stuff, man. We're living in the future, my friend. No, I'm not. You're not living in the future. I'm living in the present. You live in the future. It's impossible. I don't actually know. I don't know that it is. I really think this whole time as a linear construct thing is is just something that we well, no, I think it's I think it's necessary, right? I mean, our our not just our feeble human brains, but but our our human bodies are very temporarily rooted, right? So we really can only experience time in this linear thing. But but I don't think time is is linear like that. I think it's it sort of exists. You know, we depending on what you're doing, time can certainly seem to accelerate or slow down. It's true. And we can only experience one moment at a time, right? Like we can't we can't really like, you know, like I said earlier, our brains just aren't built to do more than one thing at a time, even though we try to trick ourselves and think that they are, you know, or to to focus on more than one thing at a time. Obviously, our brains can can do multiple things. You know, we can we we're breathing in our bodies are doing all these amazing things sort of on autopilot. But in terms of our focus, it really is just one thing at a time. And and so I think because of that, you know, we can't think about all of time at once. You know, we have memories. That's our way of experiencing past times. So I don't know. Or you could live in the past. There's a great Jethro Tull song about that, man. I'll put a link to I've always liked that tune. It's a Jethro Tull is an interesting band, man. And it's but anyway, I'll put a link to that. So hey, can I take us to our second round of of sponsors here? My friend, is that is that OK by you? Cool. Our next sponsor is LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. You'll get fifty dollars off your first job posting. You know, the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. And that's why it is super important to find the right person. I can tell you stories of, you know, detrimental things that have happened for me and our businesses over the years by hiring the wrong person. You've got to hire very, very carefully. But it's hard these days to find people, right? It's always been hard to find people. It seems like it's even harder now. 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So check it out. Go to LinkedIn.com slash MGG and get $50 off your first job post. Again, that's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to get 50 bucks off your first job post. One more time. LinkedIn.com slash MGG terms and conditions apply as they always do. Check it out. Our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. Cross over from Code Weavers. Look, if you go to code weavers.com slash MGG, you get a 14 day free trial of crossover. And it's a cool, really cool thing, right? Because it lets you run Windows apps on your Mac without needing to muck around with Windows. What were we just talking about earlier in the show? You know, we said Microsoft gets a bad rap. They make some cool stuff. But why do they get the bad rap? Windows, because Windows, I mean, why do you want to run Windows? But sometimes you have to run a Windows app or sometimes you just want to run a Windows app. Maybe there's a fun game you want to play and it's Windows only or runs better via the Windows version. Well, check it out with crossover. Go to code weavers.com slash MGG, download your 14 day free trial and you get to just run the app. You don't not only do you not have to run Windows, you don't have to buy a Windows license. You don't have to mess around with, you know, Windows virus protection. None of that because it just runs the app without having to run a Windows environment around it. It's not even that it hides the Windows environment. It literally isn't running it. It's just sort of translating the frameworks in there using some crazy voodoo. It's actually using something called wine, but it's not an emulator. It's just doing all this translation. You got to check it out. And if you've tried it in the past and it hasn't worked for you, never fret because the folks at Code Weavers have made massive changes recently. Cross over for the Mac 17 is their most powerful version yet. Not only do you get the 14 day free trial when you go to code weavers.com slash MGG, you also get 35% off of a one year subscription of crossover for the Mac. So go check it out. Again, that's code weavers.com slash MGG. And our thanks to the folks at Code Weavers, not only for sponsoring the episode, but for making crossover and continuing to make it so much better. And it's always so much better than Windows. Thanks. And there we are. All right, John, let's see. We've got you want to take us to Robert, my friend? Let's see. I think I will take us to Robert. Awesome. There's Robert. Oh, cool. You want me to talk about it? Cool stuff. OK, you got it. All right. Good. We're good. OK, cool. I know I'm jumping around the agenda a little bit. So yeah, cool. All right. So Robert says, I know you probably hear this all the time, but my 2010 iMac is running slow. Just switching between this email and an open Safari app gives me a beach ball. I went to System Preferences and did a startup item request. And this is the list that returned. And he has Alfred three keyboard, mystro, text, expander, DDS, Sys, which is a turbo thing, default, older 10, male and Amazon Drive. That seems pretty minimal, actually. Yeah, it does. Yeah. I know these apps take up resources, but I can't believe they should slow my system down so much. I have a feeling there is more running than just these. Well, yes, there is. Right. I have checked Activity Monitor, but A, I don't know what I am looking at. And B, the only CPU hog seems to be the kernel task, which takes up about 8 percent of the CPU. And then the next large item is com.apple.speechrecognitioncore.speechrecognition, which takes up 863.4 megabytes. All right. All right. This one is a 2010 and I have installed 16 gigs of memory and I have a 500 gigabyte SSD. I am also using Ethernet directly from the iMac to the modem. And Speedtest says I'm getting 254 megabits down and 23 up. I am stumped. Does this seem right? Is the only answer to buy a new iMac? And I would say no. Now, while the 2010 iMac is now considered a vintage machine. Vintage being that Apple will no longer repair it for you, but you can still use it. It doesn't look to have the specs that are too far off from what I have, Dave, my oldest machine, which is a MacBook Pro mid-2012. Okay. Yep. Fair. Yep. And it sounds like he's done every, the best he can to get it to a point where it's not going to be resource constrained by RAM or SSD or disk. And then he has an SSD and 16 gigs of RAM, which is what I have in this machine and the machine does not slow down. That's a good amount of RAM. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think you're going to be choking on that. So and it doesn't sound like he's running a ton of stuff. The beach ball is interesting, though, right? Because that means the system is waiting for something, right? Like it doesn't throw the beach ball immediately when, you know, an app needs to go read something from the disk or use the CPU for a while. But it will use it will throw the beach ball after a few seconds of, oh, OK, this is going to take longer. So we better tell the user we're aware, right? That that's what the beach ball means. So. Right. I mean, the only thing I would suggest you look at. So this one thing occurred to me in the back of my mind here is you want to make one cause for a beach ball. Is if you're starting to do a lot of swapping, what's swapping? Swapping is when the system runs out of ram, chip ram, and needs to use the hard disk. Sure, to replace ram and because the hard disk, even an SSD is much slower if there's a lot of swapping or moving of stuff between Ram and the disk. You're going to get that beach ball. I agree. The way you could tell if this is happening under at least the current OS. I would say probably the best thing is you want to look at the memory pressure. And I think only if you're in a state where memory pressure is I believe the bar will turn. Normally, it's what I'm looking at the I step menus version of it right now. Yeah, but I would just look at that value. If you have something to experience, what's known as a memory leak in that it runs out of control and it could be the OS. I've seen this happen before where kernel task all of a sudden is taking up gigabytes and it's like, well, that's not right. Or some other tasks. So you want to make sure that something is not consuming all of your ram because then you're going to get you're going to get into the swap situation and you will see that beach ball. Other than that, Dave, I'm suspecting it may be something filthy, like a cache, which is either corrupted or there's something wrong with it. So the first thing I would try that can that can get you out of this situation here is something known as safe boot or safe mode. Yeah, and there's a handy dandy article called you safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac. And they even say if after running this, so it cleans up some cruft and rebuild some things. And as they say in the article, you could read it if the problem goes away. It must have cleared out some cash or directory issue. Beyond that, the other tool that I would use to to further clean things up beyond the safe boot or safe mode would be to get our Pal Onyx. If you go into the maintenance section of Onyx, they have several rebuild and cleaning options. So maybe that you got to rebuild something or clean it out in order for it to be recreated or rebuilt. And then you'll be OK. Um, other than that, Dave, I think I mean, 2010, that's a good run, man. Yeah, yeah, for sure years old. I mean, but I look, I mean, the specs of it aren't terrible. I mean, I think it has only sat at two. Yeah. And it's a, you know, but it's a multi core gigahertz processor. So yeah. Yeah, that's what I got. I'm running a couple of I'm trying to think of my running. Yeah, I think I've got two 2010 IMAX running in the house and I don't have 16 gigs around. I think I've got maybe eight in each of them. But I've got SSDs and I don't see this kind of slowness. I what where I see it slow down is when the CPU is pegged. I run I stat menus on them on them, all my Macs. And it's a great way to know what the, you know, like what's going on, where the, you know, where the bottleneck is, right? And I can see, OK, you know, when I boot the Mac, Dropbox goes nuts for a long time because it decides it has to reindex everything, even though that seems to be overly obsessive. And, and, you know, other things moving up and honestly, at some level, I like the fact that I see the CPU is being fully utilized because it means there are no other bottlenecks, right? Like the disc isn't the bottleneck. I've got an SSD in there. And actually, once it was when I put the SSD in years ago into that, that I first saw the CPU really start to get pegged on sort of normal operations. It's like, wow, this thing's been slowed down by the disc for so long. And that's why we've all moved to SSDs because because of that. So, yeah, but it I don't see those kinds of beach balls all the time. It sounds like a RAM issue, right? You know, from the the way he described it, moving between apps takes forever. So I think heading down that path of looking at what's using RAM and is it swapping, like you said, you know, where it's it's sort of writing something out to disc so that it has room to read something else in with 16 gigs of RAM, though, that's a pretty tall order to fill that up for for a sort of a daily use machine. Sixteen is, you know, I would say eight is enough. Sixteen is, you know, you got some some wiggle room there. So yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, you got to look, right? You got to look at what's running, what's using your RAM. The kernel task you mentioned can be one of those weird things, John, because many apps will load their resources in a way that they in activity monitor get assigned to kernel tasks. So if kernel task is bloated up, it means something. But it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a problem with the system on your Mac, right? It might just be that it's obscured a little bit. And while we're on the subject of kernel task, although it's tangential to this potentially, kernel task will also artificially report that it's using your CPU if the system has decided that it needs to throttle your CPU for, say, temperature issues. Right. If your Mac gets, if your CPU gets too hot, the Mac slows it down. And the way that it sort of addresses the the the fact that it's slowing it down is it will assign some percentage of the CPU to kernel task so that that's not available to apps that are actually going to use it. So kernel task can be a little bit misleading if you treat it like every other app and look at it and say, why is it doing all this? Well, it's special is really what it comes down to. So yeah, I like your idea about Onyx. That's, you know, and Safeboot. I mean, both are doing similar things and cleaning stuff out. If you've cleaned up the system and you're pretty confident and especially if you see that it's lots of processes running that are using using up, you know, CPU resources and sort of stealing those from you. You'll see a lot of MD workers and MDS store that are doing, you know, spotlight. Then I think taking a look at AppTamer from St. Clairsoft would be the answer there. AppTamer will throttle processes down to leave room for other processes, and that can be a handy thing, too. So that's. And finally, yes, as suggested by your good friend, Brian McGrow, in our chat room, which you can always attend at macigab.com slash stream. Brian is suggesting and actually it's I'll go with this. It could be bad or flaky ram. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, normally when you start up your Mac, it does what's known as a power on self test. And if the RAM is like totally shot, it'll make some beeps and say, yeah, your Rams, right, your Rams shot. But if the Rams like marginal, you know, or if it's having problems reading from or writing to Ram, it may be in a state where it's just really trying and it eventually succeeds. But because it has to try so many times to eventually get it right. That may cause a slowdown. So if you can get, I don't know, maybe try to reseat the RAM or maybe try getting some other RAM. I don't think the RAM for that machine is terribly expensive. Yeah. Now, it's a good one. I had not thought of that, especially in the days of, you know, when RAM was in sockets and stuff like that, if the RAM wasn't seated properly, you could run into odd behavior. Yeah, for sure. Sure. Yeah, no, I like that. Yeah, it could be bad RAM. That would definitely, you know, cause those kinds of that kind of symptom. If the system is, you know, trying to read or write data to a RAM socket that's bad or a RAM chip that's bad, it would definitely could definitely slow it down. It could also just crash the system. That's that's the symptom I've seen more often with bad RAM. But anything's, you know, hardware is one of those things when you've got a hardware problem, the symptoms are never consistent from machine to machine. It's just like however it manifests there is how it manifests. So yeah, that's interesting, man. Huh, so much stuff to think about. I like it. All right. While we're on the subject of slow, let's go to Perry here, John. Perry writes, I have a 2017 iMac 27 inch retina 5K, 32 gigs of RAM, internal fusion drive, but uses an external one terabyte SSD connected via Thunderbolt as the startup device. He says on startup using the SSD, it takes from 45 seconds to three minutes for the Apple logo to appear, at which point everything proceeds normally. I've made sure that the startup disk is selected in the startup disk preference pane. I have zapped the PRAM and I have reset the SMC. I've disabled all startup items, et cetera. I've run Drive Genius and all other disc utilities known to man and no problems are reported on the external SSD. The internal fusion drive starts up a little faster when I use that about 30 seconds to one minute for the Apple logo to appear. Everything works fine after startup. But since my 2015 MacBook Pro starts up and I see the Apple logo almost instantaneously, I thought I would ask you guys if there is anything else you might suggest that I can try. So this is an interesting one, Mr. Braun, because it not much happens before the Apple logo appears. Right. The system does what you mentioned. It's power on self-test and and then a few things because it's got to begin loading the operating system. But that's it. Then the Apple logo appears and and and boot sort of continues. But there are a few things that it does. And you can take a look at at least some of those and and regardless of what you see that when you see it can can help inform you just as much. So I would try booting in verbose mode by holding down command V at startup or there's a terminal command you can type setting the N.V. arguments to always boot in verbose mode. But that will in in a normal scenario, things in verbose mode will fly by so quickly. And I'm going to warn you in advance they will be so tiny on your retina screen that it's going to be hard to even read it. But if the system is hung for a very long time, well, then you might be able to see what it's hung on or what messages are being reported in this verbose mode. What you're seeing in verbose mode is all of the Unix console messages that that come up during during boot up. And it like I said, it's going to be totally overwhelming unless it hangs somewhere and then that can be really informative. And if it's too small, let's kind of combine a couple of tips that we've had in this episode, take a picture and zoom in on it. And you might be able to see, you know, use your iPhone or whatever, take a picture of the screen. And we've even had some people video with their iPhone of verbose boot so that they can then go back in and step through the video to see what's happening there. But with your issue being that it's slow, you might not need to step through it all. You might be able to see it right there. I would try it. You know, you've tried a couple of things. You've tried booting from the internal drive. You've tried disabling startup items. You've tried resetting the PRIM and the SMC, all things that, you know, immediately sort of came to mind to me when you, you know, when first reading this, but try unplugging all of your external devices, including your external SSD, right? Because you beat me to it. Sorry, man. Unplug as many things that you can but and let the machine still boot. So maybe just have the network cable in there. But, you know, I'll and you shouldn't need a network cable to boot. Right. I mean, just power. Right. I mean, you can boot it. You can boot a Mac with just power. You don't even need keyboard and mouse very quickly. Once it boots up, it'll say, OK, like we need to talk. But but yeah, just power. And if then if that's faster, then start plugging things in one by one and see what it is that's slowing it down. Because it could be. Yes, it could there could be a discussion between the computer and a peripheral and they're they're just not getting along. And eventually it just throws up its hands and says, OK, I can't deal with you. Yeah. Yeah. But if you remove it from the equation, then it'll it'll blow past whatever. And it could be USB. It could be. Yeah, who knows? Who knows? Right. But that that it should not take that long to get to the Apple menu or not to the Apple menu, the Apple logo. But the first thing that you you mentioned here, Perry, is something we should all should remember. And that was he that the first thing he says was I have made sure that the startup disk is selected in the startup disk pref pane. This is a very important thing in solving this particular problem because if your Mac does not if you go into startup disk in the pref pane there and you don't have something selected, what that means is that your Mac will have to go through and scan all of your disks and make a decision about where to start from. Whereas if you have a startup disk selected and it will say it now in high Sierra when you go into that pref pane, it will say you have selected Mac OS 10 dot 13 dot six on the disk. Well, my disk is called Veered Blues because I name all my disks after Miles Davis songs. But like that will be it will be not uncertain at all that you have selected a startup disk and you want to make sure you have one selected. Otherwise, your Mac sort of has to scan everything and guess and that will take longer for the Apple logo to appear and you will sort of be stuck in that that limbo mode for a while. The fact that this is happening even with the startup disk tells me maybe the Mac is waiting for that startup disk to come online, right? He's got this external drive. Maybe there's something either about the disk or the enclosure or the Thunderbolt cable or, you know, whatever, which is why then resetting SMC and PRAM makes sense because those are the things that when it's hardware, but not hardware can often fix the problem, but he's tried all those things. So we don't have the magic answer here, but just from a troubleshooting standpoint and for us to all learn at least five new things, these are important steps to have taken. So I think it's probably, hopefully it's an external device and not something with the motherboard, John, because it shouldn't take three minutes for that to happen. I don't think so. Sounds right. Right? I mean, you know, it should go pretty quickly, especially on that machine. I mean, that's a relatively new machine 2017, right? It's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. All right. Where are we on time here? Yeah. You know, my sister and her fiancee, Kristen and Jose, pinged me yesterday and asked me, John, they said, is there any way to plug my iPhone into my TV? And they were looking to plug their phone into an older TV that doesn't have HDMI, which sort of made for an interesting concept. If your TV has HDMI, sort of the easiest ways to do it are an Apple TV, right? For your iPhone, because then you can airplay stuff and you can either, you know, airplay from within an app or you can even do screen mirroring so you can see your phone. A less expensive alternative is to get a Google Chromecast and many iOS apps will let you cast, quote, unquote, which is their word for, you know, their analog to airplay, but will let you cast to a Google Chromecast that's also plugged into an HDMI port on your TV. But that doesn't solve this problem. And so the problem was OK, or the thought was, all right, well, how do we do this with a cable? And near as I can tell, John, I couldn't find anything that would go from a lightning port to a component or composite video port directly, right? You can get lightning to HDMI, no problem. Although there are some issues with that as I as I'm finding out where some apps won't do HDMI, you know, lightning port streaming like Netflix. There's a lot of lightning to HDMI adapters that that Netflix won't pass data across. I guess maybe there's some some security concerns or whatever that people could, you know, copy the content or something like that. So but you can do that, but you can't, you know, with with I haven't been able to find any cables that go to, you know, either what they call component, which is really RCA coax or sorry, composite is RCA over a single coax. Sorry, coax over a single RCA and then component, which is the three HD, you know, RCA ports. So you need a HDMI, you need a lightning to HDMI cable and then a box that will convert HDMI to composite or component video. And I found one of those in Amazon for like 30, $33, 3299. For those of you that they like to be specific about those things and it will do either. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but it's a mooso. It has 163 reviews with four stars and we'll do either of those things. So I'll put that in the show notes. Any any thoughts on this, John? Seems like from the from the chat room, Brian and Rose saying, you know, as the setup that Apple uses for their keynotes, I'm sure is custom and not available to the public. I think that's right. And Warren is saying component to HDMI converter or a new time capsule. But Brian Monroe comes up with with something that that I had not yet mentioned, which is by a first gen Apple TV, because the first gen Apple TV has component video ports on it. And whereas the all the newer ones have HDMI only. So there you go. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Brown? Yeah, that's kind of warms my heart that they're trying to use older video technology. Yeah, right. I figured you'd you'd you'd appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. But now the first thing that occurred to me was Apple TV, which is what I do. So I just airplay it to. Right. Right. My iOS device to my Apple TV. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Warren in the chat room correctly says that the first gen Apple TV is as useless as a TV without HDMI because fixed on 66 says the first gen Apple TV doesn't have airplay. So this solution would not work. Yeah. Yeah. So much for that. I forgot about that. Really, the first gen Apple TV doesn't have airplay, huh? Huh. That's I guess that's right. Huh. I didn't even think about that. Huh. I wonder why not? Maybe it's because it doesn't have doesn't have HDMI. I can't remember. Let's look. I'll pull up the specs. I'll put these in the show notes, too. Apple TV first gen. It does have an HDMI port, but it does not support airplay. Huh. OK. I'll believe you. That's that's bizarre. Huh. OK. OK. Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting. All right. Moving right along here. You know, John, we'll go to we'll go to Yanis because this is an interesting discussion. Well, I think we'll probably wrap the show here and we've got lots of others for for next week show. Yanis says my beloved 2011 MacBook Pro died a couple of weeks ago and it needs a new logic board, so it's not worth the cost. Says I've been thinking about its replacement. However, I've not been a fan of the previously current MacBook Pro design mainly because of the keyboard. Though, of course, this might have improved with the brand new 2018 models that came out last week. It says I thought two weeks ago. I thought about upgrading in 2016, but decided to hold off due to the keyboard issues in the 2015 MacBook than the 2017 and not much change, etc. He should said I should note that an iMac is not an option as I need a portable computer and the non pro laptops that Apple offers at the moment are either very old, the air or very slow for what I need, the non pro MacBook. It says anyway, briefly, these are the reasons why I'm not or haven't been keen on upgrading to a new MacBook Pro, bearing in mind that in 2019 we might have a complete redesign. What is your opinion on waiting for a year and not longer? Hopefully. And in the meantime, doing the following. Using carbon copycloner to create a bootable clone of my Mac mini at work and then use that clone to boot my quote unquote work computer when and if needed at home using my girlfriend's MacBook Air and in the meantime, using an iPad Pro at home for my everyday tasks. Is that a realistic solution for a year or maybe longer and is booting via an external SSD like Samsung's T5 usable every now and then when I need a computer thing done at home and I want to have my work environment there to do it. So this is as I read this question, I thought, you know, this isn't all that different from what I currently do. You know, I have a retina iMac in the office that I use as my sort of daily driver at work all day and it's great and all of that. But at home, I don't I certainly don't get on a computer every day from the standpoint of I don't get on, you know, one of the iMacs that I have in the house and or my MacBook Air. But, you know, once or twice a week, I do and they're slower computers and they but they, you know, they get the job done for when I need to do something. And if I need to really do a lot, I can, you know, just walk back across the driveway to the office, you know, during quote unquote, non work hours and then things are fine. So but for the most part, when I'm just around the house, I'm using a 10 and a half inch iPad Pro and it works really well. And I hadn't really thought about the fact that I don't really use a computer at home until reading Yanis's email here. And so I think that this is not only a workable solution as a temporary stop gap. It might be a long term solution where, you know, you've got a computer when you need it, but for most of the things that, you know, certainly for me, most of the things that I do, you know, an iPad is actually better because it's just easier to grab and sort of, you know, more built for that that quick interaction kind of thing. Not that you can't do long interactions on it. And I do all the time. But, yeah, what so what are your, you know, what are your thoughts on this, John? And Warren in the chat room asks, you know, a question that really does apply. What's the definition of a computer? And of course, all of these things that we're talking about, a MacBook, iMac and an iPad and an iPhone and your Apple Watch are all computers, just different interfaces and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I think the cute line in the Apple commercial where, you know, the kids using their iPad and, you know, some adults says, you know, what you do with your computer and the kids like, what's a computer? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is a computer, right? A computer without a keyboard, right? That's my only thought. Actually, I saw, you know, we were driving around. Back to the airport, I think. And Allison, I was in the car along with Allison and I saw her pull out her iPad Pro and I'm like, well, you know, if I did it, at first, I thought it was a MacBook, some sort of a smaller MacBook. Sure. I guess my only concern is that, you know, at least for me, I need a keyboard for most of the things that I do, not all of them. So maybe an iPad Pro with a keyboard would. And there's plenty of keyboard cases out there last I checked, right? Yep. Yep. So, you know, and it's a, you know, it's got a beefy processor. And so I think for most things, for me. And yeah, I think the thing is my current iPad Air is not performing well. I had to be repaired and it does weird things every now and then. Right. I'm thinking the next iPad I'd want to get, maybe an iPad Pro with some sort of keyboard case and, you know, try it as an experiment. The only thing that occurs to me is that, you know, don't. It makes me uneasy trying to force the use of an iPad to do everything because it's not, but in my humble opinion, it may not be the best tool for all the things you do. So you really have to think about what type of things you're doing. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like typing and surfing and emailing and stuff. It's it'll probably do what you need. But if you're doing like, you know, heavy video or audio production work, though, I've seen people use an iPad to do that. Sort of thing you just have to reflect on what sort of tasks you need to accomplish with each device because, you know, you are limited with with an iPad as far as what you can connect to it. Absolutely. Yeah. And even workflow wise, an iPad gets you have to really be thoughtful about the path you're going to take, right? Like, like I the one thing that for me is very difficult on the iPad, simply because of of how we do things with the show is answering people's questions from my iPad, right? Because when I answer a question, I want to then save that as a PDF in our shared Evernote, and I want to put it in our, you know, working agenda document so that I don't forget about these things. And and I realized that I can actually do that with a workflow either by saving a screenshot of something and then work flowing that into Evernote and pasting it into our document, which works well, except for replying to an email because you can't print to PDF in that way when you're composing an email. So with that, I and I figured this out on the airplane, actually heading off to vacation where I I now email it to myself that my special Evernote address and it goes into an inbox thing that I then have to go and triage when I'm at my desk. So it's imperfect, but it's doable and it allowed me to answer some questions while I was away. But that's sort of the point that I'm trying to make is is you have to really think about how you're going to get things done from a productivity standpoint on the iPad, whereas on a computer, it's it's just a little more natural to it, especially when you're trying to tie multiple apps together. I guess I guess that's where productivity gets gets to be potentially cumbersome on the iPad. But, you know, where he's not talking about replacing all of his computing time with iPad time, I think I think there's like, again, you know, for the most part, that's what I do and it works fairly well. So, yeah, yeah, but you can't like forcing I agree with you, forcing your iPad to be your main computer for most of us is is the wrong decision. You know, my son, I was talking to my son about this. He's going into his junior year high school. He's going to be doing a lot more writing. And so his older MacBook Pro, we're going to need to get him a new, you know, a new something. And I just said to him, I said, would a, you know, would a larger iPad Pro be the right thing? And he was like, huh, you know, and so we've messed around with him and he's still on the fence about it. And I think really a MacBook Pros or some sort of Mac laptop would be the right decision for him for that, too. But it's just interesting kind of thinking about thinking about all of this, that it's not it's not as straight a decision as it used to be, especially for the the person that has, say, a desktop computer and a laptop. Does that laptop need to be a Mac, you know, a MacBook? Or could it be a tablet like an iPad? So like as the as the accessory computer, the iPad can work really, really well for many people, not for everyone. Keyboard wise, I wanted to just kind of throw it out there because not a lot of people know about these bridge keyboards, B-R-Y-D-G-E. They make your iPad feel like, you know, like a MacBook in many ways. They fold in very well. They're sturdy. It's a real keyboard that you get to type on. So I'll put a link in the show notes to bridge iPad keyboards. But I've been I've tested them out at trade shows and stuff and spend like, OK, like if I was going to do a lot on the iPad, this is definitely the keyboard that I would get. So, yeah. Ah, well, all good things, my friend, all good things must come to an end. And then there's this show. And then there's this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we must, we must, my friend, we must. Speaking of this show. Yes, if you would like to provide input to us or have a question or a tip or any of anything else you want to tell us, one way you can go about that is you can send an email to feedback. At Mackeygab dot com feedback at Mackeygab dot com is what my esteemed podcasting partner here said. We had to switch today from discord back to Skype because otherwise we weren't hearing each other. So John's audio has that Skype hiss to it today. So I I think you weren't able to hear him. That's why I that's why I clarified. Yeah, no, you're correct. And if we're using discord, then you wouldn't have heard me say feedback at Mackeygab dot com. That's correct. Or any premium listeners, of course, you can email us at premium at Mackeygab dot com. 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